Wolfe's Racism Revisited: A Response to Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr (Critical Essay‪)‬

Following the recent trend of reading southern writers within a global context, Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr., in The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930-1950 (2009), offers a valuable examination of the ways that major writers from this period vigorously engaged in the worldwide debate about the evolution of government and social structure. Inspired by Lillian Smith's view that the South was haunted by three ghosts of racism and segregation--the black woman as sexual object and as surrogate mother, as well as the ostracized child of mixed-race parentage--Brinkmeyer identifies a "fourth ghost" haunting the southern psyche: the specter of European Fascism arising within America (3). In chapter 5, devoted to Thomas Wolfe, he explores the connections between this fourth ghost and Wolfe's "nativist" racism (153). Contrary to what he sees as the common tendency to view white southern writers of the 1930s and '40s as xenophobically turning inward and away from the debate about the threat of totalitarianism to Western democracy, Brinkmeyer argues that they were actually "turned fearfully outward, haunted by the ghostly presence of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany" (2). Brinkmeyer traces the numerous forms that fear of Fascism was to take--beginning with the Nashville Agrarians' fear of modernity as a manifestation of Fascism and their allegiance to southern regionalism as the last bulwark against the erosion of democracy. Afterward, he examines the Agrarians' antithesis in W. J. Cash, who viewed the South's "resistance to modernity as the death of civilization and its traditions" (87) and perceived the ideological similarities between white southerners and their contemporaries in Nazi Germany--notably authoritarianism, fear of difference, and willingness to punish dissent with barbaric violence. Brinkmeyer also offers compelling readings of William Alexander Percy, Thomas Wolfe, Lillian Smith, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, and Lillian Hellman. All these writers, with the exception of Faulkner and McCullers, Brinkmeyer notes, visited Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy during the 1930s and returned "transformed, their fiction and drama turning decidedly darker and more focused on authoritarian politics and control" (23).