Copyright by Rachel Ann Wise 2014

The Dissertation Committee for Rachel Ann Wise Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Losing Appalachia: Genre and Local Color’s Out-of-Place Objects, 1870-1920

Committee:

Coleman Hutchison, Supervisor

Phillip Barrish

Matt Cohen

Elizabeth S.D. Engelhardt

Gretchen Murphy

Losing Appalachia: Genre and Local Color’s Out-of-Place Objects, 1870-1920

by

Rachel Ann Wise, B.A.; M.A.

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin August 2014

Dedication

For Bill Jones and the others who have gone. Your veil has been lifted.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my chair, Coleman Hutchison, for reminding me “the dissertation is a goddamn marathon.” Were it not for his guidance, I would still be nursing a side-stitch somewhere around mile ten. His honest and insightful feedback was instrumental in framing this project. I am also grateful to my other committee members, Phillip Barrish, Matt Cohen, Elizabeth S.D. Engelhardt, and Gretchen Murphy, for the time and attention they provided at crucial stages in this process. Each in their own way has helped me better understand how I want to inhabit disciplinary conversations and the academic world. I am also indebted to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the Library Company of Philadelphia for access to archival materials referenced in the dissertation. I wish to thank the friends and family who have given me emotional and intellectual support for which I can never fully repay them. Meghan Andrews, Laine Perez, Nikki Gray, Rachel Schneider, and Tekla Hawkins have been confidantes, encouragers, and truth tellers. My parents always believed I could do this and knew how to put things into perspective when the weeping and gnashing of teeth began. I am also grateful to Gary and Rose Burke of Frankfort’s The Meeting House Bed and Breakfast whose kindnesses and good food aided in the revision of “Losing Appalachia.” Finally, thank you, Craig, for not divorcing me. I probably deserved it

v Losing Appalachia: Genre and Local Color’s Out-of-Place Objects, 1870-1920

Rachel Ann Wise, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2014

Supervisor: Coleman Hutchison

“Losing Appalachia” offers an alternative literary history of local color writing by touting a historically, culturally, and rhetorically situated Appalachia, one of the most perplexing of American regions. Most local color criticism takes the New England village as its starting point. Critics interested in material culture then interpret the sentimental folk objects found in the village as indicative of the genre’s middle-class investments and pastoral qualities. The project considers what it would look like to entertain the idea of a literature that is not written by—or concerned with elaborating on—the urban middle class. It proposes one way to make this intervention, which requires an attention to canon (texts) and things (material culture). In reading local color through Appalachia—a region long associated with aberrant cultural and material practices—“Losing Appalachia” argues for the importance of a ubiquitous though understudied form of material culture in local color texts: the cast off, repurposed, and inferior mass-produced product. Such material culture is out-of-place in local color texts, especially when it appears in ways that undercut dominant middle-class norms and expectations. vi Applying the theories of Michel de Certeau, the project focuses on how women writers like Rebecca Harding Davis, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Hunter Austin, Grace

MacGowan Cooke, and Mary Wilkins Freeman used material culture to maneuver within the gendered constraints of generic form, cultural imperialism, and capitalist systems.

They are, what I term, meta-localists who, through intentional formal practices, think about how literature aestheticizes the local. These writers are interested in what local color can tell us about the local as steadfastly local rather than as an extension of urban middle-class subjectivity. The following chapters examine show how diverse objects and ideologies are always pushing up against one another, destabilizing binaries that have been key to critical narratives about local color: modern and primitive, urban and rural, and center and margin. “Losing Appalachia” stresses the rhizomatic qualities of the genre and its uses, thus taking issue with historicist and feminist critics who argue that local color only performs one kind of cultural work.

vii Table of Contents

PREFACE: Losing Appalachia ...... 1

CHAPTER ONE: Changing the Map ...... 3 LITERARY HISTORIES OF LOCAL COLOR ...... 3 WHY APPALACHIA?...... 13 WHY MATERIAL CULTURE?...... 17 MULTIPLE ENTRYWAYS...... 25 CHAPTER OVERVIEWS...... 32

CHAPTER TWO: Tourism and Performativity in Rebecca Harding Davis’s Appalachia and Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Creole Louisiana...... 36 INTRODUCTION ...... 36 SILHOUETTES AND GENTEEL CRYSTALS...... 41 PERFORMATIVITY AND THE LOCAL...... 50 TOURIST TRAPS ...... 56 RESISTING SYNECDOCHE AND METONYM...... 71 ON GENRE AND THE PERSISTANCE OF THE LOCAL ...... 81

CHAPTER THREE: The Local Production and Curation of Folk in Emma Bell Miles’s Appalachia and Mary Hunter Austin’s West...... 85 INTRODUCTION ...... 85 TEACHING THE PROGRESSIVE HOME...... 91 REJECTING MIDDLE-CLASS NORMS...... 102 CATALOGUING CIVILIZATION’S TRASHINESS...... 110 CURATING THE LOCAL AND THE INDIGENOUS HOME...... 117 ON GENRE AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION ...... 126

CHAPTER FOUR: “Loving to fool” with Things in the Industrial Towns of Grace MacGowan Cooke’s Appalachia and Mary Wilkins Freeman’s New England ...... 131 INTRODUCTION ...... 131 LOCAL COLOR AND “THE LABOR QUESTION”...... 137

viii CRITIQUING MATERIAL “UPLIFT” ...... 141 LOVING TO FOOL WITH THINGS ...... 159 LOCAL SOLUTIONS AND THE MARRIAGE TROPE ...... 168 ON GENRE AND THE USES OF NOSTALGIA ...... 175

Coda: Aesthetics, Trash, and the War on Poverty ...... 180 HEIR TO THE PROGRESSIVE THRONE...... 180 AT THE CROSS-SECTION OF POVERTY AND THE PASTORAL.....185 TRASH-HEAP TACTICIANS...... 190 ON GENRE AND THE STEADFASTLY LOCAL...... 201

Afterword: Dynamite-Crate Doors ...... 204

Bibliography ...... 206

ix PREFACE: Losing Appalachia

It never occurred to us that we were Appalachian until my father saw it in black and white: “Appalachian immigrant; or child of.” It was the early 1990s, and he was applying for work with the City of Cincinnati. People still made jokes about the Norwood hillbillies flocking to work at the General Motors assembly plant; my new schoolmates would query if my mother were also my sister. When we were made to think about it at all, we did not eagerly adopt the label. To be “Appalachian” was to be from somewhere else, to be a punch line.

