Entitled to the Pedestal: Place, Race, and Progress in White Southern Women's Writing,1920-1945

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Author: Nghana tamu Lewis

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to ENTITLEDthe PEDESTAL P L AC E , RAC E , A N D P R O G R E SS I N W H I T E S O U T H E R N WO M E N ’ S W R I T I N G , 1 92 0 – 1 9 4 5

j jJ J N G H A N A TA M U L E W I S

Entitled to the Pedestal

j jJ J E N T I T L E D T O T H E P E D E S TA L

Place, Race, and Progress in White Southern Women’s Writing, 1920–1945 Nghana tamu Lewis University of Iowa Press Iowa City

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University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2007 by the University of Iowa Press www.uiowapress.org All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Design by Omega Clay No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative and is committed to preserving natural resources. Printed on acid-free paper isbn-10: 1-58729-529-6 cloth isbn-13: 978-58729-529-4 cloth lccn: 2006935963 07 08 09 10 11 c 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

Preface vii Acknowledgments xiii 1. T H E L A D I E S A N D T H E M Y T H S |

White Southern Women’s

Writing 1 2. A W H I T E B L A C K W R I T E R |

Julia Mood Peterkin 22

3. A C E R TA I N M E N TA L A B E R R AT I O N | 4. S H E ’ L L TA K E H E R S TA N D | 5. PAV I N G T H E WAY | 6. N E W B E G I N N I N G S |

Notes 173 Bibliography 187 Index 203

Gwen Bristow 55

Caroline Gordon 108

Willa Cather and Lillian Smith 137 Old Sites of Authority 165

P R E FA C E

This book is about the cultural work of five modern southern women writers: Julia Peterkin (1880–1961), Gwen Bristow (1903–1980), Caroline Gordon (1895–1981), Willa Cather (1873–1947), and Lillian Smith (1897– 1966). It centers on the specific resonating impact of their engagement with the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology in novels published between 1920 and 1945 as well as in their private correspondence, essays, and lectures. It is the culmination of a personal and professional journey that began when I moved from Louisiana to Illinois in 1994 to attend graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I knew then that my research interests would eventually take me home. Among other things, the culture of graduate school taught me the value and the pitfalls of critical distance. As a proud daughter of the South, I have always been acutely aware of the region’s rich cultural heritage, folks, and foodstu≠. How could I not be? I was born and reared in Lafayette, Louisiana, where an infant’s first words are not “da-da” and “ma-ma” but “crawfish boil” and “fais-do-do.” Like most young girls in my neighborhood before the days of VHS and DVD, I grew up watching Gone with the Wind on TBS every year, wanting desperately to be like Scarlett O’Hara but knowing that Mellie really was the better character to emulate, especially once my senior year and highly anticipated societal debut neared. As one of the South’s proudest daughters, I have also always been intimately familiar with its volatile history: The bludgeoned face of Emmett Till. The mutilated bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. The burned bodies of the four little girls attending Sunday school at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The countless, nameless black and white bodies hanging from trees, struggling against the pressure of fire-fighting hoses, battling fierce bounty-hunting dogs. These images bespeak the racist anvii

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tagonism, demagoguery, and violence that punctuate still popular notions of the South as a distinguishable region of the United States. They are the sites at which still-relevant conversations about the racial ramifications of America’s political climate, social policies, and cultural institutions converge.1 While not explicitly visible in these images, the mark of white southern women on them and the stories about American history that these images tell are indelible. When I began formally “studying” the South at the University of Illinois, the prevailing critical sentiment did not recognize the complexity of white southern women’s hand in these narratives. In the early scholarship of J. W. Cash, C. Vann Woodward, John Blassingame, and Eugene Genovese, for example, I read stories about the abandoned and newly restored “big houses” along the River Road, where my mother grew up, and where I now live, that I never heard from the elderly black and white ladies adorned in long dresses, petticoats, and hoopskirts in their guided tours of these estates. The ladies spoke of the complex market economy of which the plantations were a part: their great traffic in human and material cargo; their advantageous proximity to the Mississippi; and the challenges they endured from Mother Nature. The critics, in contrast, highlighted the network of social, anthropological, political, and economic factors that sustained the ideology of the plantation as a munificent white male–constructed institution from which enslaved blacks (and their descendants) benefited before the Civil War. Whereas the tour guides spoke of the mistresses of these estates as direct descendants of French and German aristocracy who supervised every aspect of the household, the early scholarship of Anne Firor Scott, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Anne Goodwyn Jones introduced me to the falsity of the myth of White Southern Womanhood—the white southern male–constructed mores that allegedly regulated white southern women’s domesticity, sexuality, reproduction, and social interaction—and the “realities” of aristocratic white southern women’s experiences. The “reality” of their experiences before and during the Civil War is that most remained loyal to the Confederacy and the economic, social, and political foundations upon which it was built. As Laura Edwards explains, these women “had much more invested in the existing social structure

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than other southerners did” and during the war “everything that was important in their lives hung in the balance” (71).2 Critics tend to agree, also, that in the years immediately after the Civil War, the “reality” of the disproportionate number of Confederate soldiers who died in battle led many aristocratic white southern women and their descendants to hold steadfastly to the notion that “the Cause” had not been entirely lost. “Their belief in their own elitism was battered,” observes one critic, “but not broken. Their slaves may have gone, their homes and possessions lost, but [they] could still assure themselves that something set them apart—and above— others, irrespective of the law or their immediate conditions” (G. Roberts 180). As the South became increasingly industrialized and urbanized; as black southerners migrated to the North and the United States expanded to the West; and as organization among working-class whites and blacks succeeded in challenging at least the social status quo of the South throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the values attributed to white southern women of means before, during, and immediately after the war remained constant. How do we account for this phenomenon? To what do we attribute its resonance today in arenas as wide-ranging as Congress, hip-hop music, and pop culture film?3 These questions motivate each of the chapters that this study comprises. Debates within critical circles over the concepts of agency, ideology, cultural intervention, and authorship, as well as my own experiences growing up in, leaving, and returning to the South, have made it possible for me to try to find answers to these questions. In keeping with Awkward’s view that laboring through “the discursive muck of historical, autobiographical, mythic, and sociological narratives” can “propel us toward more liberating acts” of knowing (5), I am striving in this study to produce a self-consciously black southern American female inquiry4 into the materiality of the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology. Like Lillian Smith, I am interested in “the shaky myths” Americans have historically “leaned on” and the processes whereby these myths were transformed into response mechanisms by a core group of white southern women writers between 1920 and 1945 (Killers of the Dream 12). I am also interested in how and why these myths, these “breathing symbols” of “the edgy blackness and whiteness of things”

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(12), maintain a vibe of stagnancy, a less appealing form of Paul Gilroy’s notion of the “changing same,” in the South today. By centering and contextualizing Peterkin’s, Bristow’s, Gordon’s, Cather’s, and Smith’s mythic consciousness, I aim to clarify the primary reasons the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology endure. At the very least, therefore, this book proposes to challenge longstanding assumptions about larger issues of authorship and profit in the economy of southern ideology. There is now wide consensus among southern literary and cultural critics that southern myths have, as Baym asserts, “material e≠ects” (288). Critics also largely agree that these “e≠ects” have historically promoted primarily the interests of white southern men of means. The social and cultural networks of America have historically crossed demographic lines and embodied diverse, often competing, traditions, values, and beliefs. It stands to reason, therefore, that any comprehensive examination of the myth of Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology must consider these diverging and intersecting perspectives. For my part, I o≠er this study of five writers with whom, apart from their apparent racial identifications, I share a great deal as a descendant of slaveholders and a woman born of “privileged” class status in the American South. My status as both a beneficiary and a casualty of plantation culture tempers the theoretical thrust of this book. Hayden White has observed that narrative constitutes a discursive form that “entails ontological and epistemic choices with distinct ideological and even specifically political implications” (ix). The complex relationship between, on one hand, narrative and, on the other, the cluster of socioeconomic codes and political practices that shape the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology demonstrates the range of Peterkin’s, Bristow’s, Gordon’s, Cather’s, and Smith’s aesthetic politics. Each appears to have strategically deployed these myths to respond to changes taking place in the South’s cultural architecture between 1920 and 1945. These changes directly bore upon their status as white women with deep roots in southern plantation culture and, by default and by design, vested interests in the myth of White Southern Womanhood. Their status as white women of aristocratic southern heritage, in other

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words, distinctively positioned them as both agents and targets of change committed to engaging this dialectic in their writing. In the process, I argue, they not only laid claim to the myths, they also shifted attention away from the alleged origins to the materiality of the myths. In chapter 1, I introduce a historical context for reading the writers and their works in this critical framework. I provide a general overview of events and developments between 1920 and 1945 in which each author took an active interest through writing. In chapter 2, I examine the relationship between the social and cultural determinants of Julia Peterkin’s status as a plantation mistress and a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer. The trope of mobility, a symbol of progress among the Harlem Renaissance artists with whom Peterkin was familiar, becomes in her novels Black April (1927), Scarlet Sister Mary (1928), and Bright Skin (1932), an emblem of the process whereby Peterkin was able to explore and accredit her status as mistress of Lang Syne Plantation, her home in Sumter, South Carolina, throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s. Chapter 3 uses “The Unrecorded South” (1934), a little-known essay by Gwen Bristow, to probe the interplay among technique, politics, and history in Deep Summer (1936), The Handsome Road (1937), and This Side of Glory (1941), later collected and reissued as The Plantation Trilogy (1962). Bristow’s renarration of “traditional” southern history from the perspectives of economically privileged and disadvantaged white women enabled her to excavate the material base of a plantation economy, which exploits a network of environmental, perceptual, and cultural forces that distribute authority according to race, class, and gender. Her protagonists perceive their own exploitation in this framework. They also envision alternative histories of empowerment that allow the South’s poor and privileged white constituency to profit from a “modernized” plantation economy. Complicating this level of experimentation are the sanctions the novels place on black characters—and by extension, black southern Americans—imagining and profiting from the same alternative visions. Chapter 4 investigates a similar narrative pull in Caroline Gordon’s related novels of southern history, Penhally (1931), None Shall Look Back (1937), and The Garden of the Adonis (1937). In linking Gordon’s domestic life to her aesthetic politics, however, I propose that her exploitation of black and poor white labor at the

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Preface

depth of global fiscal and southern social depression partly fueled her creativity, enabling her to write and, like Peterkin, profit from the modern plantation Gordon and her husband, Allen Tate, managed throughout the 1930s. In chapter 5, I am concerned with the intersection between Cather’s and Smith’s authorial pursuits in Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) and Strange Fruit (1944) and grassroots initiatives galvanizing the southern Civil Rights Movement around 1945. Cather’s and Smith’s related negotiations of issues of authority and oppression embedded in the myth of Southern Womanhood, especially, suggest their desire to inflect the anxieties many modern white southern women felt about black progress and their determination, nonetheless, to promote it. I conclude in chapter 6 by meditating on the implications of this study, attending briefly to current cultural contexts within which to assess the continuing influence of the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology.

AC K N OW L E D G M E N TS

The dedicated and experienced sta≠ at the University of Iowa Press facilitated the timely production of this book. Thanks, especially, to Joseph Parsons, Charlotte Wright, and Holly Carver for your acuity in knowing what was needed to make this the best book possible. I must thank the George Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust, whose financial support has contributed to the completion of this project. I want to acknowledge the many people who provided invaluable feedback on the manuscript, including the anonymous readers; my mentors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Nina Baym and Robert Dale Parker; and my friend and colleague at Louisiana State University, Robin Roberts. The moral support that I have received from my colleagues and friends in the English Department and African and African Diaspora Studies Program at Tulane University is immeasurable, and I want to express my gratitude to each of them. To my dear friends Sika Dagbovie, Miyoshi Brown, Melissa Jean-Baptiste, Shannon Gregoire, Andrea Dennis, and Jennifer Myers: Thank you for always reminding me to “Relax! Relate! Release!” Finally, to Gwen, Lou, Agnes, Ciel, Cyd, Francis, Kay, Fra, Chi, Sash, Brock, Scottie, Chermain, John, Cierra, Sheridan, Eric, San, and Barbara: Thank you for always loving, supporting, and inspiring me. I dedicate this book to each of you. The chapter “Paving the Way: Willa Cather and Lillian Smith” is a revision of my article “We Shall Pave the Way: Toward an Aesthetics of Civil Rights Politics in Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl and Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit,” which appeared in the Winter 2004 edition of Arizona Quarterly.

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Acknowledgments

Quotations from a letter to Julia Peterkin from James Weldon Johnson, dated August 18, 1929, are used courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Quotations from materials held in the H. L. Mencken Papers, covering the period between 1922 and 1925, which address his relationship with Julia Mood Peterkin, are used courtesy of the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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THE LADIES AND THE MYTHS

White Southern Women’s Writing The whole mess started with a really beautiful park. And in the park were a man, a woman, a serpent, and this tree. —Richard Greenberg, Take Me Out

Richard Greenberg opens his entirely male-cast Tony Award–winning play Take Me Out with Kippy, the narrator, progressing through the sequence of proximate causes in the above quote, which, Kippy concludes, leads to core events at issue in the play. I am reminded of this witty opening to a play about the fallout of a closeted gay black male baseball player “coming out,” because the politics of the story of Adam and Eve—which a≠ords Eve more agency, and culpability, than Adam—would seem inevitably to factor into most origin narratives, even those without women at their center. It stands to reason, therefore, that among the greatest ironies of the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology is that critical accounts of their origins tend to omit the countervailing e≠ects of the power struggles that lend these myths, like their biblical predecessor, rhetorical complexity. In the beginning, the story typically goes, there was an aristocratic white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male, who, in all his omnipotence, designed a “big house.” A munificent market economy sprang up at this site. An economy based on the labor of the disproportionate number of people of (West) African descent, whom the aristocratic WASP male began capturing and bringing to the Americas around 1619 not only to build the big house but also to reside there, under his dominion. After the Civil War in the United States, the big house came to symbolize the social market still operative in the eleven ex-Confederate states and parts of Kentucky, where the big houses were mostly built. With the remnants of the materials used to construct these sites, the aristocratic WASP male also constructed pedestals upon which to place aristocratic WASP female residents of the estates. In doing so, he was able to regulate their do1

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The Ladies and the Myths

mesticity, sexuality, reproduction, and social interaction well into the latter half of the twentieth century, when white southern women of means, among others subject to his surveillance, set about dismantling the structures of white patriarchal authority. There would seem to be nothing inherently wrong with configuring the rhetorical trajectories of the Plantation Mythology and the myth of Southern Womanhood within the context of a patriarchal and, presumably, gyno-delimiting script. Indeed, because these myths are said to have originated in southern male-authored literature,1 their resonance in the cultural realities of the South have been largely understood, mapped, and measured as white-male-constructed and -governed. That is to say, when we think of the so-called mind of the South, which these myths embody, what most of us really mean is the propertied white male mind, the craftsman of the ideologies that sustain an image of the South as a distinguishable region in the United States, despite our awareness of its diverse geographic and cultural landscapes. When taken to their logical conclusion, therefore, conventional narratives of the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology lead inevitably to critical territory whereupon white male hegemony is focalized, scrutinized, and indicted. A Di≠erent Script In setting forth the principal objectives of this book, I do not attempt a full retreat from this familiar discursive terrain. At its core, however, this book about the cultural work of five modern white southern women writers maintains that few, if any, functional American systems can be either wholly white or wholly masculine in design. As the examples of Julia Peterkin, Gwen Bristow, Caroline Gordon, Willa Cather, and Lillian Smith make clear, repression of this fact in the study of concepts as complex and familiar as the Plantation Mythology and the myth of White Southern Womanhood rests dangerously on at least three related assumptions. First, that we can ascribe determining power to these concepts. Second, that the formulation of the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology created an aristocratic white southern female behavior unambiguously and uniformly spurned by white “progressive”-minded southern women in recognition of and in opposition to a patriarchal order.

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And third, as patriarchal investments, the myths ultimately function/ed as antiprogressive and, therefore, objectionable visions. My examination of the cultural work Peterkin, Bristow, Gordon, Cather, and Smith achieved between 1920 and 1945 calls these assumptions into question by shifting conventional rhetoric about the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology from theories of idealism and ideology to questions of authorship and entitlement. Similarities and di≠erences among these writers not only deconstruct the white southern womanhood monolith, they also lay bare in this myth and the Plantation Mythology a yet unrecognized heterogeneity, which, coupled with the myths’ built-in economic, political, and social incentives, warrant revelation. It is obvious to me that without the presence of white southern women of means, the social economies and gender politics born out of the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology neither happen nor endure. Yet despite innovations in feminist theory, and in African American, whiteness,2 and cultural studies, accounts of white southern women’s histories largely continue to take for granted that a pronounced split in the white southern mindset has historically and necessarily existed along gender lines. Where the split is not apparent, white southern women’s literature, in particular, is read as either subversive of or complicit with patriarchal culture.3 Consider, for example, Patricia Yaeger’s contention in Dirt and Desire (2000) that in order to “yield interesting facts” about southern women’s fiction and “help place [it] within its ‘American’ context,” we must necessarily abandon the “older models of southern writing” (xv). Models that sustain “a belief in the belle or female ‘miniature’ as the prototypical southern female figure,” she argues, must be replaced with the “procession of giant women” that “explodes and exposes the cult of true white womanhood” (xi).4 Consider, also, the logic Katherine Hemple Prown sets out in Revising Flannery O’Connor (2001) to explain the purported contradictory collusion of self and cultural identity Caroline Gordon and her protégé Flannery O’Connor were compelled to negotiate in their struggle to secure critical and popular recognition as professional writers. “Integral to Gordon’s identification with masculine intellectuality,” Prown maintains, “was her acceptance of the racial and sexual hierarchies that prevailed in the lit-

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erary circles with which she was associated. Like her Fugitive/Agrarian associates, she regarded the subordination of blacks to whites and women to men as crucial to the maintenance of southern identity” (80–81). If we sanction Prown’s reasoning, then Gordon appears to have been a sexist supremacist modernist by default—more reactive to male dominance in the professional circles she populated than agent in fashioning the racist elements that pervade her writing. If we sanction Yaeger’s reasoning, we are compelled to intuit an uninterrupted, uncomplicated connection between the historically patriarchal order of the South and the “mythological” positioning of those subject to the patriarch in writing. Yaeger attests to the fact that modern white southern women’s fiction is “worth examining precisely because it is continually overwhelmed by racial desires (for racial blending, for racial purity, for appropriating di≠erence, for keeping di≠erence at bay).” But, like feminist critics of southern women’s writing before her, Yaeger appears to reinscribe the very binary she aims to undercut, by subordinating the materialism of white southern women’s fiction to fiction written by black women.5 “Black Southern women’s fiction about the South,” she observes, “annotates complex economic and social di≠erences among women in aesthetically fascinating ways.” Whereas “white southern women’s writing . . . creates bizarre and frequent emblems for white southerners’ racial blindness,” black southern women “are less interested in what white people know than in surrogated knowledges, in histories that have been lost or cast away” (xv, xii).6 Yaeger’s otherwise brilliant examination of the “complex racial texture” of twentiethcentury southern women’s fiction thrives at the root on what Julia Kristeva characterizes as “a kind of naïve romanticism”: the belief that we can locate the identities of white southern women in their common experiences as subjects of a white male–ordered society (138). Though this presumption is not peculiarly based in analyses of white southern women’s literature, it is much emphasized. Here, too, perhaps, it is worth noting that Prown’s insight into Gordon’s narrative negotiations extends from a second reading of Michael Kreyling’s interpretation of Robert Penn Warren’s “Briar Patch,” an essay published in the agrarian manifesto I’ll Take My Stand (1930). A third take on this essay would expose a gap in Prown’s logic in that it fails


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to account for the specific class politics shaping Warren’s—and, by extension, the agrarians’ and Gordon’s—ethics.7 My issue with Prown and Yaeger does not, however, hinge on these critical oversights alone. For as acute as their awareness is of white southern men’s desire and ability to cultivate vehicles for negotiating power in the wake of modernity—as dramatized, for example, by Gri∞th’s Birth of a Nation (1915), Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury (1923), and Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire (1946)—they seem undiscerning about white southern women’s desire and ability to accomplish the same goal. As Henry Canby, a contemporary of the writers in this study, makes clear in his analysis of the interplay between the culture and popular literature of the 1930s, “a ruling passion, if not the ruling passion” of the times was “fear of change.” Much writing of the period reflected “the troubled imagination, with its fears, its suspicions, its strong desires” spurned by modern developments a≠ecting the lives of every American (14). Prown, in particular, lapses when she excludes women from the southern elite who stood to profit from a recovery —or retention—of the so-called agrarian-imagined society. If “the chief makers” of this ideology were southern men and if modern southern women served these men when they deployed the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology in writing, the e≠ect was residual, for they first served themselves (Kreyling 102). This book introduces further productive complexity into critical understandings of white southern women’s histories and literature by bringing to light these and other facts omitted in scholarly assessments of white southern women’s mythic consciousness. Authorship and Entitlement It is my hope that this book will go some distance in rendering an interdisciplinary framework for questioning longstanding assumptions about issues of authorship and profit in the economy of southern ideology. Mine is a plea to lend legitimacy to the structures of authority Peterkin, Bristow, Gordon, Cather, and Smith imagined in their authorial e≠orts to inscribe white southern women’s senses of agency as modernity infused the South between 1920 and 1945. As concepts that directly implicate issues of ori-

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gin, industry, rights, claims, designations, and distinctions, authorship and entitlement are discursive rubrics particularly suited to the task at hand. I propose to excavate these writers’ materialist interests, or the range of gender, class, race, sexual, and regional-inflected motives each writer had for summoning the myths in her work. The upshot of my claim is threefold. In Bristow’s and Gordon’s cases the structures variously reinforced white supremacy, not as a result of the writers’ interpellation by white male hegemony, but as a result of their conscious invocations of black proscription and, with Gordon, poor white proscription too. In Peterkin’s case the structures reified black stereotypes despite her ironic e≠orts to treat the plights of modern black southern Americans sympathetically. And in Smith and Cather’s cases, the structures aid in their advocacy of the civil rights of southern blacks and other disenfranchised minorities. In all cases, I maintain, the writers’ authorial objectives flow from two principal desires: to lay claim to the mythic pedestal upon which white southern women have historically been positioned and to indemnify plantation culture. They adhere to what I call an ethos of feminist conservatism, a value system paradoxically fueled by racial, class, gender, and sexual politics both conservative and progressive, regional and national. In so doing, they provide crucial insight into the high profile the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology continue to enjoy in American popular culture.8 They enable us, too, to understand how, in the absence of the unifying force and materiality of Jim Crow, southern myths continue to underpin the substance of interracial social and political engagement throughout (most of ) the United States. Crucially, the women in this study expose the fallacy of contemporary cultural criticism’s persistent investment in the epistemology of the patriarch, especially as it, like Robyn Weigman’s notion of the “epistemology of the body,” has informed suspect analogies among white female, poor white, black, and, more recently, gay and lesbian oppression. Collectively their writing enables us to measure some of the material e≠ects that the mythic authority of white southern women had and, as I argue, continues to have on the common habit and custom—the accumulated experiences— of Americans across gender, sexual, class, racial, and regional categories. This book thus proposes to contribute to the fields of American literary


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criticism and southern cultural studies by claiming central roles for the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology in the formation of southern and American cultures. By elaborating white southern women’s agency in constituting the signifying ranges of the myths, this book endeavors further to mitigate the critical neglect of once prominent writers, Peterkin and Bristow, while revising the way critics typically approach Smith, Cather, and Gordon. Let me proceed, then, by explaining how my primary rhetorical objectives in this book have influenced its shape. Neither the grouping nor the contextualization of the central writers and writings is random. The period 1920–1945 gave way to events of global importance, including World War II, the onset of the Cold War, and the escalating dominance of U.S. policies in international a≠airs. It produced such classic American literature as Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel (1929), William Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury (1929), Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). It is a historical framework rich in implication for just about any modern southern writer. But, if, as Mollie Abernathy has noted, “a new sense of the importance of southern women” (292) was also felt during this time, the writers under consideration in this study were among the most responsive to their emerging significance. As descendants of aristocratic southern families with strong roots in plantation cultures, Peterkin, Bristow, Gordon, Cather, and Smith are part of a longstanding tradition of white southern women writers who inherited the cultural assumptions embedded in the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology. Indeed, the most celebrated and accomplished writers to emerge from the South before World War I were women who, as Carol Manning has observed, consciously drew from southern myths in articulating their linguistic, rhetorical, and narrative strategies.9 It is a creative urge akin to the one that produced Ellen Glasgow’s In This Our Life (1941), Frances Newman’s Hard-Boiled Virgin (1926), Elizabeth Madox Roberts’s My Heart and My Flesh (1927), Evelyn Scott’s Eva Gay (1933), and Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding (1946) in roughly the same historical context as the novels under investigation in this study. Peterkin, Bristow, Gordon, Cather, and Smith are, however, fur-

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ther distinguished by their linkages to the major modern movements and developments also under consideration. Because of her relationship with key Harlem Renaissance personalities, as well as their favorable reception of her novels Black April (1927), Scarlet Sister Mary (1928), and Bright Skin (1932), Julia Peterkin was ironically mistakenly deemed among the nation’s foremost “black” writers at the height of her literary career. In “The Unrecorded South” (1934) as well as her best-selling novels Deep Summer (1937), The Handsome Road (1938), and This Side of Glory (1941), Gwen Bristow mapped a New South paradigm centered on poor and aristocratic white women. The thematic fusion between feminist and conservative ideology and Caroline Gordon’s interconnected novels Penhally (1931), None Shall Look Back (1937), and The Garden of Adonis (1937) expresses the distinct stand she took alongside her husband, Allen Tate, in response to an increasingly urbanized and industrialized South. And the striking similarities between Cather and Smith’s personal philosophies and narrative theories suggest an intertextuality between Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) and Strange Fruit (1944) involving issues of racial oppression and human rights at the core of the southern civil-rights movements. Clarification of the authorial objectives of this particular group of writers in juxtaposition with crucial modern movements and developments constitutes yet another crucial result of this study: a heretofore unexplored critical perspective on white southern women writers’ active engagement with modernity. In the Fold of Modernity In di≠erent contexts Paul Gilroy and Walter Benn Michaels have both suggested that throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the aesthetic politics of popular southern writers, such as Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon, involved a crucial repression or denial of the role of slavery in U.S. modernity.10 Sheldon Van Auken is one of a number of historians who indicate, in contrast, that the majority of modern southern writers directed their attention to the years preceding and shortly following the Civil War to view the relation between their “past and present with a better perspective than their [fore]fathers had possessed” (159). As evidence, he cites the large number of historical novels with southern settings that were


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published between 1900 and 1945 as well as their consumption by the masses, “as shown by national ‘best sellers’ lists” (163).11 H. L. Mencken is said to have agitated this outpouring of modern southern literature with the publication of “The Sahara of the Bozart” (1920). The rhetorical split in public responses to southern race relations, the likes of which the nation had not witnessed since the aftermath of the Civil War posed the great “Negro Question,” seems also to have served as a catalyst. On one hand some defended southern tradition, or so-called methods of “handling the Negro” (Johnson, “The South,” 75); others, however, began calling for “severe criticism” of deficiencies in the “racial” rhetoric of southern education, politics, religion, press, and literature (“A More Articulate South” 731). Mencken, himself, contributed to this debate in “Groping in Literary Darkness,” a lesser-known essay published the same year as “The Sahara of the Bozart.”12 In this piece, a key argument that Mencken advances about southern culture in “Sahara” resounds in his evaluation of black literature. Mencken concludes that black writers have not yet produced enduring work, citing “race” consciousness and reactionism as, on one hand, vitiating black attempts at “serious” and “realistic” creative expression and, on the other hand, reducing them to melodrama and propaganda (“The Negro” 320). He holds white Americans accountable for black literary preoccupations, tacitly limning southern whites as particular culprits: The white man, even in the South, knows next to nothing of the inner life of the negro. The more magnificently he generalizes, the more his ignorance is displayed. What the average Southerner believes about the negroes who surround him is chiefly nonsense. His view of them is moral and indignant, or, worse still, sentimental and idiotic. The great movements and aspirations that stir them are quite beyond his comprehension; in many cases he does not even hear of them. (320–21)

“What we need,” Mencken deduces, “is a realistic picture of this inner life of the negro by one who sees the race from within—a self-portrait as vivid and accurate as Dostoyevsky’s portrait of the Russian or Thackeray’s of the Englishman.” In painting this picture, the artist should adhere to the following formula: “The action should be kept within the normal range of ne-

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gro experience (my emphasis). It should extend over a long enough range of years to show some development in character and circumstance. It should be presented against a background made vivid by innumerable small details.” In closing, Mencken predicts that “the negro author who makes such a book will dignify American literature and accomplish more for his race than a thousand propagandists and theorists. He will force the understanding that now seems so hopeless. He will blow up nine-tenths of the current poppycock” (321). Writing for the Sewanee Review a few years later, Anne Frazier echoes Mencken’s sentiments in taking to task the corpus of southern literature, which, she claims, “has been inadequate as a representation and interpretation of life because it shunned anything deeply unpleasant and tabooed. This attitude was,” she continues, especially shown “in the use of the Negro as literary material.” As a picturesque figure dotting our Southern landscapes he was a cherished possession, a literary asset. Against our cotton fields he made a very e≠ective study in black and white. Since the days of Ir[win] Russell13 he has been exploited in our literature as a subject of pathos or humor and caricature. And always the Southern audience demanded that the literary treatment of the Negro be such as to uphold the tradition of cordial relations and fair dealing. (314)

“Upholding” this tradition seems equally to have applied to literary treatment of the South’s poor white constituency. In an overview of popular southern fiction before and after the Civil War, Mildred Mell traces a lack of psychological development in poor white characters, which serve almost exclusively as stock sources of comic relief (13). These stories, set mostly in southern mountain and backcountry communities, sold widely in the years immediately after the Civil War. It was not, however, until the release of Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road in 1932 that a southern novel critically engaged the plight of the region’s poor white class with any degree of popular success.14 With the background of the South’s racial and class landscape sketched out, we can better trace—and comprehend—the origins of the intercourse between the consciousness and narrative strategies of Peterkin, Bristow,


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Gordon, Cather, and Smith. I thus begin chapter 2 by demystifying the historical context in which Peterkin has traditionally been read. Because of her allegedly “penetrating” portrayal of Gullah culture in early short stories such as “Missy’s Twins” (1922), as well as her first short story collection Green Thursday (1924), a reviewer for the Chicago Defender once placed Peterkin among the nation’s foremost “black” realists.15 While contemporary scholars no longer (mis)take her for “black,” they still largely place her among American realists because, as Mencken observed, she sought to deal “realistically, and yet in fine sympathy,” with the lives of black people (My Life 373).16 Peterkin’s favorable reception among notable figures of the Harlem Renaissance has only fortified this critical perspective. In a review of Green Thursday (1924), for example, W. E. B. DuBois described Peterkin as a “southern white woman” who nevertheless “has the eye and the ear to see beauty and know truth” (“Browsing” 81). Juxtaposing her first novel Black April (1927) with other southern fiction, Alain Locke observed: “No novel has come out of the South more racy and redolent of its peculiar soil. . . . Blue Brook (the novel’s fictional plantation setting) and its earthy plantation negroes is as carefully studied a portrayal of peasant life as American literature has yet produced” (“Negroes and Earth” 172). Of the same work, Countee Cullen remarked: “No attempt is made . . . to burlesque the Negro or to make anything of him except a human being.” In a letter to Peterkin, James Weldon Johnson praised her Pulitzer-prize winning novel Scarlet Sister Mary (1928) as “a fine story . . . written with great beauty, clear insight and deep sympathy.”17 In addition to these key figures, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, and Walter White also commended her work. In fact, of all the Renaissance notables who early commented on Peterkin or her writing, none cast either in a less than glowing light.18 It is no wonder then that Harlem’s collective testimony has become a kind of authenticating document contemporary scholars use to validate the accuracy of Peterkin’s fiction.19 But to do so poses a number of problems. First, it appears too hastily to play the race card by privileging Locke’s, DuBois’s, and others’ endorsements emanating from Harlem because black people issued them. In a related vein, it fails to recognize the contradiction in DuBois’s later characterization of Peterkin’s themes as “defeatist” (“Two Novels” 760) and Locke’s description of black southern-

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ers as the region’s “peasant matrix” whose “leaven of humor, sentiment, imagination and tropic nonchalance has gone into the making of the South from a humble, unacknowledged source” (“Enter the New Negro” 634). This perspective resounds in Locke’s praise of Peterkin’s “quite studied and sympathetic portrayal” of “the Negro peasantry” in Black April (“Negroes and Earth” 173). Locke’s opinion, reminiscent of Thomas Nelson Page’s pejorative fictional accounts of black southerners at the beginning of the twentieth century, places Peterkin’s portrayal of black people and black culture within the plantation tradition. The rather revealing problem inherent in this placement is that it obscures not only Locke’s and other Renaissance figures’ direct engagement with the plantation tradition but also Peterkin’s relationship to the tradition. It evades, as well, the ideological crisis the transformation of the plantation economy posed for black and white writers alike throughout the first half of the twentieth century.20 The southern plantation and the “mentality” it cultivated in popular late-nineteenth-century white-authored fiction were believed by many Renaissance enthusiasts to be among the key cultural currents—black poverty and white terrorism included—that were precluding black southerners from fully participating in U.S. democracy. Black migration from the South to the North, which accelerated around the beginning of the twentieth century and gave way to the Harlem Renaissance, created opportunities for scores of black artists and intellectuals to experience social, political, and economic freedom, in part, by aesthetically negotiating the plantation, the site that had historically shackled their creativity, regardless of where they were born.21 To Locke’s mind, literal and figurative mobility of this design was necessary in order to generate among black Americans a radically progressive consciousness of their cultural potential. “In the very process of being transplanted,” from the South to northern and midwestern regions, he observes in his manifesto on the Harlem Renaissance, “the Negro is becoming transformed. . . . Each successive wave of ” black mobility constitutes “a mass movement toward the larger and the more democratic chance—in the Negro’s case a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern” (“Enter the New Negro” 631). And, too, from dependence to self-reliance. “The Negro today is in-


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evitably moving forward under the control largely of his own objectives,” Locke concludes, and, in the process, is “moulding a new American attitude” (632). Locke’s conceptualization of black progressivism, in the specific context of the Harlem Renaissance, made both the elevation of black consciousness and the culture it rendered crucial forces of modernity that threatened to subvert the (white) status quo, particularly with respect to how blacks had theretofore been discursively perceived, positioned, and policed. On the surface, much of Locke’s reenvisioning of modern black culture and modern black consciousness appears neatly to fold into Peterkin’s aesthetic and political purviews. Consider, for example, Peterkin’s justification of the focus of her writing and delineation of her position toward her black subjects in a September 1923 letter to Emily Clark written in the wake of white South Carolinians’ hostile reactions to her early work.22 “I mean to present these people in a patient struggle with fate,” she insists, “and not in any race conflict at all” (Clark 219). In a later letter to Joel Spingarn, Peterkin builds upon her narrative objectives as she marvels at the favorable review of her writing by black artists and critics in New York City in spite of the persistence of white rage closer to home: When I found the very people on whom I had counted for sympathy here in reading my book, all upset and indignant with me, not even indi≠erent but quite angry, then I thought, “The negroes may hate me too!” But they seem to understand my intention better than the whites in many cases. This pleases me greatly. I had no intention of doing anything that could be construed as propaganda. I wanted to record my impressions of people who seemed interesting to me. Doing it gave me much pleasure, and I felt that I was quite within my rights in spending my time so.23

In an interview with Dale Warren conducted just as Black April was enjoying critical and popular success among black and white audiences alike, Peterkin expands her agenda, limning her creative impulse in a tenor more existential than altruistic: I write . . . to get rid of the things that disturb me. I know it sounds peculiar to you, but that is the reason. On the plantation I am very close to life. It is all about me—several hundred negroes, in fact. It’s their lives that I’ve known. I

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have seen sickness and death and superstition and frenzy and desire. My eyes have looked on horror and misery. And these things have stayed with me and upset me. I have had to get rid of them, so I have written them out. It is really quite simple. (“Plantation Family” 1)

These passages embody Peterkin’s most direct commentary on her art and audience. They position black people at the core of her aesthetic vision; define black people, her “subjects,” in abstract as well as raw terms; register her anxieties over white southern misinterpretation of her work, along with her awareness of a responsive black literary and intellectual community outside the South; and connect her personal life as plantation mistress to her public persona as writer, tracing a flow from these identities to her subjects (black people) and their mutual southern culture. In these passages, the motives and methods of self- and artistic development crucially coalesce to reveal a personal and professional psychology manufactured in terms of Peterkin’s perception—rather than a “realistic” representation—of black people, black culture, and their mutual influence on her life as a white southern woman. Where Peterkin’s perception is not melodramatic, it is clearly patronizing, suggesting at least her unexamined interest in primitivizing black subjectivity.24 Critics should not fail to miss this point, yet few have acknowledged or endeavored to explore its multiple implications. Most recently, Debra Beilke has suggested that, though racist, this narrative move in Peterkin’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Scarlet Sister Mary (1928) is, ultimately, altruistic because the novel “imagines a utopian space where [white] women are magically freed of childbirth pain and emotional dependence on [white] men” (80). Indeed, despite repeatedly referring to Peterkin’s racism as “disturbing,” “uncomfortable,” and “condemnable,” Beilke seems ultimately to grant Peterkin leniency in objectifying black women’s bodies in the novel because it mobilizes a (white) feminist critique of “white patriarchal, scientific ‘progress’ ” (70). In keeping with Beilke’s logic, one could conclude that Peterkin’s endorsements from Harlem actually reflected key Renaissance players’ recognition of an ironic truth about “blackness” that comes through in her writing. That is, Peterkin “realistically” accounts for the white supremacist view of “blackness” as always already emotional, irrational, uncivilized, and ignorant, and, by appearing legitimately to care about her “black” sub-


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jects, avoids condemnation as a propagandist. Such a take on Peterkin would not be entirely o≠ the mark if we recall that DuBois defines double consciousness as the constant struggle among black Americans to define themselves within and against mainstream paradigms. But the evidence that I submit in chapter 2 shows that, in addition to demonstrating concern for the black people living and working at Lang Syne, Peterkin believed that an upwardly mobile black southern population threatened her status as a modern plantation mistress. Peterkin’s desire to preserve her position in Lang Syne’s economy thus exposes a contradiction in her enduring reputation as a realist recorder of the black American experience. Peterkin’s ambition to establish her literary career with Mencken’s aid underscores the central implication born out of her ideologies of race and progress, which I explore at length in the next chapter. In short, it seems that as the political and social realities of the modern South became increasingly clear to Peterkin, Peterkin increasingly used writing and the literary market, which Mencken helped her to dominate, as mechanisms for consciously resisting change. Character focalization within and mobility about Blue Brook Plantation, the fictional setting of Black April, Scarlet Sister Mary, and Bright Skin, reverse the e≠ects of the trope of mobility as utilized by Harlem Renaissance writers. In contrast, the trope works to endorse the modern plantation economy, the likes of which Peterkin managed until her death in 1961, as mistress of Lang Syne. Chapter 3 continues to mine the social and political landscapes modern white southern women created in their writing by exploring Bristow’s decentering of the southern aristocracy in the New South order to establish a forward-looking boundary between wealthy and poor whites. I begin with an examination of “The Unrecorded South” (1934), an essay published at the pinnacle of Roosevelt’s New Deal, which illuminates Bristow’s development as a professional literary writer. Close readings of her autobiographical essays and The Plantation Trilogy follow. In analyzing the novels in the trilogy, I focus on Bristow’s blend of realist and romantic conventions to politicize issues of identity and performance at the core of the myth of Southern Womanhood and to mobilize the novels’ overlying plots and characterizations toward the myth’s deconstruction. I propose that the texts are “metamythological”; that is, they expose myths as myths expressly

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to interrogate them in the framework of the stories’ and the characters’ developments. Complicating this experimentation are the sanctions the novels impose on black characters—and by extension, black southern Americans. To corroborate this claim, I again focus on the rhetorical functions of the myth of Southern Womanhood in the novels. Here, however, I demonstrate how this myth collaborates with the Plantation Mythology to construct densely racialized social structures that a≠ord white characters across class and gender lines the privilege of self-consciousness, self-actualization, and cultural mobility while denying blacks the same opportunities for introspection, expression, and progress. Chapter 4 maps Gordon’s symbolic use of the myth of Southern Womanhood both to check black access to opportunity and to malign capitalistinduced class expansion in the modern South. I examine, first, Gordon’s letters to Sally Wood written between 1924 and 1937. In 1924 both Gordon and Wood lived and worked in Greenwich Village as fledgling creative writers. They became lifelong friends after meeting through a relative of Gordon’s who lived near Wood’s birth home in Rochester, New York. Gordon’s letters to Wood provide intimate, arguably unscripted, details of her maturation as a writer, wife, and mother in relation to domestic and economic arrangements that sustained her throughout the 1930s. In linking Gordon’s domestic life to her aesthetic politics, I contend that her manipulation of black and poor white (American and European) labor at the height of global fiscal and southern social depression partly fueled her creative energies, enabling her to write while maintaining a modern plantation labor system at home and abroad. Gordon’s registry of the racial and class implications of her professional development in letters to Wood strikingly contrasts with her meticulous attention to the sensibilities of aristocratic white southern women in other personal writing as well as in her interconnected novels of southern history Penhally (1931), None Shall Look Back (1937), and The Garden of Adonis (1937). Gordon’s privileging of aristocratic white southern women’s consciousness in these works underscores their investments in plantation culture and promotes this economy in a modern context. To support this theory, I examine Gordon’s conceptualization of the central novelistic intelligence: the point of view that she advocated as a kind of


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roaming reflector, one that e≠ects consubstantiality among writer, character(s), scene, and reader.25 Gordon uses the central intelligence to paint concrete and vivid narrative scenes, as in her description of Fort Donelson’s situation along the west bank of the Cumberland River in None Shall Look Back. She also uses the central intelligence to privilege a certain kind of consciousness, that is, a feminist conservative one, as in her widely read but little studied essays “Always Summer” (1971) and “A Visit to the Grove” (1972). Gordon’s manipulation of the central intelligence in these late essays aestheticizes tensions between and across binary perspectives (white/black, male/female, cosmopolitan/provincial, past/present, adult/child), adumbrating a politics sympathetic to white southern women who lived before and after the Civil War; neglectful of the experiences of blacks (especially black southern women); indi≠erent to the experiences of poor whites; and steadfastly if complexly rooted in southern conservatism. To round out the chapter, I reconstruct the intelligence, or consciousness, by which Gordon progressively promotes the interests of aristocratic white southern women at the expense of poor whites and blacks in the three novels. Chapter 5 takes the book to the end of the historical period under consideration, situating Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) and Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit (1944) among grassroots literary initiatives galvanizing the southern Civil Rights Movement around the end of World War II. In dating the origins of the Civil Rights Movement within five years of both Sapphira and Strange Fruit’s release, I trace the cumulative impact of local and national mass activism on public opinion and policy. I thus depart from the majority of civil rights scholars who have seen “mass activism as significant only to the extent that it contributes to successful reform e≠orts using institutionalized strategies and tactics” (Carson 20). This majority perspective has licensed even feminist critics to slight white southern women’s activism during the first half of the twentieth century. Sara Evans, for example, maintains that persistent “fears and anxieties about sex between black men and white women” undermined the liberalism of white southern women activists of the 1920s and 1930s and that their numbers declined throughout the 1940s and 1950s because they were “shunned and persecuted by the white community.” She points to “a

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new set of circumstances” on American college and university campuses and in religious subcultures in the late 1950s and early 1960s that “opened a pathway into insurgency that was peculiarly appropriate” for white southern women to follow (25). Ironically, Evans’s regard for racial tension in narrowly construing the e≠ectiveness of early white southern women’s coalitions is largely elided in her a∞rmation of their later activism. Even at the height of its success, activists in the civil rights movement were never monolithically oriented; nevertheless, it took the collaborative energies of Americans across demographics to realize the movement’s goals. White southern women’s early activism built largely upon the activism of black women such as Mary Church Terrell, Mary McLeod Bethune, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells in addressing “the resurgence of lynching” so that white southern women could “face their responsibility in relation to this crime” (Eleazer 160). Jessie Daniel Ames, perhaps the most widely acclaimed white southern woman activist before Smith, rejected the vindication of black male lynching in the name of protecting white southern womanhood; in 1930, she spearheaded the formation of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. Later activism among white southern women sought to raise consciousnesses at local levels and, thus, targeted pernicious state legislative, judicial, and educational policies in addition to intensifying assaults against mob violence. These initiatives, in conjunction with an increase in media coverage and field activism by groups such as the Congress of Racial Equality, fed into the “growing national consensus” after World War II that systematic adjustments were needed to protect the civil rights of all Americans (Sosna x).26 It is no coincidence then that Sapphira and Strange Fruit take up the themes of racial segregation, miscegenation, white supremacy and violence, and (repressed) same-sex desire within the context of relatively isolated southern communities. These were—and in many respects remain —the cultural determinants and spaces that distort(ed) and largely undermin(ed) the ideologies that Cather and Smith adhered to. These were also determinants with and within which Cather and Smith struggled throughout their lives as white southern (-born) aristocratic lesbians.


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While Cather’s biography—from her acclaim as editor of McClure’s magazine and literary champion of the frontier and Midwest to her near thirty-eight-year relationship with Edith Lewis—is widely known and documented, Smith’s background has received less critical attention. And until the release of Willa Cather’s Southern Connections (2000), little insight had been given into the particular influence of Cather’s southern heritage on her aesthetic politics in a specifically modern context.27 It is noteworthy, for example, that Cather’s family, though sympathetic to the Union during the Civil War, remained loyal to the Confederacy, providing medical assistance to injured soldiers and shelter to troops. Cather’s grandmother, Rachel Seibert Boak, the alleged prototype of Rachel Blake in Sapphira, is said not to have condoned slavery. Yet the Cathers maintained a number of slaves before the war and a number of black and white field and house servants after the war. Sensibly one can conclude, therefore, that the Cathers were rooted in the plantation economy, at least until they moved from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883. A related case, Smith’s family—staunch Methodists who early migrated from North Carolina to Ware County, Georgia, before settling in Jasper, Florida, a racially mixed town bordering the Okefenokee Swamp— strongly advocated systematic segregation, despite invoking liberal hiring policies in establishing a successful wholesale lumber and naval store. As Smith notes in the semiautobiographical Killers of the Dream (1949), both her mother and her father descended from a long line of slaveholding families and taught their children to believe in white racial supremacy. Smith claims that it was not until 1920, when, at the age of twenty-three, she traveled abroad for the first time to teach piano in Huchow, China, that she realized the oppressiveness of southern culture, particularly its racial economy. “For the first time in my life, I was ashamed of my white skin,” she once said of the experience. “I began to believe that ‘whiteness’ cast an evil spell over all that it came into contact with” (Loveland 40). After three years in China, Smith returned to the United States to become director of Laurel Falls Camp, where she broadened and updated the curriculum. At about this time, she met Paula Snelling, who assisted her in launching the Laurel Leaf, the camp’s monthly pamphlet. Editing the

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pamphlet sparked Smith’s interest in pursuing professional writing. Her relationship with Snelling sustained her on this path. Shortly after meeting one another, Smith and Snelling moved in together and, like Cather and Lewis until Cather’s death in 1947, remained lesbian partners until Smith’s death in 1966. From the time she assumed leadership at Laurel Falls in 1925 to her death forty-one years later, Smith remained a public figure noted for her work at the camp, her tireless commitment to ending racial segregation in the South, and her unabashed liberalism. Indeed, the Schomburg Collection of the New York Public Library placed Smith on its Honor Roll of Race Relations for her “consistent liberalism in a land where it takes courage to be a liberal” (Jenkins 119). Her denaturalizing of privileges she believed white southerners took for granted because of their race made Smith a veritable pioneer in “whiteness” studies.28 I propose that Cather consciously set out to forge a similar path at the culmination of her literary career in writing Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Cather and Smith’s similar cultural subjectivities and negotiations of southern myths of authority and oppression in Sapphira and Strange Fruit suggest their mutual desire to represent the anxieties white southern women of conscience felt about change and their determination nonetheless to promote black progress. Toward these ends, Sapphira’s and Strange Fruit’s narrative economies intersect with the racial and sexual politics embedded in the myth of Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology. But unlike Peterkin, Gordon, and Bristow, Cather and Smith deconstruct and (re)appropriate the myths’ materialist implications to underwrite the agency of white female characters in advancing the plights of black characters—and, by extension, black Americans. I suture this reading to brief treatments of Cather’s and Smith’s explorations of same-sex desire, which illustrate how their concern with civil rights issues necessarily, if tacitly, accommodates gay and lesbian politics. I conclude with a still briefer analysis of a gesture central to Sapphira and Strange Fruit that, at least implicitly, imagines people of color, primarily black women, as agents of the myth of Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology. This narrative tension implicates racism and elitism within black culture as forces of oppression comparable to white violence and systematic segregation.


