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Narrative Spaces and Literary Landscapes in William Gilmore Simms’S Antebellum Fiction

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Narrative Spaces and Literary Landscapes in William Gilmore Simms’S Antebellum Fiction GEOGRAPHIES OF THE MIND: NARRATIVE SPACES AND LITERARY LANDSCAPES IN WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS’S ANTEBELLUM FICTION Kathleen Crosby A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature in the College of Arts and Sciences. Chapel Hill 2015 Approved by: Philip F. Gura William L. Andrews Jennifer Larson Timothy Marr Ruth Salvaggio © 2015 Kathleen Crosby ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Kathleen Crosby: Geographies of the Mind: Narrative Spaces and Literary Landscapes in William Gilmore Simms’s Antebellum Fiction (Under the direction of Philip F. Gura) Genre affords a theoretical and conceptual framework for knowledge production and knowledge distribution. Rhetorically, genre affords a political, artistic, and ideological tool that enables a rhetor to respond to personal and cultural anxieties. Geographies of the Mind: Narrative Spaces and Literary Landscapes in William Gilmore Simms’s Antebellum Fiction examines ten of nineteenth-century American author William Gilmore Simms’s works, including three manuscript-only ones. Drawing upon rhetorical theory and narrative theory, this project uncovers the breadth of Simms’s rhetorical and literary practices within the confession narrative, the ghost story, the pirate romance, and the sentimental novel. I demonstrate that Simms’s texts both adhere to and subvert the boundaries of generic conventions and, in doing so, elucidate legal, psychological, and transnational concerns of the time. By focusing on the narrative spaces of Simms’s texts, I prove that Simms’s geographic spaces reverberate with hauntings that serve to mark moments of intellectual, personal, and historical disconnect, thereby voicing the disjunctive nature of antebellum southern spaces. By connecting rhetorical theory with literary and spatial considerations, this project offers a detailed analysis of Simms’s work, positing that narrative practices are dynamic and responsive spaces, ones that are reflective of and responsive to the geographies of the mind. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION: SPATIAL AND TEXTUAL GEOGRAPHIES…………………………………………………...1 CHAPTER 2: IN THE SHADOWS OF THE MIND: SIMMS’S USE OF THE CONFESSION GENRE………………………………………………12 CHAPTER 3: IN THE SHADOW OF ONE’S DREAMS: SIMMS AND THE GHOST STORY……………………………………………………………46 CHAPTER 4: IN THE SHADOW OF THE SHORE: THE SEASCAPES AND LANDSCAPES OF SIMMS’S PIRATE ROMANCE………………85 CHAPTER 5: IN THE SHADOW OF THE LAW: SIMMS’S SENTIMENTAL NOVEL AND THE LAW………………………………………117 WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………………………….154 iv CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION: SPATIAL AND TEXTUAL GEOGRAPHIES On the evening of June 17, 2015, a twenty-one-year-old white man entered the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina and sat alongside thirteen members of the congregation who had gathered there at that Wednesday evening for a Bible prayer group. At the end of the meeting, the man stood and opened fire, injuring one church member and killing nine. While the city of Charleston and the nation mourned yet another senseless mass shooting, the suspect, now in police custody, spoke to his desire to start a race war and social media flurried with pictures of the accused surrounded by emblems of white supremacy and images of the Confederate flag. A maelstrom followed, ricocheting through our national consciousness and catalyzing a national discussion on the place of southern history and, particularly, Confederate history in 2015. Legislators called for the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House, mass market retailers called for the removal of Confederate-branded items from their shelves, and college campuses and southern downtowns would find themselves called upon to remove statues that evoked Confederate memory.1 The pull of Confederate memory runs deep, is deeply rooted in cultural landscapes and cultural memories, and is enacted and felt deeply in innately personal, affective ways. We remember; we romanticize; we mourn; we hurt. Southern 1 The South Carolina legislature would vote to remove the flag on July 9, 2015; the flag was removed on July 10, 2015. Walmart, Kmart, Amazon.com, and others announced they would stop selling items with the Confederate flag as of June 23, 2015. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Texas at Austin, among others, would each hear calls for the removal of monuments that spoke to Confederate history. 