Helen Ellis--Eating the Cheshire Cat (2000)

This novel was recommended by a lovely person I met at the Dickens Universe this summer, after she learned about my dissertation topic.  I had to get it through Inter-Library Loan--though now that I've read it, I'm quite surprised that I haven't heard more about it.  What a fantastic read!

It follows three young women in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, from summer camp to college.  Opening with a harrowing account of Sarina's mother attack on her in an attempt to fix her disfigured fingers, it follows her friendship with Nicole, who's mother is even more intent on her daughter's physical and social perfection, as well as the experiences of Bitty Jack, the daughter of the summer camp caretakers whose life continues to intersect with those of Sarina and Nicole.

Nicole's mother makes clear the connection between the South and rigid expectations of femininity in her succinct statement, "“…this is the South.  We roll our hair and we wear lip gloss” (66). 

One thing this novel emphasizes is that women who make the choice to be ugly do so from a position of privilege.  Little Jack's ugly physical appearance is linked to her lower socioeconomic status; she would certainly not choose it, if she could:  “She wondered if she would ever outgrow what her mama called her awkward stage.  Could she ever afford new glasses?  Could she dress better? Wear makeup so it looked right?  Would her acne ever clear?  Would her hair lose the oil, gain body, gain bounce?” (26).

Unlike Little Jack, those who choose to be ugly occupy a position of privilege; they choose ugliness as a form of rebellion, usually against insistent (or in this novel, draconian) mothers who are adamant about ensuring that their daughters will fit properly into the marriage economy.  In order to choose ugliness, young women must first have access to the system in order to choose to opt out of it.  For Nicole, making herself ugly is an attempt to connect to her friend Sarina.  Nicole's obsession with Sarina is both a way of rebelling against her mother (who doesn't approve of the friendship) as well as an expression of lesbian desire, which is strictly forbidden in this community: “With Sarina, Nicole made an effort to play down her beauty.  She didn’t powder her nose.  A zit was like a door prize that she’d never try to hide.  Who cared what her date thought?  Not Nicole—one single bit.  Her unfinished face put Sarina at ease.  When Sarina was at ease, she was more attentive to Nicole.  She accompanied her to the rest room, to get popcorn, refill their drinks.  Anytime Nicole could steal Sarina from her date” (66).  

In contrast to Sarina’s and Nicole’s mothers, whose insistence on their daughter’s beauty provokes rebellion, Bitty Jack’s mother sees beauty even in the freaks. Upon witnessing “Little Miss Hose and Pony,” she whispers, “She has such a pretty face” (89).  Though she does not consciously make herself ugly, like Nicole, Bitty Jack's appearance is, to a certain extent, also mutable, especially once she learns how context-dependent value judgments about appearances are.  When she gets a job in a freak show, hosing off Johnny Iguana, the “Freak Boss” says, “You’ll get along fine with him.  I can tell.  You wouldn’t be here unless you was an ugly duckling once yourself,” to which Bitty Jack replies, “I’m no swan” (81).  At the freak show, however, the Freak Boss tells Bitty, “You’re not chicken shit…around here, you’ll be the belle of the ball….What you got?  Glasses?  Skin that’ll clear up sooner or later.  Freckles.  You’re skinny, but you’re nothing to turn your nose up at” (81).  

The Freak Boss has a clear understanding of the benefits of ugliness.  Regaling Bitty Jack with the story of the 300 pound woman who fell into the Pick a Duck pool, who “was flailing around like a pig in shit….Poor ducks were stuck in every crevice of her body,” he goes on to say that “Someone got the whole ugly incident on camera.  Won ten grand on that goddamned embarrassing video show,” and he ultimately wonders whether she staged the whole thing (92-3).
 

