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Anne Boyd Rioux
The field of American literary regionalism has been one of the most contested areas of literary study in the past 30 or so years, with debates over everything from what to call the movement and how to define it to which writers to include in it. First, what do we mean by “region”? For many it is a geographical place, while for others it cannot be found on any map but is instead a concept or a state of mind. The most fundamental approach to the region is to view it as simply the local, native, or indigenous cultures and peoples of specific, usually rural places. For some, it is the opposite of the national or the global, even a site of resistance to the centralizing or homogenizing forces of the nation and the global market economy. For others, it represents all that is marginalized, sidelined, or displaced from the mainstream or center of national life, encompassing the female, the racialized, and the ethnic, the poor and uneducated, the old, and the very young. The region can also refer to pastoral, rural, traditional, even explicitly anti‐modern beliefs and ways of life. Certainly, the idea of the regional and its corollary in literature are unstable, having been defined and redefined through the decades.
As we acknowledge the genre’s lack of prescriptiveness, it is also important to note that regionalist texts are themselves inherently unstable and thus some of the most rewarding literary texts to read and study, for they open up questions about how and why we read, how we classify people and places, and how we experience “othered” peoples and cultures. These are the kinds of questions that remain highly relevant in our multicultural world; therefore it seems likely that the study of literary regionalism will continue to flourish.
As the title of this chapter suggests, critics are also unsure exactly what to call this category of literature that thrived during the post‐Civil War era. Many use “local color” and “regionalism” interchangeably, while others distinguish between the two, sometimes using the former term specifically to refer to the form of popular fiction, usually sketches and short stories, that flourished in the decades after the war. The term “regionalism” seems particularly elastic, as many later writings, even into the twenty‐first century, are still considered to fall under that rubric. However, a significant flowering, or “rise,” of regional literatures took place after the Civil War, when the nation was undergoing reunification and thus was attentive to its own diversity. Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse (2003), in their important work Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture, have argued for a distinction between “local color” literature, which they define as seeking to exploit an exotic culture portrayed from the outside, and “regionalist” literature, which they see as writing from within the region, representing the subject position of the “other,” who resists being co‐opted by urban or national sensibilities. Their neat distinction and their classification of authors into each camp have not been widely adopted by other critics, however.
In any case, both “local color” and “regionalism” have often been laden with pejorative connotations, denoting subliterary, sentimental, exploitative, or minor writing. This literature has also been a lightning rod for ideological debates and battles between critics over what shape the American literary canon could take. Understandably, some critics have raised the issue of whether the terms are still useful (Behrendt 2008; Fetterley and Pryse 1998), with some suggesting that they be abandoned for more comprehensive and less political terms, like “rural” (Storey 2010). Disagreement has also extended to whether or not the category constitutes a subgenre of realism or should be recognized as its own genre; whether it should be broken down into smaller categories rather than discussed as one monolithic category; and which texts and authors should fall under the heading of local color or regionalist. Many consider Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Charles Chesnutt, and Kate Chopin to be its most accomplished practitioners. Other important contributors include Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, Mary Noailles Murfree (who wrote under the pseudonym Charles Egbert Craddock), George Washington Cable, Grace King, Alice Dunbar‐Nelson, Hamlin Garland, Sui Sin Far, Zitkala‐Ša, and Mary Austin. Two of the most important writers to contribute to the rise of regionalism after the Civil War are all but ignored by critics of the genre: Woolson and Twain, both of whom wrote about multiple regions and are therefore not easily identified with one place, as most regionalists are. The writers Caroline Kirkland, Celia Thaxter, Elizabeth Stoddard, Alice Cary, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Sherwood Bonner, Edward Eggleston, Alice Brown, Gertrude Atherton, Abraham Cahan, and Willa Cather are also sometimes included in discussions of literary regionalism.
Another tricky issue is how regions, when we consider them as concrete places, are determined. Criticism tends to privilege New England and the South, though the latter is particularly problematic as a cohesive region, as it encompasses Cotton Country, Florida, the Appalachians, the Carolinas, and Louisiana, the last of which is a highly diverse region in itself, encompassing a wide mixture of peoples. The West and what we today call the Midwest produced many significant (and at the time most popular) regionalist writers as well, helping to define the nation’s understanding of what was regional, in spite of the lesser attention to them and their frequent conflation.
There is also no consensus about where and when regionalist writing first appeared. Some identify Harriet Beecher Stowe’s story “Uncle Lot” (1834), set in New England, as the original regionalist story, followed by Alice Cary’s 1852 Clovernook collection of stories, set in Ohio, as well as Rose Terry Cooke’s stories of the 1850s, set in New England (Fetterley and Pryse 1992). Others point to a more masculine tradition of antebellum southern (or Old Southwest) humorists, beginning with Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s 1835 Georgia Scenes, Characters, Incidents, &c., in the First Half Century of the Republic and culminating in George Washington Harris’s 1867 Sut Lovingood (Cox 2003). And still others point to the later western story by Bret Harte, “The Luck of Roaring Camp” (1868), set in California (Ammons and Rohy 1998). However, even if some anthologists and critics look to earlier stories as precursors to regionalism, critics generally agree that Harte’s stories from California were responsible for creating a seemingly limitless appetite in American readers for magazine stories from far‐away yet still “American” locales, the so‐called “rise” of regionalism.
All of these debates suggest how vibrant the critical discussion has been, particularly over the past 30 years. For many critics who take on the task of defining and taxonimizing literary regionalism, these discussions have larger implications for what we designate as major American literature, what we consider “literature,” as well as what qualifies as “American.” The contested field of American literary regionalism has become central to our understanding of the canon and the cultural and literary work of American literature.
