LeHardy1
Annie LeHardy
Professor Kenan
English 206
25 March 2014
Biography
Lee Smith grew up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, in a small coal mining town called Grundy, Virginia. In an article from her website, Lee Smith talks about how much of her childhood was spent sitting on her front porch with her family as they told stories. From this oral tradition, Lee Smith became a natural story teller. She was an only child and used writing as a therapeutic release for herself. She would make up stories to keep from telling lies. She wrote her first “novel” on her mother’s stationary when she was just 8 years old. Since then, her list of achievements have grown significantly.Her written works include 13 novels and 4 short story collections. She attended Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia. As a student, she wrote for the school newspaper, Hollins Columns and its literary magazine, Cargoes. As an English major, she said her teachers and mentors introduced her to southern authors such as William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and James Still, all of whom have inspired much of her writing. According to Writer Magazine, Lee Smith has become one of the South’s most distinctive voices. She is the recipient of many distinguished awards including the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, North Carolina Award for Literature, and a Southern Book Critics Circle Award. Lee Smith currently lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina with her husband.
Summaries
Georgia Rose is a short story that starts off with a little girl, Lauren, spying on her neighbors at the beach. In the midst of her spying she meets Georgia Rose, who appears to be quite different from the rest of her family. Feeling like she finally met the perfect best friend, Lauren and Georgia become inseparable all summer. But Lauren soon realizes that Georgia Rose has a creepy sixth sense of foreseeing painful futures. That summer, Georgia Rose tells Lauren she saw a blue cloud around the mailman and the next day, they come to find out he had died of a heart attack. The girls fall out of contact and as they get older, Lauren tries to put more and more distance on her and Georgia Rose but Georgia Rose keeps intertwining in Lauren’s life with more bad news and Lauren must learn to face her fear of Georgia Rose.
Cakewalkis the story of two very different sisters trying to co-exist in a small town. Stella, an uptight, prim and proper older woman who was “born for elegance” and works at Belk’s make-up department, providing make-up for only the very best people in town who could afford such things. But Stella is constantly trying to change the ways of her scatter-brained, disheveled sister, Florrie. Florrie makes crazy, colorful cakes for anyone who wants them. At the beginning of the story, Stella is trying to get Florrie to move out of the big house where they grew up, and come live with her so that they can finally sell it for a hefty profit. The story then goes back in time to when the girls were growing up and takes us through their lives together in the big gray house.
Mrs. Darcy Meets the Blue-Eyed Stranger at the Beach is about an aging mother, Mrs. Darcy who isn’t well and one day she sees a man with beautiful blue eyes and then she faints. Her three daughters, Trixie, Maria, and Jenny, who are strikingly beautiful but do not resemble Mrs. Darcy in the slightest, are very concerned about her and try to coax her into a retirement home since their father is dead. The out-of-touch relationship that Mrs. Darcy has with her daughters becomes more noticeable as her very shallow daughter, Trixie treats Mrs. Darcy like a child and grows annoyed at Mrs. Darcy’s carefree appearance. None of the family believe Mrs. Darcy when she tells them about the blue-eyed stranger. Eventually, the daughters and their families leave the beach house, the lollipop, and only the youngest daughter is there to care for Mrs. Darcy. But the youngest daughter promptly leaves for the night and Mrs. Darcy invites a few friends over, cooks a pizza and helps fix a lady’s back. Once they leave, Mrs. Darcy heads out to the deck overlooking the ocean and lets the blue-eyed stranger take her away.
