Southern Women Writers

Southern Women Writers

• Literature written about the American South began during the colonial era, but more clearly defined itself as a "Southern" voice during the mid 19th century and beyond.

• Traditional Southern literature emphasized:

  • a unifying history of the region not only geographically but culturally, with an emphasis on "local color"

  • the significance of family in the South's culture,

  • a sense of community in one's personal and social life, and the individual's role within that community

  • justice

Southern Women Writers

• Traditional Southern literature emphasized:

  • the significant role of religion and adherence to the tenets of Christianity

  • a strong sense of place, which includes local dialects

  • the positive and negative impacts of religion, racial tensions, social class

• Some suggest that "Southern" authors write in their individual way due to the impact of the strict cultural decorum in the South and the need to break away from it.

The "Lost Cause"

• The Lost Cause of the Confederacy is an American pseudo-historical, negationist ideology that advocates the belief that the cause of the Confederate States during the American Civil War was heroic, just, and not centered on slavery. It is a myth.

• But, according to this ideology, slavery brought economic prosperity, the enslaved people were happy or even grateful, and slavery was not only moral but beneficial. Such beliefs were of course designed to perpetuate racism and racist power structures in the American South.

• It also emphasized the supposed chivalric virtues of the antebellum South and views the war as a struggle primarily waged to save the so-called Southern way of life and to protect "states' rights," especially the right to secede from the Union when faced with "overwhelming Northern aggression." It simultaneously minimizes or completely denies the central role of slavery and white supremacy in the build-up to, and outbreak of, the war.

"The Lost Cause"

• Proponents of the Lost Cause movement also condemned the Reconstruction era which followed the Civil War, claiming that it was a deliberate strategy by Northern politicians and speculators to exploit the South economically and to gain political power.

• The Lost Cause theme has evolved into a major element in defining gender roles in the white South, in terms of preserving family honor and chivalrous traditions. It has inspired the construction of numerous Southern memorials, and the shaping of religious attitudes.

• One of those memorials is the novel Gone With the Wind.

"The Lost Cause"

• The term "Lost Cause" first appeared in the title of an 1866 book by Virginian author and journalist Edward A. Pollard, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. He promoted many of the themes of the Lost Cause, dismissing the role of slavery in starting the war and even promoting it as a way of improving the lives of Africans:

• We shall not enter upon the discussion of the moral question of slavery. But we may suggest a doubt here whether that odious term "slavery" which has been so long imposed, by the exaggeration of Northern writers, upon the judgement and sympathies of the world, is properly applied to that system of servitude in the South, which was really the mildest in the world; which did not rest on acts of debasement and disenfranchisement, but elevated the African, and was in the interest of human improvement; and which, by the law of the land, protected the negro in life and limb, and in many personal rights, and, by the practice of the system, bestowed upon him a sum of individual indulgences, which made him altogether the most striking type in the world of cheerfulness and contentment.

"The Lost Cause"

• But it was the articles written by General Jubal A. Early in the 1870s for the Southern Historical Society that firmly established the “Lost Cause” as a lasting literary and cultural phenomenon.

• The 1881 publication of The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government by Jefferson Davis, a two-volume defense of the Southern cause, provided another important text in the history of the Lost Cause.

• Davis blamed the enemy for "whatever of bloodshed, of devastation, or shock to republican government has resulted from the war." He charged that the Yankees fought "with a ferocity that disregarded all the laws of civilized warfare." The book remained in print and often served to justify the Southern position and to distance it from slavery.

"The Lost Cause"

• University of Virginia professor Gary W. Gallagher wrote:

  • The architects of the Lost Cause acted from various motives. They collectively sought to justify their own actions and allow themselves and other former Confederates to find something positive in all-encompassing failure. They also wanted to provide their children and future generations of white Southerners with a 'correct' narrative of the war.

"The Lost Cause"

• Yale University history professor Rollin G. Osterweis summarizes the content of "Lost Cause" writings:

  • The Legend of the Lost Cause began as mostly a literary expression of the despair of a bitter, defeated people over a lost identity. It was a landscape dotted with figures drawn mainly out of the past: the chivalric planter; the magnolia-scented Southern belle; the good, gray Confederate veteran, once a knight of the field and saddle; and obliging old Uncle Remus. All these, while quickly enveloped in a golden haze, became very real to the people of the South, who found the symbols useful in the reconstituting of their shattered civilization. They perpetuated the ideals of the Old South and brought a sense of comfort to the New.

"The Lost Cause"

• Louisiana State University history professor Gaines Foster wrote in 2013:

  • Scholars have reached a fair amount of agreement about the role the Lost Cause played in those years, although the scholarship on the Lost Cause, like the memory itself, remains contested.

  • The white South, most agree, dedicated enormous effort to celebrating the leaders and common soldiers of the Confederacy, emphasizing that they had preserved their and the South's honor.

