'Interpreters of the Sea!': Historic Preservation and Women's Poetry of the Charleston Renaissance

• Published in: The Mississippi quarterly 2022, Vol.75 (3), p.253-282
• Main Author: Harrell, Sarah Grace
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aesthetics; Cities; Civil war; Culture; Historic preservation; Interpreters; Leadership; Low income groups; Museums; Pinckney, Josephine (1895-1957); Plantations; Poetry; Poets; Political activism; Professions; Society; Traditions; Women
• ISSN: 0026-637X; 2689-517X; 2689-517X
• DOI: 10.1353/mss.2022.a905462

Even for poets like Pinckney who lived in expanding cosmopolitan centers in the south, tangible vestiges of the Civil War were still a familiar part of the natural and economic landscape. Soon after the turn of the twentieth century, the rapid demolishment of historic buildings resulted from exportation of architectural features to private collectors and museums in the north, as well as from the southward encroachment of filling stations in response to the automotive industry (Weyeneth 2–4). After the turn of the century, when writing was becoming more widely respected as a profession, gendered stigmas attached to the arts were still prevalent in the United States, and particularly in the south.1 Maintaining the "tradition of women as the custodians of society's artifacts, identity, and welfare" (Yuhl 29), women were the predominant leaders of Charleston's early historic preservation movement. For preservationists, the museum's collection of dismantled architectural features signified white antebellum domesticity recontextualized as fragments of an irretrievable past.