What Is ‘Southern Stoicism’? An Interview with Professor Peter Lawler

Walker Percy is one of the first Southern writers to talk explicitly about Stoicism, you said that one of the reasons for that is that all the Southerners before him were too consumed by defending slavery or segregation. But Stoic themes are all throughout the Civil War. Gallantry, doing one s duty as they understood it, honor, quiet suffering. Yet the elephant in the room of course is the exploitation of all those people, the terribleness of slavery. It strikes me as fitting that Thomas Wentworth Higginson who led one of the first black regiments for the Union was a translator of Epictetus, a former slave. How does one reconcile the fact that the Southern aristocracy took Marcus Aurelius as a guide yet defended something as abhorrent as slavery?

Percy said there was hardly any antebellum Southern literature because all the literary energy was used up defending slavery. Many of those defenses were both ingenious and deeply repulsive. But we can t forget that the Roman patricians had slaves, and they regarded the work of slaves as indispensable for supporting their noble leisure and great deeds. So in a way taking Marcus Aurelius as a model was one way of vindicating slavery and later the racial paternalism of segregation. It is also true that Southerners admired the philosopher-slave Epictetus as much as the philosopher-emperor.

The lesson of Epictetus is that the rational man is never inwardly a slave, no matter what his political and material circumstances happen to be. As the novels of the contemporary Southern Stoic Tom Wolfe often called the novelist of manliness show, Epictetus rises in the Southern imagination as Stoicism gets democratized. In A Man In Full, Wolfe has a completely down-and-out character who finds inner freedom by actually coming upon a copy of Epictetus writing, and he ends up knowing exactly what to do to preserve his dignity all by himself in a maximum security prison. And that novel ends, with a character on fire as a born-again Zeussian or a Stoic.

via dailystoic.com

Wolfe’s A Man in Full is a great novel, in spite of being not particularly well written, like much of Dickens’s work, only better IMHO.