Reconstructing Violence

The Southern Rape Complex in Film and Literature

Deborah E. Barker

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780807160640
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

In this bold study of cinematic depictions of violence in the south, Deborah E. Barker explores the ongoing legacy of the "southern rape complex" in American film. Taking as her starting point D. W. Griffith's infamous Birth of a Nation, Barker demonstrates how the tropes and imagery of the southern rape complex continue to assert themselves across a multitude of genres, time periods, and stylistic modes.Drawing from Gilles Deleuze's work on cinema, Barker examines plot, dialogue, and camera technique as she considers several films: The Story of Temple Drake (1933), Sanctuary (1958), Touch of Evil (1958), To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), and Cape Fear (1962). Placing this body of analysis in the context of the historical periods when these films appeared and the literary sources on which they are based, Barker reveals the protean power of cinematic racialized violence amid the shifting cultural and political landscapes of the South and the nation as a whole.By focusing on familiar literary and cinematic texts—each produced or set during moments of national crisis such as the Great Depression or the civil rights movement—Barker's Reconstructing Violence offers fresh insights into the anxiety that has underpinned sexual and racial violence in cinematic representations of the South.

CHAPTER 1

Confederate Abjection in D. W. Griffith’s Early Civil War Films and Thomas Dixon’s Clansman

IN ADDITION TO the historical, cultural, and psychological circumstances that gave rise to the southern rape complex and its associated tropes, as outlined in the introduction, in order to articulate The Birth of a Nation’s role as a model of the cinematic southern rape complex, it is necessary to examine the “problem” of the abject Confederate body in Griffith’s earlier Civil War films, which found its “solution” in Birth. While the ramifications and utilizations of the southern rape complex are not limited to the South, a key component of its formulation is the post-Reconstruction rewriting of white southern abjection and loss, such as that found in both Griffith’s Civil War films as well as in the source material, Thomas Dixon’s Clansman. For decades the critical emphasis on Griffith’s early Civil War films was on the technical and historical issues of staging the battle scenes as precursors to The Birth of a Nation. Apart from the staging, even analyses of the contents of these films focused on them as antecedents to Confederate bravery as depicted in Birth. It is only more recently that critics have begun to examine the troubling images of cowardice and shame that emerge in these early films.¹ Susan Courtney has provided the most extensive analysis of the Civil War films in relation to fantasies of miscegenation as they threaten masculinity. Courtney explains that white male agony as presented in the earlier films is transferred to white female suffering in The Birth of a Nation (both as a response to the Civil War and at the hands of black men), while the phallic gaze, as “removed, omniscient, seeing but not seen,” is associated with white male power, and the “look” is limited to black male desire or white female vulnerability (25). In her broader examination of various forms of cinematic miscegenation (not just black and white), in which white women appear “as tortured spectacles,” Courtney compares Griffith’s Biograph work as the backstory not only to Birth but to the “most classic miscegenation films of the silent era,” Cecil B. De Mille’s The Cheat (1915) and Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919) (19). Clearly, fears of miscegenation pervade a larger national landscape; however—given the significance of the southern rape complex in articulating fears of miscegenation—geography, along with race and gender, is crucial especially because the southern setting continues to be used as a kind of shorthand that evokes fears of miscegenation, even when people of color are not presented as a threatening force. The present study therefore examines specifically how white southern abjection and defeat in the Civil War films is refigured as white southern valor and victory in The Birth of a Nation through the apparatus of the southern rape complex.

The southern rape complex serves as the most obvious solution to Confederate abjection offered in The Clansman and The Birth of a Nation, projecting abjection onto African Americans and then cleansing it through the sacrificial blood of the southern belle and refiguring the defeated Confederate as the victorious Klansman. Yet while both Griffith and Dixon employ the complex and the vigilante violence of the Ku Klux Klan in their efforts to rehabilitate the South, there are significant variations in how they lay the groundwork for the southern Klan “victory.” These differences become apparent when we look at how Dixon and Griffith envision Confederate defeat and its negative consequences. In The Clansman Dixon mediates both Confederate abjection and its purification through politicized characters, while Griffith, in The Birth of a Nation, revises the very scenes of Confederate abjection that appear in his earlier Civil War films. These variations attest to the myriad problems of white postwar Confederate/U.S. identity and citizenship and the ways in which Griffith and Dixon use the drama and hysteria of racialized sexual violence to obfuscate them. Thus, the southern rape complex not only justifies violence in limiting the freedom of African Americans; it also masks white southerners’ own problematic relationship to U.S. citizenship.

