Shakespeare and Masculinity in Southern Fiction: Faulkner, Simms, Page, and Dixon

Shakespeare and Masculinity in Southern Fiction

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Shakespeare and Masculinity in Southern Fiction Faulkner, Simms, Page, and Dixon

Joseph B. Keener

SHAKESPEARE AND MASCULINITY IN SOUTHERN FICTION

Copyright © Joseph B. Keener, 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60320-2 ISBN-10: 0-230-60320-3 Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Westchester Book Group First edition: February 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Kelli, who always believed.

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Contents

Introduction 1 William Gilmore Simms and William Shakespeare Combining the Father and the Son 2 Thomas Nelson Page’s Mythmaking and Shakespearean Masculinity 3 Fear of a Black Planet Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Narration of the Self via an Other

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4 Who’s Your Daddy? William Faulkner’s Making of the Father and Son

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5 I’m My Own Grandpa Quentin Compson’s Shakespearean Solution

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Epilogue

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Introduction

This new and gorgeous garment, majesty, Sits not so easy on me as you think. Brothers you mix your sadness with some fear. . . . Sorrow so royally in you appears That I will put the fashion on And wear it in my heart. Why then, be sad, But entertain no more of it, good brothers, Than a joint burden laid upon us all. For me, by heaven, I bid you assured, I’ll be your father and brother too.1 William Shakespeare, “2 Henry IV”

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ear Orangeburg, South Carolina, some fifty miles from Charleston, an unseasonably hot, late-April sun beats down on Woodlands, William Gilmore Simms’s antebellum plantation. Two stories of unimposing whitewashed brick and wood are accented by ubiquitous green shutters and capped with a rusted tin roof that looks as if it has been there since the days of Simms himself. A collection of smaller yet similar buildings circles the main house in deference. The impression is less like the columned Tara of popular imagination and more like a bed-and-breakfast. The year is 2002, but the place looks like some modern film production has decorated a set for 1852, hanging atmospheric Spanish moss from ancient trees that sprawl across a finely trimmed lawn, adding period touches right down to the dinner bell on a branch overhanging the carriage house, all in the name of verisimilitude. Descendants of Simms and his African slaves congregate here with academics from the William Gilmore Simms Society to honor this master of the plantation, novelist, poet, orator, essayist, dramatist, and would-be politician. To an outsider, this gathering may seem esoteric. Yet the keynote speaker for the Simms Conference, John C. Guilds, puts forth this estimation in his 1992 biography, Simms: A Literary Life: “Simms’s pivotal role as a kind of ancestral father to modern literature of

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the South cries for greater recognition.”2 Guilds, and many of the participants of the April 2002 Simms Conference, now wants to cast William Gilmore Simms in the role of literary ancestor. Some of these scholars, acolytes, and “Southernophiles” seem to have a need to fill the father role by appropriating this antebellum author. Guilds’s word choice is compelling; he can cast Simms’s right to canonization in any term he wants, yet he needs a patriarch. Why? These people are looking to the author to understand where they came from, who they are, and how to perform their identities. They are glancing backward to look forward, as Simms himself had done. He is their model, their father; the difference is that they will, perchance, find redemption for their father (Guilds’s “greater recognition”?) that the author was unable to achieve for his own patriarchs, both “real” and literary. A gnarled-looking man with a matching walking stick and an ancient two-piece suit is introduced to me as a distinguished philosophy professor from a major Southern university and a contributor to Harpers. Suitably impressed, I engage the man in what I think is our shared interest in Simms. The man peers out from a mass of peppered white hair from both head and face, broken only by his glasses and a gash of a mouth, seeming to bite the tongue within as I explain my idea that Southern, white, upper class authors such as Simms had appropriated their concept of masculinity from William Shakespeare (which implies the constructed, not the natural quality of masculinity). In the course of this explanation, I use a fatal term: gender studies. The aging philosopher draws himself up to full height and begins to rant about how gender studies has ruined men and has even been instrumental in creating a culture that allowed the recent terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Numbed by the man’s fervor, I realize for the first time during the entire conference that a great many of these academics, perhaps even the families themselves, adhere to the ideas of masculinity put forth in the works of William Gilmore Simms—he is being appropriated in the same way the Old South writer had acquired masculine ideals from the works of Shakespeare. Members of this Southern culture are still appropriating these paradigms of masculinity. These latter-day expropriations tend to focus on “this gallant Hotspur, this all-praised Knight” figure.3 Of all of the emotions that these rustic buildings; ancient, lumbering trees; slave-empty fields; and sun-dappled yards of Woodlands and the conference evoke, the most palpable is yearning. This kind of longing has translated to the raising and deifying of father-kings, both real and literary.

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Why would anyone write about William Shakespeare anymore? Seeming eons of bardolatry and its more recent iconoclastic Shakespearean atheism have drained the body dry and surely buried it in the backyard. The rest is for scavengers. Yet, like Hamlet Sr., the ghost of this literary patriarch still haunts the halls of American culture, exhorting, “Adieu, adieu, adieu! Remember me.”4 Embracing, rejecting, or being indifferent to William Shakespeare and his works still frequently defines one in cultures where he is pervasive. Fathers, especially literary and cultural icons, can be extremely difficult to kill. In countless books, critics offer valid cultural motivations for appropriations of William Shakespeare first and his texts second.5 Michael Dobson, however, exposes the root of the problem when he worries, “The history of Shakespeare’s changing significance for periods subsequent to his own is a history of different ‘appropriations,’ but they diverge widely in their accounts of how the process of appropriation works.”6 Dobson chooses interpretive communities as the most important factor and decries the strong individual or author, but the assumption is that strong authors and individuals are divorced from their immediate “interpretive community,” their cultural context.7 Authors disseminate first and are then disseminated. The relationship with their culture, as with their families, can be reciprocal, both making and being made at the same time. The same can be said of the afterlife of William Shakespeare and his works, especially in terms of masculinity—American, Southern, white, planter-class authors have, since before there was a “South,” made William Shakespeare a literary father and, by appropriating models and modes of masculinity from his texts and modifying them with their immediate culture, allowed themselves to be made in the process. Enter Judith Butler. Butler’s paradigm of gender citation in Bodies That Matter (1993) not only offers an understanding of how gender is constructed and performed but also addresses Dobson’s concern over how Shakespeare is appropriated. Butler argues that gender is a citation that must be constantly reinstituted. At the same time, predated citations may have become entrenched enough to become a “law.” Butler likens the relationship between citation and law to judges in a court. Judges refer to predated citations (laws) and make decisions accordingly. The citation is made and the law’s authority is reinstituted at the same time. In other words, the law is made anew and the judges offer their verdicts and the consequences.8 Butler does write of “constitutive constraints” and “punishable consequences,” but what her analogy is missing is that judges are allowed interpretation of the law. There is a world of difference in Sandra Day

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O’Connor and Judge Judy. Butler’s paradigm is valuable for understanding gender and its citational relationships and can even be applied to quell Dobson’s “how?” and its potential discomfort. To stretch Butler’s analogy to the breaking point, the four authors examined herein will act as the proverbial judges, citing William Shakespeare as the law and rendering interpretations and judgments in their own texts, often in the name of gender citation. Some will render just citations, others will abuse their power, and still others will end in indeterminacy and mistrial. William Gilmore Simms may not seem like an obvious subject of study. An enclave of critics, spearheaded by John C. Guilds, has made the effort to enshrine and canonize this author, but contemporary readers without specific interest in Simms’s time and place may find his works rough going. Yet Simms’s familial and cultural bonds make him ideally suited for a study of gender appropriation. In addition, Simms really was the first Southern professional author and published just over eighty volumes, making Anthony Trollope appear feeble. William Gilmore Simms is about as representative of an antebellum author as is available, if one feels the need for such constructs. More importantly, Simms produced works over the long historical epoch that his life encompassed (1806–1870). Watching his Shakespearean appropriations of masculinity change as his cultural circumstances dictated reveals the nature of appropriation. A younger Simms’s masculine appropriations matched his desire for nation building, and both were tied into familial bonds on a national and literary scale (though the two scales cannot be divorced). Simms appeals to what he perceives as an authority in both England and Shakespeare, eventually attempting to superannuate them at the same time. Rising sectional tensions between North and South, the chaos of the Civil War, and his brief sojourn in defeat all changed Simms’s masculine appropriations and how they were expressed in his texts. The crux of the lessons to be gleaned from Simms’s engagement with Shakespeare, his texts, and his culture is that appropriations are not static but mutable and alter with circumstances. Plotting these changes makes William Gilmore Simms worthy of study. Thomas Nelson Page was a “plantation Southern gentleman” who never actually ran a plantation. Page’s postwar texts are patient zero in the virulent plague that was and still is Lost Cause mythology. The romancer created a myth of an organic society where the white master was the good father, and everyone else, including the slaves, were his loyal children. His novels and stories pined for the antebellum days when this world was still intact and, in his later works, showed the

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damage done by the destroying of this family and its golden ways. Shot in soft lens, Page’s old world where people knew their place (class, race, and gender) was a constant rebuke to his end of the century at that time. His images, and disturbingly his ideology as well, have been burning themselves into both Northern and Southern consciousness from his day to the present. The relationship between Page’s ideals from both Shakespeare and his culture and his myth building is palpable. His mythic family romance had ramifications for gender citations as well. Models of masculinity from Shakespeare’s texts were modified with Lost Cause ideology; Page’s determinations of who a “gentleman” was; and a new class mobility brought on by industrialization, the rise of town culture, and a shift in power from traditional landed gentry to those capable of acquiring money. Page’s “moonlight and magnolias” work suggests much about memory, its lack of perspective, and the elements people use to construct the past. Especially compelling in Page is how this myth and its attendant masculinity often undercut themselves. Even in a universe of his own making, Page cannot curtail gender slippage. Thomas Dixon put the “black” in “black rapist beast.” This supposed reverend defined white masculinity against what he projected from his mind to black African bodies as black sexual animalism, both male and female, and made his race, class, and gender the protectors of white women everywhere. Dixon purloined from Shakespeare’s texts not only models of masculinity but racial issues and attitudes as well. This flesh-and-blood Iago did not whisper his racism and manipulations in people’s ears but poured his bile over such abhorrent texts as The Leopard’s Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1903). Hopefully, Thomas Dixon’s texts are only embraced by the League of the South and Free South types at best, but that does not mean there is nothing worthy of study therein. Dixon’s value here is the consideration of the intersection of race and gender and how that affects appropriations. Like Page, Dixon builds his own myth and peoples it with appropriations and citations that assist him in restoring a threatened white masculinity. Especially fascinating is how, like Page, he undercuts his own constructions of both white and black masculinity and also reveals their interdependence for definition. In a Plessy versus Ferguson world, Dixon inadvertently proves that the two races are not separate and tries to cite them as being inherently unequal. In the end, Dixon reveals more about Southern white masculinity by allowing it to be read through its fanciful constructions, both white and black.

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William Faulkner is key in studying Southern, white, planter-class masculinity. One reason for this importance is his interrogation of seemingly all relative identity politics—race, class, sex, and gender. True, Faulkner was more successful with some than with others, but his modernist project gets at the heart of what it means to be masculine, feminine, black, white, man, or, to a lesser degree, woman. The definition that Faulkner produces for all of these categories is a firm, “I just don’t know.” Old Southern codes of conduct, familial transmissions, and appropriations from others lead only to ambiguity in Faulkner’s fictive world. Bruce R. Smith writes that Shakespeare’s works are “teaching us that masculinity is contingent in all sorts of ways,” and also “giv[ing] us the opportunity to imagine versions of masculinity that may be more equitable and more fulfilling than those we already know.”9 Smith could be writing of William Faulkner’s works. Faulkner may not be able to answer these questions of identity, but his works can remind readers of just how important the questions are. However, there is another association between the novelist and the Elizabethan playwright that demands Faulkner’s inclusion here. Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.”10 O’Connor is expressing the status that Faulkner is accorded in Southern literature, not just as the author of The Sound and the Fury or Absalom! Absalom! but as a thing unto himself, the pope of all things Southern and literary. O’Connor’s anxiety of influence is similar to that of many Shakespearean would-be successors. Whether one embraces, rejects, or attempts to ignore him, William Faulkner has become definitional like Shakespeare before him. Faulkner and Shakespeare have both become icons. This iconography serves authors and poets but is erected by critics and academies. Search the Modern Language Association’s database (or almost any literary database for that matter) and the largest number of hits will be William Shakespeare and William Faulkner. Towering libraries could be built just to house the criticism, esoteric publications, and works of these two artists. The treatment of these authors exceeds mere canonizing. Bardolatry will need a counterpart— perhaps Faulkolatry. Tying these two men and their art together is not the original contribution of this work. Literary critics have been conjoining artists of various stripes to Shakespeare seemingly since there has been a “Shakespeare.” There is a more resonant connection than critical expediency.

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The narrative arc that this project follows is its significance. Shakespeare has been made into a literary, national, and political father. William Gilmore Simms tries to first prove and then reject his paternity by appropriating Shakespeare and then providing his own citations of masculinity. Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon latch onto this father and modify his models with diverse, if not totally dissimilar, cultural circumstances and ideologies. Finally, there is William Faulkner. Faulkner is being made a father in much the same manner as Shakespeare. The appropriation of Shakespeare comes full circle, and it takes an examination of masculinity refracted through the prism of father-son relationships to understand both why and how this phenomenon came to be and persists. Therein lies the taproot. Sons attempt with varying degrees of success to mature into fathers. That is not to say that William Faulkner is “naturally” a paterfamilias. The author has been retrospectively made a father, created in his own image. The emphasis is on made. This assertion raises questions: Who are the children? Why do they make their own fathers? How do they make their own fathers? Are these made fathers sufficient? Some of the answers live in example in the study herein. Some are much more difficult than can be fully addressed in such a short space. The most immediate answer regarding offspring is the artists subsequent to first Shakespeare and then Faulkner. Nevertheless, the grounds of Simms’s Woodlands plantation mentioned above contain the key. The ostensible solution is that these historians and literary critics long for major figures to hang their discipline on, to deify, and to devote their intellectual energies to. However, there is a larger cultural phenomenon at work on Simms’s estate. Academics are accompanied on the lawn of the author’s former home by Simms’s actual descendants. In that moment, these professionally Southern bibliophiles belonged. The urge for a father is the inclination for the self. Like Simms, Page, Dixon, and Faulkner before them, most humans will have a father to fulfill that yearning and help them arrive at an identity, even if they have to become “philoprogenitive” and create him to do so.

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Chapter 1

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Wi l l i a m G i l m o re S i m m s a n d Wi l l i a m S h a k e s pe a re Combining the Father and the Son

Have we preserved the household virtues of the Englishman? Do we maintain his tastes in this particular;—do we honor those humanities which every lesson of our common ancestry should teach us to revere? Do we sustain the gentle—do we venerate the old? Are we, like them, solicitous always in the decencies of life and society? Do we bow to the intellect? Seek we to promote by letters, religion and the arts, the altars of high civilization . . . what is our rank, compared with other nations, in the estimates of the civilized?1 William Gilmore Simms, The Simms Reader

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ooking to England for cues of intellect and “civilization,” bolstering his country’s self-image through “common ancestry” yet chafing paradoxically at the status of the American intelligentsia and culture, William Gilmore Simms sounds insecure. Simms would have answered the barrage of rhetorical questions hurled at the University of Alabama Erosophic Society with an emphatic “no” and a final “low.” This insecurity stems from not being a worthy son to “the Englishman,” and such a charge can be read as an issue of masculinity. Perhaps this insufficiency compelled Simms to appropriate British culture, William Shakespeare, and the models of masculinity encoded in his scripts. More particularly, the blood-and-guts cavalier with a Hotspur spirit, a Henry V bearing, and a “Thank you M’am” gentility

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swaggers throughout Simms’s works, such as Robert Singleton in The Partisan (1835) or Gabriel Harrison in The Yemassee (1835). To create such a man is to reconstitute the Old South myth of the cavalier and his attendant ideals, including his masculinity.2 That this myth persisted can be seen in Robert Cave’s 1911 screed, “The Men in Gray.” Cave rants that the South was “led by the descendants of the Cavaliers,” and possessed “a manly contempt for moral littleness, a high sense of honor, a lofty regard for their plighted faith, a strong tendency toward conservatism.”3 This ideal was not just bare-chested manliness, but a machismo with an attendant ideology. In other words, Confederate Hotspurs. But to focus on these Hotspurs in Simms’s works is merely to perpetuate this old myth anew and to reduce his engagement with Shakespeare to solely a Lost Cause ideology. Simms took possession of many characters and their attributes from the works of William Shakespeare. The title character of his novel Guy Rivers (1834) is a frontier Macbeth; husband Edward Clifford poisons his wife, calling himself “Othello”; while Frank Kingsley plays his “Iago” in Confession (1841). In Beauchampe (1842), Margaret and Beauchampe’s double suicide rings with the tragic romance of Romeo and Juliet, while Joscelyn (1867) displays its own “Hamlet” in the character of Walter Dunbar. William Gilmore Simms’s work could still be reduced to plantation idealizing, cavalier homogenizing, and Confederate proselytizing and, indeed, it is all of these. Yet what makes him worthy of consideration, and less just another literary defender of the South, both old and new, is his manipulation of Shakespearean gender constructions and the motivations behind it. Simms’s work contains yet moves beyond the Hotspur ideals of martial heroics, courage, fiery spirit, and honor in its constructions of masculinity—it does so by focusing on father-son paradigms. Simms creates a continuum of sons, most notably in his Revolutionary War novels, of Hamlet characters on one end, Prince Hals in the middle, and Hotspurs on the other extreme. Nevertheless, the fathers and their relationships to these symbolic progeny are the most significant and consistent appropriations. The absent Henry IV, the inferior yet present father figure Falstaff, and the ghost of Hamlet Sr. are all models for fathers, purveyors of masculinity as received by the patriarch. These fathers represent failures and successes, and varying levels of achievement. Simms had to be looking for more than square-jawed heroes for his literary offspring to emulate. In Simms, however, Shakespeare’s characters are not merely shorthand for the white planter class’s depiction of masculinity. Simms

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produces these appropriated father-son paradigms as a means of replacing his biological father, justifying the culture of a young America versus Great Britain, and eventually defending the American South. The author combines these fathers and sons into single characters, such as Captain Porgy, in an attempt to redeem the fallen, lost, or incomplete fathers and allow the sons to perform their masculine identities to the fullest. In a sense, save the father, save the son. Simms pulls off this act of procreation by producing literary offspring, creating representations seemingly meant to wander beyond the bounds of Simms’s texts into his culture’s consciousness. His texts offer larger-than-life literary combinations to feed a hunger that existed in his reality for a successful reiteration of masculinity that is both father and son, American and Southern. Simms’s texts contain acts of appropriation that reveal a defensiveness regarding identity that radiates from the personal to regional and back again. Perhaps this stance is what Simms has for the Simms Conference attendees (even if they do not exactly realize it!); his concerns are theirs as well. These father-son paradigms divulge the citational nature of gender; reading this author’s works through this prism is illuminating. Judith Butler argues in her 1993 book Bodies That Matter that individual sexed “I” positions are created as a reiteration of hegemonic norms. She notes, “This productive reiteration can be read as a kind of performativity. Discursive performativity appears to produce that which it names, to enact its own referent, to name and to do, to name and to make . . . reinvocation reconstitutes the law.”4 Just as Shakespeare reconstituted law through performativity and reiteration in his texts, so does William Gilmore Simms. However, this idea of Simms appropriating Shakespeare’s citations is not the same as his purely “copying” them. When Simms invokes appropriations from Shakespeare’s scripts, he is reconstituting those citations, making them as much as his citations are being made by them. Butler does offer a theoretical basis for this variance: The embodying of sex would be a kind of “citing” of the law, but neither sex nor law can be said to preexist their various embodyings and citings. Where the law appears to predate its citation, that is where a given citation has become established as “the law.” Further, the failure to “cite” or instantiate it correctly or completely would be at once the mobilizing condition of such a citation and its punishable consequence. Since the law must be repeated to remain an authoritative law, the law perpetually reinstitutes the possibility of its own failure.5

Shakespeare’s texts preexist Simms’s, a “law” in a Butlerian sense, but this antebellum author reinstitutes them by citing through his

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own texts. Simms is, in effect, citing a sexed position on paper. Butler discusses the possibility of failure at every moment of citation; she uses the example of judges who make the law every time they cite it in a courtroom. While laws may sometimes seem rigid, the interpretation of them is not, frequently leading to ambiguity and slippage despite the initial pretense of authority. The law makes the court and vice versa—the relationship is reciprocal and leaves room for failure. This “room for failure” is part of what drives much of Simms’s work, especially his Revolutionary War novels. This series includes the following works: The Partisan (1835), Mellichampe (1836), The Scout or The Kinsmen (1841), Katherine Walton (1851), Woodcraft (1852), The Forayers (1855), Eutaw (1856), and perhaps even Joscelyn, which was published serially in a Northern periodical after the Civil War. Captain Porgy appears in all but two of these works and wistfully intones in Eutaw, “I dream of a time, when every man will, perforce, fall into his right place.”6 This sentiment could be a working thesis of William Gilmore Simms’s creative output. The author struggles throughout his long literary career to put fathers and sons into “the right place.” Porgy’s expression of concern for people to be in their “right place” could mean many things to Simms depending on his ever-changing circumstances and literary focus. Simms lived from 1806 to 1870 and was a prolific, productive author.7 Over this thirty-year career and the course of his life, Simms’s circumstances and postures would change. Simms moved from one dogma to the other due to the long, chaotic, historical epoch in which the author lived and worked.8 Yet, even if it is for differing reasons depending on the era, the one constant that remains throughout is the concern for white planter-class masculinity and its place in the “natural” order. In the South, gender construction cannot be examined without the consideration of race, class, and sexuality.9 Simms’s work supports this assertion, in the relationship between Captain Porgy and Tom in Woodcraft, or between the slave Hector and the Matthews family in The Yemassee, or in Simms’s nonfiction writings and orations, such as Slavery in America, Being a Brief Review of Miss Martineau on That Subject (1838), The Southern Convention (1850), and The Social Principle: The True Source of National Permanence (1842). Yet, before these relationships can be explored, it is imperative to understand Simms’s perspective on the planter-class white male—a point on which critics do not seem to agree.10 Simms seems paradoxically a part of the aristocracy and an outsider to this closed, hereditary circle, a protean social construct and critical cipher as much as

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some Shakespearean characters themselves, and part Charlestonian Edmund and Edgar, if King Lear’s nature and custom may be employed. Simms’s class may be difficult to pin down for critics, but he would not stand for such class ambiguity in what is undoubtedly his finest creation, the lovingly rendered Captain Porgy. When Porgy is dressed by his servants in Woodcraft, the narrator exclaims, “Talk of the iron garments of ancient chivalry! Never did the closing of rivets on the part of the knights of the English Harrys and Edwards, on the eve of battle, require more time and painstaking, or cause more anxiety to pages and squires, and armor-bearers, and armorers, then did the costuming of their master.”11 The context here is a scene of humor, yet Simms’s gentleman does not fit into his outfit as his English forefathers did—he is deficient to the point of being comic. Porgy’s estimation may be a sober assessment of his generation versus the Anglo-fathers he longs to emulate, or perhaps it is merely an act of self-deprecation. In the middle of this slapstick lies a grain of truth that makes Porgy ring true, painfully so for men of Simms’s generation. Porgy offers an explanation for why he cannot live up to the “English Harrys and Edwards,” in the same novel. He laments, “but the curse of my generation was that our fathers lived too well, were too rapidly prosperous, and though they did not neglect the exercise of proper industry in themselves, they either did not know how to teach it to their children, or presumed on the absence of any necessity that they should learn.”12 If Porgy’s generation is cursed, it is due to deficient or shortsighted fathers; the result is questionable offspring. The notion of generational conflict and finger pointing will appear in Simms’s text more so than just in this episode, and the direction in which the finger points will depend on shifting circumstances. William Gilmore Simms does, however, attempt to combat this problem by appropriating father-son paradigms from William Shakespeare and combining them into single characters in the hopes of redeeming all, of remaking a Southern gentleman worthy of his English forbears and, hopefully, eventually superseding them. Simms’s aim was to combine these fathers and sons to produce a new, American gentleman, one based on older models.13 Simms wanted the old definition back, and he used Shakespeare to get it. Why Shakespeare? Simms’s cultural context, the city of Charleston, was infused with ties to the British aristocracy.14 These ties produced larger cultural reasons for the Shakespearean impulse. A feeling of American inferiority was stoked by a “lingering sense of colonialism.”15 If not militarily, America was still culturally subjugated by

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British rule. Simms’s Revolutionary War saga had to be affected by this sense, making the corpus of his work reactionary and defensive. The beginning points of overcoming these feelings of inadequacy were appropriation and emulation. In a nationalistic echo of the primal scene, this Freudian killing of the father would enable an American progeny. Simms conceptualizes this surmounting through apologia, stating in his 1846 Views and Reviews in American Literature, History, and Fiction, “The early labors of a newly established people, in all the intellectual arts, must necessarily be imitative. They advance by regular steps . . . in this progress, they can only advance through the assistance of other nations.”16 This thinking explains the phenomena that popular American authors of the early Simms era became so by adapting European literary conventions.17 The key word is “adapting”; planterclass white males did not merely lift ideas and forms wholesale, but used them to fit their particular needs. One such need was acceptance by their audience and literary forbears; perhaps this validation would lead to acceptance of self as well. But, more specifically, why Shakespeare? Michael Dobson observes in The Making of the National Poet (1992), “Shakespeare had often been recognized as occupying a position directly analogous to that of God the Father. . . . Shakespeare had been normatively constitutive of British identity as the drinking of afternoon tea.”18 Both Guilds in reference to Simms (as quoted in the “Introduction”) and Dobson regarding Shakespeare use paternalistic terms to describe these two authors. The impetus for Simms and his kind must have been to commandeer Shakespeare and acquire Great Britain or, at the very least, please it. In Judith Butler’s terms, these men could reconstitute this law through reiteration and rest assured of their own performativity, quelling insecurity while reinvocating a privileged citation, a law. With Shakespeare comes a “seriousness” that a young America could use.19 This posture is born out of a defensiveness, which in this case led to nation building (or the other way around?) and may have been the primum mobile, but planter-class white men had to begin by reiterating their individual roles. The defensive constructions of identity ricocheted from nation, to region, to individual, and back again. The Charlestonian planter class and their regional counterparts engaged in such an activity, offering a young Simms both a modus operandi and ample exposure to the likes of Shakespeare. Paradoxically, Simms endeavored to break with British tradition while gleaning images of fathers, sons, and their relationships from the cultural apex of that nation’s high art. The reason may have been a “superstitious awe of the classics” as W. J. Cash notes in his 1941

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The Mind of the South.20 Perhaps adaptation to tradition takes place by using old models for new purposes;21 Simms was trying to construct first a national and then a regional literature through older models. Both theories apply to Simms, but the compelling point is gender as a category more so than either cultural consideration. After all, status and gender identity are never quite a sure thing for white men in the antebellum South.22 What better way to shore up a tenuous grasp on masculinity than to appeal to a perceived authority? Simms’s appropriation seems a contradiction in terms, aggressive and defensive at the same time—perhaps even passive-aggressive. The salient feature of his work is a break with fathers both biological and national in an attempt to rebuild these relationships in a more equitable and fulfilling way. Shakespeare’s influence over Simms’s culture and the man himself cannot be overstated.23 Likewise, Shakespeare loomed large in the autodidact Simms’s reading and, eventually, his literature. Simms wrote articles about Shakespeare, collected Shakespeare Apocrypha, annotated plays, wrote introductions, and even adapted Timon of Athens for the stage.24 The prolific Simms performed the task of attempting to give Shakespeare to his own region before, during, and even after producing his own literature—the author was soaked in Shakespeare while trying to produce his own works and the masculine citations therein. Simms’s novels also demonstrate this obsessiveness, offering a preponderance of Shakespearean quotations.25 More importantly, the young author wrote in the December 1828 edition of Southern Literary Gazette, “For the universal heart there is Shakespeare.”26 This thinking reveals a tendency to universalize Shakespeare, a dogma that persists to this day. Of special note is Simms’s focus on the metaphoric “heart” in this universality, as if this basic feature of humanity supersedes culture, therefore allowing not only Shakespeare to have the key to it but Simms to have access as well. This proselytizing seems biblical in its expression and intent. Still, Simms hoped to universalize a strictly cultural appropriation from this deified source—the cultural hybrid that would be the Southern white planter-class male; an amalgam that would persist, made up of elements of Shakespearean models of masculinity and the pressures of Southern culture. Bruce R. Smith theorizes thus in Shakespeare and Masculinity (2000): Over the past 400 years Shakespeare’s scripts have been performed tens of thousands of times, in places all over the world . . . within different cultural

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assumptions about what constitutes masculinity. In these performances masculinity must inevitably represent the coalescence of ideas shared by actors and audiences, whoever they are wherever they may be, with ideas coded in Shakespeare’s scripts. The result is a cultural hybrid, a coalescence of early modern ways of performing masculinity with ways of belonging to another place and time.27

If Simms found the current white planter-class males deficient, first in comparison to the British, then the American nation, then within his region, and then possibly himself, he would solve this problem by creating cultural hybrids in his literature. He would offer a working out of reality in literature, as if one could be the panacea for the other. These hybrids are “A son who is the theme of honor’s tongue”28 like Hotspur, the cunning of a Prince Harry that hides yet eventually forces Hotspur to admit, “Thy name in arms were now as great as mine!”29 with a dash of the “noble heart” of Hamlet, complete with its contemplative, dark grandeur.30 A Fortinbras would not do, as he was too successful, a flip side for a Danish prince. These models also contain elements of the successful father-king in Bolingbroke, who says, “whilst on earth I rain/ My waters—on the earth,”31 yet Simms still felt, “but for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff/ true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore/ more valiant being as he is old Jack Falstaff, banish not/ him thy Harry’s company, banish not him thy Harry’s/ company—banish plump Jack, and banish all the/ world.”32 William Gilmore Simms would take these varying models and mix them with an ideal of Southern gentility.33 Of course this meant white, male, upper class, and preferably of “good stock.” Simms would not settle for one model, as seems to be the case in most acts of literary emulation; he wanted the best of each flawed man, which suggests a slightly different agenda than mere homage. The blending of all of these male constructions into one character makes Simms unique, but there is more to it than that.34 Simms’s hybrids merge fathers and sons into one. Simms takes this course of action in the name of redemption. Falstaff is flawed, and Bolingbroke, though ascending to the throne, is guilty of usurpation. Sons fare no better in Shakespeare and frequently meet untimely deaths. The impetus for combining these fathers and sons is to make one good gentleman out of the best of these filial connections and Simms’s cultural context—in effect, to produce a King Henry V, a son who exceeds the father in his royalty, gentility, and, most of all, masculinity. A son capable of spouting,

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We never valued this poor seat of England, And therefore, living hence did give ourself To barbarous license—as ’tis ever common Than men are merriest when they are from home. But tell Dauphin I will keep my state, Be like a king, and show my sail of greatness When I do rouse me in my throne of France.35

Not only do fathers benefit from this coalescing of models, but sons also can become successful versions of their fathers and reiterate their masculinity in strong, if not stereotypical, ways. Harry is able to transmogrify himself into Henry V to reiterate his masculine position first for his father, then for his court, and finally for his enemies, such as the Dauphin. Henry V is then imbued with all the braggadocio and swagger this citational position not only allows but also demands. Simms’s Captain Porgy is the aftereffect, the manifestation of the cultural hybrid, this coalescence. He is Shakespearean and a Southern gentleman (as defined above), British and American Southern, and father and son—Simms’s experiment in making masculinity. To question who Porgy really is in Simms’s work and trace his history through the novels is to determine if the author’s rewriting of the Southern gentleman succeeds and, therefore, if Simms’s partisan does so as well. Captain Porgy’s advent in The Partisan (1835) is not one of the hero or central character, but the work serves to unleash him on Simms’s audience. He stands out amid the cardboard characters, such as the title character Robert Singleton, even though he is merely comic relief. The novel follows the exploits of those joining Francis Marion’s partisans to fight the British army. Lieutenant Porgy (not yet having advanced in rank) has the body and appetite of Falstaff coupled with the fighting spirit of Hotspur. Simms’s partisan is a hybrid from the start, even before Simms genuinely begins his crosspollination. Porgy’s role in the succeeding Mellichampe (1836) is not much larger—he does, however, appear more dignified, more of a camp philosopher, and less the buffoon, and becomes the mouthpiece for all partisans who are looked down on as being inferior to the regular army. This more dignified role still has a whiff of the defensive, a constant in the works of William Gilmore Simms generally and in the portrayal of Porgy specifically. Porgy is not present in The Scout (1841).36 Katherine Walton (1851) is second only to Woodcraft (1852) in Porgy sightings and revelations. Much of the novel is set in

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the drawing rooms of Charleston (stereotypically feminine?), but Captain Porgy maintains his life in Marion’s camp (stereotypically masculine?), ever vigilant in his engagement of the enemy. Woodcraft is written specifically about Porgy, as the aging Southern gentleman returns from the war and attempts to put his plantation and love life back in order, and is the fullest expression of Simms’s seminal character. The Forayers (1855) and Eutaw (1856) are the last two Porgy incarnations. Simms creates a younger Porgy and returns him to the Revolutionary War, as if he and his partisan are taking a step back in both time and identity. The first novel and its sequel display a subjugated officer Porgy who knows how to win the war in a timely way, but his admonitions go unheeded, causing undue hardship. Captain Porgy does not survive William Gilmore Simms’s Civil War experiences and is nowhere to be seen in Joscelyn. Given the author’s great affection for this central character of his, this absence is suggestive of the trauma of the war for Simms. Porgy would be Simms’s most representative character by repetition alone, but just what exactly he represents is a little more difficult to unearth. A key to understanding this character is to consider models for the blustery captain. However, critics, with their usual tendency for assent, cannot agree on just who the model for Porgy is—Falstaff, Prince Hal, Hotspur, a general character drawn on Elizabethan drama, Simms both real and ideal, the “ideal Southern gentleman,” or a vacillation between or a combination thereof.37 All of these definitions focus on the need to delineate between the gentleman, lower classes, Africans, women, and even the postwar Southern aristocracy, such as it was, and have the taint of Southern nationalism. William C. Davis explains in Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (2002) that even long before the Civil War “some Southern spokesmen proclaimed that the features of their society and culture were sufficiently distinct that they were in effect a separate people from the North.”38 This attitude persists today and seems to inform some of the above readings of Captain Porgy. Who is right about Simms’s protagonist? At the risk of slipping into relativism, they are all right. Porgy has become many things to scores of readers and critics, and they find his sources in a variety of constructions. The ability to do so reveals the richness of the character, the layering of one composition atop the other. Porgy is an onion to be peeled by layers, with Falstaff on the outside and the author himself at the center. Porgy is Falstaff, Bolingbroke, Hotspur, Hal, Hamlet, and the ideal Southern gentleman. He is William Gilmore Simms and a literary character, creator and creation, from Simms’s

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head to the page and back again. Porgy is a cipher. More importantly, he is Simms performing masculinity on paper, a literary reiteration. Falstaff is the point of entry for understanding Porgy and his appropriated masculinity. Though they may not agree on to what degree Falstaff makes up Porgy, all the above-mentioned critics tip their hats to the fat knight. Indeed, Simms’s text begs the comparison in both physicality and manner upon Porgy’s arrival in The Partisan: “As his own height was not inconsiderable, yet showed him corpulent still. At a glance you saw that he was a jovial philosopher—one who enjoyed his bottle with his humors, and so did not suffer the one to be soured by the other.”39 Simms revels in the epicurean nature of Porgy, but it is the “jovial philosopher” element of Falstaff that the author will most notably embrace as the Revolutionary War series continues. Still, Porgy is at his most Falstaffian (in the sense of his buffoonery) in action and tone in an early scene in which he disguises himself as a beast to catch terrapins for the evening’s dinner, a move Simms will seem to regret in a later passage.40 Also noteworthy in Porgy’s first appearance is a direct reference to Falstaff, as if the author wants the two characters associated. “But he [Porgy] was not a mere eater. He rather amused himself with a hobby when he made food his topic, as Falstaff discoursed on his cowardice without feeling it.”41 Simms ameliorates Shakespeare’s character, perhaps because he is about to do the same with his Southern rendering of him in the persona of Porgy. Simms adopts the fire, courage, and martial spirit of Hotspur, the cunning and self-dramatizing of Prince Hal, and even shades of Hamlet into his father figure, while including elements of their relationships with their fathers as well. This act of combining is why the Falstaff comparison does not hold consistently true for all readers. How critics and generalized readers alike assess Porgy’s antecedents depends on which strand of his personality and what specific Simms novels they choose to examine. Like Shakespeare’s before him, William Gilmore Simms’s version of Falstaff would not be a biological father, but rather one who functions as a father figure for several younger male characters throughout the series, most palpably young Arthur Eveleigh in Woodcraft. This role is a chief part of Porgy’s identity. Judith Butler illuminates this idea with significant questions from Gender Trouble (1990): “To what extent is ‘identity’ a normative ideal rather than a descriptive feature of experience? And how do the regulatory practices that govern gender also govern culturally intelligible notions of identity?”42 Simms’s construction of gender through father-son matrices appropriated from Shakespeare and altered to fit his circumstances mirrors this societal

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notion of a “normative ideal” in his construction of Captain Porgy’s identity. Simms’s literary enterprise could be read as less a descriptive feature of his culture and more an attempt to establish an identity as a normative ideal. This attempt, however, would fail. In this instance, it is the ideal of the Southern gentleman as defined by W. J. Cash in The Mind of the South (1941) that is this epitome.43 This normative ideal went into Simms’s construction of Porgy, but it is tempered by his ambiguous relationship to the aristocracy (as a selfmade man) and his compulsion to redeem inadequate fathers and sons. Falstaff is not who most people think of as an “ideal” model for fatherhood. In fact, Sir John is not a masculine ideal in constructing gender either. Many exemplars of fatherhood and more stereotypical citations of masculinity exist in Shakespeare’s texts, yet Simms chooses him as a “sort-of ” father just as Prince Hal does. A clue to the reason for this choice lies in The First Part of King Henry the Fourth. The beginning of the play portrays a young Prince Hal of bad reputation, for he is not the ideal son and prince that his foil Hotspur appears to be. Hal has spent his time avoiding the princely duties of a good son, wasting his time in taverns with the likes of Falstaff. Act 2, scene 4 begins with the young prince receiving notice from Falstaff that he is to be called before his biological father to make an accounting. This exchange ensues: Falstaff : Well, thou wilt be horribly chid tomorrow when thou comest to thy father. If thou love me, practice an answer. Prince: Do thou stand for my father, and examine me upon the particulars of my life.44

The two enact a scene in which Falstaff takes on the role of Hal’s father and interrogates him about his questionable actions. Hal has requested this somewhat dubious father figure to act in his biological father’s stead. The errant prince can answer his father’s charges by rehearsing with Falstaff; in this way, he is safer. Simms mimics Hal in this preference—unable to choose between his own and the Southern fathers around him in reality, he chooses a safer literary character and a flawed one at that. Porgy is Simms’s greatest creation, his most recurring character, and a constant father figure in the Revolutionary War saga, yet a defining element of this partisan is Hal’s stand-in father. Simms’s attitude toward fathers is betrayed by this choice—the deeply flawed father is the starting point for redemption. A facile explanation for this choice would be that Falstaff is more fun, more entertaining than other Shakespearean fathers. Indeed, the above-mentioned

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terrapin scene from The Partisan is typical of the comic element of Porgy, yet a little disconcerting as well. Porgy queries young John, “Did I not seem to you very peculiar, very remarkable, and strange—nay something ridiculous, John, when you saw me crawling after terrapins? A man of my presence ridiculous!”45 Though not exactly iambic pentameter, Porgy uses the stilted diction that Simms gives all his upperclass men, as if he is marking them much like Shakespeare did with the use of verse versus prose. Porgy’s question is one that may reverberate in the reader’s mind; the character and Simms’s only answer are an imagined bearing. Reality and imagination are difficult to separate in Porgy’s estimation of himself, as is frequently the case with many. Porgy would change over the course of the saga, but Simms’s initial impulse was to portray this father-king appropriation in the manner of a jester.46 However, the texts as a whole beg the reader to consider Porgy as more than sheer entertainment and should be read in light of how the Shakespearean scene begun above develops. Falstaff is made the father by the son, Hal, and uses this position to promote his own interests. As the king, Sir John immediately follows charges against Hal with praise of one of his companions, himself. Falstaff as Bolingbroke is, in a sense, attempting to rewrite his own history through a work of fiction—his scene with Hal. William Gilmore Simms wrote his confidant James Henry Hammond on December 15, 1848, “My novels aim at something more than a story. I am really . . . revising history.”47 As does Falstaff, so does Simms, and both through the use of fiction. In a sense, Falstaff begat Simms, Simms begat Porgy, and Porgy begat a history Simms could live with, an acceptable offspring. As Shakespeare’s scene proceeds, Falstaff entreats the young prince to banish all except himself. Hal’s answer is as follows: Prince: Dost thou speak like a king? Do thou stand in for Me and I’ll play my father. Falstaff: Depose me? If thou doest it half so gravely, so majestically, both in word and matter, hang me up by the heels for a rabbitsucker and a poulter’s hare.48

Falstaff believes he can play the role better than Hal, yet his request for inclusion in his son’s life, at the moment both figurative and real, is met with the son’s demand to take the father’s place and enact the part, as he thinks it should be, more “king-like.” This role includes a stern rebuke of the father-son in the prince’s position plus an attack on his companion, the very real Falstaff. Falstaff ultimately plays none

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of these roles well, a fate Simms would try to save Porgy from by making him his cultural hybrid. The seemingly inadequate father figure (Falstaff ), taking on the role of the son, attempts to defend not only the son but more explicitly himself as well. Prince Hal barrages Falstaff (now Hal) with stinging accusations in question form, queries meant to tear down the father figure, culminating with the epithet, “That villainous abominable misleader of youth, Falstaff, that old white bearded Satan.”49 Hal’s charge leaves Falstaff begging for mercy and defending his character. Falstaff pleads, “Banish plump Jack, and banish/ all the world,” and the prince replies, “I do, I will.”50 The pronouns here allow for interpretation. Hal could be himself, speaking to the inadequate father figure, Falstaff, or he could be playing the role of Bolingbroke (his biological father), speaking to Hal (himself ). In a sense, all of these personae run together in Shakespeare’s scene, requiring interpretation, allowing for a reader’s perspective and, more significantly, Simms’s as well. Simms’s bread and butter is this running together of generations, thus permitting interpretation. In a letter to Joseph Johnson, which serves as the introduction to Woodcraft, the author writes of his characters, “They are all drawn from real life, and are sufficiently salient, I trust, to be remembered. The humorists of ‘Glen Eberly’ were wellknown personages of preceding generations, here thinly disguised under false names and fanciful localities.”51 Simms’s interpretation and accommodation of Shakespeare’s fathers and sons and his portrayal of American generations displayed an authorial penchant and purpose. As Drew Gilpin Faust suggests of Simms and other intellectuals of his time in A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840–1860 (1977), “By embodying both tradition and transcendence, they incarnated the past and the future in the present and thus offered the South a means of easing a tension aroused by its changing way of life.”52 Just what exactly caused this “changing way of life” depends on which era in Simms’s long career one chooses to examine, but what is paramount is Faust’s perception of Southern intellectuals as having a propensity for blending that crosses generational, cultural, and chronological boundaries. The Captain Porgy novels in the Revolutionary War series cover a period of twenty-one years, from 1835 to 1856. From the early cultural breaking away from Great Britain, to the sectionalism that fed on the nullification crisis and the compromise of 1850, the roles of Southern, white, planter-class males were always tenuous, against the British, the Yankee, the shifting role (and eventual “freedom”) of the

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African male, and the nouveaux riches who rose to power just before the Civil War, as W. J. Cash sees it.53 The story of this class’s masculinity is one of constant flux and, therefore, in constant need of shoring up. Shakespeare’s works presented an answer.54 William Gilmore Simms saw productions, read texts, and imagined versions of masculinity that brought together the courage and martial spirit of Hotspur with the cunning and self-presentation of Prince Hal, the joviality and philosophy of Falstaff with the patriarchal presence of Hamlet Sr. and Bolingbroke, all tempered with the tragic majesty of Hamlet Jr. He saw fathers and sons and how they defined their own masculinity in relation to each other, themselves, and other males around them, and envisioned uniting them. The result would be “more equitable and more fulfilling” for Simms and, he must have hoped, for men of his time, place, class, and race. This fulfillment would be attempted by constructing Porgy. Not only is Simms trying to create this kind of masculinity, but he is also, in a sense, trying to improve on a literary father’s work, to out shakespeare Shakespeare.55 All of this conjecture raises perhaps the most important question: Was Simms successful? Did he create a more fulfilling and equitable masculinity? Did he succeed where Shakespeare did not? The answer is “no” and the reason is that there were variables in Simms’s cultural context that affected even the constructions under his authorial jurisdiction, variables he could not foresee or control. The most obvious of these influences is that of race. American slavery and what it meant for both Africans and whites of Simms’s class would have an impact on masculine citations from the author’s early career but became even more pronounced as sectional tensions increased and the Civil War was imminent. As early as 1838, Simms wrote Slavery in America, Being a Brief Review of Miss Martineau on That Subject, in which he endeavored to create an apologia for slavery by promoting his worldview. Simms theorized: Democracy is not leveling—it is, properly defined, the harmony of the moral world. It insists upon inequalities, as its law declares, that all men should hold the place to which they are properly entitled. The definition of true liberty, is the undisturbed possession of that place in society to which our moral and intellectual merits entitle us.56

Simms’s assertions were addressing Harriet Martineau, activist, author, and essayist, and were no doubt intended to be his answer to her

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Society in America (1837), in which she argues that America fails to live up to its democratic principles.57 Simms’s disingenuous justification does not specify how “all men” know what they are properly entitled to or who sets the intellectual or moral standards either. Like all authors discussed in this work who come after him, Simms would feel it incumbent to take on this mantle himself. What is remarkable about his thinking is that it could apply to class as well as race. The difficulty in discussing either class or race in the American South without considering place is immense. Place is important to Simms. Joel Williamson explains the idea of an organic society and Racial Conservatism in The Crucible of Race (1984): Place was the vital word in the vocabulary of Conservatism, and it applied to whites as well as blacks. . . . White people could not prescribe and enforce a precise role upon themselves. If blacks were to be held in place, white people would have to assume a place to keep them there . . . the keeper role, being superior, had to be even more firmly fixed than the role of the kept. . . . Southern men of the higher order were supposed to play a paternalistic role. They were to behave as fathers not only to blacks, but also to white women and children of their own sort and to the lower orders of whites of both sexes.58

William Gilmore Simms evinces just this sort of view in his fiction, essays, and orations. The most palpable element of Williamson’s estimation for Simms’s work is the strain of paternalism and how that defines place. In fact, the relationship between fathers and offspring is the raison d’etre of Simms’s works, if not of his life. Simms appeals to several authorities to substantiate this perspective. In “The Social Principle: The True Source of National Permanence,” an 1842 oration, he posits, “One of the securities of the Englishman . . . was his boast that he maintained his authority over the savage—that he made no concessions to the inferior nature.”59 Simms revealingly longs to be a very English oppressor. Once again, Simms sanctions his point of view via Great Britain, but he would not stop there. He also writes: The slaveholders of the South, having the moral and animal guardianship of an ignorant and irresponsible people under their control, are the great moral conservators, in one powerful interest, of the entire world. Assuming slavery to be a denial of justice to the negro, there is no sort of propriety in the application of the name slave to the servile of the south. He is under no despotic power. There are laws which protect him, in his place, as flexible as those which his proprietor is required to obey, in his place. Providence has placed

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him in our hands, for his own good, and has paid us from his labor for our guardianship.60

Simms’s stressing of place and paternalism marks him as one of Williamson’s racial conservatives, but what is striking is that he sees this organic society as brought about by divine providence—an act of God! Perhaps not so much a divine edict as an effect of the growth of plantations, the real problem with the rosy picture painted by the likes of William Gilmore Simms stems from the intrusion of reality; if this is a family, then domestic abuse is far too common.61 How could Simms not be aware of this truth? Louis D. Rubin Jr. relates in The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South (1989) that Simms’s plantation, Woodlands, was something of a joke among his friends, that he was never able to make it profitable. He also recounts: When William Cullen Bryant came to visit Simms, he did not change his opposition to slavery, but he pronounced it about as innocuous there as it could ever be. To say all this is not to excuse slavery in the Old South. Rather, it is to indicate that Simms’s insensitivity toward its evils, one that he shared with his neighbors, was not hypocritical.62

Rubin does sound like an apologist, despite his disclaimer, especially when Simms writes as he did in a Southern Quarterly Review article titled “The Southern Convention” (1850), “African slavery, in the hands of the Anglo-American people, was really an element of strength rather than of weakness.”63 Despite this abhorrent point of view, it must be considered that not everyone practiced slavery or experienced it in the same exact way. The suggestion is not that Simms’s version of a plantation is any less repellent, it is merely that it may have been perceived differently by the author himself. Rubin’s observations do, however, raise the question of how Simms could hold such an unrealistic view of slavery. The most obvious answer is that this antebellum author was able to see the issue only from his own perspective. The even larger question is, “How are these attitudes manifested in Simms’s fiction and what does it mean for his citations of masculinity?” In the epilogue of The Yemassee (1835), the slave Hector is offered his freedom and he replies, “No, maussa; I can’t go; I can’t be free. . . . Wha’ Hector done, you guine turn um off dis time o’ day . . . enty you been frien’ to Hector! Enty you gibum physic when he sick, and see and talk wid um, and do ebbery ting he want you for do. . . . I d—n to h—l, maussa, if I

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guine be free.”64 Tom would later echo this sentiment in Woodcraft, in which the slaves see their masters as protective fathers and choose to lead this good life granted to them by their superiors. “Little Peter” and his fellow slaves join their master to drive off Hellfire Dick, the Tory raider in The Forayers, demonstrating their patriarchal allegiance.65 This imagined intimacy would eventually spawn the plantation romancers of a later period, such as Thomas Nelson Page, and his “moonlight and magnolia” approach to plantations as happy families. Perhaps for Simms this reading of black men had a much larger implication. Charles H. Brichford argues in a 1988 Southern Literary Journal article that Simms “sought fictionally to reread the times, correcting the increasingly ‘historical’ view of the period while defending the honor, past and present, of his native region and, especially, of its aristocratic society. . . . Simms saw himself as the literary champion of the honor of South Carolina, and by extension, of the South as well.”66 Brichford’s contention suggests Simms views history as a text, which is not a difficult assertion to make, given Simms’s publications. The compelling implication lies in an almost postmodern reworking of reality, a “correcting” that must be a defensive maneuver on the part of this Southern author. Simms may have had these larger cultural issues in mind, but in terms of masculinity, making the African a child facilitates making the slave master a father, a man. This act of self-definition through juxtaposition would long outlive Simms, and still lives and breathes today. Simms describes the good life the slaves lead in a story from The Wigwam and the Cabin (1856), titled “Caloya; or, the Loves of the Driver,” and suggests that Africans have advanced under slavery, unlike the North American Indians, who could enjoy the same benefits if they would only submit to this divine plan.67 In his tale “Oakatibbe; or, the Choctaw Sampson” (1841), Simms has the African slaves look down on their American Indian counterparts for not doing so, which is a way of having this point of view validated by another, not just the white perspective. More disturbing is the preamble of the story proper. Two white “gentlemen” discuss training Native Americans as opposed to Africans for slaves.68 The preamble to “Oakatibbe” itself contains such instructions and maxims as Savages are children in all but physical respects . . . you must teach them obedience. They must be made to know, at the outset, that they know nothing— that they must implicitly defer to the superior. This lesson they will never learn, so long as they possess the power, at any moment, to withdraw from his

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control . . . having no mode or hope for escape—under the full control of an already civilized people.69

