The front porch evokes cherished memories from across a lifetime
for many southerners--recollections of childhood games, courtship,
family visits, gossip with neighbors. In this book, Jocelyn
Hazelwood Donlon offers an original appreciation of the
significance of the porch to everyday life in the South. The porch,
she reveals, is not a simple place after all, but a stage for many
social dramas. She uses literature, folklore, oral histories, and
photographs to show how southerners have used the porch to
negotiate public and private boundaries--in ways so embedded in
custom that they often go unrecognized. Her sources include
writings by Dorothy Allison, William Faulkner, Ernest Gaines,
Gloria Naylor, Zora Neale Hurston, and Lee Smith, as well as oral
histories that provide varying racial, gender, class, and regional
perspectives.
Originally derived from a number of ethnic traditions, the porch
evolved in America into something both structurally and culturally
unique. In this, the first serious study of the subject, Donlon
shows how porch use and porch culture cross ethnic and cultural
lines and discusses the transitional quality of the porch
space--how it shifts back and forth, by need and function, between
a place that is sometimes interior to the house, sometimes
exterior.