However, these options largely exist on the spiritual, conceptual plane and fail to take societal effects into account. Obviously, social boundaries along lines of marital status, class, and race affect how Southern Baptist women are able to negotiate power. The boundaries also affect what that power looks like. Overall, these women aim for being in right relationship both vertically with God and horizontally with humanity. That concept of right relationship informs how they transgress social boundaries in order to obtain individualized versions of freedom. Knowles argues that God ordains egalitarian horizontal right relationships between men and women (Knowles 31). According to Walter Rauschenbusch, “‘we shall have to be socially right if we want to be religiously right. Jesus will not suffer us to be pious toward God and merciless toward men’” (qtd. in Knowles 31). In other words, social equality—read: gender equality—is a requirement for being in true right relationship in the vertical and the horizontal dimensions. Therefore, Southern Baptist women can forcefully and individualistically lay claim to their rightful “sphere of autonomy” as part of these egalitarian right relationships. The SBC’s misogynistic failure to promote or model right relationships causes Baptist women to reject the church’s version of right relationships, but not reject God. They still have the common goal of obtaining right relationship, whatever that may look like for the
individual woman. Rejecting the church in favor of the ability to redefine right
relationships as egalitarian creates more opportunities for different methods of obtaining freedom. They can use whatever methodology works to obtain their individualized manifestations of freedom, albeit still within the same overarching goal of obtaining
power and autonomy, informed along lines of marital status, race, and class. Those struggling with more complex social boundaries—race and class—are typically more successful using more subversive methodology whereas those with less complex negotiations can be more overt about their route to individual interpretation of right relationships.
Spencer’s Baptist women absolutely fall into this realm of complex transgression, but Betts’ do not because Mama Bower and Miss Paula are not concerned with
transgressing social boundaries in the way that Spencer’s characters are. In the context of a novel like This Crooked Way, relationships between characters have more room for complexity and development. In Betts on the other hand, the short stories are able to offer only snapshots of Baptist women who choose to work as Trojan horses within the church rather than reject its prescriptive definition of right relationships. Additionally, Mama Bower and Miss Paula are single white women women not attempting to establish right relationships with the men in their life because they are more concerned with either pruning God’s garden or serving the Devil, respectively. Therefore, I do not discuss Betts in this section but rather focus on the transgressive nature of Spencer’s women’s
methodologies of obtaining power.
Those at the top of the female social hierarchy—wealthy white women like Ary, Ary’s niece Dolly, and Dinah—appear to have unlimited social capital with which to negotiate their sphere of autonomy. Their freedom seems almost arbitrary because they are more powerful in comparison to the other women. However, rejecting church
structures actually destabilizes their social capital and makes it more difficult for them to redefine right relationships. For example, it appears that Ary should have no problems
obtaining autonomy in her relationship with Amos. Instead, she struggles throughout their marriage to resist his control until she feels forced to defend their daughter Dinah’s honor and therefore stand up to Amos. Although counterintuitive at first glance, Ary— and subsequently Dolly and Dinah—fails for two reasons. First, by seeking autonomy and right relationships outside of the church structure, Ary’s social capital is also destabilized, making it more difficult for her, Dolly, and Dinah to obtain right
relationships. Second, as the matriarch, Ary is expected to provide a spiritual and social example for younger women but fails to do so outside the bounds of the church structure and therefore creates a domino effect of failure in Dolly and Dinah. Ary’s rejection both of the church definition of right relationships and her fear of Amos aim to demonstrate her potential strength to Dolly and Dinah and atone for her failure.
Before this domino effect occurs, however, Ary’s social capital is destabilized, first by her marriage to Amos, and then by her rejection of church structures and
expectations. By marrying a man that is beneath her in the social hierarchy, Ary becomes tied to Amos’s social position, destabilizing the bounds on her space of negotiation. Ary’s control over Amos is therefore more tenuous throughout the majority of the novel. When she first meets Amos, her lack of tie to him means that she can behave however she wants. When he whoops as she circles the ring with her horse, she derides him by not even looking at him: “Of everybody there, the girl was the only one who did not look at Amos Dudley. She was not going to look either” (Spencer 40). He is not worth even a glance, even though he interrupts her ride and scares the horse, causing everyone except Ary to stare. Her power over him is absolute, implying not only a great ability to
white woman whose father does not bother to check her independent attitude. Ary’s choice not to engage in this moment does not imply a lack of power in this case, but rather an excess of power. There is no reason for Ary to negotiate power between her and Amos because she already has the upper hand and in this moment, he is an
inconsequential annoyance beneath her on the social ladder. However, she loses the upper hand once they marry because the social differences between her and Amos all but disappear.
