Vance and Stoll offer quite different theories of economic dislocation and family survival. Vance makes a big deal of “learned helplessness,” by which he means that poor white hillbilly families reproduce a culture of failure and encourage self-destructive tendencies that undermine the kind of personal discipline that would otherwise enable them to compete in the capitalist marketplace. Yet “helplessness” is surely the wrong word. His grandfather was an alcoholic who sobered up; his mother’s siblings did not suffer from addiction. Mamaw is anything but helpless.
What his family does indulge is anger and resentment. Vance learns from his grandmother how to draw class distinctions. Mamaw calls the woman next door a “whore” because she doesn’t work, has children, and lives off government subsidies. Vance learns to hate the people on food stamps who scam the system by using their government assistance to buy T-bone steaks Vance’s family can’t afford. His stepfather Bob Hamel is, in the words of his grandmother, “a toothless fucking retard,” a class rung below his family. He learns to despise the wealthy people in his town who drive Cadillacs. Stoll’s notion of “family solidarity” simply doesn’t apply in the Vance household: boys get more support than girls, and the women are often derailed by unplanned pregnancies and bad marriages. If Vance had been a girl, he probably wouldn’t have made it to Yale.
Vance mentions the “brain drain,” the economic decline in his Middletown neighborhood and in the trailer parks of Jackson, Kentucky. But he offers no macroeconomic analysis of the decline of the American Rolling Mill Company, where his grandfather worked all of his adult life. Why did his grandfather become an alcoholic? The one (indeed, dubious) explanation he gives is that his grandmother engaged in a “covert war” to make his “drunken life a living hell.” He blames his grandparents for refusing to internalize middle-class values, as if it was simply a matter of personal choice.
This failure to embed his family’s failings within any larger social context reflects Vance’s need to celebrate individual agency at all costs. For Vance, “hillbilly” is a term of endearment, a state of mind, a group moniker, a source of chaos and anger, but it is more often than not disconnected from real economic conditions that shaped his family’s class identity. The “hillbilly” that he invokes is both a composite of his memories and a literary device; yet for him to escape his troubled past, it must be shed, redrawn, tamed, and perhaps buried nostalgically with Vance’s grandparents.