Entitled to the Pedestal: Place, Race, and Progress in White Southern Women's Writing, 1920-1945
224
Entitled to the Pedestal: Place, Race, and Progress in White Southern Women's Writing, 1920-1945
224eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
In this searching study, Nghana Lewis offers a close reading of the works and private correspondences, essays, and lectures of five southern white women writers: Julia Peterkin, Gwen Bristow, Caroline Gordon, Willa Cather, and Lillian Smith. At the core of this work is a sophisticated reexamination of the myth of southern white womanhood.
Lewis overturns the conventional argument that white women were passive and pedestal-bound. Instead, she argues that these figures were complicit in the day-to-day dynamics of power and authorship and stood to gain much from these arrangements at the expense of others.
At the same time that her examination of southern mythology explodes received wisdom, it is also a journey of self-discovery. As Lewis writes in her preface, “As a proud daughter of the South, I have always been acutely aware of the region’s rich cultural heritage, folks, and foodstuffs. How could I not be? I was born and reared in Lafayette, Louisiana, where an infant’s first words are not ‘da-da’ and ‘ma-ma’ but ‘crawfish boil’ and ‘fais-do-do.’ . . . I have also always been keenly familiar with its volatile history.” Where these conflicting images—and specifically the role of white southern women as catalysts, vindicators, abettors, and antagonists—meet forms the crux of this study. As such, this study of the South by a daughter of the South offers a distinctive perspective that illuminates the texts in novel and provocative ways.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781587297328 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2007 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 382 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
ENTITLED TO THE PEDESTAL Place, Race, and Progress in White Southern Women's Writing, 1920-1945
By NGHANA TAMU LEWIS
University of Iowa Press Copyright © 2007 University of Iowa Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-58729-529-4
Chapter One LADIES AND THE MYTHS
White Southern Women's Writing
The whole mess started with a really beautiful park. And in the park were a man, a woman, a serpent, and this tree. -Richard Greenberg, Take Me Out
Richard Greenberg opens his entirely male-cast Tony Award-winning play Take Me Out with Kippy, the narrator, progressing through the sequence of proximate causes in the above quote, which, Kippy concludes, leads to core events at issue in the play. I am reminded of this witty opening to a play about the fallout of a closeted gay black male baseball player "coming out," because the politics of the story of Adam and Eve-which affords Eve more agency, and culpability, than Adam-would seem inevitably to factor into most origin narratives, even those without women at their center. It stands to reason, therefore, that among the greatest ironies of the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology is that critical accounts of their origins tend to omit the countervailing effects of the power struggles that lend these myths, like their biblical predecessor, rhetorical complexity. In the beginning, the story typically goes, there was an aristocratic white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male, who, in all his omnipotence, designed a "big house." A munificent market economy sprang up at this site. An economy based on the labor of the disproportionate number of people of (West) African descent, whom the aristocratic WASP male began capturing and bringing to the Americas around 1619 not only to build the big house but also to reside there, under his dominion. After the Civil War in the United States, the big house came to symbolize the social market still operative in the eleven ex-Confederate states and parts of Kentucky, where the big houses were mostly built. With the remnants of the materials used to construct these sites, the aristocratic WASP male also constructed pedestals upon which to place aristocratic WASP female residents of the estates. In doing so, he was able to regulate their domesticity, sexuality, reproduction, and social interaction well into the latter half of the twentieth century, when white southern women of means, among others subject to his surveillance, set about dismantling the structures of white patriarchal authority. There would seem to be nothing inherently wrong with configuring the rhetorical trajectories of the Plantation Mythology and the myth of Southern Womanhood within the context of a patriarchal and, presumably, gyno-delimiting script. Indeed, because these myths are said to have originated in southern male-authored literature, their resonance in the cultural realities of the South have been largely understood, mapped, and measured as white-male-constructed and -governed. That is to say, when we think of the so-called mind of the South, which these myths embody, what most of us really mean is the propertied white male mind, the craftsman of the ideologies that sustain an image of the South as a distinguishable region in the United States, despite our awareness of its diverse geographic and cultural landscapes. When taken to their logical conclusion, therefore, conventional narratives of the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology lead inevitably to critical territory whereupon white male hegemony is focalized, scrutinized, and indicted.
