In 8 pages this paper discuses how gender and race influence manners in the South in terms of personal ethics and social convention in a consideration of Their Eyes Were Watching God by Hurston and The Marrow of Tradition by Chestnutt.
Name of Research Paper File: JL5_JLmanners.rtf
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the relevance of the concept of manners to Southern fiction, it might be useful to look at how manners are defined in different cultural settings, and the function which they
fulfil in terms of aiding and elucidating social interaction. For instance, OConnor asserts that manners exemplify social discipline and contribute to the inner cohesion of society and the way in
which individuals identify themselves in relation to their community: she sees manners as having their foundation in charity and necessity, rather than merely demonstrating a superficial form of social contact.
From this point of view,
manners are not simply the good manners which we attempt to instil into our children, or the bad manners which are cited when someone behaves rudely towards us in public.
They are the outward evidence of those behaviour patterns which form the basis of a particular social culture, and which constitute a significant part of the ideological framework of the
group. In many cases, it is true
that manners and formal politeness will overlap: the way in which white Southern gentlemen treated white Southern ladies, for example, demonstrates the innate respect, almost amounting to idealism, in which
Southern womanhood was held, but it is overtly manifested in the form of verbal and behavioural politeness. In William Faulkners A Rose for Emily, for instance, we see the respect
accorded to Southern ladies as taken to a ridiculous and dangerous extreme, in that the townspeople would prefer to ignore the evidence of a murder rather than take the unthinkable