Counterfeit Gentlemen: Manhood and Humor in the Old South

4. Useful Alloys

4 Useful Alloys there is a moment near the end of Thomas Bangs Thorpe’s only novel, The Master’s House, when the hero, Graham Mildmay, gathers up his rifle and tries to slip away, as if going off on a hunt. His wife stops him for an awkward moment, looking at the gun. “i could not have the heart to shoot any thing;” she says, “even the looks of that poor buck you brought home the other day, made me feel sad,—its glazed and liquid eyes haunt me even now.” Mildmay takes her hand and starts philosophizing : “There is enough of the savage life in us, annie, in spite of our civilization,”he says,“to make the sports of the field sometimes agreeable; i think, perhaps, a dash of the wild man forms a useful alloy for even the noblest natures.” With that he travels to a prearranged spot, rubs a little dirt between his fingers to steady his nerves (a hunter’s trick), and kills his neighbor in a duel.1 This is an arresting scene, full of nuance and contradiction. Mildmay is a pure southern aristocrat with a fine plantation, but he has a new england education, a new england wife, and new england reservations about slavery. He is sensitive and reflective, characteristics we hardly expect to find in a cotton planter from West feliciana Parish, louisiana. 67 68 Counterfeit Gentlemen still, his fascination with the hunt and sports of the field is clearly masculine ; her revulsion, feminine. The talk of wild men and noble natures is romantic, but its merger into the sporting imagery of the hunt and its quick evolution into ritualized, ceremonial murder are jarring. even the innocent act of steadying his nerves becomes loathsome,a plunge literally into the dirt. Mildmay crosses a boundary into a place where he should not go, but it is a vague line, more a grey zone where the forms and ends of violence get confused. The most incongruous thing about the scene, however, is that it was written by Thomas Bangs Thorpe.Thorpe’s reputation as a writer and humorist is based almost wholly on “The Big Bear of arkansas”—a tale so definitive of the mighty hunter school that William t. Porter made it the title piece of his first collection of rough frontier humor. “Big Bear” was crude and violent, as was much of what Thorpe wrote. His characters arm themselves to the teeth with guns, dogs, and specially equipped steamboats ; they chase down creation bears, hunt buffalo, shoot topknots off of indians, despoil the countryside, knock down 200-year-old trees, fight each other, and kill anything that moves.They are sometimes bear-eaters and alligator-men, but more often they are gentlemen on a toot—out there slumming with the bad boys like the city slickers in James dickey’s Deliverance. That said, The Master’s House is almost predictable, the parting shot of a deeply disillusioned man. to return to Deliverance again: if Thorpe resembles anyone in that novel it is ed Gentry, the aptly named photographer tagging along for the fun and the chance to be a real man but altogether too serious and too sensitive to really let go. Gentry, when faced with the opportunity to kill a deer, cannot bring himself to destroy something so aesthetically pure and natural. similarly, Thorpe’s artistic instincts may have limited him. He was a painter and a new englander and a preacher’s son who aspired to be a southern gentleman and who self-consciously adopted the gentleman’s style—especially his ferocious love of tent life and manly sports.Those qualities are worth noting, for he brought an outsider’s view to southern masculinity, and his stories ultimately are not about rip-snorters but about his own adopted peers. for seventeen years he existed in the south as an exotic animal,a literary man and an artist scratching out a living doing oils, stories, and editorials for the nouveaux riches of new orleans and upriver louisiana. He took part in their politics, their boosterism, and their recreations; he wrote stories about the wonders of nature and the thrill of the chase for the Spirit of the Times. He was hardly a whooper or a chest-beater or even an armed fop, yet his stories center on violence. violence is the element that gives fire to his best work...