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Thomas F. Haddox Fears& Fascinations::: Representing Catholicism in the American South FEARS AND FASCINATIONS ................. 11469$ $$FM 07-07-05 10:47:55 PS PAGE i ................. 11469$ $$FM 07-07-05 10:47:55 PS PAGE ii FEARS AND FASCINATIONS Representing Catholicism in the American South Thomas F. Haddox Fordham University Press New York 2005 ................. 11469$ $$FM 07-07-05 10:47:55 PS PAGE iii Copyright ᭧ 2005 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Haddox, Thomas F. (Thomas Fredrick) Fears and fascinations : representing Catholicism in the American South / Thomas F. Haddox.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8232-2521-6 (hardcover) 1. American literature—Southern States—History and criticism. 2. American literature—Catholic authors—History and criticism. 3. Catholic Church—Southern States—Historiography. 4. Catholics— Southern States—Intellectual life. 5. Christianity and literature— Southern States. 6. Southern States—Religion—Historiography. 7. Catholic Church—In literature. 8. Catholics in literature. I. Title. PS261.H23 2005 810.9Ј92128275—dc22 2005016713 Printed in the United States of America 07 06 05 5 4 3 2 1 First edition ................. 11469$ $$FM 07-07-05 10:47:55 PS PAGE iv Contents Acknowledgments vii Abbreviations ix Introduction 1 1 Catholic Miscegenations: The Cultural Legacy of Les Cenelles 14 2 Medieval Yearnings: A Catholicism for Whites in Nineteenth-Century Southern Literature 47 3 The Pleasures of Decadence: Catholicism in Kate Chopin, Carson McCullers, and Anne Rice 82 4 Agrarian Catholics: The Catholic Turn in Southern Literature 112 5 Toward Catholicism as Lifestyle: Walker Percy, John Kennedy Toole, and Rebecca Wells 145 Notes 185 Works Cited 205 Index 219 v ................. 11469$ CNTS 07-07-05 10:47:58 PS PAGE v ................. 11469$ CNTS 07-07-05 10:47:58 PS PAGE vi Acknowledgments This book has been seven years in the making and has gone through several incarnations. The English department of Vanderbilt University generously funded a year of relief from teaching, and the English department of the University of Tennessee provided me with a summer grant that enabled me to travel to libraries. Both institutions also provided supportive environ- ments in which to complete the work. Several of my teachers, mentors, and former colleagues at Vanderbilt University read, commented upon, and gave other forms of guidance on this project at various stages: Thadious Davis, Teresa Goddu, Kurt Koenigs- berger, Deandra Little, J. David Macey, Kevin Matthews, Eliza McGraw, Gary Richards, Sheila Smith-McKoy, and Eugene TeSelle. I owe a particu- lar debt to Michael Kreyling, whose careful reading and direction of this project when it was still a dissertation were invaluable, and to the late Nancy Walker, whose intellectual generosity was always inspiring. I am equally grateful to my friends and colleagues at the University of Tennessee who provided close reading of chapters and savvy advice at a later stage of the project—above all, Amy Elias, Allison Ensor, Heather Hirschfeld, Chuck Maland, and Dorothy Scura. Conversations with fellow southern literary and cultural scholars elsewhere—including Deborah Cohn, Anne Good- wyn Jones, and Farrell O’Gorman—have also been valuable. The staffs of the special collections departments at the following libraries have been particularly helpful to me during the course of my research: the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt University; the Wilson Li- brary at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the Firestone Li- brary at Princeton University; the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives in Nashville, Tennessee; the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library at Tulane University; and the Local History and Genealogy Library in Mobile, Alabama. Bill Sumners at the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Ar- chives generously granted me permission to quote from The New Challenge of Home Missions by Eugene P. Alldredge. vii ................. 11469$ $ACK 07-07-05 10:48:02 PS PAGE vii viii Acknowledgments I want to extend special thanks as well to Helen Tate, for permission to quote from Allen Tate’s unpublished letters; to Nancy Wood, for permission to quote from Caroline Gordon’s unpublished letters; and to Re´gine Lator- tue, for permission to quote from her translations of the poems of Les Cen- elles. Two portions of this book have been previously published. A portion of Chapter 4 appeared in a slightly different form as ‘‘Contextualizing Flannery O’Connor: Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, and the Catholic Turn in South- ern Literature’’ in Southern Quarterly 38 (Fall 1999): 173–90. A portion of Chapter 1 appeared in a slightly different form as ‘‘The ‘Nous’ of Southern Catholic Quadroons: Racial, Ethnic, and Religious Identity in Les Cenelles’’ in American Literature 73 (December 