In chapter three of A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston, “History Touches Legend in Charleston: The Literary Packaging of America’s Most Historic City,” Stephanie E. Yuhl describes the history and significance of the Poetry Society of South Carolina (PSSC) and its major writers. She relates how writers of the Charleston Renaissance in the 1920’s worked to create a Southern literary revival through the PSSC, following the society to the end of its influence in the 1930’s. In doing so, she represents the perspectives of Charleston writers like John Bennet, Josephine Pinkney, DuBose Heyward, and Hervey Allen.

As Yuhl relates, this Charleston based revival was distinct from other emerging literary trends across both the rest of the country and the South in particular. Rather than embracing modernist language and thought and rejecting old literary styles, the South Carolina Poetry Society, composed of Charleston’s cultural elite, remained fairly conservative and dedicated to the same literary pursuits of nineteenth century Southern writers in their endeavor to sing the praises of the land, its history, and its social and racial hierarchy. Though the society participated in a larger, nationwide trend of American regionalism, it was “largely incapable of making significant original contributions to the history of ideas” because of a deep-seated “parochialism and intellectual complacency” (90). However, despite their failure to break from the mainstream, writers involved in the revival did convey the “selective civic identity” of Charleston’s upper class that believed itself to speak on behalf of the whole community (90). In addition, it was able to “help resuscitate, for a time, the city’s former antebellum status as a cultural center,” (89).

Yuhl mentions how these writers attempted to depict and were fascinated by black life in the South Carolina Lowcountry, but generally failed to represent the realities and complexities of African American life, instead imagining black people as simplistic, primitive, and loyal to the white elite. Though Yuhl talks at length about Charleston writers’ faulty representations of black life in the South, she touches only briefly on how Native Americans were depicted by members of the PSSC. She mentions Beatrice Witte Ravenel’s “The Yemassee Lands” but does not spend much time discussing her, or anyone else’s depictions of Indigenous life.

This source very directly challenges the accuracy and intellectual significance of works we have read this semester. Yuhl discusses DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy at length—though she recognizes his attempt to humanize black characters in a way many of his contemporaries could not, she points out the ways in which Heyward’s depiction of black life remains shallow. Yuhl’s analysis reveals how the black characters of Porgy are still characterized as exotic, primitive, and morally loose. Overall, Yuhl portrays the writings of the PSSC and its members as important cultural artifacts, but lacking in intellectual significance due to their adherence to and reverence for dominant cultural ideals.