Beyond that, I am specifically concerned about what I feel to be a regression in speech style among elite Northern women who give lip service to feminism but whose speaking voice in college and early career seems increasingly weak, bland, and sometimes annoyingly juvenile, which may be a product of the bourgeois gentility with which they were raised in the sterile landscape of the shopping-mall suburbs. The pampered overprotection of middle-class girls at home is prolonged in expensive Northern colleges by the intrusive paternalism of an ever-expanding campus administrator class, who now routinely use unconstitutional speech codes to enforce political correctness about sex and gender.
For example, three years ago, a raucous incident at Yale University caused a firestorm that led to the suspension of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity for five years. The Yale Women’s Center protested that pledges were required to chant pornographically explicit verses on the hallowed Old Campus, which is ringed by freshman dormitories. These admittedly vulgar lines (which I cannot repeat here) were dubbed “hate speech,” but they were actually satirizing the feminist mantra, “No always means no.” When the Yale administration was slow to respond, sixteen Yale students and recent graduates filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, and Yale buckled. Predictably, it laid on yet another layer of bureaucracy—a new committee specializing in complaints about sexual misconduct.
This now nationally accepted system of academic surveillance and control of students’ private lives is virtually unheard of in Europe. In my opinion, while reasonable sexual harassment guidelines should indeed govern the supervisory relationship of teachers to students, college administrations should not be interfering in students’ lives outside the classroom—unless a crime has been committed, in which case the police should be called. But more germane to our present theme, why are self-described feminists instantly turning to authorities for help—especially over a clownish incident involving mere words being boisterously flung into the outdoor air at night? My 1960s generation of women fought to get authority figures out of our lives in that era of strict parietal rules, when colleges claimed the duty to operate in loco parentis—that is, “in place of the parent.” And far from running to the authorities about a bunch of chanting men, we would have mounted a prankish counterattack, responding with even more lurid language about the lapses and follies of men. Here is where Northern feminists have much to learn from the Tennessee-born Dixie Carter’s brilliant performances as Julia Sugarbaker in the CBS TV hit series Designing Women, which was set in Atlanta and ran from 1986 to 1993. It was a recurrent set piece that brought down the house when Dixie would gather herself up and unleash a rhythmic gale of tongue-lashing force against a hapless miscreant—without ever losing the poise and dignity of a true Southern lady. In a democracy, offensive speech must be countered by stronger speech, not by infantilizing appeals to authority.
Impressions of the South for Northerners like myself have been refracted through art and media and are therefore necessarily half-fictional and unreliable—but so were the heroic lays out of which Homer fashioned the Iliad and the Odyssey! So let me chronicle the formative highlights of my exposure to things Southern. The very first movie star who enamored me on sight and converted me to my lifelong pagan worship of Hollywood was Ava Gardner, playing the mulatto singer Julie in Show Boat, which I saw at the age of four at the movie’s release in 1951. Ava’s magnetic power of personality filled the screen in the opening scenes, set at a dock in Natchez, where she sang “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man of Mine.” Much later, I learned that Ava was a country girl from Smithfield, North Carolina, where she had run around barefoot on her father’s small, struggling tobacco farm. The youngest of seven, she was of mixed Scots-Irish, French Huguenot, and Tuscarora Indian heritage. When she got to Hollywood, her rural Southern accent was so heavy and incomprehensible that she was sent for emergency voice training. Ava was an untamable free spirit with a superhuman energy level. She knocked out her first husband, Mickey Rooney, by beaning him with a marble ashtray. Friends of her third husband, Frank Sinatra, whose heart she broke, said she was the only woman whom the arrogant Sinatra never conquered. Ava’s country girl indifference to convention was typified by her constantly kicking off her shoes in public places, which was simply not done at the time. That habit of hers certainly influenced the title of one of her best movies, The Barefoot Contessa. Throughout her career, Ava’s closest friend remained Reenie Jordan, an African-American woman who began as her maid and became her inseparable personal assistant and companion, even in Ava’s expatriate years in Madrid and London. Reenie, who died last year at the age of 92, wrote an affectionate memoir called Living with Miss G, where she describes how Ava fiercely defended her against racism in their travels. In this respect, Ava Gardner was an admirable role model; she didn’t simply espouse progressive principles—she lived them.