Craft Analysis
Language:
Lee Smithwrites like the natural storyteller that she is.In Georgia Rose, Lee Smith opens the story with “We met on Halfmoon Island, a small resort off the coast of South Carolina, during one of those sweet long mysterious summers of childhood, the year the Harmons bought the ‘villa’ identical to ours, just next door,” ( Smith 26). It’s easy-flowing, enticing and simple. The lack of commas and punctuation make the sentences feel slower, and not as rushed. There’s a very southern appeal to her phrases like “sweet long mysterious summers.” Her word choices are remarkable in all of her stories and imagery is so strong. There’s a very charming tone to everything she writes. She demonstrates this inCakewalk, when Smithdescribes a make-up counter in Belk. “After she lets herself in, she goes straight to the cosmetics department where everything is elegant, gleaming glass counters cleaned the night before by the hired help, all the shiny little bottles and tubes and perfume displays arranged just so…” (Smith 227). Along with her Southern charm, comes her no-nonsense type of writing. Lee Smith doesn’t draw things out, she makes her case very simple. In Mrs. Darcy Meets the Blue-Eyed Stranger at the Beach, in describing a very wealthy, neighbor says “Margaret Dale Whitted, who had divorced one husband and buried two, made her slow majestic way across the sand” (Smith 161). In all three of the stories, her tone shifts just slightly but there’s always that sweet southern style that embodies classic tradition. “Barefoot and brown as Indians by that time, we were walking over the causeway to the mainland to get a coke at the hardware store on the highway,”(Smith 30). And to close, I’ll end with this quote that makes me just fee the aristocracy of the south, like old money and elegance, regardless of the time frame. “Tall, graceful women like flowers, they leaned delicately toward one another and sipped their gin and tonics and shouted into the wind,” (Smith 157).
Characterization:
I felt like Smith’s characters varied in depth depending on the story length. In all three stories, the main characters are women and ironically, their protagonists are other women. The characters are colorful and quirky and Smith uses an incredible variety of words to describe each one to a tee. “Stella was born with a natural gift for elegance…” (Smith 227). “Florrie wears running shoes, at her age, and wooly white athletic socks that fall in crinkles down around her ankles, and whatever else her eye lights on when she wakes up,” (Smith 226). Physical descriptions seem to be Smith’s strong point in character descriptions. “I sensed something in her that was too close to something in me. Leslie had a thin, pocked face, dark frizzy hair, and she seemed always to be in the grip of some sensitivity too painful to be borne,” (Smith 29). It’s enjoyable to have a very intelligent narrator and I loved how Smith highlighted really small things about a person. She wore bright red lipstick…and a thin layer of something like Vaseline on top of the lipstick, which gave her a glistening rapacious look,” (Smith 27). And one more physical description-“…narrow forehead, high cheekbones, their dark eyes set a fraction of an inch too close together: the long straight nose, rather imperious, aristocratic, and prone to sinus. They were good-looking women,” (Smith 158).
Beyond their physical descriptions there was always an underlying, almost indescribable aspect to each character. In Georgia Rose, Smith describes Georgia as “…impossibly beautiful. She was tall and lush and graceful, full-figured, her eyes still that deep bright blue,” (Smith 37). Yet, this movie star of a girl, sees the most horrid things, she’s so weird that Lauren, is frightened to be around her. And then there’s Stella and Florrie from Cakewalk—this fretfully humorous relationship that strangely reminds me of Rabbit and Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. But as easy going as Florrie is, there is something you can’t quite pin down about her, as Stella struggles through during the entire story. “Florrie never had a wedding cake of her own, poor thing, or a wedding reception either—she ran off in a snowstorm two years later with Earl Mingo, a drifter from northern Florida and married him in a J.P.’s office…” (Smith 236). In Mrs. Darcy meets the Blue-Eyed Stranger at the Beach, Mrs. Darcy is an outcast of her own family.
Lastly, Smith extends even further with her characters in their relationships. This is especially prominent in Mrs. Darcy Meets the Blue-Eyed Stranger at the Beach. Mrs. Darcy has three daughters, Trixie, Maria, and Ginny. I got a better sense of who Trixie was when she thought about her mother, “Trixie, looking at her mother, grew more and more annoyed. Trixie remember her mother’s careful makeup, her conservative dress. Why couldn’t she be reasonable, dress up a little, like the other old ladies out in the beach?” (Smith 164). Or when Mark, Maria’s husband was on the beach “focusing his binoculars on the sight he had been viewing for some time now, Ginny’s breasts moving beneath her pink T-shirt as she played Frisbee with his nephew,” (Smith 163).
Sense of place
Sense of place is probably Smith’s strongest element in her stories. I loved how she wrote about real places, many of which I was actually familiar with or had visited. In Georgia Rose, Smith talks about UVA, Chapel Hill, and Kiawah Island—all places that helped me to really feel involved. It was exciting to come across. Much of her sense of place co-exists with her word choices as she describes everything. “It was still early morning on Halfmoon Island, which I knew like the back of my hand. I could smell bacon frying somewhere…” (Smith 32). She references Nancy Drew books, and The Secret Garden and says how Lauren writes letters to Georgia and with the lack of computers and cell phones, I get the sense that this takes place in the 70s or 80s. Cakewalk, I felt sure was in a different time period simply from the way the Ludington House was described. “…the house with the gazebo, the hand-carved banisters and heart pine floors.” “The house was number one on the House Tour every year…” (Smith 229, 230). I loved events like the sidewalk carnival in Cakewalk, or Georgia Rose’s birthday party. Fun things that added depth to the place. Smith always adds a light-hearted setting to even the darkest of stories, whether it’s at a resort beach, or in a small, close-nit old timey southern town making.