I spent my college years at a private liberal arts school where I endeavored to lose my accent and blend in. Through exclusion, course offerings reinforced the idea that

Appalachia, rurality, and working-class were categories to be left behind, themselves sites of cultural absence. I learned that the academy, literature, “Culture” with a capital

“C,” and the middle class were mutually constitutive. Losing the Appalachia in me seemed imperative at the time. But I was the student who patched and hemmed her pants with duct tape, went home to pickup beds held together with green clothesline. I could never quite give up the pleasure of stretching out the life of a thing. It still feels like a middle finger. There is satisfaction in subverting a socio-economic system that requires certain populations to participate at a disadvantage.

In the graduate classroom, Appalachia seemed to me lost among American literature’s drawing rooms. Even criticism on local color writing has had little to say about Appalachia apart from occasional and mostly cursory mentions of Mary Murfree. 1 Work on the region largely remains limited to Appalachian studies—a discipline that, for all its merits, generates few sustained readings of the imagined Appalachia found in literary texts. These phenomena reinforce the idea of a sub-literary, sub-cultural, and subjugated Appalachia, all the while obscuring the way that the region has, since at least the 1870s, operated as a powerful and surprisingly versatile signifier in American literary culture.

In truth, I thought I would find my people, my tribe—kin—at the Appalachian

Studies Association (ASA) conference. The organization grew up during the 1960s War on Poverty and was known for being politically radical in its early days. Mostly what I found at ASA were progressive environmental positions paired with quilts, dulcimers, and clogging. It was a thoroughly respectable Appalachia. Where were the old underwear used as rags and refrigerators bungee-d closed? Or the crazy quilts hung next to shelves full of Dollar Tree figurines? If this Appalachia had no place in disciplinary conversations, then neither did I.

Perhaps, at its core, this project is about finding a literary and cultural prehistory for an Appalachia that I recognize. Through the process of recognition, it has helped me imagine ways of inhabiting academia’s intellectual and institutional terrain. If this project feels at times urgent, it is. “Losing Appalachia” is both a love letter and one class migrant’s struggle with her own out-of-placeness in the academy. It is personal; it is political.

2 CHAPTER ONE: Changing the Map

LITERARY HISTORIES OF LOCAL COLOR

Critics tend to read turn-of-the-twentieth-century local color writing through the lens of New England. This critical tendency towards uniformity is partially attributable to the fact that since at least the 1930s, local colorist Sarah Orne Jewett has been taken as the genre’s paradigmatic writer.1 Unsurprisingly, Jewett appears in the discipline’s major teaching anthologies, including those compiled by Norton and Heath.2 As Joseph

Csicsila’s Canons by Consensus demonstrates, prevailing trends in academic criticism govern what texts appear in anthologies. For instance, The Heath Anthology of American

Literature uses Jewett as a synecdoche for local color. So, the story goes, local color writing is elegiac, and we can see this in Jewett’s depictions of a region in decline that

“exist(s) on the edges of the industrial world” (18).

Influential Americanist critics F.O. Matthiessen and Van Wyck Brooks began their careers by laying the foundation for this field-defining narrative of Jewett’s life and work. Matthiessen emphasized the nostalgic qualities of Jewett’s New England: flowers,

"calves tethered in shady spots, puppies and kittens adventuring from doorways” (17).

Brooks similarly reflected, "She had grown up in a world of square, white houses, picket

1 Carlos Baker’s 1938 Literary History of the United States is an early example of critics who treat Jewett as the “most distinguished…among all writers of regional fiction” (844). He privileges New England fiction, specifically The Country of the Pointed Firs, as exemplifying the role of the advocate while he describes Southern fiction in terms of the outsider and exploiter. In seeking to historicize disciplinary investments, Claudia Stokes contends that New England’s centrality in American literary criticism originated in the late nineteenth century.

2 The Heath Anthology includes “A White Heron,” “The Foreigner” (a story that shares characters and themes with Country), and “Martha’s Lady.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature also includes “A White Heron” and “The Foreigner.” 3 fences—some of them ornamental, with high posts and urns, —and yards overflowing with larkspurs, petunias and asters, with hollyhocks and borders of box. When the fences were torn down,…she felt that she belonged to an age that was passing" (348).

Matthiessen's and Brooks's biographical descriptions undergirded their assumptions about the backward-looking quality of Jewett’s work. Rooted in the past, she was, they suggested, a charming representative of an earlier generation more attuned to nature and a vanishing New England legacy than to the requirements of an urgent, masculine present.3

Later critics have complicated claims about local color’s purported provincialism.

With the exception of Louis Renza, most critics have done so by challenging Jewett’s status as a “minor” author. Renza employs Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theory of minor literature to demonstrate that Jewett’s work resists the imposed frameworks of interpretation in favor of experimentation. Minor literature resists becoming representative, yet Renza participates in the process by which Jewett has become the field’s paradigmatic local colorist. In contrast, historicist Richard Brodhead’s Cultures of

Letters was instrumental in establishing local color as an important mode of writing that is indicative of the historical contexts from which it emerged. He finds that local color writing functioned as a memorialization for dying ways of life and a witness to anxieties about socio-economic change (119). In exploring local color’s cultural work, Brodhead takes Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) as his point of entry—a strategy

3 Matthiessen’s and Brooks’s narratives embody what Karen L. Kilcup calls the “nostalgic perspective” of local color criticism’s “preliminary stage” (3). For similarly patronizing treatments of Jewett’s work, see Richard Cary’s 1962 “Critical Biography," 157-8, and Warner Berthoff’s 1965 “Regionalism, Local-Color Realism” in The Ferment of Realism, 94-7.

