SOURCE: “Women and ‘The Gift for Gab’: Revisionary Strategies in A Cure for Dreams,” in Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 26, No. 2, Spring, 1994, pp. 91-101.

In the following essay, Branan describes how language empowers the women in Gibbons's A Cure for Dreams.

Several months before her third novel appeared, Kaye Gibbons voiced anxiety over “the recent dispersal and watering down of language, the lost language in the South” (Wallace 8). With her (then) forthcoming work, A Cure for Dreams, she intended to “take the language back to a very pure time … the Depression,” noting that “the hardest part of writing … has been trying to create a whole community with everything intact” (8, 9). Create a community Gibbons does—a community of talkers in Dreams, and not of least importance, a community whose talk is largely represented through and controlled by women. The book's principal narrators, Lottie Davies, the matriarch, her daughter, Betty Davies...