Dorothy Allison, author of a myriad of works such as The Women Who Hate Me, a collection of poems, Trash, a collection of short stories, Skin, a collection of essays, and novels such as Cavedweller and Bastard Out of Carolina, is a pivotal member of southern, iconoclastic literature. Pushing boundaries and tackling subjects not all writers dare to narrate, she has brought to light many issues such as emotional and physical abuse, incest, and molestation of children; as well as touching on the impact such incidents have on the psyche and development of children who experience them.

 

In an interview with Carolyn Megan in 1993, Dorothy Allison gave a little insight into why she wrote Bastard Out of Carolina, going into more detail on some of the more gritty aspects of the novel, and giving her readers some insight into her own childhood.

 

“When I was a little kid, I had a lemonade stand in the neighborhood. And I can remember this kid came up to me and said she couldn’t buy my lemonade because her mother wouldn’t let her because I was a bastard.” That last word rings a bell to anyone who has read Bastard Out of Carolina. The work begins with Ruth Anne’s mother, Anney, trying desperately to rid her daughter’s birth certificate of the illegitimate label. Being eight, Dorothy Allison had no meaning for the word, but her mother showed her how shameful it must be in the way she reacted to the news. It is eerie how similar the story is to Allison’s own life, but amazing to see how far the author has come since that troublesome childhood, and how many lives she must have changed by telling the stories so boldly as she has.

 

“When I couldn’t find my story, I wrote it,” she said in response to Megan’s questioning if writing was a means to help save Allison from her own pain, anger, and guilt. Writing is cathartic; that has been known for years, but Allison used it as a way to step outside of her own suffering, view it from older eyes, and comfort herself with what happened to her earlier in her life. “It was some kind of comfort, and yes…sometimes the whole purpose is to make yourself a heroine.” She also stated that “writing became the way [she] could say things that otherwise [she] had no other way to talk about.” It is clear that, while the story of Bone isn’t exactly the life of Dorothy Allison, the similarities are startling.

 

Allison certainly made Bone the heroine of her story in Bastard. In fact, it’s seen multiple times throughout the story, even in the thick of Bone’s suffering and grief. It is more than being a heroine, though, as Allison stated later in the same interview. It isn’t just the taking on of anger, “but to realize the justification of it.” A lot of victims of abuse internalize the feelings, just as Bone did. They internalize it, making it seem like everything going wrong is their fault, and growing numb to the world. Allison says she wasn’t angry until later, and even then it was hard. “I had been raised to be really fiercely independent. Never ask for help, never go for it…” It is easy to see that reflected in Bone, as well. She never asks for help. Never goes to her large family for assistance or to be saved from her abuser. Allison didn’t, either, until she was much older.

 

In the end, Allison believes in one thing above all: justice. “I used to collect revenge stories, read books, watch movies,” she said, “but there’s one thing more powerful, and it’s justice.” Justice for Bone, Anney, and Glen all play a big part in the story, and it seems that Allison believes in justice for herself and her abuser, as well. She laments that it took her so long to understand why her mother stayed in an abusive relationship, but as she grew older, she learned that it was just the way things were done back then. Leaving a man was unheard of; giving up, something just not done. Women in those days clung to everything desperately, believing and hoping they could change the men they loved by loving them enough; but choice is important, said Allison. “I don’t believe that anyone is born evil. I believe things happen because you choose things.” Just as Anney chose to stay in an abusive relationship, so did Allison’s mother, and just as Bone has to make her own choices for her own life in the end of the novel, so did Allison have to make her own choices.

 

Now, she is living with her partner, Alix, and their son, Wolf Michael. It seems that, in the end, Dorothy Allison was just as much a heroine as she wrote Bone to be (4).