4 that critics continue to replicate.4

The final chapter in The Country of the Pointed Firs, “A Backward View,” has served as the genre’s quintessential elegiac scene and an exemplar of the “retreat-refresh- return” trope (Griswold 28). Country chronicles a writer’s rural New England respite from city life. The remote Dunnet Landing, Maine, and its inhabitants are focalized entirely through the narrator’s subjectivity. The narrative’s conclusion literalizes the idea that the coastal village does not exist apart from the middle-class viewer’s ability to see and make sense of it. As the first-person narrator stands on the schooner, headed for home, she observes, “The islands and the headland had run together and Dunnet Landing and all its coasts were lost to sight” (133). With that final line, the reader is given little sense that village life pre- or post-dates the tourist’s arrival in any meaningful way. To the contrary, it is as if only the urban, middle-class subjectivity exemplified by the narrator can access what the local has to offer. Thus, when she leaves, Dunnet Landing takes on a “fly-in-amber quality” (Williams 61). If, as Bruno Latour argues, “modernity” refers to the “passage of time . . . an acceleration, a rupture, a revolution in time,” then, by contrast, Dunnet’s coasts function as a stable past accessible to the tourist (10). Here middle-class subjectivity emerges as a modern concept, one that necessarily holds off the modernity of the local by taking it out of the flow of time. That is, the narrator’s middle- class subjectivity requires a locality that is a fixed point—static in both time and

4 The sheer volume of entries in the Modern Language Association Bibliography demonstrates the methodological hegemony to which scholarship on local color writing seems prone. The Bibliography contains 419 listings for Jewett between 1929 and 2013, and 126 for The Country of the Pointed Firs between 1959 and 2013. 5 character—to facilitate its coherent self-articulation.

In fact, we know much about this subjectivity as critics have extensively detailed the genre’s predominantly white, urban, northern middle-class readership. Historicists like Brodhead and Amy Kaplan argue that the genre promotes the ideological illusion of authentic spaces immune to the changes affecting the modern urban outsider’s life. Local color writing thereby solidifies a nascent white middle class. As we have discussed,

Brodhead acknowledges that local color accomplished important cultural work. However, he sees the genre’s use of the past as reactionary. He argues that, as exemplified by The

Country of the Pointed Firs, a Northern reading public consumed marginalized regions and characters to maintain class hierarchies and assuage class anxieties (132). Kaplan similarly uses Jewett to show local color writing as entangled in national issues of reunification, imperialism, and capitalism. Kaplan contends that the genre’s imperialist plots use local spaces of historical innocence to rewrite America’s origins. As a result, regionalism "both fosters and thwarts the desire for a retreat from modern urban society to a timeless rural origin, the 'common inheritance' of the clan," but is ultimately complicit in the nation-building process (Kaplan 256). Kaplan’s essay extends the argument she makes in The Social Construction of American Realism, which is, at its core, a book about the subjectivity of America’s nascent bourgeois writing class. Much like Kaplan, Stephanie Foote is interested in how, as literary strategy, regionalism was less a coherent genre than a way of ordering and presenting difference. She demonstrates that regional fiction works to consolidate the nation for an elite audience that was not only interested in the “place” folk inhabited but also the “place” they inhabited in a social 6 hierarchy (11). Foote does not challenge Brodhead’s emphasis on regionalism as a balm for class anxieties, but she does contend that the genre both harkens back to and undermines a shared agrarian past by defamiliarizing stories about national origins.5

Feminist critics have responded to historicist constructions of local color as nostalgic memorialization by highlighting the genre’s ability to create empathetic connections between locals and non-locals. In Writing Out of Place, Judith Fetterley and

Marjorie Pryse explicitly respond to Brodhead. While their feminist recovery project is wide-ranging, Jewett is its central literary figure. Fetterley and Pryse even use an entry from Jewett’s diary as the impetus for their revisionary readings (1). They define regionalism as the “point where region becomes mobilized as a tool for the critique of hierarchies based on gender as well as race, class, age, and economic resources” (14).

Fetterley and Pryse argue that regional women writers empathetically portray marginalized populations, acting as translators or interpreters for the imagined urban middle-class reader (115-6).6 According to Fetterley and Pryse, this empathy distinguishes “good” regional writing from “bad” local color writing that represents regional characters as objects to be viewed—often for the reader’s entertainment.7

Critical investments in the emergence of middle-class subjectivity are understandable; as Brodhead and many others have pointed out, local color would not

5 See also Emily Satterwhite’s Dear Appalachia: Readers, Identity, and Popular Fiction Since 1878.

6 See also American Women Regionalists and Philip Joseph’s focus on the ways in which regionalist texts “envision local communities in dialogue with the outside world” (7).

7 See also Stephanie Palmer’s Together By Accident: American Local Color and the Middle Class. 7 have existed without its voracious middle-class audience. Yet in theorizing the genre as one invested in aiding class solidification or empathetic connection with locals, critics have replicated the orientation of Jewett’s backward-looking narrator. For example, critics like Brodhead and Kaplan set out to identify and deconstruct the class privilege that they see as a defining characteristic of the genre. Yet, in establishing the cultural importance of local color writing, they fail to deconstruct the class privilege implicit in reducing local color to an affective and ideological tool wielded solely by and for the urban middle class. Put another way, insofar as critics keep their focus on the middle classes (whether authors, narrators, or “visitors”) they themselves are reproducing the middle-class-centric perspective that they intend to critique.

Feminist critics also demonstrate this class bias. Despite using Mary Louise

Pratt’s “contact zone” to describe the region as a social space where “cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations,” Writing Out of Place effectively reproduces asymmetrical relations by prioritizing the formation of middle-class subjectivity (quoted in 116). In fact, Fetterley and Pryse are less interested in imagined places (“regions”) and the people who inhabit them than they are in “how regional writers use the location of region to foreground a critique of the location of women” (38). The slippage between class and gender is a problem throughout their study, for “women” most often implies middle-class affiliations. Their examination of how the

“region” as a trope elaborates on the subjectivities of middle-class women supersedes the specifics of imagined localities. Thus, in practice, Pratt’s emphasis on “co-presence” recedes before the ideological heft of middle-class subjectivity. 8 Furthermore, assumptions about the genre’s class affiliations have meant that critics tend to focus on local color’s sentimental folk objects because urban middle-class consumers used folk objects as palliatives for the changes occurring after the American

Civil War—particularly industrialization. As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich argues, nineteenth- century America valued the “age of homespun” as “a time when families made almost all the things they needed, relying on God and their own hands rather than distant markets” (413). While her study concludes with the 1850s, rapid changes in production and consumption meant urban America’s interest in the “age of homespun” only increased as the century came to a close. Brad Evans and Michael Elliot examine this continued ideological investment in folk by tracing the entanglement of art and anthropology at the turn of the century (8, xiii). Evans, in particular, is interested in how

“the circulation of something like ‘cultures’ became a sign of ‘Culture’ in the late nineteenth century; the contact with or appreciation of this kind of multiplicity was a mark of being ‘cultured’” (7). Additionally, as Americans perceived the threat of mechanization to traditional village crafts, the principles of craftsmanship and technique became more important to the bourgeois classes (Bronner 8). T. Jackson Lears and Miles

Orvell demonstrate that the valuing of traditional handicrafts was a key component of the era’s Arts and Crafts movement.

