Constructions of Femininity in Medieval Romance and the Jim Crow South by Morgan Leigh Connor B.A. in English, December 2016, Ar
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Constructions of Femininity in Medieval Romance and the Jim Crow South by Morgan Leigh Connor B.A. in English, December 2016, Armstrong State University A Thesis submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts May 19, 2019 Thesis directed by Jonathan Hsy Associate Professor of English © Copyright 2019 by Morgan Connor All rights reserved ii Acknowledgements The author wishes to acknowledge Rachael Lynch and Emma Cassabaum, without whose unending enthusiasm and support this project would not exist. Also, to my father, Douglas Connor, whose endless love, support, and dad jokes keep me going on even the most difficult days. And last but most certainly not least, the sincerest thanks and appreciation is due to Dr. Jonathan Hsy, Dr. Holly Dugan, Dr. Alexa Joubin, and the faculty and staff of the Department of English at the George Washington University, whose guidance and loving support fostered the growth of this and countless other projects throughout my time in the MA Program. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………………..iii Introduction: White Supremacy and Chivalric Romance…………………………………1 Chapter I: The Appropriation of Chivalric Femininity by the Ku Klux Klan and its Role in the Jim Crow South……………………………………….....14 Chapter II: Guinevere, Chretien de Troyes, and the Construction of Lower-Class White Femininity in Chivalric Romance…………………………………..25 Chapter III: Castles and Confining Spaces: Female Imprisonment and the Construction of “Feminine Spaces” in Marie de France’s Lais…………………41 Conclusion: The Road So Far……………………………………………………………59 Works Cited iv Introduction: White Supremacy and Chivalric Romance Thursday, September 12th, 1912 was a day that started out like many others before it for the residents of Forsyth County, Georgia. However, the events that would conspire on that day and for the next month would forever change the residents and the county as a whole. That day, Ellen Grice, a white woman known well throughout the community, claimed that she had been “awakened by the presence of a negro man in her bed,”1 who sexually assaulted her and then fled.2 When local residents heard about Grice’s assault, they didn’t waste any time asking questions or searching for legitimate answers. Instead, by the morning of Saturday, September 7th, just two days after Grice’s assault, Forsyth County Sheriff Bill Reid and his Deputy Gay Lummus had arrested a local black teenager named Toney Howell, as well as four other black men who were being held as accomplices: Isaiah Pirkle, Joe Rogers, Fate Chester, and Johnny Bates. With the four men in prison, by lunchtime on Saturday all locals could talk about while making their weekly trips to the market was Ellen Grice. However, this chatter was nothing compared to the excitement that would arise when Grice’s father, Joseph Brooks, arrived with news that his daughter was in critical condition after her alleged attack. 1 This quote, taken directly from Patrick Phillips’ Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, comes from the September 7, 1912 issue of the Atlanta Journal. It remains unclear as to whether this quote came from Grice herself or a family member after her assault. 2 Phillips, Patrick. Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017), 1. 1 The result of this news was harsh and swift, with local white men forming a mob outside of the courthouse, one that required the response of the local militias sent by the then-Governor Joseph Mackey Brown from Atlanta. For these men, the tale of Ellen Grice’s rape represented one of their most vivid fantasies—the vision of “crazed” black men rising up and taking vengeance on their former masters, and as the fantasy goes, “without sparing women and children.”3 However, Grice’s assault was only the beginning for Forsyth County, because just a few days later as the harsh anger that followed Grice’s attack was beginning to wane and the town was returning to business as usual, on September 10th, 1912, the beaten, barely-alive body of a local white girl named Mae Crow was found in the woods, where she was reportedly attacked, raped, and left for dead. A young black man, Ernest Knox, was then blamed for the attack, to which he confessed to under suspicious circumstances, was arrested and, with the clear and present danger to his life well established at this point, placed in the then-impenetrable Fulton county jail until he could be arraigned. Along with Knox was a local field hand named “Big Rob” Edwards, who was seen with Knox on the day of the assault. Unlike Knox, Edwards was kept in the Forsyth county courthouse. If the response to the first attack on Ellen Grice was harsh and swift, this new attack prompted an even more crazed response. Once word of Crow’s assault traveled throughout town, a new mob of angry, armed white local men formed, and this time they were not so easily dispersed. The crowd was eventually able to break into the jail, tossing aside Deputy Lummus and forcing the now-terrified Edwards from his cell. In the events that followed, Edwards was beaten and hung by a light pole in front of the courthouse. 