| Popis: |
Chapter 4 considers three plantation novels that depict—in different registers—Southern planters of pre-Famine Irish and Scottish Gaelic origin: Margaret Mitchell’s Gerald O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, William Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom! (both 1936), and Stephen Fox in Foxes of Harrow (1946), a bestselling novel by Frank Yerby, an African-American author of Scots-Irish maternal ancestry. (The film adaptation of the last, starring Maureen O’Hara, is also considered.) The chapter’s discussion of the entwined roots of the slave-holding Southern plantation, the Caribbean Great House, and the Irish Big House also encompasses an Elizabeth Bowen-inspired Eudora Welty short story. The three planter novels centre on initially penniless and ‘off-white’ protagonists of broadly Irish association who transform themselves into the exploitative and unconditionally white landowner class to whom they themselves had once been subject. These three novelists were all of Southern birth in a period in which that region was still racially segregated, and all three claimed Scottish Gaelic or pre-Famine Irish descent. Nevertheless, their origins do not conform to the dominant image of the Irish-connected writer as white, Catholic, and northeastern post-Famine by origin. |