Because of the era’s interest in folk, local color writing is one of the primary loci for critics interested in turn-of-the-twentieth-century representations of material culture.

Typically, these critics analyze sentimental folk objects in Jewett’s work, and thereby confirm their assumptions about local color’s class affiliations and elegiac qualities. 9 Matthiessen and Brooks emphasized pastoral forms of material culture: white picket fences, cows, and green pastures. Their critical biographies established certain forms of material cultural as normative within local color. In her study of women’s literary confrontations with modernity, Jennifer Fleissner analyzes the clean and orderly drawing rooms found in Jewett’s and Mary Wilkins Freeman’s New England local color writing

(76). Fleissner wants to give the “obsessional character of domestic life” its “due” (78).

In doing so, however, she insists on a remarkably urban middle-class conception of local color’s domestic spaces. As a classed space, the drawing room lends itself to generalizations about the cultural work undertaken by local colorists. Bill Brown’s A

Sense of Things similarly uses Jewett’s work—primarily The Country of the Pointed

Firs—to theorize the nineteenth century’s “sentimental materialism,” a phenomenon that occurs when an object has grown interesting from accumulated touch. Building on studies by Gillian Brown and Nancy Glazener, he argues that when a sentimental object functions as a fetish that is not commodity fetishism, it can interrupt hegemonic systems of value. Objects like an heirloom coral pin can thus be saved from the “tyranny of use”

(13). He concludes that local color writing provided readers relief from an urban scene in which everything was subject to the cultural logic of capitalism. Using Jewett as a synecdoche for local color, Brown describes a genre that spares its readers the tyranny of consumer goods.

Critics have taken Jewett, a paradigmatic sentimental materialist, as representative of local color as such. Sentimental folk objects are thus treated as a given in local color— a genre that critics assume uniformly reflects the investments of an urban middle-class 10 readership. Jewett’s outsized role in local color criticism allows her to function as a synecdoche for all local color writing. Indeed, this phenomenon is precisely why her critical history helps illuminate the circular logic to which material cultural analyses of the genre seem prone: Local color has middle-class affiliations; because it has middle- class affiliations, we should expect to see certain forms of material culture represented; because we see certain forms of material culture represented in local color, local color must have middle-class affiliations. As a study like Brown’s makes clear, emphasizing particular authors or texts can over-determine the kinds of objects critics associate with the genre. In turn, the objects associated with local color writing can over-determine the conclusions critics draw about the genre’s cultural work. The sentimental folk object risks giving the local that fly-in-amber quality of Dunnet’s receding coasts and, thus, making the local a resource instantly accessible to the urban middle class.

Major Americanist critics have given such careful attention to local color because they recognize a middle-class readership increasingly interested in different subject positions. However, critics rarely get to the business of thinking about the actual subject positions represented. Their methodological emphasis on middle-class subjectivity has, perhaps, everything to do with the fact that the modern academy and the middle class grew up together, one authorizing the other. In many ways, they remain mutually constitutive. “Losing Appalachia” considers what it would look like to entertain the idea of a literature that is not written by—or concerned with elaborating on—the middle class.

It endeavors to expand critical understanding of the contests in which local color engages

11 and the subject positions from which it engages them.8 The project treats local color writing as more than a subset of American literary realism; it understands the genre as a way into thinking about subjectivities overshadowed so far in literary histories. “Losing

Appalachia” proposes one way to make this intervention, which requires an attention to canon and things. Put another way, it offers an alternative literary history of local color by looking at different texts and material cultures within those texts.

The project seeks to disrupt the assumed affinity between local color writing and nineteenth-century middle-class culture by touting a historically, culturally, and rhetorically situated Appalachia. Because of its associations with aberrant cultural and material practices, Appalachia is a site from which we can tell an alternative literary history of the local color genre, one that displaces the lambs, green pastures, and picket fences favored by Jewett’s critics. “Losing Appalachia” attends to a ubiquitous though understudied form of material culture in local color texts: material items, often associated with inferior processes of mass production, that have been cast-off and/or repurposed. It examines diverse forms of material culture like beer bottles used to roll dough, carved panels, and calico wrappers. As Lori Merish argues, the discursive processes of identifying certain commodities as “privileged vehicles of subjective expression and identification” instates an amnesiac form of subjectivity (2). Indeed, this project argues that critics obscure the contextual economic processes of production and local politics of use by only talking about material culture in relationship to urban middle-class subjectivity.

8 Brodhead refers to “contests” as “literature’s cultural mediations” (9). 12 WHY APPALACHIA?

Local color has been treated as a repository for romantic notions about rural life, making it difficult to construct the literary history I am suggesting—that of today’s trashy

Appalachia. Such an excavation is made more difficult by the fact that key Appalachian studies scholars such as Henry D. Shapiro and David E. Whisnant describe nineteenth- century Appalachia as a self-evidently rural place filled with homemade folk objects. In a sense, then, this project reestablishes the historical, cultural, and rhetorical contexts that render intelligible the rusted junk scattered around the Oree, Georgia gas station in James

Dickey’s Deliverance. This scene was made famous by the 1972 film adaptation that depicts the Georgia mountains as “where everything finishes up.” Deliverance participates in an ongoing articulation of backwoods hollers filled with aberrant people and things. Indeed, the very material cultural items overlooked in criticism on the local color genre—the mass-produced, the repurposed, and the discarded—have become integral to popular representations of Appalachia. One has to look no further than the

Wrong Turn horror film franchise or David Wilcox’s car-on-blocks inspired “Eastern

Appalachian Roadside Art” lyrics for other examples.

In fact, this phenomenon has a pre-history that can be traced at least as far back as the post-bellum period. Poor mountain whites were already presenting a challenge to the idea of a normative national culture characterized by the standardization of the invention, production, distribution, and consumption of things.9 The presence of non-folk objects in

9 Leigh Ann Duck argues that the Great Depression gave rise to the cautionary trope of a backward South (7). As I will demonstrate, this trope arose much earlier, particularly in regards to Appalachia. 13 late nineteenth-century Appalachia should not come as a surprise. In the 1880s, the region experienced a rapid decline of mountain agriculture and a boom in wage-earning employment such as mining, logging, mills, and tourism industries (Eller Miners xix).10

Even in America’s so-called hinterland, diverse consumer goods began to circulate. As scholars have thoroughly detailed, the sheer abundance of commodities in the marketplace precipitated an urban bourgeois push to impose order on a scale previously unknown (Orvell 43). In this way, the burgeoning middle class dictated normative forms of material culture, managed terms of use, and maintained class hierarchies. Culture and refinement increasingly defined national aspiration, and aspiration became synonymous with the desire for a better material life (Trachtenberg 160).

