THE WAR AGAINST WEARINESS: IMAGINATIVE ENERGIES IN SOUTHERN AMERICAN NOVELS (1864-1918) Adrian Greene A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English Chapel Hill 2013 Approved by: Dr. Philip Gura Dr. William Brundage Dr. Fred Hobson Dr. Timothy Marr Dr. Eliza Richards ABSTRACT ADRIAN GREENE: The War against Weariness: Imaginative Energies in Southern American Novels (1864-1918) (Under the direction of Philip Gura) Prior to the American Civil War, white southern novelists had exhorted their countrymen to “open your eyes to the danger” of the North’s encroaching ideals and not to be caught “sleeping on your posts.” After the war, new southern novelists, like George Washington Cable, Frances Watkins Harper, Sutton E. Griggs, and Charles Chesnutt, worked instead to awaken their region to the injustice of its treatment of African Americans. Each author came to realize, however, that white readers, North and South, had grown tired of novels about race. Consequently, these writers rejected their genre and turned to nonfiction to reinvigorate social reform. To goad genteel southern readers to see the race problem as a crisis demanding immediate action rather than merely an aesthetic diversion, Cable, Harper, Griggs, and Chesnutt wrote speeches, autobiographies, sermons, and nonfiction books that argued that white churches should behave as their African-American counterparts had, as sites for interracial communion. These authors, that is, sought to reform southern white society by reforming – still in words but no longer in novels – southern white churches. More specifically, these novelists focused on Social Christianity, based on the biblical principles of love and justice, to transform society, as evidenced by Cable’s African-American Sunday School classroom, minister-novelist Griggs’ National Baptist Convention, and Chesnutt’s African Methodist Episcopal church community’s work in education, urban missions, and settlement houses. ii iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter INTRODUCTION IMAGINATIVE ENERGIES IN SOUTHERN AMERICAN NOVELS ..................... 1 I. WILL WORK FOR WAR: AUGUSTA JANE EVANS AND THE WAR AGAINST WEARINESS (1864-1866) ............................................................ 12 II. THE WAR AGAINST WEARINESS: SOUTHERN HISTORICAL ROMANCERS (1883-1904) ....................................................................................... 39 III. THE WORLD THAT IS WITH US: RACIAL-UPLIFT NOVELS AND WITHSTANDING WEARINESS (1892-1899) ............................................... 69 IV. IMAGINATIVE ENERGIES: SUTTON E. GRIGGS, THOMAS F. DIXON, JR., AND THE VIGOR BEHIND IMAGINATIVELY AMBITIOUS RHETORIC (1902-1905) .................................................................. 105 CONCLUSION THE NON-FICTIONALIZING OF IMAGINATIVE ENERGIES: GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE AND THE WAR AGAINST WEARINESS (1883-1918) ....................................................................................... 134 WORKS CITED ................................................................................................................... 163 iv INTRODUCTION IMAGINATIVE ENERGIES IN SOUTHERN AMERICAN NOVELS Far from energizing nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century southern American novelists, writing fiction about race wearied them. This weariness was born of an inability to answer in literature deceptively simple questions: How should southern whites treat African Americans, and how should southern African Americans treat whites? For George Washington Cable, Ellen Glasgow, Frances Watkins Harper, and Sutton E. Griggs, these questions were ones for which fiction ultimately proved inadequate. In striking ways not yet examined by American-literature scholars, these and other southern social-problem novelists rejected their genre, believing it to lead to daydreams rather than tangible social change. Consequently, they turned to nonfiction as a more likely means of effecting progress. To goad genteel southern readers to see the race problem as a crisis demanding immediate action rather than merely an aesthetic diversion, Cable, Glasgow, Harper, and Griggs wrote speeches, autobiographies, sermons, and nonfiction books that argued that white churches should behave as their African-American counterparts had, as sites for interracial communion. These authors, that is, sought to reform southern white society by reforming – still in words but no longer in novels – southern white churches. Cable, for instance, abandoned fiction when his 1880 novel The Grandissimes garnered more attention for its quaint descriptions of Creoles than for its trenchant commentary on the Louisiana caste system. When later dismantling