Twelve Southerners--I'll Take My Stand (1930)

            The Agrarians were a collection of writers primarily from Vanderbilt University, an offshoot of a poetic movement who called themselves the Fugitive Poets.  The Fugitives sowed the seeds which would become New Criticism, which valued organizational unity and paradox at the center of poetry and eschewed focusing on authorial intention or emotional response.  In their focus on close reading, the New Critics made philosophical assumptions about the purpose of reading: for them, form was key.  In their attempt to distinguish the study of literature from that of literary history, they emphasized preserving the authenticity of literary discourse—and in fact, were quite defensive about this.  They came from a point of view which saw the existence of literature as being threatened—this point of view was easily transferred to their disdain for technology and industry as similarly threatening allegedly traditional ways of life.

Introduction

The introduction discusses the evils of industry.  It posits that there exists a southern way of life which is different from and better than the rest of the country, primarily because it’s based on an agrarian foundation.  It claims that people are happiest when their work is meaningful, which an agrarian society allows, and an industrial one does not.

John Crowe Ransom—Reconstructed by Unregenerate

Thesis: The South is unique on this continent for having a culture founded on European principles of culture.  It champions the “English” model of farming.  To Ransom, man and nature must work in a relationship of mutual respect.  Ransom also includes a quite sexist discussion of male versus female ambition. 

Donald Davidson—A Mirror for Artists

Davidson argues that industry can’t play Maecenas—the arts require a slow civilization, one that’s agrarian based and still connected with nature, to flourish.  Industry is a devil’s bargain with art—the only art which is profitable is bad art.  Art for Davidson should be in the romantic tradition, and he sees modernism as directly linked to the Romantics, only more fully fulfilling their mission.  To Davidson, art must be beautiful.  Davidson champions lyric poetry, specifically that of the 18^th century which had a larger public role than that of the 20^th century.  In the 19^th century, poets were marginalized and became personal and subjective.  He claims that to succeed in the 20^th century, the poet must be alienated or else he becomes commodified.  Here, his work echoes that of Walter Benjamin, who saw that art was no longer part of a whole; mechanical reproduction deprived modern art of any “aura.”  

Frank Lawrence Owsley—The Irrepressible Conflict

            Owsley discusses the Civil War with strongly romantic tones, describing the subsequent peace as one “unique in history,” because it was a peace with “no generosity” (62).  The racism in this essay is quite appalling (especially considering that he was a history professor at Vanderbilt), as it describes the freed slaves as “some of whom could still remember the taste of human flesh, and the bulk of them hardly three generations  removed from cannibalism” (62).  He condemns northern abolitionists and industrialists as hypocrites and Pharisees who campaigned to impose their corrupt culture upon an agrarian South.  Interestingly, Owsley does address slavery, though he claims that “Slavery had been practically forced upon the country by England—over the protest of colonial assemblies” (77).

John Gould Fletcher—Education, Past and Present

            Beginning with a view of education as bringing out an individual’s potential—which does not necessarily require formal education—Fletcher connects the growth of American education to the changes in American which began with the growth of industrialism.  Fletcher does not see this as a positive thing.  Instead, he wishes to “return” to education based on eighteenth century principles—education “on a sound, historical, and conservative basis” (95)—which had as its goal to “produce good men” (95).  He opposes the public school system, because he feels that education’s goal is to produce an educated elite—something which a democratic public school system cannot do. 

Lyle H. Lanier—A Critique of the Philosophy of Progress

Lanier critiques progress "as a slogan and a philosophy." (p.122) Even though critical of John Dewey's conclusions, Lanier uses Dewey's theories in an argument for balancing industrial and agrarian impulses. He argues that there are limits to industrial employment, an argument generating new force in contemporary social literature.

