Ben Herbert

13382998
Southern Accents ENL3009M-1516
Modernity in the American South: Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and William Faulkner’s

‘The Bear’

In what Henry Wallace called in 1942 “the century of the common man” the American South

underwent a succession of systematic economic shifts1. As the Secretary of Agriculture (1933-40),

Wallace’s combined outlook of populism and New Deal progressivism oversaw the implementation

of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (1933-42) which dramatically altered the region’s

system of labour. Described by the historian Jonathan Weiner as the South’s “second civil war”, the

inflow of federal funds into the South saw the beginning of a more industrial method of farming,

resembling a capitalist model, which both ‘freed’ black labour from the land and increased regional

Planter mobility2. Despite its ideological heritage, the region’s resultant socioeconomic

developments marked it, like the North, as an “evolving bourgeois society” 3. For a population which

had habitually defined itself as the national Other, the South’s modernisation, which saw it evolving

in (albeit slower) the same direction as the rest of the nation, inevitably resulted in a crisis of

regional identity4. John Shelton Reed describes the sociological changes in the modernised South,

observing: “there are important respects in which Southerners look more like other Americans,

culturally, than they have at any time for decades, if ever”5. Indeed, by many Southerners

modernity’s promise of equal opportunity was perceived as a deception aimed to undermine the

region’s cultural heritage. In Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1954) modernity is

presented as producing a culture of greed. While in William Faulkner’s ‘The Bear’, from Go Down,

Moses (1942), Faulkner explores the damaging relationship between modernity and the land. Within

their texts, both Williams and Faulkner engage with South’s modernisation into a more capitalist

1
H. A. Wallace, ‘The Price of Free World Victory’ in Democracy Reborn (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1944),
pp. 190-196 (p. 193).
2
Jonathan Weiner, ‘Class Struggle and Economic Development in the American South, 1865-1955’, American
Historical Review, 84.2 (1979), 970-1006 (p. 986).
3
Harold D. Woodman, ‘Sequel to Slavery: The New History Views the Postbellum South’, The Journal of
Southern History, 43.4 (November 1977), 523-554 (p. 554).
4
Richard Gray, ‘Writing Southern Cultures’ in A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American
South, ed. by Richard Gray and Owen Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004), pp. 3-26 (p. 4).
5
John Shelton Reed, The Enduring South: Subcultural Persistence in Mass Society (Chapel Hill: NC, 1986), p. 92.
Ben Herbert
13382998
Southern Accents ENL3009M-1516
model of society, and portray the culture of modernity as corrupting the American South’s

population, land, and cultural heritage.

At the outset of his career Tennessee Williams worked with a St Louis theatre group to

create a series of protest plays in which the villains were usually representatives of a corrupt political

and economic system which amassed profit at the individual’s expense. When reflecting on the

inspiration for his radicalism, Williams commented: “the South once had a way of life I am just old

enough to remember – a culture that had grace, elegance […] an inbred culture […] not a society

based on money, as in the North. I write out of regret for that”6. Williams’ motivation, then, can be

said to be a South that that resembles its antebellum past, over a region engulfed in the modern

materialism of New Deal Progressivism. Many of Williams’ plays, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,

feature families trapped in an emotional turmoil caused by some financial crisis. In Cat, Williams

uses the character Big Daddy to signify the American North’s spirit’s failure of individual fulfilment.

As a character who praises hard work for his success of owning “twenty-eight thousand acres of the

richest land this side of the Valley Nile”7, Big Daddy represents a character that follows the ‘rags to

riches’ dichotomy of the Horatio Alger myth. When faced with the prospect of impending death,

however, he ponders whether it was worthwhile:

But a man can’t buy back his life with it, he can’t buy back his life with it when his life

has been spent, that’s the one thing not offered in […] any markets on earth […] I

think the reason [man] buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he

has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be everlasting […] The human animal

is a beast (Williams, II, pp. 45-7).

