SOURCE: Christophersen, Bill. “‘Jean-ah Poquelin’: Cable's Place in Southern Gothic.” South Dakota Review 20, no. 2 (summer 1982): 55-66.

[In the following essay, Christophersen praises Cable for the success with which he appropriates the English gothic tradition to an American landscape, noting that he grounds the grotesquery of his story in the realism of the socio-economic reality of his country.]

Ernest Stone, in his article entitled “Usher, Poquelin, Miss Emily: The Progress of Southern Gothic,”¹ renders a previous comparison between Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Faulkner's “A Rose For Emily”² suddenly meaningful by broadening it to include George W. Cable's story “Jean-ah Poquelin.” Faulkner's story, by virtue of its plot alone, resembles Cable's story much more than it does Poe's. Cable's story and Faulkner's are, in fact, suspiciously similar.³ Stone compares the two in detail, noting, finally, that both stories present

… a central conflict between a proud and doomed, but indomitable last representative of an important family of a bygone era of the South and the progress of an encroaching and usurping civilization. Both Emily Grierson and Jean Marie Poquelin perpetuate their pristine importance by immuring themselves in a massive, impregnable, outmoded house; and both successfully and secretly conceal in that house until their death a human ghoul who is all that is left to them, the success of concealment itself recording the triumph of a figure whom time and progress have otherwise relegated to ridiculousness.⁴

For Stone, however, the parallels disappear beyond the boundaries of plot and approximate characterization.

While not wishing to dispute Faulkner's masterpiece, I believe the two stories share more than a common plot structure and range of characters. Furthermore, I think Stone exaggerates the gap between the fictional mentalities of Cable and Faulkner even as he fails to appreciate the considerable gulf in orientation between Cable and Poe—all to Cable's detriment. I believe the “characteristic modernity” Stone sees as distinguishing Faulkner from his predecessors is too protean and ambiguous a criterion for differentiation. My sympathies lie with the critic who contends that “[Cable's] subject matter, his attitudes, and his method look forward to the literary renascence of the twentieth century.”⁵

Stone begins with the cogent observation that “unlike ‘Usher,’ Cable's and Faulkner's are stories not only of horror, but everywhere of time and place.” This observation, which touches on one of Cable's important contributions, might well have served to extenuate Cable's achievement. Stone, however, forfeits the implications of his insight: he finds this time and place orientation important only in justifying the tone and the plot, which concerns the expropriation of an old Creole's land by the first influx of Americans into Louisiana. Stone writes:

… merely a decade or two later, during the flood of immigration into New Orleans, Poquelin's interview with the governor would have been pathetic, rather than dramatic; and even a decade earlier, there would have been no need for it (the purchase of Louisiana in 1803 being ultimately responsible for Poquelin's desperate situation).⁶

Continuing his comparison between Poe's fiction and Cable's, Stone writes: “What distinguishes ‘Jean-ah Poquelin’ from the works of Poe and his Germanic predecessors is the successful mixture with Gothicism of truly local color and characterization.”⁷ The superficial appeal of local color, however, constitutes relatively small merit in and of itself. To relegate Cable's importance to the realm of local color, or to see him simply as one who ornamented the somber tone of the Gothic with a touch of the quaint or exotic is to overlook the ways in which he transcends the limits of ‘local color,’ and, finally, to overlook his more crucial contribution to the Gothic romance: namely, his Americanization of the genre.

