William Gilmore Simms as a Node: Social Network of Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism

• In Event: Southern Exceptionalism Revisited: Constructing a Myth Through Negotiations and Collaborations

Abstract

This paper examines the wide-ranging social network built around William Gilmore Simms, aiming to bring new insight to the literary works of this major figure in the antebellum US Southern literature and politics. Known for his ardent support of slavery and secessionism, Simms spent his tumultuous life (1806-1870) with various kinds of people in various kinds of relationships. For instance, he was part of the politico-literary circle in the Young America Movement, which also included such notable figures as William Cullen Bryant, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Hermann Melville, while constituting the “sacred circle” of Southern intellectuals such as Edmund Ruffin, James Henry Hammond, and Nathaniel Beverley Tucker. In addition, his biography is more often than not decorated by Edgar Allan Poe’s high praise to him as a great American novelist, as well as by numerous political figures in South Carolina, both radical and moderate. Considering these outstandingly miscellaneous relationships beyond the North-South geopolitical divide in the mid-nineteenth century, Simms’s writings cannot be read simply as products of an individual writer of the US South, but rather by a node in social network theory, more specifically, the smallest single unit inside an open-system network.
Remapping Simms’s social network beyond the geographical scope of the US South can contribute to reconsidering the US Southern exceptionalism to which his literary works cannot be immune. The current issue of regarding the region as a unique cultural and historical entity is not just a narcissistic, nostalgic view of Southerners in the Old South tradition based on a racially divided, patriarchal social structure (simply put, the cultural landscape as depicted in Simms’s novels), but also undervaluation of racism and sexism occurring outside the region. To tackle the latter problem requires not only a geography-based approach, but also a network-based one that is not fundamentally closed in any geographical frame. In this respect, Simms serves as a great example to clarify the process in which both Southerners and non-Southerners collaborated to invent the fantasy of US Southern exceptionalism in the mid-nineteenth century. Although his Anti-Tom novels in the mid-1850s are inseparable from his explicit pro-slavery political position, that position itself can be regarded as an effect of either weak or strong, distant or close, and hostile or friendly human relationships of which Simms was a part. Through analyzing degrees and types of numerous relationships surrounding this writer, this paper eventually brings to the forefront his narratives on social networks that cannot be reduced to the exceptional.

Author

• Ryoichi Yamane, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Japan