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SARA VILLAMARÍN-FREIRE
Universidad de Santiago de Compostela
sara.villamarin@usc.es
<https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1287-0754>
TAINTED BY (WHITE) TRASH: CLASS,
RESPECTABILITY AND THE LANGUAGE OF WASTE
IN DOROTHY ALLISON AND BONNIE JO CAMPBELL
CORROMPIDO POR LA BASURA (BLANCA):
CLASE, RESPETABILIDAD Y EL LENGUAJE
DE LOS DESECHOS EN DOROTHY ALLISON
Y BONNIE JO CAMPBELL
DOI: https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.202510514
Abstract
This article addresses the depiction of class, whiteness, dirt and respectability in the
short stories “Meanest Woman Ever Left Tennessee”, by Dorothy Allison, and “Boar
Taint”, by Bonnie Jo Campbell, from the perspective of waste studies and whiteness
studies. Characters in these stories erect discursive barriers between themselves and
others, deemed ‘white trash’ — a pervasive stigmatype connected to the working
poor experience in the US. By enforcing hierarchies that conflate cleanliness and
respectability, these characters seek to prove their adherence to unmarked forms of
whiteness while resisting assimilation into the white trash category. The negotiation
of (intra-)class divisions, especially between middle and working classes, exposes the
malleability of social hierarchies predicated on relationships of waste. In the end, the
protagonists’ rejection of white respectability re-signifies their association with waste
and leads them to find pride and community in their working-class occupations,
without necessarily embracing a purported white trash identity.
Keywords: white trash, waste studies, whiteness, respectability, working class.
Resumen
Este artículo aborda la descripción de las relaciones de clase, la blanquitud
(whiteness), la suciedad y la respetabilidad en los cuentos “Meanest Woman Ever
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Left Tennessee”, de Dorothy Allison y “Boar Taint”, de Bonnie Jo Campbell,
desde la perspectiva de los waste studies y los estudios de blanquitud. Los personajes
en estas historias erigen barreras discursivas entre ellos mismos y otros a quienes
consideran “basura blanca” — un “estigmatipo” dominante conectado a la
experiencia de la clase trabajadora pobre en los Estados Unidos. Al imponer
jerarquías que fusionan higiene y respetabilidad, estos personajes tratan de
demostrar su adherencia a formas no marcadas de blanquitud mientras resisten ser
asimilados a la categoría “basura blanca”. La negociación de divisiones de clase,
especialmente entre las clases media y trabajadora, revela la maleabilidad de las
categorías sociales basadas en relaciones de desecho. Al final, el rechazo de las
protagonistas a la respetabilidad blanca confiere un nuevo significado a su
asociación con la “basura” y las lleva a considerar sus ocupaciones de clase
trabajadora con orgullo, sin por ello abrazar necesariamente una supuesta identidad
como “basura blanca”.
Palabras clave: basura blanca, waste studies, blanquitud, respetabilidad, clase
trabajadora.
1. Introduction
Dorothy Allison’s exploration of poor white experiences in Trash: Stories (1988)
has received limited attention when compared to her oft-mentioned novels Bastard
out of Carolina (1992) and Cavedweller (1998). Even less attention has been given
to Bonnie Jo Campbell’s American Salvage (2009), a collection of short stories set
in post-industrial Michigan at the turn of the millennium and populated by
characters whose lives are likened to the remnants of a disintegrating social order:
“It’s as though there was some kind of apocalypse and nobody noticed, and now
a large number of folks are living off the debris that’s left behind” (Campbell in
Kothari 2008). Despite noticeable differences in their respective backgrounds,
themes and preoccupations, both authors often focus on the lives of those left
behind — more specifically, on the experiences of the white American underclass
and the stigma they carry.
In this article, I scrutinise contemporary iterations of the white trash trope in
Allison’s “Meanest Woman Ever Left Tennessee” and Campbell’s “Boar Taint”
from the perspective of waste theory and whiteness studies. My analysis seeks to
shed light on the rhetorical strategies mobilised by those characters who are
perceived as being ‘white trash’. I am thus interested in examining how the class
hierarchies used in these stories draw from the language of waste to establish poor
whites as both polluted and polluting, continuing a long tradition of presenting
the white underclass as inherently tainted. To that end, the article includes a
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succinct overview of the origins and evolution of the term ‘white trash’, followed
by an analysis of how some characters in Allison’s and Campbell’s stories
demonstrate allegiance to white respectability by invoking discursive divisions
based on notions of cleanliness and dirt. However, these stories also feature other
characters who reject the conflation of respectability and (racial) purity, and strive
to reappropriate the term ‘trash’ in order to vindicate class dignity and physical
labor. I contend that the protagonists in these stories reshuffle the principles of
respectability, purposefully downplaying the negative connections between
working-class occupations, dirt and the poor white stigmatype, without necessarily
embracing a purported white trash identity.
2. Poor Whites through the Lens of Waste Studies
Dirt, waste and trash are “essentially disorder” or “matter out of place”, in Mary
Douglas’s famous definition (2001: 2, 36). Waste exists as “the by-product of a
systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves
rejecting inappropriate elements” (36). However, the very existence of waste is
what constitutes any “dominant system of order” in the first place, given that the
system can only be maintained on the condition that it expels any elements
perceived as potential “threats against that order” (Liboiron and Lepawsky 2022:
150). Defined relationally as the absence, lack or negation of another entity, waste
is therefore “contextual, place-based, situated, and historically specific” (149).
Considering that “some pollutions are used as analogies for expressing a general
view of the social order” (Douglas 2001: 3), one of the most productive areas of
inquiry to branch from waste studies examines how certain social dynamics are
mapped according to models and relations of wasting.
