“Normal for His Culture”: Appalachia and the Rhetorical Moralization of Class

ABSTRACT

This essay explores how class distinctions can rhetorically shift from issues of income to social stratification in the United States. This process depends upon and affects particular regions and populations. Focusing here on Appalachia, I attend to the 1967 murder of Hugh O’Connor in rural Kentucky and media accounts in the murder’s aftermath as a nodal point in this continued stratification process. Analyzing the rhetorical mechanisms that link material economic conditions with moral character and value, I use prudence – an abstract analytic for capturing, describing, and understanding how appropriateness is communicatively adjudicated in a given context – to demonstrate the rhetorical process that internalizes and moralizes class, conflating individual crimes with the perceived inherent shortcomings of a larger group.

KEYWORDS:

• Appalachia
• class
• violence
• prudence
• forms of life

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For clarity, from this point forward I will cite Trillin’s republishing of his original essay from The New Yorker found in his book Killings because this more recent publication is more readily and widely available.