Thinking Outside the Book by Augusta Rohrbach

Author:Augusta Rohrbach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

To a war-ravaged woman of the North or South, these lines point the way to a redefinition of social purpose for women that does not include marriage. But if Irene is modeled on the Greek goddess Minerva, she also finds a source in Evans’s childhood slave Minervy, who carried the light that enabled her to write her first novel. Subsuming Minervy into Minerva, Evans expresses a collective and collecting set of ideas that have complex roots in the mentalité of the time out of which they emerge.

Just as Evans purposefully deploys her sources, so she uses genre in ways that espouse a more radical message. Even as she maintains a degree of subservience to conventional moral and social codes regarding women, she formally eschews those conventions by putting politics at the center of the plot. Other key generic violations anticipate a modern, postbellum culture. The hero of the novel, Russell Aubrey, ends up dead, and the competing loves of his life, his orphaned cousin Electra and Irene, Electra’s friend, are united through their devotion to him. They both remain unmarried, choosing to dedicate their lives to the good of others. The novel ends with this new social formation, diminished by war as the states have been, but persevering through the shared ideology of sacrifice.

In the book’s final pages, we are left with the orphan artist Electra at her easel, painting her “Modern Macaria,” modeled on her savior, Irene. Electra declares: “I want to lay my ‘Modern Macaria,’ as the first offering of Southern Art, upon my country’s altar, as a nucleus around which nobler and grander pictures, from the hands of my countrymen and women, shall cluster” (409). She also articulates larger goals for a developing South: “In sunny climes like ours, my glorious Art had its birth, its novitiate, its apotheosis; and who dare say that future ages shall not find Art-students from all ages pressing, like pilgrims, to the Perfected School of the Southern States? Ancient republics offered premiums, and saw the acme of the arts; why not our Confederate republic, when days of national prosperity dawn upon us?” (409). Rather than posit a Confederate military triumph—the war was still raging when Macaria was first published—the novel explores a Southern future apart from politics.

In a brilliant move that helps explain the book’s many reprintings over time, the novel does not present the North and South as opposed; instead it celebrates the differences between North and South, anticipating the reconciliation logic that permeated postbellum treatments of the conflict and made room for the South and its supporters to retain a sense of lost cause superiority. The two heroines call “the Southern planter class” to action, demanding that it live up to its purportedly noble resources. Irene describes what is needed to make this legacy reality. “In order to effect this ‘consummation devoutly to be wished,’” she says, regarding her revolutionary plan to open a school for women, “it is necessary that the primary branches of Art should be popularized, and thrown open to the masses” (410).

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