Visions of Order in William Gilmore Simms

This is a provocative contrasting of Simms' romances with those of his Northern contemporaries. One of nineteenth-century America's foremost men of letters, William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) of Charleston, South Carolina, distinguished himself as a historian, poet, and novelist; yet his stalwart allegiance to the ideals of the Confederacy have kept him largely marginalized from the modern literary canon. In this engaging study, Masahiro Nakamura seeks to reinsert Simms into current American literary and cultural studies through a careful consideration of Simms' Southern conservatism as a valuable literary counterpoint to the bourgeois individualist ideology of his Northern contemporaries. For Nakamura, Simms' vision of social order runs contrary to the staunch individualism expressed in traditional American romances by authors such as James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In his thoughtful approaches to Simms' historical depictions of the making of American history and society, Nakamura finds consistent assertions of social order against the perils of literal and metaphoric wilderness, a conservative vision that he traces to the influence of Simms' Southern genius loci. To understand how this Southern conservatism also manifests itself in Simms' fiction, Nakamura contrasts Simms' historical romances with those of Hawthorne, as representative of the New England romance tradition, to differentiate the ways in which the two writers interpret the dynamic between the individual and society. Nakamura finds that Simms' protagonists struggle to establish their places within their culture while Hawthorne's characters are often at odds with their culture. The resulting comparison enriches our understanding of both writers. To illustrate his point further, Nakamura discusses Simms' ""Martin Faber"" in terms of individualism transformed into dangerous egocentrism. He also examines Simms' conservative views on the progress of American civilization in his Revolutionary War and border romances and explores Simms' attitudes toward conflicts with Native American cultures in his colonial romances. Nakamura concludes that, while effectively employing the tradition of Sir Walter Scott's historical romance, Simms used the genre as a vehicle for advocating the merits of social order as a Southern conservative answer to Northern bourgeois romanticism, which celebrates individualism as key to the possibility of human progress.