Aristocrats, Yeomen, and Blue-Collar Folk: Understanding Class in the American South

While many scholars of southern literature have underscored the themes of race and gender, they have said relatively little about class; however, three recently published books provide a valuable contribution to understanding various constructions of class identity in the South. In Plantation Airs, Brannon Costello considers the ways in which aristocratic racial paternalism has determined class identity and division in the South; in Vale of Humility, George Hovis looks closely at six contemporary writers from various regions of North Carolina to highlight the centrality of yeoman values in the Tar Heel state; and in Larry Brown and the Blue-Collar South, Jean W. Cash and Keith Perry provide the first edition of critical essays on a working-class writer from Mississippi increasingly regarded as a significant southern author in the tradition of writers such as Harry Crews and Dorothy Allison. Taken together, these three studies offer readable, thought-provoking, and very different insights into a wide range of class issues represented in works by both canonical southern authors and less well-known contemporary writers.

Costello begins by contending that the tendency in scholarship to consider class only in terms of the lower classes has left other class constructions relatively unexamined; in response to this oversight, Costello selects texts by classic southern writers who portray the particularly complex ways in which adherence to the paternalism of the Old South in the midst of shifting economic and cultural practices has shaped class formation in the twentieth century. Through close, nuanced readings of texts by William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Gaines, and Walker Percy, and drawing usefully on theorists such as Max Weber, Thorstein Veblen, Pierre Bourdieux, Erik Olin Wright, Homi Bhabha, and Michel Foucault, Costello uncovers the multiple and varied responses by blacks and whites to the ways in which “radical changes in the racial, economic, and political landscape greatly complicated—but by no means demolished—a system of class formation rooted partially in agrarian racial performance” (14). While Costello employs more theories than the other two books in this review, his lucid and concise style helps readers unfamiliar with these theories to easily follow his arguments.

Costello’s novel reading of Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee examines how racial paternalism functioned as a system of social control that threatened to render African Americans unable to succeed outside of that system, and also points out that cross-racial coalitions between laborers offer the only possible site of resistance to the established order in the novel. He then persuasively demonstrates the ways in which Welty’s Delta Wedding and The Ponder Heart demystify the southern aristocracy’s use of racial paternalism to simultaneously create black labor and conceal the “true nature of that labor” (70). A chapter on William Faulkner is of particular interest given the way that scholarship on class and labor issues has generally ignored Faulkner. Looking closely at The Mansion and The Reivers, Costello makes an intriguing argument about the politics of waste under a system of racial paternalism, and reveals how The Reivers represents that such a system can no longer serve a changing South. Costello’s chapter on Gaines’s Of Love and Dust and “Bloodline” foregrounds how racial paternalism deliberately “divides white and black laborers” (100) and how interracial and cross-class alliances can succeed in dismantling paternalism only as long as they remain “grounded in the particular traditions and culture of the geographical area in which they take place” (122). His last chapter contends that Percy’s The Last Gentleman and Love in the Ruins reflect how white southerners hanging...