After the American Civil War, the South lay prostrate before the specter of the Lost Cause. There was a general poverty, both economic and personal. The war had had such a devastating effect that the intellectual capacity of a whole region shuddered, moaned. There could not be a more devastating occurrence to Southern pride than the ignoble defeat of the entire culture. The extent to which the South declined is documented in its literature. An examination of Southern literature during and after the Civil War provides a perspective on how far down the South had been driven before it revived to provide a new voice reflective of its roots and respective of its future.
Observing the literature of the South gives the impression of an impenetrable shell that regulated the influence of outside movements. For instance, the South never had the inclination to embrace Transcendentalism, the single most important cultural movement in American history largely because its properties were abhorrent to the established southern culture. After the War of 1812, Americans in the north sought a new cultural identity and found it in the principle that “man has ideas, that come not through the five senses or the powers of reasoning; but are either the result of direct revelation from God, his immediate inspiration, or his immanent presence in the spiritual world”(Gura 10). Thinkers like Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller wrote extensively to prove that American thought in the North extended beyond that which was fostered in Europe. As Emerson noted, “There are some peculiarities of the American mind in which we differ from our English brothers. They are more inclined to the matter of fact, and appeal to history; we, to the matter of ideas, and having no national history but a revolution, may appeal at once to human nature” (Emerson 20). Finding fault with European beliefs, Transcendentalists moved on the idea of the dignity of humanity. That is the thought that has become recognized as the spark plug that led to an America that supported incorporating the concepts of inclusion and equality. Transcendentalists promoted the belief in evolving social structures that recognized every member, something the stratified encapsulation of the South could not support.
It came as no shock to southerners that war would be the result of a threat to their way of life. The elitist culture that had evolved dictated that honor demands war. In response to the call went the flower of the South. Those left at home suffered along with the soldiers as want and deprivation hit with regularity on the home front. Structural and cultural collapses stratified the South and created bedlam.
It was not until long after the Civil War that Mary Boykin Chesnut’s A Diary from Dixie was published. An intimate and detailed daily account of the South from the beginning to the ending of the Civil War, her Diary provides a vivid backdrop to the extinguishment of the light of the South. From the date of “November 8, 1860 . . . The excitement was very great. Everybody was talking at the same time. One, a little more moved than the others, stood up and said despondently: ‘The die is cast; no more vain regrets; sad forebodings are useless; the stake is life or death’” (Chesnut 1). She went on to note the inclusion of all when “someone cried out: ‘Now that the black radical Republicans have the power I suppose they will Brown us all’” (Chesnut 1). There was no escaping the forces of War. The delirium that followed exposes the absolute joy with which southerners greeted the idea of secession. “From my window I can hear a grand and mighty flow of eloquence . . . Suddenly I found myself listening with pleasure. Voice, tone, temper, sentiment, language, all were perfect” (Chesnut 2). The die cast; the war began visiting its horrors on the South.
As the War progressed so did the bad news. On January 9, 1864, Mary noted, “Everybody who comes in brings a little bad news - not much, in itself, but by cumulative process the effect is depressing, indeed” (Chesnut 276). Though courtesies were still in place among the well-to-do, privations and prices were increasing. On January 14, 1864, Mary noted the increased prices, “Gave Mrs. White twenty-three dollars for a turkey. Came home wondering all the way why she did not ask twenty-five; two more dollars could not have made me balk at the bargain, and twenty-three sounds odd” (Chesnut 276).
The end was coming for the South. Mary unintentionally used metaphor to record the event with the passing of a young friend, “She died praying that she might die. She was weary of earth and wanted to be at peace. I saw her die and saw her put in her coffin. No words of mine can tell how unhappy I am” (Chesnut 404).
So ended Mary Chesnut’s Diary and so ended the resistance of the South. What had once been an enterprise in the conviction that the glory of humanity resided in the fight for southern rights, ended with the death of a dream. The resultant melancholy spawned a host of literature that looked back at the old days, a sense of nostalgia that permeated the whole culture of the South while the rest of the country moved on to greater horizons.
While the victorious North moved on to new dreams and new ventures, the South wallowed in its self-pity. Realism became the order of the day in the North and in the West giving new life to literature that reflected a new energy within a burgeoning nation. Some Southern writers migrated to the West, entranced by its opportunities, opportunities no longer available in the South. Samuel Clemons was one of the most noteworthy. He was widely read in the South with the most acclaimed pieces being The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The typical southerner could sympathize with the characters, the situations, and find humor in the innocence of the lives depicted.
Southerners also found kinship in the suspicion they shared with Native Americans of the northern culture. In the recorded speech of Chief Charlo’s Speech from 1876, Chief Charlo is speaking for his people. Though Native American Literature comes from an oral tradition, it does not negate the value of the comments. From the first line: “Yes, my people, the white man wants us to pay him” (Charlo), the script of the speech demonstrates the condition of the North American Native under the thumb of white supremacy. Chief Charlo goes on to point out the irony of being asked to pay for what they have been forced to accept. His subjects throughout the speech appeal to the soul, yet those subjects are not trivial. His physical descriptions of the events about him are real. In speaking to his people, Charlo speaks of injustice, of unfair treatment, and of duplicity. The same complaints resident in the conquered South. Charlo’s speech was lauded in newsprint in the South while it was denigrated in the North and the West.
