Summary Of Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out Of Carolina

Unbroken Strength
The back of your throat burns as anger and hatred bubble over like the pots of fruit for canning on Aunt Raylene’s stove. Excitement and want for revenge consume you while you seek some justice through the iron fists of the Boatwright’s uncles. You cry for the young Bone Boatwright as she is subjected to the mental, sexual and physical abuses as she is forced to grow up too early, a seeming specialty in the Boatwright family. In Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, Allison uses themes of guilt, social class and perseverance to depict Bone’s dysfunctional surroundings but overall resilience offering a story of hardships but also strength. Dorothy Allison forces the reader to ache with Bone’s anguish and despair as though

Bone is born she is already seen as trash in society’s eyes as Bone’s birth certificate reads as “Illegitimate” due to her lack of a father causing her mother to continuously try to change this as she “hated to be called trash, hated the memory of every day she'd ever spent bent over other peoples' peanuts and strawberry plants while they stood tall and looked at her like she was a rock on the ground. The stamp on that birth certificate burned her like the stamp she knew they'd tried to put on her. No-good, lazy, shiftless” (Allison 10). For Anney, Bone’s illegitimacy is yet another reminder from society of the Boatwright’s lowly class and reminding her that society seems to not view them as “official". With this birth certificate Anney feels like it is already a brand on her child and because of this, tries everything she can to clean this slate. Anney, as a 16 year old single mother fears for her daughter as she already knows of the preconceived views that will be thrust upon Bone. As the Boatwrights continuously move from place to place trying to find work all the while dodging debt collectors, Bone’s mother reassures to her daughters, “We're not bad people. We're not even really poor. Anybody says something to you, you keep that in mind. We're not bad people. And we pay our way. We just can't always pay when people want” (Allison 52). Bone and her sister “nod earnestly, agreeing wordlessly, but [don’t] believe her. We knew what the neighbors called us, what Mama wanted to protect us from. We knew who we were” (Allison 52). Anney tries to give her children other possibilities and alternatives by assuring them that they are not what people around them say they are. Anney continues to push away these suffocating labels hoping that her children don’t see these labels when looking