Exploring how these models are incorporated into the construction of social
hierarchies has helped shed light on their inner mechanisms and subsistence, as
well as on the discursive strategies used to negotiate the boundaries between
pollution and cleanliness. Susan Morrison argues that one of the ways in which
humans separate themselves from those deemed inferior is by incorporating the
language of waste into the “rhetoric of othering” in order to make undesirable
individuals “cognate to waste”, thereby constructing “unprivileged races, religions,
and ethnicities as unclean or inhuman” (2015: 97). This rhetorical application
stems from the threatening dimension of waste as an abject presence that ought to
be expelled “in the interest of maintaining a boundary between what is connected
to the self and what isn’t” (Hawkins 2006: 24). The compulsion to separate
oneself from polluted elements originates in the perception that “things deemed
dirty, spoiled, or noxious carry polluting effects, by touching” (Zimring 2015: 1).
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Transferred to the social plane, this fear of pollution translates into “projective
disgust” as one imaginarily anticipates contamination (Morrison 2015: 102,
emphasis in original). It is often not enough to jettison tainted individuals from a
system (or push them to the margins) to preserve it; non-tainted individuals are
driven to reinforce these symbolic boundaries rhetorically to maintain their distance.
When labelling and categorising tainted individuals, few expressions are blunter
than ‘white trash’. The term, whose origins date back to the rural American South
in the first half of the nineteenth century (Isenberg 2017: 135; see also Harkins
2004, Wray 2006), designates members of the white underclass who bear “certain
socially stigmatized traits or characteristics” (Hartigan 1997: 50). White trash
conjoins “an ethnoracial signifier” and “a signifier of abject class status” to name
“a kind of disturbing liminality […], a dangerous threshold state of being neither
one nor the other” (Wray 2006: 2-3). Whereas ‘white’ is generally used to code
‘wealth’, its coupling with the insult ‘trash’ to denote ‘economic waste’ leads to an
atypical denomination, given that “whiteness is so rarely connected to poverty in
the US imaginary” (Newitz and Wray 1997: 8). Even though its origins are
connected to the social organisation of the plantation economy, the term white
trash has long crossed geographical limits to emerge as a repository of every
reprehensible trait from which other whites want to distance themselves —
including associations with chronic and extreme poverty, illiteracy, laziness, genetic
inferiority (often manifested in scrawny or sickly constitutions), criminality,
perversion, sexual degeneracy and debased appetites, to name a few.
Throughout US history a plethora of stigmatypes, including ‘cracker’, ‘hillbilly’,
‘redneck’ or ‘clay-eater’, have been attached to whites on the fringes of whiteness
who display any traits mentioned above. The term refers to “stigmatizing boundary
terms that simultaneously denote and enact cultural and cognitive divides between
in-groups and outgroups, between acceptable and unacceptable identities, between
proper and improper behaviors” (Wray 2006: 23). An important aspect of
stigmatypes is that they function like relations of waste, that is to say, shaping
categories by recourse to absence or negation. In this case, white trash functions
both as “a rhetorical identity” and “a category of pollution through which white
middle- and working-class Americans evaluate the behaviors and opinions of other
whites of similar or lower class status” (Hartigan 2005: 113). From this perspective,
the use of ‘trash’ is indicative of “self-conscious anxiety among whites over threats
of pollution that threaten the basis for belonging within whiteness” (99). As a
negative identity whose main attribute is the lack of adherence to unmarked,
hegemonic forms of whiteness, white trash is “a means of inscribing social
distance”, especially for middle- and working-class whites “who occupy a place
‘just above’ the class divide from poor whites, straddling a line they are forever
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fearful of crossing” (Hartigan 1997: 50). An imperfect or failed performance of
whiteness may result in being labeled trash and hence socially marked as Other
— a white Other.
What makes poor whites unassimilable into normative whiteness is their
transgression of racial decorum. Whiteness is associated with domination and
hegemony (Hartigan 2005: 2) but depends on remaining invisible to preserve its
claims of universality, as Dyer argues: “Whites must be seen to be white, yet
whiteness as race resides in invisible properties and whiteness as power is maintained
by being unseen” (2017: 45). The breach of white decorum positions poor whites
as “an embarrassing and symbolically messy group which has to be distinguished
from the pure white middle class” (Grué 2014: 39). Functioning as a “contrastive
strategy or rhetorical boundary construction”, the category “white trash”
unambiguously separates white individuals from “a certain form of racial detritus”,
that is, “whites who, through their poverty and ungainliness, fit insecurely within
the body of whiteness as a hegemonic order of political power and social privilege”
(Hartigan 2005: 114). Whenever the boundaries of racial decorum are found to
be precarious, the language of waste is mobilised to demarcate what, or who,
adheres to the standards that regulate unmarked whiteness.
Even though poverty is a significant attribute of white trash as a category, it is not
what makes or breaks where the line is drawn.1 Not all poor whites are white trash.
Yet ever since the term was first introduced, it has been used inconsistently;
sometimes, a person’s character or morality could place them in the category,
overriding economic factors, and sometimes individuals meet both criteria.2
Insofar as the attributes assigned to white trash depend on how whiteness perceives
itself, the term has changed over time. Representations of poor whites (especially
in Southern literature) can be understood as “barometers of the cultural anxieties
gripping middle-class white people” in different periods (Hubbs 2022: 7).