The narrator lumps Native Americans into the same category as Simms did Africans. The relationship is still paterfamilias and progeny, and the motivation baldly stated above remains in control. In these role constructions, Simms’s emphasis on “the superior” is the engine that drives this relationship. The “S” narrator of “Oakatibbe” also echoes Simms when he avers, “God has made an obvious distinction between certain races of men, setting them apart, and requiring them to be kept so, by subjecting them to the resistance and rebuke of one of the most jealous sentinels of sense which we possess—the eye. The prejudices of this sense, require that the natural barriers should be maintained.”70 Simms’s narrator appeals to God, just as his author did before him, concerning Africans. This generalization also urges the use of the eye to see differences—in other words, skin color and features—and to “maintain natural barriers” that are easily seen. This appeal to the “natural,” a problematic label at best, would be the calling card of latter racial radicals such as Thomas Dixon Jr., so much so that the term would become a constant refrain in their arguments of racial segregation. Class, race, and gender oppressors still employ this construct in pursuit of some imagined order. Nat Turner led his slave revolt in 1831, sectionalism was on the rise in the 1840s as tensions increased, and the U.S. Census first counted people of mixed ancestry as “mulattoes” in 1850.71 Men like Simms who wanted to construct a Southern, white aristocratic masculinity would need their paternal roles and the control these roles afforded. As always, Simms would use fiction as a corrective. One of the most revelatory constructions of black masculinity/white planterclass males is that of Simms’s star, Captain Porgy, and Porgy’s cook and body servant, the aptly named Tom. On the surface, Porgy expresses what looks like a form of paternalism to his bound slave. In The Partisan he defends Tom from the physical assault of a soldier who, “owning no slaves, are very apt to delight in the abuse of other people.”72 Simms expresses the dogma that the partisan’s slave owning makes him more “sensitive” as to how not to be abusive. In other words, slavery makes the white dominant community as well as the poor, savage African better. Porgy envisions himself as Tom’s protector and ejaculates, “Nobody shall kick Tom while I’m alive. The fellow’s too valuable for blows;—boils the best rice in the southern country, and hasn’t his match, with my counsel, at terrapin in

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all Dorchester.”73 This sentiment could be read at its most cynical as Porgy protecting a commodity. No less racist but much more consistent with Simms’s perspective is the paternalism of the master who is loyal to his slave. This father is the giver of protection, food, and purpose, and the slave in turn exhibits fealty through service, taking on the role of a dependent child. Of course, this father and son are not blood related, or if they are, it is more of a tamed Cain, marked and cursed but not beyond redemption through white grace. This mythological narrative is a constant in Southern apologias, raised to the level of dogma in the Reconstruction writings of the likes of Thomas Nelson Page. Porgy and Tom’s relationship is even more complicated than the myth implies. Tom and Porgy’s cultural context, as well as Simms’s for that matter, contained an amalgamation of subordinations—race, class, and gender—and these subjugations were frequently intertwined and discursive. Porgy’s relationship to Tom in Woodcraft unites all of these subordinations. Patricia Okker notes in her essay in Periodical Literature in Nineteenth Century America (1995) that Woodcraft focuses considerable attention on courting, yet the novel upends the traditional marriage plot with Captain Porgy not wedding the widows Griffin or Eveleigh; this failure could be read as a call for secessionism.74 This reading misses the point. Porgy does marry—he weds Tom. Tom’s two possible roles are that of the child or the bride (both?); either position is one of subordination, given Simms’s culture. Woodcraft is largely a novel of Porgy’s unsuccessful wooing of females, Simms’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, in a superficial way. Yet note the ending: “Maussa better widout ’em,” says Tom, “I nebber kin ’tan for be happy in house whar woman’s is de maussa.” Porgy replies, “Well, you will be pleased to hear, then, that I have determined to live a bachelor for your sakes. . . . There are women I could love. . . . But, for your sakes I renounce them all. I shall live for you only. You could not do well without me; I will not suffer myself to do without you. You shall be mine always—I shall be yours. To woman, except as friend or companion, I say depart!”75

This pledge sounds like an angry wedding vow, but its significance is that Porgy cites his role in relation to that of his slave Tom. He reconstitutes this law through reiteration, verbally. Then Simms ends the novel, as if this arrangement represents the proper answer for all of these concerns. Porgy intones this wedding song and claims that his primary motivator is Tom. Simms may be winking at his audience, but the tone of the above section does not easily lend itself to

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this reading. The fat partisan may actually believe he is acting in Tom’s interest. Porgy benefits greatly from this marriage. If nothing else, he defines himself against Tom by placing his servant in the stereotypically feminine role. Tom is Porgy’s wife—he cooks, cleans, and takes care of all domestic duties normally foisted on females in stereotypical fashion.76 Porgy’s citation of his aristocratic, masculine role depends upon his prescription and reiteration of Tom’s role. The intersection of identity is where gender and race meet; this convergence can be seen frequently in Simms’s works. This unexpected ending is not that shocking, considering the state of flux of so many societal roles in Woodcraft. Mrs. Eveleigh is frequently referred to in masculine terms; Porgy thinks she “appeared quite too masculine,” and “her very virtues had a manly air.”77 Mrs. Eveleigh also tells one of the novel’s antagonists, Mr. M’Kewn, “I am a woman, sir, it is true; but if it needs, for the assertion of my womanly dignity, that I should lift the weapon of a man, I shall feel no womanly fears in doing so,” and M’Kewn thinks later to himself, “She should have been a man! She would have been a famous one!”78 Mrs. Eveleigh’s taking on of stereotypically masculine roles echoes the antecedents of Lady Macbeth’s prayer of “unsex me here” and Beatrice’s lament of societal limitations for revenge due to gender in Much Ado about Nothing.79 Simms must have had an eye on gender citations that play such an important part in many of Shakespeare’s scripts and poems. Of Simms’s constructions in Woodcraft, Mrs. Eveleigh is not alone in this fluidity. Even Porgy is not immune to this gender slippage. An early physical description of him relates, “His features are marked and decisive, with a large capacious nose, a mouth rather feminine and soft, and a chin well defined and masculine.”80 Porgy’s appearance is portrayed as a merging of both genders, just as he would become a merging of fathers and sons, British and American. Millhouse, Porgy’s overseer and the text’s mouthpiece for Utilitarianism, categorizes Porgy’s love for poetry and learning, and by extension his master, as the province of women and children.81 Judith Butler explains these slippages in her 1999 introduction to Gender Trouble (1990): “Performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual.”82 With each reiteration comes a chance for at least subtle slippages if not outright failures, and these abound in the portrayal of Captain Porgy. Woodcraft also concerns itself greatly with the flux of class roles. M’Kewn benefits from the chaos and profiteering during and after the Revolutionary War and is able to assert himself, despite his origins and class, over landed gentry such as Porgy. Simms does, however,

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take the opportunity to impugn M’Kewn’s manhood by describing his clothes thus: “The frills of his wrist were of the finest lace. His boots would have satisfied the Bond or Broad street dandy.”83 M’Kewn mistakes finery for gentlemanliness, and the cost is his masculinity. M’Kewn even allows, “The rules which govern the conduct of ladies and gentleman do not necessarily occur to persons in trade.”84 M’Kewn’s citation of a gentleman amounts to little more than a costume and an ill-fitting one at that. Like M’Kewn, the squatter Bostwick’s crimes also are motivated by the desire to upset class structures. Only after seeing the widow Eveleigh’s organized plantation does Porgy opine, “I feel, as I look around me, that I may once more become a gentleman.”85 Even though Simms has taken great pains to reveal “gentleman” as a code of ethics and a manner of bearing, not just a societal position, the environment of plantation order offers the partisan his gentlemanly role back. Woodcraft proves the lack of success of Simms’s cultural hybrid. The novel was published in 1852, just eight short years before the Civil War. The disputing over the role of African slaves and the institution of slavery itself (leading to the Compromise of 1850), the brandishing of sectionalism, and the flourishing of industry and town culture all affected the stability of societal roles; attempts to solidify them, even in the controlled world of literature, were not always successful. The circumstances of Simms’s cultural context were too overpowering. William Gilmore Simms may have failed to build a cultural hybrid that solved his father-son masculinity problems, but an examination of his appropriation, emulation, and creation is instructive about each process. Simms made a valiant effort to reform fathers and sons by appropriating models from Shakespeare, and Captain Porgy is the result. As noted earlier, Porgy’s first appearance in The Partisan is for comic relief as provided in the terrapin scene. Yet, before he arrives, Lieutenant Bill Humphries defends the new recruit against the charge that a man of his girth is unfit for duty. Humphries argues, “Well, Sir, if I didn’t know the man, I should think so too; but he rides like the devil, and fights like the blazes. He’s been fighting from the very beginning of the war down in the south.”86 The depiction of Porgy right from the beginning reveals a defensive posture. Simms makes it a point to let Porgy’s reputation precede him, offsetting the “Falstaff effect” of his size, appetites, and buffoonery. This move seems a natural curative.87 White Southern culture has always needed and admired its Hotspurs, even in the guise of the rotund Captain Porgy. The disparity in the explications of the relationship between Porgy and Falstaff is understandable. Simms has taken care to add a Hotspur

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spirit to his fat knight, so much so that Hetherington felt compelled to ask, “Could Porgy’s conduct and beliefs mean Simms was recalling another character in the first part of King Henry IV, one of the most famed for headlong valor in the annals of England, ‘Harry Percy, surnamed Hotspur’?”88 Perhaps Hetherington needs Porgy to exude the Hotspur spirit as much as Simms himself. Indeed, the above description of Porgy seems to echo the king and Westmorland’s assessment of Hotspur, not to mention the character’s persona in the bulk of the play and popular imagination. Such a construction ties this Southern gentleman to English aristocracy, solidifying his class and race. These motivations could not have been Simms’s sole purpose. Hotspur’s martial spirit acts as a remedy for the lack of courage Falstaff displays on the battlefields in Shakespeare’s play. Falstaff orates, “What is/ honor? A word. What is in that word ‘honor’? What is/ that ‘honor’? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He/ that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No.”89 Falstaff is the generational anti-Hotspur and vice versa, and Simms will see both the problem and the solution in these two men. William Gilmore Simms had a habit of using Hotspur’s qualities as a panacea for deficiencies, and it is no surprise that he would do so for a more “equitable and fulfilling” masculinity.90 Porgy may seem a bit like Falstaff, but Sir John is not like the partisan.91 The mixture of sons with this father and the reason for that fusion inform Simms’s construction and make Shakespeare’s the same yet paradoxically dissimilar. As Simms used Hotspur to offset the Falstaff in Porgy, there is another influence on how Porgy is employed in the novels. This influence acts as an agent of restraint on the Hotspur tendencies, and to understand it, Simms’s biography must be considered. Porgy’s superior officer and the hero of The Partisan, Major Singleton, bears the surname of Simms’s maternal grandmother’s forbears who fought in the Revolutionary War.92 First the author’s elder brother died, then his mother, while giving birth to a younger brother in 1808. Simms’s father fled Charleston to Tennessee, leaving his son with his maternal grandmother, Jane Gates.93 Holman explains that Mrs. Gates “had been a child in Charleston during the Revolution and had lived through the days of the British blockade, British occupation, and American victory. She supplemented her vivid memories with a vast store of traditions about Patriot heroism and Tory depravity and poured forth her flood of recollections on the willing ears of the young boy.”94 Jane Gates would be a defining force for the young Simms and would inculcate in her young charge her ideals of both nationalism and masculinity.

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Mary Ann Wimsatt and the preeminent Simms scholar John C. Guilds attest to the grandmother’s influence over the boy.95 An illustrative story is noteworthy. When young William was ten, his father sent his brother to Charleston to kidnap his son after a request for his son to join him went unheeded. A physical struggle between the young boy, his grandmother, and the would-be assailant ended in court. Facing the judicial choice of remaining in Charleston or returning to Mississippi with his father, Simms chose the former. Guilds narrates, “Under these dramatic circumstances young Simms chose Mrs. Gates and Charleston. . . . Simms committed himself to Charleston . . . and with that commitment repudiated his father, whom he scarcely knew.”96 Young Simms selected the maternal side of his family, rejecting his father and embracing Jane Gates, who told Simms stories of her forbears. In a sense, Simms had a female conduit to the masculinity of war heroes who preceded him. This maternal figure would carry the fathers’ masculinity in much the same way as Thomas Nelson Page would require African slaves to do so in his fictive works. Simms would use these brave soldiers, full of honor, courage, and gentility, and intermix them with Shakespearean fathers and sons throughout his works, but never more interestingly than with Captain Porgy and those around him, especially Major Singleton. As the saga unfolds over several novels, Singleton acts as a restrictive influence on Porgy’s Hotspur-like tendencies. Of note is that the literary character who functions in this manner is given the last name of Simms’s ancestors on his maternal side. Simms is symbolically allowing the feminine side of his family to control the Hotspur spirit of the hero he constructs. Singleton keeps Porgy from fighting with a regular army soldier who is beating his slave Tom, and generally disrespecting the partisans, in The Partisan.97 In Katherine Walton, Porgy has already attacked, beaten, and pinned his foe, but he is so offended when the captured Meadows calls him an “elephant” that “he had already raised the fragment of his broken sword, meaning to pummel his foe into submission, when his arm was arrested by Singleton, now appearing in his appropriate character and costume.”98 Porgy’s broken phallic symbol remains deadly but restrained by the maternal side of the family. Singleton is “appropriate,” Porgy is not. Yet this symbolic figure of the maternal ancestors struggles to make Porgy so. The major does not just restrict the physical violence of Porgy; he oversees his conduct as well. Eutaw, the last novel in the saga, portrays a discontented Porgy who constantly questions the competency and motives of many of his military superiors. Major Singleton warns,

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“Shocking, Porgy, shocking. Do not speak in this manner. Do not think thus,” and “Your language, such as you use now, can only do mischief.”99 Singleton is Northumberland to Porgy’s Hotspur, and he echoes the sentiments if not the content of Northumberland’s rejoinder, “Why, what a wasp-stung and impatient fool/ Art thou to break into this woman’s mood,/ Tying thine ear to no tongue but thine own!”100 Decorum and restriction epitomize what it means to be not only a gentleman but a man as well. Otherwise, these men might slip into “this woman’s mood” and not comport themselves properly. If the flawed father figure of Falstaff is to be redeemed, he must be infused with the fighting spirit of Hotspur, but tempered with the prudence of the mother’s side of the family. Simms wants Porgy to learn the lesson of Hotspur’s demise due to his warrior tendencies and rashness. Simms’s restriction of the Hotspur element in Porgy curbs the primal ethic that informs the South via the idea of gentility.101 Simms had learned that all action with no repose was detrimental and displays this knowledge in his novel Guy Rivers (1834). The title character is a bandit, all action, and the “snake in the garden of the Southern idyll.”102 Simms is taking the best of Shakespearean characters and modulating them with his own cultural context. This antebellum author is reinstituting the law, but allowing variance in his citations and creating his cultural hybrids to do his cultural work. Hotspur is not the only son present in Porgy—Prince Hal is added to the mix as well. In a letter to William Porcher Miles in 1856, Simms writes, “Approaching that physical condition when a citizen incurs the risk of being made an alderman I—in Falstaff ’s mournful language—’lard the earth as I walk along.”103 Falstaff does not pronounce this line; Prince Hal does, using only the third person.104 Simms places the words of the son into the mouth of his inadequate father figure, then uses the misappropriation to represent himself, his current state. This confused action seems like a clichéd Freudian slip; still, it is not a big leap in logic to assume that the author would meld these two into Porgy. The conflation resonates from Simms to his literary creations and back again. Solid connections between Hal and Falstaff as manifested in Porgy exist other than in Simms’s active yet inconsistent brain. The easiest correlation between the young prince and the older partisan is the element of the joker in both.105 Hal enjoys an elaborate ruse at Falstaff ’s expense in act 3, scene 3 of I Henry IV when all involved play highwaymen to hear of Sir John’s cowardly actions and bloated response. Similarly, in Woodcraft, Porgy delights in fooling the sheriff in the “Coupe de Theatre” chapter, and the shaving of and

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forced feeding of legal documents to Absalom Crooks in the “Legal Regimen” chapter. This connection is valid but simplistic. The complex, driving force behind this association is revealed in The Partisan. In the middle of the book, Simms feels obliged to stop the action and comment on the character of Porgy. He addresses the reader directly, admonishing, Now, it will not do to misconceive Lieutenant Porgy. If we have said or shown anything calculated to lessen his dignity in the eyes of any of our readers, remorse must follow. Porgy might play the buffoon, if he pleased; but in the mean time, let it be understood, that he was born to wealth, and had received the education of a gentleman. . . . It was the fruit of an artificial nature. He jested with his own tastes, his own bulk of body, his own poverty, and thus baffled the more serious jests of the ill-tempered by anticipating them.106

Simms tries to salvage the character of Porgy in the middle of the book, as if he has suddenly become self-conscious about how his constructed man looks to his readers. More important for his connection to Hal is his artificial nature, his propensity to hide, and what that means for his masculinity. Simms endeavors to repudiate Porgy’s buffoonery and reveal his true nature by placing emphasis on the word play. The indecorous actions of Porgy are for the sake of performance, meant to be viewed by others but not indicative of the man himself. This sort of selfdeprecation acts as a means of defense in a Prince Hal way. Simms’s contention raises the question of what a true identity is and how it can be perceived. This query is especially relevant for an author who hopes to build a Southern, white, planter-class masculinity. Will this (can there) ever be a true identity or merely something to play? Simms’s parsing of Porgy’s character raises this question while Judith Butler supplies the answer. “Identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be the results.”107 The answer is that “true identities” are always contingent, and Simms’s midtext insertion (penetration?) unknowingly supports this assertion by displaying identity as performative. Butler’s argument undercuts Simms’s display due to its looking to a “true identity” for recourse, but the notion must have been important to Simms to devote so much space to it. Just as Porgy anticipates the “ill-tempered,” so does Simms through a metafictive act. Simms’s explanation of Porgy versus what he seems reverberates from Hamlet. Gertrude asks the prince about his mental state early in the play. He replies:

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Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems . . .” . . . Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly. These indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play. But I have that within which passes show; These but the trappings and the suits of woe.108

In his bid to outgrieve everyone, Hamlet reveals the denotation of people versus what they actually are. And like Simms’s discussion of Porgy above, the Danish prince finds the performance lacking compared with what he sees as truth. The difficulty resides in whether that truth is ever revealed, or ever can be for that matter. Another example of Porgy’s proclivity can be seen in Katherine Walton, where the narrator notes, “Porgy was an actor.”109 Porgy conceals from others what he thinks of as his true self as a form of protection, and offers an artificial self that fends off attack through self-deprecation, according to the narrator’s evaluation. This kind of acting divulges an assumption by the actor—that his environment offers hostility and he needs to defend himself through acting. Whatever spurs this attitude on remains hidden in the depths of the partisan’s unrevealed psyche. Prince Hal is an actor too. At least, Hal “performs” himself in the first half of I Henry IV, concealing what he will later offer as his “true nature.” This maneuver constitutes his defense as well. He performs this soliloquy: Prince: Yet herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world, That when he please again to be himself, Being wanted he may be more wandered at By breaking through the foul and ugly mists Of vapors that did seem to strangle him . . . So when this loose behavior I throw off And pay the debt I never promised, By how much better than my word I am By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes; And like bright metal on a sullen ground, My reformation, glittering o’er my fault.110

The prince has been disguising his “true nature” in an effort to make himself look even better upon revelation. He wants men to misjudge and underestimate him. This sort of conscious manipulation of the kind

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of man he is echoes Simms’s passage on Porgy (or vice versa) quoted above. True, Porgy’s manipulation rings a little more of self-defense than Hal’s, but surely the prince must have sensed the necessity for this pose due to some threat—perhaps Hotspur, maybe even his own father. Both Porgy’s and Hal’s posturing disclose not only self-awareness but also a consciousness of being watched, an attentiveness to others. Hal would eventually reveal (recite?) himself, defeat the rebellious Hotspur, save his father, and fulfill his destiny, becoming the father-king himself, Henry V. William Gilmore Simms combined the ill-equipped father with the best of both sons in the character of Porgy, not being able to conceive of his creation in an unalloyed way. Perhaps he dreamed of Porgy, and by extension Southern, white, planter-class males and himself, having his “revelation of true character.” A cultural context that caused this effort to fail has already been demonstrated. Is there any Henry V–style triumph? Any successful reiterations of masculinity? Any “breaking through the foul and ugly mists of vapors that did strangle him”? Any redemption? Sort of. Simms ameliorates Porgy in later editions of The Partisan.111 This revision is not an isolated incident but a trend over the course of the entire Revolutionary War saga. As the series progressed, Simms increased Porgy’s dignity, stature, and bearing.112 What had transpired between the initial publication of The Partisan in 1835 and its new edition in 1854? What had caused Simms to “ennoble” Porgy as the series progressed? The popularity of the character had to be part of the concern. In a March 3, 1836, letter to his friend James Lawson, Simms brags, “You have no idea how popular Porgy is with a large majority. He is actually the founder of a sect.”113 Simms’s perception of his character being “watched” by others may have affected his reimaginings. This reason is probably, however, the most superficial. C. Hugh Holman voices another. “The publication in 1847 of Lorenzo Sabine’s The American Loyalist, a historical study of the loyalist sentiment and activity during the American Revolution, led many Northerners to question the part the South had played in the winning of American independence.”114 Simms would have keenly felt what could only be perceived as stabs at Southern masculinity.115 After all, an attack on the South’s militarism and courage is an assault on its manly virtues, its masculinity. Surely, a criticism of the South’s loyalty exacerbated by sectionalism over slavery led to defensiveness. Southerners were embattled from a personal level, where manhood and courage were questioned and seemingly interchangeable, to the regional one, where the forefathers of Southern gentility had their pa-

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triotism challenged. The author defended the South, the men of his class, and in turn himself by altering Porgy to answer this concern, making him more of the masculine patriot, more of a partisan, and less of a character providing mere comic relief. These men’s need to be seen as patriots would have larger consequences than merely answering Sabine’s charges. William C. Davis examined the formation of the Confederacy from its early rumblings and found that many Southerners in the secessionist movement believed they were required to preserve constitutional government, not to destroy it, and that free government would only survive in North America if they would save it through the reformation of this strong central government. Some actually argued that slavery was the “occasion” and not the “cause” of secession.116 Of course, Davis easily explodes these myths, but a compelling feature of this thinking is the desire of these men to posture as patriots and revolutionaries, like their fathers before. Given this thinking, calling the Revolutionary era fathers’ masculinity into question threatens an already overcompensatory citation of patrilineal masculinity. Simms’s drive in revising Porgy may have been similar, only after the fact. Wimsatt offers a more specific yet grander motivation: “He [Simms] is able to impose the interpretation of his age upon events of the past and thus convey his sense of providential movement in history by his reference to an action whose shape is completed and whose pertinence is clear.”117 Wimsatt’s notion that Simms demonstrates a predestined movement from Britain, to America, and eventually to the South (the father, son, and sibling?) is an astute one; lineage is everything. Yet what is important is how these ideologies affected his rendering of Porgy’s citation of masculinity. His amalgamation of Shakespeare’s models would need refinement. Simms revises his partisan in order to move him further away from Falstaff and closer to Prince Hal, perhaps with an eye toward Henry V in his final, triumphant revelation and full blooming of manhood—if not so much earlier to the later draft of The Partisan unquestionably throughout the course of the series. A Southern gentleman would emerge through the character of Porgy, displaying the appeal and camaraderie of Falstaff, the martial spirit and bravery of Hotspur, the cleverness, secrecy, and yet ascendancy of Prince Hal, tempered with contexts personal and cultural, entwined and inseparable in this hybrid. Simms would eventually attempt to retire Porgy to his estate, the model of patriarchal gentility. If competing cultural forces such as the changing role of Africans, the surge of antagonism between the North and the South, and an

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unstable class hierarchy—all challenges to Southern, white, planterclass masculinity—threatened the success of Simms’s experiment, no circumstance would cause Captain Porgy’s failure more than the Civil War.118 Porgy did not survive the Civil War; there was no role for him after Eutaw (1856). Simms admits defeat, as does the South itself. Simms’s revised and redeemed father-son, his masculine ideal, could not withstand this “simple test of manhood.” The real turning point for Porgy is Woodcraft. The novel is fifth in a series of seven, but last chronologically. The work was published under the title The Sword and the Distaff with the alternate title of Fair, Fat, and Forty: A Story of the South at the Close of the Revolution, apparently first in 1852 as part of semimonthly supplements to the Southern Literary Gazette and in 1853 as an edition for Lippincott, Grainco, and Company of Philadelphia. Finally, the last title, with the inapt subtitle Or, Hawks about the Dovecote, was chosen for the 1854 Redfield edition, referenced above.119 No clear explanation is given for these title changes, but the shift from one title to the other is illuminating in terms of masculinity. A “distaff ” has several definitions, but the most pertinent is “women’s work or concerns, of or pertaining to women or the female line of descent.” Simms’s initial impulse is to balance war and “women’s concerns.” Simms allows this gendered concern to coexist with the sword, at least within the confines of his title. James Meriwether observes, “Woodcraft is not a war novel at all, but a novel about the aftermath of war, or about war only in retrospect—the war as seen through its results, its effects upon returning soldiers and upon the civilian population.”120 Without the war as an arena for citing masculine roles, these men must find alternate modes of citationality. To be sure, the novel opens with the British withdrawal from Charleston at the close of the war and Porgy’s subsequent return to his dilapidated plantation and potential wooing, including Mrs. Eveleigh. Drastic changes brought on by the war would initiate differences, as has already been demonstrated, in Porgy’s citation of masculinity, so much so that Meriwether believes the novel exposes Porgy’s weaknesses and limitations while making Mrs. Eveleigh the hero and superior to Porgy. The ex-partisan is the central character but not the hero.121 He is not the hero, and the redeemed ideal begins to show real cracks, while Mrs. Eveleigh wields a phallus of her own. In Woodcraft, Porgy is, perhaps like his author, overcome by Hamlet and Shakespeare’s more tragic sons.122 This focus was not only in Simms’s literature, but in his culture and himself as well. This movement represents a palpable shift from earlier models of Shakespearean

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masculinity. While the father element in Porgy would remain fairly constant (Falstaff ), the sons would no longer do so. Hotspur cannot comport himself outside of war and is killed by his own rashness. Simms would have to look elsewhere to redeem this imperfect father of his, and he would, ironically enough, find this redemption in Denmark. Increasing sectionalism and a “sense of doom” must have made Prince Hal and his ascendancy to Henry V seem unattainable for Simms and his character by 1851–1852. Possibly the ghost of a marginal father, such as Hamlet Sr., haunted Simms; he would endeavor to use the ghost’s son to save his creation, his father-son Porgy. Simms’s Falstaff would take on Hamlet’s inky cloak without the benefit of a Hamlet Sr.123 Simms may have offered Porgy several anti-Hamlets, such as Arthur Eveleigh, to reform him but to no avail. Porgy does defend his home from the sheriff with the put-on countenance of Hotspur, but the book does not end with heroic or tragic deaths but with ruminations and intimations of dissatisfaction. The end emphasizes Porgy’s failure to understand women and marriage (the distaff ) and “fanciful speculations and philosophy” about his future. There is some resolution, but, as the title of the last chapter reveals, “The Grapes are Sour!” The novel teems with passages that support a Hamlet thesis. Note this description of Porgy’s state: His despondency for awhile, increased with his meditation, until he felt that it would not be difficult that very hour to die. To die, was to escape the cares, the troubles and humiliations to which he felt himself unequal, and which he now felt to be inevitable from life, with such a prospect as now grew up, dark and distinct, before his mind. He would have found it at once easy and grateful to be roused that moment with the call of battle.124

This “to be or not to be” reverie ends with a Hotspur wish. Effective. Despite the coda, the preponderance here is uncertainty, musing on death, and a propensity to ruminate—all pure Hamlet. Simms’s partisan is not performing bravery or buffoonery for anyone—he is his own audience, and it is at this moment that he is his most Hamletlike. The consideration of death in this rumination also reveals a change in perspective; prior to Woodcraft, the only consideration of that undiscovered country would have been in terms of martial glory or a field of honor and death, but in the passage above the idea of battle remains his only savior. Porgy frequently demonstrates this essential makeup of his character throughout Woodcraft.

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The stress and balance of the first title would not do. Simms chose Woodcraft for the final edition. “ ‘Woodcraft’ was the art of guerilla warfare used by the partisans during the revolution.”125 Simms attempts to make Porgy nobler by focusing his title on the militarism of Porgy and company, the women’s concerns and the “fat” take a backseat to skill in warfare, and the partisan is able to reiterate his masculinity, at least in the title of the work. In Woodcraft, Simms’s hero endeavors to recover his slaves. Porgy employs his woodcraft, and teaches it to young Arthur Eveleigh, to recapture his slaves stolen by Tory profiteers and their henchmen. Perhaps Simms portrays this passage in this manner as a response to the Fugitive Slave Act and an aggressive response he felt was needed by Southerners, but the author had other motivators.126 Simms underscores stereotypical notions of Porgy’s masculinity, attempting to resurrect Hotspur after the fact, after his death. By 1854, Simms must have felt some misgivings about the “Hamleting” of his father figure and chose to de-emphasize this move. The author had seen this Hamlet tendency as a weakness, and weakness is not an attribute of stereotypical masculinity.127 The self-protective author wanted to present a common front to his enemy, the North.128 Simms needed a strong, white, Southern male figure. The author needed Porgy to be manly and vice versa. The nature of this change seems defensive; in fact, Simms’s appropriations and citations always seem to come from this posture. Naturally, this stance would improve as antagonism between the North and the South escalated, but the tendency was there long before the deepening sectional crises that were to come. Simms used his literature not only to construct a masculine ideal but also to create another offspring—America—in an effort to throw off one of the parents, Great Britain, and its literature.129 Western civilization, as defined by a man like Simms (white, male, and patrician), would evolve, from Britain, to America, and eventually to the South. The defensive posture springs from a tangible fear that this movement would be seen as a devolution, whether men like Simms cared to admit it or not. An American identity was to be forged out of contrast with its antecedents. This creating is not unlike a son differentiating himself from his father, in search of his own identity, still related but separate. Simms did, after all, refer to “us, speaking the language of Milton and Shakespeare.”130 This inclination may have been national and historical, but William Gilmore Simms was concerned about this need most in relation to American intellectualism and literature, his personal sphere of both accomplishment and reiteration of his manhood. In an

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1844 oration titled “Americanism in Literature” at the University of Georgia, Simms warned of the imperious genius of the Old World. We must set ourselves free of the tyranny of this genius, and the time has come when we must do so. . . . If the time for this movement has not yet arrived, it is certainly very near at hand. This conviction grows out of the fact that we now daily taunt ourselves with our protracted servility to the European. . . . To write from a people is to write a people—to make them live—to endow them with a life and a name— to preserve them with a history forever.131

Notice that Simms sees the relationship between old and new not as familial but as one of servility. His solution, though giving him godlike powers to create a people, reeks of a defensive posture, emphasizing the importance of being a native (from). What is missing here is who exactly is he writing to. Americans? Southerners? The British? This compulsion was strong in Simms. So much so that, despite the differing politics of its members, he joined the Young America group, a collection of writers such as Edgar Allen Poe and Herman Melville, led by Evert Duyckinck, “literary nationalists” who hoped to weaken Britain’s influence on American letters.132 Simms’s works reveal this thinking through the portrayal of the British in the Revolutionary War series and his use of “American dialects” for some of his characters. In his novel Mellichampe, Porgy, sounding a bit like a provincial, partisan Shylock, asks, “Has a Tory a better stomach than a patriot? Is his taste more refined and intellectual . . . are his virtues higher?”133 Simms would have answered these questions with a “no” and did so by his rendering of American planter-class masculinity and the body of his work. The impetus for this defensive attitude would change as circumstances dictated. These varying conditions cause Simms to implore, in a letter he wrote to the leader of the Young America group on July 15, 1845, “If the authors of America will only work together we can do wonders yet. But our first step will be to disabuse the public mind of the English and Yankee authorities.”134 Simms yokes the “Yankee” and the English together and perceives them both as authorities, people to whom he is subjugated and whom he needs to throw off to gain both autonomy and definition.135 This outlook rears its head a full fifteen years before the outbreak of the Civil War. Simms’s rhetoric remains amazingly consistent throughout his public life, merely shifting groups to fit certain preconceived roles that he had already conceptualized.136 Simms’s

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politics molds Porgy as much as it does his oratories and essays, and the Southern author would display his creation in the same public manner. The rhetoric would be cranked up even more by 1850, just two short years before the publication of Woodcraft. In an 1850 Southern Quarterly Review article, Simms rants about the North, “She will provoke all the fatal parallels which marked the career of Great Britain, in respect to her colonies. And she will provoke these results without any such relative superiority as Great Britain possessed.”137 The North is placed in the aggressor’s position, but Simms cannot equate the region with Great Britain, as it would place the American region in too high regard as far as the author is concerned. Simms’s defensiveness moved from the national to the regional level and is manifested in his literature. He defended this change in the dedication to the new 1856 edition of The Wigwam and the Cabin. The author theorizes, “One word for the material of these legends. It is local, sectional—and to be national in literature one must needs be sectional. No one mind can fully or fairly illustrate the characteristics of any great country; and he who shall depict one section faithfully, has made his proper and sufficient contribution to the great work of a national literature.”138 Just a few short years after the Civil War, this statement of purpose could be read as an apologia, depending on the tone the reader infers. The compensatory claims of a place for the regional South as national divulges Simms’s defensiveness. Also of note is Simms’s focus on legends, a construction that is artificial yet can take on a reality of its own. William Gilmore Simms has a history of moving between his fictive and real worlds when conceptualizing his reality. Even more revealing is an unpublished, difficult-to-date, lecture by Simms titled “Antagonisms of the Social Moral. North and South” dug up by Miriam J. Shillingsburg. In this arcane screed, Simms reveals a larger concern. Simms argues: It was especially important that the North should be disabused of the notion that the South is imbecile—imbecile because of her slave institutions— imbecile in war—unproductive in letters—deficient in all proper agencies of civilization, —and so, incapable of defence against assaults. Upon these notions our enemy very strenuously insist, & every form of phrase, through every popular medium—the press, the pulpit, the poet, and the politician. A miserable paragraphist will prate of the intellectual, moral, and military deficiencies of a region . . . whose wisdom, virtue, valour, eloquence, have established the government.139

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The South may have had every right to feel attacked by the North for, indeed, in many ways it was. Nevertheless, what is compelling is Simms’s need to disabuse the North of its perspective and that he casts the charges in terms of intellect, of imbecile. Simms not only confronts his enemies with positive attributes of the South but also offers a veiled threat regarding the region’s ability to defend itself. Finally, he demands credit for the South’s part in the formation of America. All this defensiveness affects the rendering of Porgy and his changing persona as the Revolutionary War series progresses in Simms’s literary world. In Woodcraft, the most significant realization of this posture is Porgy’s endeavor to explain his shortcomings. In a passage quoted above, but worth reiterating, the partisan laments, “But the curse of my generation was that our fathers lived too well, were too rapidly prosperous, and though they did not neglect the exercise of proper industry in themselves, they either did not know how to teach it to their children, or presumed on the absence of any necessity that they should learn.”140 The fathers are responsible for the failings of the sons. These men failed to pass on to their sons what they needed to be noble. The burden of knowing the truth, of being a man, falls independently on the shoulders of the son. This idea may seem contradictory as Simms became so rankled earlier at Sabine’s charge of the insufficiency of the fathers, but this charge is not leveled at the fathers’ masculinity, merely at the nature of their relationships with their offspring. Additionally, criticisms are different when they come from “inside the family.” Porgy tells Arthur Eveleigh, his son by proxy, “One usually dates his manhood from the moment when he instructs his father in what way to properly break his eggs.”141 There may be some sarcasm in Porgy’s barb. However, the significance here is not when others date the son’s manhood (not even the fathers), but when the son does so himself. Given Porgy’s observation above about the insufficiency of fathers, it is difficult to tell which is more important in the act of citation—others or the self. Simms has Porgy continue this line of thinking in The Forayers. Well into the novel, Porgy holds forth in Falstaffian mode on drinking. When he is asked if he thinks his descendants will be able to outdrink him, he replies: Ah! Say nothing of our progeny. Do not build upon degenerates. It may be that the milksops will fancy it bad taste, nay, even immoral, on the part of their ancestors, to have swallowed Jamaica or whiskey at all. In proportion as their heads are weak, will pronounce ours vicious; and just as we have a certain amount of strength in our virtue—a certain quality of brawn and blood and muscle, to keep our sentiment from etherealizing—growing into more

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thin air—will they presume to stroke their beards in self-complaisant satisfaction, thanking God that such poor publicans, have given way to a more saintly race of sinners.142

The ambiguity is, “Who are the degenerates?” This statement could mean the progeny will conceive of the fathers in this way. Is Porgy taking on his potential offspring’s point of view? The ambiguity does suggest a Prince Hal/Falstaff confusion about father-son roles. The reference could be to Porgy thinking of himself, that he is a degenerate and should not be “built upon” or should not procreate. Perhaps the offspring (Simms’s own generation) will be the degenerates and will not be able to be built on; no Confederacy will stand. No matter which reading is applicable, the focus is generational antagonism. This father-to-be senses his progeny will be weaker, “milksops.” Porgy’s sentiment is a faint echo of Hotspur that remains. Hotspur relates to the king how, as he stood weary from battle, Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword, Came there a certain lord, neat and trimly dressed . . . And as the soldiers bore dead bodies by He called them untaught knaves, unmannerly, To bring a slovenly unhandsome corpse Betwixt the wind and his nobility. With many holiday and lady terms He questioned me.143

Ostensibly, Hotspur is insulting the men of the king’s court, but the comparison to Porgy’s assertion is how the speaker feels condescended to by the central character in each harangue but is also doing the same in the telling of the tale. Both men also question the masculinity of their subjects, especially when juxtaposed with their own. This act allows the reinstituting of the subject’s masculinity by tearing down another’s. Hotspur has the advantage of being on the battlefield when he offers this assessment—an arena of masculinity where a courtier looks out of place. A key to Porgy’s conjecture is that the sons may be less manly, but they will still be thankful for not being like their forbears. The sons will judge the fathers and find them lacking, rude, and vulgar, but they will not find them effete and feminine. Porgy also judges these offspring in his characterization of them as weak, slight (etherealizing), and self-complaisant, whereas the fathers will have virtue, brawn, blood, and muscle. The sons will be everything the fathers are

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not and vice versa, each judging and finding the other inferior. The Hamlet tendency in Porgy is overthrown by the time he returns in The Forayers (he is actually younger and the novel takes place chronologically before Woodcraft), but when the Hotspur spirit returns to the partisan it leads to generational strife. Simms must have wanted it this way. The sympathies of the narrative lie with Porgy, and statements like the one above abound in the last two novels. The fathers and sons are oppositional, and one generation, Simms’s, holds the advantage of accusing fathers and insulting their future sons. The stance entails much finger pointing. This antagonism is a reverberation of 2 Henry IV. In act 4, scene 5, Henry IV is on his deathbed. Prince Hal comes into his chamber, finds his father sleeping, and thinks he is dead. The prince lifts his father’s crown from his pillow and intones: Thy due from me Is tears and heavy sorrows of the blood, Which nature, love, and filial tenderness Shall, O dear Father, pay thee plenteously My due from thee is this imperial crown, Which, as immediate from thy place and blood, Derives itself to me.144

Note how Hal casts his taking of the crown in terms of what he is “due”; this terminology suggests what is fitting, proper, and fair, almost in the legalistic terms of a contract. After Hal leaves the room with the crown, the king awakens and demands the prince’s presence. King Henry rants that Hal cannot wait for his death and compares himself to a bee. “Our thighs packed with wax, our mouths with/ honey,/ We bring it to the hive, and like the bees/ Are murdered for our pains.”145 This father suspects his son as Porgy does in The Forayers. The animosity between the two generations is clear, and it is about power. Eventually Hal grovels and King Henry relents, offering his son hope and a little self-pity. Regarding his crown, Henry avows, “To thee it shall descend with better quiet,/ Better opinion, better confirmation,/ For all the soil of the achievement goes/ With me into the earth.”146 The dirt, the stain, and the work will be buried with the fathers, and the beneficiary will be a son who will not have to feel this dirt. Hal is offered a resolution, even if it does not come as soon as he wishes. William Gilmore Simms’s literary sons never get this kind of resolution, even when they are mixed with models of fatherhood. Only the oppositional relationship remains for Simms’s models.

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Porgy’s chronological narrative ends in Woodcraft. His estate, Glen-Eberly, has become with his return “a sort of centre for the parish civilization. The charm was great—a sort of salient attraction— which drew the gentry, all around, with the sphere of its genial, yet provocative influences.”147 At his career’s end, he has neither wife nor sons, but the African males and lower-class whites of his plantation at least know their roles—beneath and protected by the gentry. Porgy also has influence over the males of the “gentry” in his area, acting as a father figure in lieu of direct progeny. Perhaps Simms saw this ending as only befitting his father-son figure, one, ironically, with no present father and only symbolic sons, not unlike the author himself, who lost a father and many sons, hence the temptation to conflate creation and creator. Simms did not technically end Porgy’s tale there. The attempt to undercut the Hamlet tendencies in Woodcraft through revision had not taken place. The Civil War loomed large. William Gilmore Simms’s answer was to go back in time, before his Hamlet experiment on Porgy.148 This antebellum author would begin again, from where he left off in Katherine Walton, as if the period of Woodcraft had not existed, or if it did, paradoxically before and after the last two novels. Simms must have wanted to bring back the fighting spirit of Hotspur/Porgy in the face of perceived aggression from the outside. The answer resides in the manly role of the soldier in the right venue to perform masculinity, the battlefield. Back to Hotspur’s country. Nation, region, and masculinity were all at stake, and this formation would be needed in these times. This Porgy would, however, be different. The martial spirit of Hotspur would remain, but would be tempered in the last two novels by a little more wisdom. He would, in effect, resemble Prince Hal toward the end of I Henry IV—wiser, but not yet Henry V. This correlation is less true in Forayers, where Porgy exists to outdo all the regular army officers in his ability to entertain, than in Eutaw, in which he is the voice of reason in unheeded military strategy. The implication is that the patriot army would have been more successful had its leaders listened to Porgy’s counsel and men like him. More importantly, Porgy would have his chance for ascendancy, his opportunity to become Henry V, a triumphant leader and son, one who eclipses the father. Porgy remains disregarded and a member of the inferior class, the partisans as opposed to the regular army, who actually win the war despite substandard leadership. Porgy is never given his chance. Perhaps Simms would extrapolate this situation to himself, if not to Southern, white men in general. His (their) chance would be stolen by the Yankees with the Civil War ending in defeat.

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Captain Porgy’s last words ever would leave the father unredeemed. Pontificating to his fellow partisans around the fire, he intones wistfully, “I dream of a time, when every man will, perforce, fall into his right place! In other words, I think the millennium possible. Meanwhile, let us eat, drink and be satisfied, though tomorrow we sup on steel.”149 Porgy ends with a wish for stability in societal roles and concludes his tenure in Simms’s body of work on a note that sounds of pure Falstaff. He has regressed to the initial model, the first appropriation and citation, never to return, and is not even offered a valiant death scene in Hotspur mode. Falstaff is not offered this sort of glorious death either. The fat knight dies offstage, his last words related by Nym, Bardolph, and Company early in Henry V.150 More importantly, Prince Hal has become the king, Henry V, and is absent at the time of this father figure’s death. Falstaff is effectively banished by his “son”—his worst fear— and does not share in his triumph. Likewise, Porgy ends his days “offstage,” a luxury William Gilmore Simms did not have. Simms wrote his friend William Porcher Miles near the end of 1860, “I am . . . like a bear with a sore head, and chained to the stake. I chafe, and roar and rage, but can do nothing.”151 Though ostensibly discussing his current circumstances, the passage implies that Simms was unable to continue the solution to the father-son conundrum he had sought earlier due to these conditions. Not even William Shakespeare, one of his literary fathers, could solve these problems of identity and masculinity. Simms would manage to publish novels just before and during the Civil War, such as The Cassique of Kiawah (1859) and Paddy McGann (1863), to name only two, but Porgy would not return. Simms had lost everything in the Civil War—his home, his library, and his wife.152 Porgy had vanished as well, fittingly lost in a failed test of masculinity. Simms claimed he would write another novel with Porgy as the central character, setting it after the Revolutionary War and making him a legislator, but he wrote John Esten Cooke in 1859 that he was not yet matured enough and he asserted, “I must prepare him and myself together to drape our sunsets with dignity.”153 The first was never completed and the second is even now being debated. Still, Simms identified himself with his partisan on some level, continuing his attempt to redeem this literary character (if only in his imagination) and perhaps himself as well. Simms would write another Revolutionary War story set in 1775, Joscelyn, serialized in a periodical after the Civil War, but Porgy is notably absent and the work would have little semblance to the earlier

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novels. The author’s male figures are considerably different after the war. The title character from Voltmeier (1869) is morally ambiguous at best and does not fit neatly into any “type.”154 The appropriations from Shakespeare, the hopes of redemption, and the establishing of Southern planter-class gentility were gone, killed off by the war. The ensuing uncertainty of the postwar South ruled both the region and Simms’s fictive world. Simms did still look occasionally to Shakespeare for self-reference. As he undertook the rebuilding of his destroyed plantation, Woodlands, he eventually let his children assume control of the estate. He wrote to Evert Duyckinck that he was like King Lear, becoming guests at their own tables.155 This effort seems more like a feeble memory than an active appropriation and citation, an aftereffect of the war and aging, but Simms’s reference reveals his mind-set—a betrayed character who is as much the victim of his own choices as of Shakespeare’s villains. The year 1869 would bring another novel with a telling portrayal. The Cub of the Panther combines two folktales, one a ballad of a pregnant woman trudging through snow and the other a tale of a male panther with a taste for pregnant women.156 In this novel, Rose Carter flees a sham marriage to Edward Fairleigh through a snowy wilderness, pregnant and stalked by a panther. She dies but gives birth to a child with a birthmark in the shape of a panther on his forehead, hence the name of the novel. The baby grows to be a prodigious hunter and bit of an outcast. This set-apart son kills his father, Fairleigh, at the end of the book without realizing that he has destroyed an ancestor. A marked son destroys an evil father in self-defense without knowing he has shattered this biological bond—a fitting end to the father-son relationship in Simms’s last novel—thus resulting in no appropriations, no attempt to use masculine ideals from Shakespeare for reiteration, no reinstitution of the law, and no redemption for fathers and sons. This work could be read as a metaphor for postwar race relations— blackness as “mark,” black sexuality as bestial and desirous of white women, the fear of miscegenation and the freed offspring that could destroy the father—yet, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, Simms may have felt as if his race and class had become the marked ones, as many Southern apologists after him took on the role of victimhood. Unintended revenge is the best that sons could hope for in Simms’s eyes this late in his life, and there would be no “draping of sunsets with dignity.” Simms wrote in March of 1869, “I do not write for fame or notoriety or the love of it but simply to procure the wherewithal of life

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for my children.”157 Literature had failed Simms in his attempt to save the fathers and sons of his class, time, and place, and the most it could do anymore was feed and clothe his children. Yet he was not totally without hope. In an address in the last year of his life, titled “The Sense of the Beautiful,” Simms still wished for “the full development of that greatest of all human virtues—a perfect manhood . . . the man becomes complete in the exercise of all his fullness of quality, in beauty, majesty, and strength.”158 The author still had the desire for a “proper” citation of masculinity, even if he no longer had the will to reiterate it in his works. He died in Charleston on June 11, 1870, with some eighty-two publications to his name, his progeny living to beget the likes of the William Gilmore Simms Society. Almost every piece of literary criticism about William Gilmore Simms written since the 1970s begins with a lament. Critics rent and tear their clothes over the ignoring of this prolific and once-popular author.159 These critics need to have a representative from the period, a central figure, and this urge reveals as much about them as it does about Simms. This study itself falls into a critical tendency—an inclination to connect Simms to Shakespeare, one that has existed since the author’s day. In a review of Eutaw in the Charleston Mercury on April 23, 1856, the reviewer trumpets: His [Simms’s] chain of historical novels which Eutaw completes will be to after generations the history of South Carolina, in the same degree that the historical plays of Shakespeare are the history of England for the period they embrace.160

The concern for “after generations” is illuminating, though the review could be seen as merely a propaganda of its time. Sectional conflicts and the Civil War, just four brief years away, coupled with a South that felt increasingly under attack, may have caused the reviewer to align one of their own with the culturally elite Shakespeare, but the point remains that this impulse is nothing new. A case for this conjecture is easily made, but the connecting of the two is not merely a product of its time. In 1966, a hundred and ten years after the Mercury review and long after the Civil War, Hugh Hetherington wrote, “Just as The Partisan, Mellichampe, Katherine Walton, The Forayers, and Eutaw, giving Porgy’s war years are Simms’s the two parts of King Henry IV, Woodcraft is in some ways Simms’s The Merry Wives of Windsor.”161 The inclination to relate the antebellum author’s works to those of Shakespeare persists. Perhaps even

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Simms felt this connection himself when he wrote a poem about Shakespeare, his song of bardolatry, in 1843. He wrote of “the mighty master in each page we trace” and “How the mind follows, how vibrates the heart.” Simms’s description of his “master” and his effect on the Southern writer deifies even as it reveals the need for this relationship with the literary patriarch.162 The purpose here has been to read Simms in Shakespearean terms. Yet a much more specific aim of understanding gender and its relationship to fathers and sons prevents this analysis from being merely a culturally received reading of Simms and his works. Understanding and glorification are not synonymous, a distinction that needs to be made, especially in the study of Southern literature. Perhaps the old Charleston Mercury, various literary critics since the time of Simms, and many of the attendees of the Simms Conference in April of 2002 have this common thread—they all want William Gilmore Simms to be an ancestral father just as William Shakespeare was and still is to scores of people. They feel a lack; something missing in their context needs to be replaced. They want to redeem the father, as Simms wanted to in his work, and thereby complete their own identities. Humans may not always want to admit it, but our familial bonds, or lack thereof, inform who we are. To discover the father is to understand an element of ourselves.

