The Turn to the South: The Influence of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s Southern Studies

Abstract

DAVID MOLTKE-HANSEN Cambridge Studies on the American South The Turn to the South: The Influence of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s Southern Studies FEW AUTHORS HAVE EIGHT NEW VOLUMES OF THEIR WORK PUBLISHED posthumously. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who died in January 2007, is one. At her death, she left several lectures on marriage, given at Princeton University’s Madison Program; those lectures resulted in Marriage: The Dream That Refuses to Die, issued by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 2008. The same year, Cambridge University Press published the second of Fox-Genovese and her husband Eugene Genovese’s “Mind of the Master Class” series, Slavery in White and Black: Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders’ New World Order. It considers the question of slavery in the abstract in the thinking of Southern slaveholders. Cambridge brought out the last of the three volumes, Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South, in 2011. It examines the self-deception in planters’ paternalistic rationalization of their discipline and exploitation of their slaves. The years from 2007 to 2011 saw as well preparation of five volumes of Fox-Genovese’ essays and talks—eighty in all—that mostly had not become parts of her, or her and her husband’s, books. The collective title is History & Women, Culture & Faith: Selected Writings of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.TheUniversityofSouthCarolinaPresspublishedthefirst two volumes, on women, in June 2011, with the others issuing over the following twelve months. Volume 1, Women Past and Present, focuses on women either in European and American (but not Southern) history or in the third of a century before Fox-Genovese’s death. The three other, non-Southern volumes include one of cultural and historical criticism and political analysis, one on religion, and a reader selected largely from the other volumes. Volume 3 is called Intersections: History, Culture, Ideology. The title of volume 4 is Explorations and Commitments: Religion, Faith, and Culture. The reader features a quote from Edmund Burke as the main title: Unbought Grace: An Elizabeth 558 David Moltke-Hansen Fox-Genovese Reader. Organized topically in sections and chronologically withinsections,thesefour volumes provideintellectualcontextsfor,and perspectives on, Fox-Genovese’s Southern studies. They also include several essays on Southern subjects other than women. It is the second volume of the five, Ghosts and Memories: White and Black Southern Women’s Lives and Writings, that considers how individual women reflected, reflected on, or transformed their Southern experiences in their writings—diaries as well as stories, novels as well as poetry, and autobiographies as well as slave narratives. Fox-Genovese at one time planned but never produced a volume on African American womenwriters, to include versions of some of these essays.Together,the fifteen pieces included in Volume 2 illustrate a dimension of her scholarship now often forgotten by Southernists, whether historians or literary scholars. Beginning with an essay in 1979 on Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, she wrote voluminously on, and edited numerous texts of, white and black women writers either from or in the South. Many of these women, like Chopin, lived after the fall of the Confederacy and the end of slavery, so were not part of the cohorts Fox-Genovese examined in Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. The women in that most influential of her Southern studies volumes of course also were parts of the classes analyzed in the “Mind of the Master Class” series. The posthumous appearance of the last two volumes in that series, as well as of Ghosts and Memories, raises a question: now, finally, that the body of Fox-Genovese’s work in Southernstudiesisreadilyaccessibleinsubstantiallycompleteform,how does it add up? In answer, the three essays in this forum make several things clear. The first is that Fox-Genovese’s contributions in the field ranged widely, were voluminous, and appeared over more than a third of a century. A second point is that she brought to bear multiple theoretical and disciplinary perspectives. Long a Marxist, she never gave up class analysis. Trained in psychoanalysis and in statistics, as well as in intellectual and social history and political economy, she continually expanded her topical and disciplinary range—from political economy, in the era leading up to...