Essay on Southern Literature

My paper for English Composition and Literature course taught by Prof. Clemans at Cerritos College. It's a paper about Southern Literature--what is the flavor of the South?

The Mirror of Southern Literature:

The Reflection of Endless Value

The history of the South is fickle. For many years following the Civil War the South, one might say, is hammered by social transformation. However, the South is reluctant to accept the new American values and look backward to its faded identity. It is not their nature to be blamed for this manner, but it happens as a result of the sudden change in society. Even though American South has been industrialized, southern writers manage to use their literature as a mirror to reflect the lost tradition and look for history as a reverberation of timeless value.

Southern fiction enfolds a strong use of history. Writers in the South aspire to comprise faded tradition and regard history as a “repository of value” (Kessler 490). Literary fiction of the South evokes a sense of “not-letting-it-go.” Most southerners, especially those who live at high social status, refuse to concede the truth that their aristocratic class is degenerated because of the change in social structure, and they pretend that they are still living with their non-existent ideals. This self-deception idea can be viewed in a short story from Mississippi, William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” that highlights a contradiction in Miss Emily who no longer possesses her so-called high social class, but she refuses to acknowledge the reality. In addition, the central conflict of this story is centered in “Miss Emily’s background, her history” (Parker 106). She is considered a victim of tradition that she can not make love with a Negro man, Homer Barron, who has lower status than she has, while she can not let him go, either. This lifelong oppression is what drives Miss Emily, causing her “to cling to that which had robbed her” (98).

Technically, the South survives on the “margin of history” with a perspective from the “social rear that was the major dispensation that South could offer its writers” (Howe 550). Clearly, the South lives in the time border between aristocratic and modernized societies. Their central conflict in writing is continuous with the past—their ideals of “honor, chivalry, and noblesse” (Cash 547). As an illustration, the way the grandmother dresses and her superstitious nature in O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” show readers how hard it is to let go of the past. The literary content of southern writers is not determined much by its industrialization but continue to show characters who are “from present towards the past” (Cash 549). These characters are living in the present world but cling to mannerism from a long-ago past.

It is true that W.J. Cash considers the South as a tree with many age rings with “its tap roots in the Old South” (548). This statement helps explain that the South sticks with their old identity and tradition which can be defined as southern interminable values. The demonstration of historical background and individuality occupied by the South can be observed in Andrea Lee’s “Anthropology” through her definition of identity. She identifies “place” as “identity, whether defined by pigmentation, occupation, economic rank, or family name” (Lee 194-195). Also, a first reading would leave readers with ambivalence of “white-white” people, “white-black” people, and “black-black” people. But “Anthropology” obviously suggests that in Ball County “everyone knows everyone’s place” (195). This idea evokes a sense of Old South where people have to know their place, position in society, and social role. Indeed, “Anthropology” reveals the recurrence of southern tradition and identity in the past that would never fail to exist in the present.

On the other hand, the expression of backwardness employed by southern writers is used as a “vantage-point to observe” Southern-American life and thereby to “arrive at a profound and withering criticism” of place and its morality (Howe 550). In Lee’s “Anthropology,” the protagonist searches for her roots that indicate the idea of looking backward. This fiction demonstrates an embrace of morality that depicts the South as a backward legend. Every White-Black individual mentioned in “Anthropology” still believes in the idea that “White” is superior since they even change their last names to a White-sounded name. This is the contradiction that can be perceived in southern stories. It is the contradiction which tells readers that the South has been trained for looking back to the matter of social class and clan—which, otherwise, becomes one of their central focuses in literature.

In reality, the power to change the past is just an unattainable wish—and the South, too, is unable to change the occurrence of social reform that happened in American history. Southerners look backward to their past, and they do not want to be modernized. So, the South decides to romanticize themselves and make their endless value possible in the literature. The New South has been industrialized which makes people think of the New South as a brand-new legend. However, the New South and the Old South are still the “South,” regardless of these two different adjectives [Old and New] and both legends have very similar favor which is like a trend moving from present towards the past. And this favor is used uniquely in southern literature.

Literary Paper on Southern Literature written by MONIRATH SIV