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Steven Lubar AMCV 2650: Introduction to Public Humanities September 26, 2011 Camp Confederacy Inside the chapel the Athenaeum Rectory in Maury Co., Tennessee, a teacher with a strong southern accent stands in front of a group of teenage girls and asks, how many of you girls love the movie Gone With the Wind? As a barrage of hands fills the air, the teacher continues, Ok, Scarlett is not the character in Gone with the Wind you want to try to Emulate! Scarlett was the bad girl. We wanna all be Mellies! OK? All the women in the room, the teacher included, are wearing corsets, hoop skirts, floral dresses and wide-brimmed straw bonnets. Dainty white lace gloves cover their hands, and they sit in full attention listening to the wisdom of their instructor. They are here to learn about becoming proper southern ladies, and to preserve the gentility of their culture on the eve of succession. The Confederate Bonnie Blue flag hangs neatly on the wall. It is 2010. Stan Deaton, director of the Georgia Historical society, comments, at first glance, you dont really find anything wrong with what these people are trying to do. They want to give their daughters self-esteem. They want to teach them manners But as you watch this, and you listen to the kind of history--some of it purely fabricated--you realize theres a lot more going on.1 In 1861, prominent Tennessee families would send their daughters to the Athenaeum Rectory to receive one of the best educations in the state. The curriculum included science, the arts, mathematics, and literature. Meanwhile in 2010, the girls attending this camp of re-enactment (known as the 1861 girls school) learn dancing, sewing, singing, and all forms of etiquette. According to the documentary Southern Belle, they seem to spend much of the weeklong camp learning how to properly curtsy and bow. In an interview responding to the issues of historical accuracy in the documentary, professor Tara McPherson explains how the mythic figure of the Southern Lady, as seen in the girls icon, Melanie Hamilton, is largely an invention of the 1880s and 1890s.2 This greatly resembles Stephanie Yuhls description of the process in which the powerful white elite of twentieth-century South Carolina invented a tradition of southern gentility as they felt their
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Stan Deaton, scholars response to Southern Belle, http://southernbellefilm.com/ McPherson, scholars response to Southern Belle.

Harbison 2 world collapsing around them in the wake of modernity. Yuhl quotes David Lowenthal is stating, dismay at massive change stokes demand for heritage.3 McPhersons likewise interprets the creation of the southern lady as a response to the trauma of the Civil War and reconstruction. In a time when white male masculinity had been seriously challenged on the battlefield, white males invented the concept of the gentle southern lady in order to preserve a lost cause. Stan Deaton describes this lost cause as a post-war restructuring of the reasons the South fought the war. By the early twentieth century, the war had stopped being about slavery and had become fight for the valor of the southern people, the superiority they had in terms of their morals Theyre fighting for homeland, for hearth, for southern womanhood. They placed southern women at the heart of not only what they were fighting for, but as part of the fight.4 While examining this case study of this truly unique (but extremely popular) summer camp, I feel the urge to turn this into a much larger paper. There is so much opportunity to explore this story while applying the theories of Pierre Nora, Benedict Anderson, Paul Connerton, Eric Hobsbawn, Marianne Hirsh, and others. A scholarly examination of the intricacies of this place and its history would present an incredible opportunity to question the roles of race, gender, power, class, age and generation in the creation of historic memory. At the 1861 girls school, the main way in which this memory is created is through what Paul Connerton calls the rhetorical persuasiveness of bodily behavior.5 The curtsies, the bows, the uncrossed legs, and the salutes to the Confederate flag are all essential to the verisimilitude of an antebellum social hierarchy. In the 21st century re-enacting, slaves are conspicuously absent from this hierarchy. The director of the Athenaeum, Mark Orman, defends the organizations reluctance to discuss slavery as a racist institution by explaining, we dont really make reference to blackness or whiteness, or whatever. When asked, why not?, Orman responds, Its just not a part of what we do.6 So what do they do? Caroll Van West (director of Tennessee Civil War National Heritage Area) says the Athenaeum creates a fantasy worlda world that didnt exist. Van Wests description of the fantasy world brings to mind Eric Hobsbawns theory of invented traditions,
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Stephanie E. Yuhl, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005) 190. 4 Stan Deaton, scholars response to Southern Belle. 5 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 72. 6 http://www.itvs.org/films/southern-belle

Harbison 3 or traditions where the authentic continuity with the past has been broken. In short, they are responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition.7 The while elites of Charleston in the 1930s used invented traditions to create a performative form of memory that could be marketed to a wide public and in turn used as a means for social control. At the same times, while historical memory can be used in this way as a weapon of the strong, as a force of domination, to others historical memory can be used as a source of resistance to hegemonic narratives and oppressive power structures. 8 In the South, the purveyors of memory are able to wield historical memory of the Old South in both capacities. The Old South is both the victorious preserver of its heritage, and the blameless victim of northern aggression. Common defenses used by the attendees of the girls attending the 1861 girls school include phrases such as I feel like were always presented as the bad guys, and unfortunately what you learn in school about the Civil Waror the war between the statesis not the whole story. Caroll Van West effectively sums up the community memory of the Athenaeum in the following words: as the families of Maury County built a New South, a way of getting past the devastation of the war, its interesting how they also started to build a new memory of what the Old South was like. It was a place in their memory where race didnt matter, women were submissive, and everyone was a Confederate.9 In many ways, Maury County is to Tennessee what Charleston is to South Carolina. The city of Columbia houses the states most valuable archives on Civil War history, and through the popularity of the 1861 girls school at the Athenaeum, Maury County has become the leading author in the construction of Tennessees collective memory of the Old South. In both places, members of the white elite who feel jaded by modernity seek to return to a better time. Just as southern ladies societies of the early the twentieth century reinvented their collective memories of the plantation in the wake of the trauma of war, the Columbia Athenaeum arguably nostalgically clings to social order and culture that was largely eradicated in the digital age. The shocking part is that this time, the community also seems to be reacting against social progresses made during the Civil Rights and womens movement. Like slavery, issues of race and gender are successfully silenced.
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Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 2. 8 Yuhl, 9-10. 9 Caroll Van West, scholars response to Southern Belle.

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Harbison 5 Links: http://www.itvs.org/films/southern-belle/photos-and-press-kit http://southernbellefilm.com/ http://www.athenaeumrectory.com/school.php http://www.itvs.org/films/southern-belle