Building plantation America: Creolized design and captive labor in Wright, Faulkner, and Chesnutt

Abstract

Pairing Wright's Auldbrass and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! in light of Chesnutt's earlier novel, The House Behind the Cedars, we can read across literature and architecture to foundational myths of plantation America. These myths are embedded in the material structure of the veranda, framed architecturally and also verbally in the structures of literary narrative. However, in these modernist versions of the southern plantation, the myths repeat differently. Like the “guilty secret” screened behind the cedars of Chesnutt's fiction, an obscured global history of captive labor, entwined from its beginnings with creolized architectural design, comes into view. While Chesnutt brings our attention to the “back of the Big House,” Wright and Faulkner's reworkings of the plantation veranda display a contested aesthetic. Echoing the iconic features of the antebellum Big House, they also carry forward an alternate vision, one that counters the rigid patterning and control of racialized labor. Appreciated as “beyond plumb,” this aesthetic recalls different stories, different architects, and the creativity of enslaved plantation workers of earlier centuries.