Lucinda MacKethan, An Overview of Southern Literature by Genre

The South's geography, terrain, and weather kept the region tied to an agricultural economy while the North turned much earlier to an industrial, urban one. The rural ordering of southern life well into the twentieth century determined many of its ideological positions, and these positions in turn made the classical genre of Pastoral a congenial form for many southern writers. Pastoral* is a genre that, standardized by Virgil in his Eclogues, served writers seeking to resolve the tension between memories of a simpler past, associated with nature and rural society, and experience in a more complex present world. Pastoral literature historically has flourished in times of dramatic change. Writers undergoing a dislocation from a familiar home world turn to the conventions of the pastoral to envision that simpler locale from the vantage point of inevitable loss and removal. In pastoral, then, the Past looms large, not so much as a particular historical time and place as an idealized, mythologized lost realm (such as Virgil's Arcadia). The Past of pastoral is associated with the natural world (imaged as the "good earth" or "the garden") and with community (shepherd and flock, extended family, village, or homeland). However, such a version of the Past tends inevitably towards nostalgia and fatalism, and potentially towards paralysis. In the South the idealization of the rural past is made even more dangerous, and more complicated, because the South's Arcadia was predicated upon slavery.

The pastoral became a congenial genre for southern writers even before the Civil War, in large part through its ties to agrarian idealism. Thomas Jefferson's 1780s invocation, in Notes on the State of Virginia, of the "cultivators," those who "till the earth" as "the chosen people of God," was his attempt to stand against the encroachments into his idyllic Virginia of the trade and manufacturing economy that was already enlisting the enthusiasm of northern colonies. In the next century, John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn (1832) was the evocation of a city dweller (a Baltimore businessman and lawyer) who created a James River plantation setting both to praise and satirize the country life of his childhood. Both Jefferson and Kennedy lived in the whirlwind of a complex, changing South, far removed from the cultivators they idealized, with intentional or unintentional irony, in their writing. Herein lies the impetus of the pastoral: its creation of the rustic inhabitants of the good earth always grows out of a consciousness steeped in the effects of inevitable change and displacement. The garden is a lost paradise whose primary use, as image, is to mount an exile’s critique of the complex, urban world caught up in dramas of historical force and social upheaval.

For the last twenty years of the twentieth century, literary critics have tried to move beyond a famous (now infamous) pastoral pronouncement of southern agrarian Allen Tate, a comment that became the defining statement of southern literature’s thematics from the 1940s to the 1980s. With the end of World War I, Tate intoned, "the South reentered the world—but gave a backward glance as it slipped over the border." Certainly beneath Tate's singling out of the First World War as a dividing line responsible for a pastoralized literary consciousness was an awareness of the Civil War as another cataclysmic moment of change and separation responsible for summoning up, in the southern mind, the "backward glance." Tate and the Vanderbilt Fugitives, forming their poetic as well as social credo in the 1920s, wanted nothing more than to distance themselves from the literature of the "post-Confederacy," the canon of the "Lost Cause," that memorialized the South’s forced re-entry into the Union. The complex literature of the Fugitive-Agrarians (Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Donald Davidson) and Southern Modernists (epitomized by William Faulkner) explores, with more guilt, tension, and ambivalence, the emotions of pastoral that we recognize in earlier, and especially white male local color, writers. In their tendency to return to a mythic past, we can connect the more ironic response of Southern Renascence writers to the responses of Local Colorists publishing in the years following "Surrender" and novelists from that time forward who have used the Civil War as the specific historical dividing line between ideal past and real present. Local Color, Civil War, Agrarian, and Modernist classifications of southern literature all involve evoking a sense of loss through the allure of the threatened natural environment and juxtaposing fading ideals of the past against painful realities of the present.

