Diplomarbeit

Home , Southern Agrarians

Sense of Place: Literary and Visual Texts of the American South

Diplomarbeit

zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades einer Magistra der Pholosophie

an der Geistwissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

vorgelegt von Tina PUKŠIČ

am Institut für Amerikanistik

Begutachter: Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Walter Hölbling

Graz, 2014 Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Prof. Walter Hölbling for his academic guidance and patience. I dedicate this paper to my parents, who waited patiently and with belief for my academic product, to my grandmother, who told me the stories and showed me the photographs.

Tina Puksic, Graz, January, 2014

All art reflects us in our time, in our place. Fiction wrests out of life some inner truth about ourselves in our society. It achieves its moral power when it faithfully reveals us to ourselves, shows us our society in its full and larger context. (Eudora Welty)

Table of Contents

1 Introduction ...... 5

2 20th-century Southern literature and photography in context ...... 11

2.1 Southern (literary) tradition and ‘sense of place’ in context ...... 11 2.1.1 The Southern ‘sense of place’ ...... 14

2.2 The intersection of literary and visual texts and is there a southern photography tradition? ...... 15 3 Southern Renascence ...... 18

3.1 The Agrarian ideas and their influence on the literary tradition ...... 18 3.2 Neo-Agrarians and the influence of ‘Weltyan sense of place’ ...... 20 3.2.1 Eudora Welty’s place in fiction ...... 20

3.2.2 Eudora Welty’s sense of place in Losing Battles ...... 22

3.3 Documentary and nostalgic photography of the American South from 1930s to 1950s 26 3.3.1 The South as documented through the lens by Evans and Welty ...... 27

3.3.2 Laughlin’s nostalgic illumination and visual poetry of the southern past ...... 40

4 Postsouthern ‘sense of place’ and ‘placelessness’ ...... 44

4.1 Challenging southern (literary) traditions ...... 44 4.1.1 Harry Crews’ ‘sense of place (-lessness)’ in A Feast of Snakes and the death of southern literature ...... 48

4.2 Contemporary southern photography ...... 52 4.2.1 Sally Mann’s nostalgic vision of the contemporary South...... 55

4.2.2 Deborah Luster’s Louisiana outcasts ...... 61

5 Conclusion ...... 65

6 Bibliography ...... 67

7 Webliography ...... 69

8 List of Photographs ...... 71

9 Abstract ...... 72

1 Introduction

Sense of place is a concept very much associated with the culture and arts of the American South. “It is a truth universally acknowledged among southern literary scholars that “the South” and “southern literature” have been characterized by a “sense of place […] and it has been […] integral to southern literary and cultural discourse […] (Bone, 1974/2005: vii).” Southern culture, including southern literary tradition as well as southern photography, has been notable for the concept “sense of place” since the beginning of the 20th century. Although the economic, political, and cultural landscape of the South has changed significantly in the 20th century, which altered the Southern tradition and many contemporary critics question the existence of an indistinguishable southern tradition, the notion or rather nostalgia for that ‘sense of place’ continues to be saturated in the contemporary southern literary and photographic art. The definitions and constructions of ‘sense of place’, never simple and one-fold, have been altered simultaneously with the change of the 20th century South’s political, economical and cultural landscape.

The notion of ‘sense of place’ has been invented and developed by the Southern Agrarians and their ideas of the idealized rural South in the beginning of the 20th century, with the emergence of the movement called the Southern Renascence. The notion was constructed out of the fear of losing the distinguishable Southern culture based on agriculture, which was in danger of disappearing due to the rise of industrialism, mechanism and capitalism. The Agrarians basically propagated the Southern tradition by emphasizing its connection to nature and land, uniqueness, sense of community, unity, traditional values and family (the main elements that constitute the Southern sense of place) and with this ‘propaganda’ they created a stronger sense of awareness among the Southern writers.

This sense of place was then further developed and given a wider and artistic dimension by the Neo-Agrarian group of writers and critics, among which the most prominent was Eudora Welty. With her literary thought, which she developed from the Agrarian ideas and gave them a more artistic literary dimension, she greatly influenced the (literary) Southern cultural thought, and although the South had already been transforming by the emerging industrialization, critics were so thrilled about her work based on Southern tradition they refused to notice those transformations.

With the industrial development and the rise of capitalism, the regionalism or the individuality of certain regions of the USA was gradually disappearing. The economy, society and culture became more indistinguishable from region to region while capitalism and the rise of vertical monopoly along with the mass media were homogenizing the regions of the United States and that the result of that was the loss of the Southern regional identity. The contemporary Southern writer suddenly found himself lost or rather trapped in a Southern literary tradition that could no longer be applied in the changed Southern landscape and needed to find a new voice.

The new Southern writers had to consider whether they could still speak from the established southern literary tradition or find their new voice in the transformed contemporary South (cf. Hobson, 1991. p. 1 and 4). While some writers turned to contemporary subjects but still remained the traditional attitudes towards the South (Spencer and Harington), others turned to constructing a new tradition, which as they perceived, was more suitable for dealing with the subjects of the contemporary American South. Critics wonder whether this new tradition can still be labeled as distinctly ‘Southern’ or is it rather indistinguishable from the rest of America. While the contemporary Southern writer grew up in that ‘old Southern tradition, he is aware of it and my findings show that, the new tradition rests on that awareness. The lack of southern self-consciousness presented in the post-southern novel is pointing to the continuation of the presence of ‘sense of place’ in their work as well as the nostalgia thereof. The nostalgia for the ‘sense of place’ and feeling the urge to belonging to a (southern) place lie in the undertones of this lack.

While focusing on the literary texts, the following thesis also provides an intersection of literature and photography of the American South, which focuses on the analysis of the Southern traditional concept of ‘sense of place’ also through the representations of southern visual texts. There is a lack of attention to the interpretation and study of southern photography as a distinct art in the United States. It is considered by the critics as indistinguishable from the rest of the photography in America. However, the South offers a whole canon of photographers articulating distinctively Southern themes, however, there is no such thing as “traditional southern photography” and consequently secondary literature on the subject is scarce. Ordering the Facade: Photography and Contemporary Southern Women's Writing by Henninger is one of the few studies on contemporary Southern photography,

6 providing a short introduction to the history of southern photography, however it mainly focuses on representation of women through photographic texts and how the images of southern women have helped construct the . However, her study focuses on the representation of women in photography and how these images shape the women’s identities in the South.

In addition to the research of the already existing critical literature on the subject of sense of place in southern literature, the study of selected Southern visual texts is the new aspect this research provides. Drawing parallels to Southern photography, the central argument of the thesis argues that the traditional ‘sense of place’ in Southern literature in one form or another is continued throughout the 20th century including the contemporary period. The collections of southern photographers selected for this thesis are poetic, and as Kirsten states in an essay of Evans’ collection American Photographs, “[they deserve] a reading as attentive to detail and nuance – “intention, logic, continuity, climax, sense and perfection” – as the reading of poetry or fine fiction (Trachtenberg, 1989, p. 234)”.

During the Southern Renascence in the 1930s, and with the Southern Agrarians and the Works Progress Administration, notable photography collections emerged, such as Eudora Welty’s collection One Time, One Place, Walker Evans’ and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, both of which capture the South and southerness of the 1930s during the Great Depression in a documentary fashion. In the late 1940s, as representative of the Neo-Agrarian ideas of the idealized South, Clarence John Laughlin’s Ghosts Along the Mississippi was published, a collection of nostalgic surrealist images capturing vanishing southern urban landscapes. Some of the contemporary southern photography continues to focus on the subject of southerness and the nostalgia thereof – such as Sally Mann’s photography collection The Immediate Family, displaying images of typical southern landscape and family in the rural southern environment, while other photographers, such as Deborah Luster explore the ‘New’South focusing on capturing the social outcasts of Louisiana.

7 in southern culture, originated by the Southern Agrarians, further developed and enhanced artistically by the Neo-Agrarians such as Eudora Welty in her work and critical essays, and adapted to the changes of the contemporary South or newly constructed by such writers as Harry Crews continues to be the landmark of Southern literary tradition in different shades or intensities and that in spite of contemporary critics claiming otherwise, the study proves that the concept is still there, although constructed according to the new literary voice. It also proves that there is a distinct southern photography and that it should earn a place as a tradition in the canon of a wider American traditional photography. The photographs selected depict the themes of the American South in the context of sense of place, and what they represent is analyzed through the content and the photographic techniques employed by the photographer. The method applied in this thesis is the following: the concept and its definitions as represented in the Southern literature and photography are firstly placed into the context and then divided into two chapters, starting with the Southern Renascence, which is branched into the Agrarian and Neo-Agrarian subchapters, and continuing with the contemporary or ‘postsouthern’ period. The analysis moves from context to text to image and seeks to locate its literary and photographic texts in various definitions of the concept of sense of place.

The second chapter, 20th-century Southern literature and photography in context, puts the subject of the thesis in a wider context and presents the main features of the southern literary tradition, following a short description of southern ‘sense of place’, the intersection of literature and photography and a discussion on whether there is indeed such a thing as Southern photography tradition.

Southern Renascence, the third chapter, includes two subchapters, the first of which, The Agrarian ideas and their influence on the literary tradition, focuses on the views and ideas by the Southern Agrarians of the 1930s and their idealized view of the rural South. The subchapter studies the invention of the southern tradition as laid down by the Agrarians and with it the prominent southern ‘sense of place’ as developed by their essays in their manifesto I’ll Take My Stand. Their most important ideas from this work are mentioned in relation to the influence on the Southern literary tradition.

In the American South, the Southern Agrarian “sense of place” gained an enhanced artistic dimension with Eudora Welty's treatment of the concept in her critical essays and her

8 literary as well as visual work, which is examined in the second subchapter, Neo-Agrarians and the influence of ‘Weltyan sense of place’. In this chapter, I am discussing Eudora Welty’s interpretation of ‘sense of place’ and her definitions which are never simple and clear-cut, through her critical essays “Place in Fiction” (1956) as exemplified in her work “Some Notes on the River Country” (1944). Finally, I trace these definitions in her novel Losing Battles (1970) and analyze whether her work articulates distinctively Southern themes she considers are constituents of ‘sense of place’. Finally, the chapter arrives at the conclusion that Losing Battles nicely captures the (neo-) Agrarian ideas, as exemplified by Eudora Welty in her literary critical essays.

Finally, the chapter “Southern Renascence” deals with a study of visual texts of two photographers who deal with specifically Southern themes in a documentary way, Walker Evans and Let us now Praise Famous Men, a collection of photographs he published together with the text by James Agee, and Eudora Welty and her collection One Time, One Place. Finally, another photographer is presented, who deals with the Southern theme of nostalgia and the Southern past, Clarence John Laughlin and his surrealist photographic collection Ghosts along the Mississippi.

The fourth and last chapter, Postsouthern sense of place and ‘placelessness’ refers to Southern writers emerging in the 1960s and after and examines how the postsouthern writers developed a new literary voice and reconstructed the Southern sense of place in accordance with the changed social landscape of contemporary South, as exemplified by Harry Crews in his novel A Feast of Snakes. The chapter also poses a question whether the distinct South still exists and seeks to answer that question by looking at the socioeconomic changes of the contemporary South, which influenced the construction, in my opinion, of a ‘new’ Southern literary tradition, a new writers’ voice. In opposition to the majority of critics claiming that there indeed is no longer ‘a southern tradition’ since the Southern artistic product is indistinguishable from the rest of America, I claim that the South still produces works distinguishable from the rest of the country, however, the methods in which it does have had to adapt to the Southern transformation. The chapter also examines the second group of writers who still write in the southern literary tradition based on the (neo-) Agrarian ideas and enunciate the traditional and distinctively Southern themes, such as remembering the Southern past as in the case of

Elizabeth Spencer and her “The Gulf Coast” and Donald Harington in his novel Lightning Bug.

Finally, the last section of the fourth chapter, Contemporary Southern photography, deals with contemporary Southern photography. As in the example of the contemporary literary texts, the visual texts are divided into two groups – those photographs dealing with the traditional Southern themes, especially focusing on the sense of longing for the idealized Southern past, such as photographers William Christenberry depicting Southern rural landscapes and architecture and Timothy Hursley, an architectural photographer from Arkansas. Photographers of the second group are those representing the contemporary southern American (pop) culture and the themes more universal, experimental and/or dealing with the not so traditional contemporary social issues. Sally Mann is a photographer belonging to both groups for her controversial style and representing traditional Southern themes. My reading of her collection Immediate Family and her landscape photographs offers an analysis of the traditional southerness they represent as well as the techniques she employs in that representation. Deborah Luster is the representative of the second group, a photographer dealing with the contemporary social issues of Louisiana. Most of her photography investigates the violence in the South and her collection One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana records the portraits of inmates in several prisons in Louisiana.