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Cather’s and Smith’s insights into the influence of the myth of Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology on black culture and consciousness suitably segues into chapter 6, “New Beginnings.” Here, I briefly project this book’s various implications. In linking Peterkin, Bristow, Gordon, Cather, and Smith, I set the stage for further discussion of these and other white southern women writers’ awareness of and response to one another’s work. Welty reviewed Cather in “The House of Cather”; Glasgow reviewed Peterkin; Porter reviewed Gordon; and Gordon reviewed Porter and O’Connor. Peterkin and Gordon socialized with one another at symposiums, which, in Donald Davidson’s opinion, were tempered by a feeling of “natural kinship” among participants “in being Southern writers” (495). Other accomplished white southern women writers in frequent attendance were Mary Johnston and Ellen Glasgow. If they did not specifically discuss their narrative strategies, the fact of their interaction in these informal settings seems to constitute fertile ground for future studies of the South’s literary tradition as a whole as well as the specific contributions of white southern women. In concluding, therefore, I attempt not to bring closure but to ask what current significations on the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology can teach us about past significations as well as significations to come. I present both the problems and possibilities born out of these processes. The paradox, for example, of Steve Martin and Queen Latifah’s blockbuster hit Bringing Down the House (2003) successfully dismantling and fortifying the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology seems to bear upon the culture Americans imagine for themselves in the twenty-first century. Like the writing of the white southern women at the center of this study, it bears, too, upon the culture we can expect future generations of Americans to inherit, envision, and invest in.

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A W H I T E B L AC K W R I T E R

Julia Mood Peterkin The negroes have no books, they cannot read and they know nothing of how to write. Yet by word of mouth they have handed down through generations strange and beautiful myths. They sit over their fires and talk about them, tell them to their children. . . . It’s such a pity they don’t know how to preserve them. When these old plantations are all gone, broken up and civilized, and the life of the people changed, they’ll soon lose faith in their myths and superstitions and songs, and try to believe in the things of white people.

—Julia Mood Peterkin, On a Plantation

There is confusion over why On a Plantation,1 one of a handful of Julia Peterkin’s fiction focused through a white character, was never published. Susan Williams claims that Peterkin ambitiously sought to publish the would-be novel, submitting revisions of it to H. L. Mencken even after he advised her to abandon the project, because, as Williams maintains, Peterkin really preferred to write “about white people, especially white people like herself. But when she tried,” concludes Williams, “her vision dimmed and the strong, sure voice turned pompous” (Devil xv). In addition, Williams believes that Mencken’s condemnation of the preoccupation with “petty, self-absorbed white people” in On a Plantation and his approval of her more pointed emphasis on black culture in her early short stories, further discouraged Peterkin from adopting an overtly white perspective.2 Whatever the case, Peterkin neither completed nor released any versions of On a Plantation. And though her papers include drafts of at least one other (undated and untitled) story from a white woman’s point of view, and though “Boy-Chillen” (1932), her sole attempt at dramatic writing, includes a central white character, the greater part of Peterkin’s literary repertoire, particularly her acclaimed novels Black April, Scarlet Sister Mary, and Bright Skin, focuses on and through black characters. When read in juxtaposition with these three novels, in the specific context of Peterkin’s status as mistress of Lang Syne Plantation, On a Plantation o≠ers 22

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critical insight into the issues at the center of this chapter, namely, the intricacies of Julia Peterkin’s aesthetic politics and her enduring reputation as a white “black” writer. Helen West, the character speaking in the opening passage from On a Plantation, is white; but her subjects are black people and black culture and her specific conclusions about both being caught in the undertow of encroaching modernity. Helen West can be read as an alter ego through which Peterkin projects an image of “blackness” that is at once intelligible, inspirational, inferior, and obsolescent. Nostalgic, mystical, and mythological imagery converge in the passage to thematize black power and subjugation while privileging white prophecy and progress. It is the very discursive process by which, I maintain, Peterkin used narrative to oppose modern forces impinging on her cultural subjectivity and ushering in a new era of promise and progress for black Americans. Groping at Lang Syne Scholarly assessment of the sequence of events that launched Peterkin’s literary career in 1921 follows a single line of development that forks at the moment Henry Bellaman, dean of the School of Fine Arts at Chicora College, with whom Peterkin studied piano, allegedly encouraged her to record the black experiences she narrated to him. In 1921 Peterkin invited both Carl Sandburg and H. L. Mencken to visit Lang Syne.3 Attached to the invitations were copies of several of her fictional pieces that engaged black life. From this gesture, scholars have accurately deduced Peterkin’s desire to secure a “more severe critic” of her work than Bellaman was or could be (Montgomery 11). But as late as 1992, critics were taking Peterkin at her word, which attributed her introduction to the literary world to serendipity. According to Peterkin, Bellaman not only coerced her into writing; he also instructed her to show her work to Carl Sandburg. Sandburg in turn encouraged her to submit her work to Mencken, who forwarded her name and sketches to Emily Clark, chief editor at the Reviewer, a journal out of Richmond, Virginia, where Peterkin eventually placed many of her early sketches and short stories. Peterkin’s account deserves exact quoting:

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A White Black Writer

Before I came [for another piano lesson, Bellaman] said, I must sit down and write out the story I had told him, the story that later became “Black April.” Naturally, I remonstrated. I couldn’t write, I told him. Even my letters were no more than telegrams. But he was firm. It was the condition on which I would be given music lessons. He said that to write things down, freed us of them, like the confessional. So on the way home I bought a tablet and before I went back for my next lesson I wrote that first sketch as best I could with a pencil. Every time I went I was required to take Mr. Bellaman another, each recounting some incident of life among the plantation Negroes. Mr. Bellaman is a writer as well as a musician. While he was still living in Columbia [South Carolina], Carl Sandburg came to visit him. Mr. Bellaman brought Mr. Sandburg to Lang Syne and insisted that I let him read my sketches. Very reluctantly I did so, and Mr. Sandburg suggested that I submit them for publication. I said, “But you are a guest. You would have to be polite. Tell me the name of the best critic in America and I will be governed by what he says.” Mr. Sandburg suggested Henry Mencken, to whom I later sent sketches. Mr. Mencken was extremely kind and generous and said he thought it would help me to see some of my work in print. So he asked the editor of the Richmond Reviewer to write to me, with the result that some of the short stories later included in Green Thursday were printed in the Reviewer. (D. Warren 1)4

We know today that Peterkin does more than stretch the truth in this narrative. She flatly lies about how she met Sandburg and Mencken, and how her work got into print. Critics, however, have failed adequately to take Peterkin’s mendacity to task, electing instead to view the tale as one Peterkin weaved in harmlessly feigned modesty once she became famous. (See, for example, Williams, Devil, 29). But Peterkin’s dissembling in this instance reveals much about her “craft,” character, and composition. Consider, first, how she positions herself and her work in relation to Bellaman, Sandburg, and Mencken. When Bellaman makes Peterkin’s sketches a currency that she must o≠er—indeed, the only currency he will accept—in exchange for piano lessons, she acquiesces to his terms. When Sandburg intimates that her stories are art worthy of examination, Peterkin inquires about a critic. When Mencken makes her stories a commodity available for public consumption, Peterkin becomes a writer. At every turn, Peterkin seems willingly to deprive herself of agency in deter-


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mining her professional development, reducing herself and her writing to what one critic has described as “passive items of exchange” in a medium largely controlled by men (Castiglia 3). Given the centrality of Peterkin’s role in actually establishing her career, her conscious e≠ort toward selfe≠acement in the narrative invites speculation on the array of developments and interactions that shaped her motives for writing, the methods she adopted, and the web of personal and professional connections that placed her at the center of cultural activity in New York City even as she lived, worked, and wrote at Lang Syne. Many critics have intimated that Peterkin, among other pioneers of the South’s “cultural awakening” around the beginning of the twentieth century, began writing to challenge Mencken’s famous assertion in “The Sahara of the Bozart” (1920) that the region was an intellectual and cultural vacuum.5 It seems that it is precisely because this essay so largely shaped public perceptions of the South that scholars have not questioned why Peterkin pursued Mencken’s opinion of her work. If favorably inclined, Mencken could have the greatest influence in promoting her material and establishing her career. Furthermore, if part of her objective in writing was to counter Mencken’s attack on the South, then Peterkin’s accomplishment would serve the dual purpose of self-promotion and regional redemption. But if these were Peterkin’s goals—and I believe that, in part, they were— how could representing Gullah people (whom she herself once characterized as “persistently ignorant” and “pitifully improvident and wasteful”), Gullah experiences (which she claims to have been immensely disturbed by in her interview with Dale Warren), and Gullah culture (which, near the culmination of her writing career, she described as vibrant but unrefined and fleeting [Roll Jordan, Roll 9, 23]) work toward their achievement? I believe the answer to this question can be found by shifting attention from “The Sahara of the Bozart” to “Negro As Author” (1920). In chapter 1, I observed that this lesser-known essay Mencken wrote in 1920 e≠ectively issued a challenge to southern writers—black and white alike—to radically alter literary representations of black Americans’ experiences, which, theretofore, had been accounted for with little depth. Regardless of whether Peterkin read this essay, the extent to which both the content and form of Black April, Scarlet Sister Mary, and Bright Skin ad-

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dress Mencken’s observations is highly suggestive, especially since Peterkin sought his approval and assistance. The central setting for the novels is Blue Brook Plantation, and the central characters are black. All reside at Blue Brook and all have little if any interaction with white subjects in the narrative framework. The principal narrator in each novel is articulated to the plantation system, though also somehow outside the system, with restricted and omniscient points of view merging to tell each story. Commentary on the plantation community’s traditions and beliefs is interspersed within the narrative proper, which ultimately vacillates between acculturating and displacing the “outsider” perspective. The plantation owners are conveniently, though creatively, “on vacation” at the start of the novels; and each story concludes as the black residents of Blue Brook prepare for the owners’ return. Time is measured primarily in seasons, and so the calendar year remains unknown. The dialogues, activities, and dispositions of the novels’ central characters, however, enable us to speculate that, though they live on a plantation, they are not slaves. They are paid for their work. The day-to-day, or so-called “normal range,” of these black characters’ experiences are mapped with profligacy, philandering, and promiscuity exhibited as common registries among Blue Brook inhabitants. Everyone works. Everyone plays. Education matters to only a few of the elderly folks’ children; they go o≠ to acquire the diploma but often return and become reintegrated into a community where good ham-boning, quilting, and sermonizing are more appreciated. Black April opens with the birth of a child, Breeze, at Sandy Island, a plantation close enough to Blue Brook for the two plantation communities to correspond easily with one another. Breeze’s mother has a prolonged labor, and so his grandfather, Old Breeze, travels to Blue Brook to secure Maum Hannah’s assistance—and the assistance of her charm beads—with the delivery. Breeze is born with a caul on his face, or, as the natives read it, with second sight. He grows into a healthy adolescent at Sandy Island, assisting his grandfather’s profitable yet dishonest lumber-felling business. (He fells trees that he deliberately poisons.) One day, Old Breeze is apparently murdered by Breeze’s stepfather, who makes o≠ with all the money Old Breeze had saved for the family. The event sends Black April, the fore-


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man at Blue Brook, to Sandy Island to assist in Old Breeze’s burial, whereupon he learns that Old Breeze is really his father and Breeze is his own illegitimate son. A few months later, when a drought and boll weevil attack make food scarce at Sandy Island, Breeze migrates to Blue Brook Plantation to acclimate to plantation life under Big Sue’s guidance. The remainder of the narrative consists mostly of Breeze’s “learning” Blue Brook’s social politics by observing, among other things, quilting sessions and a would-be knife fight, by working in the field alongside April, and by participating in church services. The narrative proper in Scarlet Sister Mary follows the plight of Mary Poinsett, whose profligate, philandering husband, July, abandons her on their wedding night. Pregnant and depressed, Mary wallows for an extended period in self-pity before being nurtured back to health by her adopted mother, Maum Hannah, her adopted brother, Buddha Ben, and July’s brother, June. Equipped with a set of charmed beads to protect her from heartbreak, Mary becomes intimate with June and bears another child. Shortly thereafter, June leaves Blue Brook in search of work to support his family. A pattern in which Mary becomes intimate with transient men and bears their children develops such that by the end of the novel Mary has nearly a dozen children by as many men. The dissolution of each relationship and birth of each child become opportunities for Mary to comprehend and expound on the various forces—social, economic, political— working within and outside the plantation to define her situation. Like Black April, Bright Skin opens with the removal of a young child, Blue, from a remote plantation to Blue Brook. Blue’s sojourn follows his parents’ bitter divorce, when his father takes him to Blue Brook to be reared by his grandparents Fancy and Alfred. Unlike Breeze, Blue does not have a di∞cult time acclimatizing to Blue Brook because he is generally familiar with plantation culture. Blue concentrates largely on winning the love of his cousin, Cricket, a biracial child, whom most of the children at Blue Brook cruelly refer to as a “no-nation bastard.” Cricket, however, sets her sight on opportunities outside Blue Brook, leaving the plantation for Harlem, New York, at the end of the narrative. Blue stays at Blue Brook to marry Cooch, the mother of his alleged child.

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Given these novels’ structures and themes, it seems of some consequence that Mencken’s prediction in “Negro As Author” eventually fits Peterkin, who, as has already been noted, was considered among the foremost “black” U.S. writers and among the nation’s most accomplished literary realists. Peterkin’s response to the former distinction was loaded. “If it were not that I am a blond,” she wrote to Carl Sandburg in March 1925, “I think an e≠ort would be made to prove that I am half black. Maybe I am spiritually,” she concluded. In others’—and her own—opinion, therefore, Peterkin’s writing convincingly appeared to undercut Mencken’s testimony that white people know nothing of the “inner life” of blacks. If we suppose that Peterkin wrote with “literary gropings” in mind, or, at least, with similar sentiments in mind, we understand at least two of her motives for making black people her subject. Mencken had helped to open the literary market for a “realistic” representation of black culture and black life and covertly challenged white southern Americans to provide the goods. But to speak of Peterkin’s choice of subjects as strictly opportunistic would ignore the added influence of Peterkin’s subjectivity; that is, the politics involved in her relation to black culture as mistress of Lang Syne Plantation and her subsequent reification of “blackness” as superstitious, promiscuous, and profligate in her writing. Returning to Peterkin’s tale of her discovery, we remember that she says she does not write down the stories she tells Bellaman until he insists that she do so. Peterkin also reveals through Bellaman her personal perception of the experiential value of writing. By likening the process to a purgative—“to write things down, frees us of them, like the confessional”—Peterkin intimates that she not only seeks but also needs cleansing, healing, and renewal. Details from her interview with Dale Warren fortify this theory. “My eyes have looked on horror and misery. And these things have stayed with me and upset me,” she conceded. “I have had to get rid of them” (D. Warren 1). The psychological and literary functions of writing things down give relief to the isolated and interrelated positions of Peterkin and “her people.” As mistress of Lang Syne, Peterkin enjoys mobility that seems to enable her to permeate, to be of and outside, the plantation’s various cultures in order to survey the activities, relationships, and dispositions of its inhabitants. Supposedly denied the same rites of passage, the Gullah re-


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main confined to their place within the plantation order and, consequently, subject to the authority of Peterkin’s shifting locations. Peterkin’s freedom to move around, about, and among the Gullahs a∞rms and sustains her dominion over the land and the people regardless of the “space” she occupies at any given point. That she seeks spiritual and psychological cleansing through actual and authorial space negotiation among the Gullah implicates Peterkin in what she observes, and it suggests the need for their positions to change. That is, for the “healing” process Peterkin speaks of to begin, both she and her subjects would seem to need to enjoy—or at least have a right to—freedom of mobility. But the kind of renewal Peterkin desires and ultimately maps across her writing thwarts this necessarily mutual process. To be fair, the renewal Peterkin sought is complex. It rejects the charge made by some that white writers can never validly represent black consciousness and experiences or that white and black people are incapable of mutual understanding. At the same time, it strengthened and sustained Peterkin’s position as modern plantation mistress. History, in the form of slave narratives, diaries, and personal testimony, evinces the complexities of the various relationships cultivated on southern plantations, particularly those between mistresses and slaves (or in Peterkin’s case, former slaves).6 In “Seeing Things,” Peterkin’s most widely referenced but little dissected philosophical piece, Peterkin herself registered these complexities. To Dominize or Not to Dominize Peterkin begins “Seeing Things” by revealing that early in her schooling as mistress of Lang Syne, she learned that “the plantation had never tolerated a mistress who could not ‘dominize’ it. . . . Those too weak or too fearful to ‘dominize,’ ” she observes, “had either been quickly crushed or taken away. There was no escape” (66). Peterkin does not disclose the origins of this folklore. But she goes on to explain her reaction to the knowledge that the black people who work at Lang Syne are aware of it. (The modification of the verb dominate to dominize suggests the Gullah voice in this legend.) “When I found that some of the old Negroes were watching to see how I met the plantation’s challenge, I couldn’t disregard it. I tried to find out just what ‘dominizing’ meant, and at last I made out that in order to ‘do-

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minize,’ the plantation mistress must achieve enough wisdom and courage to meet any occasion with composure and grace” (66). Although Peterkin does not explicitly note how she would secure this wisdom and courage, she intimates her source in the following series of reflections: I had always laughed at superstitions; but here, where people lived and died by them, they were hard to ignore, and an uneasiness that was close kin to fear began stirring deep down in my heart. What must I do? How could I find out what I needed to know? I soon discovered that the ability to see is an acquirement. It takes skill to mark di≠erences between things that look just alike, and to make out distinctions between forms that are very close kin. To learn how to do it requires time and patience, and not only a keen wish to know about things themselves but also to know how all things are bound together into one common whole. Our individual worlds are made up of things we perceive, and no two of us ever see things alike. The impressions given us by our senses may be accurate or false; they may be a record of absolute truth, or a jumbled confusion of mistakes; yet, whatever they are, the sum of them constitutes for us the only information we can ever have concerning the particular world we live in. No two of us live in the same world. We must each make our own environment and mold our individual universe, and the only material we have to use for this purpose is what our senses have gathered for us. There is no way out of it. All well-being depends on seeing things. The more we see clearly, the more interesting is the exclusive world that we must make for ourselves. (66–67)

Taken out of the context in which Peterkin expresses them, these reflections may seem rather abstract. But the politics of Peterkin’s position and objective and her perception of black expectations enable one to envisage a specific aspect of southern history that clarifies her professed anxieties. Much like the mistresses of large antebellum plantations, Peterkin must firmly manage Lang Syne’s home and hands, requiring her—in the words of a former slave—to know “ever’thing dat am gwine on” (Mellon 195). This, in part, compels Peterkin to gain as much information as she can about the inner and outer workings of black people’s lives. Hence, she positions herself among them to learn their habits, their customs, their beliefs, their morals, their likes and dislikes. In the process of gathering this information, she makes discoveries about herself as well as those she observes.


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First, she learns that penetrating the depth of superficial appearance requires not only keen observation but also a willingness to suspend expectation and presumption so that concrete, unexpected knowledge can emerge. She acknowledges the e≠ort it takes to neutralize her prejudices in order to recognize black people’s humanity, diversity, and resilience. She learns further that concepts of reality and truth may mask perception’s ability to confirm and distort how we see ourselves in isolation from and in relation to the people and forces that surround us. She discovers that our perceptions govern and reproduce over space and time the way we behave, and, perhaps, invites us to read her own tacit condemnation of tradition and history in that both undermine the terms and conditions that construct them. In other words, both are subject to perception. As an alleged target (as woman) and perpetuator (as southern aristocrat) of tradition and history, Peterkin evinces a sense of betrayal and guilt in light of her revised perspective on black people and black culture. Still, Peterkin’s final analysis complicates her recognition of the operations of perception. She concludes that because we are governed by our perceptions, we are charged, in keeping with a modernist impulse, to tutor our senses to the degree that they enable us to bring order and purpose to our individual existence. But because “no two of us live in the same world,” the process of constructing our individual existence may impinge on the existences of others, as in high modernist formulations on history, tradition, race, class, gender, and human sexuality. In the end it seems we do have a hand in determining how we will live and view the world about us. However, the premium we place on our personal lives may compel us to negotiate, even repress, sound perception—for example, our sense of right and wrong—to the detriment of others, resulting in, among other crimes against humanity to which Peterkin both directly and indirectly speaks, U.S. slavery and black lynching. Peterkin’s consciousness of the historical constitution of the plantation mistress and determination nevertheless to “dominize” Lang Syne’s black hands set her on a modernist course, rendering her conscription in the myth of Southern Womanhood in her personal life and inscription of the Plantation Mythology in her writing both strategic and political. As opposed to accentuating the oppressive influence of these myths on white

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southern women, Peterkin indicates that she actually capitalized on them, using them to gain access to herself as agent in relation to black people and purchasing power with them through silence in relation to (white) men.7 Her advice to a younger generation of white southern women in a di≠erent context provides additional evidence of these strategic investments. Addressing the 1933 graduating class of Winthrop College, Peterkin reflected on South Carolina’s history, the contributions of women of her generation, and, tacitly, the roles a legally empowered generation of southern women needed to assume in order to “bring . . . a return of civilization” to the entire South (“Art” 2). “The social life of [my] days was in the hands of women to whom the word ‘Lady’ was important,” she begins. “I know that the word is almost obsolete now, but I believe that then as now ladyhood depended not so much on what a woman did as on what she did not do. Those things which a woman will not do are, I suspect, the things which define and dignify her” (2). She continues: I was brought up to think that a proper young lady should be seen and seen to be as beautiful as possible, but she must be heard very little in the presence of her elders and never be heard at all in public. A woman speaker was a curiosity. The unpardonable sin was to be conspicuous. . . . Our parents felt that they had succeeded in rearing us properly if we understood that we were to be obedient to them before we married and obedient to our husbands afterward. Good taste desired the daughters of the household to seem gentle, docile, and if possible helpless. I don’t mean for an instant that we di≠ered from you in our heart of hearts, but the simple truth is that this apparent dependence had its compensations, for it encouraged our brothers and cousins and sweethearts to protect us from discomfort. (2)

In this spirit, the “code for living” that Peterkin charges modern southern women to adopt imagines the myth of Southern Womanhood as a cultural commodity beneficial to women and men alike. “To be at their best,” Peterkin later insists, “men need to strut, to dominate, to make decisions for themselves, . . . to risk life and limb and bank account for the chance of providing for those who lean upon them. Somebody has got to lean and be helpless, or we’ll have no worth-while men left and women cannot submit to being loved by inferior men” (“Ideal Woman” 10). Of course, the final clause discloses specifically the value of female submission in intimate,


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conjugal connections. But to Peterkin, the benefits of submission seemed always to outweigh the cost in her relationships with men. Recall, for a moment, the story of Peterkin’s literary debut and the agency she grants Bellaman, Sandburg, and Mencken in establishing her career. Peterkin’s conscious self-e≠acement explodes the notion that white southern women who choose not to reject or revise the myth of Southern Womanhood are somehow trapped in patriarchal discourse. Peterkin fabricated the story that reinvented her image to her liking. She knew what she had accomplished and how she accomplished it. But she played the role, allowing false perceptions to govern how others would imagine and reproduce the tale of her entry into the literary profession. In this instance, Peterkin’s willingness to subject herself to misrepresentation and misinterpretation intimates her willingness to subject others to the same processes if she found it expedient. We can, thus, speculate that as the development of a black cultural center away from the South encroached on her status as Lang Syne’s mistress, Peterkin’s negotiation and mediation of her position as realist writer of black experiences grew increasingly self-conscious and self-serving. From Lang Syne to Harlem? Although the mass migration of black people from the South to other parts of the country did not accelerate until around 1910, southern historians were recording its impact on the region as early as 1895 (Meriwether). Various developments urged black South Carolinians to join their exodus in larger numbers than migrants from any other state. In his examination of the development of social structure in a South Carolina town during and after Reconstruction, Burton points out that, though the state’s black population was diversely tied to the land as owners, renters, croppers, and farm laborers, a disproportionate number worked for wages. Consequently, most black South Carolinians lacked the financial stability and access to opportunities for economic self-su∞ciency that land ownership and tenancy a≠orded many of their white peers (765–67). At the height of the agricultural depression in the South, around the dawn of the twentieth century, South Carolina’s black population declined by fifty percent, making whites the state’s majority for the first time in more than a century.

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Though the boll weevil indiscriminately arrived and crippled cotton production throughout the region, black South Carolinians—mostly farm laborers rather than owners—appear to have su≠ered the most economic hardship. A decade-long outbreak of tuberculosis in the mid-1910s that contributed to the economic crisis of the 1920s also seems to have wreaked great havoc in South Carolina’s black communities.8 Across the South, but particularly in South Carolina, violent white backlash against (majority) black-led initiatives to unionize and lobby for fairer wages and employee benefits stymied labor-class progress, maintaining an antebellum southern infrastructure throughout Reconstruction and several decades after. The political rise of Ben Tillman, launched in 1885, further constricted South Carolina’s black population. As governor, he promoted legislation that imposed a literacy test on all voters. After revisions to the state’s constitution—authored by Tillman himself—passed in 1890, public school expenditures for black students in South Carolina decreased from little to almost nothing. Jim Crow laws segregating the state’s transportation systems and public facilities all passed under Tillman’s regime. Between 1890 and 1898, race riots in South Carolina counties resulted in sixteen documented lynchings of blacks. The 1910 gubernatorial election of Cole Blease, who endorsed lynching as the best means of black containment, a≠orded white violence against blacks political as well as social sanction.9 Undoubtedly, Peterkin was aware of the developments and events that agitated white antagonism and black unrest, catapulting South Carolina into cultural mayhem before and after blacks began to leave the state in large numbers. For example, the much-anticipated release in 1915 of D. W. Gri∞th’s Birth of a Nation—based on Thomas Dixon’s infamous novel, The Clansman (1905)—met with equal favor among critical and popular white South Carolinian audiences (Moore 30–40). Cries for equal opportunity among disgruntled black veterans of World War I spawned the race riots of 1919 that began in Charleston and spread to most of the country’s largest cities. The 1925 self-defense killing of a white sheri≠ by members of a black family in Aiken, South Carolina, a town only fifty miles west of Peterkin’s home in Fort Motte, resulted in the mob-led execution and lynch-


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ing of several of the accused family members a year later.10 Even in correspondence with Mencken and Sandburg, Peterkin early marks her fear of Ku Klux Klan retaliation against her or members of her family for her unconventional portrayals of black and white South Carolinians.11 Yet Peterkin’s fictional accounts of Lang Syne’s socioeconomic infrastructure in Black April, Scarlet Sister Mary, and Bright Skin register little to no sensibility of South Carolina’s actual cultural climate and the imminent threat (and e≠ects) of white violence. Sketchy evidence suggests that Lang Syne’s hands were among the ranks of black wage laborers throughout the South agitating for change and progress on the large plantations where they lived and worked. Lang Syne’s hands worked not as tenant farmers or sharecroppers, but as wage laborers. Thus, they relied nearly entirely on the Peterkins for subsistence. Mary Weeks, the domestic on whom Peterkin allegedly models Mary Poinsett in Scarlet Sister Mary, lost her father to white violence for his leadership in mobilizing black laborers during the controversial months before the 1876 presidential election.12 From 1877 through 1891, when black South Carolinians began moving north in measurable numbers, Lang Syne’s hands found their wages increasingly diminished by a growing poor white labor supply and by stepped-up e≠orts among white planters to dismantle black labor alliances (Neal and Kremm 106–12). To be sure, the economic, political, social, and educational opportunities sought by blacks in South Carolina and elsewhere across the South were not immediately realized in northern and midwestern areas, where there was arguably as much racial hostility and class oppression as in any southern state. But the prospect of opportunities in the North that remained unimaginable in the South was enough to push southern blacks forward and out of the one environment they had known for generations. The politics of position in the plantation order and Peterkin’s investment in the myth of Southern Womanhood enable us reasonably to conclude that Peterkin sensed this impulse among black Americans as a threat to her way of life. Awareness of this threat bears on her writing for at least three reasons. First, it reveals an author beset by social, racial, and cultural forces over which she had increasingly unstable control as modernity in-

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fused the South. Second, it broadens the rhetorical functions of the trope of white female mobility in Peterkin’s work, encompassing her desire to proscribe black progress, ironically by appropriating a principal rhetorical technique of Harlem Renaissance writers. Finally, it better equips the critic to dissect the interconnectedness of motive, method, and theme in her novels. Peterkin’s techniques for assembling setting, consciousness, and characterization in each of the three novels published at the height of her literary career locate her shifting personal positions and interests in direct relation to Lang Syne’s hands. These, in turn, elucidate a pattern of sustained and negotiated perceptions that underlie her political anxiety about black upward mobility, especially in connection with the Harlem Renaissance. To varying degrees, Black April, Scarlet Sister Mary, and Bright Skin open by penetrating the consciousness of character and place at Blue Brook plantation, the site of the three novels’ primary action. The link between psychological and physical movement—and removal—at the beginnings of Black April and Bright Skin evokes patterns of repetition between these two novels wherein characters unfamiliar with many or all of Blue Brook’s mores enjoy symbolic and actual freedom of mobility about the plantation. The process of learning Blue Brook’s culture in these two novels reproduces it from one generation to the next. By contrast, in Scarlet Sister Mary the link between psychological and physical movement evokes patterns of repetition wherein characters familiar with Blue Brook’s mores secure symbolic and actual freedom of mobility about the plantation by unlearning its culture. This process also facilitates containment. At the outset of the three novels, the conventions of autobiography and ethnography merge to enact the trope of mobility by which Peterkin immerses herself in black plantation culture in an e≠ort to understand, so that she can better control, the influence of black progress in her life.13 In Black April a struggle takes center stage between emic (black/insider) and etic (white/outsider) perspectives to determine “meaning” at the site of discrete moments of intracultural communication about plantation order and politics. In Scarlet Sister Mary, etic insight encroaches upon Blue Brook citizens to exercise greater authority over black individual growth and cultural devel-


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opment. In Bright Skin emic forces fight back, increasing the psychological and physical space between black and white cultures in ways that, for the first time, appear to escape Peterkin’s authority. Narratives of Immersion The earliest event that we learn about in Black April is the birth of April’s illegitimate son Breeze on Sandy Island, a dilapidated plantation located close to fecund Blue Brook. Details of locale initially explain why Breeze moves from his birthplace to live with Big Sue at his father’s plantation. As Big Sue explains to Breeze’s mother: “I cooks at de Big House. An’ no matter if de buckra is at Blue Brook or up-North whe’ dey stays most o’ de time, I has all de victuals an’ money I wants. I has more’n I kin use. It’s de Gawd’s truth. You’ll sho’ have sin, if you don’ give me dat boy to raise” (44). Shortly thereafter, a second and third motive are linked to Big Sue’s desire to rear Breeze. “I’ll train em good,” she insists. “I’ll fatten em up. I’ll learn em to have manners. Dis same boy might git to be foreman at Blue Brook yet. E comes from dat foreman breed. . . . April’s de foreman at Blue Brook, an’ e’ll help me raise Breeze. E tol’ me so las’ night” (44–45). The intimation that April seeks in Breeze a ready successor to his position as plantation foreman and that he charges Big Sue to assume partial responsibility for Breeze’s training narratively centers upon Breeze’s acculturation to Blue Brook plantation. Unlike the majority of Blue Brook’s black constituency, Breeze mediates field and house space under Big Sue and April’s tutelage. What he learns over the course of the novel is seemingly designed to prepare and empower him in the end to assume authority over the lives and conditions of the plantation’s black subjects. Here, we are invited to see how aspects of Breeze’s education in Black April parallel the role that education plays in Peterkin’s own life once she becomes mistress of Lang Syne. The link between Breeze’s limited knowledge and the omniscient narrator’s consciousness further buttress the correspondence between these processes. As the only perspectives through which considerable depth of information and characterization is presented, Breeze’s psychology merges with that of the narrator’s to process, order, and evaluate what they observe of plantation life.

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Initially, both bear uncritical witness to a wealth of cultural configurations that reveal the pragmatism, resilience, and diverse personalities of Blue Brook’s citizens. “Thick description” of these configurations charts the processes through which the characters build and maintain strong cultural ties. Consider the following account of a quilting session: The older, more settled women came first. Each with her needle, ready to sew. The younger ones straggled in later, with babies, or tiny children, who kept their hands busy. . . . The room buzzed with chatter. How would such a great noisy gathering ever get straightened out to work? They were as much alike as guinea fowls in a flock, every head tied up turban-fashion, every skirt covered by an apron. Big Sue welcomed every one with friendliest greetings. . . . A sudden hush followed a loud clapping of her hands. The closest attention was paid while she appointed Leah and Zeda captains of the first quilts to be laid out. Zeda stepped forward, with a jaunty toss of her head, and, shrugging a lean shoulder, laughed lightly. “Big Sue is puttin’ sinner ’gainst Christian dis mawnin’! . . . You choose first, Leah. You’s de foreman’s wife.” Leah chose Big Sue. . . . The choosing went on until eight women were picked for each quilt, four to a side. Then the race began. . . . Two of the patch-work covers that Big Sue had fashioned with such pains, stitch by stitch, square by square, were opened out wide and examined and admired. “Which one you want, Zeda? You take de first pick.” . . . Gussie pointed to the “Snake-fence” design, and Zeda took it, leaving the “Star of Bethlehem” for Leah. . . . Leah’s crew beat fixing the quilt on the poles, but the sewing was the tedious part. The stitches must be small, and in smooth rows that ran side by side. They must also be deep enough to hold the cotton fast between the top and the lining. Little talking was done at first. Minds, as well as eyes, had to watch the needles. (164–68)

Direct and free indirect discourses merge in this passage to explain the sociocultural function of the quilting session. More than an industrious means to an end, quilting sessions occasion opportunities for “saints” and “sinners”—members and nonmembers of Heaven’s Gate Church—to form creative coalitions that require participants to check ethical di≠erences and personal hostilities at Maum Hannah’s door. The quilts themselves o≠er material and oral evidence of such alliances. The unified e≠ort of otherwise rival teammates such as Leah and Big Sue shape the finished prod-


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uct, which ultimately preserves and tells the story of the community’s religious values and traditions. Most important, the women’s di≠erent choices of patches and stitching patterns distinguish their contributions to cultural preservation, their individual artistry, and the depth of their collective labor in an apparent e≠ort to respond to—perhaps, even silence—the queries of the outsider perspective. The ease with which ethical and social boundaries relax to facilitate utilitarian interests at Blue Brook is further registered in observations of the plantation’s theological orders. Community members cultivate and practice a syncretized religion wherein the performative and transformative rites of conjuring and Judeo-Christianity merge to promote communal cohesion, ancestral veneration, and a symbiosis between humans and nature that invests greater spiritual authority in individuals than in institutions. We see evidence of this phenomenon in Maum Hannah’s religious practices. Her habit of harmonizing her own brand of preaching with that of the Christian minister invokes the call-and-response pattern so central to conjuring rituals. Heir to the “string of charm beads [her] grandmother had brought all the way from Africa when she came on a slave ship,” and cultivator of the source from which “the fires that burned in all the Quarter houses” were generated, Maum Hannah is the oldest direct living connection the community has to its ancestral origins (18, 112). Therefore, it is of little wonder or consequence to church members that this matriarch integrates elements of African spirituality into the Christian liturgy. That she is accustomed to “taking part in the service” in this way signals a key change in the ceremony marked by the “new” town preacher’s objection to her behavior (186). Maum Hannah’s initial oblivion to his admonishments and subsequent rejection of his method of renewing the Ten Commandments point to an apparent disjunction between clergy and congregation that de-Africanized Christianity breeds. Its e≠ects are importantly focused through Breeze: Maum Hannah’s head dropped, her chin was on her breast, her eyes were shut tight, her lips moving in whispers. Breeze could tell she was praying alone, quite apart from the preacher and the congregation which had strangely become two beings: one, a lone, black, shiny-skinned, shiny-eyed man in the pulpit, repeating God’s commandments, in the high singsong, and clapping

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his hands for the people to respond; and the congregation, now knitted into a many-mouthed, many-handed, many-eyed mass, that swayed and rocked like one body from side to side, crying to God in an agonized, “Do, Lawd, help us keep dis law!” A shrill voice screamed out of the rumbling body, “Hallelujah! I feel de sperit!” A chill crept over Breeze. He felt something strange himself. He couldn’t hear his own voice in the flood of shouted praying, but he knew he was one with the rest. (188)

Susan Williams reads Breeze’s awareness of Maum Hannah’s withdrawal from, and his own involuntary contributions to, the mockery that the service becomes as an omen to the church, signaling the declining influence of African traditions on central and sustaining elements of Blue Brook culture (Foreword xi). But the observation of the church’s evolution as a potential threat to the plantation order urges shifts in narrative development and characterization that not only renew Maum Hannah’s authority but also unmask a social incentive for suppressing the pulse of Western influence encroaching on Blue Brook’s black community. “Is you gone plum crazy, Breeze?” Big Sue asks when he rises in church to follow his newly inspired religious inclinations. “You ain’ got no business seekin’! If you miss an’ find peace an’ git religion you couldn’ bat ball on Sunday wid li’l young Cap’n when he come! Not if you’s a Christian!” (193). Capitulating to Big Sue’s command, Breeze sits down and, thus, keeps change at bay. He takes a moment, however, to reflect on Big Sue’s hypocrisy. Big Sue didn’t care if he burned in Hell. Many a time she had told him how those wicked, hell-bent buckras spent Sundays in sin. Riding horses. Singing reels. Dancing and frolicking on God’s day. Young Cap’n played ball, baseball, under the trees, on the Sabbath, just as if it were the middle of the week. Big Sue said God didn’t like people to even pick a flower on Sunday. And now she wanted him to have sin right along with those brazen white people. (193)

In this passage, the convergence of free indirect and free direct discourses marks a fundamental maturation in Breeze’s consciousness and status at Blue Brook from cultural observer/outsider to cultural critic/insider and signals his divide from the consciousness of the novel’s other central focalizer. Increasingly Breeze registers an awareness of the link between black


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cultural values and practices and the broader social dynamics of plantation life that the outsider perspective governs. Crucially, in this frame of mind he recalls Big Sue’s attitudes toward education. “Big Sue said she had never bothered to learn to read and write. She didn’t have any use for either” (123). “The old people didn’t believe in book learning. They thought learning signs and charms were more important, and they discouraged having school. Learning magic would be better for [Breeze] than learning books” (137). Here black objection to education does not lack historical grounding. In fact, for decades after the Civil War, high rates of illiteracy among members of many rural black communities reflected individual choice as well as lack of opportunity (Mellon 177). In Black April book learning is cast in the same disruptive light as deAfricanized Christianity because of its potential to undermine the plantation order. Unlike the narrative of religion, however, the narrative of education does not achieve closure by the end of Black April. Breeze’s rejection of God and the devil and final initiation into Blue Brook’s community through sexual experimentation with Emma do little to squelch his curiosity about school or the words on a printed page (227, 304, 311). Thus, it seems that the principal role education plays in Scarlet Sister Mary e≠ects a kind of continuity whereby this novel takes up the cause that Black April is unable to achieve. Narratives of Containment In Scarlet Sister Mary, the focus shifts between omniscient and limited perspectives frequently penetrate Mary’s consciousness. Mary is the character whose “unschooling” begins when she abandons naïve notions of love and marriage and embarks on a journey toward self-discovery and spiritual renewal. As Daddy Cudjoe foretells: “You’s young, honey. You ain’t got much sense, but you’ll learn better. . . . You can’ nebber blongst to nobody, honey, an’ nobody can’ blongst to you. But Ki! Dat ain’ reason fo cry! You breth come an’ go might sweet when e free, but you strive fo hold em. Den e bitter!” (70). Mary’s sexual and gender politics eventually position her at odds with the whole of Blue Brook’s Christian and domestic communities. That the governing consciousness of the novel readily sanctions Mary’s rejection of Christianity is perfunctory; it merely echoes the theme central to

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the structure of Black April. But the link between Mary’s rejection of Christianity and domestication underscores the narrative approval Mary receives once she decides to renounce her wedding vows. Early on and almost simultaneously Mary and readers learn that the initial power she allows the church over her life does much to hem her in a marriage that stunts her personal and spiritual growth. At the wedding dance, with his vows “not cold on his lips,” July saunters onto the floor with Cinder, forcing Mary to sit quietly as her archrival cavorts with her new husband. “I’ll be right back, honey,” he assures her, “as soon as I lead o≠ dis set wid Cinder. You wait here till I come” (27). As Mary watches July and Cinder “dance on” (27) beyond the first reel, she begins to covet the privilege that Cinder’s “sinner-status” a≠ords her: Cinder cared nothing for what anybody thought of her. She was showing Mary she could make July pleasure himself even on his wedding-night. Mary ached to stop her, to tell her what she thought, but shyness kept her silent. The fiddle sang out with all its might and main, the drum beat faster and louder, the racket became so deafening with the dancing and singing that Mary gave up trying to hear the things that were shouted at her. She felt left out and lonely, almost sorry she was a church-member. If she were a sinner Cinder would not be July’s partner.