Allen Tate—Remarks on the Southern Religion

            Tate explains that he approaches the task of commenting about religion in "the spirit of irreligion." Tate laments the loss of the class of "professional men of religion." These men used to be highly respected by laymen and unbelievers alike, and when they spoke, no one questioned whether they had the authority to speak about the "Higher Things." He laments the loss of the kind of religion professed by those in the antebellum South, which he notes as “highly illuminating,” that the Southerners had a religion which they “never profoundly believed,” but they “acted as if they did” (174).  In fact, despite Tate’s own professed atheism (a religious atheism, however), he claims that the South would not have been defeated had they “possessed a sufficient faith in its own kind of God….had  it been able to bring out a body of doctrine setting forth its true conviction that the ends of man require more for their realization than politics” (174).  In other words, I think what Tate is saying is that the South must find a way to live paradox in order to survive—ironically, this theme of unattainable paradox seems to be a common undercurrent of many of these essays.

Herman Clarence Nixon—Whither Southern Economy?

Nixon covers the changes in the South's economy-with the proposal that one must balance the agrarian and industrial economic pressures. Employing positively a negative memory, he concludes "it is possible for the South, which has had experience with slavery, to subordinate industrial processes to the status of slaves, not masters.... From a dull industrialism Southern civilization should bepreserved with its supporting agrarian economy." (200) Onewonders, however, about the receptivity to these arguments in the socialsciences today because the agrarian option continues to be swallowed byeconomic shifts, even in the South.

Andrew Nelson Lytle—The Hind Tit

            Lytle uses military language mixed with an odd attempt at vernacular speech.  He idealizes the yeoman farmer and disregards the existence of slavery.  He gives a detailed description of a household which is sexist and condescending. 

Robert Penn Warren—The Briar Patch

            This is one of the few essays in the collection to make an attempt at addressing race issues, especially those after the War.  He supports Booker T. Washington’s vocational solution.

John Donald Wade—The Life and Death of Cousin Lucius

Taking the form of a biographical sketch, the essay is based on the life of Jacob Walter Frederick, Wade's maternal uncle and a man who embodied the "southern way of life" as defined by many of the book's other contributors. Frederick (fictionalized as "Cousin Lucius") is described as hard working, self-reliant, learned, and tradition bound. As he grows older and times change, Cousin Lucius sees the new generation of young people leaving for the city and recognizes that they desire and expect "without effort, things that have immemorially come as the result of effort only." Wade vividly but dispassionately dramatizes Frederick's life, avoiding the temptation to comment on its lessons until the final two sentences of the essay: "And all who wish to think that he lived insignificantly and that the sum of what he was is negligible, are welcome to think so. And may God have mercy on their souls."

Henry Blue Kline—William Remington: A Study in Individualism

This essay is about a young man named William Remington, who moved about the country trying different jobs and locations and groups of friends. Finding himself eventually back in New Orleans, he develops a group of friends who think of themselves as pioneering individualists. Apparently, their individualism consists in major part of a suspicious attitude toward Yankee materialism and a pleasing feeling of superiority to the average person, which they call "median man." He describes their grand historical perspective this way; don't zip by part in which Communism may be worse than "capitalism gone progressivist", i.e., their presumption is that the two are at least equally bad. It's not clear whether "race" here means white people or the human race.

Stark Young—Not in Memoriam, But In Defense

            Author of So Red the Rose, the novel of Confederate Mississippi, in this essay, Stark states, “If anything is clear, it is that we can never go back, and neither this essay nor any intelligent person that I know in the South desires a literal restoration of the old Southern life…. But out of any epoch in civilization there may arise things worthwhile.” Young endeavored to show in his fiction and in this essay the “worthwhile things” that should survive out of the Southern tradition. Among them were, in his words, “a certain fineness of feeling, an indefinable code for yourself and others, and a certain continuity of outlook.” He also insisted upon the individual’s self-control, fairness to others, obedience to law, and respect for the social order. The essay was both a summary of his philosophy and a premise paper for So Red the Rose.

Ernest Gaines--The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971)

The frame story of the novel is that of a history teacher who convinces Miss Jane Pittman, well over a hundred years old in 1962 when the frame story is set, to tell him the story of her life.  Born into slavery, Miss Pittman reluctantly tells him her life story, from slavery to the confusion and danger of Emancipation, to the difficult life on sharecropping plantations, up through the Civil Rights movement.  The significance of a black woman telling her story to a black man allows her to speak in a more authentic voice than if she were narrating for a white audience. 