1 history, or, dare we say, American history, is intricate—and nettled; ugly—and beautiful; raw— and alive. The question, always, is what do we do with this nettled—and often ugly—past? While we can seemingly remove the past from sight and pretend it never existed; sweep it from our downtown areas, mass retailers’ shelves, and college campuses; and hope upon hope that we have excised it, the fact that four homes on the one-lane road I drive into my small rural town— population 1,650—now proudly display their Confederate flags offers a different narrative. Maybe one cannot so easily eliminate the past. If we were literary scholars and turned to our bookshelves for answers, even just a quick survey of our literary history would also suggest the inability of ever doing so. William Faulkner reminds us: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (73); Toni Morrison chronicles: “Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think if, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened” (36); and F. Scott Fitzgerald ever so expertly cautions us: “And so we beat on, boats against the currents, borne back ceaselessly into the past” (189). The study of southern literature is one rife with discussions of place, of race, of ownership, of the meaning of the South and its heritage and history in the twenty-first century. Yet, the summer of 2015 reminds us that our pedagogical discussions of purpose, methodology, and scholarship cannot and should not be divorced from the world in which we live. An excavation of southern spaces is equally an excavation of national spaces, and southern 2 literature, history, culture, and more afford us the opportunity to think critically about the spaces, institutional and cultural, that we exist in now across this nation. At the core, this is a project about the American narrative and the ways in which its literature reveals who we are, what we value, what has discomfited us, and what haunts us still. Specifically, it looks to southern antebellum author William Gilmore Simms (1806–1870), a South Carolina writer, editor, attorney, and legislator, who himself experienced an erasure from cultural memory and literary history following the end of the Civil War. While critical attention has been paid to the long-form fictional works of Simms, particularly his historical romances, this project takes under consideration Simms’s less-studied works, particularly those written in the early part of his career. An avid reader and writer, Simms wrote juvenilia poetry, short stories, novels, nonfiction, orations, and literary criticisms, and the breadth of his writing crosses historical time periods, national boundaries, and generic conventions. From ghost stories to devil stories, from border romances to experimental drama, Simms’s oeuvre incorporates almost every genre found in nineteenth-century American writings, and little attention has been paid to the ways in which Simms deploys genre as a rhetorical tool. This project seeks to do that. In Geographies of the Mind: Narrative Spaces and Literary Landscapes in William Gilmore Simms’s Antebellum Fiction, I consider ten of Simms’s texts, including three that are manuscript only. In particular, I examine the confession narrative, the ghost story, the pirate tale, and the sentimental/seduction novel. As I show, William Gilmore Simms’s texts serve to define and subvert the boundaries of generic conventions, revealing legal, psychological, and transnational concerns of the time. Additionally, Simms’s texts reveal his own capacious mind: one firmly and equally committed to the southern cause and to nineteenth-century discourses on literature, law, science, spiritualism, selfhood, psychology, and history. Drawing upon rhetorical 3 theory and narrative theory, this project uncovers the breadth of Simms’s rhetorical and literary practices within texts that have been marginalized since the nineteenth century. In this project, I advance two key arguments: first that within these texts, spatial representations embody cultural memory and, particularly, southern memory and, second, that rhetorical and narrative spaces are the primary way by which Simms articulates the life of the mind in antebellum America. Simms’s early southern landscapes reverberate with hauntings, establishing the South as a site haunted by its past, a reality ever-so-present one hundred and fifty years past the end of Simms’s life. Yet equally, Simms’s texts suggest that those hauntings go beyond the literal and the literary and serve to mark moments of intellectual, personal, and historical disconnect, thereby articulating the disjunctive nature of antebellum southern spaces. As such, a reconsideration of Simms’s works affords the opportunity to reexamine the role of genre in nineteenth century literary studies as well as the intersection of literary and intellectual spaces in nineteenth-century southern literature. To substantiate these arguments, each of the following four chapters takes up a particular literary genre, considering the rhetorical strategies of the genre and the literary landscapes of a given text(s). Chapter two, “In the Shadows of the Mind: Simms’s Use of the Confession Genre,” examines Simms’s deployment of the confession narrative, a genre rooted in autobiographical and forensic discourse.
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