Counterfeit Gentlemen: Manhood and Humor in the Old South

Introduction: Negotiating Manhood in the Old South

Introduction negotiating Manhood in the old south This is a book about values and identity in the old south. it uses ideas about manhood to examine those values, and it uses humor to explore manhood. it is not, strictly speaking, a book about the comic tradition in the south, a subject that has been thoroughly and skillfully explored.1 it does not deal with yarn-spinners or tale-tellers per se, although those people were an important part of southern history and constitute one of its enduring legacies. it is emphatically not a book about salt-river roarers , alligator-men, or bear-wrasslers either, although it uses those figures where relevant. it is, rather, a book about white southern men and the way they regarded themselves, and if there is a common reference point here it is the alligator-man’s opposite, the southern gentleman, who appears not as a storyteller or snob but as the subject of an ambivalent expression of how antebellum southern men defined themselves, and what that tells us about what it was, before the war, to be southern. Why we should study values and identity in the old south may appear problematic, since southern history is by definition a foray into values and identity.These days such a journey is a walk along the great divide of modernity.falling away to one side is a view that presents the region as precapitalistic,patriarchal,honor-bound,and conservative—a perspective that stresses class and race above all else.to the other is a south modern and fluid, a partner in the evolution of capitalism and democratic institutions , but not a full partner, given the presence of slavery. Here the very xiii xiv Counterfeit Gentlemen issue of class is so complicated it threatens to read itself out of the picture , and even race may appear overstressed.2 My focus is on the passage between these two idealized souths, the area where tensions between tradition and modernity make the going interesting. frankly, i think that the old south was a good deal more progressive than has often been assumed , but its liberalism was nuanced and complex, defined as often as not by contradictions and doubts. These nuances are worth a hard look, and i simply wanted to get at my own answers in my own way—which led me to the study of manhood. Why we should use manhood to explore values is only lately becoming clear. Gender is fundamental to identity, and its “work,” as anne Goodwyn Jones calls it, is to affirm, deny, or reevaluate the complex attitudes which make up a culture’s “dominant fiction.”3 The dominant fiction about the antebellum south is that it was a patriarchy in which power and authority rippled outward and downward from men whose view of themselves was stable and simple. This idea has its interpretive advantages. simplicity is the dominant trait of patriarchs. They lumber about like cultural dinosaurs, dominating things by sheer bulk, force, and a single-minded conviction that God put them on earth to rule.This perception of patriarchy has led to a curious “otherness” in southern gender and racial studies. We know quite a bit about women by looking at how they defined themselves in relation to men. We know much about slaves and free blacks based upon how they defined themselves in relation to white men. Patriarchy serves almost as a mathematical constant here, something by which other points can be calculated. But do we know much about white men as white men? from the sheer bulk of what has been written on the old south it would seem obvious that we do, but our assumptions about patriarchal mastery and male solidarity are a bit tidy and, well, humorless. in a region that added over 25 million acres of prime real estate in the fifteen years after Cherokee removal began in 1830 alone, that by 1860 produced 70% of the world’s cotton supply,life was anything but stable,and in changing environments like these even tough traditions like patriarchy can get fluid, be redefined , and go off on tangents. i see no evidence that white southern men were less human or more constant or more stable than anyone else in that remarkable era. They certainly did not see themselves as static or unchallenged. language matters, and what is remarkable to me is how seldom southern white males used the term “patriarchy.”They preferred the term “manhood.” Manhood is a shifty term...