A sociology of the civil war : Simms's Paddy McGann
1996; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1534-1461
Autores Tópico(s)American Political and Social Dynamics
ResumoWriting for the Atlantic Monthly in 1867, William Dean Howells bemoaned the fact that war ... has laid upon our literature a charge under which it has hitherto staggered very lamely. (1) In many ways, William Gilmore Simms's 1863 novel Paddy McGann, or The Demon of the Stump, would seem to bear out Howell's oft-repeated complaint about the paucity and poor quality of Civil War literature in America. (2) While Paddy McGann blazed important new trails for Simms into the genres of dialect and backwoods humor, its structural deficiencies are glaring, and its historical content is evasive. The narrative frameworking of Paddy's saga is highly episodic, the North-South dichotomy is downright propagandistic, and Paddy's fate is strangely anti-climactic. The War itself intrudes upon the pastoral setting of the aristocratic Wharncliffe's plantation only at the beginning and at the conclusion of the novel, and the facile treatment of race appears to bear out Daniel Aaron's notion that there was emotional resistance to confronting the racial basis of the war (Aaron xviii). The studied critical silence that has greeted this novel would, then, seem to be justified. (3) And yet close inspection of Paddy McGann's historical context coupled with a narratological analysis reveals the novel to be a complex work that occupies a crucial position in Simms's oeuvre. Furthermore, Paddy McGann may indeed lay claim to be a Civil War novel, and an important one, for it chronicles the disintegration of the idealized Southern social order centered upon paternalism and the plantation household. When Paddy steps into the spotlight to narrate his own story of the demon of the stump, he inadvertently attests to the crumbling of the social bonds that had heretofore linked him to his aristocratic neighbor, Wharncliffe. Paddy tells a story of confusion, dislocation, and suffering that is consummately solitary. The social interdependence so touted by antebellum Southern intellectuals has been reduced to naught, and the only community finally available to Paddy is the wartime community of soldiers. Paddy's experiences articulate with an uncanny prescience the experience of desperation and defeat that awaited many white Southerners who had waged this bloody conflict to protect their property, their institutions, and their peculiar social relations. Paddy McGann opens, as do many of Simms's novels, with a cliched romantic tribute to the beauty of the Southern countryside. In hackneyed prose the narrator glorifies the charms of a November Indian summer. But by the end of the chapter, one senses that Simms is more explicitly polemical and sectional in his celebration of the Southern landscape than he had been before. The narrator, the allegorically named Stylus, and his host, the planter Wharncliffe, ride after dinner to the riverbanks of the Edisto. Stylus and Wharncliffe muse silently upon the beauty of the South Carolina landscape. But the loveliness of their surroundings serves as an inevitable reminder of the unloveliness of war and the threat to their entire way of life. Although the two commune in silence, their thoughts run in the same course: So mused and thought we both, as we gazed upon the placid waters. Our thoughts, Wharncliffe's as well as mine, were, I am sure, the same, for, even as I started up with a cry, almost realizing with my own eyes the vision of conquest in my fancy, he too rose and exclaimed-- is not all over--our happy life, my friend! We shall enjoy the old sports of our sweet little river once more, in communion with our noble-hearted companions. It cannot be that God will deliver us into the hands of these atrocious heathens. As between us and the Deity, there is no doubt a sad reckoning to make; but as between us and these accursed Yankees, no reproach lies at our doors, unless that single one of having too long slept within the coil of the serpent. …
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