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American Regional Theory:

Toward a Theory o f the Region in the United States
and its Roles in the Production o f American Literature and Culture
by
Robert A Jackson
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor o f Philosophy
Department o f English
New York University
September 2001
Prof. Elizabeth McHenry
UMI Number: 3024681
Copyright 2001 by
Jackson, Robert Andrew
All rights reserved.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To my director, Elizabeth McHenry, goes the most immediate gratitude

upon completion of this project, for her steady support and constant enthusiasm
during its writing and revision. I am also deeply indebted to Ana Dopico and Una
Chaudhuri, whose diverse insights into many o f the fields peripheral to regionalism
served to shape my own body of work from the beginning and to widen my gaze in
seemingly endless, incalculably enriching ways. This dissertation could not have
been completed without their influence.
Among the many debts of gratitude at NYU, I must single out Frederick R.
Karl and Josephine Hendin for their mentorship and for the high scholarly
standards which they themselves set and demanded from me at all times. At
Loyola Marymount University, Paul Harris deserves particular recognition for his
brilliance in teaching Faulkner. At the University of Chicago, where I owe thanks
to more individuals than space would permit, W. J. T. Mitchell and David
Bevington deserve special mention.
Finally, I would like to thank the English faculty at St. Louis University
High School for starting me out on this path, and for achieving a rare and
invaluable balance in their teaching between intellectual rigor and spirituality that
has sustained my own model of the scholars vocation ever since.
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
11
LIST OF FIGURES
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
IV
Manifest Regional Destiny: Toward a Theory o f the Region

in the United States
The Emergence of Mark Twains Missouri: Regional Theory

and the Fog Episode in The Adventures o f Huckleberry Finn
44
American Idols, Regional Dissidents: William Faulkner and

the Invention of the South
94
CHAPTER 4
Irony and Idolatry/Satire and Salvation: Flannery O Connors

Modest Vision
162
CHAPTER 5
Freshening the Pain: Regional and Racial Constructions in

Toni Morrison
212
CONCLUSION From Darky to Dissident, Ethical Past to Leading Region:

Renaming the Self and Reclaiming the Region in
American Culture
277
BIBLIOGRAPHY
291
in
LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 1 Monument Valley, Stagecoach, 1939.

Fig. 2 St. Louis view o f the world, wood engraving by William Mackwitz,
Central Magazine, July 1874.
iv
Fig. 1 Monument Valley, Stagecoach, Dir. John Ford, United Artists, 1939.
Fig. 2 St. Louis view o f the world, wood engraving by William Mackwitz,
Central Magazine, July 1874; rpt. in James Neal Primm, Lion o f the
Valley: St. Louis, Missouri, 1764-1980 (1981; St. Louis: Missouri
Historical Society P, 1998) 276.
vi
CH APTER 1
Manifest Regional Destiny:
Toward a Theory o f the Region in the United States
Freedom is not possible without slavery.

-- Richmond Enquirer, April 15, 1856
Ethical Past, Contested History: Region and The Tension o f American Culture
The above epigram enjoys an eerily appropriate place in the background of

my study o f constructions of region in the United States, as well as in the wider
landscape o f American intellectual and cultural history.1 Most centrally for my
purposes, it expresses something of the intimate American connection between
imperial and republican ideals, and of the tension between them that has served as
one o f the primary forces in the generation o f American culture since the nations
birth. In its own time, during the years between the Mexican War which scored
Texas, New Mexico and California for the U.S., and the Civil War which, more
than any event since the Revolution, would shape the mature identity of the restless,
adolescent American nation, the statement that freedom is not possible without
slavery" triggered radically divisive responses. Among the Southern states that
would form the Confederacy a few years later, such a statement was used most
essentially to persuade poor whites o f the desirability o f their station; their freedom,
it was implied, resided in the superiority o f their position to that of the large slave
population in their society. As Governor Joseph E. Brown put it in a speech to an
intensely devoted north Georgia constituency around the same time, the poor white
laborer belongs to the only true aristocracy, the race o f white men.'2 Thus
freedom, from a certain, rather heavily slanted perspective, depends on slavery.
And in this way, the Confederacys demand for liberty by way of slaverys
preservation claimed a revolutionary spirit whose rhetoric invoked the American
Revolution.
Not surprisingly, of course, a less accommodating audience would greet this
rationale, which historian James M. McPherson bluntly calls Orwellian, in the
states where slavery did not exist (244). Where slavery required no intellectual
defense and, more urgently, could not be used to unite economically disadvantaged
white men in militant defense o f the slave system itself, the idea that freedom is
not possible without slavery amounted to a fabulous lie indeed. Ridiculing the
Souths bloated, misleading rhetoric of revolution, the New York Tribune in 1862
attacked what it saw more plainly as a counterrevolution reversing the wheels o f
progress [. . .] to hurl everything backward into deepest darkness [.. ,].3 It is
interesting, o f course, that this beacon of Northern light invoke the lurid image o f
deepest darkness to decry the Souths despotic transgression o f natural law. Even
in the crusade to clear the way for the momentum of American civilization, it is
perhaps more than slightly revealing that blackness itself expresses for the North
both its central impediment to progress and its most profound and instinctive
fear. Such a blind spot, the astute Southern critic might suggest, conceals the
Norths own imperial designs from itself, and encodes its own fantasies o f conquest
in self-serving, plausibly deniable, and, of course, hypocritical terms.
But apart from the somewhat predictable sectional bias revealed in these
interpretations, the statement that freedom is not possible without slavery
contains an unintentional accuracy in a more purely historical sense. For Americas
self-conception as a free country, its ideals of self-determination and liberty
emerge squarely from its previous system of economic, if not physical, slavery, that
is, from its status as a British colony and its successful revolution against the
tyranny of British imperialism. In a wholly American mythological sense, then,
nothing could be truer than the statement that freedom comes from slavery. Thus
the trajectory of American identity, moving from a condition of slavery to one of
freedom, requires the former in order to be able to frame the latter in concrete,
positive terms. Freedom, literally, is not possible without slavery, just as
Americas republican conception o f government arises in self-conscious relation to

its prior colonial subjugation.
If freedom is not possible without slavery, perhaps it depends on other
things as well. The title o f McPhersons history of the Civil War era, Battle Cry o f
Freedom, suggests another, doubtlessly related possibility: the necessity for war, its
promulgations, defenses, executions, and conquests, as an ongoing element in the
maintenance of American freedom. Certainly the contributors to the 1993
Cultures o f United States Imperialism, a volume whose inspiration was American
involvement in the Persian Gulf War, would find the idea suggestive. Building on
the work of historian William Appleman Williams, who argued as early as the
1950s that one o f the central themes of American historiography is that there is no
American Empire, Cultures o f United States Imperialism takes for its subject the
multiple histories o f continental and overseas expansion, conquest, conflict, and
resistance which have shaped the cultures o f the United States and the cultures of
those it has dominated within and beyond its geopolitical boundaries.4 By
relating those internal categories of gender, race, and ethnicity to the global
dynamics of empire-building, as Amy Kaplan writes in her introduction, the
collection addresses these central multicultural American discourses with a kind of
revisionist attention; at work is a critical methodology that questions American
exceptionalism from traditional European postcolonial theory and posits empire-
building as a force inherent to the American continuum rather than as a mere

aberration in unrelated episodes o f U.S. domestic and foreign history (16). The
critical synthesis Kaplan describes here has important implications for studies o f
American culture. Most fundamentally, it becomes clear that the tension between
the immediate goals o f a colonial expansionist motive, and the basic republican
ideals of self-government and self-determination that are so vital to the nations
self-image, constitutes a primary force in the generation o f culture in the United
States. This tension is prominent not only in the original states along the Eastern
seaboard, whose active role in the anti-colonial revolution against the British
Empire gave birth to their democratic system in the first place; but it also
characterizes, and with increasingly problematic significance for the nation as a
whole, those spaces to the west that were successively colonized and granted
statehood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Expressed most essentially, the question at the source o f such confusion and
anxiety for Americans may be posed this way: are we, then, an empire, or a
republic? Throughout this work I want to make a number o f contentions. First, 1
want to contend that the United States has attempted to affirm both possibilities
whenever possible, and to deny that such a response to the question could be, at
some level, deeply inconsistent. Second, I want to suggest that the nations overall
sense of identity is constructed precisely in the often extraordinarily delicate, and
frequently violent, balance between empire and republic: between the aims o f an
outward-looking imperialist impulse, whose cultural products arise from a
mythology o f conquest and its justifications, and the civic-minded concerns of
republican idealism, whose focus on the ongoing provision and maintenance of
individual rights within the existing democratic polis produces a very different kind
o f culture. Finally, and most importantly for this study, I want to argue that it is
exactly this problematic and often contradictory nature of expanding national space
that endows the smaller and more discrete spaces within the United States with
their unique cultural identities.
Concepts of region are particularly important in the American context not
only because o f the regions role as a primary repository for the kind o f highly
complex culture produced by such a nation, but also because the American region
stands in distinct contrast to European notions o f region and regional identity. Both
of these aspects are discernible in the vagueness and contestability o f the
contemporary notion of region that critic Roberto Maria Dainotto expresses in his
concern with the edges o f such spaces: Do regions exist as geographical realities,
independently from the purely arbitrary territorial divisions that nations - and their
kings, the regis - have ruled (in the etymological sense o f regere)? Where does the
region begin, and where does it end?5 The Latin origin of the word itself suggests
the geographic, political, and cultural fixity, that is, a sense of absolute confidence
in the authority and source of identity and citizenship, enjoyed by residents of the
European nation-state. Emerging from this kind o f historical awareness that
reaches back at least as far as the Middle Ages for its map of ideally bounded
spaces, Dainottos questions speak to the opposite condition, a condition more
prevalent in modernity and postmodemity precisely because of the nonexistence,
perhaps the extinction, o f such reliable spaces. The virtual impossibility of reading
space itself, especially at its contestable edges, then, mirrors the contemporary
challenge posed by competing narratives and cultural products to previously
unquestioned nationalist identities. Dainottos history o f the concept o f region
portrays nothing less than an unfolding existential crisis in modernity, a crisis
which modem regional literature attempts to resolve in culturally encoded spatial
terms. Lacking definitive identity in too complex and chaotic a world where
nationalist ideals have been discredited, one is suspended in a state of exile.
Dainotto explains the modem regional literary response to this state and its
significance:
A sense o f almost Sartrean nausea before the vast terrain of an

otherwise boundless sensibility makes boundaries o f some sort
essential for this kind of literature, which, free from political
impositions, would otherwise remain in perpetual exile [...]. The
regionalist restoration of place - a locale or area without historical
or geographical reference - as a fundamental category for the
understanding of human sensibility or culture exemplifies a more
general epistemological attempt that characterizes our present. (493)
That it is virtually impossible to identify the actual, geographic location o f such a

region in a present reality suggests further its role as a stand-in, metaphorically,
spatially, for what Dainotto calls an ethical past (493). With this phrase,
Dainotto implies a kind o f prescriptive space that can be evoked in narratives to
counter the ideal, moral, and existential challenges o f our less than ideal present.
History itself complete with modernitys existential challenges and
disappointments -- is the victim o f erasure here, replaced instead by the region, a
kind o f homogeneous and ideal space that commands a renewed, and often
menacing and reactionary, power o f authenticity. Thus it is not surprising that
Dainottos recent work, Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities, in
which he seeks to reconstruct a genealogy o f the literature o f place and region - the
kind o f literature, namely, erected on the commonplace o f a perfect and communal
living, has for its logical endpoint the seductive connection between regionalism
and fascism, which promotes a localism of blood and soil that pacifies social
conflict through the idea o f Volkgemeinschaft.6
In his introductory remarks, Dainotto speaks to the context of the modem
European literature and culture addressed in his overall study. Just as the region
itself proved maddeningly difficult to define in critical terms, so does regionalism
defy generic labeling and require a distinct approach because o f its commonplace
of perfect and communal living:
This is the commonplace that occasions the figural reading we call

regionalism a reading culminating, in fact, in some sort o f
pastoralization o f social divisions. I would like to insist, first of
all, on the fact that regionalism is not a literary genre a pastoral
but a way o f reading. It is an attempt, in other words, to find an
answer to the so-called crisis of modernity in a body o f literary
texts pastoralized exactly to offer such answers. (30)
The process at work here might be understood as a colonization o f Europes own

past in order to mine new cultural resources from perceived spaces whose
authenticity is viewed as limitless, recoverable, and desirable by those trapped in an
uncertain modernity. And it is this gesture, which as Dainotto points out often
tends to the reactionary mythos o f fascism, that might be compared to the parallel
responses to modernity in the United States. For as the revisionism o f Cultures o f
United States Imperialism serves to remind us, American history is plagued by
competing and often tangled cultural narratives from its very beginning, narratives
whose existence complicates any gesture to construct a pastoral or utopian vision of
the past. Consider the obvious example o f such nationalizing American myths as
those o f the Founding Fathers and the American Revolution itself, formulated with
an intent equivalent to that o f the European nationalist Grand Narratives of the
past, but countered even in their own time, and certainly even more so today, by the
continuously troubling presence o f such hard facts as slavery and Native

American repression, both products of the ongoing colonial appropriation and
expansion of the continent.7
But Dainottos model o f the ethical past so effectively evoked in the
modem European literature and culture he confronts has another, more fundamental
obstacle in the United States. This kind o f ethical past is problematic in America
precisely because slavery', not utopia, is the originary condition from which
freedom, that most vaunted o f American ideals, has arisen. The American
progression moves from colonial subjugation to republican independence, and thus
suggests that American culture, and, importantly for this study, American
constructions of region, reveal more ambivalent attitudes toward the past. This is
not to suggest that American cultural products have not revealed the desire to claim
an authentic, utopian, or prelapsarian American past in many contexts, nor that the
European model o f regionalism advanced by Dainotto has no equivalent in the
United States. Indeed, it would not be difficult to conceive a genealogy of
American culture whose reactionary and anti-modem sentiments parallel the
European anxiety that leads to fascism itself. My point here is a more complex one.
Alongside Americas storied history of nostalgic utopian constructions, there is a
parallel history of the complication, frustration, and, ultimately, failure o f such
gestures. I want to suggest that this parallel history may serve as a potentially
10
valuable resource; for the American inability to apply the European model o f
regionalism in straightforward terms, that is, as a colonization of its own past to
supply the authenticity believed to be so sorely lacking in the present, hints at the
possibility for a relationship between past and present in the United States that is
both more accurate in its treatment o f history and, ultimately, more effective in its
engagement with the complexities o f the present. The sense that such ambivalence
has always existed in America may suggest that the American crisis o f modernity
does not call for the kind o f nostalgic escapism that marks the European flight back
to a supposedly authentic past (as located ideally in the region), or, at least, that
such a flight will prove inadequate to Americas own modem and existential
challenges. Rather, and here a conception of the unique constructions o f region in
the United States and insight into the larger forces driving American history and
culture seem to reinforce one another, the contradiction inherent in the
simultaneous advance of empire and republic in America, that is, across the actual
geography of the continent and the metaphorical space addressed in its cultural
products, invites a study o f the region that is more distinctly suited to this New
World setting.8
The issue of states rights provides a unique entry point into constructions
of region in America. Here too the tension between empire and republic is directly
visible. Initially this is made clear by the fact that each state, operating as an
11
individual unit that participates in the federal democratic process, originally existed
as a colony whose peoples and resources were the property o f a centralized imperial
power in Europe. And additionally, this tension is revealed by the fact that the
piecemeal but inexorable expansion o f the nation across the midsection o f the
continent, v/ith new states admitted to the union at distinct moments, repeats in the
new spaces the transition from colony to state and also, of course, enacts spatially
Americas overall identity as both colonial dependent and imperial authority.
Most famously, the issue o f states rights played a central role in the
sectional confrontation between the free states o f the North and the slave states of
the South that would culminate in the Civil War. In maintaining that slavery was
an issue that should be settled at the state level, that each state had the right to
determine its own political and cultural destiny in the matter, the South viewed
each individual state as the fundamental unit in a democratic nation, where the selfdetermination o f a decentralized state government is the ultimate safeguard against
the potentially autocratic invasiveness of federal power. But in the United States,
two things complicate this model in the antebellum South. The first, o f course, is
the institution o f slavery' itself, whose very nature reveals something of the actual
repression and cultural myopia that were possible even within a system
championing freedom from tyranny and claiming explicitly to value individual selfdetermination above all else. This fact alone may not have precipitated the war, or
12
at least, may not have done so in 1860, since it is clear that America had tolerated
slavery for nearly two and a half centuries and that slavery had not been an
impediment to the formation of the union in the first place. The best evidence of
the cultural pressure created by slavery resides in a series o f political compromises
and legal decisions in the decades before the war, that sought to preserve the
Congressional balance o f power and the republics emphasis on individualism
while still tolerating slavery where it already existed. The Missouri Compromise
and the case o f Dred Scott v. Sandford, among others, reveal the absurd
contradictions inherent in such a problematic overall system, and the lengths to
which the United States went to preserve the union and respect its tradition of
states rights even in the face of such obvious discrepancies.
The second complicating factor connected to slavery and states rights,
which ultimately proved too divisive and did have a direct influence on the
outbreak o f the war itself, was the question of expansion into the Western territories
beyond Missouri. In these spaces, whose status as colonies rather than states made
their claims for self-determination contestable by federal authority, the issue of
slavery was no longer negotiable by fragile sectional balances between North and
South. So consuming was the desire for new land to the West, and so universally
accepted was the manifest destiny of the expanding nation, that expansion into
the territories had become by the 1850s an arguably more important issue for both
13
Northern and Southern politicians than their own districts at home.9 As McPherson
writes, the doctrine o f manifest destiny lit a slow fuse to a powder keg that blew
the United States apart in 1861 (46). This fight over the West would be decided
by the outcome o f the Civil War. The Civil War, then, would be fought not merely
for the republican ideals advanced, albeit with different interpretations, by the
Union and the Confederacy, but also for the imperial motives, on both sides of the
Mason-Dixon Line, intent on determining the fate o f the entire tract of real estate
between Kansas City and San Francisco.
It should be clear by now that the Richmond Enquirer's 1856 declaration
that freedom is not possible without slavery resonates through all these issues
whose ultimate expression in America would be spatial: empire, republic, tyranny,
freedom, slavery, independence, nationhood, statehood, subjugation, sovereignty,
society, individualism, and of course, whiteness and blackness. And in this sense it
seems entirely appropriate that the Civil War, which demarcated the line between
opposing ideas and terms even as it brought them together, and which generated an
antagonism between North and South unmatched in intensity in American history
even as it produced middling, indecisive border states like Missouri and
Kentucky, was at bottom a struggle for regional recognition in a nation not entirely
at one with its own modernity. Consider the Souths quest to transform itself from
the legally obscure entity of region into the full-fledged corpus o f nation, and the
14
Norths parallel refusal to acknowledge not only the legitimacy o f that nation but
the very identity of the South as a region, that is, as culturally distinct in any
meaningful way from other parts of the United States. Both o f these acts illustrate
the extraordinary difficulty in defining the region in concrete and acceptable terms,
and, simultaneously, the explosiveness that such a nebulous entity is capable of
unleashing in the name o f something else: tyranny or freedom, empire or republic,
and so on. If the identity and role of the region in the United States are ill-defined
in terms o f critical discourse, they nevertheless exert an unmistakable and
contentious force in American culture.
Perhaps the closest the region may come to explicit definition, then, would
be in terms like those used by geographer Armand Fremont, who states that in
general, the region presents itself as a middle space, less extended than the nation
and the great space o f civilization, but wider than the social group. 10 In an
American context, this kind of vagueness may serve as an asset rather than a
liability. For despite the political geographys easy discernment o f three discrete
regions here -- the South o f slavery, the North o f freedom, and the West of an
undecided future -- the swirling forces of empire and republic, simultaneously
penetrating all o f this territory in complex ways which only multiply in the
aftermath o f the war, endow the overall cultural space with formidable ambiguity
and contradiction. Proceeding, in this environment, with a notion o f the region as
15
'a middle space expresses an appropriate critical sense o f caution. Resisting the
dangerous inclination to claim on behalf of the region the kind of simpler, innocent
past that Dainotto finds in modem Europes regionalist restoration o f place, a
critically viable American model o f the region must be mindful o f such strategies of
appropriation even as it conceives the region in its own less ideologically coded
terms.
Not surprisingly, this critical consciousness o f the region also brings to the
surface Americas fair share o f regional restorations and purportedly authentic
incarnations. What is striking, however, is the fact that these often emerge with
unexpectedly ambivalent results that only seem to confirm and aggravate the
tensions of American culture. One might read Dainottos description o f a sense of
almost Sartrean nausea before the vast terrain of an otherwise boundless
sensibility and think o f the American West in literature and especially in film, and
specifically the image o f nearly infinite horizontality the West evokes in the
American consciousness. The conventional establishing shot o f desert landscape in
Western films expresses the astounding sublimity o f space itself (see fig. 1). Such
an image works to reinforce the smallness, the out-of-placeness, the cosmic
insignificance of its lone human figure, and to frame the existential crisis of
modernity in an iconic American visual idiom. In this space, then, the white
m ans establishment o f boundaries in the Western narrative, often through fighting
16
Indians or staking claim to a specific and geometrically delineated piece of the land,
is literally a struggle for survival, elevated in the Westerns mythology to the level
o f a heroic, culturally foundational act.
The Western genre reveals the way that Americas complex history and
distinct self-conception produce a similarly nuanced cultural role for the region
itself. The West portrayed here is indeed situated nostalgically in the past, in a
time and place whose values and virtues such as manhood, individualism,
ambition, raw strength, courage, and, most generally, conquest itself -- still enjoyed
uncontested currency. In this American version, however, the region is continually
and interminably driving things forward: the forces of colonization, o f Manifest
Destiny, upon which the overall Western narrative depends inexorably propel
attention not into a golden, authentic past but into an unknown future, a time of
presumably limitless expansion and endless migration to an even more distant and
wilder West, toward the golden land of California. Responsive to the ambivalence
contained in this distinctly American movement west, Californias cultural status in
the Western genre (and, o f course, in a good deal of American culture in general)
represents both a utopian state of paradise and the gravitational pull o f death itself.12
Such a compelling insight as this is hardly surprising in light o f the contradictory
cultural forces competing in the same space in America throughout the nations
history. The West as a region does not spatialize a simple ethical past marked by
17
its natural and communal harmony; instead, it serves as a violent and unforgiving
place whose value lies in the fact that the individual man may at least experience
his own true (that is, male) nature there. In this hostile wilderness, man has the
opportunity to create his own ethical persona through his freedom to empire-build.
In the mythology of the Western genre, man may prove his heroism most
convincingly through the simple act o f survival. Such a powerful articulation o f
isolation, o f stoicism, serves as a kind o f dark side to the American ideal o f
individualism and provides an appropriately ambivalent response to the character of
American identity itself. And of course, it is through constructions o f region, in
this case the untamed West of yesteryear, that grounds the Western genres
narrative, that this expression is made possible.
Reconstructing St. Louis: The American Region as Cultural Unit
The cover the July 1874 issue o f Central Magazine pictures a map o f the
United States in which the city of St. Louis enjoys an almost obscenely privileged
position o f centrality (see fig. 2).13 Rotated ninety degrees from its usual
representation, the nation takes on the characteristics of a portrait rather than a
landscape. Boston and Norfolk are the northernmost points, San Francisco dangles
18
at the bottom, and St. Louis serves as the focal point in the middle. This orientation
gives the impression that a force no less fundamental and assiduous than gravity
itself is pulling everyone to the West. And with no fewer than eight railroad lines
from the East converging at St. Louis, the city resembles a funnel through which
the entire body of Western civilization must pass in the magnetic drift toward the
frontier. The railroads themselves serve this new vertical orientation o f the United
States, envisioning an East-West axis o f commerce and culture that will unite the
entire continent from sea to shining sea, bringing the ideal o f Manifest Destiny to
fulfillment. In this way, the railroad lines also serve to remap the cultural
geography o f a nation whose North-South orientation had been the primary
interregional self-conception before the Civil War, and whose rivers, particularly
the Mississippi with its vast current between the Upper Midwest and the Caribbean,
had been for so long the major vehicles o f settlement, transportation, and
commerce.
In all o f these ways, the map betrays a clearly industrial bias, complete with
industrys commitment to the machine economy headquartered in the Northeast,
over an increasingly outmoded agricultural economy. As such, this kind o f bias
illustrates a cultural victory of North over South that is emblematic o f the
Reconstruction era in general, and runs parallel to the crushing outcome of the Civil
War itself. But the fact that westward expansion and industrialization reinforce one
19
another also serves to unite the nation as a whole in new ways, as the railroad lines
throughout the South and the still-undeveloped Northwest attest. More important
here, however, is the lavish attention on St. Louis as a singular site in the overall
national landscape, as the one place, the one figure, that connects all others and
unifies them. In this depiction. St. Louis is literally the center of the world. The
lines on the terrain and in the seas and Great Lakes radiate outwards like radio
waves from a single, St. Louis-based antenna. The mountains of the East and West
are layered from the perspective of a St. Louis viewer, and the continent as a whole
seems to swell in a single vast mound with St. Louis as its panoptic pinnacle. The
magazine's revealing title, which brings to mind Fremonts regional middle
space, obscures much of New England and nearly all of California while framing
St. Louis in its central position. Even the names o f the other American towns
(for they hardly deserve to be called cities) are printed at angles that a St. Louis
reader will find easier to read. And perhaps the most powerful and subtle aspect o f
the image is the fact that the city is situated almost exactly at the center o f the map
and on the magazine cover, which is a gross exaggeration of the actual geography,
in which the distance from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean is no less than twice as
fa r as that from St. Louis to the Atlantic.
In these ways, this image of America is responsive to the pressures of its
historical moment and setting. The fact that it was envisioned during the
20
Reconstruction era hints at the transitional nature of the United States, the sense of
in-betweenness that the period experienced in its emergence from the Civil War and
its consolidation of new, increasingly modem identities. Set in Missouri, a border
state that did not secede despite its legalization o f slavery, St. Louis had strong ties
to both the Union and the Confederacy before and during the war. During
Reconstruction, the citys emerging relationships to railroad economies of the
Industrial Midwest and the developing Western territories and California provided
it with a wide range of commercial and cultural opportunities that, in addition to its
historically crucial site at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers,
provided some latitude for St. Louis to conceive itself. Perhaps the most important
single event o f this period in the citys growth was the construction o f the Eads
Bridge, a monumental, unprecedented structure spanning the Mississippi at
downtown St. Louis. The bridge was completed in June of 1874. scarcely a month
before Central Magazine would feature St. Louis so prominently; the bridge would
consolidate a number of these diverse commercial and cultural factions, such as the
railroad and steamboat transportation systems and their respective geographic
alliances, and advance St. Louis claim for cultural if not exactly spatial centrality.
Particularly between the lower Ohio Valley and the Rocky Mountains,
Reconstruction was also marked by frenzied civic boosterism on the part o f towns
that were trying to establish themselves in the emerging postwar economy. Scores
21
o f very young towns across the middle third of the continent routinely and
ridiculously exaggerated their status and potential. Places like Cairo, Illinois,
Napoleon, Arkansas, Falls City, Nebraska, Chariton, Missouri, and a host o f
Parises and New Athenses, as historian James Neal Primm writes, were among
those that argued vehemently on behalf o f their locational, economic, and cultural
advantages.14 That many of these names go unrecognized today reveals something
of the pitch of pure salesmanship common in such places. St. Louis, which during
Reconstruction was the fourth largest city in the United States and by far the most
important city on the continents interior, could hardly be grouped with such towns
as Chariton in this regard; and yet the booster spirit o f the time is unmistakable in
the Central Magazine maps presentation o f St. Louis. Looking at the map today,
one senses something of the insecurity that could be felt even by a cosmopolitan
city like St. Louis during a period o f such great upheaval and literal reconstruction.
But the hunger for relevance and connection, for recognition, in an evolving nation
seems to have produced, in this case, an overcompensating desire to transform St.
Louis into nothing less than the seat o f an empire. Responding to this notion in the
political arena, many prominent St. Louis leaders even advocated the idea o f
removing the nations capitol from Washington to St. Louis, going so far as to
organize a convention in 1869 that attracted wide support for the plan in the
22
surrounding states and in the West (before Eastern congressmen summarily crushed
the project).15
The fact that St. Louis has faded in relative national importance since the
Gilded Age, and especially during the twentieth century, may make its earlier
visions o f majesty, and the map theorizing such fantasies, appear rather
adolescently amusing. Nevertheless, the map articulates perfectly the empirebuilding tendencies o f the nation as they influence the self-image o f a smaller, more
discrete space like the St. Louis area. And one aspect o f this articulation that
remains interesting, even after a century o f remappings o f its cultural geography
and efforts to assimilate the evolving forces o f what it perceives as the American
national culture, is the sense that this smaller space, this middle space, has
remained distinct, unique in its own individual identity. Even the inane boosterism
and fantasies o f constructing an empire o f ones own, a Babylon o f the New
World, not standing on the banks of the Euphrates, but on the banks o f the great
Mississippi, as civic dreamer and real estate hustler Logan U. Reavis described St.
Louis at the time, seem mere perversions o f the more genuine and basic sense of
identity that adheres to the culture of a particular place.16 Such fantasies express an
entirely American pose o f defiance in the face of its own national empire, or, for
that matter, any other authority figure, whose influence is judged to be monolithic,
repressive, and not appropriately sensitive to the smaller middle space at stake.
23
Through this strategy o f picturing its own authority over the rest o f the American
nation, St. Louis inverts its perceived relation to America, its spatial status as one
mere individual in the face of the many a status that seems to flirt dangerously
with the notion o f enslavement. This appropriation o f the nation's status as
imperial authority for its own identity, however, envisions the preferable condition
not merely as freedom but, in a gesture as hierarchical as it is revolutionary, as
freedom by way o f mastery. Thus, in a manner simultaneously comic and
disquieting, the map presents a version of St. Louis that accomplishes several
things at once: even as it adopts the imperial model with what should be understood
as quite earnest economic motives, its comic, patently unrealistic mimicry o f a
more accurate map o f the same national geography displays a satirical resistance to
the idea of empire itself. St. Louiss self-representation as a reformed,
recognizable Other, as a subject o f difference that is almost the same, but not
quite, speaks in the familiar American idiom to its own inner tension, its
simultaneous longing for and suspicion of fulfillment o f the nations ideals, which
seem unable, in yet another expression of ambivalence, to separate freedom from
mastery, and thus, o f course, from slavery.17
The above description, taken from Homi Bhabhas discussion o f mimicrys
subversive role in colonial spaces, anticipates the extraordinary range o f intensely
contested meanings that have been projected, by competing perspectives and
24
narratives, onto any individual space in the United States. I want to suggest that
such an elaborate theoretical formulation o f the identity o f St. Louis during
Reconstruction, justifying and mythologizing its own privileged role in the life o f
the empire and, simultaneously, mocking the notion o f empire itself, is required
because of the ambivalence and tension inherent in the overall American design.
And while the idea o f St. Louis may be understood to represent the city and its
desired status as capitol in the former sense, it also seems to have what might be
considered a regional connotation in the latter sense. In its parody o f what it views
as a truly monolithic seat of power -- the federal establishment in the United
States during Reconstruction, St. Louis is emblematic of a kind of smaller and more
sensitive cultural unit that wants recognition and respect. This cultural unit
proceeds, as culture so often does, intuitively. Not exactly a state, which can be
mapped literally, has recourse to the letter of the law, and is subject to very specific
constitutional rights and prohibitions, the region encodes cultural meaning spatially
and metaphorically, and asserts its identity in more creative and innovative ways.
The regions spiritual defiance and intuitive self-image respond more subtly and
completely to the pressures and existential uncertainties o f external forces than a
merely legal structure could. And in the spaces o f the United States, endowed as
they were, and are, with such ambivalent and often contradictory forces most
essentially, as I have argued, the ideals of empire and republic -- the regions
25
ability, at its most articulate, to respond humanistically to such forces, represents a

potentially vital asset to American culture in general.
American Regional Theory: Critical Traditions and Design o f the Present Work
Before outlining the chapter by chapter progression o f my study, I think it

may be instructive to provide a kind o f historical background survey o f the critical
engagements with issues related to my own model o f the American region. Three
major strains o f criticism have grown into their own relatively distinct traditions,
each o f which informs my own work. The first o f these traditions may be
characterized by its attentiveness to concepts o f space and place in American
history and culture across a wide range o f fields from landscape painting to political
discourse. The work o f Henry Nash Smith and his student Leo Marx is emblematic
o f this kind o f criticism. Smiths Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and
Myth, and Marxs The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal
in America, represent two o f the most influential such studies.18 M arxs classic
examination o f the tension between the forces o f nature and technology, and the
role o f this tension in the production o f American culture, is considered along with
some o f his other writings in Chapter 2 o f my study. As that chapter discusses at
26
greater length, the critical method of thinkers like Marx and Smith is driven by a
perspective I have termed national, and whose ideological motives sometimes
overshadow the individual works of literature under consideration. While their
work has a key place in the tradition o f place-based studies, it has come to seem
rather severely dated when held up to a number of more recent, subtler treatments
o f American spaces, studies whose critical reflection on the assumptions of
methodology itself has provided a more cautious and balanced approach to both
criticism and primary cultural products. Nevertheless, it is important to
acknowledge the early sensitivity o f Smith and Marx to the unique spatial
properties in the emergence of American literature and culture.
Among the following generation of critics whose work is indebted to Smith
and Marx is Philip Fisher, whose Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American
Novel considers a number o f distinct models of space and place in American
literature. Utilizing a historiographic methodology similar to that of the earlier
critics, Fishers work nevertheless represents an advance in regional awareness in
part because it diverges from the kind of overarching and monolithic national
thesis that limits earlier works like The Machine in the Garden. More specifically,
Fisher is attentive to the particular literary resources at his disposal, as when, for
example, he demonstrates a greater sense of the role and subtleties o f genre in the
literary constructions of place in the works of Cooper, Stowe, and Dreiser. As a
27
result, his work reveals a greater flexibility in its critical method, a more thoughtful
consideration o f the ways that place and literary form coexist and influence one
another. Chapter 5 o f this study considers Fishers excellent reading o f Harriet
Beecher Stowes Darwinian and highly deterministic regional model in Uncle
Tom s Cabin, and places this reading in the context of my own regional reading o f
Toni Morrisons Beloved.
The second body o f work that has contributed significantly to place-based
studies in American culture has stemmed from the pioneering writings o f the late
John Brinckerhoff Jackson. What Jackson referred to as human geography, and
what is now also widely known as cultural landscape studies, constitutes an
interdisciplinary approach to American space that is perhaps best defined as the
way the natural landscape evolves over time as a result o f human presence and
influence. Jacksons founding of Landscape magazine in 1951 marked the earliest
explorations in this field, and his seven volumes of essays and criticism remain the
most complete articulation o f cultural landscape methodology to date.19 More
recently, publications such as the journal Places: A Forum o f Environmental
Design have continued to advance the field, as have critics including Todd W.
Bressi, Paul Groth, and Dell Upton.20 Attempting to meld theoretical models of
land use and social organization to practical settings, much o f this work has turned
in recent years to a more material concern with urban and suburban planning,
28
architectural design, environmentalism and ecology, and so on. This has resulted,
not surprisingly, in a decreasingly cultural, certainly less literary, view o f space,
favoring instead an awareness o f space in its more explicitly economic
potentialities. As such, much o f the field o f cultural landscape studies represents a
road not taken in my own work, since I have focused on a more comprehensive
theoretical understanding o f the cultural and especially literary identities of what
may be understood as the same kinds o f American spaces addressed by Bressi and
others. This trend in contemporary cultural landscape writing also represents
something of a shift within the field itself, since Jacksons own background in early
American literature provided him with an extraordinarily fluid (and highly literary)
landscape aesthetic that emerges quite clearly in the wide range o f cultural topics
from Thoreau and Jefferson to the cultural impact of the mobile home -- undertaken
by his writing. At its best, and even in its more pragmatic permutations and
applications o f Jacksons early work, the field continues to benefit from his
innovative approaches to American spaces. My work owes something to cultural
landscape thought most fundamentally in the sense that the field has produced a
certain shorthand for reading space in inclusively cultural rather than exclusively
geographic or sociological terms. Through its centrally cultural identity, my own
model o f the American region similarly conceives of the literary geography rather
than the merely literal geography, and extends this basic insight to the various
29
objects o f its critique, including the literary fiction and criticism addressed later in
my study.
The third body o f work worth mentioning here is more difficult to place
within a single field like cultural landscape studies. It consists o f a highly
abstract theoretical tradition o f considering the terms space and place (and
landscape, as W. J. T. Mitchell has recently argued for a triadic configuration of
the three terms).21 Two predominant branches of this theoretical tradition are
discernible. First, there are the phenomenological/experiential writings o f
philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Gaston Bachelard, for whom concepts o f
space itself cannot be separated from a highly subjective experience o f the self.22
Second, the Marxist tradition, represented by Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault,
reads in space manifestations o f the power structures o f society authority,
regulation, and control.23 Predictably enough, a problem arises from the seeming
incompatibility of the individualized mode o f spatial relation represented by the
phenomenologists and the impersonal and theoretical models of space offered by
the historical materialist thinkers. The recent work of critic David Harvey attempts
a synthesis of these traditions in the service o f a spatial model that is both
aesthetically satisfying and materially practicable.24 And Mitchells effort to
consider space, place, and landscape as a dialectical triad, a conceptual structure
that may be activated from several different angles, represents another effort to
30
resolve the dilemma o f experiential microspace and administrative macrospace,

and, as Mitchell puts it, to release the vernacular resources o f theory embedded in
these terms.25 The influence o f all these thinkers upon my study would be difficult
to quantify. The categories o f space, place, and landscape are o f course central to
my overall project, and emerge consistently throughout the following chapters. My
model of the American region and its subsequent engagement with American
literature and culture are deeply and fundamentally indebted to this entire tradition
of philosophy and criticism.
Angela Millers study, The Empire o f the Eye: Landscape Representation
and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875, presents a critical model that
resembles my own perhaps more closely than any o f those so far mentioned.
Questioning the supposed nationalism of various movements in nineteenthcentury landscape painting, Miller arrives at a nuanced reading of the entire genre
and its period of history.26 Like Philip Fisher, whose work also builds on an earlier
generation of scholars even as it rethinks their primary assumptions, Miller is
cautious and sensitive when dealing with the smaller, discrete spaces in America,
and her result comes close to my own in its emphasis on the unique cultural
properties o f individual spaces within the American nation. Miller is not
consciously courting a regional model, and certainly does not try to theorize the
region itself to any significant degree, but in her suspicion o f the basis of an
31
automatic and monolithic nationalism she intuitively beckons toward something

quite close to my own model o f the region as a more promising alternative unit of
consideration. In doing so, her work cultivates a richer appreciation of the
landscape representations and resituates their accumulated critical traditions in a
new critical context.
While I share a number of methodological assumptions with Miller, my
study diverges from hers most pointedly in its comparative method. As each o f the
following chapters will show, my work systematically utilizes the statements and
writings of literary contemporaries to elucidate one another. In addition to the
critical traditions I have outlined here and the significant bodies of scholarship
surrounding each o f the primary figures I will consider, my study contextualizes its
primary texts and authors by placing them in the presence o f their own kind, as it
were. This method intends, in Mitchells phrase, to 'release the vernacular
resources o f the literature itself in explicit relation to the region as it is conceived
in literary and cultural terms. The comparative methodology in my study is central
to my reading of the regions cultural contribution to the work o f each of the figures
considered here. It establishes each writers work more specifically in a literary
tradition that is both chronological, or linear, and spatial, in a way that helps to
provide a sense o f that writers distinct placement within both the ongoing
American tradition and his or her own historical milieu. This aspect of American
32
regional theory reinforces both the singularity of each writers regional provenance
and the larger impact o f that perspective on the national literary landscape, and does
so in a way that respects the identities and potentially valuable contributions of
both region and nation. Another aspect of this method is the way it places all
criticism into a new context where the implicit and explicit biases toward space and
place are more easily recognizable. As Chapter 2 discusses at some length,
American regional theorys ability to read literature with new insight also
questions, and often rereads, the bodies of scholarship that have been, for better or
worse, cornerstones o f the critical tradition. In the end, the comparative method
employed in my study assumes much o f the burden of American regional theory as
a coherent and consistent discourse. It seeks to counter oppressively authoritarian
assumptions on the part o f the nation or any single region, literary figure, or critic,
even as transforms this defensive posture into a more sensitive critical stance. It
seeks to infuse the study with a more vernacular sensibility, a perhaps more
democratic, dialogic openness to these texts that will contribute positively to
literature, criticism, and culture in the best American tradition that is exemplified
by the writings o f Twain, Faulkner, OConnor, and Morrison.
It may be necessary here to speak to the privileged role o f William Faulkner
in my overall study, and to the important role of the South as a regional model.
Perhaps some o f this abundant attention may be explained simply by the period o f
33
American history addressed in my work. The impact of the Civil War and
Reconstruction on American identity cannot be ignored as formative regional
events, particularly for the American South, whose reverberations have been felt
nationally throughout the twentieth century. My consideration o f Mark Twain in
Chapter 2 anticipates the southward turn that will be most completely articulated by
my engagement with the work o f Faulkner, an almost pathologically sensitive
historical and regional voice. Faulkner is surrounded, of course, by a number of
important Southern writers, including Flannery OConnor, Shelby Foote, Walker
Percy, and the Nashville Agrarians, whose acute sense of place offers a regional
model that is diverse even in its relative cultural consistency, if not homogeneity.
But apart from the wonderful facility with which Faulkner and the South lend
themselves to this kind of study, my intention is to provide a model that utilizes the
South as an emblematic region rather than a necessarily hermetic one. Had my
period been earlier in American history, New England would likely have taken
precedence over the South, and Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, Fuller and others
would have provided quite adequate figures for regional consideration. The
regional model I have advanced in this chapter, and which I will continue to utilize
in my readings of the figures in this work, should be considered entirely theoretical,
that is, applicable to any discrete and individual American cultural spaces. A
regional model that only worked for one region, and said nothing about the rest of
34
the country, would have much more limited use as a discursive or critical method in
American culture, and would also, it seems to me, be rather suspect in its most
basic ideological assumptions.
A case study of the way my regional model contributes to a more practical
literary criticism, Chapter 2 begins roughly where this chapter ends, not quite in St.
Louis, but in the Missouri of Mark Twains early years. Twains Missouri,
conceived in cultural terms as an individual region, provides the grounding for what
I will call a regional reading o f his greatest work, The Adventures o f Huckleberry
Finn. Published in 1884 at the height o f the Gilded Age, the novel serves as a
bridge between the Reconstruction era and the looming twentieth century o f
modernism and postmodernism. Its status as a foundational monument in the
American literary canon invites a series o f questions about the way traditional
criticism has approached the novel as representative of supposedly national
characteristics and thereby utilized it to advance an effectively ideological model o f
national cultural identity. What is important for a reading of Twains novel, as a
subtler understanding of the constructions o f region in Twains own experience will
serve to articulate, are the ways that traditional criticism has failed to appreciate the
novel on its own terms, and the ways this understanding enables a meaningful new
interpretation of the work. American regional theory leads us to pose one obvious
question here: are we reading Huckleberry Finn for the wrong reasons, reasons
35
which in themselves limit our understanding o f the novel and compromise our
ability to conceive its best place in American culture?
In Chapter 3. Twains case study gives way to the formidable figure o f
William Faulkner, who resides, literally as well as figuratively, at the center o f an
intensely contested American legacy o f regional identity. Faulkners Southern
background not only ensured his immersion in what amounted to an American
culture made representative precisely in its dissidence from a perceived
mainstream, but also situated him in problematic relation to his own milieu. The
first part o f this chapter concerns Faulkners literary constructions o f region and
attempts to frame in regional terms his understanding o f the problems of American
space as they emerge in his work. In the second part o f the chapter, Faulkner is
placed in the context o f the Nashville Agrarians o f the Depression era, whose
writings on Southern culture would become the most influential body o f regionalist
criticism in United States history. The emergence o f the Agrarian movement
during the period of Faulkners greatest productivity presents an excellent
opportunity to rethink both of their regional models in a shared cultural space, and
provides a better sense of Faulkners literary achievement in Southern as well as
American contexts.
The South commands attention again in Chapter 4, which reads Flannery
OConnors minor canonical status as a kind o f parallel to her self-consciously
36
regional literary aesthetic. OConnors cultivation o f a modest vision fits

comfortably with her assumption o f an archetypal Southern role as cultural
dissident; the particulars of her life and work consistently impose this pattern
whose most complete articulation is expressed in her constructions o f region. O f
particular interest is O Connors religious identity. Her Catholic faith in a
decidedly Protestant South foregrounds the discussion o f her short fiction. Perhaps
not surprisingly, Faulkners presence is also important here, both in his abiding
influence on O Connor and in the way his own treatment o f Southern religion
reveals the uniqueness o f her approach to their shared cultural legacy.
For Toni Morrison, who like OConnor has self-consciously cultivated a
sense o f the regions importance to her work, regional difference parallels racial
difference in ways that deepen her understanding o f both constructions. Chapter 5,
which explores the situation of Morrisons fiction and criticism in an American
tradition marked by its systematic repression o f the black presence, does so by
considering the narrative strategies she employs in her constructions of region.
Writing from the perspective of the Industrial North, from an endpoint o f the black
migration whose significance mirrors something o f the manifest destiny of white
Americas westward expansion, Morrison utilizes the region for dissident ends
quite distinct from those of Faulkner or O Connor. But as this chapter argues, it is
in the gesture toward the region itself, rhetorically framing issues in an immediately
37
recognizable American context, that Morrisons work shares a common ground

with theirs on a much more fundamental level.
The primary figures considered here -- Twain, Faulkner, OConnor, and
Morrison represent some o f the most facile, innovative and expressive
articulations o f the American region in the literary history' of the United States.
Their presence, it should be noted, greatly eases the political burden of many o f the
claims of American regional theory in my work. Particularly in need of emphasis is
the American regional models positive, affirmative cultural potential, its capacity
to contribute meaningfully not only to more liberating criticism of the literature
itself, but also, and more generally, to a more humanistically comprehensive
understanding o f the range, potential, and limitations o f American culture. With
respect to Dainottos insight into the reactionary regionalist way of reading in
modem Europe and against the admittedly countless American incarnations of this
kind of derivative, ideologically suspect regional culture, American regional
theory must clarify its own aesthetic bias. And the achievements o f writers like
Twain, Faulkner, OConnor, and Morrison, viewed through the critical lens of
American regional theory, serve to expose the inherent ffaudulence o f such
retrogressive tendencies. Along the way, the present work will address in some
detail both parts of this problem: the limiting critical methods whose indifference to
or misappropriation o f the region have heretofore prevented the emergence of a
38
more viable, culturally positive American regional theory; and the primary literary
figures and their writings, which benefit in often surprising ways from the kind of
critical attention a more viable American model o f the region brings to bear in
studies o f their work.
39
Notes to Chapter 1
1Richmond Enquirer, April 15, 1856; James M. McPherson, Batde Cry o f

Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford UP, 1988) 244.
2 Steven Hahn, The Roots o f Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the
Transformation o f the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (New York: Oxford UP,
1983) 86.
J New York Tribune, May 21, 1862; McPherson 244.
4 William Appleman Williams, The Frontier Thesis and American Foreign
Policy, Pacific Historical Review 24 (November 1955): 379-95; Cultures o f
United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke UP, 1993) 4.
' Roberto Maria Dainotto, All the Regions Do Smilingly Revolt: The
Literature o f Place and Region, Critical Inquiry, Volume 22, Number 3 (Spring
1996): 490.
6 Roberto Maria Dainotto, Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures,
Communities (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000) 30, 32. The German term gemeinschaft
denotes a social relationship characterized by strong reciprocal bonds o f sentiment
and kinship within a common tradition. Its 1937 etymology places the term
squarely within the reactionary' mythos o f Fascism, suggesting its implicit effort to
simplify, through the evocation of a harmonious, homogeneous pastoral space, the
complexities o f the modem industrialized state. This term is instructively
contrasted with gesellschaft, which refers to a rationally developed mechanistic
type o f social relationship marked by impersonally contracted associations between
persons. Dating to 1887, gesellschaft more accurately expresses the increasingly
atomistic modem condition, and predates by several decades the catastrophic events
of the Great War and the rise o f Fascism which would make the ideals o f
gemeinschaft more appealing to many people.
40
7 See Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel
(New York: Oxford UP, 1985). Fishers work discusses the imbedded nature of
these problematic social conditions in the cultural soil of nineteenth-century
America and the narrative strategies o f James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher
Stowe, and Theodore Dreiser to shape the popular consciousness o f such conditions
even in their own time.
8 See, for example, David M. Jordan, New World Regionalism: Literature in
the Americas (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1994). Jordans work undertakes a more
systematic Pan-American treatment o f regional literature and criticism in New
World national contexts.
9 See Frederick Mark, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A
Reinterpretation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963). Marks Chapter II,
Manifest Destiny, provides an excellent introduction to the political investment
o f the Eastern establishment in the expansion o f the nation to the Pacific and
beyond.
10 Quoted in Dainotto, All Regions 490.
" Stagecoach, dir. John Ford, United Artists, 1939.
12 See Jane Tompkins, West o f Everything: The Inner Life o f Westerns (New
York: Oxford UP, 1992). Tompkins offers incisive analyses o f representations o f
landscape, manhood, death, and the West in the Western genre. Tompkins
formulation o f the genre as a fundamentally modernist reaction against nineteenthcentury Victorian values, which include the privileged status of domesticity,
femaleness, sentimentality, and the like, assumes an almost Darwinian view o f
regional competition with strong gender-based connotations. In this model, the
West provides what is intended as a superior and salutary model of male identity
(and American imperial mission) to that provided by the effete and compromised
New England that has nurtured the womens rights movement and other culturally
emasculating causes.
13 Central Magazine, July 1874, wood engraving by William Mackwitz;
James Neal Primm, Lion o f the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri, 1764-1980 (St. Louis:
Missouri Historical Society P, 1998) 276.
41
14 Primm 274.
15 See Primm, Chapter 8, The Fourth City? for a comprehensive account

of St. Louis commercial and imperial ambitions, and the spirit of boosterism more
generally, during Reconstruction.
16 Quoted in Primm 274.
17 Homi Bhabha, O f Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial
Discourse, The Location o f Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) 86.
18 See Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and
Myth (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1950); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden:
Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford UP, 1964).
19 See John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape
(New Haven: Yale UP, 1984). Jacksons essays in this early collection provide an
incisive introduction to cultural landscape studies across a wide range of topics.
20 See, for example, Paul Groth and Todd W. Bressi, eds., Understanding
Ordinary Landscapes (New Haven: Yale UP, 1997). This anthology represents a
comprehensive survey of cultural landscape work that revisits many of Jacksons
earlier issues and explores a number of more recent issues in place-based studies.
21 W. J. T. Mitchell, preface to the second edition, Landscape and Power,
ed. W. J. T. Mitchell, 2nd ed. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, forthcoming in 2001) 1-5.
22 See Martin Heidegger, Art and Space, trans. Charles Seibert, Man and
World I (1973): 3-8; Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics o f Space, trans. Maria Jolas
(Boston: Beacon P, 1964) xi-xxix, 183-210. In defining place in terms o f the thing
that occupies it, Heidegger makes the concept o f place itself dependent on being
and presence for its existence: Place always opens a region in which it gathers the
things in their belonging together. [. . .] Place is not located in a pre-given space,
after the manner o f physical-technological space. The latter unfolds itself only
through the reigning of places of a region. (6) In this way Heidegger renders
impossible the very category of place without a kind o f redemptive
phenomenological presence. Heideggers use of the term region is important
here also, representing a kind of larger spatial category that contains places in an
increasingly hierarchical, rigidly ordered model.
42
23 See Henri Lefebvre, The Production o f Space, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Michel Foucault, O f Other Spaces, Diacritics
(Spring 1986): 22-27. Foucaults classic essay on the heterotopia represents an
excellent introduction to his treatment of the problems o f space and place: There
are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places places that do
exist and that are formed in the very founding o f society which are something
like counter-sites, a kind o f effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the
other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented,
contested, and inverted. (24) Among these places are museums, libraries, and
imperial colonies; Foucault emphasizes throughout the controlled aspects o f these
places, their limited permeability, their relationship to surveillance and secrecy, and
the ways in which they mirror the structures of power in their cultures.
24 See David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography o f Difference
(Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996). Harveys Chapter 11, From Space to Place and
Back Again, works through the theoretical oppositions o f Heidegger and Marx in
an effort to derive a more conceptually inclusive spatial model.
25 Mitchell 3, 4.
26 See Angela Miller, The Empire o f the Eye: Landscape Representations
and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993). Millers
introduction discusses her methodological approach to her subject, and addresses
the impact o f her own deep-seated suspicion o f nationalism on her overall study.
43
CHAPTER 2
The Em ergence of Mark Tw ains Missouri:
Regional T heory and the Fog Episode in The Adventures o f Huckleberry Finn
The Regional Reading in an American Context
Emerging from the negative concept o f national literature problematized by

contemporary demands for multicultural approaches to culture, regional criticism
has traditionally been viewed as a kind o f reactionary or secondary field with
highly suspect ideological motives.1 In this context, critic W. H. New advances
rarely considered notions o f region and their potential contribution to studies of
literature, and defends their methodological validity in his essay Beyond
Nationalism: On Regionalism. Countering claims that the region enforces a very
limiting provincialism upon its communities and, thus, its literary products, New
begins with a disarmingly simple gesture: he points out that the very question o f
whether authors can ever not be in space, yields either absurd answers or openly
political ones political statements that constitute new definitions o f the relation
44
between spaces in a society.2 Immediately New assesses the implications of this

awareness in terms of literature. He writes:
Defining the significance that particular spaces have for us, we

parenthetically define or at least hint at our preconceptions about the
significance o f statements that will emerge from those given spaces,
locales, regions.
The notion o f region, that is, contains within it a hidden
notion o f total structure, and it is often the artifice and the emotional
reality o f this implied total structure that literature encodes. (14-15)
This statement formulates the capacity of notions o f region, the knowledge of

specific geographic landscapes and their cultures, and the explicit and implicit
significance in their eventual representative voices, to inform literary texts. What
might be called a regional reading of any literary text, then, if it is to apprehend the
regions hidden notion informing literature, will require an understanding of the
regions intricacies, o f the singularities of its moment and topology, and also, of
course, of its emergence from and within a national context. The potential value of
this method would seem to reside both in a literary exposition that reveals new
meaning in the text and also, somewhat incidentally but not unimportantly, in a
qualification o f the strains of national criticism that have attempted to frame any
previous understanding o f the literature. As New suggests, given the increasingly
dissatisfying and problematic nature o f criticism springing from nationalizing or
nationalist perspectives, regionalism is a more appropriate frame within which to
45
read literature (13). Clearly, however, as New and others have perceived, the
danger o f this more appropriate regional reading, especially in the national
political and cultural atmosphere that has led many to envision the region as a
spatial model o f purity and authenticity in place o f a supposedly corrupted
national body, lies in the risk o f seeking in the region a miniature version o f the
national empire in a kind o f purified state.3 Such a model would merely enact on a
smaller scale what Edward Said describes as the geographic violence o f the
centralizing ambitions and repressions implicit in such a nationalist construction.4
In an American context, the national model o f empire follows its own
peculiar, profoundly complex set o f relations within its national borders. And in
this setting it seems that the region, either in seeking to reproduce the national
model on a smaller scale or in fashioning itself in some other way, cannot avoid, at
some point, a confrontation with that complexity, and the realization that Americas
tangled national history and culture constitute a great measure of its inheritance, for
better or for worse.5 It may be instructive in this connection to note that even the
regions attempt to claim some kind of authentic identity apart from the nation
personifies exactly that paradoxically individualistic quality of the American
national character itself.
Attention to a specific literary product, and to its grounding in a particular
American regional context, will make this kind of complexity clearer. And since a
46
highly suspicious reactionary motive, o f the kind discussed above, has often
motivated the tendency to retreat from nation to region, it seems most appropriate
to consider a literary text that has been universally acknowledged as an archetypal
American model, as an undisputed and permanent member o f the national literary
canon, and as a work that transcends the presumably narrow provincial limits o f the
region and engages the presumably larger national themes and concerns. Perhaps
no American book could be more exemplary under these criteria, or provide a better
case study for this kind o f regional reading than The Adventures o f Huckleberry
Finn. Mark Twains novel is widely considered to be a definitively American
literary text. And yet, if the arguments o f New and others are to be taken seriously,
if the region does indeed offer a particular and appropriate critical framework for
studies of literature, a regional reading o f Huckleberry Finn should be productive
and valuable in the context o f any understanding of the novel.
Descending from Twains native Hannibal, Missouri (renamed St.
Petersburg in the novel) to lower Arkansas, the Mississippi Valley does indeed
offer a singular, irreplaceable setting for the story, to the extent that any conception
of its events elsewhere would seem, to borrow News term, absurd. In light o f
Twains fidelity in his writing to the actual geography o f the river valley, this point
hardly needs to be forced. But Huckleberry Finn offers an especially interesting
case because o f the unusual process o f its writing, a process that also renders in
47
some detail Twains own experiences o f his Missouri youth and his later
relationship to the region in which he would locate his story.
By 1882, Twain had lived away from his native region for more than twenty
years -- nearly half his lifetime and virtually all his adult life. Having spent the
Civil War years primarily out West, and having settled in New England after the
wars conclusion in 1865, his personal connection to the State of Missouri and to
the Mississippi River of his youth may be described as more tenuous and perhaps
nostalgic than immanent and contemporary. His 1882 return to Hannibal, and his
steamboat journey down the river he had not traveled since his brief career as a
pilot ended in 1860, are documented in Life on the Mississippi, which he completed
upon returning to his adopted home in the Northeast. And while no reader will
confuse Twains erratic, uneven writing in this volume with the incendiary
performance of Huckleberry Finn, it provides a fortuitous expression o f Twains
own complex, often misunderstood or ignored relationship with the regions
peculiar identities. His experience of this primary relationship is the object of
consideration here, as it sets the stage for his spectacular success in the writing o f
Huckleberry Finn. Even more importantly for any regional reading of the novel
itself, the nature o f this central relationship between Twain and his native region
addresses many critical questions within the text itself, and, perhaps also, will
48
contribute to a vital overall reading o f the novel, especially in light of the vast body
of national criticism that has accumulated since its original publication.
The National Thesis: Leo Marx and the Pastoral/Industrial Complex
The eminent critic Leo Marx shares an interest in the geographical spaces o f
Twains work in his 1956 essay, The Pilot and the Passenger: Landscape
Conventions and the Style o f Huckleberry Finn. Marx advances the claim that
Twains various narrative strategies in his Mississippi River writings -- The
Adventures o f Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, and Huckleberry Finn reveal
his struggle to express, in ways more complete and satisfying to himself, his
relationship to the region where these books are set.6 Marxs argument hinges on
the head-on collision between a kind of Edenic pastoral ideal and the increasingly
threatening technological realities intruding into that natural space. As is suggested
by the title o f Marxs great national opus on the same theme, The Machine in the
Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, the direct conflict between
these binary forces comes to be viewed as the primary and shaping force in
American culture. Marx sees the nation subjected, over and over, to versions of
49
this eternal, recapitulated struggle, and to the revealing, often uneasy compromise
of these two driving forces.7
Marx applies this thesis directly to Twains work by contrasting what he
considers Twains two dominant ways o f viewing the landscape: the pastoral and
the industrial. The pastoral view is likened to that o f a steamboat passenger
enjoying the beauty afforded by the leisurely river journey. The industrial view, by
contrast, is likened to that o f a veteran steamboat pilot whose gaze is no longer free
to indulge in such a sentimental, superficial image o f nature, but who must
constantly interpret the landscape warily, and see it explicitly in terms of dangers to
be avoided. The conclusion Marx reaches from this basic dichotomy has important
implications:
In Life on the Mississippi each o f these ways o f apprehending the

river characterizes a particular mode of life. One might say a
particular culture. One culture is exemplified by the uninitiated
spectators and the ignorant novice pilot; the other is reflected in the
melancholy wisdom o f the older man who tells the story. There are
many differences between these two ways of life, but the most
important is the relation to nature fostered by each. The passengers
are strangers to the river. They lack the intimate knowledge o f its
physical character a pilot must possess. As spectators, well trained
to appreciate painted landscapes, they know what to look for. They
enjoy the play o f light on the water. This aesthetic response to
nature, given the American geography, Clemens inevitably
associates with the cultivated, urban East. But the pilot, on the other
hand, is of the West, and his calling such that he can scarcely afford
to look upon the river as a soft and beautiful picture. He is
responsible for the steamboat. To navigate safely he must keep his
50
mind on the menacing reality masked by the trail that shines like
silver. (51)
With these two regionally representative views battling for Twains full
recognition, Marx suggests, Life on the Mississippi stands as a testament to his
struggle to find a balanced narrative voice without betraying or abandoning either
view. Such a reading also implies one explanation for the books notoriously
inconsistent quality o f writing: Twain, having been both passenger and pilot,
Eastern tourist and Western native, simply never found an adequate authorial
perspective, a single voice that could respond to the challenge o f expressing the
contradictions o f the landscape, and the unevenness o f the text reflects this formal
difficulty.
Marx suggests that Twains impossible choice in this matter was not
merely a philosophical issue between two conceptions of society, nor was it limited
to several types of culture as understood in terms o f regional traits the civilized,
aesthetically appreciative East versus the crude, utilitarian West (52). More
urgently, he says, Twains impasse played out directly in his writing in terms of
style, which must be understood as Twain the writers most physical, concrete
expression o f himself. The resolution o f this conflict between pastoral and
industrial forces, in Marxs view, lies in Twains eventual discovery o f the boy
Huck Finns first person narrative voice, which would enable the author to express
51
the entire range o f landscape associations he confronted in his narrative journey.

Moreover, Marx concludes, Huckleberry Finns transcendent tone and liberating
sense o f emotional release are the result, paradoxically enough, o f Hucks literal
immersion in his environment, and o f the power o f his emerging narrative voice to
evoke the landscape and everything within it, including deeply flawed human
communities more perfectly than anything else Twain would ever write.
In considering the region, albeit incidentally, as a shaping force in Twains
sensibility, Marxs explanation of the success of Hucks voice depends for its
credibility largely on the correct diagnosis o f that regions character. In other
words, Marxs reading would be quite misleading if it inaccurately accounted for
Twains own experience of the region itself. Yet this is exactly what Marxs
argument does. In his formulation of the pastoral/industrial, or passenger/pilot,
dilemma, Marx implicitly and drastically oversimplifies the character o f Twains
relationship to his Missouri background. In explaining the style o f Hucks narrative
voice as the product and resolution o f two warring social visions, Marx also fails to
acknowledge the inestimable psychological influence on Twain o f his 1882 return
to the region. Marx reads Life on the Mississippi primarily to compare its
descriptive passages with those in Huckleberry Finn, but he seems virtually blind to
what the former text reveals about Twains profound emotional experiences during
the journey, and how the intensity of Twains return to his native region prepared
52
him to resume work on the previously shelved manuscript that would become
Huckleberry Finn.
It also seems that M arxs argument undervalues the passage of time, along
with the highly subjective experiences of the same region that Twain had during
different periods in history. Marx does speak of Twains pastoral voice as
celebrating a past state of innocence in the regions history, but, here again, his
methodological attempt to account for so much in terms o f basic binary forces
allows a great deal of regional complexity to pass under his gaze undetected and,
thus, unconsidered. The vast significance o f the Civil War, an extraordinarily
complex event that also split Twains bonds to his native region in two, spatially,
chronologically, and emotionally, passes unmentioned by Marx. Twains lifetime
accumulation o f personal associations and meanings for his native region, also not
addressed by Marx, is relegated perforce to an almost machine-like automatism, as
if the notions o f pastoralism and industrialism in America, systematically filling in
any gaps, were adequate to express the balance of Twains lived experience.
What Marxs method, both in The Pilot and the Passenger and in The
Machine and the Garden, seeks to prove is nothing less than what might accurately
be termed a national thesis. His entire methodological approach to American
literature and culture emerges ffom a clearly and consciously national gaze, with
which he attempts to formulate and extend a comprehensive theme across all
53
internal delineations o f genre and space. The presence o f the pastoral and industrial
are, undeniably, key aspects of American history, and it is to Marxs credit that he
traces so effectively their influence through the work o f Twain and other American
literary figures. Indeed, Marxs reading of Huckleberry Finn privileges many o f
the concerns among others, for example, its attentiveness to the subtleties and
conventions o f landscape art, its more general appreciation o f the roles o f
geography and space in the novel, and its intuition that the first person narrative
voice o f Huck Finn deserves serious and special consideration that will be
valuable to other methodological approaches to the novel, including my own
regional reading.
To more appropriately contextualize this critical achievement, however,
what must be kept in mind is the driving ambition o f the overall thesis itself, and its
claims on authority at the national level. Marxs thesis arises not from the
particularities o f an individual literary text, but approaches and interprets such texts
ffom its own remote, perhaps even placeless, critical source. The thesis effectively
utilizes the literary artifact in order to advance itself as a universally and eternally
germane American truth, as a cultural commonplace. Perhaps an advancement o f
this kind o f national thesis need not suffer, a priori or by definition, the sinister
connotations o f the unilateral, autocratic state. And perhaps it is enough simply to
note the great danger native to such a method in tending towards the kind of
54
monolithic essentialization of literature and culture that fails to register many of

their vital characteristics and, o f course, generates resistance at regional and other
levels. But certainly the national framework o f Marxs thesis seems ideologically
contiguous, in this most dangerous way, with such an aggressively advancing
discourse. In any case, Marxs particular national thesis, having set out to prove its
own ambitious claim concerning the pastoral and the industrial, falls short of
providing a satisfying reading of Huckleberry Finn in part because o f its failure to
appreciate the complexity o f the Missouri of Twains childhood and Twains
evolving, lifelong emotional relationship to his native region.
The Persona o f Twains Missouri
Leo Marxs failure to appreciate the complicated, often contradictory

identities o f the Missouri o f Twains youth is more the rule than the exception in
criticism o f Twains work.8 Critics variously refer to Missouri as part o f the North,
the South, and the West, locating it everywhere, it seems, except the East where
Twain settled in adult life. Often the choice o f where to place Missouri in regional
terms is made to suit a critics purposes in the advancement of a specific argument.
Consider, for example, Marxs comparison of the regions Western cultural
55
mentality in contrasted to that o f the aesthetic East. But even when this kind of
rhetorical appropriation on the part o f many critics is exposed, it must be admitted
that Missouri, approached as a regional construction, has indeed predisposed itself
to such uncertainties, both geographically and culturally.
Missouri had always been a home for slavery, and its entry into the Union
wrought havoc for the latitudinal symmetry of the countrys North/South division.
The clearest and most literal expression of this disorder came in 1820 with what
would become known as the Missouri Compromise.9 The compromise attempted to
deal with slavery in two ways that appear almost ridiculous in their contradiction to
one another. First, national leaders agreed that the southern border o f Missouri
would forever that is, as the nation edged farther to the West demarcate the
limits of slavery: all new states north of the border would be admitted as free states,
and those to the south would be slave states. Second, and rather absurdly from a
strictly geometric surveying perspective, Missouri itself was constituted as a slave
state, and thus bulged out on the north side of the slave border. This exception
would allow Maine to enter the Union as a free state at the same time, and thus
preserve the tenuous balance o f power between North and South in Congress.
As a political act, the compromise seemed to suit everyone in power, at least
for the time being. As a cultural act, it only served to illustrate the diverse nations
irreconcilable and messy realities which no single leader or group could resolve,
56
and which, indeed, the very constitution o f the national government appears to have
been inadequate to confront. O f course, the compromise was successful only as a
temporary measure, delaying the crisis that would culminate, forty years later, in
the Civil War. Missouris role in this kind o f temporary compromise, the
uniqueness o f its geographic placement before and after the 1820 national
remapping, and the singularity o f its particular cultural identities that made such an
internally contradictory act o f legislation desirable or even possible, testify to the
complexity native to the state and its relationship to the nation as a whole.
Most Missourians did not own any slaves during Twains youth, and those
who did generally had no more than one or two. By 1850, only those with a
sentimental attachment to the institution or to individual slaves had resisted the
lucrative opportunities to sell slaves to planters in the Deep South. Not only was
there no plantation culture in Missouri, with the minor exception o f a few counties
north o f the Missouri River in the central part of the state, but the population
growth o f the state during Twains youth included vast numbers o f anti-slavery
German immigrants and pragmatic New England business families. These groups
further complicated Missouris sentiments about slavery, forging new industrial and
political alliances and producing increasingly complex and diverse visions of the
states future. This does not suggest that most people acted or even spoke out
against slavery, but simply that the simmering ambiguity o f the state during
57
Twains early youth should not be grouped clumsily with the much more
confrontational secessionism o f lower Mississippi states like Louisiana,
Mississippi, Tennessee, and Alabama.
A brief glance at what historian James Neal Primm refers to as the
supercharged atmosphere of the cultural and political life in St. Louis during this
period, and increasingly in the later 1850s, gives the impression o f an almost
guerrilla chaos.10 With countless ideological factions, several competing political
machines, a citizenry of diverse origins and languages, a vigorous and prolific local
press with perspectives and languages as various as its readers, and an explosive
business economy with interests in farming, industry, and river and railroad trades,
the only thing absent during this period was any kind o f consensus on key cultural
and political questions. Twains travels during his early years as a riverboat pilot
enabled him to witness much o f this culture firsthand, and to view it alongside the
more polar regional distinctions o f the industrial North upriver and the Southern
plantation culture of the lower Mississippi. This experience may also have left him
with an increasingly problematic sense of his own place, his own kind o f border
status, in a national context that was seeking more and more to define itself in the
strictly binary terms of Northern unionism or Southern secessionism. In its own
moment o f crisis, finally, a deeply fractious Missouri remained loyal to the North
during the Civil War, with economic motives and fears about the risks o f war
58
taking precedence over the state's historical connection to slavery. During the war
itself, the state provided the setting for countless local skirmishes, often highly
intramural in nature, including many among hardy civilians who distrusted their
neighbors. The state never gained anything like the single-minded momentum that
expressed the fervor and decisiveness o f less ambivalent states on both sides o f the
Mason-Dixon Line.
An episode that took place in St. Louis in 1862 may provide insight into the
complexity and ambiguity of Missouri during the war period. It also frames a case
in which a critical sensitivity to regional complexity, especially in the context o f a
national imposition upon that local space, serves both region and nation in a
productive, humane way." In angry response to the ongoing terrorist activities o f
Confederate sympathizers in Missouri, and with the hope of stamping out the
various degrees of disloyalty that had been such an annoying omnipresence for so
long, the Union General John Schofield appointed a committee to assess a list o f
secessionists and southern sympathizers in the amount of five hundred thousand
dollars (Primm 249). This enormous sum would be used to support the families o f
Union volunteers and to further the Unions overall war effort.
As soon as the list o f supposed secessionists was drafted, and many
persons had been assessed on the basis of wealth and presumed degree o f guilt, it
became obvious that the assessment, in its rationale, motives, and process, was
59
highly suspect (Primm 249). Many o f those listed as traitors and rebel spies had
actually supported the Union war effort in different capacities; one was selected
because he had been a classmate o f Jefferson Davis in a Kentucky school as a child;
others were known to maintain a Unionism o f merely economic interest and
expediency; still others were conditional Unionists who had voiced criticism o f
Republican policies on one issue or another (Primm 249). The assessment
immediately and quite understandably generated a great deal of antagonism and
resentment among those singled out, many o f whom had begun reluctantly to pay
their fines before the timely intervention o f one William Greenleaf Eliot.
Eliot had been the citys only open abolitionist for many years, had
supported the Union without hesitation from the start, and was a personal friend of
President Lincoln. Such a vast levy in the service o f the Union cause would
obviously serve the interests he had supported all along, but Eliots written
condemnation of the assessment process, which soon reached Lincolns desk in
Washington, framed the situation differently. Eliot wrote that the assessments were
doing great harm to the Union cause precisely because they were so insensitive to
the complexity of the local situation with regards to the war in general and the
question o f loyalty to the Union in particular; in St. Louis, Eliot pointed out, there
were all shades o f opinion, from that kind o f neutrality which is hatred in disguise,
through all the grades of lukewarmness, sympathy, and hesitating zeal up to the
60
full loyalty which your memorialists [. . .] claim to possess.12 The extreme

difficulty for any arbiter, local or national, to establish with certainty the elusive
and binary definitiveness o f loyalty and disloyalty, was readily obvious to Eliot in
St. Louis and quickly impressed Lincoln himself, who perhaps realized that his own
wife would not have met the boards standards o f loyalty. The president ordered
the collections halted, and the assessed, finally, did not have to pay.
In Eliot, a Unitarian pastor whose mission had brought him decades earlier
ffom his native Massachusetts to a vastly different Missouri, the region found a
critic and spokesman who clearly guarded his own national, perhaps even universal,
agenda in that frontier society, but who nevertheless remained acutely aware o f the
limitations o f his gaze in that particular place. He perceived not only the complex
shades o f opinion regarding the national question o f loyalty, but also the futility
and implicit violence in any attempt to set a punitive legal policy in motion based
on his or anyone elses assessment o f that complexity. It is his voices
particularly regional location here that personifies something o f the American
paradox o f individual freedom (through his ability to articulate the local situations
complexity) in the context o f limitation (through his sense o f the limited reach o f
any individual authority, even that o f the federal government, in the assessment
process). Overall, o f course, the episode goes some distance toward expressing the
unique and complicated identity o f the Missouri Twain experienced as he was
61
growing up. And as the concluding section o f this chapter will illustrate more fully,
William Greenleaf Eliots presence in the space and culture o f the period resonate
several generations later, when one o f his grandchildren, Thomas Steams Eliot, a
more nationally and internationally famous literary figure who also experienced St.
Louis firsthand, would take up many o f the same concerns with Huckleberry Finn
that remain in the foreground o f this brief sketch of Twains native region.
Mark Twain's Middle Ground
Missourians had spread their votes widely among the four presidential
candidates in 1860, with the moderate, or, as some charged, absurdly contradictory,
Stephen Douglas carrying the state by a narrow margin. Abraham Lincolns
unconditional Unionism, perhaps too absolute a stance in such a state, won him a
mere eleven percent o f the statewide vote and last place in Missouri. In effect,
what historian James Neal Primm says about the inestimably consequential 1860
elections may be applied more generally to the states identity and overall history
during this period: Missourians had chosen the middle ground. 13
The middle ground here is indeed a paradoxical conception. It is a
construction that is both central and devoid o f exact location, both centered and,
62
somehow, lacking a firm center. The phrase seems to express aptly Missouris
desire to maintain the status quo in its public affairs, and to suggest that its
individuals would rather negotiate each new moment improvisationally, as they had
no doubt been doing all along, without recourse to a histrionic, potentially
cataclysmic confrontation o f national armies. This inclination toward such an
intuitive self-conception, toward an endlessly contingent approach to both local and
national culture, is entirely consistent with the regional model articulated in
Chapter 1. This suggests, o f course, that the Missouri o f this period, with all its
historical and geographic uniqueness, may be considered as a distinct region in the
cultural life o f the larger nation.
Mark Twains own behavior during the war was notoriously erratic and, to
say the least, improvisational; it may be summarized as a series o f failed attempts to
participate in the increasingly public or collective national culture, followed each
time by a kind o f ritualistic, and very personal, escape ffom such developments, a
lighting out, o f sorts. Without endowing Missouri with a wholly deterministic
power over the identities of its residents, Twains behavior does seem quite
consistent with his native regions own erratic, often contradictory character.
Dissatisfied with each and every single voice in the increasingly partisan crisis, the
indecisive Twain seems that much more representative o f the very culture within
which and against which he is struggling for his own identity and humanity.
63
Considered in this way Twains literary persona, traditionally canonized, quite

publicly and nationally, for its typically and consummately American character,
can be seen as a most revealing, ironic marvel in its own right.
It should be clear by now, even after a survey o f Twains Missouri as
admittedly brief as this, that as a region it cannot be narrowed into simple terms or
characterized with the categories o f pastoral and industrial, as Marx tries to do in
his method. And as the region itself demands a more faceted understanding of its
unique qualities, it is clear that Twains relationship to it and his writing also
require the same attention.
By the time Twain journeyed down the Mississippi by steamboat in 1882,
he was feeling the stress o f more than one blocked narrative voice. His work on
Huckleberry Finn had simply stopped, the unfinished manuscript had been shelved
for several years, and he despaired o f making any headway. His travel writings that
would become Life on the Mississippi were slow in coming, and he found the small
bits he did write to be so forced and unwilling that he was casting about for other
material to fatten that manuscript. The Adventures o f Tom Sawyer, his most
recently published work, had gained him recognition and some financial success,
but Twain himself had never found the book itself entirely satisfactory, and since
its publication he had felt increasing pressure to meet his own and his readers
heightened literary demands.
64
Twain did not experience the trip in either o f Marxs senses; he found
himself neither an aesthetically attuned passenger nor a wary pilot. In fact, these
designations seem almost embarrassingly narrow in the face o f what Twain referred
to as this hideous trip, and in the context of the subsequently published Life on
the Mississippi, whose subject matter and authorial tone range from the merely
pessimistic and unhappy to the outright morbid and terrifying.14 Even if Mark
Twain had not been congenitally disposed to look apprehensively on existence,
critic Richard Bridgman writes, his experience o f the trip and during the
composition of the Life would have encouraged uneasiness (Bridgman 117).
Twains journey down the river he had not traveled since before the Civil War, his
visit to Hannibal and reunion with many people, living and deceased, ffom his
childhood, and his explorations o f the entire region which he had left behind for
good nearly twenty years earlier, rocked him with a chorus o f memories, emotions
and visceral associations whose power over him was more authoritative than ever.
And while he probably anticipated a sense of nostalgia or even a jarring loose of
certain long forgotten memories before the trip, it seems unlikely that he could have
foreseen the engulfing intensity and particularly dark character o f this experience.
Had he in fact been able to foresee such turns, the question o f whether he would
have taken the trip at all would become a very real one, exposing Twain to charges
o f masochism and an almost bottomless despair.
65
Perhaps this overstates the subjective nature o f the trip. But throughout his
own account o f the journey, Twain seems to be touring a gallery o f demoralization
and decay. From the presence of bridges and other unhappy reminders of
encroaching industry along the upper Mississippi, to the grotesque particulars o f
burial practices in New Orleans, his view is predominantly negative. Overall, his
visual landscape is encoded with countless symbols and reminders o f death itself.
His initially hopeful visit to Hannibal frustrates him because its people appear to
sag with age and failure, and he suggests that the town's superficial image o f health
only masks its underlying fatigue. His worst prejudices about the Deep South and
its corrupt, moribund society systematically prove themselves true. The steamboat,
beloved and transcendent icon of Twains youth, is now so rare that its few
remaining dinosaurs appear almost unbearably grotesque and prehistoric to his
eyes. The landscape itself, especially as Twain penetrates deeper and deeper into
the heart of the South, is littered with ugly associations o f the Civil War: he
encounters many battle sites whose terrain serves, literally, as a monument to a
scarred, even tragic, history. No wonder Twain used the term hideous to describe
his trip; one wonders how he managed to survive the interminable ordeal at all, and
senses the great relief he must have felt upon returning to his adopted home in the
Northeast.
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In his discussion o f the narrative style in Life on the Mississippi, Bridgman

plots the course by which Twains account of his experiences as a steamboat pilot
deliver him back to earlier and earlier recollections o f childhood. As if to suggest a
kind of original source for the sorts o f dark and deathly forces that Twain sees
everywhere during his 1882 trip, the common image in such recollections is that of
a child whose most basic and elemental fears are often realized but never placated
by others. Bridgman writes:
Mark Twains hardest task as a cub pilot had been to force himself
to steer his boat directly into a solid straight wall o f darkness,
trusting that it would fall back and make way for him. That
imaginary bluff, which still produced nightmares, was associated
with his profoundest fear and guilt. Solid blackness~a crackless
bank o f it generated unnerved terror for him, and although it was
specifically associated with the river, it also went back to childhood
fears. When Twain was a boy, the night after a companion had
drowned, a ferocious thunder-storm struck, there was inky
blackness, then lightning, then the solid darkness shut down
again. On this nostalgic trip, that black wall loomed over him,
again and again. (107)
On this nostalgic trip, Twains native region literally whips up storms whose
blinding flashes of light only serve to punctuate the ever-threatening, deathly
darkness. Bridgman even goes so far as to suggest that a more appropriate title to
Twains volume might have been Death on the Mississippi (107). But Twains
particular fears are more disturbing because of the yawning time lapse between the
events of his early childhood and the 1882 journey. And while the book never
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reaches a fully conscious sense o f the location o f these primal fears in Twains
youth or o f their subsequent lack o f resolution (instead, and perhaps because of a
self-protective refusal or inability to recognize such fears in himself, projecting
those fears upon the geographic and cultural landscapes o f his native region), there
is a strong sense in Twains narrative voice that the 1882 experience o f his native
region touched him at his deepest and most vulnerable (and most heavily defended)
levels, and in ways only hinted at by the books uneven writing and ubiquitous
flirtation with death. Without attempting a more in-depth reconstruction of
Twains psyche with his travel writings as a map, it is enough to state at this point
that Twains journey, along with the writing and 1883 publication o f Life on the
Mississippi, constituted powerful influences on him just at the moment he was
returning to the now dusty opening chapters of Huckleberry Finn. Bridgman
summarizes the journeys impact on Twain:
[Life on the Mississippi] is an exceedingly uneven performance,

broken backed, evasive, patchy, but with some extraordinary
segments in it. Most remarkable is its demonstration o f Mark
Twains reflecting first on his apprenticeship and then moving
further back into his youth, releasing memories of humiliation and
terror. The sense he revivified in the Life of the anarchic dangers of
the world, of mens untrustworthiness, and o f his own uncertain role
in this threatening environment carried over into the middle reaches
o f Huckleberry Finn. Although the trip down the river had made
him a boy again, this boy was no longer the confident, comfortable
fantasist Tom but the homeless indigent Huck, on the run from a
world that gave him nightmares at night and then embodied them by
day in a sordid and frightening reality. Writing the Life had been
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less a trip down the Mississippi than one down into Twains psyche.
(119-120)
Bridgmans conclusion here, about the fundamentally self-referential,

psychological aspect of Twains Life as he was returning his attention to
Huckleberry Finn, suggests the potential value of a regional reading o f the latter
novel. Recalling News formulation that the notion of region [...] contains within
it a hidden notion o f total structure, and it is often the artifice and the emotional
reality o f this implied total structure that literature encodes, Bridgmans
assessment of Twains work provides clues to both the hidden notion o f total
structure that is revealed in Twains own conception of his native region during
that period o f his life, and the emotional reality imbedded in that highly
subjective conception.
The Fog Episode
By now something of the weight and momentum of the region, in all its
history and paradoxical force, may be felt in the turning of Twains attention to
Huckleberry Finn. The regions curious and complex history in the United States
has been made clearer, with all the distinctly American connotations o f empire and
69
colony, republic and individualism, determinism and freedom, characterizing its

space. Twains native region has been considered with an appreciation for its
complex and often ambiguous geography, history and culture. And Twains own
return to and experience of that region, after some twenty years and one thousand
miles had divided the spaces o f his youth and adulthood, have been seen in their
immediate influence on his authorial sensibility in Life on the Mississippi. News
earlier point, on the absurdity of the question whether authors can ever not be in
space, is well taken in such a context, and informs also the critical attitude o f the
regional reading which can, at last, and like Twain the author was finally able to do,
turn to the novel itself.
The premise o f Huckleberry Finn a raft journey down the Mississippi
around 1845 -- should be understood in the context of all the regional concerns
discussed above. Were it simply an anti-slavery novel, in the vein o f the many
produced before the Civil War primarily by Northeastern abolitionists, Huck and
Jim could have just crossed the Mississippi, fled into the interior of Illinois, and
gone directly to Canada or the Ohio Valley. Were it simply a dystopian critique o f
society in general, Huck could have gone west to the territory right away. O f
course, Huck does neither o f these things. Instead, his journey is designed to
resemble, on many levels, Twains own 1882 steamboat tour. The obvious
parallels between the latter trip and Hucks journey scarcely need mentioning by
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now; Hucks travels in Huckleberry Finn reconstruct the central portion o f Twains
trip with a consistency easily fathomed in the natural progression o f the rivers
southward flow. The symmetry o f these journeys, and Twains desire to travel the
same river not as passenger, not as pilot, but as author, inform a very specific kind
o f narrative.
The differences between Twains narrative, experiences and emotions in
Life on the Mississippi, and those o f Huck in Huckleberry Finn, are also striking.
Consider Twains recollection of the nightmares he suffered as a child, nightmares
which his 1882 journey recalls and which he never seems to have overcome
emotionally. In Huckleberry Finn, the very structure o f the novel leaves no space
for nightmares as Twain knew them: Huck and Jim are awake during their nights,
cruising the surface o f the glassy river. The weather remains largely clear and
placid, and instead o f risking the intrusion of unfriendly dreams, the two travelers
are free to meditate on the beauty of the starry skies. This setting even brings the
famously irreligious Twain to the brink of metaphysical inquiry, qualified, o f
course, by the unique perceptions and articulations o f Huck and Jim: relaxing on
their raft securely in the middle of the night, they discuss the genesis and laws o f
the stars, exchanging hypotheses on the origin o f the heavens.
To suggest that this aspect of the novels structure rescued Twain from the
problem o f his nightmares is only to understand his authorial strategy partially. For
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in inverting time as he did, in turning the night into day for Huck, Twain also
turned day into night. So while Hucks opportunity to experience the night
comfortably and securely, in the protective presence o f Jim, created a kind of
healing or redemptive vision for Twain himself, it also allowed him to channel his
nightmarish associations into Hucks days, into the often ugly civilized society that
serves as Twains satirical target throughout the journey. On their best days, Huck
and Jim sleep the daylight hours away rather than interacting with anyone from
society; each foray onto dry land precipitates a more foreboding and risky feeling
than the previous one. Twains masterful inversion o f day and night thus frees him
to utilize his own convoluted, ambivalent intimacy with his native region as a
brilliant literary device, with important narrative implications.
This authorial strategy makes it clear that Hucks journey is guided, to some
degree at least, by a kind o f ritual repetition of unresolved emotional trauma, in
which Twains novel is being constructed from the past experience in healing,
redemptive terms. One o f the finest examples of this guiding force comes in
Chapter 15, when a thick fog descends on the river during the night and separates
Huck, in his canoe, from Jim and the raft. Not only does this episode directly
articulate Twains own intense fear of the solid, visually impenetrable wall of
darkness into which he was forced to venture alone as a child and again as a cub
pilot; but it also reveals the extent to which the authors narrative reconstructs, in
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ritual fashion, a similar emotional experience, with important differences in

outcome and tone that directly respond to the needs o f his psychological condition.
At the beginning o f Chapter 15, Huck paddles ahead o f the raft in order to
fasten a line to a tree and thus secure the raft for the night. He prefers dry land,
with all its treacheries, to the prospect of facing down the fog. Even when Huck
stands on land after tethering the canoe to a tree branch, the distant sight of the fog
incites an immediate, overwhelming, mortal fear in the boy:
I see the fog closing down, and it made me so sick and scared I
couldnt budge for most half a minute it seemed to meand then
there wamt no raft in sight; you couldnt see twenty yards. I
jumped into the canoe and run back to stem, and grabbed the paddle
and set her back a stroke. But she didnt come. I was in such a
hurry I hadnt untied her. I got up and tried to untie her, but I was so
excited my hands shook so I couldnt hardly do anything with them.
As soon as I got started I took out after the raft, hot and
heavy, right down the towhead. That was all right as far as it went,
but the towhead wam t sixty yards long, and the minute I flew by
the foot o f it I shot out into the solid white fog, and hadnt no more
idea which way I was going than a dead man.15
This passage describes an experience of fear that is rare for Huck; even his basic
desire to rid himself o f the uncomfortable apparel of society seems a minor
inconvenience by comparison. Hucks defining characteristic, his industrious
improvisation in any situation before him, is tested so severely that he finds himself
unable to react creatively to the approaching wall of fog, to respond at all, which is
a condition he associates with death itself.
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What follows is a harrowing struggle in the thick fog. Huck knows that his
options, to paddle aimlessly with no sense of direction or to sit still while the fear
courses through his veins, are equally bad. He bemoans the difficulty o f locating
Jim and the raft, and mourns, rather existentially, the fact that that ones sensory
information is so unreliable in a fog. Finally, upon realizing that an island has split
him from Jim and the raff, struggling to avoid the dangers o f the eddying currents,
and noting his desolate condition, dismal and lonesome out in a fog that way, by
yourself, in the night, Huck collapses with fatigue, and the river carries him
sleeping downstream (80).
After envisioning Hucks experience with the terrifying unknown and
surpassing the limits o f the boys courage and ability to endure such a fear by
himself, Twain follows with the mercy of a loving parent and rescues Huck from
his hopeless fate. Huck reports:
[.. .] when I waked up the stars was shining bright, the fog was all
gone, and I was spinning down a big bend stem first. First I didnt
know where I was; I thought I was dreaming; and when things
begun to come back to me, they seemed to come up dim out o f last
week. (69)
This is no dream for Huck: reality is kinder the reality, that is, with which Twain
is able to endow Hucks narrative universe. And Twains device for distancing and
softening the fear is, in a profoundly revealing stroke, Hucks sense that the pain of
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the experience took place in the far off, and now harmless, past. It is time, not
space, that separates one from such horrors. Twain, perhaps, would know.
But the supreme measure o f Twains ritually repetitive narrative impulse in
this episode comes soon after Huck awakens, when he paddles on and finds the raft
and Jim. This reunification o f the boy with his friend, protector, and surrogate
parent, comes at a crucial moment. Jim s simple presence here, to say nothing o f
the concern and love he expresses when he himself awakens to find Huck safely
back on the raft, works in direct rebuttal to Hucks nightmarish suffering in the fog.
It is as if the boy had woken from a bad dream, only to find himself under the
soothing, protective gaze o f a comforting parental figure. In providing this episode
with just such an outcome, Twain fashions an emotional presence with obvious
personal relevance.
How then to read the chapters final exchange? Huck invents a tall tale and
convinces Jim that he had merely dreamt the fog and their separation; Jim, whose
ignorance and gullibility are exposed when he sees the tattered raft as evidence to
the contrary, angrily denounces Huck for shaming him, and stalks off into the rafts
shelter; and finally, Huck apologizes for his deception, which is the last o f its kind,
and feels great relief, not regret, in doing so. The fact of Hucks evolving
conscience is made plain in the exchange, but the nature of this evolution, in light
o f Twains complicated authorial motives, deserves close consideration. Perhaps,
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in his attempt to convince Jim o f the unreality o f the fog and their resulting
separation, Huck is actually celebrating the fact o f their reunification in his own
prankish, playful way. By telling Jim that it had all been a dream, just a dream and
nothing more, Huck reaffirms his triumph over the horrors o f the fog. His story
belittles the harmlessness of the fog as dreamlike, fictional. Like Twain himself,
Huck is energized by the power o f his own authorial, narrative act, by his ability to
ritually rewrite, reconstruct, and thus demonstrate his mastery over a very real
experience o f trauma. Even though he preys on Jims ignorance here, Huck fully
expects him to share the joke, the glorious conclusion to which is their emergence
from the nightmarish ordeal together.
In any case, it upsets and genuinely surprises Huck to witness Jim s anger
and offense at the elaborate lie, and the final emotional reality in his apology is that
Huck needs Jim in the manner o f a child who needs, in psychological as well as
physical senses, its parents. Twain seems acutely aware o f this as well, making
sure to unite them again, by way o f the apology this time rather than the clearing
away o f the fog, before the chapter is concluded. Hucks deceptive fiction-making
seems to be, in its roundabout, adolescent, Tom Sawyerish way, nothing less than a
testament to his sheer emotional investment in the person of Jim. Strange as the
idea strikes him, Huck seems to want to submit, he seems to desire the kind o f fixed
authority and moral center provided by Jims presence in his life; and the fact that
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the apology repairs their friendship, especially on the heels o f such an

