Clear-Cutting Eden: Representations of Nature in Southern Fiction, 1930-1950 Christopher B
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2002 Clear-cutting eden: representations of nature in Southern fiction, 1930-1950 Christopher B. Rieger Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Rieger, Christopher B., "Clear-cutting eden: representations of nature in Southern fiction, 1930-1950" (2002). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 2905. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/2905 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. CLEAR-CUTTING EDEN: REPRESENTATIONS OF NATURE IN SOUTHERN FICTION, 1930-1950 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Christopher B. Rieger B. A., Emory University, 1993 M. A., Louisiana State University, 1997 May 2002 Acknowledgments I would like to thank, first of all, my director, Dr. John Lowe, whose advice, encouragement, suggestions, and friendship made the completion of this project possible. I am particularly indebted to the other members of my committee as well: Dr. Richard Moreland, whose comments and suggestions helped to improve every chapter, Dr. Peggy Prenshaw, Dr. Carolyn Jones-Medine, Dr. Joseph Kronick, and Dr. Frank Anselmo. Additionally, I would like to thank the members of my exam and Master’s committees, Drs. Bainard Cowan, Carl Freedman, Kevin Cope, and Panthea Reid. Special thanks goes to Drs. Robert Beuka and Dan Gonzalez for their help with this project and, more importantly, for their friendship throughout the last seven years. I certainly could not have started or finished my work without the constant love, support, and advice of my parents, Dr. Branimir Rieger and Dr. Marilyn Rieger. Finally, I want to thank my wife Wendy. Her love, understanding, patience, paychecks, and proofreading have made the completion of this project possible. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgments ……………………………………………………………………ii Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………iv Introduction. Changes in the Air and on the Ground: Nature and Southern Modernism ………………………………..……………………1 Chapter One. Depleted Land, Depleted Lives: Erskine Caldwell’s Impoverished South………...………………….………………..27 Chapter Two. Cross Creek Culture: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ Pastoral Wilderness……………………………………79 Chapter Three. “Dawn and Doom was in the branches”: Zora Neale Hurston and the Transformative Power of Nature ………...…………..135 Chapter Four. Hunting for the Wilderness: An Ecohistorical Approach to William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses .…………….193 Conclusion. Return to Eden: The Current State of Pastoral .………………………247 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………….257 Vita ………………………………………………………………………………...269 iii Abstract This dissertation examines how Southern literary representations of the natural world were influenced by, and influenced, the historical, social, and ecological changes of the 1930s and 1940s. Specifically, I examine the ways that nature is conceived of and portrayed by four authors of this era: Erskine Caldwell, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Zora Neale Hurston, and William Faulkner; through their works, I investigate the intersections of race, class, and gender with the natural environment. I argue that during this time of profound regional and national upheaval there exists a climate of professed binary oppositions and that these authors’ representations of nature in their fiction reflect the tensions of such polarities as past/present, male/female, left/right, white/black, and culture/nature. Although there is no clear linear development of the way the idea of nature is used in Southern literature, the period now termed the Southern Renaissance (roughly 1930-1950) is fueled by a new wave of Southern authors who reconfigure the use of nature in their fiction in conjunction with modernist analyses of the self and the South. The relatively belated arrival of modernism in the South offers a special opportunity for studying the shift from nineteenth- to twentieth-century culture, a change that proceeded in the South in far more concentrated fashion and with greater tension and drama than in the rest of the nation. I focus on the natural environments of the texts as dynamic, expressive spaces, and I also connect the representations of the natural world in selected novels of Caldwell, Rawlings, Hurston, and Faulkner to their responses to issues of race, class, and gender while situating their works within the contexts of Southern history and literary traditions. iv Introduction. Changes in the Air and on the Ground: Nature and Southern Modernism The American South has always been a region closely aligned and identified with nature and the land, both in the popular imagination and in the realities of its agrarian past. From the lush, Edenic descriptions of the landscape in the reports of explorers like John Smith to the reactionary essays of the Nashville Agrarians in I’ll Take My Stand (1930), writers have consistently sought to construct and employ versions of a South defined by its relationship to nature for their own purposes. Whether seeking to lure new settlers and investors to the New World or trying to make a case for Southern exceptionalism in the twentieth century, authors writing about the South often rely on conceptions of nature in creating a definition of the region, and these conceptions can vary widely from author to author. That is, the idea of nature is an important tool in the construction of the idea of the South and in the construction of the actual, physical conditions of Southern society. Notions of the South as an abundant paradise, as a pastoral haven of order and simplicity, as a feudal, aristocratic anachronism, or as a place cursed and ruined by its legacy of chattel slavery all depend on particular versions of the relationship between the South and nature for their force; generally, the region and its inhabitants are seen as either in harmony with or in opposition to a specific view of the natural world that is posited as an objective depiction of the natural order of the universe. Although there is no clear linear development of the way the idea of nature is used in Southern literature, the period now termed the Southern Renaissance (roughly 1930-1950) is fueled by a new wave of Southern authors who reconfigure the use of nature in their fiction in conjunction with modernist analyses of the self and the 1 2 South. The relatively belated arrival of modernism in the South (generally dated around the end of World War I) means that its effects were more pronounced and concentrated in the region. Daniel Singal argues that “the South offers a special opportunity for studying the shift from nineteenth- to twentieth-century culture.” Because its writers are more self-conscious of the effects of modernism than its “northern pioneers,” change proceeded in the South “in far more concentrated fashion [and] with greater tension and drama,” and the culture clash was “fiercest in the South,” as well as “comparatively self-contained.”1 Issues of race, class, and gender figure prominently in modernist reappraisals of the contemporary and historical South, and representations of the natural world are inextricably tied to such analyses. At the same time these intellectual changes were sweeping the South between the two World Wars, significant social, political, and economic revolutions were creating what has come to be known as the “New South.” This period of profound upheaval includes the great migration of blacks out of the South, increased industrialization and urbanization, and a decreasing number of Southerners making their living as farmers. This dissertation examines how Southern literary representations of the natural world were influenced by, and influenced, the historical, social, and ecological changes of the 1930s and 1940s. Specifically, I examine the ways that nature is conceived of and portrayed by four authors of this era: Erskine Caldwell, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Zora Neale Hurston, and William Faulkner; through their works, I investigate the intersections of race, class, and gender with the natural environment. I argue that during this time of profound regional and national upheaval there exists a climate of professed binary 3 oppositions and that these authors’ representations of nature in their fiction reflect the tensions of such polarities as past/present, male/female, proletarian/bourgeois, left/right, white/black, and culture/nature. Allen Tate accurately describes this time in Southern history as a clash of opposing values and claims that this conflict is responsible for the Southern Renaissance, which he compares to “the outburst of poetic genius at the end of the sixteenth century when commercial England began to crush feudal England.” After World War I, Tate says, the influences of modernism prompted the South to rejoin the world and created a peculiar dual perspective among the region’s writers: “with us, entering the world once more meant not the obliteration of the past but a heightened consciousness of it; so that