Chapter 2

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Th o m a s N e l s o n Pag e’s Mythmaking and S h a k e s pe a re a n M a s c u l i n i t y

[Let’s] write up a few sketches of Southern life as it was, and see if we cannot make a few dollars off of them. This old Southern life is an almost uncultivated field and one that may yield an abundant harvest.1 Thomas Nelson Page I am a man/ More sinned against than sinning.2 William Shakespeare, King Lear

T

homas Nelson Page once wrote, “There is no true history of the South. In a few years there will be no South to demand a history. What of our history is known by the world today? What is our position in history? How are we regarded?”3 These queries thinly mask self-consciousness, insecurity, and fear—fear of upset social hierarchies, the rising white middle class, the free African, the changing role of women, and the defeat of an aristocracy that taught Page to perform his role of masculinity, how to be. Page’s fictive works overcompensate for the aliment of gender, race, and class roles that had festered since the Civil War. The martial hero guided by the principles of a Southern gentleman in Red Rock, Steve Allen, or the aristocratic soldier and title character in “Marse Chan,” to name only a few, are constructions of masculinity who attempt to allay

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these fears and also address Page’s larger concern of history and regard. “Masculinity,” “Southern people,” and even “history” would all need to be redefined by the author to placate his fears and those of his race and class. This redefinition is one of the primary functions of Thomas Nelson Page’s art and all constructions found therein. As William Gilmore Simms looks back to a previous time (the Revolutionary War) to alleviate his present anxiety, so does Page. In fact, this plantation novelist becomes so identified with the Lost Cause ideology that the “present anxiety” motivation is frequently ignored.4 This critical generalization ignores Page’s novel Gordon Keith and, to a lesser extent, Red Rock. To read this postbellum author’s works, especially the latter ones, solely as a withdrawal from reality into a “moonlight and magnolias” world where all aristocratic white males are brave soldiers, wise fathers, and protectors of white women while the white yeomanry and Africans not only know their place but also revel in them is to interpret Page’s novels in the most facile of ways. The purpose in these fictions is not to merely escape into a golden past but to reinterpret the past to build a more suitable, workable present and future for his class, gender, and race. Thomas Nelson Page appropriates modes of masculinity and attendant ideologies from William Shakespeare not unlike William Gilmore Simms in the generation before him. Page is also indebted to earlier plantation fiction authors such as John Pendleton Kennedy (Swallow Barn, 1832). The difference is that Page fully embraces Lost Cause dogma and refracts all of his annexations through this lens. Page’s texts reveal his expropriations through his construction of romantic couples, both tragic and festive; the “natural” and its relationship to hierarchical structures; father-son paradigms; the reliance on the pastoral “green world” as a solution to societal ills; and the aristocratic link to the land for identity and strength. Southern authors would retain many of these appropriations as late as William Faulkner, though the modernist himself would interrogate these appropriations to the point of sucking the meaning right out of them. All of these concepts inform Page’s fictive constructions of masculinity, from his early poetry (“Uncle Gabe’s White Folks,” 1876) to his posthumously published last novel The Red Riders (1924). The author culled Shakespearean modes and models of masculinity from King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, and Richard II, to name a few, but modified them to build a supposedly more authoritative yet palatable masculinity. Judith Butler offers a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon in her 1993 Bodies That Matter:

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Sexed positions are not localities but, rather, citational practices instituted within the juridical domain—a domain of constitutive constraints. The embodying of sex would be a kind of “citing” of the law, but neither sex nor the law can be said to preexist their various embodyings and citings. Where the law seems to predate its citation, that is where a given citation has become established as “the law” . . . since the law must be repeated to remain an authoritative law, the law perpetually reinstitutes the possibility of its own failure.5

Butler’s notion of practices versus localities would not sit well with a “pretend” plantation owner, as that suggestion allows one of his greatest fears. The fear that drives Page’s texts is anxiety over failure of the law. Page attempts to cite white, Southern, aristocratic roles of masculinity in his works to repeat a predated citation, reiterating it as law. This earlier citation is then fortified with Lost Cause ideology, born out of concern for what Northerners and Englishmen thought of these men—Page’s own “constitutive constraints.” The predated citation as law for this Southern writer is the masculine reiterations of Great Britain’s number one cultural export—the works of William Shakespeare. William Shakespeare did not invent but purveyed the thematic material Page appropriates, which raises the question, why Shakespeare? The cultural work of Shakespeare used by William Gilmore Simms to construct men in his fiction was surely inherited by Page’s generation, but Page offers an even larger reason in his 1892 collection The Old South. He writes in the chapter “Life in Colonial Virginia,” “The South was largely settled not merely under the patronage of but largely by, the better class in England.”6 Page perpetuates the cavalier myth of the South’s founding discussed at length in Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s The Shaping of Southern Culture (2001). Yet Page’s assertion does have a modicum of validity. Helen Taylor reports, “Many British cultural influences on, and dialogues with, the South have partly made it what it is.”7 The difference between Taylor and Page, however, is “partly” and just what those elements of British culture are exactly. Page’s above assertion stresses “the better class,” a primary concern of Page’s. Being British was enough to qualify as one of Page’s forefathers—aristocracy need only apply. Southern progenitors are tied not only to England in a general sense but to class issues as well. Page writes: Among the chief factors which influenced Virginia life and moulded it in its peculiar form were this English feeling (which was almost strong enough to be termed a race feeling); the aristocratic tendency; the happy combination of

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soil, climate, and agricultural product (tobacco), which made them an agricultural people, and enabled them to support a generous style of living as a landed gentry.8

This vague notion of “feeling,” both English and race, is intended to relate his forbears to English language, culture, and aristocracy, to forge an identity acceptable to an author with patrician pretensions. Page addresses his fear of how Southerners will be regarded by not only appealing to this cultural authority but also by becoming it. Like William Gilmore Simms’s generation before him, this identification for Page was literary as well. He stresses in his 1908 collection The Old Dominion, “The Virginians preserved through all of their republicanism a strong feeling, almost like a kinship, toward the English. Many of the old families kept up a sort of association with the old country; filled their shelves with English books; took English reviews, and kept abreast of English politics.”9 In Page’s estimation, it was not enough for his region to be tied to the English race and class constructions, but the connection to English literary, intellectual, and political thought held sway as well. Little wonder that Page constructs his ideal “Virginia gentleman” in Social Life in Old Virginia before the War (1892) with the assertion that Shakespeare should be among his poets.10 Given Page’s attitudes, Shakespeare’s status as a British cultural deity, his nationalist affiliation more so than his impressive body of works, seems to be the prime motivator in co-opting the bard. All of these nonfiction texts reveal a Page who links his forefathers to Great Britain, its literature, class system, and “national poet” as well. Page co-opted Shakespeare, this cultural token, and his influential medium to aid in his cultural struggle—the performativity of the white, Southern, planter-class male.11 This performativity reclaims the predated citations, Butler’s idea of law, and it does so through even older citations than the Old South fathers. Alan Sinfield explains in Political Shakespeare (1994), “In the United States, Shakespeare has long been recognized as a means of securing cultural privilege,” and he is used as well “to assert cultural authority, tradition . . . elitism, and stability.”12 Page would find all of the elements—“cultural authority,” “tradition,” “elitism,” and “stability”— alluring. Thomas Nelson Page turns to Shakespeare to fulfill a postwar need of men of his race and class: legitimacy. Part of this legitimacy is the building of the white, Southern, upper-class man after the defeat in the Civil War.13 This construction manifests itself as overcompensation in much of Page’s work and lacks any sort of realism, despite sporadic claims of such from the author and other Southern apologists.

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“Marse Chan. A Tale of Old Virginia,” a story that first appeared in 1884 in Century Magazine, was a well-received effort that eventually led to the publication of Page’s collection In Ole Virginia; or, Marse Chan and Other Stories three years later.14 The title character defends his father’s ideology through dueling, lives up to his military obligations with bravery and courage, and, in full chivalric mode, worships the fair Anne Chamberlain. In short, he projects the ideal of Southern heroism, more of an epitome than an actual man. Marse Chan is described thus: He wuz so solum an’ moanful all de time, at leas’ ’cep when dyah wuz gwine to be a fight. Den he’d peartin’ up, an’ he alwuz rode at de head o’ de company, ’cause he wuz tall; an’ hit wan’ on’y in battles whar all his company wuz dat he went, but he use’ to volunteer whenever de cun’l wanted anybody to fine out anythin’, an’ ’twuz so dangersome he didn’ like to mek one man go no sooner’n anurr. . . . Yes, she, he sut’n’y wuz a good sodger.15

Page’s aristocratic males are great soldiers who know no fear, who ride tall and true as they face the enemy from their higher cultural and physical vantage points. These early male constructions are conceived as men capable of echoing a St. Crispian Henry V, “If we are marked to die, we are enough/ To do our country loss; and to live,/ The fewer men, the greater share of honor.”16 Military honor and glory are an integral part of Page’s citational practices, an idea he appropriates from Shakespeare yet never bothers to interrogate. This citation of masculinity remains a constant throughout the body of Page’s work. Page had lived through the Civil War, the freeing of the slaves, the Reconstruction, the withdrawal of federal troops from the South (sometimes known as the Great Redemption) in 1877, the rise of the so-called New South and the backlash of populism, and the beginning of “The Gilded Age.”17 Page did not invent but reinvented the plantation ideology; he reinterpreted it through Lost Cause ideology and Shakespearean models of masculinity, perhaps sensing the weakness of the “old traditions.”18 Defining white aristocratic masculinity in Henry-like terms is compelling because of the cultural work that such reiterations enable. Judith Butler theorizes, “Discursive performativity appears to produce that which it names, to enact its own referent, to name and to do, to name and to make.”19 Page creates such men as Marse Chan who enact this male referent while creating it at the same time; there is no original, only elements of predated citations—a copy of a copy at best. These reiterations may seem invariable, but as Page’s circumstances changed so did his attitudes and appropriations. A distinct

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path of Page’s fictive reiterations of masculinity can be traced: first, appropriation (King Lear, to name one), then glorification (In Ole Virginia), then victimization (Red Rock), and, finally, his version of modernization (Gordon Keith). Page’s corpus of works seems to have a narrative arc. Still, the most palpable of the Page-Shakespeare connection is this postbellum author’s “father and offspring” myth, whose fountainhead is Romeo and Juliet. “Marse Chan” is the prototype of Page’s plantation Romeo and Juliet. The conflict in the story is familial and within the South. Marse Chan is descended from Democrats and his Juliet, Anne Chamberlain, is loyal to her father, a staunch Whig. Both families are Southern aristocrats but are divided by sectional politics, and loyalty to the father’s perspective supersedes all others in this society. This law reinforces for young men of this race and class a major part of their citations of masculinity, and Marse Chan successfully cites his role by consistently defending his father’s judgments to the point of dueling with “Cun’l Chahmb’lin,”20 a citation of masculinity firmly ensconced in the ideology of Southern honor. Marse Chan’s compulsion to reiterate this masculine role is due to the constitutive constraint of both his parents, but especially his father. His parents discover their son’s heroics well after the fact, and their response is described thus: “Lawd! how she did cry and kiss Marse Chan; an’ ole marster, aldo he never say much, he wuz jes’ ez pleas’ ez ole missis. He call’ me in de room an’ made me tole ’im all ’bout it, an’ when I got th’oo he gi’ me five dollars an’ a pyar of breeches.”21 The father responds well to his son’s successful citation of masculinity and offers economic rewards to express his pleasure, not unlike a king. The honor of defending the father’s perspective is thus reaffirmed through the actions of the son. These elements resonate in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as well. The drama begins with the chorus: “Two households, both alike in dignity,/ In fair Verona, where we lay our scene/ From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,/ Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.”22 This strife between two households manifests itself doubly in “Marse Chan.” Page uses this theme in regard to the two families of his story, but he also freights his tale with national significance, a reference to the Civil War and its sectional conflict. Rosewell Page writes in his 1923 hagiography of his brother that the author once claimed that he “had never wittingly written a line which he did not hope might tend to bring about a better understanding between the North and the South, and finally lead to a more perfect union.”23 Rosewell Page commits a half-truth, as the real impetus is for the North to understand

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the South; there is not one example of the reverse of that being true in the entirety of Page’s work. Page’s first published story is one of reconciliation, a theme he would continue in a varied way throughout his works, but this reunion would take place, as shall be demonstrated, entirely on Southern terms. The reiteration of the father’s perspective and role is the major source of threat, an obstacle in Romeo and Juliet, but Page is filtering the idea through Lost Cause idealizations, a glorification of the past that brooks no dissension among fathers and sons.24 Page’s presentation of cited masculinity in the story offers the Old South as a panacea for unacceptable changes with an eye toward the future, though the outcome is inflected with Shakespeare’s tragic couple. Page reiterates this masculine role in his fiction as Shakespeare did before him, in this case with doomed couples who take on symbolic weight. “Marse Chan’s” two families keep the lovers apart in true Romeo and Juliet fashion until the hero of the title leaves for war. Anne finally sends him a letter admitting her love, but begs him not to return until he is honorably furloughed. Chan is killed, his body shipped home, and, of course, a fever and the strain of losing her true love kills Anne as well. After all, Page must have his tragic Shakespearean couple. Sam relates, “So we buried Miss right by Marse Chan, in a place whar ole missis hed tole us to leave, an’ dey’s bofe on ’em sleep side by side over in de ole grabeyard at home.”25 Thomas Nelson Page imbues these final lines of Sam’s with the concluding reverberation of the prince from Shakespeare’s tragedy. “Go hence to have more talk of these sad things./ Some shall be pardoned, and some punished/ For never was there a story of more woe/ Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”26 This appropriation is forceful, with Page attempting to rise to the challenge of a story with “more woe.” Rosewell Page, if he is to be believed, writes, “The impression made by the story was very great,” and, “He who reads it without tears has never been found.”27 The only form of reconciliation is through death in both pieces of fiction. One could argue that this romanticized notion is the beginning of Page’s attempt to both glorify and paradoxically victimize all Southerners, especially white aristocratic males. Indeed, Page writes, “The press of a portion of the land is filled with charges of injuries to the negro. The real injury is not to him, but to the white.”28 Page uses this belief to offer white Southerners as a minority under attack and must show their great suffering and victimization. This role would become more predominant in the novels, especially Red Rock, but the proposition remains the subtext of all of Page’s masculine idealizations whether consciously intended or not.

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Southern pride could be restored and its guilt assuaged by giving this class of men the moral high ground; they attempt to steal the role of the oppressed from Africans and co-opt outsiders’ sympathies, making sectional reconciliation easier for all. More telling is Page’s readiness to place the transmittal of his Romeo and Juliet myth and its gender roles into the mouth of a worshipful ex-slave, Sam. In her 1999 preface to Gender Trouble, Judith Butler argues, “Performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition, a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization.”29 Sam naturalizes this white masculine role—ritual by proxy. Marse Chan performs this role by dueling, fighting honorably in war, and worshipping the Southern white lady, all in Lost Cause fashion. Sam puts his inflection on his masters’ words when he relates them, “Sam, we’se goin’ to win in dis battle, an’ den we’ll go home an’ git married; an’ I’se goin’ home wid a star on my collar.”30 In Ole Virginia (1887) has, in fact, African narrators for all but one of its tales. The author first used this device in “Uncle Gabe’s White Folks,” a “dialect poem” published in an 1877 Scribner’s Monthly, his first publication.31 The attitudes Page has these slaves or ex-slaves express is astounding. In “Marse Chan,” Sam relates to the white man who began the narrative, “Dem wuz good ole times, marster—de bes’ Sam ever see! Dey wuz, in fac’. . . . Dyar warn’ no trouble nor nothing.”32 Billy, the narrator of In Ole Virginia’s “Meh Lady,” echoes this longing for an idealized past when he remembers, “We wuz rich den, quarters on every hill, an’ niggers mo’ ’n you could tell dee names.”33 The ex-slave includes himself in the stated wealth of the “we.” These slaves may, in fact, be unreliable narrators, as Page does offer several examples in his works of these Africans telling white people what they want to hear. Still, given his ideology of race relations expressed in his fiction and nonfiction alike, readers may wonder if Page himself is aware of this potential for unreliability. Page’s white upper-class men define themselves against their slaves, as Shakespeare would have John Talbot in I King Henry VI, when he rails against his father, “O, if you love my mother,/ Dishonor not her honorable name/ To make a bastard and a slave of me!”34 Yet Page would have the juxtaposition less pejorative, posturing them more as loyal servants who are almost part of the “family,” such as Adam in As You Like It. Page’s portrayals of bondsmen are formed by the acute pressure of his cultural context in a more significant way than Shakespeare’s. If nothing else, race is ever present in Page’s formulations. One such pressure is Page’s Lost Cause dogma. This ideology peddled the notion that slavery was not the critical issue between the

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North and the South, an idea that unfortunately still has currency.35 This view resounds through The Old South. Page writes, “This [secession] was not primarily because it was wedded to slavery, but because it tolerated no invasion of its rights under any form or upon any pretext.”36 Governmental power, taxation, land acquisition, and overall “sectional rivalry” were the chief causes of the war for Page, though he offers little evidence for these assertions. The author expresses his greatest concern, “Unless we look into, the South’s action will have gone into history as the defence of human slavery, and it will be deemed the world over to have been as great a crime against nature as the slave trade itself.”37 His answer to this problem is to make the African slave the loyal servant who benefits under slavery. If Page’s South does not want to go into history having defended slavery, perhaps the slaves will. Once again, African slaves do all the heavy lifting for their white Southern masters. There are other mitigating factors that have an even more direct bearing on Page’s portrayal of black men versus their white masters. Joel Williamson identifies three postbellum white attitudes toward Africans in The Crucible of Race (1984). Williamson places these mentalities on a continuum with racial liberals, who were fairly openminded and optimistic regarding the newly freed Africans on one end, and racial radicals on the other, who argued that freed slaves would retrograde to their natural state of savagery and would eventually disappear.38 George W. Cable is an example of the former, while Thomas Dixon, with his “Reconstruction Trilogy” of The Leopard’s Spots (1902), The Clansman (1903), and The Traitor (1907), is a model of the latter. Thomas Nelson Page’s fiction falls somewhere between these ideologies. Racial Conservatism assumed the natural inferiority of Africans and emphasized “place” for all in an organic society. White aristocrats are cast as the paterfamilias who understand Africans and the damage done by outside agitators, such as abolitionists, who do not understand. Proponents of this thinking desired to restore race relations to what they thought they had been before the war. Page postures black men as the keepers of white cultural myths due to his limited aristocratic perspective that imagines Billy of “Meh Lady” as part of the “we” of the family. This imagined intimacy causes Page to entrust the aristocratic fathers to their supposedly loyal servants. The code of chivalry and the fathers are validated while the black men are contained safely in Page’s narrative, only having meaning through their masters.39 Page saw these constructions as art reflecting life, given his limited perspective on these people and, in some sense, on himself.

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There are other reasons for this modus operandi. Page buys his tales a supposed local color verisimilitude while driving his “family” dogma home.40 This supposed authenticity may have been true for Page’s contemporary readers, but the doctrinaire nature of this method was especially effective. In Ole Virginia presents African males as being childlike, who long for the days when they knew where they belonged and revel in the glories of their white masters’ manhood. These men bear Lost Cause ideology, citations of the fathers’ masculinity, and Racial Conservatism as well.41 “Marse Chan” reveals where Page thinks this strong mystical bond between servant and master, this intimacy, therefore the slave system, derives from. Sam tells his white male audience of the day the infant “Chan” is presented to the plantation slaves. The ex-slave makes much of the master knowing his name and that he is asked to hold the offspring. Sam narrates, “And den he sez; Now, Sam, from dis time you belong to yo’ young Marse Channin’; I wan’ you to tek keer on im ez long ez he lives. You are to be his boy from dis time. An’ now,’ he sez, ‘carry ’im in de house.’ . . . An from dat time I was tooken in de house to be Marse Channin’s body-servant.”42 In Page’s fictive world, the father prescribes the roles of the white aristocratic male and the African male slave at an early age, at the same time, the two gaining definition through juxtaposition, contradistinction. The father enacts this law, and the two males spend the rest of their lives reinstituting it through repeated citations, given the constitutive constraints of their culture.43 There is, however, a cost for employing African males in this manner. A young white man rides through 1872 Virginia at the beginning of the collection. Sam then takes over the narrative proper and teaches the young man about the glories of Marse Chan, his bravery in battle, his honor in life. Sam reiterates Marse Chan’s citation of masculinity, as if invoking the law in a Butlerian sense. These aristocratic white males are no longer the transmitters of their own masculinity. In a sense, they depend on the black man as much as the Old South plantation masters. They are, however, depending on narrators who may become unreliable, even if the author himself seems blissfully unaware of this potential hazard. Page’s golden age had been upset. He thought everyone enacted prescribed roles of race and gender and relished the structure of this organic society, so he produced a myth to preserve the old order and perhaps forge a new one.44 This Romeo and Juliet reconciliation is romantic but not sufficient. A reunion of death is a tragic, romantic, yet hollow endeavor. If the assertion of the forward-looking element of

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Lost Cause mythology is true, Page would need a reunification fantasy that looked as if it had a future. The author offered a persistent pattern in which a Union officer and an unreconstructed Confederate woman would find romance.45 The goal was reunification, and the result was always on the woman’s (hence Confederate’s) terms. This idea is stressed much more emphatically in “Meh Lady.” The title character loses her love to the war but eventually replaces him with ex-Union officer Captain Wilton. Page’s text reveals the same impulse that drives Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet. Upon hearing of Romeo’s request to marry the young lovers, Laurence exclaims, “Come, go with me/ In one respect I’ll thy assistant be;/ For this alliance may so happy prove/ To turn your households’ rancor to pure love.”46 Friar Laurence sees marriage as transformative, healing, as will Thomas Nelson Page. The author undertakes this same feat, joining “Meh Lady” and Wilton, tagged by the narrator as “De pertector.” This label is significant for two reasons: first, the title character is unable to successfully run the plantation because the gender roles on these estates are clearly defined; a man will have to take “Marse Phil’s” place if they are to prosper. Second, the narrator, a black male, gives Wilton this name. Both black male and white female must recognize the role of the aristocratic white male for success. This form of masculinity is created in the triangulation of the black male, the Southern white lady, and the white male patriarchs who have come before. The solidifying of race and gender roles is the price of reunification in Page’s fictive world, a price Africans and women will have to pay. As in “Marse Chan,” the black narrator, Billy, ties the old to the new. Billy relates the wedding ceremony of Wilton and “Meh Lady” as, “An’ dyah, facin’ Mistis’ picture an’ Marse Phil’s (tooken when he wuz a little boy), lookin’ down at ’em bofe, dee wuz married.”47 If Page was an emissary of the Old South in his day, then he has a symbol of this collective, the Old South plantation master in the painting, look down on this reunification as if he approves. On the surface, Page’s move is strikingly similar to the typical Shakespearean marriage plots of the festive comedies, such as As You Like It or Much Ado about Nothing, where all conflicts are resolved in the end and all gender roles, even if they do go through fluctuation throughout the works, are ultimately reiterated. “Marse Phil’s” Old South masculinity and Shakespeare’s marriage plot are fused and reiterated in the climax of “Meh Lady.” The implied fear is that this law, predated citations in Butler’s conception, could have failed with Marse Phil’s death and the title character’s (a woman!) assumption of the plantation, but Page will not allow this to

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happen; he reciprocally brings the law into existence while he reiterates these gender roles. More importantly, white aristocratic power is renewed in a way more palatable to the likes of Page. With the resolidifying of gender, race, and the past comes the festive ending. Billy gushes, “An’ hit ’pear like de plantation ’live once mo’, and de ain’ no mo’ scufflin,’ an’ de ole times done come back ag’in.”48 This sentiment is not unlike that of Duke Senior at the end of As You Like It as he intones, “Every of this happy number/ That have endured shrewd days and nights with us/ Shall share the good of our returned fortune/ According to the measure of their states./ Meantime, forget this new-fall’n dignity,/ And fall to our rustic revelry.”49 A return to a supposedly better time is the emphasis of both endings. All “happy” endings have a catch, and Page’s ending does as surely as Shakespeare’s. For Page’s ending, Billy may feel inclusion, but what he really regains is his subservient position. Duke Senior regains his wealth and position. Of course, a racial conservative like Page would see these two endings as equal, which reveals the limitations of his perspective. Billy may be able to sound like the duke, but, despite Page’s insistence on the Lost Cause notion of the “natural” subservience of blacks, he can never wield anything close to the power of a Duke Senior.50 This festive ending puts everyone into “place” and restores order, a restoration more festive for some than others. White, Southern, planter-class males intended to at least win the cultural Civil War. Captain Wilton really only qualifies to take Marse Phil’s place because he is partially Southern in lineage, and he agrees to essentially become his Old South predecessor.51 The net effect is that the South loses the war militarily but wins it culturally, as all Captain Wiltons are “Southernized.” The old master controls the plantation from beyond the grave, not unlike Hamlet Sr. in Shakespeare’s play. This portrayal demonstrates the power of these patriarchs. Page would continue this postbellum Southernizing of Yankees with the Welch family in Red Rock and even the elite of New York society in Gordon Keith. These texts firmly demand the understanding of the Southern aristocratic male and the return of the “proper place” for every member of their organic society. Page’s novel Red Rock was published twelve years after In Ole Virginia and is a major alteration of Virginia’s appropriations and purposes. Red Rock follows the life of Jacqueline Gray, a to-themanor born aristocrat who loses his father at Shiloh. The plantation mentioned in the novel’s title is expropriated by the lower-class white profiteer (and former overseer) Hiram Still, as are many Southern

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lands by the ludicrously named Dickensian carpetbagger Jonadab Leech, and the bulk of the novel deals with Gray’s attempt to defeat the forces of Reconstruction and reclaim his father’s lands, his birthright. The novel plots Gray’s growth from boyhood to manhood, set against the backdrop of a protracted lawsuit for the plantation. Men of Gray’s (Confederate) class initially form and support the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) but withdraw from it when “lower class violent types” more interested in “revenge” than “justice” co-opt it. This portrayal offers an apologia for the KKK by making the issue one of class, a distinctive Pagian move. Steve Allen, a cousin raised by the Grays and the epitome of the Southern heroic ideal, assists Gray in his endeavors and acts as a model of Southern aristocratic masculinity for the young man. The work is also frequently punctuated with the on-again, off-again romance with the local New Southern Belle ideal Blair Cary.52 The naming of characters in the work is heavy-handed: Hiram Still’s last name implies the low-class moonshiner he truly is, Jonadab Leech is the unwanted parasite bleeding the South dry, and Dr. Cary bears the burden of keeping Old South cultural ideals alive and relevant during an oppressive Reconstruction. The most compelling names belong to the young lovers Jacqueline Gray and Blair Cary. These strangely androgynous monikers intimate the possibility of sexed positions in flux, though their roles seem reiterated with force in the novel. Perhaps, at some level, Page feared the possibility of this confusion, given the state of the South, and reiterated the role behavior with emphasis, to offset these sexually confusing names. Red Rock would move Page’s work from nostalgia to a portrayal of the South as a postbellum victim.53 Page’s most immediate purpose may not have been that different from In Ole Virginia. Henry W. Lanier writes in an 1889 article for American Monthly Review of Reviews that “it [Red Rock] cast a spell strong enough to exorcise Uncle Tom’s ghost from all except the darkest, most benighted corners of the land.”54 This intention is wishful thinking for both Page and Lanier, but one could argue that it is the prime motivator of all of Page’s work. Page’s more specific object with Red Rock is twofold. First, Page creates the misinterpreted hero and thereby defends the South and its “gentlemen.”55 A lack of understanding on the part of Northerners and the like accounts for the sectional conflict and instills the guilt of misperception in these outsiders. Second, these heroes are able to remain true to Old South ideals while enduring great injustice, earning the right to be their forefathers’ sons.56 The Virginia gentleman of the Reconstruction era bears the ideological burden of Old

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South masculinity in this novel, whereas the role once belonged to black males in the earlier short stories. Cultural changes brought about this alteration. Federal troops had withdrawn from the South in 1877.57 Joel Williamson reports an economic recession in the 1880s and a depression in the 1890s that set the stage for racial radicalism and the likes of Thomas Dixon. The urban environment population doubled during this period, a new middle class arose, and the industrial sector became dominant. At the same time, these cultural forces accompanied an attack on the Old South order during this era, led by “New South prophets” such as Henry Watterson, Walter Hines Page, and George W. Cable.58 Added to these drastic changes was the stress of populism that threatened to overturn class distinctions between farmers and laborers and the new ruling class, the industrialists and businessmen of the New South.59 The Old South planter class had been supplanted by these New South elites and these usurpers were threatened as well. Thomas Nelson Page’s Old South ideals were really two generations removed. Page’s earlier African narrators would not do. Race is important to almost any American author writing in this period, much less a Southerner, but Page had an equal if not greater (yet related) concern—the maintenance of social hierarchies, of class.60 Race cannot necessarily be divorced from class, but Page seems to broaden the affiliation in his novels. If Thomas Dixon was going to save the “Anglo-Saxon” race (whatever that is) from “the Negro,” then Page would define this race in Red Rock as aristocrats and save it from lower classes, “clerks” and “overseers.”61 Racial conservatives such as Page could not see Africans as serious competitors and therefore did not make them objects of fear.62 Page’s mentality began and ended with the inferiority of Africans; they were to be employed, not feared. If the aristocratic white male was to defend himself against the encroaching lower class, he would have to be more present than merely being transmitted verbally by slaves. He would have to be present in the flesh, through worthy sons. The black male is, for the most part, reduced to the supporter of the “old ways” in Red Rock. The ex-slave Jerry states, “Umph! things is tunned sort o’ upside down. . . . Overseer’s son drivnin’ buggy and gent’mens in de fiel.”63 The Africans in the novel help delineate the white social classes, as if Page is still looking for some sort of African validation.64 This “world turned upside down” and its threat to Page’s class of masculinity haunt this novel. African males, however, are not totally benign in Red Rock. Page flirts with the idea of black male desire for white women through the character of the “trick-doctor”

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who argues with the other black men, “I’m jest as good as any white man, and I’m goin’ to show ’em so. I’m going t marry a white ’ooman and meck white folks wait on me.”65 This episode does suggest a fear of black male sexuality and concern for white female sexuality, but Page portrays African males as childish buffoons or dupes of Yankees in the novel. Page seems to impute the doctor’s attitudes more to Yankee carpetbaggers than the bestial nature Thomas Dixon would impute it to in his propaganda. Red Rock embraces the Lost Cause ideology of Southern advocacy, the South as oppressed minority, and the idealization of Confederate soldiers, even though the bulk of the work takes place not during the war but during Reconstruction. In the fourth chapter, titled “In Which a Long Jump Is Taken,” the narrator glibly dismisses the Civil War years because this form, the written word, is inadequate to portray both the epic nature and the tragedy of those years. This sentiment echoes the opening chorus in The Life of King Henry the Fifth, who laments the insufficiency of the Globe Theater’s “wooden O” to portray the immense nature of Henry V’s war against the French.66 Page moves from directly glorifying the Old South to critiquing Reconstruction and, in a sense, to the results of it—the time in which he is writing. This movement is why his works are not purely nostalgic, merely looking back. The white, aristocratic, Southern men of the novel (especially the Grays, Carys, and Steve Allen) no longer have to take on the Romeo role of masculinity that leads to reconciliation yet death. Page is finished with this form of romanticism and puts Shakespeare’s young lovers to sleep. Reconciliation patterns of gender that had persisted throughout Page’s early work no longer hold true.67 Class, “nature” versus custom, and the stemming of the chaotic upheaval thrust upon his organic society become Page’s paramount concerns. The consideration of social hierarchies is one of Page’s strongest appropriations from Shakespeare. The need for rigid social strata with their correlative masculine, feminine, and filial roles worthy of performativity and reiteration, and the consequences of upsetting these structures, is most palpably demonstrated in The Tragedy of King Lear. More specifically, a focus on Edgar as the central character is especially illuminating.68 Second only to the title character, Edgar is the lynchpin of the play, but it is his relationship with his half brother, Edmund, his father, the Earl of Gloucester, his godfather, King Lear, and differing combinations of these fathers, sons, and half brothers that establishes the importance of social hierarchies and gender roles therein. Thomas Nelson Page believed in a natural order as well, and

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first derived this belief from a personal source. The Nelsons and the Pages had a long history of belief in an organic society, and it informed their social and political opinions.69 Page inherited it from his father, who did likewise in turn, ad infinitum. The author’s patrimony becomes his limited perspective. Shakespeare’s play begins with Edmund’s soliloquy on nature versus custom. He offers the prayer, “Thou, Nature, are my goddess; to thy law/ My services are bound./ Wherefore should I/ Stand in the plague of custom and permit/ The curiosity of nations deprive me . . . / Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land . . . I grow, I prosper./ Now, gods, stand up for bastards!”70 Edmund thinks he represents the natural and is kept down by custom; he is just as good as Edgar. Yet the play seems to suggest that Edgar—the rightful heir—is the “natural” one (by allowing him to defeat and kill Edmund, thereby securing the throne) and Edmund’s supplanting of him throughout the bulk of the work is “unnatural” and can only lead to tragedy (almost everyone but Edgar and Kent dies). The word “nature” is used thirty-six times in King Lear and is crucial. Edmund may employ the word to represent his perspective, but Shakespeare’s play supports the idea of a natural social hierarchy based on birthright, and the attempt to overthrow this order brings about dire consequences, pain and death. An imbalance in “nature” will be corrected, naturally. Thomas Nelson Page infuses all of his works with this idea; Gordon Keith (1903), Bred in the Bone (1904), and Under the Crust (1907) all trade in this ideology in one fashion or the other, but it is the Reconstruction mythology of Red Rock that leans most heavily on this concept. With the put-upon Southern gentlemen removed from their “natural” place, one could identify Jacqueline Gray, Steven Allen, and company with Edmund, but Page would have his heroes align with Edgar; these gentlemen must disguise or at least mute their true identities during the chaotic time of Reconstruction. They are obliged to take on, what must seem like to these privileged Southern men, their own Tom O’ Bedlam roles due to the “occupation.”71 Of course Page’s text begs its readers to view it as an anti-imperialist novel— again, Page co-opts African victimization and the North’s moral high ground by doing so. Page is also fully embracing the Lost Cause idea that the Reconstruction was much worse than the Civil War.72 In the Civil War, both sides suffer. During the Reconstruction, the South is the sole victim, taking on the mantle of suffering and victimization. Page offers an Edmund in Hiram Still. Still is a lower-class white male who begins the novel as an Iago figure, keeping his alignment with the Northern forces that have upset the South’s “natural”

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hierarchy a secret. This commoner eventually amasses so much land and wealth through trickery and manipulation of his associations that he becomes the owner of the Gray plantation. Several characters, such as the good Dr. Cary, pronounce Hiram Still as “good” and “kind” while Still plies his nefarious trade in true Iago fashion. Like Edmund, Still believes that custom in the South has kept him down and he, given the chance to show his natural talents, can be as good as his once social superiors. Still becomes a wealthy man thanks to Reconstruction politics, and he struggles to assert himself in the manner befitting an “Edgar” and a gentleman. When Major Welch first calls on the now-wealthy landowner, Still replies, “Yes, sir, I’m the gentleman: I’m Mr. Still— Colonel Still, some of ’em calls me; but I’m like yourself, Colonel, I don’t care for titles.”73 Still has acquired many of the local plantations, but he is not the natural heir and cannot truly run these estates, just as women are incapable of doing so in Page’s earlier works. The author also marks this man by rendering his speech patterns in “dialect,” not unlike Shakespeare’s differentiation of class by putting prose into the mouth of Edmund when he speaks to any member of the nobility early in King Lear, while giving this entire class the more stately iambic pentameter. As Edmund tries to improve his station by an alliance with either Regan or Goneril in King Lear, so does Still attempt to raise the status of his material wealth by arranging a marriage between his son Wash (an attempt to clean him?) and Blair Cary. Still’s proposition is rebuffed and he rants, “You ain’t good enough for ’em! Well, I’ll show ’em. I’ll turn them out in the road and make their place a nigger settlement. I’ll show ’em who they’re turning their noses up at. I’ll show them who Hiram Still is.”74 With the categories of power destabilizing during the 1880s and 1890s, and the slow disappearance of the Old South landed gentry, Page must have sensed a threat to his beloved social order—the Hiram Stills and their economic power were the greatest of these threats.75 The solution was a redefinition of “gentleman.” The word became associated through repetition with qualities such as honor, courage, duty, devotion to truth, and chivalry.76 Red Rock’s old aristocrats demonstrate these attributes, whereas the nouveaux riches usurpers are incapable, as if they are not learned but inherent. Lower-class whites are able to manipulate Reconstruction politics to amass their nearest semblance to the older ideal of the gentleman— money. This class of white men really endangers Southern, white, aristocratic male roles, not the easily duped ex-slaves.77 Again, the emphasis is on the “natural order” as Page and his class of men would see it. This

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“natural” for Page’s novel, as well as Shakespeare’s text, is predicated on birthright. Edmund is constantly reminded of his inferior birth throughout King Lear, leading him to bark, “As to th’ legitimate. Fine word, ‘legitimate!’ ”78 Wash Still realizes this importance. The younger Still tries to convince others of his gentlemanly status by suggesting that his family is descended from the “Steels” and “Sir Richard Steel,” to strengthen their British ties and shore up their questionable social standing.79 Thomas Nelson Page presents this idea as folly as much as Shakespeare does with regard to Edmund. Hiram Still and his offspring are as insufficient to rule, despite their money, as the “half-bastard” son of Gloucester in King Lear. This idea would be echoed again in Gordon Keith, especially the absurdity of purchasing a lineage, when the wealthy Ferdy Wickersham inveighs against the title character’s Southern idealized forbears, “I can buy better ancestors on Broadway for twenty dollars.”80 Page will attempt to demonstrate in Gordon Keith that one must come by ancestors and, therefore, birthright, “naturally” to be effective. This notion is especially interesting considering Shakespeare’s (Page’s British cultural deity) pretensions of gentleman status late in life, even purchasing a coat of arms for his family. Page’s upside-down world in Red Rock twins King Lear’s. The aging king slips into madness and the “natural” males (Edgar, Kent) into disguise as chaos tears the kingdom apart. Furthermore, the characters of both the play and the novel have difficulty in fully enacting their masculine roles amid the disorder. The previous citations that had become naturalized through ritual and repeated performativity are lost in the confusion of the upset order; the law cannot be reinstituted under these “unnatural” conditions. Suffering is the true mode of action in Red Rock:81 the loss of the older Gray, the expropriation of the plantations, the death of good men such as Dr. Cary, and the inversion of the classes—the good aristocracy suffers poverty while the bad lower classes obtain wealth and power—are but a few of the sufferings of this class of men as seen from Thomas Nelson Page’s perspective. Suffering is at the base of Lost Cause dogma and informs Southern literature down to William Faulkner. Yet there is one important element that dominates Shakespeare’s play that is missing in Page’s novel. “Lear is at once father, king, and a kind of mortal god: he is the image of male authority, perhaps the ultimate representation of the Dead White European Male.”82 There is no raging Lear equivalent in Page’s novel; it is the sons who must rage. Still, several father-kings haunt the novel, and it is the ghostly presence of these men that fortifies their descendants and keeps them from slipping into a passive victimization in Page’s

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mythology. Red Rock’s father-king is not Lear, but Hamlet Sr., a shadow of the former self, yet still the primary motivator. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark also offers the chaos of an upset hierarchy, as Claudius has killed his brother, the rightful king, taken what “naturally” should be Hamlet’s “office,” married Gertrude, and made Denmark a “couch for luxury and damned incest.”83 The play sides with the need for a “natural” order and reproducing it, much in the way Red Rock does.84 Shakespeare has been enshrined as the transcendent personification of a national ideal,85 and Page wants this ideal in his texts. Part of that order is the missing fathers, and he looks to Hamlet for at least the specter of these absent fathers. The narrator begins Red Rock with the tale of the first Jacqueline Gray who settled on the plantation. This patriarch killed the Indian chief who murdered his wife, giving a huge rock on the plantation a stain, hence its name. The plantation is founded on blood and thievery, yet Page seems to make this shame a point of pride. The father now hangs in a portrait above the fireplace. The narrator relates that the forbear, “with his piercing eyes and fierce look, hung in black frame over the mantel, and used to come down as a warning when any peril impended above the house.”86 This absent father’s “ghost” still protects the house, not unlike the ghost of Hamlet Sr. He goes on to tell of how the eyes follow anyone in the house and that the current Gray’s mammy used the painting to scare young Jacqueline, his younger brother Rupert, and Steve Allen into behaving when they were children. The painting frightens the two antagonists, Hiram Still and Jonadab Leech, and all of the (ex) slaves, who treat the picture with fear and trembling. The portrait, or at least what it represents in the novel, has power. The antagonists want to appropriate this power and the protagonists aspire to fulfill its promise. In Page’s mythology, the former fail while the latter do not. In this sense, the ghost of the “Indian Killer” haunts the novel, motivating and begging for remembrance, helping the boys of this class and race to become Southern, white, aristocratic gentlemen. Hamlet, despite its chaos, displays a missing father who still manages to drive the action of the work notwithstanding his shuffling off of the mortal coil. Not only does this absent father act as a plot motivator, but he also demands remembrance. Leaving his son after his first appearance, the dead father-king utters, “Adieu, adieu, adieu! Remember me.”87 The last two words of the exit line have more of the tone of a command than a request. One such way in which Hamlet Jr. intends to honor his father’s words is through his actions, his supposed revenge for his father’s sake.

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Another way is through his idealization of a representational father. He uses this “likeness” to convince Gertrude of his father’s superiority and Claudius’s insufficiency. Hamlet rails: Look here upon this picture, and this, The counterfeit presentment of two brothers. See what grace was seated on this brow; Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself, An eye like Mars to threaten and command, A station like the herald of Mercury New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill— A combination and a form indeed Where every god did seem to set his seal To give the world assurance of a man. This was your husband.88

Hamlet raises his father to godlike status, which culminates in “a man.” The troubled prince derives this estimation of his father not from his father’s ghost as it walks the corridors of the play or his own memories, but from a picture, a likeness, a representation. The thinking here reveals an implied message that the actuality of the father does not matter, only its representational value does. Red Rock’s missing father-king is idealized through portraiture as well. He does not walk around the plantation mentioned in the title in a physical/spectral manifestation, but he does haunt the aristocratic males as an ideal in which they find comfort while the interloping under classes see him as an epitome of judgment. This patriarch motivates the action of the novel, giving his descendants the power to withstand the cruelties of Reconstruction and causing the pretenders to feel insufficient. He is “The Indian Killer,” and the heart of Red Rock, both the novel and the plantation. In a way, Page does carry over the father-king from Red Rock and Shakespeare four years later in Gordon Keith. General Keith, the title character’s father, is presented as more of a spirit than a human, embodying tradition while he lives in an almost otherworldly fashion. Theodore Gross offers in Thomas Nelson Page, “Page presents Gordon Keith and his father, General Keith, as figures who journey through a dreamlike world. . . . General Keith, the father, remains more a spirit than a person.”89 Indeed, the general never comes across as a real person in the novel, merely a repository for Lost Cause ideology and idolatry. The younger Keith’s relationship to this fatherly ghost echoes Hamlet. The narrator offers the son’s lamentation: “Keith thought of his father and how steadily that old man had held

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to his ideals through everything. ‘I have not realized them,’ he said firmly. ‘I fear I have lost most of them. I set out in life with high ideals, which I got from my father; but, I seem to have changed them.’ ”90 Gordon Keith seems Hamlet-like in the sense that he has placed his father, really almost the representation of a father, in such high regard that he cannot possibly live up to his ideals. Still, Gordon avoids Hamlet’s fate by learning from his mistakes and returning to the citations of his father and their correlative principles. Hamlet’s infamous indecision would not allow him such a victory; this successful resolution would be reserved for Fortinbras. The connection between Hamlet and Red Rock is a strong one, though their conclusions are different. An important distinction is that the Danish prince makes his missing father-king into such a godlike figure that comparisons between himself and his father would be futile. Gordon Keith follows a similar, if less strident, pattern, but the narrator of Red Rock never tires of juxtaposing the patriarch and his offspring. When Jacqueline returns home to find not only his father dead but also his home in the hands of Hiram Still, an old, ex-slave asserts, “Ef I didn’ think ’twas my ole marster—er de Injun-Killer don’ come down out de picture sho ’nough.”91 Apparently these young Grays both grow into the image of their original, missing father-king. Hiram Still mistakes Rupert, Jacqueline’s younger brother, for the ghost of the “Indian-Killer” at the novel’s climax.92 These young men are able to take on the image of this idealized patriarch in Page’s mythology; therefore, they do not culminate in the complete tragedy of Hamlet. Page asserts in The Old South that “the New South is, in fact, the Old South with its energies directed into new lines.”93 Page’s new lines seem much like the old ones; the romancer writes these novels and their citations of masculinity to imbue them with energies indeed, the missing father-kings. This effort only tempers, not totally modifies, the changes in Page’s society. At the end of the novel, Jacqueline Gray wins the majority of his ancestral home while Hiram Still retains the overseer’s house and half of the estate. Gray’s victory is partial, and the novel suggests that Gray’s generation may survive but will not achieve the level of success of the forefathers—the Old South ideal of an organic society has been reduced to its current state and is found wanting. The book renders this sort of judgment due to political and sociological circumstances in the country as a whole, insufficiency of this newer generation of aristocrats, or, more likely, given Page’s view of the Old South as a golden age, a combination of the two. Little wonder that the novel ends in ambiguity.94 If this paradise is regained, it is

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only partially so and will always fall short of the glories of its fathers, even if Page is attempting to reclaim those glories. A fine line demarcates the tragic grandeur of fighting a losing battle and being delusive. The irony exists in that to see Page as the former is to romance the romancer. To see him as the latter is harshly realistic. The parallels between the title character in Gordon Keith and the author are numerous (both had the same education level, both taught, both achieved wealth in a modern age, and both were Southern gentlemen who managed to become “fashionable men of the city”).95 Page’s fiction leads here because of the author’s attempt to move a Southern, white, aristocratic gentleman into not only the New South but also the larger culture of the United States with its urbanization, industrialization, and privileging of cities, such as New York, that succeed in a new market economy. The major failing of Gordon Keith is Page’s perspective. The author writes of General Keith, “He knew the Past and lived in it; the present he did not understand, and the Future he did not know.”96 Page may have thought he was Gordon, but the perspective revealed in the work is modeled more on his father, the general. The author’s inability to “understand the present” causes him to attempt a work that is both a romance and a realistic novel. Page may have thought his tale was realistic because of connections between his life and Gordon’s, but he fails to realize how much he romanticizes Keith’s rise to financial power and social status. While Page was appointed ambassador to Italy by Woodrow Wilson in 1913 through his second marriage to the wealthy Florence Lathrop Field,97 he romanticizes Gordon Keith’s rise not through a well-connected marriage but through his intelligence, acumen, and adherence to his father and his ideals. Page reveals the source of these values early in the novel. The young Gordon and his father travel to England on pre–Civil War diplomatic business. There Gordon meets his lifelong enemy Ferdy Wickersham and friend Norman Wentworth. The former takes sides in a fight against the young Keith because “he is a rebel.” Norman reminds the antagonist, “He is an American.”98 The scene implies that Northerners and Southerners can truly become reunited only under the aegis of England. Page suggests that the remembrance of British fathers can make all of the sectional boys into American men. After all, he writes in Social Life in Old Virginia before the War of “interest in English matters having been handed down from father to son as a class test.”99 The author clearly cites British ideals as the bedrock for his forefathers becoming the class of men that their heritage demanded—certainly Yankees could benefit from this connection and a proper reconciliation

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could ensue. The overwhelming stress is less on region and/or nationality as much as it is on class. One of these beliefs is a connection to the land, an idea Page lifted directly from the British landed gentry’s social system. Of his Virginian forefathers he asserts, “The land-holding instinct of the people displayed itself from the first. . . . Here they set up establishments as nearly like those of the landed gentry of England.”100 Gordon Keith strays from this ideal by leaving his homeland for New York City eventually, but he ultimately returns to the South and purchases his father’s plantation for him, figuratively reversing the effects of losing the war.101 Gordon Keith manages to benefit from the wealth and opportunity of New York City but still returns to the Southern homeland and its ideals—he has the best of both worlds by the novel’s end. Part of the successful performativity of the masculine role for these deposed white aristocrats is at least forging a connection with the land, if not full control of it through ownership. Once Gordon has learned his lesson about the difference between the practicality of amassing wealth and the retention of principles inherited from the father, Page offers this passage: He had almost forgotten that life held other rewards other than riches. He had forgotten the calm and tranquil region that stretched between the moil and the anguish of strife for gain. Here his father walked with him again, calm, serene, and elevated, his thoughts above all commercial matters, ranging the fields of lofty speculation with statesmen, philosophers, and poets, holding up to his gaze again lofty ideals; practicising, without thought of reward, the very gospel of the universal gentleness and kindness.102

The location is important in the passage. This reconnection with the land has certainly transfigured these males into not just patriarchs, but seemingly mortal gods as Page lays on the hokum thickly with religious diction and a regionalist dogma to match. General Keith’s bond with the land raises him both spiritually and intellectually into a loftier (notice Page uses the word “lofty” twice in the passage above) atmosphere than is available to the Yankees in New York. In other words, the pastoral is the moral.103 The moral aspect of the land is prevalent in almost all of Page’s works, but, as shown above, is never quite so overwrought as it appears in Gordon Keith. This element is part of what a man of this class needs to successfully cite his masculine role and reiterate the law. Judith Butler may feel as if the sexed positions and the law do not preexist each other but are brought into being reciprocally through citation, but she does allow that a law may seem to predate

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a citation when a given previous citation becomes viewed as a law, especially when accompanied by social pressures that make the law seem authoritative.104 This connection to the land as part of a successful citation of masculinity for this class of men has such authoritative citations in the works of William Shakespeare and his culture. For Page to produce his “imaginary past,” he would look for his “regrounding of authority” in literature.105 He would combine his historical context with literary selffashioning and the cultural authority of Shakespeare for appropriate citations of masculinity as they relate to a connection to the land.106 Page made a strong tie between land and identity when his chief complaint about the treatment of aristocratic white Southerners since the Civil War was, “The muniments of title to the property we hold, nay, the very proof of our identity and position, social and legal, have been disregarded and destroyed.”107 Shakespeare offers this predated citation in King Lear when the king loses his identity (and his masculine role) upon dividing up his lands; Lear remains a king only without his lands. Of the plantation owners in Page’s fiction, the two most important attributes are land and honor.108 Page sees these two as inextricably bound. In his fiction, both are absolutely necessary for this class of men to be able to cite their sexed positions and uphold the law. Like Page’s thesis, The Tragedy of Richard the Second reflects a similar concern. Land ownership is so important to the play that the word “land” or its plural is used twenty-nine times in the text. Yet King Richard’s tragic flaw is his willingness to “farm our royal realm” or sell the right to collect taxes to individuals to keep a “too great court.”109 General Keith passes on to his son a comparable judgment with Shakespeare’s play on Richard when he admonishes, “A fortune is a great blessing in the hands of a man who knows how to spend it. But riches considered as something to possess or display is one of the most despicable and debasing of all aims that men can have.”110 King Richard’s flaw is identical to that found in Gordon Keith’s Ferdy Wickersham and Yankee carpetbaggers—like King Richard, their value of the land is economic and not really a part of who they are. Their identity is gained through acquisition, not observance, and therefore is inferior. Part of this value is proprietorship. The responsibility of the fatherking in relationship to the land is that of a caretaker. Page offers this assessment of General Keith’s role: “This plantation, then, was Gordon’s world. The woods that rimmed it were his horizon, as they had been that of the Keiths for generations; more or less they always affected his horizon. His father appeared to the boy to govern the world; he governed the most important part of it—the plantation— without ever raising his voice. His word had the convincing quality of

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a law of nature.”111 In Page’s fictive world, the role of the white male patriarch was that of governance. This rule is, like everything else in Page’s constructs, “natural.” This assertion of the natural persists as Page’s most consistent offering. Failure to be this father-king caretaker is the central thesis of King Richard. In act 3, scene 4, the queen happens upon a gardener full of Edenic images and allegory. Speaking of King Richard, the wasteful king, this gardener laments, “O, what a pity is it/ That he hath not so trimmed and dressed his land/ As we this garden!”112 This figurative speaker has a clearer idea of what father-kings should be and do because of his own link to the land. The lack of understanding with regard to this important point is what causes King Richard to reiterate his sexed position in a failed way, leading to Bolingbroke’s constant questioning of Richard’s masculinity and the broken king’s eventual downfall.113 The masculine role and the land are bound and rise and fall by the success or failure of one or the other. Both Page and Shakespeare also demonstrate the importance of the connection to the land in a less punitive manner—the pastoral tradition. True the Renaissance playwright was merely a purveyor not inventor of this tradition, but it has been amply demonstrated that Page had a vested interest in gleaning these images from Shakespeare. The tradition is of the wild, the forest, being the place where urban citizens must flee unjust authority and solve their problems, frequently created by their lack of union with this primeval world. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and The Tempest are just a few examples of these “green world” plays. Gordon Keith buys into this ideology wholesale. Page writes of a stranger passing through the Keiths’ green world: Would have heard much of Elphinstone, the Keith plantation, but he would have seen from the main road . . . only long stretches of rolling fields were tilled, and far beyond them a grove on a high hill, where the mansion rested in proud seclusion amid its immemorial oaks and elms, with what appeared to be a small hamlet lying about its feet. Had he turned in at the big-gate and driven a mile or so he would have found that Elphinstone was really a world to itself, almost as much cut off from the outer world as the home of the Keiths had been in the old country . . . he would have found culture with philosophy and wealth with content, and he would have come away charmed with the graciousness of his entertainment.114

The physical landscape is imbued with ideological attributes, a philosophic and cultural apex. Page cannot resist connecting both his hero’s

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lineage and his Eden to “the old country.” Gordon would have to return to this world and its attendant ideals, including the father-king caretaker masculinity, for a fulfilling conclusion. The rural landscapes of the South are Page’s forest of Arden. As You Like It offers a chaotic, urban world in which Duke Frederick usurps and banishes his brother Duke Senior to the forest and Rosalind, Celia, and even Orlando take on opposite gender roles in response to various crises. Duke Senior reconnects to his basic humanity through his link with this wood. He states, “Are not these woods/ more free from peril than the envious court?/ Here we feel not the penalty of Adam/. . . . And this our life, exempt from public haunt,/ Finds tongues in tree, books in the running brooks,/ Sermons in the stones, and good in everything.”115 As Page would do later on, Shakespeare has his duke correlate ideals to his physical environment. Eventually Duke Frederick wanders into Arden and converts, recanting his evil ways, and Orlando wins the hand of Rosalind—this world has fixed everything; it especially has returned each person to a proper citation of their roles, both class and gender, reiterating predated citations. Page envisions a similar dichotomy with regard to New York City and the rural South. The urban landscape of New York City is Page’s Shakespearean court, and he refers to its “heartlessness and emptiness,” and how the people “were machines that ground through life monotonously as the wheels in their factories, turning out riches, riches, riches.”116 Even the housing seems like “ever-recurrent brownstone monotony. They were as much alike as so many box-stalls in a stable.”117 Worse yet, this environment engenders the kind of avarice present in Duke Frederick, who is willing to betray his own brother for gain. Gordon Keith frequently asserts that the moneyed gentry of this system are praised for vice, not virtue, particularly if they produce capital. In contrast, as has been shown, the rural landscapes of the South are the pastoral cradle. Gordon Keith may go to New York City in an effort to gain power, but he, like Duke Senior, must reconnect with the land, in this case the South, to fully resolve all problems. Near the end of the novel, Gordon learns, “He left his office and went down to the country. To be there was like a plunge in a cool, limpid pool.”118 Eventually Gordon would repurchase his father’s plantation, marry the Southern girl instead of the elite New Yorker, and return to the South to live with his bride and his father in Page’s forest to aright the situation. The young Keith’s ability to leave his office and walk, like his father, among the lands is as much responsible for the novel’s fairy-tale ending as any plot device.

