“There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.."-Opening Credits "Gone With the Wind"
Ah, the Old South, America's own medieval "merrie ole England" a great bastion of faith harkening to the bygone days of European feudalism. In the images painted by her ideologues (many of them Northerners, surprisingly) it was a land of Cavaliers, romantic rebels against Yankee puritanical roundheads. Everyone knows slavery was bad, and it is an undisputed fact that American slavery was based on racism, numerous examples of American racism from Jim Crow, to the KKK, to arguably even the Atomic Bombs are enough to caution against its glorification. Indeed, few critics today would openly praise gone with the wind or say it was anything other than racist. However, a great fiction still informs our view of slavery, mainly the one that Northern and Southern ideologues concocted together, the literary conceit that the South was America's premodern, irritable sector prone to irrationality. Walter Johnson and Edward Baptist have done an effective job busting the myth of the "pre-capitalist" or "premodern" South against the feudal system thesis promoted by eve certain "Marxists" like Eugene Genovese. They have established that not only did the South possess a booming capitalist economy but that it was actually avant-garde for its time and age in key features of modernity. Baptist has also raised the point, how could the Old South be old if it only existed 80 years? He has pointed out that it is a mythological conceit that makes us believe that the social structure of older states like Virginia was effortlessly and neatly imposed on the Deep South, or that plantation life never changed.
So what am I griping about? What is the point of this article? It's really not a moralist one. Throughout my time as an English student, I've had many teachers, good teachers in many respects who have tried to share with me their own love of Modern Southern fiction. Undisputed greats like Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Flannery O'Connor as well as many short-stories from somewhat lesser lights. I even had one teacher teach a section from Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, but by and large such crass assignments are considered bad taste. Even she taught the work almost as if dissecting a corpse and not a living, breathing text, in the same sense that a film teacher may show Birth of a Nation to students, simply because no matter how uncomfortable, it is an essential artifact in American cultural history. I did, however, start to notice a pattern in Southern writing, mainly the reproduction of romantic literary conceits in Southern writing. It's obvious in a story like Faulkner's "Barn Burning" with Major de Spain filling the role of Southern gentlemen in the chaos of the post-emancipation world, and Abner acting in much the same way as a ruined kulak who had the misfortune of falling into the proletariat. Many analysis have focused on the decaying Southern social world, the unleashing of capitalist forces etc, etc. Only problem is that the slaveowners of the South were not aristocrats, they were bourgeois land-owners, and they ran their estates with a rapacity and ruthlessness that surpassed even large capitalist farms in England and Ireland. Tennessee William's "The Glass Menagerie" reproduces the same fundamental error by positioning Amanda Wingfield as the fallen heiress/debutant, a noble lady in a vicious bourgeois world, whose exalted origins do not match with the quasi-proletarian drudgery of her life, the worldliness, ambitions, and mainstream socialization of her son, as well as the needs of her unique/disabled (there is frequent debate here) daughter Laura. The story seems to mine similar veins as Chekov's "The Cherry Orchard" in that the response of the characters to a decaying/dying social world is that they must let go of the past, and in turn their illusions. Arguably this is only the case for Amanda, but it doesn't necessarily matter as she is the overbearing force hanging over the other characters. I will say, so as to avoid being unfair to Williams, the problems of identity and existence in that play and others is more self-consciously modern than other works of Southern literature.
The theme of the decaying feudal world, the dying aristocratic ethos, decaying/degraded noble characters/families struggling to adapt to the frenzied pace and strange customs of the new bourgeois Europe is a key-element of European Romantic/Gothic fiction. As Englishmen began to reckon with the rise of Industrial capitalism and Europeans with the changes brought about by the French Revolution, European writers began developing literary concepts and tropes to better explain their present world. In part, the result was the preaching of what Marx called "Feudal Socialism" or the advocation to a return to the feudal past. Part reactionary, part progressive, this cultural-historical criticism of capitalism drew attention to the increased exploitation of common people due to the rise of capital, the increased tyranny and lack of freedom exercised by the enlightened state and its "rationality" as opposed to the openness and liveliness of the feudal countryside. The supposed universal freedom of the enlightened state, and freedom of the individual promised by capital, all of which in the final instance is largely abstract, is contrasted with the numerous everyday freedoms fixed by the complex and 'irrational' customs of medieval life. In many ways, it was a cultural counter-blast, a response to the trauma inflected by the Enlightenment, which culminated in world war under Napoleon. To be sure there are many contradictions, many of these writers supported the French Revolution, and heatedly debated amongst themselves where it went wrong. Some of them, also took up Burkean traditionalism (Burke's treatise on the sublime is probably an underlooked influence on romantic literature.) and other reactionary figures of the age, which has been loosely termed "Counter-Enlightenment". It is interesting that these literary figures used the tentative rights of the bourgeois state, and the individualist ethos of the Enlightenment, as a weapon against it, supporting workers, along with many other common miscreants against the great. To get back on track, these works reflect a recognition of the fall and decay of the feudal world, whose remnants existed throughout Europe and horror, shock (and a gauntlet of other emotions) experienced by Europeans at the seemingly sudden dominance of modern capitalism. I believe this trope and conceit of the dying medieval world, a weakening aristocratic class, and a terrifying yet exhilarating new world of capital and the bourgeoisie, is also found in the organic theory of English history that emerges from a close reading of Shakespeare's works. Which no doubt, is the reason for his popularity among romantics, as well as Karl Marx.
