Setting the Record Straight: Anne W. Armstrong, Regionalism, and the Social Efficacy of Fiction
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 8-2008 Setting the Record Straight: Anne W. Armstrong, Regionalism, and the Social Efficacy of Fiction Katherine Hoffman Doman University of Tennessee - Knoxville Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Doman, Katherine Hoffman, "Setting the Record Straight: Anne W. Armstrong, Regionalism, and the Social Efficacy of Fiction. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2008. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/428 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Katherine Hoffman Doman entitled "Setting the Record Straight: Anne W. Armstrong, Regionalism, and the Social Efficacy of Fiction." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Allison R. Ensor, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Mary E. Papke, Thomas F. Haddox, Benita J. Howell Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the Graduate Council: We are submitting herewith a dissertation written by Katherine Hoffman Doman entitled, ―Setting the Record Straight: Anne W. Armstrong, Regionalism, and the Social Efficacy of Fiction.‖ We have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Allison R. Ensor ________________ Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Mary E. Papke_____________________ Thomas F. Haddox__ _______________ Benita J. Howell __________________ Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges___________________ Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official student records.) Setting the Record Straight: Anne W. Armstrong, Regionalism, and the Social Efficacy of Fiction A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Katherine Hoffman Doman August 2008 Copyright © 2008 by Katherine Hoffman Doman. All rights reserved. ii Dedication To my parents, Laing and Weedie Hoffman, for the love, support, and confidence to make it through this process. iii Acknowledgments I am a most fortunate person, having benefited from the assistance and encouragement offered by many generous people in the completion of this project. Central to my effort has been Mark Doman, who spent long years listening to my ideas and helping me earn this degree. I remain very grateful for his support. I owe a great debt of gratitude, of course, to the members of my committee. I am honored to have had the assistance of such a diverse, generous, and talented group of scholars as I worked on this dissertation. Dr. Allison Ensor, my committee chair, has been a constant source of encouragement and wisdom. His enthusiasm for my project never seemed to wane, and I relied heavily on both his encyclopedic knowledge of Appalachian literature and his eye for editing, not to mention his calmness and good humor. Dr. Mary Papke added to the project her remarkable editing skills, finding just the right phrase or word when I could not, curbing my fondness for extraneous commas, and suggesting content and structural changes that made great improvements in the text. When personal matters threatened to interfere with my professional work, both Dr. Ensor and Dr. Papke were sources of sound advice. I will always be grateful for the way they helped me stay on track, offering compassion and understanding while continuing to demand my best efforts. Dr. Tom Haddox could always be counted on for comments that pushed me to dig for deeper theoretical and personal insights into the material. His detailed narrative iv comments showed how much he cared about contributing to this effort, and his searching questions were invaluable in helping me focus and streamline my project. Dr. Benita Howell‘s background in anthropology and her vast knowledge of Appalachian history and culture were most useful to me during this effort. I appreciate her early interest in my topic, and I am grateful for the careful feedback and attention to detail that she showed throughout the process. A number of academic friends from other institutions helped sustain this effort as well. Dr. Cynthia Burnley took me under her wing years ago and explained the reasons why I should earn a Ph.D. I heard you, Cynthia. Dr. Linda Dietz, my neighbor and friend, spent hours listening to me and helping me think about how to take the next step when I was lost or confused. I will always be indebted to Dr. Jean Haskell, my longtime mentor and friend, gave me excellent advice and many opportunities to explore my interests in Appalachian Studies. Dr. Jack Higgs shared his personal archives with me, offering me a number of primary documents that have proved invaluable to this dissertation. Finally, my friend Dr. Anne Snellen, a newly-minted Ph.D. herself, read and commented on this dissertation and also provided comic relief. She kept me from taking myself too seriously and sent chocolate when times were desperate. I also wish to acknowledge my best sister-friends: Catherine Vodrey, Judy Strang, Mary Boyes, Viki Rouse, Wanda Buda, and Connie Pepper. To the sole other member of the ―Hundred Dollar Club,‖ a secret society of two, thank you for betting on me when others wouldn‘t. To Raymond and Diane, thanks for the music and the peacefulness of your presence. And to Jan and Al Orgain, cousins extraordinaire, thanks for the prayers and the dinners and the phone calls. You have all, in your different ways, made this v process easier by serving as my sounding boards and offering both material and moral support. I am truly grateful. vi Abstract Categorized by the few critics who know her work as a ―minor‖ Appalachian writer, Anne Wetzell Armstrong has never enjoyed the recognition she deserves. But she produced an important body of work, including fiction, non-fiction and drama. In the 1970‘s, critic Elaine Showalter led the gynocritical effort to recover women writers and inspired the reintroduction of a number of overlooked authors. This national impulse and the positive reception of its results has driven, in turn, an interest in similar regional efforts—hence my own interest in recovering the work of Armstrong, whose work has value in both national and regional contexts. This study applies a regionalist lens to Armstrong‘s fiction, including an early short story entitled ―Half-Wit Mary‘s Lover‖ (1912), and her two novels: The Seas of God (1915) and This Day and Time (1930). The project begins with Armstrong‘s biography, outlining the elements of her long and unusual life that influenced her writing. The three regionalist close readings point out the ways in which her fiction resisted hegemonic culture and offered a new perspective to early twentieth-century American readers. This project explores the ways in which Armstrong used her fiction to resist dominant culture‘s view of marginal populations, with a particular emphasis on the stereotyping of women and Southern mountaineers. Because Armstrong‘s considerable body of work focuses frequently on marginal women, the temptation exists to adhere strictly to a feminist lens in reading her work. Such an approach proves valid; however, the lens of literary regionalism—especially as defined by critics like Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse and differentiated from local color by its counterhegemonic agenda—offers a broader consideration of Armstrong‘s vii work. As a site for feminist readings, Armstrong‘s work proves interesting but stands as one among many; as regionalism, her fiction offers important new opportunities both to support and to problematize current thinking about the definition of the term as it applies to literature and also to explore certain controversial topics arising in the theoretical discourse, the role of feminism being one of those topics. viii Table of Contents Chapter Page Introduction: Anne W. Armstrong and the Case for Literary Recovery ............................1 Regionalism and Feminism...............................................................................................24 ―Half-Wit Mary‘s Lover‖: A Regionalist Close Reading ................................................33 I. A Biography of Anne W. Armstrong ...............................................................................59 II. The Seas of God ..........................................................................................................145 Critical Context, Reception, and Genre ........................................................................145 A Regionalist Close Reading ........................................................................................167 III. This Day and Time