James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice: A Reappraisal

Abstract

IN THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH, PUBLISHED IN 1911 AND SET IN HER native Virginia where time all but stands still, Ellen Glasgow uses the voice of Abel Revercomb to verbalize what she sees as the southern malady and the blighted legacy of the Old South. Abel, the eponymous miller, observes of Old Church, and by extension of the South, that “[t]he world he moved in was peopled by a race of beings that acted under ideal laws and measured up to an impossible standard” (164). The ideal laws and impossible standards that form an inextricable part of the southern mythology center on the conception of aristocratic heritage as a staple of southern identity and police the behavior of men and women. None can escape conformity, and Glasgow’s characters’ struggles to imitate or elevate themselves to the vaunted archetype become lost causes predetermined by the very inaccessibility of the standards they wish to emulate. Although Glasgow was not immune to the “imperishable charm,” she never tired of exposing the debilitating effect of the Old South mythology on growth and progress, opining that what the South needed to reinvigorate itself was “blood and irony”—blood because it “was satisfied to exist on borrowed ideas” and irony because it is “the safest antidote to sentimental decay” (A Certain Measure 12, 28). James Branch Cabell, her contemporary and fellow Richmonder, responded to Glasgow’s call for exposing the pernicious influence of Old South sentimentalism and its stale ideal of aristocratic descent on the conception of southern identity. The result, an ambiguous and ironic novel, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice, was published in 1919.1 It is