Thursday, May 30, 1996
Noon
Caribou Coffee
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Building on last week's discussion of Old Southwestern Humor, in which
some narrators show a sympathy toward their rustic protagonists, we turned
this week to two writers with more mixed feelings towards backwoods people:
William Byrd and Sarah Kemble Knight.
We began by discussing Bird and his History of the Dividing Line.
Drawing on his interest in and knowledge of canonization and Southern literature,
Chris G. pointed out that Louis Rubin has celebrated Byrd as a precursor
of features that would come to characterize much of Southern literature:
low comedy, characters' pecadillos, and genteel narrators. Turning to the
narrative itself, we noted several tantalizing patterns. Chris G., for example,
noted that Byrd tends to aim his satire at the male rustics and natives,
while giving the women better treatment. Moreover, the native women sometimes
receive better treatment than the North Carolinian women. Returning to question
that inspired this discussion--what do literary treatments of backcountry
rustics and natives say about writers' and their cultures' ideas about nature
and civilization?--we asked ourselves whether Byrd intended his work to
be read by an English audience. We also considered the conventional wisdom
that Northerners valued democracy more than Southerners, who clung to beliefs
about class.
In our discussion of Sarah Kemble Knight, Chris S. noted the heavy emphasis
on financial matters in The Journal of Madame Knight. On the question
of Knight's ideas about civilization, we agreed that Knight generally ridicules
the rustics she encounters in her travels, but Mark pointed out that Knight
expresses genuine pity for these individuals in her poem on the struggles
of life in the woods. This poem ends: "When I reflect, my late fatigues
do seem / Only a notion or forgotten Dreem." Mark, Chris G., and Judy
noted parallels in Knight's journal and Ebeneezer Cooke's The Sot-weed
Factor.