In the early twentieth century, literary regionalism of the late nineteenth century was identified as a minor genre within the larger, more significant field of realism. It was more or less designated as realism’s female cousin, focused on the everyday lives of rather insignificant, usually older women, most of them unmarried or widowed. The genre was equated with spinsterhood (Gebhard 1991) and New England’s decline (Wood 1972). In the 1970s, feminist critics were naturally drawn to what was considered a largely female literary genre, celebrating the feminine values of community and cooperation that reigned in a kind of “female Arcadia” (Donovan 1983) that was created in New England as men left to find better economic opportunities. They argued effectively for a reevaluation of the male‐dominated canon and the literary values on which it was based. Some critics complained, however, that the effect was to reify segregated literary spheres and to focus the genre primarily on one region: New England.
Beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the rise of cultural studies, some critics reinterpreted regionalist writing as participating in the processes of nationalization, imperialism, and cultural commercialization (e.g. Brodhead 1993; Kaplan 1991). These quite critical readings stressed the ways regionalist or local color texts, rather than promoting progressive, democratic ideals, were actually conservative in their political underpinnings. They argued that such texts reinforced dominant ideologies that sought to categorize and contain difference within a national imaginary of Anglo‐Saxon, metropolitan, and capitalist superiority used to justify the subjugation of racial and regional difference at home and increasingly abroad. Some feminist critics responded vociferously to such characterizations of regionalism, such as Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse (2003), who argued that the texts that participated in such hegemonic discourses are “local color,” but “regionalist” writing, almost all of it by women, was subversive and anti‐hegemonic. The key feature of the regionalist text was its empathetic authorial stance, which was embedded in or aligned with the region, not approaching it from outside. So, are regionalist texts powerful sites of resistance to mainstream national culture, or are they complicit in the commodification of the region as a tourist destination and the imperialist project of late nineteenth century?
Today’s critics are more interested in breaking down binaries in the study of literature and culture generally, and the field of American literary regionalism is no different. Susan Gilman (1994) may have been among the first to recognize regionalism’s inherently paradoxical nature by calling it “Janus‐faced” (109). Elizabeth Ammons and Valerie Rohy (1998) referred to it as “a double genre, at once normal and perverse, central and marginal” (xxiv). And Tom Lutz (2004) has written at length about regionalism’s “doubleness,” which others have called ambiguity. In essence, regionalism is today most often seen as embodying opposing values of the egalitarian and elitist, rural and urban, hegemonic and anti‐hegemonic, exploitative and empathetic, conservative and progressive. In fact, the best regionalist texts, as Lutz argues, embody doubleness by allowing readers to see beyond the patronizing stance of their urban narrators, who are often visitors to the region and portray local customs as quaint and humorously backward. These were the kinds of narrators that Fetterley and Pryse (2003) associated with “local color” fiction and thus saw as supporting “hierarchical structures of gender, race, class, and nation” (6) Yet, a reader’s experience of a text does not depend exclusively on the narrator’s perception. To assume so is to underestimate the role of the reader, then and now, in creating a text’s meaning. One could even say that texts allowing readers to see beyond the narrator’s limited perspective and question its prejudices are more resisting than those in which narrator and region are so closely aligned, for they more overtly dismantle assumptions and preconceptions that contemporary audiences likely shared. In such texts, Lutz explains, “the implied author and the implied reader meet in an understanding broader than, more cosmopolitan than, that of the characters or narrator” (30), a dynamic that he particularly finds in stories such as Chopin’s “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche” and Garland’s “Up the Coulee.” One could add many of the works of Woolson and Twain as well.
New directions in the study of American literary regionalism reflect the innovations in the study of American literature generally, as in the adoption of transnational (Freitag and Sandrock 2014), global (Joseph 2007), and postcolonial (Boyd 2011; Watts 2008) perspectives. Critics are also further challenging how we define region, increasingly understanding it as extending beyond the national borders of the United States, encompassing the Caribbean, in particular (Gleason 2011; Lowe 2011). Because regionalist texts are so diverse and often touch on the politics of race, gender, and sexuality, it seems likely that the study of American literary regionalism will continue to be robust.
In spite of so much critical contention, there is more general agreement on the common features of regionalist texts, which tend to be short stories or less fully realized sketches but in a few cases are longer works of fiction. Most fundamental is the tension between the metropolitan, outsider perspective and the native, insider view of things, between those who see the region as strange and those for whom it is familiar and normalized. Regionalist stories tend to feature narrators who are urban, well‐educated, and sophisticated, like most readers of the high‐cultural periodicals – such as the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Scribner’s, and the Century – in which such stories regularly appeared. These narrators may be omniscient and genteel (as in Harte’s stories, Austin’s The Land of Little Rain, and Jewett’s “A White Heron”) or they may be individuals who are essentially tourists, visiting regions to which few have previously ventured (as in Jewett’s Deephaven and Country of the Pointed Firs, Murfree’s Appalachian stories, or many of the stories in Woolson’s Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches). Sometimes the narrator can be a new resident in the region, as in Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow?, or a returnee, as in the case of Hamlin Garland’s “Up the Coulee,” which is told from the perspective of an urbane character returning to the provincial home of his youth.
Regional characters are generally common folk and are often marginalized figures or outcasts, such as old women and spinsters (as in the fiction of Freeman, Cooke, and Austin), children (as in Woolson’s “Felipa,” Jewett’s “A White Heron,” and Zitkala‐Ša’s “Impressions of an Indian Childhood”), outlaws and refugees from civilization (as in Harte’s stories and many of the stories in Woolson’s Castle Nowhere: Lake‐Country Sketches), slaves or ex‐slaves (Harris’s and Chesnutt’s dialect stories), or ethnic minorities (Far, Zitkala‐Ša, Cahan, Ruiz de Burton, and Dunbar‐Nelson). The natives usually speak in a local dialect, or vernacular, for which some regionalists were particularly famous, such as Eggleston in the Hoosier Schoolmaster and Harris in Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings. Both prided themselves on what they felt was a painstakingly accurate, rather than simply humorous, recording of how the real‐life counterparts of their characters actually spoke (Jones 1999: 43). Regionalist or local color stories were also popular because of the humor they employed, however, sometimes through the vehicle of a strange dialect, although the butts of the joke were just as often the sophisticated visitors as the naive locals. Twain was famous for his humor, and Harte’s stories were celebrated for their humorous portraits of rustic miners or gamblers who mocked pretension and bourgeois morality while also showing their tender‐hearted altruism.