Local color writers of the South were encouraged by northern markets to make plantation and village southern settings into the "good lost land" of Pastoral, in part to satisfy the longings of readers increasingly removed in the late 19th century from any real experience of country life. In this way the plantation was mythologized in local color writing more than it had been in antebellum fiction, with slavery ironically now an acceptable feature of the idealization. Following World War I, southern writers confronted historical pressures forcing the South irrevocably from its rural and agricultural base. Certainly in relation to immediate post-Civil War writers, these modern writers saw the Past through a glass darkened by shades of guilt and irony that are missing in some local colorists, who were trying to win with their pens the war that had been lost at Appomattox. Nevertheless, the tension between mythologized past and diminished present that characterizes all pastoral is embodied in southern writing of many different places and times: from Jefferson's Monticello and Kennedy's tidewater Virginia, to Grace King's New Orleans and Joel Chandler Harris's middle Georgia, to Ellen Glasgow's Civil War battle grounds and Faulkner's mythical Yoknapatawpha County, to Jean Toomer's Georgia and Zora Neale Hurston's south Florida. It is a tension involving the ominous threat of change in southern locales that always function only precariously and ambivalently as havens held sacred out of time.

*See Lewis Simpson, The Dispossessed Garden: Pastoral and History in Southern Literature (Louisiana State University Press, 1975), and Lucinda MacKethan, The Dream of Arcady: Place and Time in Southern Literature (Louisiana State University Press, 1980).

The southern writer, particularly after the Civil War, saw the advantage of devising a literary agenda to advance a political one and found in local color writing a successful formula for this program, especially during the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction era, roughly from 1870 to 1920. Southern white writers, both men and women, made local color fiction a convenient tool for insinuating racial paternalism into pastoral evocations of a traditional society of the past. Popular taste dictated many of the properties of the genre: quaint locales, attention to details of dress, manner, and speech, colorful vernacular dialects, marriage plots which both highlight and overcome difference (between families, classes, and regions). Many of the most popular local color works of white male writers (Thomas Nelson Page in In Ole Virginia (1887), Joel Chandler Harris in his Uncle Remus tales (1880), James Lane Allen in his many short stories) used the mechanism of the frame narrator who speaks in a detached, non-vernacular voice that controls the portrayals of quainter but also less sophisticated narrators in the "inside" story. The double structures are designed to highlight the gap between simple and "peculiar" or exotic folk, colorful and sympathetic though they may be, and the educated, realistic, framing voice that the reader has no choice but to accept as a higher authority. Herein the pastoral tension between the sophisticated man of the world who takes the backward glance and the rural rustic who has been left behind meet within a dual (and dueling) narrative structure. White women writers often promoted the same white paternalism (Sherwood Bonner in her Dialect Tales, 1883, Grace King in stories such as those collected in Balcony Stories, 1893, Eugenia Jones Bacon in Lyddy, 1898, and Ruth McEnery Stuart in In Simpkinsville, 1897), yet they were much less likely to create the remote, outside narrative voice and often used dialect to achieve less patronizing, more flexible versions of life in community. As we will see below, some white writers and many African American writers during this period adapted local color trappings to literature which set itself against the conservative political agenda of traditional Local Colorists.

