Anne Goodwyn Jones--Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936 (1981)

Jones looks at the work of seven white women writing before WWII who “all criticize the ideal of southern womanhood point by point in similar ways, and by means of similar imagery, plotting, characterization, and narrative points of view.”  Importantly, she observes that

the ideal of southern womanhood that informed these women’s lives and fictions not only often conflicted with their actual human needs but also contained its own internal ambiguities and contradictions.  When the image exhorts both intelligence and submission, both bravery and fragility, conflict seems inevitable. (xii)

As Jones observes “that ideal did not serve only as a norm for individual behavior[,] it became also a central symbol in the South’s idea of itself” (xii), she provides an important reason for the study of women in this literature: “in the American South woman represented as well [man’s] ambivalent feelings about social class, race, and national identity” (5).  Further, she points out that for traditional southern womanhood, itself more a personification than a human possibility, “efforts to join person and personification, to make self into symbol, must fail because the idea of southern womanhood specifically denies the self” (4).  While acknowledging the similarities between traditional southern womanhood and the Victorian lady or American True Womanhood, she points out important differences:

the southern lady is at the core of a region’s self-definition; the identity of the South is contingent in part upon the persistence of its tradition of the lady.  Secondly, and perhaps for that reason, the ideal of southern womanhood seems to have lasted longer than other ideas….in a third divergence…southern womanhood has from the beginning been inextricably linked to racial attitudes….finally, the very image itself seems, if not radically different from, at least an extreme version of the nineteenth century lady….And the class—aristocratic—that the image of the lady represents receives a stronger emphasis in the South than elsewhere. (4-5)

Significant to my work is her quote from Robert Afton Holland, a clergyman at the University o the South, who in 1909 said that, “once outside the home, woman become a horrific animal, acquiring ‘bigger hands, bigger feet, higher cheek bones, lanker limbs, flatter chests, hook noses, lips thin and tight” (20).

While the individual chapters have analyses and observations on specific authors, works, and characters which I find useful, Jones’s remarks in her conclusion are the most useful for my project.  For example, she observes that,

In contrast to symbolizing beauty as purity and fragility, as the southern lady should, these protagonists have dark eyebrows and strong bodies.  Probably because their values—free intelligence, aloneness, self-assertion—are traditionally masculine, the physical appearance of the protagonists is often atypical, even androgynous.  Edna, Scarlett, Katharine, Beulah, Hagar, and Gabriella are all described as striking but not beautiful: they have “character.”  On the other hand, to Oliver, Virginia appeared fragile and delicate, her skin like magnolia blossoms.  Moreover, many characters feel and express their sexuality, from the adolescent Claire’s emerging sensuousness, responding to the dancing in the streets, to Calixta’s full adult pleasure in the act of sex. (354)

Further, she points out that “traditional images of beauty of the southern female are, in almost every work, scorned or ignored.  Beginning by discarding the fragility of the skin like magnolias and eyes like violets, these women writers are inventing through imagery their own definitions of southern womanhood” (362).  In Jones’s consideration, the heart of the conflicts expressed in these works is a fundamental tension between realism and romanticism.  Romanticism, a familiar mode, allows the author to “substitute for material reality a dream that is, paradoxically, more ‘realistic’ than objective reality.  This is, in fact, what these writers do when they dream up characters who are neither beautiful nor fragile, conventionally good nor powerless” (359).  While these authors grew up with romanticism as the primary mode of their society, “because the realist depicts the actual daily experience of ordinary persons, realism would have appealed as the literary method for debunking the ideal of the southern lady.  It would thus serve as a corrective for the entire society of the South, in exposing the romantic illusion of the marble lady” (359).  Realism “reveals the ugliness, the injustice, and the sordidness of society, which romanticism can pass over” (358).

It occurs to me that Jones’s observations circle around Sonnet 130—that the physical appearance of Shakespeare’s mistress is what attracts the speaker—it makes her corporeal, rather than ethereal.  It may be in part that we want characters we can relate to.  It may be that flaws make someone more attractive, more interesting—in the whole “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” Tolstoy way.