At the fair, Bitty Jack's ugliness gets her access (and training) that allow her success—winning the big pig prize which eluded Stewart.  When we first see Stewart and Sarina at the fair, we’re tempted to believe them that the games are fixed, although Sarina’s response to the Pick a Duck game—“The ugly bitch behind the counter kept giving Stewart small prizes” (54) seems excessive.  When we later learn that the ugly bitch is, in fact, Bitty Jack, it illuminates the kind of unique power which ugliness grants Bitty Jack.

Bitty Jack’s account of the story includes her own self-appraisal: “Bitty knew she was no swan.  Her beauty wasn’t storybookish: no dragon returns to find Bitty’s face morphed into a pot of gold.  She still had to wear glasses.  The shower was a war zone against combination skin.  But she wasn’t the same girl she was at thirteen.  Bitty knew she had bettered.  She looked different, but not that different” (95).  The power she holds over the Pick a Duck game is to give the small prize—the plush snake—in exchange for every duck that Stewart picks, and to refuse to give a purple snake, Sarina’s requested prize if they can’t win the big prize of the plush pig.  As Stewart’s frustration mounts with each additional consolation prize snake, “Within minutes, Sarina stood like Medusa’s maid of honor.  A wilted bouquet of bold-colored snakes drooper from her grasp” (96).  

It is significant that she is Medusa’s maid of honor, and not Medusa herself.  In this scenario, Bitty does not grant Sarina the full power of Medusa.  Instead, Bitty Jack retains her power, and it is her silent stare which drives Sarina mad, making enough of a commotion that she is asked to leave the fair (96-97).

What this novel ultimately emphasizes is that ugliness in the South is synonymous with rebellion and dissent.  After Nicole’s bloody cutting experience at the Tri Delt house, and her attack on her mother at the Tri Delt Poker Party, the incident is referred to as an “ugly situation” (178)--an extreme version of the warning given by so many southern mothers to their children to not "be ugly."  What Eating the Cheshire Cat does is highlight how the imperative for southern women to fit into such narrow parameters of beauty results in a desire and drive to "be ugly"--both in appearance and in behavior.

Monique Truong--Bitter in the Mouth (2010)

This is a beautiful novel.  Such gorgeous writing.  People's whose taste I admire were praising it on facebook, so I gave it a try.

It's the story of Linda, who grows up in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, in the 1970s and 1980s.  It jumps around in time, from high school, to elementary school, to law school at Yale and her life as a lawyer in New York City.  Linda has lexical-gustatory synesthesia, which means that she experiences many words as flavors.  Growing up, she has no explanation for her experiences, which she quickly learns to keep mostly to herself, after her mother forbids her from talking crazy.

Though Boiling Springs is a tiny, conservative, southern town, Linda's experiences reflect the changing South of the seventies and eighties, as changes in understandings of ethnicity, gender identity, sexual identity, and even psychological health unfold.  As her own understanding of reality has been mediated since birth by her synesthesia, Linda's observation of these changes (as well as her own understanding of them) is both beautiful and insightful.

I don't want to say too much about the plot, because even though plot is my least favorite part of a novel, there are important revelations along the way.  I totally plan on using this in my fall Introduction to Fiction Class--"The Many Souths"--because it does address a good job of addressing southern identity.  What does it mean to identify as southern?  What happens to those with a conflicted southern identity?

Lewis Simpson--The Fable of the Southern Writer (1994)

(I'm still reading while I'm plugging away at my exams.  I lost almost a week between anxiety over the storm and a migraine--but I'm back at it!)

Simpson opens this work by connecting the history of the South with the larger history of the United States—particularly its textual history with regard to both government documents as well as the Protestant Bible—and concludes that “southerners, more than the generality of American citizens, have been people who live and die by the text” (17).  In fact, Simpson emphasizes the literary nature of history itself, observing that “all compelling interpretations of history are verbal or rhetorical artifices resulting from an imaginative critique—a literary criticism—of the possibilities, mundane and fantastic, of history” (21).  The South is such a textual region, in fact, that Simpson points out that “the African slave, having been placed in the context of a society that had been invented in the written texts energized by the dynamic idea of the sovereignty of the whit (Anglo-Saxon) democratic self, needed only to attain literacy in the language of his master (sufficient reading and writing skills in English) in order to become a Frederick Douglass and assert the presence of a black selfhood in American history” (47).  Simpson links this textuality to the Enlightenment ideal of “the awareness of mind as the creating source and model of American history” (56).