Southern Civil War literature is distinctive primarily because of its tendency to deal not only, or even primarily, with the conditions of the 1861-1865 war but with the whole fabric of the society that preceded it. There are some valuable treatments of the war period by writers who actually were involved in events both at home and on the battlefield: John Esten Cooke's battlefield stories (1866), Sidney Lanier's Tiger-Lilies (1867), Augusta Jane Evans Wilson's Macaria, or The Altars of Sacrifice (1864), and Eugenia Jones Bacon's Lyddy: A Tale of the Old South (1898), are examples. The brilliant war-time diary of Mary Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie (1905), could also be included here. Yet the most enduring southern fiction produced to cover the historical scope of the Civil War is that of twentieth century writers whose works display some version of pastoral. Thus they incorporate, with varying degrees of both longing and irony, detailed visions of plantation life on the eve of the conflict. What is emphasized in the "before the War" sections of such works is the image of the South as a traditional society, securing individuals within sustaining constructions of family and community. "In my day," a young protagonist’s grandfather tells him in Allen Tate's novel The Fathers (1938), "we were never alone." If we consider Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage (1895) or Ambrose Bierce's Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) to offer an "American" model of the Civil War novel, then we see the terms through which we need to distinguish a southern genre, represented by Ellen Glasgow's Battle-Ground (1902), Mary Johnson's The Long Roll (1911) and its sequel, Cease Firing (1912), Andrew Lytle’s The Long Night (1936), Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (1936), and Caroline Gordon's None Shall Look Back (1937), along with Tate's The Fathers and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and The Unvanquished (1938). Unlike Crane and Bierce, these writers, although differing in technique and artistic as well as political vision, nevertheless begin with the presumption that they must look back (as Gordon's title ironically warns against). For them the Civil War is not a cataclysm set apart from lives contained within community scrutiny, social obligation, and family interaction. The southern works listed above gather families into prescribed rituals as a kind of prerequisite to any dramatization of war. In other words, their conception of war places it within a set of social realities, not apart from them. These works also follow the pastoral in its double thematics: one track setting up the simpler life of antebellum plantation society as a more healthful, life-sustaining time and the other warning that memorializing the past distorts it, while enshrining the past overpowers the present. This reading of the threat implied in the pastoral is the theme of Allen Tate's poem "Ode to the Confederate Dead" (1928).

The most brilliant Civil War novel north or south is one that defies genre classifications but one that retains the southern groupings' emphasis on human relationships beyond as well as within war. Evelyn Scott created in The Wave (1929) an immense kaleidoscopic epic of lives thrown into chaos through the disorder of war. Its title image indicates the rising and breaking, overpowering force of unchecked emotions that her disconnected, character sketch structure also reflects. The narrative consists of over one hundred separate but interlocking vignettes recording the workings of individual consciousness, from actual generals and President Lincoln, down to anonymous foot soldiers, children, widows, deserters, and lovers. Two acclaimed recent examples resist geographical as well genre categorization. Set as they are in the western North Carolina mountains and the borderland of Missouri, respectively, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain (1997) and Paulette Jiles's Enemy Women (2002), like Scott's The Wave, foreground human nature and lives rooted in elemental social contexts without grinding the pastoral theme of the past's tyranny over the present.

In 1956, Robert Penn Warren, speaking at a reunion of the Fugitive poets who had banded together at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s, said, "The Past is always a rebuke to the Present. . . . It’s a better rebuke than any dream of the Future." The Fugitives—Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson chief among them—became modern spokesmen for southern agrarianism not only in their poetry, but also in biography, fiction, and literary as well as social criticism. Their agrarianism, outlined definitively in their 1930 manifesto I’ll Take My Stand, had its roots in a myth of a traditional agricultural South—populated by self-sufficient, stoically religious, well-educated, non-materialistic gentry. Their agrarianism exalts Nature over the Machine, Contemplation over Competition, Rootedness over Progress. Yet as Warren's reunion comments indicate, the past envisioned can be a rebuke to the present, but is not an agenda for the future. Warren himself had broken with the Southern Agrarian movement's conservative racial politics by the 1950s, and today their image of the South is often attacked as the construction of a southern male elite promoting a segregationist ideal as a false "Golden Age."