A Different Script
In setting forth the principal objectives of this book, I do not attempt a full retreat from this familiar discursive terrain. At its core, however, this book about the cultural work of five modern white southern women writers maintains that few, if any, functional American systems can be either wholly white or wholly masculine in design. As the examples of Julia Peterkin, Gwen Bristow, Caroline Gordon, Willa Cather, and Lillian Smith make clear, repression of this fact in the study of concepts as complex and familiar as the Plantation Mythology and the myth of White Southern Womanhood rests dangerously on at least three related assumptions. First, that we can ascribe determining power to these concepts. Second, that the formulation of the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology created an aristocratic white southern female behavior unambiguously and uniformly spurned by white "progressive"-minded southern women in recognition of and in opposition to a patriarchal order. And third, as patriarchal investments, the myths ultimately function/ed as antiprogressive and, therefore, objectionable visions. My examination of the cultural work Peterkin, Bristow, Gordon, Cather, and Smith achieved between 1920 and 1945 calls these assumptions into question by shifting conventional rhetoric about the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology from theories of idealism and ideology to questions of authorship and entitlement. Similarities and differences among these writers not only deconstruct the white southern womanhood monolith, they also lay bare in this myth and the Plantation Mythology a yet unrecognized heterogeneity, which, coupled with the myths' built-in economic, political, and social incentives, warrant revelation.
It is obvious to me that without the presence of white southern women of means, the social economies and gender politics born out of the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology neither happen nor endure. Yet despite innovations in feminist theory, and in African American, whiteness, and cultural studies, accounts of white southern women's histories largely continue to take for granted that a pronounced split in the white southern mindset has historically and necessarily existed along gender lines. Where the split is not apparent, white southern women's literature, in particular, is read as either subversive of or complicit with patriarchal culture.
Consider, for example, Patricia Yaeger's contention in Dirt and Desire (2000) that in order to "yield interesting facts" about southern women's fiction and "help place [it] within its 'American' context," we must necessarily abandon the "older models of southern writing" (xv). Models that sustain "a belief in the belle or female 'miniature' as the prototypical southern female figure," she argues, must be replaced with the "procession of giant women" that "explodes and exposes the cult of true white womanhood" (xi). Consider, also, the logic Katherine Hemple Prown sets out in Revising Flannery O'Connor (2001) to explain the purported contradictory collusion of self and cultural identity Caroline Gordon and her protégé Flannery O'Connor were compelled to negotiate in their struggle to secure critical and popular recognition as professional writers. "Integral to Gordon's identification with masculine intellectuality," Prown maintains, "was her acceptance of the racial and sexual hierarchies that prevailed in the literary circles with which she was associated. Like her Fugitive/Agrarian associates, she regarded the subordination of blacks to whites and women to men as crucial to the maintenance of southern identity" (80-81). If we sanction Prown's reasoning, then Gordon appears to have been a sexist supremacist modernist by default-more reactive to male dominance in the professional circles she populated than agent in fashioning the racist elements that pervade her writing. If we sanction Yaeger's reasoning, we are compelled to intuit an uninterrupted, uncomplicated connection between the historically patriarchal order of the South and the "mythological" positioning of those subject to the patriarch in writing.
Yaeger attests to the fact that modern white southern women's fiction is "worth examining precisely because it is continually overwhelmed by racial desires (for racial blending, for racial purity, for appropriating difference, for keeping difference at bay)." But, like feminist critics of southern women's writing before her, Yaeger appears to reinscribe the very binary she aims to undercut, by subordinating the materialism of white southern women's fiction to fiction written by black women. "Black Southern women's fiction about the South," she observes, "annotates complex economic and social differences among women in aesthetically fascinating ways." Whereas "white southern women's writing ... creates bizarre and frequent emblems for white southerners' racial blindness," black southern women "are less interested in what white people know than in surrogated knowledges, in histories that have been lost or cast away" (xv, xii). Yaeger's otherwise brilliant examination of the "complex racial texture" of twentieth-century southern women's fiction thrives at the root on what Julia Kristeva characterizes as "a kind of naïve romanticism": the belief that we can locate the identities of white southern women in their common experiences as subjects of a white male-ordered society (138). Though this presumption is not peculiarly based in analyses of white southern women's literature, it is much emphasized. Here, too, perhaps, it is worth noting that Prown's insight into Gordon's narrative negotiations extends from a second reading of Michael Kreyling's interpretation of Robert Penn Warren's "Briar Patch," an essay published in the agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand (1930). A third take on this essay would expose a gap in Prown's logic in that it fails to account for the specific class politics shaping Warren's-and, by extension, the agrarians' and Gordon's-ethics.
My issue with Prown and Yaeger does not, however, hinge on these critical oversights alone. For as acute as their awareness is of white southern men's desire and ability to cultivate vehicles for negotiating power in the wake of modernity-as dramatized, for example, by Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915), Faulkner's Sound and the Fury (1923), and Williams's Streetcar Named Desire (1946)-they seem undiscerning about white southern women's desire and ability to accomplish the same goal. As Henry Canby, a contemporary of the writers in this study, makes clear in his analysis of the interplay between the culture and popular literature of the 1930s, "a ruling passion, if not the ruling passion" of the times was "fear of change." Much writing of the period reflected "the troubled imagination, with its fears, its suspicions, its strong desires" spurned by modern developments affecting the lives of every American (14). Prown, in particular, lapses when she excludes women from the southern elite who stood to profit from a recovery -or retention-of the so-called agrarian-imagined society. If "the chief makers" of this ideology were southern men and if modern southern women served these men when they deployed the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology in writing, the e?ect was residual, for they first served themselves (Kreyling 102). This book introduces further productive complexity into critical understandings of white southern women's histories and literature by bringing to light these and other facts omitted in scholarly assessments of white southern women's mythic consciousness.