Ary’s choice to marry Amos amounts to a decision to step outside societal expectations, underlining her independent nature. The church hierarchy reflects societal expectations, as exemplified by the WMU monthly magazine Royal Service: “Clearly the battleground for sobriety and decency is the social realm in which woman rules…The social graces and the personal charm of Christian women must be capitalized for the glory of God” (Hill 6). According to this passage, women are to be the paragons of “decency” and “social graces.” By marrying outside of societal expectation, Ary forfeits that position at the top of the hierarchy, the position as paragon of decency and social grace. However, her practice of independence backfires because she becomes afraid of Amos and spends a large portion of their marriage adhering far more to social strictures and the church structures than she did while unmarried. By rejecting the church and marrying Amos, Ary destabilizes her base social capital and for a long time is unable to find another route to freedom. That freedom is the feeling she had as the woman who rode a horse wildly and ignored Amos, but she remains mired in fear and confusion.
Ary’s continued choice to not negotiate because of her fear enables Amos to exert power over her in their relationship, causing her to grow farther away from the
independent girl she used to be. For example, he renames their daughter while Ary is asleep as retaliation for the death of their unborn son. He then wakes her up and says, “‘You can go back to sleep now’” (Spencer 145). Amos only wakes her up so that she can know exactly how little power she has, indeed commanding her to go back to sleep. More important than his command is her obedience to it, implying a lack of desire to push against the boundaries imposed on her by Amos. This lack signifies an attempt to remove herself from the possibility of negotiation. Furthermore, it signals the loss of her independent nature, a rejection that cannot help but affect those who look up to her. Ary has lost herself and therefore cannot be a role model for maintaining identity, much less for redefining right relationships in terms of individual freedom.
As matriarch Ary is inherently a role model for those around her. In Baptist theology, women are to be role models for younger women. From a conservative viewpoint, women could not teach anyone but young women and girls. John Rice analyzes Titus conservatively: “Titus 2:3, 4 plainly commands ‘the aged women likewise…That they may teach the young women.’ Here we are plainly told that old women may teach young women, and should do so” (Rice 42). According to this reading of Scripture, younger women are meant to learn from and follow the example of older women. The actions of the younger women in Spencer—Dinah and Dolly in particular— are greatly affected by Ary’s choice to negotiate or not to negotiate. Dolly leaves because she sees that Ary is afraid and Dinah, despite her independent streak, is unable to obtain autonomy because she bows to Joe’s authority just as Ary bends to Amos.
Dolly’s failure, according to her in the section “The Indictment: Ary,” directly results from what she correctly perceives to be Ary’s fear of Amos. At the time of “The
Indictment, Dolly is only a child. Unable to have a close relationship with her own mother, Ary’s sister, she spends a lot of time with Amos and Ary. She worships them both, but eventually she sees Amos for who he is. When she argues with him, she realizes that “his pride had shut him from me” (Spencer 118). Dolly knows in this moment that Amos is not as she had thought him to be. He is not the loving uncle that she had believed him to be but rather a prideful, selfish man. Dolly therefore feels alienated: “I stood there naked to his gaze, miserable and ugly and crying, wishing to go back to all the things I renounced when I came to him—silence and understanding and endearment, to say what I wanted his heart to say, I am only a child” (Spencer 118). The lack of genuine love is acute for Dolly. She wants her Uncle Amos to defend her for the sake of her happiness, not for his own selfish gains. Instead, she sees him for who he is and then wishes that she could return to “silence and understanding and endearment” rather than face the truth. Since he sends her away, back to her own home, Dolly cannot return to “the things I renounced.” She can either choose to negotiate the frameworks of power or not. By choosing not to engage, Dolly separates herself from those who do choose to negotiate. Dolly has much less on the line should she choose to negotiate than a character who is lower in the social hierarchy, but she follows Ary’s example of fearful obedience. Dolly is unable to strive for her brand of freedom and her failure condemns Ary for being like the SBC: failing to be a role model.
Dolly and Ary’s fear is perhaps understandable, as Dolly explains to Ary when Ary comes to her asking for advice on Amos. She says, “I did not know to be afraid before. In fact, ‘Tary, I took him as what I had to stand up against, big as Fate and not hearing me perhaps, but feeling me. I could, you might say, dent him…by defying. But
then I found how to be afraid” (Spencer 201). Dolly’s recognition of the existence of fear, is the reason that she cannot stand up to Amos. She says that Amos is like Fate; he is bigger than her and therefore something to stand up against. Amos, in other words, is her test, a test that she fails. She knows that she could have dented his power—not subsume it, but dent it—by defying him, but instead she runs away. She finds “how to be afraid,” an unfortunate but necessary development in a child’s life. However, without an example to follow in Ary, Dolly cannot do what she needs to and conquer her fear. She cannot emotionally develop in this moment and has to find another way to doing that, which she does by removing herself from the picture. Her failure is symptomatic of the systemic failures of the church to model or promote right relationships and what it means to have freedom and free will.