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Page’s romanticized view in Gordon Keith is full of glaring contradictions. Gordon eventually eschews New York with its focus on ostentatious wealth and social status, yet no one in the novel wants it more than he does. Gordon reconnects with the land, his father, and his role in the South only after he has obtained all that the North and its wealth has to offer. These contradictions are also present in Page’s personal life. Page had married into money—an easy position from which to decry the evils of money. He also lived in an urban environment while offering an agrarian ideal.119 These facts reveal the serious gap between the mythologies Page was building and the life he was actually leading. In fact, Page’s grandson Henry Field wrote in his 1978 Field Research Project titled A Memoir of Thomas Nelson Page, “With the royalties from Gordon Keith, Thomas Nelson Page gave each stepdaughter a tiny string of pearls with the card, ‘with love, your Dad and Gordon Keith.’ ”120 Page was not above enjoying the crass materialism the novel afforded him; a careful reader will note just how much Page sounds like Gordon Keith’s nemesis, the Yankee Ferdy Wickersham. There is an even greater credibility gap between Page’s fiction and his essays than his personal life.121 In In Ole Virginia, African males are the keepers of white aristocratic masculinity. In Red Rock, they have been reduced to supporters of the Old South at best or dupes or agents of Reconstruction at worst. By the time Page published Gordon Keith in 1903, Africans receded so far into the background of the narrative as to almost disappear. At the same time, Page was writing essays such as “The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem” and “The Lynching of Negroes—Its Cause and Its Prevention,” both in 1904. The latter article suggests that black males had been manipulated into the desire for white women by Yankees.122 The former offered the “true nature” of the black man as rapist beast based on his ignorance, an area that Thomas Dixon would mine and Page would eventually abandon.123 Numerous cultural forces brought about Page’s change. Jim Crow laws first appeared in Southern law books a decade after the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877.124 At the same time, the country had just gone through an economic depression and the rise of populism. Reconstruction had shattered the slave versus free citizen dialectic that had proven African inferiority in the past and that a black/white binary was needed to restore some sort of hierarchy. The radical racial mentality appeared in 1889 and ran until 1915—its zenith was between 1897 and 1907.125 White America finally reunified fully by not being black.

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Page was not immune to this power. Many bottom racial conservatives fell into radical range during this period, and by 1904 Page had done so as well.126 Race, class, and gender are concomitant; the hierarchy shift must have, therefore, affected constructions of gender and sexuality as well as race. The result is an instability created by flux and the need to compensate by clearly defining race, class, gender, and sex roles. Page writes, “Unless the white race continues to assert itself and retains control, a large section of the nation will become hopelessly Africanized, and American civilization [will] relapse and possibly perish.”127 This thinking has some of its origin in Lost Cause ideology, but it certainly echoes Iago in Othello. The schemer warns Brabantio, Desdemona’s father, “Zounds, sir, you are robbed. For shame, put on your/ gown/ Your heart is burst; you have lost half your soul./ Even now, now, very now, an old black ram/ is tupping your white ewe. Arise, Arise!/ Awake the snorting citizens with a bell,/ Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you.”128 Both Page and Shakespeare’s passages are warnings, infused with fear and manipulation, an always dangerous yet effective mixture. Page also points out the black man’s “same animal instincts in slavery that he exhibits now.”129 “The Negro Question” spends a significant amount of time discussing the economic ramifications of miscegenation, as surely as Iago postures that Brabantio has been “robbed.” Both passages are a call to arms, only one is fiction and the other is “real.” The important, unanswerable question raised is if Page is an Iago or merely a gullible Roderigo. Despite all of this inflammatory rhetoric, Thomas Nelson Page still maintained his organic Southern society in his fiction. Perhaps he could not bear to destroy what he saw as an idyllic picture with the brutalities of his essays, this definition of the black man and his relationship to white men. This contradiction acts as a harbinger for the likes of William Faulkner, who would write so movingly about race in Light in August, but once ranted, “But if it came to fighting I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out in the street and shooting Negroes.”130 Fiction and nonfiction often uneasily diverge, even if romancers like Page may not have wished them to do so. Thomas Nelson Page’s texts are mostly read today solely by students of Southern history and occasionally as a footnote in the study of Southern literature. Yet, like William Gilmore Simms, Thomas Dixon, and, to a lesser extent, William Faulkner, Page is indicative of his times.131 The author managed this feat in two ways. First, his Lost Cause ideology and his plantation myth were embraced by an industrialized North looking for a Utopia to soothe both sectional tensions

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and the strain of modernity, motivations not inherent in earlier plantation fiction.132 A January 19, 1907, New York Times Book Review of The Plantation Edition offers, “Thomas Nelson Page has been the recognized interpreter of the South—the Old South—to the rest of the country. Indeed, it would hardly be too much to say that most people of the younger generation who live north of Mason and Dixon’s line have built their conception of what the South before the war was like largely upon the foundation furnished by Mr. Page’s writings.”133 Lost Cause literature could not have survived had it not been popular outside of the South. Page’s images of the South gave meaning to the war with a heroic foe and a tip of the hat to Southern society as worthy of reunification.134 Larger cultural forces were responsible for the North’s embracing of Page’s vision during America’s “Gilded Age.” Second, Southern readers viewed Page’s works as authentically offering justification for the South, as if they were histories, not fiction.135 Page’s dedication in his collection of short stories In Ole Virginia reads, “To My People. This Fragmentary Record of Their Life is Dedicated.”136 The author perpetuated this belief in the veracity of his myth and Southerners used it to placate their fears and insecurities, much like the effect of William Gilmore Simms’s myths of the Revolutionary War. Page’s larger myth may have had this impact, but he and authors such as Joel Chandler Harris elicited sectional pride in a time when the South needed it most, after crushing defeat. In her 1932 autobiography, Grace Elizabeth King writes, “It is hard to explain in simple terms what Thomas Nelson Page meant to us in the South at the time,” and he “showed us an ineffable grace that although we were sore bereft, politically, we had a chance in literature at least.”137 King’s notion may not have been felt by all, but it does speak to a larger longing for pride, a need that Lost Cause ideology exploited as surely as Page. These people needed a chance, at least. Page wrote in Social Life in Old Virginia before the War that his “history” of this society “may be idealized by the haze of time; but it will be as I remember it.”138 Page also admits in the preface to Red Rock that the novel’s setting and people “lies in the South, somewhere in that vague region partly in one of the old Southern States and partly vaguer land of Memory.”139 At least in these instances Page acknowledges the difference between historical reality and the fictions that he produced, frequently under the claim of verisimilitude. As Cora Harris, roughly a contemporary of Page’s and a contributor to the Independent, once wrote of Page, “He is not a man of brains, but

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of feelings.”140 Harris may have intended to emphasize the latter attribute, but the historical record stresses the former. Richard Gray, in his foreword to South to a New Place (2002) coins the useful phrase, “the interface between consciousness and history.”141 Page’s organic society, his ideal South, exists in just such a place. Gray adds, “The South is an imagined community made up of a multiplicity of communities, similarly imagined. Some of those communities are more imagined than others (where, say, there is little or no immediate contact).”142 Page’s vague memory, with its tendency to idealize, Southern apologists, and Lost Cause adherents would argue with Gray about just what level of imaginary Page’s fictive community was and is.143 Page’s construction of the South is one of these representations that has attempted to displace experience at the interface of history and consciousness. If Page felt that Southern, white, aristocratic males had to perform a masculinity that valued Old South ideals of honor, a bond with the land, fidelity to father and section, and worship of the white lady, along with New South ideals of reconciliation through romance, both tragic and festive, he was not always capable of leading this sort of life. The gap between the mythologies he built and his own personal life (or anyone’s for that matter) reveals the reality that this legend making was up against. Page did, after all, write romances, not novels of realism, despite his frequent claims to the contrary. Thus, appropriating his ideals from the works of Shakespeare and Lost Cause ideology would be more successful in the pages of a romance than in the quickly changing society of the New South.

Chapter 3

4

Fe a r o f a B l ac k P l a n e t Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Narration of the Self via an Other

The children of Shakespeare and Burns, Drake and Hawkins, Howard and Raleigh would no longer submit to Negro rule.1 Thomas Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons Thoughts are the real forces of life and death. They make or unmake the man. They make or unmake the Nation.2 Thomas Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons

T

he hallmark of Thomas Dixon Jr. was fragility. Dixon’s writings, fiction, drama, and biography are imbued with the delicate state of whiteness, masculinity, femininity, nationality, and blackness. This pervasiveness is ironic, considering that the author’s life and work were an attempt to solidify these categories—an endeavor that, instead, revealed these unstable labels as just that, as contingent at best. Dixon’s corpus is about control, stability; these ideas eluded him, even in his fictive world and much less in the actuality of his existence. The temptation to lump Thomas Dixon with Thomas Nelson Page is strong. The two did, after all, produce works within a relatively short period of time from each other. Both were affected by shared historical and cultural experiences and/or their aftermath, such as the Civil War, Reconstruction, the rise of industrialism, ushering in a “New South,”

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and the inculcating of the Lost Cause ideology into this emergent ethos, making Dixon and Page ideological “confederates.” This last shared attribute is especially acute in Dixon’s works as it is in Page’s. That the Civil War was not about slavery and that the South would have given it up eventually, given the chance, free from outside agitators, are two basic tenets of Lost Cause ideology.3 Dixon argues, “The war had not been fought by the North to free the slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation just issued was an accident of the titanic conflict . . . my father believed that slavery would die of its own weakness in the South, as it had died in the North, unless meddling fools should provoke a war over it. As they did.”4 In an attempt to rationalize Southern thinking about slavery, Dixon felt comfortable telling Northerners what their own motivations were, as if he fully understood these “fools” while the reverse was not true. Clearly, Dixon’s father had taught him these basic elements of Lost Cause thinking. Dixon’s culture taught the nationalistic/cultural difference between the North and the South prevalent in this ideology as well. The author refers to the “Anglo-Saxon” race, meaning “white, upper class,” far too many times in his “Reconstruction Trilogy,” (The Leopard’s Spots (1902), The Clansman (1905), and The Traitor (1907)), to be counted.5 What had been a rising tide of Lost Cause, regional, and racial propaganda in Page’s day became assumptions just a short period later, the era of Dixon, and myth became reality. Lost Cause propaganda also argued that Reconstruction was much worse than the Civil War, an assertion both Page and Dixon believed and represented in their works repeatedly. Dixon has his one-legged Civil War vet bemoan, “Them was awful times, but they wuz nothin’ to what we’re goin’ through now. The Lord knows best, but I can’t understand it.”6 If white men suffered through a horrific war, they did doubly so under the yoke of Reconstruction acts, carpetbaggers, scalawags, and the new freedmen in both Page’s and Dixon’s assessments. To an even greater extreme than Page, Dixon would co-opt African victimization and the attendant moral high ground. Dixon’s appropriations of masculine tropes from the works of William Shakespeare are striking; they resonate with Page’s earlier presentations of these same expropriations before adding the constitutive constraints of Dixon’s era, such as the rise of redefining race and institutionalizing racism, class mobility, the effects of industrialization, an economic depression, and the reunification of the nation ostensibly after the Spanish-American War but more realistically under the banner of whiteness. In The Clansman, Dixon displays both the warring parents keeping offspring lovers apart in the manner of

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Romeo and Juliet and the reconciliation through marriage as portrayed in the festive comedies, the stock and trade of As You Like It and Much Ado about Nothing, among others. Yankees Elsie and Phil Stoneman, progeny of Austin Stoneman (based on radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens), the radical leader of Congress, end the novel by marrying Ben, the Grand Dragon of the KKK, and Margaret Cameron, his sister, respectively. This reconciliation takes place despite the direct conflict between the elder Dr. Cameron and Stoneman. As in Page’s works, this reconciliation means being acquiescent to the Southern perspective, as both Phil and Elsie reject their father’s thinking and wishes to form these new alliances with Southern spouses. The next generation of Northerners would see the truth of not only Southern dogma but also its supposed way of life to boot. Charles Gaston in The Leopard’s Spots, Ben Cameron in The Clansman, and John Graham in The Traitor, protagonists all three, fit the horseback-riding, weapon-handling, white woman defending, opponent-defying, honor-desiring model of Hotspur masculinity, tempered with the cunning of Prince Hal, so dominant in these Dixon works and earlier romances by Thomas Nelson Page. Dixon calls them in The Clansman, “these young dare-devil Knights of the South, with their life in their hands, a song on their lips, and the scorn of death in their souls.”7 But it is not all Hotspur/Prince Hal heroics in the trilogy. Graham, in a later novel (The Traitor), is also presented in full-on Hamlet mode, particularly in relation to his father. The son loses the family home to the carpetbagger Judge Butler (note the subservient, lower-class implications) while the father comes back from the Civil War physically but not mentally. Butler and his servant, Aunt Julie Ann, witness Major Graham haunt the halls of the old plantation: “ ‘Look—look!’ he whispered. ‘It is Old Graham. Watch his thin bony fingers grip the rail as he climbs the steps!’ ‘Hit’s his livin’ ghost I tell ye!’ persisted Aunt Julie Ann.”8 Graham the younger is motivated by his father’s spirit to set right that which is wrong, the Reconstruction enterprise and the loss of the South. Butler and Aunt Julie Ann’s description of old Graham echoes Horatio’s take on the ghost of Hamlet Sr. in Shakespeare’s play. The overarching point is that one could group Page and Dixon together, to perhaps see them as two different sides of the same racist coin, one paternal, the other radical. Despite this classification of convenience after the fact, Dixon felt the need to differentiate himself from his immediate predecessor. Walter Hines Page was Dixon’s publisher at

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Doubleday; the author relates Hines Page’s initial response to The Leopard’s Spots manuscript, “Thomas Nelson Page has taken the wind out of your sails—if I may make a pun. You’re about fifteen years too late for a sensation on this subject,” to which Dixon replied, “And you think Thomas Nelson Page has anticipated me? He never touched on my theme!”9 Page romanticized the South and acted as a Southern apologist, hoping to reunite the country under the aegis of the Southern perspective. Dixon assumed unity after the Spanish-American War and instead focused on the Anglo-Saxon mission of world leadership and the threat of blacks on the continent.10 To be sure, constructions of race, and resultant masculinities, are where the two authors’ point of divergence is greatest. Dixon may have assumed unity, but it was his making of race into a political category and the foundation of the nation that differentiated his form of racism from the plantation tradition.11 Dixon would not settle for including a racial Cain in a Southern family romance—this intimacy would not do. Race and masculinity are inextricably bound in Dixon, intimate in their reiterations of both labels, violently and mercilessly, in such a palpable way as to separate the author from Thomas Nelson Page’s paternalistic Racial Conservatism permanently; therefore, their use of Shakespeare’s models of male gender roles, while having some common ground, would have to deviate as well. Because race was so central to Dixon’s constructions of masculinity, he appropriated the Iago perspective, pervasive in Othello, of the construction, or narration, of the self via others around his identity, creating and uncreating to suit his personal needs. The result for Dixon is the half-man and half-animal Caliban of The Tempest and a white planter-class masculinity he could clearly define and reiterate in both fiction and, hopefully, life. Perhaps then Dixon could echo Prospero when he grudgingly admits, “This thing of darkness I/ Acknowledge mine.”12 In Dixon’s world, he could only admit “mine” in terms of ownership, not in a familial way. This “via others around his identity” for Dixon in his works is almost always cast in terms of black and white. Dixon could write in The Leopard’s Spots, “Henceforth there could be but one issue: Are you a White Man or a Negro,” but what he failed to realize is that by depending on these categories he binds them together, making one need the other for role definition.13 Jonathan Dollimore offers in Sexual Dissidence (1991) the perverse dynamic, “that fearful interconnectedness whereby the antithetical inheres within, and is partly produced by, what it opposes.”14 Dixon uses both white and black females in this “perverse dynamic” way to help define his brand of white masculinity, but it is the “fearful interconnectedness” with the

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black man that is most conspicuous in the works of this author, a paradox considering Dixon’s endeavor to define the two as separate. Joel Williamson lucidly classifies racial ideology since emancipation in The Crucible of Race (1984), offering Dixon’s brand of racism as radicalism.15 Thomas Dixon wrote his “Reconstruction Trilogy” between 1902 and 1907, making racial radicalism while it made him. Williamson rightly asserts that Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots is “virtually an encyclopedia of Radicalism, catching the movement during its apogee and weaving together into a single and simple piece nearly all the various and complex strains of the Radical mentality.”16 This casebook of racial radicalism offers insight into a mind-set equally shocking and fascinating. The Reverend John Durham represents the ideological mouthpiece for Dixon’s views in the novel. The author, a reverend himself, regularly tossed off such nonfiction missives (as in Southern Horizons) as “every bond that held the black race had been loosed. Crimes of unusual horror began to shock the community. The negroes now had freedom.”17 Dixon saw the Apocalypse, and it was black. Likewise, Reverend Durham pontificates to the local African preacher Ephraim Fox (note the animalistic last name, a metaphoric sure sign of Dixon’s view of black men, even their leaders): In the old slavery days you were taught the religion of Christ. It didn’t mean crime, and lust, and lying, and drinking, whatever it meant. Your religion has come to be a stench. You are getting lower and lower. . . . In the old days . . . I used to preach to your people. I saw before me many men of character . . . faithful home servants who loved their masters and were faithful until death. Now I see a cheap lot of thieves and jailbirds and trifling women seated in high places. You have shown no power to stand alone on the solid basis of character.18

Reverend Durham’s rant equates racial servility with Christianity. Durham also produces the false dichotomy of Africans as either loyal slaves or criminals, as if there is no middle ground for Africans. Decline and degradation is all Reverend Durham (and Dixon) sees in the freedom of slaves. Dixon’s racial radicalism is repeated from here, his first novel, until his last, The Flaming Sword (1939). Even when this view would seem anachronistic, as the imminent disappearance of blacks did not come true, Dixon clung to this ideology; it helped him define who he was as a Caucasian, a man, as a white man. While Dixon both formed and was formed by this philosophy, one of his cultural antecedents that informs his constructions of his masculine/racial dyad is

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the works of William Shakespeare and tropes of masculinity and race found therein. Shakespeare is not being used here merely as a shorthand way of understanding Dixon and his views. The author, and the culture that produced him, forged very tangible connections to this national forefather. Shakespeare’s dramas, the Bible, and John Bunyan were in every household in Dixon’s culture. Thus, Dixon came of age in a culture that deified Shakespeare.19 In fact, Dixon worked hard in both his writing and his life to connect himself to England and Shakespeare. The Southerner relates in his autobiography of listening to Grandma Dixon’s tale of how “she had married a Dixon of pure English strain,” and how he was overwhelmed with pride while listening to stories of her ancestry.20 Dixon was taught at an early age to privilege the “English strain,” but his latter literary works would stress the “pure” element of this myth. Grandma Dixon also told young Tom of his granduncle Major Joseph Dixon, known as “The Britisher,” who once had “a great victory and a shout went up the hills of Carolina and Georgia that they heard it in England, I suspect.”21 This Southern Hotspur, connected to England by label, radiated the martial spirit until the English had to be aware of it, a demand for validation. Dixon, then, came by the need to connect himself and his “people” to the aristocratic men of Great Britain, or who he called “the AngloSaxons,” quite naturally. His works are infused with what he labels “the Anglo-Saxon civilization of the South,” an attempt to draw a direct line of paternity, and his white planter-class characters frequently espouse this link to anyone who will hear.22 For example, when Dr. Cameron is arrested in The Clansman, he appeals to his “Magna Charta rights of every man who speaks the English tongue.”23 As historical circumstances change, so do Shakespearean appropriations. The process of how these appropriations work varies.24 Thomas Dixon inherited an appropriation of British culture and, with it, the deification of Shakespeare, but the significance of the playwright and his works were not one and the same as those Southern appropriators who had annexed the bard before Dixon, such as William Gilmore Simms or Thomas Nelson Page, to name only a few. Dixon’s appropriations would have their birthplace in the theater. Dixon’s sole biographer, Raymond Cook, tells the story in his 1968 Fire from the Flint of young Tom Dixon, bitten by the acting bug while attending Johns Hopkins University as a mere twenty-yearold, who was, in his own words, “bubbling over with a desire to fire the world in Shakespearean roles.”25 Dixon “began the study of the

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stage by taking a course in the Forbisher School” and “saw every play in town. First the masterpieces of Shakespeare.”26 The author pursued the playwright’s works with great fervor. In his second year, he left the university for New York to pursue an acting career. Dixon eventually landed the role of the Duke of Richmond in a traveling production of Richard III, but the affair turned out to be a scam; after many failed auditions, Dixon headed for home.27 The would-be actor never got over his love of the stage and toured with productions of the adapted-for-stage versions of his novels in later years, giving speeches and even, from time to time, enacting roles, but Shakespeare was his first and foremost theatrical love. Thomas Dixon’s connection to the playwright’s works was personal—something he longed to give his entire life to but was unable to do. Logically, Dixon would look to a source he privileged in such a way for masculine idealizations he could “enact,” in more than one sense, creating or appropriating Shakespeare as a father. The real significance of Shakespeare’s modes and models for the author’s appropriations is how they were seen through the lens of racial radicalism (and helped birth the ideology at the same time) and employed to define a nexus of both race and masculinity in the works of Dixon. The starting point for understanding Dixon’s use of Shakespearean negotiations of race and masculinity is Othello. For Dixon, what seems to be most manifest in his novels from Shakespeare’s play is not really the portrayal of the title character, though he is relevant, but the surrounding characters and how they are defined, and define themselves, in relation to others—especially to the play’s “inside” outsider, Othello. Like the play itself, Dixon’s appropriations of masculine and racial reiterations are stolen by Iago’s perspective or the white perception. Iago is central to the play, with eight soliloquies to the title character’s three.28 More important is Iago as playwright, creating a narrative and placing every character around him into it.29 Iago creates and manipulates the narratives of those around him; that is his power and can be the power of whiteness. Iago attempts total creative control of his environment and, therefore, has command of his own presentation of self. Dixon gives his white male protagonists this same sort of power— the authority to rewrite narratives of identity to suit their own ends.30 Dr. Cameron, father of the eventual Grand Dragon of the KKK, Ben Cameron, offers this narrative of the black man in The Clansman: And this creature, half child, half animal, the sport of impulse, whim, and conceit, “pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw,” a being who, left to his

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will, roams at night and sleeps in the day, whose speech knows no word of love, whose passions, once aroused, are as the fury of the tiger—they have set this thing to rule over the Southern people.31

This white patriarch provides a narrative of what a black man is, in turn providing by contradistinction what a white man is not. The black man is a thing, an animal, a child at best. Dr. Cameron’s consternation suggests that “Southern People” are the antithesis of this construction. This narrative will eventually compel his son Ben to carry out the “good work” of the KKK. The Reverend John Durham enacts this role in The Leopard’s Spots. Discussing young Dick, the protagonist Charles Gaston’s young, black playmate who is taken into the Gaston home after his father attempts to kill him, Durham queries, “I don’t know whether he’s got a soul. Certainly the very rudimentary foundations of morals seem lacking. I believe you could take a young ape and teach him quicker.”32 The supposed good reverend adds later, “The Negro is the human donkey. You can train him, but you can’t make a horse out of him.”33 Durham’s tirades are no doubt a “rebuke” to the idea that Miss Ophelia can “reform” Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). More importantly, once again the readers have foisted upon themselves a white male definition of what a black male is—an animal, without intellect, morality, or even a soul, and Dixon’s novels set about to offer “evidence” to support these racist assertions. The racial rhetoric is toned down a bit in The Traitor, and is more about whiteness than a threatening blackness.34 This threat is implicit in the disorder of the South, and the third novel’s “black menace” does seem muted, especially in comparison to the previous two. Still, Dixon’s shift is only a temporary one, as the author would five years later in his novel The Sins of the Father have his white aristocratic protagonist remark about his black house servant Andy: But yesterday our Negroes were brought here from the West Soudan, black, chattering savages, nearer to anthropoid ape than any other living creature. . . . In old Andy there you see him to-day, a creature half child, half animal. For thousands of years beyond the seas he stole his food, worked his wife, sold his child, and ate his brother.35

This supposed lack of filial connection may have arisen from the economic need to split slave families by selling them, but it also insinuates that Africans have no civilization, even down to the basic family unit. Dixon’s white upper-class men would continue to narrate identities for

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black men for the rest of the author’s works, a reverse of Thomas Nelson Page, who frequently allowed African males to transmit white aristocratic masculinity. There are many consistent threads running through this making, this narrating, but the most common is the relation of the black man to the animal. This writing of the black man in these terms is Iago’s stock and trade in Othello. Iago begins this sort of role projection, interestingly enough, outside of Desdemona’s father’s house. Iago warns Brabantio, “Even now, now, very now, an old black ram/ Is tupping your white ewe.”36 Iago uses this terminology mostly for the “benefit” of others, trying to provoke animalistic images for the father of this white woman. Note too that Desdemona is cast in these terms as well, as if she becomes animalistic herself through sex with this “black ram.” Iago’s use of “old” also suggests an age difference—allowing Desdemona to be read as young and gullible, and placing the blame for this animalism, by default, on Othello if not the lack of protection by Brabantio. Iago refers to Othello as a “Barbary Horse,” claims the Moor can be “tenderly led by the nose/ as asses are,” and asks Othello on one occasion, “Are you a man? Have you a soul or sense?” while on another exhorting him, “Good Sir, be a man.”37 Iago’s narrative for Othello’s masculinity has everything to do with race, and he narrates blackness into the animal and vice versa. Why would Iago, and much later Dixon’s white men, choose this particular way to cast black masculinity? One simple reason is the longing for a suitable hierarchy. Iago is forced to be “his Moorships’s ancient,” and Brabantio worries that “Bondslaves and pagans shall our statesmen be.”38 Both of these white men are concerned with maintaining hierarchies, which would imply changes they find unacceptable. Dixon’s works are replete with this concern for an upset hierarchy, no doubt hinging on fear of the freed black man and the perceived wrongs of Reconstruction. He writes, “of such infamy being forced on the South two years after his [Lee’s] surrender, as this attempt to make the old slaves the rulers of their masters, and to destroy the Anglo-Saxon civilization of the South.”39 In The Clansman, Dixon echoes Brabantio when his narrator asserts about a black-dominated state government, “A new mob of onion-laden breath, mixed with perspiring African odor, became the symbol of American Democracy. A new order of society sprouted in this corruption. The old high-bred ways, tastes, and enthusiasms were driven into the hiding places of a few families and cherished as relics of the past.”40 Clearly all of these white men, from Shakespeare’s to Dixon’s, are concerned with an upset, or at the very

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least the threat of an upset, hierarchy. Their place in it is not suitable.41 Seeing black men with at least a chance for power, watching their own power slip away, and failing to cite their previously comfortable masculine and racial roles, these men chafed. If they could demote the black man to an animal, to a thing, to something less than human, then they could reclaim their “natural” place.42 Iago goes even further than merely placing Othello below him in a hierarchy, and seeks to uncreate him, to send him back to his African origin, what Iago would see as Othello’s original chaos.43 Iago may not find an immediate human-animal order sufficient, and he tries to uncreate this superior black man. Iago’s ideological connection of a force that moves from uncreation, to chaos, to Othello’s place of origin, Africa, as if they are a causal chain, reveals much about the antagonist’s assumptions. Thomas Dixon has Dr. Cameron make this same connection in The Clansman. He postulates: Since the dawn of history the Negro has owned the Continent of Africa—rich beyond the dream of a poet’s fancy, crunching acres of diamonds beneath his bare black feet. Yet he never picked up one from the dust until a white man showed to him its glittering light. His land swarmed with powerful and docile animals, yet he never dreamed a harness, cart, or sled. A hunter by necessity, he never made an axe, spear, or arrow-head worth preserving beyond the moment of its use. He lived as an ox, content to graze for an hour. In a land of stone and timber he never sawed a foot of lumber, carved a block, or built a house save of broken sticks and mud. With league on league of ocean strand and miles of inland seas, for four thousand years he watched their surface ripple under the wind, heard the thunder of the surf on his beach, the howl of the storm over his head, gazed on the dim blue horizon calling him to worlds that lie beyond, and yet he never dreamed a sail!44

Dr. Cameron faults Africans for not considering the economic implications of their environment; he indicts them for not being good capitalists and asserts that this failure is the reason for their lack of sufficient “progress.” The argument not only insinuates that little or no African culture exists, but also constructs Africans as not having the intellect to conceive of a culture and its supposed progress in the doctor’s terms. Dr. Cameron’s simple-minded reduction of African culture has many colonial implications; Dixon’s seeming mouthpiece clearly connects Africa to chaos much in the same manner as Iago’s association does. And like Iago, Dixon’s Southern white aristocratic men want to send their black males back to this original chaos as well, to “uncreate” them in American society. In fact, Dixon attempts to co-opt the authority of Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation

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by putting this very ideology into the mouth of this symbol of the Union, the revered assassinated president. In The Clansman, he has Lincoln assert that his parents were Virginians and that he was born in Kentucky, and, “I have urged the colonization of the Negroes, and I shall continue until it is accomplished. My emancipation proclamation was linked with this plan.”45 Dixon’s wish fulfillment is that, had Lincoln lived, the black man would have been “repatriated” to Africa, uncreated, returned to the original chaos from whence he came. Even the emancipator of the black man, a father of the Union, saw the necessity of this action according to Thomas Dixon. Still, uncreating the black man or reducing him to an animal may not have been the original aim but a means to an end. Iago includes himself in his narrative, and he knows that identity is a narrative that can be told in many ways.46 Iago, then, like seemingly all of Dixon’s protagonists, appears to know that defining everyone in his context is one way of defining himself. Iago cheekily states to Roderigo, “It is as sure as you are Roderigo/ Were I the Moor I would not be Iago.”47 Othello here is named solely by his race, as he frequently is throughout the play, while Iago is defined against him by his name, a specific identity. This difference may be because whiteness is presupposed and needs no tag, but it still speaks to the relationship between the assumed and unassumed. Iago may “hate the Moor,” but he needs him to define himself against, to successfully cite his masculine and racial role, his identity. Again, this paradox is the “perverse dynamic.” He can be Iago or the Moor, but the one role is defined by the other. Dixon’s white aristocratic characters are trapped in this same double bind. The black male becomes central to Dixon’s work, as he is needed to help define race, class, and gender.48 The black male is paradoxically the lowest in Dixon’s hierarchy, yet the most integral to it. This bind has to do with race, but it informs these white men’s performance of gender roles as well. The terms “narration,” “labeling,” “enacting,” “performance,” and “reiteration” have been used here interchangeably—Judith Butler offers citational practice, reiteration, and their relationship to the “law” as an encompassing paradigm for all of these terms in regard to gender.49 Dixon and his generation of white, Southern, aristocratic males would have their instances of reiteration of both these citations (race and gender) and the law and their own possibility of its, and by definition their, failure. Dixon’s constitutive constraints would not be exactly the same as Thomas Nelson Page’s, William Gilmore Simms’s, or even William Shakespeare’s, but he would want to reiterate his role and their law (predated citations), for he seems to have feared this

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Butlerian failure,50 and he projected that fear onto the black man, making him the chief constitutive constraint for Dixon’s generation. Again, the perverse dynamic is at work here, and the formation of white upper-class masculinity depended on its opposition to its narration of the black man—the two were inextricably entwined. Dixon’s race and class of men not only knew what they were through the use of helpful models, such as those in Shakespeare to name only one, but they also knew what they were by what they thought they were not. There were, however, many cultural forces affecting these citations and forced narrations. Conservative whites returned to dominance in their Southern states in what they termed “the Redemption,” in 1877.51 While this return to power could have signaled the beginning of racial radicalism and the likes of Thomas Dixon, it did not, not quite yet. An economic recession in the late 1880s and a depression in the 1890s endangered the Victorian family and sex roles as it became difficult for men to maintain their positions as providers, thus causing feelings of inadequacy.52 The instability of the white masculine role due to these economic hardships offered the opportunity for failure in reiteration, for slippage. In Butlerian terms, the punishable consequence would be the loss of power and a failure to recite the law, making it authoritative. The effect was a destabilization of the categories of power. The uncertainty of what kind of hierarchy would replace the old slave/free man dialectic caused a mobile and changing society. The difficulty of sustaining this white male role during this time period was a function of both economic conditions and the hard social realities of the freed black man. The solution to this problem of modernity was to produce difference, and nothing afforded an opportunity quite like the meaning of race and its resultant segregation.53 These men would produce these differences as surely as Iago does for Roderigo, Othello, and even himself, and for many of the same reasons. That is not to conflate fictional characters and real men. Yet, Southern Horizons, Dixon’s autobiography, demonstrates that the author used events from his life in his fiction, and his life and art are bound together.54 The African boy Dick from The Leopard’s Spots has his genesis in young Dixon’s life; Austin Stoneman from The Clansman is, no doubt, radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens; and Judge Butler of The Traitor is an amalgamation of carpetbaggers. Both events and ideology, word for word, move back and forth between Dixon’s fiction and nonfiction. The effect is that it is tempting to read Dixon’s white male protagonists as ideals of himself, an assertion that cannot be proven, yet an engaging one nonetheless.

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Further, given his appropriations of both self-narrated and forced masculinity and race from Othello, it is enticing to see Dixon as an Iago-like figure, whispering into the ears of his white male protagonists Ben Cameron, the Reverend John Durham, Charles Gaston, and Dan Norton, only to name a few, and having them enact this role of narrator of race and masculinity for him. These fictional characters, in turn, end up taking up the cause of “I’ll pour this pestilence into his ear,” and this is exactly what they do through Dixon’s works, fiction, drama, and films. Dixon explains, “I have made no effort to write literature. I had no ambition to shine as a literary gymnast. It has always seemed to me a waste of time to do such work. Every generation writes its own literature. My sole purpose in writing was to reach and influence with my argument the mind of millions. I had a message and I wrote it as vividly and simple as I know how.”55 Dixon is truly a terrible writer and a worse logician, but through these white male protagonists he did disseminate his narration of black males and the relationship of the white male to it, and Dixon clearly felt the need for these inventions, though he was not the sole purveyor of this ideology. In a review of The Leopard’s Spots in The Saturday Evening Post (April 12, 1902), one reviewer shockingly argues, “I, for one, from absolute knowledge of my facts, do not hesitate to say that the book is moderate in tone considering what might have been written.”56 This notion is particularly appalling considering that all three books of Dixon’s trilogy turn on the act of rape. The Leopard’s Spots sold more than a million copies within twelve months of its publication.57 Dixon himself states with pride, “The Clansman was a bestseller and reached a circulation of more than a million copies,” and goes further to write, “But The Birth of a Nation, founded on it, in ten years reached a hundred million people”58 Dixon was not alone in his attempt to narrate men both black and white. So this endeavor to construct the black man as an equivalent to the status of an animal, if not to totally uncreate him, thereby raising the anxious role of the white male during Dixon’s volatile period back to one of superiority, was not only about hierarchies but was also about something else—sex. Dixon and his ilk believed in the irrationality of sexual impulses and imputed this force to Africans as animals as a way of projecting their fear of this conceptualization of sex to an other.59 While all of this reiteration of white masculine roles through narration of the black man is taking place, there is an even more tangible concern. Sex, sex roles, and sexual insecurities frequently bubble under the surface of Dixon’s works, sometimes rupturing the façade with violence, if not

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acting as a covert motivator. Dixon’s reasons for his appropriation of Iago’s narrative technique of identity are multitudinous—cultural, political, psychological, and ideological—yet it is this projection of sexuality versus its expression that is the lynchpin of Othello and informs Dixon’s annexation of the play. Volumes have been written about Iago’s motivation for destroying Othello; it seems to be one of the central preoccupations of many viewers and readers of the play—Iago’s reasons. One such motivator is lack of advancement. Iago is upset that the “bookish theoric” Michael Cassio has been promoted over him because, “Preferment goes by letter and affection,/ And not by old gradation, where each second/ Stood heir to the first.”60 After having Cassio cast aside in a scandal of Iago’s making and infecting Othello with his story of Desdemona’s infidelity, the villain is told by his captain, “Now art thou my lieutenant,” to which he replies, “I am your own forever.”61 This vow sounds like one of fidelity, in contradistinction to Cassio and Desdemona. Iago recovers his position, the loss of which must have affected his sense of identity, of his masculine role, of his manhood. After all, the villain does assert, “If Cassio do remain,/ He hath a daily beauty in his life/ That makes me ugly.”62 Iago is anxious about his role, despite his cool conniving. “Honest Iago” claims to be motivated by “sport and profit,” or makes no declaration at all, as in the play’s climax, when he taunts, “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know./ From this time forth I will never speak word.”63 Readers and viewers can never be quite sure; Iago’s last assertion especially invites viewers to contemplate motivations. Still, the most charged anxiety that seems to be expressed in Shakespeare’s play is sexual, and it is this anxious topic and how it informs black and white masculinity, and white femininity as well, that is a constant thread throughout all possible motivators of the majority of the play’s characters. This same anxiety also informs Thomas Dixon’s constructions of masculinity and femininity, both white and black. Dixon creates in The Leopard’s Spots Tim Shelby, a “full-blooded Negro” who is college educated and “well versed in English history,” and has him argue to a crowd of freed black men: Our proud white aristocrats of the South are in a panic it seems. They fear the coming power of the Negro. They fear their Desdemonas may be fascinated again by an Othello. Well, Othello’s day has come at last. If he has dreamed dreams in the past his tongue dared not speak, the day is fast coming when he will put these dreams into deeds, not words.64

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This dangerous new creature, the educated black man, meant to abscond with the white woman, leaving the white masculine role, as defined by Dixon, lacking. The freedom that Africans wanted in Dixon’s perspective, and later D. W. Griffith’s as well, was sexual.65 In what may possibly be a case of projection, Dixon could not imagine any other motivation for the African yearning for freedom than the desire for white women, an (il)logical extension of his African-as-animal narrative. Again, this thinking is a paranoid reaction to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, of which Dixon writes in The Leopard’s Spots, “A little Yankee woman wrote a crude book. The single act of that woman’s will caused the war, killed a million men, desolated and ruined the South, and changed the history of the world.”66 Dixon’s shoot-the-messenger thinking ignores his own crudity. Shelby’s “deed” is an attempt in the General Assembly of North Carolina to introduce an “Act to Relieve Married Women from the Bonds of Matrimony When United to Felons, and to Define Felony.” Shelby defines all rebellious Confederates as felons and offers “that the married relations of all such felons are hereby dissolved and their wives absolutely divorced, and said felons shall be forever barred from contracting marriage or living under the same roof with their former wives.”67 Tim Shelby tries to legislate Othello and Desdemona couples into existence by divorcing white women from their men. Shelby, Dixon’s black “animal” posing as a legislator, is, in a sense, antifamily values in Dixon’s paranoid fictive world. Dixon has the bill defeated, but the sequence reveals his anxiety about black male sexual intentions. This same kind of anxiety can be seen in Iago’s statements. He spits, “I hate the Moor;/ And it is thought abroad that twixt my sheets/ He’s done my office. I know not if ’t be true;/ But I, for mere suspicion in that kind,/ Will do as if for surety.”68 This charge he repeats later in the play: “For that I do suspect the lusty Moor/ Hath leaped into my seat, the thought whereof/ Doth, like a poisonous mineral, gnaw my innards;/ And nothing can or shall content my soul/ Till I am evened with him, wife for wife.”69 Shakespeare provides no evidence for Iago’s fear—not even an intimation. Iago is, in fact, so sexually insecure that he fears “Cassio with my nightcap too.”70 Both of these potential betrayers suffer at the hands of Iago’s projective narrations of their identities. Iago narrates the sexual roles for the black man, the white woman, and himself throughout the play, an act that Dixon’s protagonists and narrators feel the need to commit as well. What these constructions reveal is the very anxiety Iago puts forth in Shakespeare’s play—the fear of cuckoldry, which leads to the possibility of failure to cite the white masculine role.

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The antagonist of The Clansman, Austin Stoneman, argues, “Your first task, as I told you in the beginning, is to teach every Negro to stand erect in the presence of his former master and assert his manhood.”71 Dixon’s villain is discussing liberty, but the sexual connotations in his word choice are rather obvious. What Dixon fears the most is the vision of the African male “standing erect” and “asserting his manhood,” especially in the presence of his former master. In Dixon’s ideology of racial radicalism, the black man was first given freedom, then economic and political power, and then, finally, as the protagonist Ben Cameron explains, “The next step will be a black hand on a white woman’s throat.”72 In Dixon’s racist fictive world, Cameron’s prophecy comes true with the black assault of the white woman. This fear of black male sexuality is an apprehension of the white masculine role as well, its contingency, and it resonates from Iago and Brabantio to the Cameron family, Charles Gaston, and pretty much any of Dixon’s white, aristocratic, Southern men. Yet there is an important difference between Shakespeare’s and Dixon’s treatment of this sexuality. This difference has to do with the white female in this nexus of gender and race. Othello had been performed frequently in America, yet its productions declined during the Jim Crow era of 1890 to 1920 and the play was frequently parodied.73 Even though Shakespeare carried so much cultural authority in nineteenth-century America, and even though the play had been enacted frequently before Dixon’s era, the play declined in American culture for a simple reason: Desdemona chooses Othello. This choosing reflects Tim Shelby’s wish (and prophecy) in his abovequoted speech from The Leopard’s Spots. And Thomas Dixon’s fear. The black man imagines white women will be fascinated with these new “Othellos”—not one anywhere in Dixon’s works ever is. Still, the anxiety of the possibility lingers in Dixon’s novels despite his best efforts. Early in The Leopard’s Spots, a young Charles Gaston and his mother must defend their home from newly freed black men, drunk on power and booze. Young Gaston had lost his father in the war and the only adult male he had to help with their defense was a stereotypically loyalto-the-end slave by the name of Nelse. During the attack, Mrs. Gaston takes down her dead husband’s sword from the mantle. Dixon writes, “She took the sword from its place and handed it to Nelse. Was there a shade of doubt in her heart as she saw his black hand close over its hilt as he drew it from the scabbard and felt its edge! If so she gave no sign.”74 In the absence of the white male patriarch (a Civil War loss), the son is almost infantilized and the phallic symbol of the father’s

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power, and its potential defense of the white family, is wielded by a black man. This scene is oddly sexual, as reflected in Dixon’s word choice; still, Nelse feels the sword’s edge and uses it as it was “meant” to be. The passage reads as if the narrator has a moment of doubt, even if Mrs. Gaston does not. Perhaps only the “edge” of this strong symbol keeps sex and race roles aright in Dixon’s fiction, but there is this apprehension. Yet, in Shakespeare, the white female clearly selects the Moor. White male characters in the play do, however, feel compelled to offer many reasons for Desdemona’s choice, all revealing their biases. Her father postulates that Desdemona was “corrupted/ By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks,” otherwise, “Sans witchcraft could not.”75 Brabantio stretches the idea of black magic while searching for a motivation he finds acceptable. What is important here is that Brabantio, as if the idea is impossible for him to believe, never suggests agency for Desdemona. He attacks Othello: Whether a maid so tender, fair, and happy, So opposite to marriage that she shunned The wealthy curled darlings of our nation Would ever have, t’ incur a general mock, Run from her gaurdage to the sooty bosom Of such a thing as thou—to fear, not to delight.76

Brabantio’s explanation is witchcraft and magic—the materials of “savages” in his world. His response is to immediately narrate Othello into a thing, a thing to be feared. Dixon had apparently learned a lesson from Brabantio’s fate; his works were an attempt to head off Desdemona’s choice. In an interview on May 26, 1915, Dixon posited that his purpose was “to create a feeling of abhorrence in white people, especially white women, against colored men.”77 Dixon’s transparent plan does not exactly need to be stated so baldly to be perceived in his works, but his motive just might elude the author himself: the shoring up of white masculinity through the degradation of black masculinity and the defense of white femininity. Iago practices this same method by narrating Desdemona’s preference for both Roderigo and Othello. To Roderigo, “when she is/ sated with his body, she will find the error of her/ choice. She must have change, she must.”78 Iago assures Roderigo that Desdemona’s choice is sexual and it will run its course. Iago defines the black man, and a white woman’s attraction to him, in terms of sex only, but when speaking of himself and Roderigo, he states, “We have reason to cool

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our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts.”79 Hence, white men have superiority over both the black male sexual beast and the white woman who can fall for this beast only in a carnal way because he is less than a man and subject to his animal nature. The implication of the latter part is that Desdemona has a strong libido, is a sexual being. Iago may be admitting female sexuality, autonomy, and choice, or he may be merely telling Roderigo what he wants to hear. Iago continues this juxtaposition of sex versus civility, black versus white, in Manichean fashion to Roderigo when he states, “Her eye must be fed; and what delight shall she have to look on the devil? When the blood is made dull with the act of sport, there should be, again to inflame it and give it satiety a fresh appetite, loveliness in favor, sympathy in years, manners and beauties—all of which the Moor is defective in.”80 The villain narrates the difference between the white and black man and exactly how the white woman fits into this triangle of identity. This narration is to suit the gullible Roderigo, but one could argue that Iago suits himself as well. The white male may be lacking in this animalistic sexuality, but this seeming deficiency is caused by actual superiority—with reason that leads to civility—and this attribute will eventually inflame the likes of Desdemona and women of her societal position. Roderigo’s delusions are stoked by Iago’s flattering and pleasing narratives. Iago narrates Desdemona, and in turn Othello, the title character, playing on race differences to spur Othello’s insecurity and, in a sense, lower his self-image. Iago pours his narration into Othello’s ears: In Venice they [Wives] do let God see the pranks They dare not show their husbands; their best conscience Is not to leave ’t undone, but keep’t unknown, and, Not to affect many proposed matches of her own clime, complexion, and degree, Whereto we see in all things nature tend . . . I may fear Her will, recoiling to her better judgment, May fall to match you with her country forms And happily repent.81

Iago separates the black man and the white woman by placing the mistrust of the white woman in Othello’s head.82 In turn, the villain forces Othello to see himself for what he really is in Venetian society— a painful truth. Despite his position in this society and how much he has assimilated himself, Othello will always be an outsider, as in “all things nature tends.”83

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Thomas Dixon takes a slightly different approach with the same result in mind. The author makes the black man the rapist beast and does so for several reasons. First, by reducing the man to an animal, he removes him from the aegis of the supposed “all men are created equal”; creates the abhorrence in white women for the black man, as he stated he desired; relieves the white woman of any possibility of choosing a black man, keeping her purity, both racial and sexual, intact; lowers the freed black man’s self-image to match his own conception of these men; and reiterates the white male aristocratic role as protector of white women and as being superior to the role of the African. Dixon reiterates this citational law of gender that hinges on race and masculinity and, in his own ideology, saves the Anglo-Saxon race. Iago becomes Henry V. Dixon initiates this narration, this citation, in his very first novel The Leopard’s Spots. The juxtaposition of white and black masculinity begins during childhood with the protagonist’s (Charles Gaston) bond with young Dick (the sexual connotations of Dixon’s character naming once again rears its Freudian head). Gaston and family take the young African boy in and try to raise him, but Dixon’s radicalism has the character move toward brutality. Dick runs away when threatened with a whip, but eventually returns to rape and murder the young white girl, Flora Camp. This portrayal offers a convenient rationale for Dixon’s view and treatment of the black man—he will develop toward criminality and betray white trust.84 One of Dixon’s primary motives is to reveal this inevitable betrayal, to question the idea of the “New Negro” put forth by racial conservatives. Also, this betrayal exposes as a lie the loyalty of the older slaves.85 These older slaves are only as loyal as their opportunities allow them to be. While exposing this betrayal, Dixon panders when he leeringly writes about Dick’s crime: Flora lay on the ground with her clothes torn to shreds and stained with blood. Her beautiful yellow curls were matted across her forehead in a dark red lump beside a wound where her skull had been crushed. The stone lay at her side, the crimson mark of her life showing on its jagged edges . . . it was too plain, the terrible crime that had been committed.86

Dick’s black animalism, in Dixon’s fictive world, leads to a mix of sex and violence with white femininity as its prey. The author magnifies the indecency of this act by making Flora Camp so young, with an emphasis on her innocence. This narration of black masculinity struck a chord with Dixon’s readers.87 This societal terror of the black rapist beast may have been

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a psychological reimbursement for the sexual exploitation of African women during slavery, or it may have just been an easy way for whites to justify their racist inclinations.88 Yet it was not just black masculinity Dixon was defining. The author makes sure to draw a clear line between the white men searching for the body of the young Flora and the “Negroes” who hide during the hunt. He observes about these black people and their relationship to the whites, “Had they been beasts of the field the gulf between them would not have been deeper.”89 Despite these efforts to define black men as animals, Dixon’s novel reveals the instability of these categories. The white crowd searching for the young Flora becomes, in Dixon’s words, “A Thousand-Legged Beast,” and Tom Camp, when considering his daughter’s then-unknown murderer, spits, “Oh! if I only had him here before me now, and God Almighty would give me strength with these hands to tear his breast open and rip his heart out!—I—could— eat—it—like—a—wolf!”90 Camp’s cry reads almost like a paraphrase of Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing. Incensed over the public shaming of Hero and trying to spur Benedick to action, Beatrice growls, “O God, that I were a man!/ I would eat his heart in the marketplace.”91 Beatrice’s message is that honor must be defended and justice allows it to be done so in the most animalistic of ways—and the job undoubtedly belongs to men. Not only Tom Camp but also the white crowd searching for Flora seems to understand this component of masculinity. This instability would, however, not be blamed on the “natural” volatility of the white male citation in Dixon’s works as much as exposure to the animal force of the black male role. Mrs. Durham explains to the young Allan McLeod that by associating with “Negro politicians” he will “degrade” his masculinity, which she also refers to with the sexually charged term “manhood.”92 Mrs. Durham is proffering that mere association can alter masculine citations. This sort of instability gives credence to Judith Butler’s idea of the citational nature of the law and its precarious quality at the moment of reiteration. Failed reiteration can lead to an inability to substantiate the law. In Thomas Dixon’s racial terms, “pollution” becomes a component of race and its attendant masculinity. George Harris Jr., son of Eliza (Stowe’s character from Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Simon Legree is imported from that work and used for Dixon’s purposes as well), is a similar yet more intellectualized version of the narrative created for Dick. Harris is educated by Boston congressman Everett Lowell and spends much of his time in the congressman’s home. Of course, the congressman’s young daughter’s

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response to blacks in general and Harris in particular is, “They always gave me the horrors. Young Harris is the scholarly gentleman, I know. He is good looking, talented, and I’ve played music for him sometimes to please you, but I can’t get over that little kink in his hair, his big nostrils and full lips, and when he looks at me, it makes my flesh creep.”93 The passage suggests that even if the “New Negro” should be “reformed” through the civilizing efforts of whites, the natural reaction of the white woman should be one of disgust and horror. Miss Lowell’s response is premised entirely on physical attributes, which she sees as trumping any cultivation. Harris falls in love with Lowell’s daughter, and when he confesses his desire to marry her, this racially progressive congressman retorts, “If you were able to win her by consent, a thing unthinkable, I would do what old Virginius did in the Roman Forum, kill her with my own hand, rather than see her sink in your arms into the backwaters of Negroid life! Now go!”94 Like Tom Camp before him, Lowell prefers homicide to the pollution of miscegenation. Lowell’s “backwaters of Negroid life” ostensibly suggests the inferiority that the congressman places on the African race, but it also intimates the true place of the black American, even in the supposedly racially enlightened Northern states. Dixon is no doubt calling Northern progressives on their racial hypocrisy in judging the South. A fundamental tie exists between the portrayal of George Harris and Dick. Dixon suggests that uneducated black men will rape, and cultured, educated black men will seek white women for marriage—both will end in miscegenation.95 Sticking to his radical racist guns, Dixon has Harris descend into criminality by slower degrees than Dick, but his fate is sealed in much the same manner. Dixon provides an even more palpable portrayal of the black rapist beast in his next book, The Clansman. His beast, Gus, in this novel and “four black brutes” invade the home of Mrs. Lenoir and her daughter, Marion, the first love of the protagonist Ben Cameron, and hold the two defenseless women at gunpoint, tying the mother to the bedpost. At this point, Dixon panders and leers even harder than in his previous novel: The mother screamed. A blow from a black fist in her mouth, and the rope was tied. . . . Again the huge fist swept her to the floor. Gus stepped closer, with an ugly leer, his flat nose dilated, his sinister beadeyes wide apart gleaming ape-like as he laughed: “We ain’t atter money!”

