The Southern Hospitality Myth by Szczesiul Anthony;

Author:Szczesiul, Anthony;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2017-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

“The New South is . . . simply the Old South”: Plantation Literature, Hospitality, and the Example of Thomas Nelson Page

As the nation progressed fitfully toward the modern era in the last decades of the nineteenth century, regional writing increasingly provided fodder for Americans’ imaginations and particularly their nostalgic desires for pleasanter, simpler ways of life. Plantation literature of the South was perhaps the most popular and certainly the most ideologically potent school of this growing field of regional and local color writing.39 Writers in this field helped to renovate the image of the Old South after the war, providing a sanitized, favorable view of slavery, and popularizing a nostalgic, sentimental image of southern hospitality. Many of our perceptions of the South today are still filtered through the lens created by this late nineteenth-century plantation literature and its fictions. As Americans navigated the accelerated rate of social change and flux that came with modernity, this sentimental view of southern hospitality allowed them to project onto the South their own desires for social ideals they may have felt were slipping away. But these imagined hospitable social relationships did not include the African American population. Instead, while white Americans faced the increasingly complex racial politics of the so-called Negro question—including the development of segregation culture and disenfranchisement of the free black population of the South—southern plantation literature encouraged them to retreat into sunny pastoral landscapes filled with hospitable southerners and happy-go-lucky slaves who exhibited a doglike fidelity to their white masters. The “New Negro” may have been agitating for political rights or making inroads into the middle class at the end of the century, but in these fictions, the “Old Negro” of the plantation days was still alive and well.40 So while these positive representations of the Old South were steeped in nostalgia, they also went hand in hand with a racist doctrine of white supremacy. The overarching ethical ideals of hospitality were utterly displaced as southern hospitality became a prevailing signifier of white civilization, white solidarity, and white supremacy.

Thomas Nelson Page was by far the most influential and popular writer in this growing field of plantation literature, and his most significant extended statement on southern hospitality occurs in the sketches that comprise Social Life in Old Virginia before the War. Social Life in Old Virginia was originally included in Page’s 1892 collection The Old South: Essays Social and Political, and it was also published in book form in 1897, with illustrations by Genevieve and Maude Cowles. Page labored relentlessly in his writings and public appearances to alter the American public’s perception of the Old South, and many of the sketches and essays from these works were originally either delivered as lectures or published in periodicals as he strove to reach the widest possible audience. Page knew this world of the Old South firsthand, having spent his boyhood years on a plantation in Virginia. But the world he writes about had essentially disappeared by the time he was twelve with the South’s

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