View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by eGrove (Univ. of Mississippi) University of Mississippi eGrove Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 2012 The Cost Of Kinship: Southern Literary Families And The Capitalist Machine Joshua Sean Lundy University of Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd Part of the American Literature Commons Recommended Citation Lundy, Joshua Sean, "The Cost Of Kinship: Southern Literary Families And The Capitalist Machine" (2012). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 545. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/545 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of eGrove. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Cost of Kinship: Southern Literary Families and the Capitalist Machine A Thesis Presented for the Master of Arts Degree University of Mississippi Joshua Lundy August 2012 Copyright 2012 by Joshua Lundy All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT The purpose of this thesis is to examine the thematic role of families and the familial in the literature of the Southern Renaissance. Whereas a number of scholars have come at this matter from a strictly cultural perspective, this analysis utilizes an economic framework. Following the example set by Karl Marx, Freidrich Engels, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, I attempt to formulate an understanding of the southern family not as an independent and singular social organism, but, rather, as a mechanism for the distribution of capital, firmly embedded within modern capitalism’s expansive network of production, consumption, and exchange. My argument is that the ruptures and various points of tension that typify so many of the southern literary families encountered during this time period indicate not so much the degradation of an older social order, as has often been suggested, but, instead, the proper functioning of a fundamentally economic device. In order to make this case, I examine two of the key texts from the Southern Renaissance: William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding (1946). Both novels are preeminently concerned with the breakdown of families that appear to embody the “Old South” ideal. Moreover, both novels repeatedly frame these breakdowns within the context of contemporary economic concerns. Employing the work of historians such as Gavin Wright, Grace Elizabeth Hale, and C. Vann Woodward, I argue that this pattern of familial dissolution indicates the manner in which such families function as extensions of the operational logic that characterized the New South economy, engendering those repeating cycles of destruction upon which modern capitalism relies. ! ""! ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to offer my sincere thanks and appreciation to the members of my thesis committee for their guidance, assistance, and patience during the research and composition process. To Drs. Annette Trefzer, Deborah Barker, and Jay Watson, I also owe a debt of gratitude for their assistance in helping me formulate the theoretical framework that has come to define my own approach to matters of literary criticism. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Dr. David Wyatt for his encouragement, advice, and inspiration, all of which has proven invaluable to me both within and without the realm of academia. Among the many colleagues who have shown support over the last three years, particular recognition is due the following: Robert Hodges, Travis Rozier. Sara Olsen, Sara Williams, Amy King, Pip Gordon, Sara Phifer, Ebony McNeil, Thomas Bullington, and Jesse Wright. I would also like to offer my thanks to those friends and compatriots back home, particularly Samuel Janney, Serda Ozbenian, Toby Biswas, and Elizabeth Miller. Last, but certainly not least, I would like to extend a special thanks to Lael Ensor who was pivotal in encouraging my return to academia and to whom I owe a debt of gratitude beyond all possible recompense. Above all, I wish to thank my parents for all their support, financial and otherwise. It has played an important role in the completion of this thesis. I would like also to thank my sister, Ilene, whose own successes have proven immeasurably helpful in staving off the siren songs of apathy and lassitude. ! """ TABLE OF CONTENTS I. ABSTRACT ii II. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii III. INTRODUCTION: FAMILIAL ECONOMIES/FAMILY AS ECONOMIC APPARATUS 1 IV. BLOODLINES AND THE SOUTHERN MACHINE(S): THEORIZING THE INTERSECTION BETWEEN FAMILY AND CAPITAL 18 V. KEEPING THE BLOOD IN: SHIFTING PATTERNS OF CONSUMPTION AND THE PROBLEM OF BOURGEOIS IDENTITY IN THE SOUND AND THE FURY 41 VI. “OTHER COTTON”: DELTA WEDDING AND THE PARADOXES OF PLANTATION PATERNALISM 91 VII. (IN) CONCLUSION 121 VIII. WORKS CITED 126 IX. VITA 136 ! "# INTRODUCTION: FAMILIAL ECONOMIES/FAMILY AS ECONOMIC APPARATUS Donald Kartiganer has suggested that William Faulkner may well be “the premier American novelist of the family” (381). A valid enough proposition. Tracing the convoluted contours of those intertwining genealogies that make up the social landscape of his imagined Yoknapatawpha county, Faulkner’s novels are pre-eminently, and almost uniformly, concerned with the familial. But within his own time and place, Faulkner was hardly alone in harboring this preoccupation with matters of family. Eudora Welty, Faulkner’s neighbor to the south, was equally attuned to the manner in which matters of legacy and filiation informed our understanding of the human condition, something recognized by numerous critics, including such figures as Dan Fabricant, Sara McAlpin, and Noel Polk. However, while many critics have recognized the central importance of family in the work of both authors, it is my contention that their understanding of the form and function of the familial within these works has often been skewed, informed as they are by certain presuppositions about what a family should or should not be. In order to counteract this trend, I want to examine the southern family as it appears in the works of Faulkner and Welty and to do so through an economic lens, in particular that framework established by the cultural and economic revolution generally referred to as the New South. By doing so, I believe we might finally come to an apprehension of the southern literary family in its rawest form, one informed by an appreciation for its most rudimentary operations within the social field. ! $ A primary reason for what I am here interpreting as the fundamental misunderstanding of the southern literary family has been the influence of what one might call the pastoral myth, first developed in the post-Reconstruction era and then codified, in as sense, by the Agrarians in the early twentieth century. Empowered by the methodological dictates of New Criticism, many early scholars of the Southern Renaissance actually helped to perpetuate this mythic quality of southern narrative by generally refusing to acknowledge any forces outside the text proper. Critics such as Irving Howe, Cleanth Brooks, and Michael Milligate, emphasized the primacy of symbol and archetype. Even when such matters as history or economy were given due consideration, their impact was mitigated by a sustained emphasis on representationality and metaphor. In her seminal essay on William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Olga Vickery interprets the tragic downfall of Thomas Sutpen as representative of the antebellum south’s own decline. However, Vickery’s reading of this decline is thoroughly allegorical, positioning Sutpen not so much in history as such, but rather a very particular historical narrative. For some of Vickery’s colleagues, even this allegorical treatment proved a bit much to swallow. Millgate, for one, insisted that Sutpen’s downfall in fact reflected a contemporary degeneration within American society as a whole, a degeneracy that Millgate maintained was actually more prevalent outside the South. Because of this Agrarian influence, many of these early scholars perceived the southern literary family in much the same way they viewed the South itself, as something static and immutable. Mother, Father, Son, and Daughter figure in these readings as narrowly defined archetypes rather than products of a particular socio-economic reality, flesh-and-blood avatars of those supposed verities of the human, or simply southern, condition. Although altering the critical framework and opening up new and undeniably product avenues of exploration, the ! % psychoanalytical works of the 70s, including such seminal publications as John T. Irwin’s Doubling and Incest, simply reinforced this archetypal perception of the southern family, insisting that southern figures be read through the lens of a narrowly defined Freudian type. If, as John William Corrington and Miller Williams suggest, the familial and the communal are central to any understanding of the south and southern culture, then it would seem that such myopic interpretations of the southern family pose a genuine problem for reading the South in manner that is thorough and accurate and eschews the temptations of mythic or reductive narrative regarding tortured scions, chaste matriarchs, wise mammies or the like (McAlpin 480). Fortunately, criticism of the last thirty years or so has increasingly distanced itself from these various essentializing tendencies, recognizing more and more the manner in