S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

i n S o u t h e r n F i c t i o n

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S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

i n S o u t h e r n F i c t i o n

Fau l k n e r, S i m m s, Pag e ,

a n d D i xo n

J o s e p h B . K e e n e r

SHAKESPEARE AND MASCULINITY IN SOUTHERN FICTION

Copyright © Joseph B. Keener, 2008.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced
in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the
case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

First published in 2008 by
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ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60320-2
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For Kelli, who always believed.

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C o n t e n t s

Introduction

William Gilmore Simms and William Shakespeare

Combining the Father and the Son

Thomas Nelson Page’s Mythmaking
and Shakespearean Masculinity

Fear of a Black Planet

Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Narration of the Self
via an Other

Who’s Your Daddy?

109

William Faulkner’s Making of the Father and Son

I’m My Own Grandpa

127

Quentin Compson’s Shakespearean Solution

Epilogue

153

Notes

155

Bibliography

189

Index

199

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I n t r o d u c t i o n

This new and gorgeous garment, majesty,
Sits not so easy on me as you think.
Brothers you mix your sadness with some fear.
. . . Sorrow so royally in you appears
That I will put the fashion on
And wear it in my heart. Why then, be sad,
But entertain no more of it, good brothers,
Than a joint burden laid upon us all.
For me, by heaven, I bid you assured,
I’ll be your father and brother too.

William Shakespeare, “2 Henry IV”

ear Orangeburg, South Carolina, some fifty miles from Charleston,

an unseasonably hot, late-April sun beats down on Woodlands,
William Gilmore Simms’s antebellum plantation. Two stories of
unimposing whitewashed brick and wood are accented by ubiquitous
green shutters and capped with a rusted tin roof that looks as if it has
been there since the days of Simms himself. A collection of smaller yet
similar buildings circles the main house in deference. The impression
is less like the columned Tara of popular imagination and more like a
bed-and-breakfast. The year is 2002, but the place looks like some
modern film production has decorated a set for 1852, hanging at-
mospheric Spanish moss from ancient trees that sprawl across a finely
trimmed lawn, adding period touches right down to the dinner bell
on a branch overhanging the carriage house, all in the name of
verisimilitude.

Descendants of Simms and his African slaves congregate here with

academics from the William Gilmore Simms Society to honor this mas-
ter of the plantation, novelist, poet, orator, essayist, dramatist, and
would-be politician. To an outsider, this gathering may seem esoteric.
Yet the keynote speaker for the Simms Conference, John C. Guilds, puts
forth this estimation in his 1992 biography, Simms: A Literary Life:
“Simms’s pivotal role as a kind of ancestral father to modern literature of

the South cries for greater recognition.”

Guilds, and many of the par-

ticipants of the April 2002 Simms Conference, now wants to cast
William Gilmore Simms in the role of literary ancestor. Some of these
scholars, acolytes, and “Southernophiles” seem to have a need to fill the
father role by appropriating this antebellum author.

Guilds’s word choice is compelling; he can cast Simms’s right to

canonization in any term he wants, yet he needs a patriarch. Why?
These people are looking to the author to understand where they
came from, who they are, and how to perform their identities. They
are glancing backward to look forward, as Simms himself had done.
He is their model, their father; the difference is that they will, per-
chance, find redemption for their father (Guilds’s “greater recogni-
tion”?) that the author was unable to achieve for his own patriarchs,
both “real” and literary.

A gnarled-looking man with a matching walking stick and an ancient

two-piece suit is introduced to me as a distinguished philosophy pro-
fessor from a major Southern university and a contributor to Harpers.
Suitably impressed, I engage the man in what I think is our shared in-
terest in Simms. The man peers out from a mass of peppered white
hair from both head and face, broken only by his glasses and a gash of
a mouth, seeming to bite the tongue within as I explain my idea that
Southern, white, upper class authors such as Simms had appropriated
their concept of masculinity from William Shakespeare (which implies
the constructed, not the natural quality of masculinity). In the course
of this explanation, I use a fatal term: gender studies. The aging phi-
losopher draws himself up to full height and begins to rant about how
gender studies has ruined men and has even been instrumental in cre-
ating a culture that allowed the recent terrorist attack on the World
Trade Center.

Numbed by the man’s fervor, I realize for the first time during the

entire conference that a great many of these academics, perhaps even
the families themselves, adhere to the ideas of masculinity put forth in
the works of William Gilmore Simms—he is being appropriated in the
same way the Old South writer had acquired masculine ideals from
the works of Shakespeare. Members of this Southern culture are still
appropriating these paradigms of masculinity. These latter-day expro-
priations tend to focus on “this gallant Hotspur, this all-praised
Knight” figure.

Of all of the emotions that these rustic buildings; an-

cient, lumbering trees; slave-empty fields; and sun-dappled yards of
Woodlands and the conference evoke, the most palpable is yearning.
This kind of longing has translated to the raising and deifying of
father-kings, both real and literary.

I n t r o d u c t i o n

Why would anyone write about William Shakespeare anymore?

Seeming eons of bardolatry and its more recent iconoclastic Shake-
spearean atheism have drained the body dry and surely buried it in the
backyard. The rest is for scavengers. Yet, like Hamlet Sr., the ghost of
this literary patriarch still haunts the halls of American culture, ex-
horting, “Adieu, adieu, adieu! Remember me.”

Embracing, reject-

ing, or being indifferent to William Shakespeare and his works still
frequently defines one in cultures where he is pervasive. Fathers, espe-
cially literary and cultural icons, can be extremely difficult to kill.

In countless books, critics offer valid cultural motivations for appro-

priations of William Shakespeare first and his texts second.

Michael

Dobson, however, exposes the root of the problem when he worries,
“The history of Shakespeare’s changing significance for periods subse-
quent to his own is a history of different ‘appropriations,’ but they di-
verge widely in their accounts of how the process of appropriation
works.”

Dobson chooses interpretive communities as the most im-

portant factor and decries the strong individual or author, but the as-
sumption is that strong authors and individuals are divorced from their
immediate “interpretive community,” their cultural context.

Authors disseminate first and are then disseminated. The relation-

ship with their culture, as with their families, can be reciprocal, both
making and being made at the same time. The same can be said of the
afterlife of William Shakespeare and his works, especially in terms of
masculinity—American, Southern, white, planter-class authors have,
since before there was a “South,” made William Shakespeare a literary
father and, by appropriating models and modes of masculinity from
his texts and modifying them with their immediate culture, allowed
themselves to be made in the process. Enter Judith Butler.

Butler’s paradigm of gender citation in Bodies That Matter (1993)

not only offers an understanding of how gender is constructed and
performed but also addresses Dobson’s concern over how Shake-
speare is appropriated. Butler argues that gender is a citation that
must be constantly reinstituted. At the same time, predated citations
may have become entrenched enough to become a “law.” Butler
likens the relationship between citation and law to judges in a court.
Judges refer to predated citations (laws) and make decisions accord-
ingly. The citation is made and the law’s authority is reinstituted at
the same time. In other words, the law is made anew and the judges
offer their verdicts and the consequences.

Butler does write of “constitutive constraints” and “punishable con-

sequences,” but what her analogy is missing is that judges are allowed
interpretation of the law. There is a world of difference in Sandra Day

I n t r o d u c t i o n

O’Connor and Judge Judy. Butler’s paradigm is valuable for under-
standing gender and its citational relationships and can even be applied
to quell Dobson’s “how?” and its potential discomfort. To stretch But-
ler’s analogy to the breaking point, the four authors examined herein
will act as the proverbial judges, citing William Shakespeare as the law
and rendering interpretations and judgments in their own texts, often
in the name of gender citation. Some will render just citations, others
will abuse their power, and still others will end in indeterminacy and
mistrial.

William Gilmore Simms may not seem like an obvious subject of

study. An enclave of critics, spearheaded by John C. Guilds, has made
the effort to enshrine and canonize this author, but contemporary
readers without specific interest in Simms’s time and place may find
his works rough going. Yet Simms’s familial and cultural bonds make
him ideally suited for a study of gender appropriation. In addition,
Simms really was the first Southern professional author and published
just over eighty volumes, making Anthony Trollope appear feeble.
William Gilmore Simms is about as representative of an antebellum
author as is available, if one feels the need for such constructs.

More importantly, Simms produced works over the long historical

epoch that his life encompassed (1806–1870). Watching his Shake-
spearean appropriations of masculinity change as his cultural circum-
stances dictated reveals the nature of appropriation. A younger Simms’s
masculine appropriations matched his desire for nation building, and
both were tied into familial bonds on a national and literary scale
(though the two scales cannot be divorced). Simms appeals to what he
perceives as an authority in both England and Shakespeare, eventually
attempting to superannuate them at the same time.

Rising sectional tensions between North and South, the chaos of

the Civil War, and his brief sojourn in defeat all changed Simms’s
masculine appropriations and how they were expressed in his texts.
The crux of the lessons to be gleaned from Simms’s engagement with
Shakespeare, his texts, and his culture is that appropriations are not
static but mutable and alter with circumstances. Plotting these
changes makes William Gilmore Simms worthy of study.

Thomas Nelson Page was a “plantation Southern gentleman” who

never actually ran a plantation. Page’s postwar texts are patient zero in
the virulent plague that was and still is Lost Cause mythology. The ro-
mancer created a myth of an organic society where the white master
was the good father, and everyone else, including the slaves, were his
loyal children. His novels and stories pined for the antebellum days
when this world was still intact and, in his later works, showed the

xii

I n t r o d u c t i o n

damage done by the destroying of this family and its golden ways.
Shot in soft lens, Page’s old world where people knew their place
(class, race, and gender) was a constant rebuke to his end of the cen-
tury at that time. His images, and disturbingly his ideology as well,
have been burning themselves into both Northern and Southern con-
sciousness from his day to the present.

The relationship between Page’s ideals from both Shakespeare and

his culture and his myth building is palpable. His mythic family ro-
mance had ramifications for gender citations as well. Models of mas-
culinity from Shakespeare’s texts were modified with Lost Cause
ideology; Page’s determinations of who a “gentleman” was; and a new
class mobility brought on by industrialization, the rise of town culture,
and a shift in power from traditional landed gentry to those capable
of acquiring money. Page’s “moonlight and magnolias” work sug-
gests much about memory, its lack of perspective, and the elements
people use to construct the past. Especially compelling in Page is
how this myth and its attendant masculinity often undercut them-
selves. Even in a universe of his own making, Page cannot curtail
gender slippage.

Thomas Dixon put the “black” in “black rapist beast.” This sup-

posed reverend defined white masculinity against what he projected
from his mind to black African bodies as black sexual animalism, both
male and female, and made his race, class, and gender the protectors
of white women everywhere. Dixon purloined from Shakespeare’s
texts not only models of masculinity but racial issues and attitudes as
well. This flesh-and-blood Iago did not whisper his racism and ma-
nipulations in people’s ears but poured his bile over such abhorrent
texts as The Leopard’s Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1903). Hope-
fully, Thomas Dixon’s texts are only embraced by the League of the
South and Free South types at best, but that does not mean there is
nothing worthy of study therein.

Dixon’s value here is the consideration of the intersection of race

and gender and how that affects appropriations. Like Page, Dixon
builds his own myth and peoples it with appropriations and citations
that assist him in restoring a threatened white masculinity. Especially
fascinating is how, like Page, he undercuts his own constructions of
both white and black masculinity and also reveals their interdepend-
ence for definition. In a Plessy versus Ferguson world, Dixon inadver-
tently proves that the two races are not separate and tries to cite them
as being inherently unequal. In the end, Dixon reveals more about
Southern white masculinity by allowing it to be read through its fan-
ciful constructions, both white and black.

I n t r o d u c t i o n

xiii

William Faulkner is key in studying Southern, white, planter-class

masculinity. One reason for this importance is his interrogation of
seemingly all relative identity politics—race, class, sex, and gender.
True, Faulkner was more successful with some than with others, but
his modernist project gets at the heart of what it means to be mascu-
line, feminine, black, white, man, or, to a lesser degree, woman. The
definition that Faulkner produces for all of these categories is a firm,
“I just don’t know.”

Old Southern codes of conduct, familial transmissions, and appro-

priations from others lead only to ambiguity in Faulkner’s fictive world.
Bruce R. Smith writes that Shakespeare’s works are “teaching us that
masculinity is contingent in all sorts of ways,” and also “giv[ing] us the
opportunity to imagine versions of masculinity that may be more equi-
table and more fulfilling than those we already know.”

Smith could be

writing of William Faulkner’s works. Faulkner may not be able to an-
swer these questions of identity, but his works can remind readers of
just how important the questions are. However, there is another associ-
ation between the novelist and the Elizabethan playwright that de-
mands Faulkner’s inclusion here. Flannery O’Connor once wrote,
“The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference
in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants
his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roar-
ing down.”

O’Connor is expressing the status that Faulkner is ac-

corded in Southern literature, not just as the author of The Sound and
the Fury or Absalom! Absalom! but as a thing unto himself, the pope of
all things Southern and literary. O’Connor’s anxiety of influence is sim-
ilar to that of many Shakespearean would-be successors. Whether one
embraces, rejects, or attempts to ignore him, William Faulkner has be-
come definitional like Shakespeare before him. Faulkner and Shake-
speare have both become icons.

This iconography serves authors and poets but is erected by critics

and academies. Search the Modern Language Association’s database
(or almost any literary database for that matter) and the largest num-
ber of hits will be William Shakespeare and William Faulkner. Tower-
ing libraries could be built just to house the criticism, esoteric
publications, and works of these two artists. The treatment of these
authors exceeds mere canonizing. Bardolatry will need a counterpart—
perhaps Faulkolatry.

Tying these two men and their art together is not the original con-

tribution of this work. Literary critics have been conjoining artists of
various stripes to Shakespeare seemingly since there has been a “Shake-
speare.” There is a more resonant connection than critical expediency.

xiv

I n t r o d u c t i o n

The narrative arc that this project follows is its significance. Shake-
speare has been made into a literary, national, and political father.
William Gilmore Simms tries to first prove and then reject his paternity
by appropriating Shakespeare and then providing his own citations of
masculinity. Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon latch onto this
father and modify his models with diverse, if not totally dissimilar, cul-
tural circumstances and ideologies.

Finally, there is William Faulkner. Faulkner is being made a father in

much the same manner as Shakespeare. The appropriation of Shake-
speare comes full circle, and it takes an examination of masculinity re-
fracted through the prism of father-son relationships to understand
both why and how this phenomenon came to be and persists. Therein
lies the taproot. Sons attempt with varying degrees of success to ma-
ture into fathers. That is not to say that William Faulkner is “naturally”
a paterfamilias. The author has been retrospectively made a father, cre-
ated in his own image. The emphasis is on made.

This assertion raises questions: Who are the children? Why do they

make their own fathers? How do they make their own fathers? Are
these made fathers sufficient? Some of the answers live in example in
the study herein. Some are much more difficult than can be fully ad-
dressed in such a short space. The most immediate answer regarding
offspring is the artists subsequent to first Shakespeare and then
Faulkner. Nevertheless, the grounds of Simms’s Woodlands planta-
tion mentioned above contain the key.

The ostensible solution is that these historians and literary critics

long for major figures to hang their discipline on, to deify, and to de-
vote their intellectual energies to. However, there is a larger cultural
phenomenon at work on Simms’s estate. Academics are accompanied
on the lawn of the author’s former home by Simms’s actual descen-
dants. In that moment, these professionally Southern bibliophiles be-
longed. The urge for a father is the inclination for the self. Like Simms,
Page, Dixon, and Faulkner before them, most humans will have a fa-
ther to fulfill that yearning and help them arrive at an identity, even if
they have to become “philoprogenitive” and create him to do so.

I n t r o d u c t i o n

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C h a p t e r 1

Wi l l i a m G i l m o re S i m m s a n d

Wi l l i a m S h a k e s pe a re

Combining the Father and the Son

Have we preserved the household virtues of the Englishman? Do we
maintain his tastes in this particular;—do we honor those human-
ities which every lesson of our common ancestry should teach us to
revere? Do we sustain the gentle—do we venerate the old? Are we,
like them, solicitous always in the decencies of life and society? Do
we bow to the intellect? Seek we to promote by letters, religion and
the arts, the altars of high civilization . . . what is our rank, com-
pared with other nations, in the estimates of the civilized?

William Gilmore Simms, The Simms Reader

ooking to England for cues of intellect and “civilization,” bolster-

ing his country’s self-image through “common ancestry” yet chafing
paradoxically at the status of the American intelligentsia and culture,
William Gilmore Simms sounds insecure. Simms would have answered
the barrage of rhetorical questions hurled at the University of Alabama
Erosophic Society with an emphatic “no” and a final “low.” This inse-
curity stems from not being a worthy son to “the Englishman,” and
such a charge can be read as an issue of masculinity.

Perhaps this insufficiency compelled Simms to appropriate British

culture, William Shakespeare, and the models of masculinity encoded
in his scripts. More particularly, the blood-and-guts cavalier with a
Hotspur spirit, a Henry V bearing, and a “Thank you M’am” gentility

swaggers throughout Simms’s works, such as Robert Singleton in The
Partisan (1835) or Gabriel Harrison in The Yemassee (1835).

To create such a man is to reconstitute the Old South myth of the

cavalier and his attendant ideals, including his masculinity.

That this

myth persisted can be seen in Robert Cave’s 1911 screed, “The Men
in Gray.” Cave rants that the South was “led by the descendants of
the Cavaliers,” and possessed “a manly contempt for moral littleness,
a high sense of honor, a lofty regard for their plighted faith, a strong
tendency toward conservatism.”

This ideal was not just bare-chested

manliness, but a machismo with an attendant ideology. In other
words, Confederate Hotspurs.

But to focus on these Hotspurs in Simms’s works is merely to per-

petuate this old myth anew and to reduce his engagement with Shake-
speare to solely a Lost Cause ideology. Simms took possession of many
characters and their attributes from the works of William Shakespeare.
The title character of his novel Guy Rivers (1834) is a frontier Mac-
beth; husband Edward Clifford poisons his wife, calling himself “Oth-
ello”; while Frank Kingsley plays his “Iago” in Confession (1841). In
Beauchampe (1842), Margaret and Beauchampe’s double suicide rings
with the tragic romance of Romeo and Juliet, while Joscelyn (1867)
displays its own “Hamlet” in the character of Walter Dunbar.

William Gilmore Simms’s work could still be reduced to plantation

idealizing, cavalier homogenizing, and Confederate proselytizing
and, indeed, it is all of these. Yet what makes him worthy of consider-
ation, and less just another literary defender of the South, both old
and new, is his manipulation of Shakespearean gender constructions
and the motivations behind it.

Simms’s work contains yet moves beyond the Hotspur ideals of

martial heroics, courage, fiery spirit, and honor in its constructions of
masculinity—it does so by focusing on father-son paradigms. Simms
creates a continuum of sons, most notably in his Revolutionary War
novels, of Hamlet characters on one end, Prince Hals in the middle,
and Hotspurs on the other extreme. Nevertheless, the fathers and
their relationships to these symbolic progeny are the most significant
and consistent appropriations. The absent Henry IV, the inferior yet
present father figure Falstaff, and the ghost of Hamlet Sr. are all mod-
els for fathers, purveyors of masculinity as received by the patriarch.
These fathers represent failures and successes, and varying levels of
achievement. Simms had to be looking for more than square-jawed
heroes for his literary offspring to emulate.

In Simms, however, Shakespeare’s characters are not merely short-

hand for the white planter class’s depiction of masculinity. Simms

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

produces these appropriated father-son paradigms as a means of replac-
ing his biological father, justifying the culture of a young America versus
Great Britain, and eventually defending the American South. The
author combines these fathers and sons into single characters, such as
Captain Porgy, in an attempt to redeem the fallen, lost, or incomplete
fathers and allow the sons to perform their masculine identities to the
fullest. In a sense, save the father, save the son. Simms pulls off this act
of procreation by producing literary offspring, creating representations
seemingly meant to wander beyond the bounds of Simms’s texts into his
culture’s consciousness. His texts offer larger-than-life literary combina-
tions to feed a hunger that existed in his reality for a successful reitera-
tion of masculinity that is both father and son, American and Southern.

Simms’s texts contain acts of appropriation that reveal a defensiveness

regarding identity that radiates from the personal to regional and back
again. Perhaps this stance is what Simms has for the Simms Conference
attendees (even if they do not exactly realize it!); his concerns are theirs
as well. These father-son paradigms divulge the citational nature of gen-
der; reading this author’s works through this prism is illuminating.

Judith Butler argues in her 1993 book Bodies That Matter that in-

dividual sexed “I” positions are created as a reiteration of hegemonic
norms. She notes, “This productive reiteration can be read as a kind
of performativity. Discursive performativity appears to produce that
which it names, to enact its own referent, to name and to do, to name
and to make . . . reinvocation reconstitutes the law.”

Just as Shake-

speare reconstituted law through performativity and reiteration in his
texts, so does William Gilmore Simms. However, this idea of Simms
appropriating Shakespeare’s citations is not the same as his purely
“copying” them. When Simms invokes appropriations from Shake-
speare’s scripts, he is reconstituting those citations, making them as
much as his citations are being made by them. Butler does offer a the-
oretical basis for this variance:

The embodying of sex would be a kind of “citing” of the law, but neither sex
nor law can be said to preexist their various embodyings and citings. Where the
law appears to predate its citation, that is where a given citation has become es-
tablished as “the law.” Further, the failure to “cite” or instantiate it correctly or
completely would be at once the mobilizing condition of such a citation and its
punishable consequence. Since the law must be repeated to remain an authori-
tative law, the law perpetually reinstitutes the possibility of its own failure.

Shakespeare’s texts preexist Simms’s, a “law” in a Butlerian sense,

but this antebellum author reinstitutes them by citing through his

S i m m s a n d S h a k e s p e a r e

own texts. Simms is, in effect, citing a sexed position on paper. Butler
discusses the possibility of failure at every moment of citation; she
uses the example of judges who make the law every time they cite it in
a courtroom. While laws may sometimes seem rigid, the interpreta-
tion of them is not, frequently leading to ambiguity and slippage de-
spite the initial pretense of authority. The law makes the court and
vice versa—the relationship is reciprocal and leaves room for failure.

This “room for failure” is part of what drives much of Simms’s

work, especially his Revolutionary War novels. This series includes the
following works: The Partisan (1835), Mellichampe (1836), The Scout
or The Kinsmen (1841), Katherine Walton (1851), Woodcraft (1852),
The Forayers (1855), Eutaw (1856), and perhaps even Joscelyn, which
was published serially in a Northern periodical after the Civil War.
Captain Porgy appears in all but two of these works and wistfully
intones in Eutaw, “I dream of a time, when every man will, perforce,
fall into his right place.”

This sentiment could be a working thesis

of William Gilmore Simms’s creative output. The author struggles
throughout his long literary career to put fathers and sons into “the
right place.”

Porgy’s expression of concern for people to be in their “right place”

could mean many things to Simms depending on his ever-changing
circumstances and literary focus. Simms lived from 1806 to 1870 and
was a prolific, productive author.

Over this thirty-year career and the

course of his life, Simms’s circumstances and postures would change.
Simms moved from one dogma to the other due to the long, chaotic,
historical epoch in which the author lived and worked.

Yet, even if it

is for differing reasons depending on the era, the one constant that re-
mains throughout is the concern for white planter-class masculinity
and its place in the “natural” order.

In the South, gender construction cannot be examined without

the consideration of race, class, and sexuality.

Simms’s work supports

this assertion, in the relationship between Captain Porgy and Tom in
Woodcraft, or between the slave Hector and the Matthews family in
The Yemassee, or in Simms’s nonfiction writings and orations, such as
Slavery in America, Being a Brief Review of Miss Martineau on That
Subject (1838), The Southern Convention (1850), and The Social Prin-
ciple: The True Source of National Permanence (1842).

Yet, before these relationships can be explored, it is imperative to

understand Simms’s perspective on the planter-class white male—a
point on which critics do not seem to agree.

Simms seems paradox-

ically a part of the aristocracy and an outsider to this closed, heredi-
tary circle, a protean social construct and critical cipher as much as

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

some Shakespearean characters themselves, and part Charlestonian
Edmund and Edgar, if King Lear’s nature and custom may be em-
ployed. Simms’s class may be difficult to pin down for critics, but he
would not stand for such class ambiguity in what is undoubtedly his
finest creation, the lovingly rendered Captain Porgy.

When Porgy is dressed by his servants in Woodcraft, the narrator

exclaims, “Talk of the iron garments of ancient chivalry! Never did
the closing of rivets on the part of the knights of the English Harrys
and Edwards, on the eve of battle, require more time and painstaking,
or cause more anxiety to pages and squires, and armor-bearers, and
armorers, then did the costuming of their master.”

The context here

is a scene of humor, yet Simms’s gentleman does not fit into his out-
fit as his English forefathers did—he is deficient to the point of being
comic. Porgy’s estimation may be a sober assessment of his genera-
tion versus the Anglo-fathers he longs to emulate, or perhaps it is
merely an act of self-deprecation. In the middle of this slapstick lies a
grain of truth that makes Porgy ring true, painfully so for men of
Simms’s generation.

Porgy offers an explanation for why he cannot live up to the “En-

glish Harrys and Edwards,” in the same novel. He laments, “but the
curse of my generation was that our fathers lived too well, were too
rapidly prosperous, and though they did not neglect the exercise of
proper industry in themselves, they either did not know how to teach
it to their children, or presumed on the absence of any necessity that
they should learn.”

If Porgy’s generation is cursed, it is due to defi-

cient or shortsighted fathers; the result is questionable offspring. The
notion of generational conflict and finger pointing will appear in
Simms’s text more so than just in this episode, and the direction in
which the finger points will depend on shifting circumstances.

William Gilmore Simms does, however, attempt to combat this

problem by appropriating father-son paradigms from William Shake-
speare and combining them into single characters in the hopes of re-
deeming all, of remaking a Southern gentleman worthy of his English
forbears and, hopefully, eventually superseding them. Simms’s aim
was to combine these fathers and sons to produce a new, American
gentleman, one based on older models.

Simms wanted the old defi-

nition back, and he used Shakespeare to get it.

Why Shakespeare? Simms’s cultural context, the city of Charleston,

was infused with ties to the British aristocracy.

These ties produced

larger cultural reasons for the Shakespearean impulse. A feeling of
American inferiority was stoked by a “lingering sense of colonial-
ism.”

If not militarily, America was still culturally subjugated by

S i m m s a n d S h a k e s p e a r e

British rule. Simms’s Revolutionary War saga had to be affected by this
sense, making the corpus of his work reactionary and defensive. The
beginning points of overcoming these feelings of inadequacy were ap-
propriation and emulation. In a nationalistic echo of the primal scene,
this Freudian killing of the father would enable an American progeny.

Simms conceptualizes this surmounting through apologia, stating

in his 1846 Views and Reviews in American Literature, History, and
Fiction, “The early labors of a newly established people, in all the in-
tellectual arts, must necessarily be imitative. They advance by regular
steps . . . in this progress, they can only advance through the assistance
of other nations.”

This thinking explains the phenomena that popu-

lar American authors of the early Simms era became so by adapting
European literary conventions.

The key word is “adapting”; planter-

class white males did not merely lift ideas and forms wholesale, but
used them to fit their particular needs. One such need was acceptance
by their audience and literary forbears; perhaps this validation would
lead to acceptance of self as well.

But, more specifically, why Shakespeare? Michael Dobson observes

in The Making of the National Poet (1992), “Shakespeare had often
been recognized as occupying a position directly analogous to that of
God the Father. . . . Shakespeare had been normatively constitutive of
British identity as the drinking of afternoon tea.”

Both Guilds in ref-

erence to Simms (as quoted in the “Introduction”) and Dobson re-
garding Shakespeare use paternalistic terms to describe these two
authors. The impetus for Simms and his kind must have been to com-
mandeer Shakespeare and acquire Great Britain or, at the very least,
please it. In Judith Butler’s terms, these men could reconstitute this
law through reiteration and rest assured of their own performativity,
quelling insecurity while reinvocating a privileged citation, a law.

With Shakespeare comes a “seriousness” that a young America

could use.

This posture is born out of a defensiveness, which in this

case led to nation building (or the other way around?) and may have
been the primum mobile, but planter-class white men had to begin by
reiterating their individual roles. The defensive constructions of iden-
tity ricocheted from nation, to region, to individual, and back again.
The Charlestonian planter class and their regional counterparts en-
gaged in such an activity, offering a young Simms both a modus
operandi and ample exposure to the likes of Shakespeare.

Paradoxically, Simms endeavored to break with British tradition

while gleaning images of fathers, sons, and their relationships from
the cultural apex of that nation’s high art. The reason may have been
a “superstitious awe of the classics” as W. J. Cash notes in his 1941

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

The Mind of the South.

Perhaps adaptation to tradition takes place by

using old models for new purposes;

Simms was trying to construct

first a national and then a regional literature through older models.
Both theories apply to Simms, but the compelling point is gender as a
category more so than either cultural consideration.

After all, status and gender identity are never quite a sure thing for

white men in the antebellum South.

What better way to shore up a

tenuous grasp on masculinity than to appeal to a perceived authority?
Simms’s appropriation seems a contradiction in terms, aggressive and
defensive at the same time—perhaps even passive-aggressive. The
salient feature of his work is a break with fathers both biological and
national in an attempt to rebuild these relationships in a more equi-
table and fulfilling way.

Shakespeare’s influence over Simms’s culture and the man himself

cannot be overstated.

Likewise, Shakespeare loomed large in the au-

todidact Simms’s reading and, eventually, his literature. Simms wrote
articles about Shakespeare, collected Shakespeare Apocrypha, anno-
tated plays, wrote introductions, and even adapted Timon of Athens
for the stage.

The prolific Simms performed the task of attempting

to give Shakespeare to his own region before, during, and even after
producing his own literature—the author was soaked in Shakespeare
while trying to produce his own works and the masculine citations
therein.

Simms’s novels also demonstrate this obsessiveness, offering a pre-

ponderance of Shakespearean quotations.

More importantly, the

young author wrote in the December 1828 edition of Southern Liter-
ary Gazette, “For the universal heart there is Shakespeare.”

This

thinking reveals a tendency to universalize Shakespeare, a dogma that
persists to this day. Of special note is Simms’s focus on the metaphoric
“heart” in this universality, as if this basic feature of humanity super-
sedes culture, therefore allowing not only Shakespeare to have the key
to it but Simms to have access as well. This proselytizing seems bibli-
cal in its expression and intent.

Still, Simms hoped to universalize a strictly cultural appropriation

from this deified source—the cultural hybrid that would be the South-
ern white planter-class male; an amalgam that would persist, made up
of elements of Shakespearean models of masculinity and the pressures
of Southern culture. Bruce R. Smith theorizes thus in Shakespeare and
Masculinity (2000):

Over the past 400 years Shakespeare’s scripts have been performed tens of
thousands of times, in places all over the world . . . within different cultural

S i m m s a n d S h a k e s p e a r e

assumptions about what constitutes masculinity. In these performances mas-
culinity must inevitably represent the coalescence of ideas shared by actors
and audiences, whoever they are wherever they may be, with ideas coded in
Shakespeare’s scripts. The result is a cultural hybrid, a coalescence of early
modern ways of performing masculinity with ways of belonging to another
place and time.

If Simms found the current white planter-class males deficient, first

in comparison to the British, then the American nation, then within
his region, and then possibly himself, he would solve this problem by
creating cultural hybrids in his literature. He would offer a working
out of reality in literature, as if one could be the panacea for the other.

These hybrids are “A son who is the theme of honor’s tongue”

like Hotspur, the cunning of a Prince Harry that hides yet eventually
forces Hotspur to admit, “Thy name in arms were now as great as
mine!”

with a dash of the “noble heart” of Hamlet, complete with

its contemplative, dark grandeur.

A Fortinbras would not do, as he

was too successful, a flip side for a Danish prince. These models also
contain elements of the successful father-king in Bolingbroke, who
says, “whilst on earth I rain/ My waters—on the earth,”

yet Simms

still felt, “but for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff/ true Jack Fal-
staff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore/ more valiant being as he is
old Jack Falstaff, banish not/ him thy Harry’s company, banish not
him thy Harry’s/ company—banish plump Jack, and banish all the/
world.”

William Gilmore Simms would take these varying models and mix

them with an ideal of Southern gentility.

Of course this meant

white, male, upper class, and preferably of “good stock.” Simms
would not settle for one model, as seems to be the case in most acts of
literary emulation; he wanted the best of each flawed man, which sug-
gests a slightly different agenda than mere homage. The blending of
all of these male constructions into one character makes Simms
unique, but there is more to it than that.

Simms’s hybrids merge fa-

thers and sons into one.

Simms takes this course of action in the name of redemption. Fal-

staff is flawed, and Bolingbroke, though ascending to the throne, is
guilty of usurpation. Sons fare no better in Shakespeare and fre-
quently meet untimely deaths. The impetus for combining these fa-
thers and sons is to make one good gentleman out of the best of these
filial connections and Simms’s cultural context—in effect, to produce
a King Henry V, a son who exceeds the father in his royalty, gentility,
and, most of all, masculinity. A son capable of spouting,

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

We never valued this poor seat of England,
And therefore, living hence did give ourself
To barbarous license—as ’tis ever common
Than men are merriest when they are from home.
But tell Dauphin I will keep my state,
Be like a king, and show my sail of greatness
When I do rouse me in my throne of France.

Not only do fathers benefit from this coalescing of models, but

sons also can become successful versions of their fathers and reiterate
their masculinity in strong, if not stereotypical, ways. Harry is able to
transmogrify himself into Henry V to reiterate his masculine position
first for his father, then for his court, and finally for his enemies, such
as the Dauphin. Henry V is then imbued with all the braggadocio and
swagger this citational position not only allows but also demands.

Simms’s Captain Porgy is the aftereffect, the manifestation of the

cultural hybrid, this coalescence. He is Shakespearean and a Southern
gentleman (as defined above), British and American Southern, and fa-
ther and son—Simms’s experiment in making masculinity. To ques-
tion who Porgy really is in Simms’s work and trace his history
through the novels is to determine if the author’s rewriting of the
Southern gentleman succeeds and, therefore, if Simms’s partisan does
so as well.

Captain Porgy’s advent in The Partisan (1835) is not one of the

hero or central character, but the work serves to unleash him on
Simms’s audience. He stands out amid the cardboard characters, such
as the title character Robert Singleton, even though he is merely
comic relief. The novel follows the exploits of those joining Francis
Marion’s partisans to fight the British army. Lieutenant Porgy (not
yet having advanced in rank) has the body and appetite of Falstaff
coupled with the fighting spirit of Hotspur. Simms’s partisan is a hy-
brid from the start, even before Simms genuinely begins his cross-
pollination.

Porgy’s role in the succeeding Mellichampe (1836) is not much

larger—he does, however, appear more dignified, more of a camp phi-
losopher, and less the buffoon, and becomes the mouthpiece for all
partisans who are looked down on as being inferior to the regular
army. This more dignified role still has a whiff of the defensive, a con-
stant in the works of William Gilmore Simms generally and in the
portrayal of Porgy specifically. Porgy is not present in The Scout
(1841).

Katherine Walton (1851) is second only to Woodcraft

(1852) in Porgy sightings and revelations. Much of the novel is set in

S i m m s a n d S h a k e s p e a r e

the drawing rooms of Charleston (stereotypically feminine?), but
Captain Porgy maintains his life in Marion’s camp (stereotypically
masculine?), ever vigilant in his engagement of the enemy. Woodcraft
is written specifically about Porgy, as the aging Southern gentleman
returns from the war and attempts to put his plantation and love life
back in order, and is the fullest expression of Simms’s seminal charac-
ter. The Forayers (1855) and Eutaw (1856) are the last two Porgy in-
carnations. Simms creates a younger Porgy and returns him to the
Revolutionary War, as if he and his partisan are taking a step back in
both time and identity. The first novel and its sequel display a subju-
gated officer Porgy who knows how to win the war in a timely way,
but his admonitions go unheeded, causing undue hardship. Captain
Porgy does not survive William Gilmore Simms’s Civil War experi-
ences and is nowhere to be seen in Joscelyn. Given the author’s great
affection for this central character of his, this absence is suggestive of
the trauma of the war for Simms.

Porgy would be Simms’s most representative character by repeti-

tion alone, but just what exactly he represents is a little more difficult
to unearth. A key to understanding this character is to consider mod-
els for the blustery captain. However, critics, with their usual ten-
dency for assent, cannot agree on just who the model for Porgy
is—Falstaff, Prince Hal, Hotspur, a general character drawn on Eliza-
bethan drama, Simms both real and ideal, the “ideal Southern gentle-
man,” or a vacillation between or a combination thereof.

All of these definitions focus on the need to delineate between the

gentleman, lower classes, Africans, women, and even the postwar
Southern aristocracy, such as it was, and have the taint of Southern
nationalism. William C. Davis explains in Look Away!: A History of the
Confederate States of America (2002) that even long before the Civil
War “some Southern spokesmen proclaimed that the features of their
society and culture were sufficiently distinct that they were in effect a
separate people from the North.”

This attitude persists today and

seems to inform some of the above readings of Captain Porgy.

Who is right about Simms’s protagonist? At the risk of slipping

into relativism, they are all right. Porgy has become many things to
scores of readers and critics, and they find his sources in a variety of
constructions. The ability to do so reveals the richness of the charac-
ter, the layering of one composition atop the other. Porgy is an onion
to be peeled by layers, with Falstaff on the outside and the author
himself at the center. Porgy is Falstaff, Bolingbroke, Hotspur, Hal,
Hamlet, and the ideal Southern gentleman. He is William Gilmore
Simms and a literary character, creator and creation, from Simms’s

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

head to the page and back again. Porgy is a cipher. More importantly,
he is Simms performing masculinity on paper, a literary reiteration.

Falstaff is the point of entry for understanding Porgy and his ap-

propriated masculinity. Though they may not agree on to what de-
gree Falstaff makes up Porgy, all the above-mentioned critics tip their
hats to the fat knight. Indeed, Simms’s text begs the comparison in
both physicality and manner upon Porgy’s arrival in The Partisan: “As
his own height was not inconsiderable, yet showed him corpulent
still. At a glance you saw that he was a jovial philosopher—one who
enjoyed his bottle with his humors, and so did not suffer the one to
be soured by the other.”

Simms revels in the epicurean nature of

Porgy, but it is the “jovial philosopher” element of Falstaff that the
author will most notably embrace as the Revolutionary War series
continues. Still, Porgy is at his most Falstaffian (in the sense of his
buffoonery) in action and tone in an early scene in which he disguises
himself as a beast to catch terrapins for the evening’s dinner, a move
Simms will seem to regret in a later passage.

Also noteworthy in Porgy’s first appearance is a direct reference to

Falstaff, as if the author wants the two characters associated. “But he
[Porgy] was not a mere eater. He rather amused himself with a hobby
when he made food his topic, as Falstaff discoursed on his cowardice
without feeling it.”

Simms ameliorates Shakespeare’s character, per-

haps because he is about to do the same with his Southern rendering
of him in the persona of Porgy. Simms adopts the fire, courage, and
martial spirit of Hotspur, the cunning and self-dramatizing of Prince
Hal, and even shades of Hamlet into his father figure, while including
elements of their relationships with their fathers as well. This act of
combining is why the Falstaff comparison does not hold consistently
true for all readers. How critics and generalized readers alike assess
Porgy’s antecedents depends on which strand of his personality and
what specific Simms novels they choose to examine.

Like Shakespeare’s before him, William Gilmore Simms’s version

of Falstaff would not be a biological father, but rather one who func-
tions as a father figure for several younger male characters throughout
the series, most palpably young Arthur Eveleigh in Woodcraft. This
role is a chief part of Porgy’s identity. Judith Butler illuminates this
idea with significant questions from Gender Trouble (1990): “To what
extent is ‘identity’ a normative ideal rather than a descriptive feature
of experience? And how do the regulatory practices that govern gen-
der also govern culturally intelligible notions of identity?”

Simms’s

construction of gender through father-son matrices appropriated from
Shakespeare and altered to fit his circumstances mirrors this societal

S i m m s a n d S h a k e s p e a r e

notion of a “normative ideal” in his construction of Captain Porgy’s
identity. Simms’s literary enterprise could be read as less a descriptive
feature of his culture and more an attempt to establish an identity as a
normative ideal. This attempt, however, would fail.

In this instance, it is the ideal of the Southern gentleman as defined

by W. J. Cash in The Mind of the South (1941) that is this epitome.

This normative ideal went into Simms’s construction of Porgy, but it is
tempered by his ambiguous relationship to the aristocracy (as a self-
made man) and his compulsion to redeem inadequate fathers and sons.

Falstaff is not who most people think of as an “ideal” model for fa-

therhood. In fact, Sir John is not a masculine ideal in constructing
gender either. Many exemplars of fatherhood and more stereotypical
citations of masculinity exist in Shakespeare’s texts, yet Simms
chooses him as a “sort-of ” father just as Prince Hal does. A clue to
the reason for this choice lies in The First Part of King Henry the
Fourth. The beginning of the play portrays a young Prince Hal of bad
reputation, for he is not the ideal son and prince that his foil Hotspur
appears to be. Hal has spent his time avoiding the princely duties of a
good son, wasting his time in taverns with the likes of Falstaff.

Act 2, scene 4 begins with the young prince receiving notice from

Falstaff that he is to be called before his biological father to make an
accounting. This exchange ensues:

Falstaff : Well, thou wilt be horribly chid tomorrow when thou comest

to thy father. If thou love me, practice an answer.

Prince: Do thou stand for my father, and examine me upon the partic-

ulars of my life.

The two enact a scene in which Falstaff takes on the role of Hal’s fa-
ther and interrogates him about his questionable actions. Hal has re-
quested this somewhat dubious father figure to act in his biological
father’s stead. The errant prince can answer his father’s charges by re-
hearsing with Falstaff; in this way, he is safer. Simms mimics Hal in this
preference—unable to choose between his own and the Southern fa-
thers around him in reality, he chooses a safer literary character and a
flawed one at that. Porgy is Simms’s greatest creation, his most recur-
ring character, and a constant father figure in the Revolutionary War
saga, yet a defining element of this partisan is Hal’s stand-in father.

Simms’s attitude toward fathers is betrayed by this choice—the

deeply flawed father is the starting point for redemption. A facile expla-
nation for this choice would be that Falstaff is more fun, more enter-
taining than other Shakespearean fathers. Indeed, the above-mentioned

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

terrapin scene from The Partisan is typical of the comic element of
Porgy, yet a little disconcerting as well. Porgy queries young John, “Did
I not seem to you very peculiar, very remarkable, and strange—nay
something ridiculous, John, when you saw me crawling after terrapins?
A man of my presence ridiculous!”

Though not exactly iambic pen-

tameter, Porgy uses the stilted diction that Simms gives all his upper-
class men, as if he is marking them much like Shakespeare did with the
use of verse versus prose. Porgy’s question is one that may reverberate in
the reader’s mind; the character and Simms’s only answer are an imag-
ined bearing. Reality and imagination are difficult to separate in Porgy’s
estimation of himself, as is frequently the case with many. Porgy would
change over the course of the saga, but Simms’s initial impulse was to
portray this father-king appropriation in the manner of a jester.

How-

ever, the texts as a whole beg the reader to consider Porgy as more than
sheer entertainment and should be read in light of how the Shake-
spearean scene begun above develops.

Falstaff is made the father by the son, Hal, and uses this position to

promote his own interests. As the king, Sir John immediately follows
charges against Hal with praise of one of his companions, himself.
Falstaff as Bolingbroke is, in a sense, attempting to rewrite his own his-
tory through a work of fiction—his scene with Hal. William Gilmore
Simms wrote his confidant James Henry Hammond on December
15, 1848, “My novels aim at something more than a story. I am
really . . . revising history.”

As does Falstaff, so does Simms, and both

through the use of fiction. In a sense, Falstaff begat Simms, Simms
begat Porgy, and Porgy begat a history Simms could live with, an
acceptable offspring.

As Shakespeare’s scene proceeds, Falstaff entreats the young prince

to banish all except himself. Hal’s answer is as follows:

Prince: Dost thou speak like a king? Do thou stand in for Me and I’ll

play my father.

Falstaff: Depose me? If thou doest it half so gravely, so majestically,

both in word and matter, hang me up by the heels for a rabbit-
sucker and a poulter’s hare.

Falstaff believes he can play the role better than Hal, yet his request
for inclusion in his son’s life, at the moment both figurative and real,
is met with the son’s demand to take the father’s place and enact the
part, as he thinks it should be, more “king-like.” This role includes a
stern rebuke of the father-son in the prince’s position plus an attack
on his companion, the very real Falstaff. Falstaff ultimately plays none

S i m m s a n d S h a k e s p e a r e

of these roles well, a fate Simms would try to save Porgy from by mak-
ing him his cultural hybrid.

The seemingly inadequate father figure (Falstaff ), taking on the

role of the son, attempts to defend not only the son but more explic-
itly himself as well. Prince Hal barrages Falstaff (now Hal) with sting-
ing accusations in question form, queries meant to tear down the
father figure, culminating with the epithet, “That villainous abom-
inable misleader of youth, Falstaff, that old white bearded Satan.”

Hal’s charge leaves Falstaff begging for mercy and defending his char-
acter. Falstaff pleads, “Banish plump Jack, and banish/ all the world,”
and the prince replies, “I do, I will.”

The pronouns here allow for in-

terpretation. Hal could be himself, speaking to the inadequate father
figure, Falstaff, or he could be playing the role of Bolingbroke (his bi-
ological father), speaking to Hal (himself ). In a sense, all of these per-
sonae run together in Shakespeare’s scene, requiring interpretation,
allowing for a reader’s perspective and, more significantly, Simms’s as
well.

Simms’s bread and butter is this running together of generations,

thus permitting interpretation. In a letter to Joseph Johnson, which
serves as the introduction to Woodcraft, the author writes of his char-
acters, “They are all drawn from real life, and are sufficiently salient, I
trust, to be remembered. The humorists of ‘Glen Eberly’ were well-
known personages of preceding generations, here thinly disguised un-
der false names and fanciful localities.”

Simms’s interpretation and

accommodation of Shakespeare’s fathers and sons and his portrayal of
American generations displayed an authorial penchant and purpose.
As Drew Gilpin Faust suggests of Simms and other intellectuals of his
time in A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old
South, 1840–1860 (1977), “By embodying both tradition and tran-
scendence, they incarnated the past and the future in the present and
thus offered the South a means of easing a tension aroused by its
changing way of life.”

Just what exactly caused this “changing way of life” depends on

which era in Simms’s long career one chooses to examine, but what is
paramount is Faust’s perception of Southern intellectuals as having a
propensity for blending that crosses generational, cultural, and chrono-
logical boundaries. The Captain Porgy novels in the Revolutionary War
series cover a period of twenty-one years, from 1835 to 1856. From the
early cultural breaking away from Great Britain, to the sectionalism that
fed on the nullification crisis and the compromise of 1850, the roles of
Southern, white, planter-class males were always tenuous, against the
British, the Yankee, the shifting role (and eventual “freedom”) of the

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

African male, and the nouveaux riches who rose to power just before
the Civil War, as W. J. Cash sees it.

The story of this class’s masculin-

ity is one of constant flux and, therefore, in constant need of shoring
up.

Shakespeare’s works presented an answer.

William Gilmore Simms

saw productions, read texts, and imagined versions of masculinity that
brought together the courage and martial spirit of Hotspur with the
cunning and self-presentation of Prince Hal, the joviality and philoso-
phy of Falstaff with the patriarchal presence of Hamlet Sr. and Boling-
broke, all tempered with the tragic majesty of Hamlet Jr. He saw
fathers and sons and how they defined their own masculinity in rela-
tion to each other, themselves, and other males around them, and en-
visioned uniting them. The result would be “more equitable and more
fulfilling” for Simms and, he must have hoped, for men of his time,
place, class, and race. This fulfillment would be attempted by con-
structing Porgy.

Not only is Simms trying to create this kind of masculinity, but he

is also, in a sense, trying to improve on a literary father’s work, to out
shakespeare Shakespeare.

All of this conjecture raises perhaps the

most important question: Was Simms successful? Did he create a
more fulfilling and equitable masculinity? Did he succeed where
Shakespeare did not? The answer is “no” and the reason is that there
were variables in Simms’s cultural context that affected even the con-
structions under his authorial jurisdiction, variables he could not fore-
see or control.

The most obvious of these influences is that of race. American slav-

ery and what it meant for both Africans and whites of Simms’s class
would have an impact on masculine citations from the author’s early
career but became even more pronounced as sectional tensions in-
creased and the Civil War was imminent. As early as 1838, Simms
wrote Slavery in America, Being a Brief Review of Miss Martineau on
That Subject, in which he endeavored to create an apologia for slavery
by promoting his worldview. Simms theorized:

Democracy is not leveling—it is, properly defined, the harmony of the moral
world. It insists upon inequalities, as its law declares, that all men should hold
the place to which they are properly entitled. The definition of true liberty, is
the undisturbed possession of that place in society to which our moral and in-
tellectual merits entitle us.

Simms’s assertions were addressing Harriet Martineau, activist, au-

thor, and essayist, and were no doubt intended to be his answer to her

S i m m s a n d S h a k e s p e a r e

Society in America (1837), in which she argues that America fails to
live up to its democratic principles.

Simms’s disingenuous justifica-

tion does not specify how “all men” know what they are properly en-
titled to or who sets the intellectual or moral standards either. Like all
authors discussed in this work who come after him, Simms would feel
it incumbent to take on this mantle himself. What is remarkable about
his thinking is that it could apply to class as well as race.

The difficulty in discussing either class or race in the American

South without considering place is immense. Place is important to
Simms. Joel Williamson explains the idea of an organic society and
Racial Conservatism in The Crucible of Race (1984):

Place was the vital word in the vocabulary of Conservatism, and it applied to
whites as well as blacks. . . . White people could not prescribe and enforce a
precise role upon themselves. If blacks were to be held in place, white people
would have to assume a place to keep them there . . . the keeper role, being su-
perior, had to be even more firmly fixed than the role of the kept. . . . Southern
men of the higher order were supposed to play a paternalistic role. They were
to behave as fathers not only to blacks, but also to white women and children
of their own sort and to the lower orders of whites of both sexes.

William Gilmore Simms evinces just this sort of view in his fiction,

essays, and orations. The most palpable element of Williamson’s esti-
mation for Simms’s work is the strain of paternalism and how that de-
fines place. In fact, the relationship between fathers and offspring is
the raison d’etre of Simms’s works, if not of his life.

Simms appeals to several authorities to substantiate this perspec-

tive. In “The Social Principle: The True Source of National Perma-
nence,” an 1842 oration, he posits, “One of the securities of the
Englishman . . . was his boast that he maintained his authority over
the savage—that he made no concessions to the inferior nature.”

Simms revealingly longs to be a very English oppressor. Once again,
Simms sanctions his point of view via Great Britain, but he would not
stop there. He also writes:

The slaveholders of the South, having the moral and animal guardianship of
an ignorant and irresponsible people under their control, are the great moral
conservators, in one powerful interest, of the entire world. Assuming slavery
to be a denial of justice to the negro, there is no sort of propriety in the ap-
plication of the name slave to the servile of the south. He is under no despotic
power. There are laws which protect him, in his place, as flexible as those
which his proprietor is required to obey, in his place. Providence has placed

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

him in our hands, for his own good, and has paid us from his labor for our
guardianship.

Simms’s stressing of place and paternalism marks him as one of

Williamson’s racial conservatives, but what is striking is that he sees
this organic society as brought about by divine providence—an act of
God! Perhaps not so much a divine edict as an effect of the growth of
plantations, the real problem with the rosy picture painted by the likes
of William Gilmore Simms stems from the intrusion of reality; if this
is a family, then domestic abuse is far too common.

How could Simms not be aware of this truth? Louis D. Rubin Jr.

relates in The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society
of the Old South (1989) that Simms’s plantation, Woodlands, was
something of a joke among his friends, that he was never able to make
it profitable. He also recounts:

When William Cullen Bryant came to visit Simms, he did not change his op-
position to slavery, but he pronounced it about as innocuous there as it could
ever be. To say all this is not to excuse slavery in the Old South. Rather, it is
to indicate that Simms’s insensitivity toward its evils, one that he shared with
his neighbors, was not hypocritical.

Rubin does sound like an apologist, despite his disclaimer, espe-

cially when Simms writes as he did in a Southern Quarterly Review ar-
ticle titled “The Southern Convention” (1850), “African slavery, in
the hands of the Anglo-American people, was really an element of
strength rather than of weakness.”

Despite this abhorrent point of

view, it must be considered that not everyone practiced slavery or ex-
perienced it in the same exact way. The suggestion is not that Simms’s
version of a plantation is any less repellent, it is merely that it may
have been perceived differently by the author himself. Rubin’s obser-
vations do, however, raise the question of how Simms could hold
such an unrealistic view of slavery.

The most obvious answer is that this antebellum author was able to

see the issue only from his own perspective. The even larger question
is, “How are these attitudes manifested in Simms’s fiction and what
does it mean for his citations of masculinity?” In the epilogue of
The Yemassee (1835), the slave Hector is offered his freedom and he
replies, “No, maussa; I can’t go; I can’t be free. . . . Wha’ Hector done,
you guine turn um off dis time o’ day . . . enty you been frien’ to Hec-
tor! Enty you gibum physic when he sick, and see and talk wid um, and
do ebbery ting he want you for do. . . . I d—n to h—l, maussa, if I

S i m m s a n d S h a k e s p e a r e

guine be free.”

Tom would later echo this sentiment in Woodcraft, in

which the slaves see their masters as protective fathers and choose to
lead this good life granted to them by their superiors. “Little Peter”
and his fellow slaves join their master to drive off Hellfire Dick, the
Tory raider in The Forayers, demonstrating their patriarchal allegiance.

This imagined intimacy would eventually spawn the plantation ro-
mancers of a later period, such as Thomas Nelson Page, and his
“moonlight and magnolia” approach to plantations as happy families.

Perhaps for Simms this reading of black men had a much larger im-

plication. Charles H. Brichford argues in a 1988 Southern Literary
Journal article that Simms “sought fictionally to reread the times,
correcting the increasingly ‘historical’ view of the period while de-
fending the honor, past and present, of his native region and, espe-
cially, of its aristocratic society. . . . Simms saw himself as the literary
champion of the honor of South Carolina, and by extension, of the
South as well.”

Brichford’s contention suggests Simms views history

as a text, which is not a difficult assertion to make, given Simms’s
publications. The compelling implication lies in an almost postmod-
ern reworking of reality, a “correcting” that must be a defensive ma-
neuver on the part of this Southern author. Simms may have had
these larger cultural issues in mind, but in terms of masculinity, mak-
ing the African a child facilitates making the slave master a father, a
man. This act of self-definition through juxtaposition would long
outlive Simms, and still lives and breathes today.

Simms describes the good life the slaves lead in a story from The

Wigwam and the Cabin (1856), titled “Caloya; or, the Loves of the
Driver,” and suggests that Africans have advanced under slavery, un-
like the North American Indians, who could enjoy the same benefits
if they would only submit to this divine plan.

In his tale “Oakatibbe;

or, the Choctaw Sampson” (1841), Simms has the African slaves look
down on their American Indian counterparts for not doing so, which
is a way of having this point of view validated by another, not just the
white perspective.

More disturbing is the preamble of the story proper. Two white

“gentlemen” discuss training Native Americans as opposed to Africans
for slaves.

The preamble to “Oakatibbe” itself contains such instruc-

tions and maxims as

Savages are children in all but physical respects . . . you must teach them obe-
dience. They must be made to know, at the outset, that they know nothing—
that they must implicitly defer to the superior. This lesson they will never
learn, so long as they possess the power, at any moment, to withdraw from his

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

control . . . having no mode or hope for escape—under the full control of an
already civilized people.

The narrator lumps Native Americans into the same category as
Simms did Africans. The relationship is still paterfamilias and progeny,
and the motivation baldly stated above remains in control. In these
role constructions, Simms’s emphasis on “the superior” is the engine
that drives this relationship.