Nonetheless, there are several traits, including a series of physical, intellectual and
moral shortcomings, that are commonly associated with white trash — in opposition
to other whites who, as Dorothy Allison argues, were categorised as “the good
poor — hard-working, ragged but clean, and intrinsically honorable”:
I understood that we were the bad poor: men who drank and couldn’t keep a job;
women, invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old
from working too many hours and bearing too many children; and children with
runny noses, watery eyes, and the wrong attitudes. […] We were not noble, not
grateful, not even hopeful. We knew ourselves despised. (Allison 2018: vii)
The separation between the ‘good poor’ from the ‘bad poor’ is nonetheless
malleable and has evolved throughout time. In colonial times, the overlap between
the language of class and the language of race still assigned “symbolic properties,
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characteristics, and traits” indistinctly to “poor whites, Indians, and blacks” alike
(Wray 2006: 22-23).3 Around the mid-nineteenth century, mounting racial
tensions and concerns about the stability of the existing social order, especially in
Southern states, led to a shift not only in terminology but also in the
conceptualisation of poor whites “as somehow less than white, their yellowish skin
and diseased and decrepit children marking them as a strange breed apart”
(Isenberg 2017: xxvii).4 For many upper- and middle-class commentators, the
degradation of poor whites translated into a distorted version of whiteness that
challenged their perceived racial affiliation. Chronic poverty, malnutrition and
other ills stemming from the socioeconomic condition of poor whites were
increasingly understood to be consequences of some intrinsic degeneracy.
Overall, race became increasingly codified in terms of purity and cleanliness as the
nineteenth century progressed, which ties in with Mary Douglas’s observation
that waste categories are used to buttress social hierarchies “wherever the [social]
lines are precarious” (2001: 140). During the postbellum period, these divisions
sharpened as “the rhetoric and imagery of hygiene became conflated with a racial
order that made white people pure and anyone who was not white, dirty” (Zimring
2015: 89). This rhetoric can be traced in print sources, especially among Southern
authors who located poor whites “along a primitive/civilized scale all too often
applied to slaves and other people of color” (Mellette 2021: 9). The expansion of
print media during the period contributed to the spreading of this rhetoric beyond
geographical demarcations and likewise established a visual-verbal repository of
poor white types in the collective imaginary nationwide.5
The eugenics movement at the turn of the century and its emphasis on “racial
blood” (Dyer 2017: 24) helped solidify the stereotype that “large numbers of
rural poor whites were ‘genetic defectives’” (Newitz and Wray 1997: 2) and
“represented a grave internal threat to the white race” (Hubbs 2022: 4). Again,
the language of waste separates poor whites from the rest, marking them as
inherently flawed and dangerous on account of their twofold status as polluted
individuals and polluting agents. Early examples of eugenicist reports published in
the 1870s “claimed that ‘degenerate’ poor white families biologically transmitted
morally unacceptable and socially and culturally inappropriate qualities to
generation after generation” (Wray 2006: 68), perpetuating a race of mongrels
and criminals. The vocabulary in use borrowed heavily from animal husbandry and
“highlighted unnatural breeding, unfit governance, and the degenerate nature of
the worst stocks” (Isenberg 2017: 176). While the popularity of eugenics waned
in the 1930s and 1940s, it made a decisive contribution to the solidification of
widespread assumptions about poor whites, which persist in the US collective
imaginary to this day (Newitz and Wray 1997: 2).6
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Nowadays, ‘white trash’ remains a polarising term, regardless of some tepid
attempts to dignify the label — notably, among working-class writers associated
with the ‘grit lit’ genre who have sought to contest negative representations of
poor whites (see Hubbs 2022: 108-20).7 Other derogatory labels have fared
better, yet ever so slightly.8 Nevertheless, white trash continues to be a negative
identity in at least two senses of the word: first, its existence is predicated on the
negation of the traits associated with unmarked whiteness, which implies it is a
mutable concept; second, although the images of both unmarked whiteness and
white trash transform over time, the latter works by accrual, accumulating decades
of reified prejudice. In other words, it is hard to claim white trash as an identity
due to its pejorative nature, but especially because its existence is not predicated on
possessing certain attributes, but on not possessing them. Any attempt to carve out
a white trash identity must be considered carefully, lest they suppress the term’s
“historical and economic complexity” and turn it into an ahistorical, static notion
— or worse, a commodity or aestheticised “consumable identity” that the middle
classes can find “attractive” (Smith 2004: 375, 385). The complicated relation
with white trash as a social category, as well as the struggle to delineate an
alternative identity that departs from, yet re-signifies, the meaning of waste as a
boundary that ought not to be trespassed, are central concerns in the short stories
by Dorothy Allison and Bonnie Jo Campbell analysed below.
3. Warding off Trash
While the two short stories I examine in this study vindicate the association with
trash, to some extent they are likewise firmly anchored in ideas and projections of
white respectability that the main characters directly challenge or renegotiate. I use
the term ‘respectability’ or ‘white respectability’ to denote a set of social codes,
attitudes and beliefs that characters in these stories associate with upper- and
middle-class normative whiteness. In Dorothy Allison’s “Meanest Woman Ever
Left Tennessee”, the character of Shirley Boatwright constantly draws boundaries
between herself and other poor whites to dispute her association with white trash.9
Frustrated that she must live with her husband and children, whom she sees as an
inferior breed, Shirley is physically and verbally abusive, obsessed with making her
family comply with her idea of ‘quality’. This becomes a paradoxical request, as she
also claims they can never truly be ‘quality people’ on account of their innate lowly
status. Bonnie Jo Campbell’s “Boar Taint” follows Jill, a young woman who has
relocated from Ann Arbor to a rural community in southwest Michigan after
marrying Ernie, a local farmer, as she goes to purchase a hog from a poor white
family, the Jentzens. The story offers a nuanced depiction of respectability and
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social stigma by showcasing different rhetorical negotiations of class allegiances
—specifically, the existing intracommunal divisions and the perception of the same
community from an external viewpoint— and considers the malleability of these
divisions depending on the position one occupies in the social ladder.
