Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature by Jolene Hubbs

Abstract

Reviewed by: Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature by Jolene Hubbs David A. Davis Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature, by Jolene Hubbs. Cambridge University Press, 2022. 191 + xi pages. $110 cloth, eBook. Poverty leaves an indelible mark in the form of a self-consciousness that never completely fades. Growing up poor white in rural Georgia, I learned the difference between my family, who lived in a trailer, and the families of other kids, who lived in houses. I heard the jokes told about poor whites, developed the sense of shame that comes with poverty, and felt the resentment that comes with marginalization. As a literary critic, I am inclined to notice how poor white characters are portrayed, and I realize that they tend to be depicted as either depraved or pathetic, and I also notice that literary critics tend to be reluctant to address issues of class in southern literature. Jolene Hubbs’s book Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature explores how middle-class southern writers have depicted poor whites to define their own social superiority and how recent poor white writers resist their marginalization. She notes that white poverty tends to be distinctively associated with the US South, and she argues that “poor white southerners appear throughout US literature as embodiments of whatever wealthier white people are most eager to distance themselves from” (8). She uses literary case studies from four periods—the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, the civil rights movement, and the 1990s—to illustrate how poor whites have been depicted as foils for class status, ignorance, racism, and obesity. In her study, she explains that middle-class writers project deviance onto poor whites in a pattern that illustrates America’s evolving social anxiety. Hubbs focuses her analysis on five writers as illustrations of middle-class anxiety projected onto poor white southerners in southern literature. The book is much more representative than exhaustive, and each chapter functions as a case study for representations of poor whites in specific time periods and in relation to specific social contexts. While poor whites have an extensive and formative role in both the US South specifically and the United States generally, the book extrapolates from particular examples. In each chapter, Hubbs establishes a prevailing [End Page 225] tendency for depictions of poor whites in a time period, such as the Gilded Age of the 1890s, in the works of several writers and then contrasts the prevailing depiction with the somewhat different representation of poor whites in the work of a specific writer. This dialogue reveals tension between how poor whites are depicted in mass media, magazines, and print culture and in the work of authors who have offered more sophisticated impressions of poor whites. Most of the book, with the exception of the final chapter, explores southern middle-class authors’ depictions of poor whites, which diminish the ability of poor whites to influence how they are perceived, leaving a distorted perception of them. She contends that poor white authors have not been able to represent themselves effectively until the late twentieth century. Therefore, the first three chapters focus on middle-class writers and the concluding chapter focuses on two contemporary writers with poor white roots, and the book reveals, unsurprisingly, that poor whites offer a much more complex depiction of social class than middle class writers who project deviance onto white poverty. The depiction of poor white southerners as deviant, lazy, and problematic extends at least as far back as the early colonial period with William Byrd’s History of the Dividing Line (1728), which characterized southern poor whites as indolent lubbers. Since then, poor whites have been portrayed as alternately problematic or praiseworthy depending upon the political or rhetorical agenda of the author. Thomas Jefferson, for example, described them as the foundation of civil society, whereas old southwestern humorists caricatured them as ignorant and depraved. In the first chapter of the book, Hubbs begins her analysis after Reconstruction, when the regions were reunified but sectional differences continued to linger. She describes how poor whites were portrayed in The Atlantic Monthly after the Civil War, at a time when “white poverty came to be treated as a social and personal pathology,” and...