Rather than remain trapped in isolation, Mary allows her mental perambulations to lead her outside the dance hall, where she confronts her psychological and spiritual struggles with Christianity head-on. When June asks her to dance, Mary initially rejects the o≠er. “If I was to dance tonight,” she insists, “de deacons would turn me out o de church next Sunday” (29). Soon, however, the music, June’s pleading, and Mary’s latent desire overwhelm her body and initiate her outright defiance of Christian mores: She could feel her body yielding while the two minds inside her considered what was best to do. One mind said, “No,” and the other mind answered, “You are the best dancer here. Show the people that Cinder has no time with you,” and before she knew it, she heard her lips saying: “Get de box, June, and play me a tune. I rather dance by myself out here in de yard.” . . . Mary listened, then she placed her hands on her hips and with a laugh stepped out into the


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firelight. At first she bent and swayed without stepping out her tracks. Her feet felt heavy as if they were loath to shake o≠ her soul’s salvation, but as the music went faster, they began moving with it until they hardly touched the ground at all. (29)

The conflation of spiritual, corporeal, and self-centered—some may even read egotistic—imagery in this passage underscores the power of the moment and the means through which Mary acquires freedom. The instant she determines to “sin”14 and abandon Christianity by dancing, Mary casts mind, body, and spirit in equally potent lights. Moreover, she discovers a liberation that is both distinguishing and consubstantiating. By choosing to dance alone, in other words, she at once expresses her individuality and participates in a valued cultural activity. Although July’s appearance and silent condemnation of Mary’s actions make it fleeting, this moment nevertheless crucially foreshadows the evolution of Mary’s personal and cultural identities from Christian to conjure woman and from domesticated martyr to community matriarch.15 Rather than stop at reading these identities as empowering in and unto Mary, however, the narrative underwrites a reciprocity between her acquired status and plantation life that ultimately impedes black cultural progress. Consider, for example, the scope of the authority Mary believes the love charm a≠ords her and what, in the end, this authority is predicated upon. When Mary believes she has conjured June, she wonders of his praise: “Did June mean all the things he was saying to her now? Did she look as young as a single girl? Did he think as much as he said? Her heart seemed to stop beating. Her breath was cut o≠ ” (99). Reassured of her desirability in her relationship with June, Mary is “able to laugh and dance and sing again, her flesh had got back its old smoothness, her old sadness and weariness and bitterness were left behind”; her renewed sexuality is now an extension of her mind, body, and spirit (105). Mary’s newfound psychosexual identity also reformulates her attitudes toward men and women: “Thank God, she knew men at last, and she knew that not one of them is worth a drop of water that drains out of a woman’s eye” (105). A modernist shift to stream-of-consciousness confirms Mary’s opinion: “Men are too much alike, with ways too much the same. None is worth keeping, none

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worth a tear; and still each one is a little di≠erent from the rest; just di≠erent enough to make him worth finding out” (137). Women, on the other hand, “were all her rivals and competitors, except Maum Hannah”; but “certainly Maum Hannah was so old she could hardly be counted a woman. For she lived in another world. . . . To her, human men were no more than children who needed to be fed and encouraged and warned [sic?] and pitied” (119). What the women in her community fear most, Mary concludes, is “the power she had over their men . . . whom she lured boldly and without shame” (122). Reflecting on the source of her power, Mary proudly observes that “That charm, old and worn as it was now, still stood by her faithfully. It had never failed her. She prized it and cherished it as if it were God’s best gift instead of something that would send her to the bottomless pits of perdition” (122). It “did nothing but draw the men she liked to her, and hold them as long as she wanted them, no more than that” (123). Again she mentally notes the a≠ect the love charm has on her trinomial existence (flesh, mind, and body): “Her flesh got back all its old smoothness, her body its old supple grace. She could laugh and sing while she worked. All her weariness left her, all her sadness and bitterness were gone, sorrow was far behind her” (122). Indeed, even when the community aggressively begins to condemn her actions, Mary’s confidence is reassured when she gains a loyal ally in Buddha Ben. “When Mary first began sinning openly, Buddha Ben tried his best to stop her, then when he found that nothing he said made her change her ways, he began defending her and holding that whatever people crave to do is good for them to do. If Mary fed her children and clothed them and trained them to be brave-hearted, to work, and to have manners, that was enough to expect of her” (121). Mary’s character undoubtedly experiences a kind of reinvention that enables her to believe that she can “rule herself and her feelings” once she wrests both from Christianity and July’s dominion (93). Even Buddha Ben’s defense of Mary, however, intimates that the “self ” she embraces is fashioned in exclusively sexual terms. Its life depends not only on Mary’s willingness to use her body for psychospiritual gratification but also on Mary’s ability to secure ego-a∞rming responses from men and hostile reactions from women. In the end, it seems that Mary grants the body the


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authority over her mind and spirit that Christianity initially exercises. In Mary’s case, we see readily that the danger of this body-mind-spirit connection is that it places promiscuity on a plane equal to religion. Although she never indicates the specific number, on more than one occasion Mary brags about how many children she has—all but one by men other than her lawful husband (104, 106, 117, 121, 144). Indeed, in response to the shock her husband expresses when he returns to Blue Brook and learns that his wife has children other than their son, Mary proclaims: “I got plenty o chillen! Plenty! Dey ain’ none o you-own, July, so it ain’ none o you business how many I got” (162). Many critics have read Mary’s bold assertion here as poetic justice in light of July’s abandonment of her (Robeson, “Ambiguity,” 776–77). But because she does not equally regard—and, we may reasonably conclude, equally love—her children, the sympathy or praise that Mary’s matriarchal status might otherwise a≠ord her begins to dissipate. When we move beyond the e≠ect that Mary’s promiscuous lifestyle has on her personal and social condition, we see further the extended damage her attitude and behavior pose to other innocents. Although Mary initially assures Maum Hannah that none “o [her] gals will walk straight in [her] tracks” (117), she eventually trains at least one of her daughters to follow her example. “It don’t pay to love mens too much,” she counsels Seraphine. “When a man finds out fo-true a ’oman is crazy bout em, he don’ crave dat ’oman no mo. Dat’s de very time e gwine crave some new ’oman altogedder. Gawd made mens so. It don’ pay to love no one man too much. It’s all right to like em. But don’ never let yousef tink on one man all de time” (158). The moment in the novel when Mary o≠ers her daughter this advice is crucial, for it comes upon the heels of Seraphine’s return from school, a forlorn new mother. In addition to reassuring Seraphine that she, like her mother, will survive abandonment and endure as a single parent, Mary guides her daughter to the “tracks,” encouraging her to reproduce through her existence a pathology that is ultimately self- and culturally destructive. Once Seraphine returns to Blue Brook, she abandons all hope of completing her education and adopts the life of a plantation domestic. This, no doubt, is pleasing to Mary, whose numerous o≠spring countervail her tacit fear of being alone (107). The link, however, among Mary’s experiences,

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the advice she gives her daughter, and the changes that occur in Seraphine’s status and motivation once she returns to Blue Brook discloses a greater narrative incentive governing Seraphine’s condition. Deprived of an education and determined to follow her mother’s example, Seraphine soon adopts the same attitude toward progress and plantation life that Mary claims shortly after July forsakes her. “If she had the heart,” the narrator begins, “she would go away and leave everything, everybody. She could find work of some kind in the town, and yet,” Mary’s consciousness interjects, “this was home. She had known no other place in her life. The very earth here was a part of herself, and it held her so fast she could never leave it, no matter what came” (73). In spite of—perhaps, even, because of—the opportunities that removal from Blue Brook might a≠ord her, Mary rests in harmony with this land, her “peaceful” position a reflection of the pastoral vision so central to the preservation of an increasingly modernized plantation way of life.16 The trouble here is not so much the naturalization of Mary’s attitude toward the plantation prior to her psychospiritual transformation, but the narrative validation this vision seems to enjoy after she achieves “liberation.” The shift in narrative focus from Mary’s conjugal condition, that is, monogamous devotion, to licentious behavior after July leaves also registers a deeper penetration of Mary’s attitude toward her environment. She ponders over and speaks candidly about Blue Brook’s owners, changes taking place on the plantation, and the a≠ect that both have on the lives of black people. Mary curses alike the hay press, newspapers, and books now found at Blue Brook—all of which were made by white people. “Such things were dangerous,” she insists (108). Seconding Big Boy’s opinion that the hay press is “a blind contraption made by white men” (107), she calls into suspicion “what book-learning might do” to a person (108). Indeed she doesn’t discount Big Boy’s observation that “so much book readin might be changed Seraphine from how e was” when he goes to town to see her and Seraphine does not respond to his call (135). In this spirit, Mary sounds much like the elders of Blue Brook who urge Breeze to read nature rather than the printed page. “Spoken words are safer,” Mary observes.17 “They can cut and sting and beat down almost any enemy. They can bring tears or make people split their sides with laughter. Instead of reading all


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the time out of books and papers covered with printed words [one] would do better to learn how to read other things: sunrises, moons, sunsets, clouds and stars, faces and eyes. . . . Book-learning takes people’s minds o≠ more important things” (108). Her aversion to learning as whites do is, perhaps, most intensely announced when she discovers that a new law will force plantation midwives to take a series of classes to receive training in new delivery procedures. “White people are curious things,” she complains to Buddha Ben. “They pass laws no matter how fool the laws are, and put people in jail if those laws are not kept. People had come into the world over the same old road ever since Eve birthed Cain and Abel, and now, everybody had to learn how to birth children a new way. It was enough to upset the whole world” (121). Her animosity toward white people who supplant traditional systems with laws is equally directed at black people who obey them. She “resented many of the ways and customs of the plantation people who never stopped to think about things, and accepted ideas and beliefs which were handed down to them, the same as they accepted the old houses where they were born and worked in the same old fields which their parents and grandparents had salted with sweat” (121). Mary does not, however, imagine removal from Blue Brook as a way to break the ideological power the plantation exercises over its black constituency. Surveying the land and its history, she muses, “Black people used to make up a part of the plantation’s wealth the same as the carriage and saddle horses with their well-rubbed, shining hides. They were valued according to their strength and sense. The weak and stupid were sold. Only the best were kept. A good thing” (138). These thoughts supplement and reinforce Mary’s earlier attitude about the plantation and her “place” in its order. She identifies herself among its prized possessions and she embraces it as her own. That this gesture signals the culmination of Mary’s journey toward selfactualization brings into focus several vital points. First, it illuminates disparities between Peterkin’s and Mary’s gender and sexual politics, which nevertheless support the same plantation order. Second, it highlights a symmetrical, even symbiotic order among the novels’ black women characters’ faith and fecundity that grounds them to the land. Finally, and perhaps most significant, it links formal education to all things “white,” expos-

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ing at once “outsider” fear of and methods for restraining black progressive values. In the end, it seems that Scarlet Sister Mary cultivates neither a sincere desire nor a viable means through which to escape plantation life. Thus the consciousness of this novel provides solid evidence of Peterkin’s determination and ability to control the system and lives she governed at Lang Syne. The importance of this creative achievement cannot be overemphasized, for it underscores the tenacity with which Peterkin held onto her way of life. It also intimates how far she may have been willing to go to maintain that order. In addition to promoting black ignorance and female promiscuity, there is in Scarlet Sister Mary a pernicious patterning of black family division rested upon forced and willful removal of fathers from homes. This phenomenon harks back to the days of slavery, mapping a continuum between antebellum and modern societies that continues to a≠ect black communities today. But one cannot stop at reading Peterkin’s creative gesture as consummately proscriptive. Her frequently expressed candor about the value of plantation and black culture implies her willingness to confront the privilege of her own subjectivity vis-à-vis black people, even if only to a∞rm it in the end. This fact bears renewed significance when we consider the aesthetic politics of Peterkin’s last novel, Bright Skin. Narratives of Concession The continuity of setting and characterization across the three novels’ openings invites comparisons between Peterkin and Blue’s consciousnesses that may at first seem di∞cult to make. Blue has neither the insight that enables Peterkin via Breeze to penetrate the depths of black cultural practices nor the confidence that empowers Peterkin via Mary to control the plantation’s order. But when we consider the degree to which narrative development seems—almost to the very end—to escape Blue’s consciousness, connections among his opening status, his lack of character, and Peterkin’s perspective on black and plantation culture begin to materialize. As in Black April, the character perspective most in accord with the governing narrative consciousness is that of an outsider to the plantation. Unlike Breeze’s removal from Sandy Island, however, Blue’s relocation to


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Blue Brook is more physically abrupt and psychologically disruptive. “Roused from sound sleep before dawn,” Blue’s father announces, “Wake up, son, an’ put on you clothes. Me an’ you is gwine o≠. Dis house ain’ no decent place for we to stay in” (11). Without learning the details of his mother’s transgression, Blue discovers that the indecent condition into which his home has slipped is directly related to something she has done to his father. Determining that he will not abandon her, however, Blue assures his mother “I’ll be back soon.” But she silences his compassion with an announcement of her own: “I won’ be here. . . . I’m gwine o≠ my own self ” (13). Her words later resonate in Fancy’s flat assertion: “You Pa’s gone an’ left you” (3). At the outset of Bright Skin, Blue’s character stands in striking opposition to any other abandoned character across the three novels precisely because he is a young boy forsaken by his mother and father. Unlike Breeze, Blue is not sought out by a distant cousin. Unlike Big Sue and Mary, Blue lacks the fortitude of experience to sustain him after his mother and father leave. Thus the salience of Big Sue’s words echoed in Fancy’s claim “I was wishin I had a boy-child to wait on me” (36) and Blue’s father’s counsel “to be mannersable, to mind what he was told” (17) runs shallow in the consciousness of a character who is unfairly matched in a war with rejection. The rejection that Blue faces at the novel’s beginning becomes a likely extension of the rejection Peterkin is forced to deal with once Lang Syne’s black hands begin to “abandon” her. Despite the understanding and appreciation of black culture she eventually demonstrates, Peterkin must also accept the fact that she never really achieves “insider” status. Finally, Peterkin must grant that in spite of her conviction and determination to sustain the plantation’s order, Lang Syne can no longer contain a people striving toward freedom and equality of opportunity. Thus Peterkin’s concession resounds in Bright Skin’s central theme, which revolves as much around Blue’s indoctrination into plantation culture as around the interplay among etic observation of Blue Brook’s increasingly tense racial climate, emic analysis of slave history, and Cricket’s maturation from a “nonation bastard” to a New Negro (94). An inclination to read Cricket’s character as a descendant of the tragic mulatto would not be unfounded. Throughout the novel she is distin-

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guished and alienated from Blue Brook’s black and white populations in color and status: “A bright skin ain’ got no place in dis world. Black people don’ want em an’ white people won’ own em” (94). Cricket herself frequently confirms her condition through lamentation—“You’d be down-inde-heart too if you was a bright skin”—and pride—“I’m glad I ain’ got em,” she says of “blue gums” (57) and “I ain’ black like you,” she charges when Blue intimates that she cannot bear a white baby (67). There are, however, significant di≠erences between the narrative developments that shape Cricket and other literary mulatta consciousnesses; these di≠erences ultimately place her outside the “tragic” tradition and reinforce Bright Skin’s thematic formation around the material e≠ects of black/white mobility. For example, in a series of events that recall cultural dynamics in Black April and Scarlet Sister Mary, Cricket is positioned as the target and perpetuator of attitudes and activities that revise scenes from Peterkin’s earlier novels for rhetorical e≠ect. We bear witness to a spontaneous hogbutchering ceremony in Bright Skin that, much like the sewing session in Black April, appears to provide an opportunity for examining collaboration between opposing communal fronts. Though the ritual strives to cultivate the same spirit of harmony and cooperation of the gathering at Maum Hannah’s house, it ultimately sustains the mental caste that distinguishes field and house servants. In fact, it is not until Cun Hester, Cun Jule, and Uncle Ben complete the task of cleaning the hogs that house hands—Aun Missie, Uncle Wes, and Aun Fan—arrive to enjoy the fruits of field labor. Moreover, Aun Missie forbids Cricket to eat the pigtails that she and Cooch and Toosio—field workers’ children—are roasting because, according to Aun Missie, Cricket lacks the “strong insides” needed to digest them (167). In the end, therefore, the value of the ceremony depreciates along the class lines it reinforces. The biases of class-consciousness gain greater registry in the “lessons” that Blue and Cricket learn about field workers and activities. “Sunday ain’ no day to bat ball an’ dat Quarters ain’ no place for you,” Aun Fan advises Blue in a mode significantly di≠erent from Big Sue’s advice to Breeze. “De foreman’s gran-boy ain’ to run wid every common somebody,” she concludes (48). “Dis Quarters is for field-hands,” Cun Fred informs Cricket when she expresses interest in living there. “Would you pay a day’s work


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every week God sends for rent of a broke-down house? Not one o’ you people ever jerked a hoe or put dey hand on a plow” (53). Here, Cun Fred perpetuates a biased connection between degeneracy of home and occupation that he links to character in his assessment of Cricket’s playmate: “Cooch don’ come from decent people” (55). Aun Missie later echoes Fred’s opinion when she lumps all field hands in the same corrupt category: “All those Quarter people were common. They quarreled over pigs and chickens, stole from one another, scandalized everybody. Rain or shine they had to do whatever Cun Fred said from raking pine straw for the stables to scattering stable manure in the fields” (88). Again, Aun Missie reproduces negative opinions of field servants when she prevents Cricket from participating in any social activities with children from the Quarters. As the narrator points out, “Aun Missie never let Cricket go anywhere at night except prayer-meeting. She had to dance at home or not at all” (221). Initially, she does not even allow Cricket to go to school for fear she will adopt a field mentality. Aun Missie’s (among other non–field workers’) determination to condition Cricket’s attitude toward field residents and activities reinforces the fact that, like Blue’s, Cricket’s sense of Blue Brook mores is untutored. They are both “learning” culture. Yet, whereas Blue’s “learning” of these mores acclimatizes him to Blue Brook, Cricket’s “learning” drives her away from the plantation to Harlem. We see evidence of this motivation in Cricket’s revision of Blue Brook religion and the “mis-education”18 she seeks and secures from Man Jay and Cun Hester. Several scenes in the novel unfold where Cricket participates in, or observes, religious ceremonies that distinguish her spiritual power and vision. For example, she chooses to contribute to Children Day’s at the church by reciting Psalm 23 and so moves the audience that she elicits shouts and songs of praise from the congregation (158). At Uncle Wes’s funeral she responds to the rehearsed wails, howls, and death cries of women mourners with chilling silence and austerity (175, 191, 194). She also nearly breaks the burying tradition by placing the wrong color of flowers on Uncle Wes’s grave because he “ever loved . . . white blossoms” (188). When the time comes for community children seeking salvation to provide their testimony, Cricket shocks the crowd with the story of her awakening:

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Seems like I was dyin, an’ I was awful scared. Big Pa come to drench me, but somebody pushed de bottle out his hand an’ give me a glassful of medicine white same like milk. . . . Dat same somebody told me not to drink Big Pa’s teas, neither take any kind o’ medicine, long as I live. . . . I couldn’ see em, but e talked like Uncle Wes. . . . When I drank de medicine, two lil white baby chillen come. Dey had gold hair and dey skin was white like de sun ain’ never shine on em. Dey fastened two sets o’ white wings on my back. . . . Seems like Uncle Wes was squeezing his ’cordion, so I flewed by de music, but my feet was on de floor. . . . De tune been Sallie Ann. (213)

When juxtaposed with Cooch and Toosio’s common and, perhaps, false testimonies, Cricket’s honesty minimizes the humor in her vision. Indeed, the authenticity and value of her dream are confirmed when we realize that its principal figures and primary motive accomplish the task of spiritually converting Cricket. After losing Big Pa and Uncle Wes—the only two adults at Blue Brook with whom she shares genuine intimate connections —to untimely deaths, Cricket’s self-confidence and motivation are depleted. Her dream suggests Big Pa and Uncle Wes’s collaborative e≠ort to “nurture” her spirit back to health and assure her of their continuing protection. Moreover, the dream assures Cricket that she doesn’t have to mourn with tears; she can express her sorrows through dance—the medium through which she best distinguishes her character (much like Mary at the start of Scarlet Sister Mary). Thus Cricket’s decision in the end to remove herself and her spirit from clerical scrutiny enacts the miseducation she aggressively begins to pursue after her awakening. We first gain insight into Cricket’s desire to break with tradition and authority when she defies Aun Missie’s wishes and learns to read. Her earliest instructor is Man Jay, who later teaches Cricket how to write. As Man Jay tutors Cricket’s intellect through standard education, he also leads her to unconventional knowledge sources. For example, Man Jay’s mother Bina introduces Cricket to Old Blue, her excommunicated grandfather, who, upon returning to his ancestor’s home, adopts the name “Reverend Africa” and eventually settles in Harlem as a preacher (56). Man Jay later assists Big Pa’s memory through song when Cricket asks him to narrate the story of his father’s reign in Taki. The events that Big Pa recalls cast his father en route to America, a victim of the Middle Passage (135). It is ultimately


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Man Jay’s collaboration with Cun Hester that solidifies Cricket’s knowledge of her history and encourages her to revise her self- and cultural images. For days, Blue observes as Cricket experiences this renewal process. From afar, he watches Cricket and Cun Hester engage in deep conversation and wonders “what those two talked about so much, for Cun Hester’s mind tarried on what was over and gone. Maybe Cricket wanted to find out all about those Big House white people. What good would that do her? They were dead and gone” (224). Blue’s observation is critical, here, in light of Cun Hester’s early narration of her father’s history: “My Daddy knew more about God an’ Jesus dan any preacher ever was. My Daddy was wise. An’ straight talkin too. E belonged to white people but e didn’ let nobody fool him” (180). She goes on to revise several Bible stories, aligning white people with the devil and black people with Christ. Indeed, she indicates that white people crucified Jesus because they did not want to sell the riches they accumulated as the devil’s agents. When asked if she believed any white people were in heaven, she responds, “Mighty few. . . . White people traded dey souls for dat fire an’ food. Dey fetched black people to dis country an’ learnt em sinful ways. White people has much to account for” (183). Although Blue (and we) never learn exactly what Cricket and Cun Hester talk about, the narrative invites us to assume that Cun Hester inflects her racial and cultural sensibilities into their discussion, for soon after her sessions with Cun Hester, Cricket expresses her desire to leave the plantation. “It ain’ money I crave,” she tells Blue. “I want to go o≠ an’ see somebody new” (231). She registers a deeper motive in a later comment: “If I stay on here . . . nothin ain’ ahead for me but to dry up an’ get sour like Aun Missie” (233). Cricket’s awareness of the pathology that plantation culture breeds among women conflates with her earlier awakening to its detrimental influence on Blue Brook’s religious ceremonies and communities. Her exodus from the plantation follows shortly after she achieves this newfound insight. Cricket’s exodus from the plantation marks the novel’s end, but it is important to bear in mind that she is not leaving Blue Brook for the first time. The relevance of the second removal to Harlem is heightened by the fact that Blue—the character who remains confined to the plantation by choice

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and by design—watches her departure. The moment brings closure to the literal and symbolic journey Peterkin travels over the course of three novels from cultural outsider (Breeze) to cultural insider (Mary) to cultural negotiator (Blue and Cricket). Crucially, it also paves a new path for the writer and the characters she creates. After Bright Skin, Peterkin stopped writing fiction altogether and published only a few essays. Elizabeth Robeson and Susan Williams allege that this move constituted Peterkin’s unfortunate reversion in later life to “Old South” conservatism. Ironically, neither considers the possibility that Peterkin’s mindset was always already of the “Old Order.” I believe that exploring the implications of this possibility will bring us closer to understanding the complexity of Peterkin’s enduring status as a white black writer. In The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (1998), George Hutchinson claims that Harlem Renaissance intellectuals saw Peterkin as one of several “models for Negro writing” (20). Enlarging Peterkin’s literary scope beyond strict representational realism to include the vital interactions between her mythic consciousness and perspective on black progressivism paints a more complex picture of the intricacies of her response to modernity. Anxious to wrest the black experience from a history of abuse in southern literature, Peterkin nevertheless remained committed to the ethics of plantation culture. The salience of her contributions to American literature throughout the 1920s directly relates to her status as a modern plantation mistress. It serves, by extension, as no small indication of why her authorial vision resonates in a postmodern context.

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A C E R TA I N M E N TA L A B E R R AT I O N

Gwen Bristow Nigger pick de cotton, nigger tote de load, / Nigger build de levee for de ribber to smash, / Nigger nebber walk up de handsome road, / But I radder be a nigger dan po’ white trash! —Gwen Bristow, The Handsome Road

The Handsome Road, the second novel of Gwen Bristow’s Plantation Trilogy, from which the lyrics above are taken, was released after Gone with the Wind (1936) and addressed the same period in southern history as Margaret Mitchell’s widely celebrated book. The reception forecast for the novel, thus, initially appeared rather grim.1 Advance sales of The Handsome Road, which exceeded ten thousand copies, quickly laid to rest any concerns over its long-term prosperity (Crowell). Less than two weeks after Publishers’ Weekly announced its candidacy in May 1938, The Handsome Road reached number eight on the journal’s National Best Sellers list (June 11, p. 2310). It later made the bestseller lists of the New York Herald Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Boston Evening Transcript before being serialized by the Atlanta Journal and favorably reviewed by the New York Times, the Saturday Review, the Boston Evening Transcript, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Times Picayune. Albert Goldstein of the Times Picayune concluded his review of the novel by yoking The Handsome Road with the “superior novels” of its day; and if sales are any indication of a book’s value, then the connection was appropriate. By the time This Side of Glory, the last novel in the trilogy, was completed, the combined national distribution of Deep Summer and The Handsome Road had reached such a large number that, as one critic puts it, Bristow and her novels were virtual “household names” (Theriot 2, Crowell 1158). Though This Side of Glory was published to mixed reviews, Bristow had, by 1940, secured the mass appeal, financial security, and critical re55

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A Certain Mental Aberration

spect that enabled her to prosper as a professional writer. Indeed, Bristow was clearly poised to position herself as a writer of enduring significance. Most of Bristow’s novels published after This Side of Glory met with enthusiastic or favorable support.2 Each renewed her critical success and popularity such that she did, indeed, remain a reputable writer until her death in 1980. It is somewhat of a mystery, therefore, that despite her nearly constant distinction as a literary writer during her lifetime, Bristow’s place in American literary history has been all but ignored, particularly in scholarship on the 1930s and 1940s, the decades of her greatest critical and popular success. A series of related developments distinguishes these decades as crucial periods in modern American history: the devastation and recovery of the nation after the stock market crash of 1929; the social and economic upheaval in the South from cotton overproduction and the failures of sharecropping and tenant farming systems; southern agitation over industrial reform; the exacerbation of race and class-related violence throughout the nation, but especially in the South; and the zenith of the southern literary Renaissance, marked by the emergence of a number of nationally acclaimed southern writers. It is, perhaps, the last of these phenomena that accounts for Bristow’s current academic neglect, for her novels lack the technical polish of fiction by her more celebrated contemporaries, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Ellen Glasgow, and Richard Wright. But the need to reevaluate Bristow’s merit for the contemporary study of modern American literature and history stems less from her accomplishments in literary fiction than from her contributions as a cultural critic. The goal of this chapter is to recover those contributions. I-ing the Past Over the course of her writing career, which began in 1915 with a feature article in the State (Columbia, South Carolina) and culminated in 1980 with Golden Dreams, Bristow had a large and varied productivity. In 1925, after studying a year at the Pulitzer School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York, Bristow moved to New Orleans, Louisiana, to work as a reporter for the Times Picayune. From 1925 to 1934, she covered a variety of stories, including high-profile court cases and investigations and lo-

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cal jailbreaks, murders, and sports events. In 1926 she debuted as a literary writer, publishing her only volume of poetry, The Alien and Other Poems. In 1930 Owen Davis bought the rights to The Invisible Host, the first of four mysteries Bristow cowrote with Bruce Manning, her husband, and adapted it for the stage and screen to an ample critical and popular reception. Two other Bristow works were later made into movies: Tomorrow Is Forever (1943) in 1946 and Jubilee Trail (1950) in 1953. Between 1937 and 1975 seven of Bristow’s novels went through several printings and foreign translations, and over the course of her career, several were featured on bestseller lists. Though sometimes criticized for overwrought prose, Bristow’s fiction was consistently praised during her lifetime for its historical details and accuracy. As late as 1972, for example, Mary Taylor read Jubilee Trail and Celia Garth (1959) in the spirit of critics before her, lauding Bristow’s dexterous manipulation of history to actualize past events while entertaining her audience. “Part of Miss Bristow’s excellence,” she notes, “is her particular ability to create a mood of you-are-thereness.”3 Bristow “takes copious and meticulous notes on every phase of the historical period. While writing Jubilee Trail she even went so far as to eat a salad of the green weeds that the early pioneers in California used for food. Her intimate knowledge of everyday life, customs, foods, and clothes takes the reader to eighteenthcentury Charleston, early California, or the settling of Louisiana” (6). For Bristow, merging history with fiction fulfilled a narrative desire to excavate “what people did” in order to “understand what they do” (Gwen Bristow’s Plantation Trilogy xii). As she explained: “I’ve always loved stories I had to dig up the facts for. . . . I’m a born researcher; I love to know how things came to be the way they are” (Treadway). Outlining her approach to The Plantation Trilogy, Bristow says that she sought to “write three novels, each complete in itself but the series forming a record of several typical families who might have lived in Louisiana from the time of the colonial settlements until the twentieth century” (“Gwen Bristow” n.p.). Louisiana was the ideal location because “I had traveled into every corner of the state, and I had grown to love it with the inexplicable, comprehensive love that we give to places and persons who are not ours by right of birth but are more intensely ours by right of having been chosen” (“Gwen

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Bristow”). To lay claim to the land and its people, Bristow imaginatively reconstructs southern history, through the lens of southern mythology, and tethers these reconstructions to the lives of central characters in each novel and across the series. She politicizes this narrative structure by bringing into the context of the South’s economic and social development over a historical continuum of roughly one hundred fifty years larger issues of race, class, and gender. In “The Unrecorded South” (1934)4 a little-known essay published at the pinnacle of national deliberations over the South, “the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem,” as Roosevelt described the region (“Report on Economics” 1938), Bristow similarly draws from the past to project her sentiments about the South’s future. On Moons and Magnolias Bristow begins “The Unrecorded South” by celebrating the liberty modernity a≠orded southern writers to “say something new” about the South’s cultural constitution in light of their past inability to write candidly about the region of the United States in which they lived. “Before 1860,” she observes, “the writer who was both sensitive and sincere had a hard time of it.” The social system of the South was based on slavery. It was as impossible to write of the South apart from slavery as it would be today to write of it apart from the automobile. But the would-be writer was faced with a group of press-muzzling laws that throttled him with discouraging e∞ciency, and with an even worse social attitude that promised ostracism if he dared to say that all was not sweetness and light in the country that was growing increasingly sensitive from criticism from within as criticism pressed upon it from without. . . . In the e≠ort not to regard themselves honestly the Southern states e≠ectively choked those who might have spoken to them best. (228)

Bristow argues further that the nation’s modus operandi after the Civil War and into the early years of the twentieth century only strengthened the southern writer’s case for truth-e≠acement: The devastation that was visited upon the South in the lunatic decade following 1865 was not conducive to the orderly production of anything. The ruined

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and desperate residents of a plundered province have no time to write novels. When they finally rid themselves of the carpetbagger governments, the people of the South had the task of building a new civilization on the ashes—not an easy job in any case, but particularly di∞cult here. The transition from feudalism to democracy, which in England took about five centuries, had been accomplished in the South in a period of fifteen years. No wonder the people were demoralized. No wonder they looked back yearningly upon that which they had lost, forgot that it had ever had any defects, and remembered it in terms of moons and magnolias. (229)

Bristow concludes that post-Reconstruction fiction only reproduced earlier images of the South as “inhabited by a pathetically ridiculous race— ladies made of cobwebs and starlight, who spend most of their time reclining on columned verandas listening while gallant gentlemen make vows of adoration; cavaliers who drink juleps, fight a duel before breakfast and stop to hang a Negro boy to a lamp-post on the way home; and carefree blacks who sit on cotton-bales and thrum banjos” (229). In contrast to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century conditions that mandated, even encouraged, southerners to veil the reality of their experiences in writing, Bristow defines the project of modern southern literature as one determined to “tell the truth” through innovation. “The young writer is faced with a double job of creation,” she claims. “He has the opportunity to say something new, but he must evolve his own form for saying it” (227). Bristow thus distinguishes modern southern Americans as “a generation to whom both the legends of the old plantations and the horrors of Reconstruction were parts of a fossilized history” (229). She argues that modern southern writers are “more fully conscious of being part of the civilized world than of being Southerners. Unaware of any need for selfdefense,” she concludes, “they are realizing the need for self-expression” (229–30). By championing literary innovations that sanction southern acculturation, Bristow’s aesthetic politics would seem to depart from those attributed to the southern authors about whom Michaels in Our America and Gilroy in The Black Atlantic write. But the narrative techniques that Bristow endorses overlay this familiar methodology of self-a∞rmation through

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backward reflection and, perhaps more important, reproduce dimensions of the Old in the New South. “Much of the Southern background remains almost virgin territory for the writer of today,” she notes. He can deal with it unafraid of realism and unashamed of romance. For the moons and magnolias are as lovely as the most delicate romancer ever said they were, and the Negroes do sit on cotton-bales thrumming banjos; and it is also true that there are disgraceful slums in our large cities and that abuses of the share-cropper system do cause needless tragedies in our rural districts. The South has great beauties and shameful defects, and the great opportunity of the Southern writer of this generation is that unlike his predecessors he has no reason to be afraid of either. (230)

The dovetailing of nostalgic and modern images in this passage implies Bristow’s desire to speak from a position within an imaginatively reconstructed history of the South, one that would enable her to repoliticize the South’s mythic orientation toward modernity to benefit a broader cultural base. That Bristow’s vision is sensitive to the destitute and perpetuates stereotypical representations of blacks while eliminating “ladies made of cob-web and starlights” from the economy of southern nostalgia suggests further that poor white southerners and white southern women constitute that base. When Bristow speaks of the South as “sensitive to criticism from within as criticism pressed upon it from without,” we are reminded that for nearly fifteen years before the Civil War and several decades after, many white women across the nation had been formally agitating for greater political authority through su≠rage, abolition, and temperance movements. The disparity, however, between the large number of white southern women who advocated change and popular white southern female-written novels from the mid- to late nineteenth century that validated popular notions of “southern tradition” implies that most of the “choked” writers to whom Bristow refers were white southern women unwilling to break with the past, particularly under the pressing need for at least the appearance of regional solidarity. Thus it seems that Bristow’s perspective on modernity was simultaneously shaped by her appreciation of opportunities theretofore de-

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nied her to question southern “tradition” and her ability to sustain while revising “tradition” toward whatever profitable ends she imagined. This reciprocity provides the narrative framework for The Plantation Trilogy. Deep Summer, The Handsome Road, and This Side of Glory constitute a trilogy because they follow one family through several generations. Deep Summer chronicles the lives of two colonial women, Judith Sheramy, the daughter of a pious New England couple, and Dolores Bondio, of Creole ancestry. In part 1 of the novel Judith meets and falls in love with Philip Larne, an aristocratic South Carolinian who, like Judith’s father, Mark, receives a deed to land in the area of Louisiana once known as West Florida for service in King George’s War (i.e., the French and Indian War). Charmed by Philip, Judith agrees to marry the southerner against her father’s protests and her own misgivings about his character even after she learns that he pirates human cargo. The early years of their marriage are marked by Judith’s struggle to acculturate to Louisiana’s social and environmental climates while bearing children and assisting her husband in establishing their home at Ardeith. The latter years are tainted by Philip’s a≠air with Angelique, the beautiful quadroon with whom Judith develops an intimate friendship. Philip and Angelique’s transgression results in the birth of a child, Benny. Part 1 also introduces and develops Dolores’s character. While visiting New Orleans, Caleb, Judith’s brother, meets and falls in love with Dolores, who introduces herself as the daughter of a Cuban dignitary. The two marry and conceive a child. When Caleb later learns that Dolores is a barmaid of undistinguished heritage, he orders her to leave Silverwood. Forlorn and impoverished, Dolores is taken in by Judith and Philip until she gives birth to her son, Roger. Shortly thereafter, Caleb kidnaps Roger from Ardeith. Determined to rescue the child, Dolores returns to Silverwood. She enters Roger’s bedroom window but is detected by a nursemaid, who calls for help. In a fitful rage, Dolores shoots her husband after he commands her to “free” their son. The court declares Dolores an unfit mother and a social outcast and deprives her of all parental rights as punishment for her crime. The distraught Dolores robs Philip and Judith and sets out for New Orleans. En route to the city, she meets Thaddeus Upjohn, who

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o≠ers her companionship and protection. Instead of continuing her trip, Dolores agrees to settle down with Thad in Rattletrap Square, an impoverished neighborhood located only a few miles from Ardeith and Silverwood. Part 2 of Deep Summer witnesses Judith and Philip prospering as farmers of a vast plantation while Dolores and Thad struggle to make ends meet on menial employment. Death fells both women when yellow fever strikes Roger and two of Judith’s children, Philip Junior and David. Roger and David survive the disease. Dolores and Philip Junior, however, succumb, Dolores while nursing Roger back to health. The remainder of Deep Summer is marked by dramatic events: the near-burning of Ardeith; a slave revolt, during which Judith murders Philip’s illegitimate son and sustains a crippling injury; Philip’s death and David’s marriage to Emily Purcell. The novel culminates with Judith handing her daughter-in-law the keys to the plantation. The Handsome Road opens with the refrain to the folksong that opens this chapter. The song, which dichotomizes the psychology of the South’s slave and poor white populations, is followed by a synoptic history of the cotton gin that explains its role in the continuation of southern slavery and by an elaboration of the Larne, Upjohn, and Sheramy family trees. The song and histories foreground the racial and class issues at the novel’s center. Simultaneously, they mobilize the cultural consciousness of the novel represented through the relationships that develop between Corrie May Upjohn, the great-granddaughter of Dolores and Thad Upjohn, and Ann Sheramy, the granddaughter of Dolores and Caleb’s son, Roger. These characters evolve through four stages, which roughly correspond to four eras in southern history: the years immediately before the Civil War, the War, Reconstruction, and post-Reconstruction. Both Corrie May and Ann’s stories begin with the women expecting marriage proposals: Corrie May from Budge Foster, her beau of several years, and Ann from Denis Larne, the great-grandson of Judith and Philip. Like Corrie May, Budge is a native of Rattletrap Square; however, through industry and saving, Budge accumulates enough capital to buy the tract he tenant-farms on the outskirts of the district. After a chance meeting with Ann in a local park, Corrie May’s desire to settle down to a comfortable living with Budge begins to dissipate. Corrie May learns from Ann that Denis

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is hiring workers to clear cypress trees in marshy territory on his plantation. Corrie May communicates this information to her two brothers, who then work at Ardeith for several weeks before succumbing to yellow fever contracted in the swamps. Recognizing that Denis used hired rather than slave labor for the felling job, because slaves, as property, had economic value, Corrie May rejects her own and Budge’s station in life—as a small, rather than a large, planter—and determines not to marry him. Ann exhibits class-related anxieties of her own before her nuptials, questioning her desire and ability to fulfill the social expectations of a plantation mistress. Despite her reservations, however, Ann marries Denis and inherits the keys to Ardeith. After Louisiana secedes and formally enters the war, a series of events unfolds that positions Corrie May and Ann at odds over the Confederate cause, engendering hostility between the two women that increases over time. Corrie May, gaining insight into the social, economic, and political factors conditioning the war, attempts to persuade the residents of Rattletrap Square to abandon the southern troops. Her actions incite a riot during which Corrie May’s neighbors accuse her of treason and then beat her unconscious. After her mother nurses her back to health, Budge visits Corrie May, whereupon she learns that, despite his previous objections to fighting, he, too, has enlisted in the army. Eventually, Corrie May convinces Budge to desert and head west with her. Disguised as a couple eloping, the two initially deceive the Confederate o∞cers they encounter until the military boots that Budge wears betray him. After he and Corrie May are arrested, Corrie May is tried and sentenced to jail; Budge is executed. Like Corrie May, Ann finds herself increasingly disillusioned by the war; however, Ann’s concerns stem from her awareness that Denis is on the front lines of the battlefield. To reconcile herself to the fact that her husband may die, Ann organizes a grand gala to celebrate Denis’s furlough and takes to drinking. Ann’s abuse of alcohol worsens after Denis is killed in the Battle of Vicksburg. But when a band of Union soldiers attempts to pilfer Ardeith, she pledges to carry on Denis’s cause from home for the sake of her children’s future. Released from jail at the war’s end, Corrie May seeks employment with a federal agency charged with organizing the reconstruction of Louisiana’s

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roadways. Mr. Gilday, a former overseer at Silverwood, hires her. Aware that Gilday misappropriates government funds, Corrie May nonetheless establishes a sexual relationship with the agent and profligately spends the money he gives her. She throws a lavish party and secures an order for all the ice available to the city for a three-day period. In the meantime Ann struggles to secure the money needed to pay the high taxes imposed on Ardeith by the Reconstruction regime. When her daughter falls ill after drinking spoiled milk, Ann attempts in her desperation to sell the family heirlooms and valuables in return for ice. The vendors inform Ann that there is no ice available to purchase. Ann’s little girl eventually dies. Shortly thereafter, Corrie May’s insouciant living comes to an abrupt end when Gilday leaves her for another woman. Homeless, hungry, and with child, Corrie May sets out again to find shelter and labor. The aftermath of Reconstruction and the conclusion of the novel find Corrie May living in Rattletrap Square with her son, Fred, while Ann and Ardeith profit from a boom in the cotton industry. Corrie May is, however, more hopeful of her own and her son’s futures, since Fred has access to education that she was never able to secure. Ann, too, is confident that the days to come hold nothing but good things for her son, Denis II, as she imagines him carrying on the traditions and values that sustained her and her family through the war. This Side of Glory begins with an overview of the Upjohn and Larne family histories and a profile of the South’s economic climate just before World War I. Both narrative devices serve to introduce and distinguish Eleanor Upjohn and Kester Larne as representatives of the New and Old South. While out driving one day, Kester sees Eleanor seated on one of the levees her father, Fred Upjohn, now a prosperous levee contractor, had a hand in building. Immediately smitten, Kester stops his car and introduces himself to her. Neither Eleanor’s father nor Kester’s parents, Denis II and Lysiane, think that their child has secured a suitable partner; nevertheless, after dating for a while, the two marry and Eleanor finds herself the new mistress of Ardeith plantation. For the first year of their marriage, Kester and Eleanor live happily, enjoying what to Eleanor appears to be the fruit of little labor and hosting lavish parties for Kester’s old friends and her

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own new associates. A year of marriage also brings a daughter, whom they name Cornelia after Eleanor’s grandmother, Corrie May. The strength of their bond is not tested until Eleanor discovers that Ardeith is deeply in debt. This awareness sets o≠ a sequence of events that distance Kester and Eleanor from one another spiritually, emotionally, and physically, rendering divorce imminent. When she learns that the bank is about to foreclose on Ardeith, Eleanor initially works with Kester to negotiate the terms of repayment with the lending o∞cers. The two embark upon a mission to rejuvenate the plantation, transforming it into a virtual machine that produces crops and manipulates labor e∞ciently. Soon, however, political conflicts festering in Europe upset their united front as World War I breaks out and embargoes are placed on cotton. Frustrated by these circumstances, Eleanor renews her criticism of Kester and blames him for their financial strife. Eleanor’s aspersions drive her husband into the arms of Isabel Valcour, a former lover, who, like Kester, comes from a long line of aristocratic southern ancestry. An upsurge in the value of cotton, which Eleanor discovers can be used to manufacture explosives, makes it easier for her to forgive Kester’s infidelity. Their bond is mended long enough for them to conceive a second child, whom they name Philip in honor of Kester’s ancestor and Ardeith’s founder. Kester and Eleanor’s union is stressed again when the United States enters the war and, unbeknownst to Eleanor, Kester enlists in the army. Outraged, Eleanor initially refuses to support Kester’s decision. After he leaves, however, she seizes the opportunity to expand and accelerate Ardeith’s productivity on her own and modernize the interior of the house. Upon his return Kester is annoyed by the changes that Eleanor has made. Disquieted by her materialism, he accuses Eleanor of making him a stranger in his own home. Eleanor lashes back, calling him immature, incapable of serious industry, and lacking in ambition. She lays claim to Ardeith by virtue of the fact that she alone restored it to order. Eleanor’s assertion drives Kester away from Ardeith again and into Isabel’s arms and home. This Side of Glory concludes by recentering the New/Old South divide that mobilizes its plot and organizes the development of its central charac-

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ters. Eleanor confronts Isabel at her home while Kester is away. The two square o≠ over the kind of woman that Kester values and needs in his life: the modern versus the traditional southern woman. Thinking herself defeated, Eleanor returns to Ardeith prepared to grant Kester the divorce that Isabel claims he desires. In the interim, tragedy strikes Cornelia and compels Kester to go home. As their daughter recovers, Kester and Eleanor rea∞rm their love for one another and set out to rebuild their marriage. Much like Erskine Caldwell, Bristow enjoyed critical and popular acclaim throughout the 1930s for the central roles poor white characters play in The Plantation Trilogy. Unlike Caldwell, however, Bristow’s aesthetic negotiations have never been examined in connection with mythic notions of womanhood, place, and race. False Consciousness Peggy Prenshaw and Mary Jean DeMarr rightly deduce that Bristow takes southern history to task through female protagonists that are “more rounded, more assertive and independent, [and] more interesting” (DeMarr in Mainiero 238) than most dime-novel heroines. Prenshaw, however, does not interrogate the ironies implicit in Bristow having granted her female characters a hand in creating the very pedestal myth she claims oppresses them in the trilogy. In addition, both Prenshaw and DeMarr appear to reduce Bristow’s work to melodrama, calling it romantic women’s fiction, thus ignoring the broad cultural base her literature depends on. One might argue that the complex coordinates of Bristow’s aesthetics have not been su∞ciently mapped because of the scant biographical data on her. Until recently, this information consisted of three sketches, two of which Bristow wrote. The third, by historian Lyle Saxon, largely treats Bristow’s career at the Times Picayune. Saxon o≠ers little insight into her politics except to comment obliquely that Bristow “did not find it necessary to prove that she was an emancipated woman as well as a clergyman’s daughter.” This observation resonates with sharper clarity in Billie Theriot’s 1994 biography, which traces Bristow’s southern heritage back to her paternal family’s removal from England to Virginia in 1637 and her maternal family’s settlement in South Carolina around 1700. Theriot notes that Bristow’s paternal grandparents migrated to South

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Carolina upon her grandfather’s return from the Civil War. A soldier of little distinction, Bristow’s grandfather spent several months in a federal prison even after the war ended. In South Carolina, however, he worked as an agent for a railroad company before assuming an executive position with the state’s first cotton manufacturing corporation established after Reconstruction. Unlike her grandfather, Bristow’s father, Louis, avoided careers associated with the South’s economic recovery and enrolled in a Baptist seminary after serving in the Spanish-American War. In 1903, the year of Bristow’s birth, he became pastor of a church in Marion, South Carolina, where he gained a reputation for ministering to the county’s indigent and indisposed population as well as members of his congregation. His benevolence launched Louis Bristow’s career as a professional steward of the Southern Baptist Convention, the organization that aided him in founding several Baptist hospitals across the state of South Carolina from 1915 to 1922. In 1924 Louis Bristow moved his family to New Orleans, where he founded Southern Baptist Hospital and where he died in 1957 after su≠ering a heart attack (Theriot). Theriot’s profile of Bristow’s mother is sketchier, in part because she found Caroline Bristow’s identity limited by her marriage to a Baptist minister. Casting her as “a petite, gentle woman” who “appeared to epitomize devotion, faithfulness, and dedication as well as strength of character and ability” (34)—features generally associated with the myth of Southern Womanhood—Theriot claims that Caroline Bristow assumed “the role typical of other contemporary women in the South, following her husband wherever his work led him and taking care of the home and their children” (25). She even qualifies Caroline’s activism in the Women’s Missionary Society as an extension of her domestic responsibilities. From these observations, Theriot transitions into an analysis of Bristow’s personal and professional growth. She proposes that Bristow’s resentment toward her mother’s demeanor, which Bristow once described as “real Victorian in the classic sense” (34–35), compelled her toward self-actualization by rejecting any connection with her mother’s “vocation” (39). Theriot deduces that Bristow’s “independence, confidence, and assertiveness” (40) in establishing her careers as a journalist and writer prove that she had “no aspiration to be the ‘ideal’ Southern woman” (13).

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To draw these conclusions, Theriot ignores telling evidence of Bristow’s attitude toward southern women and women’s roles in marriage that she herself excavates for the biography. For example, in an uncharacteristic report on the qualities that New Orleans singles desire in a mate, Bristow warned the bachelor interested in the college-educated woman to marry her “before she has had her degree for two months. It is amazing how their ideas change after they have begun earning their own living,” she explains. “The business girl, particularly the one in a position requiring education and a sense of responsibility does not ask for so many Sir Galahad qualities in her husband, but she demands a far greater degree of independence for herself ” (“What Kind of Husband?”). Bristow tacitly undercuts the satiric edge of her commentary in a 1938 interview with Medora Field Perkerson. When asked her opinion of women who maintain careers outside the home, Bristow allegedly5 responded that “women in public life must learn to divide their time wisely, if they hope to enjoy happiness at home as well as success with their careers, . . . for the job of being a wife must always hold first place over their outside interest” (in Theriot 215–16). She insisted further: “if I did not have the complete approval of my husband, I would abandon my literary work” (Theriot 216). These convictions collaborate with details from Bristow’s journal and self-portrait to complicate Theriot’s assumption about the writer’s feminism. Bristow’s own reflections evidence a deft conflation of the economic, social, racial, sexual, and psychological tensions that shaped her cultural identity, fueled her professional development, and, eventually, organized the consciousness of her novels. Bristow begins her story in poverty. She tells us that to support herself while attending journalism school in New York she “was nursemaid to rich women’s children, typed theses for graduate students, wrote rags-to-riches biographies of successful businessmen and sold them to trade journals, and was secretary to a Central European baroness who had come to this country after the war” (Gwen Bristow: A Self-Portrait). It was in the latter capacity that Bristow was made to feel the social e≠ects of her economic status. “The baroness and her husband had their own ideas about people who worked for a living,” she explains, “so the secretary came and went by the back door and ate lunch in the kitchen.” Once the baroness and her husband discovered that Bristow’s fa-

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ther was a minister, however, Bristow “earned” access to the front-door entrance and a seat at the dining-room table (Self-Portrait). After a year in New York, Bristow secured a job with the Times Picayune in New Orleans, where she met and married Bruce Manning, who worked for another local newspaper, the Item. The two often vied for the same stories, though Bristow maintains that their personal relationship did not mitigate their individual drive. “On the contrary,” she insists, “it made us grimmer professional rivals than ever, and our eagerness to outwit each other was responsible for some of the best stories we ever dug up for our respective papers.” She delights further in relating how this competitive spirit enriched the early years of their marriage: Frequently sent to cover the same assignment, when we got there we would exchange defiant glances and not speak to each other at all. It was tremendous fun, especially when at dinner some evening one of us would keep watching the clock and squirming with impatience until the other said, “All right, the first editions are on the street now, so you can talk—did you get a picture of the murdered man or didn’t you?” (“Gwen Bristow”)

During these years Bristow and Manning collaborated on The Invisible Host, the novel that gave both their first taste of fame and fortune, though they savored neither for long. “Bruce and I immediately got very grand and, of course, very silly,” she confesses. They quit their jobs, bought a plantation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, hired a black housekeeper—because, according to Bristow, “it really delight[ed] [her] to see a Negro making good”—and “settled down to what [they] thought was the literary life, which meant having a lot of house parties and writing more detective stories” (“Gwen Bristow”).6 Soon, however, the nation’s declining economy consumed what little wealth they had amassed. “The depression,” Bristow notes—“which we had heard of, but ignored—suddenly swooped upon us and sent us scurrying for shelter. I ran back to New Orleans and the TimesPicayune. . . . Bruce began writing radio scripts about a gangster named Angelface” (Self-Portrait). Despite their financial troubles, neither Bristow nor Manning saw fit to sacrifice the luxury of hired help. Indeed, as Bristow later revealed, domestic servants enabled her to establish and maintain the routine that she followed practically every day of her life after the

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success of The Invisible Host.7 In addition to a housekeeper, the couple employed a secretary in New Orleans to whom each dictated their writing ( journals, March 20 and July 1, 1931). While Manning completed radio scripts, Bristow continued writing mysteries. She wrote four novels in as many years but could not secure a publisher for any of them. Manning, on the other hand, began writing screenplays and sold several scripts to Hollywood studios. With the proceeds, Bristow and her husband “jubilantly quit work again” and “departed in grandeur,” first to Connecticut and then to Hollywood. Downcast by her lack of success as a solo artist, Bristow determined, upon moving to Hollywood, that she would not write any more novels. “It seemed obvious,” she reflected, “that I had been mistaking desire for ability.” She attempted instead to make a career out of doing nothing. As she rationalized: “my husband’s salary, though small by Hollywood standards, was su∞cient to support me in idleness. So I sat down in the well-known sunshine and decided to be idle.” This venture was short-lived, however, as Bristow soon found herself “the victim of a certain mental aberration.” Her characterization of the malaise deserves exact quoting: It means that you are impelled to write, and neither outer circumstances nor inner determination to the contrary can stop you. It does not imply that you are cleverer, wiser, or more thoughtful than persons who are not so impelled; it does not even mean that you have any special talent. It simply means that whenever you have an idea about anything you want to write it down. You hope, of course, that somebody is going to read what you have written, but even if that is unlikely, you still want to write it. (“Gwen Bristow”)

Like Peterkin before her, Bristow uses writing as a kind of exorcising tool, a mechanism for “getting rid” of the things that mentally preoccupy her. The first novel that Bristow wrote while “su≠ering” under this desire was Deep Summer. The next two were The Handsome Road and This Side of Glory. With each novel’s publication, Bristow undertook a nationwide book promotion tour. She also met with her publishers to strategize marketing concerns for the novels’ covers. For Deep Summer, she favored the image of a coach and a plantation; for The Handsome Road, the figure of a belle walking toward a plantation; and for This Side of Glory, a belle turning to-

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ward a plantation (Self-Portrait; the original covers appear in Crowell). These pictures coalesced to market the image of the South upon which Bristow was able to build her literary career. Yet, because of Bristow’s account of the sequence of events that established this career, these symbols taken as a whole e≠ect an order of far greater significance: They intimate the end toward which Bristow hoped her novels would lead her, a white southern woman writer struggling with and against the currents of a region and a nation in transition. Returning briefly to “The Unrecorded South,” in which Bristow describes premodern8 literary representations of the region, we remember that the cast of characters included stereotypes of black southerners, white southern men, and white southern women. The activities of these characters were drawn in paradoxically exaggerated and reductive terms, with white women and blacks staged in passive opposition to active white men. We recall further that Bristow’s modernism retained premodern images of blacks, added impressions of poor whites, and suggested—by exclusion of the Old—representations of the New South woman. Examination of the original jackets to Deep Summer, The Handsome Road, and This Side of Glory in juxtaposition with a review of the novels’ plots suggests that Bristow’s vision of the New South woman revises not how she looks but what she does. The openings to The Handsome Road and This Side of Glory follow through on this project. In each, Bristow uses history to link and legitimize the novels’ central female characters’ legacies by elucidating their connections to the product—the cotton gin—and processes—the Civil War, levee flooding and building, and the manufacture of gunpowder from cotton during World War I—that helped establish, modernize, and revitalize southern plantation systems. This focal shift is consistent with the author’s approach to investigating history to determine “what people did” in order to “understand what people do.” But it also draws the reader into a frame of reference wherein the modern southern woman actively seeks to reconnect with the past. This process complexly unfolds in Bristow’s personal narrative, where she profits from opportunities in education and employment only to settle down to a conventional wealthy southern lifestyle with her husband, even after they move to California.

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To be sure, neither Bristow nor Manning ever adopts husbandry as a vocation or hobby. Nevertheless, both place a high premium on leisure a≠orded them to achieve intellectual stimulation and personal fulfillment through their professional industry. In a modern context, Bristow’s perspective achieves added dimension. In one respect, it reinforces the base of the modern plantation economy, which depended on black labor exploitation. Recall Bristow’s pledge to maintain a black housekeeper—even when she cannot a≠ord to—to secure time for writing. From a purely economic perspective, this contract was mutually beneficial to employee and employer, especially in the early years of the Depression, when the proportion between black and white domestics was nearly balanced (Giddings 231– 32). Still, because domestic labor was, for several decades before and after 1930, the only employment open to black women—even those with an education—Bristow was e≠ectively a willing accomplice in an enterprise that robbed black women of equal rights of opportunity. Having been compelled as a student to enter the labor market on lower levels than her desires and skills attested to, Bristow’s manipulation of black domestics in this manner is particularly disturbing, for it implies her unwillingness to subject white women to the same limitations. In this spirit, Bristow’s perception of leisure revises its elitist component in a roughly configured form of white feminist conservatism. Brief reconsideration of the dynamics of Bristow and Manning’s marriage elucidates this concept and o≠ers striking evidence of a negotiated plantation ethic. Contrary to Theriot’s contention, Bristow unabashedly imitated her mother in following Manning wherever his career led him, even when it meant living in the shadow of his success. Obvious and tacit incentives, however, seem to have motivated Bristow to stand by and behind her man. As her husband’s income increased, Bristow was able to climb the social ladder and thus match personal ideology with material possessions. The telling first item she secured toward this end is the structural symbol of the southern aristocracy—the plantation in Mississippi reincarnated as the big house with a swimming pool in California (Self-Portrait). Because Manning’s job took him outside the home, Bristow was further able to honor the myth of Southern Womanhood—the one her mother lived by and that Bristow actually sanctioned in her excoriation of “public” career women—

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by managing the house until her husband returned from the studio. Of particular relevance here is Bristow’s description of her daily routine, which culminated at 6:00 p.m. when Manning returned from work and they dined together (Greene). Bristow’s adherence to the code in this way positioned her to challenge her perception of its limits, specifically as they a≠ected white women. In her “Self-Portrait,” Bristow reminds us that physical inactivity at home cultivated a psychosomatic ennui from which she su≠ered until she began writing again. This malaise not only compelled Bristow to pick up the pen, it also prompted a crucial shift in the shape and content of her work. We recall that Bristow’s follow-ups to The Invisible Host were all mystery novels. One might reasonably assume that she abandoned this genre because she could not repeat the success of the first book. But the nature of the animal that apparently stimulated Bristow’s imagination supports a di≠erent hypothesis. “Mental aberration,” she writes, “simply means that whenever you have an idea [conviction?] about anything [southern culture?] you want to write it down. You hope, of course, that somebody [the nation?] is going to read what you have written, but even if that is unlikely [literary market already flooded with southern novels?], you still want to write it” [need to reconcile your professional potential to a way of life that limits it?]. My interpolations bring to the fore both the cultural and personal conditions that seem to have motivated Bristow’s creative return to the South despite, indeed, even because of, her physical displacement from the region. When Bristow and Manning moved to California in 1934, Roosevelt had been in o∞ce a full year. Bristow’s desire to respond to this political climate is evidenced by the fact that she publishes “The Unrecorded South” and begins the first draft of Deep Summer the same year that she moves to California. But she also registers a response in her day-to-day living. The Bristows’ California lifestyle transforms leisure into a commodity from which she can profit only by working. This same lifestyle also empowers Bristow to choose a lot that fulfills her creatively, rewards her financially, and urges her toward social interaction. Bristow can, in other words, function as wife and writer, provided for and provider, private and public figure. The status that she achieves seems to thrive on paradoxical notions of what southern

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women should and can do. It e≠ects a crucial restoration of the plantation order by reconfiguring the framework within which southern women operate. Thus the sum of Bristow’s symbolic economy (in her autobiographical writing as well as her essay and novels) revitalizes the past by bringing questions of materiality and embodiment to the fore. It reinscribes conventional mappings of southern race relations while revising the original terms of southern class and gender contracts. It, thus, provides a lens for witnessing these processes unfold in The Plantation Trilogy. The Plantation as Foundation “What a relief it would be to get done traveling and settle down again like civilized people,” Judith exasperatedly muses at the start of Deep Summer, as she struggles to remove a stain left by the Mississippi on clothes she launders (3). Curiosity supplants frustration when Judith returns to this thought, imagining the “civilization” that Philip maps out and o≠ers in exchange for her hand in marriage: Here is the river, and here, four days’ journey above New Orleans, is the Dalroy blu≠. Three thousand acres of the richest land on this continent are waiting there for you and me. Such a home we will have!—orange groves and fields of indigo, and its name will be Ardeith Plantation. . . . We’ll build a manor . . . and have a city of slaves in the cabins behind it. Our house will be made of clay and this gray Spanish moss plastered over cypress lathes. . . . We’ll have a double line of oaks leading to the door, and before we’re old they’ll be vast and spreading like these in the forest, with long draperies of moss brushing our shoulders as we ride underneath. You’ll be a great lady, Judith. We’ll found a dynasty, you and I, and a hundred years from now the rulers of Ardeith will be proud to remember us, first of the house, who came down the river together. (19)

A brief moment during which Judith surveys the land and the river that Philip describes, “as though she were seeing them for the first time,” serves as a prelude to her accepting his proposal (19). In one regard, Judith’s pause speaks of the attractiveness of a scene in which she might occupy a position of power and distinction in an environment that initially escapes her dominion, even to fulfill the routine task of cleaning clothes to her satisfaction. More important, however, is that Judith’s reflection signals the

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first in a series of critical revisions in characterization and narrative progression that Bristow executes. From the moment Judith agrees to marry Philip, we are called to witness the re-formation of southern culture from the perspective of an elite white southern woman. This technical innovation reorients the development of southern culture around the lives of female protagonists. It establishes a correspondence between domestic and cultural foundations that reverses the urge to deny or undermine the historically complicated relations among public and private authority; class, race, and gender empowerment; and broader issues of social order rooted in plantation infrastructures. It also provides the following interpretive framework for the trilogy. In the three historical periods that Deep Summer, The Handsome Road, and This Side of Glory cover, scenes are presented in alternation. We are thus able to trace out patterns of technique within the series that establish parallels among characters, settings, and events. The parallels integrate readers into the narratives of figures at the center and margins of the plantation economy, specifically privileged and poor white women (or their descendents). To varying degrees we follow two stories in each of the novels: Judith and Dolores’s in Deep Summer, Ann and Corrie May’s in The Handsome Road, and Isabel and Eleanor’s in This Side of Glory.9 The cultural status and personal experiences of each pair paradoxically cast them as foils and doppelgangers of one another. Their relationships to one another as well as their articulations to the plantation drive the plots of the novels. The plots—and eventually, the entire series—are unified and made comprehensible through shifts in narrative development, which direct the two major lines of action and characterization toward converging and diverging points. At these intersections Bristow’s complex management of the Plantation Mythology and the myth of Southern Womanhood emerges through contrasts and correspondences between symbolic structures that increasingly forestall the possibility of cross-racial empowerment while promoting the advancement of the South’s female and poor white populations. Male actions rule over the beginning of Deep Summer with conventional patterns of labor organization governing the activities of the colonists when they dock for the night: while Judith’s father galvanizes a legion of

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men to hunt game, she washes clothes and assists her mother in preparing food. Judith unconsciously accepts this gendered division of labor as normative and connects it to the establishment of civilization as she experienced it in New England and initially expects to know it in the southern territory her family settles. Philip’s vision of his and Judith’s future paints an altogether new and intriguing portrait of civilization because it lends authority to Judith’s role in creating it. To be certain, it is Philip’s vision, strategically manipulated for the purpose of securing Judith’s love and loyalty against her father’s objection to their union. There is, too, a territorial, almost imperialist, sense in which Philip takes for granted that the “dynasty” they conceive must literally be born of Judith’s body. Nevertheless, Judith’s interpellation into Philip’s vision as the “great lady” gives her controlling influence on the plantation; the site around which southern ecology and white southern women’s psychologies develop and evolve from Deep Summer through This Side of Glory. Because Ardeith is accoutered with the staples—human and nonhuman—typically associated with the romantic tradition of the Old South, one might reasonably conclude that its centrality in the novels uncritically perpetuates the plantation’s surrounding ideology. Yet Philip’s use of the plural subjective and possessive—“We’ll found a dynasty”—to chart Ardeith’s foundation and growth upsets the rules of the southern romantic tradition by altering the perceptual slate upon which Judith has defined herself in relation to men and her environment until she moves to the South. In other words, Judith is aware of her cultural agency. Equipped with this knowledge, Judith nevertheless aims to establish Ardeith in the terms that Philip elaborates, taking cues from the southern romantic tradition, specifically the myth of Southern Womanhood, to shape her position. Of Gervaise Purcell, the Creole native to the region and wife of one of Louisiana’s most a±uent and influential proprietors, Judith admirably—even covetously—observes: “It must be women like her Philip had known on the gullah coast, women who knew how to meet strangers and supervise slaves and wear exquisite gowns, and move always with an air of smiling sophistication” (27). She compares this behavior to her own standing “stark naked in front of a slave-girl” to be “bathed like a baby” and deduces that “being a helpless female is really quite nice” (27). She builds

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upon and rationalizes this disposition to Caleb by explaining that “back where [Philip] comes from ladies of quality let slaves do all their work” (42). Judith further defers to the myth in the attitude she adopts toward bearing children. Though she harbors contempt for the physical e≠ects of pregnancy, she concedes to Philip: “We really couldn’t start that dynasty you were talking about unless I had babies, could we?” (39).10 She later reflects that “It was exciting to have a baby, particularly a beautiful baby who would look like Philip, and to know you were starting a great house in a wilderness you were going to turn into an empire” (40). This thought resounds as the time of delivery nears—“Even now it was splendid to feel a child moving in her body and know it was the first of a dynasty that was to rule this glorious country”—and intensifies when Judith stands at Philip’s side with David in her arms, viewing Ardeith for the first time—“She could see herself mistress of this house, summoning her slaves with bells and queening it at the great table” (61, 79). Judith even seamlessly adapts to— and thus the narrative runs over rather quickly—the domestic demands placed on her once she becomes mistress of Ardeith because doing so enables her to validate conventional wisdom that “the mistress of a plantation [is] the biggest slave on it” (79). Judith’s consciousness of the myth of Southern Womanhood remains filtered through a patriarchal paradigm: the double lens of southern cultural and Philip’s alleged expectations. She thus appears naïvely to reproduce some of the very images of southern women against which Bristow inveighs in “The Unrecorded South.” But because these images conflate Judith’s assessment of Philip’s taste in women with her own ambitions for self-actualization at Ardeith, they give her perception of the myth a complexity that actually loosely sets the wheels of Bristow’s New South paradigm in motion. The first of several important mirror scenes that traverse the trilogy illustrates this point. “She gave a little gasp of joy at her reflection,” the narrator remarks in observation of Judith’s self-regard. “Nobody had ever told her how gracefully her shoulders sloped or how small her waistline was. She looked fragile, delicate, crushable—she looked—Judith leaned over the drawers and stared at herself—she looked like the kind of girl Philip was used to. If everything else was as easy as this—?” (28). Judith’s focus on how she looks

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and on looking a certain way is a form of self-objectification that animates the image-conscious center of the myth. At the same time, the correspondence Judith observes between her reflection and the myth is performative, a manifestation of seeming to be someone she does not really think she is. There is a doubleness to Judith’s consciousness of the myth dimensioned by her awareness of the concept as male-ordered and her determination nevertheless to manipulate it for personal benefit. It is a form of identity politics much like masking, a strategy that, according to Lucinda MacKethan, southern women throughout history have had to seize upon to preserve their private sense of selfhood in the face of patriarchal control over their public image.11 Critically, however, Judith does not rank among such women—or at least she does not think she ranks among these women—because she is a conscious and willing subject of the myth. Indeed, as an expression of the social and economic status to which she aspires, the myth fosters a portrait of womanhood that Judith herself characterizes as more attractive and viable than the “mousy” existence she has known in New England (23).12 And she takes for granted that there can be an untroubled division between who she is and who she pretends to be. In this regard, Judith’s reflections on Gervaise’s marriage are particularly illuminating because they follow Philip’s claim that she is acclimatizing to Louisiana, despite early di∞culties adjusting to the region. She could feel it, vaguely; it was as though the rhythms of her body were adapting themselves to the indolent rhythm of the river by which she lived. And the working of her mind too—it was so easy here to be casual. But she would never, thought Judith, learn to be as casual as Gervaise; never learn to regard life with detachment as though it were only an amusing spectacle. Sometimes she envied Gervaise and sometimes she pitied her for this. It was a very protective attitude, but it shielded her from ecstasy as well as pain. In spite of her success at making her home-life pleasant, Judith could not help wondering if Gervaise really loved any one as she herself loved Philip. Certainly not her husband, though she liked him very well and they never quarreled. . . . Oh yes, Gervaise was happy enough. Walter was fond of her and treated her like a pet kitten, and as Gervaise never manifested any desire to control

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her own destiny things went smoothly at Lynhaven. But . . . Judith compared the flaming love between [herself and Philip] to the carefully nurtured pleasantness of the Purcells and knew she would not have exchanged a minute of her life with Gervaise. (72)

Conditioning Judith’s criticism of Gervaise is a display of confidences that further regulate her appropriation of the myth of Southern Womanhood. Though she admits that Gervaise seems aware of the myth as performative and has acted accordingly to secure and maintain her social status, Judith qualifies the control that southern-born women can exercise over such roleplaying as products of social and environmental determinants not of their design. These determinants, which even dictated who and when Gervaise married, mandate the performance and thus direct the “self ” Gervaise might otherwise assert if she were not circumscribed by tradition. Put simply, because Gervaise is southern-born, Judith reads her as more object than agent in the cultural formation processes that Philip elucidates. As an outsider to the South and someone who asserts her individuality by marrying Philip in defiance of her father, as much for love as for the promise of wealth, Judith believes that she and her marriage are exempt from such influence. Indeed, the ease with which Judith perpetuates the myth is as much facilitated by her belief that she is merely role-playing as by the reciprocity she observes in her conjugal relationship. Exasperated by the awareness that she will bear another child through the summer months, Judith admirably reflects on the speed with which Philip has profitably systematized Ardeith. “He would be rich if he kept up like this, which meant that she would be rich too, for everything he had was hers as well. Not every woman could write an order on her husband’s crops whenever she chose without being questioned, and mighty few women were given so many house-slaves when workers in the fields were so sorely needed” (171). Judith toys with the notion of deferring to God for her status: “Oh, she was fortunate and no mistake, and she ought to be down on her knees thanking the Lord instead of feeling injured.” She recedes nevertheless from crediting a higher authority for her wealth and cryptically limns it as a conjugal benefit. “Philip waved and she kissed her hand to him. After all, she thought as she watched him out of sight, what

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really mattered was not slaves and clothes and houses, but being loved; the rest was what the Creoles called lagniappe, something extra. She leaned her head against the post and resolved that this time she was going to behave herself and not whine about having a baby” (171). Although the allusion is tacit, Judith’s musings remind us of Philip’s proposal in its commentary on the “extras” that marriage has a≠orded her. Thus, the kiss Judith blows her husband does more than return a greeting. In addition to expressing the love she claims matters most to her, the gesture serves as a kind of exchange/incentive that enables Judith at once to “cash” against and renew her investment in the marriage by reminding her that bearing children fulfills her end of the contract. It is, therefore, of some consequence that Judith confronts and interrogates her status as a “great lady” only after she learns of Philip’s a≠air with Angelique. In fact, no small stroke of irony causes the betrayal to surface when both Judith and Angelique are pregnant. The complexities of the circumstance weigh heaviest near the novel’s end, when, as I discuss later, Judith kills Benny and, thus, destroys Ardeith’s only “black” line of descent. But for the moment, Angelique’s status, made “equal” to Judith’s by Philip’s betrayal in terms of the procreative component of the marital contract, marks a consonant violation of mind and body that causes Judith to agonize frenziedly over her dilemma. “It brought an anguish that she could not surmount or even fight, the consciousness that what she had just found out was not something that had happened today but months ago, and now she too was with child by Philip because she had believed in him” (175). Her instinctive response is to place full responsibility for the vision—the terms of the marital contract—onto Philip. She indicts in kind the illicit measures he takes to establish Ardeith and the intimacies they share to sustain it. “He had founded Ardeith Plantation with pirate loot, and now he had cheated her even of his love.” In this frame of mind, Judith absolves herself of agency, limning their o≠spring as the product of a kind of acquaintance rape. “He had left her this unborn child of his as permanent evidence that she had believed his lies, and the knowledge that it was alive within her brought a rush of nausea that left her limp and cold.” Judith incriminates her husband further by renouncing as virtual assault weapons the conjugal benefits she had earlier laid claim to. “He could do this to her

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because the very sheltering he had given her made her helpless; she did not own a farthing nor a slave nor a pound of indigo” (176). Judith’s abdicating her role in realizing Ardeith connotes an egotistical denial of her handwriting on the plantation walls—a refusal, in other words, to acknowledge her part in laying the foundation that has betrayed her. Paradoxically, however, Philip’s betrayal unsparingly reminds Judith of her own vulnerabilities and limitations within a patriarchal establishment. “Do you know what you’ve done to me, Philip?” she asks on the heels of learning of the a≠air. He said, “Yes.” “No you don’t” she returned in a low voice, still watching the guttering candle. “You don’t understand. You never will. It isn’t in you.” (177)

The conviction with which she renounces Philip’s ability to identify with her resuscitates Judith’s gender sensibilities at a critical moment of reflection. “Don’t try to tell me it’s not your child Angelique is carrying,” she continues. “It is,” said Philip. “I’m not trying to lie to you.” “It doesn’t make any di≠erence,” she answered. “I couldn’t believe anything you said anyway.” “You’ve got to understand that this never happened before and never will again. I’m surer of that now than I was the night I married you. I never could let women alone before. I’ve told you that. I thought I’d done with that sort of thing. Then you went to New Orleans. You were gone for nearly four months.” He stopped. She was looking past him at the darkness beyond the window, where there was a magnolia tree with white flowers like great dim stars. “Are you listening to me?” he demanded. “No,” said Judith. “I suppose men always think women are going to believe tales like that.” “It’s true,” said Philip. (178)

The exchange reads like drama and marks one of few shifts in focalization from Judith’s to Philip’s point of view. It is the only moment when the narrator cedes strong presence. Philip confesses to the marital indiscretion, then tries to convince Judith that carnal urge and her prolonged absence

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from Ardeith drove him to Angelique. He truncates his oration to observe Judith observing a kind of still life of Ardeith. The imagery, though sparse, works as allusion, paralleling Bristow’s description of premodern representations of the South “in terms of moons and magnolias” and southern women “made of cobwebs and starlights.” For Philip, the e≠ect is like that of a telescope, reflecting an image of Ardeith mediated by Judith. For Judith, the e≠ect is like that of a mirror, casting an image of her “self ” beyond Philip against the plantation. The contrasting e≠ects deftly invite us to read between the lines for the exchange established between Judith and the myth of Southern Womanhood. The text reads: “ ‘Are you listening to me?’ he demanded.” Philip poses the question to determine whether Judith is hearing and heeding what he says. “ ‘No,’ said Judith. ‘I suppose men always think women are going to believe tales like that.’ ” To Philip, Judith’s negative reply means simply that she does not yet accept his explanation of the a≠air. “It’s true,” he asserts reassuringly. But the allusion casts a more complex shadow on Judith’s response to her husband. If Judith accepts Philip’s explanation, she also sanctions the (potentially) delimiting e≠ect of his actions on her status at Ardeith if other women, particularly slave women, bear him children. At risk is not the power she exercises or can claim over them (the slave women and their children), but the solemnity of her reproductive rites and symbolic authority as mistress of the plantation. Crucially, here, Judith’s self-re/cognition registers racial and even class-consciousness as she distinguishes herself from any other woman that might figure into the plantation economy. At the same time, if Judith does not believe Philip, then she cannot believe in Philip. Consequently, she negates the self she has come to know because his vision and what it makes of her amount to lies. Juxtaposed with the allusion, therefore, Judith’s negative response rejects nonexistence and existence in name only at Ardeith vis-à-vis a materialist command of the mythic authority that shapes her identity and her negotiated agency in bolstering the plantation order. It is a war waged to safeguard the very establishment that constrains her, and it crosses every plane of her existence. That race and gender emerge as the primary signifiers in Judith’s struggle facilitates both the narrative economy and the broader political agenda of the trilogy

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by containing black resistance in Deep Summer in anticipation of class conflict and resolution in The Handsome Road and This Side of Glory. Consider the sequence of events that brings closure to Judith’s conflict. In defiance of Philip, Judith moves out of the master bedroom into the quarters where Dolores previously convalesced. Retreat into an environment that makes Dolores feel like a social outcast leaves Judith “with a feeling of empty deadness” (180).13 Symbolically, Judith’s emotional state encroaches upon Ardeith, leaving the impression that “someone had just died in it” (180). Imagery doubles in a stream of consciousness to confirm the source of her apathy: She must remind the girls to put arsenic in the cans under the legs of the beds before the summer influx of ants. The men must bring in some moss, too, for restu∞ng the mattresses; this one was getting lumpy. Oh, but what for? She didn’t care what happened to the house. Somewhere was Angelique, and Philip’s child within her—at least she did not have to endure seeing Philip’s face on a half-breed child. Angelique could be sold down the river, or up the river, or any place on the face of the earth if only it was out of sight, and her child sold with her before it was born. Anywhere, if only her enticing golden beauty was away from Ardeith, and her slave-child who would look like David. (181)

Judith’s self-regard, exhibited here by an unconscious concern for domestic matters, is jarred by her hyperconsciousness of Angelique’s race and sexuality. These are the coded exigencies that Judith believes she must contend with. And the method seems apparent. “Sell her down the river as a soon as a trader comes by,” she directs Philip. “Take her to the market tomorrow. Get her away” (183). That Bristow denies Judith this “simple” solution to her problem speaks in part to the care she takes to avoid absolving patriarchal negligence in Judith’s struggle. Philip’s refusal to sell or free Angelique at Judith’s request adds insult to Judith’s already badly injured psychology. The apparent impression is that Philip is more concerned with and mindful of Angelique’s fate than of his wife’s personal crisis. The subtler, perhaps more biting, impression is that Philip and Angelique’s relationship was consensual and remained so. These twists give an undeniably bold edge to Bristow’s craft, particularly in light of recent evidence of long-term and consensual sexual

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relationships between male masters and female slaves, most notably in the likely a≠air of Thomas Je≠erson and Sally Hemings. Yet in the context of Bristow’s New South paradigm, the twists carry a darker undercurrent that elides the generally violent nature of master-slave relationships and transfers it onto Judith. At best, Bristow suggests coercion on Philip’s part. “I didn’t want it to happen at first,” Angelique confesses to Judith. “But you know how Mr. Philip is—it’s so hard to tell him no to anything—” (191). The ironic e≠ect is that Angelique’s disclosure gives Judith not a renewed sense of patriarchal negligence, but an intensified racial consciousness. Though the implications of his refusal either to sell or free Angelique seem to escape Philip, Judith does not miss them. Her rejoinder aims to call them to his attention. “All right. Keep her here,” she says. “Tell me I ought to show Christian meekness and put cold presses on her forehead because she doesn’t feel quite well. Keep her here indefinitely because you can’t find a boat luxurious enough for her to ride in. Keep her as your mistress” (185). What starts o≠ in ostensible resignation transforms into sarcastic imperatives, which all but dare Philip to prescript, or rescript, Judith’s mythical identity. The narrator observes her taking “a step backward” before leveling a last “deliberate” invective. “I hope,” she concludes, “that you have a perfectly wonderful time and that she bears you a child every year and that they’re much prettier and cleverer than my children, but it’s a shame they’ll be niggers and can’t get into good society with mine” (185). Judith all but assumes a fighter’s stance before rendering this attack and, thus, introduces physicality into the exchange. At the same time she levels verbal assaults that demonstrate her own, as they stimulate Philip’s, racial sensibilities. With recourse to the social imperatives of plantation culture, Judith puts Philip on the defensive, reminding him of the limitations of his own apparent compassion for Angelique and, as we learn later, their child, even within an order that he creates and actively governs. That Philip’s response then takes on a physical nature, therefore, seems only to amplify the complex materiality of the moment. This is an important point that should not be missed, because in almost any other narrative context, Philip’s striking Judith would work to (re-)inscribe patriarchal authority or indict patriarchal abuse. In another southern setting, it might register the price of feminine investment in the myth of Southern Woman-

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hood, as Philip’s vindication of the assault is aimed at silencing Judith: “I knew I was going to hit you some day if you didn’t learn to keep a decent tongue in your head,” he says, “I’m glad I’ve done it” (185).14 In the context of Judith’s personal struggle, however, domestic violence dramatically and necessarily returns Judith to her body as a site of patriarchal influence. “She put her hand to her stinging cheek,” the narrator observes. “She felt it vaguely, as if it belonged to somebody else, for her whole body was tingling with rage that was shaking and blinding her.” But an enlightened racial consciousness empowers Judith to re/act, indeed it becomes Judith’s mechanism of defense. “All her mind seemed concentrated under the pain in a sharp point of resolution,” the narrator explains. “She dressed and went out of the house, walking fast through the gardens and into the indigo, toward the field-quarters” (185). Again, racial and sexual imagery powerfully merges with Judith’s thoughts to sustain her in retaliation. Judith glanced at the Negroes, naked but for loincloths or pantaloons, their sweaty bodies gleaming in the sun. The light ones were Iboes and the black ones were Congoes. In a cabin down at the far end of the quarters there was an old Congo woman who knew voudou. . . . Judith turned away from the indigo and stumbled over the rough ground toward the quarters. . . . She felt soiled and insulted, and she ran toward the cabin of the Congo woman ready to plead on her knees for escape. (186)

The boldness of Judith’s actions, particularly in a modern context, would seem to give the missed abortion an anticlimactic feel. The attempt and the miss critically anticipate, however, the resolution of Judith’s conflict brought about when, ironically, after Philip prepares to sell Angelique, Angelique reminds Judith of the value she literally bears inside. In this mind, Judith’s vision of self in Ardeith symbolically amplifies: She turned and looked back at the wide, wild kingdom of indigo pressing on the forest. That was Ardeith Plantation, Ardeith of her children and her children’s children. Philip had built the plantation. That was what he would leave them. But she would leave them something more, purity of inheritance. Their pride in their line would be based on their faith in her integrity. Civilization had to be a matriarchy. (193)

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Imagery from Philip’s vision fuses with a newly gendered and racialized consciousness in Judith’s revisioning of Ardeith and reclamation of self. The merging functions metaphorically as the re-union of the two in marriage and in myth. In the process, however, Judith makes of her body a crucial principality unto itself for the posterity it a≠ords the plantation. And she subtly, though no less poignantly, genetically colors and codes Ardeith’s future in terms of her subjectivity.15 What her children inherit, therefore, is both the plantation and the racial consciousness that sustains it. The narrative masterfully reinforces this insight as Judith, upon reenvisioning Ardeith, observes a slave-boat docking on the fringes of the plantation. “She could see the Negroes sunning themselves on deck. Each one had rings on his ankles and chains between. Several Negroes were poling the boat, and a white overseer walked among them. He carried a whip” (193). The image sends Judith running to prevent Philip from selling Angelique, apparently, in an act of compassion. Nevertheless, the initiative reads doubly as containment because Judith relocates and confines Anqelique to Ardeith’s borders. The economy of what Judith observes and what she does, therefore, adds a crucial political edge to her recommitment to Philip, and, by extension, a patriarchal establishment. It is gripping testimony of Bristow’s (via Judith’s) determination to perpetuate a system that fosters the authority of white women as it represses black subjectivity. The remainder of Deep Summer works toward both ends, setting the stage for the final, though perhaps too melodramatic, deathblow Judith deals Benny while moving Dolores’s story from peripheral to central status. Though Benny’s speculations about his paternity are never confirmed, the tension between his racial consciousness and the racial logic of the plantation system nevertheless distorts his self-image at an early age. “I’m —so—sick—of bein’—a nigger!” he laments to Judith, unable to retaliate when young Philip—the child Judith attempted to abort—abuses and humiliates him (216). With knowledge of who Benny is and assurance that he does not know his biological father, Judith’s initial sympathy for the child, manifested by her chastisement of young Philip for striking a slave, evolves into a more guarded response. “I’m sorry I can’t make you white, Benny,” she says finally (217).

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The irony of her response is that Judith conceivably can make Benny part “white” by acknowledging his paternity.16 In fact, Benny laments not that he isn’t “white” but that he is “too white to be a nigger.” As he rationalizes: “I’m whiter’n my mammy or my pappy. . . . My pappy he gimme a frailin’ when I say I’m too white to be his’n. But I’m a nigger and I’m too white to be a nigger,” he concludes. “It gives me a misery in the heart” (217). Benny seeks understanding of the biological, social, and cultural forces that define him. But because his genetic makeup threatens her existence, Judith’s response perpetuates the plantation’s racial psychology at Benny’s expense. “You’ll just have to get used to having a misery in the heart, Benny,” she resolutely concludes, “because nobody can take it away” (218). Years later, however, Judith discovers that Philip may be trying to lessen Benny’s misery by elevating him to the position of overseer of a newly purchased tract of sugar land (309). The telling symbolism in Philip’s initiative is that it gives Benny authority over part of Ardeith even if he cannot inherit the land. The depth of Philip’s concern for Benny’s welfare proves still more threatening when he refuses to sell Benny at David’s urging. “He’s making trouble [in the sugar fields],” David explains. “He’s started a lot of fool talk over there about how the Negroes do all the work and get nothing for it, and he’s making them discontented” (310). Yet Philip not only refuses to sell Benny, he also relocates Benny to a field where even less work is demanded of him (312).17 The combined e≠ect of Philip’s actions bears on Judith’s and Benny’s psychologies with Judith’s resentment toward Benny growing in proportion to Benny’s self-confidence. Indeed, Bristow limns Benny as a veritable Nat Turner in terms of the leadership he eventually demonstrates in galvanizing the slave revolt that culminates the novel. But when Judith shoots Benny, she annihilates the racial and biological threat he poses to her way of life. Thus, Judith’s murder of Benny, an event that might otherwise evince the tragic transgressions of the plantation order, succeeds only in purifying the system in accordance with Judith’s revision. The crippling political implications of Benny’s death only amplify in juxtaposition with the resolution Bristow brings to Dolores’s plight. Dolores functions pivotally in Deep Summer as the character who introduces white class di≠erence into the plantation economy. Though she lies with

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the express hopes of winning over Caleb’s love and becoming Silverwood’s mistress, Dolores’s deception embarrasses her husband when he learns that she was once a barmaid. The conflict that this discovery sets o≠ engages the implications of Dolores’s former status rather than her penchant for truth e≠acement. The irony, of course, is that Caleb is as aggressive in wooing Dolores as she is eager to impress him (87–97, 99), and everyone but Caleb reads her history skeptically before the truth is finally revealed (102–3, 105). As Philip quips: “it’s none of my business. But if that girl’s the daughter of a Spanish grandee I’m a water-moccasin” (106). But because she is not the daughter of a Spanish or any other grandee, Dolores’s legal authority as Caleb’s wife and symbolic status as mistress of Silverwood are taken to task in a manner that raises the same questions of perception, subjectivity, and empowerment that Judith contends with. “I did not think it was so awful,” Dolores begins, trying to explain to Caleb why she lied to him. “I did so want to be quality. Aunt Juanita beat me when she got drunk because she said I try to be too uppity. I had no place to go. I could not make a marriage with anybody except maybe some tipsy sailor that wanted a woman to cook for him. Then you came and it was so easy. You was believe [sic] everything I said” (111–12). The gap between Dolores’s personal aspirations and familial situation represents a struggle against environmental determinism that indexes how rapidly the social economy of the plantation has taken e≠ect. When Dolores meets Caleb, Ardeith and Silverwood are less than ten years old.18 But “po white trash” is already a thriving social idiom with which Dolores seeks to escape association. So she admits resorting to performances, which, she believes, correspond to the role of a plantation mistress. Like Judith, Dolores found this easy to do largely because of her husband’s encouragement. “I swore on the cross I would make you a good wife,” she begins again, pleading for Caleb’s acknowledgement if not approval, “and I did, didn’t I?” Unlike, Judith, however, Dolores pays the price of performance with recourse to an existence qualified by both gender and economics. “You liked me yesterday!” she accuses Caleb when status becomes his apparent issue. “I am the same as I was then!” But the loss of her husband’s support strips Dolores of any subjectivity in a plantation order. The impli-

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cations of this fact are, perhaps, nowhere better elucidated than in the language used to indict Dolores after she shoots Caleb. The woman Dolores Sheramy, having attempted murder on the person of her lawful husband Caleb Sheramy, after having induced him to marry her by means of representations false and deceitful, was hereby declared outcast from the king’s grace; and moreover, her criminal attempt on the life of her husband demonstrating her unfitness to be a guardian of the young, her rights over the o≠spring born to herself and the said Caleb Sheramy were declared void and the person of Roger Sheramy was consigned to his father that the said Roger Sheramy might be trained in the true religion of the Church of England and the proper conduct of a subject of the king. (127–28)

Before Dolores goes on trial, the narrative makes clear at least three facts related to her case. Caleb kidnaps Roger from Ardeith; Dolores goes to Silverwood to rescue her abducted son; and Dolores shoots Caleb in a struggle that ensues after he attacks her as she tries to leave Silverwood with Roger in her arms.19 If Dolores does not shoot Caleb accidentally, then she shoots him in defense of herself and her child. Nevertheless the language used to convict Dolores not only ignores these interpretations, it forges a triad of o≠enses that criminalizes every plane of her identity. Dolores’s only consolation is that she is not hanged or jailed and can, thus, pave a new path toward existence outside the plantation. Ironically, to do so she resorts to criminal measures, stealing loose change and valuables from Philip and Judith’s home before setting out for New Orleans.20 En route, the value of even limited subjectivity becomes painfully clear to Dolores. Even with money to pay her way, Dolores is denied transportation to the city because the boat doesn’t “give passage to ladies traveling alone” (135). A man assisting his wife into a carriage reminds Dolores of her depreciated status. “That was what you had to have,” she regrettably observes, “a male protector with you, or at least a couple of genteel-looking slaves, and if you didn’t have either you got nothing but trouble. The more you needed protection,” she deduces, “the more folks kicked you around” (135). The truth of her conjecture resounds when Dolores again seeks passage on what to her looks like a foreign vessel but is in fact a U.S. naval ship.

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“Can you take me to New Orleans?” she asks a soldier departing the plank of a ship from the “Free and Equal United States of America.” “No woman ain’t allowed up that there plank, lady,” he tells her, “but let’s you and me get over to the King’s Tavern or whatever they call it and we can get a drink.” (136)

The irony that we should not miss here is that cultural mores deprive Dolores of refuge despite the U.S. government’s encroaching dominion over the South. Her destitution makes Dolores the subject of slaves’ mockery as they uninhibitedly laugh at her when she trips on her skirt and falls trying to free herself from the American soldier’s clutches. Yet even in an “American” context, Dolores’s status would seem to make her fair game, as the soldier’s aggressive proposition and crude antics suggest. Helplessness is the only feeling Dolores can muster at the end of a long, unsuccessful day of begging for transportation; and it poignantly surfaces when she finally secures a resting place to reflect on where she’s come from and where she is: Vaguely, in disconnected pictures, she saw the manor at Silverwood and the long dinners of spiced meats and European wines and herself facing Caleb across the table, and she remembered the gardens of Ardeith and the fields of tobacco and indigo as she had seen them through the windows of the room where her baby was born, and her tiny little baby lying in the crook of her arm. But they seemed hazy, like some remembered pleasure of childhood, too remote to cause anything but a nostalgic pain. (140)

The materiality of Dolores’s memories overlays Philip’s vision and Judith’s early reflections on her wealth and possessions. The haziness of her thoughts symbolizes on one hand their mythical proportion and, on the other hand, her loss of intimate and valuable connections to this way of life. Dolores’s psychology corresponds with Judith’s state of mind upon learning of Philip’s a≠air yet makes their economic di≠erences glaring. Although Dolores has the same incentives for remaining linked to the plantation, indeed, has the same right to be connected because she and Caleb were legally married, she lacks the resources to make this possible. We are thus left with the impression that Dolores, like Benny, must su≠er the

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e≠ects of marginalized existence in a system that cannot, or will not, cultivate her status. Deftly, however, Bristow recovers Dolores’s story in a manner that not only validates her existence but also sets the pattern for redeeming her status in the plantation economy. Several years after a self-imposed exile from Silverwood and Ardeith, Dolores resumes contact with the Sheramys and the Larnes via her son, Gideon, who falls o≠ Philip and Judith’s carriage while trying to sell them fruit. “You know why I jumped up on your carriage?” Gideon asks as Philip assesses the injury. “No, why?” returns Philip. “Because I’m related to you, kind of,” he responds. Gideon’s antics lead Judith, Philip, and their children into Rattletrap Square, where they find Dolores caring for a daughter stricken with yellow fever. The trip gives Judith a racially coded consciousness of class injustice. “Did you notice all the people we saw down in that beastly district this morning were white?” she later asks Philip. “I didn’t know there was anything so awful in the world,” she continues in sympathetic wonder. “What did they ever do to deserve that?” (210–11). She gains greater insight into the human condition when the spread of yellow fever evinces nature’s leveling e≠ect across the plantation community. Shortly after the Larnes leave Rattletrap Square, young Philip, followed by a handful of Ardeith’s field slaves, succumbs to the disease, causing Judith to lament incredulously: “these things couldn’t happen to people who were clean and careful and took pains with their children” (221). Upon surveying the area, Christopher—Judith and Philip’s second son—learns that two of Silverwood’s house-servants as well as Gervaise’s husband have been a±icted. The disease doubles back to Ardeith and Silverwood where David and Roger fall ill but do not die. The indiscriminate assault of the fever hails Dolores back to Silverwood to care for Roger (166). While nursing her son, Dolores contracts and eventually succumbs to the fever, but she dies a martyr in Caleb’s eyes for the life she seems to infuse into Roger before her death (233–36). Years later, the merit of Dolores’s sacrifice tellingly resurfaces when Gideon, like his mother, stands trial for assault committed in self-defense. Without the money needed to secure competent representation, Gid-

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eon is wrongly convicted of murdering his wife’s abusive father and sentenced to death.21 Aware of her husband’s relation to Roger Sheramy, Esther goes to Silverwood seeking his assistance in freeing Gideon. The conflict that ensues between Esther and Roger’s wife Martha forebodes the governing tension in The Handsome Road that This Side of Glory resolves. But both the tension and the resolution of these texts are predicated on the crucial exchange that takes place between Judith and Roger as he tries to determine the truth of Esther’s testimony. “Aunt Judith, is Gideon Upjohn my brother?” he asks. “Yes,” Judith responds without equivocation (306). The a∞rmation Judith gives Dolores by acknowledging Roger’s maternity saves Gideon’s life. Equally important, it recovers Dolores’s biological connection to the plantation center in glaring contrast to the validation Judith does not give Benny as a child and the deathblow she deals him years later. In Defense of Poor White Trash The importance of Judith’s opposing influences at the end of Deep Summer becomes clear at the start of The Handsome Road where Bristow omits Benny’s name in Philip’s line of descent but identifies Ann and Corrie May as Dolores’s great-granddaughters. “You will remember that Dolores and Caleb Sheramy had one son Roger,” she writes, recounting Ann’s lineage. “Dolores and Thad Upjohn had a son, Gideon,” she concludes, recounting Corrie May’s lineage in kind (xv). Ann and Corrie May’s overlapping heritages set in motion the novel’s central conflict, marked by their related struggles to reconcile themselves to changes in the postwar South. Before the war, Ann and Corrie May’s conflicts remain internalized and are, for the most part, unrelated, though Ann’s status makes her a constant symbol of opposition to Corrie May. Corrie May wars against the economic inequity fueled by the plantation system while coveting its lifestyle. Ann wars against tradition and her lack of desire to live up to social expectations while profiting from her position in the plantation order. The war and its ending establish a complex reciprocity between the two women as their shifting personal struggles begin to influence one another’s lives directly. The bastardization of “blackness” in the opening of The Handsome Road extends into the body of the novel where race becomes a central signifier in Corrie May’s personal struggle. At the outset race, as an element of

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Corrie May’s existence, is tethered to her father’s random and abstract exhortations on the cultural economy of the South. “All fault of organization,” he announces to a sparse half-listening audience. “No evenness of distribution in this here country. State of Louisiana organized wrong. Whole South organized wrong” (7). Old Man Upjohn goes on to enumerate the economic gulf between white southern landowners and nonlandowners in terms of the region’s slave population. Four million nigger slaves in the South. And is you got a nigger, Gambrell? Is you got a nigger, Kelby? You mighty right you ain’t. Not a nigger for y’all to bless yourselves with. You know who owns all them niggers? Three hundred thousand people. In the whole South four million niggers and seven million white folks. And three hundred thousand people owning all them niggers. Ain’t right. Ain’t we all white as the next man? Ain’t we got business having niggers same as them swells out on the river road? (8)

Annoyed by her father’s pontificating while there is “work to be done,” Corrie May initially dismisses what he has to say, valuing more what she already has and will have when she marries Budge, rather than what her father says she could and should have by virtue of her race (8). His ranting resounds with biting clarity, however, when, in later conversation with her mother, Corrie May looks into a mirror and observes a kind of triple image of herself, herself at her mother’s age, and herself in contrast to Ann Sheramy, whom she earlier encounters in the park. Ann is part of the “picture of elegance” Corrie May admires while waiting on Budge to pay rent on the land he tenant-farms. “Sometimes a fellow had to stand there an hour or more” while “the sun was getting hot,” the narrator explains in justification of Corrie May’s dalliance. So Corrie May seeks momentary relief in the park “where ladies took the air on pleasant afternoons” (2). Ann arrives on the scene escorted by Denis Larne. In awesome wonder at her deportment, Corrie May marvels at how Ann sits feeding the birds sweet cakes with seemingly little regard for dirtying her “expensive clothes.” And she admires “what beautiful hands” Ann has: “long and white, with polished nails and not a shadow of dust under the edges” (3, 4). These images flash in blinding opposition to “the ruddy clarity” of her own skin and her mother’s “humped,” “lined,” and “weathered” features, which

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Corrie May fears inheriting if she follows in her mother’s domestic footsteps (10–11). Set against her father’s abstractions, these concrete physical observations enable Corrie May to sense that owning slaves a≠ords the South’s three hundred thousand slaveholders the luxury to maintain themselves as Ann so insouciantly seems to do. “The first sign of a man’s rise in the world,” Corrie May concludes, “was his buying himself a nigger” (11). This insight importantly jars Corrie May’s unconscious self-regard, causing her to wonder at the “infinitely stronger” forces that seemed to be “beating her back against a destiny planned for her ages ago. They were all forcing her to it,” she observes. “Her mother and father and Budge as surely as the great folk who owned the slaves” (12). In this frame of mind, Corrie May learns of her alleged relation to Ann and reflects further that if destiny had dealt her a di≠erent set of cultural circumstances, she, instead of Ann, “might have been . . . wearing hoopskirts and riding in a carriage” (12–13; see also 16). Corrie May’s observations are the first in a series of crucial awakenings she experiences, which demystify the broader cultural dynamics that define and determine her existence. Collectively they charge the plantation system with various o≠enses against economically disadvantaged whites. For example, when her brothers die felling trees on the Larnes’ swampy land, Corrie May recognizes Denis’s economic incentives for using poor white over slave labor and indicts the system for placing a higher premium on slaves’ lives (34–35). The grounds upon which Corrie May levels such assaults, however, facilitate not the interest of dismantling an unjust system, but her personal desire to “be somebody” within the system. As she unceremoniously asserts to Budge upon rejecting his hand in marriage, “I ain’t gonta have to work hard and mess around my whole life. I’m gonta be somebody, Budge Foster, you hear me? I’m gonta have somebody and have me some clothes to wear and have folks speak to me on the street” (37).22 At the same time, they make clear that the harder Corrie May endeavors to break into the system, the harder the system works to keep her out. “Rattletrap Square held her like a quicksand,” the narrator observes, penetrating Corrie May’s consciousness; “every day it seemed that another piece of her was buried in it” (66). In this regard, Corrie May critically recognizes

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her surroundings as extensions of the sociopolitical machine that drives plantation culture, protecting the interests of the economically advantaged at the expense of the larger impoverished white community. Bristow skillfully compounds this complex interchange between personal aspirations and sociocultural limitations by placing Corrie May at the site of her attraction and resistance. Corrie May’s employment as Ann’s seamstress gives the poor white southerner direct, though marginalized, insight into the workings of the plantation economy. This strategic positioning validates Corrie May’s intuited assaults against the system as she is able to confirm, for example, how “carefully” slave women at Ardeith are attended to during their pregnancies “because a little Negro was worth a hundred dollars the day it was born” (81). At the same time, Corrie May’s position magnifies the appeal of the lifestyle the plantation a≠ords its privileged white constituency. “Money was so wonderful,” she begins, evaluating the merits of the system. “It built a wall around you, shutting out fear and hunger and ugliness so completely that you even forgot they existed. Money let you be clean and dainty, it gave you grace and manner and charm of speech. It made people bow to you as if you favored them by being alive, instead of shoving past as if you cluttered up the street. It made you sweet tempered” (75). “Until she came to work at Ardeith,” the narrator observes in conclusion, Corrie May “had never dreamed how many pleasant traits of personality could be fostered with money” (75). Language assumes almost life-size dimension in Corrie May’s reflections, with all things valuable cast in proportion to the plantation (or Ardeith) and the plantation mistress (or Ann) and the beneficiary of neglect sketched in her own image. Though she will later come to terms with the limitations of money’s purchasing power, the impression left for the moment returns us to Corrie May’s earlier resolve. Even as she labors to achieve status in the system, the system keeps her down. The narrative repeats the vicious cycle of Corrie May’s psychosocial conditioning through a series of events that elevate her consciousness toward nearly self-destructive ends. Two years into the Civil War, for instance, Corrie May overhears a conversation at Ardeith in which she learns that slavery is a governing issue in

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the conflict. Specifically, she discovers that southern slaveholders are fighting in defense of slavery, or, as she comes to see it, in defense of “their right of exploitation.” As Corrie May reasons, if slavery ended, “Negroes and white folks would both have to work for wages and there’d be no more of this having to work in competition with slaves who worked for nothing” (120). Her theory is formulated not in defiance of slavery, but in defense of opportunities she imagines a free market society a≠ording her. “That was the way to be somebody,” she concludes, “make them give you the chance to earn your own right to walk up the handsome road and not be poor white trash” (120–21). This insight emboldens Corrie May not only to sever her ties to Ardeith, and, thus, her link in the plantation system, but also to rally Rattletrap Square’s constituents against the Confederate cause. “Stop it! All you folks! Stop this yelling and singing! Go on back and mind your business and leave this war alone,” she cries as if drawing rhetorical fuel from her father. “You know what this war’s about?” she queries. “I reckon you don’t because ain’t nobody told you. The Yankees want to come down here and turn the niggers loose. And suppose they do? Why should you care? You all ain’t got no niggers. Let them that’s got niggers fight to keep them! You po’ halfwits strutting in them fine uniforms—ain’t you grand! I could just bust laughing. Why ain’t you all got nerve enough to tell them to hell with their war?” (123). In this scene Corrie May stands before her peers, a virtual social reformer, championing a kind of counter cause to promote their better interests as much as her own. The unenlightened proletariat, however, read Corrie May’s platform as treason and attack her for renouncing the Confederacy (123–24). The impact of this assault doubles when, in conversation with the police o∞cer who rescues her and takes her home, Corrie May learns that rich men can buy their way out of the trenches. “The law says any man that owns twenty slaves or more is exempt from conscription,” he tells her (127). The profound influence of the plantation system begins again to bear upon Corrie May in a whirlwind of oppressive imagery. “The dingy room went swimming around her. Against the ugly walls she could see all in a whirl the silver doorknobs of Ardeith, the shining chandeliers, the marble mantels, the obsequious slaves, the columns behind the moss-hung oaks,

