On the Southern Literary Trail discussion

So I'm taking my stand with a current article I'm writing on Cormac's first novel.

However, my claims are bold and I feel I may be fighting an uphill battle but I thought you guys might enjoy my struggle as I try to prove my claims.

I'm in no way denouncing Southern Agrarianism but I feel McCarthy may have been rejecting it while trying to keep a spiritual sense about nature and industry.

take a look at my claim

The Orchard Keeper complicates the romantic ideas of the Southern Agrarians because it embraces a pragmatic approach to economical and natural progress while still perceiving a spiritual harmony between nature and progress.

Also I'm not asking you to help me with my homework either, I'm an aspiring lit scholar that likes discussing literature.

Hey Robert,

I've read The Orchard Keeper and fancy myself a knowledgeable McCarthy enthusiast. (I'm excited about reading Suttree next month, since it's the last of his novels that I haven't read.) But I have to ask for more of your argument, because I can't think of anything on my own that would support your argument. The way I remember it, none of the characters are farmers, they're all trappers or criminals or deadbeats or sheriffs. Except for the orchard keeper himself, but by the looks of the orchard, he hasn't done any actual orchard keeping in decades (view spoiler)[or at least he doesn't keep the orchard in an agrarian sense; he's keeping the violent secret hidden within the orchard. (hide spoiler)]

I think you're definitely correct about him complicating the romantic ideas of Southern Agrarians, though. McCarthy does the opposite of romanticizing, whatever that would be called. Or, it's his own style of romanticization. Instead of virgin, sunny fields filled with wildflowers and young lovers, it's dead, burned-out forests filled with soulless murderers.

So I guess I just need more of your argument. Where does McCarthy comment on agrarianism, nature, or industry? Thanks.

Christopher,
Thanks for the feedback, McCarthy doesn't specifically say anything about the Agrarians and you make a very valid point about the characters in the novel. However, many critics have tied McCarthy's novel to Agrarians ideas plus they have refuted those claims as well. My claim backs up other arguments that claims it is not sympathetic to agrarians tradition. If you are familiar with I'll Take My Stand, you can see how Cormac's characters can be confused with Southern Agrarians ideology.

McCarthy does make several allusion to the encroachment of industry in the novel, whether it be the tank or the law that is taking shape in the area. I'm still throwing this idea around so there is surely more to come.

Thanks for the questions I really appreciate it.

Here is the full essay on this argument.

http://rjp3common.blogspot.com/

This is more of a scholarly essay than a review so there are plot spoilers.

Could someone point me to a good online description/definition/discussion of Southern Agrarianism?

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma01/Whit...

here is the intro to I'll take my stand

Jessie wrote: "Could someone point me to a good online description/definition/discussion of Southern Agrarianism?"

From Wikipedia:

The Southern Agrarians (also known as the Twelve Southerners, the Vanderbilt Agrarians, the Nashville Agrarians, the Tennessee Agrarians, or the Fugitive Agrarians) were a group of twelve American writers, poets, essayists, and novelists, all with roots in the South, who joined together to write a pro-Southern agrarian manifesto, a collection of essays published in 1930 entitled I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition.[1] They were major contributors to the revival of Southern literature in the 1920s and 1930s now known as the Southern Renaissance.
The Southern Agrarians were based at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and leaders included Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, John Gould Fletcher, Andrew Nelson Lytle, and Donald Davidson.

We have read All the Kings Men by Robert Penn Warren. Have we read the work of and other Southern Agrarians?

Zorro quoted from Wikipedia: "The Southern Agrarians were based at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and leaders included Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, John Gould Fletcher, Andrew Nelson Lytle, and Donald Davidson."

These are all men (and dare I guess white men?)as are all those listed on a longer list included in Wikipedia on the same page. Any women to include on the list? Or am I being impolite to even ask?

Larry wrote: "These are all men (and dare I guess white men?)as are all those listed on a longer list included in Wikipedia on the same page. Any women to include on the list? Or am I being impolite to even ask?
"

Who were the women novelists and poets on the faculty at Vanderbilt in 1930?

Stapleton, Ada Belle - First dean of women and first woman appointed professor of English at Vanderbilt, 1925

Not Vanderbilt faculty but Southern women writers (1920s and 1930s)

These WOMEN were NOT Southern Agrarians.
They were Not Vanderbilt faculty
They were writing in the 1920s and 1930s.
They may have had opinions about the Southern Agrarians Manifesto.
I would like to know what they said in response to the men?