The setting for regionalist stories is precisely and realistically described. In fact, the minuteness of quotidian detail that is often present has led many critics to see regionalist literature as an important branch of American literary realism. (A good example is Freeman’s “A New England Nun,” in which an aging spinster’s daily routine and meticulous housekeeping take center stage.) The locale is often remote or nearly inaccessible, as in the stories of Murfree’s In the Tennessee Mountains or Thaxter’s Among the Isle of the Shoals, just as it is usually strangely exotic, providing much of the local color for which the genre is known. One thinks of Woolson’s Florida; Austin’s desert; Cable’s, King’s, and Dunbar‐Nelson’s New Orleans; and Chopin’s Louisiana bayous. Often, as well, regionalist stories are set in a simpler, usually pre‐Civil War or preindustrial, past, a time in which traditional values and customs prevailed. Many times, in fact, the narrator is explicit that the ways of life presented are now a thing of the past. One thinks here of Stowe’s Oldtown Folks, Cary’s Clovernook sketches, Cable’s Old Creole Days, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Page’s plantation stories, and Zitkala‐Ša’s Impressions of an Indian Childhood, which contain varying degrees of romantic nostalgia for the past.
No one set of characteristics or ideas can encompass all of regionalist literature. Gary Totten (2005) perhaps put it best when he wrote, “Regionalism is a contested and sloppy term at best and has been stretched beyond its limits to accommodate various writers and texts” (86). But it is regionalism’s accommodation and even welcoming of writers from a wide variety of places and backgrounds that has made it so appealing to critics interested in expanding the boundaries of the American literary canon. For it was under the rubric of regionalist literature that writers of marginalized backgrounds and ethnicities entered the mainstream of American literature, publishing in the most popular magazines of the day, many of them supported and encouraged by the most powerful editor and critic of the late nineteenth century, William Dean Howells. As we consider more and more writers participating in the movement, our understanding of the genre expands and transforms. In order to more deeply examine its features, however, it is useful to consider the broadly defined regions that comprise it for most critics.
The West and Midwest
When we think of the nineteenth‐century West, we tend to think of a frontier first explored by participants in the mid‐century Gold Rush and then famously declared closed by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893. During that period, the far West, primarily California, was fertile ground for regionalist writers, beginning with Mark Twain’s “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” in 1865 and Bret Harte’s “The Luck of Roaring Camp” in 1868, both set in California mining camps.
A native of Missouri, Twain had come west soon after the outbreak of the Civil War, when he moved to the Nevada Territory and started writing irreverent, satirical articles for local newspapers, highly observant of the culture of the silver and gold mines that was rife with practical jokes and hoaxes (Berkove 2003). Carrying this style with him to California, he listened to miners’ tales and jokes and incorporated them into his own work, most successfully in “Jim Smiley,” which was published in papers all over the country and made Twain a national celebrity. In the story, everyone is tricked, including the frog, Jim, the narrator, and readers themselves. Twain’s book Roughing It (1872), about his western adventures, including travels to Hawaii, was another popular success, primarily for its humorous effects as Twain mocked himself for being perpetually naive about the West. His later novels set in his native Missouri have also been classified as western regionalism, particularly the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which follows Huck and the escaped slave Jim from St. Petersburg, Missouri, down the Mississippi River. In the end, Huck famously decides to “light out” for the western frontier to escape the civilizing influence of Aunt Sally.
By the time Twain moved East in 1869, another western writer had stolen the spotlight. Bret Harte, more than any other writer, established the literary West and the mythologies with which it would be associated well into the twentieth century. His “discovery of California as a field for fiction,” writes Gary Scharnhorst (2003), “made almost as much of a stir as the discovery of gold at Sutter’s mill” (481). A native of Albany, New York, Harte moved to California when he was 17 and soon began writing stories and newspaper columns about the region that were published in eastern periodicals. Writing from the perspective of an émigré from the east coast, he satisfied his eastern readers with portraits of an exotic region peopled with the cast‐offs of respectable society. As editor the Overland Monthly, founded in San Francisco in 1868, Harte supplied the local color he felt the magazine lacked with his breakthrough story “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” about an all‐male mining town transformed by the arrival of a child (whose prostitute mother dies as soon as he is born). They name the child Tommy Luck and soon realize that they must abandon their customary irreverence for everything respectable and Christian in order to provide the nurturing environment the helpless infant needs. In the end, the town is destroyed by a flood and most of its inhabitants, including Tommy, are drowned, but the implication is that their souls have been redeemed by their reverence for the Messiah‐like infant. With this story Harte instantly won the admiration of the eastern literary establishment. Thereafter followed a string of similar stories, such as “The Outlaws of Poker Flat,” “Miggles,” and “The Idyl of Red Gulch,” which challenged stereotypes of degenerate westerners as they also inaugurated new stereotypes, such as the whore with a heart of gold, the crusty gambler with a soft heart, and the prim schoolteacher who overcomes her prejudices. These stories were collected by the Boston publisher Fields, Osgood, Co. in The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Stories in 1870. The same firm offered Harte the most lucrative contract in nineteenth‐century literary history: to write a story a month for its publications, including the Atlantic Monthly, over the next year for $10 000. The results were disappointing to most readers, and for the rest of his career Harte tended to recycle the themes and characters that had made him famous.