The “S” narrator of “Oakatibbe” also echoes Simms when he avers,

“God has made an obvious distinction between certain races of men,
setting them apart, and requiring them to be kept so, by subjecting
them to the resistance and rebuke of one of the most jealous sentinels
of sense which we possess—the eye. The prejudices of this sense, re-
quire that the natural barriers should be maintained.”

Simms’s narra-

tor appeals to God, just as his author did before him, concerning
Africans. This generalization also urges the use of the eye to see
differences—in other words, skin color and features—and to “main-
tain natural barriers” that are easily seen. This appeal to the “natural,”
a problematic label at best, would be the calling card of latter racial
radicals such as Thomas Dixon Jr., so much so that the term would be-
come a constant refrain in their arguments of racial segregation. Class,
race, and gender oppressors still employ this construct in pursuit of
some imagined order.

Nat Turner led his slave revolt in 1831, sectionalism was on the

rise in the 1840s as tensions increased, and the U.S. Census first
counted people of mixed ancestry as “mulattoes” in 1850.

Men like

Simms who wanted to construct a Southern, white aristocratic mas-
culinity would need their paternal roles and the control these roles af-
forded. As always, Simms would use fiction as a corrective. One of the
most revelatory constructions of black masculinity/white planter-
class males is that of Simms’s star, Captain Porgy, and Porgy’s cook
and body servant, the aptly named Tom.

On the surface, Porgy expresses what looks like a form of paternal-

ism to his bound slave. In The Partisan he defends Tom from the phys-
ical assault of a soldier who, “owning no slaves, are very apt to delight
in the abuse of other people.”

Simms expresses the dogma that the

partisan’s slave owning makes him more “sensitive” as to how not to be
abusive. In other words, slavery makes the white dominant community
as well as the poor, savage African better. Porgy envisions himself as
Tom’s protector and ejaculates, “Nobody shall kick Tom while I’m
alive. The fellow’s too valuable for blows;—boils the best rice in the
southern country, and hasn’t his match, with my counsel, at terrapin in

S i m m s a n d S h a k e s p e a r e

all Dorchester.”

This sentiment could be read at its most cynical as

Porgy protecting a commodity. No less racist but much more consis-
tent with Simms’s perspective is the paternalism of the master who is
loyal to his slave. This father is the giver of protection, food, and pur-
pose, and the slave in turn exhibits fealty through service, taking on the
role of a dependent child. Of course, this father and son are not blood
related, or if they are, it is more of a tamed Cain, marked and cursed
but not beyond redemption through white grace.

This mythological narrative is a constant in Southern apologias,

raised to the level of dogma in the Reconstruction writings of the
likes of Thomas Nelson Page. Porgy and Tom’s relationship is even
more complicated than the myth implies. Tom and Porgy’s cultural
context, as well as Simms’s for that matter, contained an amalgama-
tion of subordinations—race, class, and gender—and these subjuga-
tions were frequently intertwined and discursive. Porgy’s relationship
to Tom in Woodcraft unites all of these subordinations.

Patricia Okker notes in her essay in Periodical Literature in Nine-

teenth Century America (1995) that Woodcraft focuses considerable
attention on courting, yet the novel upends the traditional marriage
plot with Captain Porgy not wedding the widows Griffin or Eveleigh;
this failure could be read as a call for secessionism.

This reading

misses the point. Porgy does marry—he weds Tom. Tom’s two possi-
ble roles are that of the child or the bride (both?); either position is
one of subordination, given Simms’s culture. Woodcraft is largely a
novel of Porgy’s unsuccessful wooing of females, Simms’s The Merry
Wives of Windsor, in a superficial way. Yet note the ending:

“Maussa better widout ’em,” says Tom, “I nebber kin ’tan for be happy in
house whar woman’s is de maussa.” Porgy replies, “Well, you will be pleased
to hear, then, that I have determined to live a bachelor for your sakes. . . .
There are women I could love. . . . But, for your sakes I renounce them all.
I shall live for you only. You could not do well without me; I will not suffer my-
self to do without you. You shall be mine always—I shall be yours. To
woman, except as friend or companion, I say depart!”

This pledge sounds like an angry wedding vow, but its significance

is that Porgy cites his role in relation to that of his slave Tom. He re-
constitutes this law through reiteration, verbally. Then Simms ends
the novel, as if this arrangement represents the proper answer for all
of these concerns. Porgy intones this wedding song and claims that
his primary motivator is Tom. Simms may be winking at his audi-
ence, but the tone of the above section does not easily lend itself to

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

this reading. The fat partisan may actually believe he is acting in
Tom’s interest.

Porgy benefits greatly from this marriage. If nothing else, he de-

fines himself against Tom by placing his servant in the stereotypically
feminine role. Tom is Porgy’s wife—he cooks, cleans, and takes care
of all domestic duties normally foisted on females in stereotypical
fashion.

Porgy’s citation of his aristocratic, masculine role depends

upon his prescription and reiteration of Tom’s role. The intersection
of identity is where gender and race meet; this convergence can be
seen frequently in Simms’s works.

This unexpected ending is not that shocking, considering the state of

flux of so many societal roles in Woodcraft. Mrs. Eveleigh is frequently
referred to in masculine terms; Porgy thinks she “appeared quite too
masculine,” and “her very virtues had a manly air.”

Mrs. Eveleigh also

tells one of the novel’s antagonists, Mr. M’Kewn, “I am a woman, sir, it
is true; but if it needs, for the assertion of my womanly dignity, that I
should lift the weapon of a man, I shall feel no womanly fears in doing
so,” and M’Kewn thinks later to himself, “She should have been a man!
She would have been a famous one!”

Mrs. Eveleigh’s taking on of ste-

reotypically masculine roles echoes the antecedents of Lady Macbeth’s
prayer of “unsex me here” and Beatrice’s lament of societal limitations
for revenge due to gender in Much Ado about Nothing.

Simms must

have had an eye on gender citations that play such an important part in
many of Shakespeare’s scripts and poems. Of Simms’s constructions in
Woodcraft, Mrs. Eveleigh is not alone in this fluidity.

Even Porgy is not immune to this gender slippage. An early physi-

cal description of him relates, “His features are marked and decisive,
with a large capacious nose, a mouth rather feminine and soft, and a
chin well defined and masculine.”

Porgy’s appearance is portrayed

as a merging of both genders, just as he would become a merging of
fathers and sons, British and American. Millhouse, Porgy’s overseer
and the text’s mouthpiece for Utilitarianism, categorizes Porgy’s love
for poetry and learning, and by extension his master, as the province
of women and children.

Judith Butler explains these slippages in her

1999 introduction to Gender Trouble (1990): “Performativity is not a
singular act, but a repetition and a ritual.”

With each reiteration

comes a chance for at least subtle slippages if not outright failures, and
these abound in the portrayal of Captain Porgy.

Woodcraft also concerns itself greatly with the flux of class roles.

M’Kewn benefits from the chaos and profiteering during and after the
Revolutionary War and is able to assert himself, despite his origins
and class, over landed gentry such as Porgy. Simms does, however,

S i m m s a n d S h a k e s p e a r e

take the opportunity to impugn M’Kewn’s manhood by describing
his clothes thus: “The frills of his wrist were of the finest lace. His
boots would have satisfied the Bond or Broad street dandy.”

M’Kewn

mistakes finery for gentlemanliness, and the cost is his masculinity.
M’Kewn even allows, “The rules which govern the conduct of ladies
and gentleman do not necessarily occur to persons in trade.”

M’Kewn’s citation of a gentleman amounts to little more than a cos-
tume and an ill-fitting one at that. Like M’Kewn, the squatter Bost-
wick’s crimes also are motivated by the desire to upset class structures.
Only after seeing the widow Eveleigh’s organized plantation does
Porgy opine, “I feel, as I look around me, that I may once more be-
come a gentleman.”

Even though Simms has taken great pains to

reveal “gentleman” as a code of ethics and a manner of bearing, not
just a societal position, the environment of plantation order offers the
partisan his gentlemanly role back.

Woodcraft proves the lack of success of Simms’s cultural hybrid. The

novel was published in 1852, just eight short years before the Civil
War. The disputing over the role of African slaves and the institution of
slavery itself (leading to the Compromise of 1850), the brandishing of
sectionalism, and the flourishing of industry and town culture all af-
fected the stability of societal roles; attempts to solidify them, even in
the controlled world of literature, were not always successful. The cir-
cumstances of Simms’s cultural context were too overpowering.

William Gilmore Simms may have failed to build a cultural hybrid

that solved his father-son masculinity problems, but an examination of
his appropriation, emulation, and creation is instructive about each
process. Simms made a valiant effort to reform fathers and sons by ap-
propriating models from Shakespeare, and Captain Porgy is the result.

As noted earlier, Porgy’s first appearance in The Partisan is for

comic relief as provided in the terrapin scene. Yet, before he arrives,
Lieutenant Bill Humphries defends the new recruit against the charge
that a man of his girth is unfit for duty. Humphries argues, “Well, Sir,
if I didn’t know the man, I should think so too; but he rides like the
devil, and fights like the blazes. He’s been fighting from the very be-
ginning of the war down in the south.”

The depiction of Porgy

right from the beginning reveals a defensive posture. Simms makes it
a point to let Porgy’s reputation precede him, offsetting the “Falstaff
effect” of his size, appetites, and buffoonery. This move seems a nat-
ural curative.

White Southern culture has always needed and ad-

mired its Hotspurs, even in the guise of the rotund Captain Porgy.

The disparity in the explications of the relationship between Porgy

and Falstaff is understandable. Simms has taken care to add a Hotspur

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

spirit to his fat knight, so much so that Hetherington felt compelled
to ask, “Could Porgy’s conduct and beliefs mean Simms was recalling
another character in the first part of King Henry IV, one of the most
famed for headlong valor in the annals of England, ‘Harry Percy, sur-
named Hotspur’?”

Perhaps Hetherington needs Porgy to exude the

Hotspur spirit as much as Simms himself.

Indeed, the above description of Porgy seems to echo the king and

Westmorland’s assessment of Hotspur, not to mention the character’s
persona in the bulk of the play and popular imagination. Such a con-
struction ties this Southern gentleman to English aristocracy, solidify-
ing his class and race. These motivations could not have been Simms’s
sole purpose. Hotspur’s martial spirit acts as a remedy for the lack of
courage Falstaff displays on the battlefields in Shakespeare’s play. Fal-
staff orates, “What is/ honor? A word. What is in that word ‘honor’?
What is/ that ‘honor’? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He/ that
died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No.”

Falstaff is the generational

anti-Hotspur and vice versa, and Simms will see both the problem and
the solution in these two men.

William Gilmore Simms had a habit of using Hotspur’s qualities as

a panacea for deficiencies, and it is no surprise that he would do so for
a more “equitable and fulfilling” masculinity.

Porgy may seem a bit

like Falstaff, but Sir John is not like the partisan.

The mixture of sons

with this father and the reason for that fusion inform Simms’s con-
struction and make Shakespeare’s the same yet paradoxically dissimilar.

As Simms used Hotspur to offset the Falstaff in Porgy, there is an-

other influence on how Porgy is employed in the novels. This influ-
ence acts as an agent of restraint on the Hotspur tendencies, and to
understand it, Simms’s biography must be considered. Porgy’s supe-
rior officer and the hero of The Partisan, Major Singleton, bears the
surname of Simms’s maternal grandmother’s forbears who fought in
the Revolutionary War.

First the author’s elder brother died, then

his mother, while giving birth to a younger brother in 1808. Simms’s
father fled Charleston to Tennessee, leaving his son with his maternal
grandmother, Jane Gates.

Holman explains that Mrs. Gates “had been a child in Charleston

during the Revolution and had lived through the days of the British
blockade, British occupation, and American victory. She supplemented
her vivid memories with a vast store of traditions about Patriot hero-
ism and Tory depravity and poured forth her flood of recollections on
the willing ears of the young boy.”

Jane Gates would be a defining

force for the young Simms and would inculcate in her young charge
her ideals of both nationalism and masculinity.

S i m m s a n d S h a k e s p e a r e

Mary Ann Wimsatt and the preeminent Simms scholar John C.

Guilds attest to the grandmother’s influence over the boy.

An illus-

trative story is noteworthy. When young William was ten, his father
sent his brother to Charleston to kidnap his son after a request for his
son to join him went unheeded. A physical struggle between the
young boy, his grandmother, and the would-be assailant ended in
court. Facing the judicial choice of remaining in Charleston or return-
ing to Mississippi with his father, Simms chose the former. Guilds nar-
rates, “Under these dramatic circumstances young Simms chose Mrs.
Gates and Charleston. . . . Simms committed himself to Charleston . . .
and with that commitment repudiated his father, whom he scarcely
knew.”

Young Simms selected the maternal side of his family, rejecting his

father and embracing Jane Gates, who told Simms stories of her for-
bears. In a sense, Simms had a female conduit to the masculinity of
war heroes who preceded him. This maternal figure would carry
the fathers’ masculinity in much the same way as Thomas Nelson
Page would require African slaves to do so in his fictive works. Simms
would use these brave soldiers, full of honor, courage, and gentility,
and intermix them with Shakespearean fathers and sons throughout
his works, but never more interestingly than with Captain Porgy and
those around him, especially Major Singleton.

As the saga unfolds over several novels, Singleton acts as a restrictive

influence on Porgy’s Hotspur-like tendencies. Of note is that the liter-
ary character who functions in this manner is given the last name of
Simms’s ancestors on his maternal side. Simms is symbolically allow-
ing the feminine side of his family to control the Hotspur spirit of the
hero he constructs. Singleton keeps Porgy from fighting with a regular
army soldier who is beating his slave Tom, and generally disrespecting
the partisans, in The Partisan.

In Katherine Walton, Porgy has al-

ready attacked, beaten, and pinned his foe, but he is so offended when
the captured Meadows calls him an “elephant” that “he had already
raised the fragment of his broken sword, meaning to pummel his foe
into submission, when his arm was arrested by Singleton, now appear-
ing in his appropriate character and costume.”

Porgy’s broken phal-

lic symbol remains deadly but restrained by the maternal side of the
family. Singleton is “appropriate,” Porgy is not. Yet this symbolic fig-
ure of the maternal ancestors struggles to make Porgy so.

The major does not just restrict the physical violence of Porgy; he

oversees his conduct as well. Eutaw, the last novel in the saga, por-
trays a discontented Porgy who constantly questions the competency
and motives of many of his military superiors. Major Singleton warns,

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

“Shocking, Porgy, shocking. Do not speak in this manner. Do not
think thus,” and “Your language, such as you use now, can only do
mischief.”

Singleton is Northumberland to Porgy’s Hotspur, and he

echoes the sentiments if not the content of Northumberland’s rejoin-
der, “Why, what a wasp-stung and impatient fool/ Art thou to break
into this woman’s mood,/ Tying thine ear to no tongue but thine
own!”

100

Decorum and restriction epitomize what it means to be not

only a gentleman but a man as well. Otherwise, these men might slip
into “this woman’s mood” and not comport themselves properly.

If the flawed father figure of Falstaff is to be redeemed, he must be

infused with the fighting spirit of Hotspur, but tempered with the pru-
dence of the mother’s side of the family. Simms wants Porgy to learn
the lesson of Hotspur’s demise due to his warrior tendencies and rash-
ness. Simms’s restriction of the Hotspur element in Porgy curbs the
primal ethic that informs the South via the idea of gentility.

101

Simms had learned that all action with no repose was detrimental

and displays this knowledge in his novel Guy Rivers (1834). The title
character is a bandit, all action, and the “snake in the garden of the
Southern idyll.”

102

Simms is taking the best of Shakespearean charac-

ters and modulating them with his own cultural context. This ante-
bellum author is reinstituting the law, but allowing variance in his
citations and creating his cultural hybrids to do his cultural work.

Hotspur is not the only son present in Porgy—Prince Hal is added

to the mix as well. In a letter to William Porcher Miles in 1856,
Simms writes, “Approaching that physical condition when a citizen
incurs the risk of being made an alderman I—in Falstaff ’s mournful
language—’lard the earth as I walk along.”

103

Falstaff does not pro-

nounce this line; Prince Hal does, using only the third person.

104

Simms places the words of the son into the mouth of his inadequate
father figure, then uses the misappropriation to represent himself, his
current state. This confused action seems like a clichéd Freudian slip;
still, it is not a big leap in logic to assume that the author would meld
these two into Porgy. The conflation resonates from Simms to his lit-
erary creations and back again. Solid connections between Hal and
Falstaff as manifested in Porgy exist other than in Simms’s active yet
inconsistent brain.

The easiest correlation between the young prince and the older

partisan is the element of the joker in both.

105

Hal enjoys an elaborate

ruse at Falstaff ’s expense in act 3, scene 3 of I Henry IV when all in-
volved play highwaymen to hear of Sir John’s cowardly actions and
bloated response. Similarly, in Woodcraft, Porgy delights in fooling
the sheriff in the “Coupe de Theatre” chapter, and the shaving of and

S i m m s a n d S h a k e s p e a r e

forced feeding of legal documents to Absalom Crooks in the “Legal
Regimen” chapter. This connection is valid but simplistic. The com-
plex, driving force behind this association is revealed in The Partisan.

In the middle of the book, Simms feels obliged to stop the action

and comment on the character of Porgy. He addresses the reader di-
rectly, admonishing,

Now, it will not do to misconceive Lieutenant Porgy. If we have said or shown
anything calculated to lessen his dignity in the eyes of any of our readers, re-
morse must follow. Porgy might play the buffoon, if he pleased; but in the
mean time, let it be understood, that he was born to wealth, and had received
the education of a gentleman. . . . It was the fruit of an artificial nature. He
jested with his own tastes, his own bulk of body, his own poverty, and thus baf-
fled the more serious jests of the ill-tempered by anticipating them.

106

Simms tries to salvage the character of Porgy in the middle of the
book, as if he has suddenly become self-conscious about how his con-
structed man looks to his readers. More important for his connection
to Hal is his artificial nature, his propensity to hide, and what that
means for his masculinity.

Simms endeavors to repudiate Porgy’s buffoonery and reveal his

true nature by placing emphasis on the word play. The indecorous ac-
tions of Porgy are for the sake of performance, meant to be viewed by
others but not indicative of the man himself. This sort of self-
deprecation acts as a means of defense in a Prince Hal way. Simms’s
contention raises the question of what a true identity is and how it can
be perceived. This query is especially relevant for an author who
hopes to build a Southern, white, planter-class masculinity. Will this
(can there) ever be a true identity or merely something to play?
Simms’s parsing of Porgy’s character raises this question while Judith
Butler supplies the answer. “Identity is performatively constituted by
the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be the results.”

107

The answer is

that “true identities” are always contingent, and Simms’s midtext in-
sertion (penetration?) unknowingly supports this assertion by display-
ing identity as performative. Butler’s argument undercuts Simms’s
display due to its looking to a “true identity” for recourse, but the no-
tion must have been important to Simms to devote so much space to
it. Just as Porgy anticipates the “ill-tempered,” so does Simms through
a metafictive act.

Simms’s explanation of Porgy versus what he seems reverberates

from Hamlet. Gertrude asks the prince about his mental state early in
the play. He replies:

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems . . .”
. . . Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play.
But I have that within which passes show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

108

In his bid to outgrieve everyone, Hamlet reveals the denotation of
people versus what they actually are. And like Simms’s discussion of
Porgy above, the Danish prince finds the performance lacking com-
pared with what he sees as truth. The difficulty resides in whether that
truth is ever revealed, or ever can be for that matter.

Another example of Porgy’s proclivity can be seen in Katherine

Walton, where the narrator notes, “Porgy was an actor.”

109

Porgy

conceals from others what he thinks of as his true self as a form of
protection, and offers an artificial self that fends off attack through
self-deprecation, according to the narrator’s evaluation. This kind of
acting divulges an assumption by the actor—that his environment of-
fers hostility and he needs to defend himself through acting. Whatever
spurs this attitude on remains hidden in the depths of the partisan’s
unrevealed psyche.

Prince Hal is an actor too. At least, Hal “performs” himself in the

first half of I Henry IV, concealing what he will later offer as his “true
nature.” This maneuver constitutes his defense as well. He performs
this soliloquy:

Prince: Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted he may be more wandered at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him . . .
So when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o’er my fault.

110

The prince has been disguising his “true nature” in an effort to make

himself look even better upon revelation. He wants men to misjudge
and underestimate him. This sort of conscious manipulation of the kind

S i m m s a n d S h a k e s p e a r e

of man he is echoes Simms’s passage on Porgy (or vice versa) quoted
above. True, Porgy’s manipulation rings a little more of self-defense
than Hal’s, but surely the prince must have sensed the necessity for this
pose due to some threat—perhaps Hotspur, maybe even his own father.
Both Porgy’s and Hal’s posturing disclose not only self-awareness but
also a consciousness of being watched, an attentiveness to others.

Hal would eventually reveal (recite?) himself, defeat the rebel-

lious Hotspur, save his father, and fulfill his destiny, becoming the
father-king himself, Henry V. William Gilmore Simms combined the
ill-equipped father with the best of both sons in the character of
Porgy, not being able to conceive of his creation in an unalloyed
way. Perhaps he dreamed of Porgy, and by extension Southern,
white, planter-class males and himself, having his “revelation of true
character.” A cultural context that caused this effort to fail has al-
ready been demonstrated. Is there any Henry V–style triumph? Any
successful reiterations of masculinity? Any “breaking through the
foul and ugly mists of vapors that did strangle him”? Any redemp-
tion? Sort of.

Simms ameliorates Porgy in later editions of The Partisan.

111

This

revision is not an isolated incident but a trend over the course of the
entire Revolutionary War saga. As the series progressed, Simms in-
creased Porgy’s dignity, stature, and bearing.

112

What had transpired

between the initial publication of The Partisan in 1835 and its new
edition in 1854? What had caused Simms to “ennoble” Porgy as the
series progressed? The popularity of the character had to be part of
the concern. In a March 3, 1836, letter to his friend James Lawson,
Simms brags, “You have no idea how popular Porgy is with a large
majority. He is actually the founder of a sect.”

113

Simms’s perception

of his character being “watched” by others may have affected his
reimaginings. This reason is probably, however, the most superficial.

C. Hugh Holman voices another. “The publication in 1847 of

Lorenzo Sabine’s The American Loyalist, a historical study of the loy-
alist sentiment and activity during the American Revolution, led many
Northerners to question the part the South had played in the winning
of American independence.”

114

Simms would have keenly felt what

could only be perceived as stabs at Southern masculinity.

115

After all,

an attack on the South’s militarism and courage is an assault on its
manly virtues, its masculinity. Surely, a criticism of the South’s loyalty
exacerbated by sectionalism over slavery led to defensiveness. South-
erners were embattled from a personal level, where manhood and
courage were questioned and seemingly interchangeable, to the re-
gional one, where the forefathers of Southern gentility had their pa-

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

triotism challenged. The author defended the South, the men of his
class, and in turn himself by altering Porgy to answer this concern,
making him more of the masculine patriot, more of a partisan, and
less of a character providing mere comic relief.

These men’s need to be seen as patriots would have larger conse-

quences than merely answering Sabine’s charges. William C. Davis ex-
amined the formation of the Confederacy from its early rumblings
and found that many Southerners in the secessionist movement be-
lieved they were required to preserve constitutional government, not
to destroy it, and that free government would only survive in North
America if they would save it through the reformation of this strong
central government. Some actually argued that slavery was the “occa-
sion” and not the “cause” of secession.

116

Of course, Davis easily ex-

plodes these myths, but a compelling feature of this thinking is the
desire of these men to posture as patriots and revolutionaries, like
their fathers before. Given this thinking, calling the Revolutionary era
fathers’ masculinity into question threatens an already overcompen-
satory citation of patrilineal masculinity.

Simms’s drive in revising Porgy may have been similar, only after

the fact. Wimsatt offers a more specific yet grander motivation: “He
[Simms] is able to impose the interpretation of his age upon events of
the past and thus convey his sense of providential movement in history
by his reference to an action whose shape is completed and whose per-
tinence is clear.”

117

Wimsatt’s notion that Simms demonstrates a pre-

destined movement from Britain, to America, and eventually to the
South (the father, son, and sibling?) is an astute one; lineage is every-
thing. Yet what is important is how these ideologies affected his ren-
dering of Porgy’s citation of masculinity. His amalgamation of
Shakespeare’s models would need refinement.

Simms revises his partisan in order to move him further away from

Falstaff and closer to Prince Hal, perhaps with an eye toward Henry V
in his final, triumphant revelation and full blooming of manhood—if
not so much earlier to the later draft of The Partisan unquestionably
throughout the course of the series. A Southern gentleman would
emerge through the character of Porgy, displaying the appeal and ca-
maraderie of Falstaff, the martial spirit and bravery of Hotspur, the
cleverness, secrecy, and yet ascendancy of Prince Hal, tempered with
contexts personal and cultural, entwined and inseparable in this hy-
brid. Simms would eventually attempt to retire Porgy to his estate,
the model of patriarchal gentility.

If competing cultural forces such as the changing role of Africans,

the surge of antagonism between the North and the South, and an

S i m m s a n d S h a k e s p e a r e

unstable class hierarchy—all challenges to Southern, white, planter-
class masculinity—threatened the success of Simms’s experiment, no
circumstance would cause Captain Porgy’s failure more than the Civil
War.

118

Porgy did not survive the Civil War; there was no role for him

after Eutaw (1856). Simms admits defeat, as does the South itself.
Simms’s revised and redeemed father-son, his masculine ideal, could
not withstand this “simple test of manhood.”

The real turning point for Porgy is Woodcraft. The novel is fifth in

a series of seven, but last chronologically. The work was published un-
der the title The Sword and the Distaff with the alternate title of Fair,
Fat, and Forty: A Story of the South at the Close of the Revolution, ap-
parently first in 1852 as part of semimonthly supplements to the
Southern Literary Gazette and in 1853 as an edition for Lippincott,
Grainco, and Company of Philadelphia. Finally, the last title, with the
inapt subtitle Or, Hawks about the Dovecote, was chosen for the 1854
Redfield edition, referenced above.

119

No clear explanation is given

for these title changes, but the shift from one title to the other is illu-
minating in terms of masculinity.

A “distaff ” has several definitions, but the most pertinent is

“women’s work or concerns, of or pertaining to women or the female
line of descent.” Simms’s initial impulse is to balance war and “women’s
concerns.” Simms allows this gendered concern to coexist with the
sword, at least within the confines of his title. James Meriwether ob-
serves, “Woodcraft is not a war novel at all, but a novel about the after-
math of war, or about war only in retrospect—the war as seen through
its results, its effects upon returning soldiers and upon the civilian popu-
lation.”

120

Without the war as an arena for citing masculine roles, these

men must find alternate modes of citationality.

To be sure, the novel opens with the British withdrawal from

Charleston at the close of the war and Porgy’s subsequent return to his
dilapidated plantation and potential wooing, including Mrs. Eveleigh.
Drastic changes brought on by the war would initiate differences, as
has already been demonstrated, in Porgy’s citation of masculinity, so
much so that Meriwether believes the novel exposes Porgy’s weak-
nesses and limitations while making Mrs. Eveleigh the hero and supe-
rior to Porgy. The ex-partisan is the central character but not the
hero.

121

He is not the hero, and the redeemed ideal begins to show

real cracks, while Mrs. Eveleigh wields a phallus of her own.

In Woodcraft, Porgy is, perhaps like his author, overcome by Ham-

let and Shakespeare’s more tragic sons.

122

This focus was not only in

Simms’s literature, but in his culture and himself as well. This move-
ment represents a palpable shift from earlier models of Shakespearean

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

masculinity. While the father element in Porgy would remain fairly
constant (Falstaff ), the sons would no longer do so. Hotspur cannot
comport himself outside of war and is killed by his own rashness.
Simms would have to look elsewhere to redeem this imperfect father
of his, and he would, ironically enough, find this redemption in Den-
mark. Increasing sectionalism and a “sense of doom” must have made
Prince Hal and his ascendancy to Henry V seem unattainable for
Simms and his character by 1851–1852. Possibly the ghost of a mar-
ginal father, such as Hamlet Sr., haunted Simms; he would endeavor
to use the ghost’s son to save his creation, his father-son Porgy.
Simms’s Falstaff would take on Hamlet’s inky cloak without the ben-
efit of a Hamlet Sr.

123

Simms may have offered Porgy several anti-Hamlets, such as

Arthur Eveleigh, to reform him but to no avail. Porgy does defend his
home from the sheriff with the put-on countenance of Hotspur, but
the book does not end with heroic or tragic deaths but with rumina-
tions and intimations of dissatisfaction. The end emphasizes Porgy’s
failure to understand women and marriage (the distaff ) and “fanciful
speculations and philosophy” about his future. There is some resolu-
tion, but, as the title of the last chapter reveals, “The Grapes are
Sour!”

The novel teems with passages that support a Hamlet thesis. Note

this description of Porgy’s state:

His despondency for awhile, increased with his meditation, until he felt that it
would not be difficult that very hour to die. To die, was to escape the cares,
the troubles and humiliations to which he felt himself unequal, and which he
now felt to be inevitable from life, with such a prospect as now grew up, dark
and distinct, before his mind. He would have found it at once easy and grate-
ful to be roused that moment with the call of battle.

124

This “to be or not to be” reverie ends with a Hotspur wish. Effective.
Despite the coda, the preponderance here is uncertainty, musing on
death, and a propensity to ruminate—all pure Hamlet. Simms’s parti-
san is not performing bravery or buffoonery for anyone—he is his
own audience, and it is at this moment that he is his most Hamlet-
like. The consideration of death in this rumination also reveals a
change in perspective; prior to Woodcraft, the only consideration of
that undiscovered country would have been in terms of martial glory
or a field of honor and death, but in the passage above the idea of bat-
tle remains his only savior. Porgy frequently demonstrates this essen-
tial makeup of his character throughout Woodcraft.

S i m m s a n d S h a k e s p e a r e

The stress and balance of the first title would not do. Simms chose

Woodcraft for the final edition. “ ‘Woodcraft’ was the art of guerilla war-
fare used by the partisans during the revolution.”

125

Simms attempts to

make Porgy nobler by focusing his title on the militarism of Porgy and
company, the women’s concerns and the “fat” take a backseat to skill in
warfare, and the partisan is able to reiterate his masculinity, at least in
the title of the work.

In Woodcraft, Simms’s hero endeavors to recover his slaves. Porgy

employs his woodcraft, and teaches it to young Arthur Eveleigh, to re-
capture his slaves stolen by Tory profiteers and their henchmen. Per-
haps Simms portrays this passage in this manner as a response to the
Fugitive Slave Act and an aggressive response he felt was needed by
Southerners, but the author had other motivators.

126

Simms under-

scores stereotypical notions of Porgy’s masculinity, attempting to resur-
rect Hotspur after the fact, after his death. By 1854, Simms must have
felt some misgivings about the “Hamleting” of his father figure and
chose to de-emphasize this move. The author had seen this Hamlet
tendency as a weakness, and weakness is not an attribute of stereo-
typical masculinity.

127

The self-protective author wanted to present a

common front to his enemy, the North.

128

Simms needed a strong,

white, Southern male figure. The author needed Porgy to be manly and
vice versa. The nature of this change seems defensive; in fact, Simms’s
appropriations and citations always seem to come from this posture.

Naturally, this stance would improve as antagonism between the

North and the South escalated, but the tendency was there long be-
fore the deepening sectional crises that were to come. Simms used his
literature not only to construct a masculine ideal but also to create
another offspring—America—in an effort to throw off one of the
parents, Great Britain, and its literature.

129

Western civilization, as

defined by a man like Simms (white, male, and patrician), would
evolve, from Britain, to America, and eventually to the South. The
defensive posture springs from a tangible fear that this movement
would be seen as a devolution, whether men like Simms cared to admit
it or not.

An American identity was to be forged out of contrast with its an-

tecedents. This creating is not unlike a son differentiating himself
from his father, in search of his own identity, still related but separate.
Simms did, after all, refer to “us, speaking the language of Milton and
Shakespeare.”

130

This inclination may have been national and histori-

cal, but William Gilmore Simms was concerned about this need most
in relation to American intellectualism and literature, his personal
sphere of both accomplishment and reiteration of his manhood. In an

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

1844 oration titled “Americanism in Literature” at the University of
Georgia, Simms warned of

the imperious genius of the Old World. We must set ourselves free of the
tyranny of this genius, and the time has come when we must do so. . . . If the
time for this movement has not yet arrived, it is certainly very near at hand.
This conviction grows out of the fact that we now daily taunt ourselves with
our protracted servility to the European. . . . To write from a people is to
write a people—to make them live—to endow them with a life and a name—
to preserve them with a history forever.

131

Notice that Simms sees the relationship between old and new not
as familial but as one of servility. His solution, though giving him
godlike powers to create a people, reeks of a defensive posture, em-
phasizing the importance of being a native (from). What is missing
here is who exactly is he writing to. Americans? Southerners? The
British?

This compulsion was strong in Simms. So much so that, despite

the differing politics of its members, he joined the Young America
group, a collection of writers such as Edgar Allen Poe and Herman
Melville, led by Evert Duyckinck, “literary nationalists” who hoped
to weaken Britain’s influence on American letters.

132

Simms’s works

reveal this thinking through the portrayal of the British in the Revo-
lutionary War series and his use of “American dialects” for some of his
characters. In his novel Mellichampe, Porgy, sounding a bit like a
provincial, partisan Shylock, asks, “Has a Tory a better stomach than
a patriot? Is his taste more refined and intellectual . . . are his virtues
higher?”

133

Simms would have answered these questions with a “no”

and did so by his rendering of American planter-class masculinity and
the body of his work. The impetus for this defensive attitude would
change as circumstances dictated.

These varying conditions cause Simms to implore, in a letter he

wrote to the leader of the Young America group on July 15, 1845, “If
the authors of America will only work together we can do wonders yet.
But our first step will be to disabuse the public mind of the English
and Yankee authorities.”

134

Simms yokes the “Yankee” and the English

together and perceives them both as authorities, people to whom he is
subjugated and whom he needs to throw off to gain both autonomy
and definition.

135

This outlook rears its head a full fifteen years before

the outbreak of the Civil War. Simms’s rhetoric remains amazingly
consistent throughout his public life, merely shifting groups to fit cer-
tain preconceived roles that he had already conceptualized.

136

Simms’s

S i m m s a n d S h a k e s p e a r e

politics molds Porgy as much as it does his oratories and essays, and
the Southern author would display his creation in the same public
manner.

The rhetoric would be cranked up even more by 1850, just two

short years before the publication of Woodcraft. In an 1850 Southern
Quarterly Review article, Simms rants about the North, “She will pro-
voke all the fatal parallels which marked the career of Great Britain, in
respect to her colonies. And she will provoke these results without any
such relative superiority as Great Britain possessed.”

137

The North is

placed in the aggressor’s position, but Simms cannot equate the region
with Great Britain, as it would place the American region in too high
regard as far as the author is concerned.

Simms’s defensiveness moved from the national to the regional

level and is manifested in his literature. He defended this change in
the dedication to the new 1856 edition of The Wigwam and the
Cabin. The author theorizes, “One word for the material of these leg-
ends. It is local, sectional—and to be national in literature one must
needs be sectional. No one mind can fully or fairly illustrate the char-
acteristics of any great country; and he who shall depict one section
faithfully, has made his proper and sufficient contribution to the great
work of a national literature.”

138

Just a few short years after the Civil

War, this statement of purpose could be read as an apologia, depend-
ing on the tone the reader infers. The compensatory claims of a place
for the regional South as national divulges Simms’s defensiveness.
Also of note is Simms’s focus on legends, a construction that is artifi-
cial yet can take on a reality of its own. William Gilmore Simms has a
history of moving between his fictive and real worlds when conceptu-
alizing his reality.

Even more revealing is an unpublished, difficult-to-date, lecture by

Simms titled “Antagonisms of the Social Moral. North and South”
dug up by Miriam J. Shillingsburg. In this arcane screed, Simms re-
veals a larger concern. Simms argues:

It was especially important that the North should be disabused of the notion
that the South is imbecile—imbecile because of her slave institutions—
imbecile in war—unproductive in letters—deficient in all proper agencies of
civilization, —and so, incapable of defence against assaults. Upon these no-
tions our enemy very strenuously insist, & every form of phrase, through
every popular medium—the press, the pulpit, the poet, and the politician.
A miserable paragraphist will prate of the intellectual, moral, and military de-
ficiencies of a region . . . whose wisdom, virtue, valour, eloquence, have es-
tablished the government.

139

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

The South may have had every right to feel attacked by the North

for, indeed, in many ways it was. Nevertheless, what is compelling is
Simms’s need to disabuse the North of its perspective and that he casts
the charges in terms of intellect, of imbecile. Simms not only confronts
his enemies with positive attributes of the South but also offers a veiled
threat regarding the region’s ability to defend itself. Finally, he de-
mands credit for the South’s part in the formation of America.

All this defensiveness affects the rendering of Porgy and his chang-

ing persona as the Revolutionary War series progresses in Simms’s liter-
ary world. In Woodcraft, the most significant realization of this posture
is Porgy’s endeavor to explain his shortcomings. In a passage quoted
above, but worth reiterating, the partisan laments, “But the curse of my
generation was that our fathers lived too well, were too rapidly prosper-
ous, and though they did not neglect the exercise of proper industry in
themselves, they either did not know how to teach it to their children,
or presumed on the absence of any necessity that they should learn.”

140

The fathers are responsible for the failings of the sons. These men failed
to pass on to their sons what they needed to be noble. The burden of
knowing the truth, of being a man, falls independently on the shoul-
ders of the son. This idea may seem contradictory as Simms became so
rankled earlier at Sabine’s charge of the insufficiency of the fathers, but
this charge is not leveled at the fathers’ masculinity, merely at the nature
of their relationships with their offspring. Additionally, criticisms are
different when they come from “inside the family.”

Porgy tells Arthur Eveleigh, his son by proxy, “One usually dates

his manhood from the moment when he instructs his father in what
way to properly break his eggs.”

141

There may be some sarcasm in

Porgy’s barb. However, the significance here is not when others date
the son’s manhood (not even the fathers), but when the son does so
himself. Given Porgy’s observation above about the insufficiency of
fathers, it is difficult to tell which is more important in the act of
citation—others or the self.

Simms has Porgy continue this line of thinking in The Forayers.

Well into the novel, Porgy holds forth in Falstaffian mode on drink-
ing. When he is asked if he thinks his descendants will be able to out-
drink him, he replies:

Ah! Say nothing of our progeny. Do not build upon degenerates. It may be
that the milksops will fancy it bad taste, nay, even immoral, on the part of
their ancestors, to have swallowed Jamaica or whiskey at all. In proportion
as their heads are weak, will pronounce ours vicious; and just as we have a cer-
tain amount of strength in our virtue—a certain quality of brawn and blood
and muscle, to keep our sentiment from etherealizing—growing into more

S i m m s a n d S h a k e s p e a r e

thin air—will they presume to stroke their beards in self-complaisant satisfac-
tion, thanking God that such poor publicans, have given way to a more saintly
race of sinners.

142

The ambiguity is, “Who are the degenerates?” This statement

could mean the progeny will conceive of the fathers in this way. Is
Porgy taking on his potential offspring’s point of view? The ambigu-
ity does suggest a Prince Hal/Falstaff confusion about father-son
roles. The reference could be to Porgy thinking of himself, that he is
a degenerate and should not be “built upon” or should not procreate.
Perhaps the offspring (Simms’s own generation) will be the degener-
ates and will not be able to be built on; no Confederacy will stand.

No matter which reading is applicable, the focus is generational an-

tagonism. This father-to-be senses his progeny will be weaker, “milk-
sops.” Porgy’s sentiment is a faint echo of Hotspur that remains.
Hotspur relates to the king how, as he stood weary from battle,

Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword,
Came there a certain lord, neat and trimly dressed . . .
And as the soldiers bore dead bodies by
He called them untaught knaves, unmannerly,
To bring a slovenly unhandsome corpse
Betwixt the wind and his nobility.
With many holiday and lady terms
He questioned me.

143

Ostensibly, Hotspur is insulting the men of the king’s court, but

the comparison to Porgy’s assertion is how the speaker feels conde-
scended to by the central character in each harangue but is also doing
the same in the telling of the tale. Both men also question the mas-
culinity of their subjects, especially when juxtaposed with their own.
This act allows the reinstituting of the subject’s masculinity by tearing
down another’s. Hotspur has the advantage of being on the battle-
field when he offers this assessment—an arena of masculinity where a
courtier looks out of place.

A key to Porgy’s conjecture is that the sons may be less manly, but

they will still be thankful for not being like their forbears. The sons
will judge the fathers and find them lacking, rude, and vulgar, but
they will not find them effete and feminine. Porgy also judges these
offspring in his characterization of them as weak, slight (etherealiz-
ing), and self-complaisant, whereas the fathers will have virtue,
brawn, blood, and muscle. The sons will be everything the fathers are

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

not and vice versa, each judging and finding the other inferior. The
Hamlet tendency in Porgy is overthrown by the time he returns in
The Forayers (he is actually younger and the novel takes place chrono-
logically before Woodcraft), but when the Hotspur spirit returns to
the partisan it leads to generational strife. Simms must have wanted it
this way. The sympathies of the narrative lie with Porgy, and state-
ments like the one above abound in the last two novels. The fathers
and sons are oppositional, and one generation, Simms’s, holds the ad-
vantage of accusing fathers and insulting their future sons. The stance
entails much finger pointing.

This antagonism is a reverberation of 2 Henry IV. In act 4, scene 5,

Henry IV is on his deathbed. Prince Hal comes into his chamber,
finds his father sleeping, and thinks he is dead. The prince lifts his
father’s crown from his pillow and intones:

Thy due from me
Is tears and heavy sorrows of the blood,
Which nature, love, and filial tenderness
Shall, O dear Father, pay thee plenteously
My due from thee is this imperial crown,
Which, as immediate from thy place and blood,
Derives itself to me.

144

Note how Hal casts his taking of the crown in terms of what he is

“due”; this terminology suggests what is fitting, proper, and fair, almost
in the legalistic terms of a contract. After Hal leaves the room with the
crown, the king awakens and demands the prince’s presence. King
Henry rants that Hal cannot wait for his death and compares himself to
a bee. “Our thighs packed with wax, our mouths with/ honey,/ We
bring it to the hive, and like the bees/ Are murdered for our pains.”

145

This father suspects his son as Porgy does in The Forayers.

The animosity between the two generations is clear, and it is about

power. Eventually Hal grovels and King Henry relents, offering his
son hope and a little self-pity. Regarding his crown, Henry avows, “To
thee it shall descend with better quiet,/ Better opinion, better confir-
mation,/ For all the soil of the achievement goes/ With me into the
earth.”

146

The dirt, the stain, and the work will be buried with the fa-

thers, and the beneficiary will be a son who will not have to feel this
dirt. Hal is offered a resolution, even if it does not come as soon as he
wishes. William Gilmore Simms’s literary sons never get this kind of
resolution, even when they are mixed with models of fatherhood.
Only the oppositional relationship remains for Simms’s models.

S i m m s a n d S h a k e s p e a r e

Porgy’s chronological narrative ends in Woodcraft. His estate,

Glen-Eberly, has become with his return “a sort of centre for the
parish civilization. The charm was great—a sort of salient attraction—
which drew the gentry, all around, with the sphere of its genial, yet
provocative influences.”

147

At his career’s end, he has neither wife nor

sons, but the African males and lower-class whites of his plantation at
least know their roles—beneath and protected by the gentry. Porgy
also has influence over the males of the “gentry” in his area, acting as
a father figure in lieu of direct progeny. Perhaps Simms saw this end-
ing as only befitting his father-son figure, one, ironically, with no
present father and only symbolic sons, not unlike the author himself,
who lost a father and many sons, hence the temptation to conflate
creation and creator.

Simms did not technically end Porgy’s tale there. The attempt to un-

dercut the Hamlet tendencies in Woodcraft through revision had not
taken place. The Civil War loomed large. William Gilmore Simms’s an-
swer was to go back in time, before his Hamlet experiment on Porgy.

148

This antebellum author would begin again, from where he left off in
Katherine Walton, as if the period of Woodcraft had not existed, or if it
did, paradoxically before and after the last two novels. Simms must
have wanted to bring back the fighting spirit of Hotspur/Porgy in the
face of perceived aggression from the outside. The answer resides in
the manly role of the soldier in the right venue to perform masculinity,
the battlefield. Back to Hotspur’s country. Nation, region, and mas-
culinity were all at stake, and this formation would be needed in these
times. This Porgy would, however, be different.

The martial spirit of Hotspur would remain, but would be tempered

in the last two novels by a little more wisdom. He would, in effect, re-
semble Prince Hal toward the end of I Henry IV—wiser, but not yet
Henry V. This correlation is less true in Forayers, where Porgy exists to
outdo all the regular army officers in his ability to entertain, than in Eu-
taw, in which he is the voice of reason in unheeded military strategy.
The implication is that the patriot army would have been more success-
ful had its leaders listened to Porgy’s counsel and men like him. More
importantly, Porgy would have his chance for ascendancy, his opportu-
nity to become Henry V, a triumphant leader and son, one who eclipses
the father. Porgy remains disregarded and a member of the inferior
class, the partisans as opposed to the regular army, who actually win the
war despite substandard leadership. Porgy is never given his chance.
Perhaps Simms would extrapolate this situation to himself, if not to
Southern, white men in general. His (their) chance would be stolen by
the Yankees with the Civil War ending in defeat.

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

Captain Porgy’s last words ever would leave the father unre-

deemed. Pontificating to his fellow partisans around the fire, he in-
tones wistfully, “I dream of a time, when every man will, perforce, fall
into his right place! In other words, I think the millennium possible.
Meanwhile, let us eat, drink and be satisfied, though tomorrow we
sup on steel.”

149

Porgy ends with a wish for stability in societal roles

and concludes his tenure in Simms’s body of work on a note that
sounds of pure Falstaff. He has regressed to the initial model, the first
appropriation and citation, never to return, and is not even offered a
valiant death scene in Hotspur mode.

Falstaff is not offered this sort of glorious death either. The fat

knight dies offstage, his last words related by Nym, Bardolph, and
Company early in Henry V.

150

More importantly, Prince Hal has be-

come the king, Henry V, and is absent at the time of this father figure’s
death. Falstaff is effectively banished by his “son”—his worst fear—
and does not share in his triumph. Likewise, Porgy ends his days “off-
stage,” a luxury William Gilmore Simms did not have.

Simms wrote his friend William Porcher Miles near the end of

1860, “I am . . . like a bear with a sore head, and chained to the stake.
I chafe, and roar and rage, but can do nothing.”

151

Though ostensibly

discussing his current circumstances, the passage implies that Simms
was unable to continue the solution to the father-son conundrum he
had sought earlier due to these conditions. Not even William Shake-
speare, one of his literary fathers, could solve these problems of iden-
tity and masculinity. Simms would manage to publish novels just
before and during the Civil War, such as The Cassique of Kiawah
(1859) and Paddy McGann (1863), to name only two, but Porgy
would not return. Simms had lost everything in the Civil War—his
home, his library, and his wife.

152

Porgy had vanished as well, fittingly

lost in a failed test of masculinity.

Simms claimed he would write another novel with Porgy as the

central character, setting it after the Revolutionary War and making
him a legislator, but he wrote John Esten Cooke in 1859 that he was
not yet matured enough and he asserted, “I must prepare him and
myself together to drape our sunsets with dignity.”

153

The first was

never completed and the second is even now being debated. Still,
Simms identified himself with his partisan on some level, continuing
his attempt to redeem this literary character (if only in his imagina-
tion) and perhaps himself as well.

Simms would write another Revolutionary War story set in 1775,

Joscelyn, serialized in a periodical after the Civil War, but Porgy is no-
tably absent and the work would have little semblance to the earlier

S i m m s a n d S h a k e s p e a r e

novels. The author’s male figures are considerably different after the
war. The title character from Voltmeier (1869) is morally ambiguous
at best and does not fit neatly into any “type.”

154

The appropriations

from Shakespeare, the hopes of redemption, and the establishing of
Southern planter-class gentility were gone, killed off by the war. The
ensuing uncertainty of the postwar South ruled both the region and
Simms’s fictive world.

Simms did still look occasionally to Shakespeare for self-reference.

As he undertook the rebuilding of his destroyed plantation, Wood-
lands, he eventually let his children assume control of the estate. He
wrote to Evert Duyckinck that he was like King Lear, becoming guests
at their own tables.

155

This effort seems more like a feeble memory than

an active appropriation and citation, an aftereffect of the war and aging,
but Simms’s reference reveals his mind-set—a betrayed character who is
as much the victim of his own choices as of Shakespeare’s villains.

The year 1869 would bring another novel with a telling portrayal.

The Cub of the Panther combines two folktales, one a ballad of a preg-
nant woman trudging through snow and the other a tale of a male
panther with a taste for pregnant women.

156

In this novel, Rose

Carter flees a sham marriage to Edward Fairleigh through a snowy
wilderness, pregnant and stalked by a panther. She dies but gives birth
to a child with a birthmark in the shape of a panther on his forehead,
hence the name of the novel. The baby grows to be a prodigious
hunter and bit of an outcast. This set-apart son kills his father, Fair-
leigh, at the end of the book without realizing that he has destroyed
an ancestor.

A marked son destroys an evil father in self-defense without knowing

he has shattered this biological bond—a fitting end to the father-son re-
lationship in Simms’s last novel—thus resulting in no appropriations,
no attempt to use masculine ideals from Shakespeare for reiteration,
no reinstitution of the law, and no redemption for fathers and sons.
This work could be read as a metaphor for postwar race relations—
blackness as “mark,” black sexuality as bestial and desirous of white
women, the fear of miscegenation and the freed offspring that could
destroy the father—yet, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War,
Simms may have felt as if his race and class had become the marked
ones, as many Southern apologists after him took on the role of vic-
timhood. Unintended revenge is the best that sons could hope for in
Simms’s eyes this late in his life, and there would be no “draping of
sunsets with dignity.”

Simms wrote in March of 1869, “I do not write for fame or no-

toriety or the love of it but simply to procure the wherewithal of life

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

for my children.”

157

Literature had failed Simms in his attempt to

save the fathers and sons of his class, time, and place, and the most
it could do anymore was feed and clothe his children. Yet he was not
totally without hope. In an address in the last year of his life, titled
“The Sense of the Beautiful,” Simms still wished for “the full devel-
opment of that greatest of all human virtues—a perfect man-
hood . . . the man becomes complete in the exercise of all his
fullness of quality, in beauty, majesty, and strength.”

158

The author

still had the desire for a “proper” citation of masculinity, even if he
no longer had the will to reiterate it in his works. He died in
Charleston on June 11, 1870, with some eighty-two publications to
his name, his progeny living to beget the likes of the William
Gilmore Simms Society.

Almost every piece of literary criticism about William Gilmore

Simms written since the 1970s begins with a lament. Critics rent and
tear their clothes over the ignoring of this prolific and once-popular
author.

159

These critics need to have a representative from the period,

a central figure, and this urge reveals as much about them as it does
about Simms. This study itself falls into a critical tendency—an incli-
nation to connect Simms to Shakespeare, one that has existed since
the author’s day. In a review of Eutaw in the Charleston Mercury on
April 23, 1856, the reviewer trumpets:

His [Simms’s] chain of historical novels which Eutaw completes will be to
after generations the history of South Carolina, in the same degree that the
historical plays of Shakespeare are the history of England for the period they
embrace.

160

The concern for “after generations” is illuminating, though the

review could be seen as merely a propaganda of its time. Sectional
conflicts and the Civil War, just four brief years away, coupled with a
South that felt increasingly under attack, may have caused the re-
viewer to align one of their own with the culturally elite Shakespeare,
but the point remains that this impulse is nothing new.

A case for this conjecture is easily made, but the connecting of the

two is not merely a product of its time. In 1966, a hundred and ten
years after the Mercury review and long after the Civil War, Hugh
Hetherington wrote, “Just as The Partisan, Mellichampe, Katherine
Walton, The Forayers, and Eutaw, giving Porgy’s war years are Simms’s
the two parts of King Henry IV, Woodcraft is in some ways Simms’s
The Merry Wives of Windsor.”

161

The inclination to relate the antebel-

lum author’s works to those of Shakespeare persists. Perhaps even

S i m m s a n d S h a k e s p e a r e

Simms felt this connection himself when he wrote a poem about
Shakespeare, his song of bardolatry, in 1843. He wrote of “the mighty
master in each page we trace” and “How the mind follows, how vi-
brates the heart.” Simms’s description of his “master” and his effect
on the Southern writer deifies even as it reveals the need for this rela-
tionship with the literary patriarch.

162

The purpose here has been to read Simms in Shakespearean terms.

Yet a much more specific aim of understanding gender and its rela-
tionship to fathers and sons prevents this analysis from being merely a
culturally received reading of Simms and his works. Understanding
and glorification are not synonymous, a distinction that needs to be
made, especially in the study of Southern literature.

Perhaps the old Charleston Mercury, various literary critics since the

time of Simms, and many of the attendees of the Simms Conference in
April of 2002 have this common thread—they all want William
Gilmore Simms to be an ancestral father just as William Shakespeare
was and still is to scores of people. They feel a lack; something missing
in their context needs to be replaced. They want to redeem the father,
as Simms wanted to in his work, and thereby complete their own iden-
tities. Humans may not always want to admit it, but our familial
bonds, or lack thereof, inform who we are. To discover the father is to
understand an element of ourselves.

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

C h a p t e r 2

Th o m a s N e l s o n Pag e’s

M y t h m a k i n g a n d

S h a k e s pe a re a n M a s c u l i n i t y

[Let’s] write up a few sketches of Southern life as it was, and see if
we cannot make a few dollars off of them. This old Southern life is
an almost uncultivated field and one that may yield an abundant
harvest.

Thomas Nelson Page

I am a man/ More sinned against than sinning.

William Shakespeare, King Lear

homas Nelson Page once wrote, “There is no true history of the

South. In a few years there will be no South to demand a history.
What of our history is known by the world today? What is our posi-
tion in history? How are we regarded?”

These queries thinly mask

self-consciousness, insecurity, and fear—fear of upset social hierar-
chies, the rising white middle class, the free African, the changing role
of women, and the defeat of an aristocracy that taught Page to per-
form his role of masculinity, how to be.

Page’s fictive works overcompensate for the aliment of gender, race,

and class roles that had festered since the Civil War. The martial hero
guided by the principles of a Southern gentleman in Red Rock, Steve
Allen, or the aristocratic soldier and title character in “Marse Chan,” to
name only a few, are constructions of masculinity who attempt to allay

these fears and also address Page’s larger concern of history and regard.
“Masculinity,” “Southern people,” and even “history” would all need
to be redefined by the author to placate his fears and those of his race
and class. This redefinition is one of the primary functions of Thomas
Nelson Page’s art and all constructions found therein.

As William Gilmore Simms looks back to a previous time (the Rev-

olutionary War) to alleviate his present anxiety, so does Page. In fact,
this plantation novelist becomes so identified with the Lost Cause ide-
ology that the “present anxiety” motivation is frequently ignored.

This critical generalization ignores Page’s novel Gordon Keith and, to
a lesser extent, Red Rock. To read this postbellum author’s works,
especially the latter ones, solely as a withdrawal from reality into a
“moonlight and magnolias” world where all aristocratic white males
are brave soldiers, wise fathers, and protectors of white women while
the white yeomanry and Africans not only know their place but also
revel in them is to interpret Page’s novels in the most facile of ways.
The purpose in these fictions is not to merely escape into a golden
past but to reinterpret the past to build a more suitable, workable
present and future for his class, gender, and race.

Thomas Nelson Page appropriates modes of masculinity and atten-

dant ideologies from William Shakespeare not unlike William Gilmore
Simms in the generation before him. Page is also indebted to earlier
plantation fiction authors such as John Pendleton Kennedy (Swallow
Barn, 1832). The difference is that Page fully embraces Lost Cause
dogma and refracts all of his annexations through this lens. Page’s
texts reveal his expropriations through his construction of romantic
couples, both tragic and festive; the “natural” and its relationship to
hierarchical structures; father-son paradigms; the reliance on the pas-
toral “green world” as a solution to societal ills; and the aristocratic
link to the land for identity and strength. Southern authors would re-
tain many of these appropriations as late as William Faulkner, though
the modernist himself would interrogate these appropriations to the
point of sucking the meaning right out of them.

