Telling About Southern Fluctuations: Elizabeth Spencer at the Back Door
Elizabeth Spencer’s third novel, The Voice at the Back Door (1956), is part of her Mississippi cycle. It deals with race relations and southern violence, two highly controversial issues at the time since the Civil Rights Movements were beginning. The novel, reminiscent of William Faulkner’s Intruder...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA)
2011-06-01
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| Series: | E-REA |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/erea/1803 |
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| Summary: | Elizabeth Spencer’s third novel, The Voice at the Back Door (1956), is part of her Mississippi cycle. It deals with race relations and southern violence, two highly controversial issues at the time since the Civil Rights Movements were beginning. The novel, reminiscent of William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust (1948), stages the search for a culprit after the murder of a white man. This paper focuses on Spencer’s portrait of southern manners and interracial relationships and analyzes the novel in the context of its publication. It will show that Spencer uses unpopular topics to expose the paradox at the core of the southern way of life and show that the past is constantly reenacted in the present. |
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| ISSN: | 1638-1718 |