For Dixon the problem is that while a Confederate victory would create patriots of those who fought for the Confederate States of America (CSA), defeat reduces Confederates to the status of traitors against the U.S. government. In The Clansman Dixon presents southerners as abject but does so through the words of Austin Stoneman, a fictional version of Thaddeus Stevens, leader of the Radical Republicans, who is subsequently discredited in order to undercut or even remove the link between southerners and abjection.² The vigilantism of the Klan is furthermore presented as revitalizing southern masculinity and reasserting racial domination through the “second civil war” of Reconstruction, which, though it reestablishes white southern domination, does not speak to the all-important question of national patriotism. To tackle this issue, Dixon turns to Abraham Lincoln in an attempt to redefine the fallen Confederates as patriots, and he presents (through Lincoln) a national plan to expunge African Americans through forced colonization.³ Thus, Dixon’s solution does not rest on the Klan alone but uses Lincoln’s words (out of context) to cleanse the fallen Confederates. At the same time The Clansman envisions a national project to “abjectify” African Americans not only through the act of lynching but through the contradictory call for colonization as a means both to eject African Americans from the nation and to use them as surrogates to colonize Latin America and Africa in the name of the United States of America.

Griffith, on the other hand, in his earlier Civil War films, presents a more devastating depiction of southern defeat, which he conflates with a cowardice that cannot be cleansed but only hidden or masked through the subterfuge of honor.⁴ Two 1910 Civil War films in particular expose the abject Confederate body and the artifice of honor.⁵ In The Honor of His Family the corpse of a Confederate deserter is literally posed on the battlefield to hide the family shame, while in The House with Closed Shutters the Confederate deserter is shut away for life, posing as his cross-dressing sister, who died taking his place on the battlefield. In both films the corpse of the fallen Confederate soldier threatens to destroy the family’s name and sense of itself as southern and honorable, both of which are cornerstones of social identity. In The Birth of a Nation, well before the victorious ride of the Klan (as if to make possible even this problematic concept of southern heroism), Griffith reshoots these earlier scenes of cowardice in an effort to create an image of heroism in the face of defeat; however, to present southern victory, he must turn to the southern rape complex and the KKK.

LINCOLN: THE SOUTH’S BEST FRIEND

The project of The Clansman and subsequently The Birth of a Nation was to dramatize the revisionist historical accounts of Reconstruction (which depict the Confederates as patriots defending the Constitution and states’ rights). Dixon did not invent the historical revision of Reconstruction disseminated by William A. Dunning’s influential Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction (1898), but Dixon’s books and plays, and later Griffith’s movie, helped to popularize “reconstructed Reconstruction” for a mass consumer audience far beyond the reach of any historian.⁶ The greatest threat to southern identity in the novel is voiced by Austin Stoneman, whose description of the former Confederates exemplifies Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection. Drawing on anthropological theories of purity and pollution, Kristeva explains that in establishing an independent identity separate from the maternal body, we must begin to differentiate between “me” and “not me.” This differentiation extends to bodily waste and fluids (including blood and corpses), which were once me but are now repellant and must be cast off or ritualistically contained. Because it was once me, the abject cannot be easily dismissed as the other; it is neither self nor other, and in this liminal position it has the power to unsettle identity and threaten boundaries.

Stoneman’s scorn for the South is peppered with images of waste and pollution. Employing the very language and logic that slaveholders used to justify slavery, Stoneman negatively casts the former Confederates in the role of savages outside the communication of civilized society, thus justifying military control, seizure of lands, and disenfranchisement of white Confederate officers and politicians. Stoneman refers to the “so-called states” that “are now but conquered provinces” as “waste territories” that “are unfit to associate with civilized communities” (43). Stoneman’s ultimate response to the South as “conquered soil” is “to blot it from the map” “by the extermination of its landed aristocracy, that their mothers shall not breed another race of traitors” (49, 50). Furthermore, Stoneman’s condemnation of the white southerner extends backward in history, and he denounces the Constitution and the American flag as already corrupted by the southern influence of slavery. Dixon thus presents Stoneman as the actual traitor to the Union through his denunciation of the Constitution—a “creation, both in letter and spirit, of the slaveholders of the South,” which created “a league with death and a covenant with hell’”—and the flag, which he refers to as “a polluted rag!” (42, 43).⁷

