Shiloh, and Other Stories by Bobbie Ann Mason

First published: 1982

Type of work: Short stories

Form and Content

The sixteen short stories that constitute Bobbie Ann Mason’s first published collection, Shiloh, and Other Stories, recount the lives of women in the fictional small town of Hopewell, Kentucky, who have a common desire for personal understanding. With the exception of “Nancy Culpepper” and “Lying Doggo,” Mason’s stories deal with different female protagonists, but each story addresses the same general theme: Every woman must find comfort in understanding herself as an individual; when she becomes the emotional appendage of a male, all of her individuality is lost.

Nancy Culpepper, the protagonist of the stories “Nancy Culpepper” and “Lying Doggo,” is a typical Mason protagonist. In the first story, much of Nancy’s time is spent trying to save her grandmother’s photographs and trying to identify a woman in an old portrait who she believes is a distant relative also named Nancy Culpepper. She is hoping to find some connection with her familial past. Although Nancy is disappointed when she discovers that the woman in question is not Nancy Culpepper, she realizes that she has been actively searching for her own identity.

In the second story in which she appears, Nancy Culpepper is confronted with standing up against her husband’s decision to put their old dog, Grover, to sleep. This stand is more than a mere attempt to save an old dog’s life; Nancy needs to be and will be heard.

Mason’s other female protagonists all go beyond married lives for their identities. In the collection’s title story, Norma Jean Moffitt finds little emotional satisfaction in being the wife of injured and unemployed trucker Larry Moffitt. While Larry sits home making string art and dreaming of building his wife a log cabin, Norma Jean works at body building and takes continuing education classes, seeking a place of her own.

In “The Retreat” and “The Ocean,” Mason’s protagonists accompany their husbands on excursions in search of something that is missing in their lives. Georgeann Pickett accompanies her husband, the Reverend Shelby Pickett, on a religious retreat where she attends workshops on making a successful Christian marriage, hoping to find meaning in hers. Instead, she finds she must confront the fundamentalist view that there is no reason for unhappiness in marriage or with one’s husband. Similarly, in “The Ocean,” Imogene Crittendon takes a trip in a fancy camper with her husband Bill to see the Atlantic Ocean. The story ends with Bill standing looking out into the ocean and remembering his days in the Navy. Imogene finds no satisfaction in looking at the water and hearing stories about her husband’s past. Instead, she finds symbolic relief from her husband’s ramblings in a shady place of her own.

In “The Rookers,” Mary Lou Skaggs finds a respite from running errands for her husband in her periodic games of Rook with women of similar interests and concerns. In “Still Life with Watermelon,” Louise Milsap, whose husband ran away with his mistress, finds herself by making paintings of watermelons, hoping that an eccentric local bachelor will purchase her works. In a more direct manner, the first person narrator of “Residents and Transients” takes a lover while her husband is in Louisville. Her dissatisfaction goes beyond her husband’s being away. She does not want to leave the rural area where she feels at home.

Other stories demonstrate women’s need to belong. In “Drawing Names” and “Old Things,” mothers argue with daughters about the proper thing to do. “Drawing Names” is about a family Christmas gathering to which Carolyn Sission, the story’s divorced protagonist, invites her lover, Kent Ballard. For numerous reasons Kent is unable to make the trip. Kent’s failure to appear speaks of male/female relationships in general: Women cannot depend upon men and must be able to depend upon themselves.

The remaining stories—“Detroit Skyline,” “Offerings,” “The Climber,” “Graveyard Day,” “The New Wave Format,” and “Third Monday”—continue discussing Mason’s theme of women’s search for ways of finding themselves or at least of finding ways of getting their mates to recognize their special needs.

