SOURCE: “Doris Betts's ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’: Miscegenation as Theme; Donne and Yeats as Allusive Sources,” in The South Carolina Review, Vol. 32, No. 2, Spring, 2000, pp. 163–70.

In the following essay, Evans considers the theme of miscegenation in “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and discusses the significance of references to the work of W. B. Yeats and John Donne in the story.

I

“Beasts of the Southern Wild,” the title story of Doris Betts's third collection, first appeared in the Spring 1973 issue of the Carolina Quarterly; the story, however, was completed much earlier as a letter, dated 25 October 1969, shows. Betts wrote her close friend Louise Hardeman Abbot that she had been advised to publish a new story “under a pseudonym … because it's a white woman and a black man.”¹ The story was “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” While miscegenation no longer is the taboo in southern life, it remains...