[On October 12th,
1870, Robert
E. Lee died—but not before the post-war
deification of Lee was already well underway. So this week I’ll
AmericanStudy that process and other aspects of Confederate memory, leading up
to a special post on a great recent book on the subject!]
On the parallel
but not identical Confederate veteran protagonists of two 1880s novels.
In a chapter in my
dissertation/first
book on “the South question” during the Gilded Age, I argued that the period’s
dominant cultural form related to that post-Civil War national debate was not
the familiar “romance
of reunion” (in which Northern and Southern white characters fall in love
and mutually agree to forget or at least move past the Civil War and sectional division;
that genre certainly did exist and I started the chapter by analyzing one representative
example, controversial physician S. Weir Mitchell’s 1884
novel In War Time) but rather what
I called the “narrative of conversion”: Northern and national characters and audiences
being converted to the Southern, Lost Cause, neo-Confederate perspective on the
war, on history, and most of all on America’s identity and future. I’ve
encountered many literary examples of that conversion narrative, including the
James D. Lynch poem
Redpath about which I wrote in yesterday’s
post. But in that chapter I focused on two of the most striking such Gilded Age
literary conversion narratives: Henry Adams’ anonymously published Democracy:
An American Novel (1880) and Henry James’ The
Bostonians (1886).
The male
protagonists of both novels are Confederate veterans who have come North—to Washington,
DC in the case of Adams’ John Carrington, to Boston in the case of James’ Basil
Ransom—and find themselves wooing Northern women, Madeleine Lee and Verena Tarrant
respectively. They pursue these women not only romantically, but also and
interconnectedly in an effort to convert them to their Southern,
neo-Confederate experiences and perspectives on the war, its aftermaths,
region, and nation. They find themselves opposed in those efforts by telling alternative
suitors: Illinois Senator and presidential hopeful Silas Ratcliffe in Adams,
abolitionist and suffrage activist Olive Chancellor in James (who may be pursuing
Verena out of romantic desire, although that theme is ambiguous as you
might expect from an 1880s novel, but certainly wants her for the cause in
any case). And John and Basil overcome that opposition, and a great deal of
uncertainty from Madeleine and Verena, to win the hands of these women, in
endings that (as I read them in my book and would still read them) symbolically
position these Confederate veterans and their neo-Confederate perspectives as potent
forces in the shaping of the national future.
The concluding
lines of James’s novel depict both Basil’s triumph and that national future
as somewhat less than ideal, however: as Basil takes her away from Olive, Verena
says “Ah, now I am glad” but is revealed to be in tears; and the narrator
notes, in the book’s final sentence, “It is to be feared that with the union,
so far from brilliant, into which she was about to enter, these were not the
last she was destined to shed.” The narration of The Bostonians is as multi-layered and ambiguous as is the case in most
James works, and this moment could be read as simply one final example of that
narrative complexity. But I would also argue (perhaps more strongly than I did
in my book, although I hope I noted this distinction there as well) that James’
novel is more a depiction of Basil’s conversion of Verena and influence on
her/the nation’s future, whereas Adams’ book is more a celebration of John’s
conversion of Madeleine (or at least presents that arc as a more overtly and
clearly positive development). Moreover, while no one in James’ novel is
particularly admirable, Basil is quite an asshole; while John is far more
idealized by Adams’ narrator and novel. Which makes these books two
complementary but interestingly distinct primary sources for our analysis of
the late 19th century rise and dominance of these neo-Confederate
figures and narratives.
Next memories
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other aspects of Confederate or Civil War memory you’d highlight?
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