The Politics of Southern Pastoral Literature, 1785–1885: Jeffersonian Afterlives

252 Pages·2019·1.952 MB·English

by  Peter Templeton

P E T E R T E M P L E T O N
T h e P O L I T I C S o f
S O U T H E R N
P A S T O R A L
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 7 8 5 – 1 8 8 5
J e f f e r s o n i a n A f t e r l i v e s
The Politics of Southern Pastoral Literature,
1785–1885
Peter Templeton
The Politics of
Southern Pastoral
Literature, 1785–1885
Jeffersonian Afterlives
Peter Templeton
Loughborough University
Loughborough, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-04887-7 ISBN 978-3-030-04888-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04888-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018964413
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To Andrew Dix
A
cknowledgements
I have been fortunate enough to have a number of colleagues at the School
of the Arts, English, and Drama at Loughborough University that have
offered guidance and support over the course of this project. I’d like to
extend my gratitude to Anne-Marie Beller, Carol Bolton, Mary Brewer,
Nicholas Freeman, Brian Jarvis, Paul Jenner, and Oliver Tearle for both
the direct and indirect assistance and encouragement each has offered over
the years. It is also right to acknowledge the contribution of the late Bill
Overton, who had a massive impact on the doctoral thesis on which this
volume is based. Since the project began as a thesis, I would also like to
thank all the members of the Loughborough English postgraduate com-
munity, who served as a vital support network. I can only hope that I man-
aged to pay some of that forward.
I would also like to acknowledge the generous support of Professors
Richard Gray and Tim Woods, of the University of Essex and Aberystwyth
University respectively. Thanks are also due to Allie Troyanos and Rachel
Jacobe at Palgrave Macmillan, for making the publishing experience so
overwhelmingly positive.
We do not work in a vacuum, so thanks are also due collectively to my
friends and family—in particular, Emily Harmer, Chris Musgrave, and my
parents Peter and Janet Templeton—each of whom has, in their own way,
played an integral role in this book reaching print.
Last, but by no means least, this book is dedicated to Andrew Dix. Without
his dedication, encouragement, and wisdom, in various roles as an educator,
supervisor, and colleague over the last fifteen years, it is highly unlikely that
the current volume would ever have been successfully completed.
vii
c
ontents
Introduction: The Pastoral Ideal of Thomas Jefferson 1
The Pastoral Double-Plot of Swallow Barn 45
The Cavalier Cartography of The Kentuckian in New-York 75
Strange Temporality of Pastoral in The Partisan Leader 107
John Esten Cooke and Democratic Pastoral 135
Domestic Pastoral in The Holcombes 163
Joel Chandler Harris and the Pastoral of the New South 193
Conclusion 221
Bibliography 233
Index 247
ix
Introduction: The Pastoral Ideal
of Thomas Jefferson
Consideration of Thomas Jefferson alongside literature of the nineteenth
century is not a new idea. Scholars such as Leo Marx and William R. Taylor
did just that decades ago, and more contemporary scholars will occasion-
ally still draw the two together. It is not my intention here to tread that
familiar ground. Nor is it to explain again that pastoral could be manipu-
lated to suit political ends, or that Southern literature was deployed as a
weapon by slavery’s apologists. Rather, the purpose of this book is to
examine the malleability of pastoral in writings of the American South
from the conclusion of the Revolutionary War until the later nineteenth
century, in order to track and evaluate its shifting political values alongside
those of the great Southern political icon. Put another way, the goal here
is a consideration not of what happens, since this has been covered, but
how it happens. As the region reacted initially to increasing hostility with
the North, through the period of Civil War, through Reconstruction and
the ‘New South’, ideas of the region and its pastoral underpinnings neces-
sarily must accommodate the changing political situation. Having such a
sturdy and well-researched landmark as the Jefferson image gives us a
strong reference point from which to analyse the specific pressures that are
placed on the Southern pastoral in the nineteenth century, and how
thought processes and storytelling strategies themselves are forced to
adapt to changing political landscapes that alter not only the relative value
of the Jefferson figure itself but the place of the pastoral in the American
Democratic ideal. Also, although the values of the time are rather different
© The Author(s) 2019 1
P. Templeton, The Politics of Southern Pastoral Literature, 1785–1885,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04888-4_1
2 P. TEMPLETON
to our own, and any study of politics in literature must accommodate that