Richard Gray--Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism (2000)

Gray addresses the questions of southern regionalism in literature by looking at “writers who, for very different reasons, have found their involvement with the American South particularly problematical” (ix).  Beginning with Edgar Allan Poe, and looking at authors such as Ellen Glasgow, the Agrarians, Erskine Caldwell, Appalachian authors, and contemporary southern writers who address social change such as Lee Smith, Harry Crews, and Barry Hannah (among many others).  He addresses the Agrarian codification of the southern literary canon, noting that Allen Tate in particular “was trying to rewrite literary history from a self-consciously reactive position just as much as, in his social and political essays, he was trying to reinvent the broader history of the West from a stance of equally self-conscious reaction” (97).  He then addresses subsequent canonical Southern criticism texts and examines what has been omitted from the traditions and why.  Throughout, he examines how such authors, most of whom have definite ties to the South (and write about the South) negotiate their vexed relationship to the region, often in terms of their participation in (or lack) of social criticism, awareness of social problems, or the ways in which they address the history of racial violence.

While Cash (among others) identified that “Southern white women of the privileged classes have customarily been associated with the ‘very notion’ of the region…black women were assigned the sexual function: that is, they became those with whom the sexual dimension of experience was habitually and mythically associated” (23).  Echoing Mr. Compson in Absalom, he discusses the paradox that Southern women are considered both bodiless as well as marked by blood, a contradiction which requires a certain kind of repression “when women are transformed into ‘ladies,’ drained of blood and all intimations of corporeal or sexual life, dressed in white and placed on a pedestal” (24).  He invokes Kristeva’s definition of femininity as “that which is marginalized by the patriarchal symbolic order” (quoted page 24), and says that, “To the extent that they are within the order, shielding it from an imagined chaos, they can be seen as precious guardians of the law; to the extent that they are outside, however, in contact with that chaos, they can be seen as creatures of turbulence and darkness—not preventing chaos but partaking of it, even encouraging it to come again” (25).  He then brings up Mary Douglas’s ideas of purity and dirt, noting that while traditional southern white women in literature “have all the insubstantiality that any self-respecting Southern white male…might have expected[,]…at crucial moments, they prove themselves unclean, the blood breaks through….it a blood that reminds us that they are, finally, of the earth, earthly” (25).

His discussion of Mildren Haun’s female characters is interesting: “Haun’s stories describe a community in which women can have strange powers—to put ‘a sure witch sign’ on someone they disapprove of, for instance—but where they remain, in the last analysis, powerless” (294).  Further, “Haun was convinced of the conflicted status of her sex in traditional hill culture.  The women in these stories draw whatever strength they possess, not so much from the concreteness of the natural world as from the vitality of custom; their belief in themselves flows from their tapping into the wellsprings of magic and ritual.  Their powerlessness, however, issues from the same source” (295). 

Gray’s analysis of Harry Crews sees him as the progeny of O’Connor.  “Crews deploys freaks to defamiliarize, to expose what may be concealed by the tyranny of habit and so make us see how remarkable, how truly strange, the supposedly normal can be” (402).  What’s important to me in his discussion of contemporary southern lit such as Crews is his discussion of the “postsouthern”: “these ‘postsouthern’ people live not so much in the stream of history as on its margins from where, like compulsive voyeurs, they watch everything that passes with a glazed sense of uninvolvement.  Their problem, really, is not like that of their predecessors, an excess of narrative (an excess flowing from the conviction that the past is never dead), but rather its absence, the suspicion that no stories or ceremonies apply, that there are no more tales worth telling or parts worth playing” (433).  This really echoes my own idea of the “postmythic” South, one in which we no longer believe in the old stories—but I think my position is a bit more overtly optimistic, as I see the continuation of southern literature as proof that there are new stories to tell.  Of course, it’s dangerous to use the word “optimistic” even in the same paragraph as Harry Crews’s name.

To Gray’s concluding question, “Why does Southern self-fashioning continue?” he cites Welty: “It is a matter of language and communal ritual: the human habit of positioning the self with the help of the word and others—giving a local habitation and a name to things to secure their and our identity, and establishing a connection or kinship with other people that is also an anchorage, a validation of oneself” (504).  Ultimately, southerners are driven “to position themselves with others in their locality, communality of interest or area, and against or apart from others elsewhere” (511).