In the South, the production of literature lay somnolent. The South, its will for the adventure or the written form broken, could not muster the will to speak out. Unlike in the North and the West where realism had revolutionized the literary form, the plantation novel became the "local color" movement, showing a vast nostalgic sigh for places, peoples, and times as yet untouched by industrialism and urbanization. Poets like Henry Timrod and Sidney Lanier were early mourners of "The Lost Cause," but its most prominent practitioners were fiction writers who again and again elevated the past plantation themes into the present.
For instance, after the initial shock of the loss of the war, southerners began to search for a voice and found it in Thomas Nelson Page’s Marse Chan. The novel became one of the most read pieces published in the South. One of the main characters is a former slave, Sam, of the Channing family. He, like most blacks in the literature of the South after the Civil War, was uneducated. He spoke phonetically, and he was completely devoted to his former master. The image was of a plantation that still operated just as it had before the War. No such plantations existed as slavery had been abolished and the freed slaves had either left or were given permission to buy or lease the land that they formerly farmed as slave labor. The fantasy was a reflection of what laid at the core of the southern soul. There had been no defeat, there had been no reconstruction, there would be no repatriation. It was as if the collective will of the South was unable to acknowledge the reality of their existence.
More voices came forth with fantasy as their subject. Joel Chandler Harris published a book of African-American folk tales in 1881. The publication Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings: The Folk-Lore of the Old Plantation, became an instant sensation and eventually drove the stereotyping of the black storyteller. The stories were a place where southern prejudice could hide. It did nothing to further the southern voice, it moved the literature of the South backward to an era of fairy-tales and advocated the view of the uneducated and illiterate black. In the South, the stories and the image of the black played well against the backdrop of white southern angst.
Gradually reality began to find a voice. George Washington Cable began writing in 1880. His book The Grandissimes explored and exposed the cruelty that the slave trade created. The central character of his novel, Bras Coupe, was a former Prince in his country before his kidnapping and extrication from Africa to become a slave in Louisiana. Bras Coupe attacks his white overseer only to be chased into the swamps by an angry mob, who catch him, remove his ears, cut his hamstrings, and beat him to death. This depiction of the horror of slavery earned him International fame and the complete shunning of New Orleans society. Realism had taken its first step, but the result for the author was exile from his former southern life.
Grace King also wrote with reality in mind. However, she took a tamer route than George Washington Cable. Her novels depicted the plight of those who had been dispossessed during the Federal occupation of New Orleans. Her subjects were familiar to her: a set of mothers and daughters, one couple white, the other black. The novels set out to demonstrate the complexities of life during and after the occupation and served to vanquish the stigma of separateness by having both races suffer equally. Though the writing was realistic, it did not give an accurate portrayal of black/white relations or the conditions under which they lived. However, it was a start, and the voice of the South was beginning to clear its throat.
Most of the remaining writers were article writers for news organizations. Some poetry emerged from the black population, most of which lauded Abraham Lincoln and his efforts at ending slavery. There were a few like Ellen Glasgow, who explored the ins and outs of Southern plantation life with realism in mind.
Ellen Glasgow’s The Battle-Ground directly confronted class struggle between the various levels of the white population through the visualization of a friendship between her two main characters Dan Montjoy and Pinetop. The disparity is social rank could not be more apparent with Montjoy being the heir of a wealthy aristocrat and Pinetop being a poor farmer. Glasgow reverses their social roles in the military environment with Pinetop being the superior officer. At first, Montjoy resents his social inferior somehow being his military superior. A fight breaks out between them, and Montjoy decides to ignore Pinetop’s orders (Glasgow 228). A decision which is quickly changed once the battle begins.
Glasgow reveals a class struggle hidden beneath the issue of slavery. Dan's confronts his prejudices against the status of Pinetop, a warrior risking his life and limb as much as Dan himself. His prejudices revealed, he is forced to reevaluate himself, much as the South was beginning a reevaluation of its social structures.
Glasgow succeeds in challenging the stratification within the white culture of the South. However, she does not contest the myth of plantation superiority. She depicts the slaves as ignorant of their condition calmly rebuilding what has been destroyed.
Glasgow cannot bring herself to a complete condemnation of the plantation system, revealing her latent nostalgia for what had been. Like most southerners, Glasgow still has the glory days of the plantation as the central vision of the South. It would not be long before the first writer of note comes forth to condemn much of the South’s prejudices.
Kate Chopin published The Awakening in 1899. When it first became available for public consideration, The Awakening shocked the general public with its depiction of female infidelity. It explores the psychological makeup of a woman trapped in a loveless marriage in a society that condemns change. The South, even at the turn of the Twentieth Century was still lying in the morose of its defeat. Old taboos still existed; old loyalties were held as values, and old values became hedgerows against any inroads of the invasive ideas of the North or the West. By the use of metaphor, Chopin advocated change in the culture of the South.