Authorship and Entitlement
It is my hope that this book will go some distance in rendering an interdisciplinary framework for questioning longstanding assumptions about issues of authorship and profit in the economy of southern ideology. Mine is a plea to lend legitimacy to the structures of authority Peterkin, Bristow, Gordon, Cather, and Smith imagined in their authorial efforts to inscribe white southern women's senses of agency as modernity infused the South between 1920 and 1945. As concepts that directly implicate issues of origin, industry, rights, claims, designations, and distinctions, authorship and entitlement are discursive rubrics particularly suited to the task at hand. I propose to excavate these writers' materialist interests, or the range of gender, class, race, sexual, and regional-inflected motives each writer had for summoning the myths in her work. The upshot of my claim is threefold. In Bristow's and Gordon's cases the structures variously reinforced white supremacy, not as a result of the writers' interpellation by white male hegemony, but as a result of their conscious invocations of black proscription and, with Gordon, poor white proscription too. In Peterkin's case the structures reified black stereotypes despite her ironic efforts to treat the plights of modern black southern Americans sympathetically. And in Smith and Cather's cases, the structures aid in their advocacy of the civil rights of southern blacks and other disenfranchised minorities. In all cases, I maintain, the writers' authorial objectives flow from two principal desires: to lay claim to the mythic pedestal upon which white southern women have historically been positioned and to indemnify plantation culture. They adhere to what I call an ethos of feminist conservatism, a value system paradoxically fueled by racial, class, gender, and sexual politics both conservative and progressive, regional and national. In so doing, they provide crucial insight into the high profile the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology continue to enjoy in American popular culture. They enable us, too, to understand how, in the absence of the unifying force and materiality of Jim Crow, southern myths continue to underpin the substance of interracial social and political engagement throughout (most of) the United States.
Crucially, the women in this study expose the fallacy of contemporary cultural criticism's persistent investment in the epistemology of the patriarch, especially as it, like Robyn Weigman's notion of the "epistemology of the body," has informed suspect analogies among white female, poor white, black, and, more recently, gay and lesbian oppression. Collectively their writing enables us to measure some of the material effects that the mythic authority of white southern women had and, as I argue, continues to have on the common habit and custom-the accumulated experiences-of Americans across gender, sexual, class, racial, and regional categories. This book thus proposes to contribute to the fields of American literary criticism and southern cultural studies by claiming central roles for the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology in the formation of southern and American cultures. By elaborating white southern women's agency in constituting the signifying ranges of the myths, this book endeavors further to mitigate the critical neglect of once prominent writers, Peterkin and Bristow, while revising the way critics typically approach Smith, Cather, and Gordon.
Let me proceed, then, by explaining how my primary rhetorical objectives in this book have influenced its shape. Neither the grouping nor the contextualization of the central writers and writings is random. The period 1920-1945 gave way to events of global importance, including World War II, the onset of the ColdWar, and the escalating dominance of U.S. policies in international affairs. It produced such classic American literature as Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel (1929), William Faulkner's Sound and the Fury (1929), Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936), Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Richard Wright's Native Son (1940). It is a historical framework rich in implication for just about any modern southern writer. But, if, as Mollie Abernathy has noted, "a new sense of the importance of southern women" (292) was also felt during this time, the writers under consideration in this study were among the most responsive to their emerging significance.
As descendants of aristocratic southern families with strong roots in plantation cultures, Peterkin, Bristow, Gordon, Cather, and Smith are part of a longstanding tradition of white southern women writers who inherited the cultural assumptions embedded in the myth of White Southern Womanhood and the Plantation Mythology. Indeed, the most celebrated and accomplished writers to emerge from the South before World War I were women who, as Carol Manning has observed, consciously drew from southern myths in articulating their linguistic, rhetorical, and narrative strategies. It is a creative urge akin to the one that produced Ellen Glasgow's In This Our Life (1941), Frances Newman's Hard-Boiled Virgin (1926), Elizabeth Madox Roberts's My Heart and My Flesh (1927), Evelyn Scott's Eva Gay (1933), and Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding (1946) in roughly the same historical context as the novels under investigation in this study. Peterkin, Bristow, Gordon, Cather, and Smith are, however, further distinguished by their linkages to the major modern movements and developments also under consideration.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from ENTITLED TO THE PEDESTAL by NGHANA TAMU LEWIS Copyright © 2007 by University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.