Applying Kristeva’s theory of abjection to Stoneman’s rhetoric, we see that he casts the white aristocratic southerner—“whose clothes smell of the blood of [his] kindred” and whose heart “has long ago rotted” from the “Satanic Institution of Slavery” that has “tainted the air”—as the abject (50, 53). The postwar Confederate is both American and not-American, part of the foundation of a democratic national identity yet part of an aristocratic slavocracy, a source of contagion and waste that must be cut out and exterminated. The South and slavery, therefore, are the sources of the pollution that threaten the principle of democracy upon which the nation is supposed to be founded. Dixon would no doubt be aware that Stoneman’s repeated metaphors tying the South to the image of the rotting corpse would be especially inflammatory to a southern audience.

The unprecedented death toll of the Civil War triggered extreme apprehension about death and burial, while it also renewed interest in the relation of the physical body to the afterlife. Anxiety about burial was particularly acute in the South, given that the bodies of so many Confederate soldiers were unaccounted for.⁸ To further add to the insult (from the perspective of the former slaveholders), Stoneman pronounces that only black rule and the equal distribution of property can contain the threat of the treasonous Confederates and purge the nation of the blight of slavery thrust upon the nation by the South (53). Dixon clearly presents these ideas as shocking to the southern reader and Stoneman as vengeful and overzealous, but later in the novel Dixon is also in the position of having to defend the very same ideas in relation to freedmen: the desire to purge them from the country (through colonization). The southern rape complex then becomes that defense, the one crucial difference between white northerners’ accounts of the South and white southerners’ accounts of African Americans that (in the logic of the novel) justifies the equally vengeful and overzealous retaliation against blacks.

To counter Stoneman’s accusations, much of the energy of The Clansman (which is not fully conveyed in Griffith’s movie) emanates from the rhetorical, not military, battles waged by various characters who try to defend former Confederates as loyal Americans and at the same time to justify their secession from the Union. To defend the South concerning secession, slavery, and the attitudes toward blacks, Dixon employs Lincoln as his spokesman for segregation and African American colonization. Dixon therefore stages the initial debate over the southern states between President Lincoln and Austin Stoneman, establishing the crucial stakes of the argument: the identity of the citizens of the southern states.

Dixon’s invocation of President Lincoln as his chief spokesman for the South works on a number of levels. As the victorious defender of the Union, no one is in a better position than Lincoln to pardon and defend the former Confederates without seeming disloyal to the Union. As a fallen martyr, the president has taken on mythic qualities, so that to criticize him would border on sacrilege, but his death also ensures that his views on Reconstruction can only be speculated upon (though his early statements did focus on reuniting the nation). Both sides, therefore, can present his views as theirs, and Lincoln becomes the perfect all-purpose cultural signifier (Foner, Fiery Trial xv; Stokes 186–90).⁹

Even before the debate between Stoneman and Lincoln over the status of the South, Dixon positions Lincoln as the embodiment of an indissoluble Union, as both a northerner and as a true southerner. Just as racial status is assumed to be based on visual recognition, so too is geographical origin. When Mrs. Cameron goes to the “great heart” to plead for the life of her only remaining son, she “recognizes” Lincoln as a southerner “by [his] looks, [his] manner of speech, [his] easy, kindly ways, [his] tenderness and humor, [his] firmness in the right as [he] saw it, and above all, the way [he] rose and bowed to a woman in an old, faded black dress, whom [he] knew to be an enemy” (31). Lincoln confirms his southern heritage, explaining that his parents were Virginians and that he was born in Kentucky. Furthermore, at every turn in the debate with Stoneman, Lincoln establishes the mutual interdependence of North and South in all things both before and after the war. Although Lincoln condemns slavery, he asks, “Is not the North equally responsible for slavery?” He also takes responsibility for southern atrocities at the Andersonville prison, maintaining that the death of Union soldiers was the result of the North’s refusal to exchange prisoners and their blockade of ports and seizure of medicine and food. History, he maintains, will bear this out, showing “as many deaths on our side as theirs.” Lincoln even credits southerners for the actual preservation of the Union: “But for the loyalty of four border Southern states . . . who fought for the Union against their own flesh and blood, we should have lost” (47–48). As champion of the South, Lincoln maintain that the South is and always has been part of the United States and condemns blacks—not Confederates—as the true blight on the nation.