All of these concepts inform Page’s fictive constructions of mas-

culinity, from his early poetry (“Uncle Gabe’s White Folks,” 1876) to
his posthumously published last novel The Red Riders (1924). The
author culled Shakespearean modes and models of masculinity from
King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, and Richard II, to name
a few, but modified them to build a supposedly more authoritative yet
palatable masculinity.

Judith Butler offers a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon

in her 1993 Bodies That Matter:

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

Sexed positions are not localities but, rather, citational practices instituted
within the juridical domain—a domain of constitutive constraints. The em-
bodying of sex would be a kind of “citing” of the law, but neither sex nor the
law can be said to preexist their various embodyings and citings. Where the
law seems to predate its citation, that is where a given citation has become es-
tablished as “the law” . . . since the law must be repeated to remain an author-
itative law, the law perpetually reinstitutes the possibility of its own failure.

Butler’s notion of practices versus localities would not sit well with

a “pretend” plantation owner, as that suggestion allows one of his
greatest fears. The fear that drives Page’s texts is anxiety over failure
of the law. Page attempts to cite white, Southern, aristocratic roles of
masculinity in his works to repeat a predated citation, reiterating it as
law. This earlier citation is then fortified with Lost Cause ideology,
born out of concern for what Northerners and Englishmen thought
of these men—Page’s own “constitutive constraints.” The predated
citation as law for this Southern writer is the masculine reiterations of
Great Britain’s number one cultural export—the works of William
Shakespeare.

William Shakespeare did not invent but purveyed the thematic ma-

terial Page appropriates, which raises the question, why Shakespeare?
The cultural work of Shakespeare used by William Gilmore Simms to
construct men in his fiction was surely inherited by Page’s generation,
but Page offers an even larger reason in his 1892 collection The Old
South. He writes in the chapter “Life in Colonial Virginia,” “The South
was largely settled not merely under the patronage of but largely by, the
better class in England.”

Page perpetuates the cavalier myth of the

South’s founding discussed at length in Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s The
Shaping of Southern Culture (2001). Yet Page’s assertion does have a
modicum of validity. Helen Taylor reports, “Many British cultural in-
fluences on, and dialogues with, the South have partly made it what it
is.”

The difference between Taylor and Page, however, is “partly” and

just what those elements of British culture are exactly. Page’s above as-
sertion stresses “the better class,” a primary concern of Page’s. Being
British was enough to qualify as one of Page’s forefathers—aristocracy
need only apply.

Southern progenitors are tied not only to England in a general

sense but to class issues as well. Page writes:

Among the chief factors which influenced Virginia life and moulded it in its
peculiar form were this English feeling (which was almost strong enough to
be termed a race feeling); the aristocratic tendency; the happy combination of

Pa g e ’s M y t h m a k i n g

soil, climate, and agricultural product (tobacco), which made them an agri-
cultural people, and enabled them to support a generous style of living as a
landed gentry.

This vague notion of “feeling,” both English and race, is intended to
relate his forbears to English language, culture, and aristocracy, to
forge an identity acceptable to an author with patrician pretensions.
Page addresses his fear of how Southerners will be regarded by not
only appealing to this cultural authority but also by becoming it.

Like William Gilmore Simms’s generation before him, this identifi-

cation for Page was literary as well. He stresses in his 1908 collection
The Old Dominion, “The Virginians preserved through all of their re-
publicanism a strong feeling, almost like a kinship, toward the En-
glish. Many of the old families kept up a sort of association with the
old country; filled their shelves with English books; took English re-
views, and kept abreast of English politics.”

In Page’s estimation, it

was not enough for his region to be tied to the English race and class
constructions, but the connection to English literary, intellectual, and
political thought held sway as well. Little wonder that Page constructs
his ideal “Virginia gentleman” in Social Life in Old Virginia before the
War (1892) with the assertion that Shakespeare should be among his
poets.

Given Page’s attitudes, Shakespeare’s status as a British cul-

tural deity, his nationalist affiliation more so than his impressive body
of works, seems to be the prime motivator in co-opting the bard. All of
these nonfiction texts reveal a Page who links his forefathers to Great
Britain, its literature, class system, and “national poet” as well. Page
co-opted Shakespeare, this cultural token, and his influential medium
to aid in his cultural struggle—the performativity of the white, South-
ern, planter-class male.

This performativity reclaims the predated citations, Butler’s idea of

law, and it does so through even older citations than the Old South
fathers. Alan Sinfield explains in Political Shakespeare (1994), “In the
United States, Shakespeare has long been recognized as a means of se-
curing cultural privilege,” and he is used as well “to assert cultural au-
thority, tradition . . . elitism, and stability.”

Page would find all of the

elements—“cultural authority,” “tradition,” “elitism,” and “stability”—
alluring. Thomas Nelson Page turns to Shakespeare to fulfill a postwar
need of men of his race and class: legitimacy. Part of this legitimacy is the
building of the white, Southern, upper-class man after the defeat in the
Civil War.

This construction manifests itself as overcompensation in

much of Page’s work and lacks any sort of realism, despite sporadic
claims of such from the author and other Southern apologists.

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

“Marse Chan. A Tale of Old Virginia,” a story that first appeared in

1884 in Century Magazine, was a well-received effort that eventually
led to the publication of Page’s collection In Ole Virginia; or, Marse
Chan and Other Stories three years later.

The title character defends his

father’s ideology through dueling, lives up to his military obligations
with bravery and courage, and, in full chivalric mode, worships the fair
Anne Chamberlain. In short, he projects the ideal of Southern heroism,
more of an epitome than an actual man. Marse Chan is described thus:

He wuz so solum an’ moanful all de time, at leas’ ’cep when dyah wuz gwine
to be a fight. Den he’d peartin’ up, an’ he alwuz rode at de head o’ de com-
pany, ’cause he wuz tall; an’ hit wan’ on’y in battles whar all his company wuz
dat he went, but he use’ to volunteer whenever de cun’l wanted anybody to
fine out anythin’, an’ ’twuz so dangersome he didn’ like to mek one man go
no sooner’n anurr. . . . Yes, she, he sut’n’y wuz a good sodger.

Page’s aristocratic males are great soldiers who know no fear, who

ride tall and true as they face the enemy from their higher cultural and
physical vantage points. These early male constructions are conceived
as men capable of echoing a St. Crispian Henry V, “If we are marked
to die, we are enough/ To do our country loss; and to live,/ The
fewer men, the greater share of honor.”

Military honor and glory

are an integral part of Page’s citational practices, an idea he appropri-
ates from Shakespeare yet never bothers to interrogate.

This citation of masculinity remains a constant throughout the

body of Page’s work. Page had lived through the Civil War, the freeing
of the slaves, the Reconstruction, the withdrawal of federal troops
from the South (sometimes known as the Great Redemption) in 1877,
the rise of the so-called New South and the backlash of populism, and
the beginning of “The Gilded Age.”

Page did not invent but rein-

vented the plantation ideology; he reinterpreted it through Lost Cause
ideology and Shakespearean models of masculinity, perhaps sensing
the weakness of the “old traditions.”

Defining white aristocratic masculinity in Henry-like terms is com-

pelling because of the cultural work that such reiterations enable. Ju-
dith Butler theorizes, “Discursive performativity appears to produce
that which it names, to enact its own referent, to name and to do, to
name and to make.”

Page creates such men as Marse Chan who en-

act this male referent while creating it at the same time; there is no
original, only elements of predated citations—a copy of a copy at best.

These reiterations may seem invariable, but as Page’s circum-

stances changed so did his attitudes and appropriations. A distinct

Pa g e ’s M y t h m a k i n g

path of Page’s fictive reiterations of masculinity can be traced: first,
appropriation (King Lear, to name one), then glorification (In Ole
Virginia), then victimization (Red Rock), and, finally, his version of
modernization (Gordon Keith). Page’s corpus of works seems to have
a narrative arc. Still, the most palpable of the Page-Shakespeare con-
nection is this postbellum author’s “father and offspring” myth,
whose fountainhead is Romeo and Juliet.

“Marse Chan” is the prototype of Page’s plantation Romeo and

Juliet. The conflict in the story is familial and within the South. Marse
Chan is descended from Democrats and his Juliet, Anne Chamber-
lain, is loyal to her father, a staunch Whig. Both families are Southern
aristocrats but are divided by sectional politics, and loyalty to the fa-
ther’s perspective supersedes all others in this society. This law rein-
forces for young men of this race and class a major part of their
citations of masculinity, and Marse Chan successfully cites his role by
consistently defending his father’s judgments to the point of dueling
with “Cun’l Chahmb’lin,”

a citation of masculinity firmly ensconced

in the ideology of Southern honor.

Marse Chan’s compulsion to reiterate this masculine role is due to

the constitutive constraint of both his parents, but especially his father.
His parents discover their son’s heroics well after the fact, and their re-
sponse is described thus: “Lawd! how she did cry and kiss Marse Chan;
an’ ole marster, aldo he never say much, he wuz jes’ ez pleas’ ez ole
missis. He call’ me in de room an’ made me tole ’im all ’bout it, an’
when I got th’oo he gi’ me five dollars an’ a pyar of breeches.”

The

father responds well to his son’s successful citation of masculinity and
offers economic rewards to express his pleasure, not unlike a king. The
honor of defending the father’s perspective is thus reaffirmed through
the actions of the son.

These elements resonate in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as well.

The drama begins with the chorus: “Two households, both alike in
dignity,/ In fair Verona, where we lay our scene/ From ancient grudge
break to new mutiny,/ Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.”

This strife between two households manifests itself doubly in “Marse
Chan.” Page uses this theme in regard to the two families of his story,
but he also freights his tale with national significance, a reference to
the Civil War and its sectional conflict. Rosewell Page writes in his
1923 hagiography of his brother that the author once claimed that he
“had never wittingly written a line which he did not hope might tend
to bring about a better understanding between the North and the
South, and finally lead to a more perfect union.”

Rosewell Page com-

mits a half-truth, as the real impetus is for the North to understand

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

the South; there is not one example of the reverse of that being true
in the entirety of Page’s work. Page’s first published story is one of
reconciliation, a theme he would continue in a varied way throughout
his works, but this reunion would take place, as shall be demonstrated,
entirely on Southern terms.

The reiteration of the father’s perspective and role is the major

source of threat, an obstacle in Romeo and Juliet, but Page is filtering
the idea through Lost Cause idealizations, a glorification of the past
that brooks no dissension among fathers and sons.

Page’s presenta-

tion of cited masculinity in the story offers the Old South as a panacea
for unacceptable changes with an eye toward the future, though the
outcome is inflected with Shakespeare’s tragic couple.

Page reiterates this masculine role in his fiction as Shakespeare did

before him, in this case with doomed couples who take on symbolic
weight. “Marse Chan’s” two families keep the lovers apart in true
Romeo and Juliet fashion until the hero of the title leaves for war. Anne
finally sends him a letter admitting her love, but begs him not to return
until he is honorably furloughed. Chan is killed, his body shipped
home, and, of course, a fever and the strain of losing her true love kills
Anne as well. After all, Page must have his tragic Shakespearean couple.

Sam relates, “So we buried Miss right by Marse Chan, in a place

whar ole missis hed tole us to leave, an’ dey’s bofe on ’em sleep side
by side over in de ole grabeyard at home.”

Thomas Nelson Page im-

bues these final lines of Sam’s with the concluding reverberation of
the prince from Shakespeare’s tragedy. “Go hence to have more talk
of these sad things./ Some shall be pardoned, and some punished/
For never was there a story of more woe/ Than this of Juliet and her
Romeo.”

This appropriation is forceful, with Page attempting to

rise to the challenge of a story with “more woe.” Rosewell Page, if he
is to be believed, writes, “The impression made by the story was very
great,” and, “He who reads it without tears has never been found.”

The only form of reconciliation is through death in both pieces of fic-
tion. One could argue that this romanticized notion is the beginning
of Page’s attempt to both glorify and paradoxically victimize all
Southerners, especially white aristocratic males.

Indeed, Page writes, “The press of a portion of the land is filled

with charges of injuries to the negro. The real injury is not to him,
but to the white.”

Page uses this belief to offer white Southerners as

a minority under attack and must show their great suffering and vic-
timization. This role would become more predominant in the novels,
especially Red Rock, but the proposition remains the subtext of all of
Page’s masculine idealizations whether consciously intended or not.

Pa g e ’s M y t h m a k i n g

Southern pride could be restored and its guilt assuaged by giving this
class of men the moral high ground; they attempt to steal the role of
the oppressed from Africans and co-opt outsiders’ sympathies, mak-
ing sectional reconciliation easier for all.

More telling is Page’s readiness to place the transmittal of his

Romeo and Juliet myth and its gender roles into the mouth of a wor-
shipful ex-slave, Sam. In her 1999 preface to Gender Trouble, Judith
Butler argues, “Performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition, a
ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization.”

Sam nat-

uralizes this white masculine role—ritual by proxy. Marse Chan per-
forms this role by dueling, fighting honorably in war, and worshipping
the Southern white lady, all in Lost Cause fashion. Sam puts his inflec-
tion on his masters’ words when he relates them, “Sam, we’se goin’ to
win in dis battle, an’ den we’ll go home an’ git married; an’ I’se goin’
home wid a star on my collar.”

In Ole Virginia (1887) has, in fact, African narrators for all but one

of its tales. The author first used this device in “Uncle Gabe’s White
Folks,” a “dialect poem” published in an 1877 Scribner’s Monthly, his
first publication.

The attitudes Page has these slaves or ex-slaves

express is astounding. In “Marse Chan,” Sam relates to the white
man who began the narrative, “Dem wuz good ole times, marster—de
bes’ Sam ever see! Dey wuz, in fac’. . . . Dyar warn’ no trouble nor
nothing.”

Billy, the narrator of In Ole Virginia’s “Meh Lady,” echoes

this longing for an idealized past when he remembers, “We wuz rich
den, quarters on every hill, an’ niggers mo’ ’n you could tell dee
names.”

The ex-slave includes himself in the stated wealth of the

“we.” These slaves may, in fact, be unreliable narrators, as Page does
offer several examples in his works of these Africans telling white peo-
ple what they want to hear. Still, given his ideology of race relations
expressed in his fiction and nonfiction alike, readers may wonder if
Page himself is aware of this potential for unreliability.

Page’s white upper-class men define themselves against their slaves,

as Shakespeare would have John Talbot in I King Henry VI, when he
rails against his father, “O, if you love my mother,/ Dishonor not her
honorable name/ To make a bastard and a slave of me!”

Yet Page

would have the juxtaposition less pejorative, posturing them more as
loyal servants who are almost part of the “family,” such as Adam in As
You Like It. Page’s portrayals of bondsmen are formed by the acute
pressure of his cultural context in a more significant way than Shake-
speare’s. If nothing else, race is ever present in Page’s formulations.

One such pressure is Page’s Lost Cause dogma. This ideology ped-

dled the notion that slavery was not the critical issue between the

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

North and the South, an idea that unfortunately still has currency.

This view resounds through The Old South. Page writes, “This [seces-
sion] was not primarily because it was wedded to slavery, but because
it tolerated no invasion of its rights under any form or upon any pre-
text.”

Governmental power, taxation, land acquisition, and overall

“sectional rivalry” were the chief causes of the war for Page, though
he offers little evidence for these assertions. The author expresses his
greatest concern, “Unless we look into, the South’s action will have
gone into history as the defence of human slavery, and it will be
deemed the world over to have been as great a crime against nature as
the slave trade itself.”

His answer to this problem is to make the

African slave the loyal servant who benefits under slavery. If Page’s
South does not want to go into history having defended slavery, per-
haps the slaves will. Once again, African slaves do all the heavy lifting
for their white Southern masters.

There are other mitigating factors that have an even more direct

bearing on Page’s portrayal of black men versus their white masters.
Joel Williamson identifies three postbellum white attitudes toward
Africans in The Crucible of Race (1984). Williamson places these men-
talities on a continuum with racial liberals, who were fairly open-
minded and optimistic regarding the newly freed Africans on one end,
and racial radicals on the other, who argued that freed slaves would
retrograde to their natural state of savagery and would eventually dis-
appear.

George W. Cable is an example of the former, while Thomas

Dixon, with his “Reconstruction Trilogy” of The Leopard’s Spots
(1902), The Clansman (1903), and The Traitor (1907), is a model of
the latter. Thomas Nelson Page’s fiction falls somewhere between
these ideologies. Racial Conservatism assumed the natural inferiority
of Africans and emphasized “place” for all in an organic society. White
aristocrats are cast as the paterfamilias who understand Africans and
the damage done by outside agitators, such as abolitionists, who do
not understand. Proponents of this thinking desired to restore race
relations to what they thought they had been before the war.

Page postures black men as the keepers of white cultural myths due

to his limited aristocratic perspective that imagines Billy of “Meh
Lady” as part of the “we” of the family. This imagined intimacy causes
Page to entrust the aristocratic fathers to their supposedly loyal ser-
vants. The code of chivalry and the fathers are validated while the black
men are contained safely in Page’s narrative, only having meaning
through their masters.

Page saw these constructions as art reflecting

life, given his limited perspective on these people and, in some sense,
on himself.

Pa g e ’s M y t h m a k i n g

There are other reasons for this modus operandi. Page buys his tales

a supposed local color verisimilitude while driving his “family” dogma
home.

This supposed authenticity may have been true for Page’s

contemporary readers, but the doctrinaire nature of this method was
especially effective. In Ole Virginia presents African males as being
childlike, who long for the days when they knew where they belonged
and revel in the glories of their white masters’ manhood. These men
bear Lost Cause ideology, citations of the fathers’ masculinity, and
Racial Conservatism as well.

“Marse Chan” reveals where Page thinks this strong mystical bond

between servant and master, this intimacy, therefore the slave system,
derives from. Sam tells his white male audience of the day the infant
“Chan” is presented to the plantation slaves. The ex-slave makes
much of the master knowing his name and that he is asked to hold the
offspring. Sam narrates, “And den he sez; Now, Sam, from dis time
you belong to yo’ young Marse Channin’; I wan’ you to tek keer on
im ez long ez he lives. You are to be his boy from dis time. An’ now,’
he sez, ‘carry ’im in de house.’ . . . An from dat time I was tooken in
de house to be Marse Channin’s body-servant.”

In Page’s fictive

world, the father prescribes the roles of the white aristocratic male
and the African male slave at an early age, at the same time, the two
gaining definition through juxtaposition, contradistinction. The father
enacts this law, and the two males spend the rest of their lives reinsti-
tuting it through repeated citations, given the constitutive constraints
of their culture.

There is, however, a cost for employing African males in this man-

ner. A young white man rides through 1872 Virginia at the beginning
of the collection. Sam then takes over the narrative proper and teaches
the young man about the glories of Marse Chan, his bravery in battle,
his honor in life. Sam reiterates Marse Chan’s citation of masculinity,
as if invoking the law in a Butlerian sense. These aristocratic white
males are no longer the transmitters of their own masculinity. In a
sense, they depend on the black man as much as the Old South plan-
tation masters. They are, however, depending on narrators who may
become unreliable, even if the author himself seems blissfully unaware
of this potential hazard.

Page’s golden age had been upset. He thought everyone enacted

prescribed roles of race and gender and relished the structure of this
organic society, so he produced a myth to preserve the old order and
perhaps forge a new one.

This Romeo and Juliet reconciliation is ro-

mantic but not sufficient. A reunion of death is a tragic, romantic, yet
hollow endeavor. If the assertion of the forward-looking element of

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

Lost Cause mythology is true, Page would need a reunification fan-
tasy that looked as if it had a future. The author offered a persistent
pattern in which a Union officer and an unreconstructed Confederate
woman would find romance.

The goal was reunification, and the re-

sult was always on the woman’s (hence Confederate’s) terms.

This idea is stressed much more emphatically in “Meh Lady.” The

title character loses her love to the war but eventually replaces him
with ex-Union officer Captain Wilton. Page’s text reveals the same im-
pulse that drives Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet. Upon hearing
of Romeo’s request to marry the young lovers, Laurence exclaims,
“Come, go with me/ In one respect I’ll thy assistant be;/ For this al-
liance may so happy prove/ To turn your households’ rancor to pure
love.”

Friar Laurence sees marriage as transformative, healing, as will

Thomas Nelson Page. The author undertakes this same feat, joining
“Meh Lady” and Wilton, tagged by the narrator as “De pertector.”

This label is significant for two reasons: first, the title character is

unable to successfully run the plantation because the gender roles on
these estates are clearly defined; a man will have to take “Marse Phil’s”
place if they are to prosper. Second, the narrator, a black male, gives
Wilton this name. Both black male and white female must recognize
the role of the aristocratic white male for success. This form of mas-
culinity is created in the triangulation of the black male, the Southern
white lady, and the white male patriarchs who have come before. The
solidifying of race and gender roles is the price of reunification in
Page’s fictive world, a price Africans and women will have to pay.

As in “Marse Chan,” the black narrator, Billy, ties the old to the

new. Billy relates the wedding ceremony of Wilton and “Meh Lady”
as, “An’ dyah, facin’ Mistis’ picture an’ Marse Phil’s (tooken when he
wuz a little boy), lookin’ down at ’em bofe, dee wuz married.”

Page was an emissary of the Old South in his day, then he has a symbol
of this collective, the Old South plantation master in the painting, look
down on this reunification as if he approves. On the surface, Page’s
move is strikingly similar to the typical Shakespearean marriage plots of
the festive comedies, such as As You Like It or Much Ado about Noth-
ing, where all conflicts are resolved in the end and all gender roles,
even if they do go through fluctuation throughout the works, are ulti-
mately reiterated.

“Marse Phil’s” Old South masculinity and Shakespeare’s marriage

plot are fused and reiterated in the climax of “Meh Lady.” The im-
plied fear is that this law, predated citations in Butler’s conception,
could have failed with Marse Phil’s death and the title character’s (a
woman!) assumption of the plantation, but Page will not allow this to

Pa g e ’s M y t h m a k i n g

happen; he reciprocally brings the law into existence while he reiter-
ates these gender roles. More importantly, white aristocratic power is
renewed in a way more palatable to the likes of Page.

With the resolidifying of gender, race, and the past comes the fes-

tive ending. Billy gushes, “An’ hit ’pear like de plantation ’live once
mo’, and de ain’ no mo’ scufflin,’ an’ de ole times done come back
ag’in.”

This sentiment is not unlike that of Duke Senior at the end

of As You Like It as he intones, “Every of this happy number/ That
have endured shrewd days and nights with us/ Shall share the good
of our returned fortune/ According to the measure of their states./
Meantime, forget this new-fall’n dignity,/ And fall to our rustic rev-
elry.”

A return to a supposedly better time is the emphasis of both

endings. All “happy” endings have a catch, and Page’s ending does
as surely as Shakespeare’s. For Page’s ending, Billy may feel inclu-
sion, but what he really regains is his subservient position. Duke
Senior regains his wealth and position. Of course, a racial conserva-
tive like Page would see these two endings as equal, which reveals
the limitations of his perspective. Billy may be able to sound like the
duke, but, despite Page’s insistence on the Lost Cause notion of
the “natural” subservience of blacks, he can never wield anything
close to the power of a Duke Senior.

This festive ending puts

everyone into “place” and restores order, a restoration more festive
for some than others.

White, Southern, planter-class males intended to at least win the

cultural Civil War. Captain Wilton really only qualifies to take Marse
Phil’s place because he is partially Southern in lineage, and he agrees
to essentially become his Old South predecessor.

The net effect is that

the South loses the war militarily but wins it culturally, as all Captain
Wiltons are “Southernized.” The old master controls the plantation
from beyond the grave, not unlike Hamlet Sr. in Shakespeare’s play.
This portrayal demonstrates the power of these patriarchs. Page would
continue this postbellum Southernizing of Yankees with the Welch
family in Red Rock and even the elite of New York society in Gordon
Keith. These texts firmly demand the understanding of the Southern
aristocratic male and the return of the “proper place” for every member
of their organic society.

Page’s novel Red Rock was published twelve years after In Ole

Virginia and is a major alteration of Virginia’s appropriations and
purposes. Red Rock follows the life of Jacqueline Gray, a to-the-
manor born aristocrat who loses his father at Shiloh. The plantation
mentioned in the novel’s title is expropriated by the lower-class white
profiteer (and former overseer) Hiram Still, as are many Southern

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

lands by the ludicrously named Dickensian carpetbagger Jonadab
Leech, and the bulk of the novel deals with Gray’s attempt to defeat the
forces of Reconstruction and reclaim his father’s lands, his birthright.
The novel plots Gray’s growth from boyhood to manhood, set against
the backdrop of a protracted lawsuit for the plantation. Men of Gray’s
(Confederate) class initially form and support the Ku Klux Klan
(KKK) but withdraw from it when “lower class violent types” more
interested in “revenge” than “justice” co-opt it. This portrayal offers
an apologia for the KKK by making the issue one of class, a distinctive
Pagian move.

Steve Allen, a cousin raised by the Grays and the epitome of the

Southern heroic ideal, assists Gray in his endeavors and acts as a
model of Southern aristocratic masculinity for the young man. The
work is also frequently punctuated with the on-again, off-again ro-
mance with the local New Southern Belle ideal Blair Cary.

The naming of characters in the work is heavy-handed: Hiram Still’s

last name implies the low-class moonshiner he truly is, Jonadab Leech
is the unwanted parasite bleeding the South dry, and Dr. Cary bears
the burden of keeping Old South cultural ideals alive and relevant dur-
ing an oppressive Reconstruction. The most compelling names belong
to the young lovers Jacqueline Gray and Blair Cary. These strangely
androgynous monikers intimate the possibility of sexed positions in
flux, though their roles seem reiterated with force in the novel. Per-
haps, at some level, Page feared the possibility of this confusion, given
the state of the South, and reiterated the role behavior with emphasis,
to offset these sexually confusing names.

Red Rock would move Page’s work from nostalgia to a portrayal of

the South as a postbellum victim.

Page’s most immediate purpose

may not have been that different from In Ole Virginia. Henry W.
Lanier writes in an 1889 article for American Monthly Review of Re-
views that “it [Red Rock] cast a spell strong enough to exorcise Uncle
Tom’s ghost from all except the darkest, most benighted corners of
the land.”

This intention is wishful thinking for both Page and

Lanier, but one could argue that it is the prime motivator of all of
Page’s work. Page’s more specific object with Red Rock is twofold.
First, Page creates the misinterpreted hero and thereby defends the
South and its “gentlemen.”

A lack of understanding on the part of

Northerners and the like accounts for the sectional conflict and instills
the guilt of misperception in these outsiders. Second, these heroes are
able to remain true to Old South ideals while enduring great injustice,
earning the right to be their forefathers’ sons.

The Virginia gentle-

man of the Reconstruction era bears the ideological burden of Old

Pa g e ’s M y t h m a k i n g

South masculinity in this novel, whereas the role once belonged to
black males in the earlier short stories.

Cultural changes brought about this alteration. Federal troops had

withdrawn from the South in 1877.

Joel Williamson reports an eco-

nomic recession in the 1880s and a depression in the 1890s that set
the stage for racial radicalism and the likes of Thomas Dixon. The
urban environment population doubled during this period, a new
middle class arose, and the industrial sector became dominant. At the
same time, these cultural forces accompanied an attack on the Old
South order during this era, led by “New South prophets” such as
Henry Watterson, Walter Hines Page, and George W. Cable.

Added

to these drastic changes was the stress of populism that threatened to
overturn class distinctions between farmers and laborers and the new
ruling class, the industrialists and businessmen of the New South.

The Old South planter class had been supplanted by these New South
elites and these usurpers were threatened as well. Thomas Nelson
Page’s Old South ideals were really two generations removed. Page’s
earlier African narrators would not do.

Race is important to almost any American author writing in this

period, much less a Southerner, but Page had an equal if not greater
(yet related) concern—the maintenance of social hierarchies, of class.

Race cannot necessarily be divorced from class, but Page seems to
broaden the affiliation in his novels. If Thomas Dixon was going to
save the “Anglo-Saxon” race (whatever that is) from “the Negro,”
then Page would define this race in Red Rock as aristocrats and save it
from lower classes, “clerks” and “overseers.”

Racial conservatives

such as Page could not see Africans as serious competitors and there-
fore did not make them objects of fear.

Page’s mentality began and

ended with the inferiority of Africans; they were to be employed, not
feared. If the aristocratic white male was to defend himself against the
encroaching lower class, he would have to be more present than
merely being transmitted verbally by slaves. He would have to be pres-
ent in the flesh, through worthy sons.

The black male is, for the most part, reduced to the supporter of

the “old ways” in Red Rock. The ex-slave Jerry states, “Umph! things
is tunned sort o’ upside down. . . . Overseer’s son drivnin’ buggy and
gent’mens in de fiel.”

The Africans in the novel help delineate the

white social classes, as if Page is still looking for some sort of African
validation.

This “world turned upside down” and its threat to Page’s

class of masculinity haunt this novel. African males, however, are not
totally benign in Red Rock. Page flirts with the idea of black male
desire for white women through the character of the “trick-doctor”

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

who argues with the other black men, “I’m jest as good as any white
man, and I’m goin’ to show ’em so. I’m going t marry a white ’ooman
and meck white folks wait on me.”

This episode does suggest a fear

of black male sexuality and concern for white female sexuality, but
Page portrays African males as childish buffoons or dupes of Yankees
in the novel. Page seems to impute the doctor’s attitudes more to Yan-
kee carpetbaggers than the bestial nature Thomas Dixon would im-
pute it to in his propaganda.

Red Rock embraces the Lost Cause ideology of Southern advocacy,

the South as oppressed minority, and the idealization of Confederate
soldiers, even though the bulk of the work takes place not during the
war but during Reconstruction. In the fourth chapter, titled “In
Which a Long Jump Is Taken,” the narrator glibly dismisses the Civil
War years because this form, the written word, is inadequate to por-
tray both the epic nature and the tragedy of those years. This senti-
ment echoes the opening chorus in The Life of King Henry the Fifth,
who laments the insufficiency of the Globe Theater’s “wooden O” to
portray the immense nature of Henry V’s war against the French.

Page moves from directly glorifying the Old South to critiquing Re-
construction and, in a sense, to the results of it—the time in which he
is writing. This movement is why his works are not purely nostalgic,
merely looking back.

The white, aristocratic, Southern men of the novel (especially the

Grays, Carys, and Steve Allen) no longer have to take on the Romeo
role of masculinity that leads to reconciliation yet death. Page is fin-
ished with this form of romanticism and puts Shakespeare’s young
lovers to sleep. Reconciliation patterns of gender that had persisted
throughout Page’s early work no longer hold true.

Class, “nature”

versus custom, and the stemming of the chaotic upheaval thrust upon
his organic society become Page’s paramount concerns.

The consideration of social hierarchies is one of Page’s strongest

appropriations from Shakespeare. The need for rigid social strata with
their correlative masculine, feminine, and filial roles worthy of perfor-
mativity and reiteration, and the consequences of upsetting these
structures, is most palpably demonstrated in The Tragedy of King Lear.

More specifically, a focus on Edgar as the central character is espe-

cially illuminating.

Second only to the title character, Edgar is the

lynchpin of the play, but it is his relationship with his half brother,
Edmund, his father, the Earl of Gloucester, his godfather, King Lear,
and differing combinations of these fathers, sons, and half brothers
that establishes the importance of social hierarchies and gender roles
therein. Thomas Nelson Page believed in a natural order as well, and

Pa g e ’s M y t h m a k i n g

first derived this belief from a personal source. The Nelsons and the
Pages had a long history of belief in an organic society, and it in-
formed their social and political opinions.

Page inherited it from his

father, who did likewise in turn, ad infinitum. The author’s patrimony
becomes his limited perspective.

Shakespeare’s play begins with Edmund’s soliloquy on nature ver-

sus custom. He offers the prayer, “Thou, Nature, are my goddess; to
thy law/ My services are bound./ Wherefore should I/ Stand in the
plague of custom and permit/ The curiosity of nations deprive
me . . . / Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land . . . I grow, I pros-
per./ Now, gods, stand up for bastards!”

Edmund thinks he repre-

sents the natural and is kept down by custom; he is just as good as
Edgar. Yet the play seems to suggest that Edgar—the rightful heir—is
the “natural” one (by allowing him to defeat and kill Edmund, thereby
securing the throne) and Edmund’s supplanting of him throughout
the bulk of the work is “unnatural” and can only lead to tragedy (al-
most everyone but Edgar and Kent dies). The word “nature” is used
thirty-six times in King Lear and is crucial. Edmund may employ the
word to represent his perspective, but Shakespeare’s play supports the
idea of a natural social hierarchy based on birthright, and the attempt
to overthrow this order brings about dire consequences, pain and
death. An imbalance in “nature” will be corrected, naturally.

Thomas Nelson Page infuses all of his works with this idea; Gordon

Keith (1903), Bred in the Bone (1904), and Under the Crust (1907)
all trade in this ideology in one fashion or the other, but it is the Re-
construction mythology of Red Rock that leans most heavily on this
concept. With the put-upon Southern gentlemen removed from their
“natural” place, one could identify Jacqueline Gray, Steven Allen, and
company with Edmund, but Page would have his heroes align with
Edgar; these gentlemen must disguise or at least mute their true iden-
tities during the chaotic time of Reconstruction. They are obliged to
take on, what must seem like to these privileged Southern men, their
own Tom O’ Bedlam roles due to the “occupation.”

Of course

Page’s text begs its readers to view it as an anti-imperialist novel—
again, Page co-opts African victimization and the North’s moral high
ground by doing so. Page is also fully embracing the Lost Cause idea
that the Reconstruction was much worse than the Civil War.

In the

Civil War, both sides suffer. During the Reconstruction, the South is
the sole victim, taking on the mantle of suffering and victimization.

Page offers an Edmund in Hiram Still. Still is a lower-class white

male who begins the novel as an Iago figure, keeping his align-
ment with the Northern forces that have upset the South’s “natural”

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

hierarchy a secret. This commoner eventually amasses so much land
and wealth through trickery and manipulation of his associations that
he becomes the owner of the Gray plantation. Several characters, such
as the good Dr. Cary, pronounce Hiram Still as “good” and “kind”
while Still plies his nefarious trade in true Iago fashion. Like Edmund,
Still believes that custom in the South has kept him down and he,
given the chance to show his natural talents, can be as good as his once
social superiors.

Still becomes a wealthy man thanks to Reconstruction politics, and

he struggles to assert himself in the manner befitting an “Edgar” and
a gentleman. When Major Welch first calls on the now-wealthy
landowner, Still replies, “Yes, sir, I’m the gentleman: I’m Mr. Still—
Colonel Still, some of ’em calls me; but I’m like yourself, Colonel, I
don’t care for titles.”

Still has acquired many of the local plantations,

but he is not the natural heir and cannot truly run these estates, just as
women are incapable of doing so in Page’s earlier works. The author
also marks this man by rendering his speech patterns in “dialect,” not
unlike Shakespeare’s differentiation of class by putting prose into the
mouth of Edmund when he speaks to any member of the nobility early
in King Lear, while giving this entire class the more stately iambic
pentameter.

As Edmund tries to improve his station by an alliance with either

Regan or Goneril in King Lear, so does Still attempt to raise the status
of his material wealth by arranging a marriage between his son Wash
(an attempt to clean him?) and Blair Cary. Still’s proposition is re-
buffed and he rants, “You ain’t good enough for ’em! Well, I’ll show
’em. I’ll turn them out in the road and make their place a nigger set-
tlement. I’ll show ’em who they’re turning their noses up at. I’ll show
them who Hiram Still is.”

With the categories of power destabilizing

during the 1880s and 1890s, and the slow disappearance of the Old
South landed gentry, Page must have sensed a threat to his beloved so-
cial order—the Hiram Stills and their economic power were the great-
est of these threats.

The solution was a redefinition of “gentleman.”

The word became associated through repetition with qualities such as
honor, courage, duty, devotion to truth, and chivalry.

Red Rock’s old

aristocrats demonstrate these attributes, whereas the nouveaux riches
usurpers are incapable, as if they are not learned but inherent.

Lower-class whites are able to manipulate Reconstruction politics to

amass their nearest semblance to the older ideal of the gentleman—
money. This class of white men really endangers Southern, white, aristo-
cratic male roles, not the easily duped ex-slaves.

Again, the emphasis is

on the “natural order” as Page and his class of men would see it. This

Pa g e ’s M y t h m a k i n g

“natural” for Page’s novel, as well as Shakespeare’s text, is predicated
on birthright. Edmund is constantly reminded of his inferior birth
throughout King Lear, leading him to bark, “As to th’ legitimate. Fine
word, ‘legitimate!’ ”

Wash Still realizes this importance. The younger

Still tries to convince others of his gentlemanly status by suggesting that
his family is descended from the “Steels” and “Sir Richard Steel,” to
strengthen their British ties and shore up their questionable social stand-
ing.

Thomas Nelson Page presents this idea as folly as much as Shake-

speare does with regard to Edmund. Hiram Still and his offspring are as
insufficient to rule, despite their money, as the “half-bastard” son of
Gloucester in King Lear. This idea would be echoed again in Gordon
Keith, especially the absurdity of purchasing a lineage, when the wealthy
Ferdy Wickersham inveighs against the title character’s Southern ideal-
ized forbears, “I can buy better ancestors on Broadway for twenty dol-
lars.”

Page will attempt to demonstrate in Gordon Keith that one must

come by ancestors and, therefore, birthright, “naturally” to be effective.
This notion is especially interesting considering Shakespeare’s (Page’s
British cultural deity) pretensions of gentleman status late in life, even
purchasing a coat of arms for his family.

Page’s upside-down world in Red Rock twins King Lear’s. The ag-

ing king slips into madness and the “natural” males (Edgar, Kent)
into disguise as chaos tears the kingdom apart. Furthermore, the
characters of both the play and the novel have difficulty in fully enact-
ing their masculine roles amid the disorder. The previous citations
that had become naturalized through ritual and repeated performa-
tivity are lost in the confusion of the upset order; the law cannot be
reinstituted under these “unnatural” conditions.

Suffering is the true mode of action in Red Rock:

the loss of the

older Gray, the expropriation of the plantations, the death of good
men such as Dr. Cary, and the inversion of the classes—the good aris-
tocracy suffers poverty while the bad lower classes obtain wealth and
power—are but a few of the sufferings of this class of men as seen
from Thomas Nelson Page’s perspective. Suffering is at the base of
Lost Cause dogma and informs Southern literature down to William
Faulkner. Yet there is one important element that dominates Shake-
speare’s play that is missing in Page’s novel. “Lear is at once father,
king, and a kind of mortal god: he is the image of male authority, per-
haps the ultimate representation of the Dead White European
Male.”

There is no raging Lear equivalent in Page’s novel; it is the

sons who must rage. Still, several father-kings haunt the novel, and it
is the ghostly presence of these men that fortifies their descendants
and keeps them from slipping into a passive victimization in Page’s

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

mythology. Red Rock’s father-king is not Lear, but Hamlet Sr., a
shadow of the former self, yet still the primary motivator.

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark also offers the chaos of an

upset hierarchy, as Claudius has killed his brother, the rightful king,
taken what “naturally” should be Hamlet’s “office,” married Gertrude,
and made Denmark a “couch for luxury and damned incest.”

The

play sides with the need for a “natural” order and reproducing it, much
in the way Red Rock does.

Shakespeare has been enshrined as the

transcendent personification of a national ideal,

and Page wants this

ideal in his texts. Part of that order is the missing fathers, and he looks
to Hamlet for at least the specter of these absent fathers.

The narrator begins Red Rock with the tale of the first Jacqueline

Gray who settled on the plantation. This patriarch killed the Indian
chief who murdered his wife, giving a huge rock on the plantation a
stain, hence its name. The plantation is founded on blood and thiev-
ery, yet Page seems to make this shame a point of pride. The father
now hangs in a portrait above the fireplace. The narrator relates that
the forbear, “with his piercing eyes and fierce look, hung in black
frame over the mantel, and used to come down as a warning when
any peril impended above the house.”

This absent father’s “ghost”

still protects the house, not unlike the ghost of Hamlet Sr. He goes
on to tell of how the eyes follow anyone in the house and that the cur-
rent Gray’s mammy used the painting to scare young Jacqueline, his
younger brother Rupert, and Steve Allen into behaving when they
were children. The painting frightens the two antagonists, Hiram Still
and Jonadab Leech, and all of the (ex) slaves, who treat the picture
with fear and trembling. The portrait, or at least what it represents in
the novel, has power. The antagonists want to appropriate this power
and the protagonists aspire to fulfill its promise. In Page’s mythology,
the former fail while the latter do not. In this sense, the ghost of the
“Indian Killer” haunts the novel, motivating and begging for remem-
brance, helping the boys of this class and race to become Southern,
white, aristocratic gentlemen.

Hamlet, despite its chaos, displays a missing father who still man-

ages to drive the action of the work notwithstanding his shuffling off
of the mortal coil. Not only does this absent father act as a plot moti-
vator, but he also demands remembrance. Leaving his son after his first
appearance, the dead father-king utters, “Adieu, adieu, adieu! Remem-
ber me.”

The last two words of the exit line have more of the tone of

a command than a request. One such way in which Hamlet Jr. intends
to honor his father’s words is through his actions, his supposed re-
venge for his father’s sake.

Pa g e ’s M y t h m a k i n g

Another way is through his idealization of a representational father.

He uses this “likeness” to convince Gertrude of his father’s superiority
and Claudius’s insufficiency. Hamlet rails:

Look here upon this picture, and this,
The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.
See what grace was seated on this brow;
Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself,
An eye like Mars to threaten and command,
A station like the herald of Mercury
New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill—
A combination and a form indeed
Where every god did seem to set his seal
To give the world assurance of a man.
This was your husband.

Hamlet raises his father to godlike status, which culminates in “a
man.” The troubled prince derives this estimation of his father not
from his father’s ghost as it walks the corridors of the play or his own
memories, but from a picture, a likeness, a representation. The think-
ing here reveals an implied message that the actuality of the father
does not matter, only its representational value does.

Red Rock’s missing father-king is idealized through portraiture as

well. He does not walk around the plantation mentioned in the title
in a physical/spectral manifestation, but he does haunt the aristocratic
males as an ideal in which they find comfort while the interloping
under classes see him as an epitome of judgment. This patriarch moti-
vates the action of the novel, giving his descendants the power to
withstand the cruelties of Reconstruction and causing the pretenders
to feel insufficient. He is “The Indian Killer,” and the heart of Red
Rock, both the novel and the plantation.

In a way, Page does carry over the father-king from Red Rock and

Shakespeare four years later in Gordon Keith. General Keith, the title
character’s father, is presented as more of a spirit than a human, em-
bodying tradition while he lives in an almost otherworldly fashion.
Theodore Gross offers in Thomas Nelson Page, “Page presents
Gordon Keith and his father, General Keith, as figures who journey
through a dreamlike world. . . . General Keith, the father, remains
more a spirit than a person.”

Indeed, the general never comes across

as a real person in the novel, merely a repository for Lost Cause ideol-
ogy and idolatry. The younger Keith’s relationship to this fatherly
ghost echoes Hamlet. The narrator offers the son’s lamentation:
“Keith thought of his father and how steadily that old man had held

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

to his ideals through everything. ‘I have not realized them,’ he said
firmly. ‘I fear I have lost most of them. I set out in life with high ideals,
which I got from my father; but, I seem to have changed them.’ ”

Gordon Keith seems Hamlet-like in the sense that he has placed his
father, really almost the representation of a father, in such high regard
that he cannot possibly live up to his ideals. Still, Gordon avoids Ham-
let’s fate by learning from his mistakes and returning to the citations of
his father and their correlative principles. Hamlet’s infamous indeci-
sion would not allow him such a victory; this successful resolution
would be reserved for Fortinbras.

The connection between Hamlet and Red Rock is a strong one,

though their conclusions are different. An important distinction is that
the Danish prince makes his missing father-king into such a godlike
figure that comparisons between himself and his father would be futile.
Gordon Keith follows a similar, if less strident, pattern, but the narrator
of Red Rock never tires of juxtaposing the patriarch and his offspring.

When Jacqueline returns home to find not only his father dead but

also his home in the hands of Hiram Still, an old, ex-slave asserts, “Ef
I didn’ think ’twas my ole marster—er de Injun-Killer don’ come
down out de picture sho ’nough.”

Apparently these young Grays

both grow into the image of their original, missing father-king. Hiram
Still mistakes Rupert, Jacqueline’s younger brother, for the ghost of
the “Indian-Killer” at the novel’s climax.

These young men are able

to take on the image of this idealized patriarch in Page’s mythology;
therefore, they do not culminate in the complete tragedy of Hamlet.
Page asserts in The Old South that “the New South is, in fact, the Old
South with its energies directed into new lines.”

Page’s new lines

seem much like the old ones; the romancer writes these novels and
their citations of masculinity to imbue them with energies indeed, the
missing father-kings.

This effort only tempers, not totally modifies, the changes in

Page’s society. At the end of the novel, Jacqueline Gray wins the ma-
jority of his ancestral home while Hiram Still retains the overseer’s
house and half of the estate. Gray’s victory is partial, and the novel
suggests that Gray’s generation may survive but will not achieve the
level of success of the forefathers—the Old South ideal of an organic
society has been reduced to its current state and is found wanting.

The book renders this sort of judgment due to political and socio-

logical circumstances in the country as a whole, insufficiency of this
newer generation of aristocrats, or, more likely, given Page’s view of
the Old South as a golden age, a combination of the two. Little won-
der that the novel ends in ambiguity.

If this paradise is regained, it is

Pa g e ’s M y t h m a k i n g

only partially so and will always fall short of the glories of its fathers,
even if Page is attempting to reclaim those glories. A fine line demar-
cates the tragic grandeur of fighting a losing battle and being delu-
sive. The irony exists in that to see Page as the former is to romance
the romancer. To see him as the latter is harshly realistic.

The parallels between the title character in Gordon Keith and the

author are numerous (both had the same education level, both taught,
both achieved wealth in a modern age, and both were Southern gen-
tlemen who managed to become “fashionable men of the city”).

Page’s fiction leads here because of the author’s attempt to move a
Southern, white, aristocratic gentleman into not only the New South
but also the larger culture of the United States with its urbanization,
industrialization, and privileging of cities, such as New York, that suc-
ceed in a new market economy.

The major failing of Gordon Keith is Page’s perspective. The author

writes of General Keith, “He knew the Past and lived in it; the present
he did not understand, and the Future he did not know.”

Page may

have thought he was Gordon, but the perspective revealed in the
work is modeled more on his father, the general. The author’s inabil-
ity to “understand the present” causes him to attempt a work that is
both a romance and a realistic novel. Page may have thought his tale
was realistic because of connections between his life and Gordon’s,
but he fails to realize how much he romanticizes Keith’s rise to finan-
cial power and social status. While Page was appointed ambassador to
Italy by Woodrow Wilson in 1913 through his second marriage to the
wealthy Florence Lathrop Field,

he romanticizes Gordon Keith’s

rise not through a well-connected marriage but through his intelli-
gence, acumen, and adherence to his father and his ideals.

Page reveals the source of these values early in the novel. The young

Gordon and his father travel to England on pre–Civil War diplomatic
business. There Gordon meets his lifelong enemy Ferdy Wickersham
and friend Norman Wentworth. The former takes sides in a fight
against the young Keith because “he is a rebel.” Norman reminds the
antagonist, “He is an American.”

The scene implies that Northern-

ers and Southerners can truly become reunited only under the aegis of
England. Page suggests that the remembrance of British fathers can
make all of the sectional boys into American men. After all, he writes in
Social Life in Old Virginia before the War of “interest in English mat-
ters having been handed down from father to son as a class test.”

The

author clearly cites British ideals as the bedrock for his forefathers
becoming the class of men that their heritage demanded—certainly
Yankees could benefit from this connection and a proper reconciliation

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

could ensue. The overwhelming stress is less on region and/or nation-
ality as much as it is on class.

One of these beliefs is a connection to the land, an idea Page lifted

directly from the British landed gentry’s social system. Of his Virgin-
ian forefathers he asserts, “The land-holding instinct of the people
displayed itself from the first. . . . Here they set up establishments as
nearly like those of the landed gentry of England.”

100

Gordon Keith

strays from this ideal by leaving his homeland for New York City
eventually, but he ultimately returns to the South and purchases his
father’s plantation for him, figuratively reversing the effects of losing
the war.

101

Gordon Keith manages to benefit from the wealth and op-

portunity of New York City but still returns to the Southern home-
land and its ideals—he has the best of both worlds by the novel’s end.

Part of the successful performativity of the masculine role for these

deposed white aristocrats is at least forging a connection with the
land, if not full control of it through ownership. Once Gordon has
learned his lesson about the difference between the practicality of
amassing wealth and the retention of principles inherited from the
father, Page offers this passage:

He had almost forgotten that life held other rewards other than riches. He
had forgotten the calm and tranquil region that stretched between the moil
and the anguish of strife for gain. Here his father walked with him again,
calm, serene, and elevated, his thoughts above all commercial matters, rang-
ing the fields of lofty speculation with statesmen, philosophers, and poets,
holding up to his gaze again lofty ideals; practicising, without thought of
reward, the very gospel of the universal gentleness and kindness.

102

The location is important in the passage. This reconnection with the
land has certainly transfigured these males into not just patriarchs, but
seemingly mortal gods as Page lays on the hokum thickly with reli-
gious diction and a regionalist dogma to match.

General Keith’s bond with the land raises him both spiritually and in-

tellectually into a loftier (notice Page uses the word “lofty” twice in the
passage above) atmosphere than is available to the Yankees in New York.
In other words, the pastoral is the moral.

103

The moral aspect of the land

is prevalent in almost all of Page’s works, but, as shown above, is never
quite so overwrought as it appears in Gordon Keith. This element is part
of what a man of this class needs to successfully cite his masculine role
and reiterate the law. Judith Butler may feel as if the sexed positions and
the law do not preexist each other but are brought into being recipro-
cally through citation, but she does allow that a law may seem to predate

Pa g e ’s M y t h m a k i n g

a citation when a given previous citation becomes viewed as a law, espe-
cially when accompanied by social pressures that make the law seem au-
thoritative.

104

This connection to the land as part of a successful citation

of masculinity for this class of men has such authoritative citations in the
works of William Shakespeare and his culture. For Page to produce his
“imaginary past,” he would look for his “regrounding of authority” in
literature.

105

He would combine his historical context with literary self-

fashioning and the cultural authority of Shakespeare for appropriate ci-
tations of masculinity as they relate to a connection to the land.

106

Page made a strong tie between land and identity when his chief

complaint about the treatment of aristocratic white Southerners since
the Civil War was, “The muniments of title to the property we hold,
nay, the very proof of our identity and position, social and legal, have
been disregarded and destroyed.”

107

Shakespeare offers this predated

citation in King Lear when the king loses his identity (and his mascu-
line role) upon dividing up his lands; Lear remains a king only without
his lands. Of the plantation owners in Page’s fiction, the two most im-
portant attributes are land and honor.

108

Page sees these two as inex-

tricably bound. In his fiction, both are absolutely necessary for this
class of men to be able to cite their sexed positions and uphold the law.

Like Page’s thesis, The Tragedy of Richard the Second reflects a simi-

lar concern. Land ownership is so important to the play that the word
“land” or its plural is used twenty-nine times in the text. Yet King
Richard’s tragic flaw is his willingness to “farm our royal realm” or sell
the right to collect taxes to individuals to keep a “too great court.”

109

General Keith passes on to his son a comparable judgment with Shake-
speare’s play on Richard when he admonishes, “A fortune is a great
blessing in the hands of a man who knows how to spend it. But riches
considered as something to possess or display is one of the most despi-
cable and debasing of all aims that men can have.”

110

King Richard’s

flaw is identical to that found in Gordon Keith’s Ferdy Wickersham and
Yankee carpetbaggers—like King Richard, their value of the land is
economic and not really a part of who they are. Their identity is gained
through acquisition, not observance, and therefore is inferior.

Part of this value is proprietorship. The responsibility of the father-

king in relationship to the land is that of a caretaker. Page offers this
assessment of General Keith’s role: “This plantation, then, was Gor-
don’s world. The woods that rimmed it were his horizon, as they had
been that of the Keiths for generations; more or less they always af-
fected his horizon. His father appeared to the boy to govern the
world; he governed the most important part of it—the plantation—
without ever raising his voice. His word had the convincing quality of

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

a law of nature.”

111

In Page’s fictive world, the role of the white male

patriarch was that of governance. This rule is, like everything else in
Page’s constructs, “natural.” This assertion of the natural persists as
Page’s most consistent offering.

Failure to be this father-king caretaker is the central thesis of King

Richard. In act 3, scene 4, the queen happens upon a gardener full of
Edenic images and allegory. Speaking of King Richard, the wasteful
king, this gardener laments, “O, what a pity is it/ That he hath not so
trimmed and dressed his land/ As we this garden!”

112

This figurative

speaker has a clearer idea of what father-kings should be and do be-
cause of his own link to the land. The lack of understanding with re-
gard to this important point is what causes King Richard to reiterate
his sexed position in a failed way, leading to Bolingbroke’s constant
questioning of Richard’s masculinity and the broken king’s eventual
downfall.

113

The masculine role and the land are bound and rise and

fall by the success or failure of one or the other.

Both Page and Shakespeare also demonstrate the importance of

the connection to the land in a less punitive manner—the pastoral tra-
dition. True the Renaissance playwright was merely a purveyor not in-
ventor of this tradition, but it has been amply demonstrated that Page
had a vested interest in gleaning these images from Shakespeare. The
tradition is of the wild, the forest, being the place where urban citi-
zens must flee unjust authority and solve their problems, frequently
created by their lack of union with this primeval world. A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and The Tempest are just a few exam-
ples of these “green world” plays.

Gordon Keith buys into this ideology wholesale. Page writes of a

stranger passing through the Keiths’ green world:

Would have heard much of Elphinstone, the Keith plantation, but he would
have seen from the main road . . . only long stretches of rolling fields were
tilled, and far beyond them a grove on a high hill, where the mansion rested in
proud seclusion amid its immemorial oaks and elms, with what appeared to be
a small hamlet lying about its feet. Had he turned in at the big-gate and driven
a mile or so he would have found that Elphinstone was really a world to itself,
almost as much cut off from the outer world as the home of the Keiths had
been in the old country . . . he would have found culture with philosophy and
wealth with content, and he would have come away charmed with the gra-
ciousness of his entertainment.

114

The physical landscape is imbued with ideological attributes, a philo-
sophic and cultural apex. Page cannot resist connecting both his hero’s

Pa g e ’s M y t h m a k i n g

lineage and his Eden to “the old country.” Gordon would have to re-
turn to this world and its attendant ideals, including the father-king
caretaker masculinity, for a fulfilling conclusion. The rural landscapes
of the South are Page’s forest of Arden.

As You Like It offers a chaotic, urban world in which Duke Freder-

ick usurps and banishes his brother Duke Senior to the forest and
Rosalind, Celia, and even Orlando take on opposite gender roles in
response to various crises. Duke Senior reconnects to his basic hu-
manity through his link with this wood. He states, “Are not these
woods/ more free from peril than the envious court?/ Here we feel
not the penalty of Adam/. . . . And this our life, exempt from public
haunt,/ Finds tongues in tree, books in the running brooks,/ Ser-
mons in the stones, and good in everything.”

115

As Page would do

later on, Shakespeare has his duke correlate ideals to his physical envi-
ronment. Eventually Duke Frederick wanders into Arden and converts,
recanting his evil ways, and Orlando wins the hand of Rosalind—this
world has fixed everything; it especially has returned each person to a
proper citation of their roles, both class and gender, reiterating pre-
dated citations.