From the beginning, literature written within the perspective of southern agrarianism exalted the genteel conception of the farmer and his connection to the land as the means of his enjoying the good life. As Thomas Jefferson put it in a 1787 letter to General Washington, "Agriculture is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals and happiness." John Taylor of Caroline in his Arator essays (1813) was the immediate inheritor of Jefferson's vision, which found a renewal during the Reconstruction-era in poems of Sidney Lanier, such as "Thar's More in the Man" and "Corn." The agrarianism of the Fugitives found complex expression in their poetry beginning in the 1920s (Ransom's "Antique Harvesters" and Davidson's "The Tall Men") and in novels such as Tate's The Fathers (1939) Andrew Lytle's Wake for the Living (1975), Caroline Gordon's Aleck Maury, Sportsman (1934), and stories such as Robert Penn Warren's "Blackberry Winter." An agrarian thematics was important to a number of southern women novelists of the 1920s and '30s as well. Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground (1925), Elizabeth Madox Roberts's The Time of Man (1926), Julia Peterkin's novels of African American rural life in South Carolina (Scarlet Sister Mary, 1928), and the stories collected in Katherine Ann Porter's The Old Order (1958) express an often mystical sense of their characters' relationship to the earth—not the typical objectification of woman as earth but woman as a source of sustenance and energy. Later writers such as Robert Morgan and Fred Chappell, who have been influenced primarily by Robert Penn Warren in both their poetry and novels, reflect the agrarian concern for man’s dislocation from his roots in nature. Wendell Berry's essays over thirty years have become influential agrarian statements that are now seen as counter-arguments to current endorsements of a globalist philosophy.

Modernism as a literary category in America designates patterns of mind and style as well as a relationship to the historical period of the early 1900s through World War II. Modernistic artistic expression reflects the historically marked pressures of the early twentieth century: the disintegration or serious compromise of many forms of authority (religious, governmental, gendered); the development of technologies and intellectual frameworks that changed man's thinking about time, space, physical being, and consciousness (feedback from the work of Darwin, Edison, Freud, the Wright Brothers etc.); the mass migrations to the cities and the development of the potential of new media such as film and advertising. In the South, a new generation of writers absorbed these shocks and set themselves the task of interpreting the ramifications for traditional assumptions about their place within a conservative, southern society. They understood the need for new literary techniques, new ways of using language and organizing narrative, in order to deal with new questions about how to render, even where to look for, reality. While African Americans and both African American and white women writers had different vantage points on the radical changes taking place in the South, many writers, regardless of race or gender, were inclined to combine pastoral thematics with modernist technical innovations. William Faulkner's novels of Yoknapatawpha give classic expression to the underlying pastoral emphasis of much of the southern writing that addressed modernist issues. Faulkner found innovative linguistic and structural ways to access the past in order to dramatize the modern southerner's loss of traditional avenues of knowledge and his search for viable forms of order. The pastoral invocation of the past involves the idea of time as enemy (time synonymous with the sterile mechanics of motion, with chronology as a tyrannical absolute of order, and with death). Faulkner wrote novels that dealt definitively with modern man's (and sometimes woman's) disconnection from nature and memory, with the loss of faith in God or tradition, and with alienation from any sustaining conception of community. His technical manipulations of voice and consciousness in novels such as The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936) serve to disrupt chronology and to revitalize the sometimes equally tyrannizing capacities of memory. Other white writers, particularly Robert Penn Warren in All the King's Men (1946), Eudora Welty in her many novels and short stories, Walker Percy in The Last Gentleman (1978), and James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), used similar modernist narrative techniques, particularly the brooding, interiorized first-person consciousness fragmented into multiple points of view and disruptions of chronological time. Jean Toomer's masterwork of the Harlem Renaissance, Cane (1923), also combines pastoral thematics with modernist experiments with point of view, as does Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Neither of these African American writers in any way glosses over the racial oppression associated with the southern rural landscape, but both assert that a search for inheritance and sustenance within a southern past is essential to the attainment of full identity. Southern women of the early twentieth century, African American and white, might be expected to have had problems finding empowerment within the context of images of land and traditional order. Yet from Kate Chopin and Ellen Glasgow as transitional figures of great importance, to Hurston, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Eudora Welty, Katherine Ann Porter, and Harriet Arnow, southern women writers have returned to, revised, and revitalized the meaning of women's relationship to the land and to tradition.