Big Daddy’s rambling suggests that, in commodity culture, the one thing that remains

uncommodifiable is the human spirit itself. Moreover, his animalistic reduction of humankind signals

6
Tennessee Williams, cited in Lyle Leverich, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (New York: Crown, 1995),
p. 54.
7
Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (London: Penguin Group, 2009), II, p. 45.
Ben Herbert
13382998
Southern Accents ENL3009M-1516
the unnatural quality of modernisation. Through Big Daddy, Williams produces a critique of modern

culture. C. W. E. Bigsby suggests that “Williams’s social instincts are in evidence when he creates a

portrait of society whose corruption is reflected in the cancer eating away at the man who

epitomises its pointless acquisitiveness and fierce egotism – Big Daddy”8. Big Daddy’s body has failed

to flush out its poisons, similarly, Williams presents his audience a world which is poisoned by

materialism and greed.

In the play, the clock symbolises Big Daddy’s and Big Mama’s failed attempt to purchase the

sophistication of European culture to which they failed to acculturate:

“That Europe is nothin’ on earth but a great big auction, that’s all it is, that bunch of

old worn-out places, it’s just a big fire-sale, the whole rutten thing […] lucky I’m a rich

man, yes siree […] lucky I’m a rich man, it sure is lucky, well, I’m a rich man Brick, yep,

I’m a rich man” (Williams, II, p. 45).

Big Daddy’s repeated assertion of his wealth is symbolic of the significance modern society places on

financial status. Williams uses Big Daddy’s failure to improve his cultural class to critique the

commodity fetishism of modern capitalism and its denial of fulfilment. Big Daddy, however, is not

the only character motivated by material gain. He has been deceived into believing his family are

gathered to celebrate his birthday, while they are actually assembled to ensure they receive their

share of his patrimony.

The deception of Big Daddy contributes to another of the play’s central themes; mendacity.

Rather than motivated by familial or romantic love, all the relationships of Cat (apart from maybe

Brick and Big Daddy’s) are deeply implicated in the process of exchange and transaction 9. The

foundations upon which these motivations lie is capitalism. The characters’ relationships, negatively

presented by their entanglement with mendacity, are reflective of the culture of modernity

8
C. W. E. Bigsby, Modern American Drama, 1945-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 54.
9
Bigsby, p. 54.
Ben Herbert
13382998
Southern Accents ENL3009M-1516
sweeping through the south, which is orientated primarily towards “the viewpoint of exchange” 10. As

an example of American dramatic realism, the play progresses on a single set in real time, in the

process of which each character’s mendacity is elucidated. The only character who refrains from

hiding their aim is Maggie. In Act One, after an argument ensues following Maggie’s probing of

Brick’s ambivalent sexuality, Maggie asserts:

I’m not trying to whitewash my behaviour […] I don’t know why people have to

pretend to be good, nobody’s good. The rich or well-to-do can afford to respect moral

patterns […] but I never could afford to, yeah, but – I’m honest! Give me credit for

that will you please? Born poor, raised poor, expect to die poor unless I manage to

get us something out of what Big Daddy leaves when he dies of cancer! […] Skipper is

dead! […] Maggie the cat is […] alive! (Williams, I, p. 28).

Maggie’s sacrificing her morals for the sake of wealth reveals the corrosive quality of capitalism

upon society. The irony of the play, perhaps, is to be found in its ending, which insinuates that the

only opportunity for progression lies within heterosexual discourse, a process Michel Foucault

identifies as associated with the capitalist system11. However, this could represent Williams’

acknowledgement of inevitable change and the myth of Southern history. In his essay ‘The Cat Has

Nine Lives’, Bernard F. Dukore notes how Williams associates his characters with animal imagery “to

delineate their qualities and behaviours”12. Inasmuch as the connotations of Maggie’s feline imagery

emphasises her sly, although self-proclaimed, material motivations. Dukore also observes that “The

play shows the process of life […] as it continues in its cycles. This is good, in that life continuing is an

affirmation of life. This is bad, in that greed and viciousness continue”13. In this sense Brick’s

adolescent regression, or drinking until he hears the ‘click’ that silences the mendacity of modernity,