The problem with this romantic trope is that while it works, and is in a certain sense very profound in a European context, it makes absolutely no sense when applied to the Old South, which bourgeois to the core, and radically modern. There was never a Southern aristocracy, and its doubtful that America has any true aristocracy of its own, being originally settled by non-conformists religious types from the English bourgeoisie. It's impossible to start the story post-bellum as Faulkner does with "Barn Burning" because it bypasses when the South truly hit its modernist nadir in the 19th century when slavery ruled the land. It also leaves us with a false aesthetic, of a land that seems more like post-revolutionary Britain and France, with the individual caught between a decaying social system, the lost hopes of the revolution, and the bittersweet advance of a new world. Instead the Civil War was much more akin to post-WWI Europe in its historical legacy, and psychic devastation. The land a nightmarish hell, society brutalized, and the legacy of the war and its outcome deeply contested. And while the end of slavery was certainly a revolution, it did not lead to the rise of a new economic system or even the promise of one, the system was, and remained capitalist after abolition.
If Southern Modernist writers had been more deeply in-tune with the deep psychic damage of the war after the collapse of the Old South, they might have looked at bitterness, cold and ambiguous aesthetic, and fits of promise that typified Weimar Germany or even post-war Japan. As I think the Union occupation of the defeated South's closest political analogue is really the post-war occupation of Nazi Germany and Japan, I think it would be unreasonable to try to hold southern modernist writers to that standard, many of whom wrote their best work before the war.The fight against Slavery in the 19th century, like the fight against fascism in the 20th, largely didn't end in the overturn of the capitalist system (except perhaps in China and Albania), just the collapse of a particularly awful brand of capitalism. Likewise, the Union government as many historians have shown, left and right-wing, responded to the challenge of the slave-holding south, with a similar sluggishness that it confronted fascism in the 20th. It is not for nothing that the Civil War is described as a reluctant revolution or a revolution from above. The idea that it was a revolution is not infrequently challenged.
The person who perhaps did the most to introduce the decaying aristocrat theme into the American literary landscape, was the son of slaveholders, Edgar Allen Poe, his "The Fall of the House of Usher" comes to mind. Whatever good reasons there are for Poe's writing, the waning of a feudal system and great feudal families is not one. Poe's writing is imitated elsewhere in the writing of Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty. The latter's work "A Worn Path" is considered a classic work of Southern gothic, and certainly unique in that it is primarily about the odyssey of a mentally-ill elderly black woman through the Southern countryside and white supremacist society. It has redeeming qualities like Flannery's work, but from my perspective the Gothic theme isn't justified unless its portraying a decaying bourgeois society, unless its trying to uncover not a perverted feminine aesthetic of feudal gallantry defiled by encroaching capitalism, but to uncover the terror of capital itself. In that sense, the harsh staccato rhythm of Hemingway or the cracked crystalline prose of Fitzgerald, reflecting the perverted beauty and the brutal death-impulse, and decay of the haute-bourgeoisie, would have been more suited to the job. I'm simply raising the issue of whether the pseudo-romantic aesthetic that informs modern southern fiction really deserved a place.
In that sense, Southern gothic and perhaps Southern fiction in general is not justified. The notion that a separate modernist movement for white southern writers was necessary is questionable from many points of view.Aside from local dialect and the consequences of the confederate uprising, what does make the South different? At this point, nothing, except that the North had more large cities. The South's other special institution, Jim Crow, means nothing, because ALL of America was an apartheid state. That it was a national and not a sectional sin, is something Melville and other cutting edge antebellum writers were trying to understand. There was a time when the KKK was as ubiquitous in the North, along with other fascist groups, as it was in the South. Malcolm X, it should be remembered, contested the popular idea that the North was more enlightened in race relations than the South. To be frank, many of the works of Southern modernist writers did not have the same quality as their contemporary American modernist writers, white or black. I think, if Southern literature had to be rewritten in light of a more accurate consideration of facts, it may not exist at all, or if it did it would be far different.
