The American Southern Identity in Literature

Introduction

The literature of the American South has never been one of arbitrary and convenient geographic classification. Residents of what now constitutes the states south from Virginia and Maryland to Florida and west to Louisiana—despite great diversity in peoples and terrain—have long been identified, and often identified themselves, as a distinct civic and cultural group. The literature of this region possesses unique qualities and a full consciousness of its own uniqueness. Not surprisingly, whatever else may be the subject, a governing concern of Southern literature is with identity, the identity of the individual as a Southerner and the identity of Southerners—black and white, rich and poor, urban and rural—as a group and as a culture.

Even stylistically, Southern literature has often been associated with a distinct identity. This is typically seen as romantic and frequently grotesque, a quality which has come to be called Southern gothic. The gothic quality is distributed across genres, including the folktale, the romance, the history, the drama, and the agrarian fable. Yet while Southern gothic remains iconic, the literature of the American South continues to grow and diversify along with the people of the region, leading to numerous subgenres and overlapping critical classifications.

Movements and Genres

With the onset of European migration into Virginia there emerged a literature of the responsibility of the gentlemen of the oligarchy. These men, who rather self-consciously comprised the intellectual elite, were to provide political leadership. Although there is a strong sense of democracy in Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (1776), there is no question that it was written by a Southern gentleman, not a Northern egalitarian. The document's pledge at its end of "our Lives, our Fortunes and our Sacred Honor" is undeniably romantic. Nothing about the self-consciously elegant writings of George Washington or of Jefferson smacks of the plain style, for example, of the Northern Benjamin Franklin.

In another variation of the gentleman's prose style, Joel Chandler Harris of Georgia wrote folktales in carefully presented, stereotypical dialect of the black slave; one may argue that Chandler Harris' intention is that readers understand that the writer is a gentleman observer and is creating a romance about African Americans. The black folktale tradition was carried forward by Roark Bradford in Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun (1927), which was adapted into the play The Green Pastures (1930) by Marc Connelly, which won the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 1930.

While Harris, Bradford, and other white writers such as Paul Green were fashioning an image of Southern blacks, a parallel effort by African American authors to give identity to blacks developed. This movement began with the writings of Booker T. Washington and developed into the clearly Southern gothic novels of authors such as Richard Wright and Alice Walker. In The Color Purple (1982), for example, Walker depicts the lives of poor black farmers and sharecroppers.

The rural poor among white Southerners had been portrayed earlier by Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O'Connor, James Agee, and others with sympathy, humor, and unflinching naturalism. Even the more realistic presentations (such as Agee's) of these authors are cast in what can be called a Southern gothic mode. The gothic is unmistakable in O'Connor's twisted and horrific short stories or in Caldwell's Tobacco Road (1932). One may also label such works, as well as those of writers such as Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty, as agrarian fables. Intense religious experience, especially that of Fundamentalist Protestantism, is also a familiar motif in the literature dealing with the rural poor, whether black or white.

Meanwhile, the exporting of Southern gothic to Europe—notably in the works of Edgar Allan Poe—was greatly influential upon the French Symbolist movement of the early twentieth century, which in turn had a profound effect on the literature and art of the rest of the century. Poe's works are dark, morbid pictures of torment, as in the poem "The Raven," or of the criminal mind, as in the short story "The Tell-Tale Heart," both from the early 1840s.

In the twentieth century, William Faulkner combined the Southern gothic, the narrative of the gentleman, and the historical in a series of novels about the inhabitants of a mythological Mississippi county, Yoknapatawpha. One greatly admired work, The Sound and the Fury (1929), experiments with retelling the same events from the viewpoints of four distinct participants, each searching for an identity within the South: three white brothers and one of their family's black servants. In 1949, Faulkner became the first Southern writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. His works have remained icons of Southern literature, wielding great influence that critics have traced not only in later novels by Southerners but on American literature as a whole.

Other regional developments also proved broadly influential in the mid–twentieth century. In 1930, twelve Southern writers and intellectuals came together for a symposium at Vanderbilt University. The result was a volume of essays, I'll Take My Stand (1930), which reaffirmed the Southern faith in its cultural identity and called for the return to an ideal life based on agriculture. Henceforth the group was known as the Southern Agrarians and included important literary theorists, notably John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren. With Cleanth Brooks, Warren headed an influential group that practiced what became known as New Criticism. He won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction with his novel, All the King's Men (1946), a study of a poor Southern man who seeks his identity in the manipulation of political power, only to yield to corruption and violence. The Southern Agrarians, along with Faulkner, Caroline Gordon, Zora Neale Hurston, and others, played a major role in the flourishing of Southern literature that came to be known as the Southern Renaissance.

Following World War II, the seeds of the Southern Renaissance gave rise to another wave of writers who would produce many works later considered classics. In general, these authors brought more gender and racial diversity to mainstream Southern literature. Prominent names of the postwar era include O'Connor, McCullers, Katherine Anne Porter, Shirley Ann Grau, James Dickey, and Truman Capote. The Southern gothic continued to impose its identity in the late twentieth century in such works as the vampire sagas of Anne Rice or the urban middle-class stories of Anne Tyler.

The trend of diversification continued into the twenty-first century, helping to reshape Southern literature from the classic gothic style toward a wider array of styles. Many critics moved away from earlier characterizations and asserted that various different "Souths" were emerging not only in writing but also in broader culture and society. While established authors of the late twentieth century such as Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison continued to publish works with Southern connections, younger writers also expanded the boundaries of the category. Writers from and depicting the South who earned considerable acclaim in the 2000s and 2010s included Ann Pancake, Kevin Wilson, Ron Rash, and Jesmyn Ward, who won National Book Awards for Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017).

