Fried Green Tomatoes and The Color Purple: A case study in lesbian friendship and cultural controversy

ABSTRACT

Published in the 1980s, Fannie Flagg's Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café and Alice Walker's The Color Purple are lesbian coming-of-age narratives that share a great deal in common in terms of their thematic content, publication histories, and cultural afterlives. In both novels, female friendships are shaped by patriarchal violence and develop in the context of the rural, segregated, early twentieth-century U.S. South. But the two novels also diverge in significant ways, as differences in race, gender, class, and sexuality shape their protagonists' experiences of love and friendship. As filmmakers Steven Spielberg and Jon Avnet adapted these novels for the screen, they made decisions about how to portray the texts' representations of homoerotic friendship and same-sex love. Both films generated significant cultural controversy as a result, particularly as some viewers claimed that the films elided the novels' representations of lesbian sexuality. Building upon recent scholarship in critical race theory, queer theory, and friendship studies, I argue that Walker's and Flagg's representations of queer friendship, a term that I describe in more detail throughout the essay, subvert dominant classifications of romantic, familial, and platonic love. By comparatively analyzing the American public's reception of the two film adaptations in conjunction with close readings of scenes from the novels and films, I reveal how representations of queer friendship not only catalyze cultural controversy, but also serve as a vehicle of social criticism.

KEYWORDS:

• Queer friendship
• race
• tomboy narrative
• girlhood
• coming-of-age narrative
• sentimentalism

Notes

1. For an overview of critical and cultural responses to the film adaptation of Fried Green Tomatoes, including some discussion of differences between gay/ straight viewers' responses to the film, see Eaklor, 321–7.

2. For a comparative overview of responses to the film adaptations of both Fried Green Tomatoes and The Color Purple, see Whitt, 41–47. Whitt draws upon Terry Castle's foundational work, The Apparitional Lesbian, in order to understand the films' development of “lesbian narrative space” (51).

3. See Faderman and Smith-Rosenberg for more discussion of the history of female friendship and intimacy.

4. Vickers notes that, after the release of the film, both Flagg and Avnet refused to categorize Ruth and Idgie's relationship as a lesbian relationship. She offers a critique of their response when she notes: “Female sexuality takes on many shades and by bleaching it to make mainstream audiences comfortable, Flagg and Avnet have contributed to the invisibility of the lesbian.”

5. See Bond.

6. Specifically, Foucault states, “one of the concessions one makes to others is not to present homosexuality as anything but a kind of immediate pleasure…. There you have a kind of neat image of homosexuality without any possibility of generating any unease” (136). He claims that this “cancels everything that can be troubling” in “friendship, fidelity… things that our… society can't allow a place for without fearing the formation of new alliances and the tying together of unforeseen lines of force” (136).

7. Derrida's The Politics of Friendship offers an extended philosophical meditation on the relationship between friendship and the history of democracy. As he notes in his preface, “Democracy has seldom represented itself without the possibility of at least that which always resembles—if one is willing to nudge the accent of this word—the possibility of a fraternization” (viii); Schweitzer's Perfecting Friendship traces the historical intersections of friendship and democracy in early U.S. literature and culture, with a special focus on race and gender.

8. I use the term cultural work to describe Walker's and Flagg's representations of friendship in order to highlight the ways in which they reshape dominant constructions of female friendship. For more discussion of this term, see Tompkins's Sensational Designs. By using Tompkins's terminology here, I am also aligning Flagg's and Walker's novels with an historical tradition of sentimental women's writing in the United States that offered social criticism of racial, gender, and class hierarchies.

9. Abate's Tomboys offers an extensive overview of the tomboy tradition in the United States. As an important caveat to my claim about the historical Whiteness of the early tomboy tradition, I would note that Abate demonstrates that White tomboy figures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are often racialized. Jo March and Laura Ingalls, for instance, are portrayed as physically darker than their siblings and associated with racial minorities. See especially Chapters 1 and 2 for more discussion of this topic and the epilogue for Abate's discussion of race in Fried Green Tomatoes.

10. In “A Wall on the Lesbian Continuum,” Rockler outlines this controversy (90–91) and proceeds to argue that “these responses indicate that the film, or at least the relationship of women in the film, is polysemous, or open to multiple interpretations” (91). The film's “strategic ambiguity,” she suggests, ultimately misses an opportunity. Adrienne Rich's concept of a lesbian continuum, Rocker notes, complicates the categorization of women as either heterosexual or lesbian (91).

11. Vickers also discusses Spielberg's strategic choices to alter the lesbian content in The Color Purple and contrasts this to Avnet's adaptation of Fried Green Tomatoes.

12. Eaklor points out that many gay and lesbian film critics and reviewers did not necessarily feel that Ruth and Idgie's relationship was illegible as a lesbian relationship.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kristen Proehl

Kristen Proehl is an assistant professor of English at SUNY–The College at Brockport, where she teaches courses in children's, young adult, and American literature. She has published an article on Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding in Jeunesse and has contributed articles to several essay collections, including Romantic Education in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Routledge, 2014) and Carson McCullers in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave, 2016), among others. She is currently revising a book titled Battling Girlhood: Sympathy, Social Justice, and the Tomboy Figure in American Literature and working on a companion project on queer friendship in adolescent literature.