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The girl uttered a cry, long, tremulous, heart-rending, piteous. A single tiger-spring, and the black claws of the beast sank into the soft white throat and she was still.96

This portrayal of the black rapist beast is even more graphic than Dick’s episode in The Leopard’s Spots. Dixon only shows the aftereffects of the rape of the white woman in The Leopard’s Spots, but he ratchets up the pandering, melodrama, and rhetoric as he forces his readers to actually view the attack in The Clansman. Perhaps the author was merely following the rules of a sequel in trying to top its predecessor, or possibly Dixon felt the need to justify the KKK in The Clansman by dramatizing his black rapist beast and the jungle in which it exists more graphically. How he has his characters respond to this act is telling and has an interesting correlation to his real life. In Southern Horizons, the young Dixon overhears a woman relating a very similar rape story about herself and her daughter to his uncle, the local hero and all-around patriarch, Colonel McAfee. While Marion and her mother leapt to their deaths in The Clansman, the distraught mother in Southern Horizons confesses to the colonel that she considered killing herself and her daughter after the attack but lacked the courage to go through with it. Colonel McAfee responds, “Yes, mother, thank you for coming. I’ll be a father to you both in this sad hour—depend on it.”97 Dixon’s boyhood hero offers protection, while the female victim plants the idea in young Tom’s head that white women should, ideally, choose to die after forced penetration by black males. This action is the only way to avoid the pollution of miscegenation, even if it was forced. Tom goes on in Southern Horizons to tell of how “the mental and physical assault on one of their daughters had made our people one . . . the spirit of elemental manhood had at last leaped forth, half startled at itself, ‘its feet upon the ashes and the rags, its hand tight gripped on the throat of thug and thief.’ ”98 It takes the rape of the white woman by a black rapist beast to bring white masculinity into being. This notion is the central premise of the KKK. The author relies on black male sexuality to construct both the white male and female. Dixon depended on this construction in his reality, but he idealized it even more in his fiction. Marion and Mrs. Lenoir do, after all, kill themselves after Gus’s sexual assault in The Clansman and so retain some kind of “purity.” In fact, death is the only outcome for women exposed to the assault, or even attempted attack, of the black rapist beast. Early in The Leopard’s Spots, Tom Camp’s eldest daughter, Annie, is abducted by several of the “black brutes,” during her wedding ceremony (still a virgin, still “pure”), and the Civil War vet orders white

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attendees to fire, effectively killing his daughter because “there are things worse than death!”99 After the fact, Camp concludes, “It cuts me to the quick when I think that I gave the orders to the boys to shoot. But, Preacher, I’d a killed her with my own hand if I couldn’t a saved her no other way! I’d do it over again a thousand times if I had to.”100 Part of the patriarch’s role is to protect white females from the black rapist beast, even if it means destroying the very thing these fathers protect.101 Just as Colonel McAfee promised the rape victims his paternal protection in Dixon’s youth, so does Ben Cameron in The Clansman. His answer to Marion’s fate is the title of the next book and the chapter of the novel after the graphic rape—The Ku Klux Klan and “The Hunt for the Animal.” Dixon’s apologia for the KKK is that it is a defensive organization (later taken over by rowdy, lower-class men in The Traitor) used to protect white females and bring black rapist beasts to, what they call, justice. Dixon has the white males regenerate their masculinity and cite their sexed positions successfully by clearly placing everyone else in their proper roles. All of these Southern, white, aristocratic reiterations of masculinity and their correlative projections may seem a far cry from Shakespeare’s Othello, but they are not. John Quincy Adams said in 1835, “The great moral lesson of Othello is that black and white blood cannot be intermingled without a gross outrage upon the law of nature; and that, in such violations, nature will vindicate her laws.”102 The irony is that Adams ignores Iago’s culpability in all of the play’s tragedy while sounding much like the villain himself. This interpretation of Shakespeare’s play is, however, not very surprising.103 Adams’s interpretation seems to be Dixon’s relationship to the play as well— focusing on the black man and the white woman and ignoring the white men and their complicity in this tragedy. In fact, this idea could be the thesis of Dixon’s poisonous contribution to race relations in modern America. Perhaps an even larger purpose exists for Dixon’s narrations of gender and race in The Clansman. By adhering to strict race and gender categories, Dixon makes the issues in his works less sectional and more national, transcending Southern concerns.104 Part of the reason behind Dixon’s narrations of these black and white male identities and the white female role is to set a fixed place for all involved. But the larger picture is a totally unified country, united against blackness in its forging of a modern nation. Dixon needed a scapegoat for the ideological conflict that led to the Civil War and an attempt at dissolution of the Union, and the black man and the role the author had written for him fit the bill nicely.105

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Still, it has already been demonstrated that, notwithstanding Dixon’s attempt, these supposedly fixed roles ruptured even within the aegis of his own texts. Even Shakespeare’s texts reveal how unstable defining masculinity against others is, and many of his scripts hinge on the difference between the ideal and the actual.106 Though modern readers will have a hard time swallowing Dixon’s narratives of race and gender as “ideal,” as well they should, Dixon seems to beg his readers to view them that way and bemoans his tragedy that they are not, whether knowingly or not. Still, these racial and gender ideals are, however, part of Dixon’s cultural milieu, embraced by many despite the gaps between model and expression. It has already been shown how Dixon took his lesson from Othello to keep the black man and white woman apart, but his reason was not solely sexuality—it was the fear of its product, fear of mulattoes, fear of the resultant breakdown of the white man’s identity. Dixon’s causal chain begins with the inhumanity of Africans, moves to the threat of miscegenation that will destroy the Anglo-Saxon race and keep it from its divine mission of leadership, and ends with the repatriation of blacks to Africa.107 The starting point of this slippery slope is black sexuality, and its victim, ultimately, is really the citation of Southern, white, aristocratic masculinity. Shakespeare’s The Tempest is driven by similar concerns. The relationship between the patriarchal magician Prospero and his “savage and deformed slave” can be read as an allegory of exploration and colonization, with Caliban representing the natural man or man in a more Freudian manner.108 No matter which interpretation is given preference, what is important is that Caliban is an other, and is bound into a relationship with Prospero and his daughter, Miranda. Certainly the construction of Caliban as half-animal, half-human, with questionable parentage, born from a “wicked dam,” the witch Sycorax, and the devil himself, foretells the coming of Dixon’s descriptions of the black man, as has already been shown. In addition, Caliban does spend a fair amount of his actually small part in the play imagining various ways to kill Prospero, by clubbing or stabbing, no doubt a fear of Southern white males inculcated into the black males’ thinking from the earliest days of African slavery. However, it is another of Caliban’s intentions that is noteworthy: Prospero: Thou most lying slave, Whom stripes may move, not kindness! I have used thee In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate The honor of my child.

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Caliban: Oho, Oho! Would’t had been done! Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else This isle with Calibans.109

Caliban’s reply is the same one feared by Thomas Dixon Jr. as the emancipated black man’s. Caliban sees this ability to produce offspring as power, a power that not even the magic of Prospero can control. Dixon would have gladly placed the African male into the role of Caliban—moved only by the whip, subjugated by the stronger white man, a “lesser” creature in need of white paternalism, white control— but his fear is that the black man, given the chance (freedom) will also want to “people the isle with Calibans.” The Reverend John Durham asks and warns in The Leopard’s Spots: Can you build, in a Democracy a nation inside of nation of two hostile races? We must do this or become mulatto, and that is death. Every inch in the approach of these races across the barriers that separate them is a movement toward death. You cannot seek the Negro vote without asking him to your home sooner or later. If you ask him to your house, he will break bread with you at last. And if you seat him at your table, he has the right to ask your daughter’s hand in marriage.110

The tortured logic is there, but the anxiety sounds like Prospero’s. The fear of bringing these “things” into your home is a fear for the “honor of my child.” Slaves could be controlled by masters, as Caliban is by Prospero, but a freed Caliban could take daughters and make these white men failures in their masculine roles. Miranda’s view of Caliban also matches what Dixon seems to prefer in his works. She remarks about the slave, “ ’Tis a villain, sir,/ I do not love to look on.”111 This sentiment is echoed by Susan Lowell when describing young George Harris’s looks in The Leopard’s Spots. She shudders, “It makes my flesh creep.”112 Dixon fulfills his own desire—white female detestation of the black man. Prospero’s solution is, like Dixon’s will be, segregation. Caliban laments, “and here you/ sty me/ In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me/ The rest o’ th’ island.”113 Prospero “allows” Caliban to be his slave as long as he can control him with his magic, but the fear for his daughter’s honor causes him to segregate the slave from the white home. Miranda also complains to Caliban, “I pitied thee/ Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour/ One thing or other . . . /But thy vile race,/ Thou didst learn, had that in’t which good natures/

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Could not abide to be with.”114 Miranda is angry because her attempt to educate Caliban did not “help” him; his own flawed nature would not allow him to use his education to join her proper society. Dixon gives voice to a similar sentiment regarding Africans in Southern Horizons. He theorizes, “Education is the development of what is. If the something to be educated is not there, no amount of genius in teachers can put it there. This is true of the white race. The plea in excuse for the crimes of Reconstruction was that the Negro should be educated. A few Negroes take a college education and are strengthened and helped by it. Today it is being forced on thousands who are unfitted for the work of life.”115 The author’s emphasis on what “is,” like that of Miranda, who is really parroting her father, does not hold up, even in Dixon’s fictive world—not what it is to be a black man (rapist beast), a white man (superior protector), a white woman (idealized virtue), or a black woman (animalistic seducer). It is this last narration, and its relationship to the citation of white, aristocratic, Southern masculinity, that becomes Dixon’s greatest slippage, his most palpable failure to cite the predated law of his sexed position. His attempt to narrate this relationship leads to a feminization of his cherished white male role. The white male’s interaction with the black woman calls Dixon’s narrations of race and gender into question and exposes them as highly contingent.116 Howard Zinn reports in A People’s History of the United States (1980), “In 1910 there were 10 million Negroes in the United States, and 9 million of them were in the South.”117 Dixon and his generation of white men may have feared the numbers themselves. Of course, there were legal definitions that varied from state to state of how “Negro” was described in the time period. Here is how Dixon has the Reverend John Durham define it: One drop of Negro blood makes a Negro. It kinks the hair, flattens the nose, thickens the lip, puts out the light of intellect, and lights the fires of brutal passion. The beginning of Negro equality as a vital fact is the beginning of the end of this nation’s life. There is enough Negro blood here to make mulatto the whole Republic.118

Not only does Dixon’s mouthpiece need to define it in what he sees as a clear manner, but he also warns of the dangers of this Negro blood; it threatens personal identity as well as national character by making them mulatto. Dixon’s obsession with Africans would lead him to first make clear distinctions between races and then concerning those who could be Americans and those who could not.119 Dif-

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ference is not only important in stabilizing personal citations, but what some like Dixon perceived as national citations as well. Dixon hung his hat on racial distinctions in the forging of this idea. The mulatto called this idea into question in a disturbing way for the white males of Dixon’s generation. In the same year of Zinn’s above-mentioned count, 1910, Thomas Dixon wrote and performed in his play The Sins of the Father, a drama that he would turn into a novel two years later. This procedure would be a reversal of Dixon’s normal modus operandi; he normally wrote novels that he turned into touring dramas, with parts of The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman ultimately becoming the landmark of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. This reversal is fitting considering that the novel is a reversal in so many ways—of gender, of race, and of power.120 The Sins of the Father tells the story of Dan Norton, publisher, Civil War vet, political aspirant, and all-around Southern white aristocrat. Norton allows the product of a scandalous local interracial relationship, the mulatto Cleo, to worm her way into first his business as labor and then his home as caretaker of both his son and his sickly wife. Eventually Norton and Cleo have a secret affair that produces a daughter, who is sent to a convent. Tellingly, Dixon is careful that the sexual relationship between the two and the birth of their daughter take place “offstage,” only alluded to in ambiguous ways or in an epistolary manner. Cleo blackmails Norton into letting her keep her position in his home, while in the second half of the novel, titled “Atonement,” the newspaper man becomes a segregationist politician. Finally, Norton’s legitimate son Andy replicates his father’s actions by falling in love with Norton and Cleo’s daughter, bringing the “sins of the father” to full fruition. Norton endeavors to rectify the situation by attempting to kill his son (an interesting gloss on all of the earlier daughter killing) and succeeds in ending his own life. The novel bears close examination, given Dixon’s previous narrations of race and gender, but a logical starting point is the role of the mulatto woman in the work. Dixon divulges a unique attitude in his motivation and methodology. The author reverses the popular stereotyped figure of the tragic mulatto, making her the tyrannical aggressor and the cause of the South’s degradation. This figure must be found guilty; the black woman as victim of white sexual exploitation clashes with Dixon’s ideology that miscegenation derives from black, animal sexuality.121 Dixon makes Cleo the sexual aggressor in The Sins of the Father, giving her the power, but also the blame for a generation of mulatto offspring.

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Norton himself argues in the novel, “This thing is here a living fact which the white woman of the South must face? These hundred of thousands of a mixed race are not accidents. She must know that this racial degradation is not merely a thing of today, but the heritage of two hundred years of sin and sorrow.”122 Norton addresses the idea that this problem has plagued Southern society right from its inception, but the doctor to whom he has made this proclamation places the responsibility for it just a few paragraphs later, “Yes, I know, my boy, with that young animal playing at your feet in physical touch with your soul and body in the intimacies of our home, you never had a chance.”123 The black male rapist beast’s sexual power leads to revulsion and death for the white woman; the black woman’s (and mulatto’s) animal sexuality for the white man leads to both offspring and weakening of his masculine role, therefore his power. Cleo is not, however, the first mulatto woman to wield this kind of power in Dixon’s works. In The Clansman, the antagonist and Yankee politician Austin Stoneman tries to “ruin” the South by passing racial laws, but his mulatto live-in lover Lydia Brown is Dixon’s scapegoat. Dixon writes: Whatever her real position, she knew how to play the role she had chosen to assume. No more curious or sinister figure ever cast a shadow across the history of a great nation than did this mulatto woman in the most corrupt hour of American life. The grim old man who looked into her sleek tawny face and her catlike eyes was steadily gripping the Nation by the throat. Did he aim to make this woman the arbiter of social life, and her ethics the limit of its own moral laws?124

Thomas Dixon had so much fear of this mulatto woman that he ascribed that much power to her, calling the chapter that focuses on her, sneeringly, “The First Lady of the Land.” The fear that mulatto women were trying to undo the South is present not only in Dixon’s fiction (black female sexual rapaciousness was a cultural assumption) but also in his real life, as portrayed in his autobiography. In it, Dixon points out that he based Austin Stoneman on Thaddeus Stevens and that “the thing that has given Steven’s name its most sinister meaning was that he was living in open adultery with a Negro woman, while the leader of congress and the virtual dictator of the nation.”125 He also reports, “Five mulattoes . . . were daughters of a black woman who had married a Frenchman. They directed the skilled work of the Lobby that was robbing the state [South Carolina] of millions. Charlotte, a young lady of voluptuous figure and lustrous eyes, was said to possess powers of sorcery over

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the statesmen of the new regime.”126 The author echoes Brabantio’s explanation of Othello’s “power” over Desdemona. Dixon fixes what he feels is a very real threat in reality through his fiction. Austin Stoneman recognizes his weakness and repudiates it, as he is taught by Ben Cameron and other Southerners, by example, how to be not just a man, but a white man. A solution would not be as easy for Dan Norton by the time Thomas Dixon gets to The Sins of the Father. The white male role becomes different—it is weaker. Dan Norton occupies the role of the white woman under siege and is feminized. Dixon imbues this white man with more sexuality and animalism than in past renderings.127 There are several important reversals here, but the last one is the most telling. Talking to Cleo late in the novel, Norton reveals, “I found out twenty years ago that beneath the skin of every man sleeps an ape and a tiger.”128 What is remarkable is that Dixon has his white male protagonist take on the narrative that he had previously produced for the black male only. The difference is that the white male enacts both the black male and the white female narratives concurrently. On the one hand, Norton argues, “That man is still an animal, with tooth and claw and unbridled passions, that when put to the test his religion and his civilization often are only a thin veneer.”129 White men have this sexual “beast within.” Thomas Dixon was, after all, a Presbyterian minister, in the business of being a flesh-despising Protestant. On the other hand, the white man also takes on the role of the besetting white woman when confronted with the animalistic charms of the mulatto woman. Dan Norton watches Cleo pretending to “eat up” his young son when the narrator queries, “Could any man with red blood in his veins fight successfully with a force like that? He heard the growl of the Beast within as he stood watching the scene.”130 White men may have the same sexual beast in them as black men, but mulatto women have the power to bring it to the surface, to control white men. Dixon shifts the blame for a generation of mixed race offspring on to animal-like sexual predators who are mulatto women (where did the first one come from?), but there is a price. The cost of an innocent Norton is the character’s masculinity, his position of power, and the role of “master,” as all three are interdependent.131 Yet The Sins of the Father is really only the fullest expression of the possibility of the white man slipping into the threatened white female role. Austin Stoneman occupies this role in The Clansman, but so do, interestingly enough, the Klansmen themselves. Once the Klan captures Gus for the assault of Marion and Mrs. Lenoir, they gather to put him on “trial.” Dr. Cameron hypnotizes the captive and gets him to relive his

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part in the crime from planning to completion. As Gus acts out his deed, the Klansmen react: Strong men began to cry like children. “Stop him! Stop him!” screamed a clansman. . . . Some of the white figures had fallen prostrate on the ground, sobbing in a frenzy of uncontrollable emotion. Some were leaning against the walls, their faces in their arms. Again, old McAllister was on his knees crying over and over again: “God have mercy on my people!”132

The Klansmen not only relive the scene, but they also do so from the child’s perspective, one of female victimization.133 This scene reveals the possibility that even the most supposedly masculine of Southern white men, the Klansmen, could slip into this stereotypically feminine space given the right provocation. Dixon tips his hat to the permeability of the white male and female roles in The Traitor. The Grand Dragon, John Graham, tells the young beauty Susie, “My! My! But you look like one of us to-night, with that sylph figure robe in white standing there ghost-like in the moonlit shadows.”134 The choice of “sylph” compels the reader to think of a feminine ideal, one that aids in the performance of this type of masculinity despite stereotyped clothing expectations.135 In other words, the Klansmen are appropriating the white feminine citation to not only be the victim, but to also use it, so Dixon seems to think, to do something about their victimhood. While there have been these ruptures, these coalescences, these failed citations in Dixon’s works all along, Dan Norton plays out the black rapist beast and white female victim in his own identity and creates the most conspicuous reversal of all of Dixon’s gender and race narratives that preceded The Sins of the Father. This “uncomfortable” reversal may be why it did not enjoy the popularity of Dixon’s earlier works.136 Norton, like Marion and Mrs. Lenoir who came before him, must offer his and his son’s life for the disgrace of sexual contact with blackness. This act is the final appropriation of the white female role in Dixon’s race and gender ideology. Yet, even in death, Dan Norton sounds like Othello and/or Hamlet as he attempts to narrate his life, how he will be thought of after he is gone. He argues: The sin of your father is full grown and has brought forth death. Yet I was not all to blame. We are caught tonight in the grip of the sins of centuries. I tried to give my life to the people to save the children of the future. My shame showed me the way as few men could have seen it, and I have set in motion forces that can never be stopped. Others will complete the work I have begun. But our time has come.137

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Norton’s work, his atonement, is the segregation of the races, and the physical removal of blackness, back to the chaos from whence it came. He, like Dixon, wants to uncreate miscegenation in the name of white “purity” by first blaming it on blackness and then removing it from “civilization.” Dixon’s posture here fascinates because he admits that contact between the two races causes miscegenation and that whites occupy the weaker, threatened biological position.138 Dixon feared for his race, country, region, gender, and, in sum total, his personal identity, as revealed in his works. The author strove to create a nation based on whiteness, but there were personal reasons that had to do with the reiteration of his role of Southern, white, aristocratic manhood that drove this larger purpose. These intimate motives start with Dixon’s father, the Baptist preacher Thomas Dixon Sr. The Sins of the Father functions as an apologia not only for white male raping of black slaves but for his father as well. The elder Dixon fathered a “black” son himself.139 This argument derives from the writings of John E. Bruce and his “Bruce Grit” columns (a part of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the collection The Selected Writings of John Edward Bruce, Militant Black Journalist). The story, not published anywhere else, exposes Dixon. Bruce relates: After publication of Leopard’s, a biracial man who lived in New York City began to claim often and loudly that he was Thomas Dixon’s half brother, the son of Baptist preacher Thomas Dixon Sr. When confronted with this allegation, Tom Dixon replied, “Yes, I know that Darky, he is always getting himself into trouble and I have helped him a number of times. His mother was a cook in our family in N.C.” . . . whites buried the information and historians have not mentioned it since . . . it nowhere appears . . . that Dixon denied kinship with that “darky.”140

Dixon’s racial narrative, then, of the dangerous black mulatto, in fact his entire racial ideology, although hard to prove, may have well been an attempt to absolve his father for his own sexual indiscretions. At the very least, Dixon’s ideas were a part of his culture. Blaming the black rapist male beast, revealing the danger of the animal-like black woman and mulatto, and showing the complicity of the weakness of the white female, one of Thomas Dixon’s main objectives was to find fault—who was responsible for the threat to white masculinity, to the region, and to the country? Was it the Othellos? The Desdemonas? The Calibans? In Dixon’s view, it certainly was not the Brabantios, the Prosperos, or even the Iagos. If Dixon seemed

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hesitant to blame the white fathers for the fragility he abhorred, he never came close to considering his own culpability. The hint of this guilt is revealed in The Sins of the Father. Dixon’s novel is rife with passages of the always animal-like mulatto Cleo Peeler being watched, ostensibly by Dan Norton, but more subtly by Dixon’s narrator: Norton, watching her with indulgent amusement at her impudence, saw that she moved her young form with a rhythmic grace that was perfect. The simple calico dress, with a dainty little check, fitted her perfectly. It was cut low and square at the neck and showed the fine lines of a beautiful throat. Her arms were round and finely shaped and bare to an inch above her elbows. The body above the waistline was slender, and the sinuous free movement of her figure showed that she wore no corset. Her step was as light as a cat’s and her voice full of good humor and the bubbling spirits of a perfectly healthy female animal.141

Dixon seems to drool right along with Norton as he reveals every inch of sensuality of this woman (animal?) to his readers. This kind of description is not an isolated incident in the novel. In fact, it is a constant thread until after the sexual liaison between Norton and Cleo. Dixon continues: He couldn’t shake off the impression that she was a sleek young animal, playful and irresponsible, that had strayed from home and wandered into his office. And he loved animals. . . . She simply could not get into an ungraceful attitude. Every movement was instinct with vitality. She was alive to her finger tips. Her body swayed in perfect rhythmic unison with her round, bare arms as she turned the old-fashioned rope windlass . . . [her] voice had none of the light girlish quality of her age of eighteen, but rather the full passionate power of a woman of twenty-five.142

Norton and the narrator seem to leer over this woman, yet refer to her constantly in animal terms, hinting at a predisposition for bestiality. The narrator’s part in lusting after this woman points away from Dan Norton and toward Thomas Dixon more than the author could have realized. There is no physical description of Norton’s white wife in the novel, except that she is a bedridden invalid, worn out by the traumas of childbirth. The novel does, however, comment on her mental state. Dixon writes, “Her mind was still a child’s. She could not think evil of anyone. She loved the young and she loved grace and beauty wherever she saw it.”143 Eventually, knowledge of Norton’s affair

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with Cleo “weakened her vitality,” ultimately leading to her death.144 A submerged idea in this portrayal is that the white woman, in her weakness and childishness, is complicit in Norton’s infidelity.145 The compelling significance resides in how all of these narrations correlate to Thomas Dixon Jr.’s personal life. In Southern Horizons, Dixon relates the story of taking his family on a visit to Boston and reports an innkeeper’s objection: “You have a Negro woman in your room, I am informed?” I mildly replied, “Your courts might pronounce her a Negress as she is an octoroon with oneeighth of Negro blood. But she is the nurse of my baby, a woman of unusual intelligence and character and while she happens to be a slave, she is the daughter of one of the greatest governors of North Carolina who set her free . . . what about her?” “We don’t allow a Negro in the hotel. Nor does any first class hostelry in the city.” “You can’t accommodate her in a small room on the top floor or the attic?” “Neither in the attic nor in the cellar. She is a Negress.”146

No doubt Dixon tells this story to show the racism of the North and his own nobility, but the passage reveals that the author had his own “mulatto” who raised his children and that he held her in high regard. That this mulatto is also the daughter of “one of the greatest governors of North Carolina who set her free” implies that this sort of exploitation of black female sexuality by white men occurred even at the highest levels of Southern social hierarchy. Conjecture as to whether Dixon had this young lady in mind when creating the lecherous sounding passages describing Cleo Peeler from The Sins of the Father can remain only speculation, but the temptation to surmise so is strong, especially given how the drama plays out for Norton and his son Andy in the novel. The sins of the father may have been “full grown” in the son. Another interesting link exists. When the production of The Sins of the Father toured, Dixon would travel with it, giving speeches before the play to hammer his ideological points home. Dixon conveys the story in his autobiography of how “the leading man was killed by a shark and I had to go on and play his part . . . the reviewers next morning said I was as good an actor as playwright . . . he [the producer] would star feature me, put my name in two foot electric lights and give me the time of my life.”147 Thomas Dixon actually took on the character of Dan Norton and was so convincing that he played the part for the rest of the production. In his works he had narrated the role of the black rapist beast, the old, faithful slave, the white woman,

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the Southern gentleman, the avenging Klansman, and the dutiful son, to name only a few, and all of these roles were narrated by what Dixon perceived as their constitutive constraints. However, the one role that moved from his fiction to his reality and back again was that of Dan Norton from The Sins of the Father, the only successful dramatic part he had played since taking on Shakespeare. The lecherous, leering narrator of the novel, the possibility that Thomas Dixon Sr. had produced an illegitimate son, the presence of the caretaking mulatto in Dixon the younger’s home, and the author’s taking on Dan Norton’s character in the stage production of The Sins of the Father all lend credence to the likelihood that this novel, though it had an eye for issues concerning the entire region of the South, the country as a whole, and the Anglo-Saxon race (whatever that is), was personal for Thomas Dixon. By 1915, despite the enormous success of The Birth of a Nation in that year, Dixon and his ideas had begun to wane. This shift occurred because Jim Crow legislation was firmly in place, making many whites feel secure, and the black man had not completely retrogressed or disappeared, as racial radicals had promised both.148 However, racial radicalism may have begun to die out, but other forms of race hatred would still inform the country. Howard Zinn states, “The Ku Klux Klan was revived in the 1920’s, and it spread into the North. By 1924 it had 4 1⁄ 2 million members.”149 Perhaps this revival could be marked as early as 1915, the year of The Birth of a Nation, but his point about its reaching critical mass is worth noting. Through novels like The Clansman and films like The Birth of a Nation, Dixon built this terrible legacy of hatred, all in the name of reiteration of a citation of race and masculinity that he strove to maintain—the Anglo-Saxon man. The irony is that this masculine role never really existed in the first place; the law and the role merely continued to bring each other into existence, despite different slippages and constitutive constraints, from Shakespeare right down to Thomas Dixon Jr. Dixon continued to write plays, films, and novels until his death in 1946, spreading his hate from blacks, to feminists, to communists, and frequently conflating the three, as he did in his final novel, The Flaming Sword. Raymond Rohauer writes as a postscript to Southern Horizons, “From such evidence as we have, there emerges a picture of a man who spent much of his later life wondering why he was subjected to so much vilification, and getting increasingly bitter and defensive about it.”150 Dixon’s narratives of masculinity and race may have left a legacy of hate, but they also earned him the scorn he deserved.

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Lucius C. Harper wrote an extended obituary for the Chicago Defender, a black weekly newspaper founded in 1905 that became highly influential by World War I: He advocated the violation of the Golden Rule, although he was a minister. He loved to make men hate each other; he wrote some of the filthiest books on love and social problems. Wherever there was a foulness to be placed between book covers, he enjoyed the job. He sought to make every white man whiter, and likewise every black man blacker. . . . This man was the Rev. Thomas Dixon, whose racially diseased mind gave out last Wednesday morning, April 3, in his home in Raleigh, N.C., and he went to wherever God chose to assign him. Be that as it may every black man takes particular pride at this hour in reading his obituary. . . . He was 82 years old. America would have been blessed had he died in infancy.151

Harper’s estimation of Dixon’s attempt to solidify race and its effects elucidates Dixon’s legacy in the most succinct way. Thomas Dixon must have been spinning in his grave as, in death, he was defined by a black man. One of the most palpable Dixonian messages, no matter how inadvertent, is similar to what can be learned from the works of Shakespeare. The playwright’s works give us a perspective on current ideas of masculinity, revealing the malleable nature of these constructions and offering the possibility of transforming previous citations into a more just and rewarding performativity.152 This idea is just another way Dixon is tied to the works of Shakespeare. Dixon’s works have only lived in obscurity beyond his day, and rightfully so, but they can teach us this same lesson. The irony is that Dixon was unable to control citations of masculine roles or narratives, even though he was creating the universe in which they existed, a fictive world in which he had the decision-making power of a god. Dixon’s failure to maintain these narratives of gender and race throughout his body of work unintentionally teaches readers that masculinity is, as Bruce R. Smith refers to Shakespeare’s masculine constructions, “contingent in all sorts of ways,” and can be remade, refashioned again and again.153 Readers should take valuable lessons as this from the novels of Thomas Dixon Jr., and throw the rest away.

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Chapter 4

4

Wh o’s Yo u r Da d dy ? William Faulkner’s Making of the Father and Son

They hailed him father to a line of kings. Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown And put a barren scepter in my grip, Thence to be wrenched with an unlineal band, No son of mine succeeding.1 William Shakespeare, Macbeth Nobody remembers Shakespeare’s children.2 William Faulkner

A s William Shakespeare, so William Faulkner. From “bardolaters”

to iconoclastic detractors, and those somewhere in between, William Shakespeare has been made the symbol of patriarchy, culture, and precedent. In short, he has been made a “father.” Four hundred plus years later, another William is receiving the same treatment. Faulkner has been called “the Abraham of Southern and American literature,” with one current critic going so far as to lament, “Faulkner has become for me the repository of all things fatherly, masculine, and Southern.”3 The author is being constructed as a progenitor, both in a literary sense and, like Shakespeare, with a much larger signification. Why? William Faulkner certainly co-opted the fathers who came before him. The Bible, Balzac, Dostoevsky, and James Joyce, just to name a few, all became an integral part of Faulkner’s works. However, it is his

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relationship with the works of William Shakespeare and his cultural image that is most palpable—especially the playwright’s models of masculinity. Roles were lifted from Shakespeare and pepper Faulkner’s works. The novels have their Hotspurs (Colonel John Sartoris, young Bayard from a certain slant of light, Jewel Bundren, and Thomas Sutpen) and their Hamlets too (Quentin Compson, Horace Benbow, Ike McCaslin, and a host of others too numerous to name here). Macbeth, Falstaff, Prince Hal, and Othello all offer performances of masculinity that are incorporated into Faulkner’s portrayals. William Gilmore Simms, Thomas Nelson Page, and Thomas Dixon before him all appropriated these masculine roles to suit their needs, both literary and cultural, yet they are not offered this same sort of paternity. The most obvious reason is that they are lesser talents with frequently outmoded thinking, but there is something more. These earlier writers took these forms and modified them slightly for their circumstances and/or agenda, but they certainly never interrogated them. Faulkner’s cultural context contained the Old South inheritance of a supposedly “organic society” and the chivalric code with prescriptions for gender, race, and class. At the same time, the South had lived through the Civil War, Reconstruction, industrialism and the rise of town culture, turn-of-the-century radicalism, and the ensuing post–World War modernism, all bringing about fluidity, to varying degrees, of gender, race, and class roles—a sense of rupture.4 Shakespeare and Faulkner share much of this assessment. Renaissance learning and art coupled with the rise of city culture, such as the now-teeming London, engendered a reaction to the certainties of the medieval world. It is, however, debatable as to whether Shakespeare felt this same sense of “rupture,” which could be a synonym for “modernism.” To be sure there are instances in Shakespeare’s works where he seems to position and explore his culture, to attempt to know it and perhaps by extension himself, but he does not do so with the same vehemence as William Faulkner. Perhaps the reason for this difference in degree rests in Faulkner’s act of deconstructing and rearranging the past for a better vantage point.5 The effects on Faulkner’s thinking must have been multitudinous. Faulkner became a critic of the South, questioning roles of sex, gender, race, and class, and pointed out the Southern penchant for exaggeration in its sex and gender roles.6 William Faulkner’s shouldering of “the burden of Southern history” led to a deeper interrogation of much that came with it, including gender roles. This compulsion for inquiry is perhaps the strongest explanation for the inclination to make Faulkner a father as Shakespeare before him.

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If Faulkner appropriates Shakespearean forms of masculinity, he does not do so wholesale, for his generation and its attendant culture are informed with a sense of loss, of time past. For example, young Bayard can be read as Hotspur—rash, reckless, and a man’s man, yet Faulkner writes of his Hotspur, “There were no opportunities for vainglorious swashbuckling. Denied that Sartoris heaven in which they could spend eternity dying deaths of needless and magnificent violence while spectators doomed to immortality looked eternally on.”7 Faulkner’s versions of Shakespeare’s masculinities are figures in decline, not ever having their chance for a fuller gender performativity as their literary antecedents. Hamlet figures fare no better in Faulkner’s novels. Horace Benbow may actively flee from his family in Sanctuary in hopes of expressing himself, but he returns unsuccessful in the end, sneaking into the house to his wife’s command to “lock the back door.”8 There is no consummation, no “augury” to defy, no climax, no death. Both these seemingly polar opposite masculinities come to ends that are stereotypically masculine in Shakespeare’s works; no matter how they have performed their genders while alive, they meet violent deaths. Faulkner perceived the similarity between Hotspur and Hamlet as expressions of a failure of character.9 The failure was the longing for this end. The Bayard of Flags in the Dust may be a tough-talking, drinking, and racing study of hypermasculinity, but he also exhibits a crippled psyche brought on by the death of his brother that culminates in one reckless event after another with no real point.10 Bayard’s pointlessness three generations removed is quite a comment on the legacy of the Civil War for this class of men—young Bayard is both Hamlet and Hotspur, however, and therefore is one of the few Faulkner men to get his masculine death. Nonetheless, Bayard paradoxically escapes the myth of the past and passes into it with his death, reinforcing and defeating it at the same time.11 This myth, however, is not just one of Confederate glory, the decline of the South, noblesse oblige, or the plantation gentleman—it is a much older myth than any of these constructs. This myth is the father, the progenitor, the patriarch, on its most abstract level, what Jacques Lacan posits, “It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the figure of the law.”12 Whether biological antecedent or symbol of patriarchy, this myth of the father in all its facets most informs Faulkner’s constructs of masculinity. This obsession results in a body of work that has more to say on the question of fathers than any other American author.13

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Shakespeare’s models are appropriated by the Southern novelist, for the playwright is a literary/cultural antecedent whom the novelist defined himself against.14 Faulkner did consider the Elizabethan’s works as a “casebook of the mind”: “If a man has a great deal of talent, he can use Shakespeare as a yardstick,” and “I have a portable Shakespeare I’m never too far from.”15 Nevertheless, it is the concomitant consideration of Faulkner’s modernist project and his preoccupation with fathers both present and mythically absent that alters the gender citations of his fictional men. The “modernist project” part of these corollaries is the interrogation of seemingly everything—race, class, gender, and even the essence of being and knowing—and all of these elements form a matrix that enmeshes much of Faulkner’s works and reveals the constructed nature of roles performed in relation to it. At issue in Faulkner’s examination is the control of meaning, and perhaps no other meaning receives as much fervent attention as masculinity; revising masculine stereotypes drives Faulkner’s works.16 The beginning of this revision is the understanding of the constructed nature of masculinity; Judith Butler offers insight into these concerns when she expostulates that sexed positions are a citational strategy and: To the extent that the “I” is secured by its sexed position, this “I” and its “position” can be secured only by being repeatedly assumed, whereby “assumption” is not a singular act or event, but, rather, an iterable practice . . . “sexed positions” are not localities but, rather, citational practices instituted within juridical domain—a domain of constitutive constraints. The embodying of sex would be a kind of “citing” of the law, but neither sex nor the law can be said to preexist their various embodyings and citings. Where the law appears to predate its citation, that is where a given citation has become established as “the law.” Further, failure to “cite” or instantiate it correctly or completely would be at once the mobilizing condition of such a citation and its punishable consequence. Since the law must be repeated to remain an authoritative law, the law perpetually reinstitutes the possibility of its own failure.17

Butler’s concept of the almost constant reiteration of the masculine position and the perpetual chance for failure, in terms of both the citation and the law it creates, is especially key for many of Faulkner’s male characters, particularly his Hamlets. This potential for failure on a personal and much larger scale leads characters like Quentin Compson to feel this way, “Thinking I was I was not who was not was not who,” or Darl Bundren to lament, “I don’t know what I am. I don’t know if I am or not.”18 The potential for slippage in both the citation and the law is part of these characters’

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identity crises. African men and lower-class whites face reiteration as well, but their potential failures are less freighted with tragic grandeur in Faulkner’s fictive world, perhaps with the exception of Joe Christmas. Faulkner’s fiction offers a masculinity in crisis, having to cope with “a more fluid and decentered representational field.”19 What brought on this fluidity, this decentered representational field, this crisis in masculinity in Faulkner’s works, represents the chief constitutive constraint, the father. The father remains the source of identity in these novels.20 This crisis initiates with fathers who are rather an absent presence or a present absence, weighing down their sons as a mythic, ghostly, yet still constitutive constraint, or are physically present but have abdicated their responsibility as masculine model. This cultural situation affects what is available in Faulkner—characters transmogrified by the will of the father with attendant abuses or the long shadow of the absent patriarch.21 Quentin Compson, Joe Christmas, Thomas Sutpen, and Darl Bundren are just a few of these sons affected by absence and/or will of the father. One such seemingly fatherless Hamlet character is Horace Benbow. Will Benbow, his father, is barely mentioned in Flags in the Dust. Faulkner writes, “But when he [Horace] reached New York the wire waited him saying that Will Benbow was ill . . . two subsequent days his father lived. Then Will Benbow was buried beside his wife.”22 This news is given secondhand to the reader, well after the fact, and Horace is left to learn his gender role elsewhere, or not, as the case may be. Southern literature in general displays people who are actors in a spectacle whose worth is directly tied to their performance.23 Horace represents this sort of acting, and he emulates a conventional masculinity, the gentleman. In Sanctuary, Horace does, after all, argue, “God is foolish at times, but at least He’s a gentleman.”24 He begins playing this role by following in the footsteps of his father as a young man, attending Sewanee, becoming a man of letters, and pontificating frequently on the attributes of this type of man. Horace Benbow even tells his sister, Narcissa, “Shakespeare had no sense of discrimination and no instinct for reticence. In other words, he wasn’t a gentleman . . . to be a gentleman you must have secrets.”25 Faulkner places this assessment into his Hamlet’s mouth in consideration of both Shakespeare and the role of the gentleman; perhaps he felt, on some level, that both were needed to reiterate the role of the Southern gentleman fully. His sister, Narcissa, may supposedly prefer Horace’s “fine and electric delicacy” to the rough and reckless masculinity of Bayard and John Sartoris, but what is important is how Horace himself perceives it.26 One side effect of emulating this larger myth without a personal

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model, a present father, is a heightened awareness of the performative nature of masculinity. Clearly, Horace Benbow feels this quality acutely in Flags in the Dust; as he watches Belle in her “self-imposed and tragic role” play the piano, Horace is also “himself performing like the old actor whose hair is thin and whose profile is escaping him via his chin, but who can play to any cue at a moment’s notice while the younger men chew their bitter thumbs in the wings.”27 Horace seems aware of Belle’s role (the “feminine principle” her name suggests), and his relation to it, but the greater point is that there are roles to be played, and that these roles change, require performativity, not just performance, and need constant reiteration depending upon circumstances. Horace’s awareness may seem a bit submerged in the text, but it does creep through his many discourses. In one such instance, he pontificates about the “little puny man’s way of dragging circumstance about to fit his preconception of himself as a figure in the world.”28 This man has an attentiveness that operates on a fixed idea of himself as a figure, in this case the gentleman, but he must alter his circumstances or this figure of the gentleman for a successful reiteration of its attendant masculinity. Wittgenstein specifies what is at stake in his work Philosophical Grammar, “I have the intention of carrying out a particular task and I make a plan. The plan in my mind is supposed to consist of my seeing myself acting thus and so. But how do I know it is myself that I am seeing? Well, it isn’t myself, but a kind of picture. But why do I call it a picture of me. . . . And the answer mentions characteristics by which I can be recognized. But it is my own decision that makes my image represent myself.”29 This sort of selfawareness mused on by Wittgenstein was prevalent in Shakespeare’s works and culture.30 Likewise, numerous Faulknerian characters practice this self-awareness, but it leads these men to anxiety. The best Wittgenstein or any of these fictional characters can hope for is to convince themselves that their reiterations are “[their] own decision.” What is at issue for Horace is the inability to control his performativity, hence his masculinity, because of his “more fluid and decentered representational field.” Horace bemoans, “Man’s very tragedies flout him. He has invented a masque for tragedy, given it the austerity which he believes the spectacle of himself warrants, and the thing makes faces behind his back; dead alone, he is not ridiculous, and even then only in his own eyes.”31 This consciousness that is at work here understands performativity and its reflexivity and feels the pressure of circumstances (tragedies) and others. Horace may make decisions in his performativity of his role and its gender, but what he perceives, in addition to its constructed nature, is his constitutive constraints. These circumstances

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effectuate an almost castrated figure with these constraints wielding the knife. Faulkner had what must have been for him literary precedent for this sort of awareness in his literary father William Shakespeare and co-opted it from Shakespeare’s plays for use with his literary characters. In As You Like It, Shakespeare has the melancholic Jaques offer his most famous observation, “All the world’s a stage,/ And all the men and women merely players./ They have their exits and their entrances,/ And one man in his time plays many parts.”32 Duke Senior’s fool shares with Horace Benbow both an awareness of human performativity and the fact that men and women are merely players—not exactly a powerful, fully autonomous position, but one that fits nicely with Judith Butler’s idea of citational practices. Jaques’s subsequent notion of many possible parts for men also suggests the unfixed nature of these citations, as Horace’s conception of invention quoted above reiterates. This discernment of roles and their limitations are cast in theatrical terms in Macbeth, but it takes on an even more pejorative cast in Shakespeare’s tragic mode than in Jaques’s musings. The upset familial order in As You Like It nonetheless contains stand-in patriarchs such as Duke Senior, but Macbeth’s father is nowhere to be seen in the tragedy. Perhaps this absence explains why the title character intones, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/ And then is heard no more. It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.”33 Shakespeare sees the theatricality of not just roles one might play but also life itself, and Macbeth seizes on Jaques’s “merely” and extends it from a seemingly subordinate position to having no meaning at all. Of course, Faulkner appropriates Shakespeare’s idea of the tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, for his Compson novel of the same name, but what drives men like Horace Benbow and their reiterations of masculinity is the fear of the “signifying nothing,” the chance of failure, the possibility of being “flouted” by both the drama and/or the audience. This theatricality, this constructed nature of individual roles, also played itself out in William Faulkner’s personal life. Faulkner wore such diverse personas as young dandy, RAF enlistee, university poet, and war hero almost as if they were clothing, trying them on and discarding them to suit his circumstances.34 Faulkner’s poses exist for public consumption as much as for his own fulfillment. The author was photographed in various masculine roles—fox hunter, aviator, artist, and screenwriter.35 Perhaps Faulkner wore these personas of

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masculinity in real life and photographs to match shifting circumstances, desired effects, but what is more important is that none seemed to be long term in any real, meaningful way. Judith Butler explains, “Performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization in the context of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration.”36 Faulkner had difficulty in reiteration—the shortness of many of these citations of masculinity suggests rather an inability to move beyond a singular act or an unwillingness to do so. There also exists a common thread in many of these citations of masculinity. Faulkner developed a role for himself as an Englishman studying abroad while in college and joined the literati at the university in the name of pursing “high culture.” This posture would culminate with a trip to England in October of 1925.37 British seems to be the common denominator in many of these citations, and this fact indicates a privileging of its culture and its modes of masculinity; it stands to reason that Faulkner would look to Shakespeare for citations of masculinity and, more importantly, an awareness of the theatricality of those reiterations. In a sense, Faulkner is becoming Shakespeare’s heir, if not the bard himself. Faulkner’s shifting of personas could reveal a strength. No fixed Faulkner exists, only a series of Faulkners.38 This instability afforded Faulkner his unique perspective on identity. This sunny view of Faulkner’s performativity may cast this tendency of the author in the best possible light, but it is a disposition Faulkner would not allow his literary characters. The fluidity of their reiterations leads to slippage and that frequently precedes failure. Horace Benbow exemplifies this phenomenon. Faulkner’s Hamlet enacts the role of a gentleman, but almost in caricature.39 This construct contains learning, social skills, and piety with a correlation between outward manliness and its inner source. At the same time, military honor and its martial spirit should be embraced while failure and impotency are to be avoided at all costs, as both lead to effeminacy.40 This prescriptive role offers masculine performative parameters to an almost fatherless man such as Horace, but his attempts at reiteration support the caricature contention and drive Faulkner’s depiction of latter gentility in Flags in the Dust. From his first actual, physical arrival in Flags in the Dust with “his air of fine and delicate futility,” to one local woman’s assertion that “Horace is a poet . . . poets must be excused for what they do,” Benbow does seem to be almost a parody of what a gentleman is.41 Horace is hardly the returning war hero, and his swagger from the train station

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to the end of the novel seems much more of a swish. Horace does have the learning and erudition required of a gentleman, but his piety and “outward manliness” are lost in his impotent pose with Belle, his sister, and almost everyone he encounters. Again, Butler adds an important qualification to this idea in terms of gender parody. She offers, “Indeed, the parody is of the very notion of an original . . . the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin.”42 Horace skates right up to this idea of parody, but he is also a vivid reminder, as Butler states, that the original itself is questionable, especially in the absence of an immediate model, such as a father. If Flags in the Dust is the revelation of Horace Benbow as the borderline caricature of a gentleman, then Sanctuary completes the failure of his reiteration of the masculine citations that have come before him, his failure to make and be made by the law, the name of the father. These novels have to be read in tandem to fully appreciate this narrative arc of Horace’s masculine citation. In fact, reading Faulkner’s body of work as chapters in one ongoing saga offers insight into the author’s constructs.43 If not the entire corpus, Horace Benbow is the link that at least invites just such a reading between these two novels. Horace’s masculinity is constantly in question in Sanctuary. Ruby is the first to imply that Benbow cannot take care of himself as a man (much less a gentleman) should when she blurts out, “He better get on to where he’s going, where his women folks can take care of him.”44 Faulkner paints Horace as being unable to use a hammer or even operate a motor vehicle, all firmly in the province of what is manly in Horace’s culture.45 Lee Goodwin even goes so far as to ask Horace, “What sort of men have you lived with all your life? In a nursery?”46 Of course, there are class considerations here; all gentlemen, much less a parody of one like Horace, must seem wanting to Lee Goodwin and many men of his class. A man’s man like Goodwin can only see Horace’s display of masculinity as a juvenile one—an expected performativity given the absence of his immediate model, his father. Possibly no other Shakespearean work is more appropriated by Faulkner than Macbeth, and the title character himself constantly faces questions of his manhood in much the same way as Horace Benbow does. Lady Macbeth cajoles her husband, “When you durst do it, then you were a man;/ And, to be more than what you were, you would/ Be so much more the man.”47 The idea of man here connotes action, and male may be a man in varying gradations. Lady Macbeth later “confers apart” with Macbeth over his fear of ghosts and queries, “Are you a man?”48 Even Macbeth’s own curses reveal his doubts as he swears, “Accursed be that tongue that tells me so,/ For it hath cowed

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my better part of man!”49 In fact, the play uses some variation of the words “man,” “manhood,” or “manly” some thirty-four times. What constitutes being a man is a chief concern of this Shakespearean play, and it is most frequently used in terms of failure and performance. Apparently Banquo’s ghost is not the only specter to haunt the troubled despot, and Macbeth’s answer of self-reassurance is, “I dare do all that may become a man;/ Who dares do more is none.”50 Macbeth’s rejoinder contains a key word—become. One meaning of the term “become” Macbeth is implying is “to be suitable to,” but quite another is “come to be.” If Macbeth is suggesting “becoming” in the second sense, then the succeeding line gives limitations to his final definitions. The line implies an awareness of the theatrical nature of being a man and its strictures. More importantly, the chance for being “none” exists as well. Horace Benbow faces this very same real possibility in Sanctuary, and like Horace, Macbeth’s father is nowhere to be seen; he does not even warrant a mention in the manner of Will Benbow. The examples above indicate Horace’s various slippages in his gender performativity, but there are two ways in which Horace fails outright in his reiterations of the law. Horace fails most obviously in Sanctuary by losing his court case and not reviving his patrilineal heritage.51 Certainly, the “vague troubling wind” and Horace’s lament of “Less oft is peace. Less oft is peace” at the end of the novel could be directly related to a failure of patrimony. After all, Goodwin has been lynched, Ruby is unprotected, and Horace is threatened by the crowd who say, “Do to the lawyer what we did to him. What he did to her. Only we never used a cob. We made him wish we had used a cob.”52 The threat of group sodomizing is surely an emasculating attempt to place Goodwin and Horace into the position of the violated female, of Temple Drake. This group of men assert their masculinity through physical violence while attempting to take Horace’s in the same manner. They fail to understand that, by the code of the Southern gentleman, Horace’s failure has already “feminized” him (note the inherent sexism of woman = failed man). This “vague troubling wind” and the feeling that “less oft is peace” are derived from Horace’s failures and this gendered position he is now in. The failed Benbow is driven back to the equally impotent yet less physically threatening world of Belle and Little Belle. Butler notes, “The failure to ‘cite’ or instantiate it [the law] correctly or completely would be at once the mobilizing condition of such a citation and its punishable consequence.”53 The punishable consequence for Horace is an even further loss of agency as his constitutive constraints narrow to this domestic world feared by Southern “men.”54 Popeye may be the

