Bathed in Blood
Hunting and Mastery in the Old South
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11675454 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John Mayfield (corresponding author), Nicolas W Proctor |
| Year | 2003 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 134-134 |
| Publication date | 2003-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of the Early Republic (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0275-1275 • E-ISSN: 1553-0620 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3125000 |
| OpenAlex | W2025945247 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
Bathed in Blood: Hunting and in the Old South. By Nicolas W. Proctor. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002. Pp. xi, 220. Illustrations. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $16.50.)Field sports, wrote William Elliott in 1846, both innocent and (38). The curious juxtaposition of terms provides lens into Nicolas W. Proctor's fine study of masculinity and hunting in the Old South. Although the physical acts of hunting are hard on deer and ducks, the rituals involved in it have quality reminiscent of father-son excursions to the hardware store or fraternity hazings. Consider the scene from Elliott's Carolina Sports By Land and Water in which he and seasoned hunter-friend take two novices and troupe of slaves in search of deer. The newcomers were virgins of sort; they had not yet 'fleshed their maiden swords' in the field. When one got off lucky shot, the veterans seized him, daubed his face with the blood, and ordered him to wear it all day as marker of his lost innocence. This you must know, Elliott explained, hunter's law with us (107). The slaves joined in on the initiation, but in nuanced and circumscribed ways. Clearly there was more at stake here than putting meal on the table.The hunt was social drama, highly ritualized and symbolic theater for displaying and rehearsing male identity. In the past two decades Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Kenneth Greenberg, Ted Ownby, and others have taken deep interest in this masculine theater, which seems to have directed male behavior in everything from politics to dueling to cockfighting. Most of the studies combine gender expectations with attitudes about race and class, and, not surprisingly, issues of control and domination-rather than nurturing or service-lead the discussion. Bathed in Blood is another chapter in this analysis, and it is good one. It also displays some of the limitations of the entire approach to the history of southern manhood.Proctor uses two basic techniques to deconstruct the drama of the hunt. The first is an analysis of rituals, which he outlines with an anthropologist's love of symbolism and gesture. How hunter picked his game, the weapon he used or the friends he took along, the way he controlled his dogs and his slaves-all measured and displayed the inner man. As with all drama, these theatrics were meaningless without an audience; hence the camaraderie of sportsmen. Proctor's second technique is literary. Southerners loved to write about the hunt. Elliott's Carolina Sports was only one of many books on the subject; more important was the sporting press, especially William T. Porter's Spirit of the Times (published, ironically, in New York). The fact that Porter kept his paper strictly apolitical makes it, in Proctor's eyes, an unusually reliable social diary of changing ideas about masculine identity. Sporting journals were not simply fund of technical information; they provided a sophisticated medium in which authors and readers could rehearse the connection between hunting and identity (14).This connection centered on core set of characteristics including prowess, self-control, and mastery. Mastery was the distinctively southern element of the manly ideal; it linked the rituals of hunting to broader issues of race and class. In ever-expanding circles of influence, sportsmen demonstrated their authority over their own passions and over people, animals, nature and even death(61). At basic level, the hunter was an archetypal patriarch, someone who ruled the home and provided for it. As the hunter and the hunt became more sophisticated, this domestic patriarchy evolved into broader paternalism. The hunt could be used to display generosity, careless indifference to waste, Christian charity, noblesse oblige, or any of the other characteristics expected of the master class
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| Unique citing works | 8 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.47 |
| Citation span | 2009 - 2022 (14) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 8 |