Abstract
This is a documentary about a phenomenon which most right-thinking sociologists would likely find repugnant, silly, irrelevant, pathetic, and a colossal waste of time. It is to the credit of the two women who made the film (one of several interesting works in their catalogue) that the hesitant viewer is drawn into the picture, for all sorts of sociologically and aesthetically attuned reasons. If one can resist the reflex gag reaction to the topic, it can then be considered as a “story,” as a datum which deserves sociological scrutiny, from professionals as well as the students who are lucky enough to see it.
In 1852 The Athenaeum School for Young Ladies opened its doors in Columbia, Tennessee, about 50 miles south of Nashville, at that time in the midst of very large, lucrative plantations. White girls with means were sent there to learn math, science, language, and business, and given that the library contained 16,000 volumes and the lab held 6,000 specimens, it is reported now by historians of the period that this was one of the finest such schools available to Southern adolescent females. It was most definitely not a finishing school where girls would mainly learn to comport themselves in ladylike fashion until the correct beau arrived. The school closed in 1904 (the year when one Mr. and Mrs. Weber were touring the United States, including the South).
About twenty years ago an enterprising couple decided to reopen the Athenaeum for one week each July (and one weekend in spring for older “girls”) in order to promote historical memory of a particular kind, not as much based on a factually accurate recreation of 1861 (their year of interest) as on venerating a past free of misery, regret, and repentance. One might think of the experiment as a wishful antidote to the self-loathing which now infects much of official Southern culture owing to the central role that slavery played in its long history prior to 1865. Several historians of the period attack today’s Athenaeum in four clips appended to the film itself, so that nobody is under any illusions about what in fact occurred in 1861.
So, if historical recreation of the Williamsburg variety is not the goal of the Athenaeum, what is? Put most simply, young women of about 15–17 or so, chosen from a waiting list, show up in Tennessee in the midst of unairconditioned July, bring with them a trunk full of “period-correct” clothing and accoutrements, and prepare to spend a week “glowing” in the humidity while wearing layers of cloth, banishing all modern conveniences, forgetting their ingrained I Am Woman attitudes, and falling languidly into an imagined nineteenth-century mode of modest, quiet civility that is entirely absent from today’s high school culture. They learn to write with a stylus and inkwell, eat with the correct utensils, speak in a gentle tone of voice, follow dances of the ear with a crowd of willing male partners, interact with grace and decorum, and put Scarlett O’Hara to shame—who, by the standards of the Athenaeum, was a pushy, self-dramatizing hussy. The drill sergeants responsible for this transformation are several very serious middle-aged women and a single man, who brook no disobedience and whose dedication to The Cause is absolute, though never sadistic. They truly want the girls to leave after a week (and yes, some do return for more) with a keen sense of their new identities as Southern ladies which goes deeper than mere costume changes. And it seems to work. Even those who at first find the exercise silly come around to a revised collective definition of the situation, so that graduation time is filled with tears and fond farewells.
The possibilities for pedagogically fruitful discussions of this film are almost endless for obvious reasons, provided that showing it does not cause a class room riot. Interestingly, thus far no African American girls have participated in the Athenaeum, though several have requested information about it through the mail. The man who runs the weeklong “camp” explains on camera that there is no discussion of slavery because it does not figure in what they are trying to accomplish. Imagine!