Page envisions a similar dichotomy with regard to New York City

and the rural South. The urban landscape of New York City is Page’s
Shakespearean court, and he refers to its “heartlessness and emptiness,”
and how the people “were machines that ground through life monoto-
nously as the wheels in their factories, turning out riches, riches,
riches.”

116

Even the housing seems like “ever-recurrent brownstone

monotony. They were as much alike as so many box-stalls in a stable.”

117

Worse yet, this environment engenders the kind of avarice present in
Duke Frederick, who is willing to betray his own brother for gain. Gor-
don Keith frequently asserts that the moneyed gentry of this system are
praised for vice, not virtue, particularly if they produce capital.

In contrast, as has been shown, the rural landscapes of the South

are the pastoral cradle. Gordon Keith may go to New York City in an
effort to gain power, but he, like Duke Senior, must reconnect with
the land, in this case the South, to fully resolve all problems. Near the
end of the novel, Gordon learns, “He left his office and went down to
the country. To be there was like a plunge in a cool, limpid pool.”

118

Eventually Gordon would repurchase his father’s plantation, marry
the Southern girl instead of the elite New Yorker, and return to the
South to live with his bride and his father in Page’s forest to aright the
situation. The young Keith’s ability to leave his office and walk, like
his father, among the lands is as much responsible for the novel’s
fairy-tale ending as any plot device.

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

Page’s romanticized view in Gordon Keith is full of glaring contra-

dictions. Gordon eventually eschews New York with its focus on os-
tentatious wealth and social status, yet no one in the novel wants it
more than he does. Gordon reconnects with the land, his father, and
his role in the South only after he has obtained all that the North and
its wealth has to offer. These contradictions are also present in Page’s
personal life. Page had married into money—an easy position from
which to decry the evils of money. He also lived in an urban environ-
ment while offering an agrarian ideal.

119

These facts reveal the serious

gap between the mythologies Page was building and the life he was
actually leading. In fact, Page’s grandson Henry Field wrote in his
1978 Field Research Project titled A Memoir of Thomas Nelson Page,
“With the royalties from Gordon Keith, Thomas Nelson Page gave
each stepdaughter a tiny string of pearls with the card, ‘with love,
your Dad and Gordon Keith.’ ”

120

Page was not above enjoying the

crass materialism the novel afforded him; a careful reader will note
just how much Page sounds like Gordon Keith’s nemesis, the Yankee
Ferdy Wickersham.

There is an even greater credibility gap between Page’s fiction and

his essays than his personal life.

121

In In Ole Virginia, African males

are the keepers of white aristocratic masculinity. In Red Rock, they
have been reduced to supporters of the Old South at best or dupes or
agents of Reconstruction at worst. By the time Page published Gor-
don Keith in 1903, Africans receded so far into the background of the
narrative as to almost disappear. At the same time, Page was writing
essays such as “The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem” and “The
Lynching of Negroes—Its Cause and Its Prevention,” both in 1904.
The latter article suggests that black males had been manipulated into
the desire for white women by Yankees.

122

The former offered the

“true nature” of the black man as rapist beast based on his ignorance,
an area that Thomas Dixon would mine and Page would eventually
abandon.

123

Numerous cultural forces brought about Page’s change. Jim Crow

laws first appeared in Southern law books a decade after the with-
drawal of federal troops from the South in 1877.

124

At the same time,

the country had just gone through an economic depression and the
rise of populism. Reconstruction had shattered the slave versus free
citizen dialectic that had proven African inferiority in the past and that
a black/white binary was needed to restore some sort of hierarchy.
The radical racial mentality appeared in 1889 and ran until 1915—its
zenith was between 1897 and 1907.

125

White America finally reuni-

fied fully by not being black.

Pa g e ’s M y t h m a k i n g

Page was not immune to this power. Many bottom racial conserva-

tives fell into radical range during this period, and by 1904 Page had
done so as well.

126

Race, class, and gender are concomitant; the hier-

archy shift must have, therefore, affected constructions of gender and
sexuality as well as race. The result is an instability created by flux and
the need to compensate by clearly defining race, class, gender, and sex
roles. Page writes, “Unless the white race continues to assert itself and
retains control, a large section of the nation will become hopelessly
Africanized, and American civilization [will] relapse and possibly per-
ish.”

127

This thinking has some of its origin in Lost Cause ideology,

but it certainly echoes Iago in Othello. The schemer warns Brabantio,
Desdemona’s father, “Zounds, sir, you are robbed. For shame, put on
your/ gown/ Your heart is burst; you have lost half your soul./ Even
now, now, very now, an old black ram/ is tupping your white ewe.
Arise, Arise!/ Awake the snorting citizens with a bell,/ Or else the
devil will make a grandsire of you.”

128

Both Page and Shakespeare’s

passages are warnings, infused with fear and manipulation, an always
dangerous yet effective mixture. Page also points out the black man’s
“same animal instincts in slavery that he exhibits now.”

129

“The Ne-

gro Question” spends a significant amount of time discussing the eco-
nomic ramifications of miscegenation, as surely as Iago postures that
Brabantio has been “robbed.” Both passages are a call to arms, only
one is fiction and the other is “real.” The important, unanswerable
question raised is if Page is an Iago or merely a gullible Roderigo.

Despite all of this inflammatory rhetoric, Thomas Nelson Page still

maintained his organic Southern society in his fiction. Perhaps he
could not bear to destroy what he saw as an idyllic picture with the
brutalities of his essays, this definition of the black man and his rela-
tionship to white men. This contradiction acts as a harbinger for the
likes of William Faulkner, who would write so movingly about race in
Light in August, but once ranted, “But if it came to fighting I’d fight
for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out in
the street and shooting Negroes.”

130

Fiction and nonfiction often un-

easily diverge, even if romancers like Page may not have wished them
to do so.

Thomas Nelson Page’s texts are mostly read today solely by stu-

dents of Southern history and occasionally as a footnote in the study
of Southern literature. Yet, like William Gilmore Simms, Thomas
Dixon, and, to a lesser extent, William Faulkner, Page is indicative of
his times.

131

The author managed this feat in two ways. First, his Lost

Cause ideology and his plantation myth were embraced by an indus-
trialized North looking for a Utopia to soothe both sectional tensions

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

and the strain of modernity, motivations not inherent in earlier plan-
tation fiction.

132

A January 19, 1907, New York Times Book Review

of The Plantation Edition offers, “Thomas Nelson Page has been the
recognized interpreter of the South—the Old South—to the rest of
the country. Indeed, it would hardly be too much to say that most
people of the younger generation who live north of Mason and
Dixon’s line have built their conception of what the South before the
war was like largely upon the foundation furnished by Mr. Page’s
writings.”

133

Lost Cause literature could not have survived had it not

been popular outside of the South. Page’s images of the South gave
meaning to the war with a heroic foe and a tip of the hat to Southern
society as worthy of reunification.

134

Larger cultural forces were re-

sponsible for the North’s embracing of Page’s vision during Amer-
ica’s “Gilded Age.”

Second, Southern readers viewed Page’s works as authentically of-

fering justification for the South, as if they were histories, not fic-
tion.

135

Page’s dedication in his collection of short stories In Ole

Virginia reads, “To My People. This Fragmentary Record of Their
Life is Dedicated.”

136

The author perpetuated this belief in the verac-

ity of his myth and Southerners used it to placate their fears and inse-
curities, much like the effect of William Gilmore Simms’s myths of
the Revolutionary War.

Page’s larger myth may have had this impact, but he and authors

such as Joel Chandler Harris elicited sectional pride in a time when
the South needed it most, after crushing defeat. In her 1932 autobi-
ography, Grace Elizabeth King writes, “It is hard to explain in simple
terms what Thomas Nelson Page meant to us in the South at the
time,” and he “showed us an ineffable grace that although we were
sore bereft, politically, we had a chance in literature at least.”

137

King’s notion may not have been felt by all, but it does speak to a
larger longing for pride, a need that Lost Cause ideology exploited as
surely as Page. These people needed a chance, at least.

Page wrote in Social Life in Old Virginia before the War that his

“history” of this society “may be idealized by the haze of time; but it
will be as I remember it.”

138

Page also admits in the preface to Red

Rock that the novel’s setting and people “lies in the South, some-
where in that vague region partly in one of the old Southern States
and partly vaguer land of Memory.”

139

At least in these instances Page

acknowledges the difference between historical reality and the fictions
that he produced, frequently under the claim of verisimilitude. As
Cora Harris, roughly a contemporary of Page’s and a contributor to
the Independent, once wrote of Page, “He is not a man of brains, but

Pa g e ’s M y t h m a k i n g

of feelings.”

140

Harris may have intended to emphasize the latter at-

tribute, but the historical record stresses the former.

Richard Gray, in his foreword to South to a New Place (2002) coins

the useful phrase, “the interface between consciousness and history.”

141

Page’s organic society, his ideal South, exists in just such a place. Gray
adds, “The South is an imagined community made up of a multiplicity
of communities, similarly imagined. Some of those communities are
more imagined than others (where, say, there is little or no immediate
contact).”

142

Page’s vague memory, with its tendency to idealize,

Southern apologists, and Lost Cause adherents would argue with Gray
about just what level of imaginary Page’s fictive community was and
is.

143

Page’s construction of the South is one of these representations

that has attempted to displace experience at the interface of history and
consciousness.

If Page felt that Southern, white, aristocratic males had to perform

a masculinity that valued Old South ideals of honor, a bond with the
land, fidelity to father and section, and worship of the white lady,
along with New South ideals of reconciliation through romance, both
tragic and festive, he was not always capable of leading this sort of life.
The gap between the mythologies he built and his own personal life
(or anyone’s for that matter) reveals the reality that this legend mak-
ing was up against. Page did, after all, write romances, not novels of
realism, despite his frequent claims to the contrary. Thus, appropriat-
ing his ideals from the works of Shakespeare and Lost Cause ideology
would be more successful in the pages of a romance than in the quickly
changing society of the New South.

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

C h a p t e r 3

Fe a r o f a B l ac k P l a n e t

Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Narration

of the Self via an Other

The children of Shakespeare and Burns, Drake and Hawkins,
Howard and Raleigh would no longer submit to Negro rule.

Thomas Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons

Thoughts are the real forces of life and death. They make or unmake
the man. They make or unmake the Nation.

Thomas Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons

he hallmark of Thomas Dixon Jr. was fragility. Dixon’s writings,

fiction, drama, and biography are imbued with the delicate state of
whiteness, masculinity, femininity, nationality, and blackness. This
pervasiveness is ironic, considering that the author’s life and work
were an attempt to solidify these categories—an endeavor that, in-
stead, revealed these unstable labels as just that, as contingent at best.
Dixon’s corpus is about control, stability; these ideas eluded him,
even in his fictive world and much less in the actuality of his existence.

The temptation to lump Thomas Dixon with Thomas Nelson Page

is strong. The two did, after all, produce works within a relatively short
period of time from each other. Both were affected by shared historical
and cultural experiences and/or their aftermath, such as the Civil War,
Reconstruction, the rise of industrialism, ushering in a “New South,”

and the inculcating of the Lost Cause ideology into this emergent
ethos, making Dixon and Page ideological “confederates.”

This last shared attribute is especially acute in Dixon’s works as it is

in Page’s. That the Civil War was not about slavery and that the South
would have given it up eventually, given the chance, free from outside
agitators, are two basic tenets of Lost Cause ideology.

Dixon argues,

“The war had not been fought by the North to free the slaves. The
Emancipation Proclamation just issued was an accident of the titanic
conflict . . . my father believed that slavery would die of its own weak-
ness in the South, as it had died in the North, unless meddling fools
should provoke a war over it. As they did.”

In an attempt to ration-

alize Southern thinking about slavery, Dixon felt comfortable telling
Northerners what their own motivations were, as if he fully under-
stood these “fools” while the reverse was not true. Clearly, Dixon’s
father had taught him these basic elements of Lost Cause thinking.

Dixon’s culture taught the nationalistic/cultural difference be-

tween the North and the South prevalent in this ideology as well. The
author refers to the “Anglo-Saxon” race, meaning “white, upper
class,” far too many times in his “Reconstruction Trilogy,” (The Leop-
ard’s Spots (1902), The Clansman (1905), and The Traitor (1907)),
to be counted.

What had been a rising tide of Lost Cause, regional,

and racial propaganda in Page’s day became assumptions just a short
period later, the era of Dixon, and myth became reality.

Lost Cause propaganda also argued that Reconstruction was much

worse than the Civil War, an assertion both Page and Dixon believed
and represented in their works repeatedly. Dixon has his one-legged
Civil War vet bemoan, “Them was awful times, but they wuz nothin’
to what we’re goin’ through now. The Lord knows best, but I can’t
understand it.”

If white men suffered through a horrific war, they

did doubly so under the yoke of Reconstruction acts, carpetbaggers,
scalawags, and the new freedmen in both Page’s and Dixon’s assess-
ments. To an even greater extreme than Page, Dixon would co-opt
African victimization and the attendant moral high ground.

Dixon’s appropriations of masculine tropes from the works of

William Shakespeare are striking; they resonate with Page’s earlier
presentations of these same expropriations before adding the consti-
tutive constraints of Dixon’s era, such as the rise of redefining race
and institutionalizing racism, class mobility, the effects of industrial-
ization, an economic depression, and the reunification of the nation
ostensibly after the Spanish-American War but more realistically
under the banner of whiteness. In The Clansman, Dixon displays both
the warring parents keeping offspring lovers apart in the manner of

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

Romeo and Juliet and the reconciliation through marriage as por-
trayed in the festive comedies, the stock and trade of As You Like It
and Much Ado about Nothing, among others.

Yankees Elsie and Phil Stoneman, progeny of Austin Stoneman

(based on radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens), the radical leader of
Congress, end the novel by marrying Ben, the Grand Dragon of the
KKK, and Margaret Cameron, his sister, respectively. This reconcilia-
tion takes place despite the direct conflict between the elder Dr.
Cameron and Stoneman. As in Page’s works, this reconciliation means
being acquiescent to the Southern perspective, as both Phil and Elsie
reject their father’s thinking and wishes to form these new alliances
with Southern spouses. The next generation of Northerners would see
the truth of not only Southern dogma but also its supposed way of life
to boot.

Charles Gaston in The Leopard’s Spots, Ben Cameron in The Clans-

man, and John Graham in The Traitor, protagonists all three, fit
the horseback-riding, weapon-handling, white woman defending,
opponent-defying, honor-desiring model of Hotspur masculinity,
tempered with the cunning of Prince Hal, so dominant in these
Dixon works and earlier romances by Thomas Nelson Page. Dixon
calls them in The Clansman, “these young dare-devil Knights of the
South, with their life in their hands, a song on their lips, and the scorn
of death in their souls.”

But it is not all Hotspur/Prince Hal heroics

in the trilogy.

Graham, in a later novel (The Traitor), is also presented in full-on

Hamlet mode, particularly in relation to his father. The son loses the
family home to the carpetbagger Judge Butler (note the subservient,
lower-class implications) while the father comes back from the Civil
War physically but not mentally. Butler and his servant, Aunt Julie
Ann, witness Major Graham haunt the halls of the old plantation:
“ ‘Look—look!’ he whispered. ‘It is Old Graham. Watch his thin
bony fingers grip the rail as he climbs the steps!’ ‘Hit’s his livin’ ghost
I tell ye!’ persisted Aunt Julie Ann.”

Graham the younger is moti-

vated by his father’s spirit to set right that which is wrong, the Recon-
struction enterprise and the loss of the South. Butler and Aunt Julie
Ann’s description of old Graham echoes Horatio’s take on the ghost
of Hamlet Sr. in Shakespeare’s play.

The overarching point is that one could group Page and Dixon to-

gether, to perhaps see them as two different sides of the same racist
coin, one paternal, the other radical. Despite this classification of con-
venience after the fact, Dixon felt the need to differentiate himself from
his immediate predecessor. Walter Hines Page was Dixon’s publisher at

D i x o n J r . a n d S e l f - N a r r at i o n

Doubleday; the author relates Hines Page’s initial response to The
Leopard’s Spots manuscript, “Thomas Nelson Page has taken the wind
out of your sails—if I may make a pun. You’re about fifteen years too
late for a sensation on this subject,” to which Dixon replied, “And you
think Thomas Nelson Page has anticipated me? He never touched on
my theme!”

Page romanticized the South and acted as a Southern

apologist, hoping to reunite the country under the aegis of the South-
ern perspective. Dixon assumed unity after the Spanish-American War
and instead focused on the Anglo-Saxon mission of world leadership
and the threat of blacks on the continent.

To be sure, constructions of

race, and resultant masculinities, are where the two authors’ point of di-
vergence is greatest. Dixon may have assumed unity, but it was his mak-
ing of race into a political category and the foundation of the nation
that differentiated his form of racism from the plantation tradition.

Dixon would not settle for including a racial Cain in a Southern family
romance—this intimacy would not do.

Race and masculinity are inextricably bound in Dixon, intimate in

their reiterations of both labels, violently and mercilessly, in such a pal-
pable way as to separate the author from Thomas Nelson Page’s pa-
ternalistic Racial Conservatism permanently; therefore, their use of
Shakespeare’s models of male gender roles, while having some com-
mon ground, would have to deviate as well. Because race was so central
to Dixon’s constructions of masculinity, he appropriated the Iago per-
spective, pervasive in Othello, of the construction, or narration, of the
self via others around his identity, creating and uncreating to suit his
personal needs. The result for Dixon is the half-man and half-animal
Caliban of The Tempest and a white planter-class masculinity he could
clearly define and reiterate in both fiction and, hopefully, life. Perhaps
then Dixon could echo Prospero when he grudgingly admits, “This
thing of darkness I/ Acknowledge mine.”

In Dixon’s world, he could

only admit “mine” in terms of ownership, not in a familial way.

This “via others around his identity” for Dixon in his works is

almost always cast in terms of black and white. Dixon could write in
The Leopard’s Spots, “Henceforth there could be but one issue: Are
you a White Man or a Negro,” but what he failed to realize is that by
depending on these categories he binds them together, making one
need the other for role definition.

Jonathan Dollimore offers in

Sexual Dissidence (1991) the perverse dynamic, “that fearful inter-
connectedness whereby the antithetical inheres within, and is partly
produced by, what it opposes.”

Dixon uses both white and black fe-

males in this “perverse dynamic” way to help define his brand of
white masculinity, but it is the “fearful interconnectedness” with the

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

black man that is most conspicuous in the works of this author, a par-
adox considering Dixon’s endeavor to define the two as separate.

Joel Williamson lucidly classifies racial ideology since emancipation

in The Crucible of Race (1984), offering Dixon’s brand of racism as
radicalism.

Thomas Dixon wrote his “Reconstruction Trilogy” be-

tween 1902 and 1907, making racial radicalism while it made him.
Williamson rightly asserts that Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots is “virtually
an encyclopedia of Radicalism, catching the movement during its
apogee and weaving together into a single and simple piece nearly all
the various and complex strains of the Radical mentality.”

This case-

book of racial radicalism offers insight into a mind-set equally shock-
ing and fascinating.

The Reverend John Durham represents the ideological mouth-

piece for Dixon’s views in the novel. The author, a reverend himself,
regularly tossed off such nonfiction missives (as in Southern Horizons)
as “every bond that held the black race had been loosed. Crimes of
unusual horror began to shock the community. The negroes now had
freedom.”

Dixon saw the Apocalypse, and it was black. Likewise,

Reverend Durham pontificates to the local African preacher Ephraim
Fox (note the animalistic last name, a metaphoric sure sign of Dixon’s
view of black men, even their leaders):

In the old slavery days you were taught the religion of Christ. It didn’t mean
crime, and lust, and lying, and drinking, whatever it meant. Your religion has
come to be a stench. You are getting lower and lower. . . . In the old days . . .
I used to preach to your people. I saw before me many men of character . . .
faithful home servants who loved their masters and were faithful until death.
Now I see a cheap lot of thieves and jailbirds and trifling women seated in
high places. You have shown no power to stand alone on the solid basis of
character.

Reverend Durham’s rant equates racial servility with Christianity.

Durham also produces the false dichotomy of Africans as either loyal
slaves or criminals, as if there is no middle ground for Africans. Decline
and degradation is all Reverend Durham (and Dixon) sees in the free-
dom of slaves. Dixon’s racial radicalism is repeated from here, his first
novel, until his last, The Flaming Sword (1939). Even when this view
would seem anachronistic, as the imminent disappearance of blacks
did not come true, Dixon clung to this ideology; it helped him define
who he was as a Caucasian, a man, as a white man. While Dixon both
formed and was formed by this philosophy, one of his cultural an-
tecedents that informs his constructions of his masculine/racial dyad is

D i x o n J r . a n d S e l f - N a r r at i o n

the works of William Shakespeare and tropes of masculinity and race
found therein.

Shakespeare is not being used here merely as a shorthand way of

understanding Dixon and his views. The author, and the culture that
produced him, forged very tangible connections to this national fore-
father. Shakespeare’s dramas, the Bible, and John Bunyan were in
every household in Dixon’s culture. Thus, Dixon came of age in a
culture that deified Shakespeare.

In fact, Dixon worked hard in both his writing and his life to con-

nect himself to England and Shakespeare. The Southerner relates in
his autobiography of listening to Grandma Dixon’s tale of how “she
had married a Dixon of pure English strain,” and how he was over-
whelmed with pride while listening to stories of her ancestry.

Dixon

was taught at an early age to privilege the “English strain,” but his
latter literary works would stress the “pure” element of this myth.
Grandma Dixon also told young Tom of his granduncle Major Joseph
Dixon, known as “The Britisher,” who once had “a great victory and
a shout went up the hills of Carolina and Georgia that they heard it in
England, I suspect.”

This Southern Hotspur, connected to England

by label, radiated the martial spirit until the English had to be aware
of it, a demand for validation.

Dixon, then, came by the need to connect himself and his “people”

to the aristocratic men of Great Britain, or who he called “the Anglo-
Saxons,” quite naturally. His works are infused with what he labels
“the Anglo-Saxon civilization of the South,” an attempt to draw a
direct line of paternity, and his white planter-class characters frequently
espouse this link to anyone who will hear.

For example, when

Dr. Cameron is arrested in The Clansman, he appeals to his “Magna
Charta rights of every man who speaks the English tongue.”

As his-

torical circumstances change, so do Shakespearean appropriations. The
process of how these appropriations work varies.

Thomas Dixon in-

herited an appropriation of British culture and, with it, the deification
of Shakespeare, but the significance of the playwright and his works
were not one and the same as those Southern appropriators who had
annexed the bard before Dixon, such as William Gilmore Simms or
Thomas Nelson Page, to name only a few. Dixon’s appropriations
would have their birthplace in the theater.

Dixon’s sole biographer, Raymond Cook, tells the story in his

1968 Fire from the Flint of young Tom Dixon, bitten by the acting
bug while attending Johns Hopkins University as a mere twenty-year-
old, who was, in his own words, “bubbling over with a desire to fire
the world in Shakespearean roles.”

Dixon “began the study of the

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

stage by taking a course in the Forbisher School” and “saw every play
in town. First the masterpieces of Shakespeare.”

The author pur-

sued the playwright’s works with great fervor. In his second year, he
left the university for New York to pursue an acting career. Dixon
eventually landed the role of the Duke of Richmond in a traveling
production of Richard III, but the affair turned out to be a scam;
after many failed auditions, Dixon headed for home.

The would-be

actor never got over his love of the stage and toured with productions
of the adapted-for-stage versions of his novels in later years, giving
speeches and even, from time to time, enacting roles, but Shakespeare
was his first and foremost theatrical love.

Thomas Dixon’s connection to the playwright’s works was

personal—something he longed to give his entire life to but was un-
able to do. Logically, Dixon would look to a source he privileged in
such a way for masculine idealizations he could “enact,” in more than
one sense, creating or appropriating Shakespeare as a father. The real
significance of Shakespeare’s modes and models for the author’s ap-
propriations is how they were seen through the lens of racial radical-
ism (and helped birth the ideology at the same time) and employed to
define a nexus of both race and masculinity in the works of Dixon.

The starting point for understanding Dixon’s use of Shakespearean

negotiations of race and masculinity is Othello. For Dixon, what seems
to be most manifest in his novels from Shakespeare’s play is not really
the portrayal of the title character, though he is relevant, but the sur-
rounding characters and how they are defined, and define themselves,
in relation to others—especially to the play’s “inside” outsider, Oth-
ello. Like the play itself, Dixon’s appropriations of masculine and
racial reiterations are stolen by Iago’s perspective or the white percep-
tion. Iago is central to the play, with eight soliloquies to the title char-
acter’s three.

More important is Iago as playwright, creating a

narrative and placing every character around him into it.

Iago cre-

ates and manipulates the narratives of those around him; that is his
power and can be the power of whiteness. Iago attempts total creative
control of his environment and, therefore, has command of his own
presentation of self.

Dixon gives his white male protagonists this same sort of power—

the authority to rewrite narratives of identity to suit their own ends.

Dr. Cameron, father of the eventual Grand Dragon of the KKK, Ben
Cameron, offers this narrative of the black man in The Clansman:

And this creature, half child, half animal, the sport of impulse, whim, and
conceit, “pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw,” a being who, left to his

D i x o n J r . a n d S e l f - N a r r at i o n

will, roams at night and sleeps in the day, whose speech knows no word of
love, whose passions, once aroused, are as the fury of the tiger—they have set
this thing to rule over the Southern people.

This white patriarch provides a narrative of what a black man is, in
turn providing by contradistinction what a white man is not. The
black man is a thing, an animal, a child at best. Dr. Cameron’s con-
sternation suggests that “Southern People” are the antithesis of this
construction. This narrative will eventually compel his son Ben to
carry out the “good work” of the KKK.

The Reverend John Durham enacts this role in The Leopard’s Spots.

Discussing young Dick, the protagonist Charles Gaston’s young, black
playmate who is taken into the Gaston home after his father attempts
to kill him, Durham queries, “I don’t know whether he’s got a soul.
Certainly the very rudimentary foundations of morals seem lacking.
I believe you could take a young ape and teach him quicker.”

The

supposed good reverend adds later, “The Negro is the human donkey.
You can train him, but you can’t make a horse out of him.”

Durham’s tirades are no doubt a “rebuke” to the idea that Miss Ophe-
lia can “reform” Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). More impor-
tantly, once again the readers have foisted upon themselves a white
male definition of what a black male is—an animal, without intellect,
morality, or even a soul, and Dixon’s novels set about to offer “evi-
dence” to support these racist assertions.

The racial rhetoric is toned down a bit in The Traitor, and is more

about whiteness than a threatening blackness.

This threat is implicit

in the disorder of the South, and the third novel’s “black menace”
does seem muted, especially in comparison to the previous two. Still,
Dixon’s shift is only a temporary one, as the author would five years
later in his novel The Sins of the Father have his white aristocratic pro-
tagonist remark about his black house servant Andy:

But yesterday our Negroes were brought here from the West Soudan, black,
chattering savages, nearer to anthropoid ape than any other living creature. . . .
In old Andy there you see him to-day, a creature half child, half animal. For
thousands of years beyond the seas he stole his food, worked his wife, sold his
child, and ate his brother.

This supposed lack of filial connection may have arisen from the eco-
nomic need to split slave families by selling them, but it also insinuates
that Africans have no civilization, even down to the basic family unit.
Dixon’s white upper-class men would continue to narrate identities for

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

black men for the rest of the author’s works, a reverse of Thomas Nel-
son Page, who frequently allowed African males to transmit white aris-
tocratic masculinity.

There are many consistent threads running through this making,

this narrating, but the most common is the relation of the black man
to the animal. This writing of the black man in these terms is Iago’s
stock and trade in Othello. Iago begins this sort of role projection, in-
terestingly enough, outside of Desdemona’s father’s house. Iago
warns Brabantio, “Even now, now, very now, an old black ram/ Is
tupping your white ewe.”

Iago uses this terminology mostly for the

“benefit” of others, trying to provoke animalistic images for the
father of this white woman. Note too that Desdemona is cast in
these terms as well, as if she becomes animalistic herself through sex
with this “black ram.” Iago’s use of “old” also suggests an age
difference—allowing Desdemona to be read as young and gullible,
and placing the blame for this animalism, by default, on Othello if not
the lack of protection by Brabantio.

Iago refers to Othello as a “Barbary Horse,” claims the Moor can

be “tenderly led by the nose/ as asses are,” and asks Othello on one
occasion, “Are you a man? Have you a soul or sense?” while on an-
other exhorting him, “Good Sir, be a man.”

Iago’s narrative for

Othello’s masculinity has everything to do with race, and he narrates
blackness into the animal and vice versa. Why would Iago, and much
later Dixon’s white men, choose this particular way to cast black mas-
culinity? One simple reason is the longing for a suitable hierarchy.
Iago is forced to be “his Moorships’s ancient,” and Brabantio worries
that “Bondslaves and pagans shall our statesmen be.”

Both of these

white men are concerned with maintaining hierarchies, which would
imply changes they find unacceptable. Dixon’s works are replete with
this concern for an upset hierarchy, no doubt hinging on fear of the
freed black man and the perceived wrongs of Reconstruction.

He writes, “of such infamy being forced on the South two years

after his [Lee’s] surrender, as this attempt to make the old slaves the
rulers of their masters, and to destroy the Anglo-Saxon civilization of
the South.”

In The Clansman, Dixon echoes Brabantio when his

narrator asserts about a black-dominated state government, “A new
mob of onion-laden breath, mixed with perspiring African odor, be-
came the symbol of American Democracy. A new order of society
sprouted in this corruption. The old high-bred ways, tastes, and en-
thusiasms were driven into the hiding places of a few families and
cherished as relics of the past.”

Clearly all of these white men, from

Shakespeare’s to Dixon’s, are concerned with an upset, or at the very

D i x o n J r . a n d S e l f - N a r r at i o n

least the threat of an upset, hierarchy. Their place in it is not suit-
able.

Seeing black men with at least a chance for power, watching

their own power slip away, and failing to cite their previously com-
fortable masculine and racial roles, these men chafed. If they could
demote the black man to an animal, to a thing, to something less than
human, then they could reclaim their “natural” place.

Iago goes even further than merely placing Othello below him in a

hierarchy, and seeks to uncreate him, to send him back to his African
origin, what Iago would see as Othello’s original chaos.

Iago may

not find an immediate human-animal order sufficient, and he tries to
uncreate this superior black man. Iago’s ideological connection of a
force that moves from uncreation, to chaos, to Othello’s place of ori-
gin, Africa, as if they are a causal chain, reveals much about the antag-
onist’s assumptions. Thomas Dixon has Dr. Cameron make this same
connection in The Clansman. He postulates:

Since the dawn of history the Negro has owned the Continent of Africa—rich
beyond the dream of a poet’s fancy, crunching acres of diamonds beneath his
bare black feet. Yet he never picked up one from the dust until a white man
showed to him its glittering light. His land swarmed with powerful and docile
animals, yet he never dreamed a harness, cart, or sled. A hunter by necessity, he
never made an axe, spear, or arrow-head worth preserving beyond the moment
of its use. He lived as an ox, content to graze for an hour. In a land of stone and
timber he never sawed a foot of lumber, carved a block, or built a house save of
broken sticks and mud. With league on league of ocean strand and miles of in-
land seas, for four thousand years he watched their surface ripple under the
wind, heard the thunder of the surf on his beach, the howl of the storm over his
head, gazed on the dim blue horizon calling him to worlds that lie beyond, and
yet he never dreamed a sail!

Dr. Cameron faults Africans for not considering the economic im-

plications of their environment; he indicts them for not being good
capitalists and asserts that this failure is the reason for their lack of suf-
ficient “progress.” The argument not only insinuates that little or no
African culture exists, but also constructs Africans as not having the
intellect to conceive of a culture and its supposed progress in the
doctor’s terms. Dr. Cameron’s simple-minded reduction of African
culture has many colonial implications; Dixon’s seeming mouthpiece
clearly connects Africa to chaos much in the same manner as Iago’s as-
sociation does. And like Iago, Dixon’s Southern white aristocratic men
want to send their black males back to this original chaos as well, to
“uncreate” them in American society. In fact, Dixon attempts to co-opt
the authority of Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

by putting this very ideology into the mouth of this symbol of the
Union, the revered assassinated president. In The Clansman, he has
Lincoln assert that his parents were Virginians and that he was born in
Kentucky, and, “I have urged the colonization of the Negroes, and I
shall continue until it is accomplished. My emancipation proclamation
was linked with this plan.”

Dixon’s wish fulfillment is that, had Lin-

coln lived, the black man would have been “repatriated” to Africa, un-
created, returned to the original chaos from whence he came. Even
the emancipator of the black man, a father of the Union, saw the ne-
cessity of this action according to Thomas Dixon.

Still, uncreating the black man or reducing him to an animal may

not have been the original aim but a means to an end. Iago includes
himself in his narrative, and he knows that identity is a narrative that
can be told in many ways.

Iago, then, like seemingly all of Dixon’s

protagonists, appears to know that defining everyone in his context is
one way of defining himself. Iago cheekily states to Roderigo, “It is as
sure as you are Roderigo/ Were I the Moor I would not be Iago.”

Othello here is named solely by his race, as he frequently is through-
out the play, while Iago is defined against him by his name, a specific
identity. This difference may be because whiteness is presupposed and
needs no tag, but it still speaks to the relationship between the as-
sumed and unassumed. Iago may “hate the Moor,” but he needs him
to define himself against, to successfully cite his masculine and racial
role, his identity. Again, this paradox is the “perverse dynamic.” He
can be Iago or the Moor, but the one role is defined by the other.

Dixon’s white aristocratic characters are trapped in this same dou-

ble bind. The black male becomes central to Dixon’s work, as he is
needed to help define race, class, and gender.

The black male is par-

adoxically the lowest in Dixon’s hierarchy, yet the most integral to it.
This bind has to do with race, but it informs these white men’s per-
formance of gender roles as well. The terms “narration,” “labeling,”
“enacting,” “performance,” and “reiteration” have been used here
interchangeably—Judith Butler offers citational practice, reiteration,
and their relationship to the “law” as an encompassing paradigm for
all of these terms in regard to gender.

Dixon and his generation of white, Southern, aristocratic males

would have their instances of reiteration of both these citations (race
and gender) and the law and their own possibility of its, and by defi-
nition their, failure. Dixon’s constitutive constraints would not be
exactly the same as Thomas Nelson Page’s, William Gilmore Simms’s,
or even William Shakespeare’s, but he would want to reiterate his role
and their law (predated citations), for he seems to have feared this

D i x o n J r . a n d S e l f - N a r r at i o n

Butlerian failure,

and he projected that fear onto the black man,

making him the chief constitutive constraint for Dixon’s generation.

Again, the perverse dynamic is at work here, and the formation of

white upper-class masculinity depended on its opposition to its narra-
tion of the black man—the two were inextricably entwined. Dixon’s
race and class of men not only knew what they were through the use
of helpful models, such as those in Shakespeare to name only one, but
they also knew what they were by what they thought they were not.
There were, however, many cultural forces affecting these citations
and forced narrations.

Conservative whites returned to dominance in their Southern states

in what they termed “the Redemption,” in 1877.

While this return

to power could have signaled the beginning of racial radicalism and the
likes of Thomas Dixon, it did not, not quite yet. An economic reces-
sion in the late 1880s and a depression in the 1890s endangered the
Victorian family and sex roles as it became difficult for men to main-
tain their positions as providers, thus causing feelings of inadequacy.

The instability of the white masculine role due to these economic
hardships offered the opportunity for failure in reiteration, for slip-
page. In Butlerian terms, the punishable consequence would be the
loss of power and a failure to recite the law, making it authoritative.

The effect was a destabilization of the categories of power. The un-

certainty of what kind of hierarchy would replace the old slave/free
man dialectic caused a mobile and changing society. The difficulty of
sustaining this white male role during this time period was a function
of both economic conditions and the hard social realities of the freed
black man. The solution to this problem of modernity was to produce
difference, and nothing afforded an opportunity quite like the mean-
ing of race and its resultant segregation.

These men would produce

these differences as surely as Iago does for Roderigo, Othello, and
even himself, and for many of the same reasons.

That is not to conflate fictional characters and real men. Yet, South-

ern Horizons, Dixon’s autobiography, demonstrates that the author
used events from his life in his fiction, and his life and art are bound to-
gether.

The African boy Dick from The Leopard’s Spots has his gene-

sis in young Dixon’s life; Austin Stoneman from The Clansman is, no
doubt, radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens; and Judge Butler of The
Traitor is an amalgamation of carpetbaggers. Both events and ideol-
ogy, word for word, move back and forth between Dixon’s fiction and
nonfiction. The effect is that it is tempting to read Dixon’s white male
protagonists as ideals of himself, an assertion that cannot be proven,
yet an engaging one nonetheless.

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

Further, given his appropriations of both self-narrated and forced

masculinity and race from Othello, it is enticing to see Dixon as an
Iago-like figure, whispering into the ears of his white male protago-
nists Ben Cameron, the Reverend John Durham, Charles Gaston, and
Dan Norton, only to name a few, and having them enact this role of
narrator of race and masculinity for him. These fictional characters, in
turn, end up taking up the cause of “I’ll pour this pestilence into his
ear,” and this is exactly what they do through Dixon’s works, fiction,
drama, and films.

Dixon explains, “I have made no effort to write literature. I had no

ambition to shine as a literary gymnast. It has always seemed to me a
waste of time to do such work. Every generation writes its own litera-
ture. My sole purpose in writing was to reach and influence with my
argument the mind of millions. I had a message and I wrote it as
vividly and simple as I know how.”

Dixon is truly a terrible writer

and a worse logician, but through these white male protagonists he
did disseminate his narration of black males and the relationship of the
white male to it, and Dixon clearly felt the need for these inventions,
though he was not the sole purveyor of this ideology. In a review of
The Leopard’s Spots in The Saturday Evening Post (April 12, 1902), one
reviewer shockingly argues, “I, for one, from absolute knowledge of
my facts, do not hesitate to say that the book is moderate in tone con-
sidering what might have been written.”

This notion is particularly

appalling considering that all three books of Dixon’s trilogy turn on
the act of rape. The Leopard’s Spots sold more than a million copies
within twelve months of its publication.

Dixon himself states with

pride, “The Clansman was a bestseller and reached a circulation of
more than a million copies,” and goes further to write, “But The Birth
of a Nation, founded on it, in ten years reached a hundred million peo-
ple”

Dixon was not alone in his attempt to narrate men both black

and white.

So this endeavor to construct the black man as an equivalent to the

status of an animal, if not to totally uncreate him, thereby raising the
anxious role of the white male during Dixon’s volatile period back to
one of superiority, was not only about hierarchies but was also about
something else—sex. Dixon and his ilk believed in the irrationality of
sexual impulses and imputed this force to Africans as animals as a way of
projecting their fear of this conceptualization of sex to an other.

While

all of this reiteration of white masculine roles through narration of the
black man is taking place, there is an even more tangible concern. Sex,
sex roles, and sexual insecurities frequently bubble under the surface of
Dixon’s works, sometimes rupturing the façade with violence, if not

D i x o n J r . a n d S e l f - N a r r at i o n

acting as a covert motivator. Dixon’s reasons for his appropriation of
Iago’s narrative technique of identity are multitudinous—cultural, po-
litical, psychological, and ideological—yet it is this projection of sexual-
ity versus its expression that is the lynchpin of Othello and informs
Dixon’s annexation of the play.

Volumes have been written about Iago’s motivation for destroying

Othello; it seems to be one of the central preoccupations of many
viewers and readers of the play—Iago’s reasons. One such motivator
is lack of advancement. Iago is upset that the “bookish theoric”
Michael Cassio has been promoted over him because, “Preferment
goes by letter and affection,/ And not by old gradation, where each
second/ Stood heir to the first.”

After having Cassio cast aside in a

scandal of Iago’s making and infecting Othello with his story of Des-
demona’s infidelity, the villain is told by his captain, “Now art thou
my lieutenant,” to which he replies, “I am your own forever.”

This

vow sounds like one of fidelity, in contradistinction to Cassio and
Desdemona.

Iago recovers his position, the loss of which must have affected his

sense of identity, of his masculine role, of his manhood. After all, the
villain does assert, “If Cassio do remain,/ He hath a daily beauty in
his life/ That makes me ugly.”

Iago is anxious about his role, despite

his cool conniving. “Honest Iago” claims to be motivated by “sport
and profit,” or makes no declaration at all, as in the play’s climax,
when he taunts, “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know./
From this time forth I will never speak word.”

Readers and viewers

can never be quite sure; Iago’s last assertion especially invites viewers
to contemplate motivations. Still, the most charged anxiety that seems
to be expressed in Shakespeare’s play is sexual, and it is this anxious
topic and how it informs black and white masculinity, and white
femininity as well, that is a constant thread throughout all possible
motivators of the majority of the play’s characters.

This same anxiety also informs Thomas Dixon’s constructions of

masculinity and femininity, both white and black. Dixon creates in
The Leopard’s Spots Tim Shelby, a “full-blooded Negro” who is col-
lege educated and “well versed in English history,” and has him argue
to a crowd of freed black men:

Our proud white aristocrats of the South are in a panic it seems. They fear the
coming power of the Negro. They fear their Desdemonas may be fascinated
again by an Othello. Well, Othello’s day has come at last. If he has dreamed
dreams in the past his tongue dared not speak, the day is fast coming when he
will put these dreams into deeds, not words.

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

This dangerous new creature, the educated black man, meant to ab-

scond with the white woman, leaving the white masculine role, as de-
fined by Dixon, lacking. The freedom that Africans wanted in Dixon’s
perspective, and later D. W. Griffith’s as well, was sexual.

In what

may possibly be a case of projection, Dixon could not imagine any
other motivation for the African yearning for freedom than the desire
for white women, an (il)logical extension of his African-as-animal nar-
rative. Again, this thinking is a paranoid reaction to Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, of which Dixon writes in The Leopard’s Spots, “A little Yankee
woman wrote a crude book. The single act of that woman’s will caused
the war, killed a million men, desolated and ruined the South, and
changed the history of the world.”

Dixon’s shoot-the-messenger

thinking ignores his own crudity.

Shelby’s “deed” is an attempt in the General Assembly of North

Carolina to introduce an “Act to Relieve Married Women from the
Bonds of Matrimony When United to Felons, and to Define Felony.”
Shelby defines all rebellious Confederates as felons and offers “that the
married relations of all such felons are hereby dissolved and their wives
absolutely divorced, and said felons shall be forever barred from con-
tracting marriage or living under the same roof with their former
wives.”

Tim Shelby tries to legislate Othello and Desdemona couples

into existence by divorcing white women from their men. Shelby,
Dixon’s black “animal” posing as a legislator, is, in a sense, antifamily
values in Dixon’s paranoid fictive world. Dixon has the bill defeated,
but the sequence reveals his anxiety about black male sexual intentions.

This same kind of anxiety can be seen in Iago’s statements. He

spits, “I hate the Moor;/ And it is thought abroad that twixt my
sheets/ He’s done my office. I know not if ’t be true;/ But I, for
mere suspicion in that kind,/ Will do as if for surety.”

This charge

he repeats later in the play: “For that I do suspect the lusty Moor/
Hath leaped into my seat, the thought whereof/ Doth, like a poison-
ous mineral, gnaw my innards;/ And nothing can or shall content my
soul/ Till I am evened with him, wife for wife.”

Shakespeare provides

no evidence for Iago’s fear—not even an intimation. Iago is, in fact, so
sexually insecure that he fears “Cassio with my nightcap too.”

Both of

these potential betrayers suffer at the hands of Iago’s projective narra-
tions of their identities. Iago narrates the sexual roles for the black man,
the white woman, and himself throughout the play, an act that Dixon’s
protagonists and narrators feel the need to commit as well. What these
constructions reveal is the very anxiety Iago puts forth in Shakespeare’s
play—the fear of cuckoldry, which leads to the possibility of failure to
cite the white masculine role.

D i x o n J r . a n d S e l f - N a r r at i o n

The antagonist of The Clansman, Austin Stoneman, argues, “Your

first task, as I told you in the beginning, is to teach every Negro to
stand erect in the presence of his former master and assert his man-
hood.”

Dixon’s villain is discussing liberty, but the sexual connota-

tions in his word choice are rather obvious. What Dixon fears the most
is the vision of the African male “standing erect” and “asserting his
manhood,” especially in the presence of his former master. In Dixon’s
ideology of racial radicalism, the black man was first given freedom,
then economic and political power, and then, finally, as the protagonist
Ben Cameron explains, “The next step will be a black hand on a white
woman’s throat.”

In Dixon’s racist fictive world, Cameron’s prophecy

comes true with the black assault of the white woman.

This fear of black male sexuality is an apprehension of the white

masculine role as well, its contingency, and it resonates from Iago and
Brabantio to the Cameron family, Charles Gaston, and pretty much
any of Dixon’s white, aristocratic, Southern men. Yet there is an im-
portant difference between Shakespeare’s and Dixon’s treatment of
this sexuality. This difference has to do with the white female in this
nexus of gender and race.

Othello had been performed frequently in America, yet its produc-

tions declined during the Jim Crow era of 1890 to 1920 and the play
was frequently parodied.

Even though Shakespeare carried so much

cultural authority in nineteenth-century America, and even though the
play had been enacted frequently before Dixon’s era, the play declined
in American culture for a simple reason: Desdemona chooses Othello.
This choosing reflects Tim Shelby’s wish (and prophecy) in his above-
quoted speech from The Leopard’s Spots. And Thomas Dixon’s fear.
The black man imagines white women will be fascinated with these
new “Othellos”—not one anywhere in Dixon’s works ever is. Still, the
anxiety of the possibility lingers in Dixon’s novels despite his best
efforts.

Early in The Leopard’s Spots, a young Charles Gaston and his mother

must defend their home from newly freed black men, drunk on power
and booze. Young Gaston had lost his father in the war and the only
adult male he had to help with their defense was a stereotypically loyal-
to-the-end slave by the name of Nelse. During the attack, Mrs. Gaston
takes down her dead husband’s sword from the mantle. Dixon writes,
“She took the sword from its place and handed it to Nelse. Was there
a shade of doubt in her heart as she saw his black hand close over its
hilt as he drew it from the scabbard and felt its edge! If so she gave no
sign.”

In the absence of the white male patriarch (a Civil War loss),

the son is almost infantilized and the phallic symbol of the father’s

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

power, and its potential defense of the white family, is wielded by a
black man. This scene is oddly sexual, as reflected in Dixon’s word
choice; still, Nelse feels the sword’s edge and uses it as it was “meant”
to be. The passage reads as if the narrator has a moment of doubt,
even if Mrs. Gaston does not. Perhaps only the “edge” of this strong
symbol keeps sex and race roles aright in Dixon’s fiction, but there is
this apprehension.

Yet, in Shakespeare, the white female clearly selects the Moor.

White male characters in the play do, however, feel compelled to offer
many reasons for Desdemona’s choice, all revealing their biases. Her
father postulates that Desdemona was “corrupted/ By spells and med-
icines bought of mountebanks,” otherwise, “Sans witchcraft could
not.”

Brabantio stretches the idea of black magic while searching for

a motivation he finds acceptable. What is important here is that Bra-
bantio, as if the idea is impossible for him to believe, never suggests
agency for Desdemona. He attacks Othello:

Whether a maid so tender, fair, and happy,
So opposite to marriage that she shunned
The wealthy curled darlings of our nation
Would ever have, t’ incur a general mock,
Run from her gaurdage to the sooty bosom
Of such a thing as thou—to fear, not to delight.

Brabantio’s explanation is witchcraft and magic—the materials of

“savages” in his world. His response is to immediately narrate Othello
into a thing, a thing to be feared. Dixon had apparently learned a les-
son from Brabantio’s fate; his works were an attempt to head off Des-
demona’s choice. In an interview on May 26, 1915, Dixon posited
that his purpose was “to create a feeling of abhorrence in white peo-
ple, especially white women, against colored men.”

Dixon’s trans-

parent plan does not exactly need to be stated so baldly to be perceived
in his works, but his motive just might elude the author himself: the
shoring up of white masculinity through the degradation of black mas-
culinity and the defense of white femininity.

Iago practices this same method by narrating Desdemona’s prefer-

ence for both Roderigo and Othello. To Roderigo, “when she is/
sated with his body, she will find the error of her/ choice. She must
have change, she must.”

Iago assures Roderigo that Desdemona’s

choice is sexual and it will run its course. Iago defines the black man,
and a white woman’s attraction to him, in terms of sex only, but when
speaking of himself and Roderigo, he states, “We have reason to cool

D i x o n J r . a n d S e l f - N a r r at i o n

our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts.”

Hence,

white men have superiority over both the black male sexual beast and
the white woman who can fall for this beast only in a carnal way be-
cause he is less than a man and subject to his animal nature. The im-
plication of the latter part is that Desdemona has a strong libido, is a
sexual being. Iago may be admitting female sexuality, autonomy, and
choice, or he may be merely telling Roderigo what he wants to hear.

Iago continues this juxtaposition of sex versus civility, black versus

white, in Manichean fashion to Roderigo when he states, “Her eye
must be fed; and what delight shall she have to look on the devil?
When the blood is made dull with the act of sport, there should be,
again to inflame it and give it satiety a fresh appetite, loveliness in
favor, sympathy in years, manners and beauties—all of which the
Moor is defective in.”

The villain narrates the difference between

the white and black man and exactly how the white woman fits into
this triangle of identity. This narration is to suit the gullible Roderigo,
but one could argue that Iago suits himself as well. The white male
may be lacking in this animalistic sexuality, but this seeming deficiency
is caused by actual superiority—with reason that leads to civility—and
this attribute will eventually inflame the likes of Desdemona and
women of her societal position. Roderigo’s delusions are stoked by
Iago’s flattering and pleasing narratives.

Iago narrates Desdemona, and in turn Othello, the title character,

playing on race differences to spur Othello’s insecurity and, in a sense,
lower his self-image. Iago pours his narration into Othello’s ears:

In Venice they [Wives] do let God see the pranks
They dare not show their husbands; their best conscience
Is not to leave ’t undone, but keep’t unknown, and,
Not to affect many proposed matches
of her own clime, complexion, and degree,
Whereto we see in all things nature tend . . . I may fear
Her will, recoiling to her better judgment,
May fall to match you with her country forms
And happily repent.

Iago separates the black man and the white woman by placing the
mistrust of the white woman in Othello’s head.

In turn, the villain

forces Othello to see himself for what he really is in Venetian society—
a painful truth. Despite his position in this society and how much he
has assimilated himself, Othello will always be an outsider, as in “all
things nature tends.”

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

Thomas Dixon takes a slightly different approach with the same re-

sult in mind. The author makes the black man the rapist beast and does
so for several reasons. First, by reducing the man to an animal, he re-
moves him from the aegis of the supposed “all men are created equal”;
creates the abhorrence in white women for the black man, as he stated
he desired; relieves the white woman of any possibility of choosing a
black man, keeping her purity, both racial and sexual, intact; lowers the
freed black man’s self-image to match his own conception of these men;
and reiterates the white male aristocratic role as protector of white
women and as being superior to the role of the African. Dixon reiterates
this citational law of gender that hinges on race and masculinity and, in
his own ideology, saves the Anglo-Saxon race. Iago becomes Henry V.

Dixon initiates this narration, this citation, in his very first novel

The Leopard’s Spots. The juxtaposition of white and black masculinity
begins during childhood with the protagonist’s (Charles Gaston)
bond with young Dick (the sexual connotations of Dixon’s character
naming once again rears its Freudian head). Gaston and family take
the young African boy in and try to raise him, but Dixon’s radicalism
has the character move toward brutality. Dick runs away when threat-
ened with a whip, but eventually returns to rape and murder the
young white girl, Flora Camp. This portrayal offers a convenient ra-
tionale for Dixon’s view and treatment of the black man—he will de-
velop toward criminality and betray white trust.

One of Dixon’s primary motives is to reveal this inevitable betrayal,

to question the idea of the “New Negro” put forth by racial conser-
vatives. Also, this betrayal exposes as a lie the loyalty of the older
slaves.

These older slaves are only as loyal as their opportunities

allow them to be. While exposing this betrayal, Dixon panders when
he leeringly writes about Dick’s crime:

Flora lay on the ground with her clothes torn to shreds and stained with
blood. Her beautiful yellow curls were matted across her forehead in a dark
red lump beside a wound where her skull had been crushed. The stone lay at
her side, the crimson mark of her life showing on its jagged edges . . . it was
too plain, the terrible crime that had been committed.

Dick’s black animalism, in Dixon’s fictive world, leads to a mix of sex
and violence with white femininity as its prey. The author magnifies
the indecency of this act by making Flora Camp so young, with an
emphasis on her innocence.

This narration of black masculinity struck a chord with Dixon’s

readers.

This societal terror of the black rapist beast may have been

D i x o n J r . a n d S e l f - N a r r at i o n

a psychological reimbursement for the sexual exploitation of African
women during slavery, or it may have just been an easy way for whites
to justify their racist inclinations.

Yet it was not just black masculin-

ity Dixon was defining. The author makes sure to draw a clear line be-
tween the white men searching for the body of the young Flora and
the “Negroes” who hide during the hunt. He observes about these
black people and their relationship to the whites, “Had they been
beasts of the field the gulf between them would not have been
deeper.”

Despite these efforts to define black men as animals,

Dixon’s novel reveals the instability of these categories. The white
crowd searching for the young Flora becomes, in Dixon’s words, “A
Thousand-Legged Beast,” and Tom Camp, when considering his
daughter’s then-unknown murderer, spits, “Oh! if I only had him
here before me now, and God Almighty would give me strength with
these hands to tear his breast open and rip his heart out!—I—could—
eat—it—like—a—wolf!”

Camp’s cry reads almost like a paraphrase

of Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing. Incensed over the public
shaming of Hero and trying to spur Benedick to action, Beatrice
growls, “O God, that I were a man!/ I would eat his heart in the mar-
ketplace.”

Beatrice’s message is that honor must be defended and

justice allows it to be done so in the most animalistic of ways—and
the job undoubtedly belongs to men. Not only Tom Camp but also
the white crowd searching for Flora seems to understand this compo-
nent of masculinity.

This instability would, however, not be blamed on the “natural”

volatility of the white male citation in Dixon’s works as much as ex-
posure to the animal force of the black male role. Mrs. Durham ex-
plains to the young Allan McLeod that by associating with “Negro
politicians” he will “degrade” his masculinity, which she also refers to
with the sexually charged term “manhood.”

Mrs. Durham is prof-

fering that mere association can alter masculine citations. This sort of
instability gives credence to Judith Butler’s idea of the citational na-
ture of the law and its precarious quality at the moment of reiteration.
Failed reiteration can lead to an inability to substantiate the law. In
Thomas Dixon’s racial terms, “pollution” becomes a component of
race and its attendant masculinity.

George Harris Jr., son of Eliza (Stowe’s character from Uncle

Tom’s Cabin; Simon Legree is imported from that work and used for
Dixon’s purposes as well), is a similar yet more intellectualized version
of the narrative created for Dick. Harris is educated by Boston con-
gressman Everett Lowell and spends much of his time in the con-
gressman’s home. Of course, the congressman’s young daughter’s

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

response to blacks in general and Harris in particular is, “They always
gave me the horrors. Young Harris is the scholarly gentleman, I know.
He is good looking, talented, and I’ve played music for him some-
times to please you, but I can’t get over that little kink in his hair, his
big nostrils and full lips, and when he looks at me, it makes my flesh
creep.”

The passage suggests that even if the “New Negro” should

be “reformed” through the civilizing efforts of whites, the natural re-
action of the white woman should be one of disgust and horror. Miss
Lowell’s response is premised entirely on physical attributes, which
she sees as trumping any cultivation.

Harris falls in love with Lowell’s daughter, and when he confesses

his desire to marry her, this racially progressive congressman retorts,
“If you were able to win her by consent, a thing unthinkable, I would
do what old Virginius did in the Roman Forum, kill her with my own
hand, rather than see her sink in your arms into the backwaters of
Negroid life! Now go!”