Simpson’s focus is primarily on the Agrarian understanding of the Southern Renascence; he has two chapters on Faulkner, one on Allen Tate, and a couple on Robert Penn Warren.  In his occasional jabs at the growing ubiquity of theory and multiculturalism, it seems a bit dated now—especially the odd epilogue titled “A Personal Fable: Living with Indians,” in which he details several generations of his family and the surprising revelation that he has Cherokee blood in his family.  I think the purpose of this epilogue was to emphasize the Faulkner truism that the past is never past, but it seemed an odd way to end the text.  Just before the fable is his chapter on Walker Percy, where he finally discusses an author who asks, “What happens when you find yourself in the second half of the twentieth century with all this history behind you?  And then you have to figure out how to live in the here and now?” (197).  Interestingly, Simpson ties Percy’s South back to Tate’s South, one in which the South is the last real Europe.  However, he also hears warning bells in Percy’s work, as he sees that Percy “brings to the relationship between Is and Was the sense—intimated in Warren and Tate, yet more strongly intimated in Percy than in either—not only that this relationship is losing its meaning in the South but that this loss symbolizes the general loss in Western civilization” (206). 

Oddly enough, I finished this the same day that I looked over the brand new Grit Lit anthology which recently arrived in the mail, and I’m curious what Simpson would make of it.  Certainly, it draws upon the kind of multicultural work which Simpson was so suspicious of (even expanding its boundaries-would Simpson consider Missouri part of the South?).  There’s a different kind of historical inheritance in that collection—more the kind of Red Neck Manifesto inheritance than the Quentin Compson kind of inheritance that more monolithic understandings of southern literature seem to only be able to see.  What happens when our inheritances are class-based, or race-based, or money-based?  Those are different kinds of ghosts than Quentin’s, and yet we act as though all ghosts are the same.

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.

Fred Hobson--Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (1983)

Hobson traces what he calls the “rage to explain” which he sees as a constant in writings by those from the American South since before the Civil War.  According to Hobson, “the Southerner, more than other Americans, has felt he had something to explain, to justify, defend, or to affirm” (3).  Interestingly, he observes that not only do they often feel that they need to defend the South’s inferior status, but that many take pride, “a sense of distinction, of superiority, stemming from this inferior status.  The Southerner, that is to say, wears his heritage of failure and defeat as his badge of honor” (12).  Hobson breaks up the authors in his analysis into three large historical groups: antebellum writers, those writing “after Appomattox,” and those writing during and since the Civil Rights era.  Those writing before the Civil War were generally defending the Southern way of life—specifically, a way of life centered around race-based slavery.  After the Civil War, writers defended the southern way of life they saw destroyed by the War and particularly by Reconstruction, and many mythologized the lost way of life.  However, there were some, like George Washington Cable, whose work began to be critical of the South, especially in its racial policies.  By the twentieth century, writers became much more proscriptive in their work, culminating in the work of the 1920s and 1930s, which saw the publication of I’ll Take My Stand by the Vanderbilt-based Agrarians as well as the sociology-based work of writers such as Howard Odum at the University of North Carolina.  According to Hobson, the Agrarians saw the South’s major problem as one of public relations, while the North Carolina school writers were more concerned with addressing the problems of the South such as poverty, disease, and racism.  By the Civil Rights era, writers either tried to explain the myth of the South, or encourage the South to give up segregation.  By Hobson’s writing, in the wake of the Civil Rights era, the mythic South had given way to the progressive “Sun Belt,” and writers were now “focusing on the picturesque, on the South as cultural museum of charms and oddities.

