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The Novelist as Historian: William Styron and American Negro Slavery

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

John White
John White
Affiliation:
University of Hull
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Extract

William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, a fictional account of the 1831 Virginia slave revolt, is, in the author's words, ‘less an “historical novel” in conventional terms than a meditation on history’. It produced an immediate and continuing response from American readers, and was greeted both as ‘superlative history’ and as the distorted creation of a ‘vile racist imagination’. Certainly, no recent American novel has evoked such partisan controversy and made so apparent the already deep but widening emotional and intellectual rift between white liberals and the new generation of black militants in search of a usable past. Nor has any treatment of Negro slavery and the slave personality since the publication of Stanley Elkins's seminal essay been so avidly praised or so bitterly condemned. The question in dispute has been less Styron's treatment of the events of the Turner revolt (Styron incorporates most of Turner's own alleged ‘Confessions’ into the narrative) than the historical accuracy of the author's descriptions of the workings of the slave system, particularly its effects on whites and blacks. A summary of the conflicting responses best indicates the range and impact of Styron's novel and provides also a framework within which to set and evaluate the intentions and achievements of the novelist as historian.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , February 1971 , pp. 233 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1971

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References

page 233 note 1 Styron, William, The Confessions of Nat Turner (New York, 1967; London, 1968; paperback edition, London, 1970).Google Scholar

page 233 note 2 Elkins, S. M., Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959, 1968).Google Scholar

page 234 note 1 Woodward, C. Vann, New Republic (7 10 1967)Google Scholar; Duberman, Martin, New York Times Book Review (11 08 1967)Google Scholar; Genovese, E. D., New York Review of Books (12 09 1968)Google Scholar; Rahv, Philip, New York Review of Books (26 10 1967)Google Scholar; Baldwin, James, Newsweek (16 10 1967).Google Scholar

page 234 note 2 Aptheker, Herbert, ‘A Note on History’, Nation (16 10 1967).Google Scholar See also, Aptheker, , ‘Styron-Turner and Nat Turner: Myth and Truth’, Political Affairs, 46 (10 1969), 40–50.Google ScholarAptheker, , Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion (New York, 1966)Google Scholar contains, the full text of the original ‘Confessions’. Tannenbaum, Frank, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York, 1946).Google ScholarPhilips, U. B., American Negro Slavery (New York, 1918, Baton Rouge, 1966)Google Scholar; Life and Labour in the Old South (New York, 1929).

page 234 note 3 Clarke, John H. (ed.), William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (Boston, 1968).Google Scholar

page 235 note 1 Marcus Cunliffe makes a similar point about the ‘Styron Imbroglio’ in ‘Black Culture and White America’, Encounter, 34 (January 1970), 22–35. ‘It has been one of those controversies much taken up with displays of credentials and refusals of accreditation’ (p. 30). On the Styron controversy see especially Genovese, E. D., ‘The Nat Turner Case’ (review of Ten Black Writers), New York Review of Books (7 11 1968)Google Scholar; Thelwel, Michael and Coles, Robert, ‘The Turner Thesis’, Partisan Review, 25 (Summer, 1968), 403–14Google Scholar; Alan Holder, ‘Styron's Slave: The Confessions of Nat Turner’, and Durden, R. F., ‘William Styron and his Black Critics’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 48 (1969), 167–87Google Scholar

page 236 note 1 Two recent essays question Styron's historical accuracy. See Aiken, W. E., ‘Toward an Impressionistic History: Pitfalls and Possibilities in William Styron's Meditation on History’, American Quarterly, 21 (Winter 1969), 805–12Google Scholar, and Tragle, H. I., ‘Styron and His Sources’, Massachusetts Review, 11 (Winter 1970), 135–53.Google Scholar Aiken asserts: ‘Styron's book…may be the most profound treatment of slavery in our literature because it portrays the black slavery experience in its essential schizophrenia and inhumanity in a fashion that no other study matches’, but argues, I think unconvincingly, that Styron's depiction of Nat Turner makes ‘severe alterations of the known facts’. Tragle's concern is with the existing records of the Turner trial and the personalities of those involved in the revolt. Neither article, however, considers Styron's wider depiction of the slave system.

page 236 note 2 Review of Aptheker, Negro Slave Revolts, in New York Review of Books (26 09 1963).Google Scholar

page 236 note 3 Boorstin, D. J., The Americans: The National Experience (New York, 1965, 1967), p. 467.Google Scholar

page 236 note 4 Styron, William, ‘This Quiet Dust’, Harpers' Magazine (04 1965), pp. 135–46.Google Scholar

page 237 note 1 Quoted in Harvey Wish, ‘U. B. Phillips and the Image of the Old South’, in The American Historian: A Social Intellectual History of the Writing of the American Past (New York, 1960), p. 240.