Miss Jane is born into slavery on a plantation somewhere in Louisiana. Jane is called "Ticey" during her days as a slave and has no parents; her mother died as a result of a beating when Jane was a child, and Jane did not know her father. Until she is around nine, Jane works in the Big House caring for the white children. One day toward the end of the war, some fleeing confederate soldiers arrive, followed soon after by some union soldiers. While being served water by Jane, one Union soldier named Corporal Brown tells Jane that she will soon be free and can then visit him in Ohio. He tells her to change her name and offers her that of his daughter, Jane Brown. After the soldiers leave, Jane refuses to answer when her mistress calls her "Ticey." The mistress later beats Jane until she bleeds, but Jane insists that her name is now Jane Brown. Because of her obstinacy, Jane is sent to work in the fields.

On the day of the Emancipation Proclamation, Jane's master frees them all. On the same day, Jane leaves the plantation with a group of ex-slaves. They have no idea where they are going, but a woman named Big Laura leads the way. Jane wants to go to Ohio to find Corporal Brown. The first morning away, a group of "Patrollers," local white trash who used to hunt slaves, comes upon them and kills everyone but Jane and a very young boy Ned, whom they did not find. Jane and Ned then continue on their own, still headed for Ohio. Jane's obstinacy persists for a few weeks until she and Ned are completely exhausted from walking. Finally they catch a ride with a poor white man named Job who lets them sleep at his house and takes them the next day to a plantation run by Mr. Bone. Mr. Bone offers Jane a job, but only pays her the reduced rate of six dollars a month (minus fifty cents for Ned's schooling) because she is so young. Jane and Ned get a cabin and after one month on the job, Mr. Bone raises her pay to ten dollars because she is doing as much work as the other women.

Life on Mr. Bone's plantation initially is good, until the original owner of the plantation, Colonel Dye, buys it back (with money borrowed from Yankees). Life reverts back to almost how it was before slavery, with segregation and violence against blacks who step out of line. The blacks start fleeing north because of the worsening conditions. Initially the whites do not care, but soon they try to stop the flight. Ned, who is now almost seventeen, joins a committee that helps blacks leave. Colonel Dye warns Jane that Ned must stop, but when he will not, Ku Klux Klan members arrive at Jane's house. Ned is not home when they come and is able to flee the plantation later that night. He goes to Kansas, gets an education, and eventually joins the U.S. Army to fight in Cuba. Jane soon marries Joe Pittman (without an official ceremony). Despite Colonel Dye's attempts to keep them, Joe and Jane soon move to a ranch near the Texas-Louisiana border where Joe has found a job breaking horses.

Joe and Jane live at the new ranch for many years, but as they age Jane becomes increasingly worried about Joe getting hurt in his work. One of her recurring dreams depicts him being thrown from a horse. Soon after, Jane sees a black stallion in a corral that is the horse from her dream. She tries to get Joe not to ride it, even consulting a Creole voodoo woman, but after the horse escapes (because Jane frees it), Joe is killed trying to recapture it. After a few more years, Jane moves to another part of Louisiana with a fisherman, who suddenly leaves, and she is left all alone.  Ned soon moves back to where Jane is, and he brings his wife, Vivian, and three young children. He buys a house and starts building a school. At the school, he teaches ideas about the political rights of blacks as well as basic subjects. The local whites fear Ned's rhetoric, and therefore they hire a Cajun that Jane knows, Albert Cluveau, to shoot Ned, which Cluveau does. After Ned's death, Jane tells Cluveau that the chariot of hell will come for him and Cluveau later dies a fearful, painful death.

Jane then goes to live on the Samson plantation. Robert Samson runs the plantation with his wife, Miss Amma Dean. They have one son, Tee Bob, although Robert Samson had another son, Timmy, with a black woman on the plantation, Verda. Timmy looks and acts more like Robert than does Tee Bob, and the two boys are close friends even though Robert and Miss Amma Dean still expect Timmy to be subservient to his brother since Timmy is black. After the white overseer, Tom Joe, severely beats Timmy in response to Timmy's obstinacy, Robert Samson gives Timmy money and tells him to leave the plantation.  Later in life, Tee Bob falls in love with the Creole schoolteacher, Mary Agnes LeFarbre, who appears almost white. His friends and family remind him that a white man cannot love a black woman, but one night he goes to her house and asks her to marry him anyhow. After she tells him that he is not thinking straight, he returns home and commits suicide.

