Mississippi Quarterly

In The Miller of Old Church, published in 1911 and set in her native Virginia where time all but stands still, Ellen Glasgow uses the voice of Abel Revercomb to verbalize what she sees as the southern malady and the blighted legacy of the Old South. Abel, the eponymous miller, observes of Old Church, and by extension of the South, that “[t]he world he moved in was peopled by a race of beings that acted under ideal laws and measured up to an impossible standard” (164). The ideal laws and impossible standards that form an inextricable part of the southern mythology center on the conception of aristocratic heritage as a staple of southern identity and police the behavior of men and women. None can escape conformity, and Glasgow’s characters’ struggles to imitate or elevate themselves to the vaunted archetype become lost causes predetermined by the very inaccessibility of the standards they wish to emulate. Although Glasgow was not immune to the “imperishable charm,” she never tired of exposing the debilitating effect of the Old South mythology on growth and progress, opining that what the South needed to reinvigorate itself was “blood and irony”—blood because it “was satisfied to exist on borrowed ideas” and irony because it is “the safest antidote to sentimental decay” (A Certain Measure 12, 28). James Branch Cabell, her contemporary and fellow Richmonder, responded to Glasgow’s call for exposing the pernicious influence of Old South sentimentalism and its stale ideal of aristocratic descent on the conception of southern identity. The result, an ambiguous and ironic novel, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice, was published in 1919.¹ It is [End Page 143] a text of literary and cultural contradictions, simultaneously reificatory and deconstructive—reificatory because it acknowledges the allure of the myth of aristocratic descent to the southern mind, deconstructive because it reveals the shaky foundations on which it is built.²

This reification-deconstruction dialectic leads to an aporia, a nonresolution, emblematic of the struggle of an identity formed through the politics of mythopoeia and historic recycling. Cabell, according to Louis D. Rubin, Jr., was “more fully conscious of exactly what as a novelist he was doing, and why he was doing it, than any other American author” (No Place on Earth viii). What he was doing was debunking on a large scale the myths of aristocratic descent, chivalry, and idealized femininity that shaped southern consciousness and identity. As a writer, Cabell, unlike his character John Charteris in The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck who is also a novelist, refused to “prattle of ‘ole Marster’ and ‘ole Miss,’ and throw in a sprinkling of ‘mockin’-buds’ and ‘hants’ and ‘horg-killing time,’ and of sweeping animadversions as to all ‘free niggers’; and to narrate how ‘de quality use ter cum’” (158). A “Yankee cap’en” conveniently shot in “de laig” and a “Young Miss” who “had him fotch up ter de gret hous” complete the list of Charteris’s “main ingredients” for cooking up a southern novel (15, 9). Instead of this tried and tested formula that worked well for fellow Virginian novelists like Thomas Nelson Page, Cabell opted for, in Delmore Schwartz’s words, “dandyism of speech and florid irony” (Doyle 181); or, what he called “contrapuntal prose,” which became not just the hallmark of his style but a medium through which he could trade in truths not necessarily palatable to his southern readership (MacDonald, James Branch Cabell 218). The publication of Jurgen, which Joseph Hergesheimer called a “very strange and very beautiful book,” with its prompt suppression by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and Exoneration, brought him short-lived fame and notoriety (Colum and Freeman 133).³ In the long run, Cabell’s “lovely bits of gymnastic writing” (MacDonald, James Branch Cabell 218) proved too much for the [End Page 144] reading public, so much so that by mid-twentieth century he had become a rara avis.⁴ A brief revival of Cabell’s works in the 1980s deliberately downplayed the complexity of his writing and succeeded only in...