Abstract
Southern manhood was anything but static, and historians John Mayfield and Craig Thompson Friend introduce us to an array of types that cuts across the barriers of race, class, and sexual orientation typically dividing men. In Mayfield’s single authored monograph and Friend’s edited collection, the Civil War proves the testing ground for a range of masculine ideals, for better and for worse. This makes perfect sense since, as one of Friend’s contributors notes, the war amplified tensions between residual and emergent notions of manhood within Southern culture as various models of patriarchy vied for domination. Both works persuasively demonstrate that shifting definitions of masculinity were crucial to Southern rhetoric within the antebellum and New South, as certain notions of manhood were embraced and abandoned, in the former instance, as a psychological defense against Northern encroachment and, in the latter, as part of a vanquished region’s new ethos.
In his compelling and informative Counterfeit Gentlemen: Manhood and Humor in the Old South, John Mayfield examines the humorous writings of middle-class Southern male authors who wrote for other white, educated men in the 1860s. Mayfield’s premise is that reading the values of the Old South through the prism of humorous meditations on manhood reveals a heretofore underappreciated understanding of what was an ambivalent public performance and private perception of white Southern masculinity. This premise is by and large born out. Mayfield provides a nuanced picture of the Old South that has ossified into an antebellum patriarchy “in which power and authority rippled outward and downward from men whose view of themselves was stable and simple” (p. xiv). In its stead, we get a culture based on “manhood,” a fluid state of identity upon which class and race impinge, and which is in constant need of creation and re-creation. By demonstrating the ways in which antebellum Southern manhood was “a matter of negotiation,” Mayfield is able to categorize the ways that Southern men were themselves aware of and even at times exploited a male identity that rested on self-fabrication or counterfeit presentment.
Mayfield is strongest on the compensatory and tentative nature of Southern manhood and its significance for analyses of Southern culture that seeks to cut across the horizontal lines of class and race. For much of the book he charts his authors' and their characters' careful negotiation of two competing strands of manhood: the emotional, honor-oriented so-called masquerade culture, associated with the cavalier, and the shrewd, market-oriented evangelical culture, associated with the entrepreneur. Crucial to Mayfield’s analyses are his selected texts' peculiar conventions of humor. The term humor throughout refers to a literary style marked by a sustained critique of Southern culture, and Mayfield advances a novel approach to the cultural work humor performs by stressing the importance of “the way in which a joke or story is told,” as well as what it says (p. xxii). Humor in these stories, Mayfield shows, allows for a rehearsal of the paradox at the heart of masculine identity and an exploration of the self-deprecating elements at its essence. It is humor and Southern humor in particular that allows these writers to both explore and expose a deeply conflicted manhood, one, that as Mayfield writes, was more interiorized and alienated than we have assumed.
The essays in Friend’s collection aim to “contextualize and complicate the narrative of American manhood” by attending to masculinity in the post-Civil War era. As in Mayfield, these essays hold up honor and mastery as the dominant idealized masculine traits among antebellum white men, and Friend frames the collection by rehearsing the tension between “primitive” or honor-bound masculinity and the evangelical, entrepreneurial strain. Friend’s collection parts ways from Mayfield’s study, however, in its interest in comparing Southern white masculinity to that of black, Native American and queer Southern men. One result of this dialogic approach is that the essays in Friend’s collection provide a richer canvas on which to paint the complex portrait of Southern manhood. After reading Friend’s collection, it seems all but impossible to disentangle white Southern from black Southern manhood, and Mayfield’s omission of white men’s sexual and violent subjugation of slaves seems remiss. While the Southern gentlemen may have been “a prisoner to his dependents” (Mayfield, 24), pre- and post-war vigilante violence toward slaves, free blacks, and Native Americans, as discussed throughout Friend’s collection, seems to overshadow the emasculating effects of the “sectional inferiority complex” (Mayfield, 124) suffered by white, Southern men.
The aim of Friend’s collection is ambitious, as it sets out to explore the diversity of men populating the South between Reconstruction and the turn of the twenty-first century, and the volume’s scope at times dissipates its focus. While the individual essays are trenchantly researched and convincingly argued, Kris Durocher’s essay about the participation of children in public lynchings and John Howard’s on Southern sodomy legislation stand out, the collection as whole does not always hang together. Nevertheless, there are gems to be found in what is overall an original contribution to the fields of cultural history and masculinity studies.
One glaring omission in both Mayfield and Friend is the lack of any sustained attention to how men defined themselves in opposition to women. This may say more about recent trends in masculinity studies than the particular predilection of either author. Both these works certainly set the stage for a complimentary study examining Southern manhood not only in light of effeminacy and femininity but also as in conversation with evolving notions and practices of Southern womanhood.