In the final chapter of the book, Jane describes a boy named Jimmy Aaron, whom the whole plantation sees as the great black hope who will save them all. Eventually, Jimmy gets involved in the civil rights movement. After several years away from the plantation, he returns home and plans an act of civil disobedience followed by a protest at the courthouse. First a young girl is arrested for drinking from a white water fountain. On the day that they all are to march to the courthouse in protest, however, Jimmy is shot dead. The crowd who was planning to march had already gathered when they hear the news. With the assistance of one young black man, Jane bravely encourages the people to march and takes the lead even though Jimmy is already dead.

The novel ends with this encouragement, not returning to the frame narrative of the history teacher.  Nevertheless, the conceit of Miss Jane as an old woman who has experienced both slavery and the Civil Rights movement allows Gaines to explore themes within a broad historical span: repeated themes of exodus, humor, work, and liberation pervade the novel.  By addressing head-on the complications of race and interracial relations within the American South, Gaines highlights the lack of easy answers to these problems, although he does not allow those responsible for the suffering of others to escape culpability and shame.

George Washington Cable--The Grandissimes (1880)

Cable’s first novel, it won him immediate success, including a speaking tour with Samuel Clemens.  It was first serialized in Scribner’s from November 1879 to October 1880.  However, as popular tastes moved to realism and naturalism, what Michael Kreyling refers to as Cable’s “genteel, romantic habits of mind” and local color stories fell out of favor, and Cable never enjoyed any comparable success with his later work.  While contemporary readers enjoyed the romantic aspects of the novel, they were less sympathetic to his outright opposition to slavery and a color-based caste system.  Cable himself was German, which made him an outsider in the Creole society of New Orleans about which he wrote.  After the publication of his 1885 Freedman’s Case in Equity, in which he voiced his objection to the condition of African Americans in the South, he had to move to Massachusetts for his safety.

He was discovered by Edward King from Scribner’s, and was included in his “Great South” series (which many credit with the “invention” of Southern literature).  The novel is an examplar of local color, as it relies heavily on dialect and dramatizes life within the complex racial hierarchy of New Orleans life immediately following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.  As a local color novel, it uses detail and dialect to present such an unfamiliar world to its readers—and its very unfamiliarity makes it easier to justify  While the local color conventions relies upon an outsider who is won over to the local customs (thinking as far back as even Swallow Barn), Cable is doing something different here. The novel relies heavily on a sense of nostalgia as well as a focus on domestic, every-day problems such as paying bills.  The combination of such mundane details with such deep, resonant feelings, allows for a critique of the system—particularly the role of women in this society, as it shows how their options are limited by societal norms.  Poor women can’t simply go out and get a job. 

The novel follows various members of the Grandissime family—black, white, mixed-race, rich and poor. The story begins when Honoré Grandissime, the scion of the white branch of this powerful New Orleans clan, takes in Joseph Frowenfeld, a young man from Philadelphia whose entire family has died from yellow fever. Honoré's conversations with Joseph about the New Orleans caste system shed light on the dilemmas at the center of the novel. Honoré finds himself caught between an idealistic Joseph, who advocates sweeping social reforms that would end slavery but essentially erase Creole culture, and his prideful uncle Agricola Fusilier, who ostensibly holds onto a racist past in order to preserve the Grandissime way of life—one built on the foundations of slavery. Honoré wants to establish a business partnership with his quadroon half brother (Honoré f.m.c.) and do right by Aurora Nancanou, who was widowed and destitute when Agricola murdered her husband over a gambling dispute. Yet his decisions regarding this tarnished family history are further complicated by his secret love for Aurora.

The story of Bras Coupé, retold several times, connects the novel's divergent strands and is suggestive of Honoré's struggle against his past and a New Orleans society that remains tainted by slavery. Bras Coupé, an enslaved African prince on a Spanish Creole plantation, is engaged to Palmyre, Aurora's maid. Inspired by the indignity of his plight, Bras Coupé attacks his white overseer, and is soon viciously pursued by a mob of Creole aristocrats (including Agricola) through the New Orleans swamps. Honoré tries to prevent the African prince's punishment but to no avail. Upon his capture, Bras Coupé issues a curse on both his master and his plantation. He is summarily beaten to death, though only after his ears are cut off and his hamstrings slashed. Bras Coupé, literally meaning "arm cut off" in French, personifies the cruelty of slavery and the degeneracy that lies at the heart of a so-called genteel southern society.

