The Hillbilly Identity Theme Analysis

Having grown up in a working class Ohio town primarily populated by emigrants from the hills of Eastern Kentucky, J.D. Vance makes an effort in Hillbilly Elegy to clarify what it means to be a “hillbilly.” Including himself in this demographic, he explains that hillbillies are white Americans of Scots-Irish descent for whom “poverty is the family tradition.” For generations, they have been uneducated laborers fiercely dedicated to their own communities and traditions and remarkably resistant to change. And despite the poverty and social isolation they live in, hillbillies are proud of their culture. Throughout the memoir, Vance both celebrates and laments this pride. On the one hand, he praises the fact that his Appalachian working class community values loyalty and honor above all else. On the other hand, he shows that these same values often cause the community to remain trapped in a constant state of poverty and dependency. Moving between these two viewpoints, he is able to offer an account of the hillbilly identity that balances an insider’s familiarity and compassion with an outsider’s more objective critical assessment.

Family history is deeply important to the hillbilly identity. Vance spends much of Hillbilly Elegy’s first chapter describing his relatives, reaching all the way back to his great-great-grandparents. He explains that as a young child he was obsessed with his great-uncles, whom he characterizes as “the gatekeepers to the family’s oral tradition.” Whenever Vance visited Jackson, Kentucky—where his family is from—he listened to these great-uncles (the “Blanton men”) as they told stories about themselves and their relatives. And although the stories were often violent and inappropriate for a child, Vance reveled in the family lore; “Some people may conclude that I come from a clan of lunatics. But the stories made me feel like hillbilly royalty, because these were classic good-versus-evil stories, and my people were on the right side. My people were extreme, but extreme in the service of something—defending a sister’s honor or ensuring that a criminal paid for his crimes. The Blanton men, like the tomboy Blanton sister whom I called Mamaw [meaning grandma], were enforcers of hillbilly justice, and to me, that was the very best kind.”

The stories that Vance’s great-uncles told him largely revolve around the idea of honor and retribution. When, for example, a man named Big Red insulted the mother of Vance’s Uncle Pet, Pet beat him unconscious and cut him with an electric saw. The man survived this attack and didn’t press charges because he “knew what it meant to insult a man’s mother.” This, in turn, became a family legend that signified the importance of defending the clan’s honor. In this way, Vance shows that the idea of loyalty is deeply sown throughout hillbilly culture, as it is passed down from generation to generation. And although the stories themselves may speak of unseemly events, Vance frames the purpose of each tale as pure and as “in service of” morality.

Despite the strong hillbilly inclination toward family loyalty, many of Vance’s adult role models gravely mistreated one another. His grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw, had fierce fighting matches, often with violent results. Sometimes this became readily apparent to their children (one of whom was J.D’s mother), as when Papaw came home drunk one night after Mamaw had warned him not to and she doused him in gasoline and lit him on fire. After this, Papaw eventually stopped drinking and they reconciled with one another—but it was too late, for the results had already taken a toll on J.D’s mother, who grew into an abusive woman unable to live a drug-free life with her children and rotating cast of romantic partners. In this way, Vance portrays the downside of hillbilly culture—violence, anger, hopeless addiction—as cyclical. Though the hillbilly identity brings with it certain positive values like honor and loyalty, it also perpetuates catastrophic ways of living and relating to other people. Furthermore, even its strong commitment to loyalty sometimes proves detrimental, often leading to unnecessary violence and confrontation, as was the case when Uncle Pet took an electric saw to Big Red.

Vance is able to praise the qualities of the hillbilly identity while also observing its faults because he is what he calls a “cultural emigrant.” Having experienced the life of a disenfranchised member of the working class and the life of a successful graduate of Yale Law School, he is a member of two worlds whose behavioral codes do not always align. Violence and combative behavior, for example, were encouraged in his childhood because they reinforced the strongholds of the hillbilly identity: honor and loyalty. As a “cultural emigrant” to the affluent middleclass, though, Vance found that these traits actually did more harm than good. Vance gives several examples of negotiating these differences, including his attempts to break out of the pattern of violent relationships he saw growing up and learn to relate to his wife through healthy disagreements. He also discusses a time when a driver cut him off and his instinct was to get out of the car and demand an apology or fight—however, even though he interpreted this driver’s actions as an insult to his honor that he had to address, in his new middle class life Vance realized he no longer needed to defend his honor to win the respect of his loved ones. Thus, Vance’s experience navigating between two cultures allows him to debunk the idea that hillbillies are “a bunch of slobbering morons” while also illustrating the negative elements of hillbilly life.

Vance’s portrayal of the hillbilly identity is insightful and culturally sensitive because he approaches the concept with an open mind. He insists that his success in life is largely due to the support of his hillbilly grandparents and their fierce loyalty and dedication, declaring that “hillbillies are the toughest goddamned people on this earth.” But he doesn’t allow this faith in his cultural identity to blind him to his community’s shortcomings. “Are we tough enough to look ourselves in the mirror and admit that our conduct harms children?” he asks. He himself is certainly “tough enough” to look in the mirror, a courage he clearly hopes other hillbillies will adopt. Unfortunately, this kind of self-reflection doesn’t appear to be a hillbilly strength. In the memoir’s introduction, Vance quotes an article about Appalachia’s working class that portrays hillbillies as resistant to change; “In traveling across America, the Scots-Irish have consistently blown my mind as far and away the most persistent and unchanging regional subculture in the country.” By illustrating how important it is that hillbillies assess the way they perpetuate harmful practices, Vance implies that his community must finally open themselves up to change, perhaps for the first time. They must look in the “mirror” and consider the side effects of their cultural identity.