Confession; or, the Blind Heart

An Antebellum Othello

Authors

Christy Desmet University of Georgia

Abstract

William Gilmore Simms was a novelist, poet, and literary editor from antebellum Charleston. He was also a Shakespearean enthusiast and editor of the apocryphal plays. Although Simms described himself ironically as scribbling compulsively in the margins of his Shakespeare text, his knowledge of the plays, their plots, and their language was broad and deep. Simms was also active in both the American literary world and Southern politics, defending slavery at the same time as he argued for a national American literature. For all of these reasons, his Shakespearean appropriations offer valuable insights into the American South's understanding of Shakespeare and his cultural function. This essay offers a perspective on Shakespeare in the American South shortly before, during, and after the Civil War through the example of Simms's short story, "Caloya; or, the Loves of the Driver" (1841) and his novel Confession; or, the Blind Heart (1841). Both works claim Othello as their source, and in different ways, both address contemporary issues of race and color through strategies of displacement and acknowledgment. In these texts, Simms's appropriation of Othello examines how "whiteness," as a system of social privilege, is produced.

Author Biography

Christy Desmet, University of Georgia

Christy Desmet is Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia. She is the author of Reading Shakespeare's Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity (1992) and, with Robert Sawyer, co-editor of Shakespeare and Appropriation (1999) and Harold Bloom's Shakespeare (2002).