The next Southern woman who had a major impact on my consciousness was Tallulah Bankhead, whose sensational appearance on The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour in 1957 practically blew up the TV set. At the peak of the conformist 1950s, when girls were universally expected to become docile wives and homemakers, the lordly, swashbuckling Tallulah seemed to throw back a curtain on a radically different time and place. She carried with her all the irrepressible scintillation and daring impudence of the 1920s flapper era, when she was the toast of the New York and London stage. Tallulah was born to wealth and social position in Huntsville, Alabama. After the early death of her mother, a classic Southern belle, Tallulah often lived with family in Montgomery, where she became a childhood friend of another famously independent Southern woman, Zelda Sayre, who would marry novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and become a symbol of the Roaring Twenties. Tallulah’s father, William Brockman Bankhead, was an Alabama politician who rose to become Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Her grandfather, John Hollis Bankhead, was a U.S. senator who had been a planter and a captain of the Alabama Infantry during the Civil War. With her wickedly outspoken flamboyance and flagrantly libertine lifestyle, Tallulah represented a new archetype of the emancipated woman after American women had won the right to vote in 1920. But after World War Two, that daring, assertive style had completely vanished. With her grandiloquent manner, rich Alabama accent, and rumbling chesty voice, Tallulah would end up playing a satirical version of herself on TV shows in the 1950s, when she became a cult idol for gay men and campy female impersonators.
In that same period, my family and I, then living in Syracuse, New York, began to notice and exclaim about the Southern women competing in the Miss America pageant, which was then an annual televised event in the United States of immense importance. From the moment they walked onstage, the Southern contestants exuded a stunningly intense wattage of molten warmth and dazzling charisma that was instantly recognizable. What is it that Southern women have, we would wonder? Indeed, from 1951 to 1964, when I graduated from high school, the Miss America crown was repeatedly won by Southern contestants—Miss Alabama, Miss Georgia, Miss South Carolina, Miss Mississippi (winning back-to-back years in 1959 and 1960), Miss North Carolina, Miss Arkansas. If that pace slowed over the following years, it is surely because other contestants studied the Southern secret and began to imitate that radiant style of self-presentation, which continues to flourish in beauty pageants influenced by Miss America all over the world.
As an adolescent, I saw the classic 1939 Hollywood movie Gone with the Wind in rerun theaters four times and bought Margaret Mitchell’s original novel—an 862-page paperback (then costing 95 cents) that I still own, though the pages have severely yellowed. As the decades passed, I was certainly made to realize how deficient both the book and the movie were in their sanitized portrayal of the atrocity of slavery and of the actual attitudes and experiences of African-Americans during that period. However, there are many specific small details about plantation life in North Georgia in the nineteenth century that have proved to be surprisingly accurate. And the novel is not entirely
a whitewash. For example, in the opening scene at Tara, the strappingly handsome and athletic Tarleton twins have just been expelled from the University of Georgia, “the fourth university that had thrown them out in two years.” Mitchell says, “Stuart and Brent considered their latest expulsion a fine joke, and Scarlett, who had not willingly opened a book since leaving the Fayetteville Female Academy the year before, thought it just as amusing as they did.” These are strong, condemning words coming from the invisible author.
