SOURCE: “Between Girls: Kaye Gibbons' Ellen Foster and Friendship as a Monologic Formulation,” in Journal of American Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1, April, 1999, pp. 45-64.

In the following essay, Monteith studies how the structure of Gibbons's Ellen Foster as a monologue affects the presentation of the relationship between Ellen and Starletta, demonstrating how Ellen's first-person narration essentially robs Starletta of her own voice in the novel.

I

In the work of contemporary writers who explore the racial and social geography of growing up in the American South, fleeting encounters between white and black girls abound but enduring friendships prove to be more problematic to represent.¹ In Ellen Foster (1987), Ellen and Starletta's association stretches across the novel whereas, most frequently in fictions, the points at which black and white women converge and relate tend to be brief and transient, as in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) where a heavily pregnant and fugitive Sethe...