Leslie Fiedler, in Love and Death in the American Novel, traces the development of the Gothic from its roots in the European novel, focusing on the socio-historical tradition out of which the Gothic novel sprung—a tradition which, serving ostensibly as backdrop, actually renders the tale significant. This tradition is embodied, typically, in the decaying castle or abbey. “Symbols of authority,” writes Fiedler, “secular or ecclesiastic, in ruin—memorials of a decaying past—such crumbling edifices project the world of collapsed ego-ideals through which … man was groping his terrified way.”⁸

One often-remarked problem faced by early American authors was the absence of an identifiable past, a ground against which our literature could be set. Those who chose the Gothic mode generally borrowed the European historical context as well, or else wrested the Gothic props and figures from their context altogether. Thus Charles Brockden Brown, in Wieland, imports not only his setting and accoutrements of horror, but also his characters and, more significantly, their original crimes and inherited guilts from Europe.⁹ Poe, on the other hand, concerned exclusively with the individual's emotions, tends to borrow the texture of horror and rarefy the context almost out of existence. Even Poe, however, on those occasions when referents of time and place become necessary to his tale, has recourse, either implicitly or explicitly, to medieval Europe. Thus “The Fall of the House of Usher” derives from “remote feudal times,” and is situated, by implication, somewhere in Europe.

Cable, on the contrary, takes great pains to set his tale, both socially and historically, in America.¹⁰ The “old, colonial plantation house, half in ruin”¹¹ embodies a social system—colonial aristocracy—and a past which, at the time of the story, is still in the process of disintegrating. This disintegration must have been only the more widespread in the decades following the Civil War, during which Cable penned most of his stories. Furthermore, the memory of this disintegration lingers, on a still wider scale, in the American South of the early twentieth century—the time during which Faulkner's story is set.

Here, then, is Cable's first and, perhaps, most important contribution to the Gothic genre: he has appropriated it to the Southern milieu and made it reflect the traumas of a changing American South. Cable has rendered Poe's distilled horror as the outgrowth of a particular socio-historical situation. This socio-historical ground, in turn, fertilizes the tale, invests it with meaning. Cable has, in short—and this is the significance Stone overlooks—transplanted Poe's ethereal flower to appropriate native soil, securing for it an environment in which it can bloom to full potential.

Cable's tale transpires during the time “when the Anglo-American flood that was presently to burst in a crevasse of immigration upon the delta had thus far been felt only as slippery seepage which made the Creole tremble for his footing.” Cable goes on to describe the plantation house half in ruin, which “stood aloft from civilization, the tracts that had once been its indigo fields given over to their first noxious wildness, and grown up into one of the horridest marshes within a circuit of fifty miles.”¹² Cable thus sets his story at a time in which the Creole aristocracy, having propagated itself for years in a virtual vacuum, isolated from the inroads of civilization,¹³ is suddenly beginning to crumble.

The house, we are told, is “grim, solid, and spiritless, its massive build a strong reminder of days still earlier, when every man had been his own peace officer and the insurrection of the blacks a daily contingency.” It looks “like a giant ammunition wagon stuck in the mud and abandoned by some retreating army.”¹⁴ This further characterization of the mansion suggests a crucial sub-theme and source of guilt in the story—the blight of slavery. Cable's simile, meanwhile, depicts a beleaguered class, already a relic in its own time, brought to a halt, though not yet disarmed and dismantled.¹⁵

In his portrait of a Creole mansion housing two surviving half-brothers and their sole remaining manservant, Cable captures the ambience of the traditional South: an inbred, patriarchal plantation aristocracy, built on and haunted by a racist ethic, besieged by civilization and democracy, and, ultimately, defeated—as much by its own intransigence as by external forces. Faulkner employs this same myth later on in “A Rose For Emily,” embodying it tacitly in the mansion and personalizing it in Emily Grierson herself. Perhaps Faulkner's most deft depiction of this passing patriarchal aristocracy occurs in the tableau the narrator imagines, in which Emily's father occupies the foreground, holding a horsewhip, and Emily is “a slender figure in white in the background,” the two framed by the mansion's door.¹⁶

“For the most striking evidence,” continues Stone, “of the wide gulf that yawns between Faulkner and his Southern precursor Cable in horror fiction, … we must turn to the relationships of the two protagonists with their own dead (or living dead) …” Stone finds the relationship in “Jean-ah Poquelin” to be, in a word, “conventional.”¹⁷ This relationship is crucial to the story and bears closer scrutiny.

