John T. Matthews - Hidden in Plain Sight: Slave Capitalism in Poe, Hawthorne, and Joel Chandler Harris

Hidden in Plain Sight

Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures No. 58

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT

Slave Capitalism in Poe, Hawthorne, and Joel Chandler Harris

JOHN T. MATTHEWS

2020 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

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Set in 10/14 Sabon and ITC Century by Rebecca A. Norton

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Matthews, John T., author.

Title: Hidden in plain sight : slave capitalism in Poe, Hawthorne, and Joel Chandler Harris / John T. Matthews.

Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press, [2020] |

Series: Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures; no. 58 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019033212 | ISBN 9780820356709 (hardback) | ISBN 9780820356716 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: American fiction19th centuryHistory and criticism. | Denial (Psychology) in literature. | Ignorance (Theory of knowledge) in literature. | Fetishism in literature. | National characteristics, American, in literature. | Literature and societyUnited StatesHistory19th century. | SlaveryUnited StatesInfluence. | Capitalism and literature. | CYAC: SlaveryEconomic aspectsUnited States.

Classification: LCC PS377 .M38 2020 | DDC 813/.309355dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033212

Cover image based on original photography by Alexandra Chan.

For Richard Godden and Philip Weinstein, and to the memory of Steven Ross

Foreword, by Douglas E. Thompson

In October 2016, John T. Matthews gave the Eugenia Dorothy Blount Lamar Lectures at Mercer University. His engaging lectures helped students and the general public who attended the series in the Presidents Dining Room, surrounded by paintings of the universitys presidents, see the slave economy built into the fabric of America and its national literature. Matthews revealed how racial slavery and its economic consequences remained hidden in plain sight in works by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Joel Chandler Harris for almost a century and how that fact suggests how the American South served as the onus of American racism. In these published lectures, he has built a remarkable theoretical structure to help readers understand how the reception of three works of fiction by these authors resulted from a willful ignorance about racial slavery and its lasting impact. We are grateful to him for his presence on campus and the way he engaged our students. The Lamar Lecture Series exists to create space for this kind of scholarship.

In the mid-1950s, Eugenia Dorothy Blount Lamar made a bequest to Mercer University, located in her hometown of Macon, Georgia, to provide lectures of the very highest scholarship which will aid in the permanent preservation of the values of Southern culture, history, and literature. For sixty years, the Lamar Memorial Lectures committee has brought to Mercer the best minds to examine and explain the peculiar politics, social customs, religious piety, and racial dynamics of the American South. In that sixty-year history, scholars of history and literature have revealed the complexity of the region, perhaps sometimes even in contrast to Lamars own understanding of the permanent preservation of the values of Southern culture.

Mercer University earned a National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) Challenge Grant in 2014 that would over the course of five years establish a $2 million endowment to underwrite the extensive programming around southern studies at the university, including the Lamar Memorial Lecture Series. In 2017, Mercer established the Spencer B. King, Jr. Center for Southern Studies to house both the endowment and southern studies programs. Named after a longtime history department faculty member, the King Center for Southern Studies fosters critical discussions about the many meanings of the South. As the only center for southern studies in the United States dedicated to the education and enrichment solely of undergraduate students, the centers primary purpose is to examine the regions complex history and culture through courses, conversations, and events that are open, honest, and accessible.

The committee would like to thank two people in particular who helped pull off both the lectures and the manuscript publication. Longtime program assistant Bobbie Shipley coordinated all of our efforts to bring this lecture series to Macon, as she has for several decades. Beth Snead has been a wonderful, helpful guide as the three lectures turned into an introduction and three-chapter publication. Beths sense of how the published lectures help reorient the way we think and write about the American South means that we can deliver remarkable content beyond the halls of Mercer and its student body to the broader public.

With this publication, the Lamar Memorial Lectures committee would like to acknowledge six decades of work by dedicated faculty and administrators at Mercer University to sustain this valuable series to the field of southern studies. Their constant attention to bring the very highest scholarship to publication is a testament to the importance of critical analysis of the region and the role it plays in the nation. Matthewss lectures extend that conversation.

Douglas E. Thompson, Chairman

Lamar Memorial Lecture Committee

Director, Spencer B. King, Jr. Center for Southern Studies

Macon, Georgia

I have worked intermittently on this book for a very long time, and Ive been exceedingly fortunate in the many colleagues, graduate students, and undergraduates who have come to share my excitement about its ideas and contributed to it through the years. Im going to take the space here to name as many as I can, with apologies to those I fail to mention.

I wish first to thank Mercer University and the Lamar Memorial Lectures Committee for giving me the opportunity to present my work, and for such convivial hosting by Sarah Gardner, David Davis, and Doug Thompson.

Many extraordinary scholars have become friends over the decades of my professional life, and they have generously discussed my ideas in this project from standpoints in modernist studies, Southern literary and cultural studies, American literature, Faulkner studies, and the history of the U.S. South. My thanks particularly to Hosam Aboul-Ela, Michael Bibler, James Bloom, Randy Boyagoda, Amy Clukey, Leigh Anne Duck, John Duvall, Sarah Gleeson-White, Michael Gorra, Ikuko Fujihira, Jennifer Greeson, George Handley, Lisa Hinrichsen, Coleman Hutchison, Bob Jackson, Donald Kartiganer, Catherine Gunther Kodat, Barbara Ladd, Caroline Levander, Robert Levine, Peter Lurie, Julian Murphet, Michele Currie Navakas, Susan Scott Parrish, Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, Justin Quinn, Erik Roraback, Scott Romine, Peter Schmidt, Jenna Sciuto, Jon Smith, Harry Stecopoulos, Melanie Benson Taylor, Myka Tucker-Abramson, and Jay Watson.