2 20th-century Southern literature and photography in context

2.1 Southern (literary) tradition and ‘sense of place’ in context

The definition of the literary tradition of the American South immediately arrives at a multitude of definitions already when attempting to place it into a specific area in the Southern United States, also referred to as the American South, simply as South, the Bible Belt or Dixie. The boundaries of the South are differently set. The definition of the geographical boundaries of the American South varies among ethnographers, however it is clear that it is placed in the Southern region of the United States, comprising southern states such as “Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2013, online)”. But more important than geographically, the “South has been defined […] in contrast to the rest of United States by its history, […] its conservative ideology, its economic system supported once by slavery and now by nonunion labor, and by its culture (Jones, 2003: x)”, forming a distinctive Southern literary tradition. All in all, the South has “a complicated sense of itself”, as suggested by Elizabeth Spenser in the excerpt of her memoir The Landscapes of the Heart (cf. Spencer, 2003, p. 7). A thorough understanding of the southern literary tradition requires an understanding of its “history, traditions, changing fashions, cultural contexts, and the increasingly voluminous scholarship that all these topics have generated (Andrews, 1998: xvii).” Historically and from the very beginning of colonizing America, the Southern literary tradition has been quite different from that of the North. As the settlers in the North and South were settling America, their purposes of constructing the new world on the new continent varied from the start. While the Puritans in the North were aiming at building a new society pure from sin and based on God, they had a shared purpose based on their (religious) beliefs and thus a stronger sense of unity. This was one of the reasons why culture and literature developed much quicker than in the South. The South was more concentrated on the development of the economy, which was achieved through the system of large farms or plantations and using the labor of slaves. The South was slow to develop its own literature and mostly imported it from the old continent. (cf. High, 1986/1995, p. 6). 11

Historians and critics observe that the South did not produce much remarkable imaginative literature until the 19th century with the rise of the plantation novel, which promoted the South as a distinguishable society from that of the North. These novels are said to lay the grounds for the nostalgia for the Old South, a time of leisure, aristocracy and the elegance of the Antebellum Southern belle. Out of that nostalgia also grew the foundations for the Southern tradition of sense of place. During the Civil War, there was in general a break in producing Southern literature. However, the war awoke the feeling and an idea of a unified and dignified society among the Southern whites and this was one of the central ideas responsible for the flowering and establishing of Southern literary tradition that began with the Southern Renascence in the 1920s. (cf. Matterson, 2003, p. 207).

The development of the Southern literary tradition thus begins most intensely with the Southern Renascence. Before that period, the South was mainly a rural region of the United States, which gradually started changing due to the ever increasing industrialized and capitalized America and the influences of the both started to transform the South as well. In the 1920s, it was the Southern Agrarians who invented and promoted the Southern sense of (agrarian and rural) place as a consequence of the fear of the South losing its individuality from the North. Their ideas influenced writers such as William Faulkner, the master of depicting Southern themes who is considered to “define modern Southern literature (Matterson, 2003, p. 208)” and who integrated and promoted a deep sense of (Southern) place in his fiction, which is “[occupied] with [the Southern lurid], the grotesque, with forms of romance and, above all, with the tragic sense of a Southern past (Matterson, 2003, p. 208)”. Since the South was ‘in danger’ of becoming an industrialized and mechanized society, but above all indistinguishable from the North, this ‘fight’ for preservance of the traditional southerness based on the myth of the Old South, this nostalgia for such a society, the sense of past and place became a tradition in the South and is dominant in the works of many Southern writers from the Southern Renascence to contemporary Southern literature by writers such as Margaret Mitchell and her notorious Gone with the Wind, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warre, Alice Walker, Walker Percy, Harry Crews, Elizabeth Spencer, et cetera.

It has become clear in the course of the 20th-century South that ‘sense of place’ became a central concept and characteristic in the Southern literary tradition, although the intensity of it gradually lessened with the changes that happened in the South due to

12 industrialization and capitalism, especially after the 1950s. The South has been transformed with the appearance of rural poverty, racial segregation, strong class hierarchy, technological innovations, et cetera (cf. Matterson, 2003, p. 208) and the ‘New South’ has been constructed, offering different social, economic and cultural settings and the critics have been wondering whether that ‘Southern tradition’ even exists. The cultural distinctions between the South and the rest of America are smaller and several scholars of southern literature believe that the true southerness is gradually disappearing (cf. Andrews, 1998: xvi) but nonetheless, that “what would qualify as southern literature in this postmodern era, is less a matter of birth or origin or even lived experience, than of deliberate affiliation, attitude, style, and that elusive quality known today as “voice” (Andrews, 1998: xvi).” The new, contemporary southern writers’ voice has adapted to the transformed South, of which the rural became the urban, “Southern towns have grown into cities, and technology now leaps old boundaries with the click of a mouse (Jones, 2003, xiii). That voice, as exemplified by Crews’ literary texts has largely to do with the new material the changed urban Southern landscape has to offer, which is no longer the nostalgic rural and romantic setting, but, the urban with all its attributes and in Crews’ literature what is portrayed is something of a totally newly constructed sense of place, that of depicting the urban sense of dysfunctional community, the lack of (past southern) values, poverty, violence, the freaks, and outcasts.

The definition of what makes southern literature southern or what distinguishes it from the rest of the United States was much clearer with the Agrarians and neo-Agrarians and the depiction of typical Southern themes than it is in the postsouthern literature, which has become less regional and more universal. Nonetheless, as I argue through the analysis of works below, if contemporary southern literature does not portray specific traditional Southern themes represented by the typical southern sense of place, in the undertones of its universal themes, there usually lies the signature of a traditional Southern writer, as Andrews explains it in the preface of the Norton Anthology of the Literature of the American South: [qualities such as ] the personal, almost intimate connection to place and to the past; the preference for the tangible over the abstract; a tempered, often tragic view of life; an eye for the peculiar or grotesque and an ear for the cadences of oral storytelling […] that have traditionally been cited as the signature of a southern writer (Andrews, xvii).

Andrews’ description of the characteristics of southern writing suggests that there still is a southern literary tradition. The significance of the “intimate connection to place” mentioned

13 by Andrews above, which is just another term for the ‘sense of place’ I am discussing, is the main characteristic of many southern literary anthologies, those of southern literature before and after the 20th century. According to the anthology of modern southern literature by Jones I divided the southern literary ‘sense of place’ into the following categories: remembering southern places, experiencing Southern families, negotiating Southern communities, and challenging Southern traditions (cf. Jones, 2003, ix ff.). The categories above are what constructs the traditional literary Southern ‘sense of place’, which is suggested by Eudora Welty’s definitions of ‘sense of place’, although never straight-forwardly defined.

2.1.1 The Southern ‘sense of place’ When southern authors write about the South, they write about the significance of family and community; passion for place; and sense of the past. Simply put, these are the three main elements, which, unified, and joined by the more regional elements, such as the regional dialect and distinctively Southern themes, such as remembering southern places with the strong power of the past in the present, a great attention to and affection for place, experiencing southern families, (negotiating) southern communities, (challenging) southern traditions, a religious sense, a closeness to nature, and southern pride, construct the traditional Southern concept of ‘sense of place’. Place in Southern literature has been pondered upon and given importance by many southern literary scholars and writers. While it has already been established above why and how ‘sense of place’ became an important constituent in the southern literary tradition, writers and literary critics have also been discussing the importance and the role of place in fiction. Maya Angelou, for example, writes in her I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings about the importance of place: What sets one Southern town apart from another, or from a Northern town or hamlet, or city high-rise? The answer must be the experience shared between the unknowing majority (it) and the knowing minority (you). All of childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood. (Angelou, 1969, p. 20) Angelou suggests that a place of your childhood defines who you are. So, one aspect of the role of the place in fiction (as in life) is that it shapes the identity. This is an important

14 function of place in fiction, since it offers the background against which the characters in a novel are shaped, which is also suggested by Eudora Welty.

The most important explanation and definition of ‘sense of place’ is that of Eudora Welty. Her essay “Place in Fiction” and her work in general have become an “exemplar of the southern ‘sense of place’ (cf. Bone, 1974/2005, p. 38) and her 'Weltyan sense of place' a great influence in the Southern literary tradition. The first time Welty uses the term ‘sense of place’ is in her work “Some Notes on River Country”, published in 1944. She describes the sense of place of a little part by the Mississippi River between Natchez and Vicksburg by including the descriptions of the feel of the place with its architecture, the people, the customs, the community – the women and their errands, old men playing checkers, the church and religion, a cemetery the stories, wondering about the past that shaped that place, the emotions, nature, and basically all that constitutes a place. Being a thorough literary description of a place, “Some Notes on River Country” does not offer definitions of the concept but is rather her definition of ‘sense of place’ exemplified – it is her definition of ‘sense of place’ in practice. Welty offers her broad and never simple definition in her essay “Place in Fiction”, discussed in more detail below, however, to condense the broadness of her definitions of functions and values of place in fiction according to the defining “Place in Fiction” and the practical “Some Notes on River Country”, one can claim that it encompasses the southern past or remembering southern places, southern families, southern communities, religion, nature and southern traditions, which are, after all the specific and typical southern traditional themes.

2.2 The intersection of literary and visual texts and is there a southern photography tradition?

Photographs are “illustrations of the past, of the look of people, events and things (Trachtenberg, 1989, p. xiii)”. Photography is an art form that represents the photographers’ interpretations of the world, much like the writer represents his interpretations with works of literature. “The [writer] employs words, narrative, and analysis. The photographer’s solution is in the viewfinder: where to place the edge of the picture, what to exclude, from what point of view to show the relations among the included details (Trachtenberg, 1989, p. xiv)”.

In Reading American Photographs, Trachtenberg observes that “American photographs are not simple depictions but constructions […] [and that] photographers employ their medium to make sense of their society (Trachtenberg, 1989, p. xiv)” Trachtenberg places the importance of historical values of photographers since they, in varying degrees depending on the photographer’s technique of representation, depict the truth. […] while the camera has undeniably altered our sense of the past by showing us the actual look of things and persons (within the limits, of course, of adjustment of lens, light, and perspective imposed by the photographer), there is still the question of how we make sense of what we see. The historical value of photographs includes depiction but goes beyond it. (Trachtenberg, 1989: xiv)

The “actual look” that Trachtenberg mentions above varies, of course, from photographer to photographer, and while some southern photographers are more documentary-oriented, and thus depict the more “actual looks” of southern subjects on the surface (underneath it, compilations of their documentary photographs represent a poetic coherence), others depict their photographic representations of typical southern themes in more symbolic ways. However, as Trachtenberg suggests, the value of the photograph goes beyond the depiction and this ‘beyond’ explored in the photography of the American South has to do not with the reality or surrealism of the photographs, but rather with the interpretation of the significance of the continuation of sense of place in southern photography. The American South has not only been mythologized by literature and the other media, but also by photography. Southern photography is a field not holding its righteous place in the canon of American photography and while it displays an abundance of greatly artistic photographers who already have constructed a body of distinguishable southern photography tradition, it deserves more attention. The critics have been wondering whether there is a distinct Southern photography tradition in America. The list of Southern photographers and those photographing the South is extensive, contains a highly artistic value and offers itself to (critical) interpretation of southerness or lack thereof in a canon of Southern photographs. My conclusion is that, all those facts considered, there indeed exists southern photography (tradition) distinguishable from the rest of America and it shows in a canon of Southern photographs. Perhaps critics do not recognize it as such due to the fact that it lacks critical attention. Studies and interpretational books on southern photography are scarce. One of the most notable books is Ordering the Façade: Photography and Contemporary Southern Women's Writing by Henninger, but it focuses on a narrower subject of the representation of Southern women in

16 photography and how the photography influences the construction of women’s identities in the South. The book offers a rather short introduction into the southern photography. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the representation of southerness in southern photography and the ways in which this southerness is represented. Drawing parallels between visual and literary texts of the South are placed exactly in their common depiction of this southerness. Parallels were also drawn between the two media by the Southern photographers themselves. Walker Evans worked on his collection with the writer James Agee and what they produced was the two media completing each other in their function of producing an essay of the lives of three tenant families in Alabama. As Agee explains: “[the photographs] and the text are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative (Agee & Evans, 1941/1960, pxv)”. Eudora Welty discovered the educational value of photography for her writing. Deborah Luster also produced her photographic essay in collaboration with the poet Wright. My findings of the research of the selected photographers and their work show the traditional southern ‘sense of place’ represented in visual texts of the 20th century American South through the use of techniques implying nostalgia for the lost past and through capturing typical Southern themes. Consequently, it is exactly the photographic representations of those themes that make southern photography distinguishable from the American photography.

3 Southern Renascence

Southern Renaissance, also referred to as the Southern Renascence, was a time of great literary blooming in the South during the 1920s and 1950s (cf. Matterson, 2003, p. 209). It is said to have originated, or was at least greatly influenced by the works by the Agrarians (cf. Matterson, 2003, p. 209), such as the authors of the famous Agrarian manifesto I’ll Take My Stand, and further influenced by the following generations of Southern writers belonging to the Neo-Agrarian group, such as Eudora Welty and her concept of sense of place. In the following chapters of this thesis, the movement or the period is divided into the Agrarian period lasting roughly from the 1920s to 1950s and the Neo-Agrarian period from roughly the 1950s to 1970s, wherein the concept of sense of place is focused on.

3.1 The Agrarian ideas and their influence on the literary tradition

The concept of sense of place in the 20th century Southern literature begins with the Southern Agrarians and a movement called the Southern Renaissance. The Agrarians with their ideas of the idealized rural South had great influence on the culture including literature of the South in the 1930s. “[…][T]he standard southern literary-critical conception of “place” derives substantially from the Agrarian’s idealized vision of a rural, agricultural society (Bone, 1974/2005, vii)”. In their essays the Agrarians attempted to describe and define the Southern mind (cf. Hobson, 1991, p. 3). As part of their definition of southerness, the characteristics of the Agrarian South including the literature of the time was a tragic sense, a religious sense, closeness to nature, a great attention to and affection for place, a close attention to family, a preference for the concrete and a rage against abstraction” (Hobson, p. 4) and the Southern writer was mostly concerned with place, family, community and religion (cf. Hobson, p. 4).

In Southern literature of the 1930s, the famous work that most wonderfully and comprehensively captures the ideas of Southern Agrarians is Gone with the Wind, written in 1936 by Margaret Mitchell. The novel with characteristics of local color, including the southern dialect, restores the myth of the ‘Old South’, the nostalgia for the plantation society and the South of “leisure, grace, and aristocratic chivalry”, which is what the attributes of the South were and what made the South a different kind of society than that of the North. (cf.

