'The Cassique of Kiawah': Simms's 'Moby-Dick' (William Gilmore Simms, Herman Melville)

William Gilmore Simms (1806–1870) was among the most influential American men of letters of the nineteenth century. In terms of the volume and the variety of his work, he was without peers. In terms of the popular and critical reception to his work during his lifetime, he had very few peers. Shortly after his death, though, his reputation declined for a variety of reasons, none more prominent than his identity as a southerner during a period when nearly anything associated with the South that did not also indict the South in some way was unpopular with northern readers and critics. The publication of the 1892 Simms biography by William Peterfield Trent—a development that might have been expected to revive a sagging reputation—actually contributed to the marginalization of Simms because of its thesis that the author's shortcomings are due mostly to his association with southern culture.; There are some striking similarities between the course taken by the reputation of Simms and that taken by the reputation of Herman Melville. Having achieved popular and critical success early in his career, Melville then went into decline because most readers and critics failed to appreciate his magnum opus, Moby-Dick. A critical reexamination of that novel in the twentieth century led to a revival of interest in Melville that centered Moby-Dick in the American canon and that identified all of Melville's corpus—the stronger works and the weaker—as worthy of serious study.; As Melville's had, Simms's magnum opus has gone largely unexamined. That work, The Cassique of Kiawah, was published late in Simms's career, and—despite a generally positive response upon its initial publication—came to be ignored because of the Civil War and the century of regional animosity that followed it. If Simms is to take his rightful place in the American canon, and if the canon is to reflect fully the power, depth, and diversity of its most influential authors, a critical examination of The Cassique of Kiawah is essential. I propose to make such an examination, to identify The Cassique of Kiawah both as an important continuation of the budding American literary tradition of the early nineteenth century and as a startling break in that tradition, a forerunner of the dominant literary movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.