10
Wolfgang Fritz Haung, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics, trans, Robert Brock (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986),
p.15.
11
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, 3 vols (London: Penguin Group, 1998), I, p.
5.
12
Bernard F. Dukore, ‘The Cat Has Nine Lives’, The Tulane Drama Review, 8.1 (Autumn, 1963), 95-100 (p. 95).
13
Dukore, p. 97.
Ben Herbert
13382998
Southern Accents ENL3009M-1516
is analogous with a retreat from material greed. As David Krasner suggests, Williams’ “overly

sensitive characters challenged American materialism”14. Similar to Laura in The Glass Menagerie,

who hides in her figurines, Brick’s drinking, whether to ignore his homosexuality or the corrupted

world of modernity, serves as a distraction from the horror of reality. On the one hand, Brick’s

nonconformity stands as a challenge to the certainty of the materialistic Eisenhower era, or, on the

other, reveals through his addiction the damning effects of capitalism upon the individual.

Arguably, the play’s strongest critical rhetoric rests in Williams’ intertwining of the social and

psychological aspects of the play, and the metaphysical questions they raise, with the set in which it

is performed. Bigsby praises Williams’ compositional ability, commenting: “There are no sets in a

Williams play which merely provide context for action. They are, without exception, charged with a

symbolic function”15. Indeed, the set of Cat is loaded with its own theatrical symbolism. Describing

the set in ‘Notes for the Designer’, Williams puts:

It hasn’t changed much since it was occupied by the original owners of the place, Jack

Straw and Peter Ochello, a pair of old bachelors who shared this room all their lives

together. In other words, the room must evoke some ghosts; it is gently and

poetically haunted by a relationship that must have involved a tenderness which was

uncommon […] The set should be less realistic than I have implied […] the walls […]

should dissolve mysteriously into the air; the set should be rooted by the sky

(Williams, pp. xv-xvi).

With its historically evocative and transcendent qualities the plantation set is symbolic of the

antebellum South. Interestingly, Williams associates the original owners’ relationship with the noun

“tenderness”, contrasting the characters’ relationships motivated by material gain, perhaps

illustrating the harshness of modernity. The set and the play alike rejects the greed and commodity

culture of the modernised North in favour of the past ‘uncorrupted’ antebellum South. Cultural

14
David Krasner, American Drama, 1945-2000 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007), p. 44.
15
Bigsby, p. 35.
Ben Herbert
13382998
Southern Accents ENL3009M-1516
change forms the foundations for many of Williams’ dramas, Mark Zelinsky and Amy Cuomo suggest

that “the suppression and destruction of old traditions and values by new cultural dynamics

constitute a primary tension in many of Williams’ plays”16. If the plantation setting is symbolic of an

idealised antebellum past, then William’s characters and their material motivations represent

rapacity inherent in the culture of New Deal Progressivism. By interweaving the action of his play

and its set, Williams is able to portray a symbolic corruption of the South by the forces of

modernisation.

William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses is a collection of short stories which revolve, largely,

around the differing ways of relating to the Southern land. Critical consideration of the text’s form is

varied, with some critics relating to the book as an amalgamated novel, and others maintaining the

short story perspective; Susan Donaldson describes the fragmentary collection as “a site of struggle”

amongst “contending narratives”17. The separate narratives of the collection could represent the

problematic, and often contradictory, history of the Southern region. The collection’s longest, and

often critically considered central, story ‘The Bear’ portrays Isaac ‘Ike’ McCaslin’s attempts to

acculturate to the Native American’s tradition of respecting the land, juxtaposing the timber industry

and railroad, which represent the encroachment of modernity. Faulkner engages with the radical

history of the South to represent ‘the white man’s curse’ of slavery (embodied in Ike’s grandfather’s

sexual abuse of his labour) as a product of the idea of property, specifically, the fictitious notion that

the land or an individual can be possessed and become subjected to the rights of use. In the long

fourth section of the story, Ike explains to his cousin his reason for repudiating his patrimony,