W. J. Cash--The Mind of the South (1941)

Even in retrospect, Cash’s text still remains a rather cogent masterpiece in describing the history and emergence of the “mind of the South” as he saw it in 1941.  Keeping in mind the caveats noted in the 1991 introduction by Bertram Wyatt-Brown, especially that of his audience—which was generally an audience of like-minded, white, middle class-to-affluence southern men—Cash sketches out the evolution of the current state of the South, at least from his vantage point.  Cash’s definition of the South is based on the Civil War: “roughly delimited by the boundaries of the former Confederate States of America, but shading over into some of the border states, notably Kentucky also” (xlviii).  One of the most significant reasons why Cash thinks the South has developed so differently from the North is that he sees it as kept in a series of frontier stages—pre-Civil War frontier, post-Civil War destruction and Reconstruction which returned the South to a frontier status, and then finally a burgeoning industrialization period (under the leadership of Henry Grady and those who shared his vision of a South who will beat the North at their own game), which when compared to the North continued to keep the South in a kind of frontier status (especially the poor whites, who were used as mill fodder, just as they were used as cannon fodder during the Civil War).

This continuing frontier status allowed the South to keep values more in keeping with frontier communities: fierce independence, romanticism, and violence.  This self-reinforcing values combine with what Cash identifies as gyneolatry.  After making an argument that the South has long been viewed as a quarantined area of sexual deviance (an argument which Gary Richards quite convincingly makes in his 2007 Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction), he then explains that the southern white woman grew to represent the South itself, and any attacks against her were understood to be attacks on the very traditions of the South itself: “the Yankee must be answered by proclaiming from the housetops that Southern Virtue, so far from being inferior, was superior, not only to the North’s but to any on earth, and adducing Southern Womanhood in proof” (86).  His discussion of the threat of sexual violence in the South is unsatisfying: in contrast to the white southern woman (which he does not even identify as “white,” assuming that the descriptor of “Southern woman” as sufficient (84)), and even more so in his discussion of black female sexuality: “Nor…must we overlook the specific role played by the Negro woman.  Torn from her tribal restraints and taught an easy complaisance for commercial reasons, she was to be had for the taking….For she was natural, and could give herself up to passion in a way impossible to wives inhibited by Puritanical training”(84).  I find “taught an easy complaisance for commercial reasons” a troubling euphemism for “raped.”

While his discussion of the contemporary race relations seems a bit naïve (or at least overly optimistic) for 1941, one of the most significant aspects of his discussion of racism and lynching in the 20^th century South is his insistence that it is not simply the province of the lower classes.  Rather, Cash important observes that “the major share of the responsibility in all those areas where the practice [of lynching] has remained common rests squarely on the shoulders of the master classes” (303).  He makes similar assertions about the KKK, claiming that they were made up primarily of lower class and poorer whites, though “its blood…came from the upper orders” (336).

Additionally, his discussion of the threat of sexual violence against white women by black men is equally troubling.  While he admits that “It is true that the actual danger of the southern white woman’s being violated by the Negro has always been comparatively small,” he maintains that “if the actual danger was small, it was nevertheless the most natural thing in the world for the South to see it as very great, to believe in it, fully and in all honesty, as a menace requiring the most desperate measures if it was to be held of,” because of the fear and terror of white women, the “neurotic old maids and wives, hysterical young girls”(115).  Cash scapegoats pretty much everyone for the southern rape complex—everyone, that is, except white men, of whom  there is plenty of documentation of perpetrating actual rapes (though as most of these are against slave women, I’m dubious if Cash would have characterized them as rape).