overpowering experience o f terror, reveals a great deal about the specific manner in
which Twains own redemptive psychic journey coincides with Hucks evolving
conscience, particularly in its crucial racial aspects, in the narrative.
Most essentially, what Huck seeks from Jim is that most universal of human
needs and potentialities: love. Huckleberry Finn at this moment and several others
achieves quite a remarkable expressiveness o f the boys potential to experience
love. Considered in light o f Twains own emotional associations o f youth and his
native region, the often cited elements of moral awakening and social satire in the
novel fade somewhat in prominence, at least by comparison to this less critically
discussed but clearly more driving and underlying emotional presence. And the
racial implications of Jim and Hucks relationship are given a more appropriate
grounding in the novel, especially in light o f Twains own boyhood trauma and
unrecognized need for relief and comfort.
In the very next chapter a steamboat appears literally out o f nowhere and
crashes through the raft; at this point in the novels composition, Twain abandoned
the manuscript for several years. Two general explanations for this sudden accident
and prolonged writers block are possible, and they both seem to emerge from the
same experience as so much of Hucks emotional identity in Chapter 15. Perhaps
the experience of reaching this level o f emotional intensity unnerved Twain himself
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in the fog episode. Perhaps, that is, his narrative method and material struck so
close to home that he sensed a threat to himself, and thus destroyed the raft as soon
as possible, as a kind o f self-protective precaution to prevent other intense fears
from surfacing and demanding conscious attention. The other possibility is that the
reunited Huck and Jim constituted such a glorious emotional moment that Twain
felt a certain closure or completeness in what had just passed. In this case, the
steamboat would serve effectively to provide an end to the story, to get out,
perhaps, while the getting was good.
Several facts make the former hypothesis more attractive. The first is
Twain himself: without even pointing to his legendary cynicism in life and his
aversion to the neatness o f happy endings, it should be clear that his basic
associations with the worlds o f his youth and his fiction were deeply problematic.
O f course, the attempt at ritual redemption in his narrative method, whose aim is
eternally hopeful or, at least, pragmatically therapeutic, assumes a vision and prior
experience of life that is damaging and severe. Twains tendency would clearly be
towards evasive action, favoring flight over any final triumph. In addition to this,
the steamboat is characterized as a fiendish monster rising from the depths of hell.
Emerging suddenly from the gray fog, she bulged out, big and scary, with a long
row o f wide-open furnace doors shining like red-hot teeth, and her monstrous bows
and guards hanging right over us (91).
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This is, incidentally, the kind o f image Marx places at the center o f his
national thesis on pastoral and industrial conflicts: the steamboat as machine, that
relentless, intrusive force crashing through the middle o f the pastoral American
Eden. Marx is right, o f course, to recognize both of those elements here. But it
should be clear also that the steamboat in this episode is weighed down with a great
deal more meaning than Marx is willing or able to concede; in addition to its
obviously industrial connotation, the steamboat has an infernal and threatening
significance to Twain which, as his use o f it at this particular moment in his
narrative makes quite obvious, is directly connected to the contested psychological
and emotional terrain o f his youth. Likewise, the raft that is smashed (but not
destroyed, only to return several chapters later, rather too conveniently, along with
Twains renewed interest in the novel) is no mere symbol o f a pastoral dream, no
simple Eden, but retains what can be understood now as an almost impossibly
overdetermined, and often contradictory, complex of meanings in the space of
Twains love story.
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Missouri Voices: Vernacular and Canonical
So far, there has been only slight mention o f the regional influence upon
what is perhaps the single most defining characteristic in Huckleberry Finn: Hucks
first person narrative voice. This is not an oversight meant to downplay the
possible impact of the notion o f region on Twains use o f this voice. On the
contrary, it seems undeniable that Hucks very localized vernacular style, providing
the formal structure of the novel through which everything is experienced, is itself
the best evidence for Twains experience o f his native region. The authors
explanatory note at the beginning o f the novel, pointing out the care and precision
with which the various dialects o f the characters have been recorded, is especially
significant because it follows the famous Notice to readers: Persons attempting
to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a
moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot (2).
Even through his humor, Twain seems to be telling his readers that the fictional
world they are about to visit will be less accessible by way of events than by way of
the language and voice in which they are related. He defends his vernacular
narrative on the grounds o f careful research and personal familiarity with its
subtleties, a gesture that expresses again Twains intimacy with his fictional world
( 2 ).
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Critics, including Marx, generally see in Hucks narrative voice the key
Twain used to unlock his greatest literary powers. Marx himself, as the earlier
discussion o f his thesis has revealed, considers Hucks voice to be a kind o f golden
mean between two contradictory and mutually exclusive views o f the world. And
criticism rightly points to the physicality o f evocation achieved in Huckleberry
Finn, noting also that most o f Twains other writing fails to match this level of
intensity. But considering the increasingly complex view of the region itself and
Twains equally complex relation to it, as have been discussed here in some detail,
it should become clear that Hucks voice plays a much greater number o f roles than
is often realized or acknowledged. For example: the opportunity for Twain to
assume Hucks persona, most directly in the use o f his narrative voice, has major
emotional repercussions o f the kind revealed in the fog episode in Chapter 15.
Marxs identification of the celebratory tone o f certain passages and the foreboding
tone o f others is certainly true, but even within these Hucks voice operates in
subtle ways. He is able to express sadness and loneliness within ecstatic set pieces
like his description of the sunrise. He infuses his sense o f justice with a humane
pity at the sight o f the tarred and feathered scoundrels who had so recently taken
advantage o f Jim and himself. And it is Twains unequivocal triumph to express
this paradox of such a complex human identity and range o f personal expression
within a specific geographic milieu, so well with the language o f his native region.
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Or perhaps Twain had less to do with such success than is generally granted, and
the accumulation of his personal relations to this region gained their own
momentum and emerged spontaneously as Hucks irrepressible voice. In any
event, Twains original suspicion, that Huck Finns autobiography, as he
originally envisioned it, would be, on the basis of its narrators unique point o f
view, a more successful venture than Tom Sawyers externally narrated tale had
been, proved itself true to a degree that, as with so many other aspects o f his novel.
Twain himself probably could not have understood in advance.
Another native Missourian wrote the introduction to a 1950 edition of
Huckleberry Finn, though as writers and thinkers, T. S. Eliot and Mark Twain may
seem at first to have come from different planets. In fact, Eliot and Twain shared
the same native state; Eliot, however, was bom some fifty years later, had no
personal memory o f the region before the Civil War and Reconstruction, and spent
his early years in a privileged, affluent household in the urban and increasingly
industrial city o f St. Louis. In terms of regional dialect, it is interesting to note the
extraordinary difference between Twains immersion in his native region in order
to construct the voice of Huck Finn and the great lengths to which Eliot went to
destroy all traces of the same region from his own diction. The distinct character o f
Eliots own Missouri drawl was brought to his attention by classmates who teased
him at boarding school in New England; there, and in the following years at
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Harvard, he assiduously worked to shed all traces o f his accent. By the time he
reached the age at which Twain had recorded Huck Finn's voice in his novel, Eliot
was speaking the queens English with the familiarity and ease appropriate to a
proud British subject. He hints at his own relationship to the Missouri o f his early
youth in his introduction to the novel, recalling his own experience o f the
Mississippi Rivers unpredictability:
In my own childhood, it was not unusual for the spring freshet to

interrupt railway travel; and then the traveller to the East had to take
the steamboat from the levee up to Alton, at a higher level on the
Illinois shore, before he could begin his rail journey.16
This is not, to say the least, the voice o f a young boy about to light out for the
territory. Eliots experience of Missouri seems to have had the reverse effect on
him, and he set off from there to the East, and later to Europe, in search of older
places, more traditional institutions, more centralized orders. Indeed, two famous
statements from his introduction to Huckleberry Finn say less about Twains novel
itself than about Eliots own desire for it to meet the preconceived formal and
critical requirements he believed were required for canonization of any literary
work. And overall, it might be added, one of the most striking aspects o f Eliots
introduction is his repeated emphasis on Huckleberry Finn as Twains only
masterpiece, as a work worthy to share the company of other acknowledged
classics; the impulse to classify, prioritize, and rank the novel, to isolate and
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quantify its status as a literary monument in some rarefied and idealized critical
space, competes, rather fiercely, with the boyish impulse simply to read it.
In the first o f these two statements, Eliot states: For without some kind of
God, Man is not even very interesting (201). His intent here, plainly enough, is to
apply a kind of mythological standard to the storys strong brown god, the
Mississippi River (201). Such a contentious statement would face immediate
questioning in virtually any circumstances, but especially here, in the context of
Twains entirely different intentions, it only seems to reveal the awkward
imposition o f Eliots monolithic and abstract critical imperative in the face o f the
novels own particular reality. In the second statement, Huck Finn must come
from nowhere and be bound for nowhere, Eliot invokes a similar kind o f mythic
status for Huck simply in order to justify aesthetically the novels deeply
problematic final chapters, in which Tom Sawyers intrusion causes the intensity of
the central portion o f the narrative to dissipate (202). This instance o f Eliots
totalizing impulse is damaging on two levels: not only does he attempt to canonize
and defend the novel with his own strict formal categories, as he also did in the first
statement, but in doing so he actually conceals what most critics perceive as the
novels most flawed element, and simply dismisses the frustration experienced by
most readers in that section o f the novel.
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Eliots reading o f Huckleberry Finn expresses, perhaps unintentionally, a

great deal of internal tension between his most immediate emotional response to the
novel, which is quite urgent and might even be called childlike, and the ways in
which his critical sensibility is willing or able to account for that experience. In
another essay called The Function o f Criticism, Eliot argues that the role o f the
critic consists of the elucidation o f works o f art and the correction o f taste.17
Eliot clearly sees in his critical attitude a guarded protection o f a cultures highest
aesthetic standards, even as the critic himself (Eliots own emphasis on maleness)
may be required by his very method to repress certain inclinations and responses.
He writes:
The critic, one would suppose, if he is to justify his existence,

should endeavor to discipline his personal prejudices and cranks
tares to which we are all subject -- and compose his differences with
as many o f his fellows as possible, in the common pursuit o f true
judgment. When we find that quite the contrary prevails, we begin
to suspect that the critic owes his livelihood to the violence and
extremity o f his opposition to other critics, or else to some trifling
oddities of his own with which he contrives to season the opinions
which men already hold, and which out of vanity or sloth they prefer
to maintain. We are tempted to expel the lot. (69)
Eliots move from the intensive self-discipline required to purge the aspiring critic
from his idiosyncrasies, which are, of course, hindrances to true judgm ent, to the
seething resentment he feels toward those whose deviance clearly marks them as
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unworthy o f the critical community, proceeds to shape his general model o f the
canon:
Immediately after such an eviction, or as soon as relief has abated

our rage, we are compelled to admit that there remain certain books,
certain essays, certain sentences, certain men, who have been
"useful to us. And our next step is to attempt to classify these, and
find out whether we establish any principles for deciding what kinds
of books should be preserved, and what aims and methods of
criticism should be followed. (69- 70)
Having envisioned the canon and its guardians in this way, Eliot is more
understandable in his conflicted sense of Huckleberry Finn. Such a novel -- a novel
whose incredibly attractive narrator and protagonist is the son o f a town drunk,
experiencing himself and his world with a completeness and intimacy almost
totally free of repressions, exploding the corrupt myths o f civilized society
somewhere out along the Western frontier in America -- quite plainly challenges all
of the assumptions and structures of Eliots self-consciously traditional critical
orthodoxy. That Eliot embraces the novel at all is perhaps a tribute to its expressive
voice even within such a reactionary atmosphere. At the same time, however, in
attempting to force Huckleberry Finn into such rigid and preconceived categories in
order to elevate it to canonical status, his critical method does great injustice to the
novels unique and particular identity and achievement, which are made visible
through a regional reading, and this mutes Eliots overall reading significantly.
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The theoretical and ideological motives for Eliots well-known

transmigration to the Old World are revealed to some degree in his critical
approach above. Similarly, the elitist and purifying yearnings o f his religious
impulse are apparent in his vision o f the ideal critical community. In the end,
Eliots deepest impulse towards the fixed center, towards the canons o f a
conservative-imperialist England, seem traceable in different ways o f course, but
no less so, than those behind Twains urgent outpouring o f intensity in Huckleberry
Finn to his Missouri experience. The single-mindedness o f his eviction is in a
sense an entirely appropriate response to that most American ailment: the desperate
anxiety, the almost Sartrean nausea in the face of such complexity o f place, o f what
seems such a lack o f central authority and unity, of the disturbing difference
between the American region, in all its ambiguity and seemingly careless intuition,
and the sometimes more reassuring reactionary European model, with its fixed
borders and immutable hierarchies.18 And although Eliots endpoint is Europe, his
journey remains characteristically American: like Huck, he prefers to travel as an
individual, although he clearly longs for good company; like Huck, he repudiates
what he views as an inauthentic social milieu, and takes on an awakened moral
identity through his new vision.
As for Eliots failure to recognize the fundamental nature of his complex
native region, and, eventually, America as a whole, and his need to retreat to a kind
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of parental safety as formulated in his British identity, it is tempting to read these

things ironically in light of the prior example of his grandfather, William Greenleaf
Eliot. The patriarchs impressive ability to respond creatively and humanely to the
complexity o f that same space, during an even more chaotic historical era, and with
a mature awareness o f the subtlety and quality of that world, is matched in his
grandson by an equally pressing impulse to totalize and sanitize all space through a
kind o f ritual establishment o f an authoritative and originary center. The
grandfathers authoritative moral presence, which, according to T. S. Eliot, loomed
over everything in his childhood in a very real way that had been passed on to him
by the intervening generation in his family, seems to have served both as an ironic
reminder o f the lack of centeredness in the grandsons early experience o f space,
and as an active, shaping force that would become most visible in the grandsons
consolidation o f presence in his religious, political, and literary peregrinations and
affiliations. In this context T. S. Eliots actions might be read as his own rather
awkward attempt to fulfill the imposing ideals of his grandfather. After all,
William Greenleaf Eliot was native to New England and chose Missouri as his
destination with the same deliberateness that his grandson would later choose
England. Again, however, there are both ingenuous and ironic implications: while
they share a kind o f spiritual quest, the grandfathers missionary zeal, coupled with
his ability to discern cultural differences and exercise restraint when confronted
88
with a sense of the limitations o f authority in his adopted region, seems o f more
service than his grandsons self-fulfilling elitism and negative colonial undertones,
however earnest and defensible in the name high cultural standards.
As his reading o f Huckleberry Finn shows, Eliots critical landscape buries
something native to the novel, as all imperialist methods do, in order to construct
and present its own mythic face. As in Leo Marxs national thesis, which
subordinates the object o f its critical attention to the subject o f its own advancing
materiality, there is a clear and recognizable pattern in which Twains novel fails to
receive the critical attention it deserves on its own terms. But what, in particular, is
this buried something, this repressed presence?
Canon building is Empire building, remarks Toni Morrison in an essay
that seeks to unearth and examine the Afro-American presence in American
literature.19 Morrisons study attempts to identify the strong connection between
the repression o f Afro-American culture and the maintenance o f a dominantly
imperial model of the American national literary canon as the protected preserve
o f the thoughts and works and analytical strategies o f whitemen (202). Sharing
Morrisons general assumption about the fundamental connection between the
canon and imperialism, I want to suggest that my own theoretical model o f the
region be considered in a way that parallels Morrisons critical notion o f race.
Perhaps what is buried in the analytical strategies o f critics like Leo Marx and T.
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S. Eliot, and what must be repressed in order for such methods to maintain their
own credibility, is nothing less than the region itself. Certainly the extraordinary
richness and resonance of Huckleberry Finn, and the crucial personal connections
between Twain and his native Missouri, freely emerge in the context o f the region
and through a regional reading that acknowledges and privileges its discrete and
individualistic cultural identities. Rejecting the protected preserve o f a
reactionary and repressive, highly limiting literary canon in favor o f what Morrison
envisions elsewhere as a wider landscape that has the ability to remap the
American critical geography [...] without the mandate for conquest, the region
composes an important aspect of this reconstruction.20
90
Notes to Chapter 2
1 See Roberto Maria Dainotto, All the Regions Do Smilingly Revolt: The
Literature o f Place and Region, in Critical Inquiry, Volume 22, Number 3 (Spring
1996): 486. The opening o f Dainottos essay, which is more generally focused on
European literature and culture, provides an excellent analysis o f this movement
from national to regional criticism.
2 W. H. New, Beyond Nationalism: On Regionalism, World Literature
Written in English, Volume 25, Number 1 (1984): 14.
3 Dainotto 505.
4 Edward W. Said, Yeats and Decolonization, Nationalism, Colonialism,
and Literature, Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson, Edward W. Said, intro. Seamus
Deane (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990) 77.
5 See Chapter 1 of this study, Manifest Regional Destiny: Toward a Theory
of the Region in the United States, for more on the uniqueness and complexity o f
the American imperial model.
6 Leo Marx, The Pilot and the Passenger: Landscape Conventions and the
Style o f Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain: A Collection o f Critical Essays, ed.
Henry Nash Smith (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963) 51.
7 See Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral
Ideal in America (New York: Oxford UP, 1964). Marxs introductory chapter,
Sleepy Hollow, 1844, presents a general historical account o f Americas repeated
efforts to carry out utopian ideals in its cultural practices, and o f the related
presence of industry as a kind o f problematic and intrusive force in various utopian
models.
8 See, for example, Lionel Trilling, Huckleberry Finn, The Liberal
Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking P, 1950) 10417. Trillings characterization o f Twains consciousness as primarily Southern
91
anticipates his reading o f Hucks moral crisis, and his more general sense o f the
subversiveness o f Twains novel, in implicitly regional terms; Robert Penn Warren,
Mark Twain, Mark Twain, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House P,
1986) 55-82. Among Twains critics, Warren displays a rare sensitivity to the
regional specificity o f Twains own personal background, noting the young writers
bitter division o f feeling in relation to the backward relation o f his birth that is
expressed in his considerable, though ultimately failed, attempts to sever the past
from the narratives o f his authorial alter ego. What is equally significant, Warren
continues, is the complex o f feelings that went into the telling o f that tale (56).
Himself a native o f Kentucky, a border state with ambiguous traits like Twains
Missouri, Warren moves beyond the limited perception o f regional exoticism that
limits other readers o f Twains novel, in order to read Hucks journey instead
primarily as a movement toward reality with very real and complex roots in
Twains native region (67).
9 See Chapter 1 o f this study for more on the Missouri Compromise and its
role in the national cultural context during the decades before the Civil War.
10 James Neal Primm, Lion o f the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri, 1764-1980
(St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society P, 1998) 227. See Prim m s Chapter 7, For
the Union, for an excellent general account of the fractious cultural scenes of the
city and state during the Civil War era.
11 See Primm 249-50 for more on this episodes role in exposing the
ambiguous nature o f the loyalty question in St. Louis.
12 Primm 250.
13 James Neal Primm, Missouri, St. Louis, and the Secession Crisis,
Germans fo r a Free Missouri: Translations from the St. Louis Radical Press, 18571862, trans. Steven Rowan (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1983) 13.
14 Quoted in Richard Bridgman, Traveling in Mark Twain (Berkeley: U of
California P, 1987) 107.
15 Mark Twain, The Adventures o f Huckleberry Finn (New York: BantamDoubleday, 1981)78-9.
92
16 T. S. Eliot, Introduction, Huckleberry Finn: Text, Sources, and

Criticism, ed. Kenneth S. Lynn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1961) 198.
17 T. S. Eliot, The Selected Prose ofT . S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London:
Faber, 1975) 69.
18 See After Strange Gods: Conclusions to the Literature of Place and
Region, Roberto Maria Dainotto, Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures,
Communities (Ithaca, 2000) 163-73, for more on Eliots anxiety in the face of
modem industrial societys complexity. Dainotto notes the explicitly racial aspects
o f Eliots own regional model, as well as the manner in which Eliots regionalism
symbolically takes the place o f a discredited nationalist ideal (172).
19 Toni Morrison, Unspeakable Thoughts Unspoken: The Afro-American
Presence in American Literature, Toni Morrison, ed. Harold Bloom (New York:
Chelsea House P, 1990) 207, 201. See also Chapter 5 of this study, Freshening
the Pain: Regional and Racial Constructions in Toni Morrison, for my more
systematic reading of Morrisons fiction and criticism in various regional contexts,
and a wider consideration of Morrisons parallel use o f region and race.
20 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992) 3.
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CHAPTER 3
American Idols, Regional Dissidents:
W illiam Faulkner and the Invention o f the South
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any
likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth
beneath, or that is in the water under the earth;
Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for
I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity o f the
fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation o f
them that hate me;
And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me,
and keep my commandments.
-- Exodus 20: 4-6 (The Second
Commandment)
Im the nigger thats going to sleep with your sister. Unless you
stop me, Henry.
Absalom, Absalom!
Introduction
The contempt in which William Faulkner held Hollywood its institutions,

its geography, its weather -- is by now legendary.1 From his earliest scriptwriting
junket, in 1932, through two more decades o f occasional, tempestuous periods o f
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residence and work there, and until he died in 1962, Faulkner so assiduously
cultivated a sense o f his own dis-ease with Hollywood that little has been suggested
to the contrary since his death. And yet, the opportunity to secure work in the film
industry provided him with a number o f important assets over the years. Early on,
o f course, the money enabled him to continue writing. During the Depression
1930s, which was also the period o f Faulkners most furious creative output, the
promise of five hundred dollars per week, which MGM offered him for his first
contract, must have seemed otherworldly for a man who could handily support his
family back in Mississippi on ten dollars a week. As the years passed, Faulkner
routinely used brief stints in Hollywood to support him through longer periods o f
writing novels, and accumulated a good deal o f property, including several farms,
horses, an airplane, and so on, that enabled him to take on the trappings o f success.
He wrote to his editor Ben Wasson around the time of his first trip to Hollywood: I
am going cold-blooded Yankee now; I am not young enough anymore to hell
around and earn money as I could at other things once.2 Faulkners language here
is interesting, as it associates the straightforward pursuit o f money with the North,
while, he implies, his native South offers a more laid-back, relaxed, youthfully
innocent attitude toward work. In the South, he seems to suggest, work is not really
about money, because life is something that is not really, fundamentally, about
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work, but is, instead, a more aesthetic entity. Hollywood, o f course, is an

unmistakably Northern place, or non-place, as it may turn out, for Faulkner.
In addition to the money, Hollywood offered Faulkner other things. He was
able to escape an often stifling family and community life in Oxford, which he
needed to do at regular intervals; he was able to experience a measure o f the female
companionship, troubled though it usually was, that he simply did not receive in his
own marriage; and more generally, he was brought into a setting whose sheer
distinctness from his own roots gave him insight into the diversity and range o f
American culture. The latter point, when considered in light o f Faulkners fiction,
dramatically complicates the simple stereotype he tossed out to Wasson in the 1932
letter. For even in the lone short story he sets in Hollywood, a rarely studied piece
called Golden Land, Faulkner reveals a sense o f regional complexity that speaks
to ideas o f South and North, as well as to America in general, in considerably more
nuanced ways.
Later in this chapter I will suggest that Faulkners greatness as a writer and
importance as an American cultural figure are due in no small measure to his
particular regional identity (or, perhaps, identities), as a small-town Southerner who
comes o f age in the aftermath o f World War I. I will argue that Faulkners ability
to fuse modernist aesthetic concerns with the specific spaces, places, and
landscapes of his fiction, relies on the figure of the region as a cultural unit and
96
construct as formulated in Chapter 1, and expresses a larger American concern that

is, paradoxically, more sweeping, more national, even as it articulates its own
highly localized and vernacular values. The second part o f this chapter devotes
considerable attention to the Southern Agrarian movements efforts,
contemporaneous with Faulkners most productive years, to articulate a regional
aesthetic and political agenda. The juxtaposition of the Agrarians writings with
those o f Faulkner will advance my thesis about the highly self-conscious nature of
Faulkners figural use o f the region in his fiction, and, importantly, will more
precisely clarify the nature of the divergence between his literary texts and the
unabashedly critical writings of the Agrarians. But in order to approach a sense of
Faulkners achievement and overall place in these national and regional contexts,
especially for Faulkners greatest novels, it is instructive to parallel some of the
primary ways in which he appropriates the region in stories set both outside and
inside the South. Golden Land and another short story, Dry September, offer
excellent possibilities for these respective cases: the latter, a powerful lynching
story set in Jefferson, Mississippi, Faulkners native and most comfortable fictional
milieu, shares a number of key concerns with Golden Land even as it produces its
own independent fictional and regional space.
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Golden L and and the Transposition o f the North
In Golden Land, Faulkner portrays a Hollywood whose defining

characteristic is rootlessness. The narrator quickly establishes this condition as
primary, as literally grounded in the landscape itself:
The terrace, the sundrenched terra cotta tiles, butted into a rough and
savage shear of canyonwall bare yet without dust, on or against
which a solid mat of flowers bloomed in fierce lush myriad-colored
paradox as though in place o f being rooted into and drawing from
the soil they lived upon air alone and had been merely leaned intact
against the sustenanceless lavawall by someone who would later
return and take them away.3
Perhaps what Faulkner has in mind is a set decorator from one o f the movie studios
around town someone who will merely remove the grotesquely displaced flowers
when filming has been completed for the day. The flowers seem plastic, artificial,
unnatural. In any case, there is a sense of dark comedy, even absurdity, in the
location o f the seemingly rootless flowers whose presence speaks not ju st for itself
but reflects rather bizarrely on the vast sublimity o f the overall canyonwall vista.
Both figure and ground are problematized through this juxtaposition.
A later passage speaks to the condition o f rootlessness with even more
intensity and wider geographic and cultural implications. It is an extraordinary and
revealing sentence, one of Faulkners trademark interminable meandering
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constructions that, the writer once wrote, were his attempt to put it all, if possible,
on one pinhead.4 Setting aside the rather ambitious existential implications o f this
remark, it remains clear that Faulkners narrative style here does demand quite a
serious engagement if only on topographic grounds. The passage describes Ira
Ewing, a successful Los Angeles realtor raised in Nebraska, and his view, entirely
imagined, from the passenger window o f a moving car driven through Los Angeles
by his mistress:
But he did close his eyes again and again the car ran powerful,
smooth, and fast beneath him, performing its afternoons jaunt over
the incredible distances of which the city was composed; from time
to time, had he looked, he could have seen the city in the bright soft
vague hazy sunlight, random, scattered about the arid earth like so
many gay scraps o f paper blown without order, with its curious air
o f being rootlesso f houses bright beautiful and gay, without
basements or foundations, lightly attached to a few inches o f light
penetrable earth, lighter even than dust and laid lightly in turn upon
the profound and primeval lava, which one good hard rain would
wash forever from the sight and memory o f man as a firehose
flushes down a gutterthat city of almost incalculable wealth whose
queerly appropriate fate it is to be erected upon a few spools o f a
substance whose value is computed in billions and which may be
completely destroyed in that seconds instant o f a careless match
between the moment of striking and the moment when the striker
might have sprung and stamped it out. (718-9)
This is quite a remarkable description of the landscape, especially considering that

it resides entirely within Iras imagination. While one may lament that Faulkner
never addressed Hollywood in earnest in any o f his longer works, this lone passage
99
does offer some consolation: a pinhead, perhaps, but a most zealous and
hardworking one indeed.
Iras mind conjures an image o f the city that is at once transitory and
eternal. The force of the landscape lies in its rootlessness, and yet, somehow for Ira
this very trait tempts an incredibly violent fantasy that invokes a kind o f Biblical
retribution. Or, more accurately, two fantasies: first the flood, then the fire. Ira has
an instinctive sense o f what for lack of a better word might be called the sinfulness
native to the rootless landscape and, by extension, its rootless people. This sense o f
sin and corruption, connected to the dearth o f any real foundation for the culture, is
clearly the product, in Iras case, o f his own background. Having grown up in a sod
dwelling literally dug into the ground, Iras earliest recollection of life is bound up
with solid foundations, with the earth itself. His own father, the pioneering Ewing
for whom the Nebraska town would be named, stoically endured as a wheat farmer
and, perhaps more centrally, preached. Thus Iras fundamental sense of the sin and
corruption of rootless Los Angeles takes on, appropriately enough, the immolating
Biblical tone that envisions the entire citys righteous destruction by water and fire.
Rootlessness is extended in this passage to include the citys hollow optimistic
facade, its tremendous wealth, and o f course, its economic basis in flickering
celluloid, that most artificial, and flammable, commodity.
100
Faulkner seems to be presenting an extraordinarily brutal critique of this

society; moving from the land to its inhabitants, young people... with bronzed,
unselfconscoius bodies, he writes:
Lying so, they seemed to him to walk along the rim o f the world as
though they and their kind alone inhabited it, and he with his fortyeight years were the forgotten last survivor o f another race and kind,
and they in their turn precursors of a new race not yet seen on the
earth: o f men and women without age, beautiful as gods and
goddesses, and with the minds o f infants. (721)
The invocation o f a different race of people brings to mind the Snopes clan in
Faulkners later work, or perhaps the apelike Jim Bond near the conclusion of
Absalom, Absalom!, whose kind are predicted, rather apocalyptically, to overrun
Western civilization. Here Faulkner seems to intend something comparably
insidious: the ageless, deathless, infantile culture only reveals its great distance
from a more traditional, humane, robust civilization. Even more generally, one
might also consider the vivid racial history of Faulkners South in the context of
this passage. Faulkner transforms Los Angeles into a surreal, almost sciencefictional world here, and it is through the invocation of a racial distinctness that he
does so; understandably, such a gesture is difficult to read apart from Faulkners
Southern genesis.
But no sooner does Faulkner diagnose this cultural sickness than it
becomes, for Ira, a much more complicated affair. For whereas Faulkner, the
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authorial presence, is able to situate himself outside this entire space, he affords Ira
no such luxury in his own perspective. Even as he perceives the cultures
corruption, in his foreboding associations of rootlessness, landscape and
destruction, and in his pagan image of the beautiful men and women on the beach,
Ira participates actively in the life of the culture and consciously takes on many of
its values and roles. His own corruption needs no more evidence than the long
opening passage in which, his senses dulled from the previous nights heavy
drinking, he must summon an almost superhuman power o f will just to climb out of
bed in the morning. The fact that it takes him nearly four pages o f narrative just to
stand up provides some idea o f his confused and stunted state. And the sad
condition of his family reveals the spiritual inertia o f Ira and his entire milieu. He
and his wife have, effectively, a non-marriage, and Ira seeks comfort instead in a
mistress. His daughter is the subject of tabloid scandal for her participation in
sexual orgies. And his son, named Voyd by his wife out o f sheer contempt for her
husbands legacy, is quite probably a homosexual, a designation which strikes Ira
as utterly abominable. Aside from his wife and son, whose common abhorrence for
Ira seems to unite them, none o f the family members particularly cares for any
other, and there is virtually no communication, let alone intimacy, between or
among them.
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But the complexity, and the irony, o f Iras placement in Los Angeles comes
precisely from his role as a successful, if unethical, businessman, and from the fact
that he is able to provide a life o f such luxury and ease for him self and his family.
Having fled the harshness o f his parents Nebraska farm as an adolescent, Ira
simply assumes that luxury and ease are good things in their own right. He
cultivates his place in Los Angeles, even trading on his daughters scandalous
notoriety to increase his real estate businesss publicity, writh something of his
fathers pioneering relentlessness, but replaces the latters religious mission with
his own quest for wealth. The generational stress caused by Iras choices is evident
not only in the sorry condition of his children and his failure as a father, but also in
his strained relationship with his aging mother, whom he had brought, against her
will, to Los Angeles years ago when his father died. Having witnessed the
unhealthy behavior of her grandchildren, Iras mother confronts him on his lifestyle
in an important passage:
Yes, the son said. Im making money. Im making it fast while I

can. Im going to make a lot o f it. Im going to give my children
luxuries and advantages that my father never dreamed a child might
have.
Thats it, she said. You make money too easy. This
whole country is too easy for us Ewings. It may be all right for them
that have been bom here for generations; I dont know about that.
But not for us.
But these children were bom here.
Just one generation. The generation before that they were
bom in a sodroofed dugout on the Nebraska wheat frontier. And the
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one before that in a log house in Missouri. And the one before that
in a Kentucky blockhouse with Indians around it. This world has
never been easy for Ewings. Maybe the Lord never intended it to
be.
But it is from now on, he said; he spoke with a kind o f
triumph. For me and you too. But mostly for them. (724)
Iras last pronouncements here, it seems clear, are flirting with heresy. It is as
though he has simply decreed the familys destiny, as though he has assumed total
authority to decide its fate, regardless o f what God, nature, or any other presence or
force might have to say about the matter. His mothers coarse yearning to return to
the cold desolation o f Nebraska, a wish her son refuses to grant, springs from an
entirely different system o f values, a displaced and thus devalued system.
Death, not life, is the real issue here. For Iras mother understands that
death, and the harshness of life that serves to remind humans of deaths close
proximity, are not things to be fled or avoided, least o f all through a soft life in
which money is too easy to make. She senses that Nebraska is in the single most
important sense a far healthier place than this superficial, bland rootless existence.
Ira, however, finds her stodgy conservatism a nuisance; he simply does not see the
merit in her ideas because, even in the presence of his unconscious fantasies of
violent destruction, he has committed himself so fully to the pursuit o f wealth and
luxury. When he learns his mother has been secretly saving to buy a train ticket
back home, he merely thinks she is suicidal: Back there? he said. To those
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winters, that town, that way o f living, where shes bound to know that the first
winter would .. . Youd almost think she wanted to die, wouldnt you? (720). Of
course, he is correct to intuit that the question to be confronted is indeed death. His
own life of ease is little more than a flight from all reminders o f death; this
becomes, ironically enough, merely a cultivation o f deathly forces all around
himself. And his own choices place him in a unique position, such that he is able to
perceive the two worlds he has known, and retain important traits from each space
in his own perspective. Thus his impressions of Hollywood and Los Angeles take
on a wider significance.
Where is the proper place for death in human life? In the end, the terrifying
diagnosis Faulkner provides for Hollywood in Golden Land is that there is no
room for death at all in such a place, such a culture. Society has no roots in the past
and nothing but a void (or Voyd) future; it is ageless, like its men and women,
outside o f time itself, and thus doomed to float indeterminately like the dust
particles in the hazy, languid sunlight of Iras adopted city. Only Iras mother
approaches this awareness on a conscious level: only she, with her gravitational
yearning for the tougher, more stoic Nebraska life (and death, o f course) that
includes an appropriately natural and humble relationship between man and earth,
man and place. Faulkner posits her as a kind of prophet, a doomed moralist crying
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out in the wilderness that has claimed her life, though not, as the storys closing
passage reveals, her death:
The sun was high; she could see the water from the sprinkler
flashing and glinting in it as she went to the window. It was still
high, still afternoon; the mountains stood serene and drab against it;
the city, the land, lay sprawled and myriad beneath it--the land, the
earth which spawned a thousand new faiths, nostrums and cures
each year but no disease to even disprove them onbeneath the
golden days unmarred by rain or weather, the changeless
monotonous beautiful days without end countless out o f the halcyon
past and endless into the halcyon future.
I will stay here and live forever, she said to herself. (725-6)
Resigning herself in this way to the inescapability of her situation, Iras mother
pronounces her own curse, and the curse o f her adopted place. The crowning glory
of this rootless culture is nothing less than the complete extraction o f death itself
from life. The implications of this notion, which Faulkner seems to have found
chilling, seem the natural outgrowth o f the landscape itself, the golden, impeccable
Southern California earth.
Because of the huge rift between his early years in Nebraska and his current
lifestyle, Ira is caught in a kind of no-m ans-land between two points. On the one
hand, there is a strong sense of the serious flaws o f the golden land, a deeply
ironic and sardonic connotation to the phrase itself. Iras fantasies and, even more
consciously, the ideas of his mother make this all too clear. Worshipped for its own
sake, the place itself becomes nothing less than an idol, an ideal estate in which
106
everyones faith, with the exception o f Iras mother, is invested. Iras interests in
real estate, by contrast, only reveal his active participation in this curious
manifestation o f idolatry: dealing in the land itself, he himself purveys the
abomination that plagues the entire culture. On some level Ira has an almost
violent, visceral reaction against his adopted milieu, a place that he unconsciously
envisions as an American Sodom and Gomorrah. And yet he is a willing
participant in its vogue o f deathless obsession with death. He is, then, a victim o f
the values that he has been unable to completely shed from his religious
upbringing, because having traded his fathers incorruptible and disciplined
rectitude for a life o f ease and luxury, his life is full o f dull, miserable, slow and
endless corruption. His mothers final declaration, I will stay here and live
forever, serves as Faulkners final damnation not just for her but for Ira himself;
such a pointless existence, whose worthlessness is ironic in the context of such
tremendous wealth, is its own worst fate.
In this way Faulkner utilizes the deeply divided narrative perspective o f his
story to reveal a great deal about America, or, perhaps, several Americas. Beneath
the surface, there is the South of Faulkners own provenance, which emerges in the
story through its heav>' Biblical tone, a kind o f Old Testament diagnosis and
exhortation about the sins o f the culture. Faulkners own South is a terribly
ambivalent place specifically because his deep attachment to it includes at all times
107
an awareness o f its flaws. It is no idyllic Eden; indeed. Southern citizenship

includes a kind o f universal awareness that such an Edenic state does not exist
anywhere. Also beneath the surface o f Golden Land, there is a vision o f a
Yankee North not merely of the Civil War, but o f modernity and industrialization.
This is the North Faulkner had in mind in his letter to Wasson, in which he planned
to become, temporarily, a cold-blooded Yankee, and to make as much money as
possible in a short period of time. It is the North of the machine, of the abstract
economy, where the fact that money can indeed be made too easy, along with the
alienation o f man from the earth and, thus, his own humanity, exiles him to a life
that answers poorly to his own nature and needs. Even though Faulkners South
suffers from tremendous flaws, including poverty, ignorance, racism, and, more
generally, guilt, it offers at least the opportunity for man to exist in healthy relation
to himself in terms o f nature; the North, by contrast, with all its great victories and
achievements, offers nothing like this, but seduces man with its promise o f ease to a
life o f inhumane values. Foremost among such values, o f course, is money.
Faulkners method in Golden Land is a transposition of these archetypal
American regions, South and North, to characterize, respectively, Nebraska and
Southern California. Southern economic and racial shortcomings are transformed
into brutally cold weather, a difficult farming life, and the stoic, humbling
landscape o f the Great Plains. Both these places share the presence o f a tough,
108
deeply rooted fundamentalist religious tone. And the Northern evils o f money and
power correspond in the story to the hazy, floating sunlight and almost pagan cult
of superficial, ageless beauty in Hollywood. But in effectively transposing the
stereotypical North/South regional traits of his own background to the East/West
traverse in Iras family history and personal travels, Faulkner is doing something at
once stabilized by the North/South background and widened into a more incisive
and site-specific act o f cultural criticism. The United States is addressed here not
simply as a unified national idea, but more immediately in terms of its quite varied
regional cultures. And yet, the two distinct worlds at issue in Golden Land, the
pioneer and homesteaders Great Plains and a decadent, lazy, thoroughly
modernized Los Angeles, are deeply connected even as they repel one another.
History itself, here articulated by Iras aging mother who understands the need for
roots as well as the dignity of a more challenging daily existence, binds the
individual to the place from which he comes, even as he moves toward a future that
may well be in an entirely different world.
Once Faulkner sets up Los Angeles as a representation of the monstrous,
soulless North, it would be easy to predict yet another variation on that favorite
theme of the South: the standard condemnation o f Northern corruption that has
been a primary Southern export since at least 1860. But in Ira Ewing, Faulkner
portrays a more complicated kind of cultural exchange. Two worlds, and two sets
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o f values, are mashed together in Ira; his challenge is to construct a world in which
they are reconciled to one another. And in view of the way Ira improvises his way
through his days ~ drinking, profiting from his daughters infamy, trying to salvage
an emotional life with his mistress, spewing venom at his supposedly gay son, and
faithfully (one is tempted to say, religiously) visiting his mother every day out o f
respect for whatever shadowy sense of the past she represents despite the
inconvenience and the lack o f human connection between himself and her -- it is
indeed a losing battle. Faulkner portrays a rigid, self-pitying man who participates
in a deathly culture even as he sharply criticizes its flaws; Ira presents a very
human, very individual attempt to confront the overwhelming social forces around
him. Reaching, as his work often does, for a sense of historical consciousness that
is fundamentally invested in a particular, and generally self-contained, American
space, Faulkners portrait of Ira Ewing stands as something more ambitious than a
simple polemic against a distant region, although, incidentally, it performs
devastatingly well in this regard. In transposing the traditional North/South
regional split into a migrating East/West model, and in transforming characteristics
from the former into new manifestations o f the latter, Faulkners story seeks out the
nature o f American identity in a more general sense.
Region, in which ones individual identity seems so fundamentally
grounded in America, may be understood now as an elaborate construction whose
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power lies not in its determinacy but in exactly the opposite condition. That is to
say, in Iras case, the regions secret is precisely its permeability, its contingency,
its cultural constructedness -- crucial in an immigrant and restlessly migrating
America where assimilation and self-reinvention are basic to success and even
survival. But, as his dull fatigue and his no-mans-land allegiance suggest, it
remains a secret that he never quite grasps. The region functions for Faulkner here
in much the way that the rootless flowers on the sheer canyonwall do: both serve to
expose, or, perhaps, unmask, the true nature of the landscape and its human culture.
That the region reveals the pervasiveness o f culturally constructed meanings for
this particular American space and, by extention, for all American spaces is
both the triumph o f Faulkners regional vision and, sadly enough, the elusive truth
that Ira Ewing fails to apprehend.
Dry September and the Idolatry o f the South
While Faulkner utilizes the region in Golden Land in order to question the
nature of American identity, he is no less interested in the identity o f his own South
in Dry September. But the nature o f his inquiry is quite distinct in each case, as a
closer study of Dry September will reveal. I want to suggest that the concept o f
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idolatry will provide a key to understanding the shared traits in the stories. As
discussed in the context o f Golden Land, it is place itself that becomes an idol for
the culture; as opposed to the golden calf o f the Israelites, it is the golden land itself
that is worshipped in America, and in 1930s Los Angeles in particular. Perhaps
Faulkner intended this as a fitting spiritual culmination for the nations selfproclaimed manifest destiny, which had driven, with machinelike relentlessness,
the westward expansion o f the country. In Dry September, as I will argue, the
practice of idolatry sets its gaze on the figure of race; and it is racial identity, and its
relationship to the small-town Southern scene where Faulkner sets his story, that
advances an understanding o f his regional vision, particularly when compared to
Golden Land.
The opening passage in Dry September serves as a synecdoche for the
whole storys concerns. Race, gender, community, and the stifling hot dry weather
o f Jefferson, Mississippi, immediately establish themselves as the primary issues:
Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath o f sixtytwo rainless days, it had gone like a fire in dry grassthe rumor, the
story, whatever it was. Something about Miss Minnie Cooper and a
Negro. Attacked, insulted, frightened: none o f them, gathered in the
barber shop on that Saturday evening where the ceiling fan stirred,
without freshening it, the vitiated air, sending back upon them, in
recurrent surges o f stale pomade and lotion, their own stale breath
and odors, knew exactly what happened.
Except it wasnt Will Mayes, a barber said. He was a man
of middle age; a thin, sand-colored man with a mild face, who was
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shaving a client. I know Will Mayes. Hes a good nigger. And I