Just as Harte’s star was fading, a new voice emerged in what was then called the middle West. Constance Fenimore Woolson had grown up in Cleveland, Ohio, and spent her summers on the shores of the Great Lakes. In 1873 she began publishing stories that built on Harte’s success, most notably in “King Log” (1873) and “The Lady of Little Fishing” (1874), set in the old mining and logging towns of the region. The landscapes and communities Woolson described had more or less disappeared by this time, but she had discovered through Harte the literary marketability of a frontier West peopled with male characters fleeing civilization (and the refined women who inhabited it). Although Woolson’s stories were often written from a male perspective, she pointed up its limitations, particularly in its views of women and minorities. Two stories that focus on the experiences of women escaping a civilization in which men have failed them are “Mission Endeavor” (1876) and “Ballast Island” (1873), the latter about a female lighthouse keeper who bears an uncanny resemblance to the later characters of Joanna in Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) and Louisa in Freeman’s “A New England Nun” (1891). Woolson was not simply an imitator of Harte’s, however. Her stories are much less sentimental, employing a stark, sometimes amoral realism that could occasionally draw the ire of critics who preferred that the wayward be punished. Her collection Castle Nowhere: Lake‐Country Sketches (1876) was published to great acclaim by the same firm that had published Harte’s stories. Appletons’ Journal called the field of her fiction “a region as fresh and new as any that American literature has touched” (quoted in Rioux 2016: 77).
A generation later, another writer emerged from the Midwest who had a tremendous impact on American literary regionalism. Hamlin Garland had grown up on farms in Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Dakotas but moved to Boston in 1884 to pursue a writing career. His collection Main‐Travelled Roads (1891) included 11 stories documenting the harsh conditions of life on the prairies. The only sentimentalism in these stories comes from the naive nostalgia of the narrator of “Up the Coulee,” a New York actor visiting the family he left behind in Wisconsin. He soon realizes that the vision of home he had carried with him was false and that his family has suffered tremendously in his absence. The rest of the stories, including “Under the Lion’s Paw,” exhibit Garland’s “refusal to aestheticize the region of the midwest” (Foote 1999: 161). Garland rejected the exoticization and commodification of the region that many critics have seen in other local color writers, partially because this region, made of the hardscrabble farmers whose lives border on destitution, did not attract tourism as other regions had. Influenced by the emerging populist politics championing the “common man,” Garland insisted in his essay collection Crumbling Idols (1894) that regionalist writing should not “deal with the outside (as a tourist must do). It will deal with the people and their home dramas” (quoted in Foote 1999: 161).
Another prairie writer, the Yankton Sioux Gertrude Bonin (1876–1938) – who adopted the name Zitkala‐Ša, meaning “Red Bird” – has also been classified as a regionalist writer. She wrote from the perspectives of both insider and outsider to the region in which she grew up, the Yankton Reservation in South Dakota, and which she first left at eight years old to attend White’s Manual Labor Institute in Indiana. In her early teens she again lived for three years with her mother among her people, yearning for a culture to which she no longer fully belonged. She then left again for further education and became a teacher. Her later writings reflect the dislocation and desire for a kind of lost Eden in her childhood as well as the great disruption and confusion she and her people experienced. As Gary Totten (2005) argues, Zitkala‐Ša’s relationship to regionalism is tenuous, as “she is writing neither a fixed ethnicity nor a stable and timeless region, for the culture and place she writes about are […] undergoing dramatic changes” (88). Zitkala‐Ša has been admired by critics for her critique of white patriarchal institutions, such as Christian boarding schools that sought to “civilize” Native American children by enforcing the rejection of all traditional values and customs. In this way, she perfectly illustrates the resistance of the region to hegemonic, homogenizing forces. Her autobiographical sketches “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” “School Days of an Indian Girl,” and “An Indian Teacher Among Indians” were published in the Atlantic Monthly from 1900 to 1902, while her fictional stories “A Soft‐Hearted Sioux” and “The Trial Path” appeared in Harper’s in 1901. The collection American Indian Stories (1921) also included allegorical stories she had heard in her childhood. Some of her later writings are also overtly political (as were Garland’s), reflecting her activism as an advocate of Native Americans, arguing for the preservation of their cultures and their right to full citizenship.
Another regionalist writer from the West, Edith Maud Eaton, adopted the pen name Sui Sin Far, the Cantonese name of the narcissus flower. Born of a Chinese mother and an English father who immigrated with their family to Canada, Sui Sin Far came to the United States as an adult, living in Seattle, San Francisco, and Boston. Most of her stories about Chinese immigrant communities are set on the west coast. The first was published in 1896, and her collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance was published in 1912. An overriding concern of Sui Sin Far’s was the effects of anti‐Chinese legislation, which made it illegal for Chinese immigrants to enter the country. In the title story, “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” she includes a satirical critique of the detention of Mr. Spring’s brother in prison, as well as other indignities the Chinese suffered. This story and others in the collection also portray the “local color” of Chinatown as well as the pressures on immigrants to Americanize, such as accepting that their children could marry whom they wish rather than have their marriages arranged for them. The story “Its Wavering Image” has been particularly valued by critics for its critique of the exoticization of Chinese culture by American writers and journalists. Sui Sin Far herself created a much more complex portrait of the tensions within Chinese communities and helped mainstream readers appreciate a culture far different from their own without allowing them to feel superior to her Chinese characters.
One of the most famous of the later western writers, Mary Austin grew up in Illinois and moved to California as an adult. Her first story was published in the Overland Monthly in 1892, and in 1903 she published The Land of Little Rain, widely considered a masterwork of nature writing. This collection of sketches, including “The Basket Maker,” comprehensively portrays the California dessert, its inhabitants, and the impact of the environment on human experience. Chronicling her encounters with a basket weaver, a gold digger, miners, and Native American inhabitants of the region, Austin’s narrator plays the roles of storyteller, ethnographer, and naturalist. The Land of Little Rain has to some extent been a focal point of debates about colonial narratives that seek to subdue the West and its Indigenous peoples, but most critics value the complexity of her approach to western materials. In her essay “Regionalism and American Fiction” (1932), one of the few theoretical approaches to regionalist literature by one of its practitioners, she argued that “the region must enter constructively into the story, as another character, as the instigator of plot” (quoted in Fetterley and Pryse 1992: 566), something most critics see her accomplishing in her best writing about the West.