Character responses to the story are as important as the story itself, through its frequent repetition.  Further, the Bras Coupé story shows that even if you ignore race, another caste system will emerge.  Cable illustrates that tragedy is the preferred genre for societies which stake a lot on nobility, as tragedy requires an inversion of order.  Myths require replacement, and as Americans are a people without a history, then novel dramatizes the necessity of storytelling and myth.  As a nineteenth century novel, it ends with a sort of reconciliation plot, although with a twist of ending, after a final declaration of love, on Aurora saying “No” to M. Grandissime.

Katherine Anne Porter--The Old Order: Stories of the South (1944)

I adored this collection, and intend to read more by Porter as soon as I can.  The Old Order is a collection of short stories concerning the life of a rural Texas family ruled by Sophia Jane, the matriarch and mother of eleven children. The first half of the collection deals with Sophia Jane and her African American servant and companion, Nannie. Their relationship comprises the closest bond in the family, more so even than that between Sophia Jane and her children. The second part of the collection concerns itself with the family of Harry, one of Sophia Jane’s favorite children, and his daughters Maria and Miranda, who are four years apart in age. 

Consisting of most of the second half of the text, “Old Mortality” is a longer piece in three parts: 1885-1902, 1904, and 1912.  In Part I, the girls Maria and Miranda cannot escape their family history: overshadowed by stories of their late Aunt Amy’s great beauty and romantic escapades, the girls struggle to discover their own individuality under the weight of so much history.  In Part II, they experience a small break from their “immured” existence at convent school when their father takes them to the race track to bet on their Uncle Gabriel’s horse.  Uncle Gabriel, the romantic hero of so many stories involving Aunt Amy, is a great disappointment, as he is a fat, desolate drunkard, whose horse (which the girls are forced to bet on) is given 100 to 1 odds.  Miraculously, the horse wins, though Harry takes the girls money to be put in the bank.  In the final section, Miranda, who has left school and eloped, encounters her old maid Cousin Eva on the train, as they both travel home for Uncle Gabriel’s funeral.  Aunt Eva tries to set Miranda straight about a few of the more romantic and sanitized versions of family stories.

Porter is rather frank about the existence and effects of slavery in the first section.  Slavery has yet to be abolished when they first meet as children, when Sophia Jane’s father purchases Nannie along with her mother and father; Sophia Jane is so taken with Nannie that she insists, “I want the little monkey….I want that one to play with” (14).  Appalling as it is to read this, it gives a proper sense of verisimilitude to their relationship.  Sophia Jane never undergoes any dramatic epiphanies about race relations, though over the years she and Nannie forge a bond by their shared experiences and hardships.  Most striking to me was Sophia Jane’s taking over as wet nurse when Nannie almost dies from puerperal fever—not only is it astonishing that she nurses her own children (allowing her access to a bond with her children she’s never experienced before, and which she insists upon having with her subsequent children), but she also nurses Nannie’s child Charlie.  It was striking enough to read a scene in which a white southern women nurses a black child at this time in Sherley Anne Williams’ 1986 Dessa Rose; to read such a scene in this 1944 collection was quite surprising.  The stories also contain variations on the white liberal consciousness raising scene, quite common in southern literature from this era (Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream, for example, was published in 1949, five years after this).  In these stories, much of this is a result of Nannie’s move from the big house to an empty cabin in her old age; the white family members are surprised that she does not wish to live with them any longer, which prompts realizations such as that by Maria, who thinks with a pang that “they had not really been so very nice to Aunt Nannie” (42).