Negating the notion of the South as abject, Lincoln symbolically purifies the “rotted” heart of the South that Stoneman condemns, repatriates Confederate soldiers, and, from the “waste territories” of the South, unifies the nation. Disavowing Stoneman, Lincoln maintains that “we fought no war of conquest” and, therefore, the South cannot be a “‘conquered province’ for us to spoil” because “a nation cannot make conquest of it own territory.” According to Lincoln, the war was one of “self-preservation as an indissoluble Union,” and thus the southern states “must be immediately restored to their rights, or we shall betray the blood we have shed” (44). The South, therefore, cannot be abjected because it is and always has been part of the Union: the blood of “my kindred” is a pollutant only if the southern states are not restored. But Lincoln’s speech goes on to redeem even the corpses, “the most sickening of wastes” (Kristeva 4), from abjection by magically reanimating them through the “mystic” power of memory.

Rather than reasserting the division between life and death, Lincoln’s famous prewar inaugural address of 1861, which Dixon presents as a postwar speech, creates a living connection with the Civil War dead, thereby labeling all the dead, both Union and Confederates, as “patriots.” As Kristeva explains, the corpse, when “seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection”; it is a “border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, ‘I’ is expelled.” While bodily fluids and excrement can be abjected beyond the border of me and not-me, the corpse “is death infecting life. Abject . . . Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us” (3, 4). Regarding his belief in “the honor of Lee and his people” to rejoin the Union, Lincoln declares that memory is the link that will reanimate the corpses in the grave, connecting the living and the dead: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when touched again, as they surely will be, by the better angels of our nature” (53). All the Civil War dead are thus connected by the “chords of memory” to the flesh and blood of living hearts and thereby reunited and cleansed, as Lincoln’s prewar plea to the South not to secede—based on a shared military history—becomes the postwar reanimation of the Union and an implicit confirmation of succession as an act of patriotism, not treason. But in “cleansing” the Confederate dead, Lincoln has not gotten rid of the “true” threat of abjection. Ultimately, according to Dixon’s Lincoln, it is “the Negro” (not the CSA) who is responsible for “the desolation of ten great states, and rivers of blood” (46), which can only be sanctified through the North-South reunion and the expulsion of African Americans.

Lincoln’s assassination, of course, preempted his final decision on Reconstruction; however, taking Lincoln’s words out of their historical context, Dixon uses Lincoln’s rhetoric against slavery, both before and during the war, to create his own postwar rhetoric of Reconstruction against African Americans. Weaving passages from Lincoln’s speeches—especially his references to colonization of freedmen—with his own prose, Dixon lays the groundwork for his narrative justification for colonizing blacks within the country, as he sets them apart from the white population and reimagines them as both American and not-American, as colonial subjects within their own country. Referring to a speech Lincoln made in 1858 during his bid for the Senate—in which he proposed that the former slaves should be colonized—Dixon posits Lincoln as the force behind the postwar desire to “expel” blacks from America because their “assimilation is neither possible nor desirable” (47). Dixon is therefore able to incorporate elements from earlier speeches to demonstrate Lincoln’s racial prejudice and his belief that “there is a physical difference between the white and black races which will forever forbid their living together on terms of social and political equality. If such be attempted one must go to the wall” (45). Furthermore, by adding to Lincoln’s 1858 condemnation of slavery—“a house divided against itself will not stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free . . . It will become all one thing, or all the other”—Dixon turns it into a postwar call for colonization: “The Nation cannot now exist half white and half black, any more than it could exist half slave and half free” (47).

It is true that Lincoln sought colonization as a political solution to emancipation—even including money for colonization in the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation and promoting two attempts at colonization, which were failures. Congress rescinded the monies pledged for voluntary colonization, and Lincoln arranged for the last of the “colonists” to return home. Most historians agree that the Emancipation Proclamation and the use of African Americ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Confederate Abjection in D. W. Griffith’s Early Civil War Films and Thomas Dixon’s Clansman (1905)
• Chapter 2. Taking the South Out of the Southern Rape Complex in The Story of Temple Drake (1933)
• Chapter 3. Believing in Mammy: Sanctuary (1961), the Movie
• Chapter 4. The Power of the False in Touch of Evil (1958)
• Chapter 5. “A Man Like that Doesn’t Deserve Civil Rights”: Systemic Violence in Cape Fear (1962)
• Chapter 6. “Blind Spots”: The Visual Logic and Historical Context of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
• Coda: A Time to Kill (1996) and Post–Civil Rights Variations on the Southern Rape Complex
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index