Both stories feature characters who refute their association with the white trash
stigma by demonstrating allegiance to respectability. To this end, they stage a
rhetorical displacement that involves situating someone else at the bottom of the
social hierarchy, thus transferring any associations with white trash to that inferior
position by mobilising the language of waste. If “to see ourselves as higher socially,
we need to cordon ourselves off from direct contact with muck”, these characters
epitomise “[t]he desire to dissociate ourselves from excrement, filth, and waste as
much as possible” in order to maintain rigid class distinctions (Morrison 2015:
47). The problem is that, as these stories make apparent, it is often not enough
to refute one’s identification with white trash for it to be effective. Adherence to
respectability is often meaningless if it is not corroborated by an outsider’s
perspective. In “Meanest…”, Shirley’s insistence on her superior status is met with
contempt by her fellow workers at the mill; even though she seeks to ingratiate
herself with the foremen by informing on her fellow employees, there is no proof
they regard her as anything else than a pawn at their service. In “Boar Taint”,
Ernie’s distancing from the Jentzen family is challenged by Jill’s outsider
perspective; influenced by her urban, middle-class family, Jill cannot help but
notice the similarities shared by Ernie and the Jentzens — which, by extension,
bring her closer to the Jentzens than she might have imagined.
As I advanced earlier, the borders of respectability are erected in these stories by
mobilising the language of waste against individuals perceived as inferior. In
“Meanest…”, Shirley cultivates clear-cut discursive boundaries that allow her to
sort people into either ‘quality’ or ‘trash’, two poles that determine how she treats
others. For Shirley, née Wilmer, the Boatwrights belong to a diseased breed of
“devils and worms and trash” whose “natural substance was dirt and weeds”
(Allison 2018: 21). Her verbal attacks draw from the white trash stigmatype;
namely, she is adamant that her husband’s father is a drunk and his sisters are lazy
and live in dirt-floor cabins (24). Her attitude toward her husband and children
seemingly stems from her family’s rejection after she married — presumably, below
her social station: “My side of the family don’t even want to know you’re alive”
(24). She obsessively strives to demonstrate to others that she is still “one of the
quality” (21, emphasis in original) by adhering to a rigid code of respectability. For
instance, she assigns value to different types of jobs, claiming that “[m]ill workers
are a better class of people than miners” (23). Likewise, she conflates respectability
and cleanliness, as it is made apparent in her stories of “how big and clean” the
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Wilmer house was, “how the porch shone with soapstoned wood and baskets of
sweet herbs that Grandma Wilmer used in her cooking, how the neighbors admired
her mother and looked up to her daddy” (24). Depicted as the quintessential
proper place, Shirley’s childhood home mirrors the commendable moral quality of
those living in it.
Even though Shirley’s obsession with cleanliness and dirt is central to the story, it is
suggested that she believes respectability to be an inherent biological trait. In each
of the story’s fragmentary vignettes depicting Shirley’s unmotivated abuse, her
eugenicist rhetoric ascribes manifestations of racial degeneracy to her children, such
as laziness (“Trash don’t know the meaning of use. Just like you kids”), promiscuity
and sexual degeneracy that verges on the monstruous: “Wouldn’t nobody take an
interest in you if you were to birth puppy dogs and turtles — which you might.
You might any day now” (Allison 2018: 24). Whereas Shirley believes her own
superior status is discernible to the naked eye, noting that “[t]he better people
[…] know their own” (21-22), she rules out the possibility that any of that status
has been passed on to her children: “Boatwrights, you’re all purely bred
Boatwrights” (24, emphasis added). Her fear of pollution is likewise apparent in
how she reacts to her many pregnancies, to the extent that she accuses her
husband of putting “death and dirt” in her: “All I’ve got out of you is death and
mud and worms” (26). Besides bringing Shirley closer to the stereotypically large
white trash family, each new pregnancy entails that she must carry degenerate
Boatwright blood inside her, forcing unwanted contact with a source of pollution
and thereby posing a threat to her integrity. These forced contacts further enrage
Shirley, fueling her hatred for her children.
Even if respectability is coded as an inherent biological trait, this does not prevent
Shirley from chastising her children for not living up to her standards. She
constantly polices their bodies and personal hygiene and berates them whenever
she finds any flaws: “That neck don’t look clean to me, Bo. You trying to grow
mold in those armpits, Mattie? Why are you so dirty and stupid?” (Allison 2018:
23). This is perhaps the clearest example of how the rhetoric of waste is used by
Shirley to erect boundaries that her children will never be able to cross. These
divisions act as reminders that they can never be assimilated into white respectability.
As the story approaches its climax, Mattie observes Shirley berating her younger
brother Bo for his table manners:
“Quality people use serving dishes”. Shirley slapped Bo’s hand. “Quality people
don’t come to the table with grease under their nails”.
“I washed”. […]
“If you’d really washed, you would be clean”, Shirley was saying. “Nobody in my
family ever came to the table with dirt under their nails. You go wash again”.
My family, Mattie thought. My family. (Allison 2018: 29)
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By “oppressing others” whom she sees as lower than herself, Shirley seeks to
prevent “becoming the lowest form of trash herself” (Morrison 2015: 52). This
attitude is also manifested in her workplace, yet it does not have the same effect
— mainly because other workers see Shirley for what she is: a snitch. This difference
will become the catalyst for Mattie’s rebellion at the end of the story.
