Counterfeit Gentlemen: Manhood and Humor in the Old South

Notes

Notes introduCtion: Negotiating Manhood in the Old South 1. This was accomplished most recently and superbly by Justus in Fetching the Old Southwest, a really good book that deserves attention from historians, folklorists, and humor critics alike. The literature on antebellum southern humor is dauntingly large, most of it appearing at the hands of literary critics and folklorists.rather than run this footnote to absurd lengths,i refer the reader to specialized studies that appear below and in the succeeding chapters,to Justus’s bibliography,and especially to the bibliographic section in a collection of essays edited by inge and Piacentino, Humor of the Old South. 2. again we confront a dauntingly large literature. for the precapitalist, premodern view, see any of the influential works by eugene Genovese and elizabeth fox-Genovese, esp. Fruits of Merchant Capital; the classic Political Economy of Slavery; and the recent Mind of the Master Class. for the “progressive ” perspective, see any of several works by o’Brien, esp. Conjectures of Order; his essays in Placing the South; and the essays in Rethinking the South. see also oakes, The Ruling Race; shore, Southern Capitalists; plus specialized studies cited below. 3. Jones, “The Work of Gender,” in Morris and reinhardt, eds., Southern Writers and Their Worlds, 41–56. 4. leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance, 4 and passim. 5. Jones, “The Work of Gender,” 51. 6. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States. 7. see o’Brien, Conjectures, ch. 9, for a fine discussion of Hundley. 8. on simms’s world view, see esp. ridgely, William Gilmore Simms, 22–23 and passim. 9. Greenberg, Honor and Slavery, quoted on 25; Wyatt-Brown, Southern 129 Honor; also see Wyatt-Brown’s Shaping of Southern Culture; stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South; plus specialized studies noted below. 10. in addition to the “modernists”listed in note 2 above, see ownby, Subduing Satan; Quist, Restless Visionaries; Wells, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800–1861; Bode, “formation of evangelical Communities in Middle Georgia.” 11. leverenz, Manhood, 72–73. 12.taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, 152. 13. on Porter, see yates, Porter. again, Justus’s Fetching the Southwest is the best of the recent studies of southwestern humor. see also Justus’s introduction to inge and Piacentino, eds., Humor of the Old South, and the introduction to Cohen and dillingham, eds., Humor of the Old Southwest, xiii–xxviii, a fine anthology of stories and tales. 14. Parks, “Three streams of southern Humor,” 147–59. 15. Bier, Rise and Fall of American Humor, 63. 16. Bergson, Laughter. 17. lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor; see also his introduction to an anthology, Comic Tradition in America. Cohen and dillingham echo this assessment, although not as stridently; see Humor of the Old Southwest, xv–xvi. for variations, see also fellman,“alligator Men and Cardsharpers,”and Bruce, Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South, esp. ch. 10. Justus, however, utterly rejects lynn’s analysis as “clabbered up in its inapt hygienic metaphor”(in inge and Piacentino, Humor of the Old South, 7). 18. oring, Israeli Humor, 129. see also oring’s other works, esp. Jokes and Their Relations, a superb book on humor theory that stresses appropriate incongruity , and oring, ed., Folk Groups and Folklore Genres. see also Walker and dresner, eds., Redressing the Balance, xix–xxxiv, reprinted as “Women’s Humor in america,” in Walker, ed., What’s So Funny, 171–84. alternate approaches to humor are nicely collected in Corrigan, ed., Comedy, esp. Corrigan’s introduction , 1–13. anyone studying humor must also read Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. 19.The analysis that follows is taken from a collective profile of the humorists used in Cohen and dillingham’s anthology, Humor of the Old Southwest, supplemented by biographical information gleaned from various sources. a spreadsheet divided into categories of birth, parentage, occupation, residence, education, political affiliation, and ownership of slaves was constructed; the results are summarized in the text. 20. Bier, Rise and Fall, 75. 21.turner, Ritual Process. Chapter 1. The Conception and Estimate of a Gentleman 1. The literature on the gentleman is large, and more specialized references will follow in the text as appropriate. for a varied and often contradictory sam130 Notes to Pages xviii–2 pling, see Gray, Writing the South, esp. ch. 2; taylor, Cavalier and Yankee; isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790; lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor, esp. ch. 1...