Amy’s Men, or Wounded Masculinity in Ron Rash’s One Foot in Eden (2002)

Ron Rash’s first novel, One Foot in Eden, evokes a crime investigation deep in the Appalachian Mountains in the 1950s: a man was murdered as a result of a woman and wife’s frustrated desire to become a mother. While the novel depicts a man’s world characterized by manly heroes and a great deal of ha...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inBabel (Mont-de-Marsan) Vol. 31; no. 31; pp. 103 - 130
Main Author SPILL, Frédérique
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Université de Toulon 2015
Université du Sud Toulon-Var
Subjects
masculinity challenged
One Foot in Eden
reversals
symbol
textual readings
war
masculinité contestée
symbol
reversal
masculinity challenged
textual reading
Un Pied au Paradis
symbole
war
One Foot in Eden
guerre
microlecture
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Summary:Ron Rash’s first novel, One Foot in Eden, evokes a crime investigation deep in the Appalachian Mountains in the 1950s: a man was murdered as a result of a woman and wife’s frustrated desire to become a mother. While the novel depicts a man’s world characterized by manly heroes and a great deal of harshness and uncontainable violence, the novel’s male characters paradoxically appear to be wounded and dysfunctional in one way or another. The story of Amy and her men ends up highlighting how the traditional definitions of both femaleness and maleness then experienced unprecedented changes. The succession of homodiegetic narrators evokes a complex, kaleidoscopic depiction of southern masculinity, which is shown as being in flux, probably in transition—undoubtedly as having a hard time redefining itself.
ISSN:1277-7897
2263-4746
DOI:10.4000/babel.4074