Countering "What God Thought and the Neighbors Said"

This article reads Harriette Arnow’s 1949 novel of the Kentucky hills through a lens of twenty-first-century queer theory and post-structuralism. It briefly surveys past criticism, but instead of suggesting, as many past critics have, that the novel merely offers, and fails to resolve, the tensions between its central hunting narrative and its gender critique, this paper instead argues for another way of viewing the novel’s structure, troubling denouement (when a loving and unconventional father requires his brilliant daughter to succumb to an unwanted marriage), and unique central symbol, an almost supernaturally clever red fox who plagues and challenges the community. This reading of Arnow’s mid-twentieth-century Appalachian hunting tale offers a new look at the ways in which a third-sex possibility offered through an animal avatar can undermine patriarchal authority, cross gender boundaries, and establish a uniquely Appalachian icon of alterity

French horn · Sociology · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Philosophy

• Animal Victims in Modern Fiction

  Marian Scholtmeijer•Animal Victims in Modern Fiction•1993

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• A Melus Interview

  Danny Miller, Harriette Simpson Arnow•MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of…•1982

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• "Feminine Heroism in Harriette Arnow's "The Dollmaker

  Barbara Hill Rigney•Frontiers A Journal of Women…•1975

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• Gender and language

  Sally L Kitch•Women s Studies•1987

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