Discourses of Desire: Uncovering Discursive Spaces of Race and Gender in Modern Southern Fiction

Abstract

Discourses of Desire: Uncovering Discursive Spaces of Race and Gender in Modern Southern Fiction Chanté M. Baker (bio) Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction: Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy. By Gary M. Ciuba. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2007. x + 287 pp. $47.50 cloth. Entitled to the Pedestal: Place, Race, and Progress in White Southern Women’s Writing, 1920 –1945. By Nghana tamu Lewis. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2007. xiv + 208 pp. $37.95 cloth. These two recent studies make important contributions to our understanding of noted twentieth-century southern authors and their interrogations of southern culture. While the authors’ scholarly concerns are as varied as the works they investigate, Lewis’s and Ciuba’s projects are linked in that both studies illuminate racial and gendered subtexts underlying the works of selected white southern writers. Entitled to the Pedestal examines five “white women of aristocratic southern heritage”: Julia Peterkin, Gwen Bristow, Caroline Gordon, Willa Cather, and Lillian Smith. Nghana Lewis insists that a close reading of the authors’ novels, essays, and personal writings reveals their clear engagement with and endorsement of two myths derived from the gendered and racial politics of “Lost Cause” rhetoric: the myth of white [End Page 156] southern womanhood and plantation mythology. Rightly challenging conventional narratives of both myths as “white-male-constructed and -governed,” Lewis says white southern women’s participation in maintaining a staunch Confederate consciousness before, during, and after the Civil War is a “mythic authority” inherited by the women novelists featured. Lewis insists that Peterkin’s, Bristow’s, Gordon’s, and Cather’s engagements with myths surrounding southern white womanhood and plantation culture are best understood when examined against the backdrop of modernity. Like their white male counterparts who witnessed and contested national changes in the United States between 1920 and 1945, the writers featured in Lewis’s enlightening study struggle with a “fear of change” and embrace myths endemic to the “Old South” to counter an emerging sociopolitical thrust to further unsettle southern culture and to unseat southern women from their mythic pedestals. Lewis convincingly argues that these women writers challenged the myths as constructs of “idealism and ideology” exclusively, and she insists the novelists espoused those same myths in order to assert varied claims to “authorship and entitlement” at the expense of African Americans and poor whites. She contends that Peterkin’s “patronizing” depictions of African Americans and Bristow’s investment in “mythic notions of womanhood, place, and race,” for example, demonstrate the writers’ implicit engagement with ideas derived from white supremacist ideology. Such ideology also shapes Gordon’s southern white female characters, and it influences the construction of “black racial and poor white class proscriptions” in her work. In her comparative reading of Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl and Smith’s Strange Fruit, Lewis cogently notes how Smith’s particular belief in “aristocratic white southern women’s public activism” afforded such women the opportunity to enjoy the spoils of mythic white womanhood while at the same time evaluating the very racial structures that enable its existence. Even on the silver screen, as cleverly suggested by the title of Lewis’s final chapter, “old sites of [southern mythic] authority” continue to have cultural currency in movies such as Bringing Down the House (2003). She skillfully demonstrates that a desire to “lay claim to the mythic pedestal upon which southern women have been positioned” and to “indemnify plantation culture” was as prevalent yesterday as it is today. Gary Ciuba joins Lewis in uncovering hidden racial and gendered subtexts in his provocative study Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction. Heavily influenced by the theoretical positions of [End Page 157] René Girard, Ciuba investigates how the confluence of desire, violence, and divinity results in the “mimetic desire” that he sees appearing explicitly in southern literature. Resulting from this dialectic exchange are scapegoating or “surrogate victimage mechanisms,” which Ciuba reasons are the progeny of “a culture of violence” interacting with “the violence of culture.” He claims the works of Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Walker Percy illuminate such mechanisms by imagining how desire, violence, and the...