Whereas “Meanest…” is rather straightforward in the way it represents how
respectability is constructed and understood, “Boar Taint” complicates matters by
departing from Ernie’s working-class perspective and then inserting Jill’s middle-
class outlook. The initial portrayal of the Jentzens as seen by Ernie draws from the
white trash stigmatype. The road to their farm is “long” and “slow”, leading “past
where the blacktop gives way to gravel and farther past, where it twists and turns
and becomes a rutted two track” (Campbell 2009: 151). This description
establishes them as backwoods people, not to be trusted — an impression
reinforced by Ernie’s reservations about the purchase: “That’s an awful cheap
price for any kind of hog […]. You got to ask yourself” (152). Moreover, his
recollections of having been classmates with a Jentzen kid tap into the white trash
imaginary, depicting them as extremely poor, malnourished and illiterate: “Had
only one pair of overhauls to his name. He never brought anything to eat for
lunch, not even lard-and-salt sandwiches like us regular poor kids. He still couldn’t
read in the fifth grade” (152, emphasis added). Access to normal food separates
“regular poor kids” from the Jentzens and their debased or inexistent appetites,
continuing a long tradition of identifying strategies to ward off hunger as
symptomatic of depravity (Hubbs 2022: 94): “Them Jentzens still living on
woodchuck meat and dandy-lion greens?”; “Jentzens got a good crop of pokeweed
this year?” (Campbell 2009: 163, 165).10 Unlike Shirley in “Meanest…”, Ernie
does not straightforwardly claim adherence to respectability, but his characterisation
of the Jentzens clearly portrays them as an inferior class to the “regular poor”,
working-class type Ernie believes he represents.
By contrast, Jill’s encounter with the Jentzens is not constructed by invoking the
“good poor” versus “bad poor” rhetoric used by Ernie. For Andy Oler, Jill’s
encounter with the Jentzens replicates the conventions of “hillbilly horror” as it
exploits cultural anxieties, in this case related to the dangers posed by polluted
whiteness entwined with rural decline (2019: 171). As a middle-class urbanite-
turned-farmer, Jill’s experience with backwoods people originates from a different
place than Ernie’s, even though both versions are ultimately caricatures of white
poverty. The scene as viewed through Jill’s eyes suggests that she makes sense of
her encounter with the Jentzens through the lens of “the city dweller versus evil
rural folk paradigm” (Murphy 2013: 135).11 Jentzen farm is a decaying “turn-of-
the-last-century house”, shrouded in darkness; when Jill enters, “her work boots
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press grit into the plank floor” (Campbell 2009: 153-54). The people inside are
silent and do not quite fit inside the room. Jill first distinguishes “the silhouette of
a shriveled old man in a thin undershirt, sitting motionless at a table”, and then
four more men, their faces looking “uniformly grimy” in the dim light of the stove
(154). One of them, “with dark blond hair stringy from sweat”, sits panting with
“[h]is mouth hung open”, which reminds Jill of “the way her chickens sweated
through their open mouths on the hottest days” (155). Meanwhile, the only
woman present, “thirty-five at the most”, is described as having a rough face and
raw hands, swollen ankles and two missing teeth (156). The emaciated, animalesque
profiles, combined with the suffocating atmosphere of the kitchen, make the
Jentzens feel grotesquely alien, reinforcing the association between the decaying
exterior and the physical decadence of those crammed inside.
Jill’s urban, middle-class upbringing places her farther away from both the Jentzens
and her husband, a situation that renders her incapable of spotting all the
differences between them, which Ernie perceives to be blatantly obvious. Instead,
she can spot their common quirks and habits from her outsider’s perspective.
Namely, she quickly notices that the Jentzens are “not hooked up to the power
grid” and remembers how she had to persuade Ernie “to get the electricity
connected to the house and barn”, a recently introduced feature that did not
prevent him from sitting “at the kitchen table with the oil lamp or the Coleman
lantern” when left to his own devices (Campbell 2009: 153). Jill’s observation that
“[p]eople back home in Ann Arbor refused to believe there were still folks without
electricity in America” (153) draws a line, not between Ernie and the Jentzens, but
between “people back home” and rural Michigan, blurring Ernie’s claim to
respectability as part of the good poor. Later, as she notices a mended tear in the
screen door, she is reminded of how they, too, “had repaired their screen with duct
tape last week, and she had felt bad, thinking about how her father used to replace
a porch screen when it had the tiniest hole” (157). Jill’s father’s attitude is
indicative of a middle-class ethos of consumerism and disposability, one he deems
to be the superior option: “Her father couldn’t understand how Jill could choose
a life where there was no time to relax and do things right” (157, emphasis added).
Jill imagines him pontificating on her life choices from his office: “Her father
might enjoy leaning back in his office chair about now and telling her she’d wasted
twenty-five —no, thirty— dollars and a quarter-tank of gas” (162). Compared to
Jill’s father and his respectable middle-class persona, Ernie’s mindset is very much
aligned with that of the Jentzens.
Although they represent “the clearest image of the struggling Midwestern farmer
on the brink of collapse in the twenty-first century” (Ortega 2023: 53), the
Jentzens are not the only ones who struggle financially. Jill and Ernie are going
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through a rough patch after Jill squandered most of her grandmother’s inheritance
investing in a series of failed agricultural schemes (Campbell 2009: 159). Their
neighbor has “lost about everything except his house and garage in the last few
years” and now works in retail, while his estate has been sold by the bank to “a
larger corporate farm” (163). These circumstances raise doubt regarding the
community’s socioeconomic prospects. While observing Jentzen farm, Jill notes
that “[a] big clapboard house like this […] could have been a showpiece in the
historic district in Ann Arbor, with the siding, trim, and glass all repaired”, but
here it is just a rotting anachronism “doomed to collapse” (154). The house and
its inhabitants are remnants of a lifestyle that will only get increasingly obsolete as
corporate farming takes over; Ernie and his community will follow suit. This
realisation hits Jill as she returns home, hog in tow, to find Ernie, their neighbor
and his son “sitting at the porch picnic table with the Coleman lantern” (162).
