An Overview Genres of Southern Literature by Genre
Lucinda MacKethan, North Carolina State University
Essay Sections:
The South’s Literatures of Resistance: Counter-Pastoral Literatures:
(Southwestern Humor, Counter-Pastorals, the Southern "Problem" Novel, Southern Grotesque)
For much of the twentieth century, critical focus within
southern literary study has emphasized constructions of white elite experience
within one rigidly controlled and controlling community: domain: the world of the
plantation owners and their modern class descendants who manipulated state
houses and social registers through economic privilege. Their stories,
both in triumph and in loss, were considered the story, and their canon,
so designated through dozens of literary studies and anthologies, conveyed
a white male conservative reading of what mattered in the South. Just
as strong, however, is a southern tradition of resistance counter-pastoral literature.
These works are by place-identified writers of regionalist identity who have nonetheless
looked at the region written
with an outsider's a sense of disfranchisement and a will to criticize, not by constructing
idealized myths of a romantic or tragic past but by confronting falsely
based narratives of dominance. Their counter-narratives present many Souths, imaged souths,
as regionalized worlds places of experience, not privileged artifacts of memory.
As early as 1728, one of the South's most privileged storytellers, William
Byrd, writing in The History of the Dividing Line (1841) of how
he and his team surveyed the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina,
identified a different kind of line, one that separates southern literatures of resistance counter-pastoral
writing from the more elitist Agrarian agrarian and Pastoral pastoral genres. As he mockingly
described the non-slave and non-landholding North Carolinians below "the
line," Byrd in his description of "Lubberland" opened a
space for a long tradition of southern works that offer an unruly version
the South's inhabitants and manners. Like the literatures of slavery,
the South's counter-pastoral literatures of resistance affirm diverse shapes and revisionary revise the dividing lines for
the reading of southern regional culture. cultures.
First and foremost, the
The South's literatures of resistance are essentially counter-pastoral in their creation of literatures create characters who subvert
privilege based on race, class, gender or gender. pride of place. As we have seen,
some southern writers harnessed the pastoral genre's focus on a traditional
past in order to express fear of change or frustration with the complexities
of the present. One important strain of southern literature of resistance counter-pastoral writing answered
this longing by harnessing the genre's equal potential for irony to expose
the blindness or self-serving motives of the master class. Mark Twain's
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Southwestern humorists were pioneers of southern resistance counter-pastoral literature who
debunked notions of class privilege upon which much southern pastoral
has been constructed. This rowdy genre gave Twain some of his most useful
models for contesting the emerging white racist power structure of Post-Reconstruction.
Using subversive trickster humor, the southwestern humorists of antebellum
times displaced the traditional gentleman, supplanting him not with a
counter-ideal but with rugged, sometimes openly anarchist anti-heroes.
Southern "problem"
Counter-pastoral realists of the twentieth century rejected myths of a
"usable Past" past" as they confronted urgent contemporary problems
set within realistic everyday dimensions of both region space and time. Their works present
competing versions of the roots of southern culture that challenge the
modernist tendency to privilege historical consciousness over social conscience. Thus they write
They wrote works not dominated by white traditions of authority, by “sense
of place,” or by monolithic constructions of community. These southern
literatures are not conceived as "acts of memory" involved in
"recovering" the Past. Instead such works emphasize
seeing locating
and questioning realities of in the present, starting with the question of
whose stories are actually being lived in heterogeneous Souths, souths, the
Souths souths
acclaimed by C. Hugh Holman in his powerful revisionist essays, "No
More Monoliths" and "The View from the Regency Hyatt."
When one finds the rich veins of literature that exist beyond the plantation
South and beyond the experience of white privilege, the South becomes
multi-dimensional in several respects. Appalachia and A variety of southern urban centers regions appear
as important sites of economic and social organization. New kinds of characters
are presented as positive figures: the African American school teacher,
the redneck truck driver, the poor white single mother become subjects
and voices instead of objects or hapless victims. The southern "Problem" counter-pastoral
novel zeroes in on the need to reform social change by portraying characters predominantly
within plots of economic struggle. "Grit Lit" tells about the
South with heavy doses of "gritty" violence, starkly rendered
commonplace settings, and people whose lives are lived within frames of
elemental struggle, not ornamental ritual.
In some even more estranged counter-narratives, writers' visions of multiple
Souths
are produced from surreal distortions of traditional place and gentrified
characters. The Gothic horrors of the southern-born Poe, the outrageous
exaggerations of the antebellum southern humorists, the grotesque bodies
of post-Renascence writers such as Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers,
Lewis Nordan, and Randall Kenan take center stage in these assertions
of myriad Souths souths against the "chosen" South of one literary
tradition.
