| The relationships between entities of authority and Appalachian mountaineers have ever been contentious. Despite a theoretically egalitarian political system, American society maintains social, political, and economic stratification; the "mountaineer" or "hillbilly" inhabitants of the Appalachian region are therein relegated to the lower echelons. A contribution to Appalachian Studies, this project deconstructs the interactions of mountaineers and the authorities who have attempted to "modernize" them. Using Michel Foucault's theories on power, resistance, and discipline, it demonstrates how Cormac McCarthy manipulates Appalachian regional images while simultaneously performing an "archeology" of Appalachian sociocultural constructs.;Stereotypes of the mountain people are often exaggerated or simply untrue, yet they remain vivid in the American popular imagination. Historically, mountaineers have been isolated in the Appalachian region; they have engaged the wider American economy only in limited ways and have impeded "progress" when modernizing industry and the government wanted to extract the region's resources. Foucauldian analysis of historical developments reveals how discipline in the mountains helped to draw the mountaineer into the web of the American economy, society, and culture: roads provided ways into the mountains for industry and ways out for the mountaineer; cotton mill villages and regional cities served as "disciplined" destinations for the mountaineer out-migrants; the iconic image of the mountaineer/hillbilly, a socio-political and historical construction cultivated and maintained by fiction writers, benevolence organizations, and academics, "othered" the mountain people as deviants and delinquents. The subsequent convolution of the Appalachian region and Appalachia---yet another rhetorical construction---places the mountain folk in positions of alterity relative to mainstream American society. Authority, can thereby compartmentalize, categorize, and stigmatize a segment of the population who otherwise appears no different from the majority of the American people.;Cormac McCarthy, in The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, Suttree, The Gardener's Son, and The Road, shows various conflicts between authority and the mountaineer. This Foucauldian analysis of his Appalachian writings exposes the workings of power within the Appalachian region, revealing how mountaineers have been disciplined via roads, regional migration destinations, deviance and delinquency, and the still-popular Appalachian iconography. |