Like Tom Camp before him, Lowell prefers

homicide to the pollution of miscegenation. Lowell’s “backwaters of
Negroid life” ostensibly suggests the inferiority that the congressman
places on the African race, but it also intimates the true place of the
black American, even in the supposedly racially enlightened Northern
states. Dixon is no doubt calling Northern progressives on their racial
hypocrisy in judging the South. A fundamental tie exists between the
portrayal of George Harris and Dick. Dixon suggests that uneducated
black men will rape, and cultured, educated black men will seek white
women for marriage—both will end in miscegenation.

Sticking to

his radical racist guns, Dixon has Harris descend into criminality by
slower degrees than Dick, but his fate is sealed in much the same
manner.

Dixon provides an even more palpable portrayal of the black rapist

beast in his next book, The Clansman. His beast, Gus, in this novel
and “four black brutes” invade the home of Mrs. Lenoir and her
daughter, Marion, the first love of the protagonist Ben Cameron, and
hold the two defenseless women at gunpoint, tying the mother to the
bedpost. At this point, Dixon panders and leers even harder than in
his previous novel:

The mother screamed. A blow from a black fist in her mouth, and the rope

was tied. . . .

Again the huge fist swept her to the floor.
Gus stepped closer, with an ugly leer, his flat nose dilated, his sinister bead-

eyes wide apart gleaming ape-like as he laughed:

“We ain’t atter money!”

D i x o n J r . a n d S e l f - N a r r at i o n

The girl uttered a cry, long, tremulous, heart-rending, piteous.
A single tiger-spring, and the black claws of the beast sank into the soft white

throat and she was still.

This portrayal of the black rapist beast is even more graphic than

Dick’s episode in The Leopard’s Spots. Dixon only shows the afteref-
fects of the rape of the white woman in The Leopard’s Spots, but he
ratchets up the pandering, melodrama, and rhetoric as he forces his
readers to actually view the attack in The Clansman. Perhaps the au-
thor was merely following the rules of a sequel in trying to top its pre-
decessor, or possibly Dixon felt the need to justify the KKK in The
Clansman by dramatizing his black rapist beast and the jungle in
which it exists more graphically. How he has his characters respond to
this act is telling and has an interesting correlation to his real life.

In Southern Horizons, the young Dixon overhears a woman relating

a very similar rape story about herself and her daughter to his uncle,
the local hero and all-around patriarch, Colonel McAfee. While Mar-
ion and her mother leapt to their deaths in The Clansman, the dis-
traught mother in Southern Horizons confesses to the colonel that she
considered killing herself and her daughter after the attack but lacked
the courage to go through with it. Colonel McAfee responds, “Yes,
mother, thank you for coming. I’ll be a father to you both in this sad
hour—depend on it.”

Dixon’s boyhood hero offers protection,

while the female victim plants the idea in young Tom’s head that white
women should, ideally, choose to die after forced penetration by black
males. This action is the only way to avoid the pollution of miscegena-
tion, even if it was forced. Tom goes on in Southern Horizons to tell of
how “the mental and physical assault on one of their daughters had
made our people one . . . the spirit of elemental manhood had at last
leaped forth, half startled at itself, ‘its feet upon the ashes and the rags,
its hand tight gripped on the throat of thug and thief.’ ”

It takes the

rape of the white woman by a black rapist beast to bring white mas-
culinity into being. This notion is the central premise of the KKK.

The author relies on black male sexuality to construct both the white

male and female. Dixon depended on this construction in his reality,
but he idealized it even more in his fiction. Marion and Mrs. Lenoir do,
after all, kill themselves after Gus’s sexual assault in The Clansman and
so retain some kind of “purity.” In fact, death is the only outcome for
women exposed to the assault, or even attempted attack, of the black
rapist beast. Early in The Leopard’s Spots, Tom Camp’s eldest daughter,
Annie, is abducted by several of the “black brutes,” during her wedding
ceremony (still a virgin, still “pure”), and the Civil War vet orders white

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

attendees to fire, effectively killing his daughter because “there are
things worse than death!”

After the fact, Camp concludes, “It cuts

me to the quick when I think that I gave the orders to the boys to
shoot. But, Preacher, I’d a killed her with my own hand if I couldn’t a
saved her no other way! I’d do it over again a thousand times if I had
to.”

100

Part of the patriarch’s role is to protect white females from the

black rapist beast, even if it means destroying the very thing these fa-
thers protect.

101

Just as Colonel McAfee promised the rape victims his paternal pro-

tection in Dixon’s youth, so does Ben Cameron in The Clansman.
His answer to Marion’s fate is the title of the next book and the chap-
ter of the novel after the graphic rape—The Ku Klux Klan and “The
Hunt for the Animal.” Dixon’s apologia for the KKK is that it is a de-
fensive organization (later taken over by rowdy, lower-class men in
The Traitor) used to protect white females and bring black rapist
beasts to, what they call, justice. Dixon has the white males regenerate
their masculinity and cite their sexed positions successfully by clearly
placing everyone else in their proper roles.

All of these Southern, white, aristocratic reiterations of masculinity

and their correlative projections may seem a far cry from Shake-
speare’s Othello, but they are not. John Quincy Adams said in 1835,
“The great moral lesson of Othello is that black and white blood can-
not be intermingled without a gross outrage upon the law of nature;
and that, in such violations, nature will vindicate her laws.”

102

The

irony is that Adams ignores Iago’s culpability in all of the play’s
tragedy while sounding much like the villain himself. This interpreta-
tion of Shakespeare’s play is, however, not very surprising.

103

Adams’s

interpretation seems to be Dixon’s relationship to the play as well—
focusing on the black man and the white woman and ignoring the
white men and their complicity in this tragedy. In fact, this idea could
be the thesis of Dixon’s poisonous contribution to race relations in
modern America. Perhaps an even larger purpose exists for Dixon’s
narrations of gender and race in The Clansman. By adhering to strict
race and gender categories, Dixon makes the issues in his works less
sectional and more national, transcending Southern concerns.

104

Part

of the reason behind Dixon’s narrations of these black and white
male identities and the white female role is to set a fixed place for all
involved. But the larger picture is a totally unified country, united
against blackness in its forging of a modern nation. Dixon needed a
scapegoat for the ideological conflict that led to the Civil War and an at-
tempt at dissolution of the Union, and the black man and the role the
author had written for him fit the bill nicely.

105

D i x o n J r . a n d S e l f - N a r r at i o n

Still, it has already been demonstrated that, notwithstanding

Dixon’s attempt, these supposedly fixed roles ruptured even within
the aegis of his own texts. Even Shakespeare’s texts reveal how unsta-
ble defining masculinity against others is, and many of his scripts
hinge on the difference between the ideal and the actual.

106

Though

modern readers will have a hard time swallowing Dixon’s narratives of
race and gender as “ideal,” as well they should, Dixon seems to beg
his readers to view them that way and bemoans his tragedy that they
are not, whether knowingly or not. Still, these racial and gender ideals
are, however, part of Dixon’s cultural milieu, embraced by many de-
spite the gaps between model and expression.

It has already been shown how Dixon took his lesson from Othello

to keep the black man and white woman apart, but his reason was not
solely sexuality—it was the fear of its product, fear of mulattoes, fear
of the resultant breakdown of the white man’s identity. Dixon’s causal
chain begins with the inhumanity of Africans, moves to the threat of
miscegenation that will destroy the Anglo-Saxon race and keep it
from its divine mission of leadership, and ends with the repatriation of
blacks to Africa.

107

The starting point of this slippery slope is black

sexuality, and its victim, ultimately, is really the citation of Southern,
white, aristocratic masculinity.

Shakespeare’s The Tempest is driven by similar concerns. The rela-

tionship between the patriarchal magician Prospero and his “savage
and deformed slave” can be read as an allegory of exploration and col-
onization, with Caliban representing the natural man or man in a
more Freudian manner.

108

No matter which interpretation is given

preference, what is important is that Caliban is an other, and is bound
into a relationship with Prospero and his daughter, Miranda. Cer-
tainly the construction of Caliban as half-animal, half-human, with
questionable parentage, born from a “wicked dam,” the witch Syco-
rax, and the devil himself, foretells the coming of Dixon’s descriptions
of the black man, as has already been shown. In addition, Caliban
does spend a fair amount of his actually small part in the play imagin-
ing various ways to kill Prospero, by clubbing or stabbing, no doubt a
fear of Southern white males inculcated into the black males’ thinking
from the earliest days of African slavery. However, it is another of Cal-
iban’s intentions that is noteworthy:

Prospero: Thou most lying slave,
Whom stripes may move, not kindness! I have used thee
In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate
The honor of my child.

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

Caliban: Oho, Oho! Would’t had been done!
Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else
This isle with Calibans.

109

Caliban’s reply is the same one feared by Thomas Dixon Jr. as the
emancipated black man’s. Caliban sees this ability to produce off-
spring as power, a power that not even the magic of Prospero can
control.

Dixon would have gladly placed the African male into the role of

Caliban—moved only by the whip, subjugated by the stronger white
man, a “lesser” creature in need of white paternalism, white control—
but his fear is that the black man, given the chance (freedom) will also
want to “people the isle with Calibans.” The Reverend John Durham
asks and warns in The Leopard’s Spots:

Can you build, in a Democracy a nation inside of nation of two hostile races?
We must do this or become mulatto, and that is death. Every inch in the ap-
proach of these races across the barriers that separate them is a movement
toward death. You cannot seek the Negro vote without asking him to your
home sooner or later. If you ask him to your house, he will break bread with
you at last. And if you seat him at your table, he has the right to ask your
daughter’s hand in marriage.

110

The tortured logic is there, but the anxiety sounds like Prospero’s.
The fear of bringing these “things” into your home is a fear for the
“honor of my child.” Slaves could be controlled by masters, as Cal-
iban is by Prospero, but a freed Caliban could take daughters and
make these white men failures in their masculine roles.

Miranda’s view of Caliban also matches what Dixon seems to pre-

fer in his works. She remarks about the slave, “ ’Tis a villain, sir,/ I do
not love to look on.”

111

This sentiment is echoed by Susan Lowell

when describing young George Harris’s looks in The Leopard’s Spots.
She shudders, “It makes my flesh creep.”

112

Dixon fulfills his own

desire—white female detestation of the black man.

Prospero’s solution is, like Dixon’s will be, segregation. Caliban

laments, “and here you/ sty me/ In this hard rock, whiles you do keep
from me/ The rest o’ th’ island.”

113

Prospero “allows” Caliban to be his

slave as long as he can control him with his magic, but the fear for his
daughter’s honor causes him to segregate the slave from the white
home. Miranda also complains to Caliban, “I pitied thee/ Took pains to
make thee speak, taught thee each hour/ One thing or other . . . /But
thy vile race,/ Thou didst learn, had that in’t which good natures/

D i x o n J r . a n d S e l f - N a r r at i o n

Could not abide to be with.”

114

Miranda is angry because her attempt

to educate Caliban did not “help” him; his own flawed nature would
not allow him to use his education to join her proper society.

Dixon gives voice to a similar sentiment regarding Africans in

Southern Horizons. He theorizes, “Education is the development of
what is. If the something to be educated is not there, no amount of
genius in teachers can put it there. This is true of the white race. The
plea in excuse for the crimes of Reconstruction was that the Negro
should be educated. A few Negroes take a college education and are
strengthened and helped by it. Today it is being forced on thousands
who are unfitted for the work of life.”

115

The author’s emphasis on

what “is,” like that of Miranda, who is really parroting her father,
does not hold up, even in Dixon’s fictive world—not what it is to be
a black man (rapist beast), a white man (superior protector), a white
woman (idealized virtue), or a black woman (animalistic seducer). It
is this last narration, and its relationship to the citation of white, aris-
tocratic, Southern masculinity, that becomes Dixon’s greatest slip-
page, his most palpable failure to cite the predated law of his sexed
position. His attempt to narrate this relationship leads to a feminiza-
tion of his cherished white male role.

The white male’s interaction with the black woman calls Dixon’s

narrations of race and gender into question and exposes them as
highly contingent.

116

Howard Zinn reports in A People’s History of the

United States (1980), “In 1910 there were 10 million Negroes in the
United States, and 9 million of them were in the South.”

117

Dixon

and his generation of white men may have feared the numbers them-
selves. Of course, there were legal definitions that varied from state to
state of how “Negro” was described in the time period. Here is how
Dixon has the Reverend John Durham define it:

One drop of Negro blood makes a Negro. It kinks the hair, flattens the nose,
thickens the lip, puts out the light of intellect, and lights the fires of brutal
passion. The beginning of Negro equality as a vital fact is the beginning of the
end of this nation’s life. There is enough Negro blood here to make mulatto
the whole Republic.

118

Not only does Dixon’s mouthpiece need to define it in what he

sees as a clear manner, but he also warns of the dangers of this Negro
blood; it threatens personal identity as well as national character by
making them mulatto. Dixon’s obsession with Africans would lead
him to first make clear distinctions between races and then concern-
ing those who could be Americans and those who could not.

119

Dif-

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

ference is not only important in stabilizing personal citations, but
what some like Dixon perceived as national citations as well. Dixon
hung his hat on racial distinctions in the forging of this idea. The mu-
latto called this idea into question in a disturbing way for the white
males of Dixon’s generation.

In the same year of Zinn’s above-mentioned count, 1910, Thomas

Dixon wrote and performed in his play The Sins of the Father, a drama
that he would turn into a novel two years later. This procedure would
be a reversal of Dixon’s normal modus operandi; he normally wrote
novels that he turned into touring dramas, with parts of The Leopard’s
Spots and The Clansman ultimately becoming the landmark of D. W.
Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. This reversal is fitting con-
sidering that the novel is a reversal in so many ways—of gender, of
race, and of power.

120

The Sins of the Father tells the story of Dan Norton, publisher, Civil

War vet, political aspirant, and all-around Southern white aristocrat.
Norton allows the product of a scandalous local interracial relation-
ship, the mulatto Cleo, to worm her way into first his business as
labor and then his home as caretaker of both his son and his sickly
wife. Eventually Norton and Cleo have a secret affair that produces a
daughter, who is sent to a convent. Tellingly, Dixon is careful that the
sexual relationship between the two and the birth of their daughter
take place “offstage,” only alluded to in ambiguous ways or in an
epistolary manner. Cleo blackmails Norton into letting her keep her
position in his home, while in the second half of the novel, titled
“Atonement,” the newspaper man becomes a segregationist politi-
cian. Finally, Norton’s legitimate son Andy replicates his father’s ac-
tions by falling in love with Norton and Cleo’s daughter, bringing the
“sins of the father” to full fruition. Norton endeavors to rectify the
situation by attempting to kill his son (an interesting gloss on all of
the earlier daughter killing) and succeeds in ending his own life.

The novel bears close examination, given Dixon’s previous narra-

tions of race and gender, but a logical starting point is the role of the
mulatto woman in the work. Dixon divulges a unique attitude in his
motivation and methodology. The author reverses the popular stereo-
typed figure of the tragic mulatto, making her the tyrannical aggres-
sor and the cause of the South’s degradation. This figure must be
found guilty; the black woman as victim of white sexual exploitation
clashes with Dixon’s ideology that miscegenation derives from black,
animal sexuality.

121

Dixon makes Cleo the sexual aggressor in The Sins

of the Father, giving her the power, but also the blame for a generation
of mulatto offspring.

D i x o n J r . a n d S e l f - N a r r at i o n

Norton himself argues in the novel, “This thing is here a living fact

which the white woman of the South must face? These hundred of
thousands of a mixed race are not accidents. She must know that this
racial degradation is not merely a thing of today, but the heritage of two
hundred years of sin and sorrow.”

122

Norton addresses the idea that this

problem has plagued Southern society right from its inception, but the
doctor to whom he has made this proclamation places the responsibil-
ity for it just a few paragraphs later, “Yes, I know, my boy, with that
young animal playing at your feet in physical touch with your soul and
body in the intimacies of our home, you never had a chance.”

123

The

black male rapist beast’s sexual power leads to revulsion and death for
the white woman; the black woman’s (and mulatto’s) animal sexuality
for the white man leads to both offspring and weakening of his mascu-
line role, therefore his power. Cleo is not, however, the first mulatto
woman to wield this kind of power in Dixon’s works. In The Clansman,
the antagonist and Yankee politician Austin Stoneman tries to “ruin”
the South by passing racial laws, but his mulatto live-in lover Lydia
Brown is Dixon’s scapegoat. Dixon writes:

Whatever her real position, she knew how to play the role she had chosen to
assume. No more curious or sinister figure ever cast a shadow across the his-
tory of a great nation than did this mulatto woman in the most corrupt hour
of American life. The grim old man who looked into her sleek tawny face and
her catlike eyes was steadily gripping the Nation by the throat. Did he aim to
make this woman the arbiter of social life, and her ethics the limit of its own
moral laws?

124

Thomas Dixon had so much fear of this mulatto woman that he as-
cribed that much power to her, calling the chapter that focuses on
her, sneeringly, “The First Lady of the Land.”

The fear that mulatto women were trying to undo the South is

present not only in Dixon’s fiction (black female sexual rapaciousness
was a cultural assumption) but also in his real life, as portrayed in his
autobiography. In it, Dixon points out that he based Austin Stone-
man on Thaddeus Stevens and that “the thing that has given Steven’s
name its most sinister meaning was that he was living in open adultery
with a Negro woman, while the leader of congress and the virtual dic-
tator of the nation.”

125

He also reports, “Five mulattoes . . . were

daughters of a black woman who had married a Frenchman. They di-
rected the skilled work of the Lobby that was robbing the state
[South Carolina] of millions. Charlotte, a young lady of voluptuous
figure and lustrous eyes, was said to possess powers of sorcery over

100

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

the statesmen of the new regime.”

126

The author echoes Brabantio’s

explanation of Othello’s “power” over Desdemona. Dixon fixes what
he feels is a very real threat in reality through his fiction. Austin
Stoneman recognizes his weakness and repudiates it, as he is taught
by Ben Cameron and other Southerners, by example, how to be not
just a man, but a white man.

A solution would not be as easy for Dan Norton by the time

Thomas Dixon gets to The Sins of the Father. The white male role be-
comes different—it is weaker. Dan Norton occupies the role of the
white woman under siege and is feminized. Dixon imbues this white
man with more sexuality and animalism than in past renderings.

127

There are several important reversals here, but the last one is the most
telling. Talking to Cleo late in the novel, Norton reveals, “I found out
twenty years ago that beneath the skin of every man sleeps an ape and a
tiger.”

128

What is remarkable is that Dixon has his white male protago-

nist take on the narrative that he had previously produced for the black
male only. The difference is that the white male enacts both the black
male and the white female narratives concurrently. On the one hand,
Norton argues, “That man is still an animal, with tooth and claw and
unbridled passions, that when put to the test his religion and his civi-
lization often are only a thin veneer.”

129

White men have this sexual

“beast within.” Thomas Dixon was, after all, a Presbyterian minister, in
the business of being a flesh-despising Protestant. On the other hand,
the white man also takes on the role of the besetting white woman
when confronted with the animalistic charms of the mulatto woman.
Dan Norton watches Cleo pretending to “eat up” his young son when
the narrator queries, “Could any man with red blood in his veins fight
successfully with a force like that? He heard the growl of the Beast
within as he stood watching the scene.”

130

White men may have the

same sexual beast in them as black men, but mulatto women have the
power to bring it to the surface, to control white men.

Dixon shifts the blame for a generation of mixed race offspring on

to animal-like sexual predators who are mulatto women (where did
the first one come from?), but there is a price. The cost of an innocent
Norton is the character’s masculinity, his position of power, and the
role of “master,” as all three are interdependent.

131

Yet The Sins of

the Father is really only the fullest expression of the possibility of the
white man slipping into the threatened white female role. Austin
Stoneman occupies this role in The Clansman, but so do, interestingly
enough, the Klansmen themselves. Once the Klan captures Gus for
the assault of Marion and Mrs. Lenoir, they gather to put him on
“trial.” Dr. Cameron hypnotizes the captive and gets him to relive his

D i x o n J r . a n d S e l f - N a r r at i o n

101

part in the crime from planning to completion. As Gus acts out his
deed, the Klansmen react:

Strong men began to cry like children. “Stop him! Stop him!” screamed a
clansman. . . . Some of the white figures had fallen prostrate on the ground,
sobbing in a frenzy of uncontrollable emotion. Some were leaning against the
walls, their faces in their arms. Again, old McAllister was on his knees crying
over and over again: “God have mercy on my people!”

132

The Klansmen not only relive the scene, but they also do so from the
child’s perspective, one of female victimization.

133

This scene reveals

the possibility that even the most supposedly masculine of Southern
white men, the Klansmen, could slip into this stereotypically feminine
space given the right provocation.

Dixon tips his hat to the permeability of the white male and female

roles in The Traitor. The Grand Dragon, John Graham, tells the
young beauty Susie, “My! My! But you look like one of us to-night,
with that sylph figure robe in white standing there ghost-like in the
moonlit shadows.”

134

The choice of “sylph” compels the reader to

think of a feminine ideal, one that aids in the performance of this type
of masculinity despite stereotyped clothing expectations.

135

In other

words, the Klansmen are appropriating the white feminine citation to
not only be the victim, but to also use it, so Dixon seems to think, to
do something about their victimhood.

While there have been these ruptures, these coalescences, these failed

citations in Dixon’s works all along, Dan Norton plays out the black
rapist beast and white female victim in his own identity and creates the
most conspicuous reversal of all of Dixon’s gender and race narratives
that preceded The Sins of the Father. This “uncomfortable” reversal may
be why it did not enjoy the popularity of Dixon’s earlier works.

136

Norton, like Marion and Mrs. Lenoir who came before him, must

offer his and his son’s life for the disgrace of sexual contact with
blackness. This act is the final appropriation of the white female role
in Dixon’s race and gender ideology. Yet, even in death, Dan Norton
sounds like Othello and/or Hamlet as he attempts to narrate his life,
how he will be thought of after he is gone. He argues:

The sin of your father is full grown and has brought forth death. Yet I was not
all to blame. We are caught tonight in the grip of the sins of centuries. I tried
to give my life to the people to save the children of the future. My shame
showed me the way as few men could have seen it, and I have set in motion
forces that can never be stopped. Others will complete the work I have begun.
But our time has come.

137

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S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

Norton’s work, his atonement, is the segregation of the races, and

the physical removal of blackness, back to the chaos from whence it
came. He, like Dixon, wants to uncreate miscegenation in the name of
white “purity” by first blaming it on blackness and then removing it
from “civilization.” Dixon’s posture here fascinates because he admits
that contact between the two races causes miscegenation and that
whites occupy the weaker, threatened biological position.

138

Dixon

feared for his race, country, region, gender, and, in sum total, his per-
sonal identity, as revealed in his works. The author strove to create a
nation based on whiteness, but there were personal reasons that had to
do with the reiteration of his role of Southern, white, aristocratic man-
hood that drove this larger purpose.

These intimate motives start with Dixon’s father, the Baptist preacher

Thomas Dixon Sr. The Sins of the Father functions as an apologia not
only for white male raping of black slaves but for his father as well. The
elder Dixon fathered a “black” son himself.

139

This argument derives

from the writings of John E. Bruce and his “Bruce Grit” columns (a
part of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the
collection The Selected Writings of John Edward Bruce, Militant Black
Journalist). The story, not published anywhere else, exposes Dixon.
Bruce relates:

After publication of Leopard’s, a biracial man who lived in New York City began
to claim often and loudly that he was Thomas Dixon’s half brother, the son of
Baptist preacher Thomas Dixon Sr. When confronted with this allegation, Tom
Dixon replied, “Yes, I know that Darky, he is always getting himself into trou-
ble and I have helped him a number of times. His mother was a cook in our
family in N.C.” . . . whites buried the information and historians have not men-
tioned it since . . . it nowhere appears . . . that Dixon denied kinship with that
“darky.”

140

Dixon’s racial narrative, then, of the dangerous black mulatto, in fact
his entire racial ideology, although hard to prove, may have well been
an attempt to absolve his father for his own sexual indiscretions. At
the very least, Dixon’s ideas were a part of his culture.

Blaming the black rapist male beast, revealing the danger of the

animal-like black woman and mulatto, and showing the complicity of
the weakness of the white female, one of Thomas Dixon’s main ob-
jectives was to find fault—who was responsible for the threat to white
masculinity, to the region, and to the country? Was it the Othellos?
The Desdemonas? The Calibans? In Dixon’s view, it certainly was not
the Brabantios, the Prosperos, or even the Iagos. If Dixon seemed

D i x o n J r . a n d S e l f - N a r r at i o n

103

hesitant to blame the white fathers for the fragility he abhorred, he
never came close to considering his own culpability. The hint of this
guilt is revealed in The Sins of the Father.

Dixon’s novel is rife with passages of the always animal-like mu-

latto Cleo Peeler being watched, ostensibly by Dan Norton, but more
subtly by Dixon’s narrator:

Norton, watching her with indulgent amusement at her impudence, saw that
she moved her young form with a rhythmic grace that was perfect. The sim-
ple calico dress, with a dainty little check, fitted her perfectly. It was cut low
and square at the neck and showed the fine lines of a beautiful throat. Her
arms were round and finely shaped and bare to an inch above her elbows. The
body above the waistline was slender, and the sinuous free movement of her
figure showed that she wore no corset. Her step was as light as a cat’s and her
voice full of good humor and the bubbling spirits of a perfectly healthy female
animal.

141

Dixon seems to drool right along with Norton as he reveals every
inch of sensuality of this woman (animal?) to his readers.

This kind of description is not an isolated incident in the novel. In

fact, it is a constant thread until after the sexual liaison between Nor-
ton and Cleo. Dixon continues:

He couldn’t shake off the impression that she was a sleek young animal, play-
ful and irresponsible, that had strayed from home and wandered into his
office. And he loved animals. . . . She simply could not get into an ungraceful
attitude. Every movement was instinct with vitality. She was alive to her finger
tips. Her body swayed in perfect rhythmic unison with her round, bare arms
as she turned the old-fashioned rope windlass . . . [her] voice had none of the
light girlish quality of her age of eighteen, but rather the full passionate power
of a woman of twenty-five.

142

Norton and the narrator seem to leer over this woman, yet refer to
her constantly in animal terms, hinting at a predisposition for bestial-
ity. The narrator’s part in lusting after this woman points away from
Dan Norton and toward Thomas Dixon more than the author could
have realized.

There is no physical description of Norton’s white wife in the

novel, except that she is a bedridden invalid, worn out by the traumas
of childbirth. The novel does, however, comment on her mental
state. Dixon writes, “Her mind was still a child’s. She could not think
evil of anyone. She loved the young and she loved grace and beauty
wherever she saw it.”

143

Eventually, knowledge of Norton’s affair

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S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

with Cleo “weakened her vitality,” ultimately leading to her death.

144

A submerged idea in this portrayal is that the white woman, in her
weakness and childishness, is complicit in Norton’s infidelity.

145

The compelling significance resides in how all of these narrations

correlate to Thomas Dixon Jr.’s personal life. In Southern Horizons,
Dixon relates the story of taking his family on a visit to Boston and re-
ports an innkeeper’s objection:

“You have a Negro woman in your room, I am informed?” I mildly replied,
“Your courts might pronounce her a Negress as she is an octoroon with one-
eighth of Negro blood. But she is the nurse of my baby, a woman of unusual
intelligence and character and while she happens to be a slave, she is the
daughter of one of the greatest governors of North Carolina who set her
free . . . what about her?” “We don’t allow a Negro in the hotel. Nor does
any first class hostelry in the city.” “You can’t accommodate her in a small
room on the top floor or the attic?” “Neither in the attic nor in the cellar. She
is a Negress.”

146

No doubt Dixon tells this story to show the racism of the North

and his own nobility, but the passage reveals that the author had his
own “mulatto” who raised his children and that he held her in high
regard. That this mulatto is also the daughter of “one of the greatest
governors of North Carolina who set her free” implies that this sort
of exploitation of black female sexuality by white men occurred even
at the highest levels of Southern social hierarchy. Conjecture as to
whether Dixon had this young lady in mind when creating the lecher-
ous sounding passages describing Cleo Peeler from The Sins of the
Father can remain only speculation, but the temptation to surmise so
is strong, especially given how the drama plays out for Norton and his
son Andy in the novel. The sins of the father may have been “full
grown” in the son.

Another interesting link exists. When the production of The Sins of

the Father toured, Dixon would travel with it, giving speeches before
the play to hammer his ideological points home. Dixon conveys the
story in his autobiography of how “the leading man was killed by a
shark and I had to go on and play his part . . . the reviewers next
morning said I was as good an actor as playwright . . . he [the pro-
ducer] would star feature me, put my name in two foot electric lights
and give me the time of my life.”

147

Thomas Dixon actually took on

the character of Dan Norton and was so convincing that he played the
part for the rest of the production. In his works he had narrated the
role of the black rapist beast, the old, faithful slave, the white woman,

D i x o n J r . a n d S e l f - N a r r at i o n

105

the Southern gentleman, the avenging Klansman, and the dutiful son,
to name only a few, and all of these roles were narrated by what Dixon
perceived as their constitutive constraints. However, the one role that
moved from his fiction to his reality and back again was that of Dan
Norton from The Sins of the Father, the only successful dramatic part
he had played since taking on Shakespeare.

The lecherous, leering narrator of the novel, the possibility that

Thomas Dixon Sr. had produced an illegitimate son, the presence of
the caretaking mulatto in Dixon the younger’s home, and the au-
thor’s taking on Dan Norton’s character in the stage production of
The Sins of the Father all lend credence to the likelihood that this
novel, though it had an eye for issues concerning the entire region of
the South, the country as a whole, and the Anglo-Saxon race (what-
ever that is), was personal for Thomas Dixon.

By 1915, despite the enormous success of The Birth of a Nation in

that year, Dixon and his ideas had begun to wane. This shift occurred
because Jim Crow legislation was firmly in place, making many whites
feel secure, and the black man had not completely retrogressed or dis-
appeared, as racial radicals had promised both.

148

However, racial rad-

icalism may have begun to die out, but other forms of race hatred
would still inform the country. Howard Zinn states, “The Ku Klux
Klan was revived in the 1920’s, and it spread into the North. By 1924
it had 4

⁄

million members.”

149

Perhaps this revival could be marked

as early as 1915, the year of The Birth of a Nation, but his point about
its reaching critical mass is worth noting. Through novels like The
Clansman and films like The Birth of a Nation, Dixon built this terri-
ble legacy of hatred, all in the name of reiteration of a citation of race
and masculinity that he strove to maintain—the Anglo-Saxon man.
The irony is that this masculine role never really existed in the first
place; the law and the role merely continued to bring each other into
existence, despite different slippages and constitutive constraints,
from Shakespeare right down to Thomas Dixon Jr.

Dixon continued to write plays, films, and novels until his death in

1946, spreading his hate from blacks, to feminists, to communists,
and frequently conflating the three, as he did in his final novel, The
Flaming Sword. Raymond Rohauer writes as a postscript to Southern
Horizons, “From such evidence as we have, there emerges a picture
of a man who spent much of his later life wondering why he was
subjected to so much vilification, and getting increasingly bitter and
defensive about it.”

150

Dixon’s narratives of masculinity and race

may have left a legacy of hate, but they also earned him the scorn he
deserved.

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S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

Lucius C. Harper wrote an extended obituary for the Chicago De-

fender, a black weekly newspaper founded in 1905 that became highly
influential by World War I:

He advocated the violation of the Golden Rule, although he was a minister.
He loved to make men hate each other; he wrote some of the filthiest books
on love and social problems. Wherever there was a foulness to be placed be-
tween book covers, he enjoyed the job. He sought to make every white man
whiter, and likewise every black man blacker. . . . This man was the Rev. Thomas
Dixon, whose racially diseased mind gave out last Wednesday morning, April
3, in his home in Raleigh, N.C., and he went to wherever God chose to assign
him. Be that as it may every black man takes particular pride at this hour
in reading his obituary. . . . He was 82 years old. America would have been
blessed had he died in infancy.

151

Harper’s estimation of Dixon’s attempt to solidify race and its effects
elucidates Dixon’s legacy in the most succinct way. Thomas Dixon
must have been spinning in his grave as, in death, he was defined by a
black man.

One of the most palpable Dixonian messages, no matter how inad-

vertent, is similar to what can be learned from the works of Shake-
speare. The playwright’s works give us a perspective on current ideas
of masculinity, revealing the malleable nature of these constructions
and offering the possibility of transforming previous citations into a
more just and rewarding performativity.

152

This idea is just another

way Dixon is tied to the works of Shakespeare. Dixon’s works have
only lived in obscurity beyond his day, and rightfully so, but they can
teach us this same lesson. The irony is that Dixon was unable to con-
trol citations of masculine roles or narratives, even though he was cre-
ating the universe in which they existed, a fictive world in which he
had the decision-making power of a god. Dixon’s failure to maintain
these narratives of gender and race throughout his body of work un-
intentionally teaches readers that masculinity is, as Bruce R. Smith
refers to Shakespeare’s masculine constructions, “contingent in all
sorts of ways,” and can be remade, refashioned again and again.

153

Readers should take valuable lessons as this from the novels of Thomas
Dixon Jr., and throw the rest away.

D i x o n J r . a n d S e l f - N a r r at i o n

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C h a p t e r 4

Wh o’s Yo u r Da d dy ?

William Faulkner’s Making of the Father and Son

They hailed him father to a line of kings.
Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown
And put a barren scepter in my grip,
Thence to be wrenched with an unlineal band,
No son of mine succeeding.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Nobody remembers Shakespeare’s children.

William Faulkner

s William Shakespeare, so William Faulkner. From “bardolaters”

to iconoclastic detractors, and those somewhere in between, William
Shakespeare has been made the symbol of patriarchy, culture, and pre-
cedent. In short, he has been made a “father.” Four hundred plus years
later, another William is receiving the same treatment. Faulkner has
been called “the Abraham of Southern and American literature,” with
one current critic going so far as to lament, “Faulkner has become for
me the repository of all things fatherly, masculine, and Southern.”

The

author is being constructed as a progenitor, both in a literary sense and,
like Shakespeare, with a much larger signification. Why?

William Faulkner certainly co-opted the fathers who came before

him. The Bible, Balzac, Dostoevsky, and James Joyce, just to name a
few, all became an integral part of Faulkner’s works. However, it is his

relationship with the works of William Shakespeare and his cultural
image that is most palpable—especially the playwright’s models of
masculinity. Roles were lifted from Shakespeare and pepper Faulkner’s
works. The novels have their Hotspurs (Colonel John Sartoris, young
Bayard from a certain slant of light, Jewel Bundren, and Thomas Sut-
pen) and their Hamlets too (Quentin Compson, Horace Benbow, Ike
McCaslin, and a host of others too numerous to name here). Macbeth,
Falstaff, Prince Hal, and Othello all offer performances of masculinity
that are incorporated into Faulkner’s portrayals.

William Gilmore Simms, Thomas Nelson Page, and Thomas Dixon

before him all appropriated these masculine roles to suit their needs,
both literary and cultural, yet they are not offered this same sort of pa-
ternity. The most obvious reason is that they are lesser talents with fre-
quently outmoded thinking, but there is something more. These earlier
writers took these forms and modified them slightly for their circum-
stances and/or agenda, but they certainly never interrogated them.

Faulkner’s cultural context contained the Old South inheritance of

a supposedly “organic society” and the chivalric code with prescrip-
tions for gender, race, and class. At the same time, the South had lived
through the Civil War, Reconstruction, industrialism and the rise
of town culture, turn-of-the-century radicalism, and the ensuing
post–World War modernism, all bringing about fluidity, to varying
degrees, of gender, race, and class roles—a sense of rupture.

Shakespeare and Faulkner share much of this assessment. Renais-

sance learning and art coupled with the rise of city culture, such as the
now-teeming London, engendered a reaction to the certainties of the
medieval world. It is, however, debatable as to whether Shakespeare
felt this same sense of “rupture,” which could be a synonym for
“modernism.” To be sure there are instances in Shakespeare’s works
where he seems to position and explore his culture, to attempt to
know it and perhaps by extension himself, but he does not do so with
the same vehemence as William Faulkner.

Perhaps the reason for this difference in degree rests in Faulkner’s

act of deconstructing and rearranging the past for a better vantage
point.

The effects on Faulkner’s thinking must have been multitudi-

nous. Faulkner became a critic of the South, questioning roles of sex,
gender, race, and class, and pointed out the Southern penchant for ex-
aggeration in its sex and gender roles.

William Faulkner’s shouldering

of “the burden of Southern history” led to a deeper interrogation of
much that came with it, including gender roles. This compulsion for
inquiry is perhaps the strongest explanation for the inclination to make
Faulkner a father as Shakespeare before him.

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If Faulkner appropriates Shakespearean forms of masculinity, he

does not do so wholesale, for his generation and its attendant culture
are informed with a sense of loss, of time past. For example, young Ba-
yard can be read as Hotspur—rash, reckless, and a man’s man, yet
Faulkner writes of his Hotspur, “There were no opportunities for vain-
glorious swashbuckling. Denied that Sartoris heaven in which they
could spend eternity dying deaths of needless and magnificent violence
while spectators doomed to immortality looked eternally on.”

Faulkner’s versions of Shakespeare’s masculinities are figures in de-
cline, not ever having their chance for a fuller gender performativity as
their literary antecedents. Hamlet figures fare no better in Faulkner’s
novels. Horace Benbow may actively flee from his family in Sanctuary
in hopes of expressing himself, but he returns unsuccessful in the end,
sneaking into the house to his wife’s command to “lock the back
door.”

There is no consummation, no “augury” to defy, no climax,

no death.

Both these seemingly polar opposite masculinities come to ends

that are stereotypically masculine in Shakespeare’s works; no matter
how they have performed their genders while alive, they meet violent
deaths. Faulkner perceived the similarity between Hotspur and Ham-
let as expressions of a failure of character.

The failure was the longing

for this end. The Bayard of Flags in the Dust may be a tough-talking,
drinking, and racing study of hypermasculinity, but he also exhibits a
crippled psyche brought on by the death of his brother that culminates
in one reckless event after another with no real point.

Bayard’s point-

lessness three generations removed is quite a comment on the legacy
of the Civil War for this class of men—young Bayard is both Hamlet
and Hotspur, however, and therefore is one of the few Faulkner men
to get his masculine death.

Nonetheless, Bayard paradoxically escapes the myth of the past and

passes into it with his death, reinforcing and defeating it at the same
time.

This myth, however, is not just one of Confederate glory, the

decline of the South, noblesse oblige, or the plantation gentleman—it
is a much older myth than any of these constructs. This myth is the
father, the progenitor, the patriarch, on its most abstract level, what
Jacques Lacan posits, “It is in the name of the father that we must rec-
ognize the support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of
history, has identified his person with the figure of the law.”

Whether

biological antecedent or symbol of patriarchy, this myth of the father
in all its facets most informs Faulkner’s constructs of masculinity. This
obsession results in a body of work that has more to say on the ques-
tion of fathers than any other American author.

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111

Shakespeare’s models are appropriated by the Southern novelist, for

the playwright is a literary/cultural antecedent whom the novelist de-
fined himself against.

Faulkner did consider the Elizabethan’s works

as a “casebook of the mind”: “If a man has a great deal of talent,
he can use Shakespeare as a yardstick,” and “I have a portable Shake-
speare I’m never too far from.”

Nevertheless, it is the concomitant

consideration of Faulkner’s modernist project and his preoccupation
with fathers both present and mythically absent that alters the gender
citations of his fictional men. The “modernist project” part of these
corollaries is the interrogation of seemingly everything—race, class,
gender, and even the essence of being and knowing—and all of these
elements form a matrix that enmeshes much of Faulkner’s works and
reveals the constructed nature of roles performed in relation to it. At
issue in Faulkner’s examination is the control of meaning, and perhaps
no other meaning receives as much fervent attention as masculinity;
revising masculine stereotypes drives Faulkner’s works.

The beginning of this revision is the understanding of the con-

structed nature of masculinity; Judith Butler offers insight into these
concerns when she expostulates that sexed positions are a citational
strategy and:

To the extent that the “I” is secured by its sexed position, this “I” and its “po-
sition” can be secured only by being repeatedly assumed, whereby “assump-
tion” is not a singular act or event, but, rather, an iterable practice . . . “sexed
positions” are not localities but, rather, citational practices instituted within ju-
ridical domain—a domain of constitutive constraints. The embodying of sex
would be a kind of “citing” of the law, but neither sex nor the law can be said
to preexist their various embodyings and citings. Where the law appears to
predate its citation, that is where a given citation has become established as
“the law.” Further, failure to “cite” or instantiate it correctly or completely
would be at once the mobilizing condition of such a citation and its punish-
able consequence. Since the law must be repeated to remain an authoritative
law, the law perpetually reinstitutes the possibility of its own failure.

Butler’s concept of the almost constant reiteration of the masculine
position and the perpetual chance for failure, in terms of both the ci-
tation and the law it creates, is especially key for many of Faulkner’s
male characters, particularly his Hamlets.

This potential for failure on a personal and much larger scale leads

characters like Quentin Compson to feel this way, “Thinking I was I
was not who was not was not who,” or Darl Bundren to lament, “I
don’t know what I am. I don’t know if I am or not.”

The potential

for slippage in both the citation and the law is part of these characters’

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S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

identity crises. African men and lower-class whites face reiteration as
well, but their potential failures are less freighted with tragic grandeur
in Faulkner’s fictive world, perhaps with the exception of Joe Christ-
mas. Faulkner’s fiction offers a masculinity in crisis, having to cope
with “a more fluid and decentered representational field.”

What brought on this fluidity, this decentered representational

field, this crisis in masculinity in Faulkner’s works, represents the chief
constitutive constraint, the father. The father remains the source of
identity in these novels.

This crisis initiates with fathers who are

rather an absent presence or a present absence, weighing down their
sons as a mythic, ghostly, yet still constitutive constraint, or are physi-
cally present but have abdicated their responsibility as masculine model.
This cultural situation affects what is available in Faulkner—characters
transmogrified by the will of the father with attendant abuses or the
long shadow of the absent patriarch.

Quentin Compson, Joe Christ-

mas, Thomas Sutpen, and Darl Bundren are just a few of these sons af-
fected by absence and/or will of the father.

One such seemingly fatherless Hamlet character is Horace Benbow.

Will Benbow, his father, is barely mentioned in Flags in the Dust.
Faulkner writes, “But when he [Horace] reached New York the wire
waited him saying that Will Benbow was ill . . . two subsequent days
his father lived. Then Will Benbow was buried beside his wife.”

This

news is given secondhand to the reader, well after the fact, and Horace
is left to learn his gender role elsewhere, or not, as the case may be.

Southern literature in general displays people who are actors in a

spectacle whose worth is directly tied to their performance.

Horace

represents this sort of acting, and he emulates a conventional masculin-
ity, the gentleman. In Sanctuary, Horace does, after all, argue, “God is
foolish at times, but at least He’s a gentleman.”

He begins playing

this role by following in the footsteps of his father as a young man, at-
tending Sewanee, becoming a man of letters, and pontificating fre-
quently on the attributes of this type of man. Horace Benbow even tells
his sister, Narcissa, “Shakespeare had no sense of discrimination and no
instinct for reticence. In other words, he wasn’t a gentleman . . . to be
a gentleman you must have secrets.”

Faulkner places this assessment

into his Hamlet’s mouth in consideration of both Shakespeare and the
role of the gentleman; perhaps he felt, on some level, that both were
needed to reiterate the role of the Southern gentleman fully.

His sister, Narcissa, may supposedly prefer Horace’s “fine and elec-

tric delicacy” to the rough and reckless masculinity of Bayard and John
Sartoris, but what is important is how Horace himself perceives it.

One side effect of emulating this larger myth without a personal

Fat h e r - S o n — T h e M a k i n g

113

model, a present father, is a heightened awareness of the performative
nature of masculinity. Clearly, Horace Benbow feels this quality acutely
in Flags in the Dust; as he watches Belle in her “self-imposed and tragic
role” play the piano, Horace is also “himself performing like the old
actor whose hair is thin and whose profile is escaping him via his chin,
but who can play to any cue at a moment’s notice while the younger
men chew their bitter thumbs in the wings.”

Horace seems aware of

Belle’s role (the “feminine principle” her name suggests), and his rela-
tion to it, but the greater point is that there are roles to be played, and
that these roles change, require performativity, not just performance,
and need constant reiteration depending upon circumstances.

Horace’s awareness may seem a bit submerged in the text, but it

does creep through his many discourses. In one such instance, he
pontificates about the “little puny man’s way of dragging circum-
stance about to fit his preconception of himself as a figure in the
world.”

This man has an attentiveness that operates on a fixed idea

of himself as a figure, in this case the gentleman, but he must alter his
circumstances or this figure of the gentleman for a successful reitera-
tion of its attendant masculinity. Wittgenstein specifies what is at stake
in his work Philosophical Grammar, “I have the intention of carrying
out a particular task and I make a plan. The plan in my mind is sup-
posed to consist of my seeing myself acting thus and so. But how do I
know it is myself that I am seeing? Well, it isn’t myself, but a kind of
picture. But why do I call it a picture of me. . . . And the answer men-
tions characteristics by which I can be recognized. But it is my own
decision that makes my image represent myself.”

This sort of self-

awareness mused on by Wittgenstein was prevalent in Shakespeare’s
works and culture.

Likewise, numerous Faulknerian characters prac-

tice this self-awareness, but it leads these men to anxiety. The best
Wittgenstein or any of these fictional characters can hope for is to
convince themselves that their reiterations are “[their] own decision.”

What is at issue for Horace is the inability to control his performa-

tivity, hence his masculinity, because of his “more fluid and decentered
representational field.” Horace bemoans, “Man’s very tragedies flout
him. He has invented a masque for tragedy, given it the austerity which
he believes the spectacle of himself warrants, and the thing makes faces
behind his back; dead alone, he is not ridiculous, and even then only in
his own eyes.”

This consciousness that is at work here understands

performativity and its reflexivity and feels the pressure of circumstances
(tragedies) and others. Horace may make decisions in his performativ-
ity of his role and its gender, but what he perceives, in addition to its
constructed nature, is his constitutive constraints. These circumstances

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S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

effectuate an almost castrated figure with these constraints wielding
the knife.

Faulkner had what must have been for him literary precedent for

this sort of awareness in his literary father William Shakespeare and
co-opted it from Shakespeare’s plays for use with his literary charac-
ters. In As You Like It, Shakespeare has the melancholic Jaques offer
his most famous observation, “All the world’s a stage,/ And all the
men and women merely players./ They have their exits and their en-
trances,/ And one man in his time plays many parts.”

Duke Senior’s

fool shares with Horace Benbow both an awareness of human perfor-
mativity and the fact that men and women are merely players—not ex-
actly a powerful, fully autonomous position, but one that fits nicely
with Judith Butler’s idea of citational practices. Jaques’s subsequent
notion of many possible parts for men also suggests the unfixed na-
ture of these citations, as Horace’s conception of invention quoted
above reiterates.

This discernment of roles and their limitations are cast in theatrical

terms in Macbeth, but it takes on an even more pejorative cast in
Shakespeare’s tragic mode than in Jaques’s musings. The upset famil-
ial order in As You Like It nonetheless contains stand-in patriarchs
such as Duke Senior, but Macbeth’s father is nowhere to be seen in
the tragedy. Perhaps this absence explains why the title character in-
tones, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and
frets his hour upon the stage/ And then is heard no more. It is a tale/
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.”

Shakespeare sees the theatricality of not just roles one might play but
also life itself, and Macbeth seizes on Jaques’s “merely” and extends it
from a seemingly subordinate position to having no meaning at all.
Of course, Faulkner appropriates Shakespeare’s idea of the tale told
by an idiot, full of sound and fury, for his Compson novel of the same
name, but what drives men like Horace Benbow and their reiterations
of masculinity is the fear of the “signifying nothing,” the chance of
failure, the possibility of being “flouted” by both the drama and/or
the audience.

This theatricality, this constructed nature of individual roles, also

played itself out in William Faulkner’s personal life. Faulkner wore
such diverse personas as young dandy, RAF enlistee, university poet,
and war hero almost as if they were clothing, trying them on and dis-
carding them to suit his circumstances.

Faulkner’s poses exist for

public consumption as much as for his own fulfillment. The author
was photographed in various masculine roles—fox hunter, aviator,
artist, and screenwriter.

Perhaps Faulkner wore these personas of

Fat h e r - S o n — T h e M a k i n g

115

masculinity in real life and photographs to match shifting circum-
stances, desired effects, but what is more important is that none
seemed to be long term in any real, meaningful way. Judith Butler ex-
plains, “Performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a rit-
ual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization in the context
of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal dura-
tion.”

Faulkner had difficulty in reiteration—the shortness of many

of these citations of masculinity suggests rather an inability to move
beyond a singular act or an unwillingness to do so.

There also exists a common thread in many of these citations of

masculinity. Faulkner developed a role for himself as an Englishman
studying abroad while in college and joined the literati at the univer-
sity in the name of pursing “high culture.” This posture would culmi-
nate with a trip to England in October of 1925.

British seems to be

the common denominator in many of these citations, and this fact in-
dicates a privileging of its culture and its modes of masculinity; it
stands to reason that Faulkner would look to Shakespeare for citations
of masculinity and, more importantly, an awareness of the theatrical-
ity of those reiterations. In a sense, Faulkner is becoming Shake-
speare’s heir, if not the bard himself.

Faulkner’s shifting of personas could reveal a strength. No fixed

Faulkner exists, only a series of Faulkners.

This instability af-

forded Faulkner his unique perspective on identity. This sunny view
of Faulkner’s performativity may cast this tendency of the author in
the best possible light, but it is a disposition Faulkner would not allow
his literary characters. The fluidity of their reiterations leads to slip-
page and that frequently precedes failure.

Horace Benbow exemplifies this phenomenon. Faulkner’s Hamlet

enacts the role of a gentleman, but almost in caricature.

This con-

struct contains learning, social skills, and piety with a correlation be-
tween outward manliness and its inner source. At the same time,
military honor and its martial spirit should be embraced while failure
and impotency are to be avoided at all costs, as both lead to effemi-
nacy.

This prescriptive role offers masculine performative parame-

ters to an almost fatherless man such as Horace, but his attempts at
reiteration support the caricature contention and drive Faulkner’s de-
piction of latter gentility in Flags in the Dust.

From his first actual, physical arrival in Flags in the Dust with “his air

of fine and delicate futility,” to one local woman’s assertion that
“Horace is a poet . . . poets must be excused for what they do,” Ben-
bow does seem to be almost a parody of what a gentleman is.

Horace

is hardly the returning war hero, and his swagger from the train station

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to the end of the novel seems much more of a swish. Horace does have
the learning and erudition required of a gentleman, but his piety and
“outward manliness” are lost in his impotent pose with Belle, his sister,
and almost everyone he encounters. Again, Butler adds an important
qualification to this idea in terms of gender parody. She offers, “In-
deed, the parody is of the very notion of an original . . . the original
identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an
origin.”

Horace skates right up to this idea of parody, but he is also a

vivid reminder, as Butler states, that the original itself is questionable,
especially in the absence of an immediate model, such as a father.

If Flags in the Dust is the revelation of Horace Benbow as the bor-

derline caricature of a gentleman, then Sanctuary completes the failure
of his reiteration of the masculine citations that have come before him,
his failure to make and be made by the law, the name of the father.
These novels have to be read in tandem to fully appreciate this narra-
tive arc of Horace’s masculine citation. In fact, reading Faulkner’s
body of work as chapters in one ongoing saga offers insight into the
author’s constructs.

If not the entire corpus, Horace Benbow is the

link that at least invites just such a reading between these two novels.

Horace’s masculinity is constantly in question in Sanctuary. Ruby is

the first to imply that Benbow cannot take care of himself as a man
(much less a gentleman) should when she blurts out, “He better get
on to where he’s going, where his women folks can take care of
him.”

Faulkner paints Horace as being unable to use a hammer or

even operate a motor vehicle, all firmly in the province of what is
manly in Horace’s culture.

Lee Goodwin even goes so far as to ask

Horace, “What sort of men have you lived with all your life? In a nurs-
ery?”

Of course, there are class considerations here; all gentlemen,

much less a parody of one like Horace, must seem wanting to Lee
Goodwin and many men of his class. A man’s man like Goodwin can
only see Horace’s display of masculinity as a juvenile one—an expected
performativity given the absence of his immediate model, his father.

Possibly no other Shakespearean work is more appropriated by

Faulkner than Macbeth, and the title character himself constantly faces
questions of his manhood in much the same way as Horace Benbow
does. Lady Macbeth cajoles her husband, “When you durst do it, then
you were a man;/ And, to be more than what you were, you would/
Be so much more the man.”

The idea of man here connotes action,

and male may be a man in varying gradations. Lady Macbeth later
“confers apart” with Macbeth over his fear of ghosts and queries, “Are
you a man?”

Even Macbeth’s own curses reveal his doubts as he

swears, “Accursed be that tongue that tells me so,/ For it hath cowed

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117

my better part of man!”

In fact, the play uses some variation of the

words “man,” “manhood,” or “manly” some thirty-four times. What
constitutes being a man is a chief concern of this Shakespearean play,
and it is most frequently used in terms of failure and performance.

Apparently Banquo’s ghost is not the only specter to haunt the trou-

bled despot, and Macbeth’s answer of self-reassurance is, “I dare do all
that may become a man;/ Who dares do more is none.”

Macbeth’s

rejoinder contains a key word—become. One meaning of the term
“become” Macbeth is implying is “to be suitable to,” but quite another
is “come to be.” If Macbeth is suggesting “becoming” in the second
sense, then the succeeding line gives limitations to his final definitions.
The line implies an awareness of the theatrical nature of being a man
and its strictures. More importantly, the chance for being “none” exists
as well. Horace Benbow faces this very same real possibility in Sanctu-
ary, and like Horace, Macbeth’s father is nowhere to be seen; he does
not even warrant a mention in the manner of Will Benbow.

The examples above indicate Horace’s various slippages in his gen-

der performativity, but there are two ways in which Horace fails out-
right in his reiterations of the law. Horace fails most obviously in
Sanctuary by losing his court case and not reviving his patrilineal her-
itage.

Certainly, the “vague troubling wind” and Horace’s lament of

“Less oft is peace. Less oft is peace” at the end of the novel could be
directly related to a failure of patrimony. After all, Goodwin has been
lynched, Ruby is unprotected, and Horace is threatened by the crowd
who say, “Do to the lawyer what we did to him. What he did to her.
Only we never used a cob. We made him wish we had used a cob.”

The threat of group sodomizing is surely an emasculating attempt to
place Goodwin and Horace into the position of the violated female,
of Temple Drake. This group of men assert their masculinity through
physical violence while attempting to take Horace’s in the same man-
ner. They fail to understand that, by the code of the Southern gentle-
man, Horace’s failure has already “feminized” him (note the inherent
sexism of woman

failed man).

This “vague troubling wind” and the feeling that “less oft is peace”

are derived from Horace’s failures and this gendered position he is
now in. The failed Benbow is driven back to the equally impotent yet
less physically threatening world of Belle and Little Belle. Butler notes,
“The failure to ‘cite’ or instantiate it [the law] correctly or completely
would be at once the mobilizing condition of such a citation and its
punishable consequence.”

The punishable consequence for Horace is

an even further loss of agency as his constitutive constraints narrow to
this domestic world feared by Southern “men.”

Popeye may be the

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impotent character in the novel, but he gets his male bravado and
death as he tells his executioner, “Fix my hair, Jack.”

In contrast,

Horace ends the novel trying to finish the sentence “I just wanted to
tell you.”

However, he remains unable to do so.

The above-mentioned slippages of gender performativity hint at

the second outright failure of Horace. Benbow moves from merely
gender inconsistencies in his performance of “man” via “gentleman”
to an outright opposition of the first term. This role reversal is
strongest in relation to his stepdaughter, Little Belle. After arguing
over Belle’s lovers, Horace tells of how the two embrace, “There was
a mirror behind her and another behind me, and she was watching
herself in the one behind me, forgetting about the other one in which
I could see her face, see her watching the back of my head with pure
dissimulation.”

