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The Same Old Same Old: Rogue and Representations of the South
Chris Claremont and Michael Golden created Rogue in 1981, and she made her debut in Avengers Annual #10. What makes Rogue interesting to me is her place of origin, the fictional Caldecott County in Mississippi. Speaking with the Clarion Ledger in 2016, Claremont told Jacob Threadgill, “I felt, why should Louisiana get all the fun? … (Mississippi) was a place where the racial divisions and relationships were viewed in perhaps more stark terms than in and around New Orleans.” This is a really interesting quote, specifically the juxtaposition of “fun” and “racial divisions.” Rogue could be a character that addresses issues of racism in the US South; however, those issues become subsumed within the nostalgic moonlight and magnolia myth, dashed with a pinch of Faulknearian Southern Gothic.
This image of a bygone South appears again and again in Claremont’s depictions of Rogue, most notably in Uncanny X-Men #11 when Rogue and the other X-Men square off against Horde, a villain that plays on the team member’s wants and desires, making them live within their own dreams. Rogue’s hallucination takes her to the Old South, where she gazes in upon herself at a party at a plantation house. She muses, “The Old South, as it was in song an’ story. Almost as much a fairy tale land as ‘Camelot,’ complete with a plantation princess: me.”
