| Many twentieth-century Southern works feature at least one dead, absent, or incapacitated mother, leaving the child vulnerable but also helping him or her develop maturity and strength. Generally, though, this literature is full of lost children who grow up to be lost adults.; The loss of the mother in Southern literature is more than a plot device or an appeal for pity; the absent mother in Southern fiction represents the loss of the motherland.; For white Southerners, the motherland is the antebellum South, in which one knew one's place. The New South is uncertain, like a child without a mother and, consequently, without an identity. White Southern women writers such as Porter, McCullers, Welty, O'Connor, and Alther often use the absent mother to represent freedom from the patriarchy of the Old South. Reynolds Price does so, as well. Generally, however, white men who write in the South, such as Faulkner, Warren, Price, Ehle, and Tate, mourn the loss of the mother and the motherland, as white men lose their identity and power.; For black Southerners, the motherland is Africa. Even more than white Southerners, black Southerners are displaced. The slave trade sometimes took them from their birth mothers, as well as from their homeland. Upon emancipation, former slaves were again displaced, as they were later by migration to Northern cities. Black Southern writers such as Wright, Haley, Hurston, Margaret Walker, Alice Walker, and Angelou write about children with absent mothers, often as representative of the lost Africa or of the lost surrogate, the Old South.; The most effective mother substitute for a white Southern child is a black woman. Perhaps this phenomenon is a movement toward a gentler South that encourages an almost familial relationship between the races.; The absent mother in Southern fiction can thus represent both a lost past and a connection with the future. |
