Anthony Wilson > Quotes

“Within this abstracted Southern culture, swamps remain tangible, physical spaces rather than simply collections of tropes. As Simon Schama, Donna Haraway, and others have claimed in a variety of ways, landscape is always, at least in part, a creation of culture-but the range and limits of that cultural creation are what interest the ecocritic. For W. G. T. Mitchell, in his 2002 book Landscape and Power, landscape becomes less a descriptive term than an act of creation: "[L]andscape doesn't merely signify or symbolize power relations; it is an instrument of cultural power, perhaps even an agent of power that is (or frequently represents itself as) independent of human intentions" (z).”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“Mr. R. described them as lazy vagabonds, doing but little work, and spending much time in shooting, fishing, and play... Why did he so dislike to have these poor people living near him? Because, he said, they demoralized his negroes. The slaves seeing them living in apparent comfort, without much property and without steady labor, could not help thinking that it was not necessary for men to work so hard as they themselves were obliged to; that if they were free they would not need to work" (2: 332-33).”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“This is a fading South of lost dreams, a prelapsarian space where, as Matthew Martin observes in his 1998 article "The Two-Faced New South: The Plantation Tales of Thomas Nelson Page and Charles W. Chesnutt," the sins of slavery are generally effaced: "Like the Biblical Eden, the pre-war South here exists in another time, in a kind of world that has since been fundamentally altered. Like Eden it is a world of perfect order, in which both sin and labor are nonexistent" (22).”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“Dred, the escaped slave turned swamp-dwelling prophet, becomes a strange version of Milton's Satan as Stowe undermines the Christian underpinnings of slave society: better to reign in his swampy hell than to serve in their
unjust "heaven.”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“Ruffin's views of the swamp represent one dimension of its relationship to Southern identity: the realm of the commodifiable and practical. If the South was defined by Cavalier myth, it was at least as much defined by the agricultural and slave systems that enabled that myth's promulgation.”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“Encoded in this classic formula, though, is a subtle and complex acknowledgment of the less picturesque elements of the antebellum South: violence, racial tensions, the brutality of slavery, and the looming fear of insurrection.”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“Early in the Zoth Century, the tourist entering the Dismal Swamp by the Jericho Canal asked her guide, a young white Virginian, why a swamp so filled with color, sunshine, and bird calls was named 'dismal.' 'There's more to it than shows just at first, ma'am,' he answered. 'There are more sad stories about this swamp than all the sunshine can make bright'" (422).”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“For the most part, Page's picturesque and nostalgic representations steer clear of the swamps that historically challenged such a view of the South. However, when the swamp does emerge in his stories, it becomes both vehicle and repository for all the troublesome ambiguities that complicate his idealizing vision.”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“1974 article "The Serpent of Lust in the Southern Garden”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“Southern studies has yet to engage the cultural significance of the swamps.”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“Poe's vision of the swamp goes beneath the surface that Kennedy skims: the swamp becomes not an unknown quantity behind a carefully guarded boundary but a physical exemplar of a more pervasive chaos infecting the very heart of Southern society.”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“It is not grandeur which one finds on the banks of the great stream, it is nature run riot. The very irregularity is delightful, the decay is charming, the solitude is picturesque" (384).”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“If the Cavalier myth can be interpreted as a literary and linguistic attempt to control fundamentally uncontrollable forces, then the swamp emerges as its nemesis: the distillation of pure wildness, the uncontrollable element in the pastoral garden.”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“The swamps around No Haid Pawn, in contrast to the rest of the plantation, are heavily exoticized: as the narrator traverses them, he uses "jungle" and "swamp" interchangeably, underscoring the racial overtones that become so important to understanding the tale: "Old logs thrown across the miry canals gave me an uncomfortable feeling as I reflected on what feet had last crossed on them. On both sides of this trail the marsh was either an impenetrable jungle or a mire apparently bottomless" (176).”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“The Dismal Swamp," which appeared in Harpers New Monthly Magazine in 1856.”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“the swamp thwarts Mike in both commercial endeavors (one wonders how amused the founders of the Great Dismal Swamp Company would be by the accounts of Mike's failed attempts to draw gold from the swamp bottom) and in his efforts to uphold chivalric tradition through the convention of the duel. The diabolical swamp subverts both efforts to amass material wealth and attempts to defend and uphold personal honor endorsed by a carefully created and defensively maintained system of public honor; thus Kennedy, for all his seeming insouciance, establishes the swamp as anathema to both the mercantile and the poetic aspects of the created Southern self.”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“The swamp and the myth of the plantation South have always been at odds. For the Cavalier-era Southern mind, ideas of control, purity, and dominion over nature (both within and without) were essential; in both literature and in the real world, the swamp always defied those ideas.”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“Mary Douglas' seminal anthropological work, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966), is instructive in situating the swamp's figurative link to the ongoing project of Southern self-creation and in explaining the nature and origin of the physical swamp's link to the South's moral and cultural "underside.”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“Civil War era memoirs mark a significant, if halting, evolution in the ways that Southerners viewed the long-demonized swamps. In most, rhetoric fades in deference to practicality; they become defensive and strategic assets and natural rather than supernatural problems. While the swamps remained understandably nightmarish to those, both Union and Confederate, who fought among them, a gradual sense of appreciation and cultural ownership emerges in the writings of noncombatants-particularly those of women, the ordained keepers of Southern culture.”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“Never quite assimilable into mainstream narrative or endeavor, whether literary or commercial, the swamp, like an element in the collective Southern psyche imperfectly repressed, remains a mercurial but undeniable element in defining a culture to which, in both practical and literary dimensions, it was both progenitor and antagonist.”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“Unencumbered by the need to employ swamp imagery in the service of abolitionist rhetoric, Northerners visiting the South saw in the swamps an area virtually untouched by what they perceived as a morally bankrupt civilization and thus a space that could be regarded and presented positively without stigma.”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“The appearance of Hafen, the poor man for whom the swamp holds no terrors, echoes two other aspects of traditional swamp representations: first, that the swamp is home to the dispossessed, and ironically masterable only by those excluded from the master class, and second, that the swamp is a place of evil that somehow cannot affect a virtuous man. As Hafen claims, "The swamp is a very good mother to me, although I am a simple body and can pick up a penny where rich folks would never think of looking for it.... I never saw anything in these hobgoblins to make an honest
man afraid. All you have to do is to say your prayers, and that will put any devilish thing out of heart" (257-59).”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“Ned and Mark, members of the plantation aristocracy that was essentially, as so many have argued, a literary and therefore linguistic creation, find themselves unable to speak in the thick of the swamp. Language breaks down, and thus, implicitly, the very substructure of the highly literary Southern Cavalier aristocracy breaks down, when one strays beyond the plantation boundaries into the swamp.”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“Making History... Not money.”
― Anthony Wilson