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and the triumphant faces of those patricians who in the moment of ordering a war to protect their luxury ordered also that they should not be required to wage it” (127). But the vision of an alternative social order restores Corrie May to health and maintains her in resolve. Upon recovering, she renews retaliation in the form of escape. “There ain’t no hope in this country for folks like you and me,” she tells Budge. “I’m getting out. I’m going across the river. Out West. Out where there ain’t no rich people owning everything and treating poor folks like cockroaches” (131). When Budge agrees to abandon his post and leave with Corrie May, we are invited to believe that the narrative will sustain Corrie May in retreat only momentarily. Indeed, almost from the outset, imagery, much like the river whose path Corrie May and Budge follow out of town, flows powerfully as if to deplete her trailblazing energy. “She was so tired!” the narrator observes. “Budge was trudging doggedly beside her, and she wondered if his legs felt as heavy as hers. . . . She concentrated all her mind upon the work of putting one foot in front of the other” (140). That Corrie May and Budge are eventually exposed only completes the cycle of progress and repression she experiences from nearly the beginning of her story. But Corrie May’s loss in this instance is more complexly sustained not only because she is put in jail, and thus deprived of even limited freedom, but also because Budge loses his life to her cause. The prolonged shift away from Corrie May’s struggle at this juncture in the narrative impresses upon us the weight of her defeat. But the shift also corresponds to the changing tides of the war and thus portends the nature of Corrie May’s survival. For the moment, however, this shift brings Ann’s personal conflict into sharper relief as the war ceases to be “glorious” and instead becomes “ghastly” and “sickening” (145). Like Corrie May, Ann experiences awakenings of consciousness-elevating importance. Unlike Corrie May, however, Ann’s insights come on abruptly in accord with the radical changes that the Civil War e≠ects in her life. “The war,” observes the narrator, had made Ann “feel lost and helpless. It had shown her an aspect of reality for which she had no preparation” (146). The war is to Ann what Philip’s infidelity was to Judith, because it jars, as it threatens, Ann’s consciousness of her existence in a flawed and now debilitating social order. As with the influence of Philip’s betrayal on

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Judith, the war returns Ann to the myth of Southern Womanhood as a means of self-preservation. By the time she reaches marrying age, the myth of Southern Womanhood is such a staple of southern culture that Ann can parody its performative elements. When Denis asks what the smelling salts in her pocket are used for, Ann honestly and playfully responds, “a stage-prop, Denis.” She goes on to disarm the romantic potential of the language he uses to describe her, saying “anybody can look enchanting by candlelight” (41). Before marrying Denis, Ann expresses her reservations about associating with an image that is as fixed and functional as the plantation mistress. “At Ardeith,” she complains to her brother, while mulling over Denis’s proposal, “Mrs. Denis Larne will be as much a symbol as a person” (45). Ann’s anxieties about becoming this symbol stem more from her doubts about the importance than the challenges of the role. She cannot comprehend, for example, why Denis’s mother finds it necessary to count the family’s silver every week and to supervise the slaves’ monthly rationing (45). After Denis and Ann marry, she feels the weight of the keys to the house an “uncomfortable burden at her waist.” She describes the transference ceremony as a “nuisance” and rather callously throws the keys to Napoleon, Ardeith’s “carefully trained” head servant, before retiring her first evening as mistress of the house (55). “I reckon you know more about where things are kept than I do,” she tells him. “Suppose you take these.” So insouciant is Ann’s regard for her responsibilities as Ardeith’s mistress that she heeds neither the shock nor the direction of Napoleon’s response. “You want me to carry the keys, Mrs. Denis?” he asks. “Yes, until she gets here,” Ann casually responds, thinking that Napoleon is referring to Denis’s mother. “Then give them to her” (65). Ann’s insouciance only magnifies when she determines that in marrying Denis she has willfully traded individuality and adventure for a fated existence (53, 91). “It was very comfortable,” she reflects, “but not, to tell the truth, very exciting, to be mistress of a great house. What was expected of you was so definite that you had very few decisions to make. Still,” she resolutely concludes, “it was good to know that if you followed a clear code you couldn’t possibly mess up your life, and wise persons accepted their destiny” (90). Much like Judith, Ann initially believes that in understand-

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ing “the archetype of the Southern lady” and consciously “living up to it,” her future is at once predictable and protected (91). Ann’s want of individuated agency is, thus, ironically tempered by a complex self-assuredness that in marrying Denis she has determined her destiny. She has, in her own words, “chosen . . . Ardeith and all it stood for, a life free of dissension and disorder, sure of itself and by its assurance given serene command over the emotions of the individuals who composed it” (90). It takes the crude visibility of war to demonstrate to Ann just how much of her self she sacrifices in choosing this fated existence. Ann, as much as the system that protects her, is a threat to national order. And she increasingly comprehends this reality with every southern defeat on the battlefield. Ann is, however, deprived of the support she needs to refortify her on the domestic front because she is compelled to maintain the façade of order Denis has known. This leaves Ann feeling “bitterly cheated”; but to “make the war more endurable” for her husband, she keeps up the “illusion of beauty and charm” he expects (147). That alcohol sustains Ann through the process signifies how little control she actually has. But she performs in grand style, hosting a gala as if “the war was the gallant adventure both she and Denis had thought it was going to be” and “mutilating her wedding dress” to fashion “the picture of the pampered darling” Denis desires (147, 149). The thought of what she sacrifices for Denis’s psychological well-being exacerbates Ann’s feelings of loneliness and distress upon his death. “I did so want to be married the way some people are,” she laments to his mother, “but all he ever wanted was for me to be a sweet little thing that amused him” (160). Ironically, however, this mindset motivates Ann to gather and store tangible evidence of Denis’s life at Ardeith. “All those heirlooms mean something,” she tells her mother-in-law, Frances, “I mean, don’t you see, they stand for what Denis would have given his children” (161). The tragic relief of the moment is that Denis’s mother comes to appreciate too late what Ann does not yet fully realize, that in preserving Denis’s heritage, Ann sustains her own legacy. Frances’s untimely death, on the heels of validating Ann, leaves Ann feeling yet more abandoned and afraid (164). However, the more isolated Ann feels (and literally becomes) at Ardeith the more Ann and Ardeith become as one. Upon the birth of her second

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child Ann experiences “something wonderful and miraculous” that casts a new light on “Denis’ world,” enabling her to see Ardeith apart from the wreckage that surrounds it. What Ann witnesses convinces her that “no matter what happened she somehow had to give that world back to her children” (165). In its focus on the future, this cathartic moment parallels Judith’s awakening on Ardeith’s banks, as Ann comes to value her place in the “legend her children must grow up in and renew” (168). This knowledge symbolically drives Ann back to the plantation determined to reinvent herself in the spirit of her ancestors for the sake of her descendants. “Heretofore,” the narrator explains, “she had thought lightly of tradition, but now that it was all she had left, she understood and thanked heaven for it” (168). For several years after the war, Ann pays the price, literally, for reinvesting in this tradition. The huge taxes on land and the sanctions placed on ginning cotton leave her scrounging for money to save Ardeith from seizure by the Reconstruction regime (214, 218). Ann pays still more with the loss of the unconscious privilege she enjoyed prior to the conflict. These losses feed into each other and overlay Corrie May’s postbellum struggles. Corrie May reenters Ann’s life when Ann goes to Gilday’s o∞ce to pay the final installment on Ardeith’s annual tax note. By the time the two meet again, Corrie May has become the veritable concubine of Gilday, Ardeith’s former overseer turned corrupt Reconstruction administrator.23 Their relationship is the love child of Corrie May’s resentment toward the system and her vow to make it work for her by any means necessary upon learning that even wealthy northerners could pay for exemption during the war. Corrie May pounces on the opportunity that consorting with Gilday a≠ords her. “I got an awful hankering after that shawl,” she tells him suggestively, accepting the first of several material gifts he coaxes her with. “So you’re beginning to get some sense,” he responds, as if closing a deal (194). Her bond with Gilday gives Corrie May unlimited access to what she covets most: money, and plenty of it, “to buy a sense of her own importance in the world, and . . . the knowledge that she was beautiful” (202). Toward this end, Corrie May allows Gilday to take “the balconied home of the Durhams” for her—a palace in Corrie May’s eyes—which she decks in wallpaper of red, purple, and gold with blue, gold, and pink patterns. She

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drapes the windows in red velveteen (200). And she drapes herself in “street-dresses made with long trains” (201). She hires servants, pays them handsomely, and bosses them royally. Standing before a mirror in her new home and wearing her new clothes, Corrie May believes that she has finally discovered herself because she is “more beautiful than Ann Sheramy had ever been” (203). Corrie May’s self-assurance quickly dissipates, however, during Ann’s brief stay in Gilday’s o∞ce. Corrie May perceives Ann’s disapproval of her comportment. “Ann’s eyes narrowed and the corner of her mouth curled in understanding contempt” (211). Corrie May attempts to return the glare but can only appreciate “the smoothness of Ann’s plain coi≠ure and the immaculacy of her dress” (212). This hardens Corrie May’s resolve to pay Ann back for the disapproval in her regard. Corrie May seizes the opportunity when Ann discovers that she has all but ten dollars of the money needed to pay Ardeith’s note. “Here it is,” Corrie May says, callously flicking Ann a ten-dollar bill. “I got plenty more where that came from.” Ann regards Corrie May again, this time with apparent humility. “Thank you,” she responds, “I’ll send it back to you.” The exchange concludes with Corrie May feeling not a sense of “unmarred triumph” but unmitigated regret. As the narrator poignantly puts it: “She could not rid herself of the wish that when for the first time she had had a chance to act like a great lady, she had had the grace to act like one” (216). The scene closes with Corrie May watching as Ardeith’s carriage descends out of sight while she departs in a carriage of her own. The image makes clear to Corrie May (and the double e≠ect makes clear to us) what she lacks. Despite all her material possessions, Corrie May cannot buy what she covets most: the “assurance,” “decency,” and “self-respect” of a plantation mistress. Corrie May’s earlier observation of Ann’s “air” seems to return at this moment (67). The women’s encounter also agitates Ann’s sensibilities, reminding her of how removed from the Old Order society has become. This knowledge taxes her commitment to preserving tradition. “She was tired of this whole battle to maintain decency and self-respect in a world where those qualities seemed to have no more existence.” At the same time, it forces her to regard Corrie May on more than a superficial level. “She [wondered] how

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Corrie May, who had always seemed like a nice little thing, could possibly have descended to her association with that wretched creature and [wondered] even more what she herself had ever done to merit the sneering condescension with which Corrie May had flung the money on the desk” (217–18). These thoughts violently resurface months later when Corrie May, pregnant and forlorn, seeks refuge at Ardeith while Ann is mourning the loss of her child. “I hope you starve to death,” Ann tells Corrie May, implicating her in Virginia’s death. An occasion that might otherwise present an opportunity for openness and understanding between two emotionally kindred spirits succeeds only in rea∞rming their opposing materialistic resolves. The narrative stages this tension through a kind of mirror e≠ect. “For an instant the two of them faced each other across the kitchen table,” observes the narrator. “Times have changed, and your way of doing things is gone,” Corrie May retorts. “You can tell me to starve to death but I ain’t got no notion of doing it” (243–44). The Handsome Road closes on Ann and Corrie May’s irresolute tension. But the last critical scene in the novel anticipates the resolution of their conflict in This Side of Glory. A black couple traveling along Ardeith’s handsome road encounters a nearly prostrate Corrie May. “Lawsy mussy, Liza! Dis here white girl—come see!” cries Fred (245). The two deliberate over whether Corrie May is drunk before discerning that she is pregnant. A dazed Corrie May beseeches them to take her home with them. “If I helped you around the house and all, couldn’t you make out like I wasn’t white folk?” she asks (246). Here Bristow appears to open the door to a class alliance that transcends race. It is the sort of union that could eliminate social injustice across racial and class lines in any order, but particularly in a plantation economy. This narrative potential evaporates, however, as quickly as it appears. “Sugar, you don’t want to stay wid me,” Liza assures Corrie May. “You’s white. You’s gonta have a white baby” (247). As if echoing Liza’s sentiments, Corrie May later recites a “black prayer”—“Please God, make my baby grow up to be a good man. Make him good as Fred and Liza”—and a “white prayer”—“And please God, let him grow up to be somebody! Let him have fine clothes to wear and have folks speak to him respectful on the street”—and thus e≠ectively restores the social function of a racial divide

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(249). God, or Bristow, answers both, bearing Corrie May a son, whom she names Fred and who goes on to realize the “typical American story.”24 As his daughter Eleanor explains to Kester in This Side of Glory, Fred Upjohn is “a self-made man, so proud of being able to give his children the chances he never had” (15). Foremost among these opportunities is an education; and Eleanor reaps the benefits in fairly distinguished style, securing an engineering degree from Barnard College, which she frequently “uses” as the secretary of her father’s contracting company.25 Fred’s company builds levees along the Mississippi as the South ushers in modernity. The Old in the New In This Side of Glory, modernity is quickly striding into southern life, producing little attendant sense of disorder in the community. The novel opens on an uncorseted Eleanor drafting letters on a typewriter and perusing su≠rage literature, as an indication of women’s progress in the roughly forty years since the end of Reconstruction (1–2). Technology is now leaving its mark in the phonographs, telephones, convertible automobiles, e∞cient plumbing, electric hair curlers, chartered planes, and ophthalmologists that populate the novel. Ragtime is in swing and the world is at war for the first time. These elements foreground the “quiet grandeur” of Ardeith, an air made apparent by the plantation’s “ubiquitous,” funereally cloaked “darkies,” most of whom, according to Kester, “were born on the plantation” (14, 48). Also present are Ardeith’s monogrammed co≠eepot and spiral staircase, both bearing marks of damage from the northern invasion; and family portraits, which grace the plantation’s walls and span some two hundred years in lineage. Glaringly absent in this juxtaposition of modern and premodern imagery are signs of racial progress. Indeed, the tension between levee and field laborers, or as Eleanor identifies them “levee Negroes” and “cotton Negroes,” at the outset, anticipates the reduction of black characters (and black character) sustained across This Side of Glory. “I know levee Negroes are a tough breed,” Eleanor tells Kester. “They don’t get along with cotton Negroes” (6). The description tellingly matches Philip’s remarks about “Congos” and “Ibos” in Deep Summer (103) and generally alleged distinctions drawn between “house” and “field” slaves. For the remainder of This Side of Glory, blacks figure marginally

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only as menial laborers or servants who provide comic relief. For example, Eleanor introduces her housekeeper to Kester by telling him the story of how Randa “devised [a] means of keeping her wealth to herself ” to prevent “some fortune-hunter” from trying to marry her after her husband is killed working on a levee and the government pays her compensation (16). She purchases a set of diamond studded teeth. Greater narrative energy is devoted to the intricacies of Eleanor and Kester’s relationship from their chance meeting outside her father’s o∞ce to their elaborate debates over business and history and intimate conversations about family. The details of their discussions make clear the novel’s governing theme: the reconciliation of the Old and New South white social orders. As Eleanor prosaically says to Kester: “You’re a Southerner . . . and I’m an American” (26). But the twain more than meet. They marry, and early in the novel. Though both Eleanor and Kester’s parents object to the union—“there’s something called background,” Kester’s father tells him— neither prevents them from marrying (27).26 “This isn’t the old days of the aristocracy and the trash!” Kester derisively chuckles (29). Kester’s mother even goes on to orient Eleanor into aristocratic society as though the “marriage was the consummation of her dreams” (41). The narrative tension thus revolves not around getting the two together, but around maintaining them as one. Toward this end, we find ourselves again on the home front with at least two critical distinctions: Eleanor has the option of working inside or outside the home and, unlike Ardeith’s prior mistresses, she is not of aristocratic heritage. She chooses the domestic sphere and thus repeats the pattern of conscious investment in the myth of Southern Womanhood as she pioneers “poor white” influence on the plantation. Like Judith and Ann before her, Eleanor originally invests in the myth as a dilettante. “I am doing nothing in the most delightful fashion,” she writes her father (48). “After dinner I get dressed . . . to be put on exhibit.” She goes on to deride the limning of the Durham ladies as “the Durham girls,” then reduces them to virtual relics of the Cause in her own analysis (49). While pregnant with Cornelia, Eleanor even lightly characterizes herself as “a flower of the Old South about to produce an heir” (57).

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The irony of the mockery Eleanor makes of the myth of Southern Womanhood is that the managerial savvy she brings to Ardeith animates the consciousness of the myth. As the narrator observes, “Eleanor kept the house with the exactness she liked, balancing her account books every week and doing the best she could to prevent Mamie from feeding her husband and children out of the Ardeith kitchen” (53).27 This telling narrative point anticipates the abrupt shift in Eleanor’s attitude toward her mythical existence when she discovers that Kester’s negligence has put the plantation at risk of foreclosure. She could see Ardeith all at once, the oaks and the palms and the house, the rows of cotton, the cabins and the Negroes. She saw Kester, and her baby who was going to come down the spiral staircase in a wedding veil. And strangely, she saw the print of the horseshoe [from Northern occupation] on the step of the stairs, and the dent in the silver co≠ee-pot, and Kester’s little knife with his name engraved on the handle because he was always losing things. (63) It seemed to Eleanor that this moment was like a blade that cut through her life, dividing all that lay ahead of it from all that lay behind. She stared at Kester through the minute of transition, seeing him with the clarity with which one sometimes sees through pain. She saw him as though for the first time, Kester who had been given everything and so had never been faced with the necessity of deserving anything. Blessed with an honored name, a great inheritance, compelling personal gifts. (64)

Kester’s actions—or in this case, inaction—repeats the cycle of patriarchal neglect (or abandonment) that opens the mistress’s eyes to herself in the plantation system and the material basis of her status. Eleanor thus comes to war against the system to maintain the system by which she has come to define herself. It is the same battle that Judith and Ann have fought before her and won. By the end of This Side of Glory, Eleanor is also victorious. But in addition to saving herself and Ardeith, Eleanor also revitalizes Kester’s centrality within the plantation economy, critically roping white southern men into the fold of Bristow’s aesthetic politics. At the outset Kester characterizes his relationship to the plantation. “I feel so much a part of it,” he tells Eleanor. The narrator echoes his sentiments, observing that Kester “belonged to Ardeith as essentially as the

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house or the oaks” (17). Though Eleanor acknowledges Kester’s devotion to the plantation, she does not appreciate the vital and consubstantial nature of his connection to the system. Eleanor reads Kester as “a link in an endless chain” of southerners she finds “pretty” but “anachronistic” (13, 24). His parents, whom Eleanor characterizes as an “exquisite” “porcelain pair,” give her “an impression of perfectly charming uselessness.” Indeed, to Eleanor, they appear “delicate, like relics that should be kept behind glass” (18, 24). Eleanor’s sentiments are informed largely by her belief that despite their “grace born of many self-assured generations,” Kester and his family are survivors of a defeated civilization too prideful to give evidence of or accept their loss (67). She admits feeling “superior to their canon,” because her cultural consciousness extends beyond the perimeters of the plantation. “Don’t you like to find out how people happen to be the way they are?” she asks Kester, probing his ideological sensibilities. “No, I can’t say that I do,” he replies. “They are the way they are, so what can I do about it?” (25). Kester’s response evidences the privilege of unconsciousness that perpetuates injustice in the plantation order. And Bristow appears to take his character to task for it through Eleanor’s reclamation of Ardeith. The process by which Eleanor reclaims the plantation, however, brutally disregards the contributions that Kester makes to the system: contributions that cannot be measured by the many dollars and cents Eleanor amasses as a planter. Eleanor’s hyperconsciousness of materiality dulls her emotional and spiritual sensibilities and thus alienates Kester from his home. It seems fitting, therefore, that to restore Eleanor to her complete “self ” as she restores Order (via Kester) to the plantation, Bristow revives the trope of infidelity. Doing so brings Bristow’s narrative strategy full circle when Isabel, the quintessential belle and the very woman with whom Kester has the a≠air, teaches Eleanor the myth of Southern Womanhood and the politics of performance. “Kester comes from a long line of heroes,” she begins, “no matter what the Larnes men were like, the women who loved them made them feel like heroes. What men call the charm of Southern girls . . . is simply that quality of giving a man faith in himself. We do it by instinct, all the time, even when we aren’t trying to, but give one of us a man she really loves and she

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can make him anything she pleases, and do you know how we do it?” she asks. “We do it by praising him for the qualities we want him to have” (242). Isabel’s precepts remain with Eleanor beyond the su≠ering she and Kester endure after Cornelia’s eye is injured. But the e≠ects of her teachings are measured before this, perhaps, too melodramatic event completely unfolds. Revaluing their collective potential, Eleanor observes that “the di≠erence between her power and [Kester’s] was that between the strength to make an onslaught and that required to withstand a siege. She began to understand how ignorant she had been when she assumed that only the aggressors were of much value in the world, and she began also to know how it was that for all their mannerisms Kester’s people had survived and maintained their way of life through many hazardous years” (262). Eleanor’s revised psychology draws upon history to a∞rm Kester’s as well as her place in modern southern society. It fulfills Bristow’s vision of the Old in the New South by recovering women’s and poor white’s contribution to the region’s social formation while resuscitating the role of the patriarch. At the same time, it perpetuates the pattern of “black” elimination and omission that began with Benny’s murder in Deep Summer and disinheritance in The Handsome Road. The New South paradigm Bristow outlines in her novel series The Plantation Trilogy elaborates the social, political, and cultural benefits that indiscriminately accrued to white southern women as a result of her (re)investment in the myth of Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology in her writing. In the next chapter, I direct attention to the visions of modernity Caroline Gordon maps in her novels of southern history Penhally, None Shall Look Back, and The Garden of Adonis. My examination of Gordon’s aesthetic politics continues the challenge that this chapter has issued to critical accounts of white southern women’s interaction with the temperament that shaped Bristow’s mythic consciousness throughout the 1930s. As I pointed out in presenting the case of Julia Peterkin, this temperament resonates today. Thus, the need to reclaim a space for Peterkin’s neglected novels applies equally to the cultural work Bristow achieved with her writing.

j4J S H E ’ L L TA K E H E R STA N D

Caroline Gordon I cannot remember that Chingachgook ever did anything useful, either in camp or on the war path. But when I summon up The Last of the Mohicans, a fondness for the old fellow that I was hardly aware of during the days of our close companionship steals over me. —Caroline Gordon, “A Visit to the Grove”

“A Visit to the Grove” (1972) is one of several autobiographical essays Gordon wrote toward the latter part of her literary career, in which she elaborates on the interrelations among her childhood, maturation, and craftsmanship. At the outset of this essay, Gordon draws from Samuel Coleridge’s definition of fancy as a “mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space” with “no other counters to play with but fixities and definites” to deduce that the merit of fancy, or imagination, is its creative potential. Though the imagination cannot destroy or erase what was, it can remember and reorder what was and, consequently, reorient present and future perceptions of the past. Gordon does this herself by moving the role of Chingachgook, one of the characters she reluctantly played in games with her brothers and mostly male cousins throughout her childhood, from passive to active status. “I cannot remember that Chingachgook ever did anything useful, either in camp or on the war path,” she concedes in the passage that opens this chapter. Gordon’s admiration of Chingachgook is driven by the mystical nature of his character, which she perceives only in later life. Recalling scenes in which The Last of the Mohicans’s central characters are “gathered about a flickering campfire in the trackless wilderness,” preparing to eat, Gordon reasons that over the course of the novel, Hawkeye and Uncas remain in an uneasy battle to assert authority over nature (and perhaps over one another). Chingachgook, on the other hand, always stands “a little way o≠ so that in the shadows his body is hardly visible”; without altering or uttering a word, she concludes, he critically absorbs the moment and thus is best equipped in the end to 108

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reproduce the scene for future generations (“Visit” 517–18). This strategic renegotiation of the merit of marginalized or shadowed subjectivity in the case of Chigachgook critically recalls and reconfigures the space that Gordon’s mother occupies in her memory in another of Gordon’s widely referenced late essays “Always Summer” (1972). In this chapter I explore the place of memory and marginality in the fabric of these essays as well as Gordon’s early novels of southern history: Penhally (1931), None Shall Look Back (1937), and The Garden of Adonis (1937). I develop the notion of feminist conservatism that I introduced in the last chapter to amplify critical insight into the shape that Gordon’s mythic consciousness took throughout the 1930s as the South’s social and racial economies modernized. A Modern Mistress Whereas Gordon’s life, from her distinguished ancestry to her careers as journalist, academic, and writer, has been widely documented and theorized, Gordon’s critique of southern history and ideologies within determinants of her cultural identity has only recently been interrogated.1 As I noted in chapter 1, Katherine Hemple Prown points up the materialist implications of Gordon’s views on southern “racial, sexual, and class-based hierarchies,” but in so doing casts Gordon in much the same light as Bristow’s unwitting Creole, Gervaise Purcell—a victim, more or less, of (white) male-determined cultural circumstances rather than an agent of objectionable racial and class ethics. In accounting for Gordon’s identity politics, Prown appears to follow in the suspect footsteps of Sally Wood who, in her 1984 introduction to The Southern Mandarins, ironically underwrites Gordon’s racial conservatism by asserting that Gordon’s views on blacks were “dated” because she was “a woman of her time and place.” Wood’s problematic assertion not only excuses a tolerance of racism but oversimplifies the South’s racial climate. Wood proposes that Gordon “largely shared the southern notions about blacks that were prevalent in the first half of [the twentieth] century. While Gordon felt responsible for all of the blacks in the county, she looked on them as recalcitrant children. Yet she trusted them, enjoyed their society, and recognized di≠erences among them in talent and intelligence.” Wood claims further that while “we can repudiate some of [Gordon’s] views from the vantage point of the late

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twentieth century,” it is not “proper to pretend that Caroline Gordon was more advanced in her thinking about race than most of her contemporaries” (xx, my emphases). Like Wood, Prown admits finding it “hardly unusual, given [Gordon’s] age and . . . background, that racist themes should appear in both her fiction and her letters” (81). In truth, southern conservative opinions of blacks in the first half of the twentieth century were far less stock and stable than either Wood or Prown implies. In letters to Wood, Gordon objects to the “radical” intervention of “northern agitators” into the a≠airs of southern planters, registering her familiarity with e≠orts by black and white southern small farmers, tenants, and wage laborers to unionize with the assistance of northern labor organizers, so as to challenge the increasing power of white planters over post-Reconstruction southern politics and economic policies (Wood 169–70, 183). The first three decades of the twentieth century saw the acceleration of mass black migrations from the South to northern and midwestern urban centers, the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the flowering of black cultural nationalism, and a host of several, if short-lived and unsuccessful, movements by black and white southern farm and industrial laborers to counter the deep socioeconomic problems plaguing the South. Conservative responses to these and similar developments reanimated late-nineteenth-century tactics in an attempt to arrest the social and political progress of blacks in the South and the nation at large: lynchings, stake-burnings, and (white) race riots broke out in North and South Carolina, Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi; the U.S. Congress as well as southern state legislatures passed laws sanctioning white discrimination and black disfranchisement; and southern judicial systems consistently failed to provide black Americans with adequate representation and protection under the law, even in the most egregious cases of false arrest and imprisonment (Grantham, Owsley). Wood and Prown’s assessments of Gordon’s conservatism do not account for—do not even acknowledge— what these phenomena signify; that is, that whites perceived blacks as progressive, as resistant, as threatening, and as oppressed. To my mind the most telling insight into Gordon’s feminist conservatism is the fact that she (twice) married Allen Tate, who, only five years


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after their first marriage—allegedly of convenience because Gordon was pregnant—went on to play a major role in the Agrarian Movement.2 Tate’s connection to Gordon nullified critical belief that the chief players in the movement were mere “poets and intellectuals pretending to be farmers” (Fain and Young xvi). Gordon herself conceded that “Allen and John Ransom and Don Davidson would make damn poor field workers” (Wood 25). But she seems to have convinced herself that her need to “finger the soil” (141) and be one with the land validated the principles by which “the agrarian brethren” formulated their “doctrine” (185) for their own and future generations of white southern aristocrats. Tate’s impression of his wife’s writing seems to have sustained her in this belief. As he maintained as late as 1957: “The sense of place” in Gordon’s work “is more powerful . . . than in any other Southern writer” (Fain and Young 390). And this “sense of place” thematically fuses with the agrarian ideology in Gordon’s early novels of southern history. Penhally echoes the sentiment that a culture without “a proper respect and proper regard for the soil” (I’ll Take My Stand 203) lacks health and stability. None Shall Look Back reminds the South that “the things for which it stood were reasonable and sound,” and “that its condemnation at the hands of the North has been contemptible” (I’ll Take My Stand 67). And The Garden of Adonis maintains that industrialism is not manifest destiny, by valorizing the modern southern planter’s “inherited way of life” (I’ll Take My Stand 207). More than “sympathetic” to the agrarian cause, therefore, Gordon, like her agrarian brethren, took a stand in her writing, naturalizing antebellum southern social orders and a∞rming her investment in them as a privileged white southern woman. In many of Gordon’s letters to Wood, Gordon reflects resolutely, even egoistically, on her multiple connections to nature and the land. “I’m not at all an urban person,” Gordon explains, “I love to have space around me, and I love to dig in the dirt and walk in the woods” (Wood 22). She characterizes the mound that Benfolly (Tate and Gordon’s plantation in Tennessee) is built on as “a high, healthful plateau” (56) and “probably the most beautiful hill in the world. . . . I take a walk around the house before breakfast,” she muses, “and get all the sensations and highly virtuous feelings of one who takes a cold bath every morning” (60). Surveying the foreground of the estate, Gordon points to a “hill opposite” a nearby filling sta-

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tion that is “especially beautiful. The reds and yellows are set o≠ by the very dark green cedars” (64), she observes; “I hadn’t realized before how lovely those cedars are” (64). She writes of seasonal transitions in terms of blooming jonquils and lemon lilies, emerging willow leaves, and her outof-doors activities. “We are going to have a garden in the spring,” she declares (19). “Meantime I am getting in training by sawing wood” (19). Of her garden she later proudly writes: “We have peas and cabbages and lettuce and squash planted. And I have tomato slips growing in the house” (74). Gordon’s tranquil engagement with the land in these and other letters starkly contrasts her apparent frustration and anxiety when commenting on her domestic responsibilities. In one letter, she adamantly declares: “I hate the thought of housekeeping” (11). Not just because she prefers “dirt to dishes” (28) but because, as she sees it, domestic industry stifles her creativity. “I love to sew,” Gordon maintains, “but you can’t sew very well and have any kind of prose style” (116). The same held true of entertaining the Tates’ constant flow of houseguests. “Our dear friend Red Warren descended on us this summer with his fiancee and here they stayed for six weeks” she writes. “I, of course, got nothing done” (33). Even preparing meals and supporting her husband through his creative travails apparently stunted Gordon’s productivity. “I had to drop my work for a whole month to help Allen” (46) complete his history of Je≠erson Davis, she complains. “If it hadn’t been for . . . Je≠erson Davis” she concludes, “I would have gotten a lot of work done” (47). Historically, critics have sympathetically referenced Gordon’s commentary on her domestic arrangements to characterize her as prolific.3 “I would say,” begins Lytle in his foreword to Wood’s Southern Mandarins, “that the most moving e≠ect of this book . . . is its display of the strain, the sacrifices, at times the sorrows Caroline Gordon undergoes in keeping faith with her work . . .” (2). “A woman who writes either fiction or verse, particularly if she is married,” he concludes, “has problems a man doesn’t have. Keeping a house makes daily demands. If she has a child, her responsibilities obviously increase. Neglect of her work or child can make her wretched, and the demands of each usually conflict” (5). As further evidence of the weight under which she labored, Lytle alludes to Gordon and


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Tate’s alleged perpetual financial strife. “Caroline Gordon’s apprentice years were passed during the Great Depression,” he explains, “and this lasted some eleven years. It was a time of short rations for many, and the artists su≠ered. At times the Tates were out of food. Making a living was chancy and hard,” he concludes, “but they did it” (5). Wood echoes this sentiment in her prologue, maintaining that Gordon developed into a professional writer “in the midst of poverty” (12). It is striking that none of the many critics who use Gordon’s personal testimony to characterize her domestic and economic arrangements recognizes Gordon’s near-constant maintenance of hired help between 1930 and 1945 as a contradiction of sorts. Scholars have, in other words, accepted Gordon’s claim to have been creatively incapacitated by “scullery work” (52) and driven at times not to eat for lack of money without questioning why throughout the Depression she and Tate lived as if they were in fact antebellum subjects—the “mistress of the plantation” and the “southern gentleman” (15), as Wood characterizes them. In this regard, the picture of Gordon’s domestic situation in letters to Wood is unambiguous. For nearly the first two and a half years of Nancy’s life, Gordon left her daughter in the care of other women at Benfolly and Merry Mont while she and Tate lived in New York or Europe.4 When Nancy finally joined them abroad and Tate expressed a desire to move from France to England, Gordon complained that if they moved, she would not be able to a≠ord a nurse. “We are, as usual,” she explains to Wood, “somewhat short of money” (40). Less than six months later, however, she writes of “a grand little maid,” she’s secured “for five hundred francs a month who takes complete charge of the house and keeps Nancy out in the gardens at least five hours a day” (46). As if justifying the expense, Gordon poetically theorizes: “you must have plenty of servants to abandon yourself to your emotions” (52). When Gordon and Tate moved to Paris in 1932, they again left Nancy in the care of other women at home. Again they employed a housekeeper, despite having to take out a loan to meet their rent. “I am so anxious to get my debts paid,” Gordon insists (125). Yet a few days later she reports that she and Tate have decided to “splurge” at the Cochon au Lait on Christmas Eve. “With Nancy o≠ my mind,” she concedes, “Christmas seems very simple to me” (126). Though she insists that she “must go and see about that

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child” (128) and maintains that she will never “put the ocean between” Nancy and her again (132), Gordon nevertheless wonders how she would “have done any work” if she’d had her daughter along (168). In managing her domestic responsibilities abroad, including providing for her child’s physiological and emotional needs, Gordon perpetuates the elitist and racist assumptions of plantation culture, wherein slave women were expected to care for their mistresses’ children. The same rules apply back at Benfolly, where, in describing the blooming irises, roses, zinnias, and nasturtiums and other “lower orders of creation”—her cows, cats, chickens, and their newborns—Gordon deduces that “all is very fecund” (164). By contrast, she reports that she is half out of her mind. “I might have some chance of pulling out of this hole of poverty,” she explains, “if only I could get [Aleck Maury, Sportsman] finished. But the business of cooking three meals a day, churning and so on is too much for me. I am so exhausted by afternoon that I have to get in bed and stay for hours and I can’t think of a word to write. I am starting o≠ fresh tomorrow with a little gal,” she notes, “a friend of Beatrice’s whom I picked out of a tobacco field. She is sweet and willing . . . and makes right decent biscuits” (164). Beatrice, according to Wood, was Gordon’s favorite housekeeper. Gordon herself speaks a≠ectionately of this woman who began working for the Tates as early as 1930. She writes with alarm and compassion of the evening she and several of the Tates’ friends returned to Benfolly “to find Beatrice hopelessly drunk. Yes,” she paternalistically concedes, anticipating Wood’s response, “it was a blow to me too. I couldn’t have been more shocked if I had found your mother sprawling in a gutter” (72–73). About a year later, Gordon’s prized helper confounded her yet again by walking o≠ the job. “I was never so shocked in my life,” admits Gordon, “I am still puzzling over her sudden defection. Niggers are unfathomable,” she observes, “but I wouldn’t have thought Beatrice would do that.” A bedridden Gordon unwittingly reveals the apparently overwrought and underpaid worker’s motive for leaving when, in conclusion, she writes: “I was going to let her go, anyway, once I got up—not being able to pay her any longer—but I intended to keep her till I was out of bed” (97). As Gordon’s


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reference to the abdicator’s tobacco field–working friend makes clear, however, to her mind there were plenty more laborers available to pick up where Beatrice leaves o≠. In addition to a housekeeper, the Tates employed an “able colored henchman” (57), a “remarkable milker, a negro schoolteacher” with whom Tate had long talks (86), and a female servant who, in addition to assisting with cooking and cleaning, entertained Nancy while Gordon wrote. “She is a gem,” Gordon observed of this woman, “young and strong and good natured and old fashioned. I find myself thinking I own her. She really is more like slavery time niggers than any of the modern variety” (156).5 Gordon’s reflections on the poor whites who tenant-farmed at Benfolly similarly resonate with antebellum class sensibility. Of Jesse and Florence Rye, the Tates’ first tenants, she writes: “They speak beautiful archaic English and steal everything they can lay their hands on. . . . They do not seem to be composed of flesh and blood. . . . It is an infringement of the [tenancy] system to ever give them anything, but they really don’t have enough to eat, so I said to myself Be damned with the system!” (75). The body of Gordon’s writing as well as her critical exposure flourished within the highs and lows of her modern antebellum domestic situation. As Gordon implied, the seemingly overwhelming family responsibilities at Benfolly, such as “niggers to get out of jail” and “turkeys to run” (144), actually stimulated and enriched her imagination. As Gordon saw it, when she was unable to write at home there were still other things she could do. “Sheep. My God. They begin to lamb in February, the coldest, wettest spell usually. Chickens. Stirring up the niggers if all else fails” (139). Even interacting with the white tenants at home provided Gordon creative fodder. “I have the subject of my next book,” she writes to Wood, on the heels of a heated exchange with Jesse. She then summarizes the plot of The Garden of Adonis, which was published six years later. For Gordon, therefore, writing, farming, and patronizing blacks and poor whites seem to have been related, fulfilling activities. The correspondences between Gordon’s professional development and agrarian lifestyle, which sustained her throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s, provide the narrative frameworks for Penhally, None Shall Look Back, and The Garden of Adonis.

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The Central (Female) Intelligence Juxtaposed and di≠erentiated domestic and war scenes in Penhally and None Shall Look Back engage (and thus acknowledge) the range of southern class, gender, and racial consciousness brought about by the Civil War. The Garden of Adonis retrieves and represses these perspectives through gender-enabling and racial and class-proscribing narrative codes. Across the three novels, Gordon increasingly penetrates the consciousness of white female characters and thus permits the reader to see aristocratic white southern women and their descendants evolve against and within shifting cultural contexts and constraints. Conversely, she progressively blocks black and poor white characters’ access to agency and, thus, sanctions a politics of feminist conservatism rooted in black racial and poor white class proscription in modern southern culture. The primary device through which Gordon mobilizes this agenda is the central intelligence, which Gordon characterized as “closer to the happenings” of the text “than other narrators” but “not subject to the limitation of other narrators” (How to Read a Novel 120). The central intelligence is as immediate as the first-person point of view, yet possesses a “more sophisticated” and “more acute” intellect (106). Like the e≠aced narrator, the central intelligence can “slip inside” a character: “see with her eyes, hear with her ears” (108). Unlike the central intelligence, however, the e≠aced narrator cannot view scenes at a distance. The central intelligence shares this capacity—the ability to see present and know past events—in common with the omniscient narrator. “There is nowhere,” in other words, that the central intelligence, “cannot go.” Yet the central intelligence is a perspective more “agile” than the omniscient point of view, excelling, “in both the ‘scenic’ and the ‘panoramic’ e≠ects” (83). The advantage of this perspective, Gordon concludes, is that the central intelligence “doubles the vision,” focalizing events through “two pairs of eyes” (129)—the reader’s and the central intelligence’s. The e≠ect is consubstantiating. The reader “steps inside the charmed circle of the writer’s (via the central intelligence’s) imagination” and, abandoning her “own opinions and predilections,” peers “steadily and attentively into” the central intelligence’s eyes seeing life— “the human scene,” as Gordon defines it—as the central intelligence sees it


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(128–29). Strictly adhered to, the e≠ect is also disarming because it denies the reader a critical perspective on the creative process and its corresponding impact on the scene and the reader. What the reader is left with in the end, in other words, is an inscrutable impression of life, the achievement of the goal of the novel, as Gordon—as well as Tate, Ransom, Warren, and, later, Louis Rubin—proposed,6 or what as has been more broadly theorized as “art for art’s sake.” The irony here is that Gordon herself admits that “the work of art, once it is created, has an existence separate from that of its author”; thus its reception can and, in some cases, necessarily does violate the author’s intention (How to Read a Novel 20). As in her late essays “Always Summer” and “A Visit to the Grove,” Gordon’s use of the central intelligence critically empowers her politics, enabling her both to see the influence of and to rea∞rm the merit of conservative southern traditions, values, and beliefs in her own life. Gordon’s creative approach to the past in “Always Summer” and “A Visit to the Grove” is calculated at any cost to privilege and sustain her family’s —and, by extension, her own—connection to the land. Her focus on marginalized space and female kin in “Always Summer” and penetration of her grandmother’s consciousness in “A Visit to the Grove” buttress this agenda. Southern women are at once the source and the substance of Gordon’s link to the past. Though both essays are written in the first person, Gordon’s staging of events systematically operates like the central intelligence, negotiating time and space to create a sense of continuous action among scenes and between characters in each work. The e≠ect is both visually and narratively rhetorical: readers receive a mosaic of Gordon’s life while Gordon, like the lens of a moving camera, zooms in on and out of her past, arriving finally at a more profound awareness and appreciation of herself as an aristocratic white southern woman. “When I think of those days,” Gordon begins, nostalgically signifying on the title of the first essay, “it is always summer.” So tangible is the memory of waking every morning as a child to “the rising bell,” which “Georgella, the cook’s little daughter,” rings at Merry Mont that, upon rising decades later in Paris, Gordon behaves momentarily as if she is back on her grandmother’s plantation. The power of the memory and the security it provides

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lead Gordon to question: “What did I find [at Merry Mont] so worth having that even the memory of it could make me strangle a sob as I turned back into the alien room, as if from a glimpse of a joy half risen but so wild that it transcended any joy that any future might ever hold?” (“Always Summer” 430–31). Subsequent reflections on Merry Mont’s social economy throughout her early childhood answer these queries. Gordon remembers fondly her youngest aunt, Margaret Douglas. “When I think of her,” observes Gordon, “she is always in motion. . . . There was about her in those days an aura of excitement. We children so relished it that we used to sometimes go and sit down at a little distance from where she was and observe her movements . . . as silently as if we had been at play. . . . At the time,” she continues, her aunt Mag “had a role in life and she played it beautifully.” She was “not a beauty but she was a belle.” And her interaction with the “great many” suitors who came courting at Merry Mont, told “a story,” rendered “a dramatic spectacle” that was, for Gordon, enrapturing (436). With similar reverence Gordon conjures an image of Aunt Frances, a family nurse, “standing in front of the house at Merry Mont, holding a baby in a long lace-trimmed dress on her arm. There is a kindly smile on her face,” Gordon muses, “for the persons who are admiring the baby. She had great tolerance for people who admired babies” (439). These women, whom Gordon as a child looked up to reverently for their courage, their activities, and their deference, appear to her in later life less enrapturing and noble. She recalls that by their middle to late years mothering had left Aunt Mag and Aunt Frances jaded, dispirited, and una≠ectionate. She fixes upon an image of her mother, sitting “always in the shadows” while the rest of the family gathered around the dinner table, and wonders whether her mother was “ever [really] present.” She reflects upon her “Aunt Cal,” a pioneer among the “new women” of the South, who in her youth “had been given to good works” and, in her later years, had founded the United Daughters of the Confederacy (444). At Merry Mont, Aunt Cal “was a figure of fun,” Gordon remembers, because no one took her seriously. “I, who, today, would relish her conversation as much as that of anybody living,” she concludes, “can recall having exchanged only a few words with her in the course of my life” (445). The reality of lost images of black


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female servitude and white southern womanhood as well as missed opportunities to engage with a conservative southern woman activist leads Gordon to conclude at the end of “Always Summer” that memory is at once a precious and oppressive resource. As previously observed, “A Visit to the Grove” opens with the same thought. But upon reassessing the value of marginality in relation to her own subjectivity as well as her mother’s, Gordon goes on to conclude her remembrances by reentering the woods beyond Merry Mont estate. Recalling that she found her grandmother’s home dark and menacing as a child, she now recognizes it as the repository of the bits and pieces of her family tree, which she excavates and reconstructs. From a distance she focuses intensely on Woodstock (her great grandmother’s estate) and conjures some of the same figures from the past remembered in “Always Summer.” By contrast in “A Visit to the Grove,” Gordon remembers these figures in mythic proportions. “Little May,” she recalls, “was an acknowledged beauty and belle and had more suitors than she could count.” “Cousin Mag” (formerly identified as Aunt Mag) was equally “handsome, amiable, and kind.” Drawing from the economy of southern nostalgia, Gordon observes that “Every summer,” Mag “sat in the afternoons on the long veranda that ran along one whole side of the house and greeted every visitor with the same cordiality” (“Visit” 525). Gordon remembers everyone holding Aunt Emily, the primary child-care provider at Woodstock, in high esteem, like Aunt Frances in “Always Summer.” Indeed, Gordon concedes that “she’d rather talk with Aunt Emily [today] than with any other long-dead member” (526) of her family. Gordon’s longing for past-centered knowledge, as signified by her expressed desire to speak with Aunt Emily and Aunt Cal, seems motivated by a desire to resuscitate (or retain) stock material elements of antebellum societies (“mammy” and the Confederate “daughter”).7 Gordon’s fascination with antebellum imagery and ideology is further evidenced in the lore that builds around other influential past figures and events. She recalls, for example, her grandmother’s peculiar way of “driving past the Woodstock house” and waiting until she reached “the last of the great forest oaks” on the outskirts of the estate before stopping to take in the scene. Remembering this behavior, Gordon remembers what her

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grandmother observed upon looking back. The impression of the house “on a rise, with its white-porticoed entrance turned away from the highway, as was the custom in those days” (529), seems mystically to transport Gordon back in time, carrying her from Woodstock’s settlement through the “Battle of Sacramento.” Gordon’s travels with her grandmother enable her to penetrate still deeper into her family’s history. “When we came to the wide, flat rock, which marked the line between Kentucky and Tennessee,” she observes, “my grandmother . . . would sit a long time, gazing out over a landscape which to me was hardly visible” (532). Retracing this path, Gordon now remembers that from this angle her grandmother “could survey the wide valley which her grandfather’s father [and his companion] . . . had looked down upon when they first rode . . . out to Virginia . . . looking for . . . land which would grow the kind of tobacco their forefathers had grown, first in Tidewater Virginia and later in the Piedmont” (532–33).8 Upon returning to the Woodstock and Merry Mont of her youth, Gordon claims that these remembered journeys with her grandmother equip her to see things she had never seen before (538). She begins reenvisioning the land about her in terms of its original white inhabitants. She deliberately avoids contemplating the implications of change and modern developments when she arrives at the clapboarded over log schoolhouse where her father used to teach, now inhabited by white tenants (543). Instead, Gordon reflects on “the meeting of the ideal and the real, the conflict . . . between human imagination and human reason,” as signified through her remembrances of the past (545). Gordon concedes that resolving this conflict has required tremendous self-discipline. “Early in life,” she admits, she “began forming those habits which today constitute so large a part of my professional equipment: the habit of a certain kind of observation. . . . I withdraw my gaze,” she explains, “from the house where I was born, past the houses built by my forefathers, past the groves which it was their habit to preserve on their lands in the hope that their children might make their homes in this same wide valley” (550–51). Shifts between impressionistic and self-reflexive writing in “Always Summer” had exposed inconsistencies between Gordon’s past and present consciousness of self, family, and culture like Julia Peterkin’s pre- and postconsciousness of black subjectivity


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and white female authority upon taking charge of Lang Syne. But “A Visit to the Grove” reconciles these ideological rifts by identifying and rea∞rming the mainstays of Gordon’s conservative upbringing. The politics of Gordon’s aesthetic negotiations in her late essays corresponds with the governing techniques and rhetoric of Penhally, None Shall Look Back, and The Garden of Adonis, in which domestic and battle scenes collaboratively recreate the Civil War’s impact on the southern aristocracy. The novels’ rhetorical foundations are set forth as both the war and its aftermath, in the process of changing the lives of female characters, increasingly fortifies their resilience and will to preserve the Old Order, despite the South’s defeat. Penhally, None Shall Look Back, and The Garden of Adonis, like Gordon’s World War II novel, The Women on the Porch (1944), can thus be read as Gordon’s invocation of a conservative racial and class politics alongside the authority she attributes to—and inherits from—her female lineage, particularly her Aunt Cal, founder of the Daughters of the Confederacy. Recalling Gwen Bristow’s narrative negotiation near the end of This Side of Glory, it must be duly noted that Gordon’s increased privileging of aristocratic white southern women’s consciousness in her novels is not designed to diminish the aristocratic white southern male gaze. Without having occupied the male perspective, Gordon could not have recreated with such detail and accuracy the war scenes that critically foreground domestic action in Penhally and None Shall Look Back. By extension, she could not have su∞ciently captured the postwar psychology mobilizing the theme of feminine desire and self-fulfillment in The Garden of Adonis. Thus, despite the failures of the male imagination pointed up in “A Visit to the Grove,” Gordon nonetheless appreciated its indispensability in staging and sustaining each novel’s dramatic economy.9 Material Links to the Past This narrative engineering is evidenced at the outset of Penhally, whose plot initially hinges almost exclusively on Nicholas Llewellyn’s thoughts and actions. Mentally and physically preoccupied with the land, Nicholas walks about the estate querying “What had become of that good old custom of sending sons of the family to the field occasionally?” Romantically

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recalling “hoeing many a day till noon, right along[side] the niggers,” he debates to whom among his nephews he should entail Penhally and concludes that it must be someone capable of cultivating (or retaining) the “same taste for the soil that had endured all his life” (39). Nicholas’s monologues and public exhortations about the land dominate the narrative even after John and Charles depart for the war. “Land is a responsibility,” he proclaims in reproach of Ralph’s decision to raise funds for the Confederacy by mortgaging his property. “When a man’s got land he isn’t free to follow any fool uprising that comes along. He’s got people dependent on him. Women and children. Niggers . . .” (95). Nicholas’s paternalistic admonition resonates in the aftermath of the war as southern loyalists and patrons endure broad financial, physiological, and moral defeat under the Reconstruction regime. Ralph escapes this experience, dying only days after John returns from battle, “raving the glories of the Confederacy and the fruits of victory” (182). His progeny are not so fortunate. Those most a≠ected by Ralph’s exhausted estate and worthless reserve of Confederate currency are his son’s widow Alice and his dowerless daughter Lucy. Before Alice marries Charles the general impression about her is that her conjugal interests are not driven by her emotions. Nicholas deduces that Alice would more than likely marry Charles because he is the “best catch for her as far as property went” (39). Indeed Charles romances Alice with the prospect of making her the mistress of a plantation “statelier than Mayfield or Penhally” (52). He imagines their house on a tall hill in “a place of deep shade, cool in summer and sheltered by the trees from the winter wind. She would perhaps have a flower garden on the eastern exposure,” he proposes, while “in the rear . . . would be the outbuilding and the Quarter. . . . They would have to decide soon which negroes they would take” from Mayfield, he concludes. In addition to “the ladies’ maid” that Ralph “had bought in New Orleans” Charles promises Alice “her pick of any two of the younger house servants” at Mayfield (52–53). When Nicholas announces that he’s entailed his estate to John, however, the joke around Penhally becomes that Alice surely is “going to have a hard time now, choosing between those two boys!” (70). Alice’s thoughts on the issue are intimated fairly early when she ponders why she’s at Penhally in the first place and not with her family in Virginia.