The "Lost Cause"

• Among writers of the Lost Cause, gender roles were a contested domain. Men typically honored the role which women played during the war by noting their total loyalty to the cause.

• Women, however, developed a much different approach to the cause by emphasizing female activism, initiative, and leadership. They explained that when all of the men left, the women took command, found substitute foods, rediscovered their old traditional skills with the spinning wheel when factory cloth became unavailable, and ran all of the farm or plantation operations. They faced danger without men to perform the traditional role of protector.

• See Cold Mountain, Ada and Ruby, and several of the women Inman meets along the journey.

Southern Women Writers

• From an unpublished dissertation by Katy Leedy, Marquette University, on Southern women short story writers:

  • All of the stories can be read as parallel lessons for the South to discard its constricting Old South ideals.

  • The “Old South” turns out to be more of a fantasy than a historical reality. James Cobb explains that “the Civil War and Reconstruction . . . fast-forwarded the antebellum southern order through the process of aging and historical distancing. By the end of Reconstruction, what had simply been the South in 1860 had become the ‘Old South,’ frozen away in some distant corner of time and accessible only through the imagination” (73-74).

  • The Old South is not just the history of the South, but a fictive memory that allows for nostalgia for a time that never really existed. This mythologized Old South made it even harder to abandon its ideals.

Southern Women Writers (unpublished dissertation by Katy Leedy)

• Fundamental to all versions of the South were traditional gender roles, particularly the image of white southern womanhood.

• White women were expected to uphold the tenets of what Barbara Welter has defined as a “Cult of True Womanhood” of the 1800s: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.

• This “particular construction of femininity” crafted an image of a woman on a pedestal, which served not only to suppress women, but also “served to legitimate and perpetuate antebellum class, race, and gender hierarchies” (Wright 133).

• Along with this exacting standard of “true womanhood,” “the grace, charm, and leisure of the southern lady were held up as sign and proof of the superiority of southern civilization” (Wright 133). This was a large burden for southern women and an unsustainable standard.

Southern Women Writers (unpublished dissertation by Katy Leedy)

• Women’s submissiveness did not always extend beyond appearances, though. Some of the first and most well-known women to publicly resist the restrictive ideals were Sarah and Angelina Grimké, (Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings)

• Writing was a potent tool for [empowering women]. Mary Louise Weaks asserts that “writing was probably one of the first occupations open to women because it allowed women to remain in their homes, but it also gave them a voice . . . ” (38-69).

• Many, if not most, southern women retained the image of the southern lady while they pursued these new vocations.

• Acting as the southern lady while advocating for their various causes was the only way for women to be heard . . .

Southern Women Writers (unpublished dissertation by Katy Leedy)

• Leedy also cites Anne Goodwyn Jones's book, Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936, who finds that the hallmarks of southern women’s writings “include the critique, implicit or direct, of racial and sexual oppression, of the hierarchical caste and class structures that pervade cultural institutions, and of the evasive idealism that pushes reality aside” (p. 45).

• See Kate Chopin, however. If women were too assertive, they wouldn't get published. And, even after publication, marginalized.

• These women used the genre of the short story to write their critiques, and it is in part this choice that has also limited recognition of their political work.

Short story

• The first attempt at defining the short story is generally credited to Edgar Allan Poe in his 1842 review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales.

• Poe identifies a “unity of effect or impression” as the most important trait of any composition. Part of achieving this, he states, is a sense of totality, which makes a short story superior to a novel, since a novel cannot be read in one sitting. That single effect means “in the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to be the one pre-established design.” He argues this is not attainable by either the novel (too long) or the poem (too short).

Short story

• Flannery O’Connor echoes Poe when she says that, in the short story, “detail has to be controlled by some overall purpose, and every detail has to be put to work for you.” These two assessments are representative of the larger discussion surrounding the way the short story works and the genre’s significance.

Short story

• Despite Poe's esteem for the genre, many see it as less significant than the novel because of its brevity. Mary Louise Pratt explains that “the relation between the novel and the short story is . . . a hierarchical one with the novel on top and the short story dependent. . . . The short story has a reputation as a training or practice genre, for both apprentice writers and apprentice readers.”

• What the short story offers, according to another writer, is "a moment of cultural crisis." He writes that “the short story has never had a hero. What it has instead is a submerged population group,” generally those oppressed by "confining expectations, . . . the patriarchal power structure, [by] their race and gender.

Short story

• He continues: "Short stories are also an ideal form to examine culture and prompt change in moments of cultural crisis because their brevity leads to raising questions without necessarily resolving them—leaving the resolution to the reader’s imagination.

• Former colleague Tom Leitch:

  • Short stories "constitute not a form of knowledge but a challenge to knowledge, that is, a way of debunking assumptions which are not really true.”

• That phrase, "assumptions which are not really true” describes the hierarchies of the Old South that are challenged in the short story.

• See Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily”