The female characters of novelist Clyde Edgerton demonstrate a variety of points of view for women in the South today. The male and female characters alike in these novels exemplify different social and political attitudes, and the novelist presents these points of view with a satirical edge that shows how foolish both sides in an argument can be. At the same time, he manages to do this without losing the humanity of his characters, and women such as Raney, though racist in her altitudes at first, remains a real person rather than a caricature even as the author is implicitly criticizing her beliefs. These characters express themselves in dialogue that is realistic and that reveals the underlying human being behind the words being spoken. Edgerton does not create these characters so much as he presents them, allowing them to speak for themselves and to show that they have come from real patterns and are not simply the creations of a fictional world.
Raney is the one of the strongest of the females presented by Edgerton in the novel Raney. Raney speaks for herself as narrator of this story, and she does so in a conversational style that reveals much about her feelings and attitudes. The story is about her marriage to a man very different from herself. Charles is from a big town compared to the small town where Raney grew up. Raney is a devout Southern Baptist, and Charles is much more liberal in his attitudes than she. One of his best friends is a black, and Raney cannot handle this idea. She has talked to the man on the phone and did not thing he sounded black, but she is uncertain:
I'll ask Charles about it when we're on speaking terms, and I'll tell him about how the sound comes through the vent; but if he is a nigger, he can't stay here. It won't work. The Ramada, maybe, but not here (Edgerton, Raney 32).
The novel is not about earth-shaking events, and most of the story concerns the adjustment to marriage t...