Participation Type
Paper
Session Title
Session 1.01 Literature
Presentation #1 Title
"Unruly Women: Music and Madness in Lee Smith's _The Devil's Dream_"
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Traditional mountain music, along with its descendant, country music, frequently appear in the work of Appalachian writer Lee Smith, but nowhere do they occupy a more central position than in her 1992 novel The Devil’s Dream. This polyphonic work tells the story of five generations of a “singing family” modeled loosely on the Carter clan; it includes a fictional treatment of the famous Bristol Sessions of 1927; and it begins and ends in the lobby of the Opryland Hotel in Nashville. Given the centrality of music to the novel, it perhaps should come as no surprise that one of the best critical treatments of it appears not in a literary journal but in the Country Music Annual of 2000. The Devil’s Dream also treats another frequent subject in Smith’s fiction, however: that of female madness, institutionalization, and silencing. The novel includes a striking number of unruly, depressed, and unconventional women; many of them end up institutionalized in mental hospitals, prisons, or nursing homes. This paper will examine the way that one female character, the successful musician Katie Cocker, uses music and the production of the album “Shall We Gather at the River” to free her institutionalized relatives and to give them, quite literally, a voice on the recording. Through this recording, mountain music becomes a means of emptying the asylums and giving, at least temporarily, some agency to previously silenced and disempowered female characters.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Martha Billips is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor English at Transylvania University. She has presented and published on the works of Appalachian writers Lee Smith and Harriette Simpson Arnow, and she currently serves as an assistant editor of the _Journal of Appalachian Studies_.
"Unruly Women: Music and Madness in Lee Smith's _The Devil's Dream_"
Traditional mountain music, along with its descendant, country music, frequently appear in the work of Appalachian writer Lee Smith, but nowhere do they occupy a more central position than in her 1992 novel The Devil’s Dream. This polyphonic work tells the story of five generations of a “singing family” modeled loosely on the Carter clan; it includes a fictional treatment of the famous Bristol Sessions of 1927; and it begins and ends in the lobby of the Opryland Hotel in Nashville. Given the centrality of music to the novel, it perhaps should come as no surprise that one of the best critical treatments of it appears not in a literary journal but in the Country Music Annual of 2000. The Devil’s Dream also treats another frequent subject in Smith’s fiction, however: that of female madness, institutionalization, and silencing. The novel includes a striking number of unruly, depressed, and unconventional women; many of them end up institutionalized in mental hospitals, prisons, or nursing homes. This paper will examine the way that one female character, the successful musician Katie Cocker, uses music and the production of the album “Shall We Gather at the River” to free her institutionalized relatives and to give them, quite literally, a voice on the recording. Through this recording, mountain music becomes a means of emptying the asylums and giving, at least temporarily, some agency to previously silenced and disempowered female characters.