know Miss Minnie Cooper, too. (169)
Faulkners early connection o f the long summer drought with the rumor is telling.
In comparing the rumors spread to a fire in dry grass, he immediately frames an
understanding o f the people in the community. It is a small, tight social group
made up of individuals who may have something o f the quality o f dry grass;
perhaps they are simply waiting to be ignited by something. And the rumor itself,
something about Miss Minnie Cooper and a Negro, offers virtually no narrative
movement; instead it merely mentions a white womans name in the same phrase
with a Negro. Faulkners understatement here serves to heighten the tension and
mystery surrounding the rumor, so that it takes on a dramatic quality by mere
suggestion. The phrase that follows, attacked, insulted, frightened, establishes
once and for all the nature o f the event at issue in the experience o f the community.
With these three words, the event is lowered from legal status (as attacked would
clearly qualify it) to the realm o f etiquette (insulted) and finally to a level o f pure
subjectivity (frightened), quite possibly with no basis in actual fact. Thus
Faulkner makes it clear that while none o f them... knew exactly what had
happened, this is a community where such a detail may not matter at all.
So when the barber Hawkshaw raises his voice in defense o f the Negro,
alone among the men in the barbershop, he is clearly assuming a minority stance.
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And the fury with which he is shouted down by the other men comes as little
surprise. The reason for this is simple enough: the mere suggestion o f a scenario in
which a white woman encounters a Negro whips up a torrent o f imagination in the
white men sitting around the barbershop, as well as in the white community in
general. A hint o f this process is visible in the voice o f a client in the shop, who
asks about Miss Minnie Cooper: Who is she? the client said. A young girl?
(169). Clearly the man is eager to visualize a Negros attack on a young white girl;
the power o f such a vague rumor to fire his, and the whole white communitys,
imagination, lies simply in its setting a kind o f ritualized, premeditated situation
into motion.
Later in this scene, when another man inquires whether any o f the rumors
events actually happened, and recalls that Miss Minnie Cooper has a rather
illustrious history o f fabricating man scares, the seething ex-soldier McLendon
shouts in response a model of his own, and the towns, odd notion o f justice, and
proceeds to rally the men in the barbershop to action:
McLendon whirled on the third speaker. Happen? What

the hell difference does it make? Are you going to let the black sons
get away with it until one really does it?
Thats what Im telling them! Butch shouted. He cursed,
long and steady, pointless.
Here, here a fourth said. Not so loud. Dont talk so
loud.
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Sure, McLendon said; no talking necessary at all. Ive

done my talking. Whos with me? He poised on the balls o f his
feet, roving his gaze. (171, 172)
It is easy to see Faulkners connection here between the total lack o f concern with
the actual facts o f the case and the willingness, even the urgent desire, o f the white
people in the town to participate in some kind o f joint retributive action, if only
vicariously. In the above passage it is McLendons looming violence that serves
this collective purpose, but Faulkner is careful to show that the same impulse to
collective action, often with less graphic designs than those of a lynch mob but no
less rancorous intents, may take many forms in his small town. In fact, it is
precisely this kind o f collusion against Miss Minnie Cooper, based not on racial
difference but simply on the fact of her spinsterhood, that victimizes her not with
physical violence, but with the humiliation o f social stigma: She was the last to
learn that she was losing ground; that those among whom she had been a little
brighter and louder flame than any other were beginning to learn the pleasure o f
snobbery-male--and retaliationfemale (174). Faulkner makes a case that the
towns treatment o f Miss Minnie transforms her experience of day-to-day life in
Jefferson into something grotesque and stunted, lifeless and void: Against that
background Minnies bright dresses, her idle and empty days, had a quality of
furious unreality (175). This final phrase might be a good alternate title for the
whole story, expressing the seething rage that, for Minnie, has no more basis in fact
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than the criminal guilt of the Negro does. In any event, it is in this context o f
furious unreality, in a town where the sitting and lounging men did not even
follow her with their eyes any more, that Minnie produces her latest, and most
sensational, man scare (175).
In the storys middle section, Faulkner portrays the angry mobs capture o f
Will Mayes, and the futile effort o f Hawkshaw to prevent the killing. It is not so
much that Hawkshaw tries and fails to prevent such violence; instead, his presence
shows the sheer determination of the other men to carry their plan through to the
end. McLendon, the World War I veteran, leads the others as though into a battle
to defend their entire country from an external aggressor. And the others are only
too willing to play along. Hawkshaws role reveals one of Faulkners common
themes that is, as Frederick R. Karl puts it, in the face of injustice, the good man
is silenced by intimidation.5 Hawkshaw represents the individual attempting to
speak and act independently of his society, even in outright defiance, and in this
case he fails to have any effect at all. At one point, after the struggling Negro
inadvertently slashes him across the mouth, Hawkshaw even joins the mob. In the
end, he throws him self from the moving car as a protest against what the men are
about to do to Will Mayes, and also to save himself from being present to do
nothing while the Negro is killed.
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As if this portrait o f futile action were not disturbing enough, Faulkner

proceeds to describe Miss Minnies reinvigorated self-image and her new place of
honor and respect in the town. She is presented as a kind o f triumphant debutante.
Her friends, the same people who so recently had stonewalled her with snobbery,
fawn over her and want to consume vicariously the drama o f her supposed
encounter with the Negro: Do you feel strong enough to go out? they said, their
eyes bright too, with a dark glitter. When you have had time to get over the shock,
you must tell us what happened. What he said and did; everything (180). On the
square, among the murmurs and hushed talk about the fate o f the Negro as she
passes with her friends, Minnies social status is upgraded considerably; even the
young men, Faulkner writes, tipped their hats and followed with their eyes the
motion o f her hips and legs when she passed (181).
But despite, or perhaps because of, Minnies newly restored status in
Jefferson, she soon loses what little stability she had before her recent man scare.
Faulkner presents a remarkable description o f Minnies subjective visions in the
towns movie house. It is an image that brings to mind the ageless pagan beauties
o f Golden Land even as it reveals the degree to which Minnie has ceased to
perceive reality with any kind o f objectivity:
The lights flicked away; the screen glowed silver, and soon life
began to unfold, beautiful and passionate and sad, while still the
young men and girls entered, scented and sibilant in the half dark,
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their paired backs in silhouette delicate and sleek, their slim, quick
bodies awkward, divinely young, while beyond them the silver
dream accumulated, inevitably on and on. She began to laugh. (181)
As she descends into hysteria, Minnies friends take her home and put her to bed.
And in their role of caretaker, even as they examine her hair for gray, they begin to
question whether or not something actually happened between Minnie and the
Negro. Faulkner makes it clear that they have doubted all along the authenticity of
her claim, but now, witnessing the way she has gone to pieces, they wonder. For
the second time in the story, upon witnessing some convincing individual
performance, the same question is raised: Do you suppose anything really
happened? their eyes darkly aglitter, secret and passionate (182).
This question is central to the storys overall meaning because it reveals,
once again, the degree to which everyone in the white community is eager to play
along when they hear the rumor of Minnies attack, insult, or fright. Few actually
believe there is any merit to the rumor, and their doubts as to its fictionality come
with great surprise. Faulkners emphasis here on the communal, collusive nature of
the drama reveals the wider social need to reinvest Minnie with some kind of power
and desire. At the same time, it is a drama whose beginnings lie much earlier than
the rumor itself; Minnies marginalization and humiliation in such a punitive small
town society place her in a position in which she feels compelled to create fictions
and roles in order to gain entry back into the community. She simply utilizes the
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fact o f the towns intense, unquestioned racism in order to reclaim center stage.
Minnies intensely self-absorbed, all-consuming solipsism, approaching that of
Temple Drake in Sanctua/y and Requiem fo r a Nun and perhaps even that o f the
phenomenally self-absorbed Caroline Compson in The Sound and the Fury, is thus
a condition with its roots in the culture and community, in the social mechanisms
that seem to invite such roles from individuals.
While Hawkshaws character reveals the futility of the individuals efforts
to prevent violence, Faulkner makes it clear that the reason for this is nothing less
than the whole towns need to carry the drama through to its bloody climax. If a
random Negro must be sacrificed to this end, so be it. Thus everyone in the town is
responsible for the killing, while the collective nature o f the action ensures that no
single person, not even McLendon himself, who merely helps to grant the publics
wish, is personally responsible. In a town where everyone assumes a role in the
dramatic production that leads to violence, the issue o f guilt is skirted by recourse
to communal, and therefore faceless and anonymous, action.
Faulkners cultural critique in Dry September is no less searing than in
Golden Land. Hawkshaw functions here in something of the way Ira Ewing
does; both men seem to be striving for daily harmony with their milieu, and both
men reveal, unwittingly and with unfortunate results, the great difficulty in
confronting the relentless, self-fulfilling social forces that may be self-destructive
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or, at the very least, unjust. Hawkshaw does personify a just man to a degree that
Ira does not, and he alone acts on his ideals. But both figures contextualize their
surroundings in ways that enable Faulkner to advance a regional awareness that
directly shapes his model of American culture. While Hollywoods idol is the land,
the idolatrous object is constructed in the South by notions o f racial difference and
plays a parallel role in its own cultural context.
The social world portrayed in Dry September relies on the unquestioned
assumption of racial difference for its momentum. While Minnies character
reveals the acute gender bias at work in her society, this force is dwarfed by the
virtually unapproachable idea of white superiority in the Deep South o f 1930. Even
Hawkshaw, the solitary proponent o f criminal justice in Jefferson, does not
question the racial assumption. He refers to Will Mayes as a good nigger,
classifying him not just by the content o f his character but most essentially by the
color o f his skin (169). And without question the white community o f Jefferson
invests race with a tremendous amount o f power, since the mere suggestion of a
white woman and a black man in the same sentence has the capacity to ignite
collective hysteria in the townsfolk.
Race, especially in the American South of Faulkners early career, has a
kind o f archetypal power; it offers a seemingly eternal image that opens up
repressed areas of consciousness. By this I mean to suggest that the very image of
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a racialized other, even in the imagination, suffers from an extraordinary

overdetermination and objectification by the white viewer. And this is the point at
which the Southern racism portrayed in Dry September may be directly linked
with the concept o f idolatry. Racial otherness, relying on familiar, internalized
stereotypes for the maintenance o f its dualistic categorization, operates in much the
same way as Ira Ewings idolized golden landscape does: each object is colonized,
appropriated, commodified, and ultimately violated through the ways that its
dominant human culture severely limits and objectifies it.
In an essay on visual representation, W. J. T. Mitchell considers the use o f
such an objectified image as idol in the context of colonial representation. While
his interest is more directly focused on image theory and visual culture, Mitchell
frames his study by endowing the image itself with a power of desire in order to
speak on its own terms. In doing so, however, his inquiry addresses racial images
in the specific context o f Franz Fanons description of the corporeal malediction
o f the visual encounter between whites and blacks in colonial spaces.6 Mitchell
then links the racially stereotyped image to idolatry:
The ocular violence of racism splits its object in two, rending and
rendering it simultaneously hypervisible and invisible, and object of,
in Fanons words, abomination and adoration. Abomination
and adoration are precisely the terms in which idolatry is
excoriated in the bible. The idol, like the black man, is both
despised and worshiped, reviled for being a nonentity, a slave, and
feared as an alien an supernatural power.7
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The direct implications o f this description in the context of Dry September are
readily apparent. Will Mayes does indeed seem to be simultaneously hypervisible
and invisible in almost literal terms. Captured late at night at the ice plant where
he works outside o f town, and led to his violent demise, the Negro is never actually
seen by most of the town. Even the rumored encounter between Miss Minnie and
himself, the supposed basis for his killing, is never witnessed. All the same, despite
this sense of invisibility, the Negro is indeed hypervisible in the sense that every
white person in Jefferson has conjured an overpowering image o f him. This
imaginative image is such an intense power that it transforms the entire town and
sweeps the momentum o f the lynching party along; the fact of his innocence comes
to nothing in the face of such a powerful image.
But the wider, more general implications of Mitchells connection between
racism and idolatry also speak to a larger sense of regional identity that
characterizes Faulkners South. In this sense Dry September is emblematic o f an
American region whose intimate Protestant connection with the Old Testament
serves as an inexorable, foundational source of its own culture. It is important to
consider this profound religious presence more fully in order to appreciate
Faulkners authorial strategies in a story like Dry September.
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Faulkners early saturation with the Old Testament, both in his religious
education as a small boy in the South and in his own formative reading as an
adolescent, should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with his cultural
background. In a 1955 interview, he revealed the prevailing influence o f the Old
Testament on his imagination: The New Testament is philosophy and ideas, and
something of the quality o f poetry. I read that too, but I read the Old Testament for
the pleasure o f watching what these amazing people did.8 Karl suggests that
Faulkners entire canon owes a debt to this source:
Faulkners shaping o f Yoknapatawpha County has an Old Testament

quality to it: the making of a community under the eyes o f the artist
is analogous to the Old Testament defining a culture under the eyes
o f God, its Maker. In nearly all his reading, (Faulkner) emphasized
novels which created a world, books in which a writer shaped and
reshaped a culture. And in most instances, that culture was set adrift
from the main one, taking on a life o f its own [...]. (Karl 89)
This basic connection between Yoknapatawpha County and the Old Testament
invites questions about Faulkners particular authorial choices as the Maker o f his
fictional world. Empowered to portray his human creations in any way he desires,
Faulkner seems interested in watching them suffer many of the same trials and
commit many o f the same sins as the amazing cast of the Old Testament stories.
Extending this notion o f Faulkner as a jealous God of his fictional universe to
consider the ban on idolatry that is pronounced in the Second Commandment,
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Faulkners observation and strong implicit condemnation o f idolatrous worship will

hardly come as a surprise. What is striking, even in such short pieces as Golden
Land and Dry September, is his ability to present unique, nuanced cultural
expressions of idolatry in such archetypal American settings as Los Angeles and
the Deep South. In each place, the sinful practice takes on its own particular forms:
the golden land o f Los Angeles and the racial other in Dry September.
Will Mayes is thus the unfortunate victim o f a white culture whose
corruption is inseparable from the religious identity that suffuses Southern culture
as a whole, and the small town milieu of Jefferson in particular. His status as an
idol is purely a social construction, of course, but it makes him an object of
simultaneous adoration and abomination, unleashing the collective repressions,
sexual, violent, and otherwise, of an entire community. For this he is sacrificed, his
death invested with a kind o f ritual intensity of meaning. Faulkners lynching thus
offers an extraordinarily rich, which is not to say optimistic, interpretation of the
Souths culture and institutions. For in showing its desperate need to first create
and then destroy its idolized object, the town reveals a deeply troubled, tragically
construed sense o f its own spiritual identity. It is a self-image laden with the guilt
of slavery and racism, and with the perhaps more pressing guilt o f its own repressed
desires, which must be played out hypocritically, sinfully, against a forbidding,
suffocating, restrictive religious background.
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Faulkners intense awareness o f his native regions cultural identity -- at

once religious and military, benevolent and violent, romantically individualistic and
repressively colonial is thus the initial frame for all his fiction, including pieces
like Golden Land whose concern lies outside the South. But as these stories
reveal, Faulkners regional lens sees more rather than less o f American culture
because o f its deep investment in the human figure in the context o f nature itself,
whether his own human nature, his landscape and natural background, or his natural
relationship, like that between Yahweh and the Israelites, with God. Thus Faulkner
is able to express the depth of his Southern and American experience even in a
story as short as Dry September, in which the people of Jefferson, Mississippi,
commit an atrocity for more reasons than the mere fact that they havent had any
rain in sixty-two days.
The Agrarians, Faulkner, and the Contested Southern Self-image
1930, the same year Faulkner wrote Dry September, was a critical one for
American regionalism. It saw the publication o f I ll Take My Stand: The South and
the Agrarian Tradition, which advanced the most influential consciously regional
movement in the literary history of the United States. I ll Take My Stand
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consolidated the ideas o f a group of intellectuals at Vanderbilt University in

Nashville, Tennessee, at a time when several key forces were desperately
competing to decide the economic, social, and cultural fate o f the South. These
men, whose 1922-25 periodical The Fugitive gave rise to their collective name, and
who would later be known more generally as the Agrarians, found themselves at the
center o f a cultural war whose regional implications paralleled those that split the
nation in half before the Civil War seventy years earlier. Their intimate
relationship to the South, and their overall conscious sense o f regionally derived
identity, would background their intellectual activities in ways strikingly similar to
the ways Faulkners Southern identity served him. But perhaps more interesting
than these shared traits are the crucial differences between the Agrarians and
Faulkner that offer greater insight not only into Faulkners literary achievements
but also into the possibilities and limitations o f a more theoretical regional aesthetic
program like that o f the Agrarians. In what follows I will consider the singular rise
o f the Agrarians and their articulation of a Southern way o f life in several
historical and cultural contexts. Keeping the figure of Faulkner in mind
throughout, and returning explicitly to his work towards the end of this chapter, I
want to establish Faulkners regional literature -- characterized by such gestures as
the aforementioned strategies o f regional transposition, the critical connections
among region, race and idolatry, and so on within a larger, extraordinarily
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contentious American context shaped by the Agrarians own quite distinct model o f
region.
The Agrarians came o f age during the same era that produced Faulkner.9
The primary difference between Faulkner and the most prominent members of the
group John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle, and
Robert Penn Warren ~ lies in their respective educational backgrounds. While
most o f them came from small towns in Kentucky and Tennessee quite similar to
Faulkners Oxford, the Agrarians received classical educations, with a strong
background in Greek and Latin languages and literatures. The fact that these men
found themselves in good company as students and young teachers at Vanderbilt,
by no means a top university at the time, proved fortuitous, and the emergence of a
convivial, ambitious coterie o f Southern writers and thinkers was the result.
The key cultural influences of this era included first and foremost the
recently ended Great War, in which Ransom and Davidson served as officers in
Pershings expeditionary force. The war left a strong impression on many o f the
others, particularly Tate, who were too young to serve but sensitive enough to
register not only its vast influence as a cultural event but also its historicity, its role
as a gateway into what would become a distinctly modem decade in the 1920s.
Connected to this sense of historical movement was a feeling that the war had
spoken to a sense of Southern identity that had remained deeply fractured since the
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Civil War. For a group o f men who had been bom into a culture in which aging
Confederate veterans still limped around their small hometowns, in which a
military intensity suffused much o f their experience even though the Civil War had
ended decades before their lifetime, this firsthand witness o f a war, especially one
with as much carnage and brutality as World War I, must have had an intense
effect. As Tate wrote years later, near the end of World War II: With the war of
1914-1918, the South reentered the worldbut gave a backward glance as it stepped
over the border: that backward glance gave us the Southern renascence, a literature
conscious of the past in the present.10 Not only did the war give the Agrarians a
more immediate understanding o f the Civil War, but it brought them back from
Fort Sumter into a national context, as soldiers, citizens, and, perhaps, patriots of
the United States o f America, a nation their Confederate South had repudiated in
1860. But as this relationship with the war and the nation suggest, and as I'll Take
My Stand and their other cultural writings indicate, reentry into this particular
national context would be no less complex than the Souths fractured cultural
identity before the war. If anything, one might argue that the most direct impact of
World War I upon the Agrarians was in bringing many o f these regional and
national issues to consciousness, in giving their small-town Southern roots a more
immanent and visible context in the life and history o f the rest o f the world.
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The other major event o f the Agrarians time was, o f course, the Great
Depression. Because o f the desperate economic condition o f the nation, and
especially the South, whose poverty was called the most serious crisis in the
country by President Roosevelt, the Depression raised the stakes o f the cultural
debates o f the time to fever pitch. Most generally, the Depression gave birth to
countless economic and social theories promising to solve the nations problems.
Central to these debates, and by far the most contentious element in the Agrarians
criticism, was the role o f industrialism in the nations future. Especially in the
South, whose lack of industry and loss o f cheap black labor to the North limited its
economic prospects even more during this period, the Depression served as a
severe, inescapable presence whose influence on the Agrarians thought was key.
The advent of modernism in literature, and its problematization of realism
and naturalism, the prevailing styles in poetry and the novel since the latter decades
of the nineteenth century, would serve as the primary aesthetic concern for the
Agrarians. Over the course of their careers, several o f them would play leading
roles in the rise o f the New Criticism, which, as critic George Core has written
recently, 'even in its beleaguered, misunderstood, and maligned state continues to
exercise a far-reaching influence and to be the most important criticism o f this
century. 11 That Ransom, Tate, Warren, and Cleanth Brooks, who contributed to
Agrarian thought in later years, led the way in establishing New Critical
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methodology speaks to the unique milieu from which they emerged during and
after the 1920s. To risk oversimplification o f a topic that is the worthy recipient of
much more critical attention elsewhere, the point should be made that the New
Criticisms connection to the South, and to the regional background o f the
Agrarians, is in an important sense an effort to respond adequately to modernism in
literature. The writings o f Conrad, Proust, Joyce, and others, and especially the
1922 publication of T. S. Eliots The Waste Land, demanded critical attention to
their structural and narrative complexity and to their own engagements with the
existential and spiritual conditions o f modernity which were o f great interest to the
Agrarians. Thus the New Criticisms complex response to the emerging body of
modernist literature should be understood in the context o f the economic and social
writings o f the Agrarians; in its early articulation of the aesthetic as well as
economic implications o f agrarianism, I ll Take My Stand makes this connection
explicit.
But there is one figure whose influence on the emergence o f the Agrarians
as a more or less united group of thinkers looms over the cultural landscape o f the
time. In H. L. Mencken, dean o f American letters and rebellion in the 1920s, the
Agrarians had a single person whose writings and actions galvanized the same kind
o f powerful consolidation o f Southern aesthetic and cultural experience that the
Great War had done in the context o f their Civil War legacy.12 Menckens 1920
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broadside The Sahara of the Bozart, which produced an extraordinarily vitriolic

response throughout the South, articulated many o f the same concerns about the
Souths decline, or perhaps, its lack o f recovery from the Reconstruction era, that
the Agrarians already had. In its vicious and relentless satire o f contemporary
Southern culture, however, Menckens piece held out no olive branch to young
Southern intellectuals. It was, rather, and in Menckens trademark impudent,
iconoclastic style, a call to arms. Consider a typical passage:
Nearly the whole o f Europe could be lost in that stupendous region

o f worn-out farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums: one
could throw in France, Germany and Italy, and still have room for
the British Isles. And yet, for all its size and all its wealth and all the
progress it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically,
intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert. There are single
acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states
south of the Potomac; there are probably single square miles in
America. If the whole o f the late Confederacy were to be engulfed
by a tidal wave tomorrow, the effect upon the civilized minority o f
men in the world would be but little greater than that o f a flood on
the Yang-tse-kiang. It would be impossible in all history to match
so complete a drying-up o f a civilization.13
Had such a denunciation come from someone else, perhaps a critic from the
industrial Northeast, it might have been dismissed simply as the same boilerplate
Yankee propaganda that had been around since the antebellum heyday o f Harriet
Beecher Stowe. But Mencken, a lifelong native o f Baltimore, a city not fifty miles
from Virginia and with pervasive Southern influences, was more complicated. He
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occasionally spoke o f himself as a southerner, and in 1930, the year o f I'll Take My
S ta n d s publication, he married a woman from South Carolina.14 Menckens
overall tone in The Sahara of the Bozart is, finally, elegiac rather than merely
contemptuous. Principally, he speaks with a kind o f nostalgia for the culture and
charm o f the Old South, lamenting the loss o f its great institutions and its current
state o f vulgarity, as if the Civil War stamped out every last bearer of the torch,
and left only a mob of peasants (185). Menckens portrait o f the Old Souths role
in early American culture reveals his affection for its lost glories:
But in the South there were men o f delicate fancy, urbane instinct
and aristocratic manner in brief, superior men -- in brief, gentry.
To politics, their chief diversion, they brought active and original
minds. It was there that nearly all the political theories we still
cherish and suffer under came to birth. It was there that the crude
dogmatism of New England was refined and humanized. It was
there, above all, that some attention was given to the art of living
that life got beyond and above the state o f a mere infliction and
became an exhilarating experience. A certain notable spaciousness
was in the ancient Southern scheme o f things. The f/r-Confederate
had leisure. He liked to toy with ideas. He was hospitable and
tolerant. He had the vague thing that we call culture. (Mencken 185)
It is important to note that when Mencken satirizes the Souths dearth o f beaux arts
(i.e., bozart), he places his attack in a historical context where the Old South, or,
perhaps more accurately, the highly pervasive myth o f the Old South, retains its
privileged status in American culture. Such a nostalgic attitude, incidentally, fits
the caustic, iconoclastic Menckens general pattern; as literary historian Ann
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Douglas writes: Like all modems who attacked the old pieties, Mencken had a
sentimental, Victorian streak.15 This seeming paradox might well characterize the
Agrarians own sense of their Southern heritage, which accounts for their early
interest in Menckens writings. Allen Tate, who carried Menckens American
Mercury under his arm as a young poet at Vanderbilt, responded with particular
enthusiasm to Menckens portrayal o f the South as a once great culture that had not
kept up with the relentless tempo of modernity.
Clearly Menckens credibility, or at least his influence, with the Agrarians
came not from his flattery of the South, but with his ability to attack the pieties o f
the contemporary South, with its underachieving intellectual atmosphere and its
bloated self-image, even as he gave the impression o f a deep sympathy with those
rare Southerners who sought to restore their cultures past glory. Tate and the
others thus read Mencken with a certain awe, both for the nonconforming boldness
(one is tempted to say, with a certain regional connotation, rebellion) with w'hich
the writer delivered his assessment; and also for the vision of Southern culture that
he respected in the past and prodded, in his own brazen style, toward a certain
restoration in the future. The following passage is representative o f all these
concerns; it contemplates the State o f Virginia, in the great days indubitably the
premier American state, the mother o f Presidents and statesmen, the home o f the
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first American university worthy o f the name, the arbiter elegantiarum o f the
Western World :
Elegance, esprit, culture? Virginia has no art, no literature,

no philosophy, no mind or aspiration o f her own. Her education has
sunk to the Baptist seminary level; not a single contribution to
human knowledge has come out of her colleges in twenty-five years;
she spends less than half upon her common schools, per capita, than
any Northern state spends. In brief, an intellectual Gobi or Lapland.
Urbanity, politesse, chivalry? Go to'. It was in Virginia that they
invented the device of searching for contraband whiskey in womens
underwear.... There remains, at the top, a ghost o f the old
aristocracy, a bit wistful and infinitely charming. But it has lost all
its old leadership to fabulous monsters from the lower depths; it is
submerged in an industrial plutocracy that is ignorant and
ignominious. The mind of the state, as it is revealed to the nation, is
pathetically naive and inconsequential. It no longer reacts with
energy and elasticity to great problems. It has fallen to the
bombastic trivialities of the camp-meeting and the stump. One
could no more imagine a Lee or a Washington in the Virginia o f
today than one could imagine a Huxley in Nicaragua. (Mencken
186-7)
More than any other single piece o f cultural criticism, then, The Sahara o f the
Bozart motivated the Agrarians to produce for the South a vibrant intellectual
community, to reclaim a Southern cultural identity whose best qualities were
comparable to those in the myth o f the Old South in other words, to go back to
the place where a Lee or a Washington could arise from the soil.
At least initially, Menckens essay and persona provided a salutary model
against which the Agrarians could envision their distinctly Southern aesthetic
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values. In 1920, when most of the Agrarians were still at the beginning o f their
intellectual careers, Menckens essay and persona probably offered them a kind o f
role model for participation in debates o f national and regional interest. Menckens
style, however, marked by what historian Fred Hobson calls a gleeful irreverence
that liked nothing better than mocking the old gods, and hugely popular in the
self-consciously juvenile 1920s, appealed to a rather adolescent mindset that the
Agrarians would soon outgrow.16 Perhaps predictably, Menckens sarcasm
eventually overcame his insight into the South, and by 1925, when he visited
Dayton, Tennessee, to observe the events o f the John Scopes trial, he finally
alienated Tate, Davidson, and the others.
Mencken had earlier persuaded Clarence Darrow to take up the defense of
Scopes, a high school teacher who had taught his students in Dayton about
Darwinian evolution. The trial itself offered ideal subject matter for Menckens
iconoclastic raillery: set in the heart of the Bible Belt, it brought rationality,
intellectual light, and scientific progress into direct confrontation with what
Mencken considered the fanatical, even primitive, religious superstition of the
natives. The presence of an aging William Jennings Bryan as prosecutor also
served him well, since Bryan personified the kind o f simplistic, outdated American
past that Mencken routinely attacked.
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Once the trial was underway, Mencken maintained a high profile. He

staged satirical debates with fundamentalists on the steps of Daytons courthouse
and was nearly attacked by the same kind o f mob he had written about in his essays
on the South. In general, his rude behavior in this specific setting -- in the South
itself, and in Tennessee left the Agrarians feeling that Mencken was simply
misusing their home for his own exhibitionistic purposes. And in his relentless
satirical writings about Dayton, Mencken finally lost their support, which had been
on the wane for several years anyway. Hobson summarizes the effect of
Menckens presence and writings on the Agrarians:
Notably, the Fugitives of Nashvilleparticularly Allen Tate and

Donald Davidsonwere offended that Mencken made their state the
butt o f national ridicule. Already somewhat disenchanted with
Menckenism, they charged that Menckens complete dismissal o f
religious fundamentalism betrayed a limited vision on his own part.
Davidson bitterly resented Menckens comic portrait o f rural
southerners and charged that he could see them only as types, as
abstractions, not as individuals with individual hopes, fears, plans,
and human dignity. (Hobson 183)
The portrait one draws of Mencken here, in his relation to the Agrarians, is
interesting for several reasons. First, it reveals the differing connotations between
Menckens writing about the South in more general terms from his own turf in
Baltimore and the much more offensive nature o f expressing the same sentiments
while in the South itself. While Menckens intentions had hardly changed, with the
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notable exception that during his Dayton trip he expressed little nostalgia for the
Old South, his words and actions now contained new and menacing personal
meaning for the Agrarians simply because he had insulted their native region while
visiting. In other words, Mencken behaved with none o f the tact and refinement
inherent in the Old South of his fantasy. The other interesting aspect of this sense
of Mencken is related to this. As a visitor, and a hostile, invasive one at that,
Mencken now appeared much less sympathetic to Southern culture, and much more
aligned with crass Yankee ends than he had before. The difference lay in his
personal demeanor, his comportment. While Davidson and Tate respected his 1920
essay even in light o f its biting satire, they considered his actions in Dayton deeply
offensive in a way that categorized him more than ever before as an outsider, as an
individual whose reading o f the South was inadequate, even incompetent.
I have devoted this much attention to Menckens role in the maturation o f
the Agrarians because I think it expresses a number of important regional issues.
With regard to Mencken himself, it is clear that his own background in Baltimore
establishes him as a kind o f border figure who manages to articulate and critique
many of the values held by both North and South at the same time. What is also
clear is the very real sense in which his words and actions are interpreted differently
depending on the context in which they are delivered and received, and the sense
that his own identity oscillates vaguely between distinct regional types until it takes
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on a much more ambiguous and complex quality. Menckens national status as

dean of American letters and rebellion in the 1920s is thus problematized and
given much o f its unique character by the tensions and energies o f regional
intercourse.
It would be going too far to suggest that Mencken alone precipitated the
publication of I'll Take My Stand. It should be admitted, however, that his status as
a nationally prominent cultural critic, his posture as an amateur anthropologist
chronicling the savage idiocy o f a supposedly civilized race, and his uncanny
ability to stir up contention among the savages themselves, forced the Agrarians to
question and assert their own values with concentrated vigor (Douglas 49).
Certainly Mencken could not have imagined that a group as talented and driven as
the Agrarians would emerge from the same Tennessee he had so thoroughly trashed
in the summer o f 1925. At any rate, the emergence o f the Agrarians in self
consciously regional terms during the latter 1920s, and culminating with I'll Take
My Stand, stands at least partially as their gesture to advance a model of Southern
identity and culture in direct response to Mencken.
I ll Take M y Stand takes up industrialism as its main point o f contention in
American culture. Its introduction, which bears the stamp o f Ransoms style and
thought in particular, is really nothing less than an agrarian manifesto, exhorting a
kind of revolutionary spirit with the same urgency o f Karl Marxs more
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internationally famous manifesto nearly a century earlier. But while Marxs attack
was aimed at capitalism itself, the introduction to I'll Take My Stand makes a kind
o f aesthetic distinction between industrialism and agrarianism; it is not capitalism
per se that is seriously questioned here, but the place o f capitalism, labor,
machinery, and money in the larger context of an entire culture:
All the articles bear in the same sense upon the books title-subject:
all tend to support a Southern way o f life against what may be called
the American or prevailing way; and all as much agree that the best
terms in which to represent the distinction are contained in the
phrase, Agrarian versus Industrial.'7
Marxs concept o f alienated labor is recast in terms whose thinly veiled regional
connotations would be manifest and facile to any Southerner repelled by the
Norths industrial capitalism:
The capitalization of the applied sciences has now become

extravagant and uncritical; it has enslaved our human energies to a
degree now clearly felt to be burdensome [. ..]. The contribution
that science can make to a labor is to render it easier by the help of a
tool or a process, and to assure the laborer of his perfect economic
security while he is engaged upon it. Then it can be performed with
leisure and enjoyment. But the modem laborer has not exactly
received this benefit under the industrial regime. His labor is hard,
its tempo is fierce, and his employment is insecure. The first
principle o f a good labor is that it must be effective, but the second
principle is that it must be enjoyed. Labor is one of the largest items
in the human career; it is a modest demand to ask that it may partake
of happiness. {Stand xi-xii)
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Here the argument against industrialism is fully expressed on the grounds that its
labor is inhumane. It articulates an aesthetic sense that human action is inherently
worthy of enjoyment, that the process o f labor itself should be rewarding. Among
the terms chosen to express this idea, the Agrarians invoke slavery to denounce the
tyranny of the machine. This is significant, of course, because o f the Souths own
relationship to slavery, an institution whose shadow over Southern life continues to
loom even in 1930, sixty-five years after Emancipation. More generally, the
question of race deserves serious attention in the work o f the Agrarians; for as they
struggle to assert their own individual will against what they perceive as the
monumental oppression o f industry, their own negotiation with distinctly Southern
traditions of oppression, o f which racism is the most important, helps to
contextualize their thought even more.
As the attack on industrialism continues, the introduction offers a regional
reading of American culture that simultaneously addresses pure capitalism,
socialism, communism, and totalitarianism. Viewed from an agrarian standpoint,
all of these systems are steps in the process o f endless acceleration o f industrialism
itself:
Even the apologists o f industrialism have been obliged to admit that

some economic evils follow in the wake of the machines. These are
such as overproduction, unemployment, and a growing inequality in
the distribution of wealth. But the remedies proposed by the
apologists are always homeopathic. They expect the evils to
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disappear when we have bigger and better machines, and more o f

them. Their remedial programs, therefore, look forward to more
industrialism. {Stand xiii)
The end result o f this movement is a version o f the Red menace with a disturbingly
familiar American face: the industrialists would have the government set up an
economic super-organization, which in turn would become the government {Stand
xiii). Unchecked progress will lead to an industrial Big Brother. This passage
clarifies the deeply American nature o f the Agrarians thought. Rather than simply
attacking the prevailing industrial inclinations o f the nation, they reveal an
essentially romantic concern with the status of the individual in a society that has
moved farther and farther away from respecting his inherent humanity and dignity.
Two separate but related aspects of the Souths past offer an implicitly
regional connotation to this passage. In one sense, there is a basic, Jeffersonian
connection here between the freedom o f the individual to enjoy his labor and the
long term security o f a nations democratic ideals. The idea that the economically
unencumbered individual is the most basic and crucial unit in the proper
functioning of a democratic system traces its roots to eighteenth-century Virginia
plantation society. In another sense, this passage directly transposes the old
doctrine o f states rights to a system of agrarian values; just as state autonomy
represented the only governmental safeguard against a potentially tyrannical federal
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authority, the agrarian system, it is implied, offers the best economic protection
against the industrial leviathan.
After turning its attention from production to an equally pessimistic reading
of consumption under the industrial regime, the introduction finally describes the
infinitely superior agrarian system. But this description is surprisingly short and
vague, especially in light of the detailed criticisms leveled against industrialism.
Emphasis is consciously drawn away from practical images o f farming in exchange
for more abstract allusions to the culture o f the soil and its social values:
Opposed to the industrial society is the agrarian, which does not

stand in particular need o f definition. An agrarian society is hardly
one that has no use at all for industries, for professional vocations,
for scholars and artists, and for the life of cities. Technically,
perhaps, an agrarian society is one in which agriculture is the
leading vocation, whether for wealth, for pleasure, or for prestigea
form of labor that is pursued with intelligence and leisure, and that
becomes the model to which the other forms approach as well as
they may. But an agrarian regime will be secured readily enough
where the superfluous industries are not allowed to rise against it.
=The theory of agrarianism is that the culture of the soil is the best
and most sensitive o f vocations, and that therefore it should have the
economic preference and enlist the maximum number of workers.
{Stand xviii-xix)
The comparative brevity and vagueness of this description hint once again at the
Agrarians cultural agenda that takes precedence over actual economic and political
issues. These principles do not intend to be very specific in proposing any
practical measures, the introduction states (xix). The more pressing work o f I'll
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Take My Stand is simply an exposition o f agrarian values in several fields, and a

reclamation of the Souths grand antebellum cultural heritage. There is no
abandonment of the desire for economic and political changes, but a sense persists
that the South must arrive at a new critical self-consciousness in cultural terms
before it can shape its own economic destiny.
Even more generally, however, the Agrarians passionate attack on
industrialism on economic and social grounds seems more interested in articulating
a set o f humanistic and aesthetic ideals. Their classical educational background and
their contemporary interest in literature and poetry seem to exert a subtle pressure
on the style o f the introduction; the result is a strange tone that explicitly confronts
economic structures while flirting with a more formal artfulness. This tone is
perhaps most accurately described as misplaced, since it expends a kind o f literary
passion, complete with the high Southern rhetoric o f the pulpit, on an economic
system whose infernal character the introduction explicitly claims, after attacking it
so viciously, not to want to change in any practical sense. Consider the
introductions concluding paragraph. It steers away from any concrete
recommendations about how industrialism should be confronted by the South; it
chooses the most universal, perhaps classical, terms possible with which to situate
its position, while avoiding any reference to anything more specific than the general
idea o f industrialism; and -- rather amusingly, one thinks -- it takes on a
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sermonlike, oral quality in its invocation o f mythic and spiritual terms to exhort its
reader to a militant readiness for a still undeclared war:
For, in conclusion, this much is clear: If a community, or a section,

or a race, or an age, is groaning under industrialism, and well aware
that it is an evil dispensation, it must find the way to throw it off.
To think that this cannot be done is pusillanimous. And if the whole
community, section, race, or age thinks it cannot be done, then it has
simply lost its political genius and doomed itself to impotence,
fStand xx)
By way o f bringing the writings of the Agrarians back into the context o f Faulkner,
perhaps this last allusion to impotence will be suggestive. O f course, there are two
important characters in Faulkners work whose sexual impotence serves as an
important trait in more symbolic ways. The first is Popeye, an impotent gangster
from Memphis who violates the young Temple Drake with a corncob pipe in the
1931 novel Sanctuary. Faulkner clearly associates the sybaritic corruption o f the
city with Popeyes impotence, and thus expresses the same inclination to connect
the industrial center with a more fundamental human shortcoming that the
Agrarians make explicit in the introduction to I ll Take My Stand. The other
impotent man in Faulkners fiction is Flem Snopes, whose rise to power in
Yoknapatawpha County is documented in The Hamlet, The Town, and The
Mansion. Flems impotence is not blamed on the dehumanizing evils o f the
machine, but is more abstractly associated with his relentless, all-consuming quest
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for money. While it is inviting to read Flems Herculean struggle to build an

empire as a self-serving monument alongside that o f Thomas Sutpen in Absalom,
Absalom/, there is an important difference: Flems greed lacks the tragic dimension
of Sutpens misguided hubris. While the history of the Sutpen family becomes a
kind o f mythic parallel to the tragic history o f the South itself, there is little pathos
in Flems ultimate downfall. Instead, Faulkners treatment o f the Snopes clans
assimilation into the life o f the county has a less vehement quality to it. It is more
pragmatic, though no less profound, in its assessment o f a flawed human being.
And Flems impotence reveals the basic lack in his ability to experience nature and
life itself, a lack that must be answered with greed. As Cleanth Brooks writes,
Flems marriage to Eula Varner, whose phenomenal, bursting female sexuality
drives many other men to desperation, takes on a kind o f monumentally ironic
quality:
Thus the impotent Flem, who is pure single-minded acquisitiveness,

