Amélie Moisy is a Senior Lecturer at the Université Paris Est Créteil (UPEC). She is a member of IMAGER, a research team on English language literature, Text, Images and Sounds (TIES). She is also a member of the Thomas Wolfe Society and her research focuses on that writer, his Southern contemporaries of the 30s, or on more recent texts, and on the relations between autobiography, myth and politics.
This article examines the ideology of Erskine Caldwell’s books on and for children, Georgia Boy (1943), Molly Cotton-Tail (1958), and The Deer at our House (1966). The aim is to show Caldwell’s interrogative stance regarding the status quo in these texts, and how he casts doubt more or less overtly on racism, myths of southern gentility, and parental authority. However, their ideology is also remarkably at variance with the author’s experience, especially concerning women. Thus Caldwell’s characteristic ambiguity and his ambivalence make the effects of these productions difficult to estimate.