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“They sent you out here expecting you to make a good marriage!” she declares in open frustration. Mentally, however, she begins to weigh her options, and in the process betrays an awareness of the stakes involved in choosing a partner too hastily. “On the face of it,” she muses, “John was the better match of the two. But the old gentleman was likely to make half a dozen more wills before he died” (72). Equally weighing in on Alice’s decision is her understanding of the liability her disgraced relation to the Llewellyn connection poses. Despite the fact that both Nicholas’s and Alice’s mothers had been Allards, Alice’s “people were very poor” because “her father had run through with a handsome property . . . in an incredibly short period” (51). This casts a shadow over Alice especially in Nicholas’s eyes. He characterizes her as “a cold proposition” (143) and “spoiled little hussy . . . like all her mother’s people. She didn’t really care a snap about” either John or Charles, he deduces. “Just liked to receive attention” (147). Alice’s coquetry before the war does little to undermine these impressions. She delights in toying with Charles’s and John’s emotions and even playing them against one another. “John and Charles seemed to have an understanding,” she reasons. “They allowed each other just so much time with her. When the time was up the one whose turn came next presented himself and the other one got up and left with no ceremony” (133). The duration of the war further validates Nicholas’s opinion. Her mother’s report on their trials in Virginia causes Alice’s true feelings to surface. “Pen Latham had lost a leg, and one of the Peyton twins was blind, and poor, handsome Alec Leigh had been dead now for over a year. . . . Somebody said that Mr. Davis had suggested that the people of Richmond might have to eat rats. They were as good as squirrels, he said, when properly fattened” (128). Fear of poverty, therefore, as much as desire, drives Alice to marry Charles upon his initial return to Penhally. The depth of Alice’s materialistic instinct is finally revealed at the end of the war, when the narrative gives her another chance to act upon her emotions. “I’m not dependent on Uncle Nick,” John tells Alice upon learning that he will not inherit Penhally estate if he marries her. “My father has some land . . . in Arkansas. . . . It’s wild land, but so was this country once. . . . We could build a log cabin” (180). The lifestyle promised to her before the war is too much for Alice to relinquish. Alice’s removal to the home of

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other landed members of the “connection,” therefore, is strategic, positioning her to marry and become the mistress of a large tobacco plantation in Kentucky. Like Alice, Lucy marries for security, not love. Unlike Alice, however, Lucy’s suitor spurns her in the aftermath of the war because she is landless. The “connection” she and John establish, therefore, is not without emotional merit. Indeed, John and Lucy are initially attracted to one another through common feelings of betrayal, abandonment, and loneliness. The irony, of course, is that by the third year of marriage, this emotional bond begins irreparably to fray, as Lucy grows increasingly detached from her husband and incapable of expressing any feelings to or for him. Lucy’s increasingly inward and insulated turn casts her in an image foreign to John and everyone else at Penhally. As the narrator observes, “Lucy came gradually to hate the negroes, . . . to hate them!” So intense is her hatred that she sadistically pours already scarce buttermilk on the ground one day to prevent a black woman from nourishing her children (192). In addition, John senses Lucy’s voice growing gradually “low and hard and perfectly expressionless” (194). And often late at night, when she should be sleeping, he finds her “on the latticed porch or in the kitchen, attending to some belated task” (195). Lucy’s change registers the impact of Reconstruction on landed white southern women. Within the narrative framework, however, her image bears greater rhetorical significance because it survives the novel’s final shift in setting to modern times. The arrival of the twentieth century finds the climate at Penhally peculiarly antebellum-like. Nick and Chance discuss marketing their crops and bailing “Llewellyn niggers” out of jail in practically the same breath. “What’d you get for it,” Nick asks, of tobacco Chance sold the previous day. “ ‘Oh, around nine cents,’ Chance told him.” “ ‘Nine cents . . .’ Nick said. ‘That’s a hell of a price for prime leaf!’ ” Chance nods “absent-mindedly,” stands, and departs saying, “Well, I reckon I better go see about my nigger” (217). That the sheri≠ calls Chance to handle Russ’s situation intimates how little progress blacks make in the narrative’s social organization. The responsibility that Chance and Nick feel for “their nigger,” Russ, is only partially fueled by the kinship the three men shared in childhood, having all nursed at Russ’s mother’s breast (212). Their devotion to Russ


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and other black hands at Penhally more precisely follows the examples of their great-uncle Nicholas and great-grandfather Ralph, examples that they glean from their grandmother Lucy’s remembrances. The aftermath of Reconstruction exacerbates Lucy’s frustration with change about her because in addition to “no-count niggers” she is now compelled to deal with Penhally’s brazen “poor white” tenants who drive “out from town in hordes on Sundays and never [stop] to shut a gate.” She posts a sign, therefore, at the entrance of the estate that reads: “No passing through this place” (227–28). The message reads doubly as resistance and containment, because in her determination to keep change at bay, Lucy perpetuates the Old Order at Penhally primarily through her memory. “Strange what life the memory of those old times had in them!” Chance proclaims, acknowledging that his grandmother’s memory “seemed to have stopped with the Civil War” (231). As he explains: “She could not conceive of places more magnificent than Mayfield or Penhally in their palmy days, of a gentleman finer than her own father. The glory of those days even descends on “Old Uncle Nick,” whom Lucy “had it in for, because he had gypped her father out of his property” but who, nevertheless, taught her the value of “holding on to your own land” (231–32). The conclusion of the novel hinges on this memory and thus appears to bring the text full circle by returning us to Nicholas Llewellyn’s thoughts and actions. There is, of course, irony in Alice’s son having recovered the land that she should have partly inherited as Charles’s wife and heiress. But it is Chance’s love for the land, “the very particles of the red clay,” that compels him to shoot Nick, whom he ultimately holds accountable for the changes the Parrishes make to Penhally (246). More haunting than the image of Nick’s dead body in the end, however, is the realization that Chance, in all likelihood, will not have to su≠er the consequences of his actions. “You better call the sheri≠,” he directs Douglass Parrish, “Tom Beaumont. You can get him at the jail . . . or Frank Ebberly’s cigar store” (282). That Chance calls on the sheri≠ who earlier called on him to “see about his nigger” eerily and finally underscores the merit of the Old in the New Order imposed on Penhally. In the end, Lucy’s memory is the “material” link to the past that sustains Penhally’s antebellum consciousness beyond the Civil War.

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The dramatic e≠ect of the theme of memory linking the past to the present intensifies in None Shall Look Back. In this narrative context, Cally and Lucy’s stories emerge centrally. Gordon’s casting of Cally as “ruined” appears originally designed to critique cultural mores that stigmatize unmarried or divorced women, even those who are victims of infidelity and domestic violence (65). Cally’s status appears as well to portend the novel’s conclusion by early indicating Lucy’s fate as representative of countless southern women forsaken or widowed at the end of the war. That Cally and Lucy’s moral reserves and survival instincts increase and sharpen as the novel progresses toward this end, however, foregrounds the events by which these characters achieve unifying influence within (and beyond) the narrative framework. Before the federal invasion of Clarksville, Lucy has little appreciation of the slaves’ connection to the plantation order. Her grandfather encourages her to take an active interest in her share in the estate—both its human and nonhuman components—by mandating frequent visits to Cabins Row. At Cabins Row, however, Lucy’s activities are limited to halfheartedly comforting an abused childhood playmate whose beating, she deduces, probably resulted from her having “provoked the overseer beyond endurance” (45). This callous observation constitutes the extent of Lucy’s early concern for the slaves’ presence (and influence) in her life. The slaves’ flight, however, and its impact on the Allards’ daily routines illuminate their value to Lucy on a number of critical levels. First, when Belle’s reference to “lazy Bracket niggers” causes Fount to lose his temper and insult her cousin, it implies that Fount’s loss of self-control extends from the control he has lost over “his negroes.” The man whom Lucy had always valorized is reduced in her mind to “an ordinary mortal,” leaving her “with a feeling of desolation such as she had never before experienced” (126). In this spirit, Lucy heads to the slaves’ quarters and arrives upon a “scene of extraordinary confusion.” The chaos of Aunt Mimy’s cabin, especially, which Lucy “had known from childhood,” and the reduction of her grandfather’s “character” cause Lucy to long nostalgically for the “order” the slaves’ presence had previously imposed (127). Her metaphoric association of her family—and, by extension, the South—with a “sinking ship” enables Lucy to conceptualize the Allards—and the South—as a whole


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destabilized or destroyed by black removal. (Read: mobility or progress.) The association allows her to rationalize the slaves’ removal without crediting their (complex) motives. “Yes,” she thought, “we are sinking, sinking; and [the Negroes] know it and have deserted us” (128). And it legitimizes the resentment and anger she feels when the slaves begin returning. “They’ve come back because they’re sick,” she protests when Aunt Mimy’s granddaughter, Julia, returns seeking medication. Lucy is especially insulted that her grandmother not only gives the young girl quinine but also instructs Uncle Winston, one of the handful of slaves who do not initially flee, to “put a mattress in the spring wagon” and transport all the sick slaves home. After having assumed the slaves’ domestic responsibilities for a week, Lucy resolutely determines that “she and the rest of the family would be better o≠ without the negroes” (131). Belle soon echoes Lucy’s sentiments but for starkly di≠erent reasons. “It might be better,” she maintains, “if the slaves didn’t come back—ever” (133). She explains to Cally, Lucy, and Love that the presumably “competent negro overseer” at a farm some ten miles away from Brackets raped his owner’s daughter and was allegedly on the prowl for more white women to violate (133). This revelation exacerbates Lucy’s already hostile attitude toward the slaves and fortifies her resolve to keep them at bay. In ironic contrast, Belle’s report urges Cally to promote the slaves’ return to Brackets as a means of restoring order (134). In rationalizing her theory, Cally connects the threat of white female violation by black men to the physical violence that southern men confront on the battlefield. “Terrible things were happening every day now,” she explains to Love and Lucy. “Men that they knew were being killed in battle or su≠ering tortures in prison. The chief thing” to do, she tells them, is “to keep your head, not to forget the duty that you owed to others. . . . The negroes were coming back,” she maintains, “soon they would probably all be home. The problem was to keep them in order. The best way to do that,” she insists is “by disciplining your own thoughts.” She warns Love and Lucy that they “must not only never show any fear before the servants, they must also for the sake of their own safety never have any fear of them” (134). Cally’s promotion of the psyche as a tool of empowerment galvanizes the Allard women around the “thread-bare lie,” as Ida B. Wells cast it in

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1892, to circumscribe blacks throughout Clarksville, not just alleged black male rapists. This strategy recalls the platform by which Rebecca Felton rose to political acclaim as an advocate of southern women’s rights and black lynchings in the 1890s (Grantham 32). Within the narrative framework, it recenters Cally’s character and politics—and Gordon’s, by extension—in direct relation to the myth of Southern Womanhood. In fact Cally encourages Lucy and Love to use the myth as a defense mechanism and even mandates that they adopt a soldier’s mentality when confronting the alleged “opposition” (134). She sets the tone, transforming her room into a round-the-clock post where she can “stand guard” upon Rives’s and Ned’s return. She enlists the services of Uncle Winston, a veritable prisoner of war because a slave, to “stand guard” as well in the slave quarters (140). Before the fire, Cally indicts the other slaves as insurrectionists, accusing them of disclosing the location of Bracket’s “concealed” ammunition to the federal soldiers.10 “You Yankees believe everything niggers tell you, don’t you?” she charges, upon their arrival (153). She doubles her assault by invoking the assistance of a higher authority to thwart the Yankees’ actions. When one enters the stall of a favored mare, she prays to “God” that the horse “kicks him to death” (156). Jenny Morris echoes her mother’s request, establishing a critical intergenerational alliance that eerily harks back to Penhally in its vengeful spirit. She orders Uncle Winston, Love, and Lucy to warn Rives and Ned of the federal soldiers’ arrival. Uncle Winston eagerly resumes his post, vowing to “raise [his] voice like [he] does in meetin’” as a signal to “troop.” “I’m going to sing out ‘Oh, my Lord. Oh, my sweet Saviour!’ ” he explains to Lucy and Love, whereupon he instructs them to “git back in the woods as fast as” they can and tell Rives and Ned “to make tracks away from” Brackets (160). Immediately after Brackets burns nearly to the ground, Cally busies herself trying to “bring things into some sort of order” by directing “wandering” slaves to transport salvageable items to rooms that are still standing (163). As the slaves respond to her command, she reminds herself that “the customary manner, only, perhaps, [now] a little sharper” is the way to treat them (164). The dutiful Uncle Winston falls in line as well, hurrying Lucy and Love along so that he can “git back and help [his] mistress” (161). The manifold e≠ects of Cally and Uncle Winston’s actions, which both aes-


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thetically and rhetorically invoke the myth of Southern Womanhood and the Uncle Tom stereotype while exploiting coded slave dialogue, attest to the sustained dominion of the Old Order at Brackets. Indeed, Uncle Winston’s image stands in vital juxtaposition with the burning house as evidence of the Old Order’s continuing influence, despite its physical dismantling. The rhetorical economy with which Gordon signifies on racial stereotypes to conclude the scene represses the notion that even this unfailing slave is exempt from white aversion. Mrs. Allard small-mindedly imagines that she “could never be assailed by a more grateful odor,” than “the body odor of the negro” when she observes Winston standing guard at the doorway of her room (162). Like Cally, Lucy is encouraged in the aftermath of the fire to restore Order, but the impracticality of her plan to “build an addition” to the house provokes Cally to lash out and accuse her of not knowing how “to do anything” (164–65). The assault drives Lucy to seek solace in Rives, whom she marries only days later. Lucy’s action reads doubly as defiance and fulfillment, in her quest for a sense of stability in the chaos that constitutes her existence at Brackets. Lucy receives, however, little to no relief at Good Range. She imagines the ceiling to her room literally caving in, then abruptly changing into Brackets’ burning walls before burying her alive (175). The implication of Lucy’s anxieties in the aftermath of Brackets’ burning is that she cannot imagine the Old Order in abstract terms. She needs material evidence in the form of the house and the slaves, despite the consciousness of racial superiority with which Cally equips her. Without these constants, Lucy remains fearful of physical violation as well as the other “uncertainties” that the war casts into her life. Her fear is evidenced in how she views her surroundings before Rives’s and Ned’s arrival. She imagines shadows creeping and, discerning “dark masses” moving about the trees, is scared speechless. She recovers her wits and voice only after Rives and Ned emerge. Rather than identify them by name, she identifies them by race: “They’re white, Aunt Cally!” she cries, “They’re white!” (137). Her fear of “blackness” returns at Good Range, when she and Molly are about the cane fields and hear a noise, the source of which they never identify (224). The vision that Rives presents to Lucy on the heels of her nightmare is, thus, critically restorative.

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“We could have the house here,” he tells her, motioning to a vast rectangular space that encompasses “a tall oak” and other “big trees” on the land they survey (178). “The front gallery would be here,” she spiritedly chimes in. This vision of the Old in the New South Order at Good Range brings the story of None Shall Look Back full circle, despite the destructive battle scenes that follow. For this vision gives Lucy a concrete ideal to focus on in its literal reconstruction of the plantation economy. The subsequent merging of Lucy and Cally’s thoughts and actions to resolve the narrative drives home this theme. In the aftermath of the battle at Good Range, Lucy plummets into depression, crying pitifully for the demise of the cause she apprehends in the dying Confederate soldier (215). With Rives’s restorative vision in her mind, however, facing death head-on is purgative, enabling Lucy to battle, if not completely cast o≠, her fear of the unknown. In this restored frame of mind, she joins the housekeeper at Good Range in the fields to cut cane and harvest crops. And she joins Susan on the battlefields to tend to wounded soldiers. Lucy’s encounter with Rives on this front gives them a crucial opportunity to consecrate the grounds upon which they imagine building their home. Lucy clings to this and other “tender” memories with Rives at Good Range on the eve of his final return to battle (358). Meanwhile at Brackets, Cally begrudgingly moves her family to the Bradley estate when Jenny Morris sees a “black man’s face—pressed against the window pane” of the manor one night (323). Cally insists, however, upon paying the Bradleys’ rent, in prideful and ironic condemnation of their “new money.” Her father, Fount, is reduced to a state of infancy upon Brackets’ burning, but she makes him believe that he is still lord of the manor. “Pa!” she cries out when he rises, ostensibly to confront Joe Bradley for referring to him by his first name, “Pa, man out here wants to see you about a horse,” she tells him. “Winston,” she continues, enlisting the assistance of the Allards’ ever-devoted manservant, “come here quick and get your master.” “Come on, Marster,” he dutifully replies, “come on, less go see ’bout them horses” (325). Cally further renounces change by calling for Mr. Bradley’s demise—“I wish he was dead. Dead and rotten,” she cries—and verbally assaulting her brother, Jim (327). “You’re no better than a spy or a deserter,” she charges,


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when he refuses to accept a customer’s worthless Confederate money. “You can’t run a store without taking in money,” he counters, “and there’s no use taking money that ain’t worth the paper it’s printed on.” Cally retorts by castigating her brother in her accusation that he has dishonored the family name by working for the Bradleys (331). Jim’s observation that Cally is getting “harder and harder to manage” because she “didn’t want to forget the war one minute” (331–32) roundly anticipates his final condemnation of southern women who “never knew when they were licked” (338). The impression left upon Ned’s arrival and the Allards’ subsequent return to Brackets under Cally’s direction is that though the South has lost the battles, Cally has won the war. And Lucy’s expected return to Brackets at the novel’s conclusion confirms this sentiment, for she will bring with her not only her tenderest memories of Rives, but also the will to realize their mutual vision, despite his death. It is, therefore, only mildly ironic that The Garden of Adonis opens with the Mortimers returning to the Allard Plantation some sixty years after the end of the Civil War. More than half the central action in The Garden of Adonis takes place at the height of the Great Depression between the urban and rural centers of Montgomery, Kentucky. Laid o≠ from the assembly line of an automobile factory in Detroit, Michigan, Ote Mortimer returns to Montgomery and moves with his mother and father to Hanging Tree, Ben Allard’s plantation. The Mortimers tenant-farm at Hanging Tree along with the Sheelers and several other poor white families. After watching her dance one evening from afar, Ote introduces himself to the Sheelers’ youngest daughter, Idell, and begins courting her. As Ote struggles to earn an honest living as a tenant tobacco farmer, the narrative shifts to the urban scene, where Ben’s daughter Letty Allard is keeping pace with a more progressive, moneyed, and sophisticated crowd. In the city, Letty meets and falls in love with Jim Carter, an older, married businessman groomed in southern chivalry. Spurned by Jim, Letty returns to Hanging Tree, embittered but unbroken. Jim’s history is related through a series of flashbacks that take us from the outset of Prohibition to the outset of the Depression, outlining his transition from prize dog trainer to advertising agent to manager of his northern wife’s father’s diaper manufacturing plant. A series of marital in-

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fidelities as well as the collapse of his father-in-law’s business drive Jim to Hanging Tree and into Letty’s arms. Jim’s migration to Hanging Tree returns (and confines) the narrative action to the plantation site just as Idell informs Ote that she is pregnant. Determined to validate their relationship and prove his love for Idell, Ote asks Ben Allard to move up the construction date on Hanging Tree’s new tenant housing. Ben explains that lack of labor, finances, and supplies precludes him from building the homes before the start of the new season. Distressed, but not despairing, Ote seeks to reassure an anxious Idell that he will secure the money needed to purchase a marriage license. Ote returns to Ben and asks him for an advance on his crop, which Ben refuses. Ote then asks for a loan of ten dollars, and Ben o≠ers him the little money he has in his bank account. Angered and frustrated, Ote leaves the main house and heads back to Idell’s place. Upon his arrival he learns that Idell has eloped with Buck Chester, a local bootlegger. Defeated and forlorn, Ote enters the Allard stable, mounts a harvesting team, and proceeds to drive over the immature tobacco crops. When Ben runs out to stop him, Ote dismounts and, equipped with the plow’s crossbar, delivers one deathblow to his landlord. The novel concludes with a horrified Ote abandoning Ben’s lifeless body and running through the woods. At the outset, The Garden of Adonis seems concerned to create a space for poor white progress. Ote recalls that while playing with Letty and Frank Allard as a child, their grandmother approached and forbade them from ever associating with him again because they might “catch the itch.” The irony of Ote’s remembrance is that he casts the Allards as the victims of their grandmother’s assault against his character. As he recalls: “It was Frank and Letty that was lonesome,” as a result of their grandmother’s actions (10). In addition to Ote’s mental fortitude, his dedication and initial success as a tenant set him apart from the Sheelers, whom Gordon grants Ote the “privilege” of indicting as lazy and no-count. Gordon cannot, or does not, however, sustain Ote’s distinction as the representative progressive poor white southerner. The key to understanding her abrupt shift away from Ote’s to Letty’s story appears to lie in the period between 1931, when Gordon began the novel, and 1937, when she concluded it.


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Mythic Consciousness, Cultural Politics The latter part of the period witnessed the accelerated failure of southern tenancy and sharecropping systems (due to natural disasters, poor wages, strikes, poor white and black resistance, and white violence). Coupled with poor management of their income from writing, this event left the Tates financially strapped. In 1935 money was so scarce that they were compelled to rent out Benfolly, despite wanting to remain at home (Wood 195). By 1937 their situation had worsened. It appears, therefore, that on the heels of less than moderate sales of None Shall Look Back (for which Gordon blamed Margaret Mitchell), Gordon reoriented The Garden of Adonis in the critical direction of Penhally and None Shall Look Back to condemn modern industrial southern economies.11 Indeed, the whole of The Garden of Adonis unfolds like a conclusion to Penhally, with Chance and Lucy’s characters readmitted and Nick’s character glaringly omitted from the story. More critical to the remobilization of Penhally’s aesthetic politics in The Garden of Adonis, however, is the correspondence Gordon establishes between Emily’s and Letty’s characters. Though cast as a minor character in Penhally, Emily nonetheless indelibly leaves her mark as the novel’s only modern southern belle. Outspoken and uninhibitedly sexually aggressive—she feeds herself toast with one hand while caressing Chance’s cheek with the other—Emily, nevertheless, is “fiercely Confederate” (222, 253). Defending tradition with the same passion and conviction as Lucy, Emily indicts the Parrishes—the harbingers of change to come at Penhally—for turning the Llewellyn’s “niggers out of their house and home” (244). Like Emily, Letty is profoundly aware of her sensuality. Her indi≠erence to cultural mores about southern women’s sexuality is evidenced by her willingness to enter an extramarital a≠air with Jim because it’s “what she want[s]” (39, my emphasis). Jim’s initial spurning of Letty, however, launches the dramatic economy wherein Letty’s progress, as a representative aristocratic white southern woman, is measured in terms of her ability to fulfill her desire without dismantling the Old Order.12 Letty’s return to Hanging Tree thus marks a pivotal narrative shift away from the site of modern progress to the site of southern tradition. Keeping

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with tradition, Letty displaces her anger and resentment toward Jim onto Aunt Pansy, the Allards’ black housekeeper, when she directs another servant to move a plate of food closer to her mistress. Annoyed by this gesture, Letty queries whether “she could persuade her father to get rid of Pansy” (113). She decides against this, however, concluding that Pansy is needed to take care of her father during her absence. Regarding her father further, Letty observes “a glow upon” his face that “she had never seen before.” She realizes that it is largely a reflection of her presence at Hanging Tree. “He never sees anybody but poor white folks and niggers,” she muses. “I never thought of his being lonely before.” Ben’s isolation causes Letty to consider her own single status and to question “how it would be if she never married” and instead made “occasional visits to Baltimore and Louisville” while living at home (116). Briefly enticed by this thought, Letty finally rationalizes that “people didn’t want an unattached girl around forever, no matter how pretty and pleasant she was” (116). Letty concludes with conviction, however, that she will not permit social mores to determine when she will marry. She gives herself another year to settle down, because as she sees it, anything can happen in this span of time. “The most important things in your life,” she reasons, “happen in a day, a minute, a second, even, so that afterwards you wish you could have been two persons, one to participate, and one to observe what is going on, for the sake of memory” (117). Letty’s heightened consciousness of life’s progression recalls Alice and Lucy’s plights in Penhally and None Shall Look Back; the critical distinction is that a modern aristocratic white southern woman can hold out considerably longer for what she wants. Letty’s position within the plantation economy further sustains her in this e≠ort. To point up this distinction and to bring the novel full circle, Gordon recenters the poor whites. Idell thus emerges single, pregnant, and, ostensibly, eager to marry Ote. We soon learn, however, that Idell, like Letty, is unwilling to settle for less than what she really wants. “I notice Miss Letty goes around dressed up mighty fine,” she tells Ote, hinting at her aspiration (281). She drives the point home when Ote suggests that they briefly move in with his mother while he saves up for a place of their own: “I’d ruther lay down in the road and die than go live with her,” she declares (283).


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The unevenness of Gordon’s hand over the narrative psychology of The Garden of Adonis is evidenced in how she brings closure to Idell’s and Letty’s stories and thus ends the novel. The impression left by Ote’s killing Ben is that Gordon literally puts the ax to the way of life Ben symbolizes and thus directs the reader to sympathize with Ote and Idell. But a few critical narrative details make this implausible. First, Idell’s rejection of Ote is represented in an unsavory light. She runs o≠ with the man to whom she was alleged to have been devoted all along. In addition, Letty and Jim plan to settle down at Hanging Tree to restore the plantation even before her father’s demise. Gordon’s likely motive, therefore, for concluding the novel with Ote “running, slowly at first, then faster and faster, through the clover, towards the distant woods,” is to achieve ironic political and aesthetic e≠ect because Ote seeks asylum in the very space to which he is confined (299). The dominion that the Llewellyn and the Allard women maintain over these “distant woods,” from Penhally through The Garden of Adonis, signifies that Ote, and the poor whites he represents, cannot escape these women’s authority, regardless of the changes taking place in the world about them. To conclude this chapter, I want to reiterate that the strategies that Gordon scholars have developed for treating her life and writing have failed adequately to illuminate the complex politics of her aesthetics. Even those who recognize the central roles southern women play in Gordon’s writing neglect adequately to scrutinize the underlying sociopolitical implications of these roles. Especially striking are the rationales more recent critics give to justify ignoring the relationship between Gordon’s politics and aesthetics in their critique of her life and works. In her preface to the 1992 edition of None Shall Look Back, released as part of the Southern Classics Series edited by M. E. Bradford, Eileen Gregory, for example, contemplates the “problem of courage” and the “importance of the hero” and theorizes that “the polemical is as alien to this novel as is the sentimental” (xii). She reads slavery as “a symptom of a deeper spiritual problem” in the South that Gordon aims to expose and expel. She therefore proposes that Gordon deliberately avoids “the question of slavery as an abstract issue” whose “unresolved moral perplexities” (xiv) cannot—or should not—be taken up in the narrative framework. In so reasoning, Gregory is able to avoid the issue

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and its representation in her own critical framework. It is a practice still all too common among literary scholars, particularly those treating the event and developments that had meaning for feminist conservative writers, such as Caroline Gordon. Gordon’s instincts and motives for mythmaking derived directly from her status as an aristocratic white southern woman. The clarity and precision with which she remembered and invoked the Old Order in Penhally, None Shall Look Back, and The Garden of Adonis are largely due to the fact that she consciously lived by its ideological principles daily. And the implication of her having done so, at least throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s, is that Gordon consciously exploited the depressed conditions of black and poor white southern Americans for her own benefit.

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PAV I N G T H E WAY

Willa Cather and Lillian Smith The artist spends a lifetime in loving the things that haunt him . . . in trying to get these conceptions down on paper exactly as they are to him and not in conventional poses supposed to reveal their character. —Willa Cather, preface to The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett Moments of sudden vision came over me . . . and I wrote with immense passion.

—Lillian Smith, letter to Maxwell Geismar

Willa Cather and Lillian Smith are two modern southern women writers who have never been read in juxtaposition with one another, probably because of what Terry Eagleton has termed the “disabling idea of aesthetic autonomy,” that is, the notion that true (literary) writers write in isolation of their political influences (9). Until quite recently, this theory ironically held both Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) and Strange Fruit (1944) in academic neglect, the former for lacking the artistic merit of Cather’s earlier novels, the latter for modeling too closely Smith’s public speeches, which vehemently inveighed against modern segregationist systems. This chapter urges a reading of Strange Fruit that probes the aesthetic injunctions invoked by the novel’s complex racial politics so as to underwrite its linkages to Sapphira and the Slave Girl. In both novels, I argue, we can trace an aesthetics of civil rights politics that not only challenges rigid critical distinctions between novelistic aesthetics and politics but also points to a correspondence between Cather’s and Smith’s mythic consciousnesses of racial progress in the modern South. Inheritors of the Myths Lillian Smith often characterized racial segregation as “spiritual lynching,” emblematic of the stranglehold that systematic oppression has on the human spirit. A maternal sensibility governed her theory of its psychosomatic e≠ects. “A child’s personality cannot grow and mature without self137

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esteem,” she maintained, “without feelings of security, without faith in the world’s willingness to make room for him to live as a human being. No colored child in the South is being given today what his personality needs in order to grow and mature richly and fully. No white child, under the segregation pattern, can be free of arrogance and hardness of heart, and blindness to human need—and hence no white child can grow freely and creatively under the crippling frame of segregation” (Gladney 87). This racial sensibility resonates in Strange Fruit, which opens in the aftermath of World War I as Nonnie Anderson, a young college-educated black woman, prepares to tell her white lover, Tracy Deen, that she is pregnant with his child. Nonnie and Tracy are citizens of Maxwell, a small socially and racially stratified southern town (the fictional equivalent of Smith’s birthplace, Jasper, Florida). Both are aware of the social (and legal) sanctions they face if they have the child; but only Tracy seems to care. He plots ways to handle the problem created by Nonnie’s determination to have the baby by proposing marriage to Dottie, the girl next door, whom his mother Alma favors, and by arranging for his lifelong friend and house servant Henry to marry Nonnie. Nonnie’s brother Ed discovers Tracy’s plan and kills him. Nonnie helps her brother escape Maxwell with the aid of their sister Bessie and the local black doctor, Sam. Tracy’s sister Laura helps Nonnie avoid being implicated in the crime. Henry becomes the fall guy for Ed’s o≠ense and is murdered by the town’s white lynch mob. In a January 1961 letter to Maxwell Geismar, from which the excerpt at the start of this chapter is taken, Smith said that there came over her, while she was working on Strange Fruit, “moments of sudden vision” in which she saw “what segregation as symbol and symptom actually was.” And it was these times when she “wrote with immense passion” (Sugg 161). The novel unfolds over the course of a two-day revival in Maxwell. Smith’s dexterous manipulation of stream of consciousness and narrative syncopation inflects bold commentaries on abortion, same-sex desire, and religious fanaticism while the technical elements of the novel clarify her opposition to racial segregation. As far as we know, Cather never candidly expressed her thoughts about race prejudice or any of the issues central to Sapphira’s rhetorical economy. What she did account for—and frequently—was her craftsmanship; but in

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so doing she suggested a great deal about her broader ideological investments. “The artist spends a lifetime in loving the things that haunt him,” she observes in her preface to The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, cited at the opening of this chapter, “in having his mind ‘teased’ by them, in trying to get these conceptions down on paper exactly as they are to him and not in conventional poses supposed to reveal their character” (Willa Cather on Writing 51). The resonance of racial violence and sexual exploitation in Sapphira implies their haunting influence on Cather’s aesthetic politics. Set five years before the outbreak of the Civil War in Back Creek County, Virginia, the story chronicles the internal conflicts and schemes of Sapphira Colbert, a plantation mistress. After overhearing her favorite and most devoted servant Till’s daughter Nancy arguing with another slave, Sapphira comes to suspect that her husband Henry is sexually involved with Nancy. Sapphira plots to disrupt the alleged a≠air by proposing to sell Nancy, by replacing Nancy as the millhouse tender, and, finally, by arranging for her young rake of a nephew, Martin Colbert, to seduce Nancy after Henry refuses to sell her and demands that she stay on as his personal housekeeper. Sapphira’s plans are thwarted when Sapphira’s daughter, Rachel Blake, helps Nancy escape to Canada. The novel concludes several years after the war, with Nancy returning to Back Creek to be reunited with her mother and with Cather revealing the story’s origins in a postscript. Cather’s adept characterizations and management of time, space, and folk speech patterns in Sapphira accentuate events and issues designed to resonate beyond the narrative framework. The timing of Cather’s reckoning with Sapphira’s “haunting” forces is crucial. Theretofore she had never directly engaged racial and sexual tensions within a southern context and with such strong autobiographical overtones.1 As Edith Lewis explains in Willa Cather Living (1953), Cather “had often been urged to write a Virginia novel,” but “for a long time some sort of inhibition—a reluctance, perhaps, to break through to those memories that seemed to belong to another life—had deterred her.” Lewis maintains, however, that once Cather “finally did begin the writing of Sapphira, it was with her whole power and concentration” (Lewis 182). The country’s mounting preoccupation with southern racial practices in the 1930s and 1940s certainly could not have escaped Cather’s notice even

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had she wanted it to. But this national fact remains unnoticed in critical treatments of the novel. Petrie hypothesizes that Cather’s “deep-seated aversion to the political and the public” coupled with “her increasing despair” over modern developments indicate why her novels, particularly Sapphira, have long been evaluated outside “the wider currents of literary and cultural history” in which they participated. Petrie himself proposes that Sapphira demonstrates how Cather believed “ ‘high art’ ought to deal with social issues” by replacing what Petrie sees as the “simple, dualistic political positions” of leftist literature with “complex interpersonal relationships” and “intricate patterns of interwoven political commitments and moral quandaries” (31). For Petrie, therefore, Nancy’s flight is not “the result of any yearning for an abstraction called freedom, but of the highly individualized dilemma created by the confluence of her slave status, Henry Colbert’s attraction, Sapphira’s jealousy and Martin Colbert’s lust” (31). It seems to me that it is precisely this network of racial and sexual tensions embodied in Sapphira that has historically fleshed an ideology of freedom for “oppressed” people and their sympathizers. Equally unconvincing is Petrie’s assumption that the so-called leftist ideology of the 1930s and 1940s was mapped and read in “simple” binary terms. When “gendered,” “sexed,” and “racialized,” the economic bipolar along which proletarian and bourgeois interests supposedly lie takes on multiple, even conflicting meanings. If Cather was actively seeking to engage the “Left” in Sapphira, as I believe she was, she did so not to destabilize its narrative agenda by “subordinating the ideological to the interpersonal” (Petrie 27, 31) but to supplement leftist rhetoric by interweaving seemingly disparate interpersonal interests into an aesthetics of civil rights politics. Why else would Cather regress some ninety years in time, set the story in a rural Virginia community much like her birthplace, and place southern hierarchies of race, sex, and class at the center of the novel’s conflict if not to confront the issues yet forestalling modern social progress? I believe that part of the di∞culty scholars have in dealing with Sapphira’s politics lies in their inability to recognize that though Cather often denied the value of propagandistic art, she never denied the artist’s ability to speak to the masses. Indeed the very “thing not named,” (Cather on Writing 41) in her work, that which Cather insisted “should be felt and


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not heard,” (Bohlke 158) is precisely what draws readers in, enabling, in fact, compelling us to experience what Joyce MacDonald aptly refers to as “the quiet center of Cather’s unspoken political views” (4). Another di∞culty lies in comprehending what many have identified as a breakdown in narrative logic around the novel’s nostalgic impulses, specifically its representation of the “winding country road” that forms a “Double S” with the “winding ravine” in Back Creek. Naomi Morgenstern links this site to the novel’s other symbolic “S”—slavery—to suggest Cather’s resistance “to human meaning and to change” (185) as symbolized by Nancy’s escape and modernity’s “destroying armament” (Sapphira 70). That Rachel confronts Martin as Nancy’s guardian and adviser at the “Double S” suggests the illogic of conflating Cather’s environmental and racial politics; the confrontation marks the very shift in moral authority away from Sapphira (and, vicariously, from Martin) to Rachel that makes Nancy’s escape possible. Morgenstern and Petrie’s conclusions illuminate yet a third critical challenge posed by Sapphira, that of clarifying Cather’s politics, though, ironically, not because of a dearth in biographical data. Indeed, even today, despite solid and abundant evidence to the contrary, some question whether Cather was really a lesbian. Marilee Lindemann negotiates the issue of Cather’s sexuality by insisting that Cather was “an agent and a subject of historical process.” As such, she concludes, Cather’s novels are “interventions in [the] processes that outstrip and often contradict whatever conscious intentions or beliefs Cather the person might have held” (6).2 Toni Morrison speculates that the specific challenge of accounting for Cather’s racial sensibilities lies in the historical shortsightedness of scholars who miss (or dismiss) the “meaning in the thunderous, theatrical presence of black surrogacy—an informing, stabilizing, and disturbing element” in Sapphira and other white-authored/white-centered American novels (13). Morrison herself describes Sapphira as an “honest engagement” with “the sycophancy of white identity” that “implies the powerful impact race has on narrative—and on narrative strategy” (19). Applauding Cather’s exposure of the racial implications of homoerotic desire embedded in Sapphira and Nancy’s relationship, Morrison tacitly acknowledges the centrality of the myth of Southern Womanhood in the narrative econ-

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omy. “This novel,” she maintains, “concerns a troubled, disappointed woman confined to the prison of her defeated flesh, whose social pedestal rests on the sturdy spine of racial degradation; whose privileged gender has nothing that elevates her except color, and whose moral posture collapses without a whimper before the greater necessity of self-esteem, even though the source of that esteem is a delusion” (25–26). Disconcerting to Morrison, however, and what she believes ultimately works to Cather’s discredit, is the novel’s “unbelievable and unsympathetic” treatment of Till, whose alleged complicity in the narrative’s seduction plot insidiously assumes “that slave women are not mothers; that they are ‘natally dead,’ with no obligations to their o≠spring or their own parents. . . . Surrounding this dialogue,” Morrison concludes, “is the silence of four hundred years. It leaps out of the novel’s void and out of the void of historical discourse on slave parent-child relationships and pain” (21–22). Scholars have used information about Cather’s “forebears” and their link to plantation economies to conclude, like Morrison, that her racial sensibilities in Sapphira complexly, though finally, objectionably, register her advocacy of preindustrial southern beliefs about race relations. To substantiate this position, a few critics have glossed Lewis’s characterization of Cather’s mother and Cather’s claim to have been “more like her mother” than “any other member” of her family, to the exclusion of considering any of her other influences, most notably her grandmother’s, as her primary educator, and that of Willowshade’s poor white and black female employees, whose storytelling sessions she regularly participated in. According to these critics Mary Virginia Boak, Cather’s mother, was a typical southern belle, whom Cather strove to be like but never quite really was like.3 Lewis observes that Cather’s mother was a handsome, imperious woman, with a strong will and a strong nature. She was always the dominating figure in the family, and her personality made a deep impress not only on her children, but on her grandchildren as well. In both she seems to have inspired great devotion and great deference—her will was law. . . . In spite of her occasional severity—even tyranny—she had . . . a great capacity for caring about things—everything—whether the co≠ee was hot, whether a neighbor’s child was ill, whether it was a good day for the picnic—for caring about living, in fact. (6–7)


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Not quite the typical southern belle but certainly close in appearance, dominion, and domesticity. If Lewis’s account is accurate, one is hard pressed to argue that Cather’s mother did not in some way inspire the characterization of Sapphira Colbert. But inspiration and e≠ect are di≠erent things, and if we take into account other apparently inspired characters in the novel—Sapphira’s daughter, Rachel Blake, for example—then Cather’s racial sensibilities are finally complex and arguably far from objectionable. And claims about Cather’s alleged political conservatism throughout her life (assumed by most because she was a Republican) do little to shake my conviction. In fact, I am struck less by Cather’s party a∞liation than by the myopia of critics who, while referencing it to underscore her racism in Sapphira, ignore it when praising her rather radical immigration politics in earlier works.4 For as keen as they’ve been to recognize Cather’s “spatialized historical consciousness” of inclusion vis-à-vis European immigrants, they seem equally motivated to disregard the similar politics working in Sapphira vis-à-vis black Americans.5 For this reason, I am also finally unconvinced by Morrison’s complication of Cather’s racial politics precisely because I agree that “the interdependent working of power, race, and sexuality in a white woman’s battle for coherence” constitutes the narrative’s central tension (20). That being the case, consideration must be given to the broad signifying range of the myth of Southern Womanhood in the story. Morrison herself admits that becoming critically conscious of the aesthetic politics of a text involves observing, theorizing, and conceptualizing authorial interests within and against the interests of others. The white racial gaze in Sapphira is a trope of black abnegation, but it is also a trope of self-actualization, a way of white female characters seeing and decidedly (re-)defining themselves in relation to one another and others. Morrison accounts for Sapphira’s compulsions, disabilities, and frustrations vis-à-vis black female sexuality. She does not, however, account for these same phenomena vis-à-vis white male sexuality. The novel’s diachronic framework invites us to assume that the taboo of white male master/black female slave sexual intercourse will be addressed; the seduction plot commands us to recognize the plantation mistress’s awareness of the taboo’s actual and potential violation.