Cash claims both that the South has had a hierarchical class system, and yet is a much more democratic system than the North; the backbends of logic he undertakes to support this is rather ludicrous.  First he gives a rather essentialist depiction of class, locating class status as a biological (perhaps even genetic) characteristic: when describing the lazy type of the white trash southerner, he describes it as manifesting in a “distinctive, physical character—a striking lankness of frame and slackness of muscle in association with a shambling gait, a boniness and mis-shapeliness of head and feature, a peculiar sallow swartness, or alternatively a not less peculiar  and not less sallow faded-out colorlessness of skin and hair” (24).  Despite his subsequent claim that it is impossible for even the best southern stock to have been diluted with inferior blood, and the fact that quality southern folk still abound disprove the validity of such a genetic basis for character, his argument rings rather false to me.  Rather, the analogy that he makes in his “Of Time and Frontiers” section regarding how a family of brothers can, within a few generations, result with widely disparate social conditions—to the point that relatives with the same name will no longer be aware of their own kinship—seems a weak example of social Darwinism (albeit one which is echoed in Gone with the Wind) (27).

It is in the post-bellum South that Cash claims the real myth of the aristocratic Old South took hold (124).  Such mythology was reified by characteristics of the South which Cash throughout his text identifies as its primary values, across the entire South: sentimentality, politics, and love of rhetoric characteristics which were present in the antebellum period, but which only grew stronger under the torture of Reconstruction (126).  Importantly, though, one of the most important aspects of the South’s struggle under Reconstruction was its tragic dependence on cotton as its key crop: not only did such a one-crop strategy deplete land already unsuitable for the crop, depleting the land of its fecundity, but it also meant that the “yeomen and poor whites” who were “converted to cotton culture…no longer produced provender enough at home to take care of themselves and their animals form crop to crop, and must, therefore, somehow manage to secure it from outside” (147).  Further, once the South began to pursue technological progress, Cash importantly points out that the mill system was at heart another plantation: “the Southern mill factory almost invariably was…a plantation, essentially indistinguishable in organization from the familiar plantation of the cotton fields” (200)—because “Progress depended upon the cheapness of labor was a new and powerful block upon any possible advance en masse for the lower classes in the South” (203).  The South’s pursuit of progress encouraged a return to individualistic thinking, and the plantation/factory system meant that poor whites, needing a scapegoat for their poverty, were encouraged to view blacks as their enemy.  Loyalty, instead, grew to the twinned giants of Progress and Religion, which were considered the be-all saviors. 

Interesting to my own work is Cash’s brief description of another “type”: the “Yankee schoolma’am who, in such numbers, moved down upon the unfortunate South in the train of the army of occupation, to “educate” the black man for his new place in the sun and to furnish an example of the Christian love and philanthropy to the benighted native whites.  Generally horsefaced, bespectacled, and spare of frame, she was, of course, no proper intellectual but at best a comic character, at worst a dangerous fool, playing with explosive forces which she did not understand….if she not was not an intellectual, the South, with its vague standards in these manners, accepted her as such.  It saw her, indeed, as a living epitome of the Yankee mind, identified her essentially with Northern universities, read in the evils springing abundantly from her meddlesome stupidity categorical proof that Northern ‘theory’ was in toto altogether mad” (137).  Though he makes a brief aside to blame the northern journalist as well, it is clear that he lays the majority of the blame on meddling northern women.

He then discusses the seeming paradox that the South during Reconstruction, as it became more religious and anti-intellectual, began to for the first time develop a real literature of its own.  However, he explains the paradox that much of the literature, with the exception of Sidney Lanier, was quite propaganda-esque in nature, in its nostalgia for the Old South, noting Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, and George Washington Cable (the Grandissimes in particular) as examples.  I’m a bit confused by this last characterization—while Cash notes that the The Grandissimes is “so predominately a piece of sentimental glorification that it goes mainly unread nowadays, yet had so many flashes of untrammeled insight, so many sudden lapses into realism, that his countrymen actually denounced it as libel” (143).  Certainly, The Grandissimes relies heavily on sentimentalism, but I don’t see how the story of Bras Coupé (or of Honoré Grandissime, f.m.c.) can be considered “sentimental glorification.”