arguing that repudiation itself is impossible because

16
Mark Zelinsky and Amy Cuomo, ‘Southern Drama’ in A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the
American South, ed. by Richard Gray and Owen Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004), pp. 280-296
(p. 288).
17
Susan Donaldson, ‘Contending Narratives: Go Down, Moses and the Short Story Cycle’ in Faulkner and the
Short Story, ed. by Evans Harrington and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1992), pp. 128-
148 (p. 129).
Ben Herbert
13382998
Southern Accents ENL3009M-1516
It was never mine to repudiate. It was never Father’s and Uncle Buddy’s to bequeath

to me to repudiate because it was never Grandfather’s to bequeath them to

bequeath to me to repudiate because it was never Ikkemotubbe’s to sell to

Grandfather […] Because it was never Ikkemotubbe’s father’s father’s to bequeath to

Ikkemotubbe to sell to Grandfather […] on the instant when Ikkemotubbe discovered,

realized, that he could sell it for money, on that instant it ceased ever to have been

his for ever, father to father to father, and the man who bought it bought nothing 18.

Ike’s argument turns the history of the land into a tale of repeated false dispossession, and rests

upon the illegitimacy of property that disturbs his moral consciousness. The argument is indicative of

Faulkner’s opinion regarding the modern forces of a “capitalist reality”, and its attempt to attain

ownership of the land, particularly the provisions put in place by the Agricultural Adjustment

Administration intended to reduce market depression19.

For Ike, the ethos of the plantation and ownership of the land is tainted with the

embodiment of the barbarity of human ownership and slavery: his grandfather’s sexual abuse of a

slave and the daughter they produced20. Like in Faulkner’s The Sound and Fury, the theme of incest

represents the racism and class narcissism of the plantocracy. However, in ‘The Bear’, incest and

miscegenation is also symptomatic of a social corruption stemming from the concept of property

that represents “the grand narrative that informs the whole history of America” 21. Faulkner’s,

perhaps most popular, quote, “The past is never dead, It’s not even past”22, reveals the author’s

understanding of history as informing the present. In ‘The Bear’ Faulkner presents the history of

18
William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (London: Penguin Group, 1960), p. 195.
19
Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920- 1942 (Los Angeles,
University of California Press, 1985), p. xviii.
20
Erik Dussere, Balancing the Books: Faulkner, Morrison, and the Economics of Slavery (New York: Routledge,
2003), p. 63.
21
David H. Evans, ‘Taking the Place of Nature: ‘The Bear’ and the Incarnation of America’ in Faulkner and the
Natural World, ed. by Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999),
pp. 179-197 (p. 189).
22
William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (London: Penguin Group, 1996), p. 73.
Ben Herbert
13382998
Southern Accents ENL3009M-1516
slavery as a delusion of ownership to critique modern society’s attempt at claiming ownership over

the land.

If Ike’s repudiation of his inheritance is to be seen as a regression from radicalised Southern

history, then his retreat into the woods can be understood as a withdrawal from the New Deal world

of property and commercial capitalism; “the wilderness closed behind his entrance as it had opened

momentarily to accept him” (Go Down, Moses, p. 148). As Ike is initiated into the wilderness he even

goes as far as to remove himself from his ancestry of corruption, “It seemed to him that at the age

often he was witnessing his own birth” (Go Down, Moses, p. 148), and imagines an alternate family

in which Sam Father’s becomes his paternal guardian. It is the Native American ancestry of Sam, and

the ‘green’ use of the land which existed before a history of aggressive greed and injustice it

represents, that permits Ike to reimagine the land as separated from its history of possession 23.

Faulkner presents the woods as an alternate narrative, not only to a history tainted by property, but

also to New Deal politics, for no one

To hold suzerainty over the earth and the animals on it in His name, not to hold for

himself and his descendants inviolable title forever, generation after generation, to

the oblongs and squares of the earth, but to hold the earth mutual and intact in the

communal anonymity of brotherhood (Go Down, Moses, p. 196).