“Kirby describes the swamp's significance for those who, while not enslaved, were excluded from the master narrative of Southern civilization and society: "This same wetland environment rendered free humans freer to resist both bourgeois society and the agronomic reformers. . . . In and near the Great Dismal, especially, woods-burning and hog-running country folk might live their `careless' lives ... and still raise cash at will, on the periphery of the world's market order" (161). By its very fecundity, the swamp threatened the crucial order of the plantation system, sowing discontent among the enslaved through the example of those who lived outside the system they were compelled to perpetuate with their labor and providing limited prosperity to those excluded by the Southern order.”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“Of course the black rascal was my guide to the guerilla Clark's hiding place. My force was compelled to follow a narrow path across the swamp. Any deviation from the track, only wide enough for one horseman, was almost certain death. Quagmires were bottomless.... It occurred to me that we had traveled ten or fifteen, when the negro had said we need only go eight miles.... Within twenty minutes I heard the report ofa pistol, and riding rapidly forward I encountered a corporal, who said that the negro had taken advantage of his perfect knowledge of the paths through the swamp, and of the different appearances of miry and of hard ground, and had separated himself and the sergeant from the main body of my command, and that the "black rascal had shot the sergeant dead and disappeared. " 077)”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture

“In his article "The Other Side of Slavery: Thomas Nelson Page's `No Haid Pawn,"' Louis Rubin has remarked at the story's radical departure from the others in Page's collection, pointing out that in the midst of Page's "tribute to the golden days before the Fall" there lurks, "seemingly unrelated to the life described in all the other stories[,] ... this terrible tale of horror, guilt, fear, and depravity" (99). Significantly, it is also the only story to mention the swamps that surround the plantation Eden.”
― Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture