Deliverance

Deliverance takes place during a time of transition in the American South. After the Civil War (1861-1865), the southern United States remained more rural and agrarian and less industrial and economically successful than the North. Following World War II, however, the South, including states like Georgia, experienced rapid industrialization and urbanization as southerners moved to larger cities to seek employment and northerners migrated south in search of warmer climates and new job opportunities. These factors contributed significantly to rising education and income levels in the South. Urban centers such as Atlanta became symbols of southern prosperity and home to a successful professional class. In contrast, rural areas of the South, such as those depicted in Deliverance, remained poorer, and their populations were less educated. Rural southerners were sometimes stereotyped in popular culture as throwbacks to a preindustrial era of isolation and ignorance (Green, John C. and James L. Guth. “The Transformation of Southern Political Elites.” The Disappearing South? Studies in Regional Change and Continuity, edited by Robert P. Steed, Laurence W. Moreland, and Tod A. Baker, University of Alabama Press, 2012, pp. 34-53).

Tensions between these two versions of the South—one urban and modern and the other poor and geographically isolated—play out in the interactions between Ed, his three friends, and the rural people they encounter on the canoe trip. When the four men arrive in the town of Oree, Bobby and Drew try to communicate with the old man they encounter at the gas station. When Bobby compliments the man on the way he wears his hat, the man is contemptuous, suggesting that rural people think little of the opinions of city folk. Drew, however, makes a connection to what Dickey suggests is “authentic” rural southern culture through music. Drew’s guitar duet with the strange-looking young man is an example of his identification with the local people. The young man, Lonnie, is a skillful banjo player, and Drew is ecstatic about playing with him. However, Drew does not survive the trip, suggesting the tenuousness of such connections.

On that note, Lewis is defiant toward the locals, who in turn resist his pushiness, suggesting a mutual animosity between rural and urban southerners. When Lewis offers $20 to one of the Griner brothers to drive the cars to the end point of the canoe trip, the brother says he will take $50, to which Lewis responds with indignation. Ed embodies still another attitude toward the rural south: He is afraid of the rural people and views them as threatening, noting that he was “scared to death” when Lewis appears ready to argue with Griner over the money (59). Ed’s apprehension about the locals manifests in thoughts about their physical imperfections. When he sees the old man at the gas station, he thinks, “There is always something wrong with people in the country,” further observing, “In the comparatively few times I had been in the rural South I had been struck by the number of missing fingers” (50). These reflections suggest that Ed, like Lewis, sees himself as different from and superior to the rural people he encounters.

The novel acknowledges the poverty of the rural South through references to the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a government-owned power company that provides power to several southern states. Controversially, the TVA bought land under value from poor families to dam it and provide hydroelectric power. The fictional river that the men canoe down in Deliverance is being impounded by an electric utility, nodding to the TVA’s hydroelectric projects, and Lewis observes that the damming projects have caused resentment among locals because many rural cemeteries had to be moved.