The South
Before the Civil War, a host of writers wrote popular works set in and around southern plantations that helped to create the South as a literary region, including William Gilmore Simms, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, John Pendleton Kennedy, Caroline Lee Hentz, Maria McIntosh, and Mary Virginia Terhune (Marion Harland). Their works tended to support the institution of slavery and counter the portrayals of masters’ cruelty in slave narratives and the wildly influential novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which were aimed at turning public opinion against the South’s reliance on slave labor. However, when the Civil War laid waste to most of the region and its publishing capacity, the South was left more or less voiceless for many years.
In the aftermath of the war, however, northern interest in the South had only intensified, and periodicals sent journalists to report on conditions there and to search for talented writers from the region. The first to emerge was George Washington Cable, discovered by Edward King, writer of “The Great South,” a popular 13‐month illustrated series for Scribner’s. Cable’s “‘Sieur George,” set in New Orleans, appeared in that magazine in October 1873. Thereafter other stories from different parts of the South were published, satisfying northern audiences’ curiosity about the conquered region. Twain’s “True Story,” told in the dialect of a slave mother and set in North Carolina, appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in November 1874. Woolson’s first southern story, “Miss Elisabetha,” set in Florida, appeared in Appletons’ Journal in March 1875. These writers turned away from the romantic portraits of a slaveholding South and favored realism in portraying local customs and speech. By the end of the decade, the South had reemerged as the richest, most diverse field for literary exploration.
Cable was the first writer to emerge after the war who was native to the South. Considering the devastation wrought on the region, it is no wonder that few southerners were prepared to write about it. Cable’s New Orleans had come through the war more or less unscathed, however, as it was captured early on in the war and occupied by federal troops. (When Cable began to publish, troops still occupied the South. They would not leave until 1877.) New Orleans was a rich setting for regionalist fiction, as James Nagel has explained, because of its “diverse population, its ownership by three different countries, its amalgam of languages and customs, its French legal system, ethnic codes, music and literature, marriage and courtship practices, and a legacy of slavery and racial stratification quite unlike any other area of the country” (2014: 4–5). Cable’s early stories, collected in Old Creole Days (1879), focused on the conflicts between Creoles – who were mostly Catholic, French and Spanish, and observant of strict social hierarches – and the Americans who had come in after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, who were primarily Protestant, of English and Germanic extraction, and believers in social mobility and the ethic of hard work. Cable’s family were of the latter group, and his critiques of Creole society were not particularly welcome in New Orleans. Central to his criticism were the evils of slavery and racial stratification, which he would go on to lecture about, further antagonizing local Creoles to the extent that Cable no longer felt welcome in his native city. (He would move to the North in 1885.) The exotic locale, customs, and dialect in Cable’s stories made them quite popular in the North, however, and led to a lucrative career, including his novel The Grandissimes (1880), which elaborated on the themes from his stories: mixed‐race families, the plight of free people of color in New Orleans, slave insurrection, and the efforts of newly arrived Americans to reform Creole society.
After Cable’s departure, other New Orleans writers began to mine the rich literary material the city afforded, including Grace King, who was inspired to begin writing her stories after meeting Richard Watson Gilder, Cable’s editor at the Century. Having complained to Gilder about Cable’s portrayals of Creoles, she was surprised when he responded, “Why, if Cable is so false to you, why do not some of you write something better?” (quoted in Fetterley and Pryse 2003: 288). King was herself of Creole heritage, although her family were Presbyterian. She went to a Creole, French‐speaking school, and regretted the demise of that once‐grand culture. King’s first story, “Monsieur Motte,” appeared in the New Princeton Review in January 1886. Thereafter followed other stories, published in the Century, which portrayed bonds of friendship and loyalty between whites and people of color as well as the rise in fortunes and rapacity of freed slaves and poor whites. These stories, featuring orphaned girls, widows, and in one case a spinster, portray the perseverance of the genteel class that had fallen in wealth and status during the Civil War and Reconstruction, as King’s own family had. They were collected in Balcony Stories (1893) and were greeted warmly by northern audiences eager by that time to lay to rest the social and racial strife of the postwar period. King’s stories have been variously interpreted by critics as either participating in a regressive southern apologist tradition or as challenging racial binaries, in a more nuanced way (Fetterley and Pryse 2003: 288–290).
Another New Orleans writer about whom there is greater consensus on these matters is Alice Dunbar‐Nelson, who was born Alice Ruth Moore in 1875, the daughter of an ex‐slave and a white seaman. Overt racial markers are noticeably absent from her portraits of New Orleanians in her two collections of stories, Violets and Other Tales (1896) and The Goodness of St. Roque and Other Stories (1899). While some critics have faulted her for not writing directly about race, Dunbar‐Nelson herself insisted she didn’t have “much liking for those writers that wedge the Negro problem and social equality and long dissertations on the Negro in general into their stories.” She thought of her characters as “simple human beings” rather than representations of “a race or an idea” (quoted in Fetterley and Pryse 2003: 283). Nonetheless, stories like “Sister Josepha,” about an orphan girl who decides to stay in the convent in which she was raised because her exotic beauty makes her sexually vulnerable, deal with the fraught racial politics of a city where the idea of a racial binary was particularly absurd. The history of racial mixing, which had been common since the city’s inception, made New Orleans the perfect place to test the constitutionality of so‐called Jim Crow laws in the landmark case of Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the Supreme Court legalized racial segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine in 1896. Dunbar‐Nelson’s fullest and most overt exploration of the so‐called color line, “The Stones of the Village,” is a devastating story of a light‐skinned young man of color who chooses to “pass” and disavow his family, ultimately dying in fear of his mixed‐race identity being exposed. When in 1900 Dunbar‐Nelson asked Bliss Perry, then the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, for his advice about expanding the story into a novel, he told her that audiences were not receptive to stories about the effects of Jim Crow. She consequently chose never to publish the story, which was discovered in manuscript after her death.
Another writer who wrote of New Orleans, Kate Chopin, set her stories there and in the outlying parishes of Louisiana. Although Chopin grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, she married into New Orleans Creole society and was herself a descendent of French Creoles. She lived with her husband and growing family of six children in New Orleans until 1879, when they moved to the Chopin family plantation in Natchitoches Parish in northern Louisiana. After her husband’s death in 1882, she lived on there, returning to St. Louis in 1884. Her first stories did not appear until 1889, and, remarkably, all of her writing was set in Louisiana and New Orleans, although she hadn’t lived there in many years. Her stories were collected in Bayou Folk in 1894 and A Night in Acadie in 1897. They include “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche,” about a Cajun man who objects to a northern artist’s portrait of him as if he has just emerged from the swamp, preferring instead to be immortalized in his best suit. The story criticizes writers who portray the region from without, reducing it to its “local color” aspects while ignoring the dignity of the people who live there. In “At the ’Cadian Ball,” Chopin captures the social stratification of Louisiana with Creole men at the top and Acadians, or Cajuns, beneath them, and African Americans lower still. The story portrays an affair between a Creole man and an Acadian woman, and the companion story, “The Storm,” portrays the sexual consummation of that same affair. The latter story was not published in Chopin’s lifetime. She had explored a subject (women’s sexuality) as taboo as the themes of Dunbar‐Nelson’s “Stones of the Village.” The failure of both stories to be published exposes the limits of what literary regionalists could explore in their fiction. In fact, Chopin’s literary career was effectively ended by the controversy ignited by her now celebrated novel, The Awakening (1899), an unconventional story of a married woman’s growing sexual awareness and consequent infidelity set in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast.
Outside of New Orleans, other writers made significant contributions to the literary regionalism of the South. One of the earliest and most important was Constance Fenimore Woolson, who had moved south with her invalid mother in the winter of 1873. Woolson and her mother were not alone. Hundreds of northerners began to flock to the subtropical climate of Florida. A popular resort town, St. Augustine, was the setting of many of Woolson’s stories, including “Felipa,” about a Minorcan girl who falls in love with a visiting northern woman, as well as the novel East Angels (1886), which is partially a love letter to the Florida landscape and partially a response to the themes of marriage and women’s restricted lives that Henry James had treated in his novel The Portrait of a Lady (1881). In these works, and virtually all of those published in her collection Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (1880), the central characters are visiting northerners who underestimate and fail to understand the locals, much like the artist in Chopin’s “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche.” In stories such as “In the Cotton Country,” “King David,” and “Old Gardiston,” Woolson “challenges the imperial eyes of northern visitors, the narrator, and her contemporary readers” (Boyd 2011: 15). At the end of many of these stories, the visitors return to the North, unable to colonize the locals or the landscape of the South. In “Rodman the Keeper,” her most famous southern story, a northern cemetery keeper watches over the dead in a federal cemetery and keeps away from the locals until he finds a former Confederate soldier dying of want. He then nurses him back to health and becomes his friend, but the ailing man’s female cousin resists the keeper’s help and offers of reconciliation. In the end, he respects her steadfastness to the memory of her family and what she calls her country. Thereafter they part ways, unlike the forced reconciliations of so many North–South romance stories written after the war. “Rodman” was identified by reviewers at the time as capturing the aftermath of the war like no other story of the period.
Mary Murfree was another important writer to emerge from the South just after the end of Reconstruction and the removal of federal troops in 1877. She published her first story, “The Dancin’ Party at Harrison’s Cove,” under the pseudonym Charles Egbert Craddock in the Atlantic Monthly in May 1878. Thereafter followed a number of immensely popular stories set in the Tennessee mountains, featuring mountain folk who speak in a heavy dialect, make moonshine, have feuds, look back warily at genteel northern visitors, and are fiercely loyal to their kin. The stories were collected in 1884 in In the Tennessee Mountains, after which Murfree traveled to Boston and revealed herself to the Atlantic’s editor, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who had only known the author as Craddock. He was shocked, as were national audiences who were then apprised of the discovery, as the style of her stories was considered to be overwhelmingly “masculine.” Murfree continued to publish until her death, but she had reached the height of her fame under her male pseudonym. In the wake of Craddock’s popularity followed other stories set in the Appalachians by Woolson (her novella For the Major [1883]), Joel Chandler Harris, and Thomas Nelson Page.
Harris, from Georgia, was more widely known, however, as the author of the “Uncle Remus” stories, which also made a significant contribution to southern regionalism. He published his first story featuring the storytelling ex‐slave, “Uncle Remus As a Rebel,” in the newspaper the Atlanta Constitution in 1877. A number of stories followed, culminating in 1880 with the wildly popular Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings, which featured 34 “legends of the old plantation” told in the voice of Uncle Remus, in black dialect, to a young white boy who comes to his cabin most evenings to hear a story. The stories feature Brer (Br’er or Brother) Rabbit, a trickster figure popular in slave (and before that African) folklore who outwits larger and stronger, but not smarter, animals. Brer Rabbit’s exploits made for great entertainment, but they were also parables of slave resistance, which Harris had collected from ex‐slaves. Further collections of Uncle Remus tales were published through the turn of the century, contributing to the nostalgic turn in southern literature.
By the 1890s, we see a shift in southern local color identified by Barbara Ewell and Pamela Glenn Menke (2002) as “seeing the inequities of southern society as simply a ‘picturesque’ counter to the ‘prosaic’ equality of modern democracy” (xlii). In essence, the threat that southern differences had posed before the Civil War were neutralized and accommodated in the national image of itself. A figure like Uncle Remus became a reminder of a simpler time, “befo’ de wah,” when the South was prosperous, or when the white planter class was, and its dependents, principally slaves, were allegedly well cared for. No writer was more responsible for this shift toward what is now known as the plantation tradition than Thomas Nelson Page. A native of Virginia, Page got his big break with the story “Marse Chan,” published in the Century in 1884. The story was instantly successful, and with the publication of In Ole Virginia or Marse Chan and Other Stories (1887) Page became “the high priest of Southern apologists” (Ewell and Menke 2002: xlvii). Grace King counted him as an important influence on white southern writers, who saw that they could now gain the attention and sympathy of northern audiences for their grievances about the collapse of their slave economy and racialized social hierarchies. Page’s stories are reminiscent of earlier plantation stories in the way they feature white northern visitors meeting (now former) slaves, who attest to the strong bonds they have with their (now former) white masters. In Page’s postbellum setting, the loyal slave has refused to leave his “home” and enjoys telling stories about the grand goings‐on among the aristocratic class before the war. Meanwhile, the former planter class is portrayed as benignly looking out for their former slaves’ welfare. These nostalgic portraits, which gently asserted the superiority of whites over childlike blacks, helped pave the way for the extremist white supremacy that would assert such beliefs more forcefully, even violently, at the turn of the century, particularly in the wake of Plessy v. Ferguson, as witnessed in the rise of lynching in these years.