Matterson, 2003, p. 207 ff.). The reason this myth of the Old South was revived at this point in history had to do firstly with a sense of the southern pride after the Civil War and secondly with the Agrarian fear of the modern South becoming an “industrial, mechanized pastless society indistinguishable from the North (Matterson, 2003, p. 208)”. This influenced a great deal of Southern writers well into the contemporary period and in general laid the foundation for that nostalgia for traditional Southern subjects in Southern literature that distinguish it from the literature of the rest of America. Of course, as the South was changing due to becoming more and more industrial, that influence of the nostalgia for emphasizing typical and traditional Southern topics receded, however, in some way or another, it is still present in the writers minds, even if hidden in the undertones of their more contemporary subjects (as shall be shown in the course of this thesis).

In the 1920s the Agrarian movement set out to define and maintain the true quality of southern culture. Their most significant literary and historical document was published in 1930. I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition is a collection of 12 essays by 12 different authors, who resisted the industrial capitalism and persisted that southern rural and small-town culture should be preserved in order to maintain a distinct Southern tradition. As Louis Rubin, one of the twelve authors, explains, the work represents a protest against industrialism that had already homogenized many communities in America and was beginning to threaten the distinctive Southern region as well. In the introduction to I’ll Take My Stand he sums up the main ideas of the twelve writers: “all tend to support a Southern way of life against what may be called the American or prevailing way; and all as much as agree that the best terms in which to represent the distinction are contained in the phrase, Agrarian versus Industrial (Rubin, n.d., online),” by which he means that the Agrarians promote the preservation of the Southern identity, which rests on the rural tradition, as distinctive from the rest of America.

The Agrarians expressing their ideas in I’ll Take My Stand managed to create a unified tone and platform, but their approach, social attitudes and rhetoric differed. Some of their essays were socially tinted; others were literary texts (e.g. poems), some were elitist and identifying with the antebellum southern slaveholding; and some promoted the folk culture of the southern farmer. But what they had in common, and this is the idea mentioned several times above, was their common belief that the rural culture of the South was more natural than the emerging urban and homogenizing culture of America. They promoted a return to a

19 more traditional rural and regional culture and resisted the consumer-driven mass culture that had emerged in the 1920s. (cf. Murphy, n.d., online).

3.2 Neo-Agrarians and the influence of ‘Weltyan sense of place’ Hobson in his study of the postmodern southern writer, The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World describes the Neo-agrarian society of the 1950s as a continuation of the Agrarian society sustained by family, religion, tradition and community. Not surprisingly did the southern writers of that period concern themselves with the same themes, place, family, community and religion and continued to be fascinated with the southern past and the individual past as it was involved with the regional past. (cf. Hobson, 1991, p. 4) The most outstanding writer and critic of this period or rather this group of Southern writers is Eudora Welty, who with her ‘Weltyan sense of place’ not only greatly influenced the neo-Agrarian literary tradition but the literary tradition of the South in general. Her influential definitions of sense of place through her work “Place in Fiction” and “Some Notes on the River Country” allowed certain neo-Agrarian critics to celebrate her ‘sense of place’ rather than realizing that that idealized South of their predecessors, the Agrarians, as well as Welty’s continuation of their ideas, no longer existed and was transformed by the industrialization. So Welty’s work, including her novel Losing Battles discussed below, is actually “a look back” (cf. Bone, 1974/2005, p. 40).

3.2.1 Eudora Welty’s place in fiction Eudora Welty was a (Southern) writer, essayist and photographer and her works are particularly notable in the Southern literary tradition for her (Southern) aesthetics of place. “Her work has come out of a particular landscape and is based on her long familiarity with its people (Gretlund, 1994, vii)”. It demonstrates a cultural continuity of Agrarian ideas from their origin in the rural South to the contemporary South and represents the collective Southern experience from the Depression until today (cf. 1994, vii).

Welty’s literary aesthetic relies strongly on a notion of sense of place. As evident from her many essays on the topic as well as her works, she finds the notion extremely important in both, her personal life as well as in fiction. It is a notion she upgraded from the Agrarian ideas of the idealized and distinct rural South and gave it additional dimensions of definition.

Welty’s romanticizing the natural landscape in her work “Some Notes on the River Country”, published in 1944 could be compared to the Agrarian aesthetics of place and of anti-development and is considered as the revival of the idealized Agrarian sense of place. Although the South was already transforming, Welty's natural and romantic notions of the traditional southern place became a Neo-Agrarian celebration of that sense of place. Welty can be seen as the main influence of that neo-agrarian celebration and nostalgia. (cf. Bone, 1974/2005, p. 39).

The concept of sense of place was (further) and in a more artistic and literary way developed in more detail by Eudora Welty in her essay “Place in Fiction”. In order to make sense of her broad, vague, often confusing, never clear and one-fold or simple definitions of sense of place, it is best to look at the practical example where she applies her own definitions. This should not be difficult, since she applies her ‘sense of place’ in all her works. “Some Notes on the River Country”, in which she mentions the concept ‘sense of place’ for the first time, provides a wonderful practical example of her definitions of the concept as developed in her essay “Place in Fiction”.

In “Place in Fiction”, Welty mostly discusses the function that place has in fiction, why it holds the vital importance as a literary element in constructing a story and how it influences the construction of all other elements in the story.

Welty puts an emphasis on place in fiction because of the other story elements, such as characters, themes, the story, and the language, place is what establishes the real essence in a story and provides the grounds for all the other elements of the story. “Place in fiction is the named, identified, concrete, exact and exacting, and therefore credible, gathering spot of all that has been felt, is about to be experienced, in the novel's progress (Welty, Place in Fiction, 1942/1977, p. 122).”

Welty observes that the novel is “bound up in the local, the "real," the present, the ordinary day-to-day of human experience (Place in Fiction, p. 117)” and continues that the “world of appearance” in the novel must seem actual. Thus in order for a writer to be able to create a “believable” world of appearance or an illusion of an actual place, and for the reader to perceive it as credible, feelings, associations and customs must be bound up in a place as

21 well. (cf. 118 ff.) “It’s the human life lived there that gives place its emotional impact in her fiction. Her characters are the place they live (Gretlund, 1994, viii)”. She concludes that place is an all-inclusive framework, it conditions a novelist’s mode of characterization, his sense of direction – in brief, his entire point of view. (cf. Kumar & McKean, n.d., online). How are the main definitions of sense of place applied or traceable in her essay on the part of Mississippi stretching from Vicksburg to Natchez, “Some Notes on the River Country”?

Welty describes a little part by the Mississippi River between Natchez and Vicksburg by as the “concrete and named”, continuing with the descriptions of the feel of the place with its architecture, the people and their experience in the described, named and concrete place by describing briefly their history, customs and the community. She gives an account of the local ordinary every-day action of the women and their errands, old men playing checkers, the church and religion, a cemetery the stories, nature, creating just the sense of place she defines in “Place in Fiction”.

3.2.2 Eudora Welty’s sense of place in Losing Battles

Written in the postsouthern period in 1970 in the traditional neo-Agrarian fashion, Losing Battles is considered by the critics to be “the last good Southern novel” (cf. Bone, p. 40). Welty’s literary reflections and practice are wonderfully presented in Losing Battles. Set in rural Mississippi, the novel reflects the specific Southern themes as well as the region’s language and culture through the representation of one (rather large) family. The main two points in the following chapter deal with how Welty’s own literary thought and fictional techniques in the novel, focusing mainly on her notion of ‘sense of place’, and the distinct Southern themes are demonstrated in Losing Battles.

The novel’s temporal setting is the summer in 1930s and lasts a day, on a Sunday including the next morning on Monday. The spatial setting is placed in the hill country of northeast Mississippi, more specifically a farm, which is the home of Granny Vaughn and the Renfro family in the nearby community of Banner. Members of the large Granny Vaughn’s

22 family, the Renfros and the Beechams, three generations of her descendants, get together in her home for a celebration of her 90th birthday. The main plot of the story is actually very simple – Granny’s clan gather in her home to celebrate her birthday and are also excited about another major event in the plot, the reunion with Jack Renfro, Granny’s grandson, who escaped from penitentiary one day before his release, to be there in time for the celebration. The next day, on Sunday morning, is the day of the funeral of a school teacher Miss Julia Mortimer and it is spent with the family by the breakfast table and ends with Jack singing on the farm. What makes the plot turn into a long novel that it is is the story-telling of the family members at the celebration. Through their story-telling, which seems to represent the central essence of the story, an abundance of (mostly humorous but also tragic) events and actions are revealed and most of the novel’s narration is conducted through dialogue between the family members, consisting of many characters.

Losing Battles immediately opens with a detailed description of place – the “named and the concrete”, as she defines place in “Place in Fiction” (Place in Fiction, p. 122): When the rooster crowed, the moon had still not left the world but was going down on flushed cheek, one day short in the full. A long thin cloud crossed it slowly, drawing itself out like a name being called. The air changed, as if a mile or so away a wooden door had swung open, and a smell, more of warmth than wet, from a river at low stage, moved upward into the clay hills that stood in darkness. (Welty, Losing Battles, 1970, p. 3).

Immediately, the sense of an agrarian region is established, the setting and the place where the farm, the main setting of the story lies. The reader feels as if the narrator is taking him for a ride to some place as the setting continues to unfold the particularity of that place by unfolding the details, one after another, to reveal them to the reader piece by piece in order to create the sense of that place in the story. In the scenery, the house appears, accompanied by a dog, a baby who comes out of the house and a girl picking it up after the chickens surrounded him, the animals of the farm, the surroundings, until we are taken into the house and the characters’ dialogues begin. From this point on, most of the details of the place (as well as the plot) are revealed through the dialogues of the characters, featuring mostly only narrator’s detailed descriptions of the concrete material comprising the place and the house. Even though Welty’s technique of narrating the story is mostly based on dialogue and minor descriptions by the narrator, she manages to integrate a great deal of descriptive detail, which,

23 as suggested in her essays, livens up the story and makes the place, that “world of appearance” in fiction more “actual”, believable (Welty, Place in Fiction, p. 125). Losing Battles is, what in her essay Eudora Welty describes a novel should be, “bound up in the local, the “real”, the present, the ordinary day-to-day of human experience (Welty, Place in Fiction, p. 117)”. The characters of this novel are insignificant, poor, somewhat awkward, isolated in the hill country of Mississippi and insignificant.

Welty’s sense of place also reveals itself in a strong sense of family tradition. Its members are closely connected by the stories they share. Celebrating their predecessor’s anniversary, the adult members of the family organize the preparations and gather to exchange narratives of the past, which mix with the narratives of the present. Their children play in the fields, coming in only for food and goodbyes. They stick together in their beliefs and constitute a small community of their own. Everyone outside that community is an outsider, whom they gossip about and refuse to accept, such as the teacher, Miss Mortimer, who never appears in the novel as a person, but still causes much distress in the family. The family members look forward to seeing Jack at the celebration, who is returning from the penitentiary after two years. Uncle Percy tells the story of how Jack was fighting with Curly, the local store owner who took a family ring from Ella Fay in his store, claiming that the family was too poor to pay him anyway and they owe him money. Jack went to the store to get the ring back, fights with Curly, takes the safe with the ring and while he carries it home loses all the contents. Curly presses charges and Jack is sentenced to penitentiary. During Uncle Percy’s telling of the story, the rest of the listeners join in with questions for more details and join in criticizing Jack’s misfortune, making the Judge Moody, who sentenced him, the enemy in their community.

As the family’s stories and secrets are told and especially in the last two chapters, the family drama progresses. As a consequence of gossiping about the deceased Miss Mortimer, the aunts come up with a definition of the identity of Gloria’s father. According to their logical connection of events, her father is her mother-in-law Beluah’s brother, which would make Gloria and Jack cousins. Much distress is caused when the Judge tells them that if Gloria and Jack were indeed cousins, their marriage would be illegal in the state of Mississippi. The more the action in the novel progresses the more of the family history and their secrets are revealed. As one of the uncles returns from Miss Mortimer’s place, he, Uncle Nathan, reveals a story about his past that only Granny and Miss Beulah have known. Years

24 ago, he killed a man named Dearman. This is why Nathan is constantly on the move and allows himself no comfort; he is doing penance for his crime. It is implied that Nathan killed Dearman because Dearman had impregnated Sam Dale's girlfriend. This means that Dearman, not Sam Dale, was Gloria's father, and therefore Jack and Gloria are not cousins. When real drama happens, the members are ignorant. I believe Welty makes her characters ignorant to the painful truths because they have to fight so many battles and only seldom win them. Several times in the story it is clear to the reader what their story-telling implies, but the other members listening choose to ignore the implications and stick to their own more pleasant interpretations. This is evident when the story about Ellen and Euclid Beecham, the Beulah and her brothers’ parents, is told, about how they drowned when their children were young, their deaths appear to be suicide, but the family members prefer to leave this ambiguous and not deal with the harsh reality.

