The North of the South: The Natural World and the National Imaginary in the Literature of the Upper South

Barbara Ladd, a distinguished scholar of Southern literature, recently published her addresses from the 2018 Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lecture Series as The North of the South: The Natural World and the National Imaginary in the Literature of the Upper South. Ladd's book is an exercise in critical regionalism. She argues that the literature of the Upper South—which she defines as Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky—has a distinctive place within both Southern and U.S. literary histories. She contends that "the natural world" plays a distinctive role in "the national imaginary of Upper South writers" (3) and argues that attending "more literally" (30) to the role of nature in these texts will provide "a new and better understanding of ourselves as creations of a natural world that not only surrounds but also inhabits us" (12). Significant to readers of this journal, Ladd dedicates an entire chapter (one of only three in her brief volume) to Edgar Allan Poe, focusing both on his heritage as a Southerner and on the Southern geographies that appear in and inform his literature. She argues that Poe "was more of a naturalist than most people realize" (4) and submits that by situating Poe within the environment of the Upper South this naturalist strain in his fiction and poetry will become apparent.Poe is no stranger to exercises in canon making of the literatures of the American South. He appears in the seventeen-volume Library of Southern Literature (Martin and Hoyt, 1909–23) and has more recently featured in critical reassessments of the Southern literary tradition, including Jennifer Rae Greeson's Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature (Harvard, 2010), Coleman Hutchison's Apples and Ashes: Literature, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of America (Georgia, 2012), and Shawn Chandler Bingham and Lindsey A. Freeman's The Bohemian South: Creating Countercultures, from Poe to Punk (North Carolina, 2017). I don't anticipate that Ladd's short book will become the definitive take on Poe's relationship with the South and Southern literature. Nevertheless, there are a number of evocative insights in The North of the South that are worth taking seriously as topics for further study, even if Ladd has not dedicated sufficient space to develop the full potential of these valuable insights. This is a small book with only sixty-two pages of text, and the Poe chapter itself is just over twenty pages in length. Public lectures such as the ones this brief study derives from are designed to be suggestive and provocative rather than thorough and comprehensive. With this caveat in mind, Ladd's insights provide some fascinating starting points for thinking about Poe and the literature of the American South.Much of Ladd's argument hinges on the time that Poe spent in Virginia. She cites Poe's residency in Richmond and Charlottesville, along with those cities' proximity to the Blue Ridge Mountains, Ragged Mountains, and Great Dismal Swamp, as the key to two separate arguments about Poe's relationship to the Upper South. First, she argues that Poe's firsthand knowledge "of the natural world he inhabits" grants his literature access to the Upper South's "bioregion and the almost inconceivably interwoven realities of ecosystems" (26–27). From there she offers short readings of natural imagery in the poems "The Lake—To—" (1827), "Fairyland" (1829), "Introduction" (1831), "Alone" (1829), and "Dream-Land" (1844). Based on these and other short readings of "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), "Ligeia" (1838), and "Mesmeric Revelation" (1844), she posits, "We can best understand Poe's great subject, terror, through the lens of this understanding of the natural world, of place and matter, and argue that, in Poe, terror is the materiality of the soul and the sentience of the natural world, a sentience he seems to have felt intensely" (33).The second argument that Ladd makes relative to the time Poe spent in Virginia centers less on the natural landscape surrounding Richmond and more on the Virginia capital's status as "a city of merchants," making "Poe . . . himself a kind of merchant, if by that we mean an agent of exchange" (25). She writes further, "Richmond and the entire Eastern Seaboard were a crossroads where people from many different places and traditions were circulating," noting that "I have defined 'locality' in this Upper South in terms of the crossroads, and Poe himself as an agent of exchange among cultures and times" (26–27). The most solid example that Ladd provides of Poe as a "crossroads" figure and "agent of exchange" comes when she asks the question, "How might Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginiahave been read by Edgar Allan Poe?" (36). In the speculative exercise that follows, Ladd reads the natural imagery in "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" against Jefferson's nationalist rhetoric, concluding, "There are simply too many counterpoints to Jefferson's optimistic nationalism in Poe's tale to be accidental" (41). This argument for Poe's resistance to Jefferson's nationalism continues into the third and final chapter of the book, on the twentieth-century authors Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Cormac McCarthy, and Toni Morrison, who follow Poe, Ladd argues, in their use of nature writing to "recast the narrative of nation building in a melancholy tenor, as stories of loss and forgetting" (4).One of the most provocative moments in The North of the South takes place during Ladd's reading of Poe's "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" against Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, when her stated methodology of reading "the natural world somewhat more literally" butts up against her need to interpret Poe's nature writing more figuratively. "I stated earlier that I did not want to move too quickly to a figurative or metaphorical reading," she admits, "but clearly at this point I'm doing just that" (37). I find Ladd's candor refreshing as she acknowledges that her attempt to access the natural world "more literally" runs afoul of the unavoidably figurative and metaphorical nature of language. Despite writing a book about the literature of the natural world, Ladd does not foreground the theoretical work of contemporary ecocritics. But in her frustrated attempt to do an end run around figurative language by reading "the natural world somewhat more literally," she has nevertheless foregrounded one of the primary theoretical issues in literary ecocriticism—namely, the relationship between the natural world and the meaning-making projects of human beings (which include language and literature). Ladd's book has got me thinking that Poe would be a great candidate for ecocritical studies that put human language and the natural world into direct conversation. (Matthew A. Taylor's 2013 book from the University of Minnesota Press, Universes without Us: Posthuman Cosmologies in American Literature, has already taken Poe in this productive direction.)A text like The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), for instance, confronts both mysterious landscapes and mysterious languages alongside the narrator's fraught encounter with racially coded human beings. (An earlier volume in the same University of Georgia Press series that published Ladd's book—John T. Matthews's 2022 volume Hidden in Plain Sight: Slave Capitalism in Poe, Hawthorne, and Joel Chandler Harris—already gestures in this direction.) Similarly, a text like "The Gold-Bug" (1843) is rooted to a very specific landscape (Sullivan's Island, South Carolina) but is overwhelmingly preoccupied with the words, numbers, codes, and logics of human thought. I'm grateful for the provocative insights in Ladd's book that already have me rethinking my assumptions about Poe's relationship to the South and its landscapes. I am optimistic that other readers will find The North of the South similarly generative of further scholarship on Poe, Southern literature, and the natural world.