Expanding Southern Whiteness: Reconceptualizing Ethnic Difference in the Short Fiction of Carson McCullers

Abstract

In Carson McCullers' 1936 collection of short stories, The Ballad of Sad Cafe and Other Stories, issues of ethnic difference, racialization, and negotiation of identifies play a central role. This is not surprising, considering that loosely imagined body of texts known as the Southern Renaissance has a strong preoccupation with these themes. Southern writers, both Anglo- and African American, have long fore-grounded question in representing and imagining New South following Civil War, and McCullers is no exception. Her characters grapple with what it means to be in South, what it means not to be white, and what it means to challenge or comply with standards of whiteness. However, what differentiates The Ballad of Sad Cafe and Other Stories from most other pieces of southern literature is relative absence of African American characters. If, as many theorists of race in United States have pointed out, notions of and notions of white are mutually constitutive and exist in a hierarchical binary, can whiteness ever be reconceptualized in a way that does not define it against and above blackness? In other words, can white exist apart from black? I argue that McCullers attempts to answer yes to such questions by introducing European immigrant characters into southern fiction. This gesture interrogates southern identity through means other than comparisons to black southern identity. It is important to note that absence of African American characters in this collection of stories is not an oversight that resulted from presenting some new form of ethnic difference. Rather, this absence is functional. It serves to isolate and explore in some depth a new valance of race emerging in New South without having to revert to well-trodden path of imagining racialization within black-white binary. McCullers' conceptual replacement of African American with European immigrant in her examination of racial and ethnic difference has its counterpart in southern labor history. During late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, many southern states launched campaigns to attract European immigrants in response to labor shortages caused by black migration to West and Southwest immediately after Civil War and to North during Great Migration. For a South struggling to rebuild itself both economically and ideologically, European immigrant labor seemed a viable and even more favorable replacement for black labor. An avid recruiter of European immigrant labor in years immediately following Civil War, Richard Hathaway Edmonds founded a white-supremacist newsletter called Manufacturers' Record to provide coverage on southern industry and capitalism. Edmonds launched aggressive campaign to recruit laborers from Europe as a way to compensate for declining black laborer population in South. However, he intended for only immigrants of Anglo- and northern European stock to fulfill his goals. By 1880s, wave of immigrants from these areas gave way to those from eastern and southern Europe. This new influx of immigrants, Edmonds believed, did not assimilate properly and threatened Anglo-European racial integrity of South. By 1920s, Manufacturers' Record reversed its stance toward immigration, embracing nativist sentiments along with rest of United States and becoming one of most vocal anti-immigrant publications. Even if South's desire for immigrant labor had not been conflicted from start, region's attractiveness to European newcomers paled in comparison to that of North. Southern historian Martha G. Synott argues that South's attempt to lure and retain immigrants was doomed from beginning because it lacked high wages and inexpensive land that could be found in North. And from point of view of employers, southern landowners were more willing to exploit black labor because of their impression that Jim Crow laws regulated autonomy of blacks, making them more docile and reliable than immigrants. …