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Transformational Spectacle in Bobbie Ann Mason’s Feather Crowns by Rhonda Jenkins Armstrong Modes of spectacle and spectatorship can be found throughout Bobbie Ann Mason’s novels and short stories and, for the most part, Mason’s Kentucky characters serve as contemporary- era spectators, con- suming televised images and incorporating them into their own iden- tities. In Feather Crowns (1994), however, Mason turns to an earlier era whose characters — old enough to be the grandparents and great- grandparents of her usual characters — h ave less access to popular culture than their late- twentieth century counterparts. For these early twentieth- century characters, popular culture intrudes upon their lives when they become objects of interest to tourists and the press. Feather Crowns tells the story of Christie Wheeler, who in 1900 gives birth to North Ameri- ca’s first quintuplets on a rural southern farm. Based loosely on an actual event, the novel follows Christie as she and her babies become first a tourist attraction in their own home and then a sideshow attraction after the babies’ deaths. In the final two sections of the novel, Mason brings Christie into the future, first to 1937, when she travels to Canada to see the
The Southern Literary Journal – University of North Carolina Press
Published: Jul 19, 2013
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