World War I, Literary Modernism, and the U.S. South

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository WORLD WAR I, LITERARY MODERNISM, AND THE U.S. SOUTH by David A. Davis A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English. Chapel Hill 2006 Approved by Advisor: Fred Hobson Reader: William L. Andrews Reader: Joseph Flora Reader: Minrose Gwin Reader: Trudier Harris © 2006 David A. Davis ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT DAVID A. DAVIS: World War I, Literary Modernism, and the U.S. South (Under the direction of Fred Hobson) This dissertation analyzes the relationship between social history and the geographic spread of modernism. Many critics have noted the irony that writers from the South—the nation’s poorest and most illiterate region in the first half of the twentieth century—cultivated an unexpected literary flowering between World War I and World War II. I argue that World War I acted as a pivotal catalytic event, ending the post- Reconstruction South’s self-imposed intellectual isolation and allowing for the diffusion of modern American and European social, cultural, and economic practices into the region, thus shifting the region’s economic base from agriculture to industry and moving the region’s intellectual superstructure from regionalism to modernism. In five chapters I examine the representation of World War I in modernist texts by southern and non-southern writers. The first two chapters analyze changes in the demographic and economic foundation of southern culture, connecting the war as a vehicle for interregional cultural exchange to William Faulkner’s Soldiers’ Pay and short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald and tracing the emergence of mechanization and industrialization in Ellen Glasgow’s Barren Ground and Faulkner’s Flags in the Dust. The three subsequent chapters examine the effects of infrastructural change on major elements of southern society, exploring the effects of war-time patriotism on sectional ideology in William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee and Donald Davidson’s The Tall Men, analyzing the war’s impact on the struggle for civil rights in Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint and Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, and discussing the representation of southern womanhood in post-World War I southern women’s fiction. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Initially, I expected writing a dissertation to be a solitary activity, but now I see that dozens of people help, sometimes in delightfully unexpected ways. I would like to thank my academic friends who have contributed advice and encouragement: Barbara Bennett, Lucas Carpenter, Susan V. Donaldson, Elizabeth Fox- Genovese, Anne Goodwyn Jones, Kimball King, Barbara Ladd, Noel Polk, John T. Matthews, James L. Peacock, Riche’ Richardson, Scott Romine, Harry Ruche, Jon Smith, Ron Schuchard, Jon Stallworthy, Annette Trezfer, Linda Wagner-Martin, Harry Watson, and, of course, Tony Danza. I would like to thanks friends who have contributed patience, good humor, and astute football analysis: John Adrian, Jonathan D’Amore, Ian Finseth, Bryan Giemza, Chris Hill, Tom Horan, Andy Leiter, Collin Messer, Farrell O’Gorman, Tara Powell, Bryan Sinche, Kurt Spurlock, Harry Thomas, Amy Weldon, Robert West, Andrea’ Williams, and Christopher Windolph. I would like to thank my writing partners, Michael Dowdy and Maria Hebert, who have contributed time and understanding. I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee, the southern literary cabal, who have contributed wisdom and guidance: William L. Andrews, Joseph Flora, Minrose Gwin, and Trudier Harris. I would like to thank my mentor, advisor, role model, boss, and friend—Fred Hobson—to whom my gratitude will never be adequate. Finally, I would like to thank my family—Kris, Lucas, and Ayden—who have contributed love, support, and joy. iv DEDICATION For Kris and the boys. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………………………..1 “How You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm?”: World War I and the Emergence of Literary Modernism in the U.S. South CHAPTER 1 …………………………………………………………………………….21 “The Backward Glance”: The South’s Transition to Modernism CHAPTER 2……………………………………………………………………………..67 Mules and Machines: Modernism, World War I, and the Southern Economy CHAPTER 3……………………………………………………………………………131 Re-Reconstructing Regional Identity: Martial Patriotism, Southern Sectionalism, and American Nationalism CHAPTER 4……………………………………………………………………………188 Civil Rights through Carnage: Black Southerners, World War I, and the Color Line CHAPTER 5..…………………………………………………………………………. 253 Blood and Irony: World War I, Southern Women’s Fiction, and the Fiction of Southern Womanhood BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………314 vi INTRODUCTION “How You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm?”: World War I and the Emergence of Literary Modernism in the U.S. South “World War I changed everything,” said Robert Penn Warren, “It was a great shock to the whole country, but the war broke open a frozen culture like the southern world” (“Mad for Poetry” 29). When America entered the war in 1916, the U.S. South was indeed a frozen culture. While the world’s developed countries established strong economic and political ties based on mutual cooperation, free-market economics, and exploitation of colonial holdings, the South remained socially stagnant. Clinging to an outdated dominant ideology that valorized the Lost Cause, an outdated set of economic practices that exhausted the land, and a static system of social structures that marginalized women and blacks, the South at the beginning of the twentieth century had become essentially isolated from the rest of the country and the rest of the world. In effect, despite New South boosterism, the South was a domestic colony of the United States that produced cotton and poverty. Not surprisingly, the South in the early twentieth century, which H. L. Mencken called the Sahara of the Bozart, produced relatively little art and contributed less to the nation’s intellectual superstructure. But by 1950, many writers and intellectuals either born in or living in the South commanded international attention, including, for example, three of the most influential modernist writers— William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright—all of whom had been born in Mississippi between 1897 and 1909. These three writers illustrate the problem of southern modernism: namely, how did southern writers become modernists? Representing different races, genders, and classes, they appear to share only two common characteristics, time and place, which suggests a possible theory. Yet one could argue that each of these individuals intuitively or spontaneously developed modernist sensibilities, but that position would not account for the dozens of other writers from the South who contributed to the movement sometimes called the Southern Renaissance. The mass aggregate of writers and intellectuals from the South who rose to prominence by the mid-twentieth century suggests that a broader cultural dynamic may better explain the emergence of modernist writing by southerners. In the same vein, one could argue that the work produced by southerners during this period represents not necessarily some abstract reified “Modernism” but, instead, a suppressed southern intellectualism that, largely because of poverty and regional exclusion by the northern press, had not been capable of expression earlier. While there is much merit to this position in many respects, especially since it allows that not all southerners between 1864 and 1914 were intellectually bereft, it does not account for the crucial fact that southern modernists were engaged with the same problems, themes, motifs, and techniques as their northern and European contemporaries. The connections between southern modernism and transatlantic modernism strongly suggest that they were responses to similar circumstances. And this point raises another possible explanation for modernism in the South, namely, that it represents a wave of abstracted intellectualism detached from everyday life, so the actual circumstances of 2 time and place are irrelevant. This position comes back to the problem of southern modernism: specifically, how is it possible for the most isolated, most impoverished, most illiterate region in an otherwise developed nation to generate a massive intellectual superstructure in an extremely short period of time? A number of critics have addressed this question already. Louis D. Rubin, Jr. says that “after the First World War, the South did begin to produce memorable literature, stories and poems of great moral and spiritual intensity, of tremendous intellectual depth” (Writers of the Modern South 6). Rubin notes that the emergence of modernist literature by southerners coincides with the end of World War I, but he does not necessarily see a causative relationship between the two events. His position essentially establishes the conventional wisdom on the emergence of southern modernism. John M. Bradbury suggests that World War I caused southerners to “reassess” their values, (7-8) and Michael O’Brien says that “modernism undoubtedly came to the South between the world wars, but its success was not thoroughgoing” (xvii). Lewis P. Simpson describes southern modernism as a “culture of alienation” resulting from a “large expression of discontent with the emphasis modern societies place on machines and consumption as a debasement

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