When Robert Penn Warren published Band of Angels in 1955, the most frequent critical response was to compare the novel with Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 blockbuster Gone with the Wind. Such comparisons spoke volumes about the indelibility of Mitchell’s single novelistic success, which after two decades was still the pattern for fictional treatments of the Civil War and the Reconstruction South, but they did little to help serious-minded readers understand Warren’s novel.
To be fair to the reviewers, Warren’s protagonist, Amantha Starr, does share superficial qualities with that ubiquitous southern beauty Scarlett O’Hara: both are the pampered daughters of rich plantation owners, and both see the privileged lives to which they have become accustomed disintegrate along with the South’s fortunes during the Civil War.
For Scarlett, the exigencies of a war to preserve the South’s “peculiar institution” result in her choosing a series of loveless marriages and pragmatically assuming tradesperson status in order to preserve Tara, the romantic symbol of her regional heritage. For Manty, however, the loss of her antebellum way of life proves more costly when her supposed identity is revealed as a sham: she discovers, at her father’s death, that her parents had never married—nor could they, since her mother had been one of the enslaved black women on her father’s plantation. Overnight she finds herself transformed from belle to chattel, sold on the slave block to pay her father’s debts.
Given the potential for sensationalism in Warren’s plot, critical misreadings of his novel were numerous, and the possibility of further misreading proved inevitable after Yvonne de Carlo and Clark Gable were cast to star in the 1957 film adaptation of Band of Angels. Indeed, it seemed that Warren’s story of Amantha Starr was only, as one reviewer characterized it, “an old-fashioned, three-decker melodramatic romance.”
For all that Band of Angels includes characters typical of melodrama—a beautiful and helpless heroine, her several intense male counterparts, a lush Louisiana setting, and the requisite romantic time period—one critic was willing to consider that Warren was not writing in the tradition of Gone with the Wind, but against that tradition, albeit on Margaret Mitchell’s “own grounds and without subterfuge” (Fiedler, 29).
According to that critic, Leslie Fiedler, Amantha is an essentially passive character, unwilling to accept her black heritage but unable to return to the easy assumption of white selfhood that ignorance of her real identity had permitted her. As a result, her story becomes only a small part of the broader stories of the equally conflicted men who love her, own her, marry her, or otherwise seek to control her.
Seth Parton is infatuated with her, but renounces her for the sake of his soul and his utopian abolitionist vision; Hamish Bond, even as he seeks to escape the guilt of his occupation as a slave trader, buys her and becomes her first lover; Tobias Sears, earnestly fulfilling his role in the postwar Reconstruction government but little suspecting that the woman he loves had once been enslaved, marries her; finally, Rau-Ru, who is enslaved with Manty by Bond and, like her, is the bitter beneficiary of Bond’s ambivalent gestures toward expiation, threatens her—first with exposure and ultimately with an activist agenda she repudiates as steadily as she repudiates her own true identity.
And thus Warren repudiates the simplistic labels readers had thought to affix to Band of Angels. Certainly, Warren’s story has many of the earmarks of 19th-century sentimental novels, but with a difference: tears, sighs, and cries of “Poor Manty” to the contrary, Amantha Starr’s secure future is not sealed with a happily-ever-after marriage, as in the fashion of Frances E. W. HARPER’s Iola Leroy; or Shadows Uplifted (1892), wherein an earlier “tragic mulatta” confirms her true identity through marriage, but only after weighing the costs and benefits of denying her racial heritage.
If anything, Warren’s novel subverts the classic sentimental form by showing, as did Harriet JACOBS’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), how antebellum slave women were systematically deprived of the very demonstrations of purity and piety that qualified their white counterparts for membership in the “cult of true womanhood.”
Perhaps, however, Manty’s story can be most profitably read through its comparison with William Wells BROWN’s Clotel: or The President’s Daughter (1853), a novel purporting to tell the story of Thomas Jefferson’s daughter, whose mother had been one of Jefferson’s slaves. The similarities between Clotel and Manty are significant in that they question the complicity of the “father”—both the actual and the symbolic figure—in allowing the tragedy of enslavement to continue.
Only two years earlier, the ghost of Thomas Jefferson had made an appearance in Warren’s Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices (1953), posthumously answering to very similar charges of complicity in the evils of enslavement. In the year after Band of Angels appeared, Warren would publish Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (1956).
True to his time, the racially conflicted era of the 1950s, Warren addressed the issue in multiple discourses, as few writers are empowered to: in poetry, in fiction, and in social commentary. Viewed then in the context of Warren’s writings on race in the 1950s, Amantha Starr becomes a metaphor for American society, which only at great risk to itself denies the elements, both black and white, that give it identity.
SOURCES
Ferriss, Lucy. Sleeping with the Boss: Female Subjectivity and Narrative Pattern in Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997.
Fiedler, Leslie A. Review of Band of Angels, New Republic 26 (September 1955): 28–30.
Justus, James H. The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.
Warren, Robert Penn. Band of Angels. New York: Random House, 1955.
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