Welty’s technique of presenting the plot mostly through the dialogue of the characters, through which they reveal the central subplots, stories and backgrounds, suggests the typical Southern tradition of (oral) story-telling, which in the novel plays an important role. The family gathers on the porch, the symbol of socializing in the Deep South, which provides the place where the gossip happens and where the family stories are told and their secrets revealed. It is the story-telling that provides the sense of past and that constructs the identities of the characters in the novel, but most importantly it is a device that holds the family together. In chapters four and five the family’s emotional character changed and their world is being shaken up by reality – first of all, the celebration is being interrupted by the information of Miss Mortimer’s funeral preparations and the mood gets filled with the complications of Gloria’s father’s unknown identity. It is suggested that her father is Jack’s uncle and there is fear that they are in fact related. Another story told by an uncle reveals that Gloria’s father is not of any relation and thus resolves this complication. Story-telling has a function of preserving memory and memory strongly holds the family together. This preservation of the family stories is also suggested by Uncle Noah, who at the end of the celebration says to Gloria: 'Gloria, this has been a story on us all that will never be allowed to be forgotten […] Long after you're an old lady without much further stretch to go, sitting back in the same rocking chair Granny's got her little self in now, you'll be hearing it told to Lady May and all her hovering brood. How we brought Jack Renfro back safe from the pen! How you contrived to send a court judge up Banner Top and caused him to sit at our table and pass a night with the family, wife along with him. The story of Jack making it home through thick and thin and into Granny's arms for her biggest and last celebration--for 25

so I have a notion it is. […] I call this a reunion to remember, all! […] Do you hear me, blessed sweethearts?' He swung over to Granny's chair and folded his arms around her, not letting go, begging for a kiss, not getting it." (Welty, Losing Battles, 1970, p. 354)

Losing Battles is largely based on the traditional Agrarian and Welty’s idealized southern sense of place. Welty set it in the hilly, rural part of Mississippi, focusing on a small family community and characters attached to their land. However, as Bone suggests, there are (very few) occasional signs of “socioeconomic change” in the novel (Bone, 1974/2005, p. 41), refering, for example, to the local identity of Banner being altered and homogenized (ruined) by Dearman the mill-owner, who “took over some of the country, brought niggers in here, cut down every tree within forty miles, and run it through a sawmill (Bone, p. 41).” But the main ideology remains Agrarian as seen through Welty’s fictinoal techniques and the repressented traditional Southern themes and as represented by Uncle Dolphus declaratoin that “farmers still and evermore will be!”. (cf. Bone, p.41). While many families in the Banner community have moved away, the Renfros intention is to stay on their land and continue farming.

3.3 Documentary and nostalgic photography of the American South from 1930s to 1950s

The first half of the 20th century American South, the period described also as the Southern Renascence, is marked by two different photographic genres - the documentary photography of Walker Evans and Eudora Welty and its social and cultural role as well as the artistic nostalgic photography of Clarence John Laughlin. Both photography collections, Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and Welty’s One Time, One Place, “present more than a compilation of individual photographs; rather, a deliberate order of pictures, a discourse of images (Trachtenberg, 1989, p. 233),” which as a whole represent their views as well as the sense of place in Southern society. Evans’ photography is focused mostly on the representation of the Southern life in Alabama during the Depression in the 1930s, while Welty’s, also during the Depression, has more to do with the representation of the Southern traditions in Mississippi. While Evan’s camera documents, Welty’s does that as well, however, by focusing more on capturing the typical Southern life she turns her camera into a tool that helps create her literary style.

The surrealist photography of Clarence John Laughlin in the 1940s employs a more artistic style. It depicts the southern nostalgic sense of past through his dream-like photographs of decaying Southern plantations collected in his book Ghosts along the Mississippi.

3.3.1 The South as documented through the lens by Evans and Welty

Walker Evans (1903 - 1975) was a world-wide known photographer, one of the fathers of the documentary tradition in American photography, who “for fifty years, from the late 1920s to the early 1970s, recorded the American scene with the nuance of a poet and the precision of a surgeon, creating an encyclopedic visual catalogue of modern America in the making (Walker Evans, 2000)”. Although Evans’ work is distinguished from fine art by some critics, such as Newhall, since documentary photographs are considered to be factual records with sociological purposes (cf. Trachtenberg, 1989, p. 190), Evans’ photography nevertheless exhibits artistic treats. As Newhall describes documentary photography in Reading American Photographs, although documentary photographs are overall considered as records, what makes them artistic is that they exhibit poetic and emotional qualities (cf. Trachtenberg, 1989, p. 191). As Evans puts it himself: “Looking at what I was doing, most people didn’t think it was anything at all. It was just a wagon in the street or anybody, but that turned out to be what I presume to say was its virtue (Guimond, 1991, p. 10).” Evans’ photography collections, seen as whole rather than individual photographs, are indeed poetic and exhibit elements that are also constituents of fine fiction (such as “intention, logic, continuity, climax, sense and perfection”) (cf. Trachtenberg, 1989, 234). But even for the observer that cannot find an artistic value in them, what is clear is that they exhibit accounts of the southern life and a pictoral or rather photographic description of the southern place.

While drawing quality and aesthetic parallels between documentary photography of Walker Evans and literature, Evans also colaborated with other writers, among them James Agee, with whom he published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in 1941, which examines the Southern sharecropepers' lives. The book is a textual and visual account of their project, a government job with a New Deal agency, commissioned by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1936 (cf. Trachtenberg, 1989, p. 245). As Agee writes in the Preface, the photographer and the writer had to “prepare […] an article on cotton tenantry in the United

States, in the form of a photographic and verbal record of the daily living and environment of an average white family of tenant farmers (Agee and Evans, 1941/1960, xiii)”. This “preparing of an article” developed into a book focusing mainly on the lives of three poor farming families in rural Alabama. The colletion of Evans’ photographs and of various genres of Agees accompanying text record the land and the place, the people who shaped the land and the In his Preface Agee describes the method implied in the book, explaining that the instruments to capture the stories of the three families are both, the camera and the “printed word”; that it represents one volume of a wider collection titled “Three Tenant Families”; that it is experimental; and that the images and the text need to be viewed as a unified discourse (cf. Agee and Evans, 1941/1960, xv). The focus of this thesis, however, is to focus on the photographs rather than on the text by Agee.

The Evans' 61 black and white photographs in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men document the poor and simple lives of 3 farming families in the South, the Gudgers, the Woods, and the Ricketts, as described in the text by Agee. The aim of the book, what was initially meant to be an article which was never published, was that of social responsibility through showing accurate lives of farmers in rural Alabama during the Great Depression (cf. Austgen, n.d., para. 9). Thus, the photographs foremost have a documentary value for that reason, however, as a collection rather than individually, they also tell a story or rather represent a place and the people in it. All photographs are placed at the beginning of the book and have no captions, as the individuals and the families, their homes and their lives are described in detail in Agee's text.

As is to be expected from the documentary genre, Evan's photographic style is clean and straightforward. The lighting is simple and the construction of his subject is solid. His subjects, individuals and families, are mostly captured sharply, with a hard focus, up close with a head-on camera angle,and using a shorter focal lenght for a more intimate presentation. All the above mentioned characteristics are evident in the photographs of the first family captured by Evans, given below: the husband (Photograph 1), his wife (Photograph 2), their home shown from a wider angle so as to capture the place they have shaped and that also played a part in shaping them (Photograph 3), one of their children (Photograph 4) and other details, such as working shoes (Photograph 5) and a woman working in the field (Photograph 6). “As a series, the photographs seem to have elucidated the whole tragedy of the Great

Depression [in the South]; individually, they are intimate, transcendent, and enigmatic (Walker Evans, 2000)” and are great examples of the visual texts that document the Agrarian sense of place – the subjects as well as the content in the photographs represent (and propagate) the Agrarian rural place and the intimate family lives of the South.

Although Agee suggests that photography can only record the absolute and “dry” truth (cf. Agee & Evans, p. 109), Evans’ photographs indeed seem to be presented straightforwardly and without emotion, but if one looks closely, it is precisely the Evans’ straightforward techniques as well as his point of view that do finally evoke some emotion and this is precisely what represents his unique photographic aesthetic – the intimacy of individuals shot from up-close, for example, revealing the subjects’ looks in their eyes of a hard life – as in Photograph 1, 2 and 3. Evans also chose to capture working shoes, which in itself tells a story of a hard working life by their owner.

Photograph 1: The Father1 by Walker Evans; from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men2

Photograph 2: The Mother3 by Walker Evans; from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

1 My caption. 2 Souce: All images by Evans in this thesis are scanned from Agee, James and Walker Evans. Three Tenant Families. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston: The Riverside Press. 29

Photograph 3: The Home4 by Walker Evans; from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Photograph 4: One of the Children5 by Walker Evans; from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Photograph 5: Working Shoes6 by Walker Evans; from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

3 My caption. 4 My caption. 5 My caption. 6 My caption 30

Photograph 6: Woman Working in the Field7 by Walker Evans; from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Eudora Welty’s portfolio of photographs can be compared to Evans’ in its documentary value as well as its visualization of the rural South in general. Before becoming a writer, Welty’s first job was a journalist for the Works of Progress Administration, which, as in Evans’ case the FSA mentioned above, also aimed at social responsibility and made efforts to improve the situation of Great Depression in the 1930s, when she travelled all over Mississippi, writing news stories and taking pictures (cf. Welty, 1983: p. 84).

While Welty worked as a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration, she took photographs of people from all economic and social classes. One Time, One Place is Welty’s collection of photographs of those people and that southern place all around Mississippi during the 1930s. In the introduction of her collection she explains that this experience gave her the chance to really see for the first time the nature of the place of her childhood. (cf. Welty, One Time, One Place, 1971: p. 3) and her collection of photographs is a result of that first seeing. The opportunity to take photographs allowed Welty to get to know “the real8 State of Mississippi, not the abstract state of the Depression (Welty, 1971, p. 3)”. Mississippi had already been the poorest state in the 1930s and the Depression in that part was not a “noticeable phenomenon”, as Welty describes it (Welty, p. 3). As we can see from her statement as well as the contents of the 100 photos she exhibits, she was not trying so much to show the downfalls of the Depression and was not concentrated on propagating the farming

7 My caption. 8 My italics. 31 way of life and the Agrarian ideas as well as the New Deal ideas as in the case of Evans and Agee, but simply to capture the southern place and what constitutes that place.

In a lecture delivered at Harvard University in 1983, Welty explains the value of photography for her as a writer. She herself connects the act of photographing to a way of seeing as well as creating a sense of place in her literature. She acknowledges that photography played a significant role in finding her literary voice and as established in the previous chapters on literary texts, Welty’s name is simultaneously used with the notion of sense of place in the South.

Through photography, a means of recording a place and all elements that make a place the subject of a visual as well as literary text, Welty found the importance of truly knowing a place and the important functions it has in a story. She explains: The camera was a hand-held auxiliary of wanting-to-know. It had more than information and accuracy to teach me. I learned in the doing how ready I had to be. Life doesn't hold still. A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away. Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had. Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture; and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it. These were things a story writer needed to know. And I felt the need to hold transient life in words – there's so much more of life that only words can convey – strongly enough to last me as long as I lived. (Welty, 1983: p. 84 ff.)

Welty made a connection between the two different mediums, the photography and literature and created a relationship between her photography and her fiction. She used these photographs to provide a picture of what is southern and a foundation for the southern place in her literature. She made comments on the backs of her photographs and those comments discuss typically Southern poses, such as a photograph of a young black girl lying in a porch swing (Photograph 7 below) with an amusing comment on the back: “Good Southern attitude”. (cf. Mars, p. 282)

Photograph 7: Staying Home by Eudora Welty; from One Time, One Place It would most likely be considered a cultural crime if one were to conduct a study of the Southern ‘sense of place’ without mentioning the “famous” and foremost traditional southern front porch and one does not exactly have to be an expert of Southern tradition to immediately notice that not only in Southern literature but also in the culture of the contemporary South in general, the front porch is still a symbol of the South – nearly every house has one and on nearly every porch there are people socializing, talking (probably mostly ‘gossiping) and observing the surroundings. It is an indispensible place in almost all Southern literature. Welty mentions this in one of her interviews discussing how Southerners entertain themselves while sitting on their porches and talking in the evenings (cf. Ferris, 1975/76, p. 164). The porch is used in her literary works as a gathering place as well, such as the porch in Losing Battles, where the characters gather in the evenings to swap tales.

However, to return to the discussion of the function that photography had for shaping Welty’s literary style, she used the method of commenting on the reverse of her snapshots on several occasions, commenting mostly the “typical Southern types”, which she used as subjects or simply as the sense of the place in her literature, as discussed in Mars’ study of how Welty turned her images into fiction: [Welty’s] fiction is filled with such typically Southern types. In fact, Welty’s famed sense of place in her early fiction is established more through character and social behavior than through description of the physical setting. The three ladies in “Lily Daw” who gather at the post office while one of their number does up the mail might well be images from a Welty’s photograph. […] Welty’s vision as a photographer and her vision as a story writer were similar: what interested her in one art form interested her in another.

Mars further claims that “Welty carefully selected what to enclose within the frame of her camera […], and her “instinct and knowledge […] was to take a group of people whose being together shows something”. The same instinct and knowledge, she went on to state, governed her work as a writer (Mars, p. 283)”. That “something” to show, as Welty puts it, is exactly that typical southern sense of place she uses in her literature, such as Losing Battles analyzed above and her photography, such as One Time, One Place.

In the introduction to One Time, One Place, Welty explains that the merit her pictures have is not in how they were made (referring to her poor equipment as well as her technique) but in what they show – their subject matter and that they represent a record of the elements of one time and one place (cf. Welty, 1971: p. 4).

Her photographs “suggest her fascination with the citizens of her native state [… and] depict the lives of Southerners (Mars, p. 280)”. They document typical sights of Southern life and show the faces and landscapes, focusing on encounters and smaller groups of people: workers, children playing, socializing in the streets, community life, farm work, Mississippian architecture, street musician, state fair, the hub of Southern life, Sunday school, et cetera and together as a whole, these images create the sense of the Southern place in Mississippi during the 1930s. The photographs of people, their surroundings, workplace and events are filled with life and dynamics, unlike Evans’ portraits of the farmers, which seem rather static and posed. Indeed, Welty had perhaps an easier task than Evans, since she was “moving through the scene openly and yet invisibly, because [she] was part of it, born into it, taken for granted (Welty, 1971: p. 4)”. Most of her subjects were not aware that they were being photographed, this is also why Welty refers to them as “snapshots”. Evans was not as lucky. As Agee explains, sometimes Evans had to allow the mothers to wash their children before being photographed and pose in order not to shame the families (cf. Austgen, n.d. para.4), which resulted in more static images and perhaps more depressingly presented, but after all this criticism can hardly qualify as countable as this was the time of Depression and the families were extremely poor.

