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. John Faucheraud Grimké was a successful Charlestonian lawyer and onetime South Carolinian legislator, and his son Thomas followed his father's vocation as a lawyer in the Cheves's law firm. And finally, all three most certainly flirted in the same social, political, and intellectual circles of antebellum Charleston, no doubt even playing the role of belle at the same Southern cotillions during their comingout years. And yet they also shared something much more profound than Charleston, camellias, and coquetry, for in their writings on the subject of slavery was inextricably bound up the question of gender and the respective positions of male and female.Few scholars of the antebellum South, and of the peculiar institution in particular, have paid adequate attention to the gendered dimensions of proslavery thought. 2 Yet in the words of historian Stephanie McCurry, "the subordination of women bore a great deal of the ideological weight of slavery."3 That the subsumed status of women in the private sphere of the plantation household could bear any relationship to the public world of Southern slavery politics may appear problematic to those who still hold to a rigid distinction between the personal and the political, the private and the public. Yet as historian Joan W. Scott has noted, "The publicprivate distinction families as compared to the nation, mother's needs versus the needs of the state . . . is critical in the formulation of nationalist or patriotic ideologies. To what extent these ideologies also rest on and reinscribe existing notions of gender relationships and the sexual division of labor remains an important and as yet unstudied question."4In the attempt of the Old South's ideologues to bring into being just such a regionally conscious weltanschauung (and in the North's attempts to extinguish such an ideology), it was precisely the politics of the socalled private, gendered, and racial that so fiercely animated public debate both within and between both sides of the MasonDixon line. As a consequence, in the South, the circumscribed borders of conventional gender relations were as fiercely patrolled as the plantation's slave quarters~ while in the North, in spite of an emerging discourse on the contested status of middle class women, none but the most radical Garrisonian abolitionists were prepared to make common cause with a nascent woman's rights movement. Not surprisingly, then, it was not just the proslavery argument of Southern ideologues that tended to coalesce around the axis of gendered difference, but the rhetoric of the North's abolitionistfeminists as well, at least in analogy if not intent. This is, it turns out, no less the Page 29case with Louisa McCord and Angelina and Sarah Grimké. Yet while Sarah Grimké could "rejoice, because I am persuaded that the rights of woman, like the rights of slaves, need only to be examined to be understood and asserted," 5 for McCord, the nexus linking sex and race would lead to her warning that "the poison [the doctrine of women's rights] is spreading . . . and, it is but a piece with Negro emancipation. . . ."6 Louisa McCord then, like other apologists for slavery, was well aware of, and in large measure responding to, the thoughts and writings of her Northern antagonists. It may be instructive, therefore, to situate McCord in counterpoint to the Grimkés, for while the line separating McCord from her transplanted Southern sisters may have demarcated two disparate cultures, the MasonDixon divide was not an impenetrable one, as ideas did flow in both directions.Louisa McCord wrote and published on such topics as political economy, free trade, secession, slavery, and the anthropology of race, managing almost invariably to smuggle the "woman question" into her essays. While most historical treatments of McCord are concerned with the textual analysis of these political works (she wrote for such popular midnineteenth century Southern journals as the Southern Quarterly Review, Southern Literary Messenger, and De Bow's Review) it is only by foregrounding the more selfreflective McCord that emerges in her letters, poetry, and drama that we can fully illuminate the thought contained in her polemical pieces. Elizabeth FoxGenovese, who has written of both the public and private McCord in Within the Plantation Household, concludes that McCord like other "handmaidens of the system" of Southern plantation paternalism, ultimately threw her lot in with her class and race rather than her sex. Admittedly, McCord may have identified with and thus mimicked the rhetorical style of her male proslavery peers by, in FoxGenovese's words, writing ''in the idiom of the canon."7 Certainly a review of her expressly political writings, uninformed by her more private deliberations, would lead one to such a conclusion. But as a woman who hoped to be published and read in the South, such literary conformity was all but a necessity.8 To read McCord solely on this level, then, is to miss many of the nuances in her work, which far from being transparent, contains multiple layers of meaning. Like nineteenthcentury women novelists, McCord's position was one of conflicted authorship engendered by an acute awareness of the paradoxical role which female publication necessarily demanded when private women stepped onto the public stage of the literati.9 As feminist literary critics of the female genre of domestic fiction have Page 30shown, resolution of this conflict was typically played out in the work itself and took several forms: authorial anonymity through the use of pseudonyms (McCord used her initials L. S. M.) as well as the utilization of a formulaic plot of feminine conventionality that glossed over an undercurrent of discontent and subterfuge. 10 McCord, then, was as much aware as these female fiction writers that she was, to use Anne Goodwyn Jones's playfully sardonic metaphor, "dancing to someone else's music."11 And in McCord's case, the composers were all Southern defenders of slavery.For proslavery proponents in the blackbelt South, there seemed to be no dearth of historical material to draw upon in their rationalization for nineteenthcentury slavery, which was buttressed, they claimed, by the transhistorical existence of human inequalities [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]