Cable's tale involves two men, Jean Marie Poquelin and Jacque Poquelin. Jacques is “the gentle, young half-brother, more than thirty years his [Jean's] junior.” The two half-brothers are united, however, by a bond which exceeds ordinary fraternal or even paternal affection:

There was no trait in Jean Marie Poquelin, said the old gossips, for which he was so well known among his few friends as his apparent fondness for his “little brother.” “Jacques said this” and “Jacques said that”; he “would leave this or that or anything to Jacques,” for “Jacques was a scholar,” and “Jacques was good,” or “wise,” or “just,” or “far-sighted.”

“They had seemed to live so happily in each other's love,” we are told. “No father, mother, wife to either …”¹⁸

Their kinship notwithstanding, the two half-brothers suggest a classic homosexual pair. In addition to their complementary personalities (Jean is a “bold, frank, impetuous, chivalric adventurer,” Jacques a “gentle, studious, book-loving recluse”), the two exhibit an inordinate dependence on each other, Jean deferring habitually to Jacques' judgment (in absentia, of course), and Jacques cleaving to Jean like a wife, resolving to go with Jean rather than suffer his absence when Jean proposes a voyage to Africa. In this latter scene, Cable's language infuses the relationship with an almost desperate tenor:

Jacques had begged him hard for many days not to go, but he laughed him off, and finally said, kissing him: “Adieu, 'tit frere.” … “No,” said Jacques, “I shall go with you.”¹⁹

In light of an earlier remark concerning Jean's “circle of exclusively male acquaintances,”²⁰ we are tempted to read significance into the man's name itself, Jean Marie Poquelin.²¹ Cable's imagery reinforces the ambiguous nature of the relationship: “They lived upon the ancestral estate,” we are told, “like mated birds, one always on the wing, the other always in the nest.”²²

This relationship scarcely seems “conventional.” It is, on the contrary, a highly idiosyncratic portrayal that captures the inbred and isolated nature of this patriarchy whose survivors cleave to each other for emotional sustenance as their tradition becomes increasingly obsolete. If the characterization carries overtones of perversity, it can and should be seen as the reflection of a social situation (the anomalous persistence of colonial aristocracy) that, no doubt, had come to seem unnatural and perverse. Faulkner, of course, uses an elaborately perverse relationship—Emily's necrophilic attachment to Homer Barron—to dramatize his protagonist's peculiar plight.

Cable's male relationship is rendered even more significant by the story's racial overtones. Jean Poquelin is a slaver and slavetrader. Having gambled his slaves away one by one, the “generous gentleman” goes off in search of “larger profits in the African slave trade.”²³ It is in light of this fact that his half-brother's fate assumes the proportions of poetic justice: the trip to Africa that was to result in a livelihood for Jean bequeaths upon Jacques a fate worse than death; an enterprise calculated to result in profits from black skin nets, instead, a devastating personal loss, dramatized by the snow-white skin of Jacques, the leper. Cable has created a myth in which, figuratively speaking, the sins of the father are visited on the son (remembering that the brothers are a full thirty years apart). This myth has obvious relevance for the post-war South, and it recurs, though the emphasis is modified, in Faulkner's portrait of Miss Emily.²⁴

Even considering these aspects, I'm still not sure the depths of Cable's portrait have been plumbed. Fiedler contends that incest is the archetypal erotic theme of the American Gothic romance, even as slavery is its archetypal sociological concern.²⁵ Cable's portrait of two half-brothers who love each other exclusively and who live together “like mated birds” may well constitute an incest theme within a patriarchal context—thereby adding an element of decadence to the portrait and introducing, incidentally, a strange hybrid of the more familiar Gothic motif of brother-sister incest.