One Time, One Place is divided into four chapters, which Welty titled Workday, Saturday, Sunday, and Portraits. The first image in the collection is the most powerful portrait in the collection, a portrait of an African-American woman in a buttoned up working jacket. Her

34 face expression is powerful, a map of her whole life and one filled with experience and wisdom, “a story of her life in her face (Welty, 1971: p. 7)” (Photograph 8).

Photograph 8: Woman in the Buttoned Sweater9 by Eudora Welty, from One Time, One Place10 The focus of the analysis of Welty’s collection is not on the technicalities of picture making, such as the lighting, which might be criticized in some photographs, such as the Beggar at the Fair Gate, With Jigging Dolls (see Welty, 1971: p. 73), images out of focus, such as Free Gate, State Fair (see Welty, 1971: p. 72), et cetera. As already established above, Welty urges the viewers to rather focus on the content, which represents the typical Southern types. The First Part, “Workday”, presents photographs of just what the title of the chapter suggests – the working days of the people in the South –a girl chopping in the field (Photograph 9), a cotton gin, a dead hog hanging from a tree and a farmer getting ready to chop it up into pieces of meat, making cane syrup, a few shots of people taking a break from work and socializing, washwomen, nurses, teachers, and a weaver. Workday shows a variety of occupations and elements that are typical for the South, such as the cotton gin and making of the cane syrup, the strong sense of community working together and socializing (as in Photograph 11).

9 My caption. 10 All images by Welty in this thesis are scanned fromWelty, Eudora. One Time, One Place. Mississippi in the Depression. A Snapshot Album. New York: Random House. 35

Photograph 9: Chopping in the Field by Eudora Welty; from One Time, One Place

Photograph 10: Making Cane Syrup by Eudora Welty, from One Time, One Place

Photograph 11: Workers taking a Break11 by Eudora Welty, from One Time, One Place Part Two is titled “Saturday” and depicts people staying at home, resting, playing, visiting each other and socializing. It is not surprising that most of the photographs in this part show people on their porches (see Photograph 7, 12, and 13). Some typical Southern architecture and homes are captured (Photograph 14), such as a wooden farm, plantation ruins, a plantation home offering the southern hospitality, since it is open for visitors and an abandoned home. From more intimate places of homes, the photographs shift into a small- town atmosphere on a Saturday, when people stroll through the streets, farmers do their town errands, women window shopping, men conversing on the pavements, elderly sitting on a bench in the park, men inviting women for a date, the action at a State Fair – in short, Welty captured the whole variety of a Southern small-town dynamics (Photographs 15 , 16) along with some special characters such as the fortune-teller in Jackson and the bootlegger woman in Hinds County (see Welty, 1971: p. 64 and 65).

11 My caption. 37

Photograph 12: Hairdressing queue. Hinds County by Eudora Welty; from One Time, One Place

Photograph 13: Home. Clairborne County by Eudora Welty; from One Time, One Place

Photograph 14: Home with bottle trees, sometimes said to trap evil spirits that might try to get in the house. Simpson County by Eudora Welty; from One Time, One Place

Photograph 15: Saturday in Town. Grenada by Eudora Welty; from One Time, One Place

Photograph 16: Strollers. Grenada by Eudora Welty; from One Time, One Place Part Three, “Sunday”, is Welty’s photographic exploration of the typical southern church day, a depiction of another constituent of ‘sense of place’ religion. Photographs in that part depict people dressed up in churches, children in Sunday Schools, people praying and singing, and church architecture, while the last part, Part Four, “Portraits”, contains a more intimate setting of portraits of individuals and families.

As a whole, the content of the collections offers a solid pictorial representation of the elements that constitute the southern sense of place, namely, the characteristics unique or, due to its history, symbolic of the South, such as the tradition of making cane syrup, the cotton gin, the community and the southern porch, tradition and superstition, such as the bottles on trees to chase away evil spirits, religion, the small-town socializing and finally, the more intimate sense of family shown as the last part of the collection.

3.3.2 Laughlin’s nostalgic illumination and visual poetry of the southern past

Reading visual images by the Southern photographer Clarence John Laughlin in his collection Ghosts along the Mississippi requires a bit of a different approach than reading the southern documentary photographs by Evans and Welty. It is less a documentary presentation of the South and more a romantic and surrealist one with artistic and poetic elements open for a variety of interpretation. It still possesses elements of documentary photography, after all, Laughlin is documenting the old architecture of the South, but in comparison with Evans and Welty, Laughlin’s images differ in that they convey an additional, artistic dimension, based mostly on the different technique resulting in surrealist style.

Clarence John Laughlin was a Southern photographer from Louisiana, titled by some critics to be the father of photographic surrealism in America (cf. University Press of Mississippi, n.d., online), who also made several attempts at becoming a writer, but was mostly known for his surrealist and nostalgic photography of disappearing southern places. His most famous work based on capturing such places, a collection of photographs of the New Orleans architecture accompanied by his poems, The Ghosts along the Mississippi, was published in 1948. It portrays Laughlin’s nostalgia of the lost Southern past, which was one of his most frequent themes.

In the introduction to the collection that Laughlin subtitled ‘An Essay in the Poetic Interpretation of Louisiana’s Plantation Architecture’, which are decayed and falling apart but their existing even in that form prove that the past is not dead, but rather lives in the viewer’s longing for it (or so he interprets it). He writes: The dark mystery of time, the luminous and living mystery of light -- so intricately and strangely interrelated with time -- the snake-brown waters of the great serpentine Mississippi -- these are the chief protagonists now on the darkening stage occupied by the last structures of the doomed plantation system. They and they alone, determine everything we see and feel. Lost in a curious evocative pattern of light and shadow, lost in a nameless union of light and time whose intimations can never be completely phrased in words -- we find again a past which, cryptically, is no longer wholly dead, a splendor no longer wholly unreal -- but which lives tenuously, yet undeniably, in corroded walls, in empty and discolored chambers, in shadow entities, in the labyrinths of our blood. (House, 2011, online)

Laughlin’s collection comprises one hundred black and white images, which he accompanies with his own text. The photographs largely present images of decaying plantations, plantation ruins, moss-strewn bayous, abandoned and ruinous cemeteries, and farmers’ homes. Several of his images are titled “grandeur and decay”, for example a double- exposed, ghost-like image of a once clearly grand plantation now decaying (Photograph 17). Laughlin technique of this ghost-like illumination suggests a sense of nostalgia for the past, a dream-like image of the melancholy for past. Photograph 18 also suggests melancholy and longing. The double exposure of the decaying plantation house and the swampy landscape present the struggle between the natural and the manmade. The solitary tree covered with Spanish moss appears to even lift the house into the air in victory. The ghost of a woman under the tree appears to be disappearing into the swamp. With a bowed head she is disappearing just like the old plantation, the grandiose existence of which is now evident in the decay of its structure. Laughlin’s compositions of trees overgrowing the decaying structures of the plantations create a feeling of calmness and emptiness at the same time, even when he puts (too) much detail in front of the lens.

Photograph 17: Grandeur and Decay, Ghosts along the Mississippi by Clarence John Laughlin12

12 Source: (Battle Hall Highlights, 2013, online) 41

Photograph 18: Elegy for the Moss Land, Ghosts along the Mississippi by Clarence John Laughlin13

The past magnificence of the grand, glamorous, antebellum and neoclassical-style plantation houses is contrasted with their decaying facades (Photographs 17 and 18). The once magnificent plantation tradition is only evident as a ghost within a decaying frame. The lighting is bright and the dark, dreamy Spanish moss seems to overgrow the falling apart structures. There is evidence of mold and rotten walls worn out by the effects of weather and time reminding of a dead lifestyle of southern plantations that are now overgrown by the wild plants and vegetation.

In his image Elegy for the Old South (Photograph 19), Laughlin creates a truly surrealist feel. He composed it of several negatives of an old Louisiana plantation of which he created a collage and painted over it to give it a somewhat gothic feel, ghostly and mysterious. In the setting of the plantation, he also added images of an old dress, which rather looks like a headless ghost, a tomb, a framed portrait, the Louisiana sky, and other rather obscure items, which, as he describes himself serve “as symbols of the South which once existed”. (cf. Kachur, 2008, online). Laughlin himself explains that the individual elements in the photograph represent Southern past and the caption of the photograph expresses a longing for that lost past , as suggested by the meaning of ‘elegy’, which is a poem of mourning. The photograph clearly represents nostalgia for the traditional Southern past.

13 Source: Ibid. 42

Photograph 19: Elegy for the Old South, No. 2, 1946, by Clarence John Laughlin14 Most of Laughlin’s photographic techniques suggest his preoccupation with time, the passing of time, and memory in relation to sense of past. Those techniques include multiple- or double- exposure of images, the dream-like illumination and the use of symbols of time such as ghosts, decaying or old subjects and clocks, as exhibited in Photograph 20 below.

Photograph 20: The Mirror of Long Ago by Clarence John Laughlin15 The Mirror of a Long Ago is a photograph of a portrait framed in a decorated frame. It is a portrait of a woman, the antebellum Southern belle, as suggested by the clothes she is wearing and by the baroque style of the frame. Instead of using the actual technique of double-exposure, Laughlin cleverly used the reflection in the glass of a room in the background and a clock in the foreground, creating a romantic image of longing for the past.

14 Source: (Kachur, 2008, online) 15 Source: (Jackson Fine Art, n.d., online) 43

4 Postsouthern ‘sense of place’ and ‘placelessness’

4.1 Challenging southern (literary) traditions

As the South became more and more industrial and mechanized from the 1930s onwards, the social and cultural strata changed significantly and the South saw the emergence of rural poverty, racial segregation, and strong class hierarchy. From the 1960s onward, the Civil Rights Movement, heavy financial investment and technological innovation have transformed the South substantially including its cultural and literary tradition. The questions the writers of the Southern Renascence were concerned with no longer concerned the writers of the new, postmodern South. (cf. Matterson, 2003, p. 208)

Literature of the ‘New South’ displays more variety than it did before, to the extent that writers and critics have been wondering whether we can still talk about that indistinguishable ‘southerness’, about that distinct Southern place and whether now a Southern literature even exists. Thornton, in a New York Times Article, discusses southerness in southern photography and comments that “in contemporary art photography, as in virtually everything else, the South is now indistinguishable from the rest of the nation (Thornton, 1981, online)”.

While the Southern writers of the Agrarian and Neo-Agrarian period from roughly 1920s to 1960s were mostly concerned with place, family, community and religion (cf. Hobson, 1991, p. 4), the new Southern writers, the writers of the non-agrarian South with the legacy of region’s defeat, poverty and racial guilt, also an emerging capitalist region, had to face some new questions: could they still speak from a shared tradition, or would they have to turn elsewhere in search of new voices (cf. Hobson, 1991. p. 1 and 4). The ‘new’ Southern writer had to change his voice which was inevitable since the traditional values and conventions of the ‘Old South’ based on the idealized rural notions were gradually evaporating. The percieving of that change resulted in a different combination of assumptions among southern writers. The voice is still Southern, but there has been a shift in the power of the southern self-consciousness, or rather a lack thereof. But my point is that exactly this lack of southern self-consciousness presented in the post-southern novel is pointing to the

44 continuation of the presence of ‘sense of place’ in their work. The nostalgia for that ‘sense of place’ and feeling the urge to belonging to a (southern) place lie in the undertones of this lack. However, the new voice relies less on the models of the past (cf. Hobson, 1991, p. 8).

The postsouthern writers can be divided into those challenging the Southern traditions and dealing with more universal themes that are not distinctly Southern, as well as with the themes of the changed urban and capitalized South; and those still concerned with traditional southern subjects, themes and regional elements. I am attempting to prove that either it is the reconstructed sense of southern place by the first group, or the more romanticized and nostalgic sense of place of the latter, the ‘sense of place’ is there, present in most of the contemporary Southern literature. The idealized southern places still exist for some writers (Elizabeth Spencer), while for others they only exist in the memories and not in reality (Harry Crews).

The former group includes those writers who have found a new voice and constructed a new definition of ‘sense of place’ through their works and are concerned with the elements of the ‘new’ urbanized South, the outsiders, freaks and outcasts and the dysfunctional communities who have lost (the traditional southern) values. Those writers include Harry Crews and his works, such as A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, published in 1978 and his A Feast of Snakes analyzed below.

The contemporary writers of the second group in my opinion also have a new voice adapted to the changes of the contemporary South, however, their work more obviously and directly expresses the nostalgia for the values of the Agrarian and Neo-Agrarian idealized South through remembering southern places. Such writers, among others, include Elizabeth Spencer and her memoir Landscapes of the Heart, published in 1998, which is a recollection of her childhood and friendships in Mississippi. Of particular interest in relation to the nostalgic feeling for her Southern past and an expression of her sense of the past and place, is the memoir’s excerpt titled “The Gulf Coast”. The following excerpt vividly shows that traditional Southern identity, or perhaps it should be called ‘self-identity’ of a distinguishable tradition, the traditional Southern hospitality, and the strong sense of the past, family and community: Here at the Mississippian’s southernmost point of native soil, one had to recall what inland Mississippi was like, how people in its small towns (or even in larger towns like Meridian and

Jackson and Columbus) related inward, to family life, kinfolks, old friendships and hatreds. How hospitably newcomers were welcomed, but how slowly accepted. Once I heard this remark: “The H----s haven’t lived here but thirty years, but look how everybody likes them!” In talk of the outside world, not much was to be accepted, nothing could be trusted to be “like us.” There were Yankees “up there,” we said to ourselves, looking north; the other southern states, like neighboring countries, offered names that could be traced in and out among one’s connection and might prove acceptable. In such towns people lived on stories of one another’s sayings and doings, repeating and checking for the facts, speculating and measuring and fitting together the present to the past, the known to the suspected, weaving numberless patterns. It was a complex and at times beautiful society; much fine literature has been created to do it justice […]. (Spencer, 2003, p. 9 ff.; my emphasis).

