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INTRODUCTION  THE PROBLEM OF FLEM SNOPES’S HAT Southern History, Racial Paternalism, and Class Recent years have seen a steady flow of important scholarship in southern literary studies, work that has opened up new avenues of exploration in terms of race, gender, history, and the American South’s relationship to the Caribbean. The concept of“class,” however, is situated along an avenue which, as Fred Hobson has noted, southern literary scholars have seldom trod (But Now I See 43). To be sure, critics of southern literature have paid increasing attention to the works of socially marginalized white southerners—the so-called poor whites or“white trash”—such as Erskine Caldwell and Dorothy Allison, and well we should: understanding the works of these writers is essential to understanding class in the South.Yet I fear we have let the spectacular, often grotesque descriptions of poverty and deprivation in these works distract us from other important aspects of class in the South. It can be difficult to wrest our gaze from the sight of Jeeter and Ada Lester burning to death in their dilapidated home in Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, or from the sight of young Harry Crews’s skin being boiled from his body in his memoir, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. Of course, the spectacular nature of these depictions makes them no less complicated, as much insightful scholarship on these writers attests. Too often, however, our only answer to the question “What about class?” is to offer a list of these writers and the critical works about them.1 But we make a dangerous mistake when we conflate “class” and “trash,” much as earlier generations of critics conflated “race” and“black” or“gender” and“woman.” Such a conflation ignores both the slipperiness and instability of class hierarchies and the often confounding variety of other ways in which“class” operates in the South. One such crucial aspect is the relationship between class and racial paternalism. I contend that well into the twentieth century, the performance of attitudes and behaviors—including, most significantly, racial paternalism—associated with an idealized version of agrarian antebellum  2 PLANTATION AIRS aristocracy was essential for wealthy white southerners to validate their identities as “aristocrats” and for upwardly mobile white southerners to separate themselves from“trash.” Take the example of Flem Snopes. The Mansion (959), the final novel in Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy, chronicles the last stage of Flem’s climb from poverty and obscurity in the rural community of Frenchman’s Bend to what seems the pinnacle of wealth, prestige, and respectability as a bank president in the town of Jefferson— just before his murder at the hands of kinsman Mink Snopes. Widely considered a money-hungry upstart by his neighbors, Flem takes care to exhibit his success in symbols and language associated with an agrarianoriented southern aristocracy. Veteran Snopes-watcher V. K. Ratliff describes Flem’s new abode, Manfred de Spain’s “rejuvenated ancestral home” (458), as “jest a house,” and notes that it would have been a perfectly acceptable house for de Spain or even Colonel Sartoris, since Sartoris “had been born into money and respectability too, and Manfred de Spain had been born into respectability at least even if he had made a heap of the money since” (469). However, Flem knows that since he had to earn the house and the bank presidency, had to “snatch and tear and scrabble both of them outen the hard enduring resisting rock,” such an ordinary house would not do for him; instead, his house“would have to be the physical symbol of all them generations of respectability and aristocracy that not only would a been too proud to mishandle other folks’ money, it couldn’t possibly ever needed to” (469). Because the town does not see Flem as legitimately heir to the Old South tradition that is for them synonymous with aristocracy, Flem must “put on airs” that align him with that tradition. His new upper-crust status, then, is precarious and requires constant reinforcement, requires a performance that, paradoxically , represents both his skill with a dollar and his indifference to the base world of economics. Therefore, he sets about converting this“jest a house” into a replica of an antebellum mansion, white columns and all (469). But the house alone does not suffice: Ratliff goes on to point out that Flem only becomes“completely complete . . . with a Negro cook and a yard boy that...

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