Context

Bobbie Ann Mason’s Shiloh and Other Stories continues the tradition in which women writers tell the stories of women who are looking for individual identities, a tradition perfected by such earlier writers as Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Eudora Welty, and Harper Lee. Like her literary precursors, Mason chooses to tell women’s stories through female protagonists and narrators. This technique has proved to be a successful vehicle for telling women’s stories in the works of other disparate contemporary women writers such as Lee Smith, Alice Walker, Amy Tan, and Rita Mae Brown.

Feminist critics have long been concerned with the dearth of women writers who have come to the forefront of American literature and with men writers’ attempts to tell women’s stories. In Shiloh and Other Stories and in her later works, Mason takes important steps toward allaying these concerns. In each story, Mason provides a complete depiction of the momentary fragments that produce the lives that her female protagonists have been forced to live.

In none of her stories does Mason moralize or offer clear-cut answers to complex problems. Her intention is to inform rather than pontificate. Mason is able to draw her reader into her fictional world by creating believable characters who live in believable settings. The reader’s concern turns from the progression of a fictional narrative to commiseration with an individual who is experiencing intense challenges to a once-stable relationship or to her attempts to come to terms with herself.

In the canon of works by women about women, Mason’s short stories stand out in their portrayal of women who decide to make their own decisions about their lives. Often this individualism goes against the social grain, yet Mason’s protagonists are willing to stand up to any stigma that may be cast upon them. They must live their own lives unencumbered by outside interference. Her works join the growing list of high-quality works that speak directly to the need of women to have lives and identities of their own without the fear of being branded as radical. Mason’s works exemplify the new works that are being considered for canonization, works that, in the past, would have been overlooked because they were written by women, not because of any artistic weakness.

Bibliography

Arnold, Edwin T. “Falling Apart and Staying Together: Bobbie Ann Mason and Leon Driskell Explore the State of the Modern Family.” Appalachian Journal 12, (Winter, 1985): 135-141. This article attempts to show how a male and a female writer approach the theme of family differently by comparing Mason’s Shiloh stories with the works of another Kentucky writer, Leon Driskell. This article is especially valuable to the investigator who wishes to study Mason as a feminist writer.

Giannone, Richard. “Bobbie Ann Mason and the Recovery of Mystery.” Studies in Short Fiction 27 (Fall, 1990): 553-566. In a focused analysis of Mason’s characters, Giannone is concerned with the reaction of Mason’s characters to the situations in which they find themselves. In most cases, the characters find themselves without clear answers at the end of their stories.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. December 5, 1982, p. 12.

Nation. CCXXXVI, March 19, 1983, p. 345.

The New Republic. CLXXXVII, November 1, 1982, p. 36.

The New York Review of Books. XXIX, December 16, 1982, p. 38.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVII, November 21, 1982, p. 7.

Newsweek. C, November 15, 1982, p. 107.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXII, September 17, 1982, p. 98.

Ryan, Maureen. “Stopping Places: Bobbie Ann Mason’s Short Stories.” In Women Writers of the Contemporary South, edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984. The thrust of this article is to show how the women characters in the Shiloh stories try to find a place for themselves in a contemporary world of ever-changing moral expectations and social roles for women. To underscore her argument, Ryan shows how Mason’s stories have moved the literary depiction of the South from the Old South plantations into the contemporary world of malls and beauty parlors.

White, Leslie. “The Function of Popular Culture in Bobbie Ann Mason’s Shiloh, and Other Stories and In Country.” The Southern Quarterly 26 (Summer, 1988): 69-79. This article is good for its discussion of Mason’s use of popular culture to depict the commonness of her characters. In Shiloh, and Other Stories and in her Vietnam novel In Country (1985), Mason follows her characters through their daily lives, which are governed by the encroachment of various aspects of popular culture.

Wilhelm, Albert E. “Private Rituals: Coping with Change in the Fiction of Bobbie Ann Mason.” Midwest Quarterly 28 (Winter, 1987): 271-282. Wilhelm provides an interesting and informative look at Mason’s presentation of the private means her characters employ to deal with the changes that occur in their lives.