Southern Spaces

T. S. Eliot, delivering the 1933 Page-Barbour lecture at the University of Virginia, articulated his own regional ideal, what he envisioned as "the re-establishment of a native culture" in the South:

A bit later in the same address Eliot clarified the best qualities of this new "native culture," in a passage that has, for obvious reasons, drawn charges of anti-Semitism. Prominent among these qualities, and inseparable from Eliot's elitism, is like-mindedness:

Eliot's attitude toward Jews is offensive enough in its own right. But looking across some of the events that have taken place since 1933 — not just the Holocaust but, in America and the South, civil rights and integration, and in our field of literary studies these past several decades, an assault on the canon that would have sent Eliot scurrying back to London as fast as British Airways could take him, the ongoing reconsideration of literary value that has given solid footing to African American literature and theory, and the emergence of postcolonial, transnational, and other multicultural critical discourses — in light of these events, Eliot's dream of a "homogeneous" region seems almost unbearably rigid, not just in its well-maintained hierarchies but also, and even more untenably, in the very composition of its human community. In these passages Eliot brings to mind black and white images of the lone white woman riding the bus in Montgomery in 1955, surrounded by empty seats, ignoring the boycott, and largely ignored, to our eyes today, by history itself.

With this historical consciousness in mind, it is the collective identity of this supposedly organic community —the region— that requires clarification and redefinition. This is the moment to stop simply using the "we" that carries so much meaning precisely because it leaves so much unsaid. An appropriately American way to throw off the tyranny of like-mindedness would be to speak in individual terms, of "I" rather than "we." In Eliot's case, the "I" behind his regional "we" is profoundly revealing, and, perhaps not surprisingly in light of his background, deeply American. For despite his self-identification above as a New Englander, which he made, I think, largely as a rhetorical device to contrast the industrialized Northeast with what he wanted to view as a pastoral, even Edenic, South, Eliot was in truth a Missourian, that most existentially challenging of all American identities. Like those of Samuel Clemens before him, Eliot's life and writings show deep traces of ambivalence about his early background. Did his family's New England ties qualify him, vicariously, as a Yankee? Not according to his boarding school classmates back East, who mocked him for his heavy drawl and motivated him to shed all traces of his Missouri accent and, in the long run, to adopt the Queen's English. And yet surely Eliot, who had grown up in the cosmopolitan industrial city of St. Louis, where his grandfather had been the most outspoken abolitionist in the state, could not identify himself as a southerner? Or perhaps the open spaces of the frontier West a few blocks from his home held the keys to his identity? Clemens, according to his quixotic nature, at times embraced the West; Eliot, with a lifelong determination almost worthy of Thomas Sutpen, fled from it.