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I cannot remember that Chingachgook ever did anything useful, either in camp or on the war path. But when I summon up The Last of the Mohicans , a fondness for the old fellow that I was hardly aware of during the days of our close companionship steals over me. —Caroline Gordon, “A Visit to the Grove” “A Visit to the Grove” (1972) is one of several autobiographical essays Gordon wrote toward the latter part of her literary career, in which she elaborates on the interrelations among her childhood, maturation, and craftsmanship. At the outset of this essay, Gordon draws from Samuel Coleridge’s definition of fancy as a “mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space” with “no other counters to play with but fixities and definites” to deduce that the merit of fancy, or imagination, is its creative potential. Though the imagination cannot destroy or erase what was, it can remember and reorder what was and, consequently, reorient present and future perceptions of the past. Gordon does this herself by moving the role of Chingachgook, one of the characters she reluctantly played in games with her brothers and mostly male cousins throughout her childhood, from passive to active status. “I cannot remember that Chingachgook ever did anything useful, either in camp or on the war path,” she concedes in the passage that opens this chapter. Gordon’s admiration of Chingachgook is driven by the mystical nature of his character, which she perceives only in later life. Recalling scenes in which The Last of the Mohicans’s central characters are “gathered about a flickering campfire in the trackless wilderness,” preparing to eat, Gordon reasons that over the course of the novel, Hawkeye and Uncas remain in an uneasy battle to assert authority over nature (and perhaps over one another). Chingachgook, on the other hand, always stands “a little way o≠ so that in the shadows his body is hardly visible”; without altering or uttering a word, she concludes, he critically absorbs the moment and thus is best equipped in the end to SHE’LL TAKE HER STAND Caroline Gordon 4 J j 108 Caroline Gordon | 109 J reproduce the scene for future generations (“Visit” 517–18). This strategic renegotiation of the merit of marginalized or shadowed subjectivity in the case of Chigachgook critically recalls and reconfigures the space that Gordon ’s mother occupies in her memory in another of Gordon’s widely referenced late essays “Always Summer” (1972). In this chapter I explore the place of memory and marginality in the fabric of these essays as well as Gordon’s early novels of southern history: Penhally (1931), None Shall Look Back (1937), and The Garden of Adonis (1937). I develop the notion of feminist conservatism that I introduced in the last chapter to amplify critical insight into the shape that Gordon’s mythic consciousness took throughout the 1930s as the South’s social and racial economies modernized. A Modern Mistress Whereas Gordon’s life, from her distinguished ancestry to her careers as journalist, academic, and writer, has been widely documented and theorized , Gordon’s critique of southern history and ideologies within determinants of her cultural identity has only recently been interrogated.1 As I noted in chapter 1, Katherine Hemple Prown points up the materialist implications of Gordon’s views on southern “racial, sexual, and class-based hierarchies,” but in so doing casts Gordon in much the same light as Bristow ’s unwitting Creole, Gervaise Purcell—a victim, more or less, of (white) male-determined cultural circumstances rather than an agent of objectionable racial and class ethics. In accounting for Gordon’s identity politics , Prown appears to follow in the suspect footsteps of Sally Wood who, in her 1984 introduction to The Southern Mandarins, ironically underwrites Gordon’s racial conservatism by asserting that Gordon’s views on blacks were “dated” because she was “a woman of her time and place.” Wood’s problematic assertion not only excuses a tolerance of racism but oversimpli fies the South’s racial climate. Wood proposes that Gordon “largely shared the southern notions about blacks that were prevalent in the first half of [the twentieth] century. While Gordon felt responsible for all of the blacks in the county, she looked on them as recalcitrant children. Yet she trusted them, enjoyed their society, and recognized di≠erences among them in talent and intelligence.” Wood claims further that while “we can repudiate some of [Gordon’s] views from the vantage...

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