A framework for the ephemeral: dialect and performance in the Revolutionary war novels of William Gilmore Simms
Date
2000
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This essay examines the relationship between speech and the nineteenth-century convention of reading aloud, or performing, texts. Beginning with William Gilmore Simms’s series of eight nineteenth-century historical novels detailing the Revolutionary War in South Carolina, this argument focuses on Simms’s textual depiction of African-American dialect. Further, examining women’s roles within nineteenth-century parlor culture and the level to which oral performance of text transforms and/or translates meaning from the page into reality provides context for investigating the larger implications of dialect as a mediator between performance and communication. ☐ Conceptualizing the performative aspect of these texts and their larger relationship to issues of power, race, and gender requires an understanding of the social and cultural context in which they were written. This essay addresses three specific issues, including: nineteenth-century parlor culture as depicted in period journals as well as Simms’s texts; women’s roles within the parlor and society in general, specifically the use of voice and language as an exertion of power, and the implications of performing dialect by white women in the parlor. ☐ An examination of these three topics reveals a common theme: their shared resistance to imposed cultural hierarchies of expression and communication. Through oral performance, Simms’s textual representation of dialect becomes an artifact, framed within cultural and historical ideologies. As an ephemeral artifact made permanent, textual speech demands a re-interpretation of both context and methodology, forcing critics to ask questions of the object rather than about it. Theorizing out of Simms’s texts leads to an examination of dialect as it relates to performance, forcing one to reconsider conventional concepts of performer and audience, specifically as this relationship informs questions of power, agency, and identity. This essay attempts first to contextualize women’s performances, understanding the significance of speech as a mode of communication and instrument of expression, then extends analysis to examine the spoken word’s ability to maintain or destabilize social and cultural hierarchies of communication.