Margaret Mitchell
Julia Peterkin
Pearl Buck (West Virginia) close but not southern
Caroline Miller
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Ellen Glascow
Katherine Anne Porter
Caroline Gordon
Zora Neale Hurston
Lillian Hellman

and the poets??

I wonder what they thought about the Southern Agrarians' Manifesto?

Zorro wrote: "Not Vanderbilt faculty but Southern women writers (1920s and 1930s)"

So are you suggesting that some or all of these women were part of the Southern Agrarians?

I am interested because evidently there were at least some who thought the Agrarians were interested in keeping women and blacks "down on the farm" and not just to combat industrialization.

No, no, no. I am just trying to list some women writers who were writing at the time of the movement. There were no WOMEN in the Southern Agrarians. But you asked: " Any women to include on the list? Or am I being impolite to even ask?"

and I am looking at Southern women writers who I am sure had some opinion at the time about what this
good ole boys' club was saying.

We can read what the men said in I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition

Robert wrote: "So I'm taking my stand with a current article I'm writing on Cormac's first novel.

However, my claims are bold and I feel I may be fighting an uphill battle but I thought you guys might enjoy my ..."

Robert, I agree that McCarthy's Tennessee novels do not hold up with with Southern Agrarians ideology. But The Border Trilogy and No Country for Old Men, seems more in line with Agrarianism.

Larry wrote: "So are you suggesting that some or all of these women were part of the Southern Agrarians?

I am interested because evidently there were at least some who thought the Agrarians were interested in keeping women and blacks "down on the farm" and not just to combat industrialization. "


I have started reading about these Southern Women Writers today and found that:

Caroline Gordon was married to Southern Agrarian Allen Tate.

From Wikipedia:
"Gordon's early fiction was influenced by her association with the Southern Agrarians.[3] Paul V. Murphy writes that she "exhibited a southern nostalgia as strong as any member of the group, including Davidson, the most unreconstructed of the Agrarians".[4]

"Over the next twenty years, Caroline Gordon (who retained her maiden name) and Allen Tate lived in Tate's house in Clarksville. Their guests included some of the best-known writers of their time, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, T. S. Eliot, Robert Penn Warren, and Ford Madox Ford, the author whom Gordon considered her mentor. Ford counseled and prodded her into completing her first novel Penhally, published in 1931.[1] Gordon received both of her awards, the Guggenheim and the O. Henry, during this early period. The O. Henry was a unique second-place prize awarded for her 1934 short story "Old Red", published in Scribner's Magazine. There were seventeen third-place recipients that year, including William Saroyan, Pearl Buck, Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Thomas Wolfe.[2]"

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles....

"Caroline Gordon, a fiercely assertive distaff member of the tribe of Southern writers known consecutively as the Fugitives, the Agrarians, and, from the 1940s on, the New Critics."
......
"Gordon emphasized Maritain’s teaching about the subordinate place of women. This was a ratification, both biographies suggest, of what Gordon had always felt—that men were inherently more competent, more suited to action, than women. “Successful male novelists always get rid of the partner of their lean days as soon as they hit the top,” she wrote witheringly to Josephine Herbst upon the latter’s divorce. Yet if they were morally inferior cads, male novelists (and poets) were better able to make novels and poems than women were, or so Gordon believed. She called herself a “freak” for doing the “unsexing” work of fiction writing, and quoted Dr. Johnson to the effect that a woman at intellectual labor is always a dog walking on its hind legs."

Zorro wrote: "http://www.newcriterion.com/articles....

"Caroline Gordon, a fiercely assertive distaff member of the tribe of Southern writers known consecutively as the Fugitives, the Agrarians, and, from the 1940s on, the New Critics"

Surely a complicated woman. She seems to have been a strong and independent woman who believed women were inferior to men. But I am not convinced by the bulk of this long article that she was a member of the Agrarians with "all the rights, privileges and honors appertaining thereto." However, they might have been glad for her to take the minutes at the meetings.

Larry said, "However, they might have been glad for her to take the minutes at the meetings. "

No, I think she served their mint juleps and washed their socks.

Well, if I wasn't already turned off the Agrarians, I am now. :^)

However, from Zorro's message, and the Wikipedia article: "...Ford Madox Ford, the author whom Gordon considered her mentor. Ford counseled and prodded her into completing her first novel Penhally, published in 1931." Good ole Ford; champion of new literature.