A History of American Literature

Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 239

already know, a consequence of male power: he has never had to know, or appear to

know, what “mother” wants, until now. What is clear, however, is that this “mother”

has the same quiet courage, even heroism, as some of Jewett’s female characters.

“Nobility of character manifests itself at loop-holes when it is not provided with

large doors,” the narrator tells us, in the course of this story. And it is clear that, in

taking over the barn, she has acquired power along with territory: she has shown

and got what she wants, and also shown and become what she might be.

Regionalism in the South

The writing described as regionalist or local color after the Civil War was, very often,

committed to cultural restitution and recovery, the celebration of a vanishing social

order or the commemoration of one that had already vanished. So it is not really

surprising that much of this writing came from and concerned the South. Those

loyal to the feudal image of slave society could now blame the Civil War for the fact

that reality hardly coincided with myth. Those who were more critical were supplied

with a perfect subject: the clash between new and old habits of behavior and belief

as the Southern states were assimilated back into the nation. Southerners were

drawn to such writing for a whole range of reasons, varying from nostalgic alle-

giance to the good old days to a more skeptical interest in the legends that had

helped justify oppression and engineer civil conflict – and that still held imaginative

power and distributed social privilege across the region. So were those from outside

the South, not least because they were intrigued by the society they had helped

defeat, one that even more than any other prewar social order was now, for good or

ill, irretrievably lost. For many writers and readers, this meant that in effect the myth

of the feudal South was modulating into the myth of the Lost Cause. The South

Carolina poet Henry Timrod (1828–1867), for instance, is mainly known for poems

that honor the memory of the Confederate dead: those who, as he put it in one of

his poems, “The Unknown Dead” (1872), were “true martyrs of the fight / Which

strikes for freedom and for right.” A Confederate volunteer himself, who was to see

his house destroyed by the troops of General Sherman, Timrod chose to see the Civil

War, as many Southerners did, as a fight for white Southern “freedom” and inde-

pendence rather than as a fight to keep black Southerners in slavery. That made it

easier, not only to celebrate the heroism of Confederate troops, but to revere the

cause for which they had fought. “Sleep sweetly in your humble graves, / Sleep, mar-

tyrs of a fallen cause,” Timrod declared in his most famous poem, “Ode: Sung on the

Occasion of Decorating the Graves of the Confederate Dead, at Magnolia Cemetery,

Charleston, S.C., 1867” (1872). “Stoop, angels, hither from the skies! /” he concluded,

“There is no holier spot of ground / Than where defeated valor lies, / By mourning

beauty crowned!”

A more complex and subtler response to the defeat of the South is to be found in

the work of another Southern poet, Sidney Lanier (1842–1881), who was born in

Georgia. After writing his only novel, Tiger-Lilies (1867), Lanier turned to verse,

much of which was published only after his death. The verse varies widely in rhythm

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