The ethos of the natural world Ike idealises disregards notions of property over the land, favouring a

mutually respected inhabitance. Moreover, the “communal anonymity of brotherhood” alluded to is

evocative a primitive communism that greatly contrasts the ideologies of the modern capitalist era.

John T. Matthews suggests that when Go Down, Moses is centred on ‘The Bear’, the collection

“becomes an elegy to the primeval ‘unaxed’ wilderness as it falls to modern use”24. Arguably,

though, rather than mournful, the collection’s nostalgia for the wilderness suggests an alternative to

23
John T. Matthews, William Faulkner, Seeing Through the South (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons Ltd, 2012),
p. 213.
24
Matthews, p. 207.
Ben Herbert
13382998
Southern Accents ENL3009M-1516
the culture of modernity. In the words of Melvin Backman, “In the conscious and unconscious

memory of American writers, the woods and rivers have loomed large because of their associations

with a primitive and mutual existence, free form the restraints and corruption of civilisation” 25. In

Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck and a slave establish peace and friendship on the

Mississippi River before their idyll is disrupted by civilisation. Like in Huck Finn, Faulkner’s woods

represent an idyllic retreat from modernity. Faulkner’s juxtaposition between the nature and the

modern world critiques the greed of modern culture, preferring a simpler, natural alternative.

In the story, the wilderness is most embodied by the figure of the bear itself; Old Ben. For

Ike, the act of seeing Old Bear is a vital rite of passage in his initiation into the community of the

woods. In order for Old Ben to reveal himself, Ike realises he must revoke his hunting instruments:

“Then he relinquished it completely. It was the watch and the compass. He was still tainted” (Go

Down, Moses, p. 158). The instruments are symbols of civilisation, and represent man’s attempts to

regulate the unattainable properties of time and space; they embody modernity’s desire for control

over the natural world. The fact that Ike is “tainted”, reveals in the verbs connotations the modern

world as a polluting force upon the wilderness. Once Ike removes his tools the bear appears,

however, “’[i]t did not emerge […] it was just there, immobile, fixed in the green […] not as big as he

had dreamed it but as big as he had expected, bigger, dimensionless […] Then it was gone. It didn’t

walk into the woods. It faded, sank back into the wilderness without motion” (Go Down, Moses, p.

159). Faulkner describes the bear’s appearance as almost mystical, emphasising the transcendent

quality of nature, contrasting the man-made, industrial modern world. The book’s potential irony is

that the ‘brotherhood’ of the woods attempt to kill the epitome of their spirit. However, David

Minter suggests: “the hunt itself has been transformed from a ritual of violence into an excursion in

which people go out in space, into the world of the big woods, as to a world that is not yet

completely fallen because it is not yet divided up and owned”26. Like Ike’s rejection of radical

25
Melvin Backman, Faulkner, The Major Years (Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1966), p. 164.
26
David Minter, Faulkner’s Questioning Narratives: Fiction of his Major Phase, 1929-42 (Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 2004), p. 139.
Ben Herbert
13382998
Southern Accents ENL3009M-1516
Southern history, the hunt is symbolic of a trip into the past before the idea of property marked the

earth, or people, as possessions. Nevertheless, in the story Old Ben’s death denotes modernity’s

looming destruction of the wilderness. Major de Spain sells the land to a timber company, after

which Ike returns to find Boon crouched in the undergrowth, surrounded by squirrels, yelling “Get

out of here! Don’t touch them! […] They’re mine!” (Go Down, Moses, p. 252). On the one hand this

could be a lament for the passing of the woods, on the other, however, it could symbolise the

polluting effects of modern capitalist culture, that once touched, anything, even the wilderness, is

commodifiable. In ‘The Bear’, Faulkner articulates a relationship between the wilderness and the

modern world which, similar to Williams, presents modernity as a corrupting force upon the region.

In both texts modernisation is presented as polluting force upon the culture and heritage of

the American South. In Cat, Tennessee Williams focuses particularly on the rapacity of modernised

capitalist culture. Using his characters, particularly Big Daddy, Williams is shows the spirit of

capitalist culture as individually unfulfilling, despite its apparent benefits within populist politics.

