Regionalism and Local Color Fiction

AHTL-2_18_R_p929-990.qxd 10-24-2005 10:02AM Page 971 REGIONALISM AND LOCAL COLOR FICTION Steffens, Lincoln. The Shame of the Cities. New York: Peter common to local color fiction is a degree of narrative Smith, 1901. distance rendered through the character of a narrator Talmage, T. De Witt. Evils of the Cities. Chicago: Rhodes differing in class or place of origin from the region’s and McClure, 1891. residents; a variation on this is a narrative voice dis- Tarbell, Ida. The History of the Standard Oil Company. New tanced through educated diction or an ironic tone. York: McClure, Phillips, 1904. In the late nineteenth century, local color fiction appeared in the great literary journals of the day such Secondary Works as Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, the Century, and Boyer, Paul. Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University the Atlantic Monthly as well as in newspapers and pop- Press, 1992. ular magazines, as Nancy Glazener, Richard Brodhead, and Charles Johanningsmeier have shown. It differed Dombroski, James. The Early Days of Christian Socialism in from mainstream realism in its choice of local or rural America. New York: Octagon Books, 1977. instead of urban subjects and its interest in the customs Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism. of populations otherwise invisible in the literary land- Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. scape, such as the poor, ethnic minorities, and the eld- May, Henry F. Protestant Churches and Industrial America. erly; moreover, unlike mainstream realism, the market New York: Harper, 1949. for local color encouraged writers who might other- Pizer, Donald, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American wise find difficulty publishing their work because of Realism and Naturalism: From Howells to London. gender, geography, class, or ethnicity. Describing a Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995. locale, a time, and a set of characters removed from the Thomas, John L. Alternative America: Henry George, concerns of city dwellers who read high-culture jour- Edward Bellamy, Henry Demerest Lloyd, and the nals, local color stories provided an imagined space Adversary Tradition. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press containing the roots of the nation, a site of unchanging of Harvard University Press, 1983. values and authentic traditions against which to view Wiebe, Robert. The Search for Order, 1877–1920. New York: the uncertainties of industrial urban life. Such a per- Hill and Wang, 1967. spective later led to claims that regionalism was too limited in its subjects and too nostalgic or sentimental Bruce Levy in its approach, charges that contributed to its disap- pearance early in the twentieth century. Twentieth- century critics saw local color fiction as a marginal REGIONALISM AND LOCAL offshoot of mainstream realism, with women’s regional COLOR FICTION fiction a “literature of impoverishment,” in Ann Douglas Wood’s words, that lacked the aesthetic The terms “regionalism” and “local color fiction” sophistication of modernist works, the vigor of writing refer to a literary movement that flourished from the by male social realists, and even the rich detail of close of the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth domestic fiction written in the 1850s and 1860s. century. Although most fiction is regional in that it Some commentators have challenged both the makes use of a specific setting, for regionalist writers denunciation of local color fiction and the conditions the setting was not incidental but central, and the of its literary revival. Like realism, local color fiction “local color” details that established that setting gave now seems a significant staging-ground for late-nine- a name to the movement. In writing regional fiction, teenth-century debates over citizenship and nation- authors focused on representing the unique locales of hood, although the criteria for establishing that what they saw as a vanishing American past whose cus- significance have shifted. For example, beginning in toms, dialect, and characters they sought to preserve. the 1970s feminist critics such as Josephine Donovan, Furthermore, as writers of a continuing national nar- Marjorie Pryse, and Judith Fetterley found in the form rative implicitly focused on what it meant to be a vibrant celebration of community that resisted the American, they often presented characters as types, Gilded Age’s preoccupation with national wealth and sometimes as representatives of the collective traits of industrial power, whereas twenty years later Sandra a community or region and sometimes as outsiders or Zagarell, Susan Gillman, and Elizabeth Ammons eccentrics whose attempts to fit into a community denounced its promotion of racist, nationalist, and exposed both the community’s values and their own. imperialist ideologies and, by virtue of its celebration In addition to this emphasis on setting and its effect of community, its strategies for resisting social change upon character, local color stories feature dialect that and reinforcing an oppressive status