Much of Stone's dissatisfaction with “Jean-ah Poquelin” stems from his perceiving it as melodrama. Whether or not the story is melodrama is a moot question. Cable does indulge in melodrama in certain other stories in Old Creole Days, most notably in “Belles Demoiselles Plantation,”²⁶ in which an entire mansion collapses into the Mississippi River, killing seven frolicking girls within. However, at least one critic finds “Jean-ah Poquelin” a notable exception to this tendency.²⁷

For Stone, the term “melodrama” seems to connote, in particular, a tendency toward one-dimensional characterization and subjective narration. He points out that, in Cable's story, “primarily and consistently we sympathize with Poquelin and his heroic, if baffling, resistance …” and contrasts Cable with Faulkner, who “impassively maintains his (and our) distance, sympathizing with and reproving, in turn, Emily and her adversary, the town.”²⁸

If Cable's attitude was so blatantly sympathetic toward his characters, why, we must ask, did the Creole population so disclaim the protagonist?²⁹ Cable's characterization is, I think, far subtler than either of these appraisals suggests. While we sympathize with Jean Poquelin, the valiant, yet kind-hearted warrior, we do not sympathize with Jean Poquelin, profiteer, smuggler, and slave-trader. While we sympathize with an old man hounded by children and adults alike, we do not especially sympathize with a hermit whose bitterness causes him to curse any child who mocks him in play. Nor are the townsfolk portrayed as all bad. Poquelin's adversary, the governor, for instance, is genial enough to Jean: when their conversation had reached an impasse, we are told he “took a quill and wrote a line to a city official, introducing Mr. Poquelin, and asking for him every possible courtesy.”³⁰

Even Little White, secretary to the “Building and Improvement Company” that wishes to use Poquelin's land, acts out of mixed motives that render his subsequent stance of “devil's advocate” in a more complex light. White agrees to “look into the matter”—i.e., spy on Poquelin's house in hopes of discovering some illegal business for which the old man might be convicted, and thereby evicted—as a “personal favor,” in response to a suggestion of one of the members of the board of directors. This implies voluntary complicity in an unethical enterprise—a position that places White's later noble actions in strange relief. As if to insure the ambiguity of White's motives, Cable ends the episode as follows: “‘I tell you frankly,’ he [White] privately said to the president, ‘I go into this purely for reasons of my own.’”³¹ Cable thus refuses either to condemn or condone his initial involvement—a far cry, needless to say, from one-dimensional characterization.

Beyond Stone's charge of melodrama, however, lies a more serious charge—one Stone states forthrightly:

As the moralist that his century required the serious writer of fiction to be, Cable had to inculcate in his readers attitudes of censure and approbation in viewing the opposing forces of the story.³²

That Cable was bowing to the dictates of public interest is somewhat humorous, since the bitterest irony in his story rebukes the concept of “public interest.” “Public interest” is revealed to be nothing more than society's as well as the individual's rationalization for the vilest, most indefensible enterprises.³³ Irony notwithstanding, Cable does, for whatever reason, give us an ending in which a “heart of gold” surfaces. Jean Poquelin is both revealed as a hero and absolved of taint by an unexplained, if not gratuitous death—an ending that at least verges on melodrama, and that, far from indulging the complexities of characterization previously established, effectively deflates them. Although I myself find the ending more tragic than melodramatic,³⁴ I must agree, in certain other respects, with Stone's contention that Cable is “inculcating … attitudes of censure and approbation”—and this to the detriment of his story.

In inculcating a moral perspective, Cable stifles certain ambiguities in the situation he has created, and undercuts his own provocative characterizations. It is in the depiction of his protagonist and her odd relationship that Faulkner surpasses Cable, for Faulkner dispenses entirely with genteel moral imperatives and allows Miss Emily to develop uncensored.