Another writer of the second group briefly observed from the contemporary perspective of the more traditional southern ‘sense of place’ is from Arkansas, Donald Harington, one of my favorite authors, whom I came across during my studies at Hendrix College in Arkansas. Harington has not yet been discovered by the literary critics and given the acclaim for his extraordinary talent and humor of his literary work.

In the context of contemporary treatment of the notion ‘sense of place’ one of his novels should not go unnoticed and deserves an (unfortunately) brief attention in this thesis. Harington’s novel Lightning Bug, published in 1970, is a story set in a small town in the Arkansas Ozark Mountains, Stay More. In a nutshell, the story features the lives of ordinary people, in particular an attractive girl Latha, who rejected many young men and was eventually raped by Every, who then robbed the bank and escaped, leaving Latha pregnant. To everyone’s surprise in Stay More, Every returns several years afterwards as a preacher and marries Latha in the end of the story.

Lightning Bug is the first of Harington’s many novels set in the mythical town Stay More and although the town is fictional is could just as well be real, even to those who know nothing at all about Arkansas, since Harington masterly includes characteristics of any Arkansas town, including the dialect of the Ozark Mountains. The significance of the opening lines lies in the sensual representation of a typical Southern place – the story begins with an illustration of mood and it involves all senses,

46 starting with the description of the sound16 of the opening of typical southern front porch door: From a porch swing, evening, July, 1939, Stay More, Ark. IT BEGINS WITH THIS SOUND: The screen door pushed outward in a slow swing, the spring on the screen door stretching vibrantly, one sprung tone and fading overtone high-pitched even against the bug noises and frog-noises, a plangent twang, WRIRRRAANG, which more than any other sound, more than cowbells or distant truck motors laboring uphill, more, even than all those overworked katydids, crickets, tree frogs, etc, seems to evoke the heart of summer, of summer evenings, of summer evenings there in that place, seems to make it easy for me to begin this one. WRENCH! WRUNG! WRINGING! (Harington, 1970, 1).

Again, as in so many pieces of southern literature, the porch serves as a gathering place, on which the members of the Stay More community swap their tales and from which the protagonist, Latha, observes the men fighting for her affection in a fashion of a “Southern belle” of the plantation era. Lightning Bug’s (metaphysical) technique of narration with the narrator’s interruptions also suggests the collision of past and present, a common theme in the contemporary southern literature, as established in this thesis by now. The novel is not divided into chapters but movements and ends with a future forecast of what will happen in Stay More – all its inhabitants will leave or die and it will become a ghost town. This is the ‘will happen’, predicting ending of the story. The narrator, however, decides not to give the story an ending at all: “Hell, what is the mood of an end, of an ending? Are all endings sad, because they are endings? Can there truly be a happy ending? If not, then better no ending at all, for your story is a happy one, Bug, and I would not for anything spoil it by my loss. So then it does not end. (Harington, 1970, p. 239)”. The narrator simply ends it with the same kind of mood as in the beginning, involving again all senses as in the beginning, but in reverse and with the sound of the closing front porch door. Nonetheless, the predicted disappearing will-future of Stay More and the ending mood descriptions leave the reader with a sense of nostalgia for a lost past, a theme often applied in Harington’s stories.

16 Sound plays an important role in the language of Harington's novels. His stories are filled with the descriptions of the Southern landscapes' sounds, which is significant, because Harington lost his hearing at the age of 12 and all the sound descriptions of sound come from his memory. 47

4.1.1 Harry Crews’ ‘sense of place (-lessness)’17 in A Feast of Snakes and the death of southern literature

“A Georgia-born Rabelais [1935 - 2012], Mr. Crews was renowned for darkly comic, bitingly satirical, grotesquely populated and almost preternaturally violent novels (Fox, 2012, online)”.

In his essay “Climbing the Tower”, Crews explains that he does not want to be referred to as a Southern writer, and yet explains that he draws material for his work from the South familiar to him: “I didn’t know any storytellers who wanted an adjective – Southern or gothic or ethnic – in front of the word novelist. […] I was a novelist from the South and […] had no alternative but to write out of manners of my people (Crews, 1993: p. 441)”.

At first glance, Crews does not seem to be the traditional Southern writer and his work seems completely devoid of influence from past southern literary giants, however in his A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, he explores the meaning of the place, sense of family, his childhood past and tradition. He realizes the significance of a family home place, which he defines as that single house where you were born, where you lived out your childhood, where you grew into young manhood. It’s your anchor in the world, that place, along with the memory of your kinsmen at the long supper table every night and the knowledge that it would always exist, if nowhere but in memory. (Crews, 1993, p. 31)”.

Suggesting that the South he knows from his individual experience is devoid of the traditional sense of place, he also displays an awareness of such a sense and that it exists in the remembering of it. He continues to explain that he did not experience that home place due to moving constantly with his family: “Bacon County is my home place, and I’ve had to make do with it. If I think of where I come from, I think of the entire county. I think of all its people and its customs and all its loveliness and all its ugliness (Crews, 1993, p. 31).” Crews comes from a rural setting, a tenant family in Georgia: “[...] a boy who was born and raised in the rickets-and-hookworm belt of South Georgia and who moved nearly every year of his life from one framed-out piece of dirt to another so his family could rent out their backs and sweat

17 The concept 'sense of placelessness' is of my invention and it does not imply that there is a lack of authenticity in the writer's style. It refers to a new construction of the traditional (Agrarian and Neo-Agrarian) Southern sense of place (such as that of Crews). 48 as sharecroppers on somebody else’s land […] (Crews, 1993, p. 10)”.Crews’ citations above are important for understanding Crews’ construction of his literary voice and style and while A Childhood exemplifies undertones of his traditional southern sense of place through remembering, his other works seem to have a completely different attitude towards the South as he mainly paints an upsetting chaotic picture of the South. He presents the troubled (and violent) aspect of the South as opposed to the (neo-) Agrarian traditional and at times romanticized.

Harry Crews’ A Feast of Snakes has nothing to do with the traditional Southern sense of place, especially if one expects the traditional Southern setting, a nostalgic and romanticized attitude to place, and a sense and awareness of past and tradition. Crews’ attitude towards the South is not comparable to the one of his southern literary predecessors previously exemplified in this thesis because the South itself has transformed significantly. His is not the romanticized rural setting where the characters have a strong sense of past, of family, traditional southern values, and a strong connection to nature and land. The setting of the contemporary South has changed and along with it the writers’ attitude and voice and Harry Crews represents the utmost extreme of that changed attitude through representing the violent aspect of the South.

A Feast of Snakes, published in 1976, is a true shocker for someone expecting a traditional Southern novel. It is an extreme, a total opposition of a work written in what would by contemporary critics be considered a romanticized Southern tradition, and has the ‘force of a sledgehammer’ (cf. Woods, 2012, online). For someone who explores the continuation of the traditional southern sense of place or who believes that there still is a southern tradition, A Feast of Snakes immediately represents its instant death. The South of the novel is radically “un-southern”, significantly so if observed from the standpoint of tradition, but it has all the characteristics of the ‘other’, socially poor and violent (and disgusting) South: whiskey, dog- fights, violence, obscene behavior, murder, et cetera.

The characters of the novel are crippled individuals, misfits, freaks, snake freaks, dog- fighters, and castrated cops. The location of the setting is contemporary Georgia that Crews new, and the situations are violent and bizarre, the central situation being the town’s strange annual ritual involving rattlesnake rodeo.

The main freak of the story is Joe Lon Mackey, a terrifying protagonist, who is a “functionally illiterate” high-school football star who marries and has children and is not capable of educating himself or even to find an equivalent for making use of his (physical) talents. Hence, he turns to violence, sex and finally a series of murders and ends up in a snake pit thrown there by a group of other snake hunters. (Bryant Jr., 1997, p. 219) Other bizarre characters, composing the (dysfunctional) community of Mystic include Joe’s father Big Joe, who breeds pitbulls and is respected for his cruelty to animals by other Mystic locals. Joe inherited his moonshine business from his father. Joe’s sister Beeder is an insane girl, who rubs fecal matter in her hair and watches television all day. His best friend Buddy Matlow is the town sheriff who lost his leg in Vietnam and who locks up and rapes young, black (or white) girls who reject him. There are also other characters – alcoholic lunatics from all over the Bible Belt, who gather in Mystic once a year to join the bizarre annual rattlesnake roundup where they hunt, kill, and eat snakes of all kinds; to produce (or represent) the “human shit in quantities that nobody could believe (Crews, A Feast of Snakes, 1976, p. 17).”

With the set of these freakish characters, I believe that Crews is critical of the existentialism of individuals in the contemporary Southern society. As he says in his autobiography A Childhood when talking about the lack of a home place, “the people understand that if you do not have a home place, very little will ever be yours, really belong to you in the world (Crews, 1993, p. 31)”, suggesting that the poor origins of an individual in the contemporary Southern society do not provide either, the foundations for a sense of belonging or any chance for material prosperity in the future. The individual is doomed to fail from the start. There is an instant link here to the criticism of the availability of the American Dream for all its citizens, and obviously, Crews does not find it in the contemporary South of Mystic, Georgia.

One of the most important aspects articulated in the novel is the sense of placelessness, most vividly represented through Joe Lon. The small-town Mystic is a dysfunctional community that resembles a snake pit, as suggested by the title. The members of the community are like snakes, savage and cruel to one another and the animals; they hiss and bite at each other constantly. The story is filled with snake metaphors, which also represent the feelings of Joe Lon: "a writhing of the darkness, an incessant boiling of something thick and slow-moving (Crews, A Feast of Snakes, 1976, p. 47)". Joe Lon wasted his high-school talent to become a professional football player and make something of his life

50 only to stay in Mystic, where he lives in a trailer with his wife and two babies, selling illegal beer and whiskey. Joe realizes that his could-haves are over and getting in the way of his destiny. So he gives into the violent feel of the community. He has his short-lived signs of remorse especially after beating his wife Elfie: “He leaned against the fender trembling, feeling he might puke. He almost never had an impulse to cry, but lately he often wanted to scream. Screaming was as near as he could get to crying usually […] Jesus, he wished he wasn’t such a sonofabitch (Crews, A Feast of Snakes, 1976, p. 11 ff.).” Another important existential moment occurs while lifting weights with his buddies. He realizes that his life is purposeless and wasteful. He feels an intense feeling of despair and guilt: “What am I doing here on my back? What is this I am doing? I’m a grown man with two babies and a wife and I’m out here fucking around with weights. What the hell ails me? (Crews, A Feast of Snakes, 1976, p. 101)”. He keeps having these thoughts in the back of his mind and yet he does not rise up to change his life. On many occasions he expresses his wish to leave the community in which he cannot find his place, but never does. Rather, he drinks even more heavily, doing more violent acts, and feeling an even greater sense of guilt. When assaulting the no-harm old man Poncy, he finally realizes that the improvement is out of reach: He hadn’t meant to hit the old man, but he knew he had. […] Something in him was tearing loose. He felt it more and more going out of control. […] He wished to God he could escape. But he didn’t know where he could go or what he wanted to escape from (Crews, A Feast of Snakes, 1976, p. 109)

The sense of placelessness he feels in the community is in fact so great that even if he found the strength to leave, he would not know where to go until he finally gives in to total madness resulting in a series of murders.

The irony of naming the place “Mystic” might lie in the fact it is mystical why its inhabitants do not leave. But the mystery, as suggested by the title of the novel lies in that the town represents a snake pit in which its people are driven mad and twisted by their own poisonous bites. The only character in the story, who fights back the town’s ‘snake-bites’, even if out of her maddening fear, is Lottie Mae. The snake she feared was actually the penis of the Sheriff who had raped her and as he tried to rape her again, she cut off his penis. His consequent death caused such a stir in Mystic that it disrupted the course of the bizarre traditional feast of snakes.

Crews does not give any straightforward moralizing in the novel, but because his story is so nefarious and shocking the reader believes it must be a disapproval of the Southern violent society portrayed.

It is argued by some reviewers and critics that “Crews’ sledgehammer prose” signifies the death of Southern literature: It is not the job of Harry Crews to school you on the quaint anthropology of a foreign region or to make you feel better about living there. It is his job to take you to a different Georgia, Enigma and Mystic, a Georgia of the mind. Crews is not a romantic writer, but his works are now being romanticized — and civilized. The Southern Lit industry tells us what to expect when we read these dead gritty Southern white dudes. But the only way to do justice to the sledgehammer prose of Crews — to allow it to do its work — is to kill off the genre, sacrificing the adjective “Southern” for the sake of what really matters here, which is literature. (Woods, 2012, online)

I would not signify the changed attitude in Crews’ literature necessarily as ‘death’ of Southern literature, but simply a construction of a new southern literary voice encompassing (not only and not necessarily) the traditional Southern themes of the Southern Renascence, which still encompasses the Southern character in ways, but also the variety of themes that the changed landscape of the South brought along. Of course, one might argue that these themes are no longer distinguishably Southern, but the regionalism of the South still prevails, either rural or urban in what might simply be termed not ‘death of traditional South’ but rather the ‘construction of a new traditional South’.

