Right now, I'm at 28 days before the essays are due!
Kreyling’s book is “a
consideration of the ways and means by which southernness has come into being
and been sustained there, along with the attempt to measure how and why the
meaning of the term has changed over time” (169). He relies upon Benedict Anderson’s concepts
of nationhood in order to explain how the South understands itself. Unlike Patricia Yaeger’s later work, in this
work he says that this text is “not a counternarrative that seeks to dynamite
the rails on which the official narrative runs; rather, it is a metanarrative,
touching upon crucial moments when and where the official narrative is made or
problematically directed” (ix).
In his discussion of
the Agrarians and the formation of the southern canon and southern studies
which put Quentin Compson and Faulkner at the center, he notes that putting
Quentin at the center is the result of “the legion of white males who have
assumed responsibility for inventing a style for thinking of the South.” I’m particularly interested in his discussion
of feminist responses:
Feminist critics are
not unanimous on an alternative to the Quentin thesis. Some, like Carol S. Manning, might he called
moderates: Manning points out the
defects in the Quentin position but wants to preserve the status quo long enough to modify it for the admission of
southern women's fiction (Manning
i-i2). A little to the left are critics like Susan V. Donaldson and
Anne Goodwyn Jones, who would like to
modify the meaning of "history" in the prevailing southern formula (usually along
lines of Foucaultien "genealogy")
and, thus, run southern women's history into the mainstream at an angle” (Donaldson i77ff).
He goes on:
More extreme is the
position of southern lesbian critic Mal, Segrest, who would have community admit neither men nor
their history: "For there have
always been Southern women who knew that they did not want to join
the white men in Mississippi for
anything; who have known that WE did not
lose the war" (Segrest 29-3o; emphasis in original). Segrest's view
represents the most radical denial of
the Quentin thesis, and it is not merely a matter of polemic. Her reading of the figure of the
spinster (like Jones's reading of the
southern-woman-as-author, but more radically) breaks the hold of the consensus in thematic literary readings:
"The other terrible absence in male-dominated fictions is the absence of female community,
or even its possibility. In all the stories I described [Ahsalom, Absalom!,
"A Rose for Emily," "The
Ballad of the Sad Cafe," and "Good Country People"[, the
spinster was ;clone, set apart from both
amen and married women. The small-town communities within the fictions showed complete lack of
support for female self-identification.
Without either respect for female solitude or the presence of female community', of course spinsters were
seen as freaks (Segrest 35).
Segrest's critique
fractures the ideal of community by alleging that representations of it have been unreflectingly male As I
have argued just above, Simpson's
reading of Roberts could fall under this indictment. If Segrest's image of community is as narrow from the
feminist side as any might he from the
male, it is nevertheless provocative. In her "fable" of becoming it
southern writer, exclusion from
"the community" is double. She dates her initiation to the moment when she spied, from it
distance, the black children who were
integrating her school in the Alabama of George Wallace: "I have it tremendous flash of empathy, of
identification, with their vulnerability and
their aloneness inside that circle of force Ithe white males of the
Alabama Highway I'atroll. Their
separation is mine" (Segrest, 20). Segrest, establishing another ideological center, uses the
vocabulary of the former center-race
and community identification-to make herself it southern (woman) writer. Extending and "outing"
Lillian Smith's deconstruction of the southern
imaginary, Segrest links southern women writers in shared
consciousness of exclusion from it constructed
center.
What the Quentin-based canon formation leads to is
blindness to the kinds of female community which exist in the work of southern
women writers, and the kinds of women who are estranged from these
communities. I particularly like Kreyling’s
observation that while Flannery O’Connor’s comment on the centrality of
Faulkner to southern studies originally referred to him as the “Dixie Limited,”
her comment was quickly changed to be understood as the “Dixie Special.”
If one looks at the work of southern women’s
writing, one sees different kinds of commentaries on not only community, but the
work of race within these communities:
Eli:abeth Jane Harrison
reads the "other" narrative as a version of the more familiar pastoral. Her reading of recent
fiction by southern women,
black and white,
arrives at it kind of utopian community: "Despite difficulties in overcoming the harriers to sex and race
equality, female friendship and
cooperative communities become an important part of the new southern garden for these women authors"
(Harrison i4-15). Harrison's guide is
Nina Auerhach's Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (tg78), it work that is both about utopian communities of
women in fiction and the product of the
author's own personal experience of "a model community of women Ithe Radcliff Institute and its Fellows] who
gave a local habitation to the Utopias I
read about" ("Acknowledgments," n.p.). Female textual
utopias exist, for Auerbach, in it
ghostly relationship with the male, public community of history: "The communities of women
which have haunted our literary
imagination from the beginning are emblems of female self-sufficiency which create their own corporate reality,
evoking both wishes and fears" (5).