Kate Chopin dove in at the first words, providing a metaphor that would hold true throughout the book. “A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over . . .He could speak a little Spanish, and also a language nobody understood” (Chopin 1). The image of a caged bird that spoke words no one understood was to become a visualization of the main character’s, Edna, dilemma. Edna held in complete disregard the image of southern mothers” It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood” (Chopin 43). Surrounded by men and women who were steeped in the traditions of the South, Edna had no way to deny the image she was to portray. “They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals” (Chopin 42). Saddled with children that she supposed she should love and care for, her ability to roam and explore her surroundings was limited.
Edna is a victim of unrequited love. “An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish” (Chopin 38). In spite of the pressure of her peers and the pressures deep within herself, Edna “was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her” (Chopin 60).
Edna has known physical love, but never that all-consuming, bone-aching, fever-inducing love that she seeks. “Her marriage . . . was purely an accident, in this respect resembling many other marriages which masquerade as the decrees of Fate” (Chopin 72).
Her adherence to the façade of marriage gradually fades. She realizes that “I would give my money, I would give my life for my children, but I wouldn’t give myself” (Chopin 86).
Meanwhile, her husband finds it “very discouraging that his wife, who was the sole object of his existence, evinced so little interest in things which concerned him, and valued so little his conversation” (Chopin 34).
Robert, a foolish young man who dolts on her, arouses her to the possibility of true love. Eventually, she is drawn to him and must leave the confines of her marriage to explore this side of herself. It is at the instant of her decision to leave her coop that the bird metaphor appears again. “The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings” (Chopin 112). Imagining herself flying, she falls into the arms of an eager Robert. It is a passing thing. There is nothing beyond the moment for her. Robert disappears from her house and her heart. Nothing is left.
Just as the restrictive conventions of the South were gradually withdrawing, Edna no longer needs the conventions of her cage. Her wings have spread, and she has known the thrill of flight. Refusing to go backward, she remembers “the night she swam far out [into the Gulf], and recalled the terror that seized her at the fear of being unable to regain the shore” (Chopin 144).
Metaphorically, that fear is gone. The old conventions of the South no longer held a place for her. “She did not look back now, but went on and on, thinking of the blue-grass meadow that she had traversed when a little child, believing that it had no beginning and no end” (Chopin 146). Slowly, tired of the charade, Edna sinks into the Gulf.
Edna is the metaphor that Chopin wields. The charade of the South must end. The endless façade of unfelt passions for the past must stop. The real world awaits any who wish to grasp it. The long years of nostalgia that characterized Southern literature after the Civil War are straddled by the writings of Mary Boynton Chesnut and Kate Chopin. Just as Mary’s young friend had been too worn to live, Edna was too worn to be. Through Edna, the old South perished and a new South was born. It was a literary triumph that was unforeseen.
After Chopin, the South began to waken, to stumble from its stupor, to open itself to the possibilities of the world outside its borders. The bird was emerging from its cage, but only with short flights lest it receives, once again, mortal wounds.
Criticism abounded for Chopin, and not all of them favorable. In the end, she quit writing, worn down by the constant comments about her vision. Still, she provided the final spark, the ultimate foundation, the last bit of energy to the awakening of the voice of the South. Not long after Chopin quit writing, the United States entered WWI. Once again the South stood shoulder to shoulder with warriors from the North and soldiers from the West. Once again the South physically took its place on the firing line defending what it felt was worth defending.
When the fighting was over, and the men returned, they brought with them confidence in themselves and in the culture from which they sprang. Just as has been done here, the culture of the South examined itself, reminded itself of its worth, found themes of revival after terrible loss and became conscious of its own strengths.
A study of the South’s literature tells it all. The journey from loss and deprivation to the light of a new voice was complete. The foundations of the southern renaissance were laid through the evolution of the culture. Its roots grew deep and sucked the marrow of life. The literary world did not know, but it was holding its breath for the most compelling and real depictions of life in the South from the best, from the southerners themselves.
Works Cited
Cable, George Washington. The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life. New York: Sagamore, 1957. Print.
Chesnut, Mary Boykin, and Ben Ames Williams. A Diary from Dixie. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949. Print.
Chief Charlo. “Speech from 1876” A Flathead Indian Speaks. Web. 12 March 2016.
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories. 2006. Kindle. Project Gutenberg, 11 Mar. 2006. Web. 11 March 2016.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, and Elfriede Abbe. The American Scholar. 5th ed. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1955. Print.
Glasgow, Ellen Anderson Gholson, W. F. Baer, and W. Granville Smith. The Battle-ground. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1902. Print.
Gura, Philip F. American Transcendentalism: A History. First ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007. Print.
Harris, Joel Chandler, Frederick S. Church, and James Henry Moser. Uncle Remus His Songs and His Sayings: The Folk-lore of the Old Plantation. New York: D. Appleton and 1, 3, and 5 Bond Street, 1881. Print.
King, Grace Elizabeth. Monsieur Motte. Freeport, NY: for Libraries, 1969. Print.
Page, Thomas Nelson. In Ole Virginia: Or, Marse Chan and Other Stories. New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1926. Print.
