Content area
Abstract
In 1640, Ovid's Metamorphoses became the first book to be translated into English in the Americas by George Sandys, treasurer of the Virginia Company. This text marks the beginning of a Southern literary tradition in which identities have been consistently constructed as possessing a stable essence linked to an unstable or inconsistent embodiment. Those who write about the South deploy such identities in order to lay claim to a coherent regional identity which can survive radical changes in economic, social, political and cultural circumstances over time. A startling number of nineteenth-century texts concerning the region, including works by William Gilmore Simms, Edgar Allan Poe, George Washington Cable and Charles Chesnutt, contain imagery of haunting and conjuring, two supernatural phenomena which are based on just such an assumption that identity can survive bodily metamorphosis and even bodily absence. In conjuring, a stable identity is linked to a body which may transform, fragment and/or dramatically reposition itself physically, economically, or socially. Haunting, on the other hand, frees identity from the body, suggesting that the essential self continues after death and raising the possibility that it also exists prior to birth. We find a similar tendency to deny a clear correspondence between identity and embodiment in eighteenth-century writings about nature in the South by Thomas Jefferson, William Bartram, Hector St John de Crèvecoeur and Olaudah Equiano and in the twentieth-century literary and cultural criticism of Perry Miller and F. O. Matthiessen which relies heavily on the imagery of an enduring collective mind (identity) experiencing transient cultural renaissances (embodiments) which was first developed by theorists of the New Negro and Southern Renaissances. The construction of a persistent identity linked to a metamorphic embodiment or disembodied entirely which began with Sandys's translation of Ovid survives in Southern literature into the twentieth century, although the vocabulary in which it is expressed and the purposes for which it is deployed varies dramatically. This Southern paradigm for regional identity eventually came to influence the construction of national identity in American Studies scholarship which nevertheless sought to marginalize the region.