Into this turbulent literary and social climate entered Charles Chesnutt, who was born in Ohio and grew up in North Carolina, returning to Ohio as an adult to escape racial prejudice and limited opportunities. His first story, “The Goophered Grapevine,” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1888. Although he was the first African American short‐story writer to appear in that magazine and ultimately to make an impact on literary regionalism, his editor and readers did not know of his race. In fact, his African descent was not revealed to the public (although his publisher had known for some years) until after his first collection of stories, The Conjure Woman, was published in 1899. The stories in this collection drew on the popularity of the plantation tradition while subtly subverting it. In all of the stories, the frame narrator is John, a white northern businessman, and the internal narrator is the former slave Uncle Julius McAdoo. In the “The Goophered Grapevine,” Uncle Julius tells a tale of how the vineyard that the frame narrator wishes to purchase had been bewitched. John suspects that Uncle Julius is trying to warn him against buying the vineyard, which he imagines the ex‐slave has been pilfering from, but more likely Uncle Julius used the story show his knowledge and value, which do earn him a job with John when he buys the vineyard. Later in the same year as The Conjure Woman was published, a second collection of Chesnutt’s stories appeared, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line. These stories more overtly addressed the issues attendant with segregation, such as “The Wife of His Youth,” about a free black who left the South during the war and remade himself in the North, becoming a prosperous businessman and dean of the elitist Blue Vein Society, whose members prize light skin and genteel refinement. When his former wife from the days of slavery shows up looking for him, they no longer recognize each other. In the climax of the story, he decides to acknowledge her and present her to the Blue Veins, a parable of the necessity of African Americans to accept their slave past and darker‐skinned kin, despite pressures to assimilate into white society and, when possible, pass. Chesnutt himself was light enough to pass, but he refused to do so. As his writings became more overtly critical of America’s racial politics, particularly in the novels he published at the turn of the century, he lost his readership and the support of his greatest champion, William Dean Howells. Chesnutt thereafter returned to practicing the law and gave up his literary career, as did Alice Dunbar‐Nelson, who turned to journalism and activism after “The Stones of the Village” was deemed unsuitable for publication.
New England
New England is the region with which regionalist literary studies have been primarily concerned, particularly as feminist critics were drawn to New England local colorists, most of whom were women. In the writings of these New Englanders the intersections between region and gender are most visible (as in the writings of southerners the intersections between region and race are most visible). Part of the reason is that, historically speaking, rural New England has been a region full of women. As the economic downturns of the 1830s and 1840s hit the region, the economic opportunities in industrial centers and new settlements in the middle West as well as the discovery of gold out West lured many men away from the region. This is apparent in Jewett’s “A White Heron,” in which a girl and her grandmother live alone in the country, the girl’s parents having moved away to a factory town and her uncle having left for California. In addition, many New England women never married, as eligible bachelors were few. As early as 1830, Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s “Cacothes Scribendi” portrayed a small village, probably in Massachusetts, from which nearly all of the men have left, to go to sea, to Boston, or to the South or West for economic opportunity. Thus, it is not surprising that New England regionalism was written primarily by women and about communities comprised almost entirely of women, creating what some critics have identified as a “queer” form of literature that explores the lives outside of the norm, identified as heterosexual familial units (Fetterley and Pryse 2003: chap. 10). Although writers from other regions (most notably Woolson, King, Dunbar‐Nelson, Sui Sin Far, and Austin) explore the connections between gender, sexuality, and region in their work, it is primarily in the writings of the New England regionalists that critics have examined these issues.
Harriet Beecher Stowe is an important precursor to New England regionalists with the series of sketches, including “Uncle Lot,” in The Mayflower (1843). In later works, such as her Maine novel The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862) and the Massachusetts collection of stories Oldtown Folks (1869), Stowe values the quiet, rural, hard‐working, thrifty side of a tradition‐oriented Yankee culture, over the acquisitive, outwardly expanding side of it that would project itself onto the continent and define for many the bedrock of a national culture. She focused instead on the quotidian lives of her characters, initiating a preoccupation with women’s domestic tasks that would inform the work of later writers.
Rose Terry Cooke, who grew up in Connecticut, began publishing her regional stories early. She was invited to contribute to the first issue of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly in November 1857, and over the next four decades published over a hundred regionalist stories in the leading magazines of the day. She produced three important volumes of regionalist stories: Somebody’s Neighbors (1881), The Sphinx’s Children and Other People’s (1886), and Huckleberries Gathered from New England Hills (1891). Cooke’s stories are particularly notable for their critiques of the institution of marriage, such as in “How Celia Changed Her Mind,” about a woman who, tired of the disrespect spinsters receive, decides to marry and then discovers how vulnerable women thus become to cruel or improvident men. Celia regrets her loss of freedom and then regains it upon her husband’s death, after which she helps other women avoid marriage and celebrates Thanksgiving with the town’s spinsters. In other stories, such as “Miss Beulah’s Bonnet” and “Polly Mariner, Tailoress,” she portrays single women who freely assert their right not to like boys or to support themselves without the aid of relatives.
