92 American Literature
Has entered (traditional) history, and for whom love is not the reward” (p. 392). Looking for Rhett’s return is, Jones suggests, nostalgia for myth, for the return of patriarchy and confinement. This mildly feminist revision of the orthodox view of romance prepares us for further re-evaluation; in HSL, however, Jones’s approach is safely quarantined with “popular” literature. It is not allowed to reach back, for instance, and influence a reading of the romances of Simms.
Perhaps the purest tone in the orthodox choir belongs to M.E. Bradford, whose pair of essay on Porter, Gordon, and Lytle (“The Passion of Craft”) and “Madison Jones” characterize southernness as a “patrimony,” and the shared responsibility to and for it as “the corporate life of Southern civilization” (p. 375). Before the deracinated, modern present, Bradford argues via Lytle’s fiction, there were “immemorial ways” (p. 376) and an order of material and moral reality (a mimesis) “constrained by a corollary commitment to the network of families well situated on the land that had been Christendom before the modern deification of will and intellect had occurred” (p. 381). When “intellect” inquires into the means by which certain, by no means all, families became well situated on the land, and into the means (literary as well as political and economic and cultural) by which this privileged situation is and was maintained, the orthodox mimesis begins to crack and history seeps into the temple of myth. Bradford and others keep their fingers in the leaks.
One might expect black southern writers to dissent from any definition that confines them to an inferior or derivative social and literary status. After all, many of the “families well situated on the land” and many of the “families well situated on the land” and many of the immemorial ways” that define the themes of southern literature in its orthodox mode have remained fixed at the expense of black lives and labor. The question does appear in HSL: was there a literature that white writers and readers missed and have continued to miss? Craig Werner (p. 86) points to the existence of a black southern literature in the 1820s and 1830s as an “invisible tradition.” Lee Greene picks up the tradition in “Black Novelists and Novels, 1930-1950.” He sees its culmination not in a unique black aesthetic or ideology but rather in “the evolution of sophisticated fictional technique.” He thinks that, in “the best of the novels” by black writers of the modern period (those working the wake of Native Son),