The Image of the Negro in the Pre-Civil-War Novels of John Pendleton Kennedy and William Gilmore Simms

Extract

The crucial issue facing the novelists of the pre-Civil War South was the expression of the Negro in their writings. A fine balance had to be struck between the deliberate attempt to present, as William Taylor suggests in Cavalier and Yankee (Garden City, New York, 1961), a favourable image of the slave-holding society, and the subjective impulse to express the powerful forces of racial destruction that were covert in the ante-bellum South. Such a balance rarely occurred. Rather, as social tensions increased with the approach of the Civil War, the writers retreated from their confrontation with the image of the Negro. Kenneth Lynn, in Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston, 1959), shows a progression which finds the authors using increasingly younger narrators, which Lynn feels absolves them of the responsibility of maturely facing the issues. But the novels of John Pendleton Kennedy and William Gilmore Simms reveal rather different forms of evasion. Kennedy, the more didactic writer, as the war approached, increasingly removed his novels from the present. This simply relieved him of the obligation of expressing concretely documented reality, and allowed a shift into fantasy. The image of the Negro could be safely excluded from such a context. However, fantasy is, if anything, a more congenial environment for the expression of covert social forces. Thus, a curious irony occurs in Kennedy's later novels. The image of the Negro disappears from works such as Rob of the Bowl (1838), but the forces of demonic malevolence with which he is associated are transferred to the figure which replaces him, the indentured Indian. A racial equation emerges, and in this chiaroscuric world of night and fire the Indian offers a glimpse of the malevolence suppressed in the image of the Negro.