Sherry Chandler

The Shadow Self

David Payne, “Writing on Writing,” in the March 2008 issue of The Oxford American, a column entitled “Carrying America’s Shadow:”

The first hint of an explanation for the marginalization of Southern writers appeared for me in the work of Barbara C. Ewell and Pamela Glenn Menke, feminist scholars of Southern lit. In their introduction to Southern Local Color, a volume of nineteenth-century short stories, they apply feminist and postcolonial theory, which holds women as “Other” to men, and colonized people as “Other” to their colonizers. Ewell and Menke point out that after the Civil War, the Northeast established itself as the center of American literary and cultural production (publishing houses, magazines, newspapers), as well as of political and economic power (Wall Street, etc.). As a result, the North took on the role of “Self” in America’s collective psyche; Northerners became the “we.” The South, by consequence of its defeat, became the “Other”—Southerners, the “they.”

Farfetched? Then ask yourself why those Boston and New York accents—which sound as “colorful” to Southerners as ours do up North—rate standard orthography, while our speech is rendered as phonetically spelled dialect.

Self and Other in the outward and political realm correspond to ego and shadow in the inward and psychological one, which brings me to my hypothesis—the bias against Southern writers is an example of a lingering Northern bias against the South itself, which has historically played the role of shadow in America’s collective psyche.

Long ago, C. Vann Woodward said that American character was formed on the basis of three factors: a national pattern of material abundance, the tradition of success, and a conviction of innocence. The South—an impoverished land that had suffered a crushing defeat at arms, and had committed, in slavery, one of history’s greatest, most protracted crimes—differed on all counts.

The South presented—and presents—a counternarrative that contradicts the official story America likes to tell the world—and tell itself—about its righteous exceptionalism among nations. For Americans, Woodward said—and he meant Northerners—history was something that happened someplace else, to someone else.

But we’re a “someone else” it happened to, the South a “someplace else” where history occurred.

The shadow, psychologists tell us, is the repository of what we hate and fear as well as of urges difficult to reconcile with self-regard. Thrusting these down into the unconscious, we then project them outward onto others.

This argument gets into some dangerous territory for me because it feeds into a certain defensiveness I feel as a cultural Southerner, a person whose forefathers fought on the wrong side of the Civil War. Nevertheless, I don’t think Southern defensiveness invalidates the argument.

And even though arguments that the North got rich from slavery, too, smack of rationalization for inescapable sin, the fact remains that it is easier to blame the South for all the national sins than to face up to the fact that the country was built on slavery and genocide.

The Political South, of course, never misses an opportunity to live up to its reputation, and yet the South is not monolithic. It’s as culturally diverse as any other area of the nation, with as many shades of opinion and as many shades of prejudice.

This argument seems to me to speak to Ritwik Banerjee’s comment at Windows Toward the World that those who judge never learn.

If I remember my Jungian psychology, the Shadow is not only a source of darkness, but also of creativity. It is instinctive, intuitive, and empathetic.

Payne goes on to argue that it is not the South’s racism that makes it suspect but its very blackness. The relationship of blacks and whites in the South has been exploitive but it has also been symbiotic. No other region is so influenced by African-American culture in language, diet, music, and literature. And so you have layers and layers of racism in the nation.

It seems we’re always ready to adopt the culture while exploiting the members of that culture.

It’s very controversial and complicated territory but so the truth often is.

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