2001): 757–78. I am grateful to both journals for permission to reprint these articles. I would also like to thank those at and associated with Fordham Univer- sity Press who helped see this book into print, especially my readers, whose suggestions for revision were enormously helpful; Mindy Wilson, who pro- vided thorough and meticulous copyediting; Chris Mohney, managing edi- tor; and Helen Tartar, editorial director. Finally I wish to thank my family: my parents, James and Margaret Had- dox, and my sister, Katherine Jollit, for their love and moral support through the years. And the lion’s share of gratitude goes to my wife, Honor McKi- trick Wallace, who has seen me through every crisis and without whose love, constructive criticism, and faith in me this book would never have been completed. ................. 11469$ $ACK 07-07-05 10:48:02 PS PAGE viii Abbreviations AA Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner ACD A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole CA Cannibals All! or, Slaves without Masters, George Fitzhugh CD Critical Dialogue Between Aboo and Caboo; or, A Grandissime Ascension, Adrien-Emmanuel Rouquette CY A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain DC Decadence and Catholicism, Ellis Hanson DP ‘‘The Displaced Person,’’ Flannery O’Connor DS Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Rebecca Wells FAS The Feast of All Saints, Anne Rice GWTW Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell IA The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain JA Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Mark Twain L Lancelot, Walker Percy LAE Little Altars Everywhere, Rebecca Wells LC Les Cenelles, trans. Re´gine Latortue and Gleason R. W. Adams LCG ‘‘The Little Convent Girl,’’ Grace King LLB Letters of the Late Bishop England to the Honorable John Forsyth, on the Subject of Domestic Slavery, John England LR Love in the Ruins, Walker Percy MD Madame Delphine, George Washington Cable MW The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers RSR ‘‘Remarks on the Southern Religion,’’ Allen Tate SJ ‘‘Sister Josepha,’’ Alice Dunbar-Nelson SP Selected Poems of Father Ryan, Abram J. Ryan TF The Fathers, Allen Tate TLG The Last Gentleman, Walker Percy TM The Malefactors, Caroline Gordon TMG The Moviegoer, Walker Percy TSC The Strange Children, Caroline Gordon VV A Vocation and a Voice, Kate Chopin ix ................. 11469$ ABBR 07-07-05 10:48:06 PS PAGE ix ................. 11469$ ABBR 07-07-05 10:48:06 PS PAGE x Introduction ‘‘He is the one who is curious to me.’’1 Jason Compson Sr.’s offhand remark about Charles Bon identifies a persistent source of fascination in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! ‘‘Curious’’ Bon certainly is: as Thomas Sut- pen’s unacknowledged son and wrecker of his dynastic ‘‘design,’’ a man of French ethnicity and uncertain race, a languorous and fatalistic decadent, and ‘‘a Catholic of sorts’’ (AA 94), he astonishes Yoknapatawpha County and provokes widely divergent responses from the novel’s characters. On the one hand, Bon suggests to some the horror of miscegenation—‘‘the nig- ger that’s going to sleep with your sister’’ (AA 358), as Quentin and Shreve imagine him telling Henry Sutpen—and embodies what the white South both disavows and fears that it might become. Yet ‘‘Charles the Good’’ is also an object of desire and envy, representing European standards of re- finement and exposing the pretensions of the South’s uncouth would-be aristocrats, who build elegant plantation homes and fashion themselves as lords of the manor to hide the fact that they have broken with a genuinely feudal culture. As Jason Sr. suggests, Bon fascinates and frightens those ‘‘who have not quite yet emerged from barbarism, who two thousand years hence will still be throwing triumphantly off the yoke of Latin culture and intelli- gence of which they were never in any great permanent danger to begin with’’ (AA 94). By bringing into sharp relief several of the white South’s obsessions—racial mixing, decadence, nostalgia for lost cultural glories, and fear of cultural inferiority—Bon crystallizes, in a powerful but contradictory way, the anxieties and investments that surround any narrative of identity. What accounts for these contradictory responses to Bon? Certainly the fact that the novel’s narrators reconstruct Bon’s story from incomplete (and sometimes dubious) information and often revise their judgments contri- butes to the sense of contradiction. More fundamentally, however, of all the markers of Bon’s difference, only his Catholicism binds together the rest and offers an adequate explanation for the full range of his significations. Though Bon’s faith in Catholicism has lapsed, Catholic practices and associ- 1 ................. 11469$ INTR 07-07-05 10:48:11 PS PAGE 1 2 Fears and Fascinations ations surround him, from the voudun ceremony that he allegedly partici- pates in with his octoroon mistress to his dandyish style of dress.