Up Close with Author Taylor M. Polites
Monday, February 13, 2012
Providence resident Taylor Polites’ just-released novel The Rebel Wife is already garnering lots of attention. The Atlanta-Journal Constitution named it one of 2012’s best Southern books. The February issue of O Magazine includes The Rebel Wife on its list of “Ten Titles to Pick Up Now,” saying that this story about “a resilient heroine in the post-Civil War South has all the drama of the era and none of the clichés.” Polites is currently in the South on the first leg of a reading tour that will soon bring him back to southern New England. He spoke with GoLocalProv from the road.
Many readers will think of Gone with the Wind when reading your novel. Do you see a relationship between the two stories?
Yes, there absolutely is a strong link between these books. First, by the fact of my experience of Gone With the Wind at a young age and my immersion in the myths that the book crystallized. Gone With the Wind captured in amber all the sentimentality and stereotypes of the Civil War legacy. These myths, strangely enough, were validated from all different parts of society, in post-Civil War literature, politics, and scholarly thought as well as the justice and economic system. And Gone With the Wind continues to exist as a very popular centerpiece of our common cultural heritage, rightly or wrongly.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTI would say, also, that elements of the story found their way into my book. Whispers, my editor said when she first read the book. Anyone who writes a female protagonist set in the Civil War South cannot avoid the shadow of Scarlett O'Hara, so I wanted to meet her head-on. Using the stereotypes that were distilled through Gone With the Wind was a way to play with that literary tradition and subvert it using current scholarship on the war and Reconstruction.
The protagonist of the novel is Augusta (Gus) Branson, a sheltered elite Southern woman who’s forced to come to terms with life after the end of the Civil War and the sudden death of her husband. She seems like an utterly familiar and yet still very fresh character. What drew you to her?
Sometimes writers say that they feel a particular character has always been a part of them. Looking back now, I feel like Augusta has always been there. Female protagonists have fascinated me ever since I first read
Gone With the Wind almost thirty years ago. Since then, a whole parade of other female characters have captivated me: Becky Sharp, Elizabeth Bennett, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Isabel Archer, Lily Bart, Jane Eyre and even her mad counterpart in the attic. Creating my own strong woman character felt very natural--and putting her in the midst of the mythology and the often ugly realities of the Reconstruction era gave her an amazing field in which to operate and grow.Your novel addresses an obvious truth—that Southern whites and blacks had to relate to one another in the aftermath of the Civil War—and takes it in surprising directions with Augusta and Simon, a former slave of her estate. Can you speak to that part the story?
Augusta was always at the center of this novel. Simon stepped from the shadows, taking on a larger role the more I wrote. I love that tension between them, first condescension, then suspicion and mutual need, and finally trust and as close to love as they could get. But they both had a very fine line to walk. Race relations in the post-bellum South were already fraught, and nothing was more incendiary than relations between a white woman and a black man. Furthermore, Augusta and Simon are members of the same household where Augusta is effectively the boss—and she is very aware of that, as well. All of these dynamics are barriers for them, or certainly for Augusta. Breaking them down is the road that Augusta travels through the book.
A tremendous amount of historical research underlies this novel. What’s the most surprising thing you discovered?
The events of the Civil War with their truly momentous dramas have always overshadowed Reconstruction. What’s worse, to the extent that I gave much thought to Reconstruction before working on this book, I had always understood it as a period of misguided failure. That certainly was a major theme of how Reconstruction had been taught, starting in the first decade of the 20th century. But gradually a comprehensive reevaluation of Reconstruction occurred. Certainly, there was corruption and in many ways the program of Reconstruction failed in its incredibly ambitious goals. But what has surprised me is the intense idealism that existed during Reconstruction, a commitment in the aftermath of the war to ensure that all the bloody sacrifice would serve some higher purpose.
By the end of the war, something like 750,000 soldiers were dead, and President Lincoln had been assassinated. The people of the Union wanted some substantive meaning for all that death, in the same way that people of the former Confederacy were looking for meaning in all the death and defeat. For many, like Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, that meaning was to enfranchise as full members of the American democracy all of those men formerly held in bondage. I have tried to think of another society in history that not only freed a people in slavery, but made them full and equal citizens of that society. Of course, we know the tragic end to those efforts, the violence, resistance, and ultimate waning of commitment in the face of political and economic crisis. We know that there were critical groups, women most obviously, who were left out of this program of change. But the kernel of what is fascinating about Reconstruction, what makes it fundamental to understanding the war, is that idealistic and progressive impulse to fundamentally change and expand participation in American society.
Your novel is set in northern Alabama and has only Southern main characters. Why do you think so much fiction about the Civil War is focused on the South’s experiences?
I own a book called White Columns in Georgia. It’s a very sentimental book from the 1950’s written by a Georgian woman who traveled to different towns, collecting a lot of Gone With the Wind-inspired folklore. There is a beauty to the book, as well as a lot of not-so-beautiful things you would expect. But one story has always stuck with me. During the Civil War on a plantation in the path of the Union army, a woman is bedridden after giving birth to stillborn twins. When the soldiers come, they ransack the house and dig up the two new tiny graves, believing they are actually hiding the family silver. She can see them from her sickbed. The narrator says something like, “No wonder people in the South remember the war so strongly. There is so much to remember.”
Those stories are passed down from generation to generation and eventually become the folklore of an experience, a representation of the sense of loss as well as of being viciously wronged. Would these stories have been collected had the South won the war? Would they have been remembered in quite that way? The literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote of an attempt at national amnesia about the war, but, he said, “we have had the defeated enemy on the premises, and he will not allow us to forget it.” That effort to define what the war was about continues in surprising ways. Perhaps that is why it still preoccupies us.
The Rebel Wife is available in bookstores throughout Rhode Island, as well as online and via Amazon Kindle, Apple iBook, and Barnes & Noble Nook. Polites will be reading in Rhode Island on March 9 at 5pm at the Providence Athenaeum, April 12 at 5:30pm at the Brown University Bookstore, and May 3 at 7:30pm at the Providence Public Library Rochambeau Branch. For Polites' full reading schedule, go here.
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