Violence In Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out Of Carolina

As her mother waits outside the bathroom door, Ruth Anne Boatwright, nicknamed Bone, is being beaten by her step-father, Glen. She looks into his menacing features and thinks, “it was nothing I had done that made him beat me. It was just me, the fact of my life. Who I was in his eyes and mine. I was evil” (Allison 110). Bone, the main character in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, comes to this irrational, self-deprecating conclusion as she is being abused one day and blames not her abuser, but her mere existence instead. However, it is Glen’s own insecurities that makes him resort to the physical violence aimed towards his step-daughter. This violence reinforces Bone’s self-blame and thus creates a never-ending vicious cycle as Glen
Bastard Out of Carolina is a semi-autobiographical account of Bone Boatwright, a bastard child growing up in Greenville County, South Carolina in the 1950’s and 60’s. The novel follows her through thirteen years of her life, during which she is sexually and physically abused by her step-father. This abuse is worsened due to the social stratum of the family, who are known for being “poor white trash.” In her analytical essay, “Vengeance is Fleeting: Masculine Transgressions in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina,” Laurie Vickroy states that men resist their trash status through “displays of physical violence and sexual transgressions” (Vickroy 55). Bone’s mother, Anney, “hated to be called trash” (Allison 3) and would do anything to break free from that conventional image, the most disturbing of which is choosing to remain with an abusive man in order to be somewhat financially stable, endangering her child’s life in the process. When Anney first meets Glen Waddell in her diner, she contemplates her need for a husband, but also “a car and a home and a hundred thousand dollars” (Allison 13). She looks at Glen and sees a handsome, blue-eyed boy who is seemingly suitable enough to marry, but what