and Eula, who is unself-conscious and almost mindless
personification o f the fecundity of nature, are almost like goddess
and ogre, a positive and negative power, and the yoking o f them
together takes on the quality of an allegorical event.18
Faulkners allegory shares with the Agrarians its connection o f the lust for money
with sexual impotence. But in Flems case there is little to link him to
industrialism itself; he has no urban background like Popeye, and it would be
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misleading to attribute his hell-bent ways to any Northern influence. For Flem, the
idea o f money itself replaces not only his sexuality but any trace whatsoever of
human individuality. And while it may be possible to conjoin the ideas of money
and industry in order to put Flems impotence into the Agrarians context, doing so
would limit Faulkners intent in a crucial way. Flems own Southemness would be
minimized or obscured by such a gesture, since he would be dismissed as the
personification o f an industrial force in other words, a Northern import. And
Faulkners portrayal o f Flem, and of the entire Snopes clan, not only makes no such
implication, but actively envisions the Snopes clan as a uniquely Southern
phenomenon. This is a vital aspect of Faulkners distinctness from the ideas of the
Agrarians. I want to suggest that Flem Snopes is representative o f a large number
o f characters in Faulkners fiction whose complexity is derived from a much more
complicated set o f influences and traits, regional, national, and otherwise, than I'll
Take My Stand is willing or able to entertain. As a result, Faulkners work can be
understood both in the cultural context of the Agrarians, especially in light of the
Iatters unique articulation o f Southern intellectual concerns during and after the
1920s, and also in light o f its divergence from Agrarian thought. Most directly,
Faulkners fusion o f his Southern identity with his own modernist literary vision
deserves careful consideration, especially in its ability to reach levels o f insight,
emotion, and what might be called a Southern critical self-knowledge.
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Faulkners novel As 1 Lay Dying might serve as a good entry point for this
kind o f study, not least because it was published, like I ll Take My Stand, in 1930.
Not only is As I Lay Dying one o f Faulkners greatest novels, but it also addresses
many o f the important characteristics and themes at issue in the Agrarians work.
A sensitive representation o f one version o f the South, the novel is at once critical
o f the regions flaws and keenly aware of its assets. Faulkners own position, or
perhaps, his lack o f affiliation with academia, enables him to explore a vernacular
world o f poor whites with none o f the Agrarians pretension to Old South culture.
And ironically, the novels innovative narrative style constitutes a universal, even
classical form that outpaces the Agrarians own vision o f their cultures
achievements while it seems to confirm their claim about the South as an ideal
creative environment.19
In many ways, As I Lay Dying reflects the relationship of Anse and Addie
Bundren, the husband and wife at its center. Theirs is a grotesque marriage of
opposites. Similarly, the novels landscape is at once pastoral and funereal; its tone
is at once apocalyptic and celebratory; its story leads to madness as well as
heroism. Faulkners ability to accomplish so much in the same space may be
attributed in part to his narrative style. Told in short first person monologues by
various members o f the Bundren family and other local figures, the story
effectively has a privileged communal narrator who never actually loses his or her
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individual and subjective reading o f the scene at hand. In this way, Faulkner
applies modernist technique, with shifting viewpoints and nonlinear chronology, to
his poor Southern setting.
Perhaps the most conspicuous aspect o f As I Lay Dying in the context of
Agrarian thought is the background o f Faulkners protagonists, the Bundren family.
The Bundrens are hardly the sort of people the Agrarians are invoking with their
rhetoric about the culture o f the soil and their belief that cultured men choose an
agrarian lifestyle for wealth, for pleasure, or for prestige (Stand xix). The
Bundrens are farmers with a rather more modest goal: survival. Representatives of
the large population of poor whites in the South after Reconstruction, the Bundrens
have little claim to literacy, let alone the Agrarians notions o f high culture. And
while each member of the family nurses a personal aspiration, none o f these would
qualify as cultured by any high standard. Only Dari displays a kind o f artistic
sensitivity, but this proves a liability in such an absurd environment, landing him in
the state insane asylum in Jackson.
If the Bundrens portray a rather disturbing element in Southern culture, it is
in the person o f Anse, husband and father, that Faulkner finds his most penetrating
portrait o f the poor South. Anse is exactly the opposite o f the paterfamilias so
crucial to the myth o f the Old South. Lazy, ignorant, cheap, timorous, and cruel,
Anse is perfectly adapted to his environment; one has no doubt that he will be the
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last man standing at the end o f a crisis. Rather like Flem Snopes in his instinctive
and machinelike ability to suck others dry, Anse replaces any notion of paternal
honor with a total vacuum of personal responsibility and leadership. And yet he is
not merely contemptible, and in his absurd refusal to compromise during the
journey he takes on a bizarre, inexplicable kind of respectability. Cleanth Brooks
description of Anse may account for this strange sense of simultaneous revulsion
and admiration: He represents a force probably necessary to the survival o f the
human animal though it is terrifying when seen in such simple purity.20 Anse is
endowed with a total lack of authority and fatherly traits, and yet he leads the
family to an accomplishment o f its goal, the transportation and burial of Addie.
Proceeding with such a cast o f characters, Faulkner is clearly pursuing a
Southern vision quite distinct from that of the Agrarians here. Brooks description
o f Anse hints at the major themes o f the novel: survival, endurance, and heroism.
Faulkners modernist narrative structure affords a privileged perspective from
which to contemplate the intense variety o f human experience and the human
capacity to suffer, survive, and endure. And yet, as Brooks also points out, none of
the individual family members ever fully understands the nature o f their heroism.21
Not only does Faulkners method enable him to reveal the limitations of each
individual in a social and even universal context, but it also allows him to leave the
indelible sense of heroism and triumph at the same time. The fact that none o f the
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Bundrens has any sense o f this heroism, and that their lasting image is one of
pathetic, farcical absurdity, simply deepens this sense.
In this way Faulkner articulates a truly vernacular vision o f the South. He
seems unconcerned with the primary issues taken up by the Agrarians in I ll Take
My Stand: oppressive industrialism, theories of labor, establishment of a tradition
o f Southern high culture after the nostalgic model of the Old South. Even as he
remains sensitive to the same social pressures and forces that the Agrarians
identify, Faulkner channels his energy into a more personal Southern cosmos o f his
own creation. His own portrayal of the Old South, in works like Sartoris, The
Unvanquished, Go Down, Moses, and Requiem fo r a Nun, is quite deliberately not a
utopian state. While this world offers its own kind o f stability and organization, it
is at least as violent and corrupt as the civilization that would remain after
Reconstruction. Much like the setting in As I Lay Dying, Faulkners antebellum
South is affectionately tragic, gloriously absurd.
Absalom, Absalom!, perhaps Faulkners best novel, attempts to confront
exactly this experience o f ambivalence toward Southern history and culture, past
and present. Read alongside The Sound and the Fury, which informs the character
of Quentin Compson and depicts the last shudders of the pretentious Old South
long after its demise, Absalom, Absalom! provides Faulkners most complete
statement in all these areas: modernist narrative technique, the two Souths bridged
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by the Civil War and Reconstruction, constructions o f regional and national

identity, and the bottomless depths o f ambivalence that endanger any effort to
resolve these concerns rationally. And in a much more involved way than Dry
September, the novel rewrites the Souths tragic racial history in the more
universal terms o f Old Testament theology.
One gets the sense from Absalom, Absalom! that Faulkners view o f the
South is rather diametrically opposed to that o f the Agrarians in a most vital sense.
Specifically, Faulkner interprets slavery, and more generally, racism, as the basis o f
the Souths spiritual corruption and the cause o f its ultimate destruction.22 In the
person o f Thomas Sutpen, whose life is devoted to the creation of Sutpens
Hundred, Mississippis largest slave plantation, Faulkner creates the archetypal
antebellum paterfamilias. Sutpens devotion to his own legacy, while successful
enough on account o f his sheer determination, is undermined not just by slavery,
but by his refusal to affirm the humanity of his own son, one Charles Bon, who is
revealed to have mixed blood. The repudiation o f Charles Bon by Sutpen, and the
murder of Bon years later by Sutpens white son Henry, precipitate the collapse of
Sutpens Hundred and the violent death of Sutpen himself. And it is in Quentin
Compsons desperate effort to piece together Sutpens ambiguous history, and thus
his own history and the history o f the South, that the freight of slavery takes on its
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most terrifying implications. For Quentin approaches the dark secret o f the Souths
inhuman racial legacy: that even incest would be preferable to miscegenation.20
Faulkners own ambivalent attachment to a region with such a complex
history is expressed in Quentins famously unconvincing exclamation about the
South at the end o f the novel, I dont hate it! I dont hate it!24 Here, finally, is a
critical statement toward the South that contains within it an individualistic vision
o f both the assets and the liabilities of the region. In an even more profound way
than he did with the vernacular approach o f As I Lay Dying, Faulkner channels the
full range o f Southern experience, especially the inescapably tragic role o f slavery,
into a literary monument whose ultimate value lies in its ability to encompass so
much experience, to contain, in the impoverished South o f 1936, that elusive
property called truth. This achievement is made rather starkly clear by John Crowe
Ransoms assessment o f the Souths racial history in Reconstructed But
Unregenerate, the essay he contributed to I ll Take My Stand. Typifying the
Agrarians stunning lack of consciousness on race, Ransom writes: Slavery was a
feature monstrous enough in theory, but, more often than not, humane in practice;
and it is impossible to believe that its abolition could have effected any great
revolution in society (Stand 14). This critical blindness on the part of the
Agrarians, with its utter dismissiveness of the importance o f race itself in the South,
152
only augments the sense of the prophetic intensity and depth o f Faulkners own
Southern vision.
Perhaps race is a fitting issue with which to conclude a study of Faulkners
regional identity.2i In his later years, Faulkner the international figure would find
himself attacked from all sides on racial grounds. While Northern liberals accused
him o f caving in to the ignorance of racist white Southerners, his own community
and immediate family in Oxford excoriated him for what they considered his
betrayal o f Southern values that is, for his moderate and progressive racial views.
Black intellectuals including W. E. B. Du Bois and James Baldwin tried without
success to confront him on his ambiguous, contradictory statements on
integration.26 And Faulkners death in 1962 probably saved him a great deal of
embarrassment, as it rescued him from having to act on his threat to shoot blacks in
the streets o f Oxford if the University of Mississippi attempted to integrate its
student body.27
But setting aside his failure to provide a coherent, consistent public stance
on racial issues when fame and civil rights had forced him into the national
spotlight, Faulkner reveals in his earlier writings the level of his appreciation for
the Souths racial legacy. The novels The Sound and the Fury, Light in August,
Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, and Intruder in the Dust, and such short
stories as Dry September, That Evening Sun, Red Leaves, and A Justice
153
utilize race as a key figure in order to pose more general questions about humanity.
Writing in 1946, Ralph Ellison appraised Faulkners racial explorations:
Indeed, through his many novels and short stories, Faulkner fights
out the moral problem which was repressed after the nineteenth
century, and it was shocking for some to discover that for all his
concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature
o f man. Thus we must turn to him for that continuity o f moral
purpose that made for the greatness of our classics. As for the Negro
minority, he has been more willing perhaps than any other artist to
start with the stereotype, accept it as true, and then seek out the
human truth which it hides. Perhaps his is the example for our
writers to follow, for in his work technique has been put once more
to the task o f creating value.28
In addition to its insight into Faulkners use of race and region in an American
canonical literary context, this passage suggests an answer to the question of
whether Faulkner, had he been invited, would have joined the Agrarians or not.
Though the point is moot considering the fact that Faulkner was still largely
unknown in 1930 and in light of the Agrarians rarefied academic credentials, the
question itself sets the regional concerns of both parties into an interesting context.
With a natural aversion to groups o f any kind, Faulkner most likely would have
shied away from such an affiliation despite shared attitudes in a number of areas.
But more generally, Faulkner would probably have registered the relative crudity of
the Agrarians gesture, the attempt to consolidate the balance o f their regional
identity and sentiment in reaction against a system o f any kind, let alone the
154
industrial system that played almost no role in the vernacular Southern culture that
invited, demanded, serious literary treatment on its own terms: impoverished,
rustic, racial, and so on. Ellisons description o f Faulkners method addresses not
only an openness to the culturally repressed element o f race in Southern culture, but
also, more universally, the moral and humanistic values with which Faulkners
writing of this period was so deeply engaged.
If the Agrarians fare poorly in this kind o f competition with Faulkner,
perhaps they deserve a more reasonable standard o f comparison. Clearly the reach
o f Faulkners work is much greater in its articulation o f its own issues, even as it
treats many of the Agrarians regional questions in more innovative and convincing
ways than they themselves do. But this obscures the very real difference between
Faulkners work, which is literary art, and the Agrarians work, which is criticism
in general and a very narrowly defined kind of cultural criticism in this case. But
the Agrarians subtle emphasis on aesthetic categories rather than economic
solutions in I ll Take My Stand suggests that their own faith in regional literature o f
the kind that Faulkner was producing as they convened their symposium was quite
strong. In contrast to Mencken and several Southern critics, including W. J. Cash
and others, who advocated a kind o f positivist intervention o f social science
research in order to bring the South into modernity, the Agrarians were ultimately
dedicated to literature.
155
The enormous and lasting cultural influence that the Agrarians had
individually in later years leaves a sense that they shared much of Faulkners faith
in the vital role o f literature in Southern culture. During the 1940s, Ransoms
Kenyon Review, Lytle and Tates Sewanee Review, and Brooks and Warrens
Southern Review established themselves as literary publications of national and
even international merit. These periodicals played an irreplaceable role in the
emergence o f an entire generation o f Southern authors, supporting and publishing
work by such writers as Randall Jarrell, Caroline Gordon, Eudora Welty, Flannery
OConnor, and Katherine Anne Porter. As noted earlier, several o f the Agrarians
played a prominent role in the rise o f the New Criticism, which schooled the same
generation of critics that would recognize Faulkner, in the later 1940s, as a major
figure in the history o f American literature. Robert Penn Warren, not without his
own claim to major status as a novelist and poet, would be instrumental in reviving
Faulkners reputation; in his 1946 review of The Portable Faulkner, Warren
brought Faulkners work out of a solely Southern context and into a more universal
humanistic context that spoke to the modem world. Here is a novelist, he wrote,
who, in mass o f work, scope of material, in range of effect, in repertorial accuracy
and symbolic subtlety, in philosophical weight., can be put beside the masters o f our
own past literature.29 As Warren himself matured, and perhaps began to feel a
greater solidarity with Faulkners more subtle and complex literary approach to
156
Southern culture, he would distance himself from what he considered the overly
reactionary stance o f I ll Take My Stand. But despite the gradual dissolution o f the
Agrarians in the late 1930s into their independent literary activities, their earlier
efforts to derive an explicitly regional set o f aesthetic and cultural ideals articulated
the underappreciated role o f the region in American culture in a way that would
survive, explicitly or implicitly, in their future work, including the New Criticism
itself.
Despite his own sharp divergence with so much o f the critical methodology
o f the Agrarians, it was Faulkners innovation as a regional writer that ultimately
enabled him to speak, as Ellison points out, in more representatively American and,
indeed, human terms. The figure o f the region serves in his work as a bridge
between the seemingly disparate anti-modem South o f his origin and the
aggressively modernist narrative modes that enable him to exploit the moral and
humanistic possibilities of Southern identity for his fiction. Both in its
understanding and manipulation o f the regions cultural constructedness, as in
stories like Golden Land and Dry September, and in its ability to appropriate
the South as an archetypal American setting in the great Yoknapatawpha writings,
Faulkners work and place in the American canon are perhaps most properly and
accurately understood in the same regional terms went so far in shaping the
literature itself.
157
Notes to Chapter 3
1See Otto Friedrich, City o f Nets: A Portrait o f Hollywood in the 1940s

(New York: Harper & Row, 1986) 237-40, for a more detailed account o f
Faulkners Hollywood experiences. Friedrichs account foregrounds one o f the
themes o f this chapter, Faulkners acute sense o f death in the culture o f Hollywood:
They worship death here, he once remarked at dinner with a friend. They dont
worship money, they worship death (237).
2 Quoted in Frederick R. Karl, William Faulkner, American Writer: A
Biography (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson P, 1989) 477.
3 William Faulkner, Golden Land, Collected Stories (1950; New York:
Vintage-Random, 1995) 406-7.
4 Quoted in Lewis P. Simpson, William Faulkner o f Yoknapatawpha, The
American South: Portrait o f a Culture, ed. Louis D. Rubin, Jr. (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State UP, 1980) 233.
5 Karl 409.
6 Franz Fanon, The Fact of Blackness, Black Skin, White Masks (New
York: Grove P, 1967) 109. Quoted in W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Really
Want? October 77 (Summer 1997): 74.
7 Mitchell 75.
8 Quoted in James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate, eds., Lion in the
Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926-1962 (Lincoln: U o f Nebraska P,
1968) 112.
9 See Cleanth Brooks, Faulkner and the Fugitive-Agrarians, Faulkner and
the Southern Renaissance, eds., Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: UP of
158
Mississippi, 1982) 22-39, for an incisive treatment of the parallel careers and rare
interactions between Faulkner and the Agrarians.
10 Quoted in George Core, The Dominion of the Fugitives and Agrarians,
The American South: Portrait o f a Culture, ed. Louis D. Rubin, Jr. (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State UP, 1980) 294-5.
11 Core 302.
12 Fred Hobson, This Hellawfiil South: Mencken and the Late
Confederacy, Critical Essays on H. L. Mencken, ed. Douglas C. Stenerson
(Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1987) 174.
13 H. L. Mencken, The Sahara o f the Bozart, A Mencken Chrestomathy
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949) 185.
14 See Hobson 185 for more on Menckens marriage and frequent travels
throughout the South.
15 Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New
York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995) 500.
16 Hobson 180.
17 Twelve Southerners, I ll Take My Stand (1930; New York: P. Smith,
1951) ix.
18 Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (New
Haven: Yale UP, 1963) 172.
19 See Calvin Bedient, Pride and Nakedness: As I Lay Dying, Faulkner:
New Perspectives, ed. Richard H. Brodhead (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc.,
1983) 136-52, for a nuanced reading o f the novels ability to address both the
vernacular identities of the Bundren family and the more abstract narrative issues
with which Faulkner was concerned during this period. Bedient envisions the
tension between familial pride and existential nakedness as the central force in the
novel, suggesting that the conflict between mans hunger for reality and his
nerve for truth in the novel mirrors Faulkners more general struggle to synthesize
modernist aesthetic and cultural forms with his Southern background (152).
159
Implicit in Bedients thesis is the idea that Faulkners most direct authorial concern
lay outside the realm o f the kind o f cultural criticism put forth by the Agrarians at
this time, even as his effort to meld form and content in his work spoke to many of
the issues (namely, the construction o f regional identity) most vital to the
Agrarians.
20 Brooks, Faulkner 155.
21 See Brooks, Faulkner 143, 166, for more on the Bundrens unwitting
heroism.
22 See Eric J. Sundquist, Faulkner: The House Divided (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1983). In his reading o f Absalom, Absalom!, Sundquist parallels
Thomas Sutpen and Abraham Lincoln, each of whom labors heroically to build or
preserve a magnificent house symbolic of his national and personal dream, and
both of whom, at about the same time, face a crisis in the house and try desperately
to postpone it. In each case, the Civil War forces a resolution o f the crisis though
not in either case without violent consequences (105). Sundquists study has
interesting regional implications, particularly in his sense o f the shared cultural
legacy of the North and South that expresses itself in regional permutations of
culture: The image of a nation divided against itself is apt in more ways than the
obvious one o f threatened union, for it also represents the dangerous, paradoxical
ways in which North and South, each internally divided as well, were not simply
opposed but in significant respects were almost mirrored images (99). I would
suggest that this mirrored resemblance reflects an important aspect o f my overall
model of the American region, that is, the regions intuitive resonance o f meaning
and complex identity rather than any merely reactionary, political, or legal self
conception. Significant in this context, of course, is the fact that Sundquists
primary metaphor for this kind of intra- as well as interregional complexity is
racial.
2j See John T. Irwin, Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A
Speculative Reading o f Faulkner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1975) for a superb
treatment of the incest/miscegenation patterns in The Sound and the Fury and
Absalom, Absalom! Irwins critical method, which includes a transposition of the
structures of space and time in Faulkners work into psychoanalytical terms, has
strong implications for a regional reading of Faulkner that are implicit in my own
work. A representative diagnosis of Quentin Compsons mental processes reveals
the obvious intra- and interregional applications of Irwins approach, particularly in
160
the ways that Irwin perceives the consolidation of identity at work in Quentins
demarcation and overall spatialization o f psychic categories: Quentin projects
onto the characters of Bon and Henry opposing elements in his own personality ~
Bon represents Quentins unconsciously motivated desire for his sister Candace,
while Henry represents the conscious repression or punishment o f that desire. This
separation o f the unacceptable elements from the acceptable elements in the self,
this splitting o f Quentins personality into a bad half and a good half, with the
subsequent tormenting of the good half by the bad and the punishment o f the bad
half by the good, involves a kind o f narrative bipolarity typical o f both compulsion
neurosis and schizophrenia (28-9).
24 William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936; New York: VintageRandom House, 1990) 303.
25 See Thadious M. Davis, Faulkners Negro, Art and the Southern
Context (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1983) for a systematic treatment o f
Faulkners racial constructions in his writings. Davis Chapter I, Cultural
Contexts: The Artist, the South, and the Negro, provides an excellent historical
contextualization o f the Negro as a social and cultural construct during the years
o f Faulkners early career, suggesting that Faulkners racial consciousness was
slow to mirror the regions evolving social and economic realities during later
decades. Davis argues that in a sense, Faulkner never seemed to move beyond the
thirties in his general conception of the South (5).
26 See Karl 925, 937, for more on the exchanges between Faulkner and Du
Bois in this arena, including Faulkners refusal to publicly debate Du Bois on
integration; James Baldwin, Faulkner and Desegregation, Nobody Knows My
Name (1961; New York: Vintage-Random House, 1963) 117-26, offers another
contemporary perspective on Faulkners statements on Southern racial matters.
27 See Meriwether and Millgate 261 for the interview in which Faulkner
makes this threat.
28 Ralph Ellison, Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of
Humanity, Shadow and Act (1964; New York: Vintage-Random-House, 1994) 43.
29 Quoted in Karl 744.
161
CH APTER 4
Irony and Idolatry/Satire and Salvation:
Flannery O Connors Modest Vision
Introduction: On Adolescence and Authority, Region and Religion
Writing to his lifelong friend Walker Percy in 1969, the Mississippi novelist
and historian Shelby Foote assessed the life and career o f their contemporary and
fellow Southerner Flannery OConnor:
She had the real clew, the solid gen, on what its about; I just wish
shed had time to demonstrate it fully instead of in fragments. Shes
a minor-minor writer, not because she lacked the talent to be a major
one, but simply because she died before her development had time
to evolve out o f the friction o f just living enough years to soak up
the basic joys and sorrows. That, and I think because she also didnt
have time to turn her back on Christ, which is something every great
Catholic writer (that I know of, I mean) has done. Joyce, Proust-and, I think, Dostoevsky, who was just about the least Christian man
I ever encountered except maybe Hemingway [. . .]. I always had
the feeling that OConnor was going to be one o f our big talents; I
didnt know she was dyingwhich o f course means I misunderstood
her. She was a slow developer, like most good writers, and just
plain didnt have the time she needed to get around to the ordinary
world, which would have been her true subject after she emerged
from the grotesque one she explored throughout the little time she
had.1
162
Footes image o f O Connor is striking not only for what it expresses about her life
and writings, but perhaps even more so for its imaginative portrait of the person
who might have evolved into a very different writer with age and maturity. He
reads O Connor not simply on the basis of her work -- two novels, two collections
o f short stories, and a handful of nonfiction essays but considers her work in the
larger context o f her life and early death (at thirty-nine, from complications o f
lupus). OConnors portrait here takes on a very particular qualification, that o f
genius whose full realization and expression did not receive time enough for
fulfillment. Footes description of the life O Connor did experience, characterized
by the friction of just living enough years to soak up the basic joys and sorrows,
implies the opportunity, if one survives long enough, to emerge into a more fully
mature and complete sense of personal and authorial identity. It is an identity,
Foote seems to suggest, that enables a writer to confront more sweeping subjects, to
address a more universal, cosmic range of human experience, and, eventually, to
have some claim to being a major literary figure.
Along with Percy, Foote himself provides an excellent lens through which
to view O Connors standing in American literature and especially in the Southern
literature of their time. Both Percy and Foote might be classified as minor writers
whose fiction struggles to attain major status without ever quite doing so. In
163
relation to canonical issues, Foote is perhaps the more interesting o f the two for
several reasons. O f central importance is his epic, three-volume nonfiction work.
The Civil War: A Narrative, which took twenty years to write and essentially
prevented him from continuing his own career development from young novelist to,
perhaps, major figure. Modeled not on the historical writings of Thucydides but on
The Iliad, The Civil War is Footes defining achievement as a writer, far
overshadowing his six well-received novels. Footes method, an amalgamation o f
the rigorous research of the nonfiction historian and the attentive formal and
thematic concerns of the novelist, enabled him to produce a work that has been
compared to the best literature o f Gibbon, Prescott, Napier and Freeman. In other
words, Footes reputation as a major writer, which by now is virtually unquestioned
by historians, would be established not in a purely literary fictional context, but in
the company of a small group o f writers whose work cut across genres and fields,
with a particular stress on history. Even as his abbreviated career as a fiction writer
fell short of commanding the serious attention o f American critics and university
literature departments, and failed to transcend the label of minor, Foote himself
moved into an entirely different pantheon.
That the subject of his greatest work is the American Civil War serves as a
most appropriate central presence in Footes career, and in many ways in the
overall body of great twentieth-century Southern writing. The Civil War, whose
164
final volume was published in 1974, serves as a monumental testament to that event
whose influence on the maturation o f the United States as a nation remains its most
important episode since the Revolution itself. Foote speaks elsewhere o f the wars
psychological role in the life of the nation, its occurrence during the nations crisis
o f adolescence, and its shaping force on the nations identity throughout the
following periods.2
Footes models o f maturation, o f OConnors aborted growth, o f the
adolescence o f the nation as a whole, of the Civil W ars defining influence in the
forced development o f the United States (as much as ever a nation o f regions, but
united now by the traumatic experience o f the war itself), also resonate with the
presence of William Faulkner himself, the literary artist whose literature and
persona relegated writers like OConnor, Foote, and Percy to beginner, or at least
minor, status. Footes lifelong admiration of and friendship with Faulkner has the
unmistakable character o f a master/apprentice relationship. Living in Greenville,
Mississippi, during his youth, Foote first sought out Faulkner, his idol, as a
teenager. Footes regard for Faulkners work, and especially his identification with
Faulkner as a great writer who was also Southern and Mississippian, would remain
one o f the crucial and defining values throughout his life.
So Footes description of OConnor as a minor-minor writer who never
reached maturity may be read with Faulkner, the one undisputed major writer who
165
towered over their region, in mind. OConnor herself wrote o f Faulkners looming
shadow over the Souths literary landscape:
When there are many writers all employing the same idiom, all
looking out on more or less the same social scene, the individual
writer will have to be more careful that he isnt just doing badly
what has already been done to completion. The presence alone of
Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can
and cannot permit him self to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon
stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.3
That trains and railroads are haunting and haunted symbols in O Connors own
fiction should not be ignored here. The train, with its steel rails cutting through
virgin Southern timber forests, with its piercing whistle and earth-shaking rumbling
cars, rudely confronts the pastoral, rural South with that most contentious figure,
the big city. It is an invasive presence, a kind of authority that has insidious,
vaguely Northern connotations. Even here, in OConnors nonfiction essay Some
Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction, the inexorable Dixie Limited roars
menacingly toward a violent collision with a similarly iconic American figure, the
lowly mule and wagon. With her usual fondness for the violent, grotesque
marriage of such opposed forces, O Connor points out the inadvisability of her
own, or, for that matter, any Southern writers attempt to compete with Faulkner on
his own terms.
166
But OConnors view o f Faulkner, which seems a mischievous mixture of

satiric rebellion and respectful, even reverent, awe, expresses something o f the
central aesthetic program o f her work as a whole. Even as she notes Faulkners
tremendous, inescapable influence on herself and the rest o f the South, O Connor
constructs a metaphor that registers its hazardous potential. And she seems to
perceive something alien: the Dixie Limited may be Southern in name, but its force
is certainly allied with outside -- that is, Yankee -- interests. To borrow the
language of the Nashville Agrarians, the train represents an industrial rather than
agrarian regime.4 Even as she holds up Faulkner as the definitive and
representative Southern literary figure, as a synecdoche for modem Southern
literature as a whole, and does so with complete earnestness and ingenuousness,
O Connor instinctively reacts against this same figure with a subtle but determined
gesture of iconoclasm. This simultaneous and opposing combination o f meanings
in O Connors loaded language reveals a deeply American and Southern trait in its
own right, set in motion by an individualistic, romantic, perhaps ill-advised,
perhaps adolescent desire for some kind of independence from authoritative
tradition; and in the case o f O Connor, as I will suggest at greater length in what
follows, it characterizes the tension and explosiveness of her work and encapsulates
her overall literary identity, that o f a minor-minor writer whose modest body of
work and, especially in her self-conscious relation to Faulkner, modest literary
167
goals nevertheless demand serious consideration in larger Southern and American

contexts.
Another major concern for any study of OConnors work is, of course, her
religious identity. OConnors Catholic faith, or more specifically, her Catholic
faith in an overwhelmingly Protestant and widely fundamentalist rural South, has
been and remains one of the central problematics in criticism o f her work. Perhaps
due, at least in part, to the dearth o f Catholic literary figures o f the first rank in the
United States, OConnors fiction has attracted a great deal o f consideration on
explicitly religious grounds; much o f this scholarship attempts to mine her stories
and novels for the ways that they engage the primary Christian mysteries of the
Incarnation and Redemption, and portray the doctrine offelix culpa in a modem
and familiar context.5 Catholic critics in particular have shown a great deal of
interest in OConnors work, and have generated a formidable body of writing
dedicated to establishing her reputation on this aspect o f her background; Kathleen
Feeley, Richard Giannone, Carter Martin, and others exemplify this critical trend.6
Also common in O Connor scholarship are critical methods, like that employed by
John F. Desmond in Risen Sons: Flannery O Connor's Vision o f History, in which
an ever-present awareness o f O Connors faith serves to frame the otherwise
secular or nonreligious aspects o f her work.7
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At the other extreme from this religious criticism is the body o f O Connor
scholarship that may be termed, simply enough, secular. Dissatisfied with what
they consider a kind o f derivative and self-fulfilling Christian reading o f
OConnors work, secular critics proceed with minimal attention on the religious
influences and characteristics o f the literature, focusing instead on more
mainstream critical methods. Formalist, deconstructionist, psychoanalytic, and
feminist studies of OConnor are among these works.8 Emblematic o f these critical
efforts is the work o f Josephine Hendin, whose 1970 study The World o f Flannery
O Connor quite consciously downplays the Catholic aspect o f O Connors life and
writing in order to view her as the product o f much wider cultural forces and as the
author o f a body of work whose concern reaches deeply into personal and social
worlds with perhaps less overtly Catholic significance than the religious critics
have suggested. A summary passage expresses Hendins sentiments, and echoes
the approaches of other secular critics:
The impulse to write or to pray grows from some more complex

force, a necessity that must be rooted in the concrete, the particular
experience. For Flannery O Connor, I suspect that necessity had
more to do with being Irish-American, a Southern woman, the
offspring o f an old Georgia family, and a victim of lupus, the
wasting, degenerative disease that struck her at twenty-five and
eventually killed her, than with being part o f the Roman Catholic
Church.9
169
Perhaps it is not surprising, given her often contentious style, that OConnor
generally scorned most critics of her work, both religious and secular, even as she
herself contributed to the great confusion surrounding her work. On the one hand,
she made many bald statements that located her Catholic identity at the precise
center o f every authorial choice she made. In one essay on Catholicism and
literature, she wrote: When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I
cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I
cannot afford to be less than an artist (OConnor 808-9). Such generalizing
remarks naturally do little to settle specific questions about literature; they more
quickly and effectively engender a sense of distrust toward OConnors own claims
about her work. And certainly the omnipresence of religious themes in the stories
and novels themselves, from invocations of forces of divine grace and the terrible
speed o f mercy, to restagings of Biblical tableau scenes, to the vast chorus of
bizarre preachers and prophets wandering the narrative landscape, begs many of the
questions that religious criticism of O Connors work has tried to answer (478).
OConnors impatience with many religious readings of her work seems, in this
light, somewhat undeserved.
On the other hand, however, her steadfast opposition to purely secular
interpretations o f her work is equally well known. What might be summarized as
the prevailing modem culture of scientific humanism fares quite poorly in
170
O Connors work. Given body and voice by an army o f ineffectual intellectuals,

sniveling social workers, and generally flat, fleshless hypocrites, the secular
perspective seems to be holding sway in O Connors fictional milieu even as its
disciples suffer countless acts o f violence, degradation, and dehumanization.
Psychoanalysis in particular receives a great deal of caustic satire; with machinelike
regularity, OConnors narratives exact a kind o f ritualistic vengeance upon such
quintessentially modem discourses, at the same time that the wider culture is
defined and transformed by the collision between religious and secular forces.
My own approach to questions o f OConnors religious faith and its
influence on her writing attempts a kind o f mediation between the religious and
secular criticism that have accumulated in response to her work. The danger o f any
straightforward religious reading lies in its tendency to reduce OConnors
literature to a mere cipher for Christian dogma, at the expense of any other
pertinent insight. Secular criticism likewise flirts with the danger of cutting itself
off from the religious presence that clearly must be kept in mind when considering
a writer with O Connors background. In what follows I will engage both bodies of
OConnor criticism and attempt to reach a kind of balance between them. In order
to do so, my approach seeks to place OConnors Catholic identity in the context o f
her Southern heritage, and to examine the religious concerns alongside the
constructions of place and region in her fiction. Most specifically, I want to
171
explore questions of minor and minority status by moving along several parallel
lines: the Souths self-conscious identity as a dissident and minority culture in the
United States, OConnors status as a minor writer in the larger context o f Southern
and American fiction, and her Catholic faith in its minority status in the South, a
heavily Protestant region with its own fiercely individualistic and often grotesque
expressions of faith. My own contribution to the overall body o f OConnor
scholarship lies in my formulation, in each o f these areas, o f the figure o f the
region, following the model developed in Chapter 1, as the crucial link between
such disparate terms. The region, I will argue, provides a kind o f shared ground for
many o f these seemingly opposed forces to work themselves out dramatically in
O Connors fiction.
Shelby Footes remark to Percy that he always had the feeling that
OConnor was going to be one of our big talents, reveals a strong sense of
Southern rather than merely American pride, a kind of cultural possessiveness that
bespeaks the key regional role in each o f these concerns. It is a pride that sharply
qualifies Footes comment on the relationship between OConnors faith and
writing, that she also didnt have time to turn her back on Christ, which is
something every great Catholic writer [. . .] has done. In what follows I will
consider the ways that these figures o f region and religion simultaneously come to
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bear in O Connors fiction. The concept o f idolatry will be useful here, clearing
some inroads into the central cultural concerns o f OConnors work.
William Faulkners portrayal o f diverse American practices of idolatry,
explored at some length in Chapter 3, provides a readily apparent example o f his
own personal kind o f religious vision. And in Flannery OConnor, another
Southerner whose religious concerns, while violently contested in their substance
by many critics, are never questioned in their presence, Faulkner enjoys an
excellent figure whose own treatment o f idolatry contextualizes his own in
revealing ways. OConnors understanding o f idolatry often leads to quite explicit
pronouncements on the subject. And the often disturbingly violent culmination of
her narratives may be read on one level as a desperate gesture of iconoclasm, a kind
o f righteous attempt to bring down the idols o f a sinful people.10 Not only does
idolatry come to bear here in unique and revealing ways, but OConnors utilization
o f it also exposes, as I will discuss near the end of this chapter, some of the
important distinctions between her own literary vision and that of Faulkner, that
anxiety-inducing figure who looms, perhaps himself not unlike an idol, over the
South o f O Connors imagination.
Considering OConnors abiding concern with the originality o f her literary
identity as a Southerner, one might look closely at her short stories in search o f
ways that she tried to appropriate, in her own personal way, the same materials that
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had already been confronted by Faulkner. But the most striking revelation o f such
a comparison between the two writers is not a greater awareness of O Connors
distinct religious impulse in her work. Rather surprisingly, it is Faulkner himself, a
man who distanced himself from any formal religious affiliation and avoided
discussion of religious issues in any but the most general terms, who emerges from
the comparison with a more visible and central religious voice, and whose own
work reveals many o f the same spiritual concerns that are explored in O Connors
fiction. The term "religious deserves clarification in this context: from the most
general Southern sense o f a shared, relatively homogeneous Christian culture,
complete with an almost visceral intimacy with a decidedly Old Testament model
o f society, the world, and the cosmos, to a more pointed sense of the urgent
spiritual crisis facing man in his modem, industrial, technological society,
Faulkners writings, when considered alongside those of OConnor, share a
remarkable consistency of purpose.
The influence o f the Old Testament on OConnors work is comparable in
importance to its influence on Faulkner. OConnors stories are littered with
Biblical references and themes; her protagonists are often bizarre Southern
incarnations of Old Testament prophets. And in her essays and letters, her own
sense of her Biblical influences merges in a very concrete way with her region.
Thus it seems appropriate, in light o f the history, traditions, and culture o f her
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South, that O Connors most comprehensive explanation for the influence o f her
native region upon her writing conceives the geography not in artistic, ideal,
formal, or literary terms, but in unequivocally theological ones. O Connors
fiction, in which she fleshes out this vision in its most complete form, provides
insight into its peculiar, often paradoxical nature, and reveals the way that its
distinctive Southern genesis serves not to hinder or narrow its scope, but works in
much the reverse process, through the fiction itself, to amplify and clarify its
resonance, power, and humanity.
Consider the following statement from an essay titled The Catholic Novel
in the Protestant South, which OConnor read at Georgetown University in 1963.
Here OConnor parallels contemporary literatures function with that of the Bible,
that definitive sacred text which, to her mind, provides the human community with
moral, ideal, and spiritual guides, and serves the very precise function of being
something to measure ourselves against in everyday life:
For the purposes o f fiction, these guides have to exist in the form of
stories which affect our image and our judgment o f ourselves.
Abstractions, formulas, laws, will not do here. We have to have
stories. It takes a story to make a story. It takes a story o f mythic
dimensions; one which belongs to everybody; one in which
everybody is able to recognize the hand o f God and imagine its
descent upon himself. In the Protestant South the Scriptures fill this
role. The ancient Hebrew genius for making the absolute concrete
has conditioned the Southerners way o f looking at things. That is
one o f the big reasons why the South is a story-telling section at all.
Our response to life is different if we have been taught only a
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definition o f faith than it is if we have trembled with Abraham as he

held the knife over Isaac. (858-9)
OConnor is not simply circumscribing her entire aesthetic vision with Biblical
terms here, although she is perfectly clear about doing so; but within that space she
also seems to be identifying a highly paradoxical process o f creation and
destruction, a kind o f dialogue between artistry and violence. It is a process that
brings to mind her construction o f the metaphor o f Faulkner as the roaring Dixie
Limited in order to simultaneously honor and subvert him. On the one hand, stories
are to be considered tools, very specific objects that have been designed to serve an
equally specific purpose. OConnors desire for something to measure ourselves
against makes a case for her literary art in only the most self-effacing, utilitarian
terms. And yet such workmanlike concreteness is precisely the necessary quality
for this most urgent o f all spiritual tasks which the Bible itself also completes;
anything less real or physical in its dimensions, however ideally conceived, will
not do. O Connors sense of irony is fully engaged here, cutting down her literary
form in almost comic gesture o f understatement even as she suggests its high
purpose.
The aptness o f OConnors allusion is also noteworthy. Taken from
Genesis, the story o f Abrahams willingness to sacrifice Isaac in order to prove his
obedience to God illustrates the kind of Scriptural guidance of the concrete spiritual
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narrative that OConnor finds so compelling. The implicit connection between

faith and violence also satisfies O Connors own general narrative pattern.
Simultaneous creation and destruction could scarcely demand a more suitable
dramatic illustration that the one she provides here to characterize the Souths
response to life. Abrahams lifting of the knife over his beloved son Isaac, his
willingness to carry out this monumental act o f self-denial and sacrifice in order to
prove his faith in God, does indeed reveal effectively, as O Connor says, the
ancient Hebrew genius for making the absolute concrete. But it should be
emphasized again that there is a kind of supreme irony at work here, since this
literal reality, this concreteness, takes the shape of a violent act o f destruction, a
negation that is simultaneous with the creative, affirming gesture o f faith itself.
Abrahams willingness to sacrifice his beloved son also serves OConnor in another
sense: the tableau is a dramatic analogue to the New Testaments central, and even
more violent act, in which God offers His only son, Jesus Christ, in order to
reconcile a fallen human community, and creation as a whole, to Himself.
O Connors strong identification with Scriptural tradition, especially the intricate
dialogue between the Old and New Testaments, invites a reading o f her work along
similar lines, such that the Hebrew tradition and, of course, the Christian mystery of
the Incarnation, become tools, in all their paradoxical tension, for critique itself.
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In another essay dealing with region as an influential element in her fiction

and titled, appropriately enough, The Regional Writer, OConnor qualifies her
fictions violence with the comparison to another dramatically iconoclastic scene.
In the South, she writes, we have, in however attenuated a form, a vision of
Moses face as he pulverized our idols (847). As she goes on to suggest that the
South deserves credit for grounding this vision in a familiar landscape, it becomes
even more obvious that O Connors complex theological, cultural, and literary
identity is shaped by a vivid conception of specific idols and acts o f idolatry. As
divine agency works through the concrete dimensions o f real time and space, the
destruction o f these idols and the interruption of these idolatrous acts become a
kind o f grotesque, often violent testament to the equally efficacious process of
grace, G ods active agency in the world, that bums away the sin o f humanity and
creation.
The Iconoclastic Idol: Race, Irony, and Mr. Heads Paradox
In considering O Connors own unique fashioning o f idols, one obvious

point o f entry is her famous story, The Artificial Nigger. The title refers to the
grotesque plaster statue encountered by the storys protagonists, Mr. Head and his
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grandson Nelson, during an ill-fated journey from their rural home to Atlanta. The
description o f the strange figures introduction is worth close attention, especially
in its consideration of the unique perspective o f Mr. Head:
He had not walked five hundred yards down the road when
he saw, within reach o f him, the plaster figure o f a Negro sitting bent
over on a low yellow brick fence that curved around a wide lawn.
The Negro was about Nelsons size and he was pitched forward at an
unsteady angle because the putty that held him to the wall had
cracked. One of his eyes was entirely white and he held a piece of
brown watermelon.
Mr. Head stood looking at him silently until Nelson stopped
at a little distance. Then as the two o f them stood there, Mr. Head
breathed, An artificial nigger!
It was not possible to tell if the artificial Negro were meant
to be young or old; he looked too miserable to be either. He was
meant to look happy because his mouth was stretched up at the
comers but the chipped eye and the angle he was cocked at gave him
a wild look of misery instead.
An artificial nigger! Nelson repeated in Mr. Heads exact
tone. (229)
In an important sense, the words artificial and nigger are interchangeable here.
Both terms describe something that is fashioned, molded either in plaster or in
thought, as an idol or an ideal. Both terms describe something that exceeds Mr.
Heads capacity for imagination; just as the artificiality of the plaster statue
articulates a kind of mysterious presence that reduces him to a state o f awed
rapture, so does the category o f Negro represent a vision o f humanity which he is
plainly unequipped to approach on its own terms. In both cases his limited ability
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to conceive the object or idea before him creates a strange kind of reverence.
Earlier in the story, Mr. Heads thoughts o f black people, encounters with them on
the train to the city, and discussions of them with Nelson a literal innocent who
has never seen one before, and thus possesses a capacity for wonder parallel to his
grandfathers are accompanied by narrow-minded derision and scorn. Mr.
Heads brand o f 1950s Georgia racism is defined more by lack o f familiarity and
the resulting stereotyping of the Other, than by any genuine personal contact and
experience with black people. Later, in his encounter with the statue, Mr. Head
reveals a vulnerability, a defenselessness in the peeling face of this inexplicable
Other, and the fact that it is in actuality nothing more than a crude suburban lawn
ornament does not hinder its power over him; indeed, the figures trashy
physicality, its coarse artifice, crystallizes Mr. Heads awe. In this light, the title of
the story invites a subversive reading that virtually gives away its secret in advance,
but in such an obvious, ironic, even comic way that its very conventionality and
straightforwardness seem (when reread after the fact, that is, Biblically) like a
shocking revelation: for a man like Mr. Head, the point is that every nigger is
artificial.
OConnor thus treats the colossal issue o f race in the American South with
the gentle subtlety of Mr. Heads reverent sense of mystery. Central to her vision is
the fact that the Negro in this relationship is nothing more than an idol, a lifeless,
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crumbling statue, and that Mr. Heads worship does not take the form o f elevating
the idol into a direct, ingenuous competitor against a true monotheistic God; his is
not a false god in this confrontational sense. Instead, Mr. Head reduces his peculiar
version o f the golden calf to decay, squalor, and profanity: consistent with Franz
Fanons formulation of the downcast racial Other as an idol o f abomination, the
idol and ideal o f the Negro are forced into the stereotypes and artifice o f an
ignorant, blunt, unoriginal racist vocabulary.11 He sins not by exalting a pretender
to Gods authority, but by belittling creation itself, by refusing to entertain the
possibility that such a divine presence might actually exist -- in the Other or,
perhaps, in himself in real time and space. As such, Mr. Heads practice o f
idolatry seems doomed to take the form o f endless petty acts of violence, feckless
expressions self-hate and despair. His spiteful, grating barbs aimed at Nelson in the
early part o f the story attempt to protect his own flawed perspective; his sinful
vision can be maintained only with this constant repressive reinforcement, leaving
him with an eternal struggle to restate and reinforce the profanity o f his many
hateful, but indispensable, idols.
The futility of Mr. Heads abusive, idolatrous vision is what O Connor is
most interested in portraying in the story. The old man proceeds to justify his
abuse of his grandson, and even to take a certain cruel pride in it, until Nelson finds
himself in a predicament that actually frightens Mr. Head himself. When the boy
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actually needs his grandfathers guidance, Mr. Head considers his own welfare first
and last. He abandons Nelson, then flatly denies that he knows him: This is not
my boy, he said. I never seen him before (226). Only with this final disavowal,
with its obvious echoes of Simon Peters supposedly pragmatic denial o f Jesus, do
Mr. Heads shame and despair make their presence more keenly and painfully
known. His isolation grows until he nearly collapses under its weight, and he finds
himself wandering through the desolate wilderness landscape o f an unfamiliar
suburban neighborhood. Forced by the flatness and emptiness o f his own
idolatrous vision to face his desperate plight, Mr. Head is finally able to assume the
lowly position o f supplicant, o f dependent, rather than fashioning a surrogate idol
and rather sadistically forcing it to play such a role in his place:
A loud bark jarred him to attention and he looked up to see a fat man
approaching with two bulldogs. He waved both arms like someone
shipwrecked on a desert island. Im lost! he called. Im lost and
I cant find my way and me and this boy have got to catch this train
and I cant find the station. Oh Gawd Im lost! Oh hep me Gawd
Im lost! (228)
At last, with Mr. Heads plea for Gods help, O Connor provides her storys
protagonist with the opportunity to experience grace in a truly genuine way,
without recourse to the demeaning, crude lens o f idolatry through which he viewed
his world in the past. Finally, at this late juncture, she assumes the much needed
authorial role o f Moses, pulverizing the idols o f the sinful people whose
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predisposition toward idolatry can only be rectified violently, and from without, so
that they may see clearly, and that this most terrible o f sins may be avoided in the
future.
Or does she? Perhaps OConnors narrative is not quite as definitive in its
idol bashing as such a reading suggests. For one thing, Mr. Heads conversion
experience, assuming that his appeal to an external and higher power for help may
be interpreted as such, takes place before, not after, his encounter with the artificial
Negro. In other words, the assault on his idolatrous, sinful mind seems to have run
its course, and Mr. Head to have survived the momentary crisis more or less intact,
before he even approaches the plaster statue. With this sequence o f events,
O Connor seems to imply that such an unqualified and transcendent resolution of
Mr. Heads ordeal would be far too simple. Instead, and with a final stroke of
irony, she posits the statue as one more iconic representation for Mr. Heads
assessment, and allows his human response to resonate with increasingly subtle,
paradoxical, significance.
Clearly the description o f the plaster figure suggests something o f the way
that the Negro, idol and ideal, has assumed responsibility for all humanitys
sinfulness, and suffers accordingly. Its mouth stretched up at the comers and its
wild look of misery articulate again the paradoxical nature o f Christian
redemption, that o f violence and death as evidence o f divine grace in the created
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world o f real time and space. Its ageless but visibly human, corruptible body spans
all time, uniting the ancient Mr. Head with his young grandson in their mutual
perception o f its meaning. This grotesque Christ figure is the ultimate iconoclastic
idol: it is meant to be destroyed, it must be destroyed, in order to bring the previous
sinful practice o f idolatry to an end, but it is precisely in this gesture of violent
destruction that the figure mushrooms into the total fulfillment o f its potential, and
ceases to be an idol in a profane, sinful sense at all. O Connor guides Mr. Head, in
his weak, embattled condition, and with his new way o f seeing and apprehending,
to some kind o f personal understanding o f the Christian triumph; but in presenting
the artificial Negro as the catalyst and vehicle for the interruption o f his idolatrous
vision, OConnor constructs new narrative figures at the very moment she crushes
other ones: radically materialistic, paradoxically Christian, she replaces one
presence, which is incomplete as a result of sins limiting apprehension of reality,
with another, fuller presence that is no less material and concrete. Her tool in this
seemingly endless cyclical narrative process is irony:
They stood gazing at the artificial Negro as if they were faced with
some great mystery, some monument to anothers victory that
brought them together in their common defeat. They could both feel
it dissolving their differences like an action o f mercy. Mr. Head had
never known before what mercy felt like because he had been too
good to deserve any, but he felt he knew now. He looked at Nelson
and understood that he must say something to the child to show that
he was still wise and in the look the boy returned he saw a hungry
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need for that assurance. Nelsons eyes seemed to implore him to

