The Whistle Stop Café as a challenge to the Jim Crow bipartition of society in Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café

Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis

doi:10.18290/rh.2016.64.11-11

Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Faculty of Humanities

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rh.2016.64.11-11

Keywords: Fannie Flagg; Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café; the American South; racial relations; Ku Klux Klan (KKK); domesticity; restaurant business; eating establishments; food consumption; the third place; BBQ

Abstract

The American South’s social order, based as it was on white supremacy and subordination of women, is reflected in the space of the café in Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café. The titular café run by two white women, Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison, becomes a site of contestation of that very social order. In the early 1930s Idgie and Ruth, the main heroines in Flagg’s novel, move out of their respective homes into the back of the café, which will offer its services till 1969. Their decision to run a café together has a twofold significance: they reject/transcend domesticity, a socially prescribed space for women, and they act on their increased sensitivity to help the disempowered and oppressed—the black and the poor—during the Jim Crow period. The ownership and management of the café allows Idgie and Ruth to negotiate and redefine their identities in the context of racial oppression and subordination of white women.

References

Abel, Elizabeth. Signs of the Times: the Visual Politics of Jim Crow. Berkley: University of California Press, 2010. Print.

Barbas, Samantha. “Just Like Home: ‘Home Cooking’ and the Domestication of the American Restaurant.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 2.4 (Fall 2002): 43–52. Print.

Beardsworth, Alan and Teresa Keil, ed. Sociology on the Menu: An Invitation to the Study of Food and Society. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Print.

Bell, David, and Gill Valentine. Consuming Geographies: We Are Where we Eat. London: Routledge, 1997. Print.

Cooley, Angela Jill. “‘Eating with Negroes’: Food and Racial Taboo in the Twentieth-Century South.” Southern Quarterly 52.2 (Winter 2015): 69–89. Print.

Cooley, Angela Jill. “‘The Customer is Always White’: Food, Race, and Contested Eating Space in the South.” The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South. Ed. John Edge, Elizabeth Engelhardt, and Ted Ownby. Athens: the University of Georgia Press, 2013. 240–272. Print.

Cooley, Angela Jill. To Live and Dine in Dixie: Foodways and Culture in the Twentieth-Century South. PhD dissertation. Tuscaloosa, Ala. : University of Alabama Libraries, 2011. date of access: September 10, 2015. http://purl.lib.ua.edu/41216

Douglas, Mary. “Deciphering a Meal.” Daedulus 101.1 (Winter 1972): 61–81. Print.

“Fannie Flagg Books.” http://fannieflaggbooks.com/ Penguin Random House, 2016. date of access: 12 July, 2016.

Flagg, Fannie. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café. 1987. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1988. Print.

George, Rosemary. The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Print.

Grubb, Alan. “House and Home in the Victorian South: The Cookbook as Guide.” In Joy and In Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South, 1830—1900. Ed. Carol Bleser. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. 154–175. Print.

Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940. New York: Pantheon, 1998. Print.

Hoelscher, Steven. “Making Place, Making Race: Performances of Whiteness in the Jim Crow South” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93.3 (September 2003): 657–686. Print.

Horowitz, David. Inside the Klavern: The Secret History of a Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. Print.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography. London: Virago, 1986. Print.

Johnson, Charles S. Growing Up in the Black Belt: Negro Youth in the Rural South. 1941. With an introduction by St. Clair Drake. New York: Schocken Books, 1967. Print.

Kovacik, Charles and John Winberry. South Carolina: A Geography. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987. Print.

Leusse, Valerie Faser. “Fannie Flagg's Birmingham.” Interview with Fannie Flagg. Southern Living. July 12, 2013. http://www.southernliving.com/travel/south-central/fannie-flagg date of access: 10 July, 2016.

Levenstein, Harvey. The Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Print.

Lindenfeld, Laura. “Women Who Eat Too Much: Femininity and Food in Fried Green Tomatoes.” From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food. Ed. Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. 221–245. Print.

Madison, Soyini. Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics, and Performance. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005. Print.

Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. New York: Marlowe & Company, 1999. Print.

Pegram, Thomas R. One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2011. Print.

Piacentino, Edward. “Ku Klux Klan.” Companion to Southern Literature. Ed. Joseph M. Flora and Lucinda H. MacKethan. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2002. 410–412. Print.

Reed, John Shelton. Kicking Back: Further Dispatches From the South. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995. Print.

Ring, Natalie J. “Jim Crow.” The Jim Crow Encyclopedia. 2 vols. Ed. Nikki L. M. Brown and Barry M. Stentiford, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2008. 416–419. Print.

Ritterhouse, Jennifer. Growing up Jim Crow. How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Print.

Warner, Andrew. Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America’s First Food. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. Print.

Whitaker, Jan. “Domesticating the Restaurant: Marketing the Anglo-American Home.” From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food. Ed. Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. 89–105. Print.