Not only a commentary on race relations in the South, these realizations also illustrate the conflicts at the heart of southern life, especially between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement.  Sophia Jane’s children are described as unable to function alone:

As their fortunes went down, and they have very few servants, they needed her terribly.  They realized how much the old woman had done for them, simply by seeing how, almost immediately after she went, everything slackened, lost tone, went off edge.  Work did not accomplish itself as it once had.  They had not learned how to work for themselves, they were all lazy and incapable of sustained effort or planning.  They had not been taught and they had not yet educated themselves.  (44)

In fact, Sophia Jane and Nannie share this disdain for her children and grandchildren, and spend quite a bit of their time as they grow old complaining to each other about these children.  Not only do they share contempt for their children, but also, more generally, of men.  In fact, another important theme throughout the piece is the solidarity with which women meet life, and the kind of “deeply grounded contempt for men” which most of them share (here used to describe Sophia Jane) (24).  Both Sophia Jane and Nannie survive despite of, rather than because of, the men in their lives.

They must be strong, because the limitations placed on them as women are great.  A theme which I’m particularly interested in which occurs often is the relationship between these limitations and a women’s physical beauty.  Old maid Cousin Eva’s entire life seems to have been determined by her lack of chin, which is blamed for her failure to marry as well as her strident political activity as a suffragist: “For even then it was pretty plain that Eva was an old maid, born.  Harry said, ‘Oh, Eva—Eva has no chin, that’s her trouble” (111).[1]  Harry makes clear the connection between appearance, value, and character:

“He was a pleasant, everyday sort of father, who held his daughters on his knee if they were prettily dressed and well behaved, and pushed them away if they had not freshly combed hair and nicely scrubbed fingernails.  “Go away, you’re disgusting,” he would say, in a matter-of-fact voice.  He noticed if their stocking seams were crooked.  He caused them to brush their teeth with a revolting mixture of prepared chalk, powdered charcoal, and salt.  When they behaved stupidly, he could not endure the sight of them. (112)

In fact, Harry also passes judgment on Miranda, saying that she “was going to be a little thing all her life, she would never be tall; and this meant, of course, that she would never be a beauty like Aunt Amy, or Cousin Isabel.  Her hope of being a beauty died hard, until the notion of being a jockey came suddenly and filled all her thoughts” (130).  Once again, once the hope of beauty is gone, it seems to clear the way for other possibilities.  The life of the beautiful belle is fixed, determined, and tragic; in these stories, it seems to be the ugly women who have the potential for more interesting lives.  It’s certainly not an easy life—at one point, contemplating Cousin Eva’s life, Miranda wonders, “why was a strong character so deforming?” (158). 

The collection does ultimately return to a larger question of the future of the South.  At the end of the novel, as Cousin Eva and her father good-naturedly banter, Miranda feels out of place, wondering, “Where are my own people and my own time?” (163).  Along with her sister, “they had lived not only their young years, but their memories, it seemed to them, began years before they were born, in the lives of the grown-ups around them, old people above forty, most of them who had a way of insisting that they too had been young once” (98).  Ten years after Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and the youth of the South are still trying to live not only their own lives but those of a past which refuses to die—or even be past.

---

[1] The more complete description of Eva given:

Eva, shy and chinless, straining her upper lip over two enormous teeth, would sit in corners watching her mother.  She looked hungry, her eyes were strained and tired.  She wore her mother’s old clothes, made over, and taught Latin in a Female Seminary.  She believed in votes for women, and had traveled about, making speeches.  When her mother was not present, Eva bloomed out a little, danced prettily, smiled, showing all her teeth, and was a like a dry little plant set out in a gentle rain.  Molly was merry about her ugly duckling.  “It’s lucky for me my daughter is an old maid.  She’s not so apt,” said Molly naughtily, “to make a grandmother of me.”  Eva would blush as if she had been slapped.  Eva was a blot, no doubt about it, but the little girls felt she belonged to their everyday world of dull lessons to be learned, stiff shoes to be limbered up, scratchy flannels to be endured in cold weather, measles and disappointed expectations. (104)

However, it is Eva who survives, compared to the beautiful Amy, who dies a tragic and mysterious death on her honeymoon in New Orleans.  Ugliness here is connected to industriousness, studiousness, and intellect, perhaps not considered attractive in a woman by society, but that Porter allows Eva to end the collection reveals a certain sympathy for Eva rather than Amy, whom she kills off.

