Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

George W. Cable’s Gardens: Planting the Creole South and Uprooting the Nation

2015; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/slj.2015.0006

1534-1461

Ieva Padgett,

American and British Literature Analysis

George W. Cable’s Gardens:Planting the Creole South and Uprooting the Nation Ieva Padgett (bio) Most of the individual pieces of George Washington Cable’s short story collections, Old Creole Days (1879) and Strange True Stories of Louisiana (1888), were originally published in Scribner’s Monthly and the Century, respectively (Turner 84, 237). Edward King, who is credited with “discovering” Cable during an 1873 excursion to the U.S. South under assignment from Scribner’s Monthly, promoted the stories of the first collection to eastern publishers (52), and it was these stories in particular that established Cable as an expert on the lifestyle of a quaint regional culture, the Louisiana Creoles, as well as an astute interpreter of their dialect. Depicted in their natural habitat of the old New Orleans, a world of intricate wrought ironwork, cloistered courtyards, and subtle decadence, Cable’s Creoles1 seem to live in a time that is already past, a time to which George W. Cable is paying an eloquent, yet nevertheless final, farewell. Cable, thus interpreted, becomes not only a local colorist but also a documenter of the departing culture, a culture that must be sacrificed in order to accommodate the future of the newly reunified nation. Creoles and their [End Page 55] quaintness are not so much depicted in writing as they are written off or written out of the U.S. national narrative. Indeed, Cable often invites an interpretation of Creoles as being irrelevant to the present by highlighting the “long ago” quality of his tales. The story of “Tite Poulette,” for example, takes the reader to “the good old times of duels, and bagatelle-clubs, and theatre-balls” (Old Creole Days 214). “Madame Delphine,” on the other hand, opens in a setting of “architectural decrepitude, where an ancient and foreign-seeming domestic life . . . overhangs the ruins of a former commercial prosperity” (1) and where the “great doors are shut and clamped and grown gray with cobweb” (2). Representative of the initial mood in many of Cable’s other Creole stories, these passages summon a world where both material objects and customs, long past their heyday, are languishing in a state of uselessness and awaiting their final descent into irretrievable oblivion. By association, Creoles, whose culture is thus portrayed, emerge as static and insignificant pawns in the United States’ march into the glorious future. Because Cable’s Creole stories were published in the first few decades following the Civil War and depict a culture peculiar to the U.S. South, they are often evaluated for the ways they fit into the larger national landscape. George Handley, for example, reads Cable’s work as a form of a wider regionalist genre meant to provide the fledgling New World nations and cultures with a measure of independence from their European predecessors by establishing an alternate set of unique roots, either in the form of subdued indigenous cultures or the legacy of plantation slavery (33). While acknowledging the subversive potential of racially suspect Creoles in an increasingly supremacist nation, Jennifer Rae Greeson has proposed that ultimately Cable’s fiction helped contribute to the impression of the former Confederate states as a kind of interior colony poised to be overtaken by the imperialistic United States. In fact, Greeson credits this peculiar status of the South as endowing its internal colonizers with a comfort of feeling empathy toward their fellow citizens while simultaneously satisfying the drive for expansion (263–268). Both these interpretations, while illuminating, render Cable’s Creole stories as passive commodities consumable by the elsewhere-situated national center of power. What if, instead of assuming that Cable was writing for the more powerful half of the relevant binaries of his time, namely the South-nation or the South-North oppositions, we consider the possibility that he was writing back? Is there a chance that rather than merely supplying easily digestible material for the [End Page 56] ravenous appetite of the newly reunified nation, Cable actually sought to find a place in the national narrative for the Creoles and the historical legacies they represented? I propose taking a closer look at a perhaps surprising motif, the garden, in Cable’s Creole stories in order...