4.2 Contemporary southern photography

Since southern photography holds no special place in the world of art in that it is not distinguishable from the rest of American photography, not much analytical study about it exists. One of the few is Ordering the Façade by Katherine Henninger, however, it is rather a narrower study of a specific field of photography, namely the ways in which images have been used to create the South and the power structures within it, focusing on southern women. Henninger does, however, provide a brief history and presentation of the photography in the South including the problematic that it has been dealing with. She claims that “despite the fact that images of gender, race, and class structure have played obvious roles in the formulation of a southern white patriarchal society, visual culture in the South […] has long been

52 overshadowed by the deep-rooted label of the region as an oral culture (Weaks-Baxter, 2008, online) ”. Henninger further calls for more attention to the study of southern photography while claiming “not to devalue the role of the oral in southern studies, [and arguing] for the importance of recognizing the equally powerful images of the South and how they have shaped perceptions of the region from both the inside and the outside (Weaks-Baxter, 2008, online)”. I believe that Henninger’s study of southern photography builds an important foundation for the development of southern photography criticism in the future and establishes an awareness of the important role that photography plays in the construction of the Southern identity.

According to Henninger, photography influenced the distinct Southern identification and the images of ‘typical Southern themes’, which she calls ‘fictional photographs’ that have been created and are still being used to preserve “the fabled white man’s country”. In her brief presentation of photography in the South, she observes that photography has been used to create gender, racial and economic stereotypes of the South, as well as to define southern memory and to construct the identities of communities and individuals, and finally to prove that the South as a unique region of America still exists. (cf. Weaks-Baxter, 2008, online)

The contemporary photography in the South encompasses the themes of the New South, the ‘old’ South and the contemporary art photography in the South displaying an array of universal or abstract artistic themes. According to an article in the New York Times discussing whether there is still ‘a Southern style’ Thornton observes that “contemporary art photography in the South is virtually indistinguishable from contemporary art photography [of the rest of America]. (Thornton, 1981, online). However, a group of Southern photographers does focus on the themes of southerness and I divided the visual texts of those contemporary photographers into two groups, as in the case with the above presented southern literary texts: those visual texts representing the nostalgia for the idealized South of the past and the sense of a rural and more intimate southern subjects/elements on the one hand and those focusing on the more contemporary material representative of the contemporary southern place on the other, imaging southerness in (southern) American popular culture. The representatives of the first group include photographers exploring typical Southern themes not only of the past but also of the present, the latter mostly including southern images reminiscent of the past, such as decaying architecture or the typical Southern landscape with the trees covered with Spanish moss, and the Southern swamp.

William Christenberry is a photographer from Alabama, whose documentary photographic work mostly concentrates on capturing the story of the regional south, in particular the regional stories of Alabama as represented through his images of regional and vernacular architecture, such as shacks, churches, juke-joints, ramshackle buildings and cafes (Photograph 21) in a typical rural Southern landscape. His images of vernacular regional buildings, as the one in Photograph 21, recall memories and evoke a passage of time. This is not only suggested by the subject of his images, but also the fact that Christenberry currently lives in the north of America, but keeps coming back to capture the regionalism of Alabama. He is one of the rare acclaimed Southern photographers who capture the South in color. In fact, he is, by many critics, perceived as a “pioneer in American color photography”. (cf. Aperture, n.d., online)

Timothy Hursley is another southern photographer who is focused on capturing the regional architecture of the South, specifically that in Arkansas. While he is primarily interested in the art of architecture itself, he always adds another, more emotional theme to his images. This is evident in the fact that in most of his photographs of architecture, he also captures the local people. A photographer and critic Cervin Robinson observes that including people in Hursley’s architectural photographs explain the architecture in some way. This, additionally, evokes in his photographs of southern architecture a sense of place, not only on a physical level that gives a kind of dimensional comparison of the size of place depicted, but it also evokes the traditional southern sense of place that people bring to a place with their character. Robinson explains how this sense of place is achieved in an architectural photograph: […] [I]n photographs what gives a sense of place is a reference to change (and sometimes to loss) and to time passing. Take a photograph that does not give that sense of change, and the subject of the picture will be seen as simply design, not place. Evidence of the passage of time, time that may be seen as carrying the place with it or leaving it in its wake, will be accompanied by an inevitably more disinterested view of structures. The place, not the success of the design of its components, will have become the point. […] [Hursley] has photographed sets of buildings as places rather than simply designs. (Robinson, 2003, online).

The black and white Photograph 22 below is an example from his photographic essay that describes a community in a particular county of rural contemporary Alabama, depicting a man on the farm feeding his ducks and chickens.

Photograph 21: Colemans’ Café, Greensboro, Alabama, 1973 by William Christenberry18

Photograph 22: Bryant (Hay Bale) House, Mason’s Bend, 199419

4.2.1 Sally Mann’s nostalgic vision of the contemporary South

Sally Mann is one of the most acclaimed contemporary Southern photographers known for exploring both, controversial and specific Southern themes and thus belongs to both categories of photographers mentioned above. Of course, Sally Mann’s images have universal themes and qualities as well; however, this chapter examines an analysis of the typical or traditional southerness they represent in the context of the notion of sense of place as well as

18 Source: (Jackson Fine Art. William Christenberry, n.d., online) 19 Source: Robinson, 2003, online 55 the techniques she employs in order to depict that southerness and her obvious photographic nostalgia for the traditional (regional) South.

Sally Mann’s photography in general represents her cultural vision of the postmodern American South – and this vision is that of the idealized Neo-Agrarian South, especially her photographs of the landscape, which are very similar to Laughlin’s surrealist photos of the plantation ruins. Mann does not use Laughlin’s technique of multi-exposure; however, she employs the technique of dream-like illumination. Her black and white images of the typical southern landscape of trees in swamps and ruins covered with Spanish moss are black and white, blurry and softly illuminated, somewhat dim, dark with an almost gothic feel, expressing the notion of nostalgic feelings of the past (see Photographs 23, 24 and 25).

It is interesting that Mann uses black and white photography in the contemporary world where color is available. The choice of black and white is artistic not technical. In Mann’s case of the nostalgic landscape photographs, the choice of black and white technique is connected to the emphasis on the themes of past and surrealism. Our actual world does not come in black and white but in color, and one way of emphasizing the notion of surrealism is to do so in black and white. In addition, it is a universal truth in photography that black and white photographs focus more on the subject and its texture than color photography. The subject is emphasized with more detail and focus. This is exactly what Mann achieved in her photographs of landscape. She dimmed the light and blurred the edges, focused in on the most important parts of the image. And because the images are in black and white their message comes out more clearly. An important American photographer, Ansel Adams, said that “You don’t take a photograph, you make it”. If Sally Mann captured the images below on a color film, they would most certainly convey a different message. But applying the black and white technique, which in itself suggests a sense of past (the color film did not appear until the 1930s), together with blurriness and dimmed illumination she “made her photograph” in a way that conveys a sense of past and longing. .

Photograph 23: From Southern Landscape by Sally Mann20

Photograph 24: From Southern Landscape by Sally Mann21

Photograph 25: From Southern Landscape by Sally Mann22

20 Source: Mann, Sally. n.d., online 21 Source: Ibid. 22 Source: Mann, Sally. n.d., online 57

Mann’s controversial collection of her family photographs, Immediate Family, depicts a very bold presentation of her family. The collection exhibits a number of traditional southern characteristics, such as the intimacy of the family, the place in which the family is set – the southern landscape and the symbolic southern porch of her home in Virginia, where the family gathers to socialize (Photograph 26). All photographs are black and white and taken with an old-style large format camera and processed with the gelatin silver process. At the same time, they are bold because the children are sometimes depicted in very “adult-like” settings. Their play is presented almost as a scene of crime, which contrasts their innocence against the world in which they live. What makes this even more remarkable or even shocking is that they are portrayed in this way by their own mother. Photograph 26 shows this cruel portrayal of a child’s play on the porch of the family’s home. The girl is nude and swinging from a rope hung from the roof. Her body is the most illuminated object on the photograph and gives an appearance of a dead body hanging off the rope.

Photograph 26: Hayhook, 1989 by Sally Mann, from Immediate Family

One reading of Mann’s photographs suggests her sense of place in her work. She begins her introduction with the importance of the place: “The place is important; the time is summer. It’s any summer, but the place is home and the people here are my family, (Mann, 1992)23” and continues to express the emphasis of her family’s past in that place. Many of the photographs depict children alongside the elderly suggesting a confluence of past and future in a place, in a community and in the intimacy of the family. Photographs 27-30, depict the fading perspective of the past.

23 Mann's photography collection Immediate Family does not have pagination. 58

Photograph 27: He is Very Sick, 1986, from Immediate Family by Sally Mann24 Among other themes that Photograph 27 conveys, in the context of ‘sense of place’, is the sense of family. The caption of the photograph suggests that the old man depicted, presumably the children’s grandfather, is ‘very sick’. Supposedly, this means a loss in the family, which is also suggested by the sad expression on the children’s faces.

Photograph 28: The Two Virginias, No. 2, 1989, from Immediate Family by Sally Mann The confluence of past and future is exhibited through capturing a series of photographs of the “two Virginias” (Photographs 28 – 30), the older woman on the left presenting, of course the past and the girl on the right presenting the future. Mann is trying to suggest a passing over of tradition through the wisdom of the older Virginia socializing with the younger one.

24 Source: all photographs from the Immediate Family collection by Sally Mann are scanned from Mann, Sally. Immediate Family. New York: Aperture Dounfation Inc. 59

Photograph 29: The Two Virginias, No. 1, 1988, from Immediate Family by Sally Mann

Photograph 30: The Two Virginias, No. 4, from Immediate Family by Sally Mann

While the themes of Mann’s photographs are traditionally Southern, the way she depicts her children is not, as already observed with the reading of Photograph 26. Usually, children are placed in innocent, bright and playful environments, but Mann (boldly) presents them in the everyday reality, many times nude or half-nude. Often she captures them at play, but restages the play in an ambiguous way that is confusing and shocking to the average observer, since it could also be interpreted as an act of darkness and horror, at times even death, staging usually not associated with the innocence of children. Mann finds these scenes ordinary and natural, as life and death are. One example of such presentation is depicted in Photograph 31, with the hunted deer, whose throat had been slain in order to release the blood from its veins. The image of a slain deer is in itself disturbing, since the deer is usually a symbol of innocence. This photograph, however, is twice as disturbing, since the killed deer

60 with a bucket of blood on the side is in the presence of a girl dressed up like a fairy, smiling. This is certainly a controversial way of depicting the connection of children to their rural home place in Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains.

Photograph 31: Jessie and the Deer, 1985, from Sally Mann’s Immediate Family

4.2.2 Deborah Luster’s Louisiana outcasts

One of the representatives of the second contemporary group of southern photographers is Deborah Luster, whose photography, explores the ‘freaks’, outcasts, the violent, criminals, and the socially marginalized Southerners of Louisiana and is, in that respect, much the representative of the representation of the social documentary outcast ‘New’ South also dealt with by Harry Crews in his fiction. As Luster herself explains, photography was a tradition in her family and her initial goal for using photography as a tool was to make sense of her family: Perhaps I was channeling my ancestors in the years following the deaths of my mother and grandmother. Perhaps it was their spirits that moved me to pick up a camera—for in our family, the camera was manned by women. It was my turn. Or perhaps I picked up the camera out of desperation. I did need a tool. I was buried under the loss of my family members. The world was a sinister one. I was awake and numb and frightened. How could I sleep under the same stars as my mother’s murderer? I used the camera to dig out. I found that I was still capable of making contact. (The Kitchen Sisters, 2010, online).

As Luster explains herself in an interview, in 1998 she moved to Louisiana, where she was commissioned by The Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities to photograph the poor region of Monroe with the goal to raise the awareness of the poor. She remembers that the region was “emptied out” to soon realize that there were a lot of prisons in the region and that is where the people mostly were. (cf. The Kitchen Sisters, 2010, online). This encouraged Luster to embark on a project with the writer C.D. Wright to record the prisoners of Louisiana through image and text, a collection of photographs titled One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana. She captured portraits of inmates, the “invisible population” of several different prisons in Louisiana. The portraits are taken without any signs of the prison, against an empty background, since Luster wanted to portray them intimately and as human beings and not labeled as prisoners. (2010, online). Capturing both, portraits of male and female inmates, they are intimate and yet formal, black and white prints, captured with the use of the gelatin silver photographic process on glass or aluminum plates, a process famous in the second half of the 19th century, which in a sense also gives them a feel of the past and non-existance in the present see Photographs 32 - 35). Another significance of these portraits also lies in the tradition of taking family potraits in the South and the authors of the collection wanted the prison portraits to become part of that tradition as well, while at the same time they did not want to present them as idealized people, as explained by the writer Wright: Family portraiture is a big tradition in the south, so these photographs were another opportunity to be included in that tradition. It was important that they were posed and dignified pictures. We tried very hard not to idealize people there; most of them were not there for spitting on the sidewalk, they had done really bad things. Most of them had brought some harm of some kind to somebody else. (The Kitchen Sisters, 2010, online).

Photograph 32: Deborah Luster, from One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, date unknown25

25 Source: (The Kitchen Sisters, 2010, online) 62

Photograph 33: Deborah Luster, from One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, date unknown26

Photograph 34: Deborah Luster, from One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, date unknown27

26 Source: (The Red List, n.d., online) 27 Source: Ibid. 63

Photograph 35: Inmate holding family photo28, Deborah Luster, from One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, date unknown29

28 My caption. 29 Source: (The Red List, n.d., online) 64

5 Conclusion

One of the most distinct features in the tradition of the American South, as well as being one of the most questionable in contemporary period, is the notion of the Southern ‘sense of place’. While critics and writers have been disputing over the existence of the indistinguishable Southern (literary) tradition in the changed contemporary South, an abundance of literary and visual Southern texts have continued to apply the traditional Southern notion in varying degrees and with altered constructions of the term since the beginning of the 20th century.