The narrator ostensibly reveals the false nature of

such females as Little Belle, but Horace also forgets that his step-
daughter can see more than the back of his head; she can see in the
other mirror just as he can. These reflections suggest a doubling of
the two, including their gender performances. This implication early
in the novel will create a certain textual logic that will come to
fruition later and complete the opposition.

Interestingly enough, Horace learns of his ability to willfully enact

this gender opposition from the novel’s female victim, Temple Drake.
When Horace interviews Temple about her horrific experiences at
Goodwin’s place, she reveals:

I was looking at my legs and I’d try to make like I was a boy. I was thinking
about if I just was a boy and then I tried to make myself into one by thinking.
You know how you do things like that. . . . I’d think about praying to be
changed into a boy and I would pray and then I’d sit right still and wait. . . .
Then I said That wont do. I ought to be a man. So I was an old man, with a
long white beard, and then the little black man got littler and littler and I was
saying Now. You see now. I’m a man now. Then I thought about being a
man, and as soon as I thought it, it happened.

Temple’s traumatic experience reveals what she feels is the ability to
move from one gender to the next as circumstances dictate. She as-
sumes that Horace knows about this ability to move not only from fe-
male to male, but also from potential son to possible father. A young
boy, a son, may still be a threatened sexual object, but the father will
“do” nicely.

Temple’s reasons for such gender fluidity are clear. She posits, “If I

just had that French thing. I was thinking maybe it would have long

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sharp spikes on it and he wouldn’t know it until too late and I’d jab it
into him. I’d jab it all the way through him and I’d think about the
blood running on me and how I’d say I guess that’ll teach you!”

Temple sees being a male as having a phallus that offers her not only
protection from the likes of Popeye but also revenge on him as well.
She finally moves from the sexual imagery of the phallus as weapon
(with a hint of surprise homoeroticism) to the phallic father as such.
The impulse of both is the same—power and authority.

This kind of imagining could be dismissed as the raving of a highly

traumatized person, but in a succeeding passage Horace Benbow
takes it to heart when he employs a similar methodology. This man
who constantly questions, or has questioned, his reiteration of mas-
culinity is assumed by Temple to “know how to do things like that.”

Just a few short pages later in the novel, Horace couples his earlier
doubling of Little Belle with Temple’s tactic. Horace hears Temple’s
tale of degradation and returns to his home and a photograph of Lit-
tle Belle. He is overcome by the smell of honeysuckle (as Quentin is
in The Sound and the Fury), swoons, and:

Then he knew what that sensation in his stomach meant. He put the photo-
graph down hurriedly and went to the bathroom. He opened the door run-
ning and fumbled at the light. But he had not time to find it and he gave over
and plunged forward and struck the lavatory and leaned upon his braced arms
while the shucks set up a terrific uproar beneath her thighs. Lying with her
head lifted slightly, her chin depressed like a figure lifted down from a cruci-
fix, she watched something black and furious go roaring out of her pale body.
She was bound and naked on her back on a flat car moving at a speed through
a black tunnel . . . far beneath her she could hear the faint, furious uproar of
the shucks.

The sound of the shucks connects Horace’s scene to that of Tem-

ple’s rape at the hands of Popeye in Goodwin’s barn. This honeysuckle
scent (which implies female sexuality) overcomes Horace; he swoons
into this Freudian-filled reverie in which he begins by being a sick gen-
tleman rushing to the bathroom and ends by being the female victim—
a change that is signaled by the shift in personal pronouns from
masculine to feminine. What could this possibly mean? The episode be-
gins with Horace’s transformation into rapist and victim, violator of
Temple and his stepdaughter, and violated. The connection between
Benbow and Little Belle reverberates, but there also exists the possibil-
ity of homoeroticism with Horace as Temple Drake, the victim of Pop-
eye, as Horace becomes all three at one point or another.

Like the

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above-quoted selection from Macbeth, the key word in this musing is
“becomes.” Readers and critics are so concerned with what sexual roles
Horace occupies

in relation to his stepdaughter, client, and supposed

nemesis in the form of Popeye that they never consider the “becom-
ing,” Horace’s implied agency, or lack thereof.

Horace Benbow has seen Temple’s gender fluidity used to meet her

circumstances and enacts this ability himself when confronted with the
idea of Popeye, Temple, and the picture of Little Belle mixed with the
smell of female sexuality.

While the word “ability” is employed here,

one must bear in mind Judith Butler’s “constitutive constraints” and the
pressure to reiterate “the law” or suffer “punishable consequences.”
Under the trauma of rape or in the privacy of one’s own lavatory, gen-
der fluidity may be employed, but in the constitutive constraint that is
Yoknapatawpha, this kind of performativity would be rendered as a fail-
ure and would be seen as punitive—again the townsmen of Sanctuary
threaten to put Horace into this role of female victim as punishment for
his defense of Goodwin. Agency in the domestic and public spheres is
quite different in Faulkner’s fictive world.

Faulkner’s fiction is rife with men who, if not to the extent of Ho-

race’s transfiguration above, still perform masculinity in ways that are
seemingly role reversals or at least contain elements of serious confla-
tion of the two. Earnest Taliaferro in Mosquitoes, Gail Hightower of
Light in August, both Charles Bon and Henry Sutpen in Absalom!
Absalom! and Quentin Compson of both The Sound and the Fury and
Absalom! Absalom! are just a few examples of these Faulknerian men.
One vivid exemplar of this type of masculine performativity is Harry
Wilbourne (Well born?) of The Wild Palms; he has such a relationship
with his lover Charlotte Rittenmeyer. Wilbourne thinks of her, “She is
not only a better man and a better gentleman than I am, she is a bet-
ter everything than I will ever be.”

Charlotte not only performs

masculinity better than Wilbourne, but the reiteration of gentility as
well. Perhaps Wilbourne only sees her success in his failure, but his
earnest assertion of her superiority in all of his potential roles alone
qualifies him as a failed Southern man, if not gentility.

Upon setting up a household with Charlotte, he observes to their

mutual friend McCord, “But she’s a better man than I am. You said
that yourself—as any man by drink or opium. I had become the Com-
plete Householder.”

If Charlotte is the better man, Henry enacts

the gendered role of woman and becomes the stereotype of female
domesticity. Finally, one of Henry’s early jobs is to write for a “con-
fession magazine” in which his pulp stories begin with sentences
such as “I had the body and desires of a woman yet in knowledge and

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experience of the world I was but a child.”

Wilbourne assumes the

female role of woman as body for popular consumption by male pulp
readers.

Harry/Henry Wilbourne is as dichotomous as his name. Wilbourne

feels that the world is backward, unlike books, and that life should be
full of the “Does, Roes, Wilbournes and Smiths—males and females
but without the pricks or cunts.”

Harry does not mind thinking of

Charlotte and himself in dichotomous terms when it comes to gender,
but he at least wants to erase the biological component of such con-
structions,

and includes his own family line in this idea. This inclusion

of the family line connects Henry Wilbourne to Horace Benbow;
Harry’s father died just two years after his birth and is only mentioned
in passing in the beginning of the novel. Harry’s father expresses his
“will” from beyond the grave through his “will” (connection to Will
Benbow, Horace’s father?), but he is a present absence, the missing
father, even if Harry is “Wilbourne.”

This missing father leads men like Harry to search for models of

masculinity outside of the family unit and, especially in Faulkner’s
novels, to have an acute awareness of the performativity of gender and
the possibility of both slippage and outright failure in their reitera-
tions of the law. No other couple in Faulkner is more aware of their
marginality than Charlotte and Harry.

Unlike Horace, even though

Harry essentially fails at reiterating constructions of masculinity that
came before him due to the absent father, he does not return to a cul-
turally sanctioned role. Faulkner demonstrates with The Wild Palms
that the cultural constraints can be far too great to overcome, and one
has to return to prescribed domestic roles as Horace does or suffer
the “punishable consequences.” In the end, Harry is jailed, presum-
ably to die soon, with Charlotte already buried.

This kind of gender role reversal exists as well in The Unvan-

quished. Drusilla Hawk and Bayard Sartoris (not the young Bayard of
Flags) exhibit this sort of reversal. For Drusilla, the mitigating factor
is the Civil War, but for both characters, the more forceful motivator
is the loss of the father. Drusilla, in Rosalind from As You Like It,
Olivia from Twelfth Night, and Portia from The Merchant of Venice
fashion, dresses in male clothing and joins in the Confederate effort
to defeat the Yankees. Drusilla muses:

Living used to be dull, you see. Stupid. You lived in the same house your
father was born in and your father’s sons and daughters had the sons and
daughters of the same negro slaves to nurse and coddle, and then you grew
up and you fell in love with your acceptable young man. . . . But now you can

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see for yourself how it is, it’s fine now; you dont have to worry now about the
house and the silver because they got burned up and carried away.

The motivating condition of the loss of father and fiancé enables
Drusilla to break out of her gender role, but the war is not a perma-
nent condition, and the women of her family eventually force her
back into a dress, a marriage, and the “stupidity,” though she never
gives up “masculine” violence.

Perhaps Drusilla’s forced performativity explains her attempts to

do the same to Bayard in the final story of The Unvanquished, “An
Odor of Verbena.” Drusilla’s attempt to foist a masculine role on her
male counterpart also implies that Sartoris was not reiterating his
male gendered role in an acceptable manner to Drusilla, if not those
around him. Bayard plans to confront his father’s killer, B. J. Red-
mond, but before he can, Drusilla approaches him with his father’s
dueling pistols and urges seductively:

Take them. I have kept them for you. I give them to you. Oh you will thank
me, you will remember me who put into your hands what they say is an at-
tribute only of God’s, who took what belongs to heaven and gave it to you.
Do you feel them? The long true barrels true as justice, the triggers (you have
fired them) quick as retribution, the two of them slender and invincible and
fatal as the physical shape of love?

Drusilla implores Bayard to take on the phallus, the chivalric code,
the honorable reiteration of masculinity that complements the female
gendered role she has been forced back into (though it is a bit of a
“drag” for her). Interestingly, she employs sexual terms and innuendo
to push these roles, but it is to no avail.

Bayard leaves the pistols near the body of his dead father and faces

Redmond unarmed, ultimately succeeding, while Drusilla is left to flee
to Montgomery. Despite Bayard’s seemingly “manly” stand against
Redmond, Bayard and Drusilla have reversed gender roles. Bayard ben-
efits from this reversal while Drusilla loses everything for it.

Drusilla

becomes a sort of Rosalind in reverse. Her forced adoption of feminin-
ity cannot hide the supposedly masculine impulses beneath, and she
must flee as Shakespeare’s cross-dressed woman before her.

In the instance of The Unvanquished, failure to reiterate gender

roles carries much heavier consequences for women than men, but,
despite this assessment, it could be argued that Bayard does live up to
a prescribed role of masculinity by bravely facing Redmond, just
merely in a different manner than that pursued by both Sartoris

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antecedents and Drusilla—by rejecting the fathers’ method. Bayard
masters a new set of moral norms, from revenge to redemption.

Ba-

yard’s success reflects the notion that the rise of white insurgency ac-
companied the decline of the old code of aristocratic pretensions.

White men were redefining themselves by a new set of “moral norms,”
and its chief distinction was based more on race than aristocracy and its
code of conduct. Drusilla’s plight suggests that females did not have
the luxury of this self-redefinition—they would only be defined by
white men, and then, usually as a monument of virtue and in relation
to the black male rapist beast of Thomas Dixon’s day.

So far the focus has been on the consequence of missing fathers

and their lone sons’ citations of masculinity; however, so strong is
the paternalistic influence on sons’ reiterations (law as predated cita-
tions) that the effects are similar for fathers who are present absences
or vice versa. What both types of fathers represent is an inability—an
incapacity to offer acceptable models of masculinity for the next gen-
eration of Southern white men. This unacceptability is part of the
sense of postwar, modern decline that informs many of Faulkner’s
male characters. This modern generation of Southern white males re-
spond, as Bayard from The Unvanquished did above, by frequently
rejecting rather the existing father or the memory of a deceased pa-
triarch and his masculine antecedents. The effect may be the fluidity,
instability, and self-awareness that Horace Benbow feels in both
Flags and Sanctuary, as recorded above, but many of Faulkner’s nov-
els suggest that this action happens recurrently in a South grappling
with modernity with its industrialism, the rise of town culture, class
mobility (see Flem Snopes), race role instability (see Joe Christmas),
and living in the throes of a defeated region. Rejection of the father,
both biological and in Lacan’s name-of-the-father sense, is one way
of dealing with unacceptable citations that have fossilized into seem-
ing law.

One such example of this direct rejection of the father is Ike Mc-

Caslin from Go Down, Moses. When Ike reads from the McCaslin plan-
tation commissary ledger, he sees a record of miscegenation, incest,
and death involving the McCaslins and the Beauchamps, with his
male antecedents as the culprits. Ike thinks of reading the entries:

Upon some apocryphal Bench or even Altar or perhaps before the Throne
Itself for a last perusal and contemplation and refreshment of the Allknowl-
edgable before the yellowed pages and the brown thin ink in which was
recorded the injustice and a little at least of its amelioration and restitution
faded back forever into the anonymous communal original dust . . . the

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yellowed pages scrawled in fading ink by the hand first of his grandfather and
then his father and uncle.

Ike approaches the ledger with religious ferverency, but the revela-

tions set him on the road to rejection of the McCaslin fathers who
have come before him. Ike not only feels the need to atone for the
sins of his father but also feels the need to repudiate the McCaslin
name as well. This throwing off of his paternal inheritance is to cause
a fissure in the young McCaslin’s identity.

As Jacques Lacan writes

in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, “But the inheri-
tance of the father is that which Kierkegaard designates for us,
namely, his sin.”

What is important is Ike’s rejection of his ancestors

and their sins, hence his identity. Ike stretches the meaning of his
name to make this point when he describes himself as “an Isaac born
into a later life than Abraham’s and repudiating immolation: father-
less and therefore safe declining the altar because maybe this time the
exasperated Hand might not supply the kid.”

Ike sees the father as a

ghost of the past, a phantom unable to help him fulfill this given
role—God the father may not intervene and save him either. Unlike
Horace Benbow, Bayard Sartoris, or Harry Wilbourne, the absence of
his Abraham frees Isaac from the test of the heavenly father.

The alternative is to repudiate fathers. In fact, no two words are

used as much in Go Down, Moses as “relinquish” and “repudiate.” Ike
even goes a step further in this act when he argues, “I cant repudiate
it. It was never mine to repudiate. It was never Father’s and Uncle
Buddy’s to bequeath me to repudiate because it was never Grandfa-
ther’s to bequeath them to bequeath me to repudiate.”

Ike is osten-

sibly talking about the land, but, in a larger sense, he refers to his
patrimony and all that comes with it, including its attendant mas-
culinity. Ike’s assertion sounds naïve, as escaping one’s paternity is an
impossible task. Therein lies the problem. Faulkner touched on this
idea when addressing the English Club at the University of Virginia in
1958. Of Ike, Faulkner notes he says, “This is bad, and I will with-
draw from it” and the problem is, “What we need are people who will
say, ‘This is bad and I’m going to do something about it, I’m going
to change it.’ ”

Ike’s response does not solve anything—neither for

the Beauchamp side of the family and the wrongs visited upon it by
the white fathers, nor for Ike personally. Ike McCaslin reacts in this
manner because he has no tradition to follow.

Repudiation involves

the loss of models, of tradition, of identity.

This loss informs Ike’s reiterations of masculinity. He looks for al-

ternate models in the likes of the appropriately named Sam Fathers,

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but he reels in his relinquishing of his paternity. This circumstance re-
sults in the beginning of the novel becoming Ike’s ending: “Isaac Mc-
Caslin, ‘Uncle Ike,’ past seventy and nearer eighty than he ever
corroborated any more, a widower now and uncle to half a county
and father to no one.”

McCaslin has repudiated not only the fathers

and their patrimony but also the idea of fatherhood in general. This
notion demonstrates, one could argue, the failure of total repudia-
tion, but another alternative exists in Faulkner’s novels, and his name
is Quentin Compson.

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C h a p t e r 5

I ’m M y O w n G r a n d pa

Quentin Compson’s Shakespearean Solution

He could feel them quite near now; Father said it probably seemed
to him that he could even hear them: all the voices, the murmuring
of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow beyond the immediate
fury.

Quentin Compson

Hamlet: Why, look you there, look how it steals away!/ My father,

in his habit as he lived!/ Look where he goes even now out at the
portal!

Queen: This is the very coinage of your brain/ This bodiless creation

ecstasy/ Is very cunning in.

ke McCaslin’s repudiation of the fathers fails. Horace Benbow’s

supposed embracing of “the gentleman” citation of masculinity leads
to parody and a loss of agency. Bayard Sartoris’s reiteration of that
Old South Hotspur spirit coupled with modern Hamletism brings
about his destruction. Gail Hightower of Light in August, Henry Sut-
pen and Charles Bon of Absalom! Absalom! Harry Wilbourne of The
Wild Palms, and the entire Bundren clan from As I Lay Dying all con-
coct some sort of strategy for dealing with the absence and/or will of
the father and what it means for their identities. None succeeded. All
roads lead to Quentin Compson, a Southern Icarus who employs the
grandest methodology while engaging this concern and offers the
most tragic failure.

Michael Kreyling writes in Inventing Southern Literature (1998), “If

the ‘South’ is a cultural entity, then ‘Faulkner’ is its official language.”

Kreyling could have easily added to his paradigm, “And Quentin
Compson is its most repeated diction.” Indeed, seemingly any discus-
sion of things Southern at least references Quentin if not depends on
him for any sort of cultural discourse.

And in all these echoes, readers

and writers frequently hear what they want.

Practically since his creation, critics have dissected Quentin Comp-

son, pulling out the individual organs that support their diagnosis.

Narrator, listener, son, incest-driven brother, historian, linguist, ho-
mosexual, heterosexual, student, spokesperson, subversive, aesthete,
and even a “style of thinking about the South” have all been con-
ferred on Faulkner’s protagonist.

Considering the portrayal of Quentin Compson over the course of

both The Sound and the Fury and Absalom! Absalom! the propensity
to make this complex character whatever an interpreter needs is un-
derstandable. Quentin offers such declarations as, “Theres a curse on
us its not our fault is it our fault,” and about the South, “I dont.
I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!”

These oft-quoted lines reveal

what would become an iconic character, a somewhat heavy burden
for a nineteen-year-old Southern boy with questionable sanity to bear.
Even Faulkner himself could not resist the urge to view Quentin as a
type, positing, “There are too many Quentins in the South who are
too sensitive to face its reality.”

The connection between Quentin and William Shakespeare’s

Prince of Denmark is not a difficult one to make. After all, Faulkner
writes of Quentin in Absalom! Absalom! as “that gaunt tragic dramatic
self-hypnotised youthful face like the tragedian in a college play, an ac-
ademic Hamlet waked from some trancement of the curtain’s falling
and blundering across the dusty stage from which the rest of the cast
had departed.”

Both of these males are as boys, not men, dark brood-

ers well known for being indecisive. Intellectual, overly analytical, a bit
unstable, and with a self-destructive streak without all the active pas-
sion of a Hotspur, both these characters meet tragic ends. Hamlet fa-
mously considers “to be or not to be,” whereas Quentin flies to that
undiscovered country. William Faulkner did not invent “the Southern
Hamlet” (antebellum author William Gilmore Simms complained of
this type of man in his day), but he surely perfected him.

Still, in

terms of the characters’ masculinities, these similarities are not what
are important for understanding Faulkner’s appropriation.

The importance lies in what haunts both characters and their

method of dealing with it. As Laertes says of Hamlet, “For he himself

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is subject to his birth.”

No line could be truer for Quentin Comp-

son. Both are haunted by the patriarchal past. In Hamlet’s case, it is
his direct patriarch, the ghost of Hamlet Sr., imploring, “List, list, O,
list!/ If thou didst ever thy dear father love.”

Quentin’s ghost is not

as immediate as young Hamlet’s, but its import and effect are the
same. The ghost of Jason Lycurgus haunts the Southern Hamlet as
sure as Colonel Sartoris did young Bayard.

This kind of confronta-

tion, this haunting, is not as corporeal as Hamlet’s, but it causes very
real effects. In The Sound and the Fury, this ghost, one of the original
Compson family patriarchs, is represented by Quentin’s watch. He
begins his section of the novel with:

And then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and
when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and
desire; it’s rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto
absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no bet-
ter than it fitted his or his father’s . . . because no battle is ever won he said.
They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and de-
spair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

Quentin’s inheritance goes back to an original Compson patriarch,

Jason Lycurgus, a man Faulkner describes in the appendix to the novel
as “the last Compson who would not fail at everything he touched
save longevity or suicide.”

Quentin Maclachan suggests an even

more important ancestor, supposedly a Scotsman who fled to Ken-
tucky from Culloden Moor after the British massacre of Highlanders.
This ancestor escaped into the Lost Cause ideology that stalks the male
Compsons right down to Quentin. Paternity and patriarchy collide.
Time is Quentin’s patrimony, and it has not treated the Compson men
very well.

The reason Quentin’s Hamlet Sr., his motivating spirit, is not di-

rectly his biological father may have something to do with Faulkner’s
propensity to render skipped generations.

Indeed, even in Shake-

speare’s play, one of Hamlet’s chief concerns regards Claudius having
“popped in between th’ election and my hopes,/ Thrown out his an-
gle for my proper life.”

The characters are for very different reasons,

but both stand the chance of being that skipped generation as their
immediate fathers before them.

Faulkner may have appropriated some of this idea from Shakespeare,

but his biography offers a clue to this impulse as well. Faulkner once
wrote Malcolm Cowley, “I am telling the same story over and over
which is myself and the world.”

Faulkner’s father, Murry Falkner,

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129

excluded the author as a young boy, preferring his brother Jack. At the
same time, a budding William embraced both a British persona (and all
that came with it) and Phil Stone, an academic mentor and social
model. If he could not be a Falkner, he would be a Stone.

Faulkner

saw his biological father as an insufficient model of masculinity and
chose another. Quentin Compson would have a similar problem. In one
of his classes at the University of Virginia, Faulkner specifies Quentin’s
problem when he elucidates:

The action as portrayed by Quentin was transmitted to him through his father.
There was a basic failure before that. The grandfather had been a failed brigadier
twice in the Civil War. It was the—the basic failure Quentin inherited through
his father, or beyond his father. It was a—something had happened somewhere
between the first Compson and Quentin. The first Compson was a bold, ruth-
less man who came to Mississippi as a free forester to grasp where and when he
could and wanted to, and established what should have been a princely line, and
that princely line decayed.

Quentin inherited only time, time and a generational failure to be-
come a man, and his lack of true inheritance would affect his perfor-
mativity of masculinity, for Quentin would not merely repudiate as
Isaac McCaslin had, but would employ a different strategy in the at-
tempt to reiterate predated citations, or the law.

In the above explanation, Faulkner stresses the father as a transmit-

tal of failure, but he also maintains that this lack of success was not
always the case in the Compson line. Again, Faulkner’s biography re-
veals much regarding this construction. Colonel William C. Falkner,
great-grandfather to the author, was an intimidating study in mas-
culinity as an accomplished soldier, entrepreneur, and all-around
Southern aristocrat.

But the formidable nature of this family patri-

arch is germane to Faulkner’s construction of both himself and his fic-
tive world. William Faulkner was haunted by the masculinity of this
powerful, paternal ghost from the past.

Faulkner once said of his an-

cestor, “Nothing left of his work but a statue. But he rode through
the country like a living force. I like it better that way.”

At the same

time, he found his father, Murry Falkner, an insufficient model. What
is a young author to do? Let Quentin Compson do it for him.

Caddy Compson from The Sound and the Fury exists paradoxically

as a symbol of loss, yet one with a dialogic voice.

Even Faulkner

himself, if he can be believed due to his notorious habit of prevaricat-
ing and contradicting himself, claimed that the novel began thus:
“The first thing I thought of was the picture of the muddy seat of that

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little girl’s drawers climbing the pear tree to look in the parlor win-
dow.”

The supposedly decentered, voiceless Caddy Compson is fre-

quently made the center of discussion in the novel—exceeded only by
Quentin. Even then, Quentin and his incestuous longings tend to be
the focus of much critical attention, as if the young Compson is com-
monly defined by his relationship (real or imagined) with his sister.

Certainly the novel invites this kind of critical leering with Quentin
relating such episodes as:

touch your hand to it
dont cry poor Quentin
but I couldn’t stop she held me against her damp hard breast I could
hear her heart going firm and slow now not hammering and the water
gurgling among the willows in the dark and the waves of honeysuckle com-
ing up the air my arm and shoulder were twisted under me
what is it what are you doing
her muscles gathered I sat up
its my knife I dropped it.

Quentin is obsessed with his sister Caddy and her sexuality; seemingly
every Compson brother reveals this tendency in each section of the
novel. Caddy exists also as a present absence without her own chapter,
her own narrative voice, and as such the temptation for critics to “dis-
cover” her on their own is too great to pass up.

Having acceded that Caddy is vital both to the novel and to under-

standing Quentin Compson, even more important in comprehending
this Southern Hamlet and his reiterations of masculinity is his relation-
ship with his father. This novel reveals the insufficiency of Mr. Comp-
son as a masculine model for Quentin, and the result will be gender
slippage to the point of nearly embracing the opposite role, femininity,
as Horace did in his Little Belle/Temple Drake sequence in Sanctuary.
If The Sound and the Fury exposes this problem, it also hints at a possi-
ble solution, one Quentin will attempt in Absalom! Absalom! Quentin
Compson will endeavor to narrate an acceptable father/masculine
model in the later novel in hopes of providing himself with an ade-
quate reiteration of the law, a working out in fiction of what cannot be
fixed in reality, just like the two novels’ author.

Mr. Compson’s unacceptability is due to his nihilism, his sense of

failure, and he attempts to pass this failure on to his son as he received
it from his father. Quentin relates, “Father said a man is the sum of his
misfortunes. One day you’d think misfortune would get tired, but then
time is your misfortune Father said. A gull on an invisible wire attached

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131

through space dragged. You carry the symbol of your frustration into
eternity. Then the wings are bigger Father said only who can play a
harp.”

Faulkner’s reference to Coleridge is telling—Quentin’s father

exists as an ancient mariner at best, the shell of a real man. Talking
about the past has become his present, a man passing on a tale of failure
and woe instead of reiterating an active masculinity. This posture makes
it difficult for him to be a masculine model for Quentin. Instead, the ci-
tational law of Quentin’s distant forefathers butts up against the weak
version of masculinity he sees performed by his father. The result is con-
fusion for Quentin’s masculinity and identity.

Mr. Compson’s condition is also one of Faulkner’s appropriations

from William Shakespeare. W. B. Yeats obsessed over Shakespeare’s
“lost kings” and how he felt the playwright must have loved them
most, simply for being lost. The long line of these lost, broken kings
from King John to King Lear haunts Yeats; he particularly identified
with Richard II, defending that “unripened Hamlet” and romanticiz-
ing with all poetic license.

Mr. Compson, though difficult to ro-

manticize in such a Yeatsian way, smacks of similarity to Richard in
that both have inherited their “kingdoms,” yet both are unfit to rule
due to their lack of conviction, and in the face of their individual fail-
ures they both turn to nihilism and petrifying self-pity. After his dep-
osition from the throne by Bolingbroke, Richard laments:

Of comfort let no man speak!
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs,
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
Let’s choose executors and talk of wills.
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives, and all are Bolingbroke’s,
And nothing can we call our own but death
For within a hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court.

Mr. Compson’s situation is not as dire as Richard’s, but one would

never know it by his rhetoric (always questionable given Quentin’s
propensity to construct others’ discourse), as is evidenced in the pas-
sage above from The Sound and the Fury. Both men fit into this “bro-
ken king” mold, Richard from his deposition as king and Mr. Compson
from his inheritance of a kingdom not worth having, of never truly hav-
ing been a king to begin with. Neither man reiterates the role of the

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stereotypically “strong man” citation of masculinity, as Bolingbroke
does in Shakespeare’s play and Gerald Bland, Dalton Ames, or seem-
ingly every other male but Quentin does in The Sound and the Fury.

More significantly, the Faulkner passage above demonstrates the

difficulty in placing which words are exactly Quentin’s and which are
his father’s. By the time he gets to Absalom, Quentin finally articulates
this fear when he thinks, “Yes. I have heard too much, too long thinking,
Yes, almost exactly like father.”

Not only is Mr. Compson not a suffi-

cient masculine model, but also Quentin seems to even fear that he is
becoming his father or at least just like him—Mr. Compson is a nega-
tive model and that includes his masculinity as well. Quentin has
every right to hold this fear within him; throughout his section in The
Sound and the Fury, Quentin carries his father’s aphorisms in his head
like ghosts from the past—an absent presence.

Looking at his books

in his Harvard room, Quentin thinks, “Father said it used to be a gen-
tleman was known by his books; nowadays he’s known by the ones he has
not returned.”

The word of the father haunts Quentin—not in the

manner of Hamlet but something more akin to Macbeth and his
ghosts. This distinction exists because these fatherly associative state-
ments always reverberate with decline, futility, and absurdity. Perhaps
Quentin’s notion that “there was always something terrible in me some-
times at night I could see grinning at me I could see it through them
grinning at me through their faces” does not reflect incestuous desire
for Caddy.

Instead, the “they” are the forefathers, back to Jason Ly-

curgus and Quentin Maclachan, and the “terrible” in Quentin sym-
bolizes the failure passed on to him by his father.

Even in the very last moments of his life, at the end of his section

where his sentence logic spirals downward, this obsession still domi-
nates him as much as his sexual desire for Caddy and the need to pro-
tect her virginity (perhaps a question of patriarchal purity for this
impure clan?). Quentin rants, “Every man is the arbiter of his own
virtues but let no man prescribe for another mans wellbeing and i tem-
porary and he was the saddest word of all there is nothing else in the
world it’s not despair until time its not even time until it was.”

What

sounds like a statement of individuality and defiance ends with the “i”
subject position being reduced from capitalized status and the “he,” in
this case the father, becoming the “saddest word of all.” Quentin has
not been defeated by the father, as Freudian critics may be tempted to
read this relationship, but has, rather, succumbed to the same burdens
his father carried.

The effects of the constitutive constraints of the forefathers are

multitudinous on Quentin and his performativity of gender. The

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133

larger consequence is discussed at the beginning of Absalom when
Faulkner writes,

His very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was
not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with
stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward,
from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even
knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not
the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever
and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the dis-
ease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence.

Quentin is haunted, if not possessed, by these forefathers (who are
cultural as well as familial, the Southern, white ruling class that came
generations before him), and the element of them that takes over
his body most is that of failure. As Mr. Compson would suggest,
“Tragedy is second hand.”

Quentin’s tragedy comes secondhand, as

his patrimony.

This haunting by more successful reiterations of masculinity of older

Compson men coupled with the insufficiency of his father affects
Quentin’s gender performativity—he moves from slippage to almost
complete role reversal. Quentin’s slippage appears in relationship to
others. Dalton Ames, Gerald Bland, and Herbert all offer citations of
masculinity that succeed in placing Quentin into a more stereotypically
feminine role. In Quentin’s case, a constant refrain runs through his
head, a daydream in which he plays the masculine role of defending his
sister’s honor against this man not good enough for her by shooting
him—a very active way of reiterating one’s masculinity. Yet Herbert per-
ceives the artificial nature of his actual encounter with Quentin when he
judges, “We’re better than a play you must have made the Dramat,” re-
ferring to Quentin as a “half-baked Galahad,” and exhorting Caddy,
“Don’t let Quentin do anything he cant finish.”

The theatricality of

Quentin’s pose is undercut by both Herbert’s awareness of it and his last
comment, which hints at Quentin’s virginal status, his inability to “fin-
ish.” The response that Quentin musters to questions of his virginity is
the denial of “yes yes lots of times with lots of girls.”

As Shreve says,

“In the South you are ashamed of being a virgin. Boys. Men. They lie
about it.”

The conflict with Herbert becomes a questioning of

Quentin’s reiteration of masculinity and chips away at his masculine
pose by pointing out his theatricality and incomplete sexuality.

Due to the haunting citations of masculinity from the early Comp-

son patriarchs, Quentin thinks dichotomously about gender and sex-

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uality as people did before him. Yet he does not fit into these neat cat-
egories himself. In the beginning of Absalom! Absalom! Faulkner
writes of Quentin:

He would seem to listen to two separate Quentins now—the Quentin Comp-
son preparing for Harvard in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and
peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts, listening, having to listen, to
one of the ghosts which had refused to lie still even longer than most had,
telling him about old ghost-times; and the Quentin Compson who was still
too young to deserve yet to be a ghost but nevertheless having to be one for
all that, since he was born and bred in the deep South the same as she was—
the two separate Quentins now talking to one another in long silence of not-
people in notlanguage.

Though the “she” in the pronoun shift can be Rosa Coldfield or Cad-
die’s eventual offspring, Faulkner conflates the two Quentins with
Rosa in an amalgam of gender indeterminacy—the notpeople of the
notlanguage.

Dalton Ames and Gerald Bland also elicit the same kind of response

from Quentin, and the results are similar to that of his encounter with
Herbert. Once again, Quentin tries on a manly, aggressive pose for
Dalton Ames, hurling threats such as “I say you must go not my father
not anybody I say it” and “I’ll give you until sundown to leave town.”

What is especially compelling about the first threat is that Quentin feels
the need to separate himself from his father—it is clear that Mr. Comp-
son poses no threat to Caddy’s lovers and exists mostly in his section in
Quentin’s head. Quentin attempts to take his father’s place by taking
the initiative.

Still, this idea relies too heavily on Freudian paradigms

of fathers and sons to realize the theatricality of Quentin’s pose. This
encounter may have happened or only took place as a one-act play in
the theater of Quentin’s fevered imagination, yet he still fails as a male
defender, even if he writes the script himself.

Quentin’s reaction to Dalton Ames, who he later conflates with Ger-

ald Bland, is to not only place himself in a stereotypically feminine posi-
tion, by passing out and being manhandled by the person whom he
attempts to thwart via aggression, but also imagine himself clearly in a
female role. He ruminates, “Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. If I could
have been his mother lying with an open body lifted laughing, holding
his father with my hand refraining, seeing, watching him die before he
lived.”

Quentin conjectures that the role of the mother would have

enabled him to defeat Ames, and as he takes on the persona and its ac-
companying personal pronouns (my hand), he interjects a sexuality dif-
ficult to describe as homo-, trans-, or bisexual.

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135

If the idea of a textual logic can be applied to such a fractious narra-

tive as Quentin’s section of The Sound and the Fury, it is this constant
repositioning of its narrator’s masculinity and sexuality.

The two are

furiously intertwined, and Quentin repeatedly ends up either in inde-
terminacy or on the feminine side of the constitutive constraints set by
his forefathers. Even the innuendo in the novel that Compson and his
roommate Shreve are a couple (twice in the work, other characters call
Shreve Quentin’s “husband”) places Quentin in the feminine role of
wife. Shreve, “wearing the pants” in the couple, quickly comes to
Quentin’s defense after his arrest and fistfight with Bland and con-
stantly acts as his protector.

The young Compson moves toward the

feminine side of the dichotomy he has inherited to the point of almost
complete role reversal. Quentin even considers not being a man at all
at one point in the novel. He ruminates:

Versh told me about a man who mutilated himself. He went into the woods
and did it with a razor, sitting in a ditch. A broken razor flinging them back-
ward over his shoulder the same motion complete the jerked skein of blood
backward not looping. But that’s not it. It’s not having them. It’s never to
have had them then I could say O That That’s Chinese I dont know Chinese.
And Father said it’s because you are a virgin: don’t you see?

This Southern Hamlet contemplates what it would be like to not

have male sex organs. Quentin cannot accept his culture’s definition
of man and considers its polar opposite—woman.

To suggest that

he is considering being female is to see females as castrated males (see
Dr. Freud’s conception of what it means to be a “female”), yet cer-
tainly Quentin is scrutinizing the role of the male as identification of
male genitals and his inability to escape either.

In addition, Mr. Compson adds the failure of Quentin’s sexuality

as the cause of all his problems and feels the need to point it out to his
troubled son. This pointing out by the father is germane to Quentin’s
problem. To be sure, Quentin obsesses over his sister’s (and his own)
sexuality, but his father’s pessimistic view of his son coupled with Mr.
Compson’s own insufficiency as a model of masculinity acts as the en-
gine in the younger Compson’s obsessions.

The Quentin Compson of The Sound and the Fury does, however,

hint at a solution he will put into practice in Absalom! Absalom! In the
earlier novel, Quentin thinks, “Say it to Father will you I will am my
fathers Progenitive I invented him created I him Say it to him it will
not be fore he will say I was not and then you and I since philoprog-
enitive.”

Quentin endeavors to narrate an acceptable father in the

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later novel, to transmogrify the insufficient model of Mr. Compson to
one of his making; he dares to create his father to fit into the line of
Jason Lycurgus and in turn create a better self. Quentin Compson
will be his “father’s Progenitive,” in essence becoming his own grand-
father rather than taking his place.

Critics frequently see Quentin’s action as one of competition with

his father, as an attempt to replace him, but this thinking is mired in
Lacanian/Freudian paradigms of father-son relationships.

Quentin

wants to improve the father so he can have a model to reiterate; the
emphasis is on creation not destruction. The failed Southern Hamlet
uses narrative to overcome his performative difficulties in The Sound
and the Fury.

This narrative performance, however, does not begin

with Quentin himself. Mr. Compson as patriarch becomes what
Quentin initially believes is the much more acceptable Thomas Sutpen,
with, understandably, mixed results.

Faulkner once told a graduate course in American fiction at the

University of Virginia that Thomas Sutpen was the central character
of Absalom! Absalom! and his real reason for writing the novel.

While the novelist places this patriarch at the center of the work, he
does so through Quentin Compson. In fact, Faulkner wrote in a let-
ter to Harrison Smith in February of 1934, “Quentin Compson, of
the Sound & Fury, tells it, or ties it together; he is the protagonist so
that is not a complete apocrypha. . . . I use his bitterness which he has
projected on the South in the form of hatred of it and its people to
get more out of the story itself than a historical novel would be. To
keep the hoopskirts and plug hats out.”

Quentin bears responsibil-

ity for Thomas Sutpen’s story through listening to both Mr. Comp-
son and Rosa Coldfield and eventually “telling about the South” by
telling about this patriarch, this most masculine of Faulkner’s cre-
ations. Faulkner’s comments above suggest that Quentin’s perspec-
tive and what he attempts to do with it are just as important as the
story of Sutpen himself.

Hamlet’s perspective on his father in Shakespeare’s play is also as

important as the actual man himself; it is difficult to measure which
drives the play’s action more. This fleeting ghost that may not even be
Hamlet’s actual father stands in stark contrast to the man the tragic
prince paints. Hamlet describes his father:

See what grace was seated on his brow:
Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself,
An eye like Mars to threaten and command,
A station like the herald Mercury

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137

New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill—
A combination and a form indeed
Where every god did seem to set his seal
To give the world assurance of a man.

Hamlet constructs his father into at least the idealized man, if not a
god. Through words, he builds this father-king ideal just as Quentin
does through narrative, and both sons’ perspectives are central to
creation.

Yet, if Thomas Sutpen is the central character of Absalom, he is al-

most always given to both the reader and Quentin in a secondhand
manner. Sutpen exists in the shadowy world of the present absence
much like Caddy Compson in The Sound and the Fury. The descrip-
tion of Sutpen’s flesh as having “the appearance of pottery, of having
been colored by that oven’s fever either of soul or environment” sug-
gests in a small sense the larger premise of the novel—that Thomas
Sutpen is a made thing.

Listening to Sutpen’s stories passed down

to his father from his father in turn (General Compson), attending to
Rosa Coldfield’s version of Sutpen, and touring the remains of Sut-
pen’s “design,” Quentin Compson serves his apprenticeship and pre-
pares his own design, that of the modern Southern patriarch and his
attendant masculinity; in the second half of the novel, he tries to ful-
fill this design with results similar to that of Sutpen’s.

The initial impulse to create Thomas Sutpen for Quentin is the

controlling of patriarchal masculinity, a threat to be expunged by his
storyteller.

Indeed, Quentin longs for Prospero-like powers as in

The Tempest, controlling the fate (narrative) of all involved with the
assurance, “I have with such provision in mine art/ So safely ordered
that there is no soul/ No, not so much perdition as a hair/ Betid to
any creature in the vessel.”

Yet Quentin wants this power more to

create himself via Thomas Sutpen than to merely defeat this forefa-
ther. Numerous Faulkner characters reinvent the past to create a sense
of identity.

Quentin will use his art to create Thomas Sutpen.

One of the main attributes of this creation is what Quentin would see

as a throwback to the Hotspur masculinity of his distant antecedents.
Early in the novel, Sutpen appears as a figure of almost hypermasculin-
ity. At Sutpen’s Hundred, his self-made plantation, Thomas exerts his
masculinity in highly physical wrestling matches with his black slaves.
Faulkner writes:

Perhaps as a matter of sheer deadly forethought toward the retention of su-
premacy, domination, he would enter the ring with one of the negroes

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himself . . . the father of her children standing there naked and panting and
bloody to the waist and the negro just fallen evidently, lying at his feet and
bloody.

Physical prowess, aggressiveness, and the domination of the black man
are all a part of Thomas Sutpen’s masculinity. In short, Sutpen is every-
thing Mr. Compson and his son are not.

Even when Quentin assumes more control of the narrative later in

the novel, he conveys a similar Sutpen masculinity. When relating the
story of Sutpen’s tenure on the Haitian sugar plantation, a tale sup-
posedly told by General Compson, to Mr. Compson, Quentin, and
Shreve, this new, vested narrator ramps up Sutpen’s masculinity in the
episode of the slave uprising. He recounts Sutpen’s words via his in-
termediaries, “Something had to be done so he put the musket down
and went out and subdued them. That was how he [Sutpen? The
General? Mr. Compson?] told it; he went out and subdued them, and
when he returned he and the girl became engaged to marry.”

Again,

Sutpen uses his aggressiveness and physical prowess to both physically
dominate his opponents and obtain a female (a failure of Quentin’s).
In Quentin’s tale, Sutpen swaggers.

These specific incidents are not the only attributes that make Sut-

pen Quentin’s ideal patriarch. Sutpen not only subdues the slaves but
also subdues the land, the entire town, the Coldfields, and, in a sense,
himself. He is the most active agent in his circumstances, attempting
to create the world around him and defining himself as well.

other words, this modern Southern Hamlet endeavors to fashion an
ideal masculine model by creating a Hotspur worth reiterating.

Thomas Sutpen does, however, become his “father’s Progenitive,”

not unlike Quentin. Compson offers Sutpen’s conjecture of his fa-
ther’s origins when he states, “He didn’t know just where his father
had come from, whether the country to which they returned was it or
not, or even if his father knew, remembered, wanted to remember and
find it again.”

In fact, Shreve and Quentin are never really clear on

where Sutpen was born; more importantly, young Thomas will
become disconnected from his heritage just like his father, as if he had
none. Part of the appeal of this disassociation for Quentin rests in Sut-
pen’s class mobility. Through his own efforts, Sutpen moves from be-
ing a working-class poor kid to becoming the master of Sutpen’s
Hundred. The Compson family reveals the aristocracy in decline, hav-
ing to sell their land just to send Quentin to college. The notion of
mobility through effort makes up part of the patriarchal ideal Quentin
constructs in Thomas Sutpen.

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139

More specifically, Sutpen, being an active agent, chooses to disas-

sociate himself from his father, his class, and that potential heritage.
The formative moment that brings about this decision occurs when
he has to deliver a message from his working-stiff father to the master
of the “big house,” and relates “how it was the nigger told him, even
before he had had time to say what he came for, never to come to that
front door again but to go around back.”

This episode makes young

Thomas aware of the insufficiency of his father as masculine role
model and convinces him to choose the master of the big house as his
male ideal.

But there is more. Thomas flees the scene of his humili-

ation and hides in a cave to consider just what has happened to him.
In this cave, Sutpen is reborn by the choice he makes—he reflects on
his alternative responses:

But I can shoot him: and the other: No. That wouldn’t do no good: and the first:
What shall we do then? And the other: I don’t know; and the first: But I can
shoot him. I could slip right up there through them bushes and lay there until he
come out to lay in the hammock and shoot him: and the other: No. That wouldn’t
do no good: and the first: Then what shall we do? And the other: I don’t know.

In the process of this rebirth that will ultimately lead to the rejection
of Sutpen’s biological father and the embracing of this plantation
gentleman, Thomas splits in two. In a sense, Sutpen resembles the
two Quentins talking to each other in the “notlanguage” cited ear-
lier.

Herein lies one of the biggest problems with Quentin’s narra-

tion of an ideal father—the intrusion of the self.

This interference is not the sole province of Quentin when it comes

to the making of Thomas Sutpen. Rosa Coldfield first describes Sutpen
to young Compson as “a man who rode into town out of nowhere
with a horse and two pistols and a herd of wild beasts that he had
hunted down singlehanded because he was stronger. . . . No: not even
a gentleman.”

Rosa constructs Sutpen’s masculinity for Quentin, but

clearly she is no more an objective source than her audience. She has
plenty of provocation for presenting Sutpen as “the demon”—
Sutpen’s offer to marry her if she could first produce male offspring
would be reason enough—but she clearly intrudes herself on her defi-
nitions of this man who never gets to speak for himself. Notably,
Shreve will appropriate Rosa’s estimation of Sutpen in the latter part
of the novel, employing the moniker of “demon” much in the same
manner as Miss Coldfield.

Mr. Compson does not have as much opportunity or motivation to

intrude himself on his construction of Thomas Sutpen. Paramount in

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his composition is the source of all of his information and his audi-
ence. His father, General Compson, supplies all of Mr. Compson’s
materials. Mr. Compson repeatedly footnotes information from his
father in statements such as, “I have this from something your grand-
father let drop one day which he doubtless had from Sutpen himself
in the same accidental fashion.”

This way of expressing his source

and its potential for unreliability due to its accidental nature explains
Mr. Compson’s need to constantly employ parentheses with qualifica-
tions or clarifications for the details offered throughout his narrative.

The retailing of Sutpen’s story by Mr. Compson is problematic be-

cause the narrative makes up part of this inheritance of loss that he re-
ceived from his father and that he tries to pass on to his son. The net
effect resonates because Mr. Compson’s view of his paternity and its
failure is pervasive—he can offer no ideal for Quentin even when re-
lating another man’s story. Like Mr. Compson himself, his construc-
tion of Sutpen reeks of incompleteness, and Shreve calls him on it.

First Shreve says doubtfully, “Your father . . . he seems to have got an
awful lot of delayed information awful quick, after having waited
forty-five years.”

Quentin’s interlocutor speaks for the audience,

questioning the validity of Sutpen’s legend. Shreve assesses even the
barometer for accuracy:

Your old man . . . when your grandfather was telling this to him, he didn’t
know any more what your grandfather was talking about than your grandfa-
ther knew what the demon was talking about when the demon told it to him,
did he? And when your old man told it to you, you wouldn’t have known what
anybody was talking about if you hadn’t been out there and seen Clytie.

Shreve has come to grasp that every generation of male Compson

has failed to pass on any sort of complete understanding of Thomas
Sutpen and offers, perhaps too optimistically, the notion that Quentin
can rectify the situation and benefit from this comprehension. Class
mobility and a successful reiteration of masculinity may be Quentin’s
if he can narrate this ideal father. In a sense, Shreve is offering to stand
in as the father who can help this son aright the situation,

but

Quentin offers him, “You cant understand it. You would have to be
born there.”

Quentin suggests that the patrimony of failure inher-

ent in being Southern is needed to even approach an understanding
of the situation, much less solve it.

These intrusions in the construction of Thomas Sutpen and his

modes of masculinity are problematic, but the interference and/or
projection of Quentin Compson’s own identity on the construction

C o m p s o n ’s S h a k e s p e a r e a n S o l u t i o n

141

of his masculine ideal dooms the project from the start. Jacques Lacan
theorizes in Ecrits that subjects can call the Name-of-the-Father for
use, if not through the biological father, then through what he desig-
nates as the “A-father.”

This constructed father is an ideal, but the

thinker warns, “In fact, the image of the ideal father is a phantasy of
the neurotic,” and “the neurotic’s wished-for Father is clearly the
dead Father.”

Most importantly, in terms of Compson and Sutpen,

the idea of Sutpen is a longing for the dead father (Jason Lycurgus)
and a neurotic projection. Surely Quentin Compson has the corner
market on neuroses, and this mental state causes him to first endeavor
to create Sutpen and his masculinity and, in the end, to fail.

The dual personages of Thomas Sutpen cited above are just one in-

stance of Quentin’s intruding of himself into what is supposedly a mas-
culine ideal. The most compelling of these projections curiously
involves the narration of the sons of Sutpen—Bon and Henry. The
father-son relationship is so problematic for this neurotic narrator that
his ideal begins to break down and, eventually, with it, all sense of
identity. The two sons are set up almost as a paradigm, as the Hamlet
versus Hotspur. Henry is referred to often as “given to instinctive and
violent action rather than to thinking, ratiocination . . . because he
never thought. He felt he acted immediately. He knew loyalty and
acted it, he knew pride and jealousy; he loved and grieved and
killed.”

Henry is frequently described in these stereotypically mascu-

line terms and exists as an active agent in the novel, killing Bon, doing
the will of the father, and defending his sister’s virginity. After all,
Henry does what Quentin cannot. Rosa Coldfield narrates, “Henry
had formally abjured his father and renounced his birthright and the
roof under which he had been born and that he and Bon had ridden
away in the night.”

If Sutpen represents Quentin’s masculine ideal,

Henry symbolizes the son’s reiteration of that ideal with the ability to
not only reiterate, but also make the citation his own.

At the risk of a slippery analogy, if Henry is Hotspur, Charles Bon is

Quentin’s Hamlet. Bon is passive, never really confronting Sutpen
about his parentage, allowing Henry to dictate the terms of their dis-
pute over Judith, and biding his time until some sort of resolution oc-
curs. Charles Bon could have easily uttered Hamlet’s lines, “Prompted
to my revenge by heaven and hell,/ Must like a whore unpack my
heart with words.”

Faulkner writes, “Bon himself never affirmed or

denied, arose and he in the background, impartial and passive as
though it were not himself involved or he acting on behalf of some
absent friend.”

Charles Bon is, then, Quentin Compson’s version of

the Hamlet-son.

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Quentin not only chooses to make Bon his Hamlet, but also em-

braces Mr. Compson’s portrait of him in feminized terms as well. Henry
first meets Charles, “presented formally to the man reclining in a flow-
ered, almost feminised gown, in a sunny window in his chambers—this
man handsome and elegant and even catlike . . . in the outlandish and
almost feminine garments of his sybaritic privacy.”

Clearly, Mr. Comp-

son sees passivity as feminine (an assertion Quentin does not contest,
even when he gains control of the narrative), a personal issue for
Quentin and himself as they remain so passive throughout both novels.

Quentin’s paradigm of the two sons of his masculine ideal does not

hold up because of a further projection of his own—homosexual ten-
dencies. Rather Shreve or Quentin, a bit difficult to tell in the text with
no clear markers, states, “There must have been nights and nights
while Henry was learning from him [Bon] how to lounge about a bed-
room in a gown and slippers such as women wore, in a faint though
unmistakable effluvium of scent such as women used, smoking a cigar
almost as a woman might smoke it.”

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,

but the imagery is quite heavy-handed. Even in Mr. Compson’s earlier
account of Henry’s relationship with Bon, he specifies, “Yes, he loved
Bon, who seduced him as surely as he seduced Judith.”

Not only

does Quentin elect to make his Hamlet-son feminine, but also he de-
cides to have him seduce and enthrall the Hotspur-son.

This seduction is, no doubt, Quentin’s projection of his relation-

ship with Shreve onto the Bon-Henry dyad. There are many passages
in Absalom! Absalom! that suggest a homoerotic flirtation, if not rela-
tionship between the two roommates. Faulkner writes:

They stared at one another—glared rather—their quiet regular breathing va-
porizing faintly and steadily in the now tomblike air. There was something
curious in the way they looked at one another, curious and quiet and pro-
foundly intent, not at all as two young men would look at each other but
almost as a youth and a very young girl might out of virginity itself—a sort of
hushed and naked searching, each look burdened with youth’s immemorial
obsession.

This tinge of homoeroticism not only requires looking but also con-
tains gender slippage, a passive Hamlet-like act that Faulkner feels the
need to feminize.

In fact, in these “looking” scenes, most of the homoerotic tension

between Shreve and Quentin exists.

Quentin, interestingly enough,

initiates this phenomenon earlier in the novel when he begins
“glancing . . . for a moment at Shreve leaning forward into the lamp,

C o m p s o n ’s S h a k e s p e a r e a n S o l u t i o n

143

his naked torso pink-gleaming and baby-smooth, cherubic, almost
hairless, the twin moons of his spectacles glinting against his moon-
like rubicund face, smelling (Quentin) the cigar and the wisteria, see-
ing the fireflies blowing and winking in the September dusk.”

Quentin and Shreve, as they construct the story of Henry and Bon, at
the very least sublimate these homoerotic impulses in these two sons.

Quentin also projects his relationship with Caddy onto Henry and

Judith’s connection. Faulkner offers, “Between Henry and Judith
there had been a relationship closer than the traditional loyalty of
brother and sister,” and “brother and sister, curiously alike as if the dif-
ference in sex had merely sharpened the common blood to a terrific,
an almost unbearable, similarity.”

In a sense, Henry manages to pull

off many of the relationships that Quentin seems unable to in The
Sound and the Fury. Yet Quentin’s projections of himself on his ideal
father and son cause his overall scheme to fail. More importantly, Mr.
Compson aids this failure by forcing Quentin onto his ideal narrative.

For example, Henry obsesses over Judith’s virginity in Absalom!

Absalom! as Quentin does over Caddy’s in the earlier novel.

The dif-

ference lies in the third party, Charles Bon, and the person who tells
the story—Mr. Compson. Of course, the belief in Mr. Compson’s
words depends on the ability to trust narrator tags that are few and far
between, perhaps an effort on Faulkner’s part to suggest some confla-
tion. Still, Mr. Compson narrates:

His fierce provincial’s pride in his sister’s virginity was a false quantity which
must incorporate in itself an inability to endure in order to be precious, to
exist, and so must depend upon its loss, absence, to have existed at all. In fact,
perhaps this is the pure and perfect incest: the brother realizing that the sis-
ter’s virginity must be destroyed in order to have existed at all, taking that vir-
ginity in the person of the brother-in-law, the man whom he would be if he
could become, metamorphose into, the lover, the husband; by whom he
would be despoiled, choose for despoiler, if he could become, metamorphose
into the sister, the mistress, the bride. Perhaps that is what went, not in
Henry’s mind, but in his soul.

This passage reads like many similar scenes in The Sound and the Fury,

with all of Quentin’s concern for his virginity and Caddy’s lack thereof.
There remains, however, one noticeable difference. Faulkner produces
here a textbook example of Eve K. Sedgwick’s concept of the homoso-
cial put forth in her Between Men (1985). Undoubtedly, Henry views his
sister as a conduit between himself and the somewhat feminized Bon,
and the sentiment is mutual.

Of Bon’s feelings toward Judith and her

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brother, Faulkner records, “Perhaps in his fatalism he loved Henry the
better of the two, seeing perhaps in the sister merely the shadow, the
woman vessel with which to consummate the love whose actual object
was the youth.”

The difference lies in Henry’s consideration of the

role of the female; Bon already leaned to that side of the dichotomy.

Quentin Compson’s Hotspur, Henry, does not live up to the mas-

culine ideal set by his father, Thomas Sutpen. In fact, there is much
role reversal between Judith and Henry, even early in the novel and in
their youth. Rosa Coldfield relates an incident in which “it had been
Judith, a girl of six, who had instigated and authorized that negro to
make the team run away. Not Henry, mind; not the boy, which would
have been outrageous enough; but Judith, the girl.”

In the dichoto-

mous world of Absalom! Absalom! males are aggressive and females
are passive—but Henry and Judith frequently prove that these roles,
these reiterations, offer the chance for slippage if not failure.