The eerie resemblance between this scene and what she witnessed back at Jentzen
farm pushes Jill to the edge: “She wanted to unhook the trailer, pull out of this
driveway, and head south until she was far enough away that she could look back
and see it all in miniature” (163). Jill’s assimilation into the category of trash, like
in Mattie’s case by the end of “Meanest…”, appears to be inevitable. However,
both these characters manage to re-signify the implications of assimilation through
their labor — in Mattie’s case, by choosing to sign up with the union and, in Jill’s
case, by doubling down on her commitment to live as a farmer despite the threat
of economic decline.
4. Re-signifying Trash through Labor
After examining the rhetorical strategies deployed to establish (intra-)class divisions
in Allison’s and Campbell’s stories, I would like to address how the association with
waste is repurposed by the characters of Mattie and Jill, who vindicate this
connection — even if that aligns them with the white trash stigmatype. In both
cases, this vindication entails a rejection of respectability embodied by parental
figures: Mattie refuses to follow her mother’s example at work, choosing class
solidarity over aspirations of upward mobility; meanwhile, Jill makes the choice to
stay a farmer despite her father’s prejudice, even if that implies grappling with
economic uncertainty. In doing so, these characters reshuffle the traits of
respectability, finding a sense of pride in their association with what others see as
trash. Although both stories opt for an open ending, it is hinted that their decision
to recast their association with waste may be the solution to their respective conflicts.
Throughout “Meanest Woman Ever Left Tennessee”, Mattie seems to be the only
Boatwright sibling to stand up to her mother’s attacks: “she hated the way Mattie
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would stare back at her and refuse to drop her eyes” (Allison 2018: 23). The other
children think Mattie is “crazy”, but nonetheless “worshiped her craziness and
suspected that without her they might have all curled up and died” (23). Although
Shirley reviles all members of her family, she is especially vicious to Mattie and
often singles her out for her alleged depravity. In Shirley’s eyes, Mattie is
simultaneously promiscuous and undesirable, in tune with other portrayals of
white trash sexuality as voracious and deviant.12 She tells Mattie she is a “whore”
who is not “worth two cents a night” (25) and takes every opportunity to drum it
into her: “[Mabel Moseley] said you were shaking your ass and swinging your hair
like some kind of harlot” (30).
In the story, Mattie’s rebellion runs parallel to her entrance in the workforce and
her sexual awakening. When she and her brother Bo are forced to find work at the
textile mill, Mattie soon discovers that other women “stepped aside when her
mama passed”: “Everybody said Shirley Boatwright believed her piss was wine.
Everybody said she repeated whatever she heard to the foreman on the second
shift” (Allison 2018: 27). Shirley’s attempts to get ahead have earned her a place
in the finishing room, “[s]afely separated from the rest of the mill by a wire-and-
glass wall” (27), but she does not instill respect in others — only resentment and
animosity. Realising her mother’s real role in the mill starts to affect Mattie’s views.
Moreover, on her way to work every morning, she often runs into a young man
who openly flirts with her: “Lord, I do love to look at pretty girls” (Allison 2018:
28). Mattie notices that this is “the first time anyone had ever suggested [she]
might be pretty” and becomes flirtatious, too, which in turn emboldens her: “She
didn’t know what she wanted to say to anybody. She only knew she wanted to start
finding things out. She felt as if her eyes were coming open, as if light were
sneaking into a dark place inside her” (28-29). This positive association between
desire and freedom recasts Mattie’s sexuality in a different light; instead of the
monstruous depravity Shirley perceives, it is presented as a liberating force that
shapes Mattie’s aspirations in life.
This change in perspective leads Mattie to openly question Shirley and her
worldview. This is reflected in the story’s progressive shift in focus, from Shirley to
Mattie, showcasing her contrasting opinions. Whereas Shirley’s food is “[w]hite
on white”, her daughter fantasises with the vibrant colors of “[b]lack-eyed peas
with pork and greens […]. When she had her own kitchen, there would be lots of
color” (Allison 2018: 29). Examining the gaps between the floorboards, Mattie
wonders, “What would it be like […] to live in a house with dirt floors?” (30). This
leads to the final scene where Mattie antagonises Shirley by bringing up the “union
man” to her brother: “‘Trade union’. Mattie filled her fork again and then looked
right past her mama to Bo. ‘You think we ought to sign up?’” (31). As Shirley gets
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up, most likely to slap her, Mattie finds herself thinking that “when she had kids,
she’d sit them all down on the dirt floor and tell ‘em to sign with the union” (31).
Confronting her mother entails embracing a lifestyle that radically clashes with
hers; thus, Mattie begins to chart an alternative pathway that casts the association
with dirt in a positive light, rejecting her mother’s brand of respectability and
embracing working-class allegiance. By depicting Shirley as a snitch allied with the
foremen, the story also makes the case that Mattie’s fantasy to live in a dirt-floor
cabin and sign with the union repurposes Shirley’s aspirational middle-class
respectability as working-class dignity.
For Jill in “Boar Taint”, repurposing respectability also entails rejecting parental
influence and embracing her association with dirt. Like Mattie’s, her future is
uncertain. Jill has gone from “post-graduate student working with experimental
bean crops” (Campbell 2009: 153) to full-time farmer in the span of thirty-six
months and struggles with her sense of belonging. Whereas she keeps squandering
money on failed schemes, such as experimental soybeans that never sprouted or a
milking operation that soon becomes obsolete, Ernie sticks to “his hundreds of
acres of the same corn, oats, and beans he’d been harvesting for the last three
decades” (152) and seems to regard Jill’s failed ventures with a mixture of
skepticism and pity (159). This perception is perhaps conditioned by Jill’s
insecurity, fueled by her family’s deprecating opinions: “Her family was right: just
because she’d studied agriculture for six years didn’t mean she knew a damned
thing about farming” (161). Her father seems to be particularly critical of Jill’s
choices, as he tells her that “marrying Ernie was proof positive she didn’t know a
damned thing about real life” (161). In the story, Jill tries to navigate her feelings
of inadequacy and alienation, as well as the looming threat of economic decline
— all sentiments that become more acute after her encounter with the Jentzens.