These wishes and fears are sexual, political, social, and historical;
they are "voiced" in a
"code" that, unlike the male code, is "a whispered and it
fleeting thing, more it buried language
than a rallying cry" (y). For it lesbian
critic like Segrest, burial is deep and the code sexually complex. For
critics like Donaldson, Manning, and
Jones the "silenced" voices are still audible in the Quentinian din.
As Segrest suggests in
her memory of identifying with the black children who integrated her school, experiences of
racial exclusion may serve as metaphors
of sexual exclusion. The historical trajectory of African-American women's writing, from the slave narratives of
the nineteenth century to their
"recovery" by Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker, suggests a common cause. The household, sexual politics of
slavery produced in the community of
women, across racial boundaries, a lively code, open to many and sometimes contradictory meanings. As Harriet Beecher
Stowe would have it in Uncle Tom's
Cabin, black and white women-though unequal- conununi- cated in the channel of domestic management
and sentiment. Chloe and her mistress
bond against Mr. Shelby's purely economic decision to sell Tom and Eli:a and her son. Eli:a Harris and Mrs.
Bird openly conspire to circumvent the
public code-the Fugitive Slave Law thematically presented as a male language. In texts by African-American
women who were slaves, Harriet Jacobs
being the most prominent example, conversation within sexual territory but across the racial barrier is
more subtle. Sometimes, in Jacobs'.
narrative, the lines hold, and sometimes they Freak down.
Solid or breakable,
conversation in overlapping racial and sexual channels is vital to an understanding of the
African-American woman's image of community as well as to the white southern
woman's imagined community. The classic
of the first half of this century, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching (;od (1y37), is almost universally
acknowledged as an encoded text on the
formation of an African-American woman's community evolving from
heterosexual, social dependence on
black men into a very strong community of
women that, according to Marjorie Pryse, "recreates the tradition
of female friendship and shared
understanding and heals the lingering impact of separation imposed by slavery and sexism" (t 5).
Rather than attempt to occupy the
discourse of history, from which black American women have been excluded even more thoroughly than white women,
African-American women writers (with
Hurston as the twentieth-century leader) have unearthed the buried languages of African-American folk
traditions and community (2-4). The
result, for its late in the century, is that in African-American women's writing, history is nearly abolished. Alice
Walker's The Color Purple (1982) is the
most famous text in which "black history becomes firmly rooted in the network of female friendship" (Pryse 20)
and, thereby is removed from male
control.
Kreyling’s analysis of Smith’s Oral History does a good job of showing how this novel exemplifies
these differences. For example, he
observes that, “Dory is horn at the center of it community the male literally cannot register because
that community is in its very
constitution beyond his "history." (loc 1775-6) Also, “Oral History signifies on traditional
images of the origin and nature of
southern community in history, even as it pleads for a redefinition of
community in the woman's register.”
Kreyling’s discussion of race in this work is quite
interesting. He says that, “bypassing of
the traditional reading of the tragedy of race in the southern narrative and suggests that it might always
have been, as Welty', feminine eye had
seen in Delta Wedding, it learned pattern of male imitation, not an essential tragedy of the community as it
living whole.” Even more importantly is
his observation that “Lillian Smith, before Fried Green Tomatoes, and
Dorothy Allison in Bastard out of
Carolina ( 1092) since, have used the same coupling of sexual abuse with racial terrorism to
stigmatize the male community.” He also
looks at the centrality of women’s lives to history; in Jill McCorkle’s work,
for example, “pregnancy and birth are
shown to be at the center of the process of identity making. Men are
irrelevant after impregnation.”
Ultimately, he concludes that
What is powerful in the
fiction of contemporary white southern women is their common, if not concerted,
challenge to the Quentin thesis. It is not
that the prevailing literary historical and critical apparatus is or
must he, in all instances, totally dismembered but rather that it must be seen
as man-made, the product not only of a
time and a social condition (though that
would he had enough When the assertions are of "transcendent"
meaning) but of gender too. Through the
heyday of "modern" southern writing, from the 1920s, of the
renaissance, through various announcements of its end, to the prophecy of a second rebirth by those who
look to the African-American male writer
as savior rather than propagandist, the canon has been presented as essentially linked to an ideal of
southern community conceived in history
but transcending the materialism of historical circumstances. The emergence of southern women's writing,
however, makes that literary orthodoxy
seem partial, at best. What is emerging in southern literature, to
confound the critical attempts of
traditional defenders to extend the hegemony
of renaissance ideology, is a body of work by white women writers that
calls up "forgotten" meanings
of precursor texts and proposes a new configuration of southern "community." The more
defenders try to stretch the Quentin
thesis to fit historical/social change, the more the thesis thins at its
weakest seams.
Ironically, after all of this, Kreyling then spent
two chapters discussing Faulkner—although his discussion of Faulkner is one in
which he identifies Faulkner as suffering from an anxiety of his own influence.
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