fact, it is not my intention to approach the texts in a prosecutorial manner.
It is not the role of the critic to lay in hiding, waiting to leap out and catch
the author in the act. Consequently, when I say that a writer invokes an
element of pastoral to certain ends, it should be inferred that I suggest no
nefarious misdoings: rather, that what each author believes contribute to
strong characterisation and intriguing narrative incident can teach us spe-
cific things about the multiple ways in which the authors saw the changing
world around them.
First though, since we will be forced to confront some critical terms
that are themselves rather nebulous, it is important that we begin with a
couple of definitions. As a starting point, it makes sense to take the mode
that is perhaps the most generally associated with Southern narrative:
romance. There are of course many different iterations of romance (and,
indeed, Romance), and the version that the reader encounters here will
likely be rather different from what they are used to if they are familiar
with how it normally appears in the American literary canon. In one of the
most important documents in the formation of the American canon,
D.H. Lawrence argued that Nathaniel Hawthorne was a writer of romance,
but that rather than composing ‘nice little tales’, he claimed that
Hawthorne was a writer of fables with hellish undertones, and said that
‘you must look through the surface of American art, and see the inner
diabolism of the symbolic meaning. Otherwise it is all mere childishness.’1
This attitude would be crucial in deciding which nineteenth-century
books would be valued in twentieth-century America, and can be seen in
the importance assigned to the dark romance found in Northern writers
such as Hawthorne and Herman Melville, but also in others such as Edgar
Allan Poe. The dominant forms of romance in the South, meanwhile,
developed from the school of Sir Walter Scott and did not find anything
diabolical beneath the surface of American life. As. V.L. Parrington would
say in Main Currents in American Thought (1927), ‘the Virginia romantic
had no need to seek the picturesque in England and Spain, as Irving had
done. He had only to pick and choose from the familiar stuff lying all
around him, emphasizing the agreeable, overlooking the unpleasant,
1 D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (London: Penguin, 1990), 93.
INTRODUCTION: THE PASTORAL IDEAL OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 3
fashioning his figures and action to suit the ideal of a golden age of planta-
tion society.’2
Though there will be instances in the coming pages in which there is a
need to consider other romantic variations, in general here we will be
thinking of romance in a specifically Southern context, perhaps best sum-
marised by Harnett T. Kane’s suggestion that many have beheld in the
region ‘a warming beauty, a fragrant panorama and a mood ranging from
the gently amiable to the beguiling’.3 Unless otherwise signalled, this sen-
timental or idealised understanding of the antebellum South, its people,
and cultural attitudes is what is meant by the term ‘romantic’. Given that
the mode we are interested in here is pastoral, I think we might also draw
on Fredric Jameson’s observations that ‘[r]omance now and again seems
to offer the possibility of sensing other historical rhythms’, and that
romance is a generically heterogeneous space free from the politically
oppressive constraint of realism, since the Southern romantic fictions of
the period do seem either to confuse time or at the very least to exist in a
curious mixture of both highly specific and vague temporalities in order to
exist outside of a Northern model.4
This brings us to the second critical term which we need to define,
which is ‘pastoral’. Once we move beyond the initial stages of traditional
pastoral poetry, actually pinning down a precise meaning of pastoral is a
rather difficult task. As Paul Alpers has identified:
Since the novel is the characteristic form of the epoch in which the literary
system ceased to be expressed by clearly defined and related genres, it seems
neither useful nor plausible to claim for the pastoral novel the literary moti-
vation or generic coherence of older forms. Rather, a piece of fiction can be
called pastoral when its author—for whatever reason, with whatever aware-
ness, and concerned with whatever subject or theme—has recourse to usages
which are characteristic of older pastorals and which in turn make a tale or
novel pastoral in mode.5
2 V. L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: The Romantic Revolution in
America 1800–1860, vol. 2. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 29.
3 Harnett T. Kane, The Romantic South (New York: Coward-McCann, 1961), 13.
4 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1981), 104.
5 Paul Alpers, What is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 376.