Real Change: George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes and the Crime of '73

Abstract

MICHAEL GERMANA Real Change: George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes and the Crime of '73 Speech may be silvern and silence golden; but if a lump of gold is only big enough, it can drag us to the bottom of the sea and hold us there while all the world sails over us. George Washington Cable, "The Freedman's Case in Equity" To say george Washington cable's The Grandissimes (1880) is set in New Orleans at the time of the Louisiana Purchase but grapples with the problems of Reconstruction is to repeat old news. Replete with an unwelcome new '"Yankee government'" (161), carpetbaggers arriving to establish new businesses, and resistant Creoles lamenting Louisiana's '"trampled rights'" while swearing she '"will rise again'" (326), Cable's first novel contains so many references to Union occupation and to post-Civil War rhetoric that only a handful of contemporary reviewers and even fewer modern critics have treated The Grandissimes as anything other than a parable for Southern culture's struggles after the fall of the Confederacy. True, many who read the novel serially in Scribner's Monthly (November 1879-October 1880) or in book form prior to Cable's emergence as an advocate for civil rights in the mid-1880s failed to see how its critiques of slavery applied to post-bellum America.1 But once Cable became a household name publishing polemical works like "The Freedman's Case in Equity" (1885) and hitting the lecture circuit as a social reformer rather than a local Arizona Quarterly Volume 61 , Number 3, Autumn 2005 Copyright © 2005 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1610 76 Michael Germana colorist, few had any trouble detecting Cable's allusions to Reconstruction or critiques of its shortcomings in The Grandissimes. But while Cable's politics became clearer over time, their relationship to the convictions of his protagonist, the American immigrantturned -apothecary Joseph Frowenfeld, did not. In fact, few readers seem to know quite what to make of Frowenfeld, whose arrival in Louisiana at the beginning of the novel coincides with a yellow fever epidemic that wipes out his entire family, and who, upon recovering from the fever himself, suddenly becomes the axis upon which all of New Orleans society turns. Given the biblical proportion of the plague that smites his family and the miraculous nature of his own resurrection as New Orleans's chosen one, it's no wonder that Cable's critics react to his protagonist with incredulity. In fact, there's even an ongoing debate amongst scholars to decide whether the well-intentioned but overzealous apothecary is a protagonist at all, or if he's just a "chorus" giving voice to and thus becoming the conscience of the novel's real hero, the white Honoré Grandissime.2 To make the waters surrounding Frowenfeld even murkier, no one has satisfactorily explained the significance of the apothecary's hobbies of astronomy and meteorology to Cable's tale of American encroachment and Creole resistance aside from observing that Frowenfeld, like his father before him, believes in an ordered universe.3 The critics' lack of success in deciphering Frowenfeld's character is, on the one hand, a testament to the apothecary's enigmatic status. But it is also symptomatic of a broader shortcoming in Grandissimes criticism, which has yet to adequately analyze Cable's narrative strategy much less Frowenfeld's role in it. For while Cable's critics have had no trouble recognizing that The Grandissimes critiques Reconstruction and its failures, few have satisfactorily explained how the novel does its rhetorical work. As a result, extant scholarship has yet to describe how the novel's form and content inform one another, what Frowenfeld's role in this hermeneutical play is exactly, or how the novel's critique of postwar American politics emerges from the resulting fold. An investigation into the shifting monetary policies of the United States during Reconstruction facilitates a new reading of The Grandissimes that addresses all of these shortcomings. For such an examination makes it clear that Cable's novel not only restages the drama of Reconstruction-era monetary reform at every turn, but that The Gran- Real Change 77 dissimes conforms to the self-same...