The Morality of Orality: Grace Paley's Stories

Abstract

The late Grace Paley was one of the great writers of the twentieth century, loved for her humanity and humor and admired for her brilliant, witty, deeply provocative prose fiction. Her literary voice is sui generis – pungent, familiar, and utterly recognizable – yet few know how to place her fiction. It could be categorized in the vernacular tradition of American literature because the speech of her narrators is not the elevated voice of the belles lettres establishment, but the regionally specific colloquial speech of ordinary people. According to Leo Marx, Walt Whitman and Mark Twain were the earliest practitioners of the American vernacular; their narrators spoke not English but American, affirming their particular regionality against the faceless gentility of the east coast or of Europe, and the democratic equality of all men against the hierarchies of race and class. Grace Paley's narrators, ordinary middle-aged women, push this radical equality further. Their colloquial speech and daily concerns challenge conventional literary notions of the subject matter of fiction as well as the class, gender, and racial identities of its speakers.