The hog ordeal reveals that the real threat for Jill does not lie in being attacked by
the Jentzens, but in becoming the Jentzens. Besides the uncanny parallels between
Ernie and the men, Jill notices unsettling similarities between herself and the only
Jentzen woman:
Despite the swollen ankles and two missing teeth, the woman appeared not much
older than Jill, maybe thirty-five at the most. Her hair was still a rich brown, but her
face was rough, as though sunburned season after season. Jill always tried to
remember to put on sunscreen, but rarely reapplied it after sweating it off. The
woman held out her raw hand, and as Jill gave her the five and the twenty, she noted
her own hand was torn up from scrubbing the cow barn’s concrete floors and walls
to prepare for this morning’s inspection. (Campbell 2009: 156)
These eerie coincidences haunt Jill, who becomes aware of how the gap she had
imagined between herself and the Jentzens is closing: “Until Jill had seen the
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Jentzen woman, she hadn’t understood what her family feared for her” (162).
This realisation dawns on her on the drive home. Believing the hog has collapsed
and died from an infection, and swarmed by negative thoughts, Jill grabs a fancy
“imported dark chocolate bar with hazelnuts” she had just acquired at the grocery
store “as an indulgence” (153) and messily devours it with “mud-crusted hands
smell[ing] of pig shit”:
She […] tore away the wrapper with her fingers and teeth, undressed the top of the
chocolate bar, spit out bits of foil. She bit into the heat-softened chocolate and
chewed and swallowed wildly. The luxury of it made her feel drunk. She tore away
the rest of the wrapper and devoured the whole damned thing. Despite the pig stink,
it tasted better than anything she’d eaten lately […]. (161)
In this passage, Jill becomes physically and symbolically tainted from the perspective
of white respectability. She partially confirms her family’s fears were founded as she
breaks away from middle-class respectability and decorum. Seeing that “her ideas
for extra income” may in fact be “hurrying the end along” (Campbell 2009: 162),
she is flabbergasted to find Ernie and their neighbors sitting around the Coleman
lantern, an image that seems to confirm Jill’s fears that they are, indeed, just like
the Jentzens: “What would her father say if he were here? Would he make clever
remarks about failing farms and inbred families at the ends of dirt roads where
everybody had six fingers on each hand?” (164). In this imaginary scornful
comment, Jill has crossed over to the other side, aligned with the “failing farms
and inbred families” her father likes to ridicule.
Even though she is tempted to flee, unsure whether “she belonged here at all”
and whether Ernie “see[s] her as a farmer” (Campbell 2009: 164), Jill chooses to
stay. In doing so, she insists on placing value in rural life even if that entails living
in contact with polluting substances, like soil and manure. Despite the influence
her father holds on her, Jill manages to separate the physical taint that is involved
in farm work from the symbolic taint her father conflates with it: “Her father
couldn’t understand […] how the contours of the farm interlocked precisely with
the contours of her mind” (161). Ultimately, it is Jill’s passion which gives her the
resolve to persevere: “All she’d ever wanted, from the time she was a kid, was to
work with land and animals, to work beside a good man” (161). However, she
charts her own course after witnessing the fate of the Jentzen woman. In an interview,
Campbell noted that the Jentzen men are “especially terrifying” to Jill because she
feels they “might devour her for sustenance”: “The challenge for Jill staying on the
farm with Ernie is that she has to imagine a way she can stay on her own terms and
without her own men devouring her” (in Kothari 2008). The end suggests there
might be hope in her sense of innovation, as opposed to the stagnant ways of failing
farmers (Ortega 2023: 54).
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In the end, Jill pursues what might be the only viable alternative left, striving “to
salvage what she can of the farm’s future” (Ortega 2023: 52) in her attempts to
adapt “their agricultural practice to a changing economy”, whereas Ernie
“continues to farm as he always has, despite evidence that his is a declining way of
life” (Oler 2019: 171). Although Jill realises that, “like all the farmers in this
downward spiral, she and Ernie could lose everything” (Campbell 2009: 162), the
story concludes on a somewhat high note after she discovers the hog is alive and
will only need some antibiotics to thrive. Despite the bleak economic prospects,
she reassures herself that her pig-roasting plan “was once again looking very
promising”: “This boar had turned out to be exactly what she needed, a creature
even bullets could not stop” (167). This ending is only possible after Jill rejects
both her father’s prejudice against rural life and Ernie’s prejudice against the
Jentzens. In staying, Jill ignores her own inevitable association with the poor white
stigmatype and tries to make an alternative pathway for herself.
5. Conclusion
Bearing all these aspects in mind, both “Meanest Woman Ever Left Tennessee”
and “Boar Taint” depict labor as a source of pride by reshuffling the tenets of
middle-class respectability, represented by the characters of Shirley and Jill’s father,
to compose a portrayal of working-class dignity wherein associations with dirt and
manual labor are cast in a positive light. Whereas Allison’s story puts emphasis on
the value of class solidarity by linking dirt-floor cabins and trade unions in Mattie’s
rebellion against the tyrannical rule of white respectability, embodied by her
mother, Campbell’s story looks past stereotypical depictions of rural folks and farm
life as backwards and degenerate, showcasing instead the intrinsic value of physical
work. Arguably, if Jill had not been tainted by driving to Jentzen farm and wrestling
the hog into her truck, she would have relinquished the opportunity to salvage the
farm’s future; if becoming tainted renders her closer to the Jentzens and the white
trash stigmatype, it is a price she is willing to pay. Similarly, Mattie does not mind
being associated with her family and fellow workers’ lowly status, as long as she can
distance herself from the abuse and impossible expectations her mother places on
her siblings and her.