Despite attempts to delimit the terms of material use, Appalachian populations embodied a disjuncture between race and class in their failure to relate to objects in ways sanctioned by a presumptively white, middle-class America. In 1879, Louise Coffin

Jones claimed Carolina mountaineers belonged to a class of “poor white trash” (756). Her deployment of the concept of “trash” tapped into a cultural logic that authorized pseudo- social scientific work like Ellen Churchill Semple’s “The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky

Mountains: A Study in Anthropogeography.” Semple essentially argued that trashy landscapes yield trashy people (616). At the turn-of-the twentieth century, the not-quite whiteness of this “native” (i.e., non-immigrant) mountain population evoked the middle

10 See also Ronald L. Lewis’s Transforming the Appalachian Countryside, 1880-1920. Appalachia’s economic transformation had much to do with the addition of seven new railroads in the South from 1880- 1892 (Rabinowitz 60). 14 class’s censure and disgust, as did the “off-white” urban poor.11 However, unlike their immigrant counterparts in cities like New York and Chicago, mountaineers were typically discussed as Anglo-Saxons whose whiteness had been degraded by years of isolation.

As this project shows, the era’s periodicals contain numerous pieces that take the mountain region’s otherness as their subject. Most famously, the 1873 sketch in

Lippincott’s Magazine, “A Strange Land and a Peculiar People,” coined the phrase that would be associated with southern Appalachia for decades to come.12 As Anthony

Harkins points out in Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon, the ridicule of the bumpkin’s perceived lack of culture has always been politically coded. The hillbilly’s backwardness highlights the progress that more cosmopolitan Americans have made. The hillbilly, white trash, bumpkin, cracker, or redneck has not evolved, so the story goes, because he does not want to. The late nineteenth century normalized the racialization of non-normative class identities during an era in which social hierarchies were increasingly couched in the rhetoric of consumption.

Appalachia held a unique class and racial status within the cultural imaginary. In his 1901 The American Scene, Henry James went so far as to describe the region as a

“vast parenthetic” that disturbed “the texture of the general Southern stuff” (381). This is why the project resists the methodological move Bill Hardwig makes in Upon

11 See Keith Gandal’s The Virtue of the Vicious for an analysis of representations of the urban poor at the turn-of-the-twentieth century.

12 Will Wallace Harney’s description of southeastern Kentucky as “peculiar” has become one of the most oft-quoted, deprecating remarks made about the inhabitants of southern Appalachian. See also William Perry Brown’s 1888 “A Peculiar People” in Overland Monthly. 15 Provincialism, which absorbs Appalachia into the literary South. Hardwig tracks the national readership’s interest in fringe spaces of the South—particularly African

American communities, New Orleans, and Appalachia (12). In particular, Hardwig argues that Appalachia’s geographic peculiarity made it the ultimate site of disjunction, and it disproportionately hefted the symbolic weight of the imagined South’s difference from the rest of the nation (75). If “the South” is a region, then Hardwig makes

Appalachia a subordinate term. Indeed, discerning exactly what he means by “region,” and the “South” can difficult at times. Because the differences between real regions and imagined Souths are not always clearly parsed, Hardwig does not spend time considering how imagined audiences interacted with these terms. Thus, while Upon Provincialism challenges critical narratives of the aristocratic plantation South, it does little to further our understanding of how Appalachia served as a focal point for contests about material culture that were not limited to the South.

In fact, turn-of-the-twentieth-century social commentators and scholars used

Appalachia as a conceptual tool for discussing larger interregional concerns about the expansion of industrial capitalism and consumer culture. Consequently, Appalachia can draw our attention to other non-normative local color settings because its folk were perceived as resistant to middle-class dictums concerning consumption, culture, and material use. The project seeks to exchange representations of the stereotypically homogenous village and hollow for what contemporary theorists might call spaces of abjection (Kutzbach and Mueller). Abjected localities, their people and things, trouble the imaginary because, as poststructuralists have suggested, they disrupt conventional 16 identitarian and cultural concepts (Childers and Hentzi 1). To get at such disruptions, this project considers turn-of-the-twentieth-century local colorists’ material engagements with tourist traps, reservations, settlement homes, industrial towns, and junk-filled landscapes.

In the chapters that follow, we will find ourselves closer to the lumbering districts and saw mills in Hamlin Garland’s critical treatment of local color in Crumbling Idols (1894) than to the pastoral New England village articulated by Matthiessen or Brooks (Stone and

Kimball Kindle Locations 168-173).

WHY MATERIAL CULTURE?

Appalachia’s historical and cultural association with cast-off, repurposed, and inferior mass-produced products highlights the ways in which some local colorists used material culture to maneuver within the constraints of systematic cultural imperialism and expanding capitalist systems. This material culture is what I term out-of-place in local color texts. Like the abject localities that it occupies, out-of-place material culture is diverse in composition and includes more than traditional folk or sentimental objects.

Material culture can be any discursive form or physical object used by characters to engage in the technology and teleology of local life. Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at

Large expands upon his theory that, like people, “things have social lives ” (The Social

Life 3). His anthropological work highlights the fact that “locality is an inherently fragile social achievement” that must be maintained by locals who deliberately produce, represent, and reproduce localized and socialized space and time (179-180). As we will see, local characters use built and natural environments, literary forms, folk artifacts, and

17 mass-produced objects to perform their subjectivities within a rapidly changing world.

Material culture is out-of-place in local color when it fails to conform to middle- class cultural norms that sought to dictate what and how commodities were used. This nonconformity hints at the agency of local subjectivities that refuse to be absorbed by local color’s urban middle-class readership. Thus, out-of-place material culture also disrupts urban middle-class fantasies of restorative, authentic, and fully accessible anti- modern localities. In other words, it mitigates against what Brodhead calls the middle- class “imagination of acquisitiveness” that seeks familiar, static types (133). Rather than create the kind of empathetic connections Fetterley and Pryse describe, out-of-place material culture works to de-naturalize normative middle-class subject positions within a text’s imagined locality. The writers and characters in this dissertation engage in a material mediation of the local, which serves to highlight the historicity (that is the contextual nature) of all subjectivity.

