Southern Belles and English Poets (Enrichment Lecture: 19)

The Department of English organized the nineteenth in its series of virtual Enrichment Lectures on 13 August 2021 with Professor Julia Nitz from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, on “Southern Belles and English Poets: Intertextual Self-Fashioning in the Civil War Diaries of White Southern Women”. 

The session began as Prof. Nitz gave the audience a generic, broad insight into her research work and the connotations of the word ‘belle’. She dovetailed it with an understanding of how patriarchy propelled the expectations of elite conduct from women in the nineteenth century and how these diary documents were infused with literary references of the then current works. She then elicited the various factors that brought these diary texts into existence and how they were modelled by their authors to comply with their ‘semi-public’ status; how women were asked to create them for archival preserving and how familial surveillance prevented it to be direct. 

She then cited samples from two such diarists, firstly Sarah Morgan, who used quotes from Shakespeare’s King Lear to imply how the south was responsible for the misery inflicted upon it and secondly, Mary Chestnut who also paraphrased extracts from King Lear and paralleled Gloucester’s adultery to the sexual harassment of enslaved women by the Lords in the south, both of which were thought to be causal for the national crisis that followed. She then added observations on the self-awareness and acknowledgement of sin by Morgan and the lack of intersectional feminism by Chestnut who critiqued white patriarchy but not the ill-treatment of the enslaved women. After this, Prof. Nitz shared color coded, Scottish, English, American and Irish sources for literary allusions. She rounded off this portion of the lecture denoting how American literature is dominated by continental literature. 

There was an extensive elaboration on the five functions of intertextual allusions and why they hold such gravitas for both an individualized as well as collective understanding of history and literature. These diary accounts were not just a channel of emotional processing but also a source of cognitive learning, acting as literary experiences in the lieu of real-life experiences. It demonstrated how these southern diarists were able to identify their fellows in fictional characters and drew analogies through juxtapositions. Extensive research into these diarists remains crucial as they were also a part of the American curriculum after the Civil War and still are employed in post-war studies for understanding war mechanisms.

Towards the end of the lecture, Prof. Nitz gave an account of the Southern refugee Judith White Brockenbrough followed by an interactive dissection of ‘The Song of the Shirt’ by Thomas Hood. The session was concluded by an extensive multi-disciplinary Q&A which explored interpretations of Hood’s song; inaccurate, unjust representations of the enslaved women, the involvement of trans-Atlantic Scottish history of enslavement and how these comprise the painful portions of memory culture. She also shared how her tryst with the field has been equivocal; as crucial as this research is, it is equally cruel to encounter.