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impotent character in the novel, but he gets his male bravado and death as he tells his executioner, “Fix my hair, Jack.”55 In contrast, Horace ends the novel trying to finish the sentence “I just wanted to tell you.”56 However, he remains unable to do so. The above-mentioned slippages of gender performativity hint at the second outright failure of Horace. Benbow moves from merely gender inconsistencies in his performance of “man” via “gentleman” to an outright opposition of the first term. This role reversal is strongest in relation to his stepdaughter, Little Belle. After arguing over Belle’s lovers, Horace tells of how the two embrace, “There was a mirror behind her and another behind me, and she was watching herself in the one behind me, forgetting about the other one in which I could see her face, see her watching the back of my head with pure dissimulation.”57 The narrator ostensibly reveals the false nature of such females as Little Belle, but Horace also forgets that his stepdaughter can see more than the back of his head; she can see in the other mirror just as he can. These reflections suggest a doubling of the two, including their gender performances. This implication early in the novel will create a certain textual logic that will come to fruition later and complete the opposition. Interestingly enough, Horace learns of his ability to willfully enact this gender opposition from the novel’s female victim, Temple Drake. When Horace interviews Temple about her horrific experiences at Goodwin’s place, she reveals: I was looking at my legs and I’d try to make like I was a boy. I was thinking about if I just was a boy and then I tried to make myself into one by thinking. You know how you do things like that. . . . I’d think about praying to be changed into a boy and I would pray and then I’d sit right still and wait. . . . Then I said That wont do. I ought to be a man. So I was an old man, with a long white beard, and then the little black man got littler and littler and I was saying Now. You see now. I’m a man now. Then I thought about being a man, and as soon as I thought it, it happened.58

Temple’s traumatic experience reveals what she feels is the ability to move from one gender to the next as circumstances dictate. She assumes that Horace knows about this ability to move not only from female to male, but also from potential son to possible father. A young boy, a son, may still be a threatened sexual object, but the father will “do” nicely.59 Temple’s reasons for such gender fluidity are clear. She posits, “If I just had that French thing. I was thinking maybe it would have long

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sharp spikes on it and he wouldn’t know it until too late and I’d jab it into him. I’d jab it all the way through him and I’d think about the blood running on me and how I’d say I guess that’ll teach you!”60 Temple sees being a male as having a phallus that offers her not only protection from the likes of Popeye but also revenge on him as well. She finally moves from the sexual imagery of the phallus as weapon (with a hint of surprise homoeroticism) to the phallic father as such. The impulse of both is the same—power and authority. This kind of imagining could be dismissed as the raving of a highly traumatized person, but in a succeeding passage Horace Benbow takes it to heart when he employs a similar methodology. This man who constantly questions, or has questioned, his reiteration of masculinity is assumed by Temple to “know how to do things like that.”61 Just a few short pages later in the novel, Horace couples his earlier doubling of Little Belle with Temple’s tactic. Horace hears Temple’s tale of degradation and returns to his home and a photograph of Little Belle. He is overcome by the smell of honeysuckle (as Quentin is in The Sound and the Fury), swoons, and: Then he knew what that sensation in his stomach meant. He put the photograph down hurriedly and went to the bathroom. He opened the door running and fumbled at the light. But he had not time to find it and he gave over and plunged forward and struck the lavatory and leaned upon his braced arms while the shucks set up a terrific uproar beneath her thighs. Lying with her head lifted slightly, her chin depressed like a figure lifted down from a crucifix, she watched something black and furious go roaring out of her pale body. She was bound and naked on her back on a flat car moving at a speed through a black tunnel . . . far beneath her she could hear the faint, furious uproar of the shucks.62

The sound of the shucks connects Horace’s scene to that of Temple’s rape at the hands of Popeye in Goodwin’s barn. This honeysuckle scent (which implies female sexuality) overcomes Horace; he swoons into this Freudian-filled reverie in which he begins by being a sick gentleman rushing to the bathroom and ends by being the female victim— a change that is signaled by the shift in personal pronouns from masculine to feminine. What could this possibly mean? The episode begins with Horace’s transformation into rapist and victim, violator of Temple and his stepdaughter, and violated. The connection between Benbow and Little Belle reverberates, but there also exists the possibility of homoeroticism with Horace as Temple Drake, the victim of Popeye, as Horace becomes all three at one point or another.63 Like the

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above-quoted selection from Macbeth, the key word in this musing is “becomes.” Readers and critics are so concerned with what sexual roles Horace occupies64 in relation to his stepdaughter, client, and supposed nemesis in the form of Popeye that they never consider the “becoming,” Horace’s implied agency, or lack thereof. Horace Benbow has seen Temple’s gender fluidity used to meet her circumstances and enacts this ability himself when confronted with the idea of Popeye, Temple, and the picture of Little Belle mixed with the smell of female sexuality.65 While the word “ability” is employed here, one must bear in mind Judith Butler’s “constitutive constraints” and the pressure to reiterate “the law” or suffer “punishable consequences.” Under the trauma of rape or in the privacy of one’s own lavatory, gender fluidity may be employed, but in the constitutive constraint that is Yoknapatawpha, this kind of performativity would be rendered as a failure and would be seen as punitive—again the townsmen of Sanctuary threaten to put Horace into this role of female victim as punishment for his defense of Goodwin. Agency in the domestic and public spheres is quite different in Faulkner’s fictive world. Faulkner’s fiction is rife with men who, if not to the extent of Horace’s transfiguration above, still perform masculinity in ways that are seemingly role reversals or at least contain elements of serious conflation of the two. Earnest Taliaferro in Mosquitoes, Gail Hightower of Light in August, both Charles Bon and Henry Sutpen in Absalom! Absalom! and Quentin Compson of both The Sound and the Fury and Absalom! Absalom! are just a few examples of these Faulknerian men. One vivid exemplar of this type of masculine performativity is Harry Wilbourne (Well born?) of The Wild Palms; he has such a relationship with his lover Charlotte Rittenmeyer. Wilbourne thinks of her, “She is not only a better man and a better gentleman than I am, she is a better everything than I will ever be.”66 Charlotte not only performs masculinity better than Wilbourne, but the reiteration of gentility as well. Perhaps Wilbourne only sees her success in his failure, but his earnest assertion of her superiority in all of his potential roles alone qualifies him as a failed Southern man, if not gentility. Upon setting up a household with Charlotte, he observes to their mutual friend McCord, “But she’s a better man than I am. You said that yourself—as any man by drink or opium. I had become the Complete Householder.”67 If Charlotte is the better man, Henry enacts the gendered role of woman and becomes the stereotype of female domesticity. Finally, one of Henry’s early jobs is to write for a “confession magazine” in which his pulp stories begin with sentences such as “I had the body and desires of a woman yet in knowledge and

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experience of the world I was but a child.”68 Wilbourne assumes the female role of woman as body for popular consumption by male pulp readers. Harry/Henry Wilbourne is as dichotomous as his name. Wilbourne feels that the world is backward, unlike books, and that life should be full of the “Does, Roes, Wilbournes and Smiths—males and females but without the pricks or cunts.”69 Harry does not mind thinking of Charlotte and himself in dichotomous terms when it comes to gender, but he at least wants to erase the biological component of such constructions,70 and includes his own family line in this idea. This inclusion of the family line connects Henry Wilbourne to Horace Benbow; Harry’s father died just two years after his birth and is only mentioned in passing in the beginning of the novel. Harry’s father expresses his “will” from beyond the grave through his “will” (connection to Will Benbow, Horace’s father?), but he is a present absence, the missing father, even if Harry is “Wilbourne.” This missing father leads men like Harry to search for models of masculinity outside of the family unit and, especially in Faulkner’s novels, to have an acute awareness of the performativity of gender and the possibility of both slippage and outright failure in their reiterations of the law. No other couple in Faulkner is more aware of their marginality than Charlotte and Harry.71 Unlike Horace, even though Harry essentially fails at reiterating constructions of masculinity that came before him due to the absent father, he does not return to a culturally sanctioned role. Faulkner demonstrates with The Wild Palms that the cultural constraints can be far too great to overcome, and one has to return to prescribed domestic roles as Horace does or suffer the “punishable consequences.” In the end, Harry is jailed, presumably to die soon, with Charlotte already buried. This kind of gender role reversal exists as well in The Unvanquished. Drusilla Hawk and Bayard Sartoris (not the young Bayard of Flags) exhibit this sort of reversal. For Drusilla, the mitigating factor is the Civil War, but for both characters, the more forceful motivator is the loss of the father. Drusilla, in Rosalind from As You Like It, Olivia from Twelfth Night, and Portia from The Merchant of Venice fashion, dresses in male clothing and joins in the Confederate effort to defeat the Yankees. Drusilla muses: Living used to be dull, you see. Stupid. You lived in the same house your father was born in and your father’s sons and daughters had the sons and daughters of the same negro slaves to nurse and coddle, and then you grew up and you fell in love with your acceptable young man. . . . But now you can

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see for yourself how it is, it’s fine now; you dont have to worry now about the house and the silver because they got burned up and carried away.72

The motivating condition of the loss of father and fiancé enables Drusilla to break out of her gender role, but the war is not a permanent condition, and the women of her family eventually force her back into a dress, a marriage, and the “stupidity,” though she never gives up “masculine” violence. Perhaps Drusilla’s forced performativity explains her attempts to do the same to Bayard in the final story of The Unvanquished, “An Odor of Verbena.” Drusilla’s attempt to foist a masculine role on her male counterpart also implies that Sartoris was not reiterating his male gendered role in an acceptable manner to Drusilla, if not those around him. Bayard plans to confront his father’s killer, B. J. Redmond, but before he can, Drusilla approaches him with his father’s dueling pistols and urges seductively: Take them. I have kept them for you. I give them to you. Oh you will thank me, you will remember me who put into your hands what they say is an attribute only of God’s, who took what belongs to heaven and gave it to you. Do you feel them? The long true barrels true as justice, the triggers (you have fired them) quick as retribution, the two of them slender and invincible and fatal as the physical shape of love?73

Drusilla implores Bayard to take on the phallus, the chivalric code, the honorable reiteration of masculinity that complements the female gendered role she has been forced back into (though it is a bit of a “drag” for her). Interestingly, she employs sexual terms and innuendo to push these roles, but it is to no avail. Bayard leaves the pistols near the body of his dead father and faces Redmond unarmed, ultimately succeeding, while Drusilla is left to flee to Montgomery. Despite Bayard’s seemingly “manly” stand against Redmond, Bayard and Drusilla have reversed gender roles. Bayard benefits from this reversal while Drusilla loses everything for it.74 Drusilla becomes a sort of Rosalind in reverse. Her forced adoption of femininity cannot hide the supposedly masculine impulses beneath, and she must flee as Shakespeare’s cross-dressed woman before her. In the instance of The Unvanquished, failure to reiterate gender roles carries much heavier consequences for women than men, but, despite this assessment, it could be argued that Bayard does live up to a prescribed role of masculinity by bravely facing Redmond, just merely in a different manner than that pursued by both Sartoris

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antecedents and Drusilla—by rejecting the fathers’ method. Bayard masters a new set of moral norms, from revenge to redemption.75 Bayard’s success reflects the notion that the rise of white insurgency accompanied the decline of the old code of aristocratic pretensions.76 White men were redefining themselves by a new set of “moral norms,” and its chief distinction was based more on race than aristocracy and its code of conduct. Drusilla’s plight suggests that females did not have the luxury of this self-redefinition—they would only be defined by white men, and then, usually as a monument of virtue and in relation to the black male rapist beast of Thomas Dixon’s day. So far the focus has been on the consequence of missing fathers and their lone sons’ citations of masculinity; however, so strong is the paternalistic influence on sons’ reiterations (law as predated citations) that the effects are similar for fathers who are present absences or vice versa. What both types of fathers represent is an inability—an incapacity to offer acceptable models of masculinity for the next generation of Southern white men. This unacceptability is part of the sense of postwar, modern decline that informs many of Faulkner’s male characters. This modern generation of Southern white males respond, as Bayard from The Unvanquished did above, by frequently rejecting rather the existing father or the memory of a deceased patriarch and his masculine antecedents. The effect may be the fluidity, instability, and self-awareness that Horace Benbow feels in both Flags and Sanctuary, as recorded above, but many of Faulkner’s novels suggest that this action happens recurrently in a South grappling with modernity with its industrialism, the rise of town culture, class mobility (see Flem Snopes), race role instability (see Joe Christmas), and living in the throes of a defeated region. Rejection of the father, both biological and in Lacan’s name-of-the-father sense, is one way of dealing with unacceptable citations that have fossilized into seeming law. One such example of this direct rejection of the father is Ike McCaslin from Go Down, Moses. When Ike reads from the McCaslin plantation commissary ledger, he sees a record of miscegenation, incest, and death involving the McCaslins and the Beauchamps, with his male antecedents as the culprits. Ike thinks of reading the entries: Upon some apocryphal Bench or even Altar or perhaps before the Throne Itself for a last perusal and contemplation and refreshment of the Allknowledgable before the yellowed pages and the brown thin ink in which was recorded the injustice and a little at least of its amelioration and restitution faded back forever into the anonymous communal original dust . . . the

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yellowed pages scrawled in fading ink by the hand first of his grandfather and then his father and uncle.77

Ike approaches the ledger with religious ferverency, but the revelations set him on the road to rejection of the McCaslin fathers who have come before him. Ike not only feels the need to atone for the sins of his father but also feels the need to repudiate the McCaslin name as well. This throwing off of his paternal inheritance is to cause a fissure in the young McCaslin’s identity.78 As Jacques Lacan writes in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, “But the inheritance of the father is that which Kierkegaard designates for us, namely, his sin.”79 What is important is Ike’s rejection of his ancestors and their sins, hence his identity. Ike stretches the meaning of his name to make this point when he describes himself as “an Isaac born into a later life than Abraham’s and repudiating immolation: fatherless and therefore safe declining the altar because maybe this time the exasperated Hand might not supply the kid.”80 Ike sees the father as a ghost of the past, a phantom unable to help him fulfill this given role—God the father may not intervene and save him either. Unlike Horace Benbow, Bayard Sartoris, or Harry Wilbourne, the absence of his Abraham frees Isaac from the test of the heavenly father. The alternative is to repudiate fathers. In fact, no two words are used as much in Go Down, Moses as “relinquish” and “repudiate.” Ike even goes a step further in this act when he argues, “I cant repudiate it. It was never mine to repudiate. It was never Father’s and Uncle Buddy’s to bequeath me to repudiate because it was never Grandfather’s to bequeath them to bequeath me to repudiate.”81 Ike is ostensibly talking about the land, but, in a larger sense, he refers to his patrimony and all that comes with it, including its attendant masculinity. Ike’s assertion sounds naïve, as escaping one’s paternity is an impossible task. Therein lies the problem. Faulkner touched on this idea when addressing the English Club at the University of Virginia in 1958. Of Ike, Faulkner notes he says, “This is bad, and I will withdraw from it” and the problem is, “What we need are people who will say, ‘This is bad and I’m going to do something about it, I’m going to change it.’ ”82 Ike’s response does not solve anything—neither for the Beauchamp side of the family and the wrongs visited upon it by the white fathers, nor for Ike personally. Ike McCaslin reacts in this manner because he has no tradition to follow.83 Repudiation involves the loss of models, of tradition, of identity. This loss informs Ike’s reiterations of masculinity. He looks for alternate models in the likes of the appropriately named Sam Fathers,

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but he reels in his relinquishing of his paternity. This circumstance results in the beginning of the novel becoming Ike’s ending: “Isaac McCaslin, ‘Uncle Ike,’ past seventy and nearer eighty than he ever corroborated any more, a widower now and uncle to half a county and father to no one.”84 McCaslin has repudiated not only the fathers and their patrimony but also the idea of fatherhood in general. This notion demonstrates, one could argue, the failure of total repudiation, but another alternative exists in Faulkner’s novels, and his name is Quentin Compson.

Chapter 5

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I ’m M y O w n G r a n d pa Quentin Compson’s Shakespearean Solution

He could feel them quite near now; Father said it probably seemed to him that he could even hear them: all the voices, the murmuring of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow beyond the immediate fury.1 Quentin Compson Hamlet: Why, look you there, look how it steals away!/ My father, in his habit as he lived!/ Look where he goes even now out at the portal! Queen: This is the very coinage of your brain/ This bodiless creation ecstasy/ Is very cunning in.2

I

ke McCaslin’s repudiation of the fathers fails. Horace Benbow’s supposed embracing of “the gentleman” citation of masculinity leads to parody and a loss of agency. Bayard Sartoris’s reiteration of that Old South Hotspur spirit coupled with modern Hamletism brings about his destruction. Gail Hightower of Light in August, Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon of Absalom! Absalom! Harry Wilbourne of The Wild Palms, and the entire Bundren clan from As I Lay Dying all concoct some sort of strategy for dealing with the absence and/or will of the father and what it means for their identities. None succeeded. All roads lead to Quentin Compson, a Southern Icarus who employs the grandest methodology while engaging this concern and offers the most tragic failure.

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Michael Kreyling writes in Inventing Southern Literature (1998), “If the ‘South’ is a cultural entity, then ‘Faulkner’ is its official language.”3 Kreyling could have easily added to his paradigm, “And Quentin Compson is its most repeated diction.” Indeed, seemingly any discussion of things Southern at least references Quentin if not depends on him for any sort of cultural discourse.4 And in all these echoes, readers and writers frequently hear what they want. Practically since his creation, critics have dissected Quentin Compson, pulling out the individual organs that support their diagnosis.5 Narrator, listener, son, incest-driven brother, historian, linguist, homosexual, heterosexual, student, spokesperson, subversive, aesthete, and even a “style of thinking about the South” have all been conferred on Faulkner’s protagonist. Considering the portrayal of Quentin Compson over the course of both The Sound and the Fury and Absalom! Absalom! the propensity to make this complex character whatever an interpreter needs is understandable. Quentin offers such declarations as, “Theres a curse on us its not our fault is it our fault,” and about the South, “I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!”6 These oft-quoted lines reveal what would become an iconic character, a somewhat heavy burden for a nineteen-year-old Southern boy with questionable sanity to bear. Even Faulkner himself could not resist the urge to view Quentin as a type, positing, “There are too many Quentins in the South who are too sensitive to face its reality.”7 The connection between Quentin and William Shakespeare’s Prince of Denmark is not a difficult one to make. After all, Faulkner writes of Quentin in Absalom! Absalom! as “that gaunt tragic dramatic self-hypnotised youthful face like the tragedian in a college play, an academic Hamlet waked from some trancement of the curtain’s falling and blundering across the dusty stage from which the rest of the cast had departed.”8 Both of these males are as boys, not men, dark brooders well known for being indecisive. Intellectual, overly analytical, a bit unstable, and with a self-destructive streak without all the active passion of a Hotspur, both these characters meet tragic ends. Hamlet famously considers “to be or not to be,” whereas Quentin flies to that undiscovered country. William Faulkner did not invent “the Southern Hamlet” (antebellum author William Gilmore Simms complained of this type of man in his day), but he surely perfected him.9 Still, in terms of the characters’ masculinities, these similarities are not what are important for understanding Faulkner’s appropriation. The importance lies in what haunts both characters and their method of dealing with it. As Laertes says of Hamlet, “For he himself

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is subject to his birth.”10 No line could be truer for Quentin Compson. Both are haunted by the patriarchal past. In Hamlet’s case, it is his direct patriarch, the ghost of Hamlet Sr., imploring, “List, list, O, list!/ If thou didst ever thy dear father love.”11 Quentin’s ghost is not as immediate as young Hamlet’s, but its import and effect are the same. The ghost of Jason Lycurgus haunts the Southern Hamlet as sure as Colonel Sartoris did young Bayard.12 This kind of confrontation, this haunting, is not as corporeal as Hamlet’s, but it causes very real effects. In The Sound and the Fury, this ghost, one of the original Compson family patriarchs, is represented by Quentin’s watch. He begins his section of the novel with: And then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s . . . because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.13

Quentin’s inheritance goes back to an original Compson patriarch, Jason Lycurgus, a man Faulkner describes in the appendix to the novel as “the last Compson who would not fail at everything he touched save longevity or suicide.”14 Quentin Maclachan suggests an even more important ancestor, supposedly a Scotsman who fled to Kentucky from Culloden Moor after the British massacre of Highlanders. This ancestor escaped into the Lost Cause ideology that stalks the male Compsons right down to Quentin. Paternity and patriarchy collide. Time is Quentin’s patrimony, and it has not treated the Compson men very well. The reason Quentin’s Hamlet Sr., his motivating spirit, is not directly his biological father may have something to do with Faulkner’s propensity to render skipped generations.15 Indeed, even in Shakespeare’s play, one of Hamlet’s chief concerns regards Claudius having “popped in between th’ election and my hopes,/ Thrown out his angle for my proper life.”16 The characters are for very different reasons, but both stand the chance of being that skipped generation as their immediate fathers before them. Faulkner may have appropriated some of this idea from Shakespeare, but his biography offers a clue to this impulse as well. Faulkner once wrote Malcolm Cowley, “I am telling the same story over and over which is myself and the world.”17 Faulkner’s father, Murry Falkner,

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excluded the author as a young boy, preferring his brother Jack. At the same time, a budding William embraced both a British persona (and all that came with it) and Phil Stone, an academic mentor and social model. If he could not be a Falkner, he would be a Stone.18 Faulkner saw his biological father as an insufficient model of masculinity and chose another. Quentin Compson would have a similar problem. In one of his classes at the University of Virginia, Faulkner specifies Quentin’s problem when he elucidates: The action as portrayed by Quentin was transmitted to him through his father. There was a basic failure before that. The grandfather had been a failed brigadier twice in the Civil War. It was the—the basic failure Quentin inherited through his father, or beyond his father. It was a—something had happened somewhere between the first Compson and Quentin. The first Compson was a bold, ruthless man who came to Mississippi as a free forester to grasp where and when he could and wanted to, and established what should have been a princely line, and that princely line decayed.19

Quentin inherited only time, time and a generational failure to become a man, and his lack of true inheritance would affect his performativity of masculinity, for Quentin would not merely repudiate as Isaac McCaslin had, but would employ a different strategy in the attempt to reiterate predated citations, or the law. In the above explanation, Faulkner stresses the father as a transmittal of failure, but he also maintains that this lack of success was not always the case in the Compson line. Again, Faulkner’s biography reveals much regarding this construction. Colonel William C. Falkner, great-grandfather to the author, was an intimidating study in masculinity as an accomplished soldier, entrepreneur, and all-around Southern aristocrat.20 But the formidable nature of this family patriarch is germane to Faulkner’s construction of both himself and his fictive world. William Faulkner was haunted by the masculinity of this powerful, paternal ghost from the past.21 Faulkner once said of his ancestor, “Nothing left of his work but a statue. But he rode through the country like a living force. I like it better that way.”22 At the same time, he found his father, Murry Falkner, an insufficient model. What is a young author to do? Let Quentin Compson do it for him. Caddy Compson from The Sound and the Fury exists paradoxically as a symbol of loss, yet one with a dialogic voice.23 Even Faulkner himself, if he can be believed due to his notorious habit of prevaricating and contradicting himself, claimed that the novel began thus: “The first thing I thought of was the picture of the muddy seat of that

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little girl’s drawers climbing the pear tree to look in the parlor window.”24 The supposedly decentered, voiceless Caddy Compson is frequently made the center of discussion in the novel—exceeded only by Quentin. Even then, Quentin and his incestuous longings tend to be the focus of much critical attention, as if the young Compson is commonly defined by his relationship (real or imagined) with his sister.25 Certainly the novel invites this kind of critical leering with Quentin relating such episodes as: touch your hand to it dont cry poor Quentin but I couldn’t stop she held me against her damp hard breast I could hear her heart going firm and slow now not hammering and the water gurgling among the willows in the dark and the waves of honeysuckle coming up the air my arm and shoulder were twisted under me what is it what are you doing her muscles gathered I sat up its my knife I dropped it.26

Quentin is obsessed with his sister Caddy and her sexuality; seemingly every Compson brother reveals this tendency in each section of the novel. Caddy exists also as a present absence without her own chapter, her own narrative voice, and as such the temptation for critics to “discover” her on their own is too great to pass up. Having acceded that Caddy is vital both to the novel and to understanding Quentin Compson, even more important in comprehending this Southern Hamlet and his reiterations of masculinity is his relationship with his father. This novel reveals the insufficiency of Mr. Compson as a masculine model for Quentin, and the result will be gender slippage to the point of nearly embracing the opposite role, femininity, as Horace did in his Little Belle/Temple Drake sequence in Sanctuary. If The Sound and the Fury exposes this problem, it also hints at a possible solution, one Quentin will attempt in Absalom! Absalom! Quentin Compson will endeavor to narrate an acceptable father/masculine model in the later novel in hopes of providing himself with an adequate reiteration of the law, a working out in fiction of what cannot be fixed in reality, just like the two novels’ author. Mr. Compson’s unacceptability is due to his nihilism, his sense of failure, and he attempts to pass this failure on to his son as he received it from his father. Quentin relates, “Father said a man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you’d think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune Father said. A gull on an invisible wire attached

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through space dragged. You carry the symbol of your frustration into eternity. Then the wings are bigger Father said only who can play a harp.”27 Faulkner’s reference to Coleridge is telling—Quentin’s father exists as an ancient mariner at best, the shell of a real man. Talking about the past has become his present, a man passing on a tale of failure and woe instead of reiterating an active masculinity. This posture makes it difficult for him to be a masculine model for Quentin. Instead, the citational law of Quentin’s distant forefathers butts up against the weak version of masculinity he sees performed by his father. The result is confusion for Quentin’s masculinity and identity. Mr. Compson’s condition is also one of Faulkner’s appropriations from William Shakespeare. W. B. Yeats obsessed over Shakespeare’s “lost kings” and how he felt the playwright must have loved them most, simply for being lost. The long line of these lost, broken kings from King John to King Lear haunts Yeats; he particularly identified with Richard II, defending that “unripened Hamlet” and romanticizing with all poetic license.28 Mr. Compson, though difficult to romanticize in such a Yeatsian way, smacks of similarity to Richard in that both have inherited their “kingdoms,” yet both are unfit to rule due to their lack of conviction, and in the face of their individual failures they both turn to nihilism and petrifying self-pity. After his deposition from the throne by Bolingbroke, Richard laments: Of comfort let no man speak! Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs, Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth. Let’s choose executors and talk of wills. And yet not so, for what can we bequeath Save our deposed bodies to the ground? Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke’s, And nothing can we call our own but death For within a hollow crown That rounds the mortal temples of a king Keeps Death his court.29

Mr. Compson’s situation is not as dire as Richard’s, but one would never know it by his rhetoric (always questionable given Quentin’s propensity to construct others’ discourse), as is evidenced in the passage above from The Sound and the Fury. Both men fit into this “broken king” mold, Richard from his deposition as king and Mr. Compson from his inheritance of a kingdom not worth having, of never truly having been a king to begin with. Neither man reiterates the role of the

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stereotypically “strong man” citation of masculinity, as Bolingbroke does in Shakespeare’s play and Gerald Bland, Dalton Ames, or seemingly every other male but Quentin does in The Sound and the Fury. More significantly, the Faulkner passage above demonstrates the difficulty in placing which words are exactly Quentin’s and which are his father’s. By the time he gets to Absalom, Quentin finally articulates this fear when he thinks, “Yes. I have heard too much, too long thinking, Yes, almost exactly like father.”30 Not only is Mr. Compson not a sufficient masculine model, but also Quentin seems to even fear that he is becoming his father or at least just like him—Mr. Compson is a negative model and that includes his masculinity as well. Quentin has every right to hold this fear within him; throughout his section in The Sound and the Fury, Quentin carries his father’s aphorisms in his head like ghosts from the past—an absent presence.31 Looking at his books in his Harvard room, Quentin thinks, “Father said it used to be a gentleman was known by his books; nowadays he’s known by the ones he has not returned.”32 The word of the father haunts Quentin—not in the manner of Hamlet but something more akin to Macbeth and his ghosts. This distinction exists because these fatherly associative statements always reverberate with decline, futility, and absurdity. Perhaps Quentin’s notion that “there was always something terrible in me sometimes at night I could see grinning at me I could see it through them grinning at me through their faces” does not reflect incestuous desire for Caddy.33 Instead, the “they” are the forefathers, back to Jason Lycurgus and Quentin Maclachan, and the “terrible” in Quentin symbolizes the failure passed on to him by his father. Even in the very last moments of his life, at the end of his section where his sentence logic spirals downward, this obsession still dominates him as much as his sexual desire for Caddy and the need to protect her virginity (perhaps a question of patriarchal purity for this impure clan?). Quentin rants, “Every man is the arbiter of his own virtues but let no man prescribe for another mans wellbeing and i temporary and he was the saddest word of all there is nothing else in the world it’s not despair until time its not even time until it was.”34 What sounds like a statement of individuality and defiance ends with the “i” subject position being reduced from capitalized status and the “he,” in this case the father, becoming the “saddest word of all.” Quentin has not been defeated by the father, as Freudian critics may be tempted to read this relationship, but has, rather, succumbed to the same burdens his father carried. The effects of the constitutive constraints of the forefathers are multitudinous on Quentin and his performativity of gender. The

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larger consequence is discussed at the beginning of Absalom when Faulkner writes, His very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence.35

Quentin is haunted, if not possessed, by these forefathers (who are cultural as well as familial, the Southern, white ruling class that came generations before him), and the element of them that takes over his body most is that of failure. As Mr. Compson would suggest, “Tragedy is second hand.”36 Quentin’s tragedy comes secondhand, as his patrimony. This haunting by more successful reiterations of masculinity of older Compson men coupled with the insufficiency of his father affects Quentin’s gender performativity—he moves from slippage to almost complete role reversal. Quentin’s slippage appears in relationship to others. Dalton Ames, Gerald Bland, and Herbert all offer citations of masculinity that succeed in placing Quentin into a more stereotypically feminine role. In Quentin’s case, a constant refrain runs through his head, a daydream in which he plays the masculine role of defending his sister’s honor against this man not good enough for her by shooting him—a very active way of reiterating one’s masculinity. Yet Herbert perceives the artificial nature of his actual encounter with Quentin when he judges, “We’re better than a play you must have made the Dramat,” referring to Quentin as a “half-baked Galahad,” and exhorting Caddy, “Don’t let Quentin do anything he cant finish.”37 The theatricality of Quentin’s pose is undercut by both Herbert’s awareness of it and his last comment, which hints at Quentin’s virginal status, his inability to “finish.” The response that Quentin musters to questions of his virginity is the denial of “yes yes lots of times with lots of girls.”38 As Shreve says, “In the South you are ashamed of being a virgin. Boys. Men. They lie about it.”39 The conflict with Herbert becomes a questioning of Quentin’s reiteration of masculinity and chips away at his masculine pose by pointing out his theatricality and incomplete sexuality. Due to the haunting citations of masculinity from the early Compson patriarchs, Quentin thinks dichotomously about gender and sex-

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uality as people did before him. Yet he does not fit into these neat categories himself. In the beginning of Absalom! Absalom! Faulkner writes of Quentin: He would seem to listen to two separate Quentins now—the Quentin Compson preparing for Harvard in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts, listening, having to listen, to one of the ghosts which had refused to lie still even longer than most had, telling him about old ghost-times; and the Quentin Compson who was still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost but nevertheless having to be one for all that, since he was born and bred in the deep South the same as she was— the two separate Quentins now talking to one another in long silence of notpeople in notlanguage.40

Though the “she” in the pronoun shift can be Rosa Coldfield or Caddie’s eventual offspring, Faulkner conflates the two Quentins with Rosa in an amalgam of gender indeterminacy—the notpeople of the notlanguage. Dalton Ames and Gerald Bland also elicit the same kind of response from Quentin, and the results are similar to that of his encounter with Herbert. Once again, Quentin tries on a manly, aggressive pose for Dalton Ames, hurling threats such as “I say you must go not my father not anybody I say it” and “I’ll give you until sundown to leave town.”41 What is especially compelling about the first threat is that Quentin feels the need to separate himself from his father—it is clear that Mr. Compson poses no threat to Caddy’s lovers and exists mostly in his section in Quentin’s head. Quentin attempts to take his father’s place by taking the initiative.42 Still, this idea relies too heavily on Freudian paradigms of fathers and sons to realize the theatricality of Quentin’s pose. This encounter may have happened or only took place as a one-act play in the theater of Quentin’s fevered imagination, yet he still fails as a male defender, even if he writes the script himself. Quentin’s reaction to Dalton Ames, who he later conflates with Gerald Bland, is to not only place himself in a stereotypically feminine position, by passing out and being manhandled by the person whom he attempts to thwart via aggression, but also imagine himself clearly in a female role. He ruminates, “Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. If I could have been his mother lying with an open body lifted laughing, holding his father with my hand refraining, seeing, watching him die before he lived.”43 Quentin conjectures that the role of the mother would have enabled him to defeat Ames, and as he takes on the persona and its accompanying personal pronouns (my hand), he interjects a sexuality difficult to describe as homo-, trans-, or bisexual.

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If the idea of a textual logic can be applied to such a fractious narrative as Quentin’s section of The Sound and the Fury, it is this constant repositioning of its narrator’s masculinity and sexuality.44 The two are furiously intertwined, and Quentin repeatedly ends up either in indeterminacy or on the feminine side of the constitutive constraints set by his forefathers. Even the innuendo in the novel that Compson and his roommate Shreve are a couple (twice in the work, other characters call Shreve Quentin’s “husband”) places Quentin in the feminine role of wife. Shreve, “wearing the pants” in the couple, quickly comes to Quentin’s defense after his arrest and fistfight with Bland and constantly acts as his protector.45 The young Compson moves toward the feminine side of the dichotomy he has inherited to the point of almost complete role reversal. Quentin even considers not being a man at all at one point in the novel. He ruminates: Versh told me about a man who mutilated himself. He went into the woods and did it with a razor, sitting in a ditch. A broken razor flinging them backward over his shoulder the same motion complete the jerked skein of blood backward not looping. But that’s not it. It’s not having them. It’s never to have had them then I could say O That That’s Chinese I dont know Chinese. And Father said it’s because you are a virgin: don’t you see?46

This Southern Hamlet contemplates what it would be like to not have male sex organs. Quentin cannot accept his culture’s definition of man and considers its polar opposite—woman.47 To suggest that he is considering being female is to see females as castrated males (see Dr. Freud’s conception of what it means to be a “female”), yet certainly Quentin is scrutinizing the role of the male as identification of male genitals and his inability to escape either. In addition, Mr. Compson adds the failure of Quentin’s sexuality as the cause of all his problems and feels the need to point it out to his troubled son. This pointing out by the father is germane to Quentin’s problem. To be sure, Quentin obsesses over his sister’s (and his own) sexuality, but his father’s pessimistic view of his son coupled with Mr. Compson’s own insufficiency as a model of masculinity acts as the engine in the younger Compson’s obsessions. The Quentin Compson of The Sound and the Fury does, however, hint at a solution he will put into practice in Absalom! Absalom! In the earlier novel, Quentin thinks, “Say it to Father will you I will am my fathers Progenitive I invented him created I him Say it to him it will not be fore he will say I was not and then you and I since philoprogenitive.”48 Quentin endeavors to narrate an acceptable father in the

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later novel, to transmogrify the insufficient model of Mr. Compson to one of his making; he dares to create his father to fit into the line of Jason Lycurgus and in turn create a better self. Quentin Compson will be his “father’s Progenitive,” in essence becoming his own grandfather rather than taking his place.49 Critics frequently see Quentin’s action as one of competition with his father, as an attempt to replace him, but this thinking is mired in Lacanian/Freudian paradigms of father-son relationships.50 Quentin wants to improve the father so he can have a model to reiterate; the emphasis is on creation not destruction. The failed Southern Hamlet uses narrative to overcome his performative difficulties in The Sound and the Fury.51 This narrative performance, however, does not begin with Quentin himself. Mr. Compson as patriarch becomes what Quentin initially believes is the much more acceptable Thomas Sutpen, with, understandably, mixed results. Faulkner once told a graduate course in American fiction at the University of Virginia that Thomas Sutpen was the central character of Absalom! Absalom! and his real reason for writing the novel.52 While the novelist places this patriarch at the center of the work, he does so through Quentin Compson. In fact, Faulkner wrote in a letter to Harrison Smith in February of 1934, “Quentin Compson, of the Sound & Fury, tells it, or ties it together; he is the protagonist so that is not a complete apocrypha. . . . I use his bitterness which he has projected on the South in the form of hatred of it and its people to get more out of the story itself than a historical novel would be. To keep the hoopskirts and plug hats out.”53 Quentin bears responsibility for Thomas Sutpen’s story through listening to both Mr. Compson and Rosa Coldfield and eventually “telling about the South” by telling about this patriarch, this most masculine of Faulkner’s creations. Faulkner’s comments above suggest that Quentin’s perspective and what he attempts to do with it are just as important as the story of Sutpen himself. Hamlet’s perspective on his father in Shakespeare’s play is also as important as the actual man himself; it is difficult to measure which drives the play’s action more. This fleeting ghost that may not even be Hamlet’s actual father stands in stark contrast to the man the tragic prince paints. Hamlet describes his father: See what grace was seated on his brow: Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself, An eye like Mars to threaten and command, A station like the herald Mercury

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New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill— A combination and a form indeed Where every god did seem to set his seal To give the world assurance of a man.54

Hamlet constructs his father into at least the idealized man, if not a god. Through words, he builds this father-king ideal just as Quentin does through narrative, and both sons’ perspectives are central to creation. Yet, if Thomas Sutpen is the central character of Absalom, he is almost always given to both the reader and Quentin in a secondhand manner. Sutpen exists in the shadowy world of the present absence much like Caddy Compson in The Sound and the Fury. The description of Sutpen’s flesh as having “the appearance of pottery, of having been colored by that oven’s fever either of soul or environment” suggests in a small sense the larger premise of the novel—that Thomas Sutpen is a made thing.55 Listening to Sutpen’s stories passed down to his father from his father in turn (General Compson), attending to Rosa Coldfield’s version of Sutpen, and touring the remains of Sutpen’s “design,” Quentin Compson serves his apprenticeship and prepares his own design, that of the modern Southern patriarch and his attendant masculinity; in the second half of the novel, he tries to fulfill this design with results similar to that of Sutpen’s. The initial impulse to create Thomas Sutpen for Quentin is the controlling of patriarchal masculinity, a threat to be expunged by his storyteller.56 Indeed, Quentin longs for Prospero-like powers as in The Tempest, controlling the fate (narrative) of all involved with the assurance, “I have with such provision in mine art/ So safely ordered that there is no soul/ No, not so much perdition as a hair/ Betid to any creature in the vessel.”57 Yet Quentin wants this power more to create himself via Thomas Sutpen than to merely defeat this forefather. Numerous Faulkner characters reinvent the past to create a sense of identity.58 Quentin will use his art to create Thomas Sutpen. One of the main attributes of this creation is what Quentin would see as a throwback to the Hotspur masculinity of his distant antecedents. Early in the novel, Sutpen appears as a figure of almost hypermasculinity. At Sutpen’s Hundred, his self-made plantation, Thomas exerts his masculinity in highly physical wrestling matches with his black slaves. Faulkner writes: Perhaps as a matter of sheer deadly forethought toward the retention of supremacy, domination, he would enter the ring with one of the negroes

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himself . . . the father of her children standing there naked and panting and bloody to the waist and the negro just fallen evidently, lying at his feet and bloody.59

Physical prowess, aggressiveness, and the domination of the black man are all a part of Thomas Sutpen’s masculinity. In short, Sutpen is everything Mr. Compson and his son are not. Even when Quentin assumes more control of the narrative later in the novel, he conveys a similar Sutpen masculinity. When relating the story of Sutpen’s tenure on the Haitian sugar plantation, a tale supposedly told by General Compson, to Mr. Compson, Quentin, and Shreve, this new, vested narrator ramps up Sutpen’s masculinity in the episode of the slave uprising. He recounts Sutpen’s words via his intermediaries, “Something had to be done so he put the musket down and went out and subdued them. That was how he [Sutpen? The General? Mr. Compson?] told it; he went out and subdued them, and when he returned he and the girl became engaged to marry.”60 Again, Sutpen uses his aggressiveness and physical prowess to both physically dominate his opponents and obtain a female (a failure of Quentin’s). In Quentin’s tale, Sutpen swaggers. These specific incidents are not the only attributes that make Sutpen Quentin’s ideal patriarch. Sutpen not only subdues the slaves but also subdues the land, the entire town, the Coldfields, and, in a sense, himself. He is the most active agent in his circumstances, attempting to create the world around him and defining himself as well.61 In other words, this modern Southern Hamlet endeavors to fashion an ideal masculine model by creating a Hotspur worth reiterating. Thomas Sutpen does, however, become his “father’s Progenitive,” not unlike Quentin. Compson offers Sutpen’s conjecture of his father’s origins when he states, “He didn’t know just where his father had come from, whether the country to which they returned was it or not, or even if his father knew, remembered, wanted to remember and find it again.”62 In fact, Shreve and Quentin are never really clear on where Sutpen was born; more importantly, young Thomas will become disconnected from his heritage just like his father, as if he had none. Part of the appeal of this disassociation for Quentin rests in Sutpen’s class mobility. Through his own efforts, Sutpen moves from being a working-class poor kid to becoming the master of Sutpen’s Hundred. The Compson family reveals the aristocracy in decline, having to sell their land just to send Quentin to college. The notion of mobility through effort makes up part of the patriarchal ideal Quentin constructs in Thomas Sutpen.

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More specifically, Sutpen, being an active agent, chooses to disassociate himself from his father, his class, and that potential heritage. The formative moment that brings about this decision occurs when he has to deliver a message from his working-stiff father to the master of the “big house,” and relates “how it was the nigger told him, even before he had had time to say what he came for, never to come to that front door again but to go around back.”63 This episode makes young Thomas aware of the insufficiency of his father as masculine role model and convinces him to choose the master of the big house as his male ideal.64 But there is more. Thomas flees the scene of his humiliation and hides in a cave to consider just what has happened to him. In this cave, Sutpen is reborn by the choice he makes—he reflects on his alternative responses: But I can shoot him: and the other: No. That wouldn’t do no good: and the first: What shall we do then? And the other: I don’t know; and the first: But I can shoot him. I could slip right up there through them bushes and lay there until he come out to lay in the hammock and shoot him: and the other: No. That wouldn’t do no good: and the first: Then what shall we do? And the other: I don’t know.65

In the process of this rebirth that will ultimately lead to the rejection of Sutpen’s biological father and the embracing of this plantation gentleman, Thomas splits in two. In a sense, Sutpen resembles the two Quentins talking to each other in the “notlanguage” cited earlier.66 Herein lies one of the biggest problems with Quentin’s narration of an ideal father—the intrusion of the self. This interference is not the sole province of Quentin when it comes to the making of Thomas Sutpen. Rosa Coldfield first describes Sutpen to young Compson as “a man who rode into town out of nowhere with a horse and two pistols and a herd of wild beasts that he had hunted down singlehanded because he was stronger. . . . No: not even a gentleman.”67 Rosa constructs Sutpen’s masculinity for Quentin, but clearly she is no more an objective source than her audience. She has plenty of provocation for presenting Sutpen as “the demon”— Sutpen’s offer to marry her if she could first produce male offspring would be reason enough—but she clearly intrudes herself on her definitions of this man who never gets to speak for himself. Notably, Shreve will appropriate Rosa’s estimation of Sutpen in the latter part of the novel, employing the moniker of “demon” much in the same manner as Miss Coldfield. Mr. Compson does not have as much opportunity or motivation to intrude himself on his construction of Thomas Sutpen. Paramount in

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his composition is the source of all of his information and his audience. His father, General Compson, supplies all of Mr. Compson’s materials. Mr. Compson repeatedly footnotes information from his father in statements such as, “I have this from something your grandfather let drop one day which he doubtless had from Sutpen himself in the same accidental fashion.”68 This way of expressing his source and its potential for unreliability due to its accidental nature explains Mr. Compson’s need to constantly employ parentheses with qualifications or clarifications for the details offered throughout his narrative. The retailing of Sutpen’s story by Mr. Compson is problematic because the narrative makes up part of this inheritance of loss that he received from his father and that he tries to pass on to his son. The net effect resonates because Mr. Compson’s view of his paternity and its failure is pervasive—he can offer no ideal for Quentin even when relating another man’s story. Like Mr. Compson himself, his construction of Sutpen reeks of incompleteness, and Shreve calls him on it.69 First Shreve says doubtfully, “Your father . . . he seems to have got an awful lot of delayed information awful quick, after having waited forty-five years.”70 Quentin’s interlocutor speaks for the audience, questioning the validity of Sutpen’s legend. Shreve assesses even the barometer for accuracy: Your old man . . . when your grandfather was telling this to him, he didn’t know any more what your grandfather was talking about than your grandfather knew what the demon was talking about when the demon told it to him, did he? And when your old man told it to you, you wouldn’t have known what anybody was talking about if you hadn’t been out there and seen Clytie.71

Shreve has come to grasp that every generation of male Compson has failed to pass on any sort of complete understanding of Thomas Sutpen and offers, perhaps too optimistically, the notion that Quentin can rectify the situation and benefit from this comprehension. Class mobility and a successful reiteration of masculinity may be Quentin’s if he can narrate this ideal father. In a sense, Shreve is offering to stand in as the father who can help this son aright the situation,72 but Quentin offers him, “You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.”73 Quentin suggests that the patrimony of failure inherent in being Southern is needed to even approach an understanding of the situation, much less solve it. These intrusions in the construction of Thomas Sutpen and his modes of masculinity are problematic, but the interference and/or projection of Quentin Compson’s own identity on the construction

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of his masculine ideal dooms the project from the start. Jacques Lacan theorizes in Ecrits that subjects can call the Name-of-the-Father for use, if not through the biological father, then through what he designates as the “A-father.”74 This constructed father is an ideal, but the thinker warns, “In fact, the image of the ideal father is a phantasy of the neurotic,” and “the neurotic’s wished-for Father is clearly the dead Father.”75 Most importantly, in terms of Compson and Sutpen, the idea of Sutpen is a longing for the dead father (Jason Lycurgus) and a neurotic projection. Surely Quentin Compson has the corner market on neuroses, and this mental state causes him to first endeavor to create Sutpen and his masculinity and, in the end, to fail. The dual personages of Thomas Sutpen cited above are just one instance of Quentin’s intruding of himself into what is supposedly a masculine ideal. The most compelling of these projections curiously involves the narration of the sons of Sutpen—Bon and Henry. The father-son relationship is so problematic for this neurotic narrator that his ideal begins to break down and, eventually, with it, all sense of identity. The two sons are set up almost as a paradigm, as the Hamlet versus Hotspur. Henry is referred to often as “given to instinctive and violent action rather than to thinking, ratiocination . . . because he never thought. He felt he acted immediately. He knew loyalty and acted it, he knew pride and jealousy; he loved and grieved and killed.”76 Henry is frequently described in these stereotypically masculine terms and exists as an active agent in the novel, killing Bon, doing the will of the father, and defending his sister’s virginity. After all, Henry does what Quentin cannot. Rosa Coldfield narrates, “Henry had formally abjured his father and renounced his birthright and the roof under which he had been born and that he and Bon had ridden away in the night.”77 If Sutpen represents Quentin’s masculine ideal, Henry symbolizes the son’s reiteration of that ideal with the ability to not only reiterate, but also make the citation his own. At the risk of a slippery analogy, if Henry is Hotspur, Charles Bon is Quentin’s Hamlet. Bon is passive, never really confronting Sutpen about his parentage, allowing Henry to dictate the terms of their dispute over Judith, and biding his time until some sort of resolution occurs. Charles Bon could have easily uttered Hamlet’s lines, “Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,/ Must like a whore unpack my heart with words.”78 Faulkner writes, “Bon himself never affirmed or denied, arose and he in the background, impartial and passive as though it were not himself involved or he acting on behalf of some absent friend.”79 Charles Bon is, then, Quentin Compson’s version of the Hamlet-son.

