Writing Their Way Out Of Honor

Abstract

In his 1982 study of personal honor and social morality in the Old South-a study that continues to shape the way we understand that region's history before the Civil War-Bertram Wyatt-Brown traced honor's source to certain conflicts of self, gender, and family that southerners projected onto the larger stage of social and public life. Although Wyatt-Brown appreciated the celebratory, even playful, aspects of the honor-bound South, his analysis was more implicated in honor's dark side. He explored its cruelties and violence in a social system built on slaves and masters. And he showed how, in personal life, honor heightened an individual's sense of preeminent worth while drawing him into a web of self-deception. Seen through honor's lens, the world appeared to be a place of primary colors; but the innocence of these hues obscured an atavistic rage made all the more destructive by its colorful exterior.1 In The House of Percy, Wyatt-Brown revisits this realm in a new and suggestive way. He abandons the broad focus on the social and cultural forms taken by honor, looking instead at several generations of one southern literary family's struggle with honor and self-image. By engaging honor on a personal, expressive scale, Wyatt-Brown explores further the ways in which honor embraces contradictions-in the Percys' case, the contradiction between image-creating and storytelling, on the one hand, and depression and death, on the other. He follows honor a level or two deeper into the southern imagination, exploring a kind of genealogy of honor through its effects on the writings of one family. In so doing, Wyatt-Brown offers significant new vistas of the powerful ways in which the ideals of honor express key tensions in the personal experience of culture. Wyatt-Brown remarks that his first intention was to write a book about the two best-known members of the Percy family, the novelist and critic Walker Percy (1916-1990) and his uncle and guardian William Alexander Percy (1885-1942). The latter's autobiographical Lanterns on the Levee, first published