Counter-Pastorals of Race and Class:
Mark Twain's Huck Finn is southern literature's poster
boy for counter-pastoral. He has no "truck" with what has been
called "the party of the past." Given his precarious social
position, he can only question the advantages of belonging to a world
that thrives on tradition. His backward glance is taken through the eyes
of a child who exists uneasily on the margins of a supposedly idyllic
village. His ambivalence is traced satirically in his relations on the
one hand with Jim, a slave, and on the other with several varieties of
white communities. By the time that Twain wrote Pudd'nhead Wilson
in 1894, even Huck's mild pastoral meditations, dreamy reflections made
as he floats briefly out of time with Jim on the river, have been banished.
Pudd'nhead Wilson confronts the absurd final consequences of
white southern racist order.
Several other southern writers of the 1880s and 1890s 90s also wrote against
the mythologizing currents of much "New South" writing in counter-pastoral
fiction that utilized many of the staples (noted above) of local color.
Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman (1899), with its intricate
frame narration, allows the black former slave narrator Uncle Julius to
undercut all the nostalgic functions that the faithful retainer type performed
for pastoral writers such as Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page.
Uncle Julius, in rich vernacular dialect, critiques the white racist and
class assumptions of the outside frame narrator, John. His conjure stories
are set before the Civil War, but Chesnutt looks at the slavery era not
to idealize the past, but to offer analogies between the brutal governance
of slaveholders and the racist political assumptions and policies of the
present, north North and south. South. George Washington Cable in The Grandissimes
(1880) more directly attacked racial prejudice through mulatto characters
negotiating the complex color lines of New Orleans, a southern metropolitan region
that offers an extreme version of caste, class, and race politics. Kate
Chopin and Grace King also depicted mulatto characters who transgress
the illogically racialized social structures of New Orleans, as did the
African American writer Alice
Dunbar-Nelson.
At the turn of the twentieth century African American writers James Weldon
Johnson in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) and
W.E.B. DuBois in Souls of Black Folk (1903), as well as Chesnutt
(in The Marrow of Tradition, 1899, especially), made the South
a site synonymous with racial violence and injustice. A masterwork of
twentieth century African American fiction, Zora Neale Hurston's Their
Eyes Were Watching God (1937), can also be seen as counter-pastoral,
especially in its construction of a very different southern mythology out of the
oral folk culture of the black South. African Americans.
Southwestern Humor:
The southwest as a regional literary region imaginary has its
boundary wherever the southern backwoods begins to meet the outer edges
of civilization. The tales of the this genre belong not to what we now know
geographically as the Southwest (Arizona (e.g. Arizona and New Mexico) but to the
southern frontier, which might be western Mississippi, or any sparsely
settled section of Alabama, Tennessee, or middle Georgia, wherever regulated
society had not yet taken root. When Johnson Jones Hooper's con man protagonist
Captain Simon Suggs comments (in Some Adventures of Captain Simon
Suggs, 1845) that it is "good to be shifty in a new country,"
he identifies the imaginative landscape of southwestern humor. It is the
"new" place that gives the lie to the ideal of the "Old"
South as a region with place distinguished by tradition,
a history, manners, and law.
The nineteenth century humorists were usually men of education and urbanity
writing for popular men's magazines. In their unruly representations of region, representations,
a man can lose his nose in a fight (in Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia
Scenes, 1835); transplanted Virginians trying to "lord" it
over others in frontier communities are routinely victimized by sharper
drifters with no pedigrees (in Joseph Glover Baldwin's Flush Times
in Alabama and Missisippi (1853); a phony preacher can be conned
by an even phonier convert (in Hooper's Captain Simon Suggs);
a lowlife of the first order named Sut Lovingood can victimize innocent
bystanders simply because he is feeling out of sorts (in George Washington
Harris's
The southwestern humor tales satirize many elements of antebellum plantation fiction
through tricksters who in their disdain for the classic virtues hold up an ironic,
inverted mirror to slave-holding society and its hypocrisies. The stories contain
exaggeration of both speech and incident, while their protagonists both critique
and subvert the dominant power structure. At their most violent or absurd, the tales
of the genre offer versions of anarchy that seem especially to target preoccupations
with social class. The poor white challenges any class claim to superiority. In the
world of hunting, horse-swap, yarn-spinning, and woman-bashing that marks the genre,
the condescension of the gentleman or dandy is no match for the resentment and the
amorality of an unaccommodated breed of backwoodsman.