Moreover, Williams’ presents modern culture as both morally and personally corrosive, and

combines his materially motivated characters with his set to symbolise modernity’s corruption of

Southern tradition. William Faulkner’s ‘The Bear’ takes stance on modernity’s impacts upon the land.

In ‘The Bear’, Faulkner engages with the South’s radical history of slavery, and presents it as

stemming from the concept of property to critique modernity’s New Deal politics, and their attempt

to claim ownership over the land. Faulkner also sets up an opposition between the wilderness and

modern civilisation. On the one hand, his juxtaposition incorporates the ethos of the primitive

wilderness to idealise a past, not only pre-modernity, but also resembling America before its

emergence as the New World. On the other hand, the idealisation of his comparison suggests, or

hopes for, an alternative culture to that of modernised society. While Williams takes fault with the

greed of modern culture, and Faulkner prioritises its effects upon the land, both writers use their

texts to ultimately present modernity as a corrupting force in the Southern region.

Ben Herbert
13382998
Southern Accents ENL3009M-1516
WORD COUNT: 3,298.

Bibliography

Backman, Melvin, Faulkner, The Major Years (Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1966).
Ben Herbert
13382998
Southern Accents ENL3009M-1516
Bigsby, C. W. E., Modern American Drama, 1945-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2000).

Evans, David H., ‘Taking the Place of Nature: ‘The Bear’ and the Incarnation of America’ in Faulkner

and the Natural World, ed. by Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University of

Mississippi Press, 1999), pp. 179-197.

Donaldson, Susan, ‘Contending Narratives: Go Down, Moses and the Short Story Cycle’ in Faulkner

and the Short Story, ed. by Evans Harrington and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University of Mississippi

Press, 1992), pp. 128-148.

Dukore, Bernard F., ‘The Cat Has Nine Lives’, The Tulane Drama Review, 8.1 (Autumn, 1963), 95-100.

Dussere, Erik, Balancing the Books: Faulkner, Morrison, and the Economics of Slavery (New York:

Routledge, 2003).

Faulkner, William, Go Down, Moses (London: Penguin Group, 1960).

— Requiem for a Nun (London: Penguin Group, 1996).

Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, 3 vols (London: Penguin Group,

1998), I.

Gray, Richard, ‘Writing Southern Cultures’ in A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the

American South, ed. by Richard Gray and Owen Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004),

pp. 3-26.

Haung, Wolfgang Fritz, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics, trans, Robert Brock (Cambridge: Polity

Press, 1986).

Krasner, David, American Drama, 1945-2000 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007).

Leverich, Lyle, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (New York: Crown, 1995).
Ben Herbert
13382998
Southern Accents ENL3009M-1516
Marchand, Roland, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920- 1942 (Los

Angeles, University of California Press, 1985).

Matthews, John T., William Faulkner, Seeing Through the South (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons Ltd,

2012).

Minter, David, Faulkner’s Questioning Narratives: Fiction of his Major Phase, 1929-42 (Chicago:

University of Illinois Press, 2004).

Reed, John Shelton, The Enduring South: Subcultural Persistence in Mass Society (Chapel Hill: NC,

1986).

Wallace, H. A., ‘The Price of Free World Victory’ in Democracy Reborn (New York: Reynal and

Hitchcock, 1944), pp. 190-196.

Weiner, Jonathan, ‘Class Struggle and Economic Development in the American South, 1865-1955’,

American Historical Review, 84.2 (1979), 970-1006.

Williams, Tennessee, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (London: Penguin Group, 2009).

Woodman, Harold D., ‘Sequel to Slavery: The New History Views the Postbellum South’, The Journal

of Southern History, 43.4 (November 1977), 523-554.

Zelinsky, Mark and Amy Cuomo, ‘Southern Drama’ in A Companion to the Literature and Culture of

the American South, ed. by Richard Gray and Owen Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd,

2004), pp. 280-296.