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Quentin not only chooses to make Bon his Hamlet, but also embraces Mr. Compson’s portrait of him in feminized terms as well. Henry first meets Charles, “presented formally to the man reclining in a flowered, almost feminised gown, in a sunny window in his chambers—this man handsome and elegant and even catlike . . . in the outlandish and almost feminine garments of his sybaritic privacy.”80 Clearly, Mr. Compson sees passivity as feminine (an assertion Quentin does not contest, even when he gains control of the narrative), a personal issue for Quentin and himself as they remain so passive throughout both novels. Quentin’s paradigm of the two sons of his masculine ideal does not hold up because of a further projection of his own—homosexual tendencies. Rather Shreve or Quentin, a bit difficult to tell in the text with no clear markers, states, “There must have been nights and nights while Henry was learning from him [Bon] how to lounge about a bedroom in a gown and slippers such as women wore, in a faint though unmistakable effluvium of scent such as women used, smoking a cigar almost as a woman might smoke it.”81 Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but the imagery is quite heavy-handed. Even in Mr. Compson’s earlier account of Henry’s relationship with Bon, he specifies, “Yes, he loved Bon, who seduced him as surely as he seduced Judith.”82 Not only does Quentin elect to make his Hamlet-son feminine, but also he decides to have him seduce and enthrall the Hotspur-son. This seduction is, no doubt, Quentin’s projection of his relationship with Shreve onto the Bon-Henry dyad. There are many passages in Absalom! Absalom! that suggest a homoerotic flirtation, if not relationship between the two roommates. Faulkner writes: They stared at one another—glared rather—their quiet regular breathing vaporizing faintly and steadily in the now tomblike air. There was something curious in the way they looked at one another, curious and quiet and profoundly intent, not at all as two young men would look at each other but almost as a youth and a very young girl might out of virginity itself—a sort of hushed and naked searching, each look burdened with youth’s immemorial obsession.83

This tinge of homoeroticism not only requires looking but also contains gender slippage, a passive Hamlet-like act that Faulkner feels the need to feminize. In fact, in these “looking” scenes, most of the homoerotic tension between Shreve and Quentin exists.84 Quentin, interestingly enough, initiates this phenomenon earlier in the novel when he begins “glancing . . . for a moment at Shreve leaning forward into the lamp,

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his naked torso pink-gleaming and baby-smooth, cherubic, almost hairless, the twin moons of his spectacles glinting against his moonlike rubicund face, smelling (Quentin) the cigar and the wisteria, seeing the fireflies blowing and winking in the September dusk.”85 Quentin and Shreve, as they construct the story of Henry and Bon, at the very least sublimate these homoerotic impulses in these two sons. Quentin also projects his relationship with Caddy onto Henry and Judith’s connection. Faulkner offers, “Between Henry and Judith there had been a relationship closer than the traditional loyalty of brother and sister,” and “brother and sister, curiously alike as if the difference in sex had merely sharpened the common blood to a terrific, an almost unbearable, similarity.”86 In a sense, Henry manages to pull off many of the relationships that Quentin seems unable to in The Sound and the Fury. Yet Quentin’s projections of himself on his ideal father and son cause his overall scheme to fail. More importantly, Mr. Compson aids this failure by forcing Quentin onto his ideal narrative. For example, Henry obsesses over Judith’s virginity in Absalom! Absalom! as Quentin does over Caddy’s in the earlier novel.87 The difference lies in the third party, Charles Bon, and the person who tells the story—Mr. Compson. Of course, the belief in Mr. Compson’s words depends on the ability to trust narrator tags that are few and far between, perhaps an effort on Faulkner’s part to suggest some conflation. Still, Mr. Compson narrates: His fierce provincial’s pride in his sister’s virginity was a false quantity which must incorporate in itself an inability to endure in order to be precious, to exist, and so must depend upon its loss, absence, to have existed at all. In fact, perhaps this is the pure and perfect incest: the brother realizing that the sister’s virginity must be destroyed in order to have existed at all, taking that virginity in the person of the brother-in-law, the man whom he would be if he could become, metamorphose into, the lover, the husband; by whom he would be despoiled, choose for despoiler, if he could become, metamorphose into the sister, the mistress, the bride. Perhaps that is what went, not in Henry’s mind, but in his soul.88

This passage reads like many similar scenes in The Sound and the Fury, with all of Quentin’s concern for his virginity and Caddy’s lack thereof. There remains, however, one noticeable difference. Faulkner produces here a textbook example of Eve K. Sedgwick’s concept of the homosocial put forth in her Between Men (1985). Undoubtedly, Henry views his sister as a conduit between himself and the somewhat feminized Bon, and the sentiment is mutual.89 Of Bon’s feelings toward Judith and her

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brother, Faulkner records, “Perhaps in his fatalism he loved Henry the better of the two, seeing perhaps in the sister merely the shadow, the woman vessel with which to consummate the love whose actual object was the youth.”90 The difference lies in Henry’s consideration of the role of the female; Bon already leaned to that side of the dichotomy. Quentin Compson’s Hotspur, Henry, does not live up to the masculine ideal set by his father, Thomas Sutpen. In fact, there is much role reversal between Judith and Henry, even early in the novel and in their youth. Rosa Coldfield relates an incident in which “it had been Judith, a girl of six, who had instigated and authorized that negro to make the team run away. Not Henry, mind; not the boy, which would have been outrageous enough; but Judith, the girl.”91 In the dichotomous world of Absalom! Absalom! males are aggressive and females are passive—but Henry and Judith frequently prove that these roles, these reiterations, offer the chance for slippage if not failure. Both Judith and Henry view Thomas Sutpen’s masculine display of fighting his slaves, as referenced above—Henry has front-row seats while Judith remains hidden in the loft, watching Sutpen’s exhibition: Judith . . . who while Henry screamed and vomited, looked down from the loft that night on the spectacle of Sutpen fighting halfnaked with one of his halfnaked niggers with the same cold and attentive interest with which Sutpen would have watched Henry fighting with a negro boy of his own age and weight. . . . She would have acted as Sutpen would have acted with anyone who tried to cross him.92

Judith and Henry react to the brute force of their father’s masculinity in stereotypically opposite ways than their prescribed gender roles would dictate. Judith has much more of “Sutpen” in her, and if she does not exactly reiterate this citation completely, she is far more prepared to do so than the squeamish Henry. The masculine display of the father does not drive the similar gender role inversion of Quentin and Caddy in The Sound and the Fury; rather, the lack of such causes the same phenomenon. Of Caddy, Quentin wonders, “Why couldn’t it have been me and not her who is unvirgin.”93 Caddy becomes sexually “successful” whereas Quentin does not. In the essentialist thinking of Quentin’s cultural context, his sister remains more of a man than he. This sort of reversal is more apparent when they are children. Quentin remembers this exchange with Caddy, “You know what I’d do if I were King? she never was a queen or a fairy she was always a king or a giant or a general.”94 Caddy takes on the role of the more dominant, aggressive, of the two, and even

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in the pretend world of children she enacts masculine roles, leaving Quentin to his own definitions. Perhaps Faulkner is not merely revealing Quentin’s gender identification problems, but speaking to a larger decentered field of representation, a sense of fluidity that can be one of the disconcerting aspects of modernist thought. Certainly the Southern Renaissance allowed for these kinds of gender narrations much more than in earlier epochs.95 Faulkner’s fictive constructions fit the bill. Quoted in a 1965 article by Stephen Longstreet, Faulkner asserted, “Latent unconscious ideas need giants to make their revelations valid.”96 Quentin Compson built his giant in Thomas Sutpen, and William Faulkner did the same with his tragic young Compson. Not only does Quentin ruin his narration of masculine ideals by projecting his gender slippage, incestuous longing, and homosexual tendencies on the very models he tries to construct, but also his passivity forces him to lose control of his narrative; this Southern Hamlet does not have the force of will (his fatal flaw?) to manipulate a Hotspur such as Henry Sutpen, much less his father. A conflict results between two Hotspurs, father and son, Henry and Thomas. Early in the novel, Quentin gets this version of father-son clash from Mr. Compson. The elder Compson tells Quentin of Henry’s relationship with Sutpen: Henry gave the lie, but to the fact that it was his father who told him, his father who anticipated him, the father who is the natural enemy of any son and son-in-law of whom the mother is the ally, just as after the wedding the father will be the ally of the actual son-in-law who has for mortal foe the mother of his wife.97

Mr. Compson fully embraces a Freudian reading of the family unit; parents and progeny are oppositional, foes, enemies. This message may be in regard to Henry and his father, but Compson generalizes here and implies that he and Quentin fit into that generalization as well. Even when Mr. Compson no longer controls the narrative, this form of father-son dynamic infects the telling, and Henry and Thomas are cast in similar terms to those dictated by Compson the elder. Faulkner writes, “And then the demon must turn square around and run not only the fiancé out of the house and not only the son out of the house but so corrupt seduce and mesmerize the son that he (the son) should do the office of the outraged father’s pistol-hand when fornication threatened.”98 The son becomes the victim of the father and, from a Freudian perspective, never really threatens him. Yet he

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still manages to take his place, but only to do the supposed dirty work his father should have done—the defense of the daughter-sister. This same dynamic exists between Quentin and Mr. Compson in The Sound and the Fury. Quentin notes, “Father and I protect women” (sad, considering they do nothing of the kind), yet he still dreams of saying to his father, “I said I have committed incest. Father I said.”99 Obviously, Quentin does not feel that his father fulfills his role as protector of his daughter, and the second fantasy here is designed to goad him into doing just that—both safeguarding his daughter and punishing his son, in other words, being what Quentin conceives of as a father. Young Compson hopes to overcome these problems by narrating them into the masculine ideals presented in Absalom! Absalom! but the lack of will of both Quentin and Mr. Compson and their dysfunctional relationship bleeds into this narrative, especially as Quentin loses control of it. This circumstance results in not only gender slippage but also a totally decentered field, fluidity in identity. Shreve and Quentin sit in their dorm room, bouncing the narrative of the doomed Sutpen family back and forth, arguing for command of the narrative with exchanges like, “Wait I tell you,” from Quentin and Shreve arguing, “I am telling.”100 Quentin thinks of the two narrators: Yes. Maybe we are both Father. Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. . . . Yes, we are both Father. Or Maybe Father and I are both Shreve, maybe it took Father and me both to make Shreve or Shreve and me both to make Father or maybe Thomas Sutpen to make all of us.101

Quentin, Shreve, Mr. Compson, and Thomas Sutpen all seep into each other with Quentin’s compelling notion of “making” in this passage. This creating can be in the biological sense, considering lineage and patrimony, the narrative signification, creating the story, or the sexual sense, the notion of being “made.” Control frequently offers Faulkner’s characters autonomy.102 Ironically, Quentin’s attempt leads to neither control nor autonomy. Whichever way one chooses to read Quentin’s cluttered thoughts, the boundaries between these four men are elastic.103 This bleeding together makes it difficult to tell who fathers whom. The implications for both the South in general terms and Faulkner in literary/cultural patrimonial terms are that these men are free to create their fathers and themselves because the distinction is just not that important in what will eventually be labeled as postmodern. Southern men can choose ancient ancestors or war heroes as fathers and define themselves in relation to

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them. Faulkner can choose Phil Stone, an RAF pilot, or even William Shakespeare to suit his purposes. Shreve and Quentin progress toward indeterminacy as their Sutpen tale proceeds. Faulkner offers, “It might have been either one of them and was in a sense both: both thinking as one, the voice which happened to be speaking the thought only the thinking became audible, vocal.”104 By this point in the novel, Shreve and Quentin are indistinguishable; they have become one, and what they create only exacerbates the condition: The two of them creating between them, out of the rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking, people who perhaps had never existed at all anywhere, who shadows, were shadows not of flesh and blood which had lived and died but shadows in turn of what were (to one of them at least, to Shreve) (shades too) quiet as the visible murmur of their vaporizing breath.105

If these people are not “shadows” of people who had lived and died, perhaps they are “shades” of the storytellers themselves.106 The two strongest “shades” for these narrators lie, however, not in the ideal father Thomas Sutpen, but in the two sons, Henry and Charles Bon. Quentin and Shreve’s melding leads to this description, “There was now not two of them but four, the two who breathed not individuals now yet something both more and less than twins.”107 This state of affairs initiates this morphing: “So that now it was not two but four of them riding the two horses through the dark over the frozen December ruts of that Christmas eve: four of them and then just two—Charles-Shreve and Quentin-Henry, the two of them both believing that Henry was thinking He (meaning his father) has destroyed us all.”108 The four have become two now, but compounds. Note that Quentin amalgamates himself with his Hotspur (Henry), not his Hamlet (Charles Bon). This decision shows that this Southern Hamlet still has the longing to be his obverse, to be a Hotspur character, to be Jason Lycurgus. The reason he cannot be so resides in the compound thought that all four males are sure that Henry has—they all have been destroyed at the hands of the father. Thomas Sutpen has manipulated his son Henry into destroying Charles Bon, his possibly mixed-race son, and making a fugitive out of himself. He has destroyed his own lineage; there can be no father without a son and no future Sutpens. Thomas Sutpen will have a few more futile attempts to reinstitute his patrimony over the course of Absalom! Absalom! but in the conclusion he will be cut down by a scythe, as if time itself catches up with him. In the end,

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Quentin’s attempts to narrate a masculine ideal worthy of reiteration will collapse under the weight of his own neuroses that infect his narration, rendering it as failed as the “design” of Sutpen’s Hundred. Even if Quentin’s own flaws had not doomed his attempt to write previous gender citations into law, his project was fated for calamity from the beginning. Judith Butler explains why in Bodies That Matter in her discussion of the effects of performatives. She elucidates, “The reach of their signifiability cannot be controlled by the one who utters or writes, since such productions are not owned by the one who utters them. They continue to signify in spite of their authors, and sometimes against their authors’ most precious intentions.”109 Quentin’s effort to narrate acceptable masculine models for his own reiteration represents an act of struggle for control of signifiability, both “struggle” and “control” being stereotypically masculine themselves. Butler explains here that this attempt is futile, that producers cannot control signification, even if they have a dire need to do so. Unfortunately for Quentin, Mr. Compson’s cynical explanation of the failed effort offers a similar yet more concrete diagnosis than Judith Butler. Early in Absalom! Absalom! he argues: Yes, Judith, Bon, Henry, Sutpen: all of them. They are there, yet something is missing; they are like a chemical formula exhumed along with the letters from that forgotten chest, carefully, the paper old and faded and falling to pieces, the writing faded, almost indecipherable, yet meaningful, familiar in shape and sense, the name and presence of volatile and sentient forces; you bring them together in proportions called for, but nothing happens; you re-read, tedious and intent, poring, making sure that you have forgotten nothing, made no miscalculation; you bring them together again and nothing happens: just the words, the symbols, the shapes themselves, shadowy inscrutable and serene, against that turgid background of a horrible and bloody mischancing of human affairs.110

Quentin’s father uses the personal pronoun “you,” and his audience is his son—he wants to put him into this place of failed creator even before the son has really begun his project. Like Judith Butler, Mr. Compson admits something important as well: the lack of control the creator has, even if the position does feel like one of power. There are no Prosperos in Faulkner’s fictive world. Even though Absalom is the second book, in the life chronology of Quentin Compson it comes first, for the “academic Hamlet” kills himself in The Sound and the Fury. Part of Quentin’s mania that exists in Sound and the Fury results directly from his failure to narrate a more acceptable father and masculine model in Absalom. The incestuous desire,

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the obsession with time, and the fractious view of reality are all symptoms of a disease that Quentin fails to cure with his narrative of Thomas Sutpen and his sons. Quentin’s failed project ultimately leads to his death. The young Compson sets out to have Prospero-like powers, to control the narrative with his art. Instead, he becomes like Hamlet, Othello, and all of Shakespeare’s characters who attempt to control the narratives of their lives, especially as they are dying. Hamlet exhorts Horatio, “Report me and my cause aright/ To the unsatisfied,” and, “If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,/ Absent thee from felicity awhile,/ And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain/ to tell my story.”111 In death, Hamlet attempts to control his own narrative. Likewise, before he kills himself, Othello directs, “Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,/ Nor set down aught in malice. Then you must speak/ Of one that loved not wisely but too well.”112 Of course, Othello has an absent father, no sons, and also has to deal with racial dynamics that Quentin only senses indirectly at best, but the significance lies in Othello’s narrative methodology, even if his motivations match Quentin’s, only in a more general way. Both Hamlet and Othello are concerned with what they perceive as the accuracy of how their stories are told, but the essential impulse is that of control; this compulsion and method reflect Faulkner’s final appropriations from Shakespeare for Quentin Compson. At least this control would suggest a stereotypically masculine position, and Quentin’s suicide represents the most active act he perpetrates in either novel, but Faulkner will not let him have it that way. Quentin’s section in The Sound and the Fury does not end with a dramatic death coupled with Hamlet and Othello-like requests for control of their own narratives.113 In fact, Quentin’s section does not even end with his own death, but with the minutiae of his preparations. His actual death is given to the readers in a somewhat secondhand manner. If Quentin Compson descends from these Shakespearean self-narrators, his power greatly diminishes, getting only, “Every man is the arbiter of his own virtues.”114 Quentin paradoxically makes meaning with the past but creates an identity he tragically cannot live with at all.115 Quentin Compson, his masculinity, and his approach to his identity are appropriations from William Shakespeare, but he filters them through the prism of modernism, and that perspective almost always equals decline. Part of what brings on this deterioration is a crippling self-awareness of the falsity, the theatricality of these men’s existence. Shreve asserts, “Jesus, the South is fine, isn’t it. It’s better than theater, isn’t it. It’s better than Ben Hur, isn’t it. No wonder you have to come away from

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it now and then, isn’t it.”116 This sense of theatricality can certainly be attributed to the culture of the South in the modern era, but there is something way more specific at work in Faulkner’s novels—the author himself.117 Faulkner writes of Thomas Sutpen, “That while he was still playing the scene to the audience, behind him fate, destiny, retribution, irony—the stage manager, call him what you will—was already striking the set and dragging on the synthetic and spurious shadows and shapes of the next one.”118 Not only does Faulkner write of Sutpen in terms of an actor but he also places an even stronger emphasis on who controls his act, the “stage manager.” On the one hand, this controlling force could be seen as fate, an idea referenced repeatedly in Absalom, but on the other, it could be the creator, the narrators, Quentin Compson, and, in a much larger sense, Faulkner himself. If Quentin controls the narrative of Thomas Sutpen, William Faulkner controls Quentin Compson. This idea of a “stage manager” resembles the “Player” in the earlier Light in August.119 In Percy Grimm’s final chase of Joe Christmas, Faulkner writes, “He [Christmas] was moving again almost before he had stopped, with that lean, swift, blind obedience to whatever Player moved him on the Board” and of Percy’s stamina, “As if the Player who moved him for pawn likewise found him breath,” and later, “The car which had passed him and lost him and then returned was just where it should have been, just where the Player designed it to be.”120 The “Player” and Faulkner’s characters relate as master and manipulated. Countless Faulkner characters frequently perceive this relationship, making them unique. Faulkner writes of Christmas, “It was as though he had been merely waiting for the Player to move him again,” and “But the Player was not done yet.”121 Given the outcome for characters like Joe Christmas and Quentin Compson, William Faulkner may have liked the idea of chalking up their destinies to fate, but the Player, the stage manager, represents himself. In his early novel Mosquitoes, Faulkner actually inserts himself precociously into the text, having two characters discuss him: “ ‘He said he was a liar by profession, and he made good money at it. . . . I think he was crazy. . . . Faulkner, that was his name.’ ‘Faulkner. . . . Never heard of him.’ ”122 In an early novel, Faulkner may have enjoyed putting himself into the text in such a way, but as he matured and took on larger issues in his work, he removed himself from the status of a walkon character to that of an overvoice, fate, God, the Player, the stage manager. Faulkner no doubt embraced Shakespeare’s idea that “All the world’s a stage,/ And all the men and women are merely players/

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They have their exits and their entrances,/ And one man in his time plays many parts.”123 The problem for William Faulkner lies in the unease he felt with all the parts that he could play. His fictive project bears a striking resemblance to Quentin Compson’s—to narrate, to become the Player, to have control, and to reassert his masculinity. Like Quentin’s endeavors, Faulkner’s efforts prove the futility of attempting this kind of manipulation. Yet, in his failure, William Faulkner has interrogated (some more successfully than others) race, class, gender, identity, religion, Southern culture, reality, time, and many other aspects of what it means to be a human being in his particular context, and some even beyond his own circumstances, as much as one can. The irony is that now Faulkner has been made into a father, a symbol of control, a standard, a yardstick, and critics, scholars, biographers, and readers of his works are controlling his narrative. William Faulkner is now being deified the way William Shakespeare once was (and some argue still is). Another literary father has been created much the way Quentin Compson attempts to bring Thomas Sutpen to life. These literary “fathers” and the seeming need many have for a “God the Father” suggest the pervasiveness of the longing for fathers. True of both parents, father or mother, the idea lingers that if we know who they are, then we know who we are.

Epilogue

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he transatlantic appropriations examined in the body of this work meet a cultural need. In fact, this study has revealed that the engine driving gender citationality can meet several needs simultaneously— identity issues that ricochet from personal, to regional and national, and back again, and entail race, gender, class, and sexuality, all furiously intertwined and interdependent. These requisites also changed as cultural circumstances dictated, which altered the nature of appropriation depending on when a specific act of gender citationality is examined. This gender work is intercultural, transhistorical, and, in this case, intertextual. This study has also offered multitudinous motivations for the American South’s appropriation of gender citations from the likes of William Shakespeare and, in the bigger picture, Great Britain. While these impulses appear varied and wide, they also seem to suggest something more elemental. All of these citations have one similar notion at their root—survival. This survival is personal, regional, national, and biological. This last component remains the most controversial in literary theory. “Biology as destiny” has been used by oppressors of all stripes to keep women and members of some races in a subjugated position; the latent effect has been hard sciences may be allowed to wander the halls of literary theory, but always under careful watch and always suspect. Cultural materialists have erected a false dichotomy with biology that reads like the bastard child of the nature/nurture debate. However, Ellen Dissanayake argues convincingly in her work that art is frequently thought of as a result, when, in fact, it is a behavior.1 If Dissanayake’s premise holds true, then it should be noted that behaviors are frequently motivated by more than one variable; they can be influenced by nature and nurture, working in tandem, as if making a new, third attribute of human behavior. This assertion does not undercut Judith Butler’s ideas of performativity and citationality, and it certainly does not suggest that there is no cultural work in what it means to be male and female, masculine and feminine. This belief would represent a false either/or. What the idea does imply is that the cultural and the biological are coterminous, certainly more so than some literary theorists on either side of the divide

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are willing to admit. In the brave, new world of the body as cultural construct, of the posthuman and beyond, the notion of biological entities has been deconstructed right out of existence, and some theorists with a hard science bent view the idea of cultural constructions of humanity as so many clever rhetorical games. This great divide has been to the detriment of studying American Southern appropriations of gender citations and how they are made manifest in literature. As stated before, this cultural work indicates a longing to survive, not just as a cultural construct but also as a collective of beings. Evolutionary science needs to be applied to this impulse to appropriate from another, more successful group, not to supplant the work contained within this study but to enhance it. To do so is to understand art, representation, culture, and, more importantly, the concept of the human.

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Introduction 1. William Shakespeare, “2 Henry IV,” in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 843. 2. John C. Guilds, Simms: A Literary Life (Fayetteville: Arkansas UP, 1992), 345. 3. Shakespeare, “1 Henry IV,” in Bevington, Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 789. 4. Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” in Bevington, Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 1075. 5. See Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore, eds., Political Shakespeare (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1994); Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991); and Michael D. Bristol, Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 1990). 6. Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 11. 7. Ibid., 12. 8. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 107–108. 9. Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 161. 10. Flannery O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, 1969), 45.

Chapter 1 1. William Gilmore Simms, “The Social Principle: The True Source of National Permanence,” in The Simms Reader: Selections from the Writings of William Gilmore Simms, ed. John C. Guilds (Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 2001), 256. 2. Bertram Wyatt-Brown explains, “During the last years before the war, Southern spokesmen fashioned a curious myth that distorted their ethnic roots . . . a small contingent of immigrants from England dominated the legend, as if the colony from Jamestown was the only seed from which the region had grown. The notion of a ‘cavalier’ society that stemmed from the seventeenth-century royalism became a reigning cliché in the ranks of the planter elite.” Bertram Wyatt-Brown,

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The Shaping of Southern Culture (Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 2001), 179. 3. Robert Cave, “The Men in Gray” (1911), quoted in Wyatt-Brown, Shaping of Southern Culture, 180. 4. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 107. 5. Ibid., 108. 6. Hugh Hetherington, Cavalier of the Old South (Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1966), 251. 7. Mary Ann Wimsatt notes, “In more than thirty years of a crowded career, he produced or had a hand in producing over eighty volumes and enough uncollected writing to fill perhaps twenty volumes more. He wrote essays and book reviews, ran magazines and edited newspapers, published orations on political and social topics, and composed poetry, plays, novels, tales, sketches, novelettes, biographies, a history, and a geography, meanwhile conducting a correspondence so heavy and varied that he sometimes seems like several people instead of a single individual.” Mary Ann Wimsatt, The Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms (Baton Rouge: Louisiana UP, 1989), 6. This telling portrayal of Simms as being several people is especially interesting in light of the different postures he would strike throughout his career and life. 8. See this history traced in detail in Charles S. Watson, From Nationalism to Secessionism: The Changing Fiction of William Gilmore Simms (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993). 9. See Susan V. Donaldson and Anne Goodwyn Jones, “Rethinking the South through Gender,” in Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, ed. Susan V. Donaldson and Anne Goodwyn Jones (Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 1997), 1–22. Page 2 is especially enlightening. 10. Hugh Hetherington writes, “It is important to establish clearly Simms’s patrician status, because it must be realized that, whatever may be the literary limitations of his portrayals of Southern aristocrats, he is writing about his own class, and not giving an outside view.” Hetherington, Cavalier of the Old South, 59. William Taylor counters with an image of Simms as a self-made man who could never quite break into the gentility, much to his chagrin. William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee (New York: Braziller, 1961), 292–293. 11. William Gilmore Simms, Woodcraft (1854; repr., New York: Norton, 1961), 331. 12. Ibid., 206. 13. Bertram Wyatt-Brown offers, “Three components appeared to be necessary for public recognition of gentility in the Old South: sociability, learning, and piety,” but the pitfall was, “There was a strongly antiintellectual streak in Southern society, one that generations of college students perpetuated so that sociability—and the reputation for manliness—would have no rival.” Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor (Oxford: Oxford

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UP, 1982), 89, 94. Porgy has two of the three components—the pitfall of learning is a debatable attribute with regard to the fat partisan. 14. See Wimsatt, Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms, 12. This seems to be a point Simms and many Charlestonian authors after him never tire of making. 15. C. Hugh Holman, The Roots of Southern Writing (Athens: Georgia UP, 1972), 22. 16. William Gilmore Simms, Views and Reviews in American Literature, History, and Fiction, First Series, ed. C. Hugh Holman (1846; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1962), 8. 17. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, 22. 18. Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 7. 19. Michael D. Bristol theorizes, “The study of Shakespeare permits American culture to take itself more seriously by virtue of this unquestioned cultural treasure.” Michael D. Bristol, Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 1990), 123. 20. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941; repr., New York: Vintage, 1991), 92. 21. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), 5. 22. Susan V. Donaldson, “Gender, Race, and Allen Tate’s Profession of Letters in the South,” in Donaldson and Jones, Haunted Bodies, 495. 23. Philip C. Kolin posits, “Shakespeare was the most popular dramatist on the antebellum southern stage and the most performed playwright since.” Philip C. Kolin, ed., Shakespeare in the South: Essays on Performance (Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1983), 3. Simms’s bardolatry would not be exclusive to the author himself, or literary types for that matter, but would pertain to many of his region, especially those with pretensions to “culture.” 24. Holman, Roots of Southern Writing, 61. Edd Winfield Parks adds, “But he had read widely and studiously, especially in the field of Shakespearean drama,” and, “His purpose in editing the works [Shakespeare’s] was primarily to persuade readers to share his own enthusiasm for the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama . . . his function as editor was first of all to make these plays accessible to his readers.” Edd Winfield Parks, William Gilmore Simms as Literary Critic (Athens: Georgia UP, 1961), 82, 87. Simms’s love of Shakespeare seems to be as much a calling as a question of taste. 25. Grace W. Whaley observes in a 1930 article for American Literature that of the 303 quotations in eighteen of Simms’s novels, 120 are from Shakespeare. This count excludes his novel Border Beagles (1840), which includes an unemployed Shakespearean actor who is fixated on the playwright and quotes him constantly. Quoted in Parks, William Gilmore Simms as Literary Critic, 72. No other author even comes close to this many citations in Simms’s corpus, except perhaps for the author himself.

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26. William Gilmore Simms, The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, 5 vols., vol. 3, ed. Mary C. Simms Oliphant, Alfred Taylor Odell, and T. C. Duncan Eaves (Columbia: South Carolina UP, 1952–1956), 216. 27. Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 148. 28. William Shakespeare, “The First Part of King Henry the Fourth,” in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th ed., ed. David Bevington (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 767. 29. Ibid., 801. 30. William Shakespeare, “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shakespeare, 1116. 31. William Shakespeare, “The Tragedy of King Richard the Second,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shakespeare, 747. 32. Shakespeare, “I Henry IV,” 783. 33. Defined by Bertram Wyatt-Brown as “a more specialized, refined form of honor, in which moral uprightness was coupled with high social position.” Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 88. In other words, this would be codified as not just a societal position but also a way of being, an identity that encompasses actions and attitudes, supposedly. 34. William Taylor sees Simms’s contribution as recognizing that Hamlet and Hotspur types are closely intertwined. He does, however, fail to see the father-son connections offered herein. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, 296. 35. William Shakespeare, “The Life of King Henry the Fifth,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shakespeare, 858. 36. Hugh Hetherington posits, “It is not a matter of chance that in this, the most detached of the Saga, and actually the most humorless, most gothic, or pseudo-gothic of the seven, our stout and jovial Captain Porgy could not live and breathe.” Hetherington, Cavalier of the Old South, 183. Hetherington’s estimation is interesting in that he offers this assessment almost as if Porgy is a real person, a testament to the appeal of the character, if not the verisimilitude. 37. Porgy is Falstaff in Hampton M. Jarrell, “Falstaff and Simms’s Porgy,” in American Literature 3, no. 2 (May 1931): 204. The similarities are only superficial in Holman, Roots of Southern Writing, 61. Porgy as a Falstaff who transmogrifies into Hamlet haunts Watson in Charles S. Watson, From Nationalism to Secessionism: The Changing Fiction of William Gilmore Simms (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993), 102. Hugh Hetherington vacillates in his assessment—Porgy is Falstaff, Prince Hal, Hotspur, a character drawn on Elizabethan drama in general, and occasionally on Simms himself, to name only a few in Cavalier of the Old South. Hetherington, Cavalier of the Old South, 21, 25, 34, 35. William P. Trent, Simms’s sole biographer for seventy years, labeled Porgy a “typical Southerner,” though he did not feel compelled to define the appellation. William P. Trent, William Gilmore Simms (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1892), 12. Alexander Cowie offers Porgy as “apparently a combination of Simms in self-portrait and of Simms’s ideal of a South Carolina gentleman.” Alexan-

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der Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel (New York: American Book, 1948), 235. Joseph V. Ridgley shares the opinion with Vernon L. Parrington that Captain Porgy is a “true son of the Old South.” Joseph V. Ridgley, William Gilmore Simms (New York: Twayne, 1962), 60. Vernon L. Parrington, The Romantic Revolution in America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927), 31. It is as if Porgy becomes all things to everyone. 38. William C. Davis, Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 20. 39. William Gilmore Simms, “The Partisan,” in Hetherington, Cavalier of the Old South, 79. 40. Ibid., 92. 41. Ibid., 79. 42. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 23. 43. Cash professes, “The gentlemanly idea, driven from England by Cromwell, had taken refuge in the South and fashioned for itself a world to its heart’s desire; a world singularly polished and mellow and poised, wholly dominated by ideals of honor and chivalry and noblesse—all of those sentiments and values and habits of action which used to be . . . invariably assigned to the gentleman born and the Cavalier . . . the great South of the first half of the nineteenth century . . . was the home of a genuine and fully realized aristocracy, coextensive and identical with the ruling class, the planters; and sharply set against the common people.” Cash, Mind of the South, 4. No doubt Cash’s theorizing would have appealed to the likes of William Gilmore Simms. 44. Shakespeare, “I Henry IV,” 782. 45. Simms, “The Partisan,” 92. 46. Hugh Hetherington, who tends to idolize Porgy in Cavalier of the Old South, calling him an “advocate,” a “Southern gentleman,” “charming as well as masterful,” and “most impressive,” even suggests, “He [Simms] may have felt qualms about the Porgy of The Partisan.” Hetherington, Cavalier of the Old South, 21, 31. These qualms, if Simms felt them, are notably after the fact. 47. Simms, Letters, vol. 2, 465. 48. Shakespeare, “I Henry IV,” 782. 49. Ibid., 783. 50. Ibid. 51. Simms, Woodcraft, 3. The emphasis is mine. 52. Drew Gilpin Faust, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977), 144. 53. Cash, Mind of the South, 56. 54. Bruce R. Smith offers, “Shakespeare’s plays and poems offer ways of finding a perspective on masculinity in the here and now. In teaching us that masculinity is contingent in all sorts of ways, productions of Shakespeare’s plays and readings of his poems give us the opportunity to imagine versions of masculinity that may be more equitable and more fulfilling than those we already know.” Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity, 161.

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It is this contingent nature of masculinity that allows Simms to use Shakespeare’s works in an attempt to find “equity,” which he would define in different ways as his cultural circumstances changed. 55. Hugh Hetherington agrees, “I wish to suggest that Simms became very ambitious and resolved to succeed where the author of Sir John Oldcastle had not.” Hetherington, Cavalier of the Old South, 31. One wonders if this estimation is truly ambition or a killing of a literary father. 56. William Gilmore Simms, Slavery in America, Being a Brief Review of Miss Martineau on That Subject (Richmond, VA: Thomas W. White, 1838), 38. The emphasis is mine. 57. Harriet Martineau, Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, vol. 1, ed. Maria Weston Chapman (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1877), 380–381. 58. Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984), 6, 24, 25. 59. Simms, “The Social Principle,” 262. 60. Ibid., 82–83. The emphasis is Simms’s, not mine. 61. Eugene Genovese offers a more down-to-earth explanation when he writes, “The slaveholders’ vision of themselves as authoritarian fathers who presided over an extended and subservient family, white and black, grew up naturally in the process of founding plantations . . . but in its overwhelming negative aspect—its doctrine of domination and its inherent cruelty to disobedient ‘children’—it pitted blacks against whites in bitter antagonism and simultaneously poisoned the life of the white dominant community itself.” Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976), 74. Genovese’s assertion of this antagonism and its effects on the white, dominant community suggests one reason for Simms’s failure to reconcile in his literature what he found troubling in his culture. 62. Louis D. Rubin Jr., The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989), 96. 63. William Gilmore Simms, “The Southern Convention,” Southern Quarterly Review 2, no. 3 (September 1850): 320. 64. William Gilmore Simms, The Yemassee, ed. Joseph V. Ridgley (1835; repr., New Haven, CT: Twayne, 1964), 399–400. 65. Charles S. Watson, “The Ongoing Study of William Gilmore Simms: Literary Critics vs. Historians,” South Carolina Review 22, no. 2 (1990): 13. 66. Charles H. Brichford, “That National Story: Conflicting Versions and Conflicting Visions of the Revolution in Kennedy’s Horse-Shoe Robinson and Simms’s The Partisan,” Southern Literary Journal 21, no. 1 (1988): 64–65, 71. 67. William Gilmore Simms, “Caloya; or, Loves of the Driver,” in An Early and Strong Sympathy: The Indian Writings of William Gilmore Simms, ed. John C. Guilds and Charles Hudson (1841; repr., Columbia: South Carolina UP, 2003), 269. 68. Peter L. Shillingsburg disingenuously suggests in a 2003 article for Southern Quarterly that Simms placed this conversation at the beginning as a

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“serious exposure of the limitations of prevailing ideas in the face of the factual details of the story that follows,” and castigates those who “adopt a righteous but critically suspect notion that Simms merely put his own views into the narrator’s mouth.” Peter L. Shillingsburg, “Antebellum American Literature from Natchez to Charleston,” Southern Quarterly 41, no. 2 (2003): 6. Shillingsburg ignores to his detriment the narrator’s name of “S” and, more importantly, Simms’s nonfiction writings that came both before and after the tale. Simms could hardly be the reformer Shillingsburg would have him be. 69. William Gilmore Simms, “Oakatibbe; or, the Choctaw Sampson,” in Guilds and Hudson, Early and Strong Sympathy, 279, 281. 70. Ibid., 281. 71. Williamson, Crucible of Race, 40. 72. Simms, “The Partisan,” 122. 73. Ibid., 121–122. 74. Patricia Okker, “Serial Politics in William Gilmore Simms’s Woodcraft,” in Periodical Literature in Nineteenth Century America (Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 1995), 162–163. 75. Simms, Woodcraft, 518. 76. Caroline Gebhard observes the history of “white southern aristocratic masculinity based on the sexual and social subordination of black men,” and how “southern gentility as well as black inferiority are exposed as mutually dependent constructions.” Caroline Gebhard, “Reconstructing Southern Manhood: Race, Sentimentality, and Camp in the Plantation Myth,” in Donaldson and Jones, Haunted Bodies, 146, 148. 77. Simms, Woodcraft, 399. 78. Ibid., 390, 392. 79. William Shakespeare, “Macbeth,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shakespeare, 1228; Shakespeare, “Much Ado about Nothing,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shakespeare, 242. 80. Simms, Woodcraft, 49. 81. Ibid., 290. 82. Butler, Gender Trouble, xv. 83. Simms, Woodcraft, 388. 84. Ibid., 32. 85. Ibid., 354. 86. Simms, “The Partisan,” 79. 87. Bertram Wyatt-Brown notes the “Southern inclination to war and military honors,” and how “Veneration of warrior virtue . . . reflected the more primitive concern with courage as a social value.” Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 191. Certainly these attitudes are on full view in Simms’s partisan. 88. Shakespeare, “I Henry IV,” 34. 89. Ibid., 798. 90. Charles S. Watson comments on Simms’s belief that “a return to military decisiveness” could cure a Hamlet-like languor that had engulfed Southern, white men. Watson, From Nationalism to Secessionism, 104. In

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many of his appearances in Simms’s novels, Captain Porgy fits this bill nicely. 91. The effect is that critics like C. Hugh Holman must argue, “But certainly the qualities listed for Porgy are hardly applicable, at least their majority, to the fat knight . . . those qualities which seem most essentially Porgy’s appear not at all in Falstaff.” Holman, Roots of Southern Writing, 71. And the critical confusion over Porgy goes on and on. 92. Wimsatt, Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms, 62. 93. John C. Guilds, Simms: A Literary Life (Fayetteville: Arkansas UP, 1992), 5–8. 94. Holman, Roots of Southern Writing, 38. 95. Wimsatt, Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms, 13–14; Guilds, Simms, 7. 96. Guilds, Simms, 10. 97. Simms, “The Partisan,” 122. 98. William Gilmore Simms, “Katherine Walton,” in Hetherington, Cavalier of the Old South, 155. 99. William Gilmore Simms, “Eutaw,” in Hetherington, Cavalier of the Old South, 239–240. 100. Shakespeare, “I Henry IV,” 773. 101. Bertram Wyatt-Brown discusses at length an archaic code, a primal ethic that informed the South and “would have been bloodier,” if not for the advent of gentility.” Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 87. 102. Jan Bakker, “The Pastoral Pessimism of William Gilmore Simms,” Studies in American Fiction 11 (Spring 1983): 82. 103. Simms, Letters, vol. 3, 62. 104. Hetherington, Cavalier of the Old South, 23. 105. Ibid., 35. 106. Simms, “The Partisan,” 104–105. 107. Butler, Gender Trouble, 33. 108. Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” 1069. 109. Simms, “Katherine Walton,” 150. 110. Shakespeare, “I Henry IV,” 769–770. 111. Mary Ann Wimsatt notes, “When Simms revised The Partisan for the Redfield Author’s Uniform edition in 1854, he reworked the character of Porgy, expanding his speeches, enlarging his role, and changing authorial commentary about him to make him more of a gentleman and less of a glutton.” Wimsatt, Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms, 76. Simms is rewriting literary history as well as the actual phenomenon. 112. Hetherington argues, “In the earlier books, even in Woodcraft, Porgy had been caught sometimes in undignified postures, although never so as to be the object of laughter. Now, however, in the final two books written [Eutaw and The Forayers], Simms seems to want to ennoble him further.” Hetherington, Cavalier of the Old South, 20. Simms’s impulse to rehabilitate this father seems progressively more important as the series advances.

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113. Simms, Letters, vol. 1, 82. 114. Holman, Roots of Southern Writing, 33. 115. Wyatt-Brown calls this period from 1840 to 1860 “The Age of Ambivalence.” Wyatt-Brown, Shaping of Southern Culture, 101. 116. Davis, Look Away, 47. 117. Wimsatt, Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms, 39. 118. Wyatt-Brown suggests, “For many, the Civil War was reduced to a simple test of manhood.” Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 35. WyattBrown’s point is well taken, even if “simple” may be a bit reductive. 119. Simms, Woodcraft, xi. 120. James B. Meriwether, “The Theme of Freedom in Woodcraft,” in Long Years of Neglect: The Work and Reputation of William Gilmore Simms, ed. John C. Guilds (Fayetteville: Arkansas UP, 1988), 22. 121. Meriwether, “Theme of Freedom in Woodcraft,” 26–27. 122. William Taylor posits, “As he [Simms] grew to accept the idea of a separate Southern destiny and as he came to feel that an impending doom was settling over his world, his imagination turned compellingly toward the great figures of tragic literature—to Othello, to Macbeth, and especially to Hamlet.” Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, 292. Simms’s appropriations matched his state of mind. 123. Watson asserts, “Falstaff is the main model for Porgy in the novels set during the Revolutionary War, but he is replaced by Hamlet in the postwar novel of peacetime, Woodcraft, which focuses on the life of a planter. Here Simms portrays Porgy, the representative planter, as self-indulgent, chronically ruminant, and dilatory—in short a bucolic Hamlet.” Watson, From Nationalism to Secessionism, 102. I am indebted to Watson for this astute observation. 124. Simms, Woodcraft, 198. 125. Watson, From Nationalism to Secessionism, 94. 126. In a 1992 article for Southern Literary Journal, Watson sees Porgy’s recovery of his slaves at the beginning of Woodcraft as Simms’s support of the Fugitive Slave Act. Watson goes so far as to claim that concerning slaves, “Simms did not believe they acted freely but had been enticed to run away. The title of this novel, ‘Woodcraft,’ recommends the aggressive means by which slaveholders can regain their fugitive slaves.” Charles S. Watson, “Simms and the Civil War: The Revolutionary Analogy,” Southern Literary Journal 24, no. 2 (1992): 81. Simms could not believe that the slaves would leave their “father” of their own volition, an idea that Lost Cause ideology would propagate from the Civil War onward. 127. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, 293–295. 128. Holman, Roots of Southern Writing, 85. 129. Steven Frye writes in an essay for Southern Quarterly (1997), “Simms was a staunch nationalist before he became a secessionist, and as a southern proponent of manifest destiny, American history for Simms revealed the process by which Western Civilization developed toward and ideal-

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ized form.” Steven Frye, “Simms’s The Yemassee, American Progressivism, and the Dialogue of History,” Southern Quarterly 35, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 83. Simms merely transferred both his perspective and modus operandi from America to the South. 130. Simms, “The Social Principle,” 259. 131. William Gilmore Simms, Americanism in Literature: An Oration before the Phi Kappa and Demosthenean Societies of the University of Georgia, at Athens, August 8, 1844, ed. Alexander Meek (Charleston, SC: Burges and James, 1844), 272–273, 275. 132. Wimsatt, Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms, 141–142. 133. William Gilmore Simms, “Mellichampe,” in Hetherington, Cavalier of the Old South, 141. 134. Simms, Letters, vol. 2, 90. 135. David Moltke-Hansen exposes a trend when he writes, “The language he [Simms] used to describe the tyranny of the Tories in 1780 was the same he used to describe the tyranny of the nullifiers in 1831–1833 and the tyranny of Northern interests in the 1850’s. Conversely, the language he used to describe his Whig heroes and their cause in the Revolutionary War romances was the same he used to describe the unionists and their cause in 1832–1833 and southerners and their cause in the 1850’s.” David Moltke-Hansen, “The Historical Philosophy of William Gilmore Simms,” in Guilds, Long Years of Neglect, 138. 136. This transhistorical categorizing may be why Hugh Hetherington believes, “For various reasons Porgy is a figure who seems to exist as much in the nineteenth century as the eighteenth . . . since Porgy is less of 1783 than of Simms’s present of 1852 . . . in fashioning him Simms was unfettered by conventions of historical romance, unrepressed by obligations to details of recorded events of long ago.” Hetherington, Cavalier of the Old South, 74. 137. Simms, “The Southern Convention,” 325. 138. William Gilmore Simms, “Dedication,” in The Wigwam and the Cabin (New York: Redfield, 1856), 4–5. 139. William Gilmore Simms, “Antagonisms of the Social Moral. North and South,” quoted in Miriam J. Shillingsburg, “Simms’s Failed Lecture Tour of 1856: The Mind of the North,” in Guilds, Long Years of Neglect, 189–190. 140. Simms, Woodcraft, 260. 141. Ibid., 139. 142. William Gilmore Simms, “The Forayers,” in Hetherington, Cavalier of the Old South, 213. 143. Shakespeare, “I Henry IV,” 770. 144. Shakespeare, “2 Henry IV,” in Bevington, Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 839. 145. Ibid., 839. 146. Ibid., 840. 147. Simms, Woodcraft, 508.

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148. “The author, however, decided to turn back the clock, and in The Forayers (1855) and Eutaw (1856) to continue his portrayal of the Revolution from near the end of 1780, where he left it in Katherine Walton, to the last months of 1781, and so to show Porgy again as a soldier.” Hetherington, Cavalier of the Old South, 20. 149. Simms, “Eutaw,” 251. 150. William Shakespeare, “Henry V,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shakespeare, 863. 151. Simms, Letters, vol. 4, 315. 152. Louis D. Rubin observes in a1988 essay, “When it [the War] was over, his once-imposing plantation gutted and his library burned, his slaves freed, his wife dead, and his community’s cause blasted beyond imagining, he sought to resume his literary vocation. It was all he had left. The plantation dreams of the Old South had vanished into smoke.” Louis D. Rubin Jr., “Simms, Charleston, and the Profession of Letters,” in Guilds, Long Years of Neglect, 217–236. 153. Simms, Letters, vol. 4, 168. 154. Guilds writes that the character is a “compelling figure cloaked in ambiguity, possessing qualities that make him capable of both the best and the worst—safeguarding some principles and protecting certain individuals while exploiting and destroying others. Caught in a web of contending forces, he is at once a protector of good and a doer of evil; a builder and a spoiler; a man of principle and an opportunist; a believer and a questioner.” Guilds, Simms, 314. The character is a paradox, a man befitting his time. 155. Simms, Letters, vol. 5, 178. 156. Wimsatt, Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms, 237. 157. Simms, Letters, vol. 5, 213. 158. William Gilmore Simms, “The Sense of the Beautiful,” quoted in Gary McDonald, “Manly Beauty and Southern Heroism: The Example of William Gilmore Simms,” Southern Quarterly 37, no. 3–4 (SpringSummer 1999): 270. 159. See essays about Simms collected under the title Long Years of Neglect, for a primer. Certainly, a critical need to view Simms in terms of representation exists. In 1954, Jay B. Hubble called Simms “the central figure in literature of the Old South.” Jay B. Hubble, The South in Literature, 1607–1900 (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1954), 572. C. Hugh Holman in 1972 wrote of Simms, “From the early 1830’s to the Civil War the outstanding Southern literary figure and as close as we get to being a representative writer the Old South had produced.” Holman, Roots of Southern Writing, 16. Guilds’s estimation, therefore, is not without merit. 160. Guilds, Simms, 226. 161. Hetherington, Cavalier of the Old South, 30. 162. For “Shakespeare” and other poems by William Gilmore Simms, see Guilds, The Simms Reader, and James E. Kibler, Selected Poems of

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Chapter 2 1. Thomas Nelson Page to A. C. Gordon, December 3, 1876, Papers of Thomas Nelson Page, Accession #7581-m, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va. 2. William Shakespeare, “King Lear,” in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th ed., ed. David Bevington (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 1194. 3. Thomas Nelson Page, The Old South (1892; repr., Chautauqua, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919), 253. 4. Richard Gray observes of Page’s generation of novelists, “The patriarchal model is presented to us in a sealed container: that interest in applying it to the contemporary experiences and problems of the South which we find . . . in the novels of Simms, Paulding, Caruthers, and Tucker is for the most part missing from the plantation fiction written after the Civil War.” Richard Gray, Writing the South (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), 90. Gray’s estimation regarding Page is not quite accurate. As is demonstrated in this chapter, Page’s primary concern was his present— this “sealed container” had leaks. 5. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 108. 6. Page, Old South, 100. 7. Helen Taylor, “The South and Britain: Celtic Cultural Connections,” in South to a New Place, ed. Suzanne W. Jones and Sharon Monteith (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2002), 343. 8. Page, Old South, 102. 9. Thomas Nelson Page, The Old Dominion: Her Making and Her Manners (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), 317. 10. Thomas Nelson Page, Social Life in Old Virginia before the War (1892; repr., Sandwich, MA: Chapman Billies, 1994), 28. 11. The importance of appropriating Shakespeare specifically has been much discussed. For example, in Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare (1984), author Michael Bristol makes a convincing case for the playwright as the name for a “tutelary deity or cult-object.” Michael D. Bristol, Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 1990), 19. Alan Sinfield argues in his and Jonathan Dollimore’s Political Shakespeare (1994), “He [Shakespeare] constitutes a powerful cultural token. . . . Shakespeare’s plays constitute an influential medium through which certain ways of thinking about the world may be promoted and others impeded, they are a sight of cultural struggle and change. . . . Shakespeare has long been recognized as a means of securing cultural privilege.” Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds., Political Shakespeare (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1994), 154, 155, 256. The cultural advantage of appropriating Shakespeare cannot be overstated.

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12. Dollimore and Sinfield, Political Shakespeare, 256, 267. 13. Bertram Wyatt-Brown notes, “For many, the Civil War was reduced to a simple test of manhood . . . Southerners’ touchiness over virility stemmed from deep anxieties about how others, particularly Northerners and Englishmen saw them.” Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982), 35. The Southerners’ citations of masculinity would not only be painfully self-aware, but also aware of critical viewers, if not outright competition. 14. Thomas Nelson Page, In Ole Virginia; or, Marse Chan and Other Stories, ed. M. E. Bradford (1887; repr., Nashville, TN: J. S. Sanders, 1991), xii. 15. Thomas Nelson Page, “Marse Chan. A Tale of Old Virginia,” in Bradford, Ole Virginia, 28–29. 16. William Shakespeare, “Henry V,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shakespeare, 880. 17. See C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1968). Also see Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002). 18. Eric Hobsbawm convincingly argues that inventing tradition occurs more frequently during rapid transformation, a circumstance that invariably weakens “old traditions.” Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), 5. These are exactly Page’s circumstances. 19. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 107. 20. Theodore L. Gross, Thomas Nelson Page (New York: Twayne, 1967), 24–25. 21. Page, “Marse Chan,” 21. 22. William Shakespeare, “Romeo and Juliet,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shakespeare, 980. 23. Rosewell Page, Thomas Nelson Page: A Memoir of a Virginia Gentleman (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923), 94. 24. Gaines M. Foster writes of the “offered image of the confederacy as an antidote to postwar change,” and “The Lost Cause . . . should not be seen, as it so often has been, as a purely backward looking or Romantic movement . . . its leaders and participants preached and practiced sectional reconciliation.” Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987), 5–6. Of course, this reconciliation was, ironically, under the vanquished’s terms. The South would lose the war but attempt to win the peace, and Page was instrumental in that attempt. 25. Page, “Marse Chan,” 38. 26. Shakespeare, “Romeo and Juliet,” 1020. 27. Rosewell Page, Thomas Nelson Page, 88, 91. 28. Thomas Nelson Page, “The Negro Question,” in Old South, 283. Alan T. Nolan offers the root of this mind-set and argues that proponents of the Lost Cause ideology believed that Southerners were a minority that needed advocacy and vindication. Alan T. Nolan, “The Anatomy of the

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Myth,” in The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, ed. Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000), 14. Appropriating victimhood is still a common modus operandi of many oppressors. 29. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990; repr., New York: Routledge, 1999), xv. 30. Page, “Marse Chan,” 32–33. 31. Gross, Thomas Nelson Page, 13. 32. Page, “Marse Chan,” 10. 33. Thomas Nelson Page, “Meh Lady,” in Bradford, Ole Virginia, 80. 34. William Shakespeare, “I King Henry VI,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shakespeare, 527. 35. Nolan, “Anatomy of the Myth,” 15. 36. Page, Old South, 34. 37. Ibid., 266–267. 38. Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984), 6–7. 39. Grace Hale refines this point when she writes of “the racial uncertainties in the 1870’s and 1880’s and white longing for a now gone and mostly imagined intimacy with blacks.” Grace Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage, 1998), 59. Scott Romine suggests that Page uses this narrator in “Marse Chan” so slaves can validate the code of chivalric honor by bearing witness to the master’s heroism; at the same time, he is contained by a literate frame narrator who confronts and inhibits him. Scott Romine, The Narrative Forms of Southern Community (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1999), 91, 98. James Christmann adds, “The [black narrators] follow their masters like shadows, and they often seem just as two-dimensional and insubstantial. . . . The lives of the slaves only have meaning through their service to and their observation of whites.” James Christmann, “Dialect’s Double-Murder: Thomas Nelson Page’s In Ole Virginia,” American Literary Realism 32, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 237. 40. Lucinda Mackethan, “Plantation Fiction, 1865–1900,” in The History of Southern Literature, ed. Louis D. Rubin, Blyden Jackson, Rayburn S. Moore, Lewis P. Simpson, and Thomas Daniel Young (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1985), 218. 41. See Jay B. Hubble, The South in Literature, 1607–1900 (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1954); Emily S. Richardson, Three Southern Views of Reconciliation, Economic Recovery, and Race in the New South, 1865–1900: As Seen in the Life and Work of Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, and George Washington Cable (Washington, DC: American UP, 1987); and Mackethan, “Plantation Fiction,” 209–218. 42. Page, “Marse Chan,” 8. 43. Gross, Thomas Nelson Page, 24. 44. Lucinda Mackethan writes, “The war and its aftermath emphasized for Page the values of the Old World just at the moment they were disappearing,

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leaving him with a sense that the regime destroyed had a tragic grandeur.” Lucinda Mackethan, “Thomas Nelson Page: The Plantation as Arcady,” Virginia Quarterly Review 54, no. 2 (1978): 316. Page would endeavor to resuscitate these values, grandeur intact. 45. Karen A. Keely, “Marriage Plots and National Reunion: The Trope of Romantic Reconciliation in Postbellum Literature,” Mississippi Quarterly 51, no. 4 (Fall 1998): 624. 46. Shakespeare, “Romeo and Juliet,” 995. 47. Page, Ole Virginia, 137. 48. Ibid., 138. 49. William Shakespeare, “As You Like It,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shakespeare, 324. 50. Nolan, “Anatomy of the Myth,” 16. 51. Theodore L. Gross exposes the ideology here: “Page writes what he considers to be a story of reconciliation, but it is a story in which characters are reconciled to the Southern way of life.” Gross, Thomas Nelson Page, 32. The North, in effect, surrenders. 52. See Diane Roberts, “The New Belle,” in Faulkner and Southern Womanhood (Athens: Georgia UP, 1994), 102–148. 53. Gross, Thomas Nelson Page, 78, 96. 54. Ibid., 95. 55. Richardson, Three Southern Views, 94. 56. Earl F. Bargainnier, “Red Rock: A Reappraisal,” Southern Quarterly 22, no. 2 (Winter 1984): 47. 57. Woodward, Strange Career of Jim Crow, 6. 58. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 80. 59. Woodward, Burden of Southern History, 141, 150–152, 160. 60. Grace Hale theorizes, “The central moment in the making of a white Southerner, the primal scene of the culture of segregation, then, was one of learning the meaning of race.” Hale, Making Whiteness, 96. 61. Walter Benn Michaels, “Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (Summer 1992): 659. 62. Williamson, Crucible of Race, 109. 63. Thomas Nelson Page, Red Rock (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900), 94. 64. Michaels, “Race into Culture,” 659. 65. Page, Red Rock, 291. 66. Shakespeare, “King Henry V,” 853. 67. Keely, “Marriage Plots and National Reunion,” 633. 68. Harold Bloom argues that most critical readings of the play King Lear focus on the title character and/or Cordelia, but Bloom notes that the title page of the first Quarto edition affords another character greater prominence: “M. William Shakespeare: His True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King Lear and his three daughters. With the Unfortunate life of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earl of Gloster, and his sullen

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and assumed humor of Tom of Bedlam.” Bloom uses this evidence as a starting point, convincingly making Edgar central to the work, second only to the title character. Edgar is “the play’s central consciousness perforce . . . who actually speaks more lines than anyone else except Lear,” according to Bloom. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead, 1998), 480, 482. 69. James Kimball King, “George Washington Cable and Thomas Nelson Page: Two Literary Approaches to the New South” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1964), 254. 70. Shakespeare, “King Lear,” 1176. 71. This forced “taking on” drives Walter Benn Michaels to write of Red Rock, “It is, in short, an antiimperialist novel.” Michaels, “Race into Culture,” 655. Perhaps it is more accurate to argue that that is the novel’s intention. 72. Nolan, “Anatomy of the Myth,” 28. 73. Page, Red Rock, 294. 74. Ibid., 226. 75. Hale, Making Whiteness, 6. See also Michael Flusche, “Thomas Nelson Page: The Quandary of a Literary Gentleman,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 84 (1976): 471. 76. Fred Hobson, Tell about the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1983), 133. 77. King, “George Washington Cable and Thomas Nelson Page,” 338. 78. Shakespeare, “King Lear,” 1176. 79. Page, Red Rock, 451. 80. Thomas Nelson Page, Gordon Keith (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 38. 81. Harold Bloom argues this point convincingly regarding King Lear, another solid connection between the two works. Bloom, Shakespeare, 505. 82. Bloom, Shakespeare, 478. 83. William Shakespeare, “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shakespeare, 1075. 84. Dollimore and Sinfield, Political Shakespeare, 155. 85. Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 14. 86. Page, Red Rock, 1. 87. Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” 1075. 88. Ibid., 1096. 89. Gross, Thomas Nelson Page, 123, 125. 90. Page, Gordon Keith, 530. 91. Page, Red Rock, 252–253. 92. Ibid., 583. 93. Page, Old South, 5. 94. Keely, “Marriage Plots and National Reunion,” 637. 95. Michael Flusche thinks the two are synonymous, and Theodore L. Gross points out, “All of the author’s fiction leads inevitably to Gordon Keith;

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and is, without a doubt, Page himself.” Flusche, “Thomas Nelson Page,” 482; Gross, Thomas Nelson Page, 124. 96. Page, Gordon Keith, 3. 97. Rosewell Page, Thomas Nelson Page, 23. 98. Page, Gordon Keith, 16. 99. Page, Social Life in Old Virginia before the War, 48. 100. Page, Old South, 103. 101. Emily S. Richardson notes Page’s love of the Southern myth of gentry dependence on land and its retention in their family as the last vestige of the past in Red Rock. Richardson, Three Southern Views, 90. 102. Page, Gordon Keith, 515–516. The emphasis is mine. 103. Mackethan, “Thomas Nelson Page,” 321. 104. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 108. 105. Hale, Making Whiteness, 43. 106. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1980), 3. See also Dollimore and Sinfield, Political Shakespeare, 267. 107. Page, Old South, 257. 108. Mackethan, “Thomas Nelson Page,” 322. 109. William Shakespeare, “Richard II,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shakespeare, 734. 110. Page, Gordon Keith, 106. 111. Ibid., 5. 112. Shakespeare, “Richard II,” 750. 113. Ibid., 743. 114. Page, Gordon Keith, 4–5. 115. Shakespeare, “As You Like It,” 299. 116. Page, Gordon Keith, 169, 238. 117. Ibid., 241. 118. Ibid., 515. 119. Michael Flusche argues that Page “praised the stability of the old life and the attachment to the land, but his own life was a model of mobility.” Flusche, “Thomas Nelson Page,” 46. Perhaps, as James Kimball King observes, “In the midst of a luxurious urban existence he [Page] began to cherish the agrarian ideal. His later fiction elaborates on the simple virtues of country living and on the ugliness of the business world.” King, “George Washington Cable and Thomas Nelson Page,” 297. Who can know Page’s intentions for sure? 120. Henry Field, A Memoir of Thomas Nelson Page (Miami, FL: Field Research Projects, 1978), 14. 121. Emily Richardson writes, “Page’s fiction supported a picture of racial harmony in the Old South. His idealized community of kindly Blacks and saintly white masters, caretakers of an inferior race, contrasted sharply with his portrayal of dangerous Blacks in his essays.” Richardson, Three Southern Views, 10. The reason for this contradiction is not readily apparent.