3 Phillips, 14. 2 His body was left hanging for the rest of the night, throughout which locals shot at him, releasing some of the righteous anger that had been building throughout the community since the day of Grice’s assault on September 5th. These men were not just responding to the anger that they felt at these assaults, however. These men were participating in a long, time-honored ritual that existed throughout the South and across generations. Many of them were aware of previous lynchings that had been done by their fathers and grandfathers. So, when Ernest Knox and Rob Edwards were arrested, and Knox taken away to safety outside of the reach of the lynch mob that formed, leaving Rob Edwards behind, these men saw their chance to “finally join that grand tradition: to show that they, too were men of honor, and no less committed to the defense of white womanhood.”4 As a result of the assaults of Grice and Crow, the white men of Forsyth county would enact a reign of terror that would eventually force out all of the county’s black residents, who often had to leave behind everything and cross over to the next county in order to keep their lives. For decades after 1912, as a result of this reign of terror, Forsyth county would remain a whites-only county. Today, that area of Georgia is home to some of the most lucrative real estate in the state, and remains predominantly white, with only 29.1% of the population of the entire county listed as being non-white.5 Though the events surrounding the Grice and Crow cases are unique in their severity and geographical impact, they were far from unusual in the state of Georgia, and the rest of the South from the end of Reconstruction until the 1980s.6 This violence, and the 4 Phillips, 49. 5 “QuickFacts: Forsyth County, Georgia.” United States Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/forsythcountygeorgia. Last updated July 1, 2018. 6 The last recorded lynching in America took place in Mobile, Alabama in 1981, in which 19-year-old Michael Donald was murdered by two members of the Ku Klux Klan. 3 emphasis on protecting Southern white womanhood was not new, but in the years after the 1905 publication of Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman, it took on a new energy. Dixon’s book “imagines Reconstruction as a kind of living hell for white people in which former slaves destroy the government, banks, and police force, driving the South into violent chaos. The last straw for the novel’s protagonist, Ben Cameron, is the rape of a young white woman by a freed slave.”7 Cameron, who in Dixon’s book would become the Klan’s fictional first Grand Dragon, uses the rape of the young white woman and her resulting suicide to mobilize the other white men around him to mobilize, forming an “Institution of Chivalry”8 for the single purpose of protecting white women’s virtue. Dixon “medievalizes many aspects of the KKK, including the burning cross of white terrorism in the twentieth century…call[ing] it ‘The Fiery Cross of old Scotland’s Hills’,” an allusion to the supposed Scottish heritage of the group’s members. Dixon’s book was initially popular but would have eventually faded into obscurity if it weren’t for D.W. Griffith, who adapted it into the breakout film success, The Birth of a Nation, a film so popular that it was screened for President Woodrow Wilson at the White House and inspired the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, to which millions of Americans joined by 1925. In this second wave, mostly influenced by Griffith’s film, the Klan began to appropriate images, symbols, and language that bled with a faux chivalry and an emphasis on the idea of the frail white woman. This myth of white female frailty and white male chivalry not Koppel, Ted. “The ‘Last Lynching’: How Far Have We Come?” Talk of the Nation, NPR, October 13, 2008. 7 Kaufman, Amy S. “The Birth of a National Disgrace: Medievalism and the KKK” Race, Racism, and the Middle Ages, The Public Medievalist, Published November 21, 2017, https://www.publicmedievalist.com/birth-national-disgrace/. 8 Dixon, Thomas.