Experiments in Realism: Doubling in Simms's The Cassique of Kiawah

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Nobody invented realism; it came. --William Dean Howells, European Masters: Armando Palacio Valdes The critical debate regarding whether William Gilmore Simms is primarily a romanticist or a realist rages across generations and is ably summarized by John Caldwell Guilds in his biography, Simms: A Literary Life. With ample quotations from Simms to bolster arguments made by both sides, Guilds presents views of William Peterfield Trent, believed that Simms's best work followed romantic traditions of Scott and Cooper (338-339), and Vernon L. Parrington insisted that Simms was at his best ... [when] depicting life as it really was, not as it should (339). While Guilds concludes that the crux is that Simms writer defies classification (340), fact is that critics will continue in their attempts to classify him, and that these attempts will likely always say more about critics and their proclivities than they will about Simms and his. A particular chronological aspect of realist/romanticist dichotomy, though, is demonstrable: Simms relied far more heavily on romantic convention early in his career that he did later on. Nearly all of his novel-length fiction from 1830s and early 1840s uses then-common techniques that would be castigated a quarter century after Simms's death by Howells, James, and other prophets of literary realism: establishment of conflict by means of unrealistic contrasts between wholly-noble heroes and wholly-base villains, use of extended and often intrusive and pedantic asides in which narrator abandons his tale to make philosophical or historical points, and glorification of romantic sensibility that can be exemplified by gradual deterioration and death by heartbreak of a character. Through late 1840s and 1850s, Simms came, with mixed results, to rely upon these conventions less and less. By time of publication of Woodcraft (1853), Porgy, Simmsian hero, was spotted with notable (and comical) vices; still present philosophical digressions were mostly taken out of mouth of narrator and placed, less intrusively, into dialogue; and widow Eveleigh, novel's heroine, was presented--quite intentionally, it seems--as too pragmatic and tough-minded to be prone to swoons and heart sicknesses that dogged many of her romantic female forebears in Simms and elsewhere. In The Cassique of Kiawah (1859), last novel published in book form during his life, Simms makes an even more thorough break with these tired--or at least tiring--romantic conventions. First, Harry Calvert, arguably novel's hero, is not just flawed: he has a side so prominent that it takes even readers familiar with Simms's romances hundreds of pages to determine whether or not he is indeed hero. Second, while philosophical asides are still important to The Cassique of Kiawah, almost none are made by narrator and very few by characters; instead, most important are suggested by Simms and actually take place only in minds of his more active and astute readers. Third, while a character dies of a broken heart in a manner that may be parodic of that romantic cliche, her suffering and death do not save her virtue, spare her loved ones a horrible fate, of even teach a valuable lesson to a morally redeemable character. In short, there is no sign of dark victory or transcendent truth that so often seems to accompany a lingering and tragic death in romantic fiction. A significant factor in near-total break with these conventions that Simms achieves in The Cassique of Kiawah is his use of doubling, or presenting two characters who fill same role in some way. Doubling obviates some of Simms's habitual romantic techniques, and it takes place of others; more importantly, though, technique involves readers more actively in telling of story, and thus allows some of lessons of morals Simms hopes to impart to be implied rather than stated. …