The Divine Secrets Of Louisiana Character Analysis

The Ya-Yas of Louisiana In Callie Khouri’s rendition of The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Siddalee Walker is a playwright living in New York City in the 1990s. Her current play focuses on her skewed vision of her Louisiana childhood; her mother, Viviane, is an eccentric alcoholic who wasn’t always present, whether that be mentally or physically. The Ya-Ya’s, Viviane’s circle of friends, fly to New York to bring Siddalee back to Louisiana to explain what really went on with her mother. The big spoiler is that Siddalee thinks that Vivi willingly left them for months, but she finds out she was involuntarily committed due to alcoholism. Siddalee’s dialect is her outward way of showing how she feels about her mother and her childhood;

In the second scene of the movie, we see Siddalee speaking to a reporter for the New York Times; her accent is very much hidden. She enunciates her words clearly, careful to articulate hard R’s, such as in “alarmingly”. Most people view people with Southern dialects as uneducated and lazy; they speak with a “Southern drawl”. In the scene where Vivi is upset with Sidda for the play article, Caro, one of the Ya-Ya’s, points out that, “You know how those Yankees make us all out to be swamp-water, alligator-wrestling bigots.” The Southern drawl is slow and relaxed, not rushed. Siddalee chooses to speak in a dialect she knows New Yorkers will accept as one of their own; even when she is at home with her fiancé, Conner, she still sticks to that proper New York

About halfway through the movie when she is going off on a tangent about her mother, she slips up and says, “Y’all should know since you were the ones mixin’ the drinks!” Her first slip-up was to say “y’all” instead of “you all”, her second was when she said “mixin’” instead of “mixing”, and her third was how she pronounced “drinks”; she said “dranks” instead of “drinks”. The anger she feels makes her forget to speak “properly” and she resorts back to her natural dialect. “Y’all” is a common Southern term, shortening “you all”. Another common habit in any strong Southern dialect is to soften the endings of –ing words, dropping the g. Although Siddalee is trying to reject her mother, she is finding it harder and harder to do; she starts speaking with a Louisiana dialect more