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Indeed Sapphira’s confidence in Martin’s desire and ability to violate Nancy is in direct proportion to the anxiety engendered by Sapphira’s past inability to prevent Till’s rape (allegedly by one of Henry’s brothers) and her current inability to supervise (or restrict) Henry and Nancy’s contact. At issue, therefore, is not only Nancy and Henry’s alleged sexual relationship but the threat Sapphira believes such intimacy poses to her authority as plantation mistress, and this point is as much focused by Henry’s as by Sapphira’s characterization. Morrison maintains that Henry is represented as “a man of modest habits, ambition, and imagination,” but his a≠ections for Nancy are never void of suspicion (19). Indeed, Henry’s attraction to the slave girl is early evidenced when she begins bringing him flowers regularly without bothering to greet him. “The miller was a little disappointed that Nancy did not tap at his door,” the narrator observes, “but he never suggested that she come earlier, or delayed his departure by one minute. His silver watch was always beside him while he shaved, and when the hand reached five minutes to eight he put on his hat. The Colbert men had a bad reputation where women were concerned” (66). This final observation (registered via free indirect discourse) suggests Henry’s conscious e≠ort to remind himself of what Sapphira already well knows. It is a manifestation of self-repression that is doubled by Henry’s imagining “Nancy’s face and figure plain in Mercy,” a character from Pilgrim’s Progress (67). But this grafting of paternal a≠ection onto amorous desire doesn’t sustain Henry for very long. In fact, when Sampson reveals Martin’s plans to violate Nancy, Henry senses “the Colbert in him threaten[ing] to raise its head after long hibernation” (209). He begins to avoid Nancy for fear of seeing her “as a woman, enticing to men” (193), for fear of seeing her “through Martin’s eyes” as a “sense of almost being Martin” takes over him “like a black spell” (209). When Rachel requests his assistance in organizing Nancy’s escape, Henry tells her “I can’t be a party to make away with your mother’s property” (227). His twisted hallucinations, however, imply a greater compulsion to delay Nancy’s release so that he can fulfill—if only vicariously—his sexual desire. Ambitions of this order are not the only ones Morrison doesn’t account for. Indeed, she neglects other urges toward fulfillment and release that are not explicitly sexual. Rachel’s characterization is here, again, cen-


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tral along with the broad interracial and cross-sexual kinships within the narrative, which warrant and facilitate Nancy’s escape. Moers theorizes that “the telling of tales is an act of seduction and also of power; the tales enslave as they delight” (231). But the opposite is true in Sapphira, where the telling of tales horrifies through the increased psychological penetration of a plantation mistress determined to violate the integrity of a young slave girl. That the novel ultimately undermines Sapphira’s authority and authorizes Nancy’s release through Rachel’s activism makes it a story of psychosocial disruption mediated by Cather’s reconstruction of the myth of Southern Womanhood. Cather’s observation in her 1922 essay “The Novel Demeuble” that “the higher processes of art are all processes of simplification” (Cather on Writing 40) suggestively accounts for Sapphira’s narrative logic, which, through a series of interpolated stories, systematically displaces the seduction plot—the providence of racial oppression—and converges on Rachel’s thoughts and actions— the source of racial liberation. The interpolations fortify Rachel’s resolve that “the owning” of human beings is wrong, “no matter how convenient or agreeable it might be for master and servant” (137). At the same time, they make apparent that unless Rachel is willing to work against it, racial oppression will persist. The mediation of Cather’s own subjectivity through Rachel—as beneficiary of a preindustrial southern economy—implies a correlation between Rachel’s call to action and Cather’s civil rights politics. The telling implication is that for Cather the authorial challenge in subverting a system of racial oppression entailed judiciously manipulating the privileges bound in it.6 Raising the Pedestal Both Sapphira and Strange Fruit open “in dialogue”—one about Sapphira and Henry Colbert’s dining habits, the other about Nonnie Anderson’s comportment. Coalescing images and opinions sketch each character’s history. These gender-, race-, and class-inflected conversations at once draw readers into and politicize the social locations of black and white characters di≠erently articulated to a single cultural framework. In Back Creek and Maxwell, literal and symbolic lines of division separate people by sex, class, and race. Back Creek is stratified around the Colberts’ Mill House

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and along the “Double S” road, while Maxwell is stratified along the swamp. There is, however, a necessary semblance of homogeneity e≠ected by each community’s social hierarchy. Knowing one’s “place” in relation to everyone else creates a communal ethos whose violation brings serious consequences. Social, racial, and sexual crossings among white and black characters account for each novel’s central narrative tensions, while time, space, and consciousness negotiation illuminates the cultural imperatives marshalling change. The novels’ organization of racial oppression around the theme of white/male–black/female miscegenation throws into relief how white female intellectual and sexual sophistication threatens the status quo. Attentiveness specifically to the construction and evolution of the myth of Southern Womanhood in each novel, therefore, makes it possible to comprehend and distinguish Cather’s and Smith’s aesthetic politics in direct relation to an ideology of racial progress. As already noted, Sapphira’s narrative center increasingly organizes around Rachel’s e≠orts to engineer Nancy’s escape. At the start, however, Rachel’s mother’s thoughts and actions provide the focal center, though, as the narrator quickly informs us, Sapphira “usually acted upon motives which she disclosed to no one” (22). We are thus compelled to draw conclusions about Sapphira’s internal conflicts based upon her outward gestures. We learn first of her determination to confront Henry over his apparent a≠ections for the slave girl, Nancy. The scene opens with Sapphira proposing to sell Nancy to the owners of a nearby estate. Evidently annoyed by the suggestion, Henry argues that Nancy’s people had been in Sapphira’s family for four generations and that Nancy had not been trained for service in another household. “She stays here,” he insists (8). Pointing up his discomfort, Sapphira also subtly reminds Henry of who Nancy’s real owner is. “It’s nothing to get flustered about,” she tells him, “as you say, her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother were all Dodderidge niggers. So it seems to me I ought to be allowed to arrange Nancy’s future” (8). Henry counters by asserting his legal authority in the matter and applying a social injunction: “You can’t sell her without my name to the deed of sale, and I will never put it there. You never seemed to understand how, when we first moved up here, your troop of niggers was held against us. This isn’t a slave-owning neighbourhood. If you sold a good girl like Nancy o≠


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. . . people here-abouts would hold it against you. They would say hard things” (8). In almost any other narrative situation, the introduction of both patriarchal and communal authority at this point would likely bring an end to Sapphira and Henry’s sparring. In this context, however, it becomes a medium through which Sapphira directly implicates Henry’s devotion to Nancy. “They’ve talked before, and we’ve survived,” she begins. “They surely talked when black Till bore a yellow girl, after two of your brothers had been hanging round here so much. . . . Perhaps you have a kind of family feeling about Nancy?” (8–9). Though Henry attempts to deny guilt by biological association—“You know well enough Sapphira, it was that painter from Baltimore”—Sapphira’s remarks work doubly to introduce issues of ownership and commodity that sexualize Nancy’s—as an extension of Till’s —body (9). The underlying suggestion is that Henry’s dominion over Nancy is both legal and sexual; his resolve to “never sign” for her release implies an unwillingness to yield either authority. Sapphira’s will to subvert is not, however, shaken, and the conversation closes with her vowing to “find some other way” to intervene between her husband and the slave girl (9). The scene extends long enough to imply a causal relation between Sapphira’s drive and physical disability, an “a±iction” made “all the more cruel,” the narrator observes, by the fact that Sapphira “had been a very active woman, and had managed the farm as zealously as her husband had managed his mill” (10). The narrative’s description of Sapphira’s predropsy activities would seem to warrant this connection. We learn, for example, that before she married Henry, Sapphira was, in essence, foreman of the Dodderidge estate. She rode about the grounds “to see that the master’s orders were carried out. She went to the public sales on market days and bought in cattle and horses, of which she was a knowing judge.” And “when the increase of the slave cabins was larger than needed for field and house service,” Sapphira, not her father, “sold o≠ some of the younger negroes” (24). Sapphira appears even to have governed the terms upon which she and Henry marry. She timed the announcement of their engagement to coincide with the completion of the remodeling of the “very considerable property” in Back Creek where she decided they will live (25). She replaced the

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“old mill house” that “tenants for successive generations,” had run with a “comfortable dwelling” built “on very much the same pattern as Mount Vernon” (27, 20). She moved her “household goods,” which include a “score of slaves” (22), to her new home and settled in. She returned to Chestnut Hill, married Henry, and then drove “directly to the new Mill House on Back Creek, omitting the elaborate festivities which customarily followed a wedding” (27–28). In relocating to Back Creek, Sapphira abandoned none of the structures, customs, and habits associated with life in Chestnut Hill. With precision and in full conscience, she erected in this scarcely populated, impoverished settlement—where “lumber was so plentiful that it brought no price at all”; where “not a single family had ever owned more than four or five negroes”; indeed, where most people “did not believe in slavery”—a plantation infrastructure (22). And she fortified its symbolic and social signification by placing the Dodderidge crest—her “stamp of superiority,” as the townsfolk come to see it—on the door of her glass-windowed carriage (the only one of its kind in Back Creek) and by conditioning her slaves to take pride in their position while disparaging poor whites. Sapphira’s later loss of mobility did nothing to undermine the system she established, for, as the narrator makes clear: “it was because she had been so energetic, and such a good manager, that even from an invalid’s chair she was still able to keep her servants well in hand” (54). As a whole, therefore, the opening scene seems to clarify Sapphira’s internal conflict, to expose its origins in the subversive potential of black female sexuality and white male desire. It is a conflict that at once indicates and displaces homoerotic desire by directing attention away from Sapphira’s ostensibly repressed sexual desire to the violent implications of white male fulfillment.7 In this regard, Till, a character who has come in for particular critical abuse of late, is worth consideration. Till has been criticized for placing too much value on her position in the Colbert household, for interpreting her slave status as “one of the fixed conditions you were born into” (219)—in short, for being a character too fully indoctrinated in the plantation economy. The criticism is fair enough with respect to Till’s elitism, which causes her to condescend to Back Creek’s “poor [white] farmers and backwoods people” and her fellow, but less “respectable and well placed”—read: house—slaves (69, 72). That Till’s


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elitism also compels her to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to Sapphira’s abuse of her daughter, Nancy, however, seems to me an indefensible claim.8 Both structurally and discursively the narrative implies the primacy of Till’s regard for her daughter’s plight. In the novel’s epilogue, the narrator is represented as a woman who, upon reflecting on her childhood experiences in Back Creek, recalls the narrative proper, the story of Sapphira and the slave girl, Nancy. The postscript to the epilogue—the novel’s actual conclusion—invites us to assume that Cather is this woman. More telling than this association, however, is the fact that the narrator—Cather—does not position herself as an agent in the narrative proper. Rather, she attributes this subjectivity to Till, her informant. “When my parents went for a long horseback ride,” she begins, “they sometimes took me as far as Till’s cabin, and picked me up again on their way home. It was there I heard the old stories,” she reveals. “Till used to take me across the meadow to the Colbert graveyard to put flowers on the graves. Each time she talked to me about the people buried there, she was sure to remember something she had not happened to tell me before. Her stories about the Master and Mistress were never mere repetitions, but grew more and more into a complete picture of those two persons” (291–92). In a manner that invokes ethnographic techniques as well as Sapphira’s governing ethos of interracial kinship, Cather positions herself as shaper of the stories Till tells. At the outset, these stories register Till and Nancy’s loving a≠ection for one another as well as the care Till has taken to rear her daughter to be kind, industrious, and conscientious. Indeed, others observe Till’s “natural delicacy of feeling” and “good manners,” reflected in Nancy, though, tellingly, “with something warmer and more alive.” Nancy’s admiration of Till is evinced by the pride she takes in her mother’s “nice ways” as well as her e≠orts to emulate them. Out of respect for her mother, Nancy never asks Till who her father was, and she demonstrates the values Till has instilled in her by respecting Je≠ and always calling him “Pappy,” even though she knows he isn’t her father (42–43). Details of this nature do not, however, inform most critical opinions of Till and Nancy’s relationship, which derive largely from a single, stark observation o≠ered near the end of the novel: “Till had been a Dodderidge

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before ever she was Nancy’s mother. In Till’s mind, her first duty was to her mistress” (219). Critics fail to grasp that these are not Till’s thoughts but Rachel’s perception of Till’s thoughts. And Rachel seizes upon them finally to condemn the forces that compel Till to “shut her eyes to what is going on at the Mill House”—forces that Rachel visualizes in terms of Sapphira’s subjectivity and characterizes as irrational. “It ain’t put on” (219), she deduces of her mother’s complex relationship with the slaves, “she believes in it, and they believe in it. But it ain’t right” (221). If we decline to privilege Rachel’s opinion, we may note the subtle, arguably more telling details underwriting Till and Nancy’s relationship. As Sapphira addresses her letter to Martin near the start of the novel, she informs Washington that she’ll be going out and directs him to tell Till to come and get her ready (30). Upon Till’s arrival, Sapphira turns “her letter face-down upon her desk” because, as the narrator explains, “Till could read, and the Mistress did not wish her to see to whom the letter was addressed” (31). Why? Because Till might question Sapphira’s motives for inviting her philandering nephew to Back Creek. Better still, she might question Sapphira’s motives in connection with what is already on her mind (and on the minds of everybody else save, perhaps, “close-mouthed” Washington who, in keeping post behind Sapphira’s chair, sees and hears everything but tells nothing), namely, “why Nancy had fallen out of favour with the Mistress” (59). The inevitability of Till’s putting two and two together seems unquestionable, particularly in light of Till’s past experience with Colbert houseguests. It seems to me impossible to think of Nancy’s potential violation at the hands of Martin Colbert without reference to Till’s actual violation allegedly at the hands of one (or both) of Henry’s brothers. To be sure, Nancy appears warmer and more alive than her mother because she does not bear her mother’s emotional scars, the earliest of which Till acquires upon witnessing her own mother burn to death. But, as we are told, the pain associated with this tragic event is lessened by Mrs. Matchem’s nurturing; indeed, almost immediately after Till’s mother’s death, Mrs. Matchem becomes her surrogate mother, impressing upon a young Till the precepts about industry, honor, and self-respect that Till passes on to her own daughter, Nancy. We are compelled to deduce, therefore, that the heavi-


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ness of heart Till feels at Back Creek is the product of pain she has endured in Back Creek. Though the narrative does not directly account for Till’s violation, we know its e≠ects. She becomes pregnant and Nancy is born. She also ends up married to Je≠, a “capon man,” inferior to her in intelligence and ambition. Reflective of neither Till’s nor Je≠ ’s will, the arrangement demonstrates Sapphira’s seeming desire to protect her favorite slave’s status. As Lizzy crudely observes, “Miss Sapphy didn’t want a lady’s maid to be havin’ chillun all over de place,—always a-carryin’ or a-nussin’ em” (43). The more telling implication of the arrangement, however, is the rupture it exposes in the Back Creek social system that Sapphira has almost singlehandedly designed. Subverted by the patriarch’s sexual authority, Sapphira tries to restore order and, in the process, triples Till’s abuse. By legally binding Till to a castrated man, Sapphira unsexes her prized servant, denying her the opportunity to experience sexual intimacy in a legitimate and consensual relationship, and preventing her from healing physically if not completely psychologically from her assault. In a seemingly desperate attempt to fix the problem created by her lack of authority, Sapphira actually gains dominion over Till’s sexuality. In this instance, homoerotic desire is again signified and displaced; Je≠ is, after all, a “capon man.” More to the point, however, is the correlation we’re compelled to draw between Till’s actual and Nancy’s potential violation. In pointing up the violent implications of black/female/slave and white/male/master miscegenation, Cather also incriminates the plantation mistress, because Sapphira’s actions—desperately urged in both Till’s and Nancy’s case—enfold the myth of Southern Womanhood within the novel’s frame of racial oppression. Sapphira does not—or cannot—consider the possibility of Till and Nancy’s liberation as a solution to her problem. Rachel enters, therefore, to create an atmosphere in which black freedom is imagined and realized; in so doing, she redeems the myth of Southern Womanhood. Cather hints that something of this nature is in store when she introduces Rachel as having Sapphira’s same compassionate regard for the sick and elderly but as hostile to her mother’s position on slavery. Rachel’s service to and casual interaction with Back Creek’s indigent population also starkly contrasts the deliberation with which Sapphira distinguishes her-

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self from the poor—recall the Dodderidge crest—and avoids mixing with them. Cather pushes this symbolism further by focusing Rachel’s consciousness of her moral obligation to Back Creek’s slave population through her association with impoverished whites. The fourth of the novel’s nine books, or major divisions, introduces events and characters seemingly unrelated to the narrative proper. Among others, we meet Mrs. Ringer and Casper Flight and learn of their individual plights, and we gain extensive insight into Mrs. Bywater’s personal history. We discover that Mrs. Ringer has two daughters who were “disgraced” by men who “fooled” (i.e., impregnated) them, that Casper’s cousins beat him for allegedly stealing the Church’s silver plate and chalice, and that Mrs. Bywater’s abolitionism inspired Rachel’s antislavery convictions when she was a child. These interpolations result from Rachel’s immersion among Back Creek’s poor white citizens. Thematically and imagistically signifying on the novel’s main events, they subtly, though tellingly, point up the conditions that make it impossible for blacks to resist oppression on their own and thus they prepare readers for Rachel’s intervention on Nancy’s behalf. Mrs. Ringer observes that “it would all a-been di≠erent,” for her daughters, if her crippled son “Lawndis was a strong man. Then he could atracked down the fellers an’ fit with ’em, an’ made ’em marry his sisters. But them raskels knowed my pore gals hadn’t nobody to stand up fur ’em. Fellers is skeered to make free with a gal that’s got able men folks to see she gits her rights” (122). Implicit in Mrs. Ringer’s observation is the expectation that “violated” white women will usually be protected either by a moral or social injunction. The only thing preventing Lawndis from restoring his sisters’ virtues is his physical disability, because if he were able, Mrs. Ringer insists, he would beat his sisters’ lovers into marrying them. This socially sanctioned (and we may presume legally sanctioned) authority is denied to blacks, as Washington and Sampson come to demonstrate. We know that Washington provides Nancy shelter and protection from Martin at least once, and we know that Sampson informs Henry of Martin’s apparent designs on Nancy. Neither Washington nor Sampson has the authority to challenge Martin directly, however, and any indirect assault they may attempt in protection of Nancy must be leveled with caution. In-


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deed, Martin’s response to Sampson’s bold regard of him standing underneath Nancy at the cherry tree precisely indicates what can happen to a slave who oversteps his boundaries. “If ever he looks me in the face like that again, I’ll break his head for him,” Martin vows (182). Casper’s image—“stripped naked to the waist and bound tight to a chestnut sapling” (127)—strikingly doubles this impression of slave abuse and reminds Rachel that “a man’s got to be stronger’n a bull to get out of the place he was born in” (130). The sum of these events and images shapes the social narrative within which Rachel contemplates her mother’s and her own divergent subjectivities. She focuses this awareness by recalling the moment when her abolitionist sentiments became a conviction: “she had always known it was wrong,” she remembers. “It was the thing that made her unhappy at home, and came between her and her mother. How she hated her mother’s voice in sarcastic reprimand to the servants! And she hated it in contemptuous indulgence. Till and Aunt Jezebel were the only blacks to whom her mother never spoke with that scornful leniency” (137). The absence of physical contact in Rachel’s moment of clarity implicates verbal abuse—a manifestation of Sapphira’s presumed superiority—as an equally damnable o≠ense. Here, we should not miss the “transcontextual” significance of the exchange. In almost any pre-civil-rights period in American history, whites could verbally abuse blacks without consequence. Within the narrative framework, however, the recognition launches the processes by which Rachel consciously reconstitutes herself apart from her mother’s abusive image. Razing the Pedestal A few of Rachel’s initiatives refer us to conventional notions of the myth of Southern Womanhood in notable ways. She becomes “more than ever reserved and shut within herself ” (137), and upon marrying endeavors, with her entire “mind and energy” (138), to create the ideal domestic situation. As the narrator sees it, Rachel’s “will to self-abnegation” took the “form of untiring service to a man’s pleasure and of almost idolatrous love for her” children (141). The measures she takes to secure Nancy’s escape, however, revolutionize this impression. Reminiscent of the command with which

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her mother took charge at Chestnut Hills, Rachel calls Back Creek’s abolitionists to order and reveals her plan. She commits the escape route to memory and then secures financial support from her father. She dons her mother’s habiliment—“her Sunday best, even to black gloves”—to pass Nancy o≠ as a “lady’s maid” and divert suspicion (231, 233). Along the Underground Railroad path, she shelters Nancy from the cold and restores the slave girl’s faith when her confidence begins to slip. “You’ve been a brave girl right along,” she reassures Nancy, “an’ you mustn’t fail me now. I took a big risk to get you this far” (237). The dramatic irony implicit in this statement is that Rachel believes she stands to lose as much as Nancy, if Nancy is not free. “If we went back,” she continues, “Mother would never forgive you—nor me. It would be worse than before” (237). Upon her return, Rachel is, in fact, unceremoniously shunned by her mother. “Mistress Blake is kindly requested to make no further visits at the Mill House,” Sapphira neatly writes, then signs her full name: Sapphira Dodderidge Colbert (245). The play on formal titles as well as the method of delivery—she has the postmistress’s son dispatch the letter—signifies Sapphira’s recognition of her daughter as her social equal; the message suggests Sapphira’s acceptance of her daughter as a political enemy. Nancy’s plight thus represents Rachel’s own journey toward self-actualization as southern mistress activist. She reappropriates her mother’s authority to set herself and Nancy free. Of course each step Rachel takes to secure Nancy’s freedom symbolically returns Rachel to Sapphira and their unresolved conflict. This strategic doubling nicely foreshadows the events that bring closure to the narrative proper and reunite Sapphira and her daughter. Ultimately the doubling is an act of redemption. By subverting the imbrication of white dominance and black oppression in a cultural system, which, to Sapphira’s mind, constitutes the “fixed ways, which satisfied most folk” (15), Cather—via Rachel—revitalizes the myth of Southern Womanhood, a∞rming its authority to promote racial progress in a modern southern context. Smith’s mobilization of the myth of Southern Womanhood in Strange Fruit closely, though more subtly, follows the same narrative path as Sapphira because, as Redding Sugg Jr. points out, Smith believed that aristo-


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cratic white southern women’s public activism was complicated by the fact that as women, they were “deprived of human rights” but as aristocratic whites they had “learned to exploit” their social situations to others’ disadvantage (160). Smith thus seems initially to keep the progressive potential of the myth of Southern Womanhood at bay, to clarify the nuances and ironies of its oppressive influence. At the outset, the aesthetic demands of Strange Fruit’s surface theme— miscegenation—crack the foundation of mythic white southern female identity in an ostensibly subversive manner. Nonnie is introduced as a figure “tall and slim and white in the dusk”; she is educated and “shutmouth”; domesticated and “so good” with children (1). With “soft black hair blowing o≠ her face” and “set” black eyes (1), she defies the expectation that women made in her image are white and, thus, exposes the instability of the myth of Southern Womanhood’s racial aesthetic. Tracy himself marvels that “in the dusk,” Nonnie “is as white as [his sister,] Laura.” But Tracy’s subsequent observation inscribes the linguistic injunctions that distort Nonnie’s image and prevent him (and others) from esteeming her like his sister or any other white southern woman: “God, if she weren’t a nigger! Lord God what a mess,” he muses (4). In thinking racially and ethically about his relationship with Nonnie and Nonnie’s relation to his sister, Tracy ironically concedes to the dominant racial ideology of the myth of Southern Womanhood. His concession is not, however, lacking in strategic purpose. The paradox of Tracy’s admiration and dehumanization of Nonnie opens the narrative to a critical examination of the gender-inflected social networks that shape his psychology. The earliest of these connections is conjured when Nonnie recalls her first encounter with Tracy. The scene deserves liberal quoting: She had fallen when Nat pulled up her dress, pulled at her underpants. Nat’s freckled hand had reached out for her and she had jerked away from him, but more from the look on his sallow face, new to six-year-old eyes. His words already old. Words scrawled on circus posters, on privies, on fences, said with a giggle, carrying no more meaning to her ears than the squawk of guineas running crazily along ditches in search of worms.

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“You all right?” Tracy had said; and then, to Nat, “Beat it. She’s not that kind. And don’t let me catch you around her again.” “Haw, haw, haw,” Nat showed tobacco-stained teeth and lolled his tongue. “I didn’t know she was yourn.” (2–3)

The coalescing images and actions—a young black girl falling, a grimy slightly older white boy physically and verbally assaulting her, and another white boy of about the same age coming to her defense—order the scene around issues of black female sexuality, desirability, and availability and white male desire, violence, and authority. It is revealing that neither Nat’s physical assault nor his actual verbal abuse is new to six-year-old Nonnie. Equally familiar to her is Nat’s negotiating with Tracy for her body. Nonnie’s response to these events—or nonresponsiveness to them—allows us to view the social space she inhabits in relation to young white boys. It is an extension of the vision of Nonnie in relation to white men that we receive earlier. Recall the “white boys whistl[ing] softly when she walked down the street,” and the “low words” they say while rubbing “the back of their hands across their mouths” (1). Recall, too, Cap’n Rushton, the manager of the turpentine farm where all the locals work, rubbing “his thick red hand over his chin slowly as he watched” Nonnie pass by, sitting there “watching the girl, rubbing his hand over his chin, watching her, until she had gone back across the railroad and turned down College Street” (2). In this scene regulated narrative syncopation casts an image of Nonnie moving forward, as if in slow motion, while the white male gaze takes her in. The scene ironically eroticizes Nonnie’s objectification by signifying on the “thread-bare lie,” the idea that black men covet white women’s bodies.9 There is no sense, however, that Nonnie’s objectification will result in white “bodies swinging in the southern breeze” or white “strange fruit hanging from poplar trees.”10 On the contrary, the image of Nonnie being taken in by the white male gaze—as a child and as an adult—works to naturalize the process, to impress upon us a sense of a cultural climate in which white men have unrestricted access to black women’s bodies. Hence, Nonnie’s seeming indi≠erence to Nat’s behavior. Hence, too, her unwitting self-objectification once Tracy succeeds in driving Nat away: “I am yourn,” she


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whispers to him; then, as if sealing a deal, o≠ers Tracy a bouquet of flowers, which he takes. The exchange is a symbolic indication of Tracy’s culpability in Nonnie’s moral and social dilemma, despite the fact that he “saves” her and eventually throws the flowers away. He is a white male and, thus, a beneficiary—and agent—of a social order that legitimizes the exploitation of black female sexuality and conditions black women to expect it. If she does not exonerate Tracy, however, Smith at least complicates his blame by tethering this process to the sexual aesthetics of the myth of Southern Womanhood. Immediately after Nonnie tells Tracy that she is pregnant, he goes to Dottie’s house to escort her to church (29). Tracy appears not to comprehend his own motives. But what he does upon escorting Dottie home at the end of the revival hints at his intentions. He goes home and, lying in bed, imagines the ritual Dottie will follow in preparing to go to sleep. She would take o≠ each garment carefully, gently, as if she were taking o≠ a part of herself. . . . Now the light was o≠. Dottie was saying her prayers. In a moment she would lie in her bed, cool, clean, composed, all of her life completely contained in the rigid little box which shut the right way to do things away from the wrong. Dottie praying. . . . What would she pray about? Sins? Tracy liked the thought of Dottie sinning. . . . Maybe she prayed for him. Goddammit, she probably did. Now why? Wanting for him what he wanted? Asking God to persuade him to keep the rules? Most likely. Yes, she knew them and wanted them kept. (28–29)

The rhetoric of this scene depends on the reader’s entering into Tracy’s assumptions during the part of the text where it is narrated. A set of symbolic and material relations evokes Tracy’s impression of Dottie’s character and temperament. Dottie—the girl next door, to whom Tracy has been committed since before high school—is pious, pristine, and proper, everything that, to Tracy’s mind, Nonnie cannot be because of her racial identity. Dottie is a constant source of anxiety, desire, and confusion to Tracy. She nags at his moral and sexual sensibilities; she reminds him of his failures and his potentials. The emotional coordinates drawn from Dottie’s subjectivity to Tracy’s mind recall standard impressions of the myth of Southern Womanhood.

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What distinguishes this portrait and makes it much more original, however, is Tracy’s regard for Dottie’s relation to the law. She is the keeper of God’s “rules”; the physical embodiment of the social and ethical codes that agitate and constrict Tracy’s desires. Radically, Tracy’s assumptions about Dottie’s subjectivity lay bare the psychosexual damage that the myth of Southern Womanhood does to black women and white men. It is a substantive rhetorical shift away from conventional representations of the myth’s “victims” that brings into relief the agency of other white female characters, namely, Tracy’s mother and sister. Reconstructing the Pedestal To the few critics who have directly accounted for her characterization, Alma Deen is a “tragic” figure whose status emanates from her “distorted” perspectives on sexuality and religion—the result of her interpellation into a southern patriarchal culture, as Althusser might see it—which cause her to oppress and alienate her children.11 What such critics do not realize, however, is that Alma’s disposition is maternally cultivated. Her devotion to Tracy and Laura is in proportion to the devotion her own mother gave her, though Alma does not herself (because she cannot) fully recognize this. Instead, Alma convinces herself that her mother never really loved her or her father and thus vows to be “a real wife” to her husband and a devoted mother to her children. She makes this commitment, however, in full memory of her mother (51). The point that Smith seems concerned to make in accounting for Alma is that nurturing is a learned behavior, and its primary instructors are women—not men. It is a telling indication of the redemptive potential the narrative later ascribes to the myth of Southern Womanhood. Alma’s “commitment” to her children, however, continues to accentuate its abuses. Alma’s influence on Tracy is evidenced by the persistent inflection of her voice in his unspoken anxieties about Dottie—“You owe it to Dorothy to make a decision” (42); about his professional ambitions—“you knew how I wanted you to be a doctor or a lawyer ” (56); and about his moral quandary —“I’ve arranged for you to have a talk with Brother Dunwoodie at nine o’clock in the morning” (55). And her impact on Laura is indicated in the scene where she discovers and destroys the clay torso that her daughter


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has created in the form of a naked woman’s body. More recent critics read same-sex desire and repression in this scene as an indication of Smith’s lesbianism and as a critique of its legal and social proscription.12 While I agree that these tensions resonate in the scene, I would argue that the scene serves as much to expose Alma’s failing mythic authority over Laura as to repress Laura’s lesbian desires. The scene opens not with Alma discovering the torso, as most critics posit, but with a description of the impact that Laura’s refusal to attend the evening service of the revival (and Tracy’s response to Laura’s refusal) has on Alma. “She began to tremble, her cup slipped, a brown stream ran slowly down the cloth and on her dress. She could not remember ever having done such a thing. She felt deeply disturbed” (44). Alma enters Laura’s room to find “peace in old familiar things,” to possess “once more the fringe of her life” (44–45). But the sexual explicitness and suggestiveness of the torso she discovers further disorients her: “she held the little figure, stared at each detail as if she saw nakedness for the first time. As if all she had feared had come to life in that lump of dirt. As if in it were hidden the key to Laura’s secrets, and Laura’s life, always as easily entered as Laura’s room, now locked against her” (45). A sequence of associations whereby Alma attempts to locate the source of her problem follows. She blames Laura’s advanced education, her interest in art, and, finally, her relationship with her brother. “Tracy is destroying Laura,” Alma reasons, “not directly, but by the subtle influence of his failures. Tracy’s tight lips, his silence, his withdrawal, the long hours spent. . . . Wherever he spent his time it was wickedly spent—this she knew. And Laura must surely be aware of this, now that she was grown. Because of it was she losing faith in her mother? Did she believe it her fault, that Tracy was no good, a failure?” (47). As McKay Jenkins sees it, the “psychological move” from Laura’s desires to Tracy’s “failures” in this quasi-dream sequence indicates “the way the white Southern mind masks a deep sexual repression—at all levels—behind a screen of racialized discourse” (110). What Jenkins doesn’t account for in this sequence, however, is the “psychological move” from Tracy’s “failures” to Alma’s subjectivity. Though the ellipses repress the specific nature of Alma’s issues with Tracy, the entire sequence subtly, though tellingly, indi-

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cates her command of the sexual and racial demands of the myth of Southern Womanhood and her determination to enforce them. Indirectly, therefore, Alma reveals her awareness of and objection to Tracy’s relationship with Nonnie. Indeed the scene closes with Alma pledging to fight both Laura and Tracy’s transgressions “with the infallible weapon of her belief in herself. . . . She was right,” she asserts reassuringly. “She could not be wrong” (47). But later events shatter Alma’s self-confidence while exposing her weaknesses to others. When Laura fails to attend the morning service of the revival, Tut notices Alma’s fingers “trembling.” He feels in her “a new quality of uncertainty. He had not realized before how old she was. . . . Past middle age,” he observes, “and showing it. And he looked at Alma’s breasts; he followed them, compressed flatly by her form-fitting girdle to her thickened waist; his mind continued the scrutiny beyond his eye’s line of vision. Well, well, well,” he concludes, “age sure creeps up on you. Yes sir, age . . .” (105). Tut’s near clinical regard of Alma’s aging and instability signifies on the novel’s overarching theme: the idea that longstanding oppressive southern traditions are tired and old and weakening. His observation also parallels Laura’s reflection on the tree that has stood outside her window since she was a child: “It had grown imperceptibly, steadily, sap pushing up, up, with stubborn rightness, obeying all the intricacies of an inner pattern, in its good fortune so little cramped by the house, or other trees, or Maxwell. Growing old, maturing as it grew, putting out leaves and clusters of green nuts, dropping them one by one as they ripened, taking the winter in its bare strength” (105). Evidence of the tree’s evolution and resilience causes Laura to contemplate the human condition. “She wondered if human beings could grow and mature. All the people she knew seemed not to grow through life, but merely to move from year to year, as a small child plays on a stairway, taking all its playthings with it as it goes up from step to step, not knowing what to leave behind. If you knew what to leave behind. . . .” Her thoughts shift again in poignantly succinct consideration of her mother’s motive for destroying the clay figure: “She hates what I like!” (162). The recognition narratively evolves into Laura’s recollection of her mother’s remarks about Jane, the woman who modeled for Laura’s nude and with whom Laura has


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been spending a lot of time. “There’re women who are—unnatural. They’re like vultures,” she tells Laura, “They do—terrible things to young girls” (163). This set of aesthetic and metaphorical relations plunges Laura into a deeper whirlwind of thought wherein she appears to retreat from the brink of sexual self-realization. “You knew you could talk to Jane,” she begins, “you could tell her about your sculpture and your verses, about your fears and your feelings. And soon you were feeling with her a security that you had not felt since you were a little girl with your Mother. And you loved her. Yes, you loved her and wanted to be with her. . . . But you also knew,” she admits, that “if Mother made an issue, if she labeled this feeling for Jane with those names, there’d be no more feeling. . . . Maybe you could go away,” she proposes, “Maybe you could go away and never come back. Never come back to Mother—and Jane. You wouldn’t want it. You wouldn’t want your relationship with Jane when mother finished with it. You wouldn’t want— anything” (165–66). Taken as a whole, the sequence of thoughts that begins with Laura observing the “natural” growth of a tree and concludes with her contemplating a means of escaping her mother’s reproach reveals Laura struggling to acquire a more complete awareness of her subjectivity and agency. It marks a crucial turning point in the narrative that suggests why the subtext of same-sex desire is, in this case, as in Sapphira, kept at bay. Both novels index what readers should already know: that while not identical, narratives of racial and same-sex oppression, particularly within a southern context, have historically fed into one another. Nevertheless, the moral quandary created by pending and actual racial violence in both novels makes the need to engage the theme of same-sex desire less urgent. The narrative thus meanders in the aftermath of Laura’s self-reflection to create a space within which she both extricates herself from her mother’s influence and aligns herself with the interests of oppressed black characters. Confirmation of her brother’s death causes Laura not to grieve his loss but to envy his condition. “He’s free!” she proclaims; he “had deliberately died,” she contends, “to keep her at home.” From this realization Laura grows “oppressed and frightened. By everything,” she imagines, but mostly by the thought of su≠ering under her mother’s oppressive influence alone (214). Laura’s hyperconsciousness of her doomed plight dramatically

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extends into a “hypersensibility” of Nonnie’s involvement in Tracy’s murder. “He must have done something dreadful to have made her do it,” she reasons. “And she must have done it slowly, so sure she was doing what had to be done” (216). Nonnie’s arrival at the Deens’ (with flowers) stresses Laura’s sensibilities further, urging her searchingly to regard Nonnie’s quiet strength. “What did he do that gave you the courage?” she queries with her eyes. “Nobody loved him much, except you, but you must have loved him. You have to love a thing—you have to love someone a great deal to kill her, don’t you? You have to love and hate what you kill, a great deal, don’t you—” (127). The Freudian slip—from “him” to “her” tellingly inflects the words Laura communicates out loud—“before you can find the courage”—inwardly and outwardly (217). It results, in other words, in a substantive, if fleeting, moment of identification between Laura and Nonnie in which Laura reveals that she, too, has “killed” someone she loves. And we come to appreciate the significance of this “murder” when we discover the role Laura plays in planning Henry’s (failed) escape. “With the shade drawn and the door lock[ed],” Laura, with Jane and Mr. Harris’s assistance, disguises Henry in her mother’s image, dressing him in Alma’s “gingham dress,” putting her “own big floppy leghorn hat on his head,” and powdering “his tear-smeared face until it was white.” In a final act of subversion, she ties her mother’s veil around Henry’s head, then positions him between Jane and Mr. Harris, in mock reproduction of her family’s order (218). Here, the overlap between Sapphira and Strange Fruit must not be missed; Laura’s actions symbolically work toward the same end as Rachel’s. Though the narrative in Strange Fruit moves toward Henry’s lynching, it also moves toward Laura’s liberation and symbolic redemption of the myth of Southern Womanhood. In the end, Smith, like Cather, seems to maintain that, for many modern white southern women writers, paving the way toward an aesthetics of black civil rights politics entails grappling with and attempting to resolve the conflicting politics of the myth of Southern Womanhood from which they benefited and against which they struggled.


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Beyond the Plantation? While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss the complexity of Sapphira and Strange Fruit’s engagement with black elitism and intracultural race prejudice, I believe it is worth briefly noting by way of concluding that Cather and Smith both presciently anticipate the forces that, arguably, oppress blacks today as much as any (past) white-ordered or designed cultural systems. Cather’s representation of Till appears concerned to identify both the psychological and social e≠ects of black elitism as a residual e≠ect of the slave system that created so-called field and house servant mentalities among black Americans. She maintains, however, that while Till can aspire to high cultural values, can even covet Sapphira’s subjectivity, she does not have to perpetuate its abuses. Smith’s characterization of Bessie follows this same line of argument. Though most of what we know about Nonnie and Tracy’s relationship comes to us through Tracy’s consciousness, key details are also filtered through Bessie’s psyche. At the outset, in fact, we learn that Bessie has known of Nonnie and Tracy’s relationship for some years prior to Nonnie becoming pregnant, even before Tillie’s (Nonnie and Bessie’s mother’s) death. Bessie divulges the a≠air to no one, however, initially in the interest of protecting everyone involved—herself included—from the repercussions of her mother finding out. “If she had dared to tell Tillie, she would have taken a hoe and driven that white boy plumb out of their lives” (16). Upon Tillie’s death, however, Bessie still declines to confront Nonnie because, as she reasons, “if she said it aloud, if she once put words to it, all she feared would come true. But if she didn’t say it, maybe it would be something she had made up—like so many of her worries” (16). What worries Bessie about Nonnie’s relationship with Tracy is not that Tracy is a white man, but that Nonnie is indi≠erent to his whiteness. It is a fear that initially subtly rises in Bessie when she observes Nonnie caressing Tracy’s face, her “fingers moving over temple, back of ear, neck. Fingers moving through his hair, lifting it, letting it fall, lifting it. Like breathing” (11, my emphasis). As the narrative progresses, Bessie’s anxiety gains in subtlety, revealing at its heart a desire to be similarly indi≠erent to race. “It was as if she’d

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shut out this world she’d been born into,” she observes of her younger sister, “insulating herself by soft denials of it. If she said it didn’t exist, it didn’t exist” (23). Bessie does not fulfill her desire to be like Nonnie, however, because she cannot transcend her own feelings of inadequacy beside her “bright skin” sister. The central narrative tension, organized around the racial and sexual politics of the myth of Southern Womanhood, underscores the source of Bessie’s problem. Bessie, as much as Nonnie, Dottie, and Laura, is a product of a culture that values white and devalues black skin and bodies. But the “compulsion to see her race through white eyes” (188) increasingly compels Bessie to project her anger and frustration with “White Town’s” abuses of its alleged racial superiority outwardly onto black culture, in general, and inwardly onto herself (188). Indeed, in the aftermath of Tracy’s murder, Bessie tells Sam that “our color has ruined our lives,” and admits her desire to “be natural and easy and simple,” in short, “to be white” (197). The tragedy of what Smith reveals through Bessie’s characterization is Bessie’s need at once to transcend and to “fix” race. It is a subtle manifestation of one of the psychological e≠ects of intracultural race prejudice on black people, a residue of the myth of Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology, uncritically filtered. Smith and Cather’s representations of the problems posed by black elitism and race prejudice do not occupy a significant amount of narrative space, perhaps, to avoid the complexity of speaking too confidently for black people in general, and black women in particular. Nevertheless, Cather and Smith crucially suggest that critical strides in this direction must be taken if the human race ever expects fully to realize the goals of the Civil Rights Movement.

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Old Sites of Authority Is Massa gonna sell us tomorrow?” / “Yes, yes.” “Mama, is Massa gonna sell us tomorrow?” / “Yes, yes, yes.” “Mama, is Massa gonna sell me tomorrow?” / “Yes, yes, yes.” —Mrs. Arness, Bringing Down the House

During my years of graduate work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I discovered the seed of my contention with critical assessments of white southern women’s writing that has resulted in this book. At about that time, I also discovered A Di≠erent World (1987–1993), a favorite sitcom of mine, in syndication. After Lisa Bonet left this Cosby Show spino≠ in 1988, the storylines increasingly directed toward capturing “the” black experience at historically black colleges and universities. The subtext of a 1991 episode debated the possibilities that extend from reversing the Hegelian master-slave dialectic in order to reckon with “mammy,” the imagined and material projection of black women as paradoxically maternal and asexual, sexually available and undesirable, and passive and domineering, which cuts across both the Plantation Mythology and the myth of Southern Womanhood. The episode concluded with Kimberly Reese, the character initially most hostile to mammy, performing a skit wherein she evolves from an Aunt Jemima–like figure singing “Dixie” into an African queen reciting Nikki Giovanni’s “Ego-Tripping.” The performance, an assertion of Kim’s expanded consciousness of the construct’s broad-ranging signification, mapped and negotiated lyrical, visual, and poetic discourses that adumbrate the complexities of black women’s histories as objects of racial and sexual oppression as well as self-a∞rming cultural agents. It broadly approximates the processes by which this book has proposed that modern white southern women writers used the myth of Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology to negotiate sites of contradiction, limitation, and possibility in their own lives.

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I have argued for a revaluation of Julia Peterkin, Gwen Bristow, Caroline Gordon, Willa Cather, and Lillian Smith’s cultural work so as to recuperate the resonating e≠ects of their authorial investments in southern myths between 1920 and 1945. I have made use of whiteness and cultural materialist theories throughout, and I could say more to push my feelings about each writer’s particular urge toward racial association and disassociation. Ellison’s and Fiedler’s seminal work on white masking, for example, which Lott’s Theft and Love (1995) masterfully builds upon, could o≠er a yet more nuanced perspective on the contours of Julia Peterkin’s “intimate material expression” of “blackness” (Lott 5). This sort of recognition could amplify the complex exchange between notions of white female agency and what Maurice Wallace refers to as the ideality of black masculinity (62–63), which I gestured toward in my discussion of Gordon’s signification on “black” coded dialogue. The ironic truth that extends from Gordon’s play on the ideality of black masculinity in None Shall Look Back is that Uncle Winston’s self-actualization is conceivable only in terms of his (negative) relationship to white women’s bodies. There is, too, about Cather and Smith’s tacit commentary on racial oppression and repressed samesex desire in America a provocative exchange with James Baldwin’s theory of black male surveillance, whose analysis also falls outside the scope of this book.1 A subtle, though persistent, narrative strand throughout has been the still pressing need to reexamine the cultural politics of the Southern Renaissance, which King, following the leads of Cleanth Brooks, Louis D. Rubin, Lewis Simpson, and Allen Tate, dates “after the late 1920s” (7).2 It was, according to King, an initiative that the Fugitive turned Agrarian poets o∞cially launched and which the death of James Agee brought to an end in 1955. Notably, E. MacDonald appears to be the only male critic to challenge King’s chronology, uncovering in the early-twentieth-century writing of Amelia Rives and Mary Johnston fledgling impulses among southern writers “to look at and within themselves and their region with critical discernment” (264). In an e≠ort properly to accredit the work of Kate Chopin and the early fiction of Ellen Glasgow, Manning argues in “Real Beginning” (1993) that “the Southern Renaissance began for women well before World War I” be-

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cause they “encountered intense cultural tension decades earlier” (40). Anne Goodwyn Jones echoes Manning’s sentiments in her survey of fiction by Chopin and Glasgow as well as Frances Newman, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and Zora Neale Hurston, whose writing promoted the “national needs for a new gender for women” (“Work of Gender” 50) grounded in “issues involving the control of the woman’s body and desires” (54). Jones and Manning labor as much to broaden conventional mappings of the origins of the Southern Renaissance as to highlight the self-conscious dismantling of the myth of Southern Womanhood among modern white southern women writers. According to Manning, these women felt “intensely the discrepancy between the conventional female role, so exaggerated in the South, and their enlarged desires” (41). That Jones and Manning do not address assumptions about modern white southern women writers’ desires and negotiations of the myth of Southern Womanhood across broad-ranging issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality indicates the work that remains to be done toward recovering these writers’ cultural insight before, within, and beyond the rebirth of the South’s literary tradition. Indeed, when the range of Margaret Mitchell and Ellen Glasgow’s aesthetic politics is considered, one might well challenge longstanding assumptions about even these writers’ investments in the “New South” woman. Guided by conventional scholarly treatment of the myth of Southern Womanhood, Matthews argues that Glasgow sought primarily to indict male policing of female desire in In This Our Life (1941). But because generational, ethical, and gender gaps code contending attitudes toward marriage and parenthood in the novel, the communication breakdown between modern women and men that the novel thematizes (and that Gone with the Wind foreshadows) reveals a more urgent crisis: the threat the “New South” woman poses to the conjugal family. Implicitly, Mitchell and Glasgow seem to highlight, without necessarily resolving, the problems created at the moment of defining what are or should be southern women’s roles within and outside familial structures and, thus, project a more conservative viewpoint on southern womanhood—both black and white— than has heretofore been recognized. Recognition of this order has been this book’s highest goal. As I see it, the Plantation Mythology and the myth of Southern Womanhood are sites

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of authority, which white southern women writers, throughout history, have declined to reduce to single narratives. Notwithstanding the fact that American society has historically been predominately white male–legislated, white southern women have maintained the power to author, subvert, modify, and reinforce the myths according to their own and other Americans’ shifting statuses. As A Di≠erent World in syndication demonstrates, and as I proposed at the start of this study, the challenge in recognizing the agency of those other than White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant-propertied men in the economy of southern ideology is to assess the narratives, in all their complex registries, that support and sustain the economy. I want to conclude, therefore, not by a formal ending as such but by a pointing to the interweaving of the work of the white southern women writers this book has centered into the logic of twenty-first-century America’s racial politics. A noteworthy contemporary text, which demonstrates America’s continued deep reliance on the Plantation Mythology and the myth of Southern Womanhood is the controversial blockbuster hit Bringing Down the House (2003),3 which earned an estimated $31,680,000 and a number-one rating in its premiere week at the box o∞ce. In this film, screenwriter Jason Filardi and director Adam Shankman craft a tale of racial, gender, and sexual archetypes that could have easily come from the pages of Peterkin’s, Bristow’s, Gordon’s, Cather’s, or Smith’s writing. The opening frame, which introduces protagonists Charlene Morton, played by Oscar-nominated4 hip-hop artist Queen Latifah, and Peter Sanderson, played by veteran comedian actor Steve Martin, sets the tone for a narrative, which is, as much as anything, a story about the enduring authority that America’s stock in southern myths gives to the color line in the twenty-first century. The irony in this rhetorical instance is grounded in the deliberateness with which Queen Latifah, herself, is said to have introduced a distinctly black racial perspective into the film, as one of its executive producers. As she explains: “This has been one of the best films I have worked on, because I was able to bring a black perspective to the movie. To figure out what we felt was o≠ensive, what we felt was funny, and what we felt was o≠ensive but funny enough to get over.” The film’s engagement with complex racial matters is designed, according to Latifah, to “come from something real” (DVD, additional materials). I want to suggest that


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the “something real” to which Latifah refers is concretized in the film’s tra∞cking in narrative sites of resistance and renewal, subversion and containment, and diversion and meaningfulness that I explored in relation to Peterkin, Bristow, Gordon, Cather, and Smith’s mythic consciousness. The Plantation Myth is inscribed in the film as much to pique our curiosity about why, throughout the film, black women’s bodies are projected as desirable and taboo as to spark side-splitting laughter, as when Mrs. Arness breaks into the “old Negro spiritual” that opens the chapter, while Charlene serves her and the Sandersons dinner. Of course not every viewer found humor in this scene. Indeed, a respondent on the film’s Internet chat line characterized the film as a whole as “one of the most racially o≠ensive” she had ever seen, second “only to DW Gri∞th’s Birth of a Nation.” Many more, however, shared in Latifah’s sentiments that the film seeks ultimately to “make people laugh.” As one viewer succinctly put it: Bringing Down the House “is never going to win any Oscars but this was [a] real ‘sit back and laugh’ film. On many occasions I was laughing uncontrollably. If you like your humor tongue in cheek and can laugh o≠ the racist innuendos then give this film a go” (http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0305669/ usercomments). The myth of Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology indeed make for dramatic and diverting story lines in this film.5 My concern with Bringing Down the House is grounded, however, not just in its capacity to critically engage and entertain me but also in its seeming incapacity to attempt any di≠erentiation between that which should critically engage and that which should entertain. The significance of the seeming unspeakability of Charlene and Peter’s “true” identities at the outset provides the perspective on the Plantation Mythology and the myth of Southern Womanhood, which plays out across the remainder of the film. After Peter discovers that Charlene is not the white female attorney that he thought he was courting on the Internet but is, instead, an ex-convict, he wants nothing to do with her and attempts to throw her out of his house. Charlene secures temporary residency, however, after threatening to expose their Internet a≠air to Peter’s friends, family, and colleagues. The plot, thus, initially turns on the comical scheming Peter is compelled to do to help Charlene secure exonerating evidence while concealing

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her identity from a cadre of vigilant white women: Mrs. Kline, his neighbor and boss’s sister; Mrs. Arness, the rich heiress, whose account he angles to secure; his estranged wife, Kate, who, because of Peter’s obsession with work, leaves him with their hormone-raging teenage daughter and illiterate adolescent son in tow; and his geriatric-prone, gold-digging sisterin-law, Ashley, who becomes Charlene’s adversarial match in slang- and fist-throwing. The frenzy that results from Peter’s e≠orts to protect Charlene from the authorities after he learns that she was not released but, rather, had escaped from prison provides an added twist on the theme of white female surveillance, which brings closure to the film. Over its course, racial matters born out of the myths increasingly follow the outline of the film’s central subtexts. Charlene’s desire to clear her name and to secure freedom becomes a mediation between southern ideology and action in the film. It identifies the crossroads separating the myths of the southern plantation and southern womanhood—against which everyone eventually reads her—and her felt experiences of exploitation, betrayal, and abandonment, especially, we later learn, by her exboyfriend, the true culprit in the crime she allegedly committed. There is a potentially powerful tale introduced in the resistance that Ashley’s character, as the would-be southern belle, brings to the fore in directly antagonizing Charlene and, subsequently, refusing to capitulate, once Charlene, determining to “whup that skinny white ho’s ass,” corners Ashley in the bathroom. In no small way, too, Latifah’s image looms larger than the character she projects, signaling the significance of female rap artists voicing “identity” in a hip-hop film, a genre that almost exclusively centers on the plights of black male urban youth.6 In this respect, however, Bringing Down the House aims not to face the interpretive challenges that extend from its potentially radical constructions of white and black womanhood, but to pursue the singular theme of the racial divide. And in remaining committed to this well-worn tale, the film works to fold Ashley and Charlene, or Ashley and Queen Latifah, neatly into the discourses along which issues of race and gender, and, to a lesser degree, class, are mapped in the film. With this it is clear that Bringing Down the House depends not only on viewers’ capacities to recall the Plantation Mythology


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and the myth of Southern Womanhood but to respond to them in marketable terms. As I read it, Bringing Down the House parallels the productions of knowledge and relations of power, which, sometimes more and sometimes less explicitly, we can read in the cultural work of white southern women writers. If white southern women’s literary history is to take shape as more than un/sub/self-conscious reflections on the position of the white male patriarch, the articulations of this book, across writers, cultures, and contexts, must serve as a model for reassessing the whole of the tradition as well as the specific contributions of neglected and still influential southern women writers. Revisionist work along this line will undoubtedly determine the success of this project. More important, however, it may also determine the future of American literary history and critical perspectives yet to come.

