This quotation from Patricia Yaeger's revolutionary Dirt and Desire encapsulates the author's intention: to see southern women's literature in a new light and liberate it from “the categories that have been used to keep southern literature in its place … [:] such as nostalgia for place, the burden of southern history, a propensity for storytelling, and miscegenation as the core of the South's family romance” (64). Instead, Yaeger proposes that the themes which obsessively recur in southern women's writing are brought to light and examined in a larger context.

These themes include the problem of neglect, or what Yaeger calls “throwaway bodies,” referring to the people whose existence is so insignificant that they are easily overlooked, discarded, or whose “bodily harm does not matter enough to be registered or repressed” (68). Southern women's literature teems with images of people of colour, whose presence is not acknowledged and becomes reduced to part of background. This is related to the larger phenomenon of “obscene racial blindness”(xii), characterising southern literature; the conception that the term “southern” has been whitened, or deprived of its African-American connotations (xii). Classic 20th-century southern novels, including the works of William Faulkner, Yaeger argues, not only do not reflect the racial diversity of the South, but, what is more, they reinforce a vision of the world which is engulfed with “a cloud of unknowing” (104), discarded knowledge, a refusal to acknowledge the complexity of this world.

Another category that Yaeger brings into focus is the depiction of female bodies in southern literature. They are traditionally perceived in terms of the miniature, diminutive, fragile, pure and graceful, which reflects women’s inferior position in social hierarchy.