Cable, to be more precise, aborts his story via the intrusion of Little White. Little White, commissioned by the “Building and Improvement Company,” spies on Poquelin's house. While on this errand, White discovers Jean's secret—part of which is passed on to the reader: namely, the living presence of the diseased Jacques, white as a ghost and reeking of death. Little White's function, however, is not simply to further the plot and catalyze the denouement. Cable uses Little White to interpret the relationship of Jean and Jacques Poquelin and the character of Jean's behavior. Immediately after his visit to the Poquelin mansion, White becomes the unflagging champion of old Jean. After Jean's death, White again steps into the vacuum of comprehension with the following highly editorial funeral oration:

Gentlemen … here come the last remains of Jean Marie Poquelin, a better man, I'm afraid, with all his sins—yes, a better, a kinder man to his blood—a man of more self-forgetful goodness—than all of you put together will ever dare to be.³⁵

White constitutes a filter through which our perceptions must pass; through him, Cable imposes transparency upon an essentially opaque relationship. Were he simply to have made his revelation without Little White—and the plot need not have included him—the reader would have been forced to scrutinize the brothers' relationship in all its complexity: a relationship with overtones not only of homosexuality, but of violence (the town, it will be recalled, suspects Jean of having killed his younger brother on the trip to Africa). The ending might have lost all semblance of melodrama, and might have proved almost as provocative as that of “A Rose For Emily.” Instead, Cable resolves a unique fictional situation conventionally.

Faulkner, by contrast, engages the understated themes Cable raises but leaves to the province of fantasy. Whereas Cable captures the outward signs of his protagonist's stultification (the town children's mockery of Jean, the presumptuousness of the immigrants, etc.), Faulkner internalizes the issue, spotlighting Emily's perverted mentality. In so doing, he develops to conclusion a situation that exists embryonically in the relationship between half-brothers in “Jean-ah Poquelin.” But whereas Cable raises our suspicions only to soothe us with a “heart of gold” ending, Faulkner, having assuaged our suspicions throughout, horrifies us doubly with his ending.

In making his protagonist a woman, Faulkner perhaps comes even closer than Cable to creating an apposite myth: the conflict between respect for and resentment of collapsing authority that many post-War Southerners must have felt is perhaps best embodied in a father-daughter relationship. Emily Grierson's necrophilic attachment to Homer Barron recapitulates her denial of her father's death even as it repudiates her father's authority.

Both “Jean-ah Poquelin” and “A Rose For Emily” concern the passing of an order. In Cable's story, however, inquiry into character is stayed in favor of a conventional plot resolution. Stone is quite right in observing that “in centering his inquiry on the workings of the morbid mind of his character, [Faulkner] moves beyond the terms of Cable.”³⁶ Yet Cable's story adumbrates Faulkner's at the deepest levels of theme as well as at the more superficial levels of plot and characterization.

Notes

1. Edward Stone, “Usher, Poquelin, Miss Emily: The Progress of Southern Gothic,” Georgia Review, 14 (Winter 1960), 433-43.

2. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Fiction, first edition (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1943), p. 412.

3. Consider the common motif of the smell emanating from the house in both stories; or Poquelin's old, mute African servant—reincarnated almost intact in the person of Emily's black “house boy” who disappears out the back door as the mystery is revealed in much the same way as Poquelin's old servant disappears without a word in Cable's story.

4. Stone, “Southern Gothic,” p. 437.

5. Louis Rubin, “The Road to Yoknapatawpha: George Cable and John March, Southerner,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 35 (Winter 1959), 129.

6. Stone, “Southern Gothic,” p. 438.

7. Ibid.

8. Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (London: Paladin, 1970), p. 124.

9. It is in Europe that Wieland's father performs his apostasy, from which all future guilt and criminality in the story flow. Carwin too expatriates to America from Europe (Ireland), where he has committed various offenses.

