Cracking up the South: Humor and identity in Southern Renaissance fiction

By analyzing the relationship between humor and identity in Southern Renaissance fiction, this study illuminates our understanding of the South's political unconscious during the 1920s and 1930s. T. S. Stribling's Teeftallow (1926), William Faulkner's The Hamlet (1940), Ellen Glasgow's The Romantic Comedians (1926), Frances Newman's The Hard-Boiled Virgin (1926), Julia Peterkin's Scarlet Sister Mary (1928) and Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934) all share at least one source of laughter. These authors all "crack up" over the deepening cracks penetrating the ideological foundation of the southern organic society. An intense debate over the "naturalness" of southern hierarchies of race, class and gender clearly emerges from the comedy of these texts.;Two major categories of humor emerge from my analysis: a transgressive type which resists the belief in "natural" hierarchies, and a hegemonic type which tries to reinforce these inequalities. The same text can be simultaneously transgressive and hegemonic because of multiple, often conflicting constituents of identity; comic strategies useful in fighting one hierarchy can reinforce another. T. S. Stribling's and William Faulkner's humor hegemonically attempts to construct poor whites as a biological, quasi-racial category. The effect of their derisive comedy is, however, to represent "white trash" as the abject, a source of horror. The transgressive humor of Ellen Glasgow, Frances Newman and Julia Peterkin denaturalizes the ideology that white southern ladies are "naturally" passive and pure. At the same time, however, Glasgow and Newman's upper-class biases dilute the power of their gender critiques, while Peterkin's racism compromises her feminist impulses. Finally, Zora Neale Hurston's recognition of sexism within the black community complicates her anti-racist comic strategies.;These writers all use humor to engage in a civil(ized) war over the naturalness of the hierarchical southern society. There are, however, no clear winners in this war because of the ambivalence created by conflicting components of identity. Rather, the struggle ends in an uneasy stalemate in which the southern hierarchy of the organic society remains in place, yet is seriously called into question.