the convict-lease system (which effectively returned southern African-American convicts to slavery), he thus employed platform speeches, delivered in both white and black churches. Chapter One of this work documents the state of southern literature immediately prior to such reform efforts by examining Augusta Jane Evans’ antebellum domestic novels, which largely avoided the topic of race in order to argue against the encroaching northern ideals of materialism, feminism, and individualism. Nevertheless, the work of having to produce in her novels an identity opposed to those ideals – a southern identity of self-sufficiency – proved impossible. As she inadvertently reveals through her protagonist, Irene Huntingdon, the South could not sustain its economy without embracing northern manufacturing; otherwise, both the soil and its people would be exhausted. Chapter Two explores the years following Rutherford B. Hayes’ election, when the post-Reconstruction weariness of Cable and Glasgow at fighting southern and northern audiences’ disinterest in the race questions – the questions of how whites should treat African Americans and African Americans, whites, queries motivated by the war and Reconstruction – was manifest in the formulaic quality of their historical romances. This fiction often unified disempowered white southern characters to achieve an altered aristocratic paradigm, usually through the deus ex machina of a marriage between a poor white southerner and a wealthy one. After producing a number of such hackneyed plots, Cable abandoned them for platform speeches, editorials, and sermons on civic equality, while Glasgow speculated at literary conferences about fiction’s relevance to the real world, thereby leading to her most incisive commentary on the race problem, her autobiography. In Chapter Three, I show how, unlike these social-problem authors, for a time racial- uplift novelists Frances Watkins Harper and Sutton E. Griggs invigorated their imaginative 2 energies with their novels – Iola Leroy and Imperium in Imperio , respectively – turning in these works to their church communities to approach the South’s race questions. These writers imagined churches as communal spaces where African Americans could vent pent-up frustrations while resisting mono-cultural and nationalistic forms of identity politics. Hence, where Evans wrote around the topic of race, and Cable and Glasgow assumed its stability while trying to ameliorate its political consequences, Harper and Griggs sought to redefine it. Against white southern preachers like George D. Armstrong who had used Christianity to defend slavery, they worked to free African Americans from a theology defined by the “Other,” incorporating them instead into a more broadly defined religious mainstream. In this way, Harper and Griggs sought full spiritual and civic citizenship for African Americans. Chapter Four reveals, however, that misinterpretation and undervaluing of his novels caused Griggs to turn once and for all to writing political tracts, where he could make his messages and motivations clearest. In 1910, Griggs collected all of his political writings and published them as Wisdom’s Call , creating by far his most successful publication, to the extent that it was revised and expanded the following year; he also, within months of that work, published Beyond the End: The Sequel to Wisdom’s Call (Coleman 24). As Chapter Four illuminates as well, Griggs, like many other post-Reconstruction writers, likely and paradoxically followed the pattern established by the white-supremacist minister Thomas F. Dixon, Jr., who represented the fulcrum between the southern novelist’s turn from fiction to nonfiction. Based on changes in Southern Baptist preaching styles, Dixon shaped his novels to be direct addresses rather than strictly fiction, adopting the new sermonic method of trading emotionalism for prosaic delivery and explicitly telling his white readers that they would have a place in the bourgeois world of the New South. The tone therefore was much 3 more optimistic, and more expressly conveyed, than in prior southern novels. Importantly, more than anything genuinely religious, Dixon emulated this new approach for its rejuvenation of white southern rhetoric. As my conclusion shows, to combat this revivification of white-supremacist expression, racial-uplift novelists (as well as the social-problem novelist Cable) turned to other forms, and, to these authors, nonfiction proved the most effective at realizing social change. In their letters and resulting nonfiction works, forward-thinking writers initially concentrated on abolitionists’ focus on civil equality; this approach, though, was exhausted by the 1890s, as Social Christians