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. John Faucheraud Grimké was a successful Charlestonian lawyer and onetime South Carolinian legislator, and his son Thomas followed his father's vocation as a lawyer in the Cheves's law firm. And finally, all three most certainly flirted in the same social, political, and intellectual circles of antebellum Charleston, no doubt even playing the role of belle at the same Southern cotillions during their comingout years. And yet they also shared something much more profound than Charleston, camellias, and coquetry, for in their writings on the subject of slavery was inextricably bound up the question of gender and the respective positions of male and female.Few scholars of the antebellum South, and of the peculiar institution in particular, have paid adequate attention to the gendered dimensions of proslavery thought. 2 Yet in the words of historian Stephanie McCurry, "the subordination of women bore a great deal of the ideological weight of slavery."3 That the subsumed status of women in the private sphere of the plantation household could bear any relationship to the public world of Southern slavery politics may appear problematic to those who still hold to a rigid distinction between the personal and the political, the private and the public. Yet as historian Joan W. Scott has noted, "The publicprivate distinction families as compared to the nation, mother's needs versus the needs of the state . . . is critical in the formulation of nationalist or patriotic ideologies. To what extent these ideologies also rest on and reinscribe existing notions of gender relationships and the sexual division of labor remains an important and as yet unstudied question."4In the attempt of the Old South's ideologues to bring into being just such a regionally conscious weltanschauung (and in the North's attempts to extinguish such an ideology), it was precisely the politics of the socalled private, gendered, and racial that so fiercely animated public debate both within and between both sides of the MasonDixon line. As a consequence, in the South, the circumscribed borders of conventional gender relations were as fiercely patrolled as the plantation's slave quarters~ while in the North, in spite of an emerging discourse on the contested status of middle class women, none but the most radical Garrisonian abolitionists were prepared to make common cause with a nascent woman's rights movement. Not surprisingly, then, it was not just the proslavery argument of Southern ideologues that tended to coalesce around the axis of gendered difference, but the rhetoric of the North's abolitionistfeminists as well, at least in analogy if not intent. This is, it turns out, no less the Page 29case with Louisa McCord and Angelina and Sarah Grimké. Yet while Sarah Grimké could "rejoice, because I am persuaded that the rights of woman, like the rights of slaves, need only to be examined to be understood and asserted," 5 for McCord, the nexus linking sex and race would lead to her warning that "the poison [the doctrine of women's rights] is spreading . . . and, it is but a piece with Negro emancipation. . . ."6 Louisa McCord then, like other apologists for slavery, was well aware of, and in large measure responding to, the thoughts and writings of her Northern antagonists. It may be instructive, therefore, to situate McCord in counterpoint to the Grimkés, for while the line separating McCord from her transplanted Southern sisters may have demarcated two disparate cultures, the MasonDixon divide was not an impenetrable one, as ideas did flow in both directions.Louisa McCord wrote and published on such topics as political economy, free trade, secession, slavery, and the anthropology of race, managing almost invariably to smuggle the "woman question" into her essays. While most historical treatments of McCord are concerned with the textual analysis of these political works (she wrote for such popular midnineteenth century Southern journals as the Southern Quarterly Review, Southern Literary Messenger, and De Bow's Review) it is only by foregrounding the more selfreflective McCord that emerges in her letters, poetry, and drama that we can fully illuminate the thought contained in her polemical pieces. Elizabeth FoxGenovese, who has written of both the public and private McCord in Within the Plantation Household, concludes that McCord like other "handmaidens of the system" of Southern plantation paternalism, ultimately threw her lot in with her class and race rather than her sex. Admittedly, McCord may have identified with and thus mimicked the rhetorical style of her male proslavery peers by, in FoxGenovese's words, writing ''in the idiom of the canon."7 Certainly a review of her expressly political writings, uninformed by her more private deliberations, would lead one to such a conclusion. But as a woman who hoped to be published and read in the South, such literary conformity was all but a necessity.8 To read McCord solely on this level, then, is to miss many of the nuances in her work, which far from being transparent, contains multiple layers of meaning. Like nineteenthcentury women novelists, McCord's position was one of conflicted authorship engendered by an acute awareness of the paradoxical role which female publication necessarily demanded when private women stepped onto the public stage of the literati.9 As feminist literary critics of the female genre of domestic fiction have Page 30shown, resolution of this conflict was typically played out in the work itself and took several forms: authorial anonymity through the use of pseudonyms (McCord used her initials L. S. M.) as well as the utilization of a formulaic plot of feminine conventionality that glossed over an undercurrent of discontent and subterfuge. 10 McCord, then, was as much aware as these female fiction writers that she was, to use Anne Goodwyn Jones's playfully sardonic metaphor, "dancing to someone else's music."11 And in McCord's case, the composers were all Southern defenders of slavery.For proslavery proponents in the blackbelt South, there seemed to be no dearth of historical material to draw upon in their rationalization for nineteenthcentury slavery, which was buttressed, they claimed, by the transhistorical existence of human inequalities [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]