Attending to out-of-place material culture in local color texts allows this project to examine diverse forms of agency that are not reducible to an absorption/resistance dichotomy. “Losing Appalachia” engages Michel de Certeau’s theories of creative maneuverings to highlight the nested agencies of local color authors and characters. In

The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau theorizes that the use of material forms

“indicates a social historicity in which systems of representations or processes of fabrication no longer appear only as normative frameworks but also as tools manipulated by users” (21). I show that Rebecca Harding Davis, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Emma Bell

Miles, Mary Hunter Austin, Grace MacGowan Cooke, and Mary Wilkins Freeman all 18 worked within the conventions of local color to undercut the homogenizing force of white middle-class culture. These writers occupied various non-normative subject positions related to geography, class, race, and gender. Davis, Miles, and Austin—for example—all experienced downward mobility.13 As a system of representation, local color is a form of material culture manipulated by authors. These local colorists take the

“inventory and repertory of combinations” offered to them in the form of settings, stock characters, and images in order to engage in a tactical reworking of local representation

(de Certeau 23). That is, they use material culture in their narratives to disrupt the reductive representations of local life that were circulating in the late nineteenth century.

Thus, they are what I term meta-localists. Through the intentional formal practices de Certeau describes, meta-localists use literature to think theoretically about place, which also means engaging the ways that literature aestheticizes the local through its interactions with material culture. Perhaps these authors are largely omitted from studies of the genre precisely because they ask us to read local color as steadfastly local.

As meta-localist work highlights, the local can never be entirely reduced to the ethos of an urban middle-class imaginary. For these writers, what is most remarkable about the local is its dynamic persistence in the face of consumer culture and the homogenizing force of bourgeois subjectivity. They utilize the genre as an opportunity to theorize how the local gets fashioned in material ways. In place of static, homogenous folk cultures and

13 Andrew Lawson’s Downwardly Mobile traces the origins of literary realism to the fear of downward mobility. He engages Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills as a case study. Downwardly Mobile provides an illuminating example of how an author’s subject position can give critic’s insight into the cultural work of their texts. 19 objects, meta-localists represent local cultures as performative, thereby undercutting inherently conservative late nineteenth-century notions of authenticity.14

The maneuverings of these writers provide a formal context in which their characters might also engage in recuperative material maneuverings. Local materials give individuals room to maneuver because they function as a form of what de Certeau calls

“tactics.” In other words, material culture gives characters a way to live in a socio- economic and cultural system over which they have little control. The writers included in this project imagine the local subject’s notoriously ephemeral “ways of using things or words according to circumstances” as “agents and authors of conjunctural operations”

(20). These tacticians are what de Certeau calls “poachers,” and they are far from passive.

The “poacher” refers to a consumer who produces her own “signifying practices,” for even mundane everyday practices such as walking and cooking are tactical in nature

(xviii). “Losing Appalachia” treats local color characters as creative tacticians whose choices are not limitless within the constraints of their historical contexts. For example,

Davis’s “The Yares of the Black Mountains” depicts a tactician who cannot change the fact that urban middle-class culture stereotypes mountaineers as violent. He can, however, use stories of mountain violence to undermine tourists’ assumptions about local accessibility. In Cooke’s The Power and the Glory, the heroine cannot dismantle industrial capitalism or the emerging consumer culture that underwrites it. She can, however, wear Louvania’s slippers and align herself with working-class women who are

14 See Regina Bendix’s In Search of Authenticity and Jeff Karem’s The Romance of Authenticity. 20 so miserable that they jump from bridges. This project explores how local characters, as agents, find creative “ways of using things or words according to circumstances.”15

On a fundamental level, it should be unsurprising that this project features women writers. As Brodhead notes, the local color genre provided women unprecedented literary access in the postbellum decades (116-7). Women writers produced some of the genre’s most interesting examples of meta-localist work. This is perhaps attributable to the fact that women were understood to be the preservers of culture, drivers of mass consumption, and managers of domestic affairs at the turn-of-the-twentieth century. As poachers, the writers in this dissertation used the contexts given them. Their work takes potentially restrictive forms of material culture and reworks middle-class norms concerning consumption and use. Susan Strasser’s Never Done: A History of American

Housework chronicles how the traditional work of household production was replaced by the twentieth-century task of consumption. The emergence of mass consumer culture transformed the routine of women’s private lives and their meanings through the invention of the middle-class female consumer in magazines, cookbooks, and mail-order catalogs (Strasser 16). New domestic practices were promoted by making cultural, moral, or ethical judgments about women as consumers (Engelhardt A Mess of Greens 14). This is why I contextualize local color with travel narratives, ethnographical writings, settlement home journals, reservation newspapers, and Progressivist publications. These

15 De Certeau finds, “everyday life poaches in countless ways” (xviii). In fact, his poacher is not unlike the artist in Walter Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” or Claude Levi-Strauss’s bricoleur, the folk recycler in The Savage Mind who engages in a kind of “dialogue” with the materials and tools given her (18). 21 extra-literary texts highlight how women’s emerging status provided the context for meta-localists who engage in material strategies that denaturalize dominant middle-class cultural norms and systems of value. This project thus aligns itself with feminist criticism that insists women’s writing engages in important cultural work that is indicative of the time, place, and identity positions that authors inhabit.16

While gender provides the dissertation a useful way to delimit the texts included, the extent to which gender functions as a category of analysis varies with each chapter.

There are many moving parts to this project, and class and region are its primary categories of analysis. However, as Joan Scott and Amy Schrager Lang have demonstrated, the concept of class in the nineteenth century relied on gender for its articulation (1073, 11). Often the proper performance of white womanhood signaled to readers that certain characters were destined for the middle class. The overlapping discourses of race, class, region, and gender are most important to the analysis conducted in chapter four. The Power and the Glory and The Portion of Labor feature heroines who reject middle-class material norms. According to scholars Peter Stoneley and Jane

Hunter, the young woman was one of the nation’s favorite allegories for negotiating social change in a newly consumerized world. As Stoneley and Hunter explain, young women became key to describing how turn-of-the-century women were “buying into womanhood” through the acquisition and management of buying power. The heroines’ refusal to properly “buy into womanhood” animates the novels’ critique of social

16 For example, see Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel and Merish’s Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. 22 hierarchies that relied on conceptual languages like race, class, gender, and region.