NOTES

Preface 1. The U.S. Department of Justice reopened Till’s case in 2004, investigating the white woman Till allegedly whistled at as well as two black male alleged accomplices in his murder. The case closed in 2005 with no additional charges leveled. Also in 2005, the state of Mississippi brought formal charges against Edgar Ray Killen for the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner; the state found him guilty of manslaughter. “Without Sanctuary,” a collection owned by curators James Allen and John Littlefield, features still images of lynchings that took place throughout the South from the beginning of the twentieth century through the mid-1940s. Allen and Littlefield took the collection on tour in 2004, exhibiting it at the Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta, the National Historic Museum in New York, and Jackson State University. For additional, recent issues steeped in the South’s violent past, see “In Prison for Having Teenage Sex,” the Oprah Winfrey Show, February 26, 2004, transcript #20040226, and “Justice, Delayed but Not Denied,” 60 Minutes, October 21, 2004. “In Prison” documented the story of Marcus Dixon, an eighteen-year-old black high school senior indicted in Rome, Georgia, for having consensual sex with his white, fifteen-year-old girlfriend. Dixon spent one year in prison before a Georgia Appeals Court reversed the charges against him. “Justice, Delayed” addresses Till’s case, introducing never-before-seen interviews with people who claimed to have witnessed two black men assist the two white men, who admitted killing Till, in kidnapping Till from his relatives’ home. The segment also addresses filmmaker Keith Beauchamp’s role in reviving judicial interest in Till’s case with his critically acclaimed documentary. 2. For direct testimony, see Waugh and Greenberg. For early criticism on southern women and the Civil War, see Massey, Patton, and Simkins, and Scott. For recent scholarship see Faust, Rable, and G. Roberts. 3. I am thinking here of “moderate Republican” Senators Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and “conservative Democrat” Senators Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas. These politicians maintain the spirit of a surprisingly long line of elected and appointed southern female U.S. senators that includes Rebecca Fel-

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ton (D-Georgia), Dixie Graves (D-Alabama), Rose Long (D-Louisiana), Hattie Caraway (D-Arkansas), Elaine Edwards (D-Louisiana), and Maryon Allen (D-Alabama). Analysis of these women’s southern roots lies beyond the scope of this project. Felton is, however, worth noting for having notoriously advocated black lynching as a means of protecting the virtues of white southern women while also acting as advocate for white convicts, women’s rights, and vocational education for young white female Appalachians. It is also worth noting that, while she was in the Texas House of Representatives (from 1972 to 1976), Hutchison worked with Sarah Weddington, the attorney who won the Roe v. Wade case to protect rape victims from having their names published. Though Hutchison does not support federal funding for abortions, she has always supported abortion rights for women. For more on Felton see J. Williamson, 90–95. In the realm of hip-hop, I am thinking of Lil’ Kim’s, Trina’s, and Foxxy Brown’s invocation of values typically associated with the myth of White Southern Womanhood in their lyrics and fashion. In pop culture, I am thinking of significations on the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology in films such as Boomerang (1992), Bulworth (1998), Life (1999), Bamboozled (2000), Save the Last Dance (2001), Undercover Brother (2001), Monster’s Ball (2001), Bringing Down the House (2003), The Ladykillers (2004), and Last Holiday (2005). 4. I am also using as a model Trudier Harris’s Summer Snow (2003). My approach is, of course, not autobiographical, but I have drawn a great deal from my upbringing in establishing my critical position. It is worth noting that Harris’s memoir—which a∞rms the “cotton-pickin’ authority” of her ancestors, measures “the price of desegregation” to black communities, and assesses “the staying power of racism” in academia—reinforces the roles of southern myths in her own upbringing and cultural work. 1. The Ladies and the Myths 1. For discussions of the myth as white male–constructed, see Cash; Scott. A few critics have suggested that many antebellum women consciously wrote against the male grain, by exposing the myth of Southern Womanhood as myth in their writing. See Baym; Clinton, Plantation Mistress; Gwin; and Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household. For discussions of Plantation Mythology, see Clinton, Tara Revisited; Fox-Genovese, and J. Jones. 2. See especially Frankenberg, Hale, and Lott. 3. I am reminded here of bell hooks’s observation in Talking Back (1989), that “within white feminist circles,” silence is seen as the “sign of woman’s submission to patriarchal authority” (6). Conventional notions of the myth of Southern Womanhood embody this belief. My examination in chapter 3 of Bristow’s protagonists, es-

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pecially Judith Larnes, calls these assumptions into question by reading the characters’ conscious transformation of “silence” into a weapon of acquisition. 4. Here Yaeger appears to collapse the rhetoric of the cult of True Womanhood, a concept traditionally associated with northern women, and the myth of Southern Womanhood, a concept traditionally associated with white southern women. In “Tomorrow Is Another Day,” Anne Goodwyn Jones provides a thorough critical genealogy of these terms, citing other feminist critics, such as Barbara Welter and Nancy F. Cott, who variously collapse and distinguish them. In the Introduction to Southern Mothers, Nagueyalti Warren and Sally Wol≠, building on earlier theories of Claudia Tate, Hazel Carby, and Francis Smith Foster, points to a contradiction in black and white American women’s appropriation of mythic constructions of womanhood at the beginning of the twentieth century. She argues, for example, that whereas white women were busy dismantling the cult of True Womanhood, black women were appropriating it as a means of gaining entry into both the public and private spaces of America’s political culture. 5. See Donaldson and Jones, Elfeinbein, Entzminger, Friedman, Harrison, and MacKethan. 6. For related arguments, see Brantley, Donaldson and Jones, eds., Harrison, MacKethan, and Manning. 7. In “The Briar Patch” Warren takes as his principal subject the impact of industrialization on southern education, specifically as manifested in the South’s racial, class, and market economies. In contrast to the hooded rhetoric of John Fletcher’s “Education, Past and Present,” another essay in I’ll Take My Stand, which treats the same issue, Warren is strikingly candid in his conclusion that educational opportunities for blacks should be limited to vocational training. And in proposing this program for minority instruction, he tacitly draws the South’s poor white constituency into his critical frame of reference; for as he backhandedly insists, an “emphasis on vocational education for the negro . . . applies equally well to [combating] the problem of white illiteracy in the South” (251). 8. A recent example from pop culture is the trendy iconography purse line that features imprints of Marilyn Monroe (as “Sugar Kane”); Audrey Hepburn (as “Sabrina”); and Vivian Leigh (as “Scarlet O’Hara”). For discussions of Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell, and the relationship between the novel and the movie, see A. Jones, Tomorrow, and Pyron. 9. See Manning, Introduction to Female Tradition. 10. See Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, and Michaels, Our America. 11.For corroborating opinions see Saxby, “The South Looks Back Ahead,” and Van Doren, The American Novel. Although his study focuses primarily on novels produced from 1900 to roughly 1912, Van Auken identifies a concentration of pop-

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ular southern historical fiction from 1934 to 1940 that manifests tensions similar to those expressed by turn-of-the-century writers. See 159 and 163–65. 12. “Groping in Literary Darkness” was republished in H. L. Mencken’s Smart Set Criticism as “The Negro As Author” (1968). 13. Irwin Russell (1853–1879) was a Mississippian best known for his use of dialect in poetry. 14. See also Skaggs, “Varieties of Local Color,” 222–23, and Mellard, “The Fiction of Social Commitment,” 354. I return to this point in Chapter 3, but it is worth noting now that Bristow’s novels loosely categorize poor whites in terms of economic and environmental disparities between white planter and working classes and black characters’ attitudes toward the latter group. Because Louisiana di≠ers geographically from the states that produced the earliest fictional representations of poor whites, no direct reference is made to “backcountry” or “mountain” folk in her works. Nevertheless, we can reasonably assume an association between the socioeconomic status of poor white characters of the Appalachia and the poor white residents of Rattletrap Square in Bristow’s novels, all of whom either work on the wharf or are employed as tenant farmers and domestic servants. 15. Review of Black April, Chicago Defender, clipping, quoted in Williams, Devil, 82. According to Williams, early reviewers of Peterkin’s writing found it di∞cult to discern her race because her representation of black culture seemed so real. 16. See, for example, Hutchinson, Robeson, Ross, and Williams, Devil. 17. Johnson to Peterkin, August 18, 1929, Bobbs-Merrill Manuscripts. 18. As many Peterkin scholars have noted, Peterkin often socialized with white Harlemites such as Carl Van Vechten in New York and Joel Spingarn at Lang Syne, her plantation home in Sumter, South Carolina. Hughes also visited Lang Syne, but Peterkin claims not to have been home at the time of his arrival. 19. See Hutchinson, Robeson, Ross, and Williams, Devil. 20. As most literary scholars well know, Peterkin was not alone in having established her reputation by writing about a culture that was not her own, at least by virtue of her racial identification. Other notable white contemporaries of Peterkin who were “writing up the black,” as Albert Halper characterized them in a 1929 Dial article, included E. C. L. Adams, Ambrose Gonzales, and Dubose Heyward. 21. Hence in the novels of Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Rudolph Fisher, Nella Larsen, Jessie Fauset, and Zora Neale Hurston, which laid bare the sordid sides of intracultural connections and the limits of progress for black women, black spatial freedom and authority are imagined as enabling and privileged rites; and in the poetry of Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Arna Bontemps, which deploys indigenous expressions of black life as well as black urban experiences, inscription of folk practices and customs facilitates the altruistic goals of exposing inequities and


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distinguishing the contributions of, while imagining, greater cultural influence for black U.S. citizens. 22. With the publication of “Missy’s Twins” in October 1922, Peterkin began receiving hate mail. The Columbia State, the most widely circulated newspaper in South Carolina and a paper born out of the state’s antipopulist sentiments, refused to print original reviews of her work until the release of Black April. Peterkin’s family also initially responded unfavorably to her writing. At the age of twenty-one, Peterkin’s son, Bill, fearing for the family’s reputation, urged her to write about other white southern women or southern gentlemen, not black people. See Clark, 217; L. Jones, 137; and Latimer, 9–17. 23. Undated letter in Joel E. Spingarn collection. 24. Marianna Torgovnick’s widely respected Gone Primitive examines this impulse among an array of white modernists. 25. At least one critic has wrongly characterized this perspective as the omniscient point of view (Blum). Though I return to this point later, it is worth noting briefly that Gordon defines the central intelligence as a combination of omniscient, e≠aced, and first-person points of view, without the use of the first-person pronoun. See The House of Fiction, 621–34, and How to Read a Novel, 120–44. 26. The agitation of black World War II veterans was also instrumental in galvanizing the movement and should not be ignored. I believe that Lillian Smith validates this point in the unrest and anger that Ed Anderson embodies as a veteran of World War I. Ed’s characterization alludes to, in order to expose, the U.S. hypocrisy in enlisting black soldiers to fight in World War II while denying their civil rights at home. See Loveland 193–95. 27. For notable exceptions see Skaggs, who reads Sapphira in an antebellum context, and Wasserman, who examines Sapphira in juxtaposition with Gone with the Wind. 28. See, for example, Frankenberg, Lott, and Roediger. 2. A White Black Writer 1. Excerpted comments from several drafts of On a Plantation, Peterkin’s unpublished novel, collected among the Peterkin papers, Archives of the South Carolina Historical Society (SCHS), Columbia, South Carolina. 2. Mencken maintains that Peterkin elected to abandon the novel after submitting only one draft to him (My Life 374). 3. See Peterkin to Sandburg, January 5, 1921 and January 25, 1921, Carl Sandburg Papers. Sandburg did not respond to the first letter. Although Peterkin’s letter to Mencken has not survived, he recalls having first heard from her early in 1921 (My Life 372).

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4. Thomas Landess is the last in a long line of critics to cite Peterkin’s version (Julia Peterkin 20). For earlier references, see Durham, S. MacDonald, Morrow, and Phifer, whose rendition leaves Sandburg out of the story altogether. Peterkin asks Bellaman “who is the most severe critic to be found?” (9). While Sallie Bingham does not directly reference Peterkin’s version of what happened, she attributes Peterkin’s celebrity to a series of initiatives Carl Sandburg took after “meeting Peterkin socially” (4). Bingham also claims that Peterkin knew no other women writers of her time. This is odd because by 1992, Peterkin’s interaction with writers such as Ellen Glasgow, Caroline Gordon, and Katherine Anne Porter was well known. Elizabeth Robeson appears to be the first critic to belie formally Peterkin’s version; Williams follows up in her 1997 biography, describing the story as “lovely . . . but false” ( Devil 29). 5. See especially Brickell, “The Literary Awakening,” 138–39; and Williams, Devil, x and 31, and “There’s No Way,” 145. I follow the lead of other scholars who read Mencken’s “Sahara” as bait meant to goad southerners into proving his assertions wrong. 6. Even the most honest attempts by white mistresses to better know and understand their black subjects were met with skepticism or disdain. See Bailey and Dale, J. Jones; Mellon; and Wilson and Russell. Bailey and Dale provide evidence of one plantation mistress who believed she maintained “the happiest relations” with her slaves but constantly feared their uprising. 7. In her study of white women and politics in antebellum Virginia, Elizabeth Varon carries her analysis of this power paradox slightly beyond conventional studies, recognizing it as “a commitment to the traditional gender order, in which women deferred to the leadership of men, with a passion for politics and a desire to be heard” (9). 8. See Newby 200–201 and “Negroes Support Health Drive,” 2. 9. See Carlton 60–63; G. Johnson, 71–72; and Neal and Kremm 172–86. 10. For accounts of these events, known as the Lowman Case, see Ginzburg 175–78; Walter White papers, October 20, 1928; W. White, Rope and Faggot. 11. See Mencken papers 1922, 1925; Sandburg papers 1923; and “The Klan in 1928.” 12. See SCHS. 13. These patterns structurally replicate Gertrude Stein’s narrative technique in Three Lives as well as her conceptualization of migratory modernism in The Making of Americans. 14. Mary’s decision recalls that of her literary predecessor, Huck Finn. Both Mary’s and Huck’s decision to sin results in their being socially isolated and, also, feeling physically and mentally liberated. The repercussions for Mary are, however,


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more severe, as her decision ends up binding her to the land, whereas Huck is able ultimately to negotiate between the boundaries of the river (individualism; unrestricted freedom) and the land (social conformity; restricted freedom). 15. For a discussion of Mary as matriarch, see P. Goldstein. 16. Robeson argues that Peterkin shifts between antipastoral and pastoral modes in Black April and Scarlet Sister Mary to inflect Victorian and modern a∞nities (773–74 and 776). I disagree with the motive and would argue that what appears to be antipastoral, for example, the absence of white owners in the novels, is the strategic removal of some pastoral elements to accentuate others. 17. Perhaps Emerson, who conversely urges readings of nature as a rejection of printed (historical) versions of truth, is on Peterkin’s mind here. 18. I borrow this term from Carter Woodson, whose Mis-Education of the Negro (1933) reorders history to highlight black contributions to American culture and evidence black oppression within standard knowledge systems. 3. A Certain Mental Aberration 1. When asked her opinion of Gone with the Wind, Bristow responded that she was “just crazy about it” (Greene). Though she denies that it had any direct influence on The Handsome Road, there are striking similarities in the novels’ key scenes and props. Note, for example, that both Scarlet and Ann manufacture regality to mask poverty in the form of a gown; and in both stories the spiral staircase is a continuing link to the past—a trope of the wealth, heritage, and resilience of Tara and Ardeith—despite changes in the economic and physical conditions of the plantations. 2. Typical examples are Walton and Wolfe. 3. Taylor lifts this description from a Bristow sketch. See “Gwen Bristow.” 4. “Fundamentalism in the South” (1927) and “Southern Fundamentalism” (1927) provide the skeleton for Bristow’s more sophisticated analysis of the South’s literary tradition in “The Unrecorded South.” 5. I say allegedly because I have not been able to check Bristow’s exact words against the primary source. Theriot claims that the interview was featured in the Atlanta Journal in June 1938; however, as I have thus far not been able to locate the interview there, the date appears to be inaccurate. 6. See also Bristow journals (“History of a Best Seller”), July 30, 1941. 7. For an overview of Bristow’s routine, see Greene, “Eight Years of Chasing Stories.” In this piece, Bristow identifies housekeeping as part of her daily chores; but in a journal entry she suggests that her contributions to work were directive, not active. See Bristow Journals, October 1, 1931. 8. I use this term loosely to refer to the period before the literary movement in-

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volving the use of unrecognizable language techniques to represent (or not represent) the materials at hand. 9. Many scholars ignore altogether the primacy of Dolores’s characterization in Deep Summer. None read Isabel Valcour in central correspondence with Judith and Ann. This is, perhaps, due to the inconsistencies and eventual breakdown in Bristow’s control over the parallels she inscribes across the trilogy. Nevertheless, I find Dolores’s character indisputably central to the story; and once introduced, Isabel, as representative of traditional southern aristocracy and wealth, importantly precipitates some of the changes that take place in Eleanor’s character by the end of This Side of Glory. 10. The first time that Judith responds negatively to her condition is when she sees her pregnant reflection in the full-length mirror Philip buys shortly before she goes into labor with David. She again expresses reservations about being pregnant just before learning of Philip’s infidelity. On both occasions guilt drives her to contain her emotions and avoid acknowledging her discontent openly. See pages 63 and 170 in the novel. 11. In addition to MacKethan, see Elizabeth Harrison. Masking as a form of identity politics is not peculiar to southern women and is, in fact, a strategy deployed by many historically marginalized subcultural groups in the United States. 12. According to Theriot, the thematic center of Deep Summer is the clash between Judith’s Calvinist upbringing and the influence of southern values on her growth. Theriot reads Judith’s abandonment of the values associated with her heritage as a veiled allusion to Bristow’s opposition to, and rejection of, the ethos of Fundamentalist Baptists. The problem with this argument is that it assumes a central correspondence between Calvinist and Fundamentalist Baptist doctrine that is at best marginal. Also, despite early explicit and implicit references to Calvinist principles and an apparent struggle within Judith to reconcile southern values with more conservative northern values, the course of the novel does not sustain such a restricted thematic reading. Indeed, with rather keen aesthetic e≠ect, Bristow appears to drop this tension just as Judith agrees to leave with Philip (30). For early references to Judith’s religious faith, see pages 15, 17, and 19. 13. For evidence of Dolores’s feelings, see pages 140 and 147. This sentimental overlay gives relief to Dolores’s conjugal strife as it foreshadows Judith’s validation of Dolores’s maternal authority, especially after her death. Judith shows compassion toward Dolores well before discovering Philip’s betrayal. After establishing herself in Rattletrap Square, Dolores returns to Ardeith, and Judith arranges for her to visit with Roger. See pages 162–65. Still, Judith’s determination to support Dolores in this and other regards intensifies upon seeing the conditions in which


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she lives, and this contact importantly takes place after Judith learns of Philip and Angelique’s a≠air. 14. See MacKethan on voice and silence in southern women’s writing. 15. We may be reminded here of the one-drop and line-of-descent rules, which defined a person’s race in terms of their physical appearance or maternal ancestry. 16. A discussion of the theoretical implications of Benny’s biraciality extends beyond the scope of my argument. But it is important to note that the confusion his character experiences constitutes a common phase that children of biracial descent experience. 17. David observes that Benny works only part-time in the orange groves. 18. Caleb goes to New Orleans “in the second spring of the rebellion,” which would be 1777. His family settles the territory after 1763, and it takes several years to build Silverwood (85). 19. Though in retrospect Dolores claims that she wanted to kill Caleb, the description of the event suggests otherwise. Also, even Dolores’s later confession makes clear the ambiguity of the moment in light of her fears that Caleb would take Roger from her again (133–34). 20. Judith’s response to her actions resounds with telling contempt for Dolores’s justification. “I don’t understand her at all,” Judith tells Philip. “This is what you get for trying to be kind.” But, as the narrator makes clear, Dolores would “steal or live on the docks, but she wouldn’t give that crew any more chance to be kind” (131, 134). 21. Bristow demonstrates the confusion that no doubt existed in Louisiana’s court system as it shifted under Spanish, French, British, and American authority. Gideon’s attorney neither speaks nor understands English. 22. Corrie May later (70) uses a variation on this rhetoric to secure employment from Ann. 23. Part of Bristow’s revisionist agenda in The Handsome Road is to expose the corruption that pervaded the Reconstruction regime. She liberally does this through Gilday’s character. But she also diplomatically casts him as vile even before Reconstruction in portraying his slave-breeding market. 24. Bristow’s naming Corrie May’s child after a black man/character is a symbolic, though ultimately economically empty, gesture. 25. Eleanor describes herself as a “lightning calculator” and her father consults her on problem solving (8). 26. Fred’s protestations are more belabored (35–38). But the fact that Eleanor can defy her father as she so boldly does speaks to the changing times. See especially page 38, where the narrator observes that Fred “wished they were back in the days when a man could lock up his daughter till she was willing to obey him.”

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27. We are here, perhaps, reminded of Ann’s dismay (in The Handsome Road) that Frances Larne supervises slaves’ monthly rations. It is worth noting that a common theme in slaves’ narratives is one of the mistress of the house watching the pot levels to ensure that the house servants are not stealing food. 4. She’ll Take Her Stand 1. See Boyle, Jonza, Makowsky, and Waldron. Eisinger comes close to recovering at least the racial implications of Gordon’s conservatism in her writing. Eisinger cursorily, though perceptively, points to the “curiously limited role” of blacks in Gordon’s fiction as the embodiment of “the violence of life and the lust of man” and “the problem of di≠erentness . . . by which white identity may be established” (91). He finds this limitation especially glaring in light of Gordon’s sympathetic treatment of Native Americans in Green Centuries (1941) and “The Captive” (1932). Eisinger seems to have inspired Prown’s observation that “Gordon viewed racial, sexual, and class-based hierarchies as mutually dependent and as the foundation upon which white southern identity was built” (81). 2. Much has been made of Tate’s alleged disregard for regional matters while a Fugitive Poet, because of his preoccupation with the more global implications of a modernist aesthetics. I find this odd given that Tate went on to co-edit I’ll Take My Stand less than a decade after The Fugitive ceased publication. For a provocative, updated take on Tate’s influence as Fugitive/Agrarian, see Donaldson. 3. Between 1931 and 1945, Gordon published six novels, several short stories, a short story collection, and several articles. After 1945, she released three more novels, a second short story collection, and more than a dozen articles. She also remained active as a lecturer, teacher, and writer-in-residence. She corresponded formally and informally with her critics; and at the time of her death in 1981, she was working on at least two new novels. 4. Prown addresses Gordon’s neglect of her daughter (see especially pp. 83–84), but she does not question the Tates’ ability to finance child care abroad while allegedly financially stricken. 5. Here, Prown reads sarcasm into Gordon’s observation (81). 6. In his 1953 encomium to I’ll Take My Stand ’s contributors, Rubin (“Serpent”) cast their materialist ideology in humanistic terms: “Tate, Ransom, Davidson and Warren were poets primarily, not social scientists.” As such, their “Agrarian quarrel” is primarily with the “applied sciences, which in the form of industrial capitalism had as its object the enslavement of human energies,” the restriction of man’s artistic development, and the alienation of man from God, family and land—the “staples” of an agrarian order that nurtured and sustained him (Rubin, “Serpent,”


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356–57). Twenty years later, Rubin’s assessment of I’ll Take My Stand centers even more narrowly on aesthetics. “The Agrarians were talking about the kind of community that would keep the artist in what they considered an organic relationship with his society. It was because they saw at least the rudiments of such a community in the nonindustrial (or preindustrial) life of the South into which they were born, and because they saw that community disintegrating around them . . . that they wrote their book” (William Elliott 146). 7. I am reminded here of Pierre Nora’s definition of tradition as “memory that has become historically aware of itself ” (ix). 8. Gordon’s acknowledgment of displaced natives is consistent with her alleged sympathy for the Indians. 9. See especially pages 510–11 and 513–16. Gordon’s characterization of men in “A Visit to the Grove” seems deliberately aimed at countering her Uncle Ned’s opinion of women in “Always Summer” (434). 10. Cally earlier tells Love and Lucy to be prepared for “a servile insurrection,” to take place (134). 11. This idea is intimated in her discussion of None Shall Look Back’s sales. (See Wood 202, 204, 206, and 208.) 12. Here Gordon adeptly challenges the trend among southern modernists to represent the demise of the Old Order through the southern woman’s body. I am thinking especially of Caddie Compson in The Sound and the Fury and Melanie Wilkes in Gone with the Wind. 5. Paving the Way 1. One could argue that the short story “Old Mrs. Harris,” collected in Obscure Destinies (1932), which chronicles the trials of a southern family forced to adjust to egalitarian cultural mores upon moving to the Midwest, is indirectly concerned with some of the political issues this chapter raises. 2. Joan Acocella argues that Cather’s relationship with Edith Lewis may not have been sexual, despite the fact that they lived together for nearly thirty-nine years. See especially pp. 46–48. Acocella’s opinion di≠ers from that of critics who have read Cather’s writing through her alleged lesbianism since Jane Rule “outed” her in Lesbian Images. 3. For example, see Joyce MacDonald, O’Brien, and Rosowski. Though I find her reading of Sapphira as an American Gothic limited, Rosowski importantly updates scholarship that dismisses the merit of Cather’s last novel, declines to investigate it critically, or fails to read the complexity of Sapphira’s characterization in particular. 4. They also forget that well into the twentieth century, the Republican party

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championed the cause of “racial uplift.” Indeed, until the Roosevelt Era, there were more black Americans registered as Republican, the “party of Lincoln,” than as Democrats. And it was not until the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy that blacks throughout the country registered with the Democratic party en masse. 5. For example, see Reynolds and Urgo. 6. Arnold advances a similar argument in her discussion of Cather’s critique of southern manners and customs. 7. Here again I take issue with Morrison as well as Accardo and Portelli, whose argument parallels Morrison’s. 8. See, for example, Arnold 333 and Morrison 21–22. 9. See Wells-Barnett. 10. These are lyrics from “Strange Fruit,” the song made famous by legendary blues singer Billie Holiday. Smith claimed that the title of her novel did not derive from this song. See Blackwell and Clay 41–42. To me, the thematic connections between the song and the novel are too keen to be coincidental. 11. For example, see Jenkins 129–30 and Sugg 160. 12. For example, see Jenkins 109–13. 6. New Beginnings 1. For a discussion of Baldwin’s theory see The Fire Next Time and Wallace 138–46. 2. This dating can be found in Rubin, “Dixie Special,” 65; Simpson, “The Southern Writer and the Great Literary Secession,” 243, and Tate, “The New Provincialism,” 292. 3. Also worth mentioning here is Eminem’s 8 Mile (2002), which, in addition to being a blockbuster hit, garnered an Academy Award for best original score in 2002. 4. Queen Latifah, whose birth name is Dana Owens, received an Oscar nomination in 2002 for her role in Chicago. 5. My earliest memory of a truly funny play on the myth of Southern Womanhood was Carol Burnett’s playing Scarlett on the Carol Burnett Show and, toward that end, donning loden green drapery, complete with curtain rod. An episode of A Di≠erent World alludes to this episode of the Carol Burnett Show, when Whitley rips the drapes from the wall in order to make a new dress, so that her mother, a quintessential black southern belle, won’t know that she has lost her job and that she and her husband, Dwayne, are struggling financially. A keenly humorous and dramatic play on the Plantation Myth is Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000), which uses a plantation as the setting for the ironic hit “New Millennium Minstrel Show.” A

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purely dramatic experimentation with mythic constructions of white male/black female relationships is the controversial Monster’s Ball (2003), starring Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thorton. 6. Examples are Baby Boy (2003), Biker Boys (2003), The Best Man (2001), Menace II Society (1997), and the classic Boyz ’N the Hood (1991).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources Bobbs-Merrill Manuscripts. Julia Peterkin author file. Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. Bristow, Gwen, Papers and Journals. Special Collections. California State University Library, Northridge. Mencken, H. L., Papers. Rare Books and Manuscripts Division. New York Public Library. Peterkin, Julia, Letters. Hargrett Library, University of Georgia, Athens. Peterkin, Julia, Papers. South Carolina Historical Society, Columbia. Sandburg, Carl, Papers. Illinois Historical Society, University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign. Springarn, Joel, Collection. Rare Books and Manuscripts Division. New York Public Library. White, Walter, Papers. NAACP Administrative Files, Library of Congress Manuscript Division. Washington, D.C. Selected Works by Gwen Bristow The Alien and Other Poems. Boston: Badger, 1926. Calico Palace. New York: Crowell, 1970. Celia Garth. New York: Crowell, 1959. Deep Summer. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1937. “Fundamentalism in the South: Where Liberalism Is Budding.” Churchman 136 (August 20, 1927): 18–20. Golden Dreams. New York: Lippincott and Crowell, 1980. The Gutenberg Murders. With Bruce Manning. New York: Mystery League, 1931. “Gwen Bristow.” Pamphlet. New York: Crowell, n.d. Gwen Bristow: A Self-Portrait. New York: Crowell, 1970. Gwen Bristow’s Plantation Trilogy: “Deep Summer,” “The Handsome Road,” “This Side of Glory.” New York: Crowell, 1962. The Handsome Road. New York: Pocket Books, 1949. The Invisible Host. With Bruce Manning. New York: Mystery League, 1930.

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Jubilee Trail. New York: Crowell, 1950. The Mardi Gras Murders. With Bruce Manning. New York: Mystery League, 1932. “Southern Fundamentalism: Some Further Comment.” Churchman 136 (November 26, 1927): 15. This Side of Glory. New York: Pocket Books, 1964. Tomorrow Is Forever. New York: Crowell, 1943. Two and Two Make Twenty-Two. With Bruce Manning. New York: Mystery League, 1932. “The Unrecorded South.” Southwest Review 20 (October–July 1934–1935): 227–30. “What Kind of Husband?” Times Picayune, n.d. F1. Selected Works by Willa Cather Collected Stories. New York: Vintage, 1992. Obscure Destinies. New York: Knopf, 1932. Preface to The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, edited by Willa Cather. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925. Sapphira and the Slave Girl. New York: Knopf, 1940. Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing As an Art. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1949. Selected Works by Caroline Gordon Aleck Maury, Sportsman. New York: Scribner’s, 1934. “Always Summer.” Southern Review 7 (Spring 1971): 430–46. “An American Girl.” In The Added Dimension: The Art and Mind of Flannery O’Connor, edited by Melvin Friedman and Lewis Lawson, 123–37. New York: Fordham University Press, 1966. “Cock-Crow.” Southern Review 1 (1965): 554–69. The Garden of Adonis. New York: Scribner’s, 1941. The House of Fiction: An Anthology of the Short Story. Edited with Allen Tate. New York: Scribner’s, 1950. How to Read a Novel. New York: Viking Press, 1957. None Shall Look Back. New York: Scribner’s, 1937. Penhally. New York: Scribner’s, 1931. “A Visit to the Grove.” Sewanee Review 80 (1972): 509–54. The Women on the Porch. New York: Scribner’s, 1944.

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Selected Works by Julia Mood Peterkin “The Art of Living.” Columbia [S.C.] State, 6 June 1932. Black April. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. “Boy-Chillen.” One-Act Plays for Stage and Study. New York: Samuel French, 1943. Bright Skin. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. Green Thursday. New York: Knopf, 1924. “The Ideal Woman for a Man-Made World.” Book League Monthly 1 (1929): 5–10. “Missy’s Twins.” Reviewer 3 (October 1922): 668–73. Roll, Jordan, Roll. New York: Ballou, 1933. “Seeing Things.” In Living Philosophies, 195–204. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931. Scarlet Sister Mary. New York: Avon, 1928. Selected Works by Lillian Smith Killers of the Dream. New York: Norton, 1961. Strange Fruit. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1944. Secondary Sources Abernathy, Mollie. “Southern Women, Social Reconstruction, and the Church in the 1920s.” Louisiana Studies 4 (Winter 1974): 289–312. Accardo, Annalucia, and Alessandro Portelli. “A Spy in the Enemy’s Country.” In The Black Columbiad, edited by Werner Sollers and Maria Diedrich, 77–87. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. Acocella, Joan. Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971. Arnold, Marilyn. “ ‘Of Human Bondage’: Cather’s Subnarrative in Sapphira and the Slave Girl.” Mississippi Quarterly 40 (Summer 1987): 323–38. Awkward, Michael. Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Positionality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Bailey, Hugh, and William Dale II. “Missus Alone in de ‘Big House.’ ” Alabama Review 8 (1955): 43–55. Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: Vintage, 1992. Bartley, Numan. The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South during the 1950s. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969. Baym, Nina. Feminism and American Literary History. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

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INDEX

Abernathy, Mollie, 7

Black April, 8, 11, 13, 26–27, 36, 37–41, 50, 176n15

Acocella, Joan, 183n2 aesthetics, 13–14, 15, 16, 36, 38, 40, 43, 81, 86, 108, 121, 133, 137, 143, 155, 162

The Black Atlantic, 59 black migration, 12, 33

Agee, James, 166

Blease, Cole, 34

agency, 7

Boak, Mary Virginia, 142

Agrarians, 4, 111, 166, 182n2

Boak, Rachel Seibert, 19

The Alien and Other Poems, 57

Bobbs-Merrill Manuscripts, 176n17

Allen, Maryon, 174n3

Boomerang, 174n3

Althusser, Louis, 158

Boston Evening Transcript, 55

“Always Summer,” 17, 109, 117–19, 120,

“Boy-Chillen,” 22

183n9

Boyle, Anne, 182n1

Ames, Jesse Daniel, 18

Bradford, M. E., 135

Association of Southern Women for the

“The Briar Patch,” 4

Prevention of Lynching, 18

Brickell, Herschel, 178n4, 178n5

Atlanta Journal, 55, 179n5

Bright Skin, 8, 27, 36–37, 48–54

Auken, Sheldon Van, 8

Bringing Down the House, 21, 165, 168, 169–71, 174n3

Aunt Jemima, 165 authorship, 5–8

Bristow, Caroline, 67 Bristow, Gwen: heritage of, 66–68; melo-

Bailey, Hugh, 178n6

drama in works, 66; and myth of

Baldwin, James, 166, 184n1

White Southern Womanhood, 6, 8,

Bamboozled, 174n3

15–16, 60–61, 66, 68, 70, 72–75, 107;

Baym, Nina, 174n1

and Plantation Mythology, 6, 8, 15–16,

Beauchamp, Keith, 173n1

60–61, 66, 70, 72–75, 102, 107; rela-

Beilke, Debra, 14

tionship with Bruce Manning, 69–70, 72–73

Bellaman, Henry, 23, 24, 28, 178n4 The Best Short Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, 139

Bristow, Louis, 67 Brooks, Cleanth, 166

Bethune, Mary McCleod, 18

Bulworth, 174n3

Bingham, Sallie, 178n4

Burton, O. Vernon, 33

Birth of a Nation, 34, 169

203

j 204 |

Index

Caldwell, Erskine, 10, 66

Donaldson, Susan, 175n5

call-and-response, 39

Du Bois, W. E. B., 11, 15

Caraway, Hattie, 174n3 Carby, Hazel, 175n4

Eagleton, Terry, 137

Cash, J. W., 174n1

education, 41, 45–48, 71, 72, 174n3, 175n7

Cather, Willa: childhood of, 19; commen-

Edwards, Elaine, 174n3

tary on black elitism, 163; and myth of

Eisinger, Chester, 182n1

White Southern Womanhood, 6, 20,

Elfeinbein, Anna, 175n5

142–45; and Plantation Mythology, 6,

Ellison, Ralph, 166

20; relationship with Edith Lewis, 19,

Entzminger, Betina, 175n5

183n2; relationship with grandmother,

Eva Gay, 7

19

Evans, Sara, 17–18

Celia Garth, 57 Chicago Defender, 11, 176n15

Faulkner, William, 7, 56

Chicago Tribune, 55

Felton, Rebecca, 128, 173–74n3

Chopin, Kate, 166, 167

feminist conservatism, 6, 8, 72, 109, 110,

Civil Rights Movement, 17, 164 Civil War, 1, 8, 9, 41, 58, 60, 62–63, 67, 71, 95, 97, 121, 125, 173n2

182n1 Fiedler, Leslie, 166 Fletcher, John, 175n7

The Clansman, 34

Foster, Frances Smith, 175n4

Clark, Emily, 13, 23

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 174n1

Cold War, 7

Frankenberg, Ruth, 174n2, 177n28

Coleridge, Samuel, 108

Frazier, Anne, 10

Congress of Racial Equality, 18

Fugitives, 4. See also Agrarians

Cooper, Anna Julia, 18 The Cosby Show, 165

The Garden of Adonis, 8, 16, 107, 109, 111,

Cott, Nancy, 175n4

116, 131–35, 136

cotton gin, 71, 100

Geismar, Maxwell, 138 Gilroy, Paul, 8, 59, 175n10

Davidson, Donald, 21, 111

Giovanni, Nikki, 165

Davis, Je≠erson, 112

Glasgow, Ellen, 7, 21, 56, 167

Davis, Owen, 57

Golden Dreams, 56

Deep Summer, 8, 55, 61–62, 75–92, 103,

Goldstein, Albert, 55

107 Delta Wedding, 7 DeMarr, Mary Jean, 66

Gone with the Wind, 7, 55, 167, 175n8, 177n27, 179n1, 183n12 Gordon, Caroline: and central intelli-

Depression. See Great Depression

gence, 116–21; childhood of, 108; and

A Di≠erent World, 165, 168

myth of White Southern Womanhood,

Dixon, Thomas, 8, 34

6, 16–17, 113–21, 128; and Plantation

Dole, Elizabeth, 173n3

Mythology, 6, 16–17, 113–21; relation-

Index | 205 ship with Allen Tate, 8, 110–11, 113; relationship with Flannery O’Connor, 3;

J

I’ll Take My Stand, 4, 111, 175n7, 182n2, 182n6

relationship with Sally Wood, 110, 111–

In This Our Life, 7, 167

12; as wife and mother, 110–15

The Invisible Host, 57, 69, 70, 73

Gordon, Nancy, 113

The Item, 69

Graves, Dixie, 174n3 Great Depression, 69, 72, 131

Je≠erson, Thomas, 84

Green Thursday, 11

Jenkins, McKay, 159, 184n11, 184n12

Greenberg, Martin, 173n2

Jim Crow, 6, 34

Greenberg, Richard, 1

Johnson, James Weldon, 11

Greene, Luke, 179n7

Johnston, Mary, 21, 166

Gregory, Eileen, 135

Jones, Anne Goodwyn, 167, 175n4, 175n8

Gri∞th, D. W., 34, 169

Jones, Jacqueline, 174n1, 178n6

“Groping in Literary Darkness,” 9–10, 25,

Jonza, Nancylee, 182n1

28, 176n12

Jubilee Trail, 57

Gullah culture, 29 Gwin, Minrose, 174n1

Killers of the Dream, 19 King, Richard, 166

Hale, Grace, 174n2

Kreyling, Michael, 4, 5

Halper, Albert, 176n20

Kristeva, Julia, 4

The Handsome Road, 8, 55, 62–64, 71,

Ku Klux Klan, 35

92–103, 107 Hard-Boiled Virgin, 7

Landess, Thomas, 178n4

Harlem Renaissance, 13, 54

Landrieu, Mary, 173n3

The Harlem Renaissance in Black and

Lang Syne Plantation, 15, 22–29 35, 48,

White, 54

49, 121

Harris, Trudier, 174n4

The Last of the Mohicans, 108

Harrison, Elizabeth, 180n11

Lewis, Edith, 139, 142, 143

Hemings, Sally, 84

Lincoln, Blanche, 173n3

hip-hop, 170

Lindemann, Marilyn, 141

hooks, bell, 174n3

Locke, Alain, 11–13

“The House of Cather,” 21

Long, Rose, 174n3

The House of Fiction, 177n25

Look Homeward, Angel, 7

How to Read a Novel, 116, 117, 177n25

Los Angeles Times, 55

Hughes, Langston, 11

Lott, Eric, 166, 174n2, 177n28

Hurston, Zora Neale, 7, 56, 167, 176n21

lynching, 18, 31, 34–35, 110, 137, 162,

Hutchinson, George, 54, 176n16

173n1

Hutchison, Kay Bailey, 173n3

Lytle, Andrew, 112

ideology, 3, 5, 15, 18, 72, 111, 119, 146

MacDonald, Edgar, 166

j 206 | MacDonald, Joyce, 183n3

Index mythic consciousness, 133–36

MacKethan, Lucinda, 78, 175n5, 181n14 Makowsky, Veronica, 182n1 Manning, Bruce, 69 Manning, Carol, 7, 166, 167, 175n6, 175n8 Martin, Steve, 21, 168

narratives: concession, 48–54; containment, 41–48; immersion, 37–41 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 110

masking, 78

Native Son, 7

Massey, Mary Elizabeth, 173n2

New Deal, 15

materiality, 82, 90, 102, 106, 109, 119, 123,

New South, 8, 15, 60, 64, 65, 71, 107, 167

125, 129, 157, 166

New York Herald Tribune, 55

Matthews, Pamela, 167

New York Times, 55

McClure’s, 19

Newby, Idus, 178n8

Mell, Mildred, 10

Newman, Frances, 7, 167

Mellard, James, 176n14

None Shall Look Back, 8, 16, 17, 107, 109,

Mencken, H. L.: influence on Peterkin’s career, 15, 22–25, 28, 35, 177n2, 177n3;

111, 116, 126–31, 133, 134, 136, 166 Nora, Pierre, 183n7

influence on Southern literary tradition, 9

Obscure Destinies, 183n1

metamythology, 15, 78

O’Connor, Flannery, 3, 21

Michaels, Walter Benn, 8, 59, 175n10

Old Order. See Old South

Mikulski, Barbara, 173n3

Old South, 54, 60, 64, 65, 76, 101, 104,

miscegenation, 17, 18, 83–84; literary rep-

107, 121, 125, 129, 133, 136

resentation of, 80, 82–83, 86–87, 138,

On a Plantation, 22–23, 177n1

143–44, 146, 148, 155

Our America, 59

The Mis-Education of the Negro, 51, 179n18 Mitchell, Margaret, 7, 55, 133, 167, 175n8 mobility, trope of: among Harlem Renais-

Page, Thomas Nelson, 8 patriarchal authority, 2–5, 6, 77, 84–86, 105, 121, 147, 168, 171, 174n3

sance artists, 176n21; in Peterkin’s writ-

Patton, James Welch, 173n2

ing, 15, 28–29, 36, 50, 54

Penhally, 8, 16, 107, 109, 111, 116, 121–25,

modernity, 8–21, 109–15, 121–33

128, 133, 134, 136

Moers, Ellen, 145

Perkerson, Medora Field, 68

Morgenstein, Naomi, 141

Peterkin, Julia: and “dominizing,” 29–33;

Morrison, Toni, 141–42, 144

education of, 32; and Harlem Renais-

Morrow, Lenna, 178n4

sance, 7, 11–12, 54; introduction to

My Heart and My Flesh, 7

writing, 23–24, 70; and myth of White

Myth of White Southern Womanhood:

Southern Womanhood, 6, 15, 29, 31–

materiality, 3, 5, 6, 16, 20, 31, 32, 82,

33, 35, 54; and Plantation Mythology,

105; origins, 1–2, 67, 78, 174n1, 175n4,

6, 15, 28, 31, 35, 47–48, 49, 54; rela-

184n5; performance of, 79, 98, 106, 165

tionship with H. L. Mencken, 15

Index | 207

J

Petrie, Paul, 140

Roosevelt, F. D., 15, 58, 73, 184n4

Phifer, Mary, 178n4

Ross, Stephen, 176n16, 176n19

Pilgrim’s Progress, 144

Rubin, Louis D., 166, 182n6

Plantation Mythology: materiality of, 3, 5,

Rule, Jane, 183n2

16, 20, 31, 71, 74–94, 169; origins and

Russell, Irwin, 176n13

definition, 1–2, 184n5 The Plantation Trilogy, 15, 55, 57, 60, 74,

“The Sahara of the Bozart,” 9, 25

107. See also Deep Summer, Handsome

same-sex desire, 18, 20, 159, 166

Road, This Side of Glory

Sandburg, Carl, 23–24, 28, 35, 177n3,

poor whites, 10, 92–103, 104, 107, 116, 125, 131–36, 148; and blacks, 16, 35, 148, 152, 175n7, 176n14; and modernity, 15

178n4 Sapphira and the Slave Girl, 17, 137, 139–54, 161, 162 Saturday Review, 55

Porter, Katherine Anne, 21

Saxby, Chester, 175n11

Prenshaw, Peggy, 66

Saxon, Lyle, 66

Prown, Katherine Hemple, 3–5, 109–10,

Scarlet Sister Mary, 8, 11, 14, 27, 35–36,

182n4, 182n5

41–48

Publisher’s Weekly, 55

Scott, Anne Firor, 174n1

Pyron, Darden, 175n8

Scott, Evelyn, 7 “Seeing Things,” 29

Queen Latifah, 21, 168, 184n4

segregation, 18, 20, 137–38 sexuality, 1

Rable, George C., 173n2

Simpson, Louis, 166

race, 9, 92, 164; and violence, 34, 156

Skaggs, Merrill, 176n14, 177n27

racism, 174n4; in black culture, 20; in

slavery, 8, 31, 48, 58, 135, 151; literary rep-

Bristow’s writing, 103–4; in Cather’s writing, 143, 163; in Gordon’s writing, 109–11, 115; in Peterkin’s writing, 14; in Smith’s writing, 163–64, 177n26

resentation of, 93–94, 96, 115, 126–28, 142 Smith, Lillian: childhood of, 19;commentary on black elitism, 163–64; and

Ransom, John Crowe, 111

myth of White Southern Womanhood,

rape, 80, 150–51

6, 20, 154–55; and Plantation Mythol-

Reconstruction, 33, 62, 64, 67, 100, 103,

ogy, 6, 20; relationship with Paula

125, 181n23

Snelling, 20

Reynolds, Guy, 184n5

The Sound and the Fury, 7, 183n12

Rives, Amelia, 166

South, 10, 25, 33, 36, 58, 71, 90, 94, 121,

Roberts, Elizabeth Maddox, 7, 167

126, 131, 167; ideology of, 5, 109, 170;

Roberts, Giselle, 173n2

race relations, 9, 13, 18, 34, 102–3, 137,

Robeson, Elizabeth, 45, 54, 176n16, 176n19, 179n16 Roediger, David, 177n28

153, 178n6 South Carolina: Bristow’s heritage in, 66–67; Columbia State, 56, 177n22;

j 208 | post-Reconstruction population, 33;

Index Urgo, Joseph, 184n5

race riots, 34, 110 Southern Baptist Convention, 67

Van Auken, Sheldon, 175n11

Southern Baptist Hospital, 67

Van Doren, Carl, 175n11

The Southern Mandarins, 109, 112

Van Vechten, Carl, 176n18

Southern Renaissance, 166, 167

Varon, Elizabeth, 178n7

Southern Womanhood. See Myth of White

“A Visit to the Grove,” 17, 108, 117, 119–21,

Southern Womanhood

183n9

Spanish-American War, 67 Spingarn, Joel, 13, 176n18

Waldron, Ann, 182n1

Stein, Gertrude, 178n13

Wallace, Maurice, 166, 184n1

Strange Fruit, 17, 137, 154–62

Walton, Edith, 179n2

Sugg, Redding, Jr., 154, 184n11

Warren, Dale, 13, 28 Warren, Naguiyalti, 175n4

Take Me Out, 1

Warren, Robert Penn, 4, 112, 175n7

Tate, Allen, 8, 110, 166, 182n2. See also

Waugh, Charles, 173n2

Gordon, Caroline

Weigman, Robyn, 6

Tate, Claudia, 175n4

Wells, Ida B., 18, 127, 184n9

Taylor, Mary, 57, 179n3

Welter, Barbara, 175n4

Terrell, Mary Church, 18

Welty, Eudora, 7, 21

Theft and Love, 166

white supremacy, 6

Their Eyes Were Watching God, 7

white violence, 20

Theriot, Billie, 55, 66–68, 180n12

whiteness studies, 20

This Side of Glory, 8, 55–56, 64–66, 71,

Willa Cather Living, 139

103–7, 121 Till, Emmett, 173n1

Williams, Susan, 22, 40, 54, 176n15, 176n16, 179n19

Tillman, Ben, 34

Williamson, Joel, 174n3

Times Literary Supplement, 55

Wolfe, Thomas, 7

Times Picayune, 55, 56, 66, 69

Wol≠, Sally, 175n4

Tobacco Road, 10

The Women on the Porch, 121

Tomorrow Is Forever, 57

Women’s Missionary Society, 67

Toomer, Jean, 176n 21

World War I, 34, 64, 65, 71, 138, 166,

Torgovnick, Marianna, 177n24 Tragic Mulatto, 49–50

177n26 World War II, 7, 18, 177n26 Wright, Richard, 7, 56

United Daughters of the Confederacy, 118 “The Unrecorded South,” 8, 15, 58–60, 71, 73, 77, 179n4

Yaeger, Patricia, 3–5, 175n4

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