explain once and for all the mystery o f existence.
Mr. Head opened his lips to make a lofty statement and heard
himself say, They aint got enough real ones here. They got to
have an artificial one. (230)
It is tempting to read Mr. Heads lofty statement with sardonic humor upon
consideration o f the comic emptiness and absurd ignorance of his explanation.
Perhaps he is simply becoming an idol unto himself, claiming even more authority
in the midst o f his ignorance than before. This reaction is especially
understandable when his words are juxtaposed with the narrators preceding
description o f the overpowering awe, humility, and mystery of Mr. Head and
Nelsons view o f the artificial Negro, with its great mystery and action of
mercy. If O Connor is using such high language as a set-up to Mr. Heads punch
line, the result would be the satirical and pessimistic image of his utter confusion.
But this reading fails to register Mr. Heads new role here, and the unique gesture
he makes in speaking these seemingly ridiculous words.
Mr. Head has indeed been changed by the action o f mercy, whereas
before, upon receiving directions from the fat man, he had simply been whipped
into a state o f submission, as if he were slowly returning from the dead (229).
Standing before the statue, which somehow expresses the depth of mystery, and the
actuality o f the Christian paradox, which he himself now feels for the first time in
his life, Mr. Head finds that his identity as well as his social role have been
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radically redefined. Mercy inspires both gratitude and responsibility, and his new
experience of himself tempers his crude, even sadistic attitude toward Nelson and
replaces it with a humane, affectionate kinship with the boy. The result o f these
changes is Mr. Heads new ability to make some kind o f gesture toward the
artificial Negro, a free response that expresses his entire being, and that he had been
unable to make before. OConnor hints that now there may be a difference between
real ones and an artificial one, as if Mr. Heads experience o f mercy has
cleansed his entire apparatus o f vision, thought, and interpretation, and given him
enough insight to recognize, and perhaps acknowledge, the humanity o f black
people themselves.
But OConnor continues to circle back in her narrative, endowing it with so
much irony that even this kind o f positive reading of Mr. Heads new identity must
be qualified by something antithetical within its own structure. Thus the highly
comic aspect o f Mr. Heads effort to appear wise to Nelson. In the end, however,
his clumsy desire to reassure the boy, to explain once and for all the mystery o f
existence, is ironic and amusing while still containing, not insignificantly, a new,
surprisingly gentle tone. Finally, too, Mr. Head achieves, with unexpected spiritual
humility and a great sense o f relief, his original, and at one time rather abusive,
goals o f teaching Nelson that the boy was not as smart as he thought he was, and
that the city is not a great place (212, 211).
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O Connors irony works in much the same way that Mr. Heads idols work.
For it is irony that refuses to let any statement stand as it is, refuses to acknowledge
a single meaning within an idea or thought. And yet the ironic tone, when read
backward and forward across time in the spirit o f Scriptural tradition, ultimately
proves the statement to be absolutely correct, and more resonant than its speaker,
especially the unwitting Mr. Head, could ever know. It seems that Mr. Head suffers
primarily as a result o f his own early, wild prophecy, and in the end he is revealed
to be no less authentic a prophet, and no less effective an iconoclast, than Moses.
Similarly, the idols that he holds up (or down, in the case o f the artificial Negro)
fail to withstand his own continual violent gestures; but in the end these too seem to
transcend their identity as profane objects with flatly sinful designs, and to resonate
with a presence that contributes, however unconventionally, to Mr. Heads own
transformation. To illustrate one example of this paradox: at the end o f the story, it
may be impossible to argue that Mr. Head has come to any material change in his
view o f black people; but it also seems impossible to argue that his view of them
has remained the same. Mr. Head, navigating the racially complex American South
o f the 1950s, certainly does not seem to anticipate the civil rights movement in this
respect; the question o f whether or not his consciousness has been raised seems to
be o f profound importance to OConnor, but hardly in a sense that clarifies the
contested figures, black people themselves, with any rational simplicity. Through
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the concreteness o f her narrative, OConnor seems content simply to ask the
question itself, and to let it suffuse the entire problem, be it race or the mystery o f
human existence, with its own ironic and spiritual implications; she seems far less
interested in providing a resolution -- violent or peaceful, smashing the idols or
affirming them with any absolute and clear-cut legibility. This approach reveals
a certain patience with the materials o f fiction itself, and a certain faith that asking
the question, without forcing it to provide too definitive an answer in any single
gesture or moment, exemplifies the human subjects healthiest, most natural and
fruitful relationship with creation.
From all this, it should be clear that OConnors use of irony serves
primarily as a technique of positioning: the problem o f idolatry for OConnor
seems to be bound up with the problem of reading and experiencing the world
Scripturally; with both the Old and New Testaments, Hebrew and Christian
traditions, sharing the same space, the challenge lies in ones ability to establish an
appropriate context or frame in which to view individual objects, such as the
artificial Negro and, even more importantly, the human figure. Mr. Heads sense o f
mystery seems to gain its force precisely in the tension between these several ways
of seeing, and in the way he is personally altered, humbled, and renewed through
his process of amalgamating them into a single perspective, regardless o f his ability
to express it verbally. And in Parkers Back, a story that deals with idolatry
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perhaps more explicitly than any other by OConnor, this same challenge is
expressed in increasingly precise narrative terms. Also, OConnors Catholic faith
in its Southern and Protestant milieu comes to bear in this story in ways that
articulate, or perhaps situate, the overall problem more clearly.
Prophecy and Fulfillment: Moses, Aquinas, Teilhard, and O. E. P arkers

Obedience
Completed only shortly before O Connors death in August o f 1964,

Parkers Back unites the same concern with idolatry that OConnor explored in
The Artificial Nigger with careful attention to the heresy o f Manichaeanism. The
latter occupied a great deal o f O Connors thought and meditation in the last decade
o f her life, which may explain its more detailed articulation in her second collection
of stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge, than in her earlier work.12 The
concern with a Manichaean worldview is present, however, in most o f her fiction to
some degree, and thus it reveals something of the consistency o f O Connors work
as a whole.
Characterized rather broadly, the Manichaean doctrine maintains the belief
in a syncretistic religious dualism defined by a complete separation o f spirit and
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matter: while God exists in a state of pure spirituality, as a kind o f detached,

absolute good, creation, earth, and nature are marked by their inherent corruption
and sinfulness. Originally founded as a Christian sect in the third century,
Manichaeanism would find its most vigorous opponent in St. Thomas Aquinas,
whose thirteenth-century writings represent the Catholic Churchs most articulate
rejection o f Manichaean dualism. Aquinas served to reaffirm the Churchs
emphasis on the actuality o f divine presence and participation in the matter o f
creation itself.13 It is not difficult to understand how O Connors Catholic identity
(and great admiration for the Summa Theologica o f Aquinas) would provide her
with a particularly unique perspective in the South o f her time, where the
prevailing, intense Protestantism was essentially Manichaean in its strong sense of
the fall o f man, o f the unmitigated tragedy o f Southern history and human history
in general, and in its sense of mans need to be saved in order to prepare himself
for death and, presumably, a wholly spiritual meeting with God.14
In Parkers Back, OConnor expresses the limitations o f a Manichaean
perspective through her portrayal of Sarah Ruth Cates. Sarah Ruth is, in her
husband Parkers estimation, plain, plain (655). Indeed, it is virtually impossible
to characterize her in any positive terms; her entire persona is shaped by her
relentless disapproval o f her husband and her overriding lack o f human warmth:
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In addition to her other bad qualities, she was forever sniffing up sin.
She did not smoke or dip, drink whiskey, use bad language or paint
her face, and God knew some paint would have improved it, Parker
thought. Her being against color, it was the more remarkable she had
married him. Sometimes he supposed that she had married him
because she meant to save him. At other times he had a suspicion
that she actually liked everything she said she didnt. He could
account for her one way or another; it was himself he could not
understand. (655)
Parkers wife is literally as well as figuratively without color, and she seems to
view the entire world in comparably void terms. Her affinity for sniffing up sin
is nothing short of a lifestyle, a vocation, a worldview. This becomes a problem for
Parker not because he disagrees with her beliefs but because he instinctively longs
for something more, for a closer connection with her and a more fulfilling
experience of life with her. Throughout the story, his frustration in this respect is
matched by a sense of bewilderment at the fact that he is unable to simply leave her
once and for all, but returns to her time after time with the hope that she will
appreciate him and affirm him on the most basic level. It is a hope that goes
unfulfilled.
Sarah Ruth expresses her Manichaean sentiments about God most
succinctly when she declares late in the story, Hes a spirit. No man shall see his
face (674). In the overall pattern of the story, OConnor parallels Sarah Ruths
failure to acknowledge the divine presence in creation with her failure to observe
her own husband in any kind o f human terms. In other words, OConnor implies, a
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primary, inherent flaw in a Manichaean reading o f creation lies in its

underestimation, its lack of recognition, o f human dignity. And this comes, o f
course, at the expense of human love. Sarah Ruths blindness, it seems, is the
blindness o f her culture as a whole.
Parker himself is at a far remove from Sarah Ruths colorlessness.
Encrusted with bizarre, colorful tattoos from head to foot, he is devoted to a very
different view o f the world. In an important sense, and as many o f O Connors
grotesque characters do, Parker speaks and acts as a kind o f prophet, bringing to
light the sins o f the culture even at his own expense. This role is a reluctant one in
a certain sense; Parker despises his first name Obadiah, after the Old Testament
prophet and keeps it a secret as much as possible. And in telling Sarah Ruth his
name, he shows her his vulnerability, his humanity, in the hope that she will
embrace his identity; true to form, however, she recognizes and reveres its Biblical
origins but fails to acknowledge its present owner. Later, in what causes a great
change in his life, a leap forward into a worse unknown, Parker crashes a tractor
into a large tree and it bursts into flame; he finds himself shoeless and terrified to
look upon the face o f God, like Moses before the burning bush, with the hot breath
o f the burning tree on his face (666, 665).
But in another and more important sense, Parker is quite an obedient
prophet, accepting whatever divine presence and instruction he comes across. After
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a barroom brawl caused by different interpretations o f his most recent tattoo (an
image of the haloed head o f a flat, stem Byzantine Christ with all-demanding
eyes, branded across his back), he reflects on this aspect o f his life:
Parker sat for a long time on the ground in the alley behind the pool
hall, examining his soul. He saw it as a spider web o f facts and lies
that was not at all important to him but which appeared to be
necessary in spite o f his opinion. The eyes that were now forever on
his back were eyes to be obeyed. He was as certain o f it as he had
ever been of anything. Throughout his life, grumbling and
sometimes cursing, often afraid, once in rapture, Parker had obeyed
whatever instinct o f this kind had come to him~in rapture when his
spirit had lifted at the sight o f the tattooed mein at the fair, afraid
when he had joined the navy, grumbling when he had married Sarah
Ruth. (667, 672)
OConnor provides a variety o f emotional and psychological states to accompany

Parkers instincts in order to show that his obedience serves a purpose not his
own. Like Abraheim, he does not have power over his own fate, and his choices are
not dictated solely on the basis o f his own self-interest. As with many o f the Old
Testament prophets, including Jonah, to whom he is compared in the passage
preceding this one, Parkers call to prophecy is not convenient and does not merely
respond to his or his cultures values. There is something more universal, and,
OConnor suggests, more immanently present, at work. In this respect it is not just
the South that OConnor is addressing. Her placement o f Parker, whose
grotesqueness in appearance and behavior marks o ff his milieu like a peacocks
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magnificent feathers redefine its drab surroundings, in a universe marked by its lack
of color and general disobedience to human nature, speaks to a quintessentially
modem condition. The threat to humanity comes not so much from some abstract
conception of sin, but from anonymity, lack of identity, lack o f self. Parkers
unconditional obedience to his instincts, even to those that frighten him, seems
every bit as anachronistic and out o f place in modernity as his tattoo-covered body
in Sarah Ruths nuptial bed.
Perhaps it would be appropriate here, with this portrait o f Parker in mind, to
note the influence o f the twentieth-century religious writer who commanded
OConnors attention and respect more than any other. In the French Jesuit Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin, O Connor found a Catholic thinker and writer who shared the
dogmatic foundations o f St. Thomas Aquinas, yet who lived and wrote in a modem
era in which the sciences were endlessly extending the abysses o f time and space,
and endlessly discerning new relationships between the elements o f the universe. 15
A scientist himself, Teilhard had a primary existential concern with modernity, with
the enormous challenges posed to man by the reorganization o f the universe
through modem, scientific categories of knowledge. OConnors appreciation of
Teilhard enabled her to extend her own Catholic vision, already based on Thomistic
theology, into the modem context o f her lifetime with greater confidence. And
Teilhards articulation o f the action o f divine grace, with its immanent agency in
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and through creation and individual human beings, provided O Connor with an
insightful contemporary model that paralleled and affirmed her own vision.
Consider the following passage from his short preface to The Divine Milieu, a work
whose title alone reveals something of Teilhards vision:
Not only as a theoretically admitted entity, but rather as a living

reality, the notion o f grace impregnates the whole atmosphere o f my
book.
And in fact the divine milieu would lose all its grandeur and
all its savour for the mystic if he did not feelwith his whole
participated being, with his whole soul made receptive of the
divine favour freely poured out upon it, with his whole will
strengthened and encouragedif he did not feel so completely swept
away in the divine ocean that no initial point o f support would be
left him in the end, o f his own, within himself, from which he could
act. (44)
In consideration of such a divine ocean sweeping human experience along in

creation, Sarah Ruths clipped remark that no man shall see his face seems, in its
brutal, flippant disavowal, little short of violent. It is hardly surprising, then, that
Parker finds himself unable to defend his prophetic perspective at this point, after
struggling to bring his experience of the truth to his wifes eyes.
If this parenthetical glance at OConnors Catholic background provides a
bit o f insight into her narrative approach in Parkers Back, it also, finally,
provides a frame for consideration of the storys treatment o f idolatry. The storys
long concluding passage stands as OConnors most complete and explicit
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statement on the subject in her fiction, and unites Sarah Ruths Manichaean
perspective with a wider, more typically Southern and fundamentalist
righteousness. Anticipating his flagging strength and imminent collapse, and once
again stonewalled by his own wifes refusal to welcome his presence with anything
resembling genuine warmth or even, in this case, acknowledgment, Parkers final
gesture is to show his wife the tattoo o f Christ on his back. Even now he seems to
hold out hope that she will perceive some kind o f truth and embrace it:
Shut your mouth, he said quietly. Look at this and then I

dont want to hear no more out o f you. He removed the shirt and
turned his back to her.
Another picture, Sarah Ruth growled. I might have
known you was off after putting some more trash on yourself.
Parkers knees went hollow under him. He wheeled around
and cried, Look at it! Dont just say that! Look at it!
I done looked, she said.
Dont you know who it is? he cried in anguish.
No, who is it? Sarah Ruth said. It aint anybody I know.
Its him, Parker said.
Him who?
God! Parker cried.
God? God dont look like that!
What do you know how he looks? Parker moaned. You
aint seen him.
He dont lo o k Sarah Ruth said. Hes a spirit. No man
shall see his face.
Aw listen, Parker groaned, this is just a picture of him.
Idolatry! Sarah Ruth screamed. Idolatry! Enflaming
yourself with idols under every green tree! I can put up with lies
and vanity but I dont want no idolator in this house! and she
grabbed up the broom and began to thrash him across the shoulders
with it.
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Parker was too stunned to resist. He sat there and let her beat
him until she had nearly knocked him senseless and large welts had
formed on the face o f the tattooed Christ. Then he staggered up and
made for the door.
She stamped the broom two or three times on the floor and
went to the window and shook it out to get the taint o f him off it.
Still gripping it, she looked toward the pecan tree and her eyes
hardened still more. There he waswho called himself Obadiah
Elihueleaning against the tree, crying like a baby. (674-5)
A basic distinction should be made here. Parker is able to distinguish between what
he understands as just a picture and what his wife immediately considers an idol.
Certainly the image does have a strong power over Parker, and he believes that he
must obey the penetrating eyes on his back. But there is also something in his
repeated instincts and visions, in those absorbing moments o f communion with
creation that he has always obeyed, which gives him the perspicuity to recognize
the face o f Christ on his back, even with its all-demanding potency, as a mere
image. Sarah Ruth, on the other hand, instinctively equates any image o f Christ
with the worship o f that picture. Lacking any kind of connection with the world
except in the negative terms o f her disapproval of its sinfulness, she also lacks any
human understanding of the difference between a picture o f God and the mystery of
Gods being. When she tells Parker, It aint anybody I know, she is revealing,
ironically enough, the secret o f her own spiritual condition. And when she beats
her husband with the broom until she had nearly knocked him senseless and large
welts had formed on the face of the tattooed Christ, Sarah Ruths Manichaean
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inability to realize the violence and inhumanity of her own acts finally reaches its
ironic climax. With her hardened eyes blind to the all too human figure whom
she is thrashing, Sarah Ruth reduces her husband to a state o f infantile
powerlessness, to a kind of subaltern objectivity reminiscent of the miserable,
silent, plaster Negro in The Artificial Nigger. Thus Parker clings to the pecan
tree, a curious amalgamation of the burning bush before Moses eyes and the wood
of Christs cross; the tree itself, in its natural state, seems much more likely than his
own wife to offer him a reciprocal gesture o f affirmation. And as he cries like a
baby, Parkers transformation to a very human and particular Christ figure is
consummated; even here, in his final collapse, Parker remains obedient and open to
the action o f grace that works through him. Teilhards depiction o f the mystic, so
completely swept away in the divine ocean that no initial point o f support would be
left him in the end, of his own, within himself, from which he could act, could
scarcely want a more perfect embodiment.
While Parkers Back puts forth OConnors most detailed exploration of
idolatry, it does so in within a larger framework o f irony not unlike that in The
Artificial Nigger. Sarah Ruth opposition to graven images is so fierce that she
considers churches, those most concrete structures claiming earthly space itself in
Gods name, to be idolatrous objects; thus it is clear that, by any material standard,
let alone OConnors Thomistic, anti-Manichaean one, her cries o f idolatry are
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hardly to be taken at their word.16 On the contrary, OConnor seems to be satirizing

the entire concept o f idolatry in order to reveal the startling blindness o f a culture
whose intense religiosity masks its poor spiritual formation and human identity, its
inability to apprehend religions most immanent subject and truth. Like Mr. Head
and Nelson in their view o f the plaster statue in The Artificial Nigger, Parker
experiences a very real and personal epiphany in his own visions o f the tattooed
man at the fair, the burning tree, and the face of Christ in the tattoo parlor.
OConnor is able to appropriate from her Southern milieu the discourse o f idolatry
and place it in the larger narrative frame of her own fictional vision, and she does
so with such control o f its effects that idolatry serves her ends without being
questioned or rejected in its own right. Once again, it is her use o f irony that
positions this discourse within a space that becomes, through its concreteness and
particularity, more universal. While Mr. Heads transformation and softening
represented his emergence from a perverse idolatrous practice in explicitly racial
terms, Parkers transformation runs parallel to the narrow, inhuman failure o f his
wife, blinded by an enflamed, Manichaean fundamentalism, to make the simple
distinction between the flatness and inertness of a crude image and the native
dignity and universal value o f a human being.
199
In Faulkners Tracks: Flannery O Connors Regional Vision
That these stories have been considered largely in O Connors own

religious terms should be clear from my frequent use o f terms like grace, sin,
incarnation, redemption, and particular Biblical references in certain contexts. But
now that some of the important relationships in her work between Old and New
Testament, Biblical and fictional narrative, idolatry and irony, Manichaean and
Catholic theology, and so on have been contextualized, it may be instructive to
revisit the earlier questions about O Connors place, including the religious label
and minor status, in the contexts o f Southern and American literature. And
O Connors fictional constructions o f region, especially in a direct consideration
and comparison with those o f Faulkner, invite some more comprehensive
statements about the American region in its theoretical construction and cultural
identity.
The facility with which idolatry works in Faulkner and OConnor, in both
the fiction itself and, as my work has attempted to show, the criticism, draws
attention to the shared idiom employed by both writers. It is, o f course, a Southern
idiom, with a natural, implicit sense of Southern citizenship and, given the Souths
strong spiritual identity, relationship to Southern sin. But there are also profound,
if subtle, differences between the two writers.
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Consider Faulkner for the moment. In his fiction, for example, there resides
a strong sense o f the communal vision, an instinctive emphasis on the life o f the
entire community and a heavy anticipation o f its collective destiny. The collusive
nature o f thought and motive in a small towns lynching in a story like Dry
September serves as the most essential evidence of this vision, which may be
contrasted with the highly personal impact o f the artificial Negro on Mr. Head.
The remarkable consistency o f Faulkners entire canon generates a vast cosmos of
interrelated characters and stories whose ultimate effect is the portrayal o f an entire
world in which no single figure is able to dominate. The tragic downfall of Thomas
Sutpen, who may be as close to the limits of self-determination and a kind of pure,
theoretical independence as Faulkner conceives, only serves to reinforce the basic
interconnectedness of fate, of the human drama. Thus Absalom, Absalom! is more
than a personal or family drama, more than the story of one mans overreaching
hubris, but constitutes a kind of spiritual biography of the South, and perhaps even
the United States, as a whole.
Thomas Sutpen is a particularly apt figure in this context because of the
strong generational implications of his identity. His sons, both Henry and the
mixed-race Charles Bon, represent the dissemination of his values and ideals into a
realm that extends beyond his own life, into the larger concerns o f his community
and the society as a whole. His flaw, an archetypally Southern vision o f humanity
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shaped by a hierarchical model o f racial inequality, is both inherited from the world
into which he is bom, and passed on to those who come after him.
Sutpens exceptional influence on Quentin Compson, who not only is not
related to him but is not even alive during any part of Sutpens own lifetime,
epitomizes once again Faulkners vision o f the Souths shared spiritual community.
Quentins desperate struggle to read both Sutpen and the South he represents is
his own monumental and finally unsuccessful attempt to come to terms with the
reality o f this shared community. For in his inability to embrace the tragedy and
chaos o f his inherited South, and in his ill-fated effort to fashion an identity for
himself along completely independent terms, with a bitter refusal to accept his
society on its own terms, Quentin self-destructs. His quest has an unquestionably
romantic idealism that might be described accurately as adolescent, perhaps even
militantly adolescent in its confrontation and rejection of adulthood. And in his
self-destruction, in the fact that death itself is the end result o f such a self
consciously individualistic construction o f identity, Quentin expresses Faulkners
insistent vision of the Souths collectivity and shared fate. Without question
Quentin is an attractive figure in many ways, even despite, or perhaps because of,
his flaws. Primarily, his hunger for some kind of purity and freedom from the
corruption o f the world lend his youthful and passionate flights a heroic quality.
And he thinks and acts with a kind o f classical lyricism matched only by several
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other o f Faulkners misfit characters, including the insane Dari Bundren in A s I Lay
Dying and perhaps the outcast Ike McCaslin in Go Down, Moses.
As discussed at greater length in Chapter 3, Faulkners debt to the Old
Testament lies most generally in its narrative formulation of an entire people, a
group with a strong sense of communal identity and history. His own fiction
constructs a distinctly Southern and American model of an entire people, in which
figures like Thomas Sutpen and Quentin Compson, to name only two, are endlessly
exerting their individualistic notions against the forces of history and community
most comprehensively designated simply as the South that Quentin claims not to
hate. Region is both enemy and ally here; it is something to be shunned, resisted,
overcome, and reinvented, even as it endows the individual with his greatest
strengths and most basic values. This explains why, for example, Faulkners
portrayal o f the crumbling South in the Snopes trilogy laments the passing o f the
old order even as it acutely registers its serious flaws. In Faulkner, whose
Southemness seems to typify Americanness in a very precise way, the ancient
Hebrew communal sense gives way to a modem vision of Gods people in a place
where their paradox is to live in a nation at schizophrenic cross-purposes with
itself: a slave nation dedicated to freedom; a tight, repressive social order peopled
with ambitious, often relentless, individualists.
203
Flannery O Connors South is, by contrast, virtually devoid o f any

communal sense at all. Such a stark generalization courts suspicion, of course, but
in the context o f Faulkners exceptionally realized overall community, it becomes
clear that the stories o f O Connor develop almost no corresponding vision o f a
larger shared human community. Instead, they gain their consistency through a
kind of ritually repetitive narrative trajectory that introduces the expansive religious
and psychological concerns o f characters early on, then flattens them violently.
The universal presence o f a larger ironic frame crushes the religiously hypocritical,
highly repressive pretensions o f characters even as it fulfills a spiritual law in the
higher, more mysterious terms of divine grace. OConnors novels Wise Blood and
The Violent Bear It Away extend this trajectory to include more complicated events
and larger movements and developments, but do not attempt to portray a social
vision to a degree significantly greater than the short stories do, and certainly not to
the degree that most of Faulkners work does. OConnor herself understood this
aspect o f her own writing, remarking once that Faulkner makes me feel that with
my one-cylander syntax I should quit writing and raise chickens altogether (1075).
Going along with her comic modesty, one might add that her raising of chickens
probably would have proceeded not en masse but on a highly individual basis.
O Connors South is a region whose social function may be expressed in the
dialectic between two archetypal figures: the self-satisfied, outwardly religious
204
hypocrite and the marginalized, crazed prophet. OConnors South is marked by

isolation, a rural individualism, an intensified concentration on ordinary objects
whose materiality often explodes with the violence o f grace. While Faulkner
exploits the dramatic potential o f Cain and Abel, of Absalom and Amnon, their
actions rippling outwards to engulf the entire community and draw its people into a
collective dramatic space, OConnor peoples her stories with the likes of Ezekiel,
Job, Jonah, and John the Baptist. Her heroes are isolated souls, from the polite,
murderous Misfit in A Good Man is Hard to Find to the homely, book-throwing
Mary Grace in Revelation. These are people whose primary relationship, like
that o f the Old Testament prophets, is with God. Like Parker, and after the model
of Abraham, obedience to their divine calling dictates every move they make in this
life; their contribution to the larger social order lies precisely in their
marginalization from the mainstream.17
To say that O Connors stories have no communal sense is not to say that
they are not concerned with community, society or culture in general, be it
Southern or American or otherwise. But in order to reveal the troubling condition
o f an atomistic modem society, O Connor circumscribes each o f these austere men
and women with a kind of bubble. Even as they hunger for the fulfillment o f an
earthly connection to parallel their generally inconvenient but undeniably powerful
bond with God, they run up against a kind of ritual and violent resistance from a
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society that leads them, in the end, to respond with their own acts o f violence.
OConnors communal role is thus that of a dissident, a self-conscious minority
figure who sits apart, or carves out her own fictional space, from the prevailing
culture.
As with Faulkner, O Connors sense o f the South as a region evokes an
ambivalent overall response which is linked to the fundamental American problem
of the individuals place in society. While she is able to appropriate the material of
the South for her fiction in brilliant ways the Protestant intensity, the raw,
unschooled ignorance, the racial and gender absurdity, the bizarre individualism,
and so on -- OConnors placement of the individual human figure in Southern
spaces is often defined in negative terms, in a kind o f spiritual resistance to the
traditional and mainstream institutions of the wider social milieu. This opposition
of forces parallels the inclination of her strong Southern background to set itself in
a kind o f minority opposition to the drift of contemporary American culture as a
whole. In stories like The Enduring Chill and Judgment Day she pits North
and South against each other in a regional culture war whose sides are as clearly
defined as those in the Civil War. Even as the terminally adolescent Southerner
Asbury Fox collapses, not unlike Quentin Compson, under the sheer spiritual and
historical weight o f the Southern burden in The Enduring Chill, O Connor seems
to maintain a sense o f trust for her familiar rural world and a deep, typically
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Southern suspicion for New York City, whose brutal atomism and anonymity
express a vision o f individualism as death. Personifying the North in all its steel
majesty and capitalist determinism. New York City offers a life without any sense
of tradition or loyalty. Plainly, O Connors modem South, for all its flaws,
promises more.
The dissident or minority figure o f the South in its regional status also
matches OConnors Catholic identity in the South remarkably well. With gestures
like her ironic framing o f Sarah Ruths Manichaean discourse o f idolatry within a
more unified and Catholic vision of creation, OConnors faith functions in
precisely the same way that her region does. For in addressing the largely
homogeneous Protestant South from her own minority religious perspective, she
provides a critique o f Southern culture in explicitly spiritual terms that parallels the
Souths more general regional critique of American culture.
In all this, O Connor seems quite content to operate as what Shelby Foote
called a minor-minor figure, seeking perfection primarily in a genre the short
story which is itself considered minor, a kind of apprentice piece to the fulllength novel. Perhaps as a result o f being a woman, a Southerner, a Catholic, an
artist, and a victim o f lupus, she reveals in her method a natural attentiveness to the
vast potential that resides in responding creatively and constructively to dominant
forces rather than attempting to create them or control them herself. Her
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mischievous label o f Faulkner as the Dixie Limited again comes to mind: even in
her open acknowledgment o f his major status and her own position somewhere
beneath him in the literary hierarchy, this revealing gesture articulates OConnors
playful instinct in confronting such forces o f authority with her own strength, style,
and aplomb, with a perhaps not entirely different incarnation o f grace than that
which drives her stories to their inexorable ends. And while it may be difficult to
entirely resist Footes impulse to imagine the writer OConnor might have become
had she lived longer and had more time to explore her world and her craft, the
steadiness and faithfulness with which she attended to her minor literary career,
on an isolated dairy farm not far from the last Confederate capitol o f the Sovereign
State o f Georgia, attest to a value that rests confident in its own individual designs.
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Notes on Chapter 4
1Jay Tolson, ed.. The Correspondence o f Shelby Foote and Walker Percy
(New York: Norton P, 1996) 136.
2 See Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the
Unfinished Civil War (New York: Pantheon, 1998). Horwitzs interview, At the
Foote o f the Master, includes Footes reflections on the significance of the Civil
War in American history, its occurrence during the nations adolescence, and its
influence on the maturation o f the South and the nation as a whole.
3 Flannery OConnor, Some Aspects o f the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,
Collected Works (New York: Library o f America, 1988) 818. All O Connor
references are taken from this edition o f her collected works.
4 Twelve Southerners, I ll Take My Stand (1930; New York: P. Smith,
1951) ix.
5 See, for example, Marion Montgomery, Why Flannery O Connor Stayed
Home (La Salle: Sherwood Sugden & Co., 1981); John R. May, The Pruning
Word: The Parables o f Flannery O Connor (Notre Dame: U o f Notre Dame P,
1976); Marshall Bruce Gentry, Flannery O 'Connor's Religion o f the Grotesque
(Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1986).
6 See, for example, Kathleen Feeley, Flannery O 'Connor: Voice o f the
Peacock (New York: Fordham UP, 1982); Richard Giannone, Flannery O Connor
and the Mystery o f Love (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1989); Richard Giannone,
Flannery O 'Connor, Hermit Novelist (Urbana: U o f Illinois P, 2000); Carter W.
Martin, The True Country: Themes in the Fiction o f Flannery O Connor
(Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1969).
7 See, for example, John F. Desmond, Risen Sons: Flannery O Connors
Vision o f History (Athens: U o f Georgia P, 1987); Anthony Di Renzo, American
Gargoyles: Flannery O Connor and the Medieval Grotesque (Carbondale:
209
Southern Illinois UP, 1993); Edward Kessler, Flannery O Connor and the
Language o f Apocalypse (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986).
8 See, for example, Carol Shloss, Flannery O 'Connor's Dark Comedies:
The Limits o f Inference (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1980); Claire Katz
Kahane, Gothic Mirrors and Feminine Identity, Centennial Review 24 (1980): 4364; Claire Katz Kahane, Flannery O Connors Rage of Vision,"American
Literature 46 (1974): 54-67.
9 Josephine Hendin, The World o f Flannery O 'Connor (Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1970) 4.
10 See John F. Desmond, Flannery O Connor and the Idolatrous Mind,
Christianity and Literature, Volume 46, Number 1 (Autumn 1996): 25-35.
Desmond interprets The Artificial Nigger with a straightforward Christian
reading that privileges the triumphant road to recognition of its protagonist (34).
My own treatment o f OConnors story in this chapter shares Desmonds general
concern with what he calls the idolatrous mind but reads OConnors narrative
with a considerable degree of irony, complicating, though not necessarily
neutralizing, the more one-sided redemptive Christian implications implicit in
Desmonds reading.
11 See Chapter 3 of this study. American Idols, Regional Dissidents:
William Faulkner and the Invention o f the South, for a related exploration o f
Fanons concept o f racial abomination in the context of idolatry; see also W. J. T.
Mitchell, What Do Pictures Really Want? October 77 (Summer 1997): 71-82.
12 See Richard Giannone, The Hermit Novelist, Flannery O 'Connor,
Hermit Novelist, for a fine introduction to O Connors understanding o f the
Manichaean heresy and Thomistic philosophy.
13 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1947).
14 See Robert Coles, Flannery O 'Connor's South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State UP, 1980). Coles Chapter 2, Hard, Hard Religion, provides an excellent
profile o f O Connors Southern religious milieu and the practical heresies o f the
people of the South (59).
210
15 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu: An Essay on the Interior

Life, trans. Bernard Wall (1957; New York: Harper & Row, 1960) 45.
16 See O Connor 663: They were married in the County Ordinarys office
because Sarah Ruth thought churches were idolatrous.
17 See Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., Asceticism and the Imaginative Vision of
Flannery O Connor, Flannery O Connor: New Perspectives, eds. Sura P. Rath and
Mary Neff Shaw (Athens: U o f Georgia P, 1996) 169-82. Brinkmeyer attempts to
establish O Connors personal background, particularly her own variation on the
ascetic vocation o f hermetic monasticism, as a kind of parallel to the
marginalization o f her protagonists.
211
CHAPTER 5
Freshening the Pain:
Regional and Racial Constructions in Toni Morrison
Introduction: On Politics, Influence, and the Region
Opening any discussion o f Toni Morrisons fiction and criticism, let alone
doing so in the context of William Faulkner, immediately releases a frisson o f
political energy and significance. Perhaps this is inevitable given the identities o f
both writers, and of the particular critical and cultural traditions of American
literary history that surround them. Race, o f course, presents itself as the obvious
and defining concern, subsuming and overwhelming other issues like power,
gender, and class, as well as the more abstract critical notions related to formalism,
poststructuralism, and so on. The public statements of both writers on racial issues,
and in particular the sustained critique o f American culture and literature on
explicitly racial grounds voiced by Morrison over the past two decades, have served
to focus much o f the attention to their work to its racial concerns.1
212
One striking aspect of this trend is the way that contemporary criticism o f
Faulkner has moved from the New Critical readings o f his work along formalist
lines that privileged his supposedly detached, ahistorical texts as something like
mythic icons, and into a more competitive multicultural, historicizing context in
which works like Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses are
reevaluated alongside an evolving body of literature written by African-Americans
and other minority writers, the most prominent o f whom is Toni Morrison.2
But if this shift in critical consciousness represents a welcome and long
overdue democratizing revolution in American letters, its highly charged political
atmosphere also engenders a certain ambivalence. Harold Bloom, whose critical
work The Anxiety o f Influence is routinely invoked in studies o f Morrisons
turbulent confrontations o f Faulkner, sums up the uncertainties brought about by
such a shift:
I am o f many minds about Morrisons critical project, if only

because it would give yet another dimension to the unhappy
procedure of uncovering just how much o f white America cannot be
exorcised from African-American fiction. Morrisons five novels,
culminating so far in Beloved, are possible candidates for entering an
American canon founded upon what I insist would be aesthetic
criteria alone, if we still retain any such criteria after our current age
o f politicized response to narrative, dramas, and poems has passed.3
That a critic like Bloom be of many minds in this regard would likely please
Morrison, since such a condition expresses the complex rethinking o f the American
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literary tradition that she has assiduously advocated in her critical writings. Her
search for the ways in which the presence o f Afro-Americans has shaped the
choices, the language, the structurethe meaning o f so much American literature,
does indeed demand careful attention.4 More troubling, however, is Blooms
evaluation that this new awareness o f the profound influence o f African-American
culture on white America is indeed an unhappy procedure. One might suppose
that such a fundamental breakthrough in understanding would be cause for
celebration; but clearly Blooms mood reflects the pessimism o f a time when, he
worries, a wholly political assault on the American canon may strip its classics o f
their status without regard to his most valued considerations, the aesthetic criteria
alone o f classic American literary texts.
But if Blooms viewpoint is not particularly generous in its attitude toward
the agenda o f any criticism that includes politicizing tendencies, his statements
come in a remarkable context that expands rather than constricts the overall debate.
His essay on Morrison serves as the introduction to a collection o f critical essays on
her work published in 1990, and edited by Bloom himself. As such, the volume
represents a marked shift even within the burgeoning body o f criticism on
Morrisons work, criticism that had largely focused on elements of folklore and the
like that is, the less than subtle placement of her work within a self-consciously
and often restrictively black context.5 Blooms openness to Morrisons work on
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aesthetic criteria alone thus invites a more universal critical consideration that is
not altogether at one with her cultural politics (Morrison 5). And the statements
o f Bloom himself, an extraordinarily prolific and perhaps audacious critic whose
attention roves across international literary landscapes in the process o f generating
what amounts to a personal canon, constitute a very particular sort o f imprimatur
for Morrisons work.6 In a later passage, Bloom distances himself from the
politicizing impulse even as he reveals, rather amusingly, a certain sympathy with it
outside literary and canon-making contexts:
I reread Morrison because her imagination, whatever her social

purposes, transcends ideology and polemics, and enters again into
the literary space occupied by only fantasy and romance o f authentic
aesthetic dignity. Extraliterary purposes, however valid or
momentous they may be for a time, ebb away, and we are left with
story, characters, and style, that is to say, with literature or the lack
of literature. Morrisons five novels to date leave us with literature,
and not with a manifesto for social change, however necessary and
admirable such change would be in our America of Chairman
Atwater, Senator Helms, President Bush, and the other luminaries of
what we ought to go on calling the Willie Horton election o f 1988.
(2 )
This last reference, to the African-American Horton whose story played out during
the 1988 presidential campaign like a made-for-television lynching drama, seems
an entirely appropriate contemporary acknowledgment of the central and deeply
unresolved role o f race in American culture.7 Bloom seems to appreciate the
pervasiveness o f race that Morrisons critical project seeks to address, even as he
215
maintains that it is best to establish a literary canon based on apolitical aesthetic

values.
Blooms next move is to suggest that Literary texts emerge from other
literary texts and are as overdetermined aesthetically as their human makers are
erotically (3). This allows him to consider Virginia W oolf and Faulkner as the
father and mother of Morrisons art, as it were; and Bloom places Morrisons
fiction in a tradition shared by the entire body o f Western civilization rather than
what he sees as a rather myopic and misleadingly constructed political model of
African-American culture (4). His gesture to link W oolf and Faulkner with
Morrison does not, to his mind, contain political motives o f its own, but envisions a
literary history that runs parallel to the wider culture, and sets Morrison squarely
among several o f its most important canonical figures.
Blooms attempt to place Faulkner and Morrison in the same literary space,
while denying the right o f any kind of cultural politics to inhabit that space, thus
reflects something of the unique context of his position. And while it is not my
simple intention here to engage in either Blooms rarefied aesthetic appreciation or
Morrisons explicitly political revisionism, this brief attention to Blooms own
contribution to the growing body of scholarship on Morrison should illustrate rather
clearly the heightened and fractious state of affairs her work has precipitated. The
presence of Faulkner in this context, Blooms aestheticizing gestures
216
notwithstanding, would seem to invite yet another level o f cultural and critical
mystification, especially in light o f Faulkners own ambivalent remarks on race and
his own furious efforts to come to terms with racial issues in his work.
The literary relationship between Faulkner and Morrison, as I will argue at
greater length in the succeeding sections o f this chapter, is as Bloom recognizes a
vital one. Morrisons own acknowledgment of Faulkners influence on her is at
times as awkward and ambivalent as Faulkners own embrace o f the racial realities
o f his time.8 And o f course, the power generated by the friction and fascination o f
each o f these relationships is indisputable. My own reading o f Morrisons fiction
in an American literary tradition informed by Faulkners presence concerns the
regional characteristics of her work, and the ways in which these both appropriate
much o f Faulkners methodology and diverge from it in order to map a personal
literary vision.
The region as a construct and core unit of study in Morrisons fiction is an
almost universally ignored commodity. While a moderate amount o f criticism
recognizes the importance of the South in her work in particular, the need for her
characters to journey from the industrial North which they have adopted back to the
rural, segregated South of their ancestors -- none has considered the concept of the
region itself in more theoretical terms. Instead, the South is approached as a more
anthropological and racially encoded site, a folkloric origin, and viewed most
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generally as a simultaneously dangerous and desirable repository for authentic

black culture.9 I want to suggest that Morrisons fiction offers a more incisive
vision o f African-American and American culture when considered in regional
terms; Faulkners prior example is instructive in this exercise, as Morrison well
knew when she set out to articulate her own literary vision:
It is that business o f being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of

meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called
regional literature and had it published all over the world. It is
goodand universalbecause it is specifically about a particular
world. Thats what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel,
it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to
write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From
my perspective, there are only black people. When I say people,
thats what I mean.10
In this statement, taken from a 1981 interview, Morrison connects the regional
method o f a writer like Faulkner, who gains his power by devoting himself to a
kind o f closed and circumscribed world in his fiction, with her own concerns as a
black writer speaking o f and to a black community o f which she herself is a
member. Just as the region provides Faulkner with a basic cultural unit with which
to confront the larger national culture as a kind o f dissident, fiercely individualistic
American voice, so does blackness extend the same identity-making power to
Morrison in her work, which she self-consciously hurls into the vast national
context o f American culture. This parallel movement of regional and racial
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methods, then, reveals Morrisons most fundamental debt to Faulkner, even as it

