Rich in Love
JOSEPHINE HUMPHREYS
Osceola’s Grave and Monument
Fort Moultrie postcard, available in the gift shop or online, $5
John C. Calhoun Monument – Marion Square,
Charleston, SC
I also felt strongly that
history was a category
comprising not only
famous men of bygone
eras, but me, yesterday.
Rich in Love
John C. Calhoun was a U.S. Senator and served as Vice President under two presidents.
Wade Hampton Hotel – Columbia, SC
Wade Hampton Hotel – Columbia, SC
(Left) View from the Capitol today; (above)
Buildings that replaced the Wade Hampton
Hotel
Wade Hampton
Wade Hampton III, for whom the hotel was
named, led a Confederate cavalry during the
Civil War. Later, he served as governor of
South Carolina and a member of the U.S.
Senate.
He was the son of Wade Hampton II, a.k.a.
“Colonel Wade Hampton,” one of the
wealthiest planters in the antebellum South
and owner of the most slaves. Wade Hampton
was a lieutenant colonel during the American
War for Independence.
Postsouthern Sense of Place
 That region we have known and narrated as “the
South” may no longer be primarily agrarian—it may
in fact have ceased to exist as a distinctive economicgeographical entity—but the social practice and
production of place continues. Whether one likes it
or not, capitalist land speculation and real-estate
development play a major role in the reproduction—
the creative destruction—of traditional “southern”
loci.

Martyn Bone, The Postsouthern Sense of Place in
Contemporary Fiction
Postsouthern Feminism
 To Woman, lovely woman of
the Southland, as pure and
chaste as this sparkling water,
as cold as this gleaming ice,
we lift this cup, and we pledge
our hearts and our lives to the
protection of her virtue and
chastity.

– a traditional toast documented
by Carl Carmer in Stars Fell on
Alabama (1934)
Illustration from Harper’s Weekly (Sept. 7, 1861)
Postsouthern Feminism
 The cult of Southern womanhood endowed [the
white southern woman] with at least five totally
different images and asked her to be good enough
to adopt all of them. She is required to be frigid,
passionate, sweet, bitchy, and scatterbrained—all at
the same time. Her problems spring from the fact
that she succeeds. Antebellum southern civilization
was built upon the white woman’s untouchable
image.

Florence King, “Would Youall Be Good Enough to Excuse Me
While I Have an Identity Crisis?” or: The Cult of Southern
Womanhood
Postsouthern Feminism
“I was taught that there is no halfway ground that a woman is either a lady or
not” – Caroline Compson in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury
“The Southern woman’s problem with the virtuous image has been intensified by
constant articulation . . . , so it is not surprising that she behaves like Scarlett
O’Hara for a month and then puts in a week as Sweet Melanie Wilkes.”
– Florence King, “Would Youall Excuse Me. . .”
Relevant Scholarship
 Anne Goodwyn Jones, Tomorrow Is Another Day
(1981)
 Carol S. Manning, ed., The Female Tradition in
Southern Literature (1994)
 Michael Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature
(1998)—chapter on the “Quentin thesis” includes
reading of Rich in Love
 Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing
Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990 (2000)