Although southwestern humor tales have long been considered a male genre,
in part because of their popularity in men's sporting journals, southern
women also took to this form, generally somewhat later and within the
generic conventions of local color. Idora McClellan Plowman Moore, recently
given new attention by scholar Kathryn McKee, wrote comic sketches for
southern newspapers (1881-1900) that clearly belong to the southwestern
humor tradition, especially in her use of poor white storyteller Betsy
Hamilton. (Dissertation: Writing in a Different
Direction: Postbellum Women Authors and the Tradition of Southwestern
Humor, 1875-1920)
Southern "Problem" Literature:
When the South was identified by President Franklin Roosevelt
as America's "number one" economic problem in the 1930s, southern
writers were already responding to the realities of the region's rural and industrial
poor with fiction that has often been included in non-regional categories of "Social
Realism," "The Protest Novel," or the "Proletarian
Novel." Very seldom has this literature been included in studies
of "southern renascence" literature. In Rubin's Southern
Renascence, which staked out this territory in 1952, Erskine Caldwell
was the only modern writer included who is not identified with the Agrarian agrarian
or Pastoral/Modernist pastoral/modernist orientation. Recently Richard Gray, in Southern
Aberrations (2000), labeled one of his groupings "Stories of
the Rural Poor Between between the Wars." Giving the title Southern "Problem"
Literature to a set of southern writers draws upon the South's dubious
distinction, during the 1930s, as the region section of the United States identified
as "worst off" in terms of all economic indicators, but it also
reflects other
regionalized denominators affecting life in the modern South: problems
related to racism and white supremacist politics, to the ideological over-valuing
of a rural gentry which contributed to anti-labor policies and "redneck"
stereotyping, and to the rigid class structure that made social mobility
especially difficult for poor southerners, white and black. A southern
regional genre of
"problem" literature incorporates these factors into its dramatic
treatment of poverty and injustice. Writers in this group stake out resistance
specifically to Agrarian agrarian and pastoral literatures that gloss over racism
and the suffering of sharecropping farm families in their attempt to associate
the good life with idealizations of the
Past past or life lived close to Nature. nature.
T.S. Stribling was an early pioneer of southern problem literature who
belonged to what was known as the "revolt from the village"
school associated more with northern and midwestern writers such as Sinclair
Lewis. Erskine Caldwell was probably the most visible but also most controversial
of the "problem" novelists in the 1930s, scoring with sensationalist,
grotesque portrayals of poor whites in fiction such as Tobacco Road
(1932) but also with a more realistic, sympathetic photo-documentary text
(with Margaret Bourke-White), You Have Seen Their Faces (1937).
Very different from the outside observer Caldwell was Harry Kroll, who
in a non-fiction account, I Was a Share-Cropper (1936), (1937), and in
novels such as The Cabin in the Cotton (1932) (1931) approached poor
white tenant farming from his own experience. Richard Wright in Uncle
Tom's Children (1938) and Black Boy (1945) also experienced
firsthand some of what he shows in this collection of short stories: the
doubly brutalizing existence that poor blacks endured in the rural South.
Probably the earliest novel to focus on poor whites was Edith Summers
Kelley's Weeds (1923), a naturalistic study of Kentucky tobacco
farming. Her position points to an interesting aspect of southern problem
literature, the relatively high number of women writers who turned to
its resistance format. Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind
(1936) was a brilliant version of the modern historical romance form that
many women, nation-wide, were successfully mastering. Still, many southern
women writers moved away from this traditional women's market.Lillian
Smith in her novel Strange Fruit (1944) and her eloquent, confessional
autobiography Killers of the Dream (1949) took a courageous stand
against segregation. Resistance autobiographies like Smith's that concentrate
on the "problem" of class and race discrimination have been
a special province of southern women writers. They represent experiences
that cross these divisions, from Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin's The Making
of a Southerner (1947), charting a white woman's growing distance
from an upperclass upper-class family's paternalistic racism, to Anne Moody's Coming
of Age in Mississippi (1968), describing a black girl's adolescence
in an impoverished rural household, and from
Ellen Douglas's Truth:
Four Stories I am Finally Old Enough to Tell (1998), concerning her
middle class family's racist past, to Linda Flowers's firsthand account,
in Throwed Away (1990), of growing up in a sharecropping family.
Southern women writers were also frontrunners in treating the urban, industrial
South in the 1930s. In 1932 three southern women, Olive Tilford Dargan,
Grace Lumpkin, and Myra Page, published novels about the 1929 textile
millworkers strikes in Gastonia, North Carolina. Harriette Arnow's The
Dollmaker (1954) brought an Appalachian woman writer's viewpoint
to the issue of the effects of industrialization on rural families through
her story of a displaced Kentucky family during World War II. In 1960
another southern woman writer, Harper Lee, published what is probably
the modern South's most popular novel of social protest, To Kill a
Mockingbird.