Another significant contributor to New England regionalism, although she is rarely considered in studies of this literature, is Elizabeth Stoddard. Her remarkable novels The Morgesons (1862), Two Men (1865), and Temple House (1867) are all set in her native coastal Massachusetts, a bleak, isolated landscape that seems to bring into being her character’s intense passions and peculiar loyalties to family. These novels, along with her stories of the 1860s, challenge sentimental portrayals of love, marriage, and womanhood, recalling the poetry of Emily Dickinson in their brusque and often oblique candor. Stoddard’s work was valued by the few rather than the many, discouraging her from continuing her literary career. Although she was neglected in her own day, critics today prize her originality and often compare her to Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Brontë sisters, whose novels were mainly set upon the brooding moors of northern England.
In the fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett, we reach what many critics consider the apotheosis of regionalist fiction. A native of Maine, she lovingly portrayed her home region from 1873 until 1902, when a carriage accident left her unable to continue writing. In addition to numerous stories, she wrote two works central to critical analyses of regionalism: Deephaven (1877) and The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). Both could be described as collections of sketches or vignettes that center on particular protagonists and their exploration of a specific place. The earlier book narrates the excursions of two female friends from Boston who visit the town of Deephaven for the summer. The chapter “The Circus at Denby” has been central to Fetterley and Pryse’s (2003) construction of a regionalist ethic of empathic narration, as it illustrates what they call “shifting the center of perception” (123). In the story, the two women enter a circus tent, presumably to gawk at the freak show on display, but instead learn the sad story of the Kentucky giantess and come to empathize with her. The Country of the Pointed Firs, widely considered the most finely crafted literary work of the entire movement, has also been central to debates about the status of women’s regionalist writing in the American literary canon, as well as about the cultural work regionalist writing performs. The essays collected in New Essays on “The Country of the Pointed Firs” (Howard 1994) exhibit the full range of critiques against what critics have variously identified as the work’s nationalism, imperialism, Nordicism, anti‐immigrant stance, and racism. However, as Lutz (2004) explains, although it “has been used as prime evidence for both the hegemonic and antihegemonic readings of regionalism, the best recent criticism recognizes the complexity of [Jewett’s] work” (87). The book, which is essentially a series of linked sketches and stories, focuses on an unnamed woman writer from the city, who gradually becomes the narrator of the book, and her relationship with her landlady, Mrs. Todd, an herbalist, healer, and leading citizen of the fishing village Dunnet Landing, in Maine. The narrator has come there to write a book but instead is pulled into the lives of the town’s inhabitants as Mrs. Todd takes her visiting and she hears their stories. The book perfectly illustrates, through its web of stories and relationships, the process of the outsider working toward the status of an insider, developing the double perspective that Jewett encouraged her protégée, Willa Cather, to acquire in her own writing. The Country of the Pointed Firs also celebrates female communities and relationships, as well as the practical tasks that often comprise their everyday lives, such as baking and herb gathering, exemplifying the female bonds and rituals that were a significant feature of nineteenth‐century life but not often valued by critics as the subject of literature.
The fiction of Mary Wilkins Freeman, a native of Massachusetts, grew out of that of her predecessors Cooke and Jewett, containing many of the same themes, but she is not considered a derivative writer. On the contrary, she has been accorded the status of artist more thoroughly than any other regionalist writer, save Jewett. Freeman exposed the tensions beneath the surface of New England rural life in her dozens of stories, over 20 collections of stories, and almost as many novels. Her most well‐known works are her stories, particularly those collected in A Humble Romance and Other Stories (1887) and A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891). Near the end of her career, she received the Howells Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1926 and was among the first women, along with Edith Wharton, inducted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1927. In comparison to Jewett’s Deephaven, Freeman’s fiction “does not dramatize the shift in the center of perception; instead she writes from a position where such a shift has already occurred” (Fetterley and Pryse 1992: 306). Her stories could convey women in rural communities straining against deprivation and male authority, such as in “The Revolt of ‘Mother’” (1890), which narrates a farm wife’s rebellion against her husband’s decision to build a new barn instead of a new house for his family. She also portrayed women’s small but momentous rebellions against male church authorities in “A Church Mouse” (1889) and “A Village Singer” (1889). Her most famous story, “A New England Nun” (1891), details the domestic world of the fastidious Louisa Ellis, a single woman who has lived alone for so long waiting for her fiancé to return from making his fortune that her world has grown too narrow to accommodate anyone else. She happily gives him up when she discovers that he loves another, returning to her solitary existence with a dog and canary but feeling none of the shame or loneliness that a spinster’s life was presumed to entail. In such stories, Freeman quietly championed the lives of women outside the norm.
Conclusion
By the mid‐1890s, the local color movement was losing its momentum. Even as the most celebrated regionalist work, The Country of the Pointed Firs, was being published in 1896, critics were declaring it a worn‐out form. As Donna Campbell (1999) explains, “local color became fragmented while it was almost simultaneously promoted as the key to a ‘national’ literature, rejected as a literary fad, reworked as a variety of proto‐naturalism, and, most damaging of all, redefined and marginalized as […] the ‘Feminine Principle’ in American fiction” (63).
The tendency toward nostalgia for the past led to the surge in popularity of historical romance novels, including works by regionalist writers themselves, most notably Jewett’s The Tory Lover (1901), Freeman’s Pembroke (1894), and, one could argue, much of Page’s work. Meanwhile, the harsh realism of some local color (one thinks particularly of Garland, Woolson, Cooke, Stoddard, and Freeman) can be seen as pointing toward the deterministic fiction of naturalism, which came to prominence at the turn of the century. However, literary regionalism did not simply die out. As Lutz (2004) and Joseph (2007), have shown, its concerns and themes would return in the writings of Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, the Harlem Renaissance writers (particularly Zora Neale Hurston), the Southern Agrarians, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor, well into the late twentieth century.
References
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 2 (TRAVEL WRITING); CHAPTER 22 (REALISM FROM WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS TO EDITH WHARTON); CHAPTER 23 (MARK TWAIN AND THE IDEA OF AMERICAN IDENTITY); CHAPTER 25 (NATURALISM).