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.

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).

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.

Lillian Smith--Killers of the Dream (1949)

Killers of the Dream is considered to be one of the most significant pre-Civil Rights era works by a white writer.  As early as the 1940s, Smith persistently called for an end to segregation.  In her foreward to the 1961 edition of this mixed genre text, Smith comments on the southernness of her text, as identified by her editor: “only one who feels deep in the bone the cruel perplexities and paradoxes of our way of life” could have written the book (13).  Smith says that it is the “apathy of white southerners which disturbs me” (20), and it is against this apathy which she writes. 

The text is divided into four parts: “The Dreamers,” “The White Man’s Burden,” “Giants in the Earth,” and “The Dream and its Killers.”  In the first section, she reflects on growing up in the South, the palpable trouble of racism which even children could sense as a haunting presence.  Smith identifies the heart of this trouble, which she describes as being taught “to split my conscience from my acts and Christianity from southern tradition” (27).  She relates the story of a little white girl who was “living with a Negro family in a broken-down shack” (35).  After Smith’s family takes her in, it is discovered that “Janie is a little colored girl” (36).  This early experience taught Smith the arbitrariness of race.  After similar childhood recollections, she ends this section with a list of clippings of quotes from southern leaders, to show the kind of racist teachings all southern children grew up with.

In the second section, Smith looks more closely at the ways in which Christianity is implicated in the perpetuation of racism in the South.  In this way, she anticipates Flannery O’Connor’s idea of a Christ-haunted South, when she notes that, “Stories about haunted houses on the edges of town…merely took our minds off our own haunted lives and gave us reasons for our fears.  We gratefully accepted the ghosts because they gave names to our fears” (112).  It is in this section as well that Smith addresses the particularly southern peculiar relationship between white children and their black caretakers, as well as the effect it had on their white mothers.  This is a very Freudian section, directly blame to these twisted mother-child relationships for a multitude of “perversions”: “we know now that these women, forced by their culture and their heartbreak, did a thorough job of closing the path to mature geniality for many of their sons and daughters, and an equally good job of leaving little cleared detours that led downhill to homosexual and infantile green pastures, and on to alcoholism, neuroses, divorce, to race-hate and brutality, and to a tight inflexible mind that could not question itself” (153). 

This Freudian mode is continued in section three, where she seems to blame the South’s lack of education and rurality for its backwards beliefs.  She does identify how poor whites in the South have been, because of this lack of education, taught to hate non-whites and to blame them for their own poverty.  In this section she uses parables to more fully explain how these dynamics of hatred have been used by those in power to maintain racist hegemonic structures and institutions.  In the final section, she points to both the hope and the tragedy in the then-recent past.  Most interesting in this section is her indictment of the Agrarians in their complicity in maintaining the racist status quo:

there was a group of writers…who should have been on the side of change but were not.  No writers in literary history have failed their region as completely as these did.  They called themselves Fugitives; some preferred the name, Agrarians.  The were not so opposed to change, if I read them accurately, as opposed to what we were changing into.  With soft stinging denunciations, they took their stand against a future which they equated with the machine and industrial clatter; they felt the answer was to return to some sort of medieval pattern. (223)

After further discussion of the Fugitives failings and the problematic ways in which these ideas were inherent in New Criticism, Smith cogently summarizes their problem:

The basic weakness of the Fugitives’ stand, as I see it, lay in their failure to recognize the massive dehumanization which had resulted from slavery and its progeny, sharecropping and segregation, and the values that permitted these brutalities of spirit.  They did not see that the dehumanization they feared the machine and science would bring was a fait accompli in their own agrarian region. (225).

And to me, this is one of the greatest strengths of the book, one which I don’t think is emphasized enough.  People still situate the Agrarians as a seminal point of southern studies, and I think it needs to be emphasized that Smith early on was pointing out the similarities between their ideas and Hitler’s.  I know that many find her mixed genre form to be distracting, but the ideas are important enough that they should continue to be remembered.

Harriet Jacobs--Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

First published in 1861 under the pen name “Linda Brent,” Harriet wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to appeal to a northern audience for the abolitionist cause.  It follows her escape from slavery in 1842 to her legal emancipation in 1852.  Jacobs was born to relatively well-off slaves and had a relatively happy childhood with them and then her grandmother, a slave with a somewhat independent income through her baking who wields a strong sense of moral power throughout the text.  Once her parents die, she is sold to the evil Dr. Flint, who pursues and threatens her sexually.  Jacobs calls upon the values of nineteenth century True Womanhood as she appeals to her audience of northern women, calling their attention to her inability to uphold these shared values, instilled in her by her grandmother, as a slave. 

Dr. Flint is a frightening threat: her “master, whose restless, craving, vicious nature roved about day and night, seeking whom to devour” who informs Jacobs that she “was made for his use, made to obey his command in every thing” (459).  In addition to her surprising frankness about the sexual dangers which Dr. Flint threatened, Jacobs is equally frank about the sexual relationship she has with Mr. Sands, a white man with whom she has two children.  In a candid aside to the reader, Jacobs admits that she chooses a sexual relationship with him, explaining that, “It seems less degrading to give one’s self, that to submit to compulsion” (501).  She asks for forgiveness, explaining that slaves should be judged differently, as slavery is an inherently corrupting system, which made her “prematurely knowing, concerning the evil ways of the world” (500). 

When Dr. Flint becomes too dangerous, Jacobs goes into hiding, staying in a secret compartment in a porch roof which was 9’x3’x7’ (at its highest part).  She stayed seven years in hiding, during which time Mr. Sands is able to take their daughter Ellen to Brooklyn.  Jacobs eventually is able to escape to Philadelphia by boat.  However, even after her escape north, she lives in fear of the Fugitive Slave Act and Dr. Flint’s relentless pursuit of her.  She works for Mrs. Bruce, even spending a year in London, caring for Mrs. Bruce’s daughter, where she experiences a more general freedom from racism than she has ever had.  Eventually, Jacobs’ freedom is bought by her new mistress Mrs. Bruce, despite Jacobs’ complete unwillingness to being purchased.  The text ends with her unfulfilled desires to have her children with her in their own home, and two more truth claims from white authors.

The narrative follows the typical pattern of the nineteenth century slave narrative: (1) loss of innocence (narrator realizes that she’s a slave); (2) realization of alternatives and formulation of resolve to be free; (3) escape (depending on when the narrative was written, will tell more or fewer details about the escape.  Pre-emancipation, fewer details were given); and (4) freedom.  It is prefaced by a truth claim by Lydia Maria Child, a well-respected white author of domestic guides.  Between 1760 and 1947, more than 200 book-length narratives were written; in total, more than 6,000 total exist.  While they were popular tools of propaganda, Jacobs was one of the first to focus on the dangers of slavery which were unique to female slaves, particularly their vulnerability to sexual abuse and rape.  Jacobs uses tropes of the sentimental novel—moralistic asides to her “Dear Reader,” and evocations of her desire to have her children at her own hearth.