Mode of Program Participation
Academic Scholarship
Participation Type
Paper
Presentation #1 Title
“Blood on the Snow”: Place, Politics, and Childhood Trauma in Contemporary Appalachian Fiction
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Lee Edelman asserts that American politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been centered on the protection of “the Child” and defined as a “fight for the future.” Campaigns for and against issues ranging from abortion to causes near and dear to Appalachia like the fight against mountaintop removal frequently employ rhetoric that seeks to convince citizens that the well-being of our nation’s children is at stake and should be at the forefront of our minds. My paper seeks to explore how this rhetoric and our attitude towards children as representatives of the future translate to contemporary Appalachian fiction. Authors frequently employ children as protagonists, or at least very prominent characters, and place them in intensely traumatic plot lines: Harriet Simpson Arnow’s The Dollmaker opens with a harrowing and iconic scene in which the main character must perform an emergency medical procedure on her young child with a stick, and more contemporary authors including Lee Smith, Dorothy Allison, and Silas House have told the stories of youthful protagonists trying to reconcile a commitment to their homes and families with the trauma they have endured. These children, in turn, become immobilized, stuck in the past and in the region, as they attempt to deal with their trauma. My paper questions why, beyond providing an emotional story for readers, these Appalachian authors might choose to depict child characters in this way: could the trauma these child characters face represent a larger trauma faced by the Appalachian region as a whole?
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Melissa Wiser is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Kentucky. Her research interests include twentieth and twenty-first Appalachian literature with a focus on representations of childhood and family.
“Blood on the Snow”: Place, Politics, and Childhood Trauma in Contemporary Appalachian Fiction
Lee Edelman asserts that American politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been centered on the protection of “the Child” and defined as a “fight for the future.” Campaigns for and against issues ranging from abortion to causes near and dear to Appalachia like the fight against mountaintop removal frequently employ rhetoric that seeks to convince citizens that the well-being of our nation’s children is at stake and should be at the forefront of our minds. My paper seeks to explore how this rhetoric and our attitude towards children as representatives of the future translate to contemporary Appalachian fiction. Authors frequently employ children as protagonists, or at least very prominent characters, and place them in intensely traumatic plot lines: Harriet Simpson Arnow’s The Dollmaker opens with a harrowing and iconic scene in which the main character must perform an emergency medical procedure on her young child with a stick, and more contemporary authors including Lee Smith, Dorothy Allison, and Silas House have told the stories of youthful protagonists trying to reconcile a commitment to their homes and families with the trauma they have endured. These children, in turn, become immobilized, stuck in the past and in the region, as they attempt to deal with their trauma. My paper questions why, beyond providing an emotional story for readers, these Appalachian authors might choose to depict child characters in this way: could the trauma these child characters face represent a larger trauma faced by the Appalachian region as a whole?