Literary Forms

Southern writing is found in a variety of literary forms. Poe and Sidney Lanier are two early poets who began a tradition enlarged upon by figures such as Ransom, Allen Tate, Elizabeth Maddox Roberts, and Warren, who in 1985 was appointed the first poet laureate of the United States. Washington and Jefferson are the progenitors of a strong group of Southern essayists who include many of the New Critics as well as the sensible voice of the journalist Ralph Magill and the irascible wit of H. L. Mencken. In oratory the eloquence of the South is reflected in a range of fiery speeches from Patrick Henry to Huey Long and to Martin Luther King Jr., most having to do with race, freedom, and political issues. Southern fiction abounds in novels and short stories.

Considering the intense contrasts—hence conflict—embodied in Southern culture, it is not surprising that quite a large number of Southern writers have turned to drama. Tennessee Williams is perhaps the best-known Southern dramatist. His powerful play A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) is a study of the destruction of the personality of Blanche Dubois, who is an embodiment of the genteel, hypocritical, and impossible ideals of the Old South. Her destroyer is her brother-in-law, Stanley, an uncouth representative of a new urban industrial culture. Lillian Hellman, in The Little Foxes (1939), also examines the identity of the Southern belle in all her complexity. Southern women writers wrestling with the definition of women in the South have been especially successful in the theater, with both Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart, 1979) and Marsha Norman ('night Mother, 1982) winning the Pulitzer Prize in drama.

Implications for Identity

That there is an identifiable Southern culture and a group of people who are Southerners is rarely denied. The nature and quality of Southern culture, however, is the subject of a seemingly endless debate. Prior to the Civil War, there was an Old South whose identity as an ideal of ancient Greek democracy was widely proclaimed by Southerners and seriously analyzed by such intellectuals as Edward Parrington (Main Currents in American Thought, 1927–30). After the Civil War, there emerged, in the words of Henry W. Grady, a new South, but this South still retained a powerful group identity, so powerful that much of Southern literature since the Civil War is centered on the individual's struggle to fit into the South or to escape from the South, or somehow to accomplish both ends simultaneously without complete destruction of personality. This conflicted desire is the burden of works such as William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) and Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman (1966).

Fixed and long established cultures tend to foster stereotypes, and much of the torment over personal identity in the South is brought on by the need to accept or reject the group ideal or stereotype. Such a struggle can be seen in Thomas Wolfe's acerbic Look Homeward, Angel (1929). Even a writer such as August Wilson, not a Southerner by birth, sensed the South of his family's past always intruding on the present. The historical informs two of his most powerful dramas: Two Trains Running (1990) and The Piano Lesson (1988).

African Americans, poor whites, and Southern women have arguably faced some of the most persistent stereotypes in all American literature. Various well-known works have used such depictions, whether in full acceptance or in more tongue-in-cheek or self-reflective ways. The Southern belle trope as well as various racist stereotypes of African Americans are thoroughly exploited by Margaret Mitchell in the popular novel Gone with the Wind (1936), which was adapted into one of the world's most famous films in 1939. In Alfred Uhry's play Driving Miss Daisy (1988), both the black chauffeur and the Jewish lady from Atlanta finally accept and enjoy living up to their stereotypes. Ignatius J. Reilly, in turn, clearly fulfills his identity as a peculiar, grotesque parody of the stereotype of urban poor white trash in John Kennedy Toole's brilliant comic piece, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), but Henley's women in The Debutante Ball (1981) both rage against and retreat to their identity as Southern ladies. Those Southern women who do find their personal realization in the cultural stereotype are, in Robert Harling's words, steel magnolias.

Just exactly what is Southern identity has produced a number of studies, perhaps the most famous of which is Joseph Wilbur Cash's work, The Mind of the South (1941). Similar studies, some critical of Cash, followed, including The Mind of the Old South (1961), The Americanization of Dixie, the Southernization of America (1974), and The Idea of the American South (1979). A variety of perspectives on the subject were included in the volume Southern Writers on Writing (2018).

Dorothy Allison

Bibliography

Bartley, Numan V. The New South 1945-1980: The Story of the South's Modernization. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Argues that the South was forced to embrace moderation, without entirely losing its culture, by the growth of cities in the region.

Bartley, Numan V., ed. The Evolution of Southern Culture. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. Eight essays on crucial aspects of Southern culture, ranging from religion to agrarianism, from politics to the hero in literature.

Cushman, Susan, editor. Southern Writers on Writing. UP of Mississippi, 2018.

Gray, Robert. Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Essays on Southern writers who specifically write about the region, including the Agrarians, Welty, Faulkner, and Percy.

Griffin, Larry J., and H. Doyle. The South as an American Problem. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Twelve essays by important historians and observers of the South. Argues that much of American culture has been fashioned by attitudes about the South.

Hall, B. C., and C. T. Wood. The South. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1995. A tour of the South and the cultural identities and icons of each subregion, from the swamps of Louisiana to the mountains of Tennessee.

"Modern Southern Literature Today." Deep South Magazine, 15 Apr. 2019, deepsouthmag.com/2019/04/15/modern-southern-literature-today/. Accessed 29 Aug. 2019.

Ransom, John Crowe, ed. I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. New York: Harper & Row, 1930. Twelve essays by leading Southern writers espousing agrarian over industrial life.

Robertson, Sarah. Poverty Politics: Poor Whites in Contemporary Southern Writing. UP of Mississippi, 2019.

Singhal, Daniel Joseph. The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. A thoughtful and illuminating study of the evolution of Southern culture and its literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Young, Stark. A Southern Treasury of Life and Literature. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937. A well-rounded collection of samples of the writing of important literary figures from colonial days to the mid-twentieth century.