Other impressions I gained from favorite movies: the willful, ruthless Southern belles played by Bette Davis in Jezebel, for which she won an Oscar in 1938, and as Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, a role premiered by Tallulah Bankhead in the hit Broadway play. Bette Davis was a Yankee born and bred in Massachusetts, but Miriam Hopkins, Davis’s antagonist in the classic 1943 comedy Old Acquaintance, was a real-life speed-talking Southern belle, born in Savannah, Georgia and raised near the Alabama border. Then there was that British import, Elizabeth Taylor, as a refined Virginia girl experiencing culture shock when she marries a Texas rancher in Giant, based on a bestselling Edna Ferber novel. Elizabeth Taylor again as the Mississippi-born Tennessee Williams’s smoldering cat on a hot tin roof, set in a plantation house in the Mississippi Delta. Or Taylor yet again as the troubled Catherine of Suddenly, Last Summer, who is menaced by a formidable iron magnolia, the imperious New Orleans matriarch Violet Venable, played by Katharine Hepburn and modeled on Williams’s own overbearing Southern belle mother. Williams created a tragically more fragile version of the Southern belle in Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, where the crudely vital New Orleans street scene is contrasted with the fading pastoral memories of Blanche’s decaying family estate in Laurel, Mississippi—Belle Reve, literally “beautiful dream,” encompassing the illusions and delusions of the Old South.
However, nothing really prepared me for dealing with a real-life Southern lady of the old school: Ellen Graham, the brilliant senior editor of Yale University Press who discovered my work 30 years ago and made my entire public career possible. It was she who took a chance on a quirky, dissident, 1,500-page manuscript called Sexual Personae which had been rejected by seven publishers and five agents. Ellen, who died eight years ago, was born in 1921 right here in Oxford, where she lived for nine years until her father, the noted folklorist Arthur Palmer Hudson, left to teach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Both sides of Ellen’s family were from Mississippi. Her maternal grandfather, William McNulty Noah, was mayor of Kosciusko and founded and edited the Herald newspaper, which is still published as the Kosciusko Star-Herald. In the 1920s, Ellen’s parents were friends of William Faulkner, whose biographer records how Ellen’s mother, Grace, typed at least two of Faulkner’s manuscripts and pronounced them “Tripe!” The long tale of my sometimes desperate and anguished give-and-take with Ellen Graham through the years-long process of editorial production of Sexual Personae would take a book in itself. Let me just say this: there is no one stronger than a Southern woman!
But it was a superb documentary film released in 1986 that got me seriously thinking about the special assertiveness of Southern women, notably in their relations with men—Sherman’s March, directed and shot by Ross McElwee, who grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina. This film, which won the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, began as a study of General Sherman’s lingering destructive legacy in the South but turned into a pensive autobiographical saga as McElwee’s hand-held camera was drawn to the bewitching charm and teasing humor of a series of attractive, confident, and deftly domineering young Southern women. Surely that mesmerizing yet subtly intimidating discourse is a modern adaptation of the verbal style of the Southern belle, about whom the body of scholarship is still relatively limited. McElwee’s improvisational documentary made me see how Southern women seize, define, energize, and control the conversational space between men and women—and to a lesser extent between themselves and other women. Even amid merriment, eye contact is intense, somehow combining wary watchfulness with flattering concentration; it’s as if, at that moment, no one else exists. Southern women seem to have a knack that Northern women have lost or never had, of interesting and attracting men while keeping them at an approved safe distance.
Now to our three myths. My first model of feisty Southern womanhood is the scrappy old mountain woman, who became a comic stock character as Mammy Yokum in the fictive town of Dogpatch of the L’il Abner comic strip, which was created in 1934 by Al Capp and drawn by him for 43 years, at its height reaching a worldwide newspaper audience of 60 million readers. Mammy was tough, blunt, and uncompromising in her archaic pioneer bonnet juxtaposed with the half-masculine motifs of her corncob pipe and clodhopper boots. Capp, the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants in New Haven, Connecticut, saw hillbilly culture first-hand when he took a long hitchhiking trip through the Appalachian Mountains to Memphis to see his uncle, an orthodox rabbi. Sleeping in haystacks and mingling with the poor, Capp made on-site sketches that would become the basis of L’il Abner. There was an additional impetus when he and his wife saw a hillbilly band performing in downtown New York. It was when hillbilly music, which would soon be called country music, was gaining national attention through a radio program called the Grand Ole Opry, broadcast live from the 1920s in Nashville. By 1943, the Grand Ole Opry would have its own temple, Ryman Auditorium.