The Southern writer was mostly concerned with place, family, community and religion from roughly 1920s to 1960s (cf. Hobson, 1991, p. 4), by Agrarian and neo-Agrarian writers. The Southern writer of 1950s and 1960s continued to be fascinated with history and the southern past and after the 1960s he had to construct a new voice due to the changed landscape of the once idealized rural South (cf. Hobson, 1991, p. 4). While there was still rural life in the South, it became an urbanized region, homogenized by the rest of capitalized America. The writer needed to percieve that change which resulted in a different combination of assumptions among southern writers. The voice is still Southern, but there has been a shift in the power of the southern self-consciousness or ‘southerness’, or rather a lack there of. The analysis of works in this thesis shows that exactly this lack of southern self-consciousness presented in the postsouthern novel itself is pointing to persistence of sense of place in contemporary Southern literature. As exemplified by Crews’ novel A Feast of Snakes, the traditional ‘sense of place’ of Agrarians and neo-Agrarians can no longer be applied in the changed contemporary South, and while it still exists in remembering, the definition of that ‘sense of place’ has changed. The traditional rural ‘sense of place’ now becomes the traditional urban Southern ‘sense of place’ or rather ‘sense of placelessness’.

Photographing the place is what southern photographers have continued to do in the South since the beginning of the 20th century. While Walker Evans considerably contributed to not only the Southern but the world documentary photography with his photographs of the three tenant families of Alabama, Eudora Welty found educational values in her photographic documentation of the Depression Mississippi, which helped shape her literary style and

65 consequently helped establish her definitions of the importance of place in fiction. The artistic expression of photography in the South began with a surrealist photographer Clarence John Laughlin in the 1940s, who was still greatly influenced by the documentary photography of Evans. His photographic documentation of plantations along the Mississippi River in Louisiana display surrealistic qualities. With the technique of multiple exposure and adding traditional objects of the Old South to his images, Laughlin conveys a sense of nostalgia for the past of the old traditional South. The contemporary South offers a long list of well established Southern photographers, whose (re-)presentation of typical Southern themes varies in the intensity. Some photographers still explore the Southern traditional themes, while others focus more on universal subjects. The bottom line is that they should receive more critical acclaim and their own place in the tradition of American photography. As clearly shown in the thesis, they are distinguishable from the rest of America.

6 Bibliography

Primary literature:

Agee, James & Walker Evans (1941/1960). Three Tenant Families. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston: The Riverside Press.

Angelou, Maya (1970/1997). I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Bantam Books.

Crews, Harry (1976). A Feast of Snakes. New York: Atheneum.

Crews, Harry (1993). Classic Crews. A Harry Crews Reader. New York: Poseidon Press.

Harington, Donald (1970). Lightning Bug. Orlando: Harcourt Jovanovich Publishers.

Mann, Sally (1992). Immediate Family. New York: Aperture Foundation Inc.

Matterson, Stephen (2003). American Literature. The Essential Glossary. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc.

Spencer, Elizabeth (2003). The Gulf Coast. In S. W. Jones, Growing up in the South. An Anthology of Modern Southern Literature (pp. 5-14). New York: Signet Classic.

Welty, Eudora (1970). Losing Battles. New York: Random House.

Welty, Eudora (1971). One Time, One Place. Mississippi in the Depression. A Snapshot Album. New York: Random House.

Welty, Eudora (1942/1977). Place in Fiction. The Eye of the Story , 116 - 133.

Welty, Eudora (1968). Some Notes on River Country. In E. Welty, The Eye of the Story (pp. 286-299). New York: Random House.

Secondary literature:

Andrews, W. L. (1998). The Literature of the American South. A Norton Anthology. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc.

Bone, Martyn (1974/2005). The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Bryant Jr., J. (1997). Twentieth-Century Southern Literature. Kentucky: The UP of Kentucky.

Ferris, Bill (1975/1976). “A Visit with Eudora Welty”. In: Peggy Whitman Prenshaw. Conversations with Eudora Welty. Jackson: UPM. 154-171.

Gretlund, Jan N. (1994). Eudora Welty's Aesthetics of Place. Newark: University of Delaware Press.

Guimond, James. (1991). American Photography and the American Dream. The University of North Carolina Press.

High, Peter B. (1986/1995). An Outline of American Literature. New York: Longman.

Hobson, Fred (1991). The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press.

Jones, Suzanne W. (2003), ed. Growing Up in the South. An Anthology of Modern Southern Literature. New York: Signet Classic.

Mars, Suzanne (1989). “Eudora Welty’s Photography: Images into Fiction”. In: W. Craig

Turner and Lee Emling Harding, eds. Critical Essays on Eudora Welty. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co. 280-296.

Trachtenberg, Alan. (1989). Reading American Photographs. Images as History. Mathew Brady to Walker Evans. New York: Hill and Wang.

7 Webliography

Aperture. (n.d.). Retrieved March 10, 2014, from William Christenberry: http://www.aperture.org/shop/books/william-christenberry

Austgen, A. S. (n.d.). Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Agee and Evans' Great Experiment. Retrieved December 24, 2013, from http://history.hanover.edu/hhr/hhr93_5.html

Battle Hall Highlights. (2013, February 8). Retrieved January 4, 2014, from Ghosts Along the Mississippi: http://blogs.lib.utexas.edu/aplhighlights/2013/02/08/ghosts-along-the-mississippi/

Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2013, November 1). Retrieved January 10, 2014, from Encyclopaedia Britannica. The South.: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/555542/the-South

Fox, M. (2012, March 30). Harry Crews, Writer of Dark Fiction, Is Dead at 76. Retrieved February 17, 2014, from The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/books/harry-crews-writer-of-dark-fiction-is-dead-at- 76.html?_r=0

House, J. (2011, April 1). Forgotten Coffee Table Book:Ghosts Along the Mississippi. Retrieved January 24, 2014, from Jerry's House of Everything: http://jerryshouseofeverything.blogspot.com/2011/04/forgotten-coffee-table-book-ghosts.html

Jackson Fine Art. (n.d.). Retrieved January 10, 2014, from Clarence Laughlin: http://www.jacksonfineart.com/private_artist.php?id=20&imageid=417

Jackson Fine Art. (n.d.). Retrieved January 4, 2014, from William Christenberry: http://www.jacksonfineart.com/William-Christenberry-256.html

Kachur, L. (2008). Clarence John Laughlin, Regionalist surrealist. Retrieved January 24, 2014, from https://jsa.hida.asu.edu/index.php/jsa/article/viewFile/62/45

Kumar, S. K., & McKean, K. F. (n.d.). Critical Approaches to Fiction. Retrieved October 18, 2013, from Google Books: http://books.google.si/books?id=- 5f0vQXcJG0C&pg=PA231&lpg=PA231&dq=main+points+of+eudora+welty%27s+place+in +fiction&source=bl&ots=q- bf4H1WtK&sig=p7Ljo8sCsyv_ukVE_uv5jUKxBUY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=zCRDU7qOBuT9yg OMv4KQBQ&ved=0CEkQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=main%20points%20o

Mann, S. (N.d.). Retrieved February 12, 2014, from http://sallymann.com/

Murphy, P. V. (n.d.). Agrarians. Retrieved February 12, 2014, from The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture: http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entry.php?rec=8

Robinson, C. (2003, January 15). Portfolio: Timothy Hursley. Retrieved January 23, 2014, from Places. The Design Observer Group.: http://places.designobserver.com/feature/portfolio- timothy-hursley/359/

Rubin, J. L. (n.d.). I'll Take My Stand. Retrieved February 12, 2014, from Introduction: A Statement of Principles: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma01/White/anthology/agrarian.html

The Kitchen Sisters. (2010, June 30). Retrieved November 26, 2013, from Deborah Luster: The Hidden Self: http://www.kitchensisters.org/girlstories/the-series/one_big_self/

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (2000, April). (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art) Retrieved Januar 29, 2014, from Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. Walker Evans.: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/evan/hd_evan.htm

The Red List. (n.d.). Retrieved January 26, 2014, from Photography: Luster, Deborah : http://theredlist.com/wiki-2-16-860-897-1106-view-social-documentary-1-profile-luster- deborah.html

Thornton, G. (1981, August 12). Photography View; Is There Still a 'Southern Style'? Retrieved December 12, 2013, from The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/02/arts/photography-view-is-there-still-a-southern- style.html

University Press of Mississippi. (n.d.). Retrieved January 24, 2014, from A biography of a New Orleans photographer of worldwide acclaim: http://www.upress.state.ms.us/books/829

Weaks-Baxter, M. (2008, March). Weaks-Baxter on Henninger, 'Ordering the Facade: Photography and Contemporary Southern Women's Writing'. Retrieved October 11, 2013, from H-Southern-Lit: https://networks.h-net.org/node/11721/reviews/11968/weaks-baxter- henninger-ordering-facade-photography-and-contemporary

Woods, B. (2012, April 3). Harry Crews and the Death of Southern Literature. Retrieved February 17, 2014, from The Millions: http://www.themillions.com/2012/04/harry-crews-and- the-death-of-southern-literature.html

8 List of Photographs

Photograph 1: The Father by Walker Evans; from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men ...... 29 Photograph 2: The Mother by Walker Evans; from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men ...... 29 Photograph 3: The Home by Walker Evans; from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men ...... 30 Photograph 4: One of the Children by Walker Evans; from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men ...... 30 Photograph 5: Working Shoes by Walker Evans; from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men...... 30 Photograph 6: Woman Working in the Field by Walker Evans; from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men ...... 31 Photograph 7: Staying Home by Eudora Welty; from One Time, One Place ...... 33 Photograph 8: Woman in the Buttoned Sweater by Eudora Welty, from One Time, One Place ...... 35 Photograph 9: Chopping in the Field by Eudora Welty; from One Time, One Place...... 36 Photograph 10: Making Cane Syrup by Eudora Welty, from One Time, One Place ...... 36 Photograph 11: Workers taking a Break by Eudora Welty, from One Time, One Place ...... 37 Photograph 12: Hairdressing queue. Hinds County by Eudora Welty; from One Time, One Place ...... 38 Photograph 13: Home. Clairborne County by Eudora Welty; from One Time, One Place ..... 38 Photograph 14: Home with bottle trees, sometimes said to trap evil spirits that might try to get in the house. Simpson County by Eudora Welty; from One Time, One Place ...... 38 Photograph 15: Saturday in Town. Grenada by Eudora Welty; from One Time, One Place .. 39 Photograph 16: Strollers. Grenada by Eudora Welty; from One Time, One Place ...... 39 Photograph 17: Grandeur and Decay, Ghosts along the Mississippi by Clarence John Laughlin ...... 41 Photograph 18: Elegy for the Moss Land, Ghosts along the Mississippi by Clarence John Laughlin ...... 42 Photograph 19: Elegy for the Old South, No. 2, 1946, by Clarence John Laughlin ...... 43 Photograph 20: The Mirror of Long Ago by Clarence John Laughlin ...... 43 Photograph 21: Colemans’ Café, Greensboro, Alabama, 1973 by William Christenberry ..... 55 Photograph 22: Bryant (Hay Bale) House, Mason’s Bend, 1994 ...... 55 Photograph 23: From Southern Landscape by Sally Mann ...... 57 Photograph 24: From Southern Landscape by Sally Mann ...... 57

Photograph 25: From Southern Landscape by Sally Mann ...... 57 Photograph 26: Hayhook, 1989 by Sally Mann, from Immediate Family ...... 58 Photograph 27: He is Very Sick, 1986, from Immediate Family by Sally Mann ...... 59 Photograph 28: The Two Virginias, No. 2, 1989, from Immediate Family by Sally Mann ..... 59 Photograph 29: The Two Virginias, No. 1, 1988, from Immediate Family by Sally Mann ..... 60 Photograph 30: The Two Virginias, No. 4, from Immediate Family by Sally Mann ...... 60 Photograph 31: Jessie and the Deer, 1985, from Sally Mann’s Immediate Family ...... 61 Photograph 32: Deborah Luster, from One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, date unknown . 62 Photograph 33: Deborah Luster, from One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, date unknown . 63 Photograph 34: Deborah Luster, from One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, date unknown . 63 Photograph 35: Inmate holding family photo, Deborah Luster, from One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, date unknown ...... 64

9 Abstract

The following thesis traces the literary and visual texts of the 20th century American South that articulate distinctively Southern traditional themes and the central concept of the image of the South – the ‘sense of place’. It seeks to present those texts that exemplify, in varying degrees, a range of perspectives on the notion of ‘sense of place’ in different periods of the 20th century. It aims at demonstrating that southern ‘sense of place’, originated by the Southern Agrarians (in their essays collected in I’ll Take My Stand), further developed and enhanced artistically by the Neo-Agrarians including Eudora Welty and her “Place in Fiction” and Losing Battles, and adapted to the transforming contemporary South by such writers as Harry Crews, continues to be the landmark of Southern literary tradition in different shades or intensities. In spite of contemporary critics claiming otherwise, the study proves that the concept is still there in the contemporary southern literature, although constructed in accordance with the new literary voice. It also provides an intersection of southern literature and photography, demonstrating that there is a distinguishable southern photography and that it should earn its rightful place as a tradition in the canon of a wider American traditional photography. The visual texts selected for analysis are taken from works by photographers such as Walker Evans, Eudora Welty, Clarence Laughlin, Sally Mann and Deborah Luster. They depict the themes of the American South in the context of ‘sense of place’, and what they represent is analyzed through the content and the photographic techniques employed by the photographers.

The method applied in this thesis is the following: the concept and its definitions as represented in the Southern literature and photography are firstly placed into the context and then analyzed in the divided chapters, starting with the Southern Renascence, which is branched into the Agrarian and Neo-Agrarian subchapters, and continuing with the contemporary or ‘postsouthern’ period. The analysis moves from context to text to image and seeks to locate its literary and photographic texts in various definitions of the concept of sense of place.