Hearts of Darkness: Wellsprings of a Southern Literary Tradition (review)

In this study, distinguished historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown turns his attention to how "the ethic of honor, the tragedy of melancholy, and the personal origins of artistic imagination" intertwine to shape a southern literary tradition (xi). The author of several important studies of southern honor, Wyatt-Brown seeks to show how concern with personal integrity and family dignity and fear of shame informed much southern writing. He finds that many southern writers suffered from a psychological depression that led them to pursue themes of loss, failure, and debilitation. Although some, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, and Ellen Glasgow, created distinctive, brilliant, even innovative literary texts out of these themes, most were not able to overcome the psychological costs of living and writing in accordance with a restrictive social code. The result, according to Wyatt-Brown, is a literature often marked by limitation, namely a lack of introspection and understanding of personal and social responsibility. The basis for nineteenth-century southern literature was protecting rather than interrogating the social order and the illusion of personal integrity (118). Nevertheless, through "a creative probing of death, ruin, and inner turmoil," Poe, Abraham Lincoln, and many others produced magnificent works "that disclose so much about the human condition" (228).

Growing out of the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History, Hearts of Darkness promises to be a work that could solidify common assumptions about southern literature, or, at the very least, reflect thoughtfully on some of its dominant themes. Just as importantly, it stands to address the ways writers as distinct as Poe, Twain, and the New England-born Constance Woolson manifest a southern character.

Yet the book's genesis as a series of lectures is a major weakness, for its ideas do not adequately gel, and by consequence, the book is uneven. Although mental depression, imagination, and honor make an appearance in each of the book's eight chapters, the relationship between these three central ideas is not weighed and revised consistently or systematically enough. In some chapters, writers' psychological demons help them create rich literature; in others, the demons, coupled with a tendency toward undiscerning romanticism, lead to doggerel. The discrepancy results, apparently, from some writers' investment in the pursuit of honor to the detriment of personal and authorial development, while others are inspired to critique the culture of honor. What is missing from Hearts of Darkness is a convincing explanation of how honor enabled as well as stifled the imagination, leading to searching works of psychological realism—such as Woolson's and Chopin's fiction—and satire—such as Twain's—as well as literature marked by reactionary stereotypes and plotting.

Hearts of Darkness also suffers from Wyatt-Brown's conflating of writers' psychological problems with those of their literary characters or personae. In the chapter on Poe, for instance, he summarizes "The Black Cat" and after mentioning the narrator's murder of his wife and burial of her cat, ponders "Is it credible that Poe failed to recognize himself in the account?" (5). Similarly, in discussing one of Poe's most famous poems, Wyatt-Brown avers, "'The Raven' is the representation of the narrator's—and . . . the poet's—own melancholy" (17). Later, in noting some authors' use of pseudonyms, he comments on the way authors may "think of themselves not as single personalities but as two distinct beings" as a way to generate characters. "The authors slip into these fictional skins, as it were, and often they imagine that the figures created have an independent existence and direct the thoughts of their creator" (156-57). Of course seeing written texts as a simple reflection of a writer's psyche is a common mistake, especially with the admittedly troubled Poe. Yet Wyatt-Brown's work is most persuasive when he keeps in sight the complexity of the creative process and acknowledges the differences between text and selfhood.

In one of...