invites a closer reading of her work in order to investigate the subtler ways in which
she advances many o f the same regional and racial issues in her own work.
There are two important and related concerns here with respect to region.
The first is explicitly racial: as the above statements by Morrison reveal, racial
identity and community provide the most immediate terms o f her authorial voice.
In opposing any universal sense o f self, which she sees as a kind of diluting
deracination, Morrison views blackness as a key asset both in the discrete racial
context of a black community and in a wader, more general humanistic community
that includes non-black readers. In this way she envisions her racially engendered
literary aesthetic as sharing its basic strategy with Faulkners regional method. If
the universal novel, as Morrison imagines it, would be water, it is her
conception o f blackness that helps her to literally ground her work more concretely.
But unlike Faulkner, Morrison proceeds with race and gender instead of region at
the center o f her conception.
The second concern is somewhat more complicated because it deals with
the relationship between Morrison and Faulkner. For even in this kind o f racially
delineated approach, Morrison utilizes the figure o f region in crucial and complex
ways that reveal considerably more pervasive and subtle appropriations of
Faulkners work. Morrison displays at all times in her fiction a keen awareness to
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the problems o f space and place, and her use o f region, frequently overlapping with
her racial concerns, is highly sophisticated in its own right. Morrisons region,
considered in its strictly geographic and spatial senses, contributes in important
ways to her own racial models. And even as Morrison transforms Faulkners
region into a cultural unit and a space o f her own very personal design, Faulkners
influence in this area is also readily apparent.
In reading Morrisons novels The Bluest Eye, Beloved, and Jazz in regional
terms, I hope to provide an conception o f that space where Morrison freshens the
pain o f human experience; to reveal how Morrisons use o f region opens aesthetic
and critical discourses, gives new play and spatial dimensions to vital issues that
have not been settled elsewhere; and to perceive in the region that space where her
aesthetic and political concerns meet, coexist, and complement each other.11 It is
precisely Morrisons use o f region, I want to suggest, that successfully translates
the problems o f race into a language that enjoys wider currency in American
culture as a whole. And while I want to focus on the unique achievements of
Morrisons fiction in a contemporary context, the enormous and abiding influence
of Faulkner on many aspects o f her evolving literary identity deserves particular
attention, both for what it reveals about Morrisons individual identity and for what
it suggests in the more general terms o f the American literary and cultural
traditions.
220
A Northern Utopia, Corrupted by Color
In Morrisons first novel. The Bluest Eye, ChoIIy and Pauline Breedlove
arrive in the steel town o f Lorain, Ohio from the rural South that they had always
known. Morrison is mindful o f the archetypal significance in this movement and
its influence on the evolution of their marriage and their entire life in the North, and
expresses the sense o f loss through Paulines account o f her new environment:
I don 't know what all happened. Everything changed. It was hard
to get to know fo lks up here, and I missed my people. I weren t used
to so much white folks. The ones I seed before was something
hateful, but they didn t come around too much. I mean, we didn t
have too much truck with them. Just now and then in the fields, or
at the commissary. But they want all over us. Up north they was
everywherenext door, downstairs, all over the streetsand colored
folks few a n d fa r between. Northern coloredfolks was different too.
Dicty-like. No better than whites fo r meanness. They could make
you feel ju st as no-count, cept I didnt expect it from them. That
was the lonesomest time o f my life. I 'member looking out them
front windows ju st waiting fo r Cholly to come home at three o clock.
I didn't even have a cat to talk to. 12
Immediately, then, there is a sense that this North, the mythic promised land in
African-American thought dating back to its exotic promise o f freedom during
slave times, does not correspond in reality to its utopian conception.13 Paulines
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isolation is a symptom of the displacement from her familiar Southern roots and o f
the lack o f any comparable sense of community in Lorain. So when Morrison
describes, in one of the most haunting passages in the entire novel, Paulines
method o f coping with her lonely Northern environment, the regional
underpinnings to her transformed identity and self-image are quite clear. What
Northern culture cannot provide in fact, what longing the memory of back home
creates in the displaced Pauline, the movies supply in fantasy:
But the loneliness in those two rooms had not gone away. When the
winter sun hit the peeling green paint o f the kitchen chairs, when the
smoked hocks were boiling in the pot, when all she could hear was
the truck delivering furniture downstairs, she thought about back
home, about how she had been alone most of the time then too, but
that this lonesomeness was different. Then she stopped staring at
the green chairs, at the delivery truck; she went to the movies
instead. There in the dark her memory was refreshed, and she
succumbed to her earlier dreams. Along with the idea of romantic
love, she was introduced to anotherphysical beauty. Probably the
most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both
originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In
equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound
it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. She forgot lust and
simple caring for. She regarded love as possessive mating, and
romance as the goal of the spirit. (121-22)
This pernicious turn in Paulines character is not arbitrary; it is, rather, a kind o f
survivalist necessity in such a fractured, fragmented world. Only in the dark o f the
theater, where the black-and-white images came together, making a magnificent
wholeall projected through the ray o f light from above and behind, does Pauline
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locate a sense of completeness, o f wholeness, that compensates for what she has
lost in her migration North (122). And it is the tragedy not only of Pauline, but also
of her daughter Pecola (whom she slaps violently to the floor even as she soothes
the little pink-and-yellow Fisher girl) and of all black Americans displaced into
indifferent or isolating environments, that this cinematic wholeness expresses its
ideals of physical beauty and romantic love in a vocabulary o f whiteness (109).
What Pauline internalizes is the equivalence o f whiteness, beauty, and value, and
by extension, of course, blackness, ugliness, and worthlessness.
In this most basic sense, then, the regional geography o f America is given
an implicitly racial, or racist, connotation which places Pauline in a brutally
vulnerable position. Having copied the hairstyle o f Jean Harlow to emulate the
white movie stars appearance, and settled into her seat to luxuriate in yet another
viewing of the same movie, Pauline loses a front tooth when she takes a big bite
of candy (123). The devastating emotional consequences o f this loss are not
surprising; the event serves as a kind of inevitable blow, exposing Paulines
escapist fantasies as empty and reinforcing her sense o f ugliness and lack of value:
I could o f cried. I had good teeth, not a rotten one in my head. I

d o n t believe I ever did get over that. There I was, five months
pregnant, trying to look like Jean Harlow, and a front tooth gone.
Everything went then. Look like I just didn't care no more after
that. I let my hair go back, plaited it up, and settled down to just
being ugly. I still went to the pictures, though, but the meanness got
worse. (123)
223
Thus the myth o f the North that held so much promise for Southern black people
like Pauline and the myth o f Hollywood that replaces reality with fantasy, are both
exploded simultaneously in Paulines experience. Her loss o f hope for fulfillment
in the North parallels her failure to imitate white movie heroines, leading to her
utter capitulation to despair.14
But mainstream Americas racial mythology, which might also be
considered the Hollywood code o f white beauty, reveals an even more destructive
design in the life o f Paulines daughter Pecola. Dreaming obsessively o f the
bluest eyes in the whole world, Pecolas place in this Lorain is consummately
defenseless (203). For not only does she lack any of the Southern grounding o f her
parents, whose Kentucky background at least provides them with a sense of
community to which their current setting may be compared, but Pecola also finds
herself in a household where despair is the only way of life she has ever known.
Her desire for blue eyes has in her mothers star-gazing a worthy precedent, and the
self-hate that attends her blackness takes on a kind of familial and historical
continuity. In the context of the geographic range that underlies the historical
movements o f her parents from South to North, Pecolas extremism, her hunger not
just for blue eyes but for the bluest eyes in the whole world, reveals a desperation
that warrants further consideration.
224
Morrisons narrative method in The Bluest Eye might be called historical in

the sense that Pecolas wish for blue eyes, her rape and the final evacuation o f self
that completes the tragic arc of the novel, are put into the context o f a familial and
communal background that reaches several generations into the past. Implicit here
is the idea that the past weighs heavily on the present and shapes its course. In this
way Morrison is also able to speak to American culture and history in a much wider
sense, because the movements o f her characters can be seen within a more
expansive frame o f reference. And just as Pecolas ambitious fantasy life has its
roots in her cultural milieu, past and present, so does her terrifying end -- descent
into a militant and solipsistic narcissism, a crazed poverty of self in which the
damage done was total and Pecola ceased to exist as a social being ~ envision a
disturbingly sundered image o f American psychic and spiritual identity (204).
Morrison chooses terms o f color and, importantly, space to express Pecolas
withdrawal from reality. Embedded in this language also is the culmination o f
Morrisons own vision o f American utopian visions gone awry through the trauma
o f racism:
She spent her days, her tendril, sap-green days, walking up and
down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so
distant only she could hear. Elbows bent, hands on shoulders, she
flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to
fly. Beating the air, a winged but grounded bird, intent on the blue
void it could not reachcould not even seebut which filled the
valleys o f the mind. (204)
225
The blue void here, an unreachable, unseeable vision o f some other place, some
other way of being, has currency in the mind of Pecola, and more generally in the
American mind, at the expense o f any validation o f real space, real humanity.
Pecolas final place, her interior world that takes precedence over reality as a
matter of survival, thus articulates a quintessentially American space that seems to
haunt individual and national efforts for authenticity: inflected by the fatal legacy
o f race, it exists simultaneously as utopia and dystopia, heaven and hell.
Morrisons North in The Bluest Eye is hardly the promised land represented
in slave narratives and, in Southern African-American folklore, what Trudier Harris
calls the myth o f the North. ,s But in consideration of their mythic potentialities,
Lorain and Lake Erie might be accurately compared here to California and the
Pacific Ocean in the white American imagination. The ambivalence o f coming up
against such a physically impassable and sublime endpoint, the hanging presence of
death and human limitation even in this space of such extraordinary, and perhaps
unrealistic, promise, and the challenges posed by this new space to those who have
left traditional forms o f culture behind: in these ways, the Northern migration of the
Breedloves and other Southern blacks mirrors the Westward expansion o f the
American national empire towards the Pacific. Considering the unreachable blue
void that is the object o f Pecolas gaze, and mindful o f the African-American
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cultural significance o f the color blue, the title o f Morrisons novel seems to
contain a savage irony that responds to these otherwise unquestioned American
myths with a tough, dissident black realism. It is an irony not unlike that employed
by Faulkner in his choosing the title Golden Land for his dystopian story set in a
placeless, ahistorical, corrupt Los Angeles in the 1930s.16
The parallel authorial strategies of Morrison and Faulkner, however, do not
end with their titles. Morrisons historical method, mentioned above, provides a
narrative architecture for the novel that is striking in its similarity to Faulkners The
Sound and the Fury. What I want to focus on in particular is the shared pattern of
Southerners who import their unresolved identities to the North, only to generate or
suffer violence there. Pauline Breedloves isolation and overcompensating
Hollywood identifications are one example o f this. But there are several other
cases in The Bluest Eye in which Southerners transfer of their traumatic
experiences, especially ones with strong racial connotations, to the North brings the
disturbing implications o f their regional cultures, and American culture more
generally, to the surface. Those involved in this movement share a great deal with
Faulkners Quentin Compson, whose ambivalent relationship to his own Southern
background, along with his removal to Harvard for college during the period of a
desperate crisis of adolescent identity, ends with his suicide in Boston.
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One such figure in Morrisons novel is Geraldine, a sugar-brown woman

whose vocation is the systematic extermination of the dreadful funkiness o f
passion, the funkiness o f nature, the funkiness o f the wide range o f human
emotions (82, 83). Morrisons contempt for such women, whom she portrays as a
kind o f subspecies within the more general palate of blackness, seems to arise from
a sense o f their hunger for assimilation into an ostensibly white culture and their
disdain for much of their own black culture. Geraldines son Junior, consequently,
is encouraged to play only with white kids: His mother did not like him to play
with niggers. She had explained to him the difference between colored people and
niggers. They were easily identifiable. Colored people were neat and quiet;
niggers were dirty and loud (87).
Morrison makes it clear that Geraldine and her kind invariably spring from
such Southern towns as Mobile, Aiken, Newport News, Marietta, and Meridian
(81). The rigidly etched racial categories that they utilize reflect the degree to
which their segregated native culture has imprinted its racist vocabulary on them,
and, o f course, the degree to which they have acquiesced in the process.
Geraldines son, who used to long to play with the black boys, rather predictably
becomes a bully in response to his mothers strict and relentless conditioning (87).
Having lured Pecola into his home one afternoon, he torments her before flinging
his mothers blue-eyed black cat into a wall. (Perhaps this is an incarnation o f the
228
cat Pauline didnt even have for company; and indeed its bizarre erotic
relationship with Geraldine suggests again the need for intimacy and connection
that seems to be so sorely lacking here.) When Juniors jealousy o f the cat finds
this violent expression, and he pins the crime on the innocent Pecola, Geraldine
responds to the situation with an almost heartbreaking act of cruelty. Stated
simply, she looks at Pecola and sees not a little girl, not a human being, but an
odious symbol of everything she has attempted to flee, control, or repress in her
own identity and background. An unseemly blackness, to be sure, is the
fundamental problem with Pecola; Geraldines refusal to acknowledge the dignity
o f such a figure is a necessary gesture in her own assimilation into the white culture
that has constructed these narrow racist categories in the first place. Her own
blackness, which she seeks to camouflage, to recast from nigger to colored, in
her middle class domestic surroundings, is an inconvenient detail, unspoken,
unacknowledged:
Geraldine went to the radiator and picked up the cat. He was limp in
her arms, but she rubbed her face in his fur. She looked at Pecola.
Saw the dirty tom dress, the plaits sticking out on her head, hair
matted where the plaits had come undone, the muddy shoes with the
wad of gum peeping out from between the cheap soles, the soiled
socks, one of which had been walked down into the heel of the shoe.
She saw the safety pin holding the hem o f the dress up. Up over the
hump of the cats back she looked at her. She had seen this little girl
all her life. Hanging out o f windows over saloons in Mobile,
crawling over the porches of shotgun houses on the edge of town,
sitting in bus stations holding paper bags and crying to mothers who
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kept saying Shet up! Hair uncombed, dresses falling apart, shoes
untied and caked with dirt. They had stared at her with great
uncomprehending eyes. Eyes that questioned nothing and asked
everything. Unblinking and unabashed, they stared up at her. The
end o f the world lay in their eyes, and the beginning, and all the
waste in between.
They were everywhere. They slept six in a bed, all their pee
mixing together in the night as they wet their beds each in his own
candy-and-potato-chip dream. In the long, hot days, they idled
away, picking plaster from the walls and digging into the earth with
sticks. They sat in little rows on street curbs, crowded into pews at
church, taking space from the nice, neat, colored children; they
clowned on the playgrounds, broke things in dime stores, ran in
front o f you on the street, made ice slides on the sloped sidewalks in
winter. The girls grew up knowing nothing of girdles, and the boys
announced their manhood by turning the bills of their caps
backward. Grass wouldnt grow where they lived. Flowers died.
Shades fell down. Tin cans and tires blossomed where they lived.
They lived on cold black-eyed peas and orange pop. Like flies they
hovered; like flies they settled. And this one had settled in her
house. Up over the hump o f the cats back she looked.
Get out, she said, her voice quiet. You nasty little black
bitch. Get out of my house. (91-2)
Geraldines endless catalogue o f contemptible associations with blackness unrolls

in a slow, steady wave of pure disgust. The figure brought to mind by Pecola is so
overdetermined that the little girl herself seems to Geraldine nothing more than an
insect, a pest, a hateful reminder of the plague o f blackness that has overrun and
corrupted Geraldines otherwise orderly world. So completely has Geraldine
absorbed this discourse of racial abomination from her native Southern background
and internalized its hierarchical racist values that her zealous labeling o f Pecola as
230
black expresses the full horror o f her own vacuous condition, to say nothing o f its
violence to Pecolas humanity.
But perhaps the most humiliating racial incident connected with the South
in the novel is the interruption of Chollys first sexual encounter by two white men
with a flashlight. Forced at gunpoint to get on wid it, nigger, for the white m ens
entertainment, Cholly projects his fierce hatred for them onto Darlene: He hated
her. He almost wished he could do ithard, long, and painfully, he hated her so
much (148). The self-loathing that he takes from the event resembles Paulines
sense o f her own ugliness, as Morrison implies when she writes that the vacancy
in his head was like the space left by a newly pulled tooth still conscious o f the
rottenness that had once filled it (150). O f course, Chollys sexuality, tangled with
this self-hate that seeks to lash out against black rather than white victims in order
to keep his own racially fractured identity intact, will find its ultimate perversion in
his rape o f Pecola. Like Geraldines view o f the little girl in her living room,
Chollys sexual violation of his daughter resonates with intensely overdetermined
historical significance that reaches back to his youth in the racist Georgia o f his
early sexual humiliation.
Also important in Chollys sexual encounter with Darlene is the connection
with death; it is a haunting aspect of Chollys sexuality that remains with him for
the rest o f his life, and is nowhere more clear than in his rape o f Pecola, in which
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his touch was fatal, and the something he gave her filled the matrix o f her agony
with death (206). For Chollys encounter with Darlene -- followed by the
intrusion o f the white men and his subsequent flight from his native environment,
first in search o f his father, then simply in the pursuit o f his own perceptions and
appetites that will lead him to a drunken rape, some years later, up North in
Lorain, Ohio -- takes place on the day o f his Aunt Jimmys funeral (160). The
formation o f Chollys sexual identity is thus intimately connected to the death of
the one woman who loved him as a child. And since Cholly flees soon after the
funeral, Aunt Jimmys death also triggers the sequence of events that separate him
from the world he associates with Blue Jack, an old man whose love and guidance
o f Cholly constituted the boys best chance for a healthy approach to manhood.
Blue Jacks increasingly common drunkenness, along with Chollys intense sexual
shame after the aborted encounter with Darlene, prevent Cholly from sharing his
experience with the old man, and accelerate his fantasies of other places. Aunt
Jimmys funeral is thus the emotional starting point for Chollys haphazardly
developed and ultimately tragic sexual identity.
This connection of death and sexuality at the site of a funeral in Morrisons
novel brings to mind Faulkners dramatization of Damuddys funeral in The Sound
and the Fury. In Faulkners work, it is Caddy Compson who climbs a tree in order
to look in a window at the funeral proceedings from which she and her brothers
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have been excluded. And while she tries to observe the mournful state o f affairs
inside, the others watch her from below. As her idiot brother Benjy reports: We
watched the muddy bottom o f her drawers. Then we couldn't see her. We could
hear the tree thrashing."17 This overall scenario, in which Caddy's stained
sexuality, in the symbolic form o f her muddy drawers, is exposed to those below
while she voyeuristically and covertly studies the funeral o f their grandmother,
represents Faulkners attempt to link death and sexuality in his novel.
The connection is particularly important to Quentin Compson, whose
adolescent sexual identity is plagued by indecision, impotence, and desperately
confused feelings toward his sister. Quentins crisis, in which the tragedy is not so
much that he commits incest with Caddy (of course, he does no such thing) but
rather that he cannot forgive himself for not doing so, bears a strong resemblance to
Chollys sexual self-loathing and eventual rape o f his daughter Pecola. In a
brilliant exchange between Quentin and Caddy, Faulkner returns to this connection
o f death and sexuality, revealing Quentins perverse thought process in which the
memory o f Damuddys funeral, and Caddys intermediary position between his
own line o f vision and the deceased, actually generate sexual tension and
excitement. Having failed to reach his own sexual maturity, and terrified at the
thought o f Caddys impurity (or sexual possession by anyone other than himself),
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Quentin suggests a death pact between Caddy and himself as they sit in the middle
of a shallow stream:
then I was crying her hand touched me again and I was crying
against her damp blouse then she lying on her back looking past my
head into the sky I could see a rim o f white under the irises I opened
my knife
do you remember the day damuddy died when you sat down in the
water in your drawers
yes
I held the point o f the knife at her throat
it wont take but a second just a second then I can do mine then
all right can you do yours by yourself
yes the blades long enough Benjys in bed by now
yes
it wont take but a second 111 try not to hurt
all right
will you close your eyes
no like this youll have to push it harder
touch your hand to it
but she didnt move her eyes were wide open looking past my head at
the sky
Caddy do you remember how Dilsey fussed at you because your
drawers were muddy
dont cry
Im not crying Caddy
push it are you going to
do you want me to
yes push it
touch your hand to it
dont cry poor Quentin
but I couldnt stop she held my hand 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 waves o f
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
234
its my knife I dropped it

she sat up (Sound 151-2)
The obviously phallic purport o f Quentins knife, which he is unable to thrust into
Caddys throat and finally drops into the water, reflects his own sexual impotence.
His repeated envisioning o f the image o f Caddys muddy drawers at Damuddys
funeral and the instruction for her to touch your hand to it suggest his own
impulse to utilize the idea o f death itself in the service o f the sexual stimulation and
release that their death pact represents to him. Of course, it is an intensely
narcissistic fantasy that never reaches sexual consummation and only contributes to
Quentins eventual suicide up North.
Faulkners overriding concern with time and temporal modes o f experience
in The Sound and the Fury ensures that Quentins struggle to confront these issues
o f sex and death will remain deeply grounded in his native Southern milieu even
during his time at Harvard. The aggressively nonlinear, stream-of-consciousness
narrative style o f the novel binds disparate times and places together into a single
body of experience that must be sorted through as one sorts through a lifetime of
personal memories. Faulkners achievement in this context is a formal structure
that adequately bridges both temporal and regional difference in order to portray
pure memory, pure experience. Quentins adventures in Boston on the day o f his
death, including his rescue o f the little Italian girl and his ill-advised fistfight
235
with Gerald Bland, are impossible to read apart from his relationship to his sister
and to his inherited Southern culture as a whole. His final act of suicide must be
considered in this historical context also, and as such it parallels Chollys rape of
Pecola, a comparably tragic event that can be traced to the shift from the gaiety
and carnival spirit of Aunt Jimmys funeral to the sense of self-hate that Cholly
comes to associate with the event after his degrading sexual experience with
Darlene beneath the white mens flashlight (143).
Quentins concern with the specifically racial aspects of his crisis is not
explicitly central to the design of The Sound and the Fury. But Absalom,
Absalom/, a novel written by Faulkner some years later during a period of greater
racial awareness and exploration, returns Quentin to all these critical questions by
way of a potentially incestuous relationship that is complicated by blackness. The
latter novel shares with The Sound and the Fury Quentins importation of his
ambivalent Southern identity to Harvard, a place that may be considered a kind of
spiritual capitol for the industrial Yankee North that stands in direct opposition to
his native milieu. Thus, while Faulkner reflects something of the regional
complexity between Quentins native South and adopted North in The Sound in the
Fury, he does so without advancing a racial discourse as central to his overall
project. It is Morrison, however, who engages in a more consciously racial strategy
in The Bluest Eye, a strategy that also suggests important regional implications.
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For while the tragic arc and ultimate downfall o f the Breedlove family invites many
comparisons to that o f the Compsons, The Bluest Eye's dissident black voice the
voice o f the racial other in a wider, generally hostile or indifferent mainstream
cultural context parallels the regions figural identity as an aesthetic
representative of the discrete spaces, histories and traditions of American culture in
their national, more overtly political formulation. And it is in this way, through this
close cooperation between regional and racial codes, that Morrisons first novel
simultaneously achieves its aesthetic and political ends.
The story o f Morrisons characters in The Bluest Eye plays out many
variations o f the same theme. Paulines shift from black to white aesthetic
categories parallels her move from communal black South to atomistic,
desegregated North. Geraldines typically Southern appropriation o f hierarchical
racial values, even among shades o f black, crushes Pecola, a human reminder o f the
South that Geraldines bourgeois aspirations are designed to repress, with a brutally
overdetermined hostility even hundreds o f miles north of the Ohio River. And of
course Chollys tangled sexuality, executing the rape of his daughter that in a
moment o f racial humiliation in his Southern past he had longed to commit against
Darlene, uses regional difference not to express the difference between North and
South, past and present, black and white, but to foreground the fundamental unity
and comiection, o f space, time, and race. The political potential o f the story, then,
237
arises from its privileging o f these racially inflected voices and perspectives, from
its placement of these people in their communal and regional contexts, North and
South, and from the emergence o f these discrete spaces into a larger American
culture that had quite intentionally ignored their presence previously.
The Reconstruction o f Sethe
Near the beginning of the 1852 novel Uncle Tom s Cabin, Harriet Beecher
Stowe writes: Perhaps the mildest form o f the system o f slavery is to be seen in
the State o f Kentucky.18 Such a remark has profoundly ironic reverberations in the
consciousness of Toni Morrisons fifth novel, Beloved. Set both on a plantation in
Kentucky and in the postbellum Cincinnati that rests on the northern bank o f the
Ohio River, Morrisons historical novel is in one sense an impassioned response to
Stowes almost absurdly violent power o f understatement and misrepresentation.
In order to apprehend the political gestures and implications o f Beloved, it may be
helpful to view it initially in the context o f Stowes novel, which is perhaps the
most politically important novel in American history. In Uncle Tom s Cabin, the
cause o f abolitionism received one of its most powerful and influential
articulations; the novels unparalleled popularity during the period leading up to the
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Civil War reflects its key role not simply as an aesthetic work but as a culturally
engaged, self-consciously polemical document. It is Stowes utilization o f the
region in her work, and her ability to weave regional difference into the popular
nineteenth-century genre o f the sentimental novel, that provides an important
starting point for consideration o f the abolitionist attack levied against the slave
system in America. Morrisons 1987 novel, as I hope to demonstrate, continues
some of the cultural work undertaken by Stowe, particularly in its feminist agenda,
but there is, perhaps not surprisingly, a profound difference between their strategies
that becomes most visible in light of Morrisons innovative and complex treatment
o f both regional and racial constructions.
The narrative method of Stowes novel centers around her placement of the
issue o f slavery into the early feminist discourse o f sentimentality. Slavery is not
represented primarily as a male concern, as an economic system connected to an
agricultural region dependent on labor-intensive cotton and tobacco. The story
rarely ventures out into the fields. Instead, Stowe presents a series of domestic
environments, recognizable set pieces in the popular womens literature o f the mid
nineteenth century in order to translate the slave system into familiar terms. The
real evil o f slavery, the novel suggests, is its systematic destruction of black
families, its heartless sundering o f the sacred bonds o f parents and children.
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Motherhood is the privileged vocation here, and the welfare of children is the best
evidence for the moral value o f social systems.
The famous death o f Little Eva by a slow, melodramatic consumption is
thus a rhetorical condemnation o f the slave system in which her wealthy Southern
family has participated. And much criticism o f the novel focuses on these
supposedly dubious, and decidedly sentimental, authorial choices and strategies.
Assailing Stowes sentimentality and the essentially decorative death o f Little
Eva even while acknowledging the power of this strategy to elicit tremendous, and
rather self-serving, sympathy in readers, critic Ann Douglas writes: It is important
to note that Little Eva doesnt actually convert anyone. Her sainthood is there to
precipitate our nostalgia and our narcissism [ ...] . Her only real demand on her
readers is for self-indulgence.19 Looking back at American Victorian culture and
literature through a tougher, more formally sophisticated, twentieth-century
modernist lens, Douglas thus expresses great contempt for Stowes method because
of its deceptively flaccid political vision. Even as she grudgingly grants the novel a
power of emotional persuasion, Douglas complains that Uncle Toms Cabin is little
more than an appropriation o f the horror of slavery for the mass consumption o f
sentimental readers, an exercise in self-absorbed devotion to matriarchal identity
that is shamefully devoid o f any legitimate political expediency.
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But if Little Eva doesnt actually convert anyone in the space o f the story
itself, her deaths mobilizing power on Stowes nineteenth-century readers must be
characterized as extraordinary. One critic who finds the modernist bias of critics
like Douglas inadequate to perceive the actual achievement o f Uncle Tom's Cabin
is Jane Tompkins, who endeavors to frame Stowes novel in a more appropriate
critical context. Tompkins argues that the popular domestic novel o f the
nineteenth century represents a monumental effort to reorganize culture from the
womans point o f view.20 Thus for Tompkins the placement o f slavery within an
implicitly female, domestic setting in Uncle Tom s Cabin is itself a radically
political gesture. Tompkins articulates the feminist agenda at once spiritual and
political of the novel in no uncertain terms:
It is the summa theologica of nineteenth-century Americas religion

o f domesticity, a brilliant redaction of the cultures favorite story
about itselfthe story of salvation through motherly love. Out o f the
ideological materials at their disposal, the sentimental novelists
elaborated a myth that gave women the central position o f power
and authority in the culture; and of these efforts Uncle T om s Cabin
is the most dazzling exemplar. (125)
Perhaps it should be noted here that Tompkins is most attentive to the political
possibilities o f women rather than blacks. Her thesis on the reorganization of
culture from the womans point of view only approaches slavery through this
intermediary force. But such a roundabout method, she suggests, does indeed lead
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to cultural and political power. Addressing the sentiments o f critics like Douglas
who find little more than demands for self-indulgence in Little Evas death,
Tompkins argues that Little Evas death brings an access o f power, not a loss o f
it and has tremendous redemptive force, both spiritually and politically (127).
Approving Stowes placement o f slavery into a female discourse as an effective
way to challenge slavery itself, Tompkins writes o f the spiritual power Little
Evas death had in the minds of Stowes readers:
The tale shows that by dying even a child can be the instrument of
redemption for others, since in death she acquires a spiritual power
over those who loved her beyond what she possessed in life.
The power o f the dead or the dying to redeem the
unregenerate is a major theme of nineteenth-century popular fiction
and religious literature. Mothers and children are thought to be
uniquely capable o f this work. (128)
It is natural to make a number of basic associations with Beloved in the context of

this passage; all o f Tompkinss key terms are concerns for Morrison: motherhood, a
childs death, the spiritual power and redemptive potential of the deceased, and
so on. But before moving into a consideration o f M orrisons novel simply with
Stowes sentimental narrative strategies in mind, the central function of region in
Uncle Tom s Cabin deserves attention. And it is through the emotional and moral
texture of Stowes sentimental design that regional difference gains its full force.
242
In his critical work Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel,
Philip Fisher provides an excellent analysis of Stowes utilization o f the region and
illustrates that what begins as picturesque regional differences o f manner slowly
reveals itself as systematic and almost Darwinian strategies of survival within the
moral geography o f various systems.21 The phrase moral geography is quite
appropriate here, for what Fisher perceives in Stowes descriptions o f the various
forms that slavery takes in Kentucky, New Orleans, and rural Louisiana, is in fact a
moral judgment against the institution itself based on the specific regional
characteristics o f each setting. Fisher contrasts the lazy New Orleans sybarite St.
Clare, who promises the dying Eva that he will free Tom but dies before getting
around to it, with Miss Ophelia, whose disciplined, New-England style o f
legalistic firmness and decisive action ensure the freedom of Topsy (126). Fisher
writes:
The major paradox of Stowes use of Stowes use of sentimentality

rests on her moral use of the appeal to a universal human nature with
primary feelings by means of which equations can be made from
character to reader at the same time that she made use of an intensely
analytic form o f realism based on regions [...]. Within Stowes
novel can even be found the Moral Darwinism o f the competition for
survival between regions: the conviction that certain forms o f life
were marginal and could not survive. Such life forms could not be
selected because they were in contradiction with the fixed inner laws
o f human feeling. Other systems, compatible with those laws, would
be found fittest.
243
In Uncle Tom's Cabin moral vocabulary, which at first

seems grounded only in style and way o f life, displays, finally, the
imprint o f regional economic and political forces. (122-23)
Through this model o f regional determinism, Stowe registers the intensely

emotional range o f familial and social injustices o f the slaveholding South; her
encoded regional framework, however, enables her to do so with a kind of
systematic and almost Darwinian rationality. And judging by the incalculable
impact o f the novel on readers in the 1850s, it is a powerful combination indeed.
This hidden but relentless utilization o f the region is what allows Stowe to conclude
o f the slave system that nothing of tragedy can be written, can be spoken, can be
conceived, that equals the frightful reality o f scenes daily and hourly acting on our
shores, beneath the shadow o f American law, and the shadow o f the cross o f
Christ (623). And Fisher anticipates the obvious outcome of these many
inevitably different, but finally, similar, evil social systems in his description of
the unavoidable implosion o f slavery itself: Such a world has set in place a self
canceling variationlike a non-surviveable Darwinian mutationo f a human nature
that will, in the end, have its revenge (127).
It hardly needs to be pointed out that Morrisons approach to race and
region in Beloved is radically different from that o f Stowe. For one thing, Morrison
makes blackness, not some idealized concept of matriarchal femaleness, her
primary reference point. But even more fundamentally, Morrisons use of region is
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far more complex. Her earlier novel The Bluest Eye, for example, reveals none o f
the straightforward regional determinism that is central to Stowes systematic
abolitionist project. For Morrison, regional difference does not prove anything;
instead, the region opens issues and liberates voices, it gives new play and new
spatial dimensions and opportunities to issues that have not been settled in other
places; it provides difference, giving racial identity new forms (even if they do
often have tragic modulations). Beloved, advancing these forms, defies the simple
categories Stowe tends to advance.
The political dimension of Morrisons fiction, and Beloved in particular,
arises from her situation o f black voices within an American literary and historical
tradition whose hostility to such voices is firmly established. Consider once again
Stowes statement: Perhaps the mildest form o f the system of slavery is to be seen
in the State o f Kentucky. Morrisons dissatisfaction with such a statement, and
her attempt to completely challenge not only the meaning of the words themselves
but the entire assumption that such an idea could be expressed on the behalf o f
slaves themselves, immediately questions a fundamental aspect o f white American
self-consciousness. Her apparent indifference to this fact, along with her headlong
attempt to articulate the slave experience with the most expansive terms o f a
humanistic rather than any merely political tradition, inevitably situates Beloved at
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an aesthetic and political crossroads where it is ripe for misreading and

misappropriation as well as great cultural enrichment.
The idea o f reconstruction lies at the heart o f the novel. O f course, it is set
during the Reconstruction era in American history, the period from the end o f the
Civil War in 1865 to the end o f Grants presidency in 1877, during which Southern
whites and blacks adapted to the realities o f emancipation. Morrisons narrative
method also attempts a reconstruction o f black consciousness during this period; in
doing so she necessarily reaches back into earlier decades when her characters were
still slaves. Her effort to express not only the political atmosphere of the time but,
more importantly, the psychological legacy o f the slave experience from the
perspectives o f the slaves themselves, contains an implicit critique of any political
history o f the Reconstruction that would attempt to represent blackness in more
narrowly defined terms. And if the Reconstruction is perilous in terms of its
dangers o f misrepresentation, Morrison senses that it is also a moment o f vast
possibilities for self-definition and reclamation of African-American identity.
As many critics have noted, Morrisons novel appropriates the form of the
slave narrative in important ways, most centrally in its account o f the physical and
psychological toll o f slavery on slaves and former slaves.22 In his introduction to
The Slave's Narrative, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., hints at the potentially problematic
nature o f utilizing the slave narrative form when slavery no longer exists:
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Once slavery was abolished, no need existed for the slave to write
himself into the human community through the action o f first-person
narration. As Frederick Douglass in 1855 succinctly put the matter,
the free human being cannot see things in the same light with the
slave, because he does not and cannot look from the same point from
which the slave does. [. . .] The nature o f the narratives, and their
rhetorical strategies and import, changed once slavery no longer
existed.23
Unlike Douglass and other writers o f slave narratives (and. in this sense, Stowe),
Morrison cannot be concerned simply with the political cause o f abolitionism. Her
challenge is to make the slave legacy relevant and meaningful over one hundred
years after emancipation, when the genre o f the slave narrative would seem more or
less obsolete, at least in its original form.24 But through its multiple narrative
voices, Beloved approaches a sense o f slave experience that is both testimonial and
voyeuristic, internalized and sharply, even violently, removed. The novel seeks to
build on the earlier genre o f the slave narrative even as it contemplates the
limitations o f its own perspective and utilizes them in its own larger design which
speaks to a late twentieth-century American cultural context. This, perhaps, comes
closest to revealing the specific type o f reconstruction that Morrison seems to have
in mind.
The sensational central event around which the novel is structured, a slave
mothers killing of her baby after a failed escape attempt, would seem in many
ways perfectly suited to the designs o f a sentimental novel like Uncle Tom's Cabin.
247
Indeed, much o f Morrisons authorial stance shares its perspective with that of
Stowe. The protagonist Sethe is defined in the novel primarily as a mother; her
relationship to her children drives the story forward, and the tragic perversions of
this relationship provide compelling evidence of the depths o f the slave systems
depravity.
Sethes complexity, however, deserves more careful attention. For there
seems to be a very permeable border between her potential to love her children and
her potential to destroy them, and it is the reality o f her crossing this line that
predicates Sethes emotional collapse and ultimate reconstruction. Thus Sethe is no
mere victim of the slave system and its haunting legacy in America, although she is
certainly that; but instead, through her own active choice to cross this border, and in
her assumption o f the responsibility for such an act, Sethe attains the dignity and
grandeur o f a tragic figure. Nineteenth-century Americas favorite story about
itself~the story o f salvation through motherly love, as Tompkins described it, is
wedded in Beloved to a more thoroughly Greek dramatic structure, in which Sethe
herself participates in the destruction o f herself and her family, in which she lifts
the knife (or saw) against them herself. Sensationalism is tempered with truth, and
thus Morrison reclaims the full humanity of her characters from the sentimental
model that denies the complexity, the very experience, o f life, and generates figures
like Uncle Tom instead.
248
My choice o f the word border to characterize this thin division between

Sethes most terrifying and redemptive qualities is, o f course, intentional. For
Beloved is deeply, even desperately interested in borders and the regions they
divide and unite. The South, that is, that vast expanse below the ribbonlike border
o f the Ohio River, is the home of slavery and the place from which slaves want to
escape. But it is also the site o f Sweet Home, the plantation whose name is not
entirely ironic in Sethes experience. But its where we were, Sethe explains
when her daughter Denver questions the actual sweetness o f the place, All
together.25 While the degradation o f slavery is never questioned, there remains
something significant and valuable in the mere memory o f Sweet Home, a kind of
human connection that defies logic and eludes explanation, which Sethe and Paul D
instinctively respect.
Also bordered by the Ohio River are Cincinnati and the North, where Sethe
is briefly reunited with her children after escaping from Kentucky. But as if ritually
stripping the border o f its abilities to divide and to enforce difference, Morrison
portrays a North that is well within the reach of slavery. It is here that
schoolteacher and several others come to catch Sethe and return her to Sweet
Home; it is here that Sethe kills Beloved and nearly kills Denver; it is here that her
home, 124 Bluestone Road, is haunted; and it is here that the girl Beloved arrives
with the unfinished business o f the past. Like that o f Cholly Breedlove in The
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Bluest Eye, Sethes North presents the new space in which an old trauma must be
confronted, regardless o f its original source.
Just as Stowes moral geography led her to a vision o f regional
determinism in her work, so does Morrisons use of the region correspond to the
central thematic and psychological concerns in Beloved. The complexity o f Sethes
racial identity during Reconstruction and the unusual process by which she must
confront her own past parallel the way her borders fail to provide simple divisions
between regions but serve instead to bring the extremes of experience together in
one time and place. Like past and present, slavery and freedom, the simple
categories of North and South break down in her experience as she struggles to
reconcile the fact o f her murder of Beloved in 1855 with the fierce love the girl
Beloved gives her and receives from her in 1873. In this way, Morrisons elaborate
design more closely resembles that produced by Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom/,
another novel built around psychological reconstructions of the past. Sethes
repression of the memory of Beloveds manner o f death, and the persistently
indirect way in which the novel circles around this center without quite
approaching it, correspond to the painstaking efforts o f Quentin Compson to
withhold the dark secret beneath the Sutpen familys tragic history that he is
piecing together. Not surprisingly, the abominable secret in Faulkners novel
concerns the racial identity, that is, the mixed blood, o f one o f its key figures.
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Quentin faces an almost epic challenge in making space for this idea o f blackness in
his grand design; and o f course, Sethes ultimate success, only possible with the
help o f the black community in which she finds herself at the end o f Morrisons
novel, in embracing her own humanity in the face o f the past takes on a similarly
heroic quality.
Aside from the parallel ways in which they use race and region in their own
stories, Morrison and Faulkner share an affinity for Greek tragedy.26 Beloved,
ultimately, stands as Morrisons attempt to give blackness the tragic and even epic
scope that Faulkner claimed for Southemness in Absalom, Absalom! Amid the
struggle, both writers suggest, there is dignity; the courageous confrontation o f an
unspeakable fear brings great spiritual rewards; the complexity and emotional chaos
o f the past must be addressed with great effort, skill, and luck: these ancient ideas
help to shape the fiction o f both writers. Sethes quest is at once a personal journey
and a national imperative; her own reconstruction o f the traumatic past is really
nothing less than an act o f leadership at personal, communal, racial, and ultimately
universal human levels. In this timeless reclamation of the female, AfricanAmerican voice and identity of her novels protagonist, Morrison inserts an
extraordinary individual into an evolving American consciousness that defies
simple categorization and resists any unjust misappropriation of aesthetic, political,
racial, and of course regional resources.
251
Jazz and the Legacy o f the Region
Morrisons 1992 novel Jazz shares its time and place, 1920s New York
City, with another American novel whose grand gestures to characterize a
nationally representative spirit may obscure its crucial, irreplaceable regional
identity and perspective. In F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby, which was
published originally in 1925, the Jazz Age (and, many have argued, the entire
twentieth-century) received its most complete articulation by a distinctly and
consummately American voice.27 In an American literary tradition where
Fitzgeralds novel enjoys such a central position, Morrisons story o f Joe and Violet
Trace, a married couple from rural Virginia who have migrated north to the City
and settled in Harlem, constitutes a kind of parallel to the tale o f Jay Gatsby and
Nick Carraway, who themselves, appropriately restless, have arrived in New York
from their native Midwest (Jazz 6). Nick acknowledges the seductive lure o f the
city and his changed perceptions o f his home after serving in World War I: Instead
o f being the warm center of the world, he notes early in the novel, the middlewest now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe.28 Clearly, the City
promises more possibilities to discover oneself; it also holds more danger.
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Jay Gatsbys desire for the unattainable Daisy Buchanan, and his famously
flawed belief in his own ability to repeat the past, engender his character with the
tragic dimension that ultimately dooms his incendiary, and mythically American,
act o f self-reinvention (116). His determined rise to magnificence from humble
Midwestern roots encodes regionally a monumental quest not merely to repeat
the past, but, more urgently, to deny history, to forget the particular limitations of
that other time and place, to repress the reality of his own identity and mortality
behind a mask o f wealth, success, and perfection. Emerging from this motive, then,
Gatsbys romantic fantasies of reclaiming Daisy carry within them a desperate need
for recognition and connection; in his quest, Gatsby seeks nothing less than a kind
o f redemption, a restoration of himself to a perceived state o f cool, controlled
completeness. In expressing this desperation through an archetypally American
trajectory o f regional migration and material accumulation, Fitzgerald is able to
transform Gatsbys appallingly sentimental quest for an ahistorical conquest into
a thoroughly historical, even generic, tragic arc (118). The destruction of Gatsbys
dream, finally, represents the inevitable victory of time and history over the young
man and his own hunger to control them.
History itself, that most undervalued commodity in the 1920s, is also one of
Morrisons central concerns in Jazz. Early in the novel, Morrisons narrator sums
up the attitude o f the era:
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At last, at last, everythings ahead. The smart ones say so and

people listening to them and reading what they write down agree:
Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad
stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff. The way everybody was
then and there. Forget that. History is over, you all, and
everythings ahead at last. In halls and offices people are sitting
around thinking future thoughts about projects and bridges and fastclicking trains underneath. (7)
This sentiment, which seems equally appropriate to the pages o f The Great Gatsby,
is the starting point from which Morrisons novel explores the meaning o f the past.
And despite this prevailing and rather self-consciously careless indifference to the
immense weight o f history, Morrisons characters share with Jay Gatsby an
extraordinary need to achieve some kind o f truce with the past. Like Gatsby, Joe
Trace is driven by the need for an elusive lovers full recognition in order to make
peace with his own past. The young Dorcas Manfred, whose own then and there
includes a childhood in which her parents were stomped and burned to death in the
1917 East St. Louis race riots, fulfills several roles for Joe. Not only does she
provide him with the intimacy outside his marriage that has lost its momentum, but
even more urgently, Dorcas also represents for Joe an incarnation of his own
mother, whose fleeting presence he never experienced as a child in Virginia, and
who never openly recognized him as her own.
Morrison also devotes a large part of her novel to the history of one Golden
Gray, whose quest to find his own father parallels much o f Joes movement.
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Golden Grays need for the same kind o f recognition sought by Joe further
advances Morrisons overall emphasis in Jazz on the extraordinary importance o f
history, and especially o f achieving some kind o f continuity between past and
present, in order to reach a complete recognition and acceptance o f ones own
identity.
I was bom and raised in Vesper County, Virginia, in 1873, Joe Trace
relates midway through the novel, and virtually the rest o f Morrisons story
reconstructs the events in and around Joe Traces life that have come to bear in his
shooting o f Dorcas on January 1, 1926 (123). Joe elaborately retraces his early
years as an adopted child and the seven times he had changed into new during his
life (123). He describes the way Henry LesTroy, the best man in Vesper County,
taught him to hunt, and the events leading to his marriage and move to the City
(125). Then his autobiography jumps to the scene where he shoots Dorcas in a
crowded room, and it is clear that the momentum o f his entire life has brought him
to this point.
Golden Grays insertion into the overall structure o f the novel at this point
speaks to the novels concern with history. Seemingly at random, Morrison travels
back into the 1850s to relate the events by which Vera Louise Wordsworth, the
white daughter of a wealthy planter, is disowned by her family and exiled to
Baltimore after conceiving a child with a black man. Golden Grays 1873 return
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from the luxurious urban world o f his upbringing to the rural Southern milieu from
which his mother had been banished thus begins to gather a kind o f narrative
momentum o f its own. At this point, such a subplot seems more than slightly out
o f place in a novel whose title is Jazz, whose setting is New York City in the 1920s,
and whose narrator had earlier exclaimed that history is over, you all, and
everythings ahead at last. But Golden Gray forms a crucial link in the novel
between several important structures. As his search for his father parallels Joes
search for both his mother and later Dorcas, Golden Gray helps to articulate a sense
o f the universality of this impulse, and a psychological and emotional explanation
for this need to set out on such a quest. What is important about Golden Gray in
particular, however, is the explicitly racial connotation implicit in his search for his
father, a black-skinned nigger whom he intends to kill (143).
In a Faulknerian context, o f course, the figure of Golden Gray evokes
Thomas Sutpens repudiated mixed-race son Charles Bon in Absalom, Absalom!
Like Golden Gray, Bons racial makeup has exiled him to a marginal urban world
(a sybaritic New Orleans not unlike Grays Baltimore). Bons return to his fathers
plantation is motivated by the desire for his father to simply acknowledge him as
his son, to affirm his humanity through the act o f paternal recognition. This
contrasts with Golden Grays effort to deny his own blackness altogether, a project
256
which motivates him to return to his fathers world with the intention o f killing this
black man whom he has never known.
Golden Grays meeting with his father presents a permutation, a color
negative, as critic Roberta Rubenstein calls it, of Faulkners Sutpen/Bon
scenario.29 For in Jazz, it is the black father, Henry LesTroy (who happens to be the
same man who taught Joe Trace to hunt), who repudiates not the son himself but
the whiteness o f Golden Grays identity:
Look here. What you want? I mean, now; what you want
now? Want to stay here? Youre welcome. Want to chastise me?
Throw it out your mind. I wont take a contrary word. You come in
here, drink my liquor, rummage in my stuff and think you can cross
talk me just cause you call me Daddy? If she told you I was your
daddy, then she told you more than she told me. Get a hold o f
yourself. A son aint what a woman say. A son is what a man do.
You want to act like you mine, then do it, else get the devil out my
house!
I didnt come down here to court here, get your approval.
I know what you came for. To see how black I was. You
thought you was white, didnt you? She probably let you think it.
Hoped youd think it. And I swear Id think it too.
She protected me! If shed announced I was a nigger, I
could have been a slave!
They got free niggers. Always did have some free niggers.
You could be one o f them.
I dont want to be a free nigger; I want to be a free man.
Dont we all. Look. Be what you wantwhite or black.
Choose. But if you choose black, you got to act black, meaning
draw your manhood upquicklike, and dont bring me no whiteboy
sass.
Golden Gray was sober now and his sober thought was to
blow the mans head off. Tomorrow.
It must have been the girl who changed his mind. (172-3)
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LesTroy responds to Golden Grays revelation o f their relationship not with fury or
repression but with this basic challenge to the boys manhood. He totally
redefines the nature o f the relationship, refusing to accept any view o f it in
deterministic racial terms, but demanding that the boy choose his own identity and
accept the consequences o f his own actions. LesTroys ultimate insight, which
effectively disarms Golden Gray and gives him for the first time the opportunity to
define himself in his own positive terms, is that race itself is a construct, that race
itself is something to be chosen. LesTroys instructive phrase draw your manhood
up invites several readings, and leaves the sense that draw means not only to
raise or to lift, but also, in an important way that speaks to the novels central
metaphor o f jazz itself, to create in more aesthetic or abstract, and improvisational,
terms.
This encounter between Henry LesTroy and Golden Gray presents a model
o f the kind o f recognition that is unsuccessfully, even tragically, sought by others,
including Joe, Dorcas, Charles Bon, and o f course Jay Gatsby. LesTroy seems to
understand that the kind of recognition and instruction he offers to Golden Gray is
precisely what the boy needs, and what he has come all the way from Baltimore to
experience. And returning to Joes futile searches for his mother, as Morrison does
immediately afterwards, this encounter represents exactly what Joe fails to
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experience. The sense o f lack, the need for connection that goes unmet, haunts Joe
in his failure to track his mother down and receive from her any kind o f response
whatsoever:
Immediately Joe fell to his hands and knees, whispering; Is it you?

