I read Dorothy Allison’s essay about her life, “A Question of Class.” In this essay she discusses growing up in a despised section of society. She reflects on how growing up in extreme white poverty, in the south, challenged her as both a child and later as a successful adult. In this essay some similarities to Bone in Bastard out of Carolina are very prevalent, and Allison’s openness about her life and her struggles make her fiction even more compelling.
In an essay about finding herself, Dorothy Allison recounts growing up in extreme southern poverty and how it affected her throughout her life. She discusses wanting to separate herself from her past, ashamed of it. She understands that her family were the “they’s” of society. She writes, “people pretend that poverty is a voluntary condition, that the poor are different, less than fully human, or at least less sensitive to hopelessness, despair, and suffering” (“A Question of Class,” Allison). Allison struggled with sexual and physical violence from her stepfather throughout her childhood, the first time he molested her being in the front seat of their car after her mother miscarried. She was also so badly beaten by him that it created a problem in their family, and her mother took her away, but only for a short period of time. Again, when Allison told her cousin that her stepfather was molesting her and her sister, did her mother take her away. Yet again, it was only for a few days. When they picked up and fled to Florida when Allison was thirteen she began to understand the desire to run away that the rest of her family already had. It is the action she would later take when leaving home for college, but she realizes, “What hides behind that solution is the conviction that the life you have lived, the person you are, are valueless, better of abandoned, that running away is easier than trying to change anything…” (“A Question of Class”).
Luckily, Allison was praised by her teachers for her intelligence, and she embraced the fact that she did not have the negative stigma attached to her family name in Greenville. When she went to college she realized she was, in a sense, escaping her family. She rarely went home and did not talk about them much with her peers. She put herself into her work, and at this time, was not writing fiction. Allison was focused on her feminist and lesbian magazines and thought fiction (and essays) to be a waste of time. It was not until she went to speak to both a group of Episcopalians and a group of juvenile delinquents that she realized that she had no way of expressing her emotions or her ideas that she couldn’t explain. When she came home from speaking to these two groups she broke down and realized that she could not continue a life of compartmentalized sections. She knew she had to work to forgive her family and accept them for who they are. She writes, “I have explained what I know over and over again, in every possible way I can, but I have never been able to make clear the degree of my fear, the extent to which I feel myself denied, not only that I am queer in a world that hates queers but that I was born poor into a world that despises the poor. The need to explain is part of why I write fiction” (“A Question of Class”).
Allison closes this essay with a paragraph that resonated with me. She wants her readers to know that every human being is valuable, and by removing the ideas of self-loathing and self-destruction defeats those who have inflicted suffering.
“I grew up poor, hated, the victim of physical, emotional, and sexual violence, and I know that suffering does not ennoble. It destroys. To resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off the conditioning of being despised, the fear of becoming that they that is talked about so dismissively, to refuse lying myths and easy moralities, to see ourselves as human, flawed and extraordinary. All of us–extraordinary.” (“A Question of Class”).
