Tell about Southern Studies: What Do They Do There?

Scorn clichés as we may, they have a disconcerting way of reminding us of larger issues, and the overwhelming cliché of Southern studies is Canadian Shreve McCannon’s needling of his Harvard roommate, Mississippian Quentin Compson, in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936): “Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all” (142). Shreve’s questions may reduce the South to a habitat for exotics or for the stereotypical grotesques associated with the region, but his final question, “Why do they live at all,” points to the recurring issues of Southern values and Southern exceptionalism. Who needs to believe that such a region associated with racism, sexism, and willful ignorance exists at all, and why would anyone want to contemplate it? If one broods about his native South like Quentin or become fascinated with the South like outsider Shreve, does that mean that one has become contaminated with its toxins? The scholar of other varieties of US literature—poetry, environmental studies, Transcendentalism, ethnic, and so forth—need not face the kind of prejudice so well expressed by Shreve: that one is attracted to Southern studies for all the wrong reasons, especially an identification with the fantasyland of Margaret Mitchell’s Tara, a faux nostalgia for a Golden Age gone with the wind that masks a longing to be among the elite in a racist, classist, and sexist society. The authors under consideration here try to confront the lingering bias against Southern studies by declaring their commitment to various types of eclecticism, either by eschewing allegiance to a single methodology as if privileging any one view might reinforce or reinscribe the authoritarianism often associated with the South, as in Jay Watson’s literary criticism and the essays edited by Jason Philips, or by promulgating a new paradigm comprised of eclectic components, as in Jon Smith’s cultural study.

Seemingly, everyone has a story to “tell about the South,” even non-Southerners who may believe that they don’t think about the South at all. The idea that the South is a peculiar region formed by its peculiar institution, and its particular consequences, has a genealogy going back more than two centuries. That history has been excellently explored in two recent books, Jennifer Rae Greeson’s Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature (2010) and Leigh Anne Duck’s The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism (2006), but its prevailing stereotype was delineated by that quintessential Yankee, Henry Adams, writing at the dawn of the twentieth century, when he described his classmate at antebellum Harvard, “Roony” Lee, the son of Robert E. Lee.

Tall, largely built, handsome, genial, with liberal Virginia openness towards all he liked, he had also the Virginian habit of command and took leadership as his natural habit. . . . For a year, at least, Lee was the most popular and prominent young man in his class, but then seemed slowly to drop into the background. The habit of command was not enough, and the Virginian had little else. He was simple beyond analysis. . . . No one knew enough to know how ignorant he was; how childlike; how helpless before the relative complexity of a school. As an animal, the Southerner seemed to have every advantage, but even as an animal he steadily lost ground.

(57)

With his customary acumen and irony, Adams is also expressing the attraction-repulsion or love-hate relationship with the Southerner that for centuries has characterized a defining regional difference in the US: southerners are attractive because they have the emotional expressiveness and physical freedom that we nostalgically associate with childhood; they are repellant because they are impulsively immature and physically expressive. Not coincidentally, these stereotypes...