Just say it. Say anything. Someone near him was breathing.
Turning round he examined the place he had just exited. Every
movement and leaf shift seemed to be her. Give me a sign, then.
You dont have to say nothing. Let me see your hand. Just stick it
out someplace and Ill go; I promise. A sign. He begged, pleaded
for her hand until the light grew even smaller. You my mother?
Yes. No. Both. Either. But not this nothing. (178)
This absent figure, this indecent speechless lurking insanity that haunts the
woods, leads Joe to the maniacal state that is easily recognizable in his tracking
o f Dorcas. T just want to see her, Joe says and he rambles through the City,
expressing a version o f the same wish more than thirty years and hundreds o f miles
later (180). Morrisons narrative structure continues to foreground the continuity
between Joes searches in the woods and his pursuit o f Dorcas in the City, cutting
back and forth from descriptions o f each scene until the final question is posed in
Wilds empty cave, soon before he finds and kills Dorcas: But where is she?'1'
(184). And the death of Dorcas herself, in which she remains silent as she bleeds
and refuses to give the name o f the man who has shot her, carries with it an
extraordinary echo of the same silence Joe heard in the woods in Virginia. Even in
Dorcas silence, in the empty space where sound is not, there is a sense o f the
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continuity between what happened to Joe back home long ago, and what has
happened here.
As all o f this serves to illustrate, Morrisons novel is an elaborate portrayal
of the assembly o f time itself. As the central metaphor for the novel as a whole,
jazz improvisationally seeks to construct a model of past and present, of disparate
times and places. Morrisons spatial expression of this model is consciously
regional: for jazz, like the new versions of the Great Gatsby and Golden Gray
sprouting up in new places and new eras, assembles not only time but space.
Consider Alice Manfreds experience at the Fifth Avenue march to protest the East
St. Louis riots that killed her sister and brother-and-law and orphaned her niece
Dorcas:
Alice had picked up a leaflet that had floated to the pavement, read
the words, and shifted her weight at the curb. She read the words
and looked at Dorcas. Looked at Dorcas and read the words again.
What she read seemed crazy, out o f focus. Some great gap lunged
between the print and the child. She glanced between them
struggling for connection, something to close the distance between
the silent staring child and the slippery crazy words. Then suddenly,
like a rope cast for rescue, the drums spanned the distance, gathering
them all up and connected them: Alice, Dorcas, her sister and her
brother-in-law, the Boy Scouts and the frozen black faces, the
watchers on the pavement and those in the windows above. (58)
Considered in more explicitly racial terms, also, jazz constitutes an important

aspect o f individual and communal identity. In a way that parallels jazzs ability to
260
highlight both the awareness of regional difference and the continuity of all space,
the music also articulates the minority and marginal perspective in a culture whose
rigidly enforced racial categories leave so much repressed and unaccounted for.
Even beyond that, jazz supplies an implicit critique and resistance against the
rigidity and determinism of such categories themselves; in other words, it functions
in ways parallel to Henry LesTroys challenge to Golden Gray to draw your
manhood up: redefining experience in human rather than hierarchical terms, and
inviting, even demanding, individual articulation o f identity in more concrete,
positive ways. In this way, Morrison once again suggests the important parallel
strategies o f regional and racial structures in her work.
Morrisons novel does not end with the death o f Dorcas, nor is it simply
another expression o f the tragically flawed America portrayed by Fitzgerald in The
Great Gatsby (or by Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom!). Gatsbys goal, to return to
a certain starting place in order to correct his flaw in advance, expresses a
sentimental and naive fantasy o f going back to a prelapsarian setting (117). And
despite his somber insight into Gatsbys failed dream, even Nick Carraway cannot
devise a better vision o f American identity. In his final retreat from the haunted
East to his native Midwest, Nick essentially shares Gatsbys romantic yearning for
the same kind of refuge from time that cost Gatsby his life (185). The novels
concluding passage wonderfully captures this longing for an Eden that no longer
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exists, and the mythic American quest to seek this place in spite o f the tragic
implications o f the project:
And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt
away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that
flowered once for Dutch sailors eyesa fresh, green breast o f the
new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for
Gatsbys house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and
greatest o f all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment
man must have held his breath in the presence o f this continent,
compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor
desired, face to face for the last time in history with something
commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I
thought o f Gatsbys wonder when he first picked out the green light
at the end o f Daisys dock. He had come a long way to this blue
lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly
fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him,
somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the
dark fields o f the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that
year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but thats no
mattertomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther....
And one fine morning
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back
ceaselessly into the past. (189)
It should be noted that Fitzgeralds regional model, so crucial to the overall design
of The Great Gatsby, is in many ways a deterministic one. Shortly before his
departure from New York, Nick reflects on the story he has been telling: I see now
that this has been a story o f the West, after allTom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan
and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common
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which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life (184). It is as though, in the end.
Gatsby, Nick, and the others have proven themselves somehow unassimilable into
what amounts to an alien culture. Nicks view o f regional identity reveals a rigidity
entirely consistent with and typical o f racist classification. Elsewhere in the novel,
o f course, racist stereotypes and prejudices abound, including Tom Buchanans
Aryan rantings and the anti-Semitic portrait o f Meyer Wolfshiem. More centrally,
Gatsbys rise to greatness may be read allegorically as a transmigration from slave
race to master race, and his tragic downfall implies the impossibility of such a
movement. Nicks return to the Midwest, in this context, is as close as he can come
to returning to an idyllic, racially purified cultural milieu. The novels wistful,
nostalgic closing passage might well be understood here as the impossible dream o f
an untainted, virgin America, a place with no sin or shame in its past; it is a vision
o f the America that can never exist in the present because o f its cultural (that is,
racial and regional) diversity. Instead it is the region, that model of homogeneity,
familiarity, and recognizability, that is invested with a slightly miniaturized version
o f these national fantasies.
In Jazz, Toni Morrison offers a very different vision of regional, racial, and
national identities. The final chapter in particular moves beyond the kind of rigid
view of American identity that Fitzgerald envisions in The Great Gatsby. In a
moment o f lucid self-awareness, Morrisons narrator not only acknowledges the
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limits o f his or her own perspective, but also recognizes that Joe and Violet have
transcended their narrow roles and claimed a fuller and more mysterious humanity
for themselves:
So I missed it altogether. I was sure one would kill the other. I

waited for it so I could describe it. I was so sure it would happen.
That the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself
at the crack and no power on earth could lift the arm that held the
needle. I was so sure, and they danced and walked all over me.
Busy, they were, busy being original, complicated, changeablehuman, I guess youd say, while I was the predictable one, confused
in my solitude into arrogance, thinking my space, my view was the
only one that was or that mattered. I got so aroused while meddling,
while finger-shaping, I overreached and missed the obvious. I was
watching the streets, thrilled by the buildings pressing and pressed
by stone; so glad to be looking out and in on things I dismissed what
went on in heart-pockets closed to me. (Jazz 220-1)
Jazz is once again the appropriate metaphor for the process that Morrisons narrator
apprehends. In the way that Joe and Violet have struggled to reach a new self
conception, to change and be changed by each other in a kind of ongoing creation
of themselves, the narrator finally perceives their independence and freedom even
within the structures o f history and geography. The narrator not only gives Joe and
Violet credit for having this power of creativity that defies narrative
preconceptions, but even admits a certain envy for the way that they have achieved
such an extraordinary level of intimacy. The novels remarkable conclusion opens
up the space o f Joe and Violets love, and privileges its place in the culture at large:
264
I envy them their public love. I m yself have only known it in

secret, shared it in secret and longed, aw longed to show itto be
able to say out loud what they have no need to say at all: That I have
loved only you, surrendered my whole se lf reckless to you and
nobody else. That I want you to love me back and show it to me.
That I love the way you hold me, how close you let me be to you. I
like your fingers on and on, lifting, turning. I have watched your
face fo r a long time now, and missed your eyes when you went away
from me. Talking to you and hearing you answerth a ts the kick.
But I cant say that aloud; I cant tell anyone that I have been
waiting for this all my life and that being chosen to wait is the
reason I can. If I were able Id say it. Say make me, remake me.
You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look.
Look where your hands are. Now. (229)
Through jazz the private experience is made public, just as Alice Manfred learned
when she heard the sound o f the drums at the protest march on Fifth Avenue. And
through the example o f Joe and Violets enviable public love the narrator shapes
a model o f experience based on interaction, variation, improvisation, call and
response that is, on the basic components o f jazz itself.30 The narrator, speaking
from the more immediate physical perspective of the book itself, instructs his or her
reader to look where your hands are with the invitation to make me, remake
me. It is a challenge that recalls Henry LesTroys demand that Golden Gray act as
his own individual, that he define himself positively rather than merely reacting
negatively against the structures that others have produced. In this context, Ralph
Ellisons conception o f jazz offers some insight into the overall statement of
Morrisons narrator in this closing passage. True jazz, Ellison says:
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is an art o f individual assertion within and against the group. Each

true jazz moment [.. .] springs from a contest in which each artist
challenges all the rest; each solo flight, or improvisation, represents
(like the successive canvases o f a painter) a definition o f his identity:
as individual, as member o f the collectivity and as a link in the chain
of tradition. Thus, because jazz finds its very life in an endless
improvisation upon traditional materials, the jazzman must lose his
identity even as he finds it [. . .].31
In returning all o f these concerns to the region, and in pursuing a more complete
understanding o f Morrisons regional model in Jazz (especially in its divergence
from the more deterministic model presented in The Great Gatsby), another
statement by Ellison may be instructive. For one of the important themes in Jazz
centers on the characters experiences o f pain and their responses to an often
excruciating and brutal past. Ellisons derivation o f what he calls the Negro blues
impulse envisions the process by which pain itself is appropriated in creative
ways:
The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes o f a

brutal experience alive in ones aching consciousness, to finger its
jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation o f
philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic
lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of
personal catastrophe expressed lyrically. (78-9)
The blues impulse, o f course, plays a crucial role in jazz itself, and Ellisons
description of a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism seems a wonderfully apt
266
characterization o f Morrisons novel as a whole. It is not the repression o f pain, nor

the attempt to rationalize pain, but a total acceptance and transformation o f pain
into a personal and individual statement that gives this aesthetic its power and
resonance. That the narrator o f Jazz comes to understand and affirm the
potentialities o f this process speaks to Morrisons desire to acknowledge the
important place o f pain itself in the experience o f her characters and their world.
In a move that is hardly surprising considering Morrisons entire body of
work, she utilizes the region in her expression of this process o f re-experiencing
and transforming pain. Regional difference does not provide a determined sense of
identity, a definitive sense o f self that parallels an implicitly racist model o f human
civilization. Instead, the region offers the opportunity to revisit history, to approach
geographically the site of trauma, and ultimately, of course, to actively redefine
oneself with a creative appropriation o f ones pain. Perhaps the most definitive
description o f all this comes in Golden Grays meditation on his own return to the
rural Virginia where his father lives:
Only now, he thought, now that I know I have a father, do I feel his
absence: the place where he should have been and was not. Before,
I thought everybody was one-armed, like me. Now I feel the
surgery. The crunch o f bone when it is sundered, the sliced flesh
and the tubes of blood cut through, shocking the bloodrun and
disturbing the nerves. They dangle and writhe. Singing pain.
Waking me with the sound o f itself, thrumming when I sleep so
deeply it strangles my dreams away. There is nothing for it but to
go away from where he is not to where he used to be and might be
267
still. I am not going to be healed, or to find the arm that was

removed from me. I am going to freshen the pain, point it, so we
both know what it is for.
...Perhaps then the arm will no longer be a phantom, but will
take its own shape, grow its own muscle and bone, and its blood will
pump from the loud singing that has found the purpose o f its
serenade. Amen. (158-9)
The South is Golden Grays destination. He maintains none o f Nick Carraways

idyllic childish regional visions, but understands that his journey will include a
great deal of suffering. In emerging from his adolescent desire to kill his black
father into a more complete acceptance o f LesTroys demand that he define himself
as a man and take responsibility for his own experience, Golden Grays maturation
abandons the kind o f wistful escapism that characterizes Nick. Morrisons use of
the region here parallels the innovative racial construction she presents in
LesTroys rejection of deterministic racial codes. For the region provides a spatial
expression of LesTroys vision; as Golden Grays hunger to freshen the pain
reveals, it is the place where the contingency of identity is understood, where the
individual both locates himself in the chain of tradition and comes to understand
the possibilities of his own identity within and against the group. In Fitzgeralds
novel, Nicks return to the Midwest merely reinforces a sense o f the immutability
o f fate and leaves the young man in possession of a very limiting definition o f his
own identity. Golden Grays regional movement, on the other hand, invites
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something much more complex and potentially liberating even as it recognizes the
authenticity o f a comparably painful experience o f the world.
I do want to be in a place already made for me, both snug and wide open,
the narrator confides near the end o f Jazz (221). Perhaps this urge best describes
the Citys potential in Morrisons novel. It is a singular stage for very public acts
o f violence and love, pain and lyricism, even as it turns its gaze outward to share in
the epic regional experiences o f a nation that is composed o f complex individual
places like Vesper County, Virginia, and East St. Louis, Illinois. As in a true jazz
moment, such smaller spaces complement each other, define themselves both
within and against each other. And thus Morrisons vision, freshening the pain of
history in both individual and national experiences o f self, offers itself as a lyric
expression o f an inclusive, communal, and endlessly creative American identity.
Conclusion: Misreading Morrison
Placing Morrisons work in the context not just of Faulkner but o f the other
important American authors I have considered in this chapter reveals the full extent
her innovative use of the region in her work. In a parallel gesture of divergence,
Morrisons overall literary independence from these earlier figures is forged by a
269
process o f what Harold Bloom calls strongly misreading previous writing, which
occurs first in Morrisons own readings o f these figures work and then in her own
w riting/2 I want to conclude with the suggestion that this process o f misreading,
a highly ambivalent and generally experimental attempt to define oneself within
and against the larger contexts o f tradition and community, provides an apt
metaphor for the regional structures in Morrisons work as well. As I have argued
in my model o f the American region and my readings of Morrisons fiction, it is the
regions contingency, its desire for both recognition from outside and its own
internal sense o f individual identity, that places it at such a potentially powerful
crossroads in American culture. Morrisons career reveals her consistent
exploitation o f this potential. From the early transmigrations o f the Breedloves in
The Bluest Eye to Sethes literal and figural reconstructions in Beloved, Morrisons
complex parallel treatment o f race and region enables her to ground her narratives
in a recognizable American idiom even as she swerves away from traditional
approaches to important themes in American literature, most particularly race and
gender. In Jazz, her most mature work among those addressed in this chapter,
Morrison utilizes the region in increasingly subtle ways in order to present a vision
not just o f black aesthetic consciousness or even American culture, but o f the range
and sheer magnificence of human possibilities.
270
In an ironic sense that seems entirely appropriate in light of the inherently

paradoxical nature o f the American region, Morrisons distinct place in the literary
history o f the United States is clarified when viewed alongside William Faulkner,
the eternally ambivalent and relentlessly experimental figure whose work Morrison
has been reading and misreading for half a century. Like Faulkner, himself a
champion misreader o f Herman Melville and others, Morrison affirms her debt to
Faulkner most centrally in her rejection of him, in her insistent desire to be read
critically on her fictions own terms: [.. .] I am not like Faulkner.33 It is the
strength of her misreadings of Faulkner and other previous writers, her fascinated
dissatisfaction with them and her attempts to articulate something better, more
complete, more humane, more idiosyncratic and personal, that drives Morrisons
regional approach in her work.
271
Notes on Chapter 5
1See Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph Blotner, eds., Faulkner in the

University: Class Conferences at the University o f Virginia, 1957-1958
(Charlottesville: U o f Virginia P. 1959) for a comprehensive collection of
Faulkners statements on race; Morrisons most explicit critical engagement with
race and American literature is found in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the
Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard UP. 1992).
2 See Carol A. Kolmerten, Stephen M. Ross, and Judith Bryant Wittenberg,
eds., Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-envisioned (Jackson: UP o f
Mississippi, 1997). Emblematic o f recent critical gestures to situate Faulkner in
wider racial contexts in American literature and culture, this volume provides the
first critical examination of the resonant intertextual relationship between the
work o f Faulkner and Morrison (x).
3 Harold Bloom, ed., Toni Morrison (New York: Chelsea House P, 1990) 1.
For Blooms original theoretical treatment of this subject, see his study The Anxiety
o f Influence: A Theory o f Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford UP, 1997); John N.
Duvall, Toni Morrison and the Anxiety of Faulknerian Influence, Unflinching
Gaze, 3-16, considers Blooms formulations in the context o f Faulkner and
Morrison.
4 Toni Morrison, Unspeakable Thoughts Unspoken: The Afro-American
Presence in American Literature, Toni Morrison, 210.
5 See Nellie Y. McKay, ed., Critical Essays on Toni Morrison (Boston: G.
K. Hall & Co., 1988). This volume, the earliest critical collection devoted to
Morrison, organizes itself around constructions o f race and, to a lesser degree,
gender; McKay emphasizes the idea that Morrisons novels constitute a rejection
of white patriarchal modernism, and are radical revisions o f the race and malecentered Afro-centered literary tradition (2).
272
6 See Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School o f the Ages
(New York: Harcourt Brace P, 1994) for his most complete treatment o f the
formation o f American and world literary canons.
7 See David C. Anderson, Crime and the Politics o f Hysteria: How the
Willie Horton Story Changed American Justice (New York: Times Books, 1995)
for more detailed background material on Willie Horton.
8 See Nellie McKay, An Interview with Toni Morrison, Conversations
with Toni Morrison, ed. Danielle Taylor-Guthrie (Jackson: UP o f Mississippi,
1994) 138-55. Morrisons most widely cited disavowal o f Faulkners influence on
her came in this 1983 interview, where she stated: (Black women) have no
systematic mode o f criticism that has yet evolved from us, but it will. I am not like
James Joyce; I am not like Hardy; I am not like Faulkner. I am not like in that
sense. I do not have objections to being compared to such extraordinarily gifted
and facile writers, but it does leave me sort o f hanging there when I know that my
effort is to be like something that has probably only been fully expressed perhaps in
music, or in some other culture-gen that survives almost in isolation because the
community manages to hold on to it (152). While many scholars have read these
statements as evidence o f Morrisons formal originality and freedom from prior
influence (especially that o f white male writers like those mentioned, and Faulkner
in particular), I find her resistance here to be more focused on the failure of
criticism to approach black womens writing on its own terms. The issue of
influence, in my view, is a separate matter altogether, one that may or may not
come to bear in an evolved critical environment that is more attentive to the cultural
singularity o f Morrisons work. If anything, M orrisons statements reveal the
privileged place o f Faulkner in her own aesthetic consciousness, which is, of
course, black and female, and such statements suggest the critical sensitivity that
will be required o f any adequate reading of her work.
9 See Trudier Harris, Fiction and Folklore: The Novels o f Toni Morrison
(Knoxville: U o f Tennessee P, 1991) for an example of this kind o f folklore-based
criticism o f Morrisons work.
10 Taylor-Guthrie 124.
11 Toni Morrison, Jazz (1992; New York: Plume-Penguin, 1993) 158. See
my reading o f Jazz later in this chapter for a more thorough explication and
273
contextualization o f this phrase and its emblematic quality in Morrisons regional

model.
12 Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970; New York: Plume-Penguin, 1994)
117.
lj See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., introduction, The Classic Slave Narratives,
ed. Gates (New York: Mentor-Penguin, 1987). Gates introduction addresses the
Norths mythic role in the consciousness of Afro-Americans before emancipation.
See also Ronald Segal, The Black Diaspora (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
1995), particularly Segals Chapters 21 and 30, 'Americas Deep River and The
Wasteland o f the American Promise, for more on Afro-American movements in
the modem era. Segals work puts American racial history into a global context,
presenting a more complete international history o f the African diaspora.
14 See Trudier Harris, Reconnecting Fragments: Afro-American Folk
Tradition in The Bluest Eye, Critical Essays, 68-76. Harris considers the folk
context of the novel in some detail, addressing the myth o f the North and setting
its larger design in the background of Paulines self-immolating ultimate
transference o f identification from blacks to whites (68, 69).
15 Harris 69.
16 See Chapter 3 of this study, American Idols, Regional Dissidents:
William Faulkner and the Invention of the South, for more on Faulkners ironic
treatment o f Los Angeles in Golden Land.
17 William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929; New York: VintageRandom House, 1990) 39.
18 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852; New York: Penguin,
1981) 50.
19 Ann Douglas, The Feminization o f American Culture (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1977)4.
20 Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work o f American
Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford UP, 1985) 124.
274
21 Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New
York: Oxford UP, 1985) 126.
22 See W. J. T. Mitchell, Narrative, Memory, and Slavery, Picture Theory:
Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: U o f Chicago P, 1994) 183207. Mitchells essay addresses slavery, the slave narrative, and Beloved, by
examining the visual and spatial codes with which servitude has traditionally been
represented. See also Wendy Harding and Jacky Martin, Narration as the Past
Remembered, A World o f Difference: An Inter-Cultural Study o f Toni M orrisons
Novels (Westport: Greenwood P, 1994) 149-79. Harding and Martin note both the
influence of the slave narrative on Morrison and her transformation o f the genre in
her own work; they also note the role of reconstruction made possible by
Morrisons use o f this historically grounded genre: This backward movement is
always present in Morrisons novels. Something has to be reconstructed and
comprehended in order for the story to proceed toward new developments. Yet the
function of narratives is not only to recover facts but also to illustrate the continuity
between past and present (169).
23 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., introduction, The Slave's Narrative, eds. Charles
T. Davis and Gates (New York: Oxford UP, 1985) xiii.
24 See Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, Neo-slave Narratives: Studies in the Social
Logic o f a Literary Form (New York: Oxford UP, 1999) for a more systematic
study of contemporary literatures appropriation of the genre o f the slave narrative.
25 Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987; New York: Plume-Penguin, 1988) 14.
26 See Morrison, Unspeakable, 202, for her statements on Greek tragedy;
Frederick R. Karl, William Faulkner, American Writer: A Biography (New York:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson P, 1989) 953-5, considers Faulkners interest in Greek
literature and culture.
27 See Matthew J. Bruccoli, preface, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott
Fitzgerald (New York: Scribners, 1995) vii-xvi, for more on the novels
representative American status.
28 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925; New York: Scribners, 1995)
7.
275
29 Roberta Rubenstein, Faulknerian and Postmodern Voices in Ja zz"

Unflinching Gaze, 157.
30 See Craig Hansen Werner, Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism
to the Jazz Impulse (Urbana: U o f Illinois P, 1994) for more on structures o f jazz
and jazz theory. Werners work is particularly attentive to the applications of jazz
theory in American literature.
31 Ralph Ellison, The Charlie Christian Story, Shadow and Act (1964;
New York: Vintage-Random House, 1994) 234.
32 Bloom, Anxiety xix.
33 McKay, Interview 152. See note 8 for more on Morrisons formulation of
black womens writing and its ambivalent relationship with traditional literary
criticism.
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CONCLUSION
From Darky to Dissident, Ethical Past to Leading Region:
R enam ing the S elf and Reclaim ing the Region
in American Culture
Placing my model o f the American region and my readings of Twain,

Faulkner, OConnor, and Morrison into a more contemporary cultural context may
offer a glimpse at the dissidence their work provides. It may also reveal the kind of
regional individualism that they have struggled to put forth in an American context
whose nationalizing impulses remain quite prevalent and generally unchallenged by
an assimilationist mainstream American culture. As I discussed in the first chapter,
the danger o f the American regions cultural identity lies partly in a kind of deeply
insecure pretension to imperial authority, or as I described it in that chapter, a
vision o f freedom by way o f mastery.1 Returning to St. Louis, whose civic
boosterism during the Reconstruction era presented an excellent model for cultural
consolidation o f the theoretical American region, I want to consider the much more
recent statements o f former Missouri Senator John Danforth on the subject o f St.
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Louis cultural identity. Envisioning the future greatness of St. Louis in a 1998
speech, Danforth stated:
Here is what St. Louis will become. We will become the leading
region o f America in the 21st century. We will become a place that
excels in creating opportunities for our people, that develops
industries o f the future, that nurtures our youth, that attracts the best
and the brightest young adults, that enriches our lifestyle and that
overcomes the barriers that divide us. We will become the leading
region o f the 21st century because we love this place and we will
accept nothing else.2
Since his retirement from political office, Danforth has headed an organization
called St. Louis 2004, whose stated mission is to return St. Louis to world-class
stature in time for the centennial celebration o f the 1904 Louisiana Purchase
Exposition. The St. Louis Worlds Fair o f 1904, as the Exposition is now more
generally known, stands as an event o f mythic dimensions in St. Louis and
represents a kind of cultural high water mark in the citys self-image.3 Speaking to
a local audience fully cognizant o f its citys traditions of past civic glory and more
recent civic decay, Danforth evoked for the region nothing less than a utopian
vision, another golden age (to match the one presumed to have taken place a
century ago) that would descend upon St. Louis in 2004. Danforths speech was
delivered in a city whose condition was in 1998, and remains, marked by intense
institutional and economic racism (to say nothing of the entrenched segregation and
unspoken but palpable prejudice endemic to the much of the population), a
278
dwindling tax base, vast deficiencies in the public education system, a brokenbacked public transportation system, an outer ring of affluent suburbs that refuse to
consider any sort o f legal or economic partnership with the city itself, and, most
generally, a sense o f widespread indifference to cultural institutions literary,
dramatic, musical, or otherwise other than the desperately popular professional
sports organizations. Danforths rationale for the turnaround o f St. Louis fortunes
is rooted in what amounts to a childishly sentimental attitude, implying that
because 'we love this place and we will accept nothing else, St. Louis simply
deserves to be the leading region o f the 21st century. The hopeful phrase the
leading region o f the 21 st century suggests both an acute sense of regional
inferiority and the common gesture o f overcompensation that marks the American
regions efforts at self-conception. And o f course, it is not economic or military
force that will achieve this status for St. Louis, but simply the fact that we love
this place.
Alongside Danforths idealistic and historically resonant boosterism,
consider the words o f another proud St. Louisan, the attorney Alonzo Smith, a stem
but ultimately sentimental patriarch in the 1944 MGM musical Meet Me in St.
Louis. Having refused to accept a transfer to the New York City office of his law
firm, Smith thunders a speech in praise of St. Louis to his wife, children, and
household servant. O f course, the irony o f Smiths situation lies in the fact that his
279
family, in its domestic wisdom, has resisted the move to New York all along,
knowing that such a move would disrupt their domestic bliss. Only the bending of
Smiths otherwise inflexible will, which finally occurs at the sight o f his young
daughters utter despair at the prospect of leaving St. Louis, has brought him to this
point o f a practically religious conversion. He validates St. Louis with histrionic
exuberance:
New York hasnt got a copyright on opportunity! Why, St. Louis is

headed for a boom thatll make your head swim! This is a great
town! The trouble with you people is you dont appreciate it
because its right under your noses! The grass is always greener in
somebody elses yard.4
As its name suggests, the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition was organized to
celebrate American expansion across the continent. The largest and most
successful o f the many worlds fairs held in the United States between 1876 and
1916, it attracted some twenty million visitors and untold economic wealth to St.
Louis during its seven-month run.5 In Meet Me in St. Louis, the fair also represents
an emotional culmination to the Smith familys story, a geographically encoded
happy ending. Gazing out over a panorama o f majestic classical architecture into a
sea of white lights under the clear Midwestern sky, the Smiths are simply
overwhelmed by the beauty o f this place that they call home. Theres never been
anything like it in the whole world! Mrs. Smith exclaims. Daughter Rose remarks,
280
We dont have to come here on a train or stay in a hotel. Its right in our own
hometown! And the storys protagonist, young Esther Smith, played by Judy
Garland, utters the films final lines in a daze o f mystical joy: I cant believe it!
Right here where we live! Right here in St. Louis! In the most sentimental
Hollywood tradition, and with a nostalgic vision o f the past that is all the more
significant when one considers the films release in the depression-riddled wartime
context of 1944, this wholly generic and highly seductive happy ending to Meet Me
in St. Louis simply proves the accuracy o f Alonzo Smiths impassioned avowal of
the greatness o f St. Louis.
While the seemingly dated sentimentality o f a film like Meet Me in St. Louis
seems innocuous enough in its own context, there is something rather disturbing
about the strong similarity between the inspired, melodramatic words o f Alonzo
Smith and the more recent and entirely ingenuous speech by Senator Danforth. I
want to suggest that the limitation in Danforths vision, which, sadly enough,
cannot be guaranteed to lead to the kind of happy ending provided by an
ostentatious MGM musical, is most fundamentally connected to his limited
conception o f the space he refers to as his region. For it is in the
oversimplification o f Danforths regional model that he fails to register the subtlety
and distinctness, the overall character, of that space.
281
An image I discussed at some length in Chapter 1 o f this study, the cover of

Central Magazine featuring a skewed map o f the United States with St. Louis at its
authoritative center, offers one way to seek out this subtlety and contemplate its
potential contribution to contemporary issues facing a St. Louis that wants to
become the leading region for the next century (see fig. 2).6 What I want to focus
on most particularly now is 1874, the year in which this image was produced. Less
than a decade after the end of the Civil War, St. Louis in 1874 had few political,
economic, or cultural worries. As Chapter 1 details, the quintessentially American
optimism of the period seems to have had little reason to limit itself in this growing
and influential city. And as the maps indulgent presentation reveals, St. Louis
could, and did, envision its own momentum with celebratory confidence in the
success, and relative simplicity, o f its regional identity.
Toni Morrison offers another voice from 1874. It is the voice of Stamp
Paid, an extraordinary model of wisdom and endurance in Beloved. Stamps
ruminations about the unfulfilled promise o f American culture in 1874 come from a
perspective that is at great odds with the simple model o f Reconstruction progress
envisioned in Central Magazine's idealized cover image. Race, o f course, is
central to Stamps distinct perspective:
And him. Eighteen seventy-four and whitefolks were still on

the loose. Whole towns wiped clean o f Negroes; eighty-seven
282
lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools

burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children
whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property
taken, necks broken. He smelled skin, skin and hot blood. The skin
was one thing, but human blood cooked in a lynch fire was a whole
other thing. The stench stank. Stank up off the pages o f the North
Star, out o f the mouths o f witnesses, etched in crooked handwriting
in letters delivered by hand. Detailed in documents and petitions
full o f whereas and presented to any legal body whod read it, it
stank. But none of that had worn out his marrow. None of that. It
was the ribbon. Tying his flatbed up on the bank o f the Licking
River, securing it the best he could, he caught sight o f something red
on its bottom. Reaching for it, he thought it was a cardinal feather
stuck to his boat. He tugged and what came loose in his hand was a
red ribbon knotted around a curl o f wet woolly hair, clinging still to
its bit of scalp. He untied the ribbon and put it in his pocket,
dropped the curl in the weeds. On the way home, he stopped, short
o f breath and dizzy. He waited until the spell passed before
continuing on his way. A moment later, his breath left him again.
This time he sat down by a fence. Rested, he got to his feet, but
before he took a step he turned to look back down the road he was
traveling and said, to its frozen mud and the river beyond, What
are these people? You tell me, Jesus. What are they?7
Far more intensely than any macroeconomic vision of civic progress, Stamp Paids
question expresses the messy realities of Reconstruction America. This passage not
only brings a black perspective to the fore in its presentation o f Stamps experience,
but it problematizes any perspective, black or otherwise, that would attempt to
speak for the historical period as a whole. Stamp is informed both by an awareness
o f the wider currents o f his culture, as evidenced by his familiarity with the general
state o f racial injustice in his society, and by a visceral reaction to the brutal
inhumanity o f American racism that literally brings him to his knees. The lyricism
283
and concentration with which Morrison expresses Stamps searing insight ensures
that her reader arrive at his final question with the same kind o f perplexity and
surrender that he himself experiences. In any case, by the end o f this passage
1874 has come to mean something entirely different one might say the date
now seems more o f a question than an answer and Stamps impulse to pray, to
seek the truth directly from Jesus, seems intuitively appropriate.
As I discussed in Chapter 5, Morrisons work consistently brings race and
racial consciousness to higher levels o f expressiveness, and challenges the entire
body o f American literature to account for its traditional constructions o f race. In
doing so, Morrison plays a crucial role in the cultural life o f the entire society, a
dissident role in which she questions the assumptions o f a democratic polis and
demands a more rigorous standard of adherence to its fundamental ideals of
freedom and equality. Also concerned with gender, Morrison utilizes what might
be considered a rhetoric o f marginalization to force her voice into contention with
hegemonic and predominant ones. This model o f dissidence is similarly used by
Flannery O Connor, whose work insists on the value o f a fiercely individualistic
spiritual sensibility in the face of a culture marked by materialism, ignorance, and a
general lack o f human dignity.
Race and religion are undeniably two of Americas most complicated
issues. Approached with the kind of heightened sensitivity that Morrison and
284
OConnor bring to their work, they are also issues whose vast potential for cultural
enrichment is made abundantly clear. I want to conclude my study with the
contention that the region represents a cultural unit in America whose potential in
this area is comparable to that o f race and religion. Like race and religion, and
especially in light of the great divergence of work like that of Morrison and
OConnor from the working assumptions of mainstream American culture, the
region, it seems clear, is widely underutilized and underappreciated in parallel
fashion. One explanation for this can be found in culturally predominant artifacts
like Meet Me in St. Louis, whose highly generic and even deterministic regional
model advances a very narrowly conceived stereotype of the region, severely
limiting its discursive potential. Following this model, the region in Meet Me in St.
Louis does indeed spatialize what Roberto Maria Dainotto has called an ethical
past whose end is by no means a humane, just, and diverse democratic culture, but
is instead a simpler, more sanitized, homogeneous utopia marked by its centralized
structures o f authority and lack of modem complexity.8 An awareness o f this kind
of reactionary inclination in American culture seems to point inevitably to the
nationalistic pressures of assimilation as a major culprit in the rise o f the regions
stereotype. As with racial and religious difference, the sheer complexity and
variety of regional differences work to place the region at odds with pervasive and
often highly generic notions o f American identity. Ultimately, the regions
285
identity crisis may be viewed as a dilemma between the urge for recognition from
without and the need for individual self-conception. The fact that this kind o f
tension also characterizes the crisis o f American racial and religious identities may
also explain why writers like Toni Morrison and Flannery O Connor so adeptly
amalgamate their racial and religious perspectives with the cultural resources o f the
region. A missed opportunity in contemporary American regional culture, and one
that becomes painfully obvious in the context o f a regional vision like the one
advanced by Senator Danforth, resides precisely the fact that the stereotypically and
narrowly conceived region lends itself to a poorly envisioned model o f democratic
culture as a whole. In Danforths case, this is revealed in his deft avoidance of, or
perhaps his actual blindness to these vital aspects of his place race and religion,
among others and in his preference for the kind o f boilerplate booster rhetoric
voiced by the sentimental but highly paternalistic Alonzo Smith in Meet Me in St.
Louis. Whatever the explanation for Danforths failure to confront these pressing
issues in St. Louis, it seems clear that his inability or unwillingness to read St.
Louis with the kind o f subtlety with which Stamp Paid reads his own time and
place severely constrains the kind o f cultural vision that would contribute to St.
Louis fulfillment as a leading region.
A final mention o f Stamp Paids extremely hard won insight into American
culture offers a most appropriate conclusion to my study. What my work has
286
explored and attempted to articulate is the potential value in rethinking the

assumptions that have placed the region in its generally undervalued position in the
culture in the first place. The literary figures considered in the preceding chapters
offer important, and by no means exhaustive or definitive, contributions to this
critical reconsideration. Demanding at all times the independence of their own
voices in order to represent the most perfect conceivable visions o f the identities of
their respective regions. Twain, Faulkner, OConnor, and Morrison fulfill crucial
cultural roles. As individual voices, they actively participate in an ongoing
tradition that, at its best, creates and cultivates value one person at a time. They
insist always on the freedom to diverge from whatever structures o f hegemony they
may encounter, nationally, regionally, and within their own tightest circles. This
dissidence provides an illustration, or series of illustrations, o f the roles that the
region and my articulation of American regional theory may play in the critical
tradition and hopefully in the wider cultural milieu o f the United States.
Awakening from a national (and familial) nightmare o f racial abuse that has left
him with an almost boundless fury and an existential mystification that finds its
expression in both prayer and heroic action, Stamp Paid reveals a fundamental part
of his healing process to Paul D near the end of Beloved: I renamed m yself (232).
The raw genius of this gesture the self-reliance, the totally American attitude of
individualism and active participation, the assumption o f personal responsibility for
287
ones physical, emotional, and moral condition perfectly expresses the best
aspects o f the American regions cultural potential. American regional theory
constitutes a critical discourse to initiate a parallel process o f renaming American
regional spaces, with an eye toward understanding the innovation and complexity
o f their literature and other cultural products, and participating, however
marginally, in the contemporary range of American culture.
288
Notes to Conclusion
1Chapter 1 of this study, Manifest Regional Destiny: Toward a Theory o f

the Region in the United States, 23.
2 Quoted in Ray Hartmann, 2004: A Wasted-Space Odyssey, The
Riverfront Times [St. Louis] 4-10 Apr. 2001: 11.
3 See Timothy J. Fox and Duane R. Sneddeker, From Palaces to the Pike:
Visions o f the 1904 W orlds Fair (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society P, 1997)
for more on the 1904 W orlds Fairs place in the cultural memory o f St. Louis;
Martha Clevenger, introduction, Indescribably Grand: Diaries and Letters from the
1904 Worlds Fair, ed. Clevenger (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society P, 1996)
also considers the impact o f the fair on subsequent generations o f local residents,
who overwhelmingly have considered it the high point o f St. Louis history (3).
4 Meet Me in St. Louis, dir. Vincent Minnelli, MGM, 1944.
5 See Robert W. Rydell, All the Worlds a Fair: Visions o f Empire at
American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: U o f Chicago P, 1984)
for more on worlds fairs during this period in American history. Rydells work is
attentive to the ideologically motivated elements at work in worlds fairs, with a
strong emphasis on the relationship between imperial propaganda and scientific,
pedagogical presentations o f American and world cultures.
6 Central Magazine, July 1874, wood engraving by William Mackwitz;
James Neal Primm, Lion o f the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri, 1764-1980 (St. Louis:
Missouri Historical Society P, 1998) 276.
7Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987; New York: Plume-Penguin, 1988) 180.
8 Roberto Maria Dainotto, All the Regions Do Smilingly Revolt: The
Literature o f Place and Region, Critical Inquiry, Volume 22, Number 3 (Spring
289
1996): 493. See Chapter 1 o f this study for more on Dainottos study o f this
reactionary regional model and its distinct ideological formulations.
290
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American Regional Theory:

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment

Prof. Elizabeth McHenry

UMI Number: 3024681

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To my director, Elizabeth McHenry, goes the most immediate gratitude

Manifest Regional Destiny: Toward a Theory o f the Region

The Emergence of Mark Twains Missouri: Regional Theory

American Idols, Regional Dissidents: William Faulkner and

Irony and Idolatry/Satire and Salvation: Flannery O Connors

Freshening the Pain: Regional and Racial Constructions in

CONCLUSION From Darky to Dissident, Ethical Past to Leading Region:

Fig. 1 Monument Valley, Stagecoach, 1939.

Freedom is not possible without slavery.

The above epigram enjoys an eerily appropriate place in the background of

Americas republican conception o f government arises in self-conscious relation to

building as a force inherent to the American continuum rather than as a mere

A sense o f almost Sartrean nausea before the vast terrain of an

That it is virtually impossible to identify the actual, geographic location o f such a

This is the commonplace that occasions the figural reading we call

The process at work here might be understood as a colonization o f Europes own

continuously troubling presence o f such hard facts as slavery and Native

Reconstructing St. Louis: The American Region as Cultural Unit

ability, at its most articulate, to respond humanistically to such forces, represents a

Before outlining the chapter by chapter progression o f my study, I think it

resolve the dilemma o f experiential microspace and administrative macrospace,

automatic and monolithic nationalism she intuitively beckons toward something

regional literary aesthetic. OConnors cultivation o f a modest vision fits

recognizable American context, that Morrisons work shares a common ground

1Richmond Enquirer, April 15, 1856; James M. McPherson, Batde Cry o f

15 See Primm, Chapter 8, The Fourth City? for a comprehensive account

The Regional Reading in an American Context

Emerging from the negative concept o f national literature problematized by

between spaces in a society.2 Immediately New assesses the implications of this

Defining the significance that particular spaces have for us, we

This statement formulates the capacity of notions o f region, the knowledge of

The National Thesis: Leo Marx and the Pastoral/Industrial Complex

In Life on the Mississippi each o f these ways o f apprehending the

the entire range o f landscape associations he confronted in his narrative journey.

monolithic essentialization of literature and culture that fails to register many of

The Persona o f Twains Missouri

Leo Marxs failure to appreciate the complicated, often contradictory

full loyalty which your memorialists [. . .] claim to possess.12 The extreme

Mark Twain's Middle Ground

Considered in this way Twains literary persona, traditionally canonized, quite

In his discussion o f the narrative style in Life on the Mississippi, Bridgman

[Life on the Mississippi] is an exceedingly uneven performance,

Bridgmans conclusion here, about the fundamentally self-referential,

The Fog Episode

colony, republic and individualism, determinism and freedom, characterizing its

ritual fashion, a similar emotional experience, with important differences in

the apology repairs their friendship, especially on the heels o f such an

Missouri Voices: Vernacular and Canonical

In my own childhood, it was not unusual for the spring freshet to