All three stories take place in the south, in a warm, soft place. “It was cocktail time. The sun, which had been in and out all day, now found a crack in the piles of gray cloud and shone brilliantly, falsely, down the length of the beach, even though thunder rolled on in the distance(Smith157).
Point-of view:
Smith sticks to first and third person. In Georgia Rose, Smith writes in first person. In the eyes of Lauren, the days at the beach were so innocently written. “Each evening she disappeared for an hour promptly at five o’clock and reappeared again at six, wearing a long startling dress and high-heeled sandals with skinny straps,” (Smith 27). I think choosing to write the story in the eyes of the protagonist helps make the story more believable. Cakewalk is written in 3rd person limited. Because the story is focused so much on the difficult relationship of Stella and Florrie, this third-person view makes the story more objective and humorous. “’Stella!’ said Miss Bett, and Stella went out, furious because she was three years older and had never joined the MYF in the first place, even though she was more religious than Florrie, and now she had to cut the flowers,” (Smith 231). Mrs. Darcy Meets the Blue-Eyed Stranger at the Beachis also written in 3rd person limitedand I could just see the disconnectedness of the family. “Mrs. Darcy leafed through the pile of craft books that Trixie had brought her, and looked down at her daughters on the beach. Craft books! Mrs. Darcy thought. Craft books. What does she know? Wrapping her robe about her, Mrs. Darcy moved to stand at the door,” (Smith 158). I found myself enjoying both points of view but I really think her characters become more alive in her 3rd person voice.
Use of dialogue:
The use of dialogue is very smooth in all three stories. There’s a very easy flow to her words and she sort of cushions all dialogue with a very visual scenario of what is happening.
“’Honey,’ her husband interrupted. He stood up.
‘But what’s happened?’ I pursued. ‘Why did she leave? Where is she now?’ I asked, al the old fear and dread coming back in a rush,” (Smith 43).
In Mrs. Darcy Meets the Blue-Eyed Stranger at the Beach, I felt the dialogue might have been almost too much. I felt there were too many people speaking for such a short story. For instance, this interaction below:
“’I don’t know,’ said Maria. Who was always deliberated, or gave the impression of deliberating…”
“’I tried to get her to help cook,’ Trixie said. ‘Remember how she used to cook?’”
“You know what really drove me mad?’ Ginny said suddenly.”
(Smith 158)
I felt like there was so much dialogue but never a clear answer to all the questions the characters were asking.
Summation
I didn’t think any of the short stories ended with a neatly packaged end result. But I did feel like in each of the three stories I read, all three characters had come to be at some sort of peace with their scenario. Lauren had found a way to not fear Georgia Rose any more,Stella had spoken her mind to Florrie, and Mrs. Darcy had given in to Mr. Blue eyes, which I am assuming is her path up to Heaven. But Mrs. Darcy Meets the Blue-Eyed Stranger at the Beach, was the least clean cut story and I still find it a bit difficult to comprehend.To leave the story with her just saying “now” into the night, was a very vague ending and I didn’t think it fit the dialogue filled, cold atmosphere of the story. I think Cakewalk had a nice visual ending, with the two sisters still so disconnected but we can understand them better as Stella flips her collar up to cover her neck and Florrie thinks of Earl Mingo and his child. But Georgia Rose was the strongest resolution for me because I witnessed Lauren overcoming an internal struggle. “I realized that my fear of her had finally disappeared after all these years. The only thing I felt now was a kind of pity, and relief that I was exempt from whatever it was she had seen, “(Smith 45).
Works Cited
“Lee Smith.” LeeSmith.com. n.d. web. 20 Mar. 2014
Smith, Lee. Cakewalk. Ballantine Books: New York, 1981. Print
Stephens, M. “Lee Smith (1940-).” Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, 31 Dec. 2014. Web. 20 Mar. 2014