Interestingly, he points to Ellen Glasgow as the first example of a writer in the South who was “approach[ing] the materials of her world almost exclusively from the viewpoint of an artist” (144).  He then gives her as an example, along with James Joyce, of authors to which educated southerners turned in the 1920s instead of traditional southern authors such as Thomas Nelson Page (325).  In his discussion of the flowering of southern literature in the 1920s and 1930s, he points to Barren Ground (1925) as “the first real novel, as opposed to romances, the South had brought forth” (374).  He considers Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner together with Thomas Wolfe, deeming Caldwell and Faulkner “romantics of the appalling” (378).  The success of these generations of authors in creating a truly southern literature, according to Cash, was their ability to stand “intellectually at least, pretty decisively outside the region,” no longer writing about the South as “Never-Never Land” (379).  In his analysis of the rise of the Vanderbilt Agrarians in the wake of Mencken’s “Sahara of the Bozart,” he says that, “These men were mouthpieces of the fundamental, f sometimes only subterranean, will of the South to hold to the old way: the spiritual heirs of Thomas Nelson Page.  And their first joint declaration, I’ll Take My Stand, was, like their earlier prose works, essentially a determined reassertion of the validity of the legend of the Old South” (380).

Ellen Glasgow--Barren Ground (1925)

This beautiful novels follows the life of protagonist Dorinda Oakley, a woman from very rural Virginia, for thirty years.  Dorinda, daughter of a land‐poor farmer in Virginia, at 20 goes to work in Nathan Pedlar's store. She falls in love with Jason Greylock, weak‐willed son of the village doctor, and forgets her purpose of helping her father to rebuild the farm.  However, the day before their planned wedding Jason instead marries a former fiancée, later claiming that he was forced to marry her. Bitterly disillusioned and pregnant, Dorinda seeks work in New York, where she is injured and miscarries after being hit by a taxi. She is attended by Dr. Faraday, who later employs her as a nurse for his children. 

Dorinda returns to the family farm as her father is dying, finding the farm impoverished and overgrown with broomsedge. Having studied scientific agriculture in New York, she introduces progressive methods, gradually returning the “barren ground” to fertility and creating a prosperous dairy farm. Her mother becomes an invalid, after her brother Rufus is questioned for murder, so that Dorinda must carry on with only the aid of a few farm laborers. After her mother's death she marries Nathan Pedlar, to provide a home for his children.  Though she doesn’t love Nathan with the same romance with which he loves her, she has real respect for Nathan which allows the two of them to have a rather stable and financially successful marriage.  Nathan, often overlooked because of his lack of looks and quiet ways, dies a hero’s death after rescuing people from a train accident.  After he dies she shelters Jason, now penniless and ill from excessive drinking. He soon dies.  The novel ends with Dorinda taking to her own bed, echoing her own mother’s final admission of exhaustion.  

Throughout the novel, Dorinda struggles with desire for happiness, contentment, and ease of mind: they seem to be incompatible.  After her young romance with Jason which leaves her emotionally (and physically) scarred, Dorinda is insistent on putting such sentimental nonsense behind her.  This struggle between sentiment and pragmatism is an overarching throughout the novel: not just in relationships between people, but also in the relationship between people and the land.  While Dorinda may (mostly) be able to keep her feelings for other people outside the realm of the sentimental, her attachment to the land and her family farm is another story.  Certainly, the hard work which Dorinda invests in her family farm does pay off, but also reveals what emotional attachments are beyond her control.  Even the sections of the novel—“Broomsedge,” “Pine,” and “Life Everlasting”—are plant names used as metaphors to illustrate Dorinda’s relationship to herself and the land.  

This is a beautifully written and moving novel.  Pre-dating both Tobacco Road and Gone with the Wind (and even Cold Mountain), it seems to be to have been a strong influence on both of them.  My only complaint is the rather uneven treatment of race throughout.  African Americans throughout the novel are consistently characterized as an inferior and lazy race, despite the outstanding individuals such as Fluvella, without whose support Dorinda simply wouldn’t have survived.  Compared to others in the novel, Dorinda’s racism is perhaps a more benevolent form, but her failure to grasp the real-life conditions of the African Americans on whose labor her own survival depends is a weakness in an otherwise sensitive depiction of a life struggling against rural poverty.