The Mississippi River and Images of the Twentieth-Century South

As in the nineteenth century, the Mississippi River continues to be an iconic symbol of Southern identity. It has been the channel through which major Southern history, music, literature, art, film, travel, legends, and myths flow. Not surprisingly, though, Southern views and representations of the river in the twentieth century have been as varied as the river itself, which, through its currents and floods, has altered Southern geography. Moreover, because of vast cultural changes in the South the river speaks a different language than it did in nostalgic antebellum fiction or Twain’s adventuresome tales. The Mississippi has been personified as a menacing foe as it was in the catastrophic flood of 1927 or a place to interrogate and challenge Southern memory. Yet the river can also be a place to reflect on theology. In 1941, William Alexander Percy spoke of “the great river, the unappeasable god of the country, feared and loved” (Lanterns). And in 2015 poet Kirk Woodward eloquently claimed that the Mississippi “can be a prayer” (Down to the Dark River 190). The ten essays in this special issue on the Mississippi River explore and emphasize the complex relationships between Big Muddy and images of the South.

The opening essay by Thomas Ruys Smith studies the cultural life of the Mississippi River at the beginning of the twentieth century through a wide variety of its representations in novels by Southern writers like George Washington Cable, Mary Noailles Murfree, and Ruth McEnery Stuart to travel articles published in major illustrated journals as well as in Tin-Pan Alley songs that reached audiences nationwide. Smith argues that, in diverse ways, these texts all emphasize the river as a multivalent symbol of the South at a key moment of transition. As he points out, “Antiquated, obsolete, stagnant; a former symbol of wealth and industry now characterized by poverty, nostalgia and romance; a space powerfully defined by racial hierarchy: the steamboat still plying its trade (or simply decaying) on the Lower Mississippi, and the roustabout still loading and unloading her cargo—all became perfect synecdoches for the South in popular culture at this moment.” While these texts reflect an earlier era in the life of the river and the South, Smith believes they also foreshadow the river as an agent of change, and, in previously unacknowledged ways, shaped an imagined Mississippi that would emerge in the later decades of the twentieth century, most particularly in Edna Ferber’s defining Show Boat (1926).

Historian Christopher Morris next assesses the Mississippi’s cultural impact through cartography. He claims that the shape of the southern half of the Mississippi River, with its meander loops, is as iconic as the river itself and concludes that it is no wonder Mark Twain called the Mississippi the “Crookedest River” in the world. Morris argues that perhaps no image has captured the wandering Mississippi better than the colorful maps produced in 1944 by Harold Norman Fisk for the Mississippi River Commission. These maps depict a time when the river moved without restriction, seeming to offer proof that twentieth-century engineering was a mistake. Yet Fisk maintained that the image of a crooked river was a relic of the past reflected through the title he used for his maps, “Ancient Courses of the Mississippi River,” reprints of which, by the way, are sought after today as objects of popular art. The Mississippi, Fisk steadfastly maintained, was naturally straightening itself out, cutting off its many bends, deepening its channel, and seeking to contain itself within its banks. Morris insists, therefore, that Fisk’s maps were not intended to portray the river's movement; actually they predicted stasis. Ironically, they have become proleptic reminders of what engineering and nature would do to the river over the decades.

While Twain (see studies by Creighton; Dix) and Tennessee Williams (Kolin) are among the Southern authors who have frequently included the river in their works, other writers have also acknowledged the Mississippi’s iconic role in Southern culture. In the midst of the Depression, for instance, William Faulkner looked back to the Great Flood of 1927 for the...