page 237 note 2 Stampp, K. M., The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1956, 1964).Google Scholar

page 238 note 1 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (London, 1853), p. 86.Google Scholar

page 238 note 2 Kemble, F. A., Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839, edited with an introduction by Scott, John A. (London, 1961), p. 102.Google Scholar

page 238 note 3 Martineau, Harriet, Society in America (1837), edited, abridged and with an introductory essay by Lipset, Seymour M. (New York, 1962), pp. 207–8.Google Scholar

page 239 note 1 Martineau, , Society in America, loc. cit. p. 232.Google Scholar

page 240 note 1 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave (1845), edited by Quarles, B. (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), pp. 85–6.Google Scholar

page 240 note 2 See Elkins, , Slavery, pp. 82–6, 131–3, 227–8.Google Scholar For discussions by historians of the ‘Elkins Sambo Thesis’ see: Lewis, Mary A., ‘Slavery and Personality: A Further Comment’, American Quarterly, 19 (1967), 114–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Genovese, E. D., ‘Rebelliousness and Docility in the Negro Slave: A Critique of the Elkins Thesis’, Civil War History, 13 (1967), 293–314.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 241 note 1 Tocqueville, De, Democracy in America, vol. 1 (1835), p. 393.Google Scholar The quotation is taken from the new edition edited by Max Lerner and J. P. Meyer, with a new translation by George Lawrence (London, 1968).

page 241 note 2 Franklin, J. H., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (New York, 1967), p. 206.Google Scholar Similarly, the Negro novelist Richard Wright observes: ‘The steady impact of the plantation system…created new types of behaviour and new types of psychological reaction. Even when a white man asked us an innocent question, some unconscious part of us would listen closely, not only to the obvious words, but also to the intonations of the voice that indicated what kind of answer he wanted…we would answer not in terms of objective truth, but in terms of what the white man expected to hear’ (Wright, R., Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the U.S.A. (London, 1947), p. 41).Google Scholar

page 242 note 1 Olmsted, F. L., The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States (1861), ed. Schlesinger, A. M. (New York, 1953, 1962), p. 542.Google Scholar

page 242 note 2 Kemble, , Journal, loc. cit. p. 84.Google Scholar

page 243 note 1 Hinton Rowan Helper (1829–1909), born in North Carolina, was a non-slaveholder and radical critic of slavery. His book The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (1857), was a documented (and sensational) attack on slavery as the cause of the South's economic backwardness. Accordingly, Helper announced himself ‘an abolitionist in the fullest sense of the term’.

page 243 note 2 Bancroft, Frederic, Slave Trading in the Old South (Baltimore, 1931), p. 368.Google Scholar

page 243 note 3 Styron, , ‘This Quiet Dust’, loc. cit. p. 139.Google Scholar

page 244 note 1 Cleaver, Eldridge, Soul on Ice (London, 1969).Google Scholar One of Cleaver's companions remarks: ‘Every time I embrace a black woman I'm embracing slavery, and when I put my arms around a white woman, well, I'm hugging freedom…when I mount a nigger bitch, I close my eyes and concentrate real hard, and pretty soon get to believing that I'm riding one of them bucking blondes’ (p. 109). In his perceptive essay, Sex and Racism in America (New York, 1965; London, 1970), Calvin C. Hernton (a Negro) suggests: ‘To the black man who is sexually sick, the white woman represents an object for symbolic mutilation as well as an escape from a despised self through the act of sexual intercourse. To the depraved Negro, every white woman is the living embodiment of the forces that have oppressed and crippled him’ (p. 78). Under slavery, such feelings were obviously frustrated and generated a potential for violence. Genovese concludes, therefore, that ‘for the best of reasons [Styron] has Nat Turner attracted to an upperclass white girl whom he must personally kill’ (Genovese, E. D., The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation, (New York, 1969; London, 1970), p. 7).Google Scholar

page 244 note 2 Holder, , ‘Styron's Slave’, loc. cit. p. 178.Google Scholar

page 245 note 1 Styron, , ‘This Quiet Dust’, loc. cit. p. 140.Google Scholar

page 245 note 2 For a recent critical survey of slavery historiography and literary images of the Negro see White, John and Willett, Ralph, Slavery in the American South (London, 1970).Google Scholar