Each story illustrates how the upper and middle classes benefit from the working
classes’ investment in respectability by including a plot that presents these internal
class divisions as having a direct negative outcome for their livelihoods. In
“Meanest…”, Shirley’s desire to move up in society grants the foremen access to
information on other workers, potentially jeopardising their activities. In “Boar
Taint”, farmers continue to believe they do not have it as bad as the Jentzens
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despite proof to the contrary, instead of finding a common cause against the
expansionist threat of corporate farming. Although the stories do not exactly
vindicate a purported “white trash identity”, they do reject the white trash
stigmatype and its discursive links with waste. Instead of dwelling on the rhetoric
of othering deployed by their fellow characters, Mattie and Jill re-signify their ties
with waste by introducing new, positive associations between dirt and self-worth
— while Mattie vindicates her working-class affiliation and rejects Shirley’s
aspirations of social ascent, Jill similarly relinquishes her father’s middle-class ethos
and finds pride in her newly acquired expertise as a farmer, even if that opens a rift
between her family’s social station and her own. Dorothy Allison and Bonnie Jo
Campbell provide relevant examples of how literature can contribute to dignifying
working-class lifestyles in the US by fostering positive representation, namely by
showcasing life choices that place value in what is often regarded as worthless, but
also by presenting the plurality of poor white experiences instead of falling for
reified identities and negative stereotypes.
Notes
1. For a thorough analysis of the
changing identities of the ‘undeserving poor’
throughout US history, see Katz (2013).
2. See Forret (2006), esp.
“Introduction”.
3. At least until the first half of the
nineteenth century, terms like “immoral, lazy,
and dirty” were still applied to “Irish
immigrants, African Americans, Indians, and
poor Southern whites alike” (Zimring 2015:
30). Later, however, race divisions pushed
understandings of poor Southern whites as
not entirely white, solidifying the conflation of
poor moral character and race while
downplaying the role of class.
4. Nancy Isenberg discusses the
“ingrained physical defects” that
characterised white trash Southerners in
nineteenth century descriptions, noting that
by being “classified as a ‘race’ that passed on
horrific traits”, the possibilities of improvement
or social mobility for poor whites were
eliminated (2017: 135-36). This connects to
fears of social arrivisme in the South during
Reconstruction, epitomised in the figure of
the scalawag, and the desire to maintain
preexisting social hierarchies on account of
alleged racial and biological differences (see
Isenberg 2017, ch. 8). In parallel to these
transformations in the US South, the growth
of an urban underclass living in deplorable
sanitary conditions cemented the belief that
“poverty and immorality went hand in hand”
regardless of location (Zimring 2015: 30).
5. Among these characters, Ransy
Sniffle, created by Augustus Baldwin
Longstreet, paved the way for subsequent
representations of poor whites. Sniffle was
“notable for his poor diet, his physical
deformities, his laziness, apathy, and low
intelligence, and his oddly colored skin”
(Wray 2006: 40). Moreover, illustrators like
E.W. Kemble disseminated the stereotypical
image that would come to be associated with
white trash (see Hubbs 2022). For further
reading on the presence of poor white
stereotypes in nineteenth century media, see
Harkins (2004).
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6. For a thorough chronological
review of the antecedents and rise of
American eugenics in relation to poor whites,
see Isenberg, especially chapters 6 to 8 (2017:
135-205). For a shorter yet compelling
overview, see Wray, chapter 3 (2006: 65-95).
Regarding the persistence of eugenics-
influenced visions of poor whites as
intrinsically degenerate, especially in rural
contexts, see Murphy (2013) for a
comprehensive discussion of the hillbilly
trope in contemporary backwoods horror film.
7. For a nuanced discussion of the
factors influencing the commodification and
vindication (or lack thereof) of white trash
identity in recent years, see Hartigan (2005:
109-33) and Smith (2004).
8. For instance, ‘redneck’ and ‘hillbilly’
have been partly revitalised by their association
with country music, authenticity, and simple
life, yet those perceived as rednecks and
hillbillies continue to be lampooned by
normative whites (see Harkins 2004; Hartigan
2005; Isenberg 2017, esp. 256-261).
9. Henceforth, “Meanest…”.
10. For further reading on the
association between hunger, moral
bankruptcy, and bizarre eating habits among
poor whites, see Hubbs (2022), esp. 96-100.
11. Murphy makes the case that rural
Gothic narratives “often pivot upon ill-fated
encounters between people who are tied to
one place, and those who are ‘just passing
through’”, who become victims of locals
“whose aggressiveness, resentment, and
degeneracy is always linked to the fact that
they tied to a deprived rural locale which
epitomises the stagnation of what was once
‘frontier territory’” (2013: 142). Jill’s
expectation of violence is shaped by her
knowledge of the Jentzens’ stagnation, but
also by her feelings of alienation as a middle-
class outsider trying to fit in a community
whose inner dynamics she still struggles to
understand.
12. Sexuality among poor whites has
been historically depicted as raw, aberrant,
and aggressive, characterised by a type of
promiscuity that may incorporate taboo
practices like incest and zoophilia. To name a
well-known example, the popularity of
Deliverance (1972, dir. John Boorman) with its
deviant, rapist hillbillies, has contributed
greatly to the perpetuation of this stereotype
in contemporary depictions of poor white
sexuality.
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