Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South

2004 Winner of the Cawelti Award Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South Tara McPherson. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Tara McPherson begins Reconstructing Dixie with this observation: "The South is as much a fiction, a story we tell and are told, as it is fixed geographic space below the Mason-Dixon line" (1). This huge, grandly conceived book is an investigation of the multiple stones told and retold about the South using the social constructs of nostalgia, gender, and race. It is fitting, then, that McPherson begins her narrative with a short autobiographical story that locates her as a southern expatriate living in Los Angeles. With this statement of self-disclosure, the author breaks out of the hermetic space of scholarly writing to acknowledge that there is no such thing as the "objective scholar." McPherson's story establishes her right to deconstruct and reconstruct the South as an insider who has both the authority to tell a southern story, and is deeply implicated in it. Thus, while McPherson's book is a complex and multilayered study of the many narratives of the South, it is written from within and is by perforce "her" story. In order to demonstrate how the grand narrative of the mythic South can be both fixed and unfixed, McPherson avoids the "standard" narratives of the South (such as William Faulkner) to introduce a refreshingly eclectic range of stories taken from fiction, film, television, journalism, the tourist industry, the Internet, autobiography, and the field of Southern studies. She examines a number of fixed stories in which the "Old South" and the "New South" are narrated as stones of nostalgia, guilt, and race, in which flat unidimensional characters such as the southern belle, the southern lady, the southern gentleman, and even the "happy slave" are presented as immutable. She explores a number of other stories in which the characters are more ambivalent, unfixed, mutable, and complex. McPherson's goal is to display the concept of "lenticular vision" (McPherson's term for a bifurcated vision in which two separate images are superimposed but can only be perceived separately and in opposition), and then to complicate and dislodge these oppositional perceptions by suggesting that nostalgia, gender, and race must be perceived as integral parts of a shared continuum of knowledge and belief. In chapter one, McPherson explores the female narrative of the Old South through the constructs of the southern belle or southern lady, and the southern black female as her inverse. In her analysis of Margaret MitchelPs Gone with the Wind and its doubly fictional sequel, Scarlett, McPherson introduces Scarlett O'Hara as the archetypal southern belle, a shapely coquette, whose highly polished beauty and femininity, genteel behavior, and gracious hospitality are set in the center (or on the porch) of a grand plantation house, which in its turn is embedded in the mythic Southern land. The southern lady is also characterized as both gracious and fragile, but she is also, like Scarlett, tough and enduring (to rule over plantations when the men are away), and one with the land (to which Scarlett inevitably returns for succor). Mitchell's plantation is a female and feminized world in which southern gentlemen (the abstracted protectors of white women) are often physically and metaphorically absent. The ties of the southern belle and lady to the plantation (home) and land (place) are thus rendered "natural," and by extension, real. Mitchell's (and McPherson's) description of Mammy is the inverse of Scarlett, her black opposite. In comparison to Scarlett's shapely form and kittenish character, Mammy's body is described as huge, old, shapeless, and unsexed, ruined by hard physical labor. She is caricatured as a "happy slave" whose loyalty to and protection of her mistress is absolute and therefore also "natural." In Scarlett, Mammy (and race) are expunged by Mammy's death. …