Mrs. Durham’s Discipline: Race, Nation, and American Literary History’s Spots

In Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots, Mrs. John Durham, partner in her clergyman husband’s calling to rescue the South from the scourges of Republican corruption and “Negro supremacy” (194), offers the following causal account of the region’s plight: “A little Yankee woman wrote a crude book. The single act of that woman’s will caused the war, killed a million men, desolated and ruined the South, and changed the history of the world” (262). Politics aside, one might assume—a century since Dixon wrote, and several decades since literary critics began to devote sustained attention to the contested categories and interrelations of historiography, authorial agency, and social change—that, for American literary historians, Mrs. Durham’s interpretive reductiveness on all of these counts would be obvious. One would be wrong.

Michael Gilmore cites Mrs. Durham’s judgment in the concluding pages of The War on Words: Slavery, Race, and Free Speech in American Literature (2010), and follows the quotation with this comment: “In 1902, no realist, and quite possibly no northern author, would have endorsed such extravagant claims for the aesthetic (or the unaesthetic, according to the preacher’s wife); but the South, blaming the war on abolitionism and still smarting from the Reconstruction amendments, had never forgotten what writing could accomplish” (272). Gilmore’s argument is that “the South,” here, has it right. Mrs. Durham, he explains, “draws our notice to the principal factor” in bringing about the Civil War and African-American civil rights: “[T]he power of literature” (272). Indeed, he suggests, had postwar northern authors not forgotten this liberatory power—had they not been so “undone by a loss of faith in the verbal’s efficacy” that they abandoned the “prophetic tradition in support of racial justice” that animated and unified the work of their American Renaissance predecessors (267)—the progressive change that Mrs. Durham excoriates might have been more robust and enduring.

Gilmore’s opening sentence announces that his book “makes a large claim about the continuity of nineteenth-century American literature” (1), a continuity predicated on this literature’s production under unremitting social and psychological pressure to silence, censor, or equivocate free (which Gilmore equates with liberationist) speech about slavery and race. For individual authors, “the censor’s presence” might prompt inspired defiance or creative indirection or guarded equivocation or dispirited compliance (1). But always it was constitutive, especially in the antebellum period, wherein, Gilmore asserts, “an atmosphere of intimidation” respecting anti-slavery speech “affected every literary work produced in the United States between the 1830s and the Civil War” (15).

Such initial sweeping claims spawn the sweeping sub-claims to which, with Mrs. Durham’s assistance, I have already alluded: that the censor was by and large triumphantly resisted by antebellum writers, only to triumph over the postwar realists; that, in their “recoil from the verbal’s agency” (30), these writers tragically abandoned “the prophetic paradigm” and “the word-deed dynamic of the American Renaissance” (31) that had affirmed and shown “the interchangeability of speech and action” (53); and that “the high quality of antebellum literature” itself was a product of its attempt “to resuscitate the revolutionary template of verbal activism” whose “acme . . . was Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence” (25). I find all of these claims overstated, lacking in—even hostile to—nuance, and ultimately unpersuasive. Indeed, the readings advanced to sustain them often seemed to me so tenuous, strained, or—in a couple of cases—counter-evidentiary as to cause me to wonder what might have drawn and tethered a scholar as mature and distinguished as Gilmore to an argument so categorical...