Reassessing local color through out-of-place material culture helps denaturalize the hegemony and centrality of the urban middle class in literary studies. In particular, the out-of-place might call into question a critical fixation on how texts, people, and things circulated in urban spaces and produced high and middlebrow cultures.17 For such arguments find critics right back in the drawing rooms rejected by the authors discussed in “Losing Appalachia.” Instead, this project takes seriously meta-localists’ commitment to the local. As Grace Hale argues, the expansion of consumer culture into previously far- flung places generated cultural meaning on two interlocking planes: buying and selling within regions versus buying and selling the region itself (147). However, meta-localists are not simply purveyors of local color as an ethnographical artifact. They are most concerned with how and what kinds of material culture become tools for performing the local within local settings. Out-of-place material culture helps us see how binaries thought to be constitutive of the local color genre actually push up against one another: modern and primitive, urban and rural, center and margin. The local color writing represented here depicts neither uncomplicated rural respites nor utopian sites of empathetic cultural connection. Rather, this project treats local material cultures as sites of the ruptures and revolutions in time that Latour understands as constitutive of

“modernity.”

17 For example, see critics Evans’s Before Cultures and Elliot’s The Culture Concept.

23 Finally, the contextual nature of material culture helps move us beyond the use of region as literary and theoretical trope, a methodological move made by Fetterley and

Pryse.18 Critics have treated the turn-of-the-century region as a discourse without specific historical and geographical referents or economic and cultural consequences. Thus, the region effectively disappears, replaced by the middle-class subjectivity that critics argue it helps constitute. Kent C. Ryden cautions against allowing “actual regions themselves

[to] vanish from discussion in favor of a focus on the cultural and political work that writing performs” (15). “Losing Appalachia” does seek to address the cultural and political work performed by local color writing, as well as explore the possibilities for re- theorizing the genre from an Appalachian perspective. These possibilities include what I have called the meta-localist theorizations performed by local color writers themselves.

At the same time, however, the project attempts to balance its consideration of larger generic discourses and the fact that different localities exert different pressures on the genre at different historical moments. In other words, this project oscillates between the two poles Ryden identifies in order to get at how different localities highlight different aspects of the many-sided genre. Out-of-place material culture facilitates this oscillation by drawing attention to the idiosyncrasies of local material use.

18 Garland argues that local color in a novel means that it has “such quality of texture and back-ground that it could not have been written in any other place or by any one else than a native” (37). While it is unclear the criteria one must meet to be considered a native (perhaps it is simply being able to craft a local novel that “could not have been written in [or about] any other place), it is clear that Garland considers the specifics of a locality to be the genre’s paramount concern. 24 MULTIPLE ENTRYWAYS

What I am proposing is an understanding of local color writing as a multi-faceted genre, one that should not be broken down into the anachronistic and value-laden designations offered by Fetterley and Pryse. Literature is where language becomes material, and genres are where habits or practices meet expectations. Because neither literary habits nor expectations are stable across time and space, genres never use their formal repertories to accomplish only one kind of cultural work. Yet critics like

Brodhead, Fetterley, and Pryse narrowly circumscribe what counts as local color.

However, there is nothing inherently liberatory or conservative about a textual form. Just as writers might tactically engage the formal elements that give the local color genre its poetic unity, the literary critic similarly assembles those texts available to her in order to illuminate a particular aspect of the genre. My understanding of genre is akin to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, which they use to describe the anti-authoritarian aspects of “minor literature.” Fittingly for this project, Deleuze and Guattari give the rhizome a spatial turn; they describe it as a map susceptible to constant modification.

Like a map, the rhizome has multiple entryways. Depending upon the entryway chosen, the map changes in appearance (31). This project argues that, as a rhizome, the local color genre contains different lines of growth and possible connections. As critics, we participate in these connections because, in choosing different entryways, we can change the map. Genre criticism is, then, intimately tied up with questions of use.

Because critics view the nineteenth-century region writ large as a relatively coherent discourse rather than as a highly contextual historical, cultural, and geographical 25 referent, it is not enough to simply displace New England with Appalachia. Rather, we must be willing to broaden the archive of local color if we are to gain a more expansive understanding of what the genre can do. In the case of Appalachian local color, this means consulting more than Mary Murfree’s In the Tennessee Mountains (1884), the collection to which critics have long traced the origins of Appalachian literature. Murfree has garnered significant critical ire for her depictions of mountain culture as “arrested” and “static” (Wright xxxiii), which, in turn, triggered “a flood of novels using and misusing the southern mountaineer” (Boger vii).19

Indeed, many of Murfree’s sketches seem to privilege middle-class subjectivity.

For example, the oft-anthologized “The Star in the Valley” is predominantly told from the perspective of Chevis who enjoys a hunting vacation in the mountains.20 He unknowingly incurs the love of a local girl, Celia Shaw, who dies after catching a cold while trying to prevent a bloody feud between two mountain families. When Chevis hears of her heroism,

He began to have a glimmering perception that despite all his culture, his

sensibility, his yearnings toward humanity, he was not so high a thing in the scale

of being; that he had placed a false estimate upon himself. He had looked down

on her with a mingled pity for her dense ignorance, her coarse surrounding, her

low station, and a dilettante’s delight in picturesque effects, and with no

19 For more reflections on Murfree’s importance and harsh criticisms of her use of detrimental stereotypes, see Harkins’s Hillbilly, 30; Allen Batteau’s The Invention of Appalachia, 40; Shapiro’s Appalachia On Our Minds, 15; Durwood Dunn’s “Mary Noailles Murfree: A Reappraisal,” 205; and chapter one in Satterwhite’s Dear Appalachia.

20 “The Star in the Valley” originally appeared in 1878 in Atlantic Monthly. 26 recognition of the moral splendors of that star in the valley. (76)

We are led to believe Chevis experiences a change of heart that allows him to understand

Celia as having a complex subjectivity all her own. Of course, this revelation is too little, too late for Celia.21 Then again, the story is not really about Celia. Murfree affords the mountain woman little subjectivity in the narration, so that her languishing death remains a purely aesthetic moment for both Chevis and the reader.22 Thus, “The Star in the

Valley” is primarily interested in how the dynamic between insider and outsider impacts the privileged tourist.23

Teasing out an alternative literary history of local color like the one I am suggesting here necessitates leaving our familiar stomping grounds and drawing together a different set of texts. Currently, Murfree’s short stories are the only literary representations of Appalachia included in anthologies like Norton’s American Women

Regionalists and The Literature of the American South. This, of course, promotes a homogenous understanding of Appalachian literature within the classroom. But what if we choose a different entryway into the genre? A text like Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills helps expand what we classify as local color, the cultural work that local

21 While I am inclined to take Chevis’s ineffectual revelation at face value, Satterwhite contends that Chevis fails to comprehend his and Celia’s “common humanity” (71).

