In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  PATERNALISM, PROGRESS, AND“PET NEGROES” Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee Zora Neale Hurston’s 948 novel Seraph on the Suwanee follows the rise of Jim and Arvay Meserve, poor white southerners who overcome poverty and tragedy to become wealthy land- and business-owners, new aristocrats for a New South. Their journey is not without its pitfalls, however, chief among them the feelings of inferiority that keep Arvay—daughter of a poor white family of turpentine“Crackers”—from believing that she is truly worthy of Jim, the scion of a once rich, now ruined family of planters. Late in the novel Arvay returns to her hardscrabble hometown of Sawley to attend to her dying mother and to reconnect with the“pineywoods Cracker” roots that she feels her more aristocratic husband does not appreciate or even accept. Arvay quickly finds, however, that the rest of her family does not share her mother’s joy at her homecoming. Her jealous, spiteful, and litigious sister Larraine and brother-in-law Carl resent Arvay’s wealth and material comforts, emblems of success and status which stand in stark contrast to their own misery and squalor. In a particularly telling scene, Larraine and Carl express their bitterness in terms that speak directly to what I see as one of Hurston’s central concerns in this text.When Arvay asks Carl to drive into town and inform the funeral home of her mother’s death, Carl bristles and tells her that she should“let that rich and noblefied husband of yours run into town for you” (857). We might merely chalk Carl’s phrasing here—“rich and noblefied”— up to Hurston’s colorful rendering of lower-class rural white dialect.1 But Hurston, I would argue, has something more complicated in mind. The suffix -fied implies that Jim’s nobleness is not an essential, fixed part of his identity, but is, rather, the result of a long process of, for lack of a better word, noblefication. Moreover, by framing “rich” and “noblefied” as discrete terms, Carl unconsciously indicates that he sees them as related but not necessarily automatically synonymous; as Max Weber might have it, “rich” might refer to Jim’s “market possibilities” and “noble” to his status 6 or his style of life. Presumably, then, when Jim first arrived in Sawley and married Arvay, he was not noble, or at least not as noble as he has become. I would argue that“noblefication”—the process of climbing the ladder of class—is inextricably linked to racial paternalism, an economic and social performance in which upwardly mobile white southerners demonstrate their allegedly essential superiority by treating African Americans as inferior and childlike. In Seraph on the Suwanee, Hurston offers a skillfully drawn portrait and a cutting critique of the ways in which white New Southerners such as Jim Meserve deploy racial paternalism both to increase their wealth and to constitute their elite class status along“noble,” aristocratic lines adapted from a romanticized version of the Old South plantation ideal.2 Yet this process has potentially disastrous results for all involved: relying on a performance of racial paternalism to validate an “aristocratic” class position commits white southerners to an attitude of sycophancy, a permanent performance that keeps them from meaningful engagement with the world and with each other. Hurston argues that this sycophancy is particularly a problem for women, who, despite even the most successful performances of paternalism, remain subordinate to the power of their husbands. Further, Hurston suggests that the paternalist system threatens to render African Americans unfit for any kind of success outside that system, unable to capitalize on the opportunities that may arise for achievement on their own terms. The immediate post–World War II years during which Hurston worked on Seraph were crucial years of change for the racial, social, and economic structures in the South. The experience of the war only ampli- fied the reform spirit and desire for self-determination that had been gaining force in the 930s, partially because of the New Deal. After the war, many African Americans exhibited a refreshed, robust interest in politics and voting rights, and they demonstrated an independence that threatened the racial logic of the paternalist system (Goldfield 45, Burton 30–3). The rise of the business elite, who were less invested in traditional racial mores than the still-influential planter class was, increased opportunities for African Americans to achieve and articulate...

Share