The Dream of Arcady

Place and Time in Southern Literature

Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9780807153574
• eBook ISBN: 9780807153567
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"This is a well-organized, gracefully written account of a significant aspect of Southern fiction, and it contains information and incisive commentary that one can find nowhere else." --Thomas Daniel Young
Many southern writers imagined the South as a qualified dream of Arcady. They retained the glow of the golden land as a device to expose or rebuke, to confront or escape the complexities of the actual times in which they lived.
The Dream of Arcady examines the work of post-Civil War southern writers who criticize the myth of the South as pastoral paradise. Sooner or later in all their idealized worlds, the idyllic vision fades in an inescapable moment of awakening. This moment, which is central to MacKethan's study, produces an atmosphere pastoral in mood and implications.
Her perspective analysis juxtaposes the responses of Sidney Lanier, Joel Chandler Harris, and Thomas Nelson Page, who contributed to yet hope to transcend sectionalism, with the ambivalent views of black writers Charles Chesnutt and Jean Toomer. Considering the writings of the Agrarians, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty, MacKethan then concludes her study by questioning whether the Arcadian dream still serves the artist of our era as a frame for artistic and ideological purposes.

Index

Agrarianism, 16, 33–34, 36, 133–34, 136, 141, 143, 208

Agrarians. See Fugitive-Agrarians

Anderson, Charles, 28

Anderson, Sherwood, 126

Arcady: southern images of, 2, 3, 5, 8, 16–17, 36

Arp, Bill, 65

Atlanta Constitution, 61, 67, 68, 81

Atlanta, Georgia, 61, 67

Atlantic Monthly, 27, 88, 92

Audubon, John James, 180

Bagby, George W., 43

Baltimore, Md., 25, 26

Black slave characters: in plantation literature, 11–12, 17, 84, 87, 91

missing in Lanier’s work, 19

Page’s use of, 36, 42, 44, 50, 53–60

Harris’ identification with, 63–64, 79–80

in Chesnutt’s fiction, 90–96

Black writers: perspective of, 86–87, 105–27 passim, 132

Blotner, Joseph, 156

Bone, Robert, 37, 84, 103n, 125, 130–31

Brooks, Cleanth, 157, 164

Buck, Paul, 8, 12, 63

Cable, George Washington, 37, 91, 103

Cardwell, Guy, 43–44

Century, 35

Chase, Patricia, 122

Chesnutt, Charles Waddell: 7, 17, 86–104, 210

moves away from South, 84, 87

formulates strategy for fiction, 87

as antipastoral writer, 85, 96–97, 103–104

description of The Conjure Woman, 90

attitude toward nature, 93–94

as activist on race issue, 103–104

—Writings: The Colonel’s Dream, 17, 89–90, 97–103

The Conjure Woman, 17, 84, 88, 89, 90–96, 102

“Dave’s Neckliss,” 92

“The Goophered Grapevine,” 88, 94

The House Behind the Cedars, 89

The Marrow of Tradition, 89–90

“Mars Jeems’s Nightmare,” 92–94

“The Passing of Grandison,” 91

“Po’ Sandy,” 94

“Sis’ Becky’s Pickaninny,” 95

Chicago Liberation, 126

Cinderella, 79

Civil War: disruption of life in South, 4, 9, 17, 18, 160, 163, 167

effect on Harris, 2, 66

effect on Lanier, 18–19, 24

effect on Thomas Nelson Page, 38–40

Clemens, Samuel. See Mark Twain

Cleveland, Ohio, 87, 88

Community: concept of, 7, 210–214; 216

Welty’s and Faulkner’s compared, 183

Country and the City, The. See Williams, Raymond

Countryman, 1, 2, 64, 66

Cowley, Malcolm, 163

Davidson, Donald: as Fugitive-Agrarian, 134

outline for “I’ll Take My Stand, 135

argument over “I’ll Take My Stand title, 136

“A Mirror for Artists,” 143

Davis, Charles T., 125

Dayton, Tenn., 129

Dial, The, 211

Douglass, Frederick, 89

Durham, Frank, 110, 121–22

Eatonton, Georgia, 64

Empson, William, 5, 53

“Fall of the House of Usher” (Poc), 45

Faulkner, William: 7, 133, 152, 153–180, 183, 210, 217

beginnings of Yoknapatawpha saga, 156

use of the past, 156–58, 159, 162, 164, 177, 179

comments on Ike McCaslin, 171–72

time in, 157, 169–70, 175–76

primitivism in, 170, 175

—Writings: Absalom, Absalom!, 45, 158, 163–68, 168–69, 170, 179, 210, 213

“The Bear,” 158, 170–79

“The Fire and the Hearth,” 172, 173

Flags in the Dust, 156, 157

Go Down, Moses, 173–79

The Hamlet, 211–12, 213, 214

Mosquitoes, 156

“An Odor of Verbena,” 162–63

“The Old People,” 174–75, 177

Soldier’s Pay, 156

Sartoris, 156, 157, 158, 159–63, 169–70, 179, 216

The Sound and the Fury, 158, 168–70, 172, 179, 183, 216

“Was,” 173–74

Fayetteville, N.C., 87, 88

Fletcher, John Gould, 136

Forsyth, Ga., 66

Frank, Waldo, 109, 124

Fugitive, 126–27, 129

Fugitive-Agrarians, 7, 15, 23–34, 126–27, 128–152. See also I’ll Take My Stand

Gaines, Francis Pendleton, 2, 11, 12, 14, 54

Gelfant, Blanche, 171, 173

Grady, Henry, 9, 34, 62, 64, 81, 97, 132

Greever, Garland, 24

Greg, Walter, 14

Harcourt, Brace, 157

Harlem Renaissance, 104, 125

Harris, Joel Chandler: 7, 10, 14, 16–17, 61–85, 210

boyhood days on Georgia plantation, 1–2, 64–66, 81

compared to Thomas Nelson Page, 37–38, 59–60

early career as a journalist, 66–67

early newspaper sketches of Uncle Remus, 68

analysis of Negro folklore, 68–69

attitude toward progress, 80–84

compared to Chesnutt, 85, 86, 90

—Brer Rabbit tales analyzed: 38, 59–60, 70ff

“Mr. Man” in, 71–72

theory of race in, 72

moral code in, 74

classifications of, 75

rabbit as hero, 77–79

—Writings: Nights with Uncle Remus, 81–82

Told by Uncle Remus, 81, 83–84

Uncle Remus and His Friends, 82–83

Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings, 68–69, 81

Harris, Mary, 65

Hayne, Paul Hamilton, 30

...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• One: The South as Arcady: Beginnings of a Mode
• Two: Sidney Lanier: The Scythe of Time, The Trowel of Trade
• Three: Thomas Nelson Page: The Plantation as Arcady
• Four: Joel Chandler Harris: Speculating on the Past
• Five: Charles Chesnutt’s Southern World: Portraits of a Bad Dream
• Six: Jean Toomer’s Cane: The Pastoral Return
• Seven: Agrarian Quarrel, Agrarian Question: What Shall This Land Produce?
• Eight: Faulkner’s Sons of the Fathers: How to Inherit the Past
• Nine: To See Things in Their Time: The Act of Focusing in Eudora Welly’s Fiction
• Ten: The South Beyond Arcady
• Bibliography
• Index