Lillian Hellman--The Little Foxes (1939)

This play, first staged in 1939 with Tallulah Bankhead starring as Regina Giddens, dramatizes the conflicts between the old and new Souths.  Set in 1900 in a small (unspecified) town in the South, it tells the story of the Hubbard family’s attempt to make their fortune through industrialization.  Brothers Ben and Oscar Hubbard have struck a deal with William Marshall, a Chicago businessman who wishes to build a cotton plant there—as Oscar frequently says, to bring the factory to the cotton rather than the cotton to the factory.  However, they require funding from a third party, and expect the funding to come from Horace Giddens, the dying brother of their sister, Regina.  Horace has been unresponsive to her pleas to him about the money, as he is away at a sanitarium, suffering from heart trouble.

The Hubbard family, though quite southern, lacks a true aristocratic pedigree, as their money was made through business—as Birdie Hubbard, Oscar’s wife, says (quoting her own mother in her reluctance to marry her daughter to a Hubbard), they are “people who made their money charging awful interest to poor, ignorant niggers and cheating them on what they bought” (59).  Birdie was raised in a truly southern aristocratic family on a plantation called Lionnet, and spends most of the play inebriated and reminiscing about how much better life was there.  Oscar is openly disdainful and downright rude to his wife, and she in turn dislikes both her husband and their son, Leo.  Leo works for Horace at his bank, though he has already been caught stealing from him once.  The Hubbard siblings, in addition to their business dealings, are also at work to set get Leo married to Regina and Horace’s daughter Alexandra, in order to further cement a financially lucrative bond with Horace’s money.

Horace returns home with the knowledge that he will die soon, intent to punish his wife and her brothers as well as safeguard his daughter from their clutches.  He discovers, in light of his refusal to invest in the Hubbard’s new business deal, that Leo has used his position at the bank to steal bonds from his safe deposit box there, and that Ben has absconded with the bonds and made the deal with Marshall.  However, Horace is able to use this knowledge to further his ends, explaining to Regina that, rather than accuse her brothers, he will instead call the money a loan from Regina, and leave the rest of his fortune to their daughter, resulting in Regina’s complete dependence on her brothers after Horace’s death.  Their confrontation, however, is too much for Horace’s health, and he dies before changing the will.  Regina is able to utilize her position with her brothers, then, to end up the financial winner.

Throughout the play, the conflicts over the changing nature of the South are highlighted again and again.  Marshall’s position as an outsider is part of this, as his image of the south as an unchanging aristocratic paradise is shown to be untrue, as Birdie’s drunken romanticism demonstrates.  Those who aspire to be like the North, however, like the Hubbards, are also shown to be amoral and corrupt.  Truly, the only sympathetic characters in the play are Alexandra and Addie and Cal, the two black servants.  These three are the only ones who take care of Horace; Addie, Alexandra, and Horace are also the only ones who show any sympathy for Birdie, who is presented as a pathetic creature unable to survive out of her own time.  Still, that the life for which Birdie yearns required the support of the plantation system makes it difficult for me at least to be fully sympathetic for her, as she represents the typical southern plantation novel claims that slavery was an acceptable system for those who treated their slaves “right.”  The treatment of the black characters is particularly interesting, especially given the repeated explanation of how the Hubbards earned their money.  Addie and Cal are not fully developed characters, but are there to further the plot and provide care for ailing white characters. 

Alexandra is presented as the true hope for the future, as she sincerely mourns for her father and rejects any overtures from her mother, even more so after learning the full scope of the machinations which have been taking place.  Regina plans to leave the South altogether and follow Marshall north to Chicago, which holds the promise of the kind of life unavailable to her as a southern woman.  After all, she claims that her behavior would not have been necessary had her father left her any money, rather than leaving it all to his male heirs.  Her brothers, however, refuse this explanation, as Ben repeatedly insists that she would be more successful if she would only be more feminine: “You’d get farther with a smile, Regina.  I’m a soft man for a woman’s smile” (73).  The play ends with Regina alone, rejected by her own daughter, who plans to leave as well: despite the larger themes of southern identity in the play, perhaps the most pressing question it raises is whether it is possible for the narrow identities allowed southern women to provide any happiness at all.  Is it possible for a proper southern woman to be happy?