10. Those writers whom Fiedler sees as having adapted the Gothic romance to American needs (i.e., C. B. Brown, in Edgar Huntly, Cooper, in the Leather-stocking tales, and Hawthorne, in The Scarlet Letter) did so by drastically reversing the role of the genre: that is, by making the tale serve as a projection of fear and guilt associated, not with the collapse of traditional authority, but with the capacity for lawlessness and anarchy. Thus, Fiedler points out, the woods or frontier and the Indians replaced the abbey or castle and the soldiers of the Inquisition as the setting and antagonists of the new, American Gothic. (Fiedler, Love and Death, p. 150.) Yet if form and function mutate, can the result be rightfully considered as part of the original species? Cable's adaptation of the Gothic romance in “Jean-ah Poquelin” differs from these others in that it remains truer to the original, European Gothic usage.

11. George Washington Cable, Old Creole Days, with a Foreword by Shirley Ann Grau (New York: New American Library, 1961; Signet), p. 131.

12. Ibid.

13. This conceit is dramatized literally in the story, as the “inroads” made by the townsfolk destroy the sanctity of old Poquelin's property and existence.

14. Cable, Old Creole Days, p. 131.

15. This image, drawn from the battlefield, could not have failed to suggest, in the late 1870s, a comparison with the post-bellum South.

16. William Faulkner, The Portable Faulkner, revised and expanded edition, edited by Malcolm Cowley (New York: Viking Press, 1946; revised ed., 1967), p. 437.

17. Stone, “Southern Gothic,” pp. 439-440.

18. Cable, Old Creole Days, pp. 134-35.

19. Ibid., p. 135. This Gallic display of affections—the use of diminutives, the custom of kissing among males—suggests a homosexual tenor to an Anglo-Saxon reading public. By exploiting this French custom, Cable comes close to dramatizing a homosexual bond while remaining within the bounds of genteel propriety.

20. Ibid., p. 134.

21. Allowing the middle name to partake of the French participle that is its phonetic and graphological equivalent, the name becomes an icon of the relationship of the two half-brothers.

22. Cable, Old Creole Days, p. 134.

23. Ibid., p. 135.

24. While Faulkner's story is not particularly concerned with the consequences of slavery, his story nonetheless does show a woman who lives under an inherited psychological burden, and whose murder and subsequent necrophilic violation of Homer Barron may be seen, in part, as an extreme response to a domineering father and to a patriarchal culture in general.

25. Fiedler, Love and Death, p. 384.

26. Cable, Old Creole Days, pp. 97-113.

27. Philip Butcher, George W. Cable (New York: Twayne Publications, Inc., 1962), p. 39.

28. Stone, “Southern Gothic,” p. 438.

29. Shirley Ann Grau, Foreward to Old Creole Days, p. ix.

30. Cable, Old Creole Days, p. 139.

31. Ibid., p. 144.

32. Stone, “Southern Gothic,” p. 438.

33. When Jean Poquelin enters the African slave trade, all responsibility and scruple is retroactively shrugged aside in the following passage:

    What harm could he see in it? The whole people said it was vitally necessary, and to minister to a vital public necessity—good enough certainly, and so he laid up many a doubloon, that made him none the worse in the public regard.

    (Cable, Old Creole Days, p. 135.)

    Later on, when the “Building and Improvement Company” voices designs on Poquelin's property, one of the board justifies their attitude as follows:

    “Mr. President, this market house project, as I take it, is not altogether a selfish one; the community is to be benefited by it. We may feel that we are working in the public interest (the board smiled knowingly), if we employ all possible means to oust this old nuisance from among us.”

    (Ibid., p. 143.)

    Finally, when the drunken mob comes in the night to harass old Poquelin, their leader, Bienvenu, defends their purpose with the words, “I am ze servan' of ze publique.” (Ibid., p. 150.)

34. Not only is this the story of the last survivor of a proud, old order, a man whose existence is invaded and destroyed by newcomers; it also depicts a slave-trader who, having exploited race prejudice, becomes the victim of race prejudice himself. Cable understates Poquelin's culpability somewhat, preferring to indict his society along with him (see p. 10, note 33 above); yet it is Poquelin's culpability that makes the tale tragic, and not merely pathetic.

35. Cable, Old Creole Days, p. 153.

36. Stone, “Southern Gothic,” p. 438.