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122. Thomas Nelson Page, “The Lynching of Negroes—Its Cause and Its Prevention,” North American Review 178 (January 1904): 35. 123. Thomas Nelson Page, The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), 112. 124. Woodward, Strange Career of Jim Crow, 34. 125. Hale, Making Whiteness, 5–6, 21; Williamson, Crucible of Race, 6. 126. Williamson, Crucible of Race, 178. 127. Page, Old South, 291. 128. William Shakespeare, “Othello,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shakespeare, 1123. 129. Page, “Lynching of Negroes,” 6. 130. Quoted in Richard Gray, The Life of William Faulkner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 37. 131. As Theodore L. Gross champions, the man “was in many ways the literary spokesman of the South during the 1880’s and 1890’s.” Gross, Thomas Nelson Page, 7. Surely this assertion suggests more about the South of that time than about Page. 132. Earl F. Bargainnier notes that when Red Rock appeared, it was widely reviewed and was fifth on the bestseller list. Bargainnier, “Red Rock,” 44. Michael Flusche adds, “Thomas Nelson Page was beyond doubt the best-known Southern author during the last years of the nineteenth century. To members of his generation, he was the foremost champion of the Lost Cause.” Flusche, “Thomas Nelson Page,” 464. 133. Margaret Haerens and Drew Kalasky, eds., “Thomas Nelson Page, 1853–1922,” Short Story Criticism 23 (1996): 286–287. 134. Matthew R. Martin, “The Two-Faced New South: The Plantation Tales of Thomas Nelson Page and Charles W. Chesnutt,” Southern Literary Journal 30, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 19. 135. Hubble, South in Literature, 795. 136. Page, Ole Virginia, v. 137. Grace Elizabeth King, Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters (New York: Macmillan, 1932. 138. Page, Social Life in Old Virginia before the War, 1. 139. Page, Red Rock, vii. 140. Quoted in L. Moody Simms Jr., “Cora Harris on the Declining Influence of Thomas Nelson Page,” Mississippi Quarterly 28, no. 4 (Fall 1975): 506. 141. Richard Gray, “Foreword,” in Jones and Monteith, South to a New Place, xx. 142. Gray, South to a New Place, xxiii. 143. Barbara Ladd explains just what is at stake: “But the memory of the Civil War has vanished into history. In other words, the experience of the Civil War has become for most of us vicarious, displaced (rather than evoked) by representations (i.e., biographies, histories, national parks, museums, documents, relics, theme parks).” Barbara Ladd, “Dismantling the Monolith: Southern Places—Past, Present, and Future,” in

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Jones and Monteith, South to a New Place, 15. Ladd is ostensibly discussing the war, but “Reconstruction,” “Old South,” “Plantation,” or a myriad of historical constructions could take the place of “Civil War” in Ladd’s assertion and still hold true.

Chapter 3 1. Thomas Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons: The Autobiography of Thomas Dixon (Alexandria, VA: IWV, 1984), 136. 2. Ibid., 311. 3. Alan T. Nolan, “The Anatomy of the Myth,” in The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, ed. Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000), 15–16. 4. Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons, 4–5. 5. Sandra Gunning writes of Dixon’s “presentation of early Klansmen as the Anglo-American link with a European past of chivalric glory.” Sandra Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996). 6. Thomas Dixon Jr., The Leopard’s Spots, in The Reconstruction Trilogy (1902; repr., Newport Beach, CA: Noontide, 1994), 66. 7. Thomas Dixon Jr., The Clansman, in The Reconstruction Trilogy (1903; repr., Newport Beach, CA: Noontide, 1994), 412. 8. Thomas Dixon Jr., The Traitor, in The Reconstruction Trilogy (1907; repr., Newport Beach, CA: Noontide, 1994), 470. 9. Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons, 265. 10. James Kinney, Amalgamation! (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985), 179. 11. Walter Benn Michaels, Our America (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995), 44. 12. William Shakespeare, “The Tempest,” in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th ed., ed. David Bevington (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 1557. 13.Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 82. 14. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 33. 15. For a fuller discussion of racial radicalism, see Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984), 6. 16. Williamson, Crucible of Race, 141. 17. Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons, 28. 18. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 159. 19. See Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 226; and Louis P. Simpson, “Foreword,” in Shakespeare and Southern Writers: A Study in Influence, ed. Philip C. Kolin (Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1985), vii. To further understand Shakespeare’s cultural importance, see Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds., Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1994), 154, 256. Michael D. Bristol discusses how “the idea of a radical return to the source provides an alternative meaning for the idea of tradition.” Michael D.

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Bristol, Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 1990), 47. 20. Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons, 45. 21. Ibid., 77. 22. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 69. 23. Dixon Jr., Clansman, 351. 24. Dobson, Making of the National Poet, 11. 25. Thomas Dixon Jr., quoted in Raymond Allen Cook, Fire from the Flint: The Amazing Careers of Thomas Dixon (Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 1968), 51. 26. Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons, 169. 27. Cook, Fire from the Flint, 53–56. 28. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead, 1998), 442. 29. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1980), 234. 30. This ability mirrors Edward Said’s discussion of colonialism via the Orient versus the Occident in Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 3–5. 31. Dixon Jr., Clansman, 381. 32. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 91. 33. Ibid., 237. 34. Judith Jackson Fossett, “(K)night Riders in (K)night Gown: The Ku Klux Klan, Race, and Construction of Masculinity,” in Race Consciousness: African-American Studies for the New Century, ed. Judith Jackson Fossett and Jeffrey A. Tucker (New York: New York UP, 1997), 43. 35. Thomas Dixon Jr., The Sins of the Father: A Romance of the South (New York: D. Appleton, 1912), 403. 36. William Shakespeare, “Othello,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shakespeare, 1123. 37. Ibid., 1123, 1131, and 1151. 38. Ibid., 1122, 1126. 39. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 69. 40. Dixon Jr., Clansman, 316. 41. Susan Gilman argues that Dixon’s entire trilogy is “also informed by the continuing success of local black candidates in such areas as the famous black Second Congressional district of North Carolina and the South Carolina Piedmont, both, not coincidently, the locale of the trilogy.” Susan Gillman, Blood Talk (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003), 80. The personal is political. 42. David Blight offers, “By the turn of the twentieth century . . . white supremacy, a hardening of traditional gender roles, a military tradition and patriotic recognition of confederate valor, and a South innocent of responsibility for slavery were values in search of a history; they were the weapons arming the fortress against the threats of populist politics, racial equality, and industrialization.” David Blight, Race and Reunion: The

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Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001), 291. 43. Bloom, Shakespeare, 438, 461. 44. Dixon Jr., Clansman, 380–381. 45. Ibid., 264. 46. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 235, 238. 47. Shakespeare, “Othello,” 1123. 48. Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching, 29. 49. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 108. 50. Clare Eby explains the seeds of this Butlerian failure: “Dixon captures the white concern that Reconstruction era gains in civil rights for blacks had abolished race distinctions and threatened to result in egalitarian interracial relations.” Clare Eby, “Slouching toward Beastliness: Richard Wright’s Anatomy of Thomas Dixon,” African American Review 35, no. 3 (2001): 442. For a similar argument, see Riche Richardson, “The Birth of a Nation ‘Hood’: Lessons from Thomas Dixon and D.W. Griffith to William Bradford Huie and The Klansman, O.J. Simpson’s First Movie,” Mississippi Quarterly 56, no. 1 (Winter 2002–2003): 3–29. Also see Martha Hodes, “War Time Dialogues on Illicit Sex: White Women and Black Men,” in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992), 230–242. 51. Williamson, Crucible of Race, 51. 52. Ibid., 141. 53. Grace Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage, 1998), 6–7, 96. 54. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, “One of the Meanest Books: Thomas Dixon, Jr. and The Leopard’s Spots,” North Carolina Literary Review 2, no. 3 (Spring 1994): 87, 100. 55. Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons, 377. 56. Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching, 30. 57. Although Joel Williamson, in The Crucible of Race, offers a close Freudian reading of Thomas Dixon and his impulse to narrate the black man and himself in the way he does, the author’s popularity during this period suggests that this phenomena was not merely personal. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore reports, “Northern and Southern readers believed Leopard’s to be the inside—and true—story of Reconstruction and Thomas Dixon to be the ideal Southern man.” Gilmore, “One of the Meanest Books,” 87. John C. Inscoe notes that the 1905 staging of the play version of The Clansman in North Carolina met with “the majority of the critics and reporters extolling the timeliness of Dixon’s warning and the accuracy of his depiction of the dangerous situation at hand.” John C. Inscoe, “The Clansman on Stage and Screen: North Carolina Reacts,” North Carolina Historical Review 64, no. 2 (April 1987): 139. The novel itself was “number four on the bestseller list for 1905.” Joan L. Silverman, “The Birth of a Nation: Prohibition Propaganda,” Southern Quarterly Review 19, no. 3–4 (Spring-Summer 1981): 24. Dixon was not alone in

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believing this narrative of the African male, and this racist perspective was not indigenous to the South. 58. Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons, 307. 59. Kinney, Amalgamation! 166. 60. Shakespeare, “Othello,” 1122. 61. Ibid., 1147. 62. Ibid., 1159. 63. Ibid., 1131, 1165. 64. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 44–45. 65. Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: California UP, 1987), 215. 66. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 135. 67. Ibid., 57. 68. Shakespeare, “Othello,” 1131. 69. Ibid., 1135. 70. Ibid. 71. Dixon Jr., Clansman, 340. 72. Ibid., 366. 73. Tilden G. Edelstein, “Othello in America: The Drama of Racial Intermarriage,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford UP, 1982), 179, 187, 191. 74. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 51. 75. Shakespeare, “Othello,” 1127. 76. Ibid., 1126. 77. Inscoe, “The Clansman on Stage and Screen,” 148. 78. Shakespeare, “Othello,” 1131. 79. Ibid., 1130. 80. Ibid., 1134. 81. Ibid., 1144. 82. As Iago is a constant dissembler, the difficulties in following a cogent racial ideology are manifold. Iago uses whatever reasoning is expedient to his ends, not unlike Thomas Dixon. Why white women would choose black men and vice versa is difficult to sort out in Shakespeare’s play— Dixon uses Iago’s methodology as much as he uses his ideology. 83. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 240. 84. Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching, 36. 85. Michaels, Our America, 19. 86. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 191–192. 87. As Eric J. Sundquist reports, “Dixon’s great popularity . . . depended upon a leering, propagandistic portrait of the black rapist.” Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993), 409. 88. These inclinations include Northerners as well as Southerners. For a string of events that demonstrate Northern prejudice and injustice against blacks in the North from before the Civil War through Appomattox, see James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men

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89. 90.

91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

102. 103.

104. 105.

106. 107. 108.

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Fought in the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997). For these same problems during Reconstruction, see Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction (New York: Harper and Row, 1990). Unfortunately, Southern apologists such as Dixon himself have used these Northern attitudes and atrocities to excuse the South’s similar behavior, causing the North’s racism and culpability to become diminished in a “who is right and who is wrong” debate concerning national race relations. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 190. Ibid., 192, 194. I am particularly indebted to the observations contained in Kimberley Iris Magowan, “Coming between the ‘Black Beast’ and the White Virgin: The Pressures of Liminality in Thomas Dixon,” Studies in American Fiction 27, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 79–80. William Shakespeare, “Much Ado about Nothing,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shakespeare, 242. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 134. Ibid., 162. Ibid., 203–204. James Kinney, “The Rhetoric of Racism: Thomas Dixon and the ‘Damned Black Beast,’ ” American Literary Realism 15, no. 2 (Autumn 1982): 149. Dixon Jr., Clansman, 385–386. Ibid., 55–56. Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons, 62. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 64. Ibid., 65. White female sexual purity and white male protection of it was a part of Thomas Dixon’s culture. For an explanation of the cultural ramifications of the “sanctity of virginity,” see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982), 234. Quoted in Edelstein, “Othello in America,” 185. As Michael Bristol points out, “The interpretation of Shakespeare and the interpretation of American political culture are mutually determining practices.” Bristol, Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare, 3. Carole J. Gerster, “Narrative Form Transformed,” West Virginia Philological Papers 45 (1999): 12. Maxwell Bloomfield suggests that Dixon was the first novelist to dramatize the “Negro problem” as a national not sectional matter. Maxwell Bloomfield, “Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots: A Study in Popular Racism,” American Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1964): 387. See Joel Williamson’s The Crucible of Race and Grace Hale’s Making Whiteness for a much more in-depth discussion of this phenomenon. Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 28, 138. Kinney, Amalgamation! 165. Harold Bloom prefers to see Caliban neither as the put-upon native nor as an “African-Caribbean Heroic Freedom Fighter,” but as a represen-

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tation of the family romance at its most desperate, a failed adoption. Bloom, Shakespeare, 662, 679. 109. Shakespeare, “Tempest,” 1535. 110. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 124. 111. Shakespeare, “Tempest,” 1535. 112. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 162. 113. Shakespeare, “Tempest,” 1535. 114. Ibid. 115. Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons, 166. 116. Magowan, “Coming between the ‘Black Beast’ and the White Virgin,” 79. Magowan makes much of this contingency and the fragility of white masculinity, particularly when confronted by black female sexuality. 117. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492–Present (1980; repr., New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 347. 118. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 124. 119. Walter Benn Michaels, “The Souls of White Folk,” in Literature and the Body, ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988), 195. 120. Eric J. Sundquist offers a key, “Dixon’s central metaphor—the Negro as ‘beast’ is here [in Sins] revealed, at least provisionally, as the frantic psychological projection it is.” Eric J. Sundquist, Faulkner: The House Divided (1983; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985), 144. 121. Kinney, “Rhetoric of Racism,” 150. 122. Dixon Jr., Sins of the Father, 122. 123. Ibid., 123. 124. Dixon Jr., Clansman, 288. 125. Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons, 21. 126. Ibid., 44. 127. Magowan, “Coming between the ‘Black Beast’ and the White Virgin,” 87. 128. Dixon Jr., Sins of the Father, 332. 129. Ibid., 152. 130. Ibid., 80–81. 131. Kimberley Iris Magowan, “Strange Bedfellows: Incest and Miscegenation in Thomas Dixon, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, and John Sayles” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1999), 63. 132. Dixon Jr., Clansman, 395. 133. Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching, 42. 134. Dixon Jr., Traitor, 422. 135. Fossett, “(K)night Riders in (K)night Gown,” 40. 136. Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching, 44. 137. Dixon Jr., Sins of the Father, 452. The emphasis is mine. 138. Kinney, “Rhetoric of Racism,” 151. 139. Gilmore, “One of the Meanest Books,” 99. Arthur F. Kinney makes this same point about Colonel Faulkner, William Faulkner’s patriarch. Arthur F. Kinney, Go Down, Moses: The Miscegenation of Time (New York: Twayne, 1996).

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140. John E. Bruce, quoted in Gilmore, “One of the Meanest Books,” 97. 141. Dixon Jr., Sins of the Father, 33. 142. Ibid., 34–35. 143. Ibid., 78. 144. Ibid., 163. 145. See Joel Williamson for how this description fits that of Dixon’s real mother. Williamson offers a Freudian reading of the mother-son relationship and applies this theorizing to Dixon’s works. Williamson, Crucible of Race, 151–173. 146. Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons, 195. 147. Ibid., 294. 148. Inscoe, “The Clansman on Stage and Screen,” 153, 156, 157. 149. Zinn, People’s History of the United States, 382. 150. Raymond Rohauer, “Afterword,” in Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons, 326. 151. Lucius C. Harper, “What Reward Has God for Thomas Dixon, the Hater?” Chicago Defender no.13 (April 1946): 1, 6. 152. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity, 161. 153. Ibid.

Chapter 4 1. William Shakespeare, “Macbeth,” in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th ed., ed. David Bevington (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 126. 2. William Faulkner, quoted in Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984), 294. 3. Michael Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature (Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1998), 50; Carlos Dews, “Why I Can’t Read Faulkner: Reading and Resisting Southern White Masculinity,” The Faulkner Journal 15, no. 1–2 (Fall 1999–Spring 2000): 188. 4. Richard Gray points out that Faulkner was born into a culture that had a complex code yet a sense of modernist rupture that gave him enough critical distance from it to explore it. Richard Gray, The Life of William Faulkner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 15. 5. Arthur F. Kinney, Go Down, Moses: The Miscegenation of Time (New York: Twayne, 1996), 43. 6. Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993), 245, 375. 7. William Faulkner, Flags in the Dust (1929; repr., New York: Vintage, 1974), 94. 8. William Faulkner, Sanctuary (1931; repr., New York: Vintage, 1993), 301. 9. William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee (New York: Braziller, 1961), 161. 10. John N. Duvall, “Faulkner’s Crying Game: Male Homosexual Panic,” in Faulkner and Gender, ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1996), 54; Donald M. Kartiganer, “Quentin Compson and Faulkner’s Drama of the Generations,” in Critical Essays

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on William Faulkner: The Compson Family, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978), 385. 11. Andre Bleikasten, “Fathers in Faulkner,” in The Fictional Father: Lacanian Readings of the Text, ed. Robert Con Davis (Amherst: Massachusetts UP, 1981), 124. 12. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (1966; repr., New York: Norton, 1977), 67. 13. James G. Watson, William Faulkner: Self-Presentation and Performance (Austin: Texas UP, 2000), 192. 14. The same can be said of William Faulkner. Ralph Ellison, James Dickey, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’ Connor, and Toni Morrison, only to name a few, have appropriated Faulkner as much as he did William Shakespeare before him. 15. William Faulkner, quoted in M. Thomas Inge, ed., Conversations with William Faulkner (Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1999), 65, 191. 16. David Rogers, “A Masculinity of Faded Blue: V.K. Ratliff and Faulkner’s Creation of Transpositional Space,” The Faulkner Journal 15, no. 1–2 (Fall 1999–Spring 2000): 125. 17. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 108. 18. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 2nd ed., ed. David Minter (1929; repr., New York: Norton, 1994), 108; William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930; repr., New York: Vintage, 1990), 80. 19. Duvall, “Faulkner’s Crying Game,” 49. 20. Watson, William Faulkner, 115. 21. John N. Duvall, Faulkner’s Marginal Couple: Invisible, Outlaw, and Unspeakable Communities (Austin: Texas UP, 1990), 132. See also Bleikasten, “Fathers in Faulkner,” 117. 22. Faulkner, Flags in the Dust, 193. 23. Richard Gray, Writing the South (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), 193. 24. Faulkner, Sanctuary, 280. 25. Faulkner, Flags in the Dust, 185–186. 26. Ibid., 77. 27. Ibid., 212. 28. Ibid., 224. 29. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar (Berkeley: California UP, 1978), 62. 30. Mapped out quite extensively in Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance SelfFashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1980). 31. Faulkner, Flags in the Dust, 405. 32. William Shakespeare, “As You Like It,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shakespeare, 305. 33. Shakespeare, “Macbeth,” 1252. 34. Watson, William Faulkner, 21. 35. Susan V. Donaldson, “Faulkner and Masculinity,” The Faulkner Journal 15, no. 1–2 (Fall 1999–Spring 2000): 3. 36. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), xv.

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37. Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History, 180, 185, 205. 38. Ibid., 332. 39. Kevin Railey, “The Social Psychology of Paternalism: Sanctuary’s Cultural Context,” in Faulkner in Cultural Context, ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1997), 86. 40. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982), 50, 86, 89, 155, 191, 289, 295. 41. Faulkner, Flags in the Dust, 170, 199. 42. Butler, Gender Trouble, 175. 43. Rogers, “A Masculinity of Faded Blue,” 127. 44. Faulkner, Sanctuary, 13. 45. Ibid., 120. 46. Ibid., 279. 47. Shakespeare, “Macbeth,” 1230. 48. Ibid., 1240. 49. Ibid., 1254. 50. Ibid., 1229. 51. Railey, “Social Psychology of Paternalism,” 95. 52. Faulkner, Sanctuary, 296. 53. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 108. The emphasis is mine. 54. Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 273–274. 55. Faulkner, Sanctuary, 316. 56. Ibid., 300. 57. Ibid., 15. 58. Ibid., 216, 217, 220. 59. Temple Drake’s version of masculinity could be conjectured as that of the gentleman given her father’s model of masculinity and its seeming reliance on this code, if nothing else, due to his class. Still, as she is attempting to defend herself against men who are “anything but gentlemen,” she may be fantasizing a masculinity more in line with her aggressors. The point is debatable. 60. Faulkner, Sanctuary, 218. 61. Ibid., 216. 62. Ibid., 223. 63. Duvall, Faulkner’s Marginal Couple, 73; James Polchin, “Selling a Novel: Faulkner’s Sanctuary as a Psychosexual Text,” in Kartiganer and Abadie, Faulkner and Gender, 154; Noel Polk, “The Space between Sanctuary,” in Intertextuality in Faulkner, ed. Michael Gresset and Noel Polk (Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1985), 20. 64. Diane Roberts takes this tack with Temple Drake, labeling her the “new belle” who “pioneers a bisexual space.” Diane Roberts, Faulkner and Southern Womanhood (Athens: Georgia UP, 1994), 103. Like Duvall and Polk regarding Horace, this assertion focuses more on role than on agency. 65. A common Faulkner trope. The most palpable example is the smell of honeysuckle in The Sound and the Fury that drives Quentin Compson crazy in the presence of his sister Caddie.

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66. William Faulkner, The Wild Palms (1939; repr., New York: Vintage, 1995), 174. 67. Ibid., 113. 68. Ibid., 103. 69. Ibid., 44–45. 70. Faulkner “masculinizes” some women, such as Charlotte, Joanna Burden, and Addie Bundren, but then makes them subjected to their own femininity in one way or the other. The suggestion may be that Faulkner sees the male/female dichotomy as inescapable. 71. Duvall, Faulkner’s Marginal Couple, 46. 72. William Faulkner, The Unvanquished (1934; repr., New York: Vintage, 1991), 100–101. 73. Ibid., 237. 74. Sherrill Harbison, “Two Sartoris Women: Faulkner, Femininity, and Changing Times,” in Critical Essays on William Faulkner: The Sartoris Family, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985), 292. 75. Patricia Yaeger, “Faulkner’s ‘Greek Amphora Priestess’: Verbena and Violence in The Unvanquished,” in Kartiganer and Abadie, Faulkner and Gender, 224–225. 76. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, The Shaping of Southern Culture (Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 2001), 280. 77. William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (1940; repr., New York: Vintage, 1990), 250. 78. Kinney, Go Down, Moses, 42. 79. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (1981; repr., New York: Norton, 1998), 34. 80. Faulkner, Go Down, Moses, 270–271. 81. Ibid., 245–246. 82. William Faulkner, quoted in Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, eds., Faulkner in the University (1959; repr., Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 1995), 246. 83. Kinney, Go Down, Moses, 127. 84. Faulkner, Go Down, Moses, 3.

Chapter 5 1. William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! (1936; repr., New York: Vintage, 1990). 2. William Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th ed., ed. David Bevington (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 1097. 3. Michael Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature (Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1998), 127. 4. Ibid., 105. 5.C. Hugh Holman sees Quentin as atonement for Southern sins, Faulkner’s Christ figure. C. Hugh Holman, The Roots of Southern Writing (Athens:

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Georgia UP, 1972), 12, 93. For Eric Sundquist, Quentin is a Southern Hamlet, a merging of Bayard and Horace and the forerunner of Ike McCaslin and in turn Gavin Stevens. Eric J. Sundquist, Faulkner: The House Divided (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985), 15, 17, 153. Leslie Fiedler posits Quentin as Faulkner’s conscience. Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1966; repr., Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1997), 414. John T. Irwin admits, “It is tempting to see in Quentin a surrogate of Faulkner, a double who is fated to retell and reenact the same story throughout his life just as Faulkner seemed fated.” John T. Irwin, Doubling and Incest/ Repetition and Rape: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1975), 158. Finally, see also James G. Watson, William Faulkner: Self-Presentation and Performance (Austin: Texas UP, 2000), 149. 6. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 2nd ed., ed. David Minter (1929; repr., New York: Norton, 1994), 100; Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 303. 7. William Faulkner, quoted in Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, eds., Faulkner in the University (1959; repr., Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 1995), 17. 8. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 142. 9. William Taylor explains, “The introverted gentleman has a long history in Southern fiction which runs the gamut from Poe’s neurasthenic Roderick Usher to Faulkner’s Quentin Compson III and includes along the way contributions by Simms, Harriet Beecher Stowe and practically all the talents large and small that have examined Southern life.” William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee (New York: Braziller, 1961), 160. 10. Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” 1072. 11. Ibid., 1075. 12. Andre Bleikasten, “Fathers in Faulkner,” in The Fictional Father: Lacanian Readings of the Text, ed. Robert Con Davis (Amherst: Massachusetts UP, 1981), 128. 13. Faulkner, Sound and the Fury, 48. 14. Ibid., 206. 15. Sundquist, Faulkner, 91. 16. Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” 1112. 17. Malcolm Cowley, The Faulkner-Cowley File: Letters and Memories, 1944–1962 (New York: Viking, 1966), 14. 18. Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993), 177–180. 19. Gwynn and Blotner, Faulkner in the University, 3. 20. Susan V. Donaldson, “Faulkner and Masculinity,” The Faulkner Journal 15, no. 1–2 (Fall 1999–Spring 2000): 3–13. 21. For an in-depth discussion of the legend of Colonel Falkner, see Richard Gray, The Life of William Faulkner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 63–64.

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22. William Faulkner, quoted in M. Thomas Inge, ed., Conversations with William Faulkner (Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1999), 213. 23. Sundquist, Faulkner, 10. See also Minrose C. Gwin, “Hearing Caddy’s Voice,” in The Sound and the Fury: A Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed., ed. David Minter (New York: Norton, 1994), 412. 24. Inge, Conversations with William Faulkner, 213. 25. See Evy Varsamopoulou, “The Crisis of Masculinity and Action in The Sound and the Fury: Quentin Compson’s Modernist Oedipus,” Renaissance and Modern Studies 41 (1998): 132–133. 26. Faulkner, Sound and the Fury, 96. 27. Ibid., 66. 28. Rupin W. Desai, Yeats’s Shakespeare (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1971), 15, 21, 27–33. 29. William Shakespeare, “Richard II,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shakespeare, 745, 746. 30. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 168. 31. Watson, William Faulkner, 63. 32. Faulkner, Sound and the Fury, 51. 33. Ibid., 71. 34. Ibid., 113. 35. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 7. 36. Faulkner, Sound and the Fury, 74. 37. Ibid., 69, 70. 38. Ibid., 96. 39. Ibid., 50. 40. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 4–5. 41. Faulkner, Sound and the Fury, 101. 42. Irwin, Doubling and Incest/ Repetition and Rape, 110. 43. Faulkner, Sound and the Fury, 51. 44. Joel Williamson explains, “Faulkner was profoundly critical of the sex roles prescribed by the Southern social order. Repeatedly he measured the distance between what society insisted was ordinary and ideal progression and what actually happened.” Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History, 366. Quentin could be exhibit “A” in Williamson’s case. 45. Faulkner, Sound and the Fury, 89, 105. 46. Ibid., 73. 47. Anne Goodwyn Jones, “Desire and Dismemberment: Faulkner and the Ideology of Penetration,” in Faulkner and Ideology, ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1995), 164. 48. Faulkner, Sound and the Fury, 78. 49. Watson, William Faulkner, 185. Watson argues that Quentin begets his own father, an idea that influences my thinking here. 50. For an example of this kind of Lacanian/Freudian reading of Quentin and Mr. Compson’s relationship, see Andre Bleikasten, “Faulkner’s Most Splendid Failure,” in Critical Essays on William Faulkner: The

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Compson Family, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978), 268–287. In a separate essay, Bleikasten also sees Sutpen’s story as Quentin’s acting out of his internal struggle in The Sound and the Fury. Bleikasten, “Fathers in Faulkner,” 115–146. Joseph A. Boone argues that Quentin’s narration is an attempt to take on his father. Joseph A. Boone, “Creation by the Father’s Fiat,” in Refiguring the Father, ed. Patricia Yaeger and Beth Kowaleski-Wallace (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1989), 209–237. 51. Noel Polk, “Testing Masculinity in the Snopes Trilogy,” The Faulkner Journal 16, no. 3 (Fall 2000–Spring 2001): 4. 52. Gwynn and Blotner, Faulkner in the University, 71, 73. 53. Joseph L. Blotner, ed., Selected Letters of William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1977), 79. 54. Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” 1096. 55. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 24. 56. Boone, “Creation by the Father’s Fiat,” 213. 57. William Shakespeare, “The Tempest,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shakespeare, 1531. 58. Richard Gray, Writing the South (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), 182. 59. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 21. 60. Ibid., 204. The insert is mine. 61. Bleikasten suggests that Sutpen is Faulkner’s most masculine father and self-generative. Bleikasten, “Fathers in Faulkner,” 128. Bleikasten does not relate the attempt at generation to Quentin; his first point is echoed in Irwin, Doubling and Incest/ Repetition and Rape, 98; and Malcolm Cowley, A Second Flowering (New York: Viking, 1974), 143. See also John N. Duvall, Faulkner’s Marginal Couple: Invisible, Outlaw, and Unspeakable Communities (Austin: Texas UP, 1990), 101–102. 62. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 181. 63. Ibid., 188. 64. John Duvall discusses the idea of Sutpen as having two fathers—one biological and the other ideological. Duvall, Faulkner’s Marginal Couple, 104–113. In a sense, the same could be said of Quentin. 65. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 190. 66. Carolyn Porter considers at length Sutpen’s splitting, the relationship of Sutpen to his father, and how Quentin makes Sutpen and is in turn made by him. Carolyn Porter, “Absalom! Absalom! (Un)making the Father,” in The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, ed. Philip M. Weinstein (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 168–196. 67. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 10, 11. 68. Ibid., 37–38. 69. Faulkner told his class at the University of Virginia, “Shreve was the commentator that held the thing to something of reality. If Quentin had been let alone to tell it, it would have been completely unreal.” Gwynn and Blotner, Faulkner in the University, 71.

186

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70. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 214. 71. Ibid., 220. 72. Thomas Loebel posits men “making” men in relation to Quentin and Shreve and the homosexual implications of this action. Thomas Loebel, “Love of Masculinity,” The Faulkner Journal 15, no. 1–2 (Fall 1999–Spring 2000): 83–106. Also see Irwin, Doubling and Incest/ Repetition and Rape, 75. 73. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 289. 74. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (1966; repr., New York: Norton, 1977), 217. 75. Ibid., 321. 76. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 76–77. 77. Ibid., 62. 78. Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” 1086. 79. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 78. 80. Ibid., 76. 81. Ibid., 253. 82. Ibid., 76. 83. Ibid., 240. 84. “The Power to look is closely associated with the power to tell stories—to explain what one sees and knows.” Susan V. Donaldson, “Reading Faulkner Reading Cowley Reading Faulkner: Authority and Gender in the Compson Appendix,” The Faulkner Journal 7, no. 1–2 (Fall 1991–Spring 1992): 28. For an in-depth analysis of Faulkner’s emphasis on seeing, see Gray, Writing the South, 177–178. 85. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 147–148. 86. Ibid., 62, 139. 87. Richard Gray notes, “Quentin sometimes sees both Henry and Charles Bon as dark reflections of himself, since the two are remembered as respectively the self-proclaimed protector and the would-be violator of a sister’s ‘honor.’ ” Gray, Life of William Faulkner, 219. 88. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 76–77. 89. Irwin, Doubling and Incest/ Repetition and Rape, 32; John N. Duvall, “Faulkner’s Crying Game: Male Homosexual Panic,” in Faulkner and Gender, ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1996), 57; Noel Polk, “The Artist as Cuckold,” in Kartiganer and Abadie, Faulkner and Gender, 24. 90. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 86. 91. Ibid., 18. 92. Ibid., 95–96. 93. Faulkner, Sound and the Fury, 50. 94. Ibid., 109. 95. Anne Goodwyn Jones, “The Work of Gender in the Southern Renaissance,” in Southern Writers and Their Worlds, ed. Christopher Morris and Steven G. Reinhardt (Arlington: Texas A&M UP, 1996), 47.

N ot e s

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96. Inge, Conversations with William Faulkner, 55. 97. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 83. 98. Ibid., 146. 99. Faulkner, Sound and the Fury, 49, 61. 100. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 222. 101. Ibid., 210. 102. Gail Mortimer, “The Masculinity of Faulkner’s Thought,” The Faulkner Journal 4, no. 1–2 (Fall 1988–Spring 1989): 78. 103. Lothar Honnighausen suggests that all of this fluidity and the narrative stance are a result of Faulkner’s tendency for masks and role-play in his own life. Lothar Honnighausen, Faulkner: Masks and Metaphors (Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1997). 104. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 243. 105. Ibid. 106. Richard Gray discusses Quentin and Shreve’s recreating and how it relates to the reader. See Gray, Writing the South, 182–192. Also see Sundquist, Faulkner, 126. 107. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 236. 108. Ibid., 267. 109. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 241. 110. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 80. 111. Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” 1115. 112. William Shakespeare, “Othello,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shakespeare, 1166. 113. Mired in Freudian paradigms, Evy Varsamopoulou sees Quentin’s death as the triumph of the father over the son. Varsamopoulou, “Crisis of Masculinity and Action in Sound and the Fury,” 132–143. 114. Faulkner, Sound and the Fury, 113. 115. Donald M. Kartiganer, “Quentin Compson and Faulkner’s Drama of the Generations,” in Kinney, Critical Essays on William Faulkner, 399. 116. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 176. 117. James G. Watson argues that the narrators of Absalom are “persistently and pervasively” theatrical and suggests that one reason for their being so is Faulkner’s tendency to be so himself. Watson, William Faulkner, 126–129. 118. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 57. 119. Jay Watson sees this Player as patriarchal law itself and considers the Player’s/the law’s ramifications for gender policing. Jay Watson, “Overdoing Masculinity in Light in August; or, Joe Christmas and the Gender Guard,” The Faulkner Journal 9, no. 1–2 (Fall 1993–Spring 1994): 149–177. James G. Watson sees the Player as a metaphoric version of Faulkner himself. Watson, William Faulkner, 137–138. 120. William Faulkner, Light in August (1932; repr., New York: Vintage, 1990), 462–463. 121. Ibid., 464.

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122. William Faulkner, Mosquitoes (1927; repr., New York: Dell, 1965), 119–120. 123. William Shakespeare, “As You Like It,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shakespeare, 305.

Epilogue 1. Ellen Dissanayake, “ ‘Making Special’: An Undescribed Human Universal and the Core of a Behavior of Art,” in Biopoetics, ed. Brett Cooke and Frederick Turner (Lexington, KY: Icus), 38.

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Index

1 Henry IV 12, 22, 25, 27, 41 2 Henry IV ix, 37, 41 1 King Henry VI 50 Absalom! Absalom! xiv, 121, 127–128, 131, 133–136, 138, 143–145, 147–149, 151 Adams, John Quincy 95 “Americanism in Literature” 32 “Antagonisms of the Social Moral. North and South” 34 As I Lay Dying 127 As You Like It 44, 50, 53–54, 67–68, 75, 115, 122 Bargainnier, Earl F. 172n132 Beauchampe 2 Birth of a Nation, The 85, 99, 106 black rapist beast xiii, 57, 69, 80, 88, 91, 93–95, 100, 102–103, 105, 124 Bleikasten, Andre 184–185n50, 185n61 Blight, David 174–175n42 Bloom, Harold 169–170n68, 177–178n108 Bloomfield, Maxwell 177n105 Boone, Joseph A. 185n50 Border Beagles 157n25 Bred in the Bone 58 Brichford, Charles H. 18 Bristol, Michael D. 157n19, 166n11, 173–174n19, 177n103 Butler, Judith xi, 3–4, 6, 11, 21, 26, 44–47, 50, 53, 65, 83, 92,

112, 116–118, 121, 149; Bodies That Matter, xi, 3, 44–45, 112, 149; citationality, xi, 4, 6, 25, 35, 46–47, 52, 83, 92, 102, 106–107, 112, 115, 117–118, 149; Gender Trouble, 11, 21, 50, 117; performativity, 3, 6, 21, 46, 65, 107, 114, 116, 123, 134 Cable, George W. 51, 56 “Caloya: or, the Loves of the Driver” 18 Cash, W. J. 6–7, 12, 15, 159n43 Cassique of Kiawah 39 Charleston 5, 10, 23–24, 30, 41; Charleston Mercury, 40–41 Christmann, James 168n39 Clansman, The xiii, 51, 74–75, 78–81, 84–85, 88, 93–95, 99–101, 106 Compromise of 1850 14, 22 Compson, Quentin 120, 127–128; actor, 135; failed masculinity, 112, 133–134; narrative control, 130, 140–141, 146, 151; role of son, 113, 129, 137 Confession 2 Cook, Raymond 78 Cooke, John Esten 39 Cowie, Alexander 158–159n37 Cowley, Malcom 129 Cub of the Panther, The 40 Davis, William C. 10, 29 Dissanayake, Ellen 153

200

Index

Dixon, Major Joseph 78 Dixon, Thomas, Jr.: actor 79; connection between biography and fiction, 105; Iago-like, xii; insecurity, 73, 104; racial radical, 19, 57, 69, 83, 101, 124. See also names of specific works Dixon, Thomas, Sr. 103, 106 Dobson, Michael xi, 6, 173n19 Dollimore, Jonathan 76, 166n11, 173n19 Donaldson, Susan V. 186n84 Duvall, John 185n64 Duyckinck, Evert 33, 40 Eby, Clare 175n50 Eutaw 4, 10, 24, 30, 38, 41 Falkner, Colonel William C. 130 Falstaff: appetite/body 9, 22; inappropriate father figure, 2, 8, 12–14, 23, 25, 110; model for Captain Porgy, 11, 15, 29, 39 Faulkner, William: author as father figure xv, 109, 152; haunted by past, 130; masculine poses, 115–116, 148; modernist project, xiv, 152. See also names of specific works Faust, Drew Gilpin 14 Fiedler, Leslie A. 183n5 Field, Florence Lathrop 64 Field, Henry 69 Flags in the Dust 111, 113–114, 116–117, 124 Flaming Sword, The 77, 106 Flusche, Michael 170–171n95, 171n119, 172n132 Foner, Eric 177n88 Forayers, The 4, 10, 18, 35–37 Foster, Gaines M. 167n24 Frye, Steven 163–164n129 Fugitive Slave Act 32

Gates, Jane 23–24 Gebhard, Caroline 161n76 Genovese, Eugene 160n61 Gillman, Susan 174n41 Glen-Eberly 14, 37 Go Down, Moses 124–125 Gordon Keith: character 62, 69; novel, 44, 48, 54, 58, 60, 63, 65–67, 69; parallels with Page’s life, 64 Gray, Richard: Life of William Faulkner 179n4, 183n21, 186n87; South to a New Place, 72; Writing the South, 166n4, 187n117 Great Redemption, The 47, 84 Greenblatt, Stephen 180n30 Griffith, D. W. 87, 99 Gross, Theodore 62, 169n51, 171n95, 172n131 Guilds, John C. ix, xii, 6, 23–24, 165n154 Guy Rivers 2, 25 Hal, Prince (Harry): character 9, 13–14, 27, 37, 61–62; type of masculinity, 2, 8, 11, 15, 29, 31, 75, 110 Hale, Grace 168n39, 169n60, 177n105 Hamlet: character 15, 63, 102, 128–129, 137, 150; play, 26–27, 61, 137–138; type of masculinity, 2, 11, 30, 75, 110–112, 116, 136–138, 142–143, 148 Hamlet, Sr. xi, 2, 15, 31, 61 Hammond, James Henry 13 Harper, Lucius C. 107 Harris, Cora 71–72 Harris, Joel Chandler 71 Henry IV (Bolingbroke): character 2, 37, 47; successful fatherking, 8, 13, 15

Index Henry V 9, 39, 57; character, 28, 91; type of masculinity, 1, 8–9, 31 Hetherington, Hugh 22–23, 41, 156n10, 158n36, 158n37, 159n46, 160n55, 162n112, 164n136, 165n148 Hobsbawm, Eric 167n18 Holman, C. Hugh 23, 28, 157n24, 158n37, 162n91, 165n159, 182–183n5 Honnighausen, Lothar 187n103 Hotspur x, 28, 31, 36; type of masculinity, 1, 2, 8–9, 11–12, 15, 22, 24–25, 29, 31, 75, 78, 110–111, 128, 138–139, 142–143, 145–146, 148 Hubble, Jay B. 165n159 Iago 70, 79, 86; character type, 2, 58–59, 84; as playwright/ author/actor, 76, 81–83, 87, 89–90 In Ole Virginia; or, Marse Chan and Other Stories 47–48, 50, 52, 54–55, 69, 71 Inscoe, John C. 175n57 Irwin, John T. 183n5 Jarrell, Hampton M. 158n37 Jim Crow laws 69, 88, 106 Johnson, Joseph 14 Joscelyn 2, 4, 10, 39 Katherine Walton 4, 9, 24, 27, 38, 41 Kennedy, John Pendleton 44 King, Grace Elizabeth 71 King, James Kimball 171n119 King Lear 5, 43–44, 48, 57–59; as character, 40, 66; sons, 60 Kinney, Arthur F. 178n139 Kinsmen, The 4 Kolin, Philip C. 157n23 Kreyling, Michael 128

201

Ku Klux Klan (KKK) 55, 75, 79–80, 94–95, 101–102, 106 Lacan, Jacques 111, 124–125, 142 Ladd, Barbara 172–173n143 Lanier, Henry W. 55 Lawson, James 28 Leopard’s Spots, The xiii, 51, 74–77, 80, 84–88, 94, 97, 99 “Life in Colonial Virginia” 45 Light in August 70, 121, 127, 151 Longstreet, Stephen 146 lost cause mythology xii, xiii, 2, 44–45, 47, 49–50, 52, 54, 58, 60, 62, 70–72, 74, 129 “Lynching of Negroes—Its Cause and Its Prevention” 69 Macbeth 21, 109, 115, 121; as character, 110, 117–118; type of masculinity, 2, 133 Mackethan, Lucinda 168–169n44 Magowan, Kimberly Iris 177n90, 178n116, 178n131 “Marse Chan” 43, 46–47, 52; as a character, 47, 50 Martineau, Harriet 15–16 McPherson, James M. 176–177n88 “Meh Lady” 50–51, 53 Mellichampe 4, 9, 33, 41 Merchant of Venice, The 122 Meriwether, James 30 Merry Wives of Windsor, The 20, 41 Michaels, Walter Benn 170n71 Midsummer Night’s Dream A, 67 Miles, William Porcher 25, 39 Moltke-Hansen, David 164n135 Mosquitoes 121, 151 Much Ado about Nothing 21, 53, 75, 92 “Negro: The Southerner’s Problem, The” 69 Nolan, Alan T. 167–168n28 Nullification Crisis 14

202

Index

“Oakatibbe; or, the Choctaw Sampson” 18 O’Connor, Flannery xiv Okker, Patricia 20 Old Dominion, The 46 Old South, The 45–46, 51, 63 Othello 70, 76, 79, 81, 85–86, 88, 96; as a character, 79, 82–83, 89, 90, 101–102, 110, 150 Paddy McGann 39 Page, Rosewell 48–49 Page, Thomas Nelson: African narrators 24, 81; anxiety, 45; appropriating Shakespeare, 44, 78; organic society, 57; racial conservative, 20, 70; redefining terms, 44, 60; romance author, xii, xiii, 43, 53, 56, 67–68, 75. See also names of specific works Page, Walter Hines 56, 75–76 Parks, Edd Winfield 157n24, 157n25 Partisan, The 2, 9, 11, 13, 19, 22–25, 28–29, 41 Porgy, Captain: actor 27; cultural hybrid, 9, 14; father-son amalgamation, 3, 10–11, 37; gentleman, 31–32, 38; representative character, 4–5, 12, 19, 26, 33 Porter, Carolyn 185n66 Reconstruction 20, 47, 55, 57, 59, 69, 73–74, 110 Reconstruction Trilogy, The 51, 74, 77 Red Riders, The 44 Red Rock 43, 48–49, 54–56, 58–60, 62, 69 Revolutionary War Series 4, 12, 14, 33, 35 Richard II 44, 66–67, 132; as a character, 132

Richard III 79 Richardson, Emily S. 171n101, 171n121 Richardson, Riche 175n50 Roberts, Diane 181n64 Rohauer, Raymond 106 Romeo and Juliet 44, 48, 53, 75; characters as a romantic paradigm, 2, 48–49, 52 Romine, Scott 168n39 Rubin, Louis D., Jr. 17, 165n152 Sabine, Lorenzo 28–29, 35 Sanctuary 111, 113, 117–121, 124, 131 Scout, The 4, 9 Sedgwick, Eve K. 144 “Sense of the Beautiful” 41 Shakespeare, William: appropriation of xii, 1, 22, 45, 66, 72, 74, 113, 150; deification of, xi, 7, 46, 61, 78; father figure, xiv–xv, 39, 109; father-son paradigms, 5, 30; unstable masculinity, 96. See also names of specific works Shillingsburg, Miriam J. 34 Shillingsburg, Peter L. 160–161n68 Simms, William Gilmore: appropriating Shakespeare 3, 5, 78; creating fathers, 11–12, 15, 22, 28; defensive nature, 9, 32–33; oratory, 1, 32; racial conservative, 16–17; reasons for study of, xii, 44, 128; young Simms, 23–24. See also names of specific works Simpson, Louis P. 173n19 Sinfield, Alan 46, 166n11, 173n19 Singleton, Robert 2, 9, 23–24 Sins of the Father, The 80, 99, 101–102, 104–106

Index Slavery in America, Being a Brief Review of Miss Martineau on That Subject 4, 15 Smith, Bruce R. xiv, 7–8, 107, 159n54 Smith, Harrison 137 Social Life in Virginia before the War 46, 64, 71 Social Principle: The True Source of National Permanence, The 4, 16 Sound and the Fury, The xiv, 115, 120, 128–129, 130–133, 136–138, 144–145, 147, 149, 150 Southern Convention, The 4, 17, 33–34 Southern Horizons 73, 77, 84, 94, 98, 105–106 Southern Literary Gazette 7 Stevens, Thaddeus 75, 84, 100 Sundquist, Eric J. 176n87, 178n120, 183n5 Taylor, Helen 45 Taylor, William 156n10, 158n34, 163n122, 183n9 Tempest, The 67, 76, 96–97, 138 Timon of Athens 7 Traitor, The 51, 74–75, 80, 95, 102 Trent, William P. 158n37 Turner, Nat 19 Twelfth Night 122 “Uncle Gabe’s White Folks” 44, 50 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 80, 87, 92 Under the Crust 58 Unvanquished 122–124

203

Views and Reviews in American Literature, History, and Fiction 6 Voltmeier 39 Watson, Charles S. 156n8, 158n37, 161–162n90, 163n123, 163n126 Watson, James 184n49, 187n117, 187n119 Whaley, Grace W. 157n25 Wigwam and the Cabin, The 18, 34 Wild Palms, The 121–122, 127 Williamson, Joel 16, 51, 56, 77, 175n57, 177n105, 184n44; The Crucible of Race, 16, 51, 77; racial conservatism, 16–17, 51–52, 56, 76, 91; racial liberalism, 51; racial radicalism, 19, 69, 79, 84, 93, 106 Wimsatt, Mary Ann 23, 29, 156n7, 162n111 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 114 Woodcraft 4, 9–11, 14, 17, 20–22, 25, 31–33, 35–36, 38, 41; alternate titles, 30 Wyatt-Brown, Bertram: The Shaping of Southern Culture 45, 155–156n2; Southern Honor, 156n13, 157n33, 161n87, 162n101, 163n118, 167n13, 177n101 Yeats, W. B. 132 Yemassee, The 2, 17 Young America Group, The 33 Zinn, Howard 98–99, 106