guthriedm15's blog

In The Kentucky Cycle, the picture is painted of a family that resides in Kentucky since the time that the family’s patriarch took land from the Native Americans through some very sinister means. This man’s name was Micheal Rowen and he is depicted as a person that driven by greed and lives life in manner that is totally devoid of self-control or morals. Micheal is said to be everything that we may think of as evil; he kidnaps a woman and forces her to be his wife, he beats her, he murders babies, he kills people that may have trusted him, and even wipes out entire groups of people in order to satisfy the intensive greed that he feels for land. In this play, Mr. Rowen is a simple character that wants one thing in his life.

Depictions of characters from the Appalachian are like this one are common in media and entertainment. This sort of person has become an Archetypical mountain man; these men live lawlessly, carelessly, and selfishly. Back Talk from Appalachia is a collection of pieces by scholars from the Appalachian area that have taken it upon themselves to combat this stereotype. Perhaps the strongest debate against this stereotypical depiction of people from this area is made by Lewis in “Beyond Isolation and Homogeneity”. He argues that these depictions are “fictional” and due to the lack of a formal history of the area (Lewis, 21).

In Back Talk from Appalachia Ledford guides the reader through an account of some of the explorers that are responsible for some of the stereotypes that hold today. She accounts a man by the name of William Byrd. He was a man that was educated in England, who wanted to be the one day governor of Virginia. In the name of business, he made a trip to the Appalachian and piedmont areas to see what the terrain and people were life. Perhaps his most blunt account was one where the men supposedly sleep all day, smoke pipes, and watch the women work on their behalf. This is a familiar sentiment that we see in Micheal. He has no respect for the rights of those around him, including his wife.

These authors set out to combat the hillbilly stereotype largely because of the depictions laid out in Kentucky Cycle because they are unfair and used to exploit and damage the people of Appalachia. As we can see from its rebuttals, this play is offensive to people of the area.