Honor, Religion, and Domesticity: New Perspectives on Southern Dueling in Augusta Jane Evans's St. Elmo

Summary

As a key figure in the school of the domestic novel, Augusta Jane Evans not only idolized house and family like her contemporaries, but she saw herself as actively defending the home against the encroachments of masculine, violent influence. In St. Elmo (1866), Evans examines southern dueling as an extended metaphor for destructive male behavior generally. And yet, most researchers have largely overlooked the duel, treating it either as a plot expedient or merely a stock character trait. As abstraction and practice, though, dueling is a key fascination in Evans’s text; to disregard it is to deform one's understanding of the story. Through it, Evans's novel reimagines the old conflict between honor culture and Christian morality as a decidedly domestic problem. The ethical contest between burgeoning lovers Edna Earl and St. Elmo Murray, each a paragon of one of these competing southern value systems, marks Evans's attempt to reconcile her demand for a traditional male-headed domesticity with her desire for non-traditional female characterization. In the end, the battle between southern honor and Christian religion mirrors the battle of the sexes for moral command of the domestic space. With the eclipse of dueling violence and honorable manhood, we see the emergence of greater domestic tranquility and pious womanliness.

There is an autobiographical tint to many of Augusta Jane Evans’s heroines, none more so than Edna Earl, the erudite and moral orphan of Evans's most famous novel, St. Elmo. In an important scene for charting her career as an aspiring writer, Edna speaks with the New York publisher who she hopes will print her proposed novel on the evils of dueling. Reacting to the description of her book, the publisher remarks:

Unless I totally misunderstand your views, you indulge in the rather extraordinary belief that all works of fiction should be eminently didactic, and inculcate not only sound morality, but scientific theories. Herein, permit me to say, you entirely misapprehend the spirit of the age. People read novels merely to be amused, not educated; and they will not tolerate technicalities and abstract speculation in lieu of exciting plots and melodramatic dénouements. (Evans 1992: 237).