Scott Romine--The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction

Evoking the work of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, Romine examines “the ‘real’/‘South’: a set of anxious, transient, even artificial intersections, sutures, or common surfaces between two concepts that are themselves remarkably fluid” (2-3).  He argues that “the South’s relatively abrupt entrance into modernity and its aftermath has generated a kind of time-space compression compression, if you will, wherein the South’s cultural and economic ‘backwardness’ relative to the U.S. nation has, ironically enough, placed it in the avant-garde of contemporary poetics” (4).  I’m fascinated by his reading of the Agrarians, who were “not too late for a South already corrupted by a capitalized and industrialized economy, but too early for a post-industrial economy wherein the flexible accumulation of capital would drive, and be driven by, the flexible accumulation of culture” (6).  Observing more recent accounts of the (post)South, Romine looks at both work by Martyn Bone and Jon Smith’s critique of Bone’s work: “narratives of rupture and continuity support tactical (scholarly) projects of different sorts—for Bone, an account of southern cities as dystopian effects of postnational finance capitalism; for Smith, an account of cities as ‘the best things to happen to the South’—and further, that they do so by suturing southern stories to southern spaces” (7).  In Romine’s consideration, his “own definition of the South, such as it is, would be precisely as a field of suture” (7).  He emphasizes the reproductive, reiterative nature of “the South”—“Post-essentialist accounts of the South (as something like a mere geographical container) characteristically reiterate, or at least depend upon, earlier essentialist accounts of what generated such boundaries in the first place” (14).

In his focus on narrative, Romine claims that “Narratives tell of, present, and portray desire even as they use and embody it, and in this doubling lies, I argue, narrative’s distinctive capacity to account, in the broadest sense, for desire’s operations as it is decoded, cut loose from more regulated forms of territoriality, and then reattached more tenuously and flexibly to themed spaces, localities, and artificial territorialities” (24).  Later, he uses this idea of narrative in his definition of culture:

I want to interrogate essentialist productions of the South as they are mapped on a stressed terrain of interlocking and overlapping territorialities, of rapid oscillations  of interpellation and articulation, of similarity and difference.  Instead of a real South, I want to think about the South as Appadurai suggests we should conceptualize culture: in a nonsubstantive way—that is, less a set of properties attached to a location (and still less a coherent “way of life” through which a coherent southern identity is maintained) than a flexible and loosely spatialized archive of “materials” (historical, cultural, material) differently mobilized in acts of situated and articulated difference, multiply embedded in what Kreyling calls narratives of identity (105)

in “the pragmatics (as opposed to the metaphysics) of authenticity” (106).  Ultimately, Romine argues that “we are still using regional culture as a tool to organize spaces, to build environments, and to tell stories,” and it is narratives which “strive to secure identities, cultures, and their locations as real, not fake, continuous, not contingent” (229).  The South is still a viable idea.

Tennessee Williams--A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1948, Streetcar follows Stanley, Stella, and Blanche in Stanley and Stella’s apartment in New Orleans.  Its New Orleans setting is a heavy influence on the story, for its jazz and its sense of decayed beauty, a place where Stella’s sister Blanche has to take a “street-care named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields” (I.1).  Blanche is described as having a “delicate beauty [which] must avoid a strong light.  There is something about her unusual manner, as well as her white clothes, that suggests a moth” (I.1).  Blanche, like New Orleans, is a decaying beauty, and it is her fraying beauty which gives away her own immorality.  Stanley, her foil, is of an animalistic masculinity: “Since early manhood the center of his life has been pleasure with women…with the power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens” (I.1).  (Notice how his masculinity is defined as sexual and in contrast to hens.)  Interestingly, Blanche’s difficulties are traced to her marriage to a “beautiful and talented man [who] was a degenerate” (I.7)—as with many Williams’ plays, the taint of homosexual masculinity is present and degenerative.

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).