"The Vintage" Faulkner: Imagining Futurity in the Degenerate South of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I. The Southern Field-Island

. . . the budding Southern mind. . . . strikes us to-day as beyond measure queer and quaint and benighted—innocent above all; stamped with the inalienable Southern sign, the inimitable rococo note. . . . [it] looks to our present eyes as artlessly perverse, as untouched by any intellectual tradition of beauty or wit, as some exhibited array of the odd utensils or divinities of lone and primitive islanders.

—Henry James (The American Scene 374)

. . . marked with the queerness, among many queernesses . . .

—Henry James (The American Scene 339)

Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it. . . . reminding one of a fungus.

—Charlotte Perkins Gilman ("The Yellow Wallpaper" 166, 175)

In his 1888 essay "The South as a Field for Fiction," north-south transplant, writer, and lawyer Albion Tourgée writes, "it cannot be denied that American fiction of today, whatever may be its origin, is predominantly Southern in type and character" (205). He continues,

A foreigner studying our current literature, without knowledge of our history, and judging our civilization by our fiction, would undoubtedly conclude that the South was the seat of intellectual empire in America, and the African the chief romantic element of our population.

205; (emphasis added)

Claiming the South as central—indeed the center—of American intellectual empire, of "our fiction," stands in stark contrast to much other writing about the South from the perspective of non-Native southerners during the years classified by historians as the Southern Redemption or Jim Crow South. "[W]hatever may be its origin" (205), the imagined South infects and replicates in American fiction, writ large.

Here, Tourgée seems an anomaly, distancing himself from "the Northern man," who "sees that twenty-eight out of every hundred of the white people of the South cannot read or write, and at once concludes that in literary production as well as in mechanical and financial achievement the North must of necessity excel" (206). For Tourgée, the northerner writes the South as abject—tortured by its history of slavery and race relations, far from elevating the "African" to a "chief" place of any sort. The South, from the northern point of view, is incapable of producing any literary talent much less a substantial one with a central role in the project of our national literature. In contrast to northerners writing the abject, deviant South, Tourgée discovers that the budding mind of the "Southern Novelist. . . . has never any doubt. He loves the life he portrays and sincerely believes in its superlative excellence. He does not study it as a curiosity, but knows it by intuition. He never sneers at its imperfections, but worships even its defects" (206). Pride of place, respect and love for region, comes before the acknowledgment of any deviance. For the southern novelist, the South may be marked with a queerness, but it is a generative queerness, instilling pride and suspicious of external narratives of southern debasement. This peculiarly southern cultural mindset at the end of the nineteenth century and into the beginning of the twentieth century would set the scene for what would later come to be a reactionary "Southern Renaissance" in American letters, with William Faulkner as its titanic figurehead. And yet, author and Nobel laureate William Faulkner is not the subject of this essay; instead I will read the character of Howard Faulkner in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Vintage" as representative of dangerous, if well-intended, northern attitudes toward our Southland during the Progressive Era.

Arguably, much of what Jennifer Rae Greeson has labeled our South—the South imagined as an internal and deviant other to the larger nation, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—was written by the non-southerners that Tourgée describes. Roughly the years 1880–1920 saw sharp literary contrasts drawn between southern authors classified as culturally less interesting to a national literary project ("local color" writers like Thomas Nelson Page, Thomas Dixon, Kate Chopin, George Washington Cable, Charles Chesnutt, and Joel Chandler Harris) and northern, metropolitan authors of "robust" American literature...