While Dolly’s fear mirrors her role model, Ary’s daughter Dinah’s inability to garner power manifests in a different way. Of course, Ary’s matriarchal position combined with her decision not to negotiate the space for autonomy with Amos
negatively affects Dinah’s ability to negotiate autonomy with Joe. Dinah, as previously discussed in Chapter 1, attacks the “other woman,” Patty, instead of challenging Joe and his infidelity. By turning on Patty, who is in reality a victim of Joe’s sexual advances, Dinah chooses not to explicitly negotiate with Joe. Her choice cements the domino effect of Ary’s choice, demonstrating how destructive going outside of the church hierarchy to seek autonomy is for the upper echelon of the social hierarchy.
Dinah’s choice to not negotiate directly with Joe occurs because she has no example in Ary to follow of what right relationships look like. Dinah then has no way to know how to go about challenging Joe for sleeping with Patty, no way of knowing how
to be in “right relationship” with him. Knowles defines “right relationships” thus: “Believers are enjoined to love God, which is the vertical dimension, and neighbor, which is the horizontal dimension” (Knowles 30). Dinah is not in right relationship with Joe, but her inability to strive for that right relationship—at least from her side—is inhibited by the dearth of examples of right relationships. Dinah cannot be in right relationship with Joe because she doesn’t know what that looks like. Ary’s failure to provide an example prevents her daughter from obtaining the autonomy that living in right relationship provides. Her failure goes beyond a simple give-and-take relationship because right relationship involves selfless service from both parties, but it also means staying true to one’s identity—one’s freedom. Ary lost the fire she used to have and so cannot help push Dinah to her freedom, her identity.
Still, that very failure pushes Ary to choose to negotiate her sphere of autonomy in her relationship with Amos. Although going outside the church hierarchy is destructive to the elite’s ability to negotiate the sphere of autonomy, its destructive effects can actually push the elite toward alternative methods of seeking autonomy. Ary’s choice to challenge Amos only occurs because she sees the negative effect her lack of action has had on Dolly and Dinah. She recognizes the truth of Dolly’s observation that Ary is afraid of Amos after she kills Joe:
I was not in the least afraid, and realizing the newness of my condition I knew that Dolly had said the truth: I had been for many years (perhaps since the April day I caught for a clear second the wild unleashed delight in the shouting face that broke through trained gait and trained control) afraid of Amos Dudley and what he would someday do. He would have his chance now; his excuse lay on his own floor; his certain object sat quietly before him. I was not afraid, but my heart picked up speed, racing faster and faster, like a bride’s heart paced to the setting sun.” (Spencer 217-218)
to Amos, provides her with the most powerful position of any of the women discussed so far. By recognizing her fear, freeing herself from the constraints of her extended family, and asserting her power over Amos, Ary obtains an extent of power and indeed of freedom unequaled by any other character. This power is what the “newness of [her] condition” refers to, revealing her consciousness of that power. She revels in her newfound identity and in the knowledge that she has reacquired the feeling of being in control of her life and her future. Her choice to kill Joe to protect her family vehemently rejects conventional concepts of when violence is acceptable; Amos is supposed to kill Joe out of vengeance over Dinah’s loss of honor, but he fails and Ary becomes the protector of the family and thereby unequaled in her power.
Although this power is unequaled—largely due to the fact that she has more social capital than any other character—Ary does not abuse it but rather makes her goal of right relationship clear from the moment she chooses to take action. She also obtains an extent of humility by giving Amos the chance to defend their daughter’s honor before she takes matters into her own hands and kills Joe. Her decision to give him the benefit of the doubt fits with Knowles’s argument for the Biblical stand on right relationships. Her decision reflects what he defines as “self-giving love,” a vital element of right
relationships: “Embedded in self-giving love is the willingness to yield or to voluntarily submit to another. Thus the actualization of self-giving love requires voluntary
submission” (Knowles 31). Knowles argues here that part of right relationships is not just loving oneself or having self-respect but also serving one another with a submissive attitude that goes both ways. Ary’s decision to give Amos the benefit of the doubt amounts to “voluntary submission,” placing her in right relationship with him. It is as if
she is reinventing their marriage: she compares her excitement to “a bride’s heart paced to the setting sun.” This language not only reaches back to reinvent the consummation of their wedding night—which is now more based on power than on the sexual nature of wedding nights—but also abruptly reverses Ary’s trend of being afraid of her husband.