Introduction | Literatures of Slavery | Literatures of Pastoral | Counter-Pastoral Literatures of Resistance | Recommended Resources

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 (1884) stands as perhaps southern literature's most compelling work of counter-pastoral. Charles Chesnutt's works, particularly the stories collected in The Conjure Woman (1899), and some of the New Orleans writings of Kate Chopin, Grace King, and George W. Cable.

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.

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.

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 Sut Lovingood Yarns, 1867).

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)

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.

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.

Introduction | Literatures of Slavery | Literatures of Pastoral | Counter-Pastoral Literatures of Resistance | Recommended Resources

Originally Published: 16 February 2004 | Last Revised: 01 Aug 2005| Revision History

© 2004 2005 Lucinda MacKethan and Southern Spaces