The Extra 87
Largely overlooked. Bercovitch, in proposing the jeremiad as the typical Puritan form of self- and cultural expression at the origins of American consciousness, has suggested that the south had its own counterpart, but we have been slow to take the hint. Richard Gray recently entertains the possibility that romance and Southwestern humor as genres had important roles to play in southern cultural formation; and Bertram Wyatt-Brown also pursues the idea that the romance genre was instrumental in the dissemination of the white, male honor code throughout the South and over time. Southern literary studies as an establishment has resisted the suggestion that, as Bercovitch put it in the American literature series, literature is “ideology in action” (p. 103). We are told to see static patterns- reality through the lens of myth.
There is not much evidence that such approaches as Gray’s and Wyatt-Brown’s eccentric as they are to orthodox southern mimesis, would be granted much attention. Official mimesis is customarily upheld: “The fact are,” Louis D. Rubin, Jr., asserts in his general introduction to HSL, “that there existed in the past, and there continues to exist today, an entity within American society known as the South, and that for better or for worse the habit of viewing one’s experience in terms of one’s relationship to that entity is still a meaningful characteristic of both writers and readers who are or have been part of it” (p. 5). This sounds safely non-theoretical. But just as clearly it forecloses on many questions, and modes of answering, we need to keep open if southern literary study is to flourish in the current climate of American literary criticism, and maintain its relational lifeline to the outer world.
Part Two, “The War and After, 1861-1920,” is the most disappointing section of HSL from the point of view of those hoping for a fresh survey of the field, for in this historical period the literary “South” was reconstructed under the duress of heavy ideological usage. Hubbell, in fact, dates the professional, self-conscious study of southern literature and literary history to the middle of the postbellum period, thereby locating a crucial intel-
The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), p. 139
Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 45-62; Southern Honor (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982).