Appalachia as an exotic, self-enclosed culture had been created in the popular mind by literary magazines in the late nineteenth century. This mountainous region, 900 miles long and 200 miles wide, extends all the way from upstate New York to central Alabama. Ethnically, the mountaineers were mostly Scots-Irish who had arrived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Quaker Philadelphia. Finding that area too settled, they traveled west toward Lancaster County, where the Amish still reside, and then turned south to straggle down through the Blue Ridge Mountains. Some have claimed that the notorious Appalachian feuds, one of which lasted 60 years in Clay County and was finally put down by state troopers, had roots in the clan rivalries of the Scottish Highlands. While they were spared in the Appalachian feuds, women according to some testimony were hot-blooded “provocateurs,” recording and remembering slights and goading their men on to fight. Appalachia was also Cherokee territory, with frequent intermarriage occurring between settlers and Native Americans. It may be relevant that Cherokee culture was matrilineal, traced through the female line, with wives having much more power over their children and property than husbands did. Intriguingly, a gender-reversing American institution originated in the L’il Abner strip—Sadie Hawkins Day, where young women pursue eligible men and rope them into marriage. Within two years of Capp introducing the Sadie Hawkins race in a November 1937 strip, nearly 200 colleges, beginning with the University of Tennessee, were staging Sadie Hawkins Day festivities every November.
Capp’s Mammy Yokum would be resurrected as Granny Moses, the matriarch of the Clampett family in The Beverly Hillbillies, a hugely popular CBS TV show that ran from 1962 to 1971. The Clampetts strike oil in the Ozarks and promptly decamp to Los Angeles. Granny, played by Irene Ryan in a pioneer gingham dress, appears in every one of the show’s 274 episodes. She claims secret skills in folk medicine and keeps goats and pigs in the backyard of their Beverly Hills mansion, where she also cooks up mountain stew in a black kettle. Firing off a shotgun at the slightest provocation, Granny is a dyed-in-the-wool Confederate who excoriates General Sherman and reveres Jefferson Davis—even though the mountaineers, with their patchwork of poor hilly soil unfit for cotton or rice cultivation, had little to do with slavery. Despite her tiny frame, Granny is fierce, aggressive, and fearless. Her stance of constant, manic combat is a vestige of the trials and privations of the agrarian era, when families who relied on subsistence farming could live or die by nature’s whims: a bad harvest could well mean starvation over a hard winter. The old mountaineer woman symbolizes persistence, courage, r
esilience, and stoicism, the stubborn will to survive under hostile circumstances.
Mammy Yokum and Granny Moses also offer a powerful persona for aging women, who have few or no models in our youth-obsessed culture. Today, middle-aged women, with their cafeteria menu of plastic surgery, fillers, and Botox, strive to look like 20-year-old girls. Well, I say, forget that! Let young women rule in all their fresh and nubile beauty. Older women of the elite class once had a dowager role to shift into, where they oversaw and dictated the courtship rituals of eligible young men and women. But with our present bias against inherited class privilege, the dowager no longer serves as a useful model. Instead, let’s substitute the snappish, irascible, proletarian old mountain woman. She is a crone without being a witch, that supernatural apparition who haunts so many global mythologies. The mountain woman, in contrast, inhabits the here and now. With her irrepressible energy and brusque common sense, she represents active engagement with and mastery of concrete physical reality.
My second canonical Southern persona is the mammy figure, who has been harshly critiqued and almost universally condemned by both white and black academics since the emergence of women’s studies and African-American studies in the 1970s. While I respect these objections, partly because of my own indignation about the universal stereotyping slurs against Italian-Americans in movies and TV, I believe the pendulum about Mammy and her descendant Aunt Jemima has swung too far toward the negative, and a partial correction is long overdue. That enslaved African-American women served as caretakers and wet nurses for affluent white children during the antebellum era is well-established. However, some scholars, such as Catherine Clinton, question the age of the women as well as the length and loyalty of their service. There may well have been exaggerations during the postbellum period to support the claim by defeated Southerners of interracial harmony in the antebellum plantation Big House.
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