quo. Opinions lends authenticity to the tale. Another element also differ as to the whether the focus on region that AMERICAN HISTORY THROUGH LITERATURE, 1870–1920 971 AHTL-2_18_R_p929-990.qxd 10-24-2005 10:02AM Page 972 REGIONALISM AND LOCAL COLOR FICTION provided access to publishing markets for populations literary tastes. The Civil War had made the regions all for women and ethnic minorities was an unmixed too aware of one another as their inhabitants traveled blessing, for as James Cox notes, the local colorists’ to, or experienced vicariously through letters and “region was a refuge for imaginative expression, yet it newspapers, areas of the country that now had names was also the enclosure that kept them in their place” and significance even for remote villages. Unsettled by (p. 767). As Tom Lutz sums up the controversies in rapidly changing technologies, such as the railroad and Cosmopolitan Vistas: the telegraph, by the increasing racial and ethnic diver- There are many other debates in the history of sity fed by successive waves of immigration and inter- criticism . having to do with local color’s “minor nal migration, and by crumbling class structures and status” (pro and con), the genre’s relation to uncertain social mobility, the middle-class reading gender (it’s women’s province; no, it isn’t), to public looked toward an imagined past located in the ethnic literature (ethnic lit is also local color; no, very regions which many of them had abandoned for it’s something else), to political progressivism an urban existence. According to Amy Kaplan, this (local color is fer it; no, it’s agin it), to realism (it is imaginary harmonious past is a “Janus-faced nostalgia” a degraded popular offshoot, it is where true real- through which readers in an industrial present project ism begins and develops), and to regional identity. images of their desire for a simpler time onto the past (P. 26) as represented by a region (p. 242). Stephanie Foote Most central, however, as Lutz suggests, is the issue of sees a further paradox in the construction of regional- whether local color exploits the region as a site for cul- ism in that its narrative techniques, such as dialect, run tural tourism, as Richard Brodhead and Amy Kaplan counter to its program of reinforcing harmony and contend, or whether this exploitation occurs only in sameness; however, the speech of rural, uneducated certain kinds of fiction. In Writing Out of Place, for characters also preserves a comfortable distance from example, Fetterley and Pryse differentiate “local color” standard English, with dialect exotic enough to be from “regionalist” fiction: “local color” writing exploits fresh and interesting without evoking the accents of regional materials for the benefit of an urban elite, but immigrants or the urban poor. Yet to imagine the local “regionalist” fiction, with its sympathetic approach, color landscape as a placid escape from modern life is does not. With the exception of Charles W. Chesnutt to ignore the problems that the writers depict. Local (1858–1932), Fetterley and Pryse see regionalism as a color settings may differ from one another, but the woman’s genre. Any account of local color’s origins, problems are universal, such as the threat of violence rise, and fall can therefore present only a partial view of and child abuse, as in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s the ways in which local color fiction was received and (1852–1930) Pembroke (1894) and “Old Woman interpreted by its nineteenth-century audiences. At Magoun” (1905); the desperate straits of the elderly issue is the very nature of the “cultural work” that local poor, as in Sarah Orne Jewett’s (1849–1909) “The color performed: Did it rebuild and unite a nation frac- Town Poor” (1890) and Freeman’s “A Church tured by the Civil War? Or did it create a false narrative Mouse” (1891); the abuses of the mill system, as in of national origins that conspired to suppress the clam- Jewett’s “The Gray Mills of Farley” (1898); and the oring of immigrants, people of color, and the poor for injustices of the banking system in Garland’s “Under political and cultural power? the Lion’s Paw” (1891). ORIGINS REGIONS Even before the Civil War, types of local color fiction New England writers were among the earliest to appear such as regional humor and frontier tales had found in “Atlantic group” magazines; for example, Rose favor with the public. Among the most prominent Terry Cooke’s (1827–1892) “Sally Parson’s Duty” was examples of regional humor were the stories of the one of the stories published in the inaugural issue of southwestern humorists, vivid tales of characters such the Atlantic Monthly in November 1857, and her sto- as Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s Ransy Sniffle ries and poetry appeared regularly in Harper’s New (Georgia Scenes, 1835), George Washington Harris’s Monthly Magazine, Scribner’s Magazine, and the New Sut Lovingood (collected as Sut Lovingood: Yarns Spun England Magazine until shortly before her death in by a “Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool,” 1867), and Johnson 1892.

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