Writing Dixie: Problems of Textual Disunion after Fort Sumter
Session Organizer: Jane E. Schultz
Indiana Univ.-Purdue Univ.-Indianapolis
jschult@uipui.edu
Lance Wilcox will be unable to attend this year’s meeting, but Sam Graber has generously agreed to step in.
When ILN artist-correspondent Frank Vizetelly set out in 1861 to cover a country at war, the potency of industrial claims that had fueled the illustrated newspaper’s success sent him first to the North. There he noted “the integrity of the Constitution” in Boston and the “mighty uprising of a united people” in New York. But by the spring of 1862, after he had lampooned the “disgraceful rout” of Union regiments at the war’s first major battle, Washington’s fear that embarrassment in the British press would encourage international recognition of the Confederacy cost Vizetelly has permit to accompany Union forces in the East. So he quietly slipped across the lines and into Virginia, where he gave up his praise for manufacturing and equipment and began to write instead of Southern “independence” and of the “colossal revolution” whose “grand picture” was beginning to coalesce. This paper traces his coverage (via the artist’s pencil and the correspondent’s pen) of the war’s “awful drama” and the South’s settled patriarchy. The ILN’s interest in class structure found unusual resonance in the views of a conservative social order that Vizetelly chose to portray and that Union forces gathered to destroy .
Kathleen Diffley
University of Iowa
kathleen-diffley@uiowa.edu
Turning to Stone: The Public Life of the Jackson Memorial
This talk focuses on the cultural dissemination of the Jackson Memorial in Richmond. First commissioned by a group of the Confederacy’s British allies as a component in their battle over British public opinion, John Foley’s statue eventually became a valuable asset in the efforts of Virginia’s redeemers to shape the historical consciousness of the region and consolidate their political control. The unveiling ceremonies surrounding this first major Confederate monument were, of course, widely noted in the press, but they were also recorded in a lengthy appendix to John Esten Cooke’s 1876 military biography of Jackson. Reverend John William Jones, the editor of the appendix and later of the Papers of the Southern Historical Society, placed an engraving and set of detailed descriptions of the statue and its dedication at the center of various collected reminiscences. This paper, borrowing from Michael Warner’s cogent analysis of publics, will suggest that anxiety over textually constituted publics inspired both the statue’s original British incarnation and the appendix’s attempts to reproduce the social power of public space in the virtual space of public discourse, thus setting the stage for future attempts to control the shape of southern memory through publishing.
Samuel Graber
University of Iowa
samuel-graber@uiowa.edu
It’s Snowing Down South, or How to Dance with My Three Selves in a Reworked Gown
Researchers have long dismissed Harrison’s racially marked works as ethically and politically conflicted. However, thanks in large part to scholars like Toni Morrison, Susan K. Harris and Kathleen Diffley, southern loyalists’ works—such as Harrison’s forty plus novels and over 100 articles, poems, and essays—are now being mined for their valuable perspectives on American gender and racial history.
Harrison ’s unique ability to publish ethically-charged editorials—for example, an abolitionist poem—while maintaining her place in Southern aristocratic society during the Civil War provides fertile soil for exploring “happy endings,” southern style. Harrison loved to dance, and she did it well, physically, socially and intellectually. By lifting the skirts of nineteenth-century literary decorum, she revealed culturally constructed injustices and, perhaps unconsciously, the institutionalized nature of racism in America, often exposing rifts in her own perspectives. One device which allowed Harrison the ability to present both sides of the conflict, North and South, as well as an arbitrator, was her use of a literary pen-pal system, where she wrote/published all three positions through separate corresponding pen-names. I argue that Harrison employed this network of fictitious women to publish her protests against social inequalities by cloaking gender and racial issues within the traditionally feminine themes of fashion and society-calendar events. Gaillynn Bowman
Marshall University College of Journalism
Bowman8@marshall.edu