Both Judith and Henry view Thomas Sutpen’s masculine display of

fighting his slaves, as referenced above—Henry has front-row seats
while Judith remains hidden in the loft, watching Sutpen’s exhibition:

Judith . . . who while Henry screamed and vomited, looked down from the
loft that night on the spectacle of Sutpen fighting halfnaked with one of his
halfnaked niggers with the same cold and attentive interest with which Sut-
pen would have watched Henry fighting with a negro boy of his own age and
weight. . . . She would have acted as Sutpen would have acted with anyone
who tried to cross him.

Judith and Henry react to the brute force of their father’s masculinity
in stereotypically opposite ways than their prescribed gender roles
would dictate. Judith has much more of “Sutpen” in her, and if she
does not exactly reiterate this citation completely, she is far more pre-
pared to do so than the squeamish Henry.

The masculine display of the father does not drive the similar gen-

der role inversion of Quentin and Caddy in The Sound and the Fury;
rather, the lack of such causes the same phenomenon. Of Caddy,
Quentin wonders, “Why couldn’t it have been me and not her who is
unvirgin.”

Caddy becomes sexually “successful” whereas Quentin

does not. In the essentialist thinking of Quentin’s cultural context, his
sister remains more of a man than he. This sort of reversal is more ap-
parent when they are children. Quentin remembers this exchange with
Caddy, “You know what I’d do if I were King? she never was a queen
or a fairy she was always a king or a giant or a general.”

Caddy takes

on the role of the more dominant, aggressive, of the two, and even

C o m p s o n ’s S h a k e s p e a r e a n S o l u t i o n

145

in the pretend world of children she enacts masculine roles, leaving
Quentin to his own definitions.

Perhaps Faulkner is not merely revealing Quentin’s gender identi-

fication problems, but speaking to a larger decentered field of repre-
sentation, a sense of fluidity that can be one of the disconcerting
aspects of modernist thought. Certainly the Southern Renaissance al-
lowed for these kinds of gender narrations much more than in earlier
epochs.

Faulkner’s fictive constructions fit the bill. Quoted in a 1965

article by Stephen Longstreet, Faulkner asserted, “Latent unconscious
ideas need giants to make their revelations valid.”

Quentin Compson

built his giant in Thomas Sutpen, and William Faulkner did the same
with his tragic young Compson.

Not only does Quentin ruin his narration of masculine ideals by

projecting his gender slippage, incestuous longing, and homosexual
tendencies on the very models he tries to construct, but also his pas-
sivity forces him to lose control of his narrative; this Southern Hamlet
does not have the force of will (his fatal flaw?) to manipulate a Hot-
spur such as Henry Sutpen, much less his father. A conflict results be-
tween two Hotspurs, father and son, Henry and Thomas. Early in the
novel, Quentin gets this version of father-son clash from Mr. Comp-
son. The elder Compson tells Quentin of Henry’s relationship with
Sutpen:

Henry gave the lie, but to the fact that it was his father who told him, his
father who anticipated him, the father who is the natural enemy of any son
and son-in-law of whom the mother is the ally, just as after the wedding the
father will be the ally of the actual son-in-law who has for mortal foe the
mother of his wife.

Mr. Compson fully embraces a Freudian reading of the family unit; par-
ents and progeny are oppositional, foes, enemies. This message may be
in regard to Henry and his father, but Compson generalizes here and
implies that he and Quentin fit into that generalization as well.

Even when Mr. Compson no longer controls the narrative, this

form of father-son dynamic infects the telling, and Henry and Thomas
are cast in similar terms to those dictated by Compson the elder.
Faulkner writes, “And then the demon must turn square around and
run not only the fiancé out of the house and not only the son out of
the house but so corrupt seduce and mesmerize the son that he (the
son) should do the office of the outraged father’s pistol-hand when
fornication threatened.”

The son becomes the victim of the father

and, from a Freudian perspective, never really threatens him. Yet he

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still manages to take his place, but only to do the supposed dirty work
his father should have done—the defense of the daughter-sister.

This same dynamic exists between Quentin and Mr. Compson in

The Sound and the Fury. Quentin notes, “Father and I protect women”
(sad, considering they do nothing of the kind), yet he still dreams of
saying to his father, “I said I have committed incest. Father I said.”

Obviously, Quentin does not feel that his father fulfills his role as pro-
tector of his daughter, and the second fantasy here is designed to goad
him into doing just that—both safeguarding his daughter and punish-
ing his son, in other words, being what Quentin conceives of as a fa-
ther. Young Compson hopes to overcome these problems by narrating
them into the masculine ideals presented in Absalom! Absalom! but the
lack of will of both Quentin and Mr. Compson and their dysfunctional
relationship bleeds into this narrative, especially as Quentin loses con-
trol of it.

This circumstance results in not only gender slippage but also a to-

tally decentered field, fluidity in identity. Shreve and Quentin sit in
their dorm room, bouncing the narrative of the doomed Sutpen fam-
ily back and forth, arguing for command of the narrative with ex-
changes like, “Wait I tell you,” from Quentin and Shreve arguing,
“I am telling.”

100

Quentin thinks of the two narrators:

Yes. Maybe we are both Father. Maybe nothing ever happens once and is
finished. . . . Yes, we are both Father. Or Maybe Father and I are both Shreve,
maybe it took Father and me both to make Shreve or Shreve and me both to
make Father or maybe Thomas Sutpen to make all of us.

101

Quentin, Shreve, Mr. Compson, and Thomas Sutpen all seep into

each other with Quentin’s compelling notion of “making” in this pas-
sage. This creating can be in the biological sense, considering lineage
and patrimony, the narrative signification, creating the story, or the
sexual sense, the notion of being “made.” Control frequently offers
Faulkner’s characters autonomy.

102

Ironically, Quentin’s attempt leads

to neither control nor autonomy.

Whichever way one chooses to read Quentin’s cluttered thoughts,

the boundaries between these four men are elastic.

103

This bleeding to-

gether makes it difficult to tell who fathers whom. The implications for
both the South in general terms and Faulkner in literary/cultural patri-
monial terms are that these men are free to create their fathers and
themselves because the distinction is just not that important in what will
eventually be labeled as postmodern. Southern men can choose ancient
ancestors or war heroes as fathers and define themselves in relation to

C o m p s o n ’s S h a k e s p e a r e a n S o l u t i o n

147

them. Faulkner can choose Phil Stone, an RAF pilot, or even William
Shakespeare to suit his purposes.

Shreve and Quentin progress toward indeterminacy as their Sutpen

tale proceeds. Faulkner offers, “It might have been either one of them
and was in a sense both: both thinking as one, the voice which hap-
pened to be speaking the thought only the thinking became audible,
vocal.”

104

By this point in the novel, Shreve and Quentin are indistin-

guishable; they have become one, and what they create only exacer-
bates the condition:

The two of them creating between them, out of the rag-tag and bob-ends of
old tales and talking, people who perhaps had never existed at all anywhere,
who shadows, were shadows not of flesh and blood which had lived and died
but shadows in turn of what were (to one of them at least, to Shreve) (shades
too) quiet as the visible murmur of their vaporizing breath.

105

If these people are not “shadows” of people who had lived and died,
perhaps they are “shades” of the storytellers themselves.

106

The two strongest “shades” for these narrators lie, however, not in

the ideal father Thomas Sutpen, but in the two sons, Henry and
Charles Bon. Quentin and Shreve’s melding leads to this description,
“There was now not two of them but four, the two who breathed not
individuals now yet something both more and less than twins.”

107

This state of affairs initiates this morphing: “So that now it was not
two but four of them riding the two horses through the dark over the
frozen December ruts of that Christmas eve: four of them and then
just two—Charles-Shreve and Quentin-Henry, the two of them both
believing that Henry was thinking He (meaning his father) has de-
stroyed us all.”

108

The four have become two now, but compounds.

Note that Quentin amalgamates himself with his Hotspur (Henry),
not his Hamlet (Charles Bon). This decision shows that this Southern
Hamlet still has the longing to be his obverse, to be a Hotspur char-
acter, to be Jason Lycurgus.

The reason he cannot be so resides in the compound thought that

all four males are sure that Henry has—they all have been destroyed at
the hands of the father. Thomas Sutpen has manipulated his son
Henry into destroying Charles Bon, his possibly mixed-race son, and
making a fugitive out of himself. He has destroyed his own lineage;
there can be no father without a son and no future Sutpens. Thomas
Sutpen will have a few more futile attempts to reinstitute his patrimony
over the course of Absalom! Absalom! but in the conclusion he will be
cut down by a scythe, as if time itself catches up with him. In the end,

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S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

Quentin’s attempts to narrate a masculine ideal worthy of reiteration
will collapse under the weight of his own neuroses that infect his nar-
ration, rendering it as failed as the “design” of Sutpen’s Hundred.

Even if Quentin’s own flaws had not doomed his attempt to write

previous gender citations into law, his project was fated for calamity
from the beginning. Judith Butler explains why in Bodies That Matter
in her discussion of the effects of performatives. She elucidates, “The
reach of their signifiability cannot be controlled by the one who utters
or writes, since such productions are not owned by the one who utters
them. They continue to signify in spite of their authors, and sometimes
against their authors’ most precious intentions.”

109

Quentin’s effort to

narrate acceptable masculine models for his own reiteration represents
an act of struggle for control of signifiability, both “struggle” and “con-
trol” being stereotypically masculine themselves. Butler explains here
that this attempt is futile, that producers cannot control signification,
even if they have a dire need to do so. Unfortunately for Quentin, Mr.
Compson’s cynical explanation of the failed effort offers a similar yet
more concrete diagnosis than Judith Butler. Early in Absalom! Absa-
lom! he argues:

Yes, Judith, Bon, Henry, Sutpen: all of them. They are there, yet something is
missing; they are like a chemical formula exhumed along with the letters from
that forgotten chest, carefully, the paper old and faded and falling to pieces,
the writing faded, almost indecipherable, yet meaningful, familiar in shape
and sense, the name and presence of volatile and sentient forces; you bring
them together in proportions called for, but nothing happens; you re-read,
tedious and intent, poring, making sure that you have forgotten nothing,
made no miscalculation; you bring them together again and nothing hap-
pens: just the words, the symbols, the shapes themselves, shadowy inscrutable
and serene, against that turgid background of a horrible and bloody mis-
chancing of human affairs.

110

Quentin’s father uses the personal pronoun “you,” and his audience
is his son—he wants to put him into this place of failed creator even
before the son has really begun his project. Like Judith Butler, Mr.
Compson admits something important as well: the lack of control the
creator has, even if the position does feel like one of power. There are
no Prosperos in Faulkner’s fictive world.

Even though Absalom is the second book, in the life chronology of

Quentin Compson it comes first, for the “academic Hamlet” kills him-
self in The Sound and the Fury. Part of Quentin’s mania that exists in
Sound and the Fury results directly from his failure to narrate a more ac-
ceptable father and masculine model in Absalom. The incestuous desire,

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149

the obsession with time, and the fractious view of reality are all symp-
toms of a disease that Quentin fails to cure with his narrative of Thomas
Sutpen and his sons. Quentin’s failed project ultimately leads to his
death. The young Compson sets out to have Prospero-like powers, to
control the narrative with his art. Instead, he becomes like Hamlet,
Othello, and all of Shakespeare’s characters who attempt to control the
narratives of their lives, especially as they are dying. Hamlet exhorts
Horatio, “Report me and my cause aright/ To the unsatisfied,” and,
“If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,/ Absent thee from felicity
awhile,/ And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain/ to tell my
story.”

111

In death, Hamlet attempts to control his own narrative. Like-

wise, before he kills himself, Othello directs, “Speak of me as I am;
nothing extenuate,/ Nor set down aught in malice. Then you must
speak/ Of one that loved not wisely but too well.”

112

Of course, Oth-

ello has an absent father, no sons, and also has to deal with racial dy-
namics that Quentin only senses indirectly at best, but the significance
lies in Othello’s narrative methodology, even if his motivations match
Quentin’s, only in a more general way. Both Hamlet and Othello are
concerned with what they perceive as the accuracy of how their stories
are told, but the essential impulse is that of control; this compulsion
and method reflect Faulkner’s final appropriations from Shakespeare
for Quentin Compson. At least this control would suggest a stereo-
typically masculine position, and Quentin’s suicide represents the most
active act he perpetrates in either novel, but Faulkner will not let him
have it that way.

Quentin’s section in The Sound and the Fury does not end with a

dramatic death coupled with Hamlet and Othello-like requests for con-
trol of their own narratives.

113

In fact, Quentin’s section does not even

end with his own death, but with the minutiae of his preparations. His
actual death is given to the readers in a somewhat secondhand manner.
If Quentin Compson descends from these Shakespearean self-narrators,
his power greatly diminishes, getting only, “Every man is the arbiter of
his own virtues.”

114

Quentin paradoxically makes meaning with the

past but creates an identity he tragically cannot live with at all.

115

Quentin Compson, his masculinity, and his approach to his identity are
appropriations from William Shakespeare, but he filters them through
the prism of modernism, and that perspective almost always equals
decline.

Part of what brings on this deterioration is a crippling self-awareness

of the falsity, the theatricality of these men’s existence. Shreve asserts,
“Jesus, the South is fine, isn’t it. It’s better than theater, isn’t it. It’s
better than Ben Hur, isn’t it. No wonder you have to come away from

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S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

it now and then, isn’t it.”

116

This sense of theatricality can certainly be

attributed to the culture of the South in the modern era, but there is
something way more specific at work in Faulkner’s novels—the author
himself.

117

Faulkner writes of Thomas Sutpen, “That while he was still playing

the scene to the audience, behind him fate, destiny, retribution,
irony—the stage manager, call him what you will—was already striking
the set and dragging on the synthetic and spurious shadows and shapes
of the next one.”

118

Not only does Faulkner write of Sutpen in terms

of an actor but he also places an even stronger emphasis on who con-
trols his act, the “stage manager.” On the one hand, this controlling
force could be seen as fate, an idea referenced repeatedly in Absalom,
but on the other, it could be the creator, the narrators, Quentin
Compson, and, in a much larger sense, Faulkner himself. If Quentin
controls the narrative of Thomas Sutpen, William Faulkner controls
Quentin Compson.

This idea of a “stage manager” resembles the “Player” in the earlier

Light in August.

119

In Percy Grimm’s final chase of Joe Christmas,

Faulkner writes, “He [Christmas] was moving again almost before he
had stopped, with that lean, swift, blind obedience to whatever Player
moved him on the Board” and of Percy’s stamina, “As if the Player
who moved him for pawn likewise found him breath,” and later, “The
car which had passed him and lost him and then returned was just
where it should have been, just where the Player designed it to be.”

120

The “Player” and Faulkner’s characters relate as master and manipu-
lated. Countless Faulkner characters frequently perceive this relation-
ship, making them unique. Faulkner writes of Christmas, “It was as
though he had been merely waiting for the Player to move him
again,” and “But the Player was not done yet.”

121

Given the outcome

for characters like Joe Christmas and Quentin Compson, William
Faulkner may have liked the idea of chalking up their destinies to fate,
but the Player, the stage manager, represents himself.

In his early novel Mosquitoes, Faulkner actually inserts himself pre-

cociously into the text, having two characters discuss him: “ ‘He said
he was a liar by profession, and he made good money at it. . . . I think
he was crazy. . . . Faulkner, that was his name.’ ‘Faulkner. . . . Never
heard of him.’ ”

122

In an early novel, Faulkner may have enjoyed put-

ting himself into the text in such a way, but as he matured and took on
larger issues in his work, he removed himself from the status of a walk-
on character to that of an overvoice, fate, God, the Player, the stage
manager. Faulkner no doubt embraced Shakespeare’s idea that “All
the world’s a stage,/ And all the men and women are merely players/

C o m p s o n ’s S h a k e s p e a r e a n S o l u t i o n

151

They have their exits and their entrances,/ And one man in his time
plays many parts.”

123

The problem for William Faulkner lies in the un-

ease he felt with all the parts that he could play. His fictive project
bears a striking resemblance to Quentin Compson’s—to narrate, to
become the Player, to have control, and to reassert his masculinity.
Like Quentin’s endeavors, Faulkner’s efforts prove the futility of at-
tempting this kind of manipulation.

Yet, in his failure, William Faulkner has interrogated (some more

successfully than others) race, class, gender, identity, religion, South-
ern culture, reality, time, and many other aspects of what it means to
be a human being in his particular context, and some even beyond his
own circumstances, as much as one can. The irony is that now
Faulkner has been made into a father, a symbol of control, a standard,
a yardstick, and critics, scholars, biographers, and readers of his works
are controlling his narrative. William Faulkner is now being deified
the way William Shakespeare once was (and some argue still is). An-
other literary father has been created much the way Quentin Comp-
son attempts to bring Thomas Sutpen to life. These literary “fathers”
and the seeming need many have for a “God the Father” suggest the
pervasiveness of the longing for fathers. True of both parents, father
or mother, the idea lingers that if we know who they are, then we
know who we are.

152

S h a k e s p e a r e a n d M a s c u l i n i t y

Epilogue

he transatlantic appropriations examined in the body of this work

meet a cultural need. In fact, this study has revealed that the engine
driving gender citationality can meet several needs simultaneously—
identity issues that ricochet from personal, to regional and national,
and back again, and entail race, gender, class, and sexuality, all furi-
ously intertwined and interdependent. These requisites also changed
as cultural circumstances dictated, which altered the nature of appro-
priation depending on when a specific act of gender citationality is ex-
amined. This gender work is intercultural, transhistorical, and, in this
case, intertextual. This study has also offered multitudinous motiva-
tions for the American South’s appropriation of gender citations from
the likes of William Shakespeare and, in the bigger picture, Great
Britain. While these impulses appear varied and wide, they also seem
to suggest something more elemental. All of these citations have one
similar notion at their root—survival. This survival is personal, re-
gional, national, and biological.

This last component remains the most controversial in literary the-

ory. “Biology as destiny” has been used by oppressors of all stripes to
keep women and members of some races in a subjugated position; the
latent effect has been hard sciences may be allowed to wander the halls
of literary theory, but always under careful watch and always suspect.
Cultural materialists have erected a false dichotomy with biology that
reads like the bastard child of the nature/nurture debate. However,
Ellen Dissanayake argues convincingly in her work that art is fre-
quently thought of as a result, when, in fact, it is a behavior.

If Dis-

sanayake’s premise holds true, then it should be noted that behaviors
are frequently motivated by more than one variable; they can be influ-
enced by nature and nurture, working in tandem, as if making a new,
third attribute of human behavior.

This assertion does not undercut Judith Butler’s ideas of performa-

tivity and citationality, and it certainly does not suggest that there is no
cultural work in what it means to be male and female, masculine and
feminine. This belief would represent a false either/or. What the idea
does imply is that the cultural and the biological are coterminous, cer-
tainly more so than some literary theorists on either side of the divide

are willing to admit. In the brave, new world of the body as cultural
construct, of the posthuman and beyond, the notion of biological enti-
ties has been deconstructed right out of existence, and some theorists
with a hard science bent view the idea of cultural constructions of hu-
manity as so many clever rhetorical games.

This great divide has been to the detriment of studying American

Southern appropriations of gender citations and how they are made
manifest in literature. As stated before, this cultural work indicates a
longing to survive, not just as a cultural construct but also as a collec-
tive of beings. Evolutionary science needs to be applied to this im-
pulse to appropriate from another, more successful group, not to
supplant the work contained within this study but to enhance it. To
do so is to understand art, representation, culture, and, more impor-
tantly, the concept of the human.

154

E p i l o g u e

N ot e s

Introduction

1. William Shakespeare, “2 Henry IV,” in The Complete Works of William

Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (New York: HarperCollins, 1992),
843.

2. John C. Guilds, Simms: A Literary Life (Fayetteville: Arkansas UP, 1992),

345.

3. Shakespeare, “1 Henry IV,” in Bevington, Complete Works of William

Shakespeare, 789.

4. Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” in Bevington, Complete Works of William Shake-

speare, 1075.

5. See Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore, eds., Political Shakespeare

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1994); Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991); and Michael D. Bristol, Shakespeare’s Amer-
ica, America’s Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 1990).

6. Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet (Oxford: Clarendon,

1992), 11.

7. Ibid., 12.
8. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 107–108.
9. Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000),

161.

10. Flannery O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fic-

tion,” in Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New
York: Farrar, 1969), 45.

Chapter 1

1. William Gilmore Simms, “The Social Principle: The True Source of Na-

tional Permanence,” in The Simms Reader: Selections from the Writings of
William Gilmore Simms, ed. John C. Guilds (Charlottesville: Virginia
UP, 2001), 256.

2. Bertram Wyatt-Brown explains, “During the last years before the war,

Southern spokesmen fashioned a curious myth that distorted their eth-
nic roots . . . a small contingent of immigrants from England domi-
nated the legend, as if the colony from Jamestown was the only seed
from which the region had grown. The notion of a ‘cavalier’ society
that stemmed from the seventeenth-century royalism became a reign-
ing cliché in the ranks of the planter elite.” Bertram Wyatt-Brown,

The Shaping of Southern Culture (Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP,
2001), 179.

3. Robert Cave, “The Men in Gray” (1911), quoted in Wyatt-Brown, Shap-

ing of Southern Culture, 180.

4. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 107.
5. Ibid., 108.
6. Hugh Hetherington, Cavalier of the Old South (Chapel Hill: North Car-

olina UP, 1966), 251.

7. Mary Ann Wimsatt notes, “In more than thirty years of a crowded

career, he produced or had a hand in producing over eighty volumes
and enough uncollected writing to fill perhaps twenty volumes more.
He wrote essays and book reviews, ran magazines and edited newspa-
pers, published orations on political and social topics, and composed
poetry, plays, novels, tales, sketches, novelettes, biographies, a history,
and a geography, meanwhile conducting a correspondence so heavy
and varied that he sometimes seems like several people instead of a sin-
gle individual.” Mary Ann Wimsatt, The Major Fiction of William
Gilmore Simms (Baton Rouge: Louisiana UP, 1989), 6. This telling
portrayal of Simms as being several people is especially interesting in
light of the different postures he would strike throughout his career
and life.

8. See this history traced in detail in Charles S. Watson, From Nationalism to

Secessionism: The Changing Fiction of William Gilmore Simms (Westport,
CT: Greenwood, 1993).

9. See Susan V. Donaldson and Anne Goodwyn Jones, “Rethinking the

South through Gender,” in Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts,
ed. Susan V. Donaldson and Anne Goodwyn Jones (Charlottesville: Vir-
ginia UP, 1997), 1–22. Page 2 is especially enlightening.

10. Hugh Hetherington writes, “It is important to establish clearly Simms’s

patrician status, because it must be realized that, whatever may be the lit-
erary limitations of his portrayals of Southern aristocrats, he is writing
about his own class, and not giving an outside view.” Hetherington,
Cavalier of the Old South, 59. William Taylor counters with an image of
Simms as a self-made man who could never quite break into the gentility,
much to his chagrin. William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee (New York:
Braziller, 1961), 292–293.

11. William Gilmore Simms, Woodcraft (1854; repr., New York: Norton,

1961), 331.

12. Ibid., 206.
13. Bertram Wyatt-Brown offers, “Three components appeared to be neces-

sary for public recognition of gentility in the Old South: sociability, learn-
ing, and piety,” but the pitfall was, “There was a strongly antiintellectual
streak in Southern society, one that generations of college students per-
petuated so that sociability—and the reputation for manliness—would
have no rival.” Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor (Oxford: Oxford

156

N o t e s

UP, 1982), 89, 94. Porgy has two of the three components—the pitfall of
learning is a debatable attribute with regard to the fat partisan.

14. See Wimsatt, Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms, 12. This seems to

be a point Simms and many Charlestonian authors after him never tire of
making.

15. C. Hugh Holman, The Roots of Southern Writing (Athens: Georgia UP,

1972), 22.

16. William Gilmore Simms, Views and Reviews in American Literature, His-

tory, and Fiction, First Series, ed. C. Hugh Holman (1846; repr., Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1962), 8.

17. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, 22.
18. Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet (Oxford: Clarendon,

1992), 7.

19. Michael D. Bristol theorizes, “The study of Shakespeare permits Ameri-

can culture to take itself more seriously by virtue of this unquestioned
cultural treasure.” Michael D. Bristol, Shakespeare’s America, America’s
Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 1990), 123.

20. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941; repr., New York: Vintage,

1991), 92.

21. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition

(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), 5.

22. Susan V. Donaldson, “Gender, Race, and Allen Tate’s Profession of Let-

ters in the South,” in Donaldson and Jones, Haunted Bodies, 495.

23. Philip C. Kolin posits, “Shakespeare was the most popular dramatist on

the antebellum southern stage and the most performed playwright since.”
Philip C. Kolin, ed., Shakespeare in the South: Essays on Performance (Jack-
son: Mississippi UP, 1983), 3. Simms’s bardolatry would not be exclusive
to the author himself, or literary types for that matter, but would pertain
to many of his region, especially those with pretensions to “culture.”

24. Holman, Roots of Southern Writing, 61. Edd Winfield Parks adds, “But he

had read widely and studiously, especially in the field of Shakespearean
drama,” and, “His purpose in editing the works [Shakespeare’s] was pri-
marily to persuade readers to share his own enthusiasm for the Eliza-
bethan and Jacobean drama . . . his function as editor was first of all to
make these plays accessible to his readers.” Edd Winfield Parks, William
Gilmore Simms as Literary Critic (Athens: Georgia UP, 1961), 82, 87.
Simms’s love of Shakespeare seems to be as much a calling as a question
of taste.

25. Grace W. Whaley observes in a 1930 article for American Literature that

of the 303 quotations in eighteen of Simms’s novels, 120 are from
Shakespeare. This count excludes his novel Border Beagles (1840), which
includes an unemployed Shakespearean actor who is fixated on the play-
wright and quotes him constantly. Quoted in Parks, William Gilmore
Simms as Literary Critic, 72. No other author even comes close to this
many citations in Simms’s corpus, except perhaps for the author himself.

N o t e s

157

26. William Gilmore Simms, The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, 5 vols.,

vol. 3, ed. Mary C. Simms Oliphant, Alfred Taylor Odell, and T. C. Dun-
can Eaves (Columbia: South Carolina UP, 1952–1956), 216.

27. Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford UP,

2000), 148.

28. William Shakespeare, “The First Part of King Henry the Fourth,” in The

Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th ed., ed. David Bevington (New York:
HarperCollins, 1992), 767.

29. Ibid., 801.
30. William Shakespeare, “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,” in Bevington, Com-

plete Works of Shakespeare, 1116.

31. William Shakespeare, “The Tragedy of King Richard the Second,” in Bev-

ington, Complete Works of Shakespeare, 747.

32. Shakespeare, “I Henry IV,” 783.
33. Defined by Bertram Wyatt-Brown as “a more specialized, refined form of

honor, in which moral uprightness was coupled with high social posi-
tion.” Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 88. In other words, this would be
codified as not just a societal position but also a way of being, an identity
that encompasses actions and attitudes, supposedly.

34. William Taylor sees Simms’s contribution as recognizing that Hamlet and

Hotspur types are closely intertwined. He does, however, fail to see the
father-son connections offered herein. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, 296.

35. William Shakespeare, “The Life of King Henry the Fifth,” in Bevington,

Complete Works of Shakespeare, 858.

36. Hugh Hetherington posits, “It is not a matter of chance that in this, the

most detached of the Saga, and actually the most humorless, most
gothic, or pseudo-gothic of the seven, our stout and jovial Captain Porgy
could not live and breathe.” Hetherington, Cavalier of the Old South,
183. Hetherington’s estimation is interesting in that he offers this assess-
ment almost as if Porgy is a real person, a testament to the appeal of the
character, if not the verisimilitude.

37. Porgy is Falstaff in Hampton M. Jarrell, “Falstaff and Simms’s Porgy,” in

American Literature 3, no. 2 (May 1931): 204. The similarities are only
superficial in Holman, Roots of Southern Writing, 61. Porgy as a Falstaff
who transmogrifies into Hamlet haunts Watson in Charles S. Watson,
From Nationalism to Secessionism: The Changing Fiction of William
Gilmore Simms (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993), 102. Hugh Hether-
ington vacillates in his assessment—Porgy is Falstaff, Prince Hal, Hotspur,
a character drawn on Elizabethan drama in general, and occasionally on
Simms himself, to name only a few in Cavalier of the Old South. Hether-
ington, Cavalier of the Old South, 21, 25, 34, 35. William P. Trent,
Simms’s sole biographer for seventy years, labeled Porgy a “typical South-
erner,” though he did not feel compelled to define the appellation. William
P. Trent, William Gilmore Simms (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1892), 12.
Alexander Cowie offers Porgy as “apparently a combination of Simms in
self-portrait and of Simms’s ideal of a South Carolina gentleman.” Alexan-

158

N o t e s

der Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel (New York: American Book,
1948), 235. Joseph V. Ridgley shares the opinion with Vernon L. Parring-
ton that Captain Porgy is a “true son of the Old South.” Joseph V. Ridg-
ley, William Gilmore Simms (New York: Twayne, 1962), 60. Vernon L.
Parrington, The Romantic Revolution in America (New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1927), 31. It is as if Porgy becomes all things to everyone.

38. William C. Davis, Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of Amer-

ica (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 20.

39. William Gilmore Simms, “The Partisan,” in Hetherington, Cavalier of

the Old South, 79.

40. Ibid., 92.
41. Ibid., 79.
42. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 23.
43. Cash professes, “The gentlemanly idea, driven from England by

Cromwell, had taken refuge in the South and fashioned for itself a world
to its heart’s desire; a world singularly polished and mellow and poised,
wholly dominated by ideals of honor and chivalry and noblesse—all of
those sentiments and values and habits of action which used to be . . . in-
variably assigned to the gentleman born and the Cavalier . . . the great
South of the first half of the nineteenth century . . . was the home of a
genuine and fully realized aristocracy, coextensive and identical with the
ruling class, the planters; and sharply set against the common people.”
Cash, Mind of the South, 4. No doubt Cash’s theorizing would have ap-
pealed to the likes of William Gilmore Simms.

44. Shakespeare, “I Henry IV,” 782.
45. Simms, “The Partisan,” 92.
46. Hugh Hetherington, who tends to idolize Porgy in Cavalier of the Old

South, calling him an “advocate,” a “Southern gentleman,” “charming as
well as masterful,” and “most impressive,” even suggests, “He [Simms]
may have felt qualms about the Porgy of The Partisan.” Hetherington,
Cavalier of the Old South, 21, 31. These qualms, if Simms felt them, are
notably after the fact.

47. Simms, Letters, vol. 2, 465.
48. Shakespeare, “I Henry IV,” 782.
49. Ibid., 783.
50. Ibid.
51. Simms, Woodcraft, 3. The emphasis is mine.
52. Drew Gilpin Faust, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the

Old South, 1840–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977), 144.

53. Cash, Mind of the South, 56.
54. Bruce R. Smith offers, “Shakespeare’s plays and poems offer ways of find-

ing a perspective on masculinity in the here and now. In teaching us that
masculinity is contingent in all sorts of ways, productions of Shake-
speare’s plays and readings of his poems give us the opportunity to imag-
ine versions of masculinity that may be more equitable and more fulfilling
than those we already know.” Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity, 161.

N o t e s

159

It is this contingent nature of masculinity that allows Simms to use
Shakespeare’s works in an attempt to find “equity,” which he would de-
fine in different ways as his cultural circumstances changed.

55. Hugh Hetherington agrees, “I wish to suggest that Simms became very

ambitious and resolved to succeed where the author of Sir John Oldcas-
tle had not.” Hetherington, Cavalier of the Old South, 31. One wonders
if this estimation is truly ambition or a killing of a literary father.

56. William Gilmore Simms, Slavery in America, Being a Brief Review of Miss

Martineau on That Subject (Richmond, VA: Thomas W. White, 1838),
38. The emphasis is mine.

57. Harriet Martineau, Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, vol. 1, ed. Maria

Weston Chapman (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1877), 380–381.

58. Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984), 6, 24,

25.

59. Simms, “The Social Principle,” 262.
60. Ibid., 82–83. The emphasis is Simms’s, not mine.
61. Eugene Genovese offers a more down-to-earth explanation when he

writes, “The slaveholders’ vision of themselves as authoritarian fathers
who presided over an extended and subservient family, white and black,
grew up naturally in the process of founding plantations . . . but in its
overwhelming negative aspect—its doctrine of domination and its inher-
ent cruelty to disobedient ‘children’—it pitted blacks against whites in
bitter antagonism and simultaneously poisoned the life of the white dom-
inant community itself.” Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan Roll: The World
the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976), 74. Genovese’s assertion of
this antagonism and its effects on the white, dominant community sug-
gests one reason for Simms’s failure to reconcile in his literature what he
found troubling in his culture.

62. Louis D. Rubin Jr., The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and

Society of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989), 96.

63. William Gilmore Simms, “The Southern Convention,” Southern Quar-

terly Review 2, no. 3 (September 1850): 320.

64. William Gilmore Simms, The Yemassee, ed. Joseph V. Ridgley (1835;

repr., New Haven, CT: Twayne, 1964), 399–400.

65. Charles S. Watson, “The Ongoing Study of William Gilmore Simms: Lit-

erary Critics vs. Historians,” South Carolina Review 22, no. 2 (1990): 13.

66. Charles H. Brichford, “That National Story: Conflicting Versions and

Conflicting Visions of the Revolution in Kennedy’s Horse-Shoe Robinson
and Simms’s The Partisan,” Southern Literary Journal 21, no. 1 (1988):
64–65, 71.

67. William Gilmore Simms, “Caloya; or, Loves of the Driver,” in An Early

and Strong Sympathy: The Indian Writings of William Gilmore Simms, ed.
John C. Guilds and Charles Hudson (1841; repr., Columbia: South Car-
olina UP, 2003), 269.

68. Peter L. Shillingsburg disingenuously suggests in a 2003 article for South-

ern Quarterly that Simms placed this conversation at the beginning as a

160

N o t e s

“serious exposure of the limitations of prevailing ideas in the face of the
factual details of the story that follows,” and castigates those who “adopt
a righteous but critically suspect notion that Simms merely put his own
views into the narrator’s mouth.” Peter L. Shillingsburg, “Antebellum
American Literature from Natchez to Charleston,” Southern Quarterly
41, no. 2 (2003): 6. Shillingsburg ignores to his detriment the narrator’s
name of “S” and, more importantly, Simms’s nonfiction writings that
came both before and after the tale. Simms could hardly be the reformer
Shillingsburg would have him be.

69. William Gilmore Simms, “Oakatibbe; or, the Choctaw Sampson,” in

Guilds and Hudson, Early and Strong Sympathy, 279, 281.

70. Ibid., 281.
71. Williamson, Crucible of Race, 40.
72. Simms, “The Partisan,” 122.
73. Ibid., 121–122.
74. Patricia Okker, “Serial Politics in William Gilmore Simms’s Woodcraft,”

in Periodical Literature in Nineteenth Century America (Charlottesville:
Virginia UP, 1995), 162–163.

75. Simms, Woodcraft, 518.
76. Caroline Gebhard observes the history of “white southern aristocratic

masculinity based on the sexual and social subordination of black men,”
and how “southern gentility as well as black inferiority are exposed as
mutually dependent constructions.” Caroline Gebhard, “Reconstructing
Southern Manhood: Race, Sentimentality, and Camp in the Plantation
Myth,” in Donaldson and Jones, Haunted Bodies, 146, 148.

77. Simms, Woodcraft, 399.
78. Ibid., 390, 392.
79. William Shakespeare, “Macbeth,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shake-

speare, 1228; Shakespeare, “Much Ado about Nothing,” in Bevington,
Complete Works of Shakespeare, 242.

80. Simms, Woodcraft, 49.
81. Ibid., 290.
82. Butler, Gender Trouble, xv.
83. Simms, Woodcraft, 388.
84. Ibid., 32.
85. Ibid., 354.
86. Simms, “The Partisan,” 79.
87. Bertram Wyatt-Brown notes the “Southern inclination to war and military

honors,” and how “Veneration of warrior virtue . . . reflected the more
primitive concern with courage as a social value.” Wyatt-Brown, Southern
Honor, 191. Certainly these attitudes are on full view in Simms’s partisan.

88. Shakespeare, “I Henry IV,” 34.
89. Ibid., 798.
90. Charles S. Watson comments on Simms’s belief that “a return to military

decisiveness” could cure a Hamlet-like languor that had engulfed South-
ern, white men. Watson, From Nationalism to Secessionism, 104. In

N o t e s

161

many of his appearances in Simms’s novels, Captain Porgy fits this bill
nicely.

91. The effect is that critics like C. Hugh Holman must argue, “But cer-

tainly the qualities listed for Porgy are hardly applicable, at least their
majority, to the fat knight . . . those qualities which seem most essen-
tially Porgy’s appear not at all in Falstaff.” Holman, Roots of Southern
Writing, 71. And the critical confusion over Porgy goes on and on.

92. Wimsatt, Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms, 62.
93. John C. Guilds, Simms: A Literary Life (Fayetteville: Arkansas UP,

1992), 5–8.

94. Holman, Roots of Southern Writing, 38.
95. Wimsatt, Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms, 13–14; Guilds,

Simms, 7.

96. Guilds, Simms, 10.
97. Simms, “The Partisan,” 122.
98. William Gilmore Simms, “Katherine Walton,” in Hetherington, Cava-

lier of the Old South, 155.

99. William Gilmore Simms, “Eutaw,” in Hetherington, Cavalier of the Old

South, 239–240.

100. Shakespeare, “I Henry IV,” 773.
101. Bertram Wyatt-Brown discusses at length an archaic code, a primal ethic

that informed the South and “would have been bloodier,” if not for the
advent of gentility.” Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 87.

102. Jan Bakker, “The Pastoral Pessimism of William Gilmore Simms,” Stud-

ies in American Fiction 11 (Spring 1983): 82.

103. Simms, Letters, vol. 3, 62.
104. Hetherington, Cavalier of the Old South, 23.
105. Ibid., 35.
106. Simms, “The Partisan,” 104–105.
107. Butler, Gender Trouble, 33.
108. Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” 1069.
109. Simms, “Katherine Walton,” 150.
110. Shakespeare, “I Henry IV,” 769–770.
111. Mary Ann Wimsatt notes, “When Simms revised The Partisan for the

Redfield Author’s Uniform edition in 1854, he reworked the character
of Porgy, expanding his speeches, enlarging his role, and changing au-
thorial commentary about him to make him more of a gentleman and
less of a glutton.” Wimsatt, Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms,
76. Simms is rewriting literary history as well as the actual phenomenon.

112. Hetherington argues, “In the earlier books, even in Woodcraft, Porgy

had been caught sometimes in undignified postures, although never so
as to be the object of laughter. Now, however, in the final two books
written [Eutaw and The Forayers], Simms seems to want to ennoble him
further.” Hetherington, Cavalier of the Old South, 20. Simms’s impulse
to rehabilitate this father seems progressively more important as the se-
ries advances.

162

N o t e s

113. Simms, Letters, vol. 1, 82.
114. Holman, Roots of Southern Writing, 33.
115. Wyatt-Brown calls this period from 1840 to 1860 “The Age of Ambiva-

lence.” Wyatt-Brown, Shaping of Southern Culture, 101.

116. Davis, Look Away, 47.
117. Wimsatt, Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms, 39.
118. Wyatt-Brown suggests, “For many, the Civil War was reduced to a sim-

ple test of manhood.” Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 35. Wyatt-
Brown’s point is well taken, even if “simple” may be a bit reductive.

119. Simms, Woodcraft, xi.
120. James B. Meriwether, “The Theme of Freedom in Woodcraft,” in Long

Years of Neglect: The Work and Reputation of William Gilmore Simms,
ed. John C. Guilds (Fayetteville: Arkansas UP, 1988), 22.

121. Meriwether, “Theme of Freedom in Woodcraft,” 26–27.
122. William Taylor posits, “As he [Simms] grew to accept the idea of a sep-

arate Southern destiny and as he came to feel that an impending doom
was settling over his world, his imagination turned compellingly toward
the great figures of tragic literature—to Othello, to Macbeth, and espe-
cially to Hamlet.” Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, 292. Simms’s appropri-
ations matched his state of mind.

123. Watson asserts, “Falstaff is the main model for Porgy in the novels set

during the Revolutionary War, but he is replaced by Hamlet in the post-
war novel of peacetime, Woodcraft, which focuses on the life of a planter.
Here Simms portrays Porgy, the representative planter, as self-indulgent,
chronically ruminant, and dilatory—in short a bucolic Hamlet.” Wat-
son, From Nationalism to Secessionism, 102. I am indebted to Watson for
this astute observation.

124. Simms, Woodcraft, 198.
125. Watson, From Nationalism to Secessionism, 94.
126. In a 1992 article for Southern Literary Journal, Watson sees Porgy’s re-

covery of his slaves at the beginning of Woodcraft as Simms’s support of
the Fugitive Slave Act. Watson goes so far as to claim that concerning
slaves, “Simms did not believe they acted freely but had been enticed to
run away. The title of this novel, ‘Woodcraft,’ recommends the aggres-
sive means by which slaveholders can regain their fugitive slaves.”
Charles S. Watson, “Simms and the Civil War: The Revolutionary Anal-
ogy,” Southern Literary Journal 24, no. 2 (1992): 81. Simms could not
believe that the slaves would leave their “father” of their own volition,
an idea that Lost Cause ideology would propagate from the Civil War
onward.

127. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, 293–295.
128. Holman, Roots of Southern Writing, 85.
129. Steven Frye writes in an essay for Southern Quarterly (1997), “Simms

was a staunch nationalist before he became a secessionist, and as a south-
ern proponent of manifest destiny, American history for Simms revealed
the process by which Western Civilization developed toward and ideal-

N o t e s

163

ized form.” Steven Frye, “Simms’s The Yemassee, American Progres-
sivism, and the Dialogue of History,” Southern Quarterly 35, no. 3
(Spring 1997): 83. Simms merely transferred both his perspective and
modus operandi from America to the South.

130. Simms, “The Social Principle,” 259.
131. William Gilmore Simms, Americanism in Literature: An Oration before

the Phi Kappa and Demosthenean Societies of the University of Georgia, at
Athens, August 8, 1844, ed. Alexander Meek (Charleston, SC: Burges
and James, 1844), 272–273, 275.

132. Wimsatt, Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms, 141–142.
133. William Gilmore Simms, “Mellichampe,” in Hetherington, Cavalier of

the Old South, 141.

134. Simms, Letters, vol. 2, 90.
135. David Moltke-Hansen exposes a trend when he writes, “The language

he [Simms] used to describe the tyranny of the Tories in 1780 was the
same he used to describe the tyranny of the nullifiers in 1831–1833 and
the tyranny of Northern interests in the 1850’s. Conversely, the lan-
guage he used to describe his Whig heroes and their cause in the Revo-
lutionary War romances was the same he used to describe the unionists
and their cause in 1832–1833 and southerners and their cause in the
1850’s.” David Moltke-Hansen, “The Historical Philosophy of William
Gilmore Simms,” in Guilds, Long Years of Neglect, 138.

136. This transhistorical categorizing may be why Hugh Hetherington be-

lieves, “For various reasons Porgy is a figure who seems to exist as much
in the nineteenth century as the eighteenth . . . since Porgy is less of
1783 than of Simms’s present of 1852 . . . in fashioning him Simms was
unfettered by conventions of historical romance, unrepressed by obliga-
tions to details of recorded events of long ago.” Hetherington, Cavalier
of the Old South, 74.

137. Simms, “The Southern Convention,” 325.
138. William Gilmore Simms, “Dedication,” in The Wigwam and the Cabin

(New York: Redfield, 1856), 4–5.

139. William Gilmore Simms, “Antagonisms of the Social Moral. North and

South,” quoted in Miriam J. Shillingsburg, “Simms’s Failed Lecture
Tour of 1856: The Mind of the North,” in Guilds, Long Years of Ne-
glect, 189–190.

140. Simms, Woodcraft, 260.
141. Ibid., 139.
142. William Gilmore Simms, “The Forayers,” in Hetherington, Cavalier of

the Old South, 213.

143. Shakespeare, “I Henry IV,” 770.
144. Shakespeare, “2 Henry IV,” in Bevington, Complete Works of William

Shakespeare, 839.

145. Ibid., 839.
146. Ibid., 840.
147. Simms, Woodcraft, 508.

164

N o t e s

148. “The author, however, decided to turn back the clock, and in The For-

ayers (1855) and Eutaw (1856) to continue his portrayal of the Revolu-
tion from near the end of 1780, where he left it in Katherine Walton, to
the last months of 1781, and so to show Porgy again as a soldier.” Het-
herington, Cavalier of the Old South, 20.

149. Simms, “Eutaw,” 251.
150. William Shakespeare, “Henry V,” in Bevington, Complete Works of

Shakespeare, 863.

151. Simms, Letters, vol. 4, 315.
152. Louis D. Rubin observes in a1988 essay, “When it [the War] was over,

his once-imposing plantation gutted and his library burned, his slaves
freed, his wife dead, and his community’s cause blasted beyond imagin-
ing, he sought to resume his literary vocation. It was all he had left. The
plantation dreams of the Old South had vanished into smoke.” Louis D.
Rubin Jr., “Simms, Charleston, and the Profession of Letters,” in
Guilds, Long Years of Neglect, 217–236.

153. Simms, Letters, vol. 4, 168.
154. Guilds writes that the character is a “compelling figure cloaked in ambi-

guity, possessing qualities that make him capable of both the best and
the worst—safeguarding some principles and protecting certain individ-
uals while exploiting and destroying others. Caught in a web of con-
tending forces, he is at once a protector of good and a doer of evil; a
builder and a spoiler; a man of principle and an opportunist; a believer
and a questioner.” Guilds, Simms, 314. The character is a paradox, a
man befitting his time.

155. Simms, Letters, vol. 5, 178.
156. Wimsatt, Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms, 237.
157. Simms, Letters, vol. 5, 213.
158. William Gilmore Simms, “The Sense of the Beautiful,” quoted in Gary

McDonald, “Manly Beauty and Southern Heroism: The Example of
William Gilmore Simms,” Southern Quarterly 37, no. 3–4 (Spring-
Summer 1999): 270.

159. See essays about Simms collected under the title Long Years of Neglect,

for a primer. Certainly, a critical need to view Simms in terms of repre-
sentation exists. In 1954, Jay B. Hubble called Simms “the central fig-
ure in literature of the Old South.” Jay B. Hubble, The South in
Literature, 1607–1900 (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1954), 572. C. Hugh
Holman in 1972 wrote of Simms, “From the early 1830’s to the Civil
War the outstanding Southern literary figure and as close as we get to
being a representative writer the Old South had produced.” Holman,
Roots of Southern Writing, 16. Guilds’s estimation, therefore, is not with-
out merit.

160. Guilds, Simms, 226.
161. Hetherington, Cavalier of the Old South, 30.
162. For “Shakespeare” and other poems by William Gilmore Simms, see

Guilds, The Simms Reader, and James E. Kibler, Selected Poems of

N o t e s

165

William Gilmore Simms (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press,
1990).

Chapter 2

1. Thomas Nelson Page to A. C. Gordon, December 3, 1876, Papers of

Thomas Nelson Page, Accession #7581-m, Special Collections Depart-
ment, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.

2. William Shakespeare, “King Lear,” in The Complete Works of Shakespeare,

4th ed., ed. David Bevington (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 1194.

3. Thomas Nelson Page, The Old South (1892; repr., Chautauqua, NY:

Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919), 253.

4. Richard Gray observes of Page’s generation of novelists, “The patriarchal

model is presented to us in a sealed container: that interest in applying it
to the contemporary experiences and problems of the South which we
find . . . in the novels of Simms, Paulding, Caruthers, and Tucker is for
the most part missing from the plantation fiction written after the Civil
War.” Richard Gray, Writing the South (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1986), 90. Gray’s estimation regarding Page is not quite accurate. As is
demonstrated in this chapter, Page’s primary concern was his present—
this “sealed container” had leaks.

5. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 108.
6. Page, Old South, 100.
7. Helen Taylor, “The South and Britain: Celtic Cultural Connections,” in

South to a New Place, ed. Suzanne W. Jones and Sharon Monteith (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2002), 343.

8. Page, Old South, 102.
9. Thomas Nelson Page, The Old Dominion: Her Making and Her Manners

(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), 317.

10. Thomas Nelson Page, Social Life in Old Virginia before the War (1892;

repr., Sandwich, MA: Chapman Billies, 1994), 28.

11. The importance of appropriating Shakespeare specifically has been much

discussed. For example, in Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare
(1984), author Michael Bristol makes a convincing case for the play-
wright as the name for a “tutelary deity or cult-object.” Michael D. Bris-
tol, Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare (New York: Routledge,
1990), 19. Alan Sinfield argues in his and Jonathan Dollimore’s Political
Shakespeare (1994), “He [Shakespeare] constitutes a powerful cultural
token. . . . Shakespeare’s plays constitute an influential medium through
which certain ways of thinking about the world may be promoted and
others impeded, they are a sight of cultural struggle and change. . . .
Shakespeare has long been recognized as a means of securing cultural
privilege.” Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds., Political Shake-
speare (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1994), 154, 155, 256. The cultural ad-
vantage of appropriating Shakespeare cannot be overstated.

166

N o t e s

12. Dollimore and Sinfield, Political Shakespeare, 256, 267.
13. Bertram Wyatt-Brown notes, “For many, the Civil War was reduced to a

simple test of manhood . . . Southerners’ touchiness over virility stemmed
from deep anxieties about how others, particularly Northerners and En-
glishmen saw them.” Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1982), 35. The Southerners’ citations of masculinity would
not only be painfully self-aware, but also aware of critical viewers, if not
outright competition.

14. Thomas Nelson Page, In Ole Virginia; or, Marse Chan and Other Stories,

ed. M. E. Bradford (1887; repr., Nashville, TN: J. S. Sanders, 1991), xii.

15. Thomas Nelson Page, “Marse Chan. A Tale of Old Virginia,” in Brad-

ford, Ole Virginia, 28–29.

16. William Shakespeare, “Henry V,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shake-

speare, 880.

17. See C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge:

Louisiana State UP, 1968). Also see Woodward, The Strange Career of
Jim Crow (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002).

18. Eric Hobsbawm convincingly argues that inventing tradition occurs more

frequently during rapid transformation, a circumstance that invariably
weakens “old traditions.” Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The
Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), 5. These are
exactly Page’s circumstances.

19. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 107.
20. Theodore L. Gross, Thomas Nelson Page (New York: Twayne, 1967),

24–25.

21. Page, “Marse Chan,” 21.
22. William Shakespeare, “Romeo and Juliet,” in Bevington, Complete Works

of Shakespeare, 980.

23. Rosewell Page, Thomas Nelson Page: A Memoir of a Virginia Gentleman

(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923), 94.

24. Gaines M. Foster writes of the “offered image of the confederacy as an an-

tidote to postwar change,” and “The Lost Cause . . . should not be
seen, as it so often has been, as a purely backward looking or Romantic
movement . . . its leaders and participants preached and practiced sec-
tional reconciliation.” Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy (Ox-
ford: Oxford UP, 1987), 5–6. Of course, this reconciliation was,
ironically, under the vanquished’s terms. The South would lose the war
but attempt to win the peace, and Page was instrumental in that attempt.

25. Page, “Marse Chan,” 38.
26. Shakespeare, “Romeo and Juliet,” 1020.
27. Rosewell Page, Thomas Nelson Page, 88, 91.
28. Thomas Nelson Page, “The Negro Question,” in Old South, 283. Alan T.

Nolan offers the root of this mind-set and argues that proponents of the
Lost Cause ideology believed that Southerners were a minority that
needed advocacy and vindication. Alan T. Nolan, “The Anatomy of the

N o t e s

167

Myth,” in The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, ed. Gary W.
Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000), 14.
Appropriating victimhood is still a common modus operandi of many
oppressors.

29. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990; repr., New York: Routledge, 1999),

xv.

30. Page, “Marse Chan,” 32–33.
31. Gross, Thomas Nelson Page, 13.
32. Page, “Marse Chan,” 10.
33. Thomas Nelson Page, “Meh Lady,” in Bradford, Ole Virginia, 80.
34. William Shakespeare, “I King Henry VI,” in Bevington, Complete Works

of Shakespeare, 527.

35. Nolan, “Anatomy of the Myth,” 15.
36. Page, Old South, 34.
37. Ibid., 266–267.
38. Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984), 6–7.
39. Grace Hale refines this point when she writes of “the racial uncertainties

in the 1870’s and 1880’s and white longing for a now gone and mostly
imagined intimacy with blacks.” Grace Hale, Making Whiteness: The Cul-
ture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage, 1998),
59. Scott Romine suggests that Page uses this narrator in “Marse Chan”
so slaves can validate the code of chivalric honor by bearing witness to
the master’s heroism; at the same time, he is contained by a literate frame
narrator who confronts and inhibits him. Scott Romine, The Narrative
Forms of Southern Community (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1999),
91, 98. James Christmann adds, “The [black narrators] follow their mas-
ters like shadows, and they often seem just as two-dimensional and in-
substantial. . . . The lives of the slaves only have meaning through their
service to and their observation of whites.” James Christmann, “Dialect’s
Double-Murder: Thomas Nelson Page’s In Ole Virginia,” American Lit-
erary Realism 32, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 237.

40. Lucinda Mackethan, “Plantation Fiction, 1865–1900,” in The History of

Southern Literature, ed. Louis D. Rubin, Blyden Jackson, Rayburn S.
Moore, Lewis P. Simpson, and Thomas Daniel Young (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State UP, 1985), 218.

41. See Jay B. Hubble, The South in Literature, 1607–1900 (Durham, NC:

Duke UP, 1954); Emily S. Richardson, Three Southern Views of Reconcil-
iation, Economic Recovery, and Race in the New South, 1865–1900: As
Seen in the Life and Work of Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris,
and George Washington Cable (Washington, DC: American UP, 1987);
and Mackethan, “Plantation Fiction,” 209–218.

42. Page, “Marse Chan,” 8.
43. Gross, Thomas Nelson Page, 24.
44. Lucinda Mackethan writes, “The war and its aftermath emphasized for Page

the values of the Old World just at the moment they were disappearing,

168

N o t e s

leaving him with a sense that the regime destroyed had a tragic grandeur.”
Lucinda Mackethan, “Thomas Nelson Page: The Plantation as Arcady,”
Virginia Quarterly Review 54, no. 2 (1978): 316. Page would endeavor to
resuscitate these values, grandeur intact.

45. Karen A. Keely, “Marriage Plots and National Reunion: The Trope of

Romantic Reconciliation in Postbellum Literature,” Mississippi Quarterly
51, no. 4 (Fall 1998): 624.

46. Shakespeare, “Romeo and Juliet,” 995.
47. Page, Ole Virginia, 137.
48. Ibid., 138.
49. William Shakespeare, “As You Like It,” in Bevington, Complete Works of

Shakespeare, 324.

50. Nolan, “Anatomy of the Myth,” 16.
51. Theodore L. Gross exposes the ideology here: “Page writes what he con-

siders to be a story of reconciliation, but it is a story in which characters
are reconciled to the Southern way of life.” Gross, Thomas Nelson Page,
32. The North, in effect, surrenders.

52. See Diane Roberts, “The New Belle,” in Faulkner and Southern Woman-

hood (Athens: Georgia UP, 1994), 102–148.

53. Gross, Thomas Nelson Page, 78, 96.
54. Ibid., 95.
55. Richardson, Three Southern Views, 94.
56. Earl F. Bargainnier, “Red Rock: A Reappraisal,” Southern Quarterly 22,

no. 2 (Winter 1984): 47.

57. Woodward, Strange Career of Jim Crow, 6.
58. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 80.
59. Woodward, Burden of Southern History, 141, 150–152, 160.
60. Grace Hale theorizes, “The central moment in the making of a white

Southerner, the primal scene of the culture of segregation, then, was one
of learning the meaning of race.” Hale, Making Whiteness, 96.

61. Walter Benn Michaels, “Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cul-

tural Identity,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (Summer 1992): 659.

62. Williamson, Crucible of Race, 109.
63. Thomas Nelson Page, Red Rock (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,

1900), 94.