22 Batteau reads Murfree’s work more charitably than most. He dates local color to the 1870s, arguing that even George Washington Harris’s 1867 Sut Lovingood’s Yarns characterized the “savage hillbilly” but refused this figure the dignity that Batteau argues characterizes local colorist works like Murfree’s (34).

23 Murfree’s later novels do suggest that a fuller reading of her nearly forty year corpus would enable a more nuanced understanding of how she depicted mountaineers. Her less well-known His Vanished Star (Atlantic Monthly 1893) disrupts the privileged outsider viewpoint and the knowingness of literary tourism through Kenniston’s tendency to overlook, stereotype, and underestimate the mountain inhabitants. Unlike Murfree’s “The Star in the Valley,” her novel affords mountaineers considerable agency and subjectivity. 27 color accomplishes, as well as significant local forms of material culture. In April 1861,

Atlantic Monthly published the novella, which depicts the author’s thinly disguised hometown, Wheeling, Virginia. It tells the tale of a Welsh iron puddler named Hugh

Wolfe and Deborah, a fellow immigrant. Hugh fashions a korl woman out of industrial refuse, and the middle-class characters visiting the mill debate the meaning of his sculpture. When Deborah steals a visitor’s wallets, Hugh is jailed for the crime.

The tendency in American literary studies is to treat the geographical location of

Davis’s industrial novel as unimportant; critics from Henry James and Sharon Harris to

Cecilia Tichi have instead focused on its gritty realism (Tichi 14). Jean Pfaelzer argues that Davis utilizes an “aesthetic language to express the ineffable nature of industrial reality” as if nineteenth-century industrialism was experienced consistently across geographical space (24). On the other hand, in “Wheeling Iron and the Welsh: A

Geographical Reading of Life in the Iron Mills” Appalachian studies scholar Anne

Knowles sees the novella embedded in place but does not consider what that embeddedness might tell us about how place intersects with nineteenth-century literary form. In taking for granted the importance of setting to the novella’s examination of industrialization, Knowles does not consider how literary form enables Davis to go about this work, or what Appalachian literature tells us about the literary culture of which it was a part. This has serious implications given the fact that Norton and Heath already exclude

Appalachian-set local color from anthologies of American literature.

By attending to formal continuities between Davis’s industrial novella and her later local color stories, we can read Life in the Iron Mills as part of a meta-localist 28 tradition. For example, the novella’s first-person narrator functions as a prototypical tour guide or interpreter of scenes for the outside reader. However, the narrator’s angry tone suggests that she has little hope of empathetic connections between insider and outsider.

She urges the middle-class reader to “stop a moment” so that she can “make it a real thing” (41). Yet even as she expresses her frustration with readers who will judge Hugh against middle-class norms, she also calls into question her own ability to tell the tale.

She laments, “I can paint nothing of this, only give you the outside outlines of a night, a crisis in the life of a man” (47). The narrator acknowledges that she tells Hugh’s story from a mediated distance. In doing so, Davis references the silhouette and the imperfect process of sketching, concepts that are important to her later meta-localist work.

The novella can also help us identify as local color texts that feature heterogeneous, sometimes industrial localities. This requires us to think about the effect of the narrator’s asides about the pristine, if inaccessible, Appalachian mountains just beyond the iron mills. Davis intersperses grim industrial scenes with scenes that are more stereotypically “local color” in quality. In fact, at one point, the narrator breaks off from the industrial scene to describe the pastoral. Just outside Wheeling there exists “odorous sunlight,—quaint old gardens, dusky with soft, green foliage of apple-trees, and flushing crimson with roses,—air, and fields, and mountains” (40). After this descriptive detour, the narrator pointedly notes that this pastoral scene does not redress the Welsh puddler’s exploited existence, for he is destined to finish his work and occupy “a hole in the muddy graveyard” (40). She is intent on reminding us that Hugh’s drama unfolds with

Appalachian summits as its background. We can read this as an indictment of those who 29 would focus solely on Appalachia’s pristine wildernesses and impressive vistas while refusing to see its local iteration of an industrial labor system.

Davis also uses local color descriptions of Wheeling’s markets to attend to the ways that the pastoral subsistence, slave, and industrial economies intersect geographically. Thus, Life in the Iron Mills explores how the nation’s expanding capitalist systems are experienced on a local level. Looking out his cell window to the town below, Hugh appreciates

How clear the light fell on that stall in front of the market! And how like a picture

it was, the dark-green heaps of corn, and the crimson beets, and the golden

melons. There was another with game: how the light flickered on that pheasant’s

breast, with the purplish blood dripping over its brown feathers! He could see the

red shine of the drops (68).

He also catches sight of a “tall mulatto girl” following her mistress (70). When Hugh takes his own life and a river of blood drips to the floor, the narrator links Hugh, the pheasant, and the mulatto girl with “scarlet turban and bright eyes” (70-1). Each is a constitutive element of a nonlocal economic system given to local iterations. In repeatedly asking readers to “see him just as he is,” the narrator suggests it is imperative that readers attend to the highly contextual aspects of Hugh’s life in Wheeling if they hope to see the logic undergirding the capitalist system that structures it (48).

Davis directs our attention to the idiosyncratic aspects of Wheeling’s iron mills— the very contexts that help elevate Hugh’s tactical repurposing of industrial refuse to the level of critique. Because he has no other supplies, Hugh molds strangely beautiful 30 figures out of korl—what is left of the ore after pig-metal is run. Like de Certeau’s tactician, he works with what is available, transforming refuse into the out-of-place. His crowning achievement is the “Korl Woman”: “There was not one line of beauty or grace in it: a nude woman’s form, muscular, grown coarse with labor, the powerful limbs instinct with some one poignant longing” (53). Hugh’s reuse of korl to fashion a woman’s form indicts a system that extracts what it likes from workers its