Storytelling, History, and the Postmodern South

Marse Chan, New Southerner: Or, Taking Thomas Nelson Page Seriously

88 Marse Chan, New Southerner Or, Taking Thomas Nelson Page Seriously k. stephen prince The years have not been kind to Thomas Nelson Page. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, Page was a darling of the American literary world. He published a string of successful novels, placed his short stories in every major literary magazine in the country, and won praise from northerners and southerners alike for his fictional depictions of a genteel and harmonious Old South. Enthusiastic accolades abounded: reviewers called Page “the literary pride of the South,” and a “complete master of the negro dialect of the old days.”1 No less an authority than Uncle Remus author Joel Chandler Harris once said of two of Page’s stories, “Marse Chan” and “Unc’ Edinburg’s Drowndin’”: “I would rather have written these two sketches than everything that has appeared since the war, or before the war, for that matter.”2 The last two decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, however, have been a different story. If his contemporaries cast Page as a master, historians have depicted him as something of a historical curiosity—a would-be southern aristocrat born fifty years too late, a talentless scribbler whose ridiculous and predictable fantasies struck a chord with a reading public afraid of modernity and desperate for an escape. When historians grapple with Page, they tend to follow a predictable formula. First, Page and his work are introduced, generally Taking Thomas Nelson Page Seriously 89 with reference to the “Old South,” “faithful slaves,” “dialect tales,” or “moonlight and magnolias.” At this point the historian may briefly editorialize on the artistic merit (or, more often, the lack thereof) of Page’s fiction. Quickly, however, the lens shifts from Page himself to his readership , as the historian discusses the wild popularity of Page’s stories and their role in fostering sectional reunion.3 While this vision of the plantation tales as harbingers of reconciliation is undoubtedly on point, the exclusive focus on Page’s writing thrusts a sort of intellectual passivity upon the man himself. By focusing solely on public responses to Page’s work, historians strip him of any historical agency. Page is rendered invisible; his stories achieve critical success and historical significance, but they do so almost in spite of him. Most of all, the historiography leaves us with the impression that there was no theory—intellectual, artistic, political, or cultural—underlying the production of Page’s works, beyond a firm conviction that “even the moonlight was richer and mellower ‘before the war’ than it is now.”4 In the process of taking Thomas Nelson Page seriously, therefore, I mean to bring Page out of the shadows cast by his own work and to consider the proposition that Page may have been a thinker as well as a writer. Between 1884 and 1910—the peak years of Page’s literary production— he published dozens of essays and delivered hundreds of speeches on southern history and storytelling.5 Although he admitted in his unpublished memoir that his initial move into writing was rooted in simple “vanity” and a “desire to see myself in print,” Page quickly styled himself a leading expert on southern literature.6 In the process Page developed and perfected an intricate reading of the southern past and the sectional conflict, a distinctly modern take on the power of culture and public opinion, and an alternative conceptualization of the New South rooted in literature and storytelling. At its heart Page’s literary and historical philosophy rested on three central premises. First, he believed that the way that the public understood the South—as a location, a people, and a civilization—carried great social, cultural, and political weight. Second, he argued that, for the vast majority of U.S. history, northerners had exercised almost exclusive control over the images of the South at play in American culture. Third, Page insisted that the white South must learn to tell its own story to the nation in the post-Reconstruction era. The end of Reconstruction marked an 90 k. stephen prince important turning point in southern history, the moment at which the “Southern people”—a class, it should be noted, that Page limited to “the landowning or better class of whites, as contra-distinguished not only from the negroes, but also from the lower...