Literary Context Presentation: Dorothy Allison

                I did my literary context presentation on Dorothy Allison. She is a storyteller and poet as well as author of bestselling novels like “Bastard Out of Carolina.” What I found the most interesting about her is that as a child, she went through a lot of horrible things like sexual abuse and incest and rather than hide what happened to her, she embraces it and uses it to teach and help others. She incorporates this trauma into her work and because of this, many people see her work as inappropriate or too explicit.

                The reading that was paired to Dorothy Allison was her very complex memoir “Two or Three Things I Know for Sure.” In this memoir, she goes in depth into her abuse as well as her family’s (specifically the women) past abuse and issues with poverty and men. Many people claim that her book “Bastard Out of Carolina,” is her memoir but it’s not. I felt that I could really understand and pick up more about her after researching into her life and her past. I got the sense that she went through some traumatic stuff but it wasn’t until after I started researching that I got the extent of what that was. I think that after figuring out the horrors she went through, I could understand the context of the short snippet from the book.

                One section that makes a lot more sense to me after finding out about her past is the part where they are at her mother’s funeral. In the story Allison is talking about how her older sister had taken on the role of mother and was taking care of everything including, “Keeping me carefully out of my stepfather’s reach,” (15). Obviously that doesn’t mean much to someone who was only reading an excerpt of her book and didn’t know her history. Now that I know he was the one who had sexually abused her for around ten years, it makes sense that they’d keep her away from him.

                Now I wasn’t in class the day of the discussion due to another class field trip so I can’t reflect on what the class talked about but my own interpretation of this book and of Dorothy is that she tried to push passed the horrible things that she endured in her childhood. She is now empowering women all over to do the same. She is using her trauma to help women realize that if they are victims of sexual abuse or child abuse, that it does not define who they are and what they can become. She also has been trying to get the title “white trash” away from her name. A label given to her by a critic just because she had come from a poor family in the South. Allison is truly an inspiration and I’m glad I was able to teach the class a little bit about her.