64. Michaels, “Race into Culture,” 659.
65. Page, Red Rock, 291.
66. Shakespeare, “King Henry V,” 853.
67. Keely, “Marriage Plots and National Reunion,” 633.
68. Harold Bloom argues that most critical readings of the play King Lear

focus on the title character and/or Cordelia, but Bloom notes that the ti-
tle page of the first Quarto edition affords another character greater
prominence: “M. William Shakespeare: His True Chronicle Historie of
the life and death of King Lear and his three daughters. With the Unfor-
tunate life of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earl of Gloster, and his sullen

N o t e s

169

and assumed humor of Tom of Bedlam.” Bloom uses this evidence as a
starting point, convincingly making Edgar central to the work, second
only to the title character. Edgar is “the play’s central consciousness per-
force . . . who actually speaks more lines than anyone else except Lear,”
according to Bloom. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the
Human (New York: Riverhead, 1998), 480, 482.

69. James Kimball King, “George Washington Cable and Thomas Nelson

Page: Two Literary Approaches to the New South” (PhD diss., Univer-
sity of Wisconsin, 1964), 254.

70. Shakespeare, “King Lear,” 1176.
71. This forced “taking on” drives Walter Benn Michaels to write of Red

Rock, “It is, in short, an antiimperialist novel.” Michaels, “Race into Cul-
ture,” 655. Perhaps it is more accurate to argue that that is the novel’s
intention.

72. Nolan, “Anatomy of the Myth,” 28.
73. Page, Red Rock, 294.
74. Ibid., 226.
75. Hale, Making Whiteness, 6. See also Michael Flusche, “Thomas Nelson

Page: The Quandary of a Literary Gentleman,” Virginia Magazine of
History and Biography 84 (1976): 471.

76. Fred Hobson, Tell about the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (Baton

Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1983), 133.

77. King, “George Washington Cable and Thomas Nelson Page,” 338.
78. Shakespeare, “King Lear,” 1176.
79. Page, Red Rock, 451.
80. Thomas Nelson Page, Gordon Keith (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,

1903), 38.

81. Harold Bloom argues this point convincingly regarding King Lear, an-

other solid connection between the two works. Bloom, Shakespeare, 505.

82. Bloom, Shakespeare, 478.
83. William Shakespeare, “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,” in Bevington, Com-

plete Works of Shakespeare, 1075.

84. Dollimore and Sinfield, Political Shakespeare, 155.
85. Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet (Oxford: Clarendon,

1992), 14.

86. Page, Red Rock, 1.
87. Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” 1075.
88. Ibid., 1096.
89. Gross, Thomas Nelson Page, 123, 125.
90. Page, Gordon Keith, 530.
91. Page, Red Rock, 252–253.
92. Ibid., 583.
93. Page, Old South, 5.
94. Keely, “Marriage Plots and National Reunion,” 637.
95. Michael Flusche thinks the two are synonymous, and Theodore L. Gross

points out, “All of the author’s fiction leads inevitably to Gordon Keith;

170

N o t e s

and is, without a doubt, Page himself.” Flusche, “Thomas Nelson
Page,” 482; Gross, Thomas Nelson Page, 124.

96. Page, Gordon Keith, 3.
97. Rosewell Page, Thomas Nelson Page, 23.
98. Page, Gordon Keith, 16.
99. Page, Social Life in Old Virginia before the War, 48.

100. Page, Old South, 103.
101. Emily S. Richardson notes Page’s love of the Southern myth of gentry

dependence on land and its retention in their family as the last vestige of
the past in Red Rock. Richardson, Three Southern Views, 90.

102. Page, Gordon Keith, 515–516. The emphasis is mine.
103. Mackethan, “Thomas Nelson Page,” 321.
104. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 108.
105. Hale, Making Whiteness, 43.
106. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shake-

speare (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1980), 3. See also Dollimore and Sinfield,
Political Shakespeare, 267.

107. Page, Old South, 257.
108. Mackethan, “Thomas Nelson Page,” 322.
109. William Shakespeare, “Richard II,” in Bevington, Complete Works of

Shakespeare, 734.

110. Page, Gordon Keith, 106.
111. Ibid., 5.
112. Shakespeare, “Richard II,” 750.
113. Ibid., 743.
114. Page, Gordon Keith, 4–5.
115. Shakespeare, “As You Like It,” 299.
116. Page, Gordon Keith, 169, 238.
117. Ibid., 241.
118. Ibid., 515.
119. Michael Flusche argues that Page “praised the stability of the old life

and the attachment to the land, but his own life was a model of mobil-
ity.” Flusche, “Thomas Nelson Page,” 46. Perhaps, as James Kimball
King observes, “In the midst of a luxurious urban existence he [Page]
began to cherish the agrarian ideal. His later fiction elaborates on the
simple virtues of country living and on the ugliness of the business
world.” King, “George Washington Cable and Thomas Nelson Page,”
297. Who can know Page’s intentions for sure?

120. Henry Field, A Memoir of Thomas Nelson Page (Miami, FL: Field Re-

search Projects, 1978), 14.

121. Emily Richardson writes, “Page’s fiction supported a picture of racial

harmony in the Old South. His idealized community of kindly Blacks
and saintly white masters, caretakers of an inferior race, contrasted
sharply with his portrayal of dangerous Blacks in his essays.” Richard-
son, Three Southern Views, 10. The reason for this contradiction is not
readily apparent.

N o t e s

171

122. Thomas Nelson Page, “The Lynching of Negroes—Its Cause and Its

Prevention,” North American Review 178 (January 1904): 35.

123. Thomas Nelson Page, The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem (New York:

Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), 112.

124. Woodward, Strange Career of Jim Crow, 34.
125. Hale, Making Whiteness, 5–6, 21; Williamson, Crucible of Race, 6.
126. Williamson, Crucible of Race, 178.
127. Page, Old South, 291.
128. William Shakespeare, “Othello,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shake-

speare, 1123.

129. Page, “Lynching of Negroes,” 6.
130. Quoted in Richard Gray, The Life of William Faulkner (Oxford: Black-

well, 1994), 37.

131. As Theodore L. Gross champions, the man “was in many ways the liter-

ary spokesman of the South during the 1880’s and 1890’s.” Gross,
Thomas Nelson Page, 7. Surely this assertion suggests more about the
South of that time than about Page.

132. Earl F. Bargainnier notes that when Red Rock appeared, it was widely

reviewed and was fifth on the bestseller list. Bargainnier, “Red Rock,”
44. Michael Flusche adds, “Thomas Nelson Page was beyond doubt the
best-known Southern author during the last years of the nineteenth cen-
tury. To members of his generation, he was the foremost champion of
the Lost Cause.” Flusche, “Thomas Nelson Page,” 464.

133. Margaret Haerens and Drew Kalasky, eds., “Thomas Nelson Page,

1853–1922,” Short Story Criticism 23 (1996): 286–287.

134. Matthew R. Martin, “The Two-Faced New South: The Plantation Tales

of Thomas Nelson Page and Charles W. Chesnutt,” Southern Literary
Journal 30, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 19.

135. Hubble, South in Literature, 795.
136. Page, Ole Virginia, v.
137. Grace Elizabeth King, Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters (New

York: Macmillan, 1932.

138. Page, Social Life in Old Virginia before the War, 1.
139. Page, Red Rock, vii.
140. Quoted in L. Moody Simms Jr., “Cora Harris on the Declining Influ-

ence of Thomas Nelson Page,” Mississippi Quarterly 28, no. 4 (Fall
1975): 506.

141. Richard Gray, “Foreword,” in Jones and Monteith, South to a New

Place, xx.

142. Gray, South to a New Place, xxiii.
143. Barbara Ladd explains just what is at stake: “But the memory of the

Civil War has vanished into history. In other words, the experience of
the Civil War has become for most of us vicarious, displaced (rather than
evoked) by representations (i.e., biographies, histories, national parks,
museums, documents, relics, theme parks).” Barbara Ladd, “Disman-
tling the Monolith: Southern Places—Past, Present, and Future,” in

172

N o t e s

Jones and Monteith, South to a New Place, 15. Ladd is ostensibly dis-
cussing the war, but “Reconstruction,” “Old South,” “Plantation,” or a
myriad of historical constructions could take the place of “Civil War” in
Ladd’s assertion and still hold true.

Chapter 3

1. Thomas Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons: The Autobiography of Thomas

Dixon (Alexandria, VA: IWV, 1984), 136.

2. Ibid., 311.
3. Alan T. Nolan, “The Anatomy of the Myth,” in The Myth of the Lost Cause

and Civil War History, ed. Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000), 15–16.

4. Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons, 4–5.
5. Sandra Gunning writes of Dixon’s “presentation of early Klansmen as the

Anglo-American link with a European past of chivalric glory.” Sandra
Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996).

6. Thomas Dixon Jr., The Leopard’s Spots, in The Reconstruction Trilogy

(1902; repr., Newport Beach, CA: Noontide, 1994), 66.

7. Thomas Dixon Jr., The Clansman, in The Reconstruction Trilogy (1903;

repr., Newport Beach, CA: Noontide, 1994), 412.

8. Thomas Dixon Jr., The Traitor, in The Reconstruction Trilogy (1907; repr.,

Newport Beach, CA: Noontide, 1994), 470.

9. Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons, 265.

10. James Kinney, Amalgamation! (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985), 179.
11. Walter Benn Michaels, Our America (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995),

44.

12. William Shakespeare, “The Tempest,” in The Complete Works of Shake-

speare, 4th ed., ed. David Bevington (New York: HarperCollins, 1992),
1557.

13.Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 82.
14. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Fou-

cault (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 33.

15. For a fuller discussion of racial radicalism, see Joel Williamson, The Cru-

cible of Race (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984), 6.

16. Williamson, Crucible of Race, 141.
17. Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons, 28.
18. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 159.
19. See Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet (Oxford: Clarendon,

1992), 226; and Louis P. Simpson, “Foreword,” in Shakespeare and South-
ern Writers: A Study in Influence, ed. Philip C. Kolin (Jackson: Mississippi
UP, 1985), vii. To further understand Shakespeare’s cultural importance,
see Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds., Political Shakespeare: Essays
in Cultural Materialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1994), 154, 256.
Michael D. Bristol discusses how “the idea of a radical return to the source
provides an alternative meaning for the idea of tradition.” Michael D.

N o t e s

173

Bristol, Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1990), 47.

20. Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons, 45.
21. Ibid., 77.
22. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 69.
23. Dixon Jr., Clansman, 351.
24. Dobson, Making of the National Poet, 11.
25. Thomas Dixon Jr., quoted in Raymond Allen Cook, Fire from the Flint:

The Amazing Careers of Thomas Dixon (Winston-Salem, NC: John F.
Blair, 1968), 51.

26. Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons, 169.
27. Cook, Fire from the Flint, 53–56.
28. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York:

Riverhead, 1998), 442.

29. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shake-

speare (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1980), 234.

30. This ability mirrors Edward Said’s discussion of colonialism via the Orient

versus the Occident in Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage,
1979), 3–5.

31. Dixon Jr., Clansman, 381.
32. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 91.
33. Ibid., 237.
34. Judith Jackson Fossett, “(K)night Riders in (K)night Gown: The Ku Klux

Klan, Race, and Construction of Masculinity,” in Race Consciousness:
African-American Studies for the New Century, ed. Judith Jackson Fos-
sett and Jeffrey A. Tucker (New York: New York UP, 1997), 43.

35. Thomas Dixon Jr., The Sins of the Father: A Romance of the South (New

York: D. Appleton, 1912), 403.

36. William Shakespeare, “Othello,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shake-

speare, 1123.

37. Ibid., 1123, 1131, and 1151.
38. Ibid., 1122, 1126.
39. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 69.
40. Dixon Jr., Clansman, 316.
41. Susan Gilman argues that Dixon’s entire trilogy is “also informed by the

continuing success of local black candidates in such areas as the famous
black Second Congressional district of North Carolina and the South
Carolina Piedmont, both, not coincidently, the locale of the trilogy.” Su-
san Gillman, Blood Talk (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003), 80. The personal
is political.

42. David Blight offers, “By the turn of the twentieth century . . . white su-

premacy, a hardening of traditional gender roles, a military tradition and
patriotic recognition of confederate valor, and a South innocent of re-
sponsibility for slavery were values in search of a history; they were the
weapons arming the fortress against the threats of populist politics, racial
equality, and industrialization.” David Blight, Race and Reunion: The

174

N o t e s

Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001),
291.

43. Bloom, Shakespeare, 438, 461.
44. Dixon Jr., Clansman, 380–381.
45. Ibid., 264.
46. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 235, 238.
47. Shakespeare, “Othello,” 1123.
48. Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching, 29.
49. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 108.
50. Clare Eby explains the seeds of this Butlerian failure: “Dixon captures the

white concern that Reconstruction era gains in civil rights for blacks had
abolished race distinctions and threatened to result in egalitarian interracial
relations.” Clare Eby, “Slouching toward Beastliness: Richard Wright’s
Anatomy of Thomas Dixon,” African American Review 35, no. 3 (2001):
442. For a similar argument, see Riche Richardson, “The Birth of a Nation
‘Hood’: Lessons from Thomas Dixon and D.W. Griffith to William Brad-
ford Huie and The Klansman, O.J. Simpson’s First Movie,” Mississippi
Quarterly 56, no. 1 (Winter 2002–2003): 3–29. Also see Martha Hodes,
“War Time Dialogues on Illicit Sex: White Women and Black Men,” in
Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina
Silber (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992), 230–242.

51. Williamson, Crucible of Race, 51.
52. Ibid., 141.
53. Grace Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South,

1890–1940 (New York: Vintage, 1998), 6–7, 96.

54. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, “One of the Meanest Books: Thomas Dixon,

Jr. and The Leopard’s Spots,” North Carolina Literary Review 2, no. 3
(Spring 1994): 87, 100.

55. Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons, 377.
56. Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching, 30.
57. Although Joel Williamson, in The Crucible of Race, offers a close Freudian

reading of Thomas Dixon and his impulse to narrate the black man and
himself in the way he does, the author’s popularity during this period
suggests that this phenomena was not merely personal. Glenda Elizabeth
Gilmore reports, “Northern and Southern readers believed Leopard’s to
be the inside—and true—story of Reconstruction and Thomas Dixon to
be the ideal Southern man.” Gilmore, “One of the Meanest Books,” 87.
John C. Inscoe notes that the 1905 staging of the play version of The
Clansman in North Carolina met with “the majority of the critics and re-
porters extolling the timeliness of Dixon’s warning and the accuracy of
his depiction of the dangerous situation at hand.” John C. Inscoe, “The
Clansman on Stage and Screen: North Carolina Reacts,” North Car-
olina Historical Review 64, no. 2 (April 1987): 139. The novel itself was
“number four on the bestseller list for 1905.” Joan L. Silverman,
“The Birth of a Nation: Prohibition Propaganda,” Southern Quarterly
Review 19, no. 3–4 (Spring-Summer 1981): 24. Dixon was not alone in

N o t e s

175

believing this narrative of the African male, and this racist perspective was
not indigenous to the South.

58. Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons, 307.
59. Kinney, Amalgamation! 166.
60. Shakespeare, “Othello,” 1122.
61. Ibid., 1147.
62. Ibid., 1159.
63. Ibid., 1131, 1165.
64. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 44–45.
65. Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, and Other Episodes in

Political Demonology (Berkeley: California UP, 1987), 215.

66. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 135.
67. Ibid., 57.
68. Shakespeare, “Othello,” 1131.
69. Ibid., 1135.
70. Ibid.
71. Dixon Jr., Clansman, 340.
72. Ibid., 366.
73. Tilden G. Edelstein, “Othello in America: The Drama of Racial Intermar-

riage,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and
James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford UP, 1982), 179, 187, 191.

74. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 51.
75. Shakespeare, “Othello,” 1127.
76. Ibid., 1126.
77. Inscoe, “The Clansman on Stage and Screen,” 148.
78. Shakespeare, “Othello,” 1131.
79. Ibid., 1130.
80. Ibid., 1134.
81. Ibid., 1144.
82. As Iago is a constant dissembler, the difficulties in following a cogent

racial ideology are manifold. Iago uses whatever reasoning is expedient to
his ends, not unlike Thomas Dixon. Why white women would choose
black men and vice versa is difficult to sort out in Shakespeare’s play—
Dixon uses Iago’s methodology as much as he uses his ideology.

83. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 240.
84. Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching, 36.
85. Michaels, Our America, 19.
86. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 191–192.
87. As Eric J. Sundquist reports, “Dixon’s great popularity . . . depended

upon a leering, propagandistic portrait of the black rapist.” Eric J.
Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Litera-
ture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993), 409.

88. These inclinations include Northerners as well as Southerners. For a

string of events that demonstrate Northern prejudice and injustice
against blacks in the North from before the Civil War through Appomat-
tox, see James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men

176

N o t e s

Fought in the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997). For these same
problems during Reconstruction, see Eric Foner, A Short History of
Reconstruction (New York: Harper and Row, 1990). Unfortunately,
Southern apologists such as Dixon himself have used these Northern at-
titudes and atrocities to excuse the South’s similar behavior, causing the
North’s racism and culpability to become diminished in a “who is right
and who is wrong” debate concerning national race relations.

89. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 190.
90. Ibid., 192, 194. I am particularly indebted to the observations con-

tained in Kimberley Iris Magowan, “Coming between the ‘Black Beast’
and the White Virgin: The Pressures of Liminality in Thomas Dixon,”
Studies in American Fiction 27, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 79–80.

91. William Shakespeare, “Much Ado about Nothing,” in Bevington, Com-

plete Works of Shakespeare, 242.

92. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 134.
93. Ibid., 162.
94. Ibid., 203–204.
95. James Kinney, “The Rhetoric of Racism: Thomas Dixon and the

‘Damned Black Beast,’ ” American Literary Realism 15, no. 2 (Autumn
1982): 149.

96. Dixon Jr., Clansman, 385–386.
97. Ibid., 55–56.
98. Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons, 62.
99. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 64.

100. Ibid., 65.
101. White female sexual purity and white male protection of it was a part of

Thomas Dixon’s culture. For an explanation of the cultural ramifica-
tions of the “sanctity of virginity,” see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern
Honor (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982), 234.

102. Quoted in Edelstein, “Othello in America,” 185.
103. As Michael Bristol points out, “The interpretation of Shakespeare and

the interpretation of American political culture are mutually determin-
ing practices.” Bristol, Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare, 3.

104. Carole J. Gerster, “Narrative Form Transformed,” West Virginia Philo-

logical Papers 45 (1999): 12.

105. Maxwell Bloomfield suggests that Dixon was the first novelist to dram-

atize the “Negro problem” as a national not sectional matter. Maxwell
Bloomfield, “Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots: A Study in Popular Racism,”
American Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1964): 387. See Joel Williamson’s The
Crucible of Race and Grace Hale’s Making Whiteness for a much more
in-depth discussion of this phenomenon.

106. Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford UP,

2000), 28, 138.

107. Kinney, Amalgamation! 165.
108. Harold Bloom prefers to see Caliban neither as the put-upon native nor

as an “African-Caribbean Heroic Freedom Fighter,” but as a represen-

N o t e s

177

tation of the family romance at its most desperate, a failed adoption.
Bloom, Shakespeare, 662, 679.

109. Shakespeare, “Tempest,” 1535.
110. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 124.
111. Shakespeare, “Tempest,” 1535.
112. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 162.
113. Shakespeare, “Tempest,” 1535.
114. Ibid.
115. Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons, 166.
116. Magowan, “Coming between the ‘Black Beast’ and the White Virgin,”

79. Magowan makes much of this contingency and the fragility of white
masculinity, particularly when confronted by black female sexuality.

117. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492–Present

(1980; repr., New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 347.

118. Dixon Jr., Leopard’s Spots, 124.
119. Walter Benn Michaels, “The Souls of White Folk,” in Literature and the

Body, ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988), 195.

120. Eric J. Sundquist offers a key, “Dixon’s central metaphor—the Negro as

‘beast’ is here [in Sins] revealed, at least provisionally, as the frantic psy-
chological projection it is.” Eric J. Sundquist, Faulkner: The House Di-
vided (1983; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985), 144.

121. Kinney, “Rhetoric of Racism,” 150.
122. Dixon Jr., Sins of the Father, 122.
123. Ibid., 123.
124. Dixon Jr., Clansman, 288.
125. Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons, 21.
126. Ibid., 44.
127. Magowan, “Coming between the ‘Black Beast’ and the White Virgin,”

87.

128. Dixon Jr., Sins of the Father, 332.
129. Ibid., 152.
130. Ibid., 80–81.
131. Kimberley Iris Magowan, “Strange Bedfellows: Incest and Miscegenation

in Thomas Dixon, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, and John Sayles” (PhD
diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1999), 63.

132. Dixon Jr., Clansman, 395.
133. Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching, 42.
134. Dixon Jr., Traitor, 422.
135. Fossett, “(K)night Riders in (K)night Gown,” 40.
136. Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching, 44.
137. Dixon Jr., Sins of the Father, 452. The emphasis is mine.
138. Kinney, “Rhetoric of Racism,” 151.
139. Gilmore, “One of the Meanest Books,” 99. Arthur F. Kinney makes this

same point about Colonel Faulkner, William Faulkner’s patriarch. Arthur
F. Kinney, Go Down, Moses: The Miscegenation of Time (New York:
Twayne, 1996).

178

N o t e s

140. John E. Bruce, quoted in Gilmore, “One of the Meanest Books,” 97.
141. Dixon Jr., Sins of the Father, 33.
142. Ibid., 34–35.
143. Ibid., 78.
144. Ibid., 163.
145. See Joel Williamson for how this description fits that of Dixon’s real

mother. Williamson offers a Freudian reading of the mother-son rela-
tionship and applies this theorizing to Dixon’s works. Williamson, Cru-
cible of Race, 151–173.

146. Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons, 195.
147. Ibid., 294.
148. Inscoe, “The Clansman on Stage and Screen,” 153, 156, 157.
149. Zinn, People’s History of the United States, 382.
150. Raymond Rohauer, “Afterword,” in Dixon Jr., Southern Horizons, 326.
151. Lucius C. Harper, “What Reward Has God for Thomas Dixon, the

Hater?” Chicago Defender no.13 (April 1946): 1, 6.

152. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity, 161.
153. Ibid.

Chapter 4

1. William Shakespeare, “Macbeth,” in The Complete Works of Shakespeare,

4th ed., ed. David Bevington (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 126.

2. William Faulkner, quoted in Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race

(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984), 294.

3. Michael Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature (Jackson: Mississippi

UP, 1998), 50; Carlos Dews, “Why I Can’t Read Faulkner: Reading and
Resisting Southern White Masculinity,” The Faulkner Journal 15, no.
1–2 (Fall 1999–Spring 2000): 188.

4. Richard Gray points out that Faulkner was born into a culture that had

a complex code yet a sense of modernist rupture that gave him enough
critical distance from it to explore it. Richard Gray, The Life of William
Faulkner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 15.

5. Arthur F. Kinney, Go Down, Moses: The Miscegenation of Time (New

York: Twayne, 1996), 43.

6. Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (Oxford:

Oxford UP, 1993), 245, 375.

7. William Faulkner, Flags in the Dust (1929; repr., New York: Vintage,

1974), 94.

8. William Faulkner, Sanctuary (1931; repr., New York: Vintage, 1993),

301.

9. William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee (New York: Braziller, 1961), 161.

10. John N. Duvall, “Faulkner’s Crying Game: Male Homosexual Panic,” in

Faulkner and Gender, ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie
(Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1996), 54; Donald M. Kartiganer, “Quentin
Compson and Faulkner’s Drama of the Generations,” in Critical Essays

N o t e s

179

on William Faulkner: The Compson Family, ed. Arthur F. Kinney
(Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978), 385.

11. Andre Bleikasten, “Fathers in Faulkner,” in The Fictional Father: Lacan-

ian Readings of the Text, ed. Robert Con Davis (Amherst: Massachusetts
UP, 1981), 124.

12. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (1966; repr., New

York: Norton, 1977), 67.

13. James G. Watson, William Faulkner: Self-Presentation and Performance

(Austin: Texas UP, 2000), 192.

14. The same can be said of William Faulkner. Ralph Ellison, James Dickey,

Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’ Connor, and Toni Morrison, only to
name a few, have appropriated Faulkner as much as he did William Shake-
speare before him.

15. William Faulkner, quoted in M. Thomas Inge, ed., Conversations with

William Faulkner (Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1999), 65, 191.

16. David Rogers, “A Masculinity of Faded Blue: V.K. Ratliff and Faulkner’s

Creation of Transpositional Space,” The Faulkner Journal 15, no. 1–2
(Fall 1999–Spring 2000): 125.

17. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 108.
18. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 2nd ed., ed. David Minter

(1929; repr., New York: Norton, 1994), 108; William Faulkner, As I Lay
Dying (1930; repr., New York: Vintage, 1990), 80.

19. Duvall, “Faulkner’s Crying Game,” 49.
20. Watson, William Faulkner, 115.
21. John N. Duvall, Faulkner’s Marginal Couple: Invisible, Outlaw, and Un-

speakable Communities (Austin: Texas UP, 1990), 132. See also Bleikas-
ten, “Fathers in Faulkner,” 117.

22. Faulkner, Flags in the Dust, 193.
23. Richard Gray, Writing the South (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), 193.
24. Faulkner, Sanctuary, 280.
25. Faulkner, Flags in the Dust, 185–186.
26. Ibid., 77.
27. Ibid., 212.
28. Ibid., 224.
29. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar (Berkeley: California UP,

1978), 62.

30. Mapped out quite extensively in Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-

Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1980).

31. Faulkner, Flags in the Dust, 405.
32. William Shakespeare, “As You Like It,” in Bevington, Complete Works of

Shakespeare, 305.

33. Shakespeare, “Macbeth,” 1252.
34. Watson, William Faulkner, 21.
35. Susan V. Donaldson, “Faulkner and Masculinity,” The Faulkner Journal

15, no. 1–2 (Fall 1999–Spring 2000): 3.

36. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), xv.

180

N o t e s

37. Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History, 180, 185, 205.
38. Ibid., 332.
39. Kevin Railey, “The Social Psychology of Paternalism: Sanctuary’s Cul-

tural Context,” in Faulkner in Cultural Context, ed. Donald M. Karti-
ganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1997), 86.

40. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982), 50,

86, 89, 155, 191, 289, 295.

41. Faulkner, Flags in the Dust, 170, 199.
42. Butler, Gender Trouble, 175.
43. Rogers, “A Masculinity of Faded Blue,” 127.
44. Faulkner, Sanctuary, 13.
45. Ibid., 120.
46. Ibid., 279.
47. Shakespeare, “Macbeth,” 1230.
48. Ibid., 1240.
49. Ibid., 1254.
50. Ibid., 1229.
51. Railey, “Social Psychology of Paternalism,” 95.
52. Faulkner, Sanctuary, 296.
53. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 108. The emphasis is mine.
54. Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 273–274.
55. Faulkner, Sanctuary, 316.
56. Ibid., 300.
57. Ibid., 15.
58. Ibid., 216, 217, 220.
59. Temple Drake’s version of masculinity could be conjectured as that of the

gentleman given her father’s model of masculinity and its seeming re-
liance on this code, if nothing else, due to his class. Still, as she is attempt-
ing to defend herself against men who are “anything but gentlemen,” she
may be fantasizing a masculinity more in line with her aggressors. The
point is debatable.

60. Faulkner, Sanctuary, 218.
61. Ibid., 216.
62. Ibid., 223.
63. Duvall, Faulkner’s Marginal Couple, 73; James Polchin, “Selling a Novel:

Faulkner’s Sanctuary as a Psychosexual Text,” in Kartiganer and Abadie,
Faulkner and Gender, 154; Noel Polk, “The Space between Sanctuary,”
in Intertextuality in Faulkner, ed. Michael Gresset and Noel Polk (Jack-
son: Mississippi UP, 1985), 20.

64. Diane Roberts takes this tack with Temple Drake, labeling her the “new

belle” who “pioneers a bisexual space.” Diane Roberts, Faulkner and
Southern Womanhood (Athens: Georgia UP, 1994), 103. Like Duvall and
Polk regarding Horace, this assertion focuses more on role than on agency.

65. A common Faulkner trope. The most palpable example is the smell of

honeysuckle in The Sound and the Fury that drives Quentin Compson
crazy in the presence of his sister Caddie.

N o t e s

181

66. William Faulkner, The Wild Palms (1939; repr., New York: Vintage, 1995),

174.

67. Ibid., 113.
68. Ibid., 103.
69. Ibid., 44–45.
70. Faulkner “masculinizes” some women, such as Charlotte, Joanna Bur-

den, and Addie Bundren, but then makes them subjected to their own
femininity in one way or the other. The suggestion may be that Faulkner
sees the male/female dichotomy as inescapable.

71. Duvall, Faulkner’s Marginal Couple, 46.
72. William Faulkner, The Unvanquished (1934; repr., New York: Vintage,

1991), 100–101.

73. Ibid., 237.
74. Sherrill Harbison, “Two Sartoris Women: Faulkner, Femininity, and

Changing Times,” in Critical Essays on William Faulkner: The Sartoris
Family, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985), 292.

75. Patricia Yaeger, “Faulkner’s ‘Greek Amphora Priestess’: Verbena and Vio-

lence in The Unvanquished,” in Kartiganer and Abadie, Faulkner and
Gender, 224–225.

76. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, The Shaping of Southern Culture (Chapel Hill:

North Carolina UP, 2001), 280.

77. William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (1940; repr., New York: Vintage,

1990), 250.

78. Kinney, Go Down, Moses, 42.
79. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans.

Alan Sheridan (1981; repr., New York: Norton, 1998), 34.

80. Faulkner, Go Down, Moses, 270–271.
81. Ibid., 245–246.
82. William Faulkner, quoted in Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner,

eds., Faulkner in the University (1959; repr., Charlottesville: Virginia UP,
1995), 246.

83. Kinney, Go Down, Moses, 127.
84. Faulkner, Go Down, Moses, 3.

Chapter 5

1. William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! (1936; repr., New York: Vintage,

1990).

2. William Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” in The Complete Works of Shakespeare,

4th ed., ed. David Bevington (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 1097.

3. Michael Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature (Jackson: Mississippi

UP, 1998), 127.

4. Ibid., 105.
5.C. Hugh Holman sees Quentin as atonement for Southern sins, Faulkner’s

Christ figure. C. Hugh Holman, The Roots of Southern Writing (Athens:

182

N o t e s

Georgia UP, 1972), 12, 93. For Eric Sundquist, Quentin is a Southern
Hamlet, a merging of Bayard and Horace and the forerunner of Ike Mc-
Caslin and in turn Gavin Stevens. Eric J. Sundquist, Faulkner: The House
Divided (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985), 15, 17, 153. Leslie
Fiedler posits Quentin as Faulkner’s conscience. Leslie A. Fiedler, Love
and Death in the American Novel (1966; repr., Normal, IL: Dalkey
Archive, 1997), 414. John T. Irwin admits, “It is tempting to see in
Quentin a surrogate of Faulkner, a double who is fated to retell and reen-
act the same story throughout his life just as Faulkner seemed fated.”
John T. Irwin, Doubling and Incest/ Repetition and Rape: A Speculative
Reading of Faulkner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1975), 158. Finally,
see also James G. Watson, William Faulkner: Self-Presentation and Perfor-
mance (Austin: Texas UP, 2000), 149.

6. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 2nd ed., ed. David Minter

(1929; repr., New York: Norton, 1994), 100; Faulkner, Absalom! Absa-
lom! 303.

7. William Faulkner, quoted in Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner,

eds., Faulkner in the University (1959; repr., Charlottesville: Virginia UP,
1995), 17.

8. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 142.
9. William Taylor explains, “The introverted gentleman has a long history in

Southern fiction which runs the gamut from Poe’s neurasthenic Roderick
Usher to Faulkner’s Quentin Compson III and includes along the way
contributions by Simms, Harriet Beecher Stowe and practically all the
talents large and small that have examined Southern life.” William R.
Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee (New York: Braziller, 1961), 160.

10. Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” 1072.
11. Ibid., 1075.
12. Andre Bleikasten, “Fathers in Faulkner,” in The Fictional Father: Lacan-

ian Readings of the Text, ed. Robert Con Davis (Amherst: Massachusetts
UP, 1981), 128.

13. Faulkner, Sound and the Fury, 48.
14. Ibid., 206.
15. Sundquist, Faulkner, 91.
16. Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” 1112.
17. Malcolm Cowley, The Faulkner-Cowley File: Letters and Memories,

1944–1962 (New York: Viking, 1966), 14.

18. Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (Oxford: Ox-

ford UP, 1993), 177–180.

19. Gwynn and Blotner, Faulkner in the University, 3.
20. Susan V. Donaldson, “Faulkner and Masculinity,” The Faulkner Journal

15, no. 1–2 (Fall 1999–Spring 2000): 3–13.

21. For an in-depth discussion of the legend of Colonel Falkner, see

Richard Gray, The Life of William Faulkner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994),
63–64.

N o t e s

183

22. William Faulkner, quoted in M. Thomas Inge, ed., Conversations with

William Faulkner (Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1999), 213.

23. Sundquist, Faulkner, 10. See also Minrose C. Gwin, “Hearing Caddy’s

Voice,” in The Sound and the Fury: A Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed.,
ed. David Minter (New York: Norton, 1994), 412.

24. Inge, Conversations with William Faulkner, 213.
25. See Evy Varsamopoulou, “The Crisis of Masculinity and Action in The

Sound and the Fury: Quentin Compson’s Modernist Oedipus,” Renais-
sance and Modern Studies 41 (1998): 132–133.

26. Faulkner, Sound and the Fury, 96.
27. Ibid., 66.
28. Rupin W. Desai, Yeats’s Shakespeare (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP,

1971), 15, 21, 27–33.

29. William Shakespeare, “Richard II,” in Bevington, Complete Works of

Shakespeare, 745, 746.

30. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 168.
31. Watson, William Faulkner, 63.
32. Faulkner, Sound and the Fury, 51.
33. Ibid., 71.
34. Ibid., 113.
35. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 7.
36. Faulkner, Sound and the Fury, 74.
37. Ibid., 69, 70.
38. Ibid., 96.
39. Ibid., 50.
40. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 4–5.
41. Faulkner, Sound and the Fury, 101.
42. Irwin, Doubling and Incest/ Repetition and Rape, 110.
43. Faulkner, Sound and the Fury, 51.
44. Joel Williamson explains, “Faulkner was profoundly critical of the sex

roles prescribed by the Southern social order. Repeatedly he measured
the distance between what society insisted was ordinary and ideal pro-
gression and what actually happened.” Williamson, William Faulkner
and Southern History, 366. Quentin could be exhibit “A” in Williamson’s
case.

45. Faulkner, Sound and the Fury, 89, 105.
46. Ibid., 73.
47. Anne Goodwyn Jones, “Desire and Dismemberment: Faulkner and the

Ideology of Penetration,” in Faulkner and Ideology, ed. Donald M. Kar-
tiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1995), 164.

48. Faulkner, Sound and the Fury, 78.
49. Watson, William Faulkner, 185. Watson argues that Quentin begets his

own father, an idea that influences my thinking here.

50. For an example of this kind of Lacanian/Freudian reading of Quentin

and Mr. Compson’s relationship, see Andre Bleikasten, “Faulkner’s
Most Splendid Failure,” in Critical Essays on William Faulkner: The

184

N o t e s

Compson Family, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978),
268–287. In a separate essay, Bleikasten also sees Sutpen’s story as
Quentin’s acting out of his internal struggle in The Sound and the Fury.
Bleikasten, “Fathers in Faulkner,” 115–146. Joseph A. Boone argues
that Quentin’s narration is an attempt to take on his father. Joseph A.
Boone, “Creation by the Father’s Fiat,” in Refiguring the Father, ed. Pa-
tricia Yaeger and Beth Kowaleski-Wallace (Carbondale, IL: Southern
Illinois UP, 1989), 209–237.

51. Noel Polk, “Testing Masculinity in the Snopes Trilogy,” The Faulkner

Journal 16, no. 3 (Fall 2000–Spring 2001): 4.

52. Gwynn and Blotner, Faulkner in the University, 71, 73.
53. Joseph L. Blotner, ed., Selected Letters of William Faulkner (New York:

Random House, 1977), 79.

54. Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” 1096.
55. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 24.
56. Boone, “Creation by the Father’s Fiat,” 213.
57. William Shakespeare, “The Tempest,” in Bevington, Complete Works of

Shakespeare, 1531.

58. Richard Gray, Writing the South (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986),

182.

59. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 21.
60. Ibid., 204. The insert is mine.
61. Bleikasten suggests that Sutpen is Faulkner’s most masculine father and

self-generative. Bleikasten, “Fathers in Faulkner,” 128. Bleikasten does
not relate the attempt at generation to Quentin; his first point is echoed
in Irwin, Doubling and Incest/ Repetition and Rape, 98; and Malcolm
Cowley, A Second Flowering (New York: Viking, 1974), 143. See also
John N. Duvall, Faulkner’s Marginal Couple: Invisible, Outlaw, and Un-
speakable Communities (Austin: Texas UP, 1990), 101–102.

62. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 181.
63. Ibid., 188.
64. John Duvall discusses the idea of Sutpen as having two fathers—one bio-

logical and the other ideological. Duvall, Faulkner’s Marginal Couple,
104–113. In a sense, the same could be said of Quentin.

65. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 190.
66. Carolyn Porter considers at length Sutpen’s splitting, the relationship of

Sutpen to his father, and how Quentin makes Sutpen and is in turn made
by him. Carolyn Porter, “Absalom! Absalom! (Un)making the Father,” in
The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, ed. Philip M. Weinstein
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 168–196.

67. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 10, 11.
68. Ibid., 37–38.
69. Faulkner told his class at the University of Virginia, “Shreve was the com-

mentator that held the thing to something of reality. If Quentin had been
let alone to tell it, it would have been completely unreal.” Gwynn and
Blotner, Faulkner in the University, 71.

N o t e s

185

70. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 214.
71. Ibid., 220.
72. Thomas Loebel posits men “making” men in relation to Quentin and

Shreve and the homosexual implications of this action. Thomas Loebel,
“Love of Masculinity,” The Faulkner Journal 15, no. 1–2 (Fall 1999–Spring
2000): 83–106. Also see Irwin, Doubling and Incest/ Repetition and
Rape, 75.

73. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 289.
74. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (1966; repr., New

York: Norton, 1977), 217.

75. Ibid., 321.
76. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 76–77.
77. Ibid., 62.
78. Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” 1086.
79. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 78.
80. Ibid., 76.
81. Ibid., 253.
82. Ibid., 76.
83. Ibid., 240.
84. “The Power to look is closely associated with the power to tell stories—to

explain what one sees and knows.” Susan V. Donaldson, “Reading
Faulkner Reading Cowley Reading Faulkner: Authority and Gender in the
Compson Appendix,” The Faulkner Journal 7, no. 1–2 (Fall 1991–Spring
1992): 28. For an in-depth analysis of Faulkner’s emphasis on seeing, see
Gray, Writing the South, 177–178.

85. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 147–148.
86. Ibid., 62, 139.
87. Richard Gray notes, “Quentin sometimes sees both Henry and Charles

Bon as dark reflections of himself, since the two are remembered as re-
spectively the self-proclaimed protector and the would-be violator of a
sister’s ‘honor.’ ” Gray, Life of William Faulkner, 219.

88. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 76–77.
89. Irwin, Doubling and Incest/ Repetition and Rape, 32; John N. Duvall,

“Faulkner’s Crying Game: Male Homosexual Panic,” in Faulkner and
Gender, ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: Missis-
sippi UP, 1996), 57; Noel Polk, “The Artist as Cuckold,” in Kartiganer
and Abadie, Faulkner and Gender, 24.

90. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 86.
91. Ibid., 18.
92. Ibid., 95–96.
93. Faulkner, Sound and the Fury, 50.
94. Ibid., 109.
95. Anne Goodwyn Jones, “The Work of Gender in the Southern Renais-

sance,” in Southern Writers and Their Worlds, ed. Christopher Morris and
Steven G. Reinhardt (Arlington: Texas A&M UP, 1996), 47.

186

N o t e s

96. Inge, Conversations with William Faulkner, 55.
97. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 83.
98. Ibid., 146.
99. Faulkner, Sound and the Fury, 49, 61.

100. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 222.
101. Ibid., 210.
102. Gail Mortimer, “The Masculinity of Faulkner’s Thought,” The Faulkner

Journal 4, no. 1–2 (Fall 1988–Spring 1989): 78.

103. Lothar Honnighausen suggests that all of this fluidity and the narrative

stance are a result of Faulkner’s tendency for masks and role-play in his
own life. Lothar Honnighausen, Faulkner: Masks and Metaphors (Jack-
son: Mississippi UP, 1997).

104. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 243.
105. Ibid.
106. Richard Gray discusses Quentin and Shreve’s recreating and how it relates

to the reader. See Gray, Writing the South, 182–192. Also see Sundquist,
Faulkner, 126.

107. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 236.
108. Ibid., 267.
109. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 241.
110. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 80.
111. Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” 1115.
112. William Shakespeare, “Othello,” in Bevington, Complete Works of Shake-

speare, 1166.

113. Mired in Freudian paradigms, Evy Varsamopoulou sees Quentin’s death

as the triumph of the father over the son. Varsamopoulou, “Crisis of
Masculinity and Action in Sound and the Fury,” 132–143.

114. Faulkner, Sound and the Fury, 113.
115. Donald M. Kartiganer, “Quentin Compson and Faulkner’s Drama of

the Generations,” in Kinney, Critical Essays on William Faulkner, 399.

116. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 176.
117. James G. Watson argues that the narrators of Absalom are “persistently

and pervasively” theatrical and suggests that one reason for their being
so is Faulkner’s tendency to be so himself. Watson, William Faulkner,
126–129.

118. Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! 57.
119. Jay Watson sees this Player as patriarchal law itself and considers the

Player’s/the law’s ramifications for gender policing. Jay Watson, “Over-
doing Masculinity in Light in August; or, Joe Christmas and the Gender
Guard,” The Faulkner Journal 9, no. 1–2 (Fall 1993–Spring 1994):
149–177. James G. Watson sees the Player as a metaphoric version of
Faulkner himself. Watson, William Faulkner, 137–138.

120. William Faulkner, Light in August (1932; repr., New York: Vintage,

1990), 462–463.

121. Ibid., 464.

N o t e s

187

122. William Faulkner, Mosquitoes (1927; repr., New York: Dell, 1965),

119–120.

123. William Shakespeare, “As You Like It,” in Bevington, Complete Works of

Shakespeare, 305.

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198

B i b l i o g r a p h y

I n d e x

1 Henry IV

12, 22, 25, 27, 41

2 Henry IV

ix, 37, 41

1 King Henry VI

Absalom! Absalom!

xiv, 121,

127–128, 131, 133–136, 138,
143–145, 147–149, 151

Adams, John Quincy

“Americanism in Literature”

“Antagonisms of the Social Moral.

North and South”

As I Lay Dying

127

As You Like It

44, 50, 53–54,

67–68, 75, 115, 122

Bargainnier, Earl F.

172n132

Beauchampe

Birth of a Nation, The

85, 99, 106

black rapist beast

xiii, 57, 69, 80,

88, 91, 93–95, 100, 102–103,
105, 124

Bleikasten, Andre

184–185n50,

185n61

Blight, David

174–175n42

Bloom, Harold

169–170n68,

177–178n108

Bloomfield, Maxwell

177n105

Boone, Joseph A.

185n50

Border Beagles

157n25

Bred in the Bone

Brichford, Charles H.

Bristol, Michael D.

157n19,

166n11, 173–174n19,
177n103

Butler, Judith

xi, 3–4, 6, 11, 21,

26, 44–47, 50, 53, 65, 83, 92,

112, 116–118, 121, 149;
Bodies That Matter, xi, 3,
44–45, 112, 149; citationality,
xi, 4, 6, 25, 35, 46–47, 52, 83,
92, 102, 106–107, 112, 115,
117–118, 149; Gender Trouble,
11, 21, 50, 117; performativity,
3, 6, 21, 46, 65, 107, 114,
116, 123, 134

Cable, George W.

51, 56

“Caloya: or, the Loves of the

Driver”

Cash, W. J.

6–7, 12, 15, 159n43

Cassique of Kiawah

Charleston

5, 10, 23–24, 30, 41;

Charleston Mercury, 40–41

Christmann, James

168n39

Clansman, The

xiii, 51, 74–75,

78–81, 84–85, 88, 93–95,
99–101, 106

Compromise of 1850

14, 22

Compson, Quentin

120, 127–128;

actor, 135; failed masculinity,
112, 133–134; narrative
control, 130, 140–141, 146,
151; role of son, 113, 129, 137

Confession

Cook, Raymond

Cooke, John Esten

Cowie, Alexander

158–159n37

Cowley, Malcom

129

Cub of the Panther, The

Davis, William C.

10, 29

Dissanayake, Ellen

153

Dixon, Major Joseph

Dixon, Thomas, Jr.: actor

79;

connection between biography
and fiction, 105; Iago-like, xii;
insecurity, 73, 104; racial
radical, 19, 57, 69, 83, 101,
124. See also names of specific
works

Dixon, Thomas, Sr.

103, 106

Dobson, Michael

xi, 6, 173n19

Dollimore, Jonathan

76, 166n11,

173n19

Donaldson, Susan V.

186n84

Duvall, John

185n64

Duyckinck, Evert

33, 40

Eby, Clare

175n50

Eutaw

4, 10, 24, 30, 38, 41

Falkner, Colonel William C.

130

Falstaff: appetite/body

9, 22;

inappropriate father figure, 2,
8, 12–14, 23, 25, 110; model
for Captain Porgy, 11, 15, 29,
39

Faulkner, William: author as father

figure

xv, 109, 152; haunted

by past, 130; masculine poses,
115–116, 148; modernist
project, xiv, 152. See also names
of specific works

Faust, Drew Gilpin

Fiedler, Leslie A.

183n5

Field, Florence Lathrop

Field, Henry

Flags in the Dust

111, 113–114,

116–117, 124

Flaming Sword, The

77, 106

Flusche, Michael

170–171n95,

171n119, 172n132

Foner, Eric

177n88

Forayers, The

4, 10, 18, 35–37

Foster, Gaines M.

167n24

Frye, Steven

163–164n129

Fugitive Slave Act

Gates, Jane

23–24

Gebhard, Caroline

161n76

Genovese, Eugene

160n61

Gillman, Susan

174n41

Glen-Eberly

14, 37

Go Down, Moses

124–125

Gordon Keith: character

62, 69;

novel, 44, 48, 54, 58, 60, 63,
65–67, 69; parallels with Page’s
life, 64

Gray, Richard: Life of William

Faulkner

179n4, 183n21,

186n87; South to a New Place,
72; Writing the South, 166n4,
187n117

Great Redemption, The

47,

Greenblatt, Stephen

180n30

Griffith, D. W.

87, 99

Gross, Theodore

62, 169n51,

171n95, 172n131

Guilds, John C.

ix, xii, 6, 23–24,

165n154

Guy Rivers

2, 25

Hal, Prince (Harry): character

13–14, 27, 37, 61–62; type of
masculinity, 2, 8, 11, 15, 29,
31, 75, 110

Hale, Grace

168n39, 169n60,

177n105

Hamlet: character

15, 63, 102,

128–129, 137, 150; play,
26–27, 61, 137–138; type of
masculinity, 2, 11, 30, 75,
110–112, 116, 136–138,
142–143, 148

Hamlet, Sr.

xi, 2, 15, 31, 61

Hammond, James Henry

Harper, Lucius C.

107

Harris, Cora

71–72

Harris, Joel Chandler

Henry IV (Bolingbroke): character

2, 37, 47; successful father-
king, 8, 13, 15

200

I n d e x

Henry V

9, 39, 57; character, 28,

91; type of masculinity, 1, 8–9,
31

Hetherington, Hugh

22–23, 41,

156n10, 158n36, 158n37,
159n46, 160n55, 162n112,
164n136, 165n148

Hobsbawm, Eric

167n18

Holman, C. Hugh

23, 28,

157n24, 158n37, 162n91,
165n159, 182–183n5

Honnighausen, Lothar

187n103

Hotspur

x, 28, 31, 36; type of

masculinity, 1, 2, 8–9, 11–12,
15, 22, 24–25, 29, 31, 75, 78,
110–111, 128, 138–139,
142–143, 145–146, 148

Hubble, Jay B.

165n159

Iago

70, 79, 86; character type, 2,

58–59, 84; as playwright/
author/actor, 76, 81–83, 87,
89–90

In Ole Virginia; or, Marse Chan and

Other Stories

47–48, 50, 52,

54–55, 69, 71

Inscoe, John C.

175n57

Irwin, John T.

183n5

Jarrell, Hampton M.

158n37

Jim Crow laws

69, 88, 106

Johnson, Joseph

Joscelyn

2, 4, 10, 39

Katherine Walton

4, 9, 24, 27, 38,

Kennedy, John Pendleton

King, Grace Elizabeth

King, James Kimball

171n119

King Lear

5, 43–44, 48, 57–59; as

character, 40, 66; sons, 60

Kinney, Arthur F.

178n139

Kinsmen, The

Kolin, Philip C.

157n23

Kreyling, Michael

128

Ku Klux Klan (KKK)

55, 75,

79–80, 94–95, 101–102, 106

Lacan, Jacques

111, 124–125, 142

Ladd, Barbara

172–173n143

Lanier, Henry W.

Lawson, James

Leopard’s Spots, The

xiii, 51,

74–77, 80, 84–88, 94, 97, 99

“Life in Colonial Virginia”

Light in August

70, 121, 127, 151

Longstreet, Stephen

146

lost cause mythology

xii, xiii, 2,

44–45, 47, 49–50, 52, 54, 58,
60, 62, 70–72, 74, 129

“Lynching of Negroes—Its Cause

and Its Prevention”

Macbeth

21, 109, 115, 121; as

character, 110, 117–118; type
of masculinity, 2, 133

Mackethan, Lucinda

168–169n44

Magowan, Kimberly Iris

177n90,

178n116, 178n131

“Marse Chan”

43, 46–47, 52; as a

character, 47, 50

Martineau, Harriet

15–16

McPherson, James M. 176–177n88
“Meh Lady”

50–51, 53

Mellichampe

4, 9, 33, 41

Merchant of Venice, The

122

Meriwether, James

Merry Wives of Windsor, The

20, 41

Michaels, Walter Benn

170n71

Midsummer Night’s Dream

A, 67

Miles, William Porcher

25, 39

Moltke-Hansen, David

164n135

Mosquitoes

121, 151

Much Ado about Nothing

21, 53,

75, 92

“Negro: The Southerner’s Problem,

The”

Nolan, Alan T.

167–168n28

Nullification Crisis

I n d e x

201

“Oakatibbe; or, the Choctaw

Sampson”

O’Connor, Flannery

xiv

Okker, Patricia

Old Dominion, The

Old South, The

45–46, 51, 63

Othello

70, 76, 79, 81, 85–86, 88,

96; as a character, 79, 82–83,
89, 90, 101–102, 110, 150

Paddy McGann

Page, Rosewell

48–49

Page, Thomas Nelson: African

narrators

24, 81; anxiety, 45;

appropriating Shakespeare, 44,
78; organic society, 57; racial
conservative, 20, 70;
redefining terms, 44, 60;
romance author, xii, xiii, 43,
53, 56, 67–68, 75. See also
names of specific works

Page, Walter Hines

56, 75–76

Parks, Edd Winfield

157n24,

157n25

Partisan, The

2, 9, 11, 13, 19,

22–25, 28–29, 41

Porgy, Captain: actor

27; cultural

hybrid, 9, 14; father-son
amalgamation, 3, 10–11, 37;
gentleman, 31–32, 38;
representative character, 4–5,
12, 19, 26, 33

Porter, Carolyn

185n66

Reconstruction

20, 47, 55, 57, 59,

69, 73–74, 110

Reconstruction Trilogy, The

51, 74,

Red Riders, The

Red Rock

43, 48–49, 54–56,

58–60, 62, 69

Revolutionary War Series

4, 12,

14, 33, 35

Richard II

44, 66–67, 132; as a

character, 132

Richard III

Richardson, Emily S.

171n101,

171n121

Richardson, Riche

175n50

Roberts, Diane

181n64

Rohauer, Raymond

106

Romeo and Juliet

44, 48, 53, 75;

characters as a romantic
paradigm, 2, 48–49, 52

Romine, Scott

168n39

Rubin, Louis D., Jr.

17,

165n152

Sabine, Lorenzo

28–29, 35

Sanctuary

111, 113, 117–121,

124, 131

Scout, The

4, 9

Sedgwick, Eve K.

144

“Sense of the Beautiful”

Shakespeare, William: appropriation

xii, 1, 22, 45, 66, 72, 74,

113, 150; deification of, xi, 7,
46, 61, 78; father figure,
xiv–xv, 39, 109; father-son
paradigms, 5, 30; unstable
masculinity, 96. See also names
of specific works

Shillingsburg, Miriam J.

Shillingsburg, Peter L.

160–161n68

Simms, William Gilmore:

appropriating Shakespeare

5, 78; creating fathers, 11–12,
15, 22, 28; defensive nature, 9,
32–33; oratory, 1, 32; racial
conservative, 16–17; reasons for
study of, xii, 44, 128; young
Simms, 23–24. See also names
of specific works

Simpson, Louis P.

173n19

Sinfield, Alan

46, 166n11,

173n19

Singleton, Robert

2, 9, 23–24

Sins of the Father, The

80, 99,

101–102, 104–106

202

I n d e x

Slavery in America, Being a Brief

Review of Miss Martineau on
That Subject

4, 15

Smith, Bruce R.

xiv, 7–8, 107,

159n54

Smith, Harrison

137

Social Life in Virginia before the War

46, 64, 71

Social Principle: The True Source of

National Permanence, The

Sound and the Fury, The

xiv, 115,

120, 128–129, 130–133,
136–138, 144–145, 147, 149,
150

Southern Convention, The

4, 17,

33–34

Southern Horizons

73, 77, 84, 94,

98, 105–106

Southern Literary Gazette

Stevens, Thaddeus

75, 84, 100

Sundquist, Eric J.

176n87,

178n120, 183n5

Taylor, Helen

Taylor, William

156n10, 158n34,

163n122, 183n9

Tempest, The

67, 76, 96–97, 138

Timon of Athens

Traitor, The 51, 74–75, 80, 95, 102
Trent, William P.

158n37

Turner, Nat

Twelfth Night

122

“Uncle Gabe’s White Folks”

44,

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

80, 87, 92

Under the Crust

Unvanquished

122–124

Views and Reviews in American

Literature, History, and
Fiction

Voltmeier

Watson, Charles S.

156n8,

158n37, 161–162n90,
163n123, 163n126

Watson, James

184n49, 187n117,

187n119

Whaley, Grace W.

157n25

Wigwam and the Cabin, The

18,

Wild Palms, The

121–122, 127

Williamson, Joel

16, 51, 56, 77,

175n57, 177n105, 184n44; The
Crucible of Race, 16, 51, 77;
racial conservatism, 16–17,
51–52, 56, 76, 91; racial
liberalism, 51; racial radicalism,
19, 69, 79, 84, 93, 106

Wimsatt, Mary Ann

23, 29,

156n7, 162n111

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

114

Woodcraft

4, 9–11, 14, 17, 20–22,

25, 31–33, 35–36, 38, 41;
alternate titles, 30

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram: The Shaping

of Southern Culture

45,

155–156n2; Southern Honor,
156n13, 157n33, 161n87,
162n101, 163n118, 167n13,
177n101

Yeats, W. B.

132

Yemassee, The

2, 17

Young America Group, The

Zinn, Howard

98–99, 106

I n d e x

203

Document Outline

Cover
Contents
Introduction
1 William Gilmore Simms and William Shakespeare
2 Thomas Nelson Page’s Mythmaking and Shakespearean Masculinity
3 Fear of a Black Planet
4 Who’s Your Daddy?
5 I’m My Own Grandpa
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- R
- S
- T
- U
- V
- W
- Y
- Z

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