Southern Grotesque:
Contemporary writers such as Harry Crews in South:
Biography of a Childhood A Childhood: The Biography of a Place
(1978) and Dorothy Allison in Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)
deal with the experience of poor whites in graphic ways that in some respects
makes them southern problem naturalists, but in others allies them with
the regionalist genre of the Southern Grotesque. Often the terms
Gothic and Grotesque are interchanged when applied to the South (the only
region place to which both rubrics
have been consistently applied as literary denominators). "Southern
Gothic" and "Southern Grotesque" refer to literature that
mixes terror and horror in order to shock or disturb. Writers of Southern
southern Gothic or Grotesque combine comic
or obscene exaggeration with sometimes gratuitous violence, often within
representations of physical deformity or sexual deviance.The deviance.
The Grotesque genre in southern literature begins with southern-born
Edgar Allan Poe, whose radical experience of repression and alienation
(in his case, alienation from the upperclass Richmond society of his adoptive
father) is reflected in the nightmare landscapes that appear in his fiction.
His gothic works of horror appeared around the same time as southwestern
humor writing, and as different as the two genres might seem, they share
elements of distortion and displacement, gratuitous violence, and outrageous
hostility. Possibly these similar traits represent a kindred response
to the stultifying effects of traditional antebellum plantation society,
which in a resistance view functioned only through blindness to the horrors
inherent in slavery and through pretentious rituals of honor and obedience.
In stories such as "The Masque of the Red Death" and "
The Fall of the House of Usher," Poe presents terrifying, irrational
inversions of order. His characters' obsession with control explodes into
bizarre excesses and disfiguring disease.
Faulkner, Eudora
Welty, and Tennessee Williams apply different kinds of
gothic effects in some of their works, often as they address alienation
and disorder in modern southern settings. Yet the most interesting, and
most radical inheritors of the Grotesque are women writers of the later
modernist era, Carson McCullers and Flannery
O'Connor, who developed this
sensibility into very different strands. McCullers in The Ballad of
the Sad Café and O’Connor in stories such as "Good Country People,"
"The Life You Save May Be Your Own," and "Revelation"
displace the horrors of a world without morality or reason onto grotesque
female bodies. Their deformed, freakish, psychotic, or imbecilic female
characters are inversions of the pure white southern woman, icon of the
well-ordered universe of southern tradition. The dramas of Tennessee Williams
and the stories of Truman Capote and Peter Taylor reflect this iconography
of estrangement as well in physical, often sexual grotesqueries. If the
South seems especially hospitable to such types, some southern scholars and writers
speculate, it may be because its social codes have allowed so few avenues
for the expression of disagreement or even confusion about the controlling norms
of the region.
norms.
Flannery O'Connor's sense of the southern affinity for the grotesque is unique because her explanations
and usages of the genre are tied to her firm sense of spiritual realities that the South, southerners,
she says, has have always been more ready to acknowlege acknowledge than other regions. Americans.
Her imagined South is defined as that "Christ-haunted landscape"
in which characters can be forgiven anything except spiritual complacency.
Epiphanies occur for O'Connor's ideal modern readers when they experience
a sense of the uncanny (translated for O'Connor into spiritual grace)
through the grotesque mode's combining of strange, often violent "discrepancies"
or oppositions in
plot or plot, character or imagery.
Following O'Connor, and deeply indebted to her, are several contemporary
southern writers who are interested in her use of the Grotesque as a way
to critique a stultifying, spiritually arid modern landscape. Cormac
McCarthy,
Harry
Crews, Barry
Hannah, Tim
McLaurin, Lewis Nordan (especially in Wolf
Whistle, 1993) and Larry Brown apply the principles of the Grotesque
in works of fiction that often today are considered under a separate rubric,
that of "Grit Lit" (not to be confused with the use of the term
"Gritlit" for ALL all of southern literature!). literature). Like O'Connor's grotesque
comedies, some of these writers' works can be violently comic, while others
are more likely to shock or repulse readers through raw portrayals of
life at its grimmest. Grit Lit can chart the disintegration of characters
bereft of dignity or hope but it can also call forth sympathy for forgotten
lives and wasted promise. Larry Brown's Fay: A Novel (2000) and
Cormac McCarthy's Suttree (1979) are two prime examples.
Essay Sections:
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