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

181 7 “I Will Write for the People” In 1886, a year prior to the publication of Alice Morris Buckner’s Towards the Gulf, the Boston firm of Roberts Brothers brought out Atalanta in the South, “a Romance”(as it was subtitled) that contains striking thematic parallels to Buckner ’s “Romance of Louisiana.” Written by Maud Howe Elliott—Columbian Woman writer,editor of Art and Handicraft in the Woman’s Building, and painter of frescoes in the mansion owned by Bertha and Potter Palmer—Atalanta in the South centers on the patrician society of economically depressed, racially divided New Orleans in the post–Civil War era. Like Towards the Gulf, Atalanta in the South reveals the tragic consequences of interracial love in a society that forbids it by dramatizing the relationship between an upper-class white man of French extraction and a young woman who possesses “one burning drop of negro blood.”1 In each novel, the girl’s ancestry is concealed and she is raised in Europe as an aristocratic young lady. Like Bamma Morant, the equally white-skinned Therese Caseneuve attempts to avert what she perceives as the fatal consequences of racial mixing in the segregated South. And, as in Towards the Gulf and many other novels of the American South, the emplotment of the lovers’ story within the larger “plot” of Southern history reveals, with oppressive irony, that slavery is a curse to both races. As in Buckner’s romance, the sins of the forefather—in both novels a wealthy planter who fathers the child of a slave—are visited on his descendents. Atalanta in the South and Towards the Gulf both register a preoccupation with social taxonomies that was pervasive in late nineteenth-century America. They also reflect the era’s widespread anxiety about the crossing or collapsing of social hierarchies, including those marked by gender, race, and class. The novels respond differently to what each one presents as a crisis of racial mixing (Bamma commits suicide, while Therese, like Harper’s Iola Leroy, forsakes the T U 182 Chapter Seven white society into which she was born); yet both respond to a society in flux by exposing the fault lines of social division.2 The precise coordinates of those fault lines vary. Although both texts are laced with the language of racial and ethnic “types,”in Atalanta in the South the social boundaries of caste loom larger than the biological consequences of racial mixing and what was termed “reversion of type.”3 Both novels, however, offer prospects of reconciliation and redemption that hint of regional and national cohesion.Both novels present the reader with scenes of horrific devastation (a flood of the Mississippi in Towards the Gulf, a plague in Atalanta of the South) that serve symbolic ends: through the extremity of hardship and suffering, social divisions are (at least temporarily) rendered inconsequential. If only fleetingly, these stories offer glimpses of a world in which “all barriers of caste were swept away,” and humanity is united and redeemed through suffering, as saint and sinner, fugitive and aristocrat become like “brother[s] and sisters to one another in blood.”4 In Towards the Gulf, Buckner draws parallels between the artificial barriers of society kept in place by laws and traditions that separate the races and the levees that restrain the mighty Mississippi in its inexorable race to the Gulf of Mexico. This device is doubly significant, for the image actually contains its own opposite: the “gulf” evokes both an unbridged chasm that separates the races in the segregated society Buckner portrays and a common reservoir, defined by the surrounding land, into which the races unavoidably meet and mix.5 The ambiguity of the image reflects profound ambivalence toward rigid hierarchies of types, classes, and castes during what Hazel Carby calls “the era of the separation of the races.”6 Navigating first the shelves of the Woman’s Building Library and then the fictional landscapes of its regionalist writers, in this chapter we consider various manifestations of regionalism in the library, paying particular attention to the way authors,books,people,and places become typed, classed, and ranked in place-based taxonomies. An examination of the classification and representation of stories, places, and people reveals multiple ways in which this library—as a physical repository as well as a collection of texts—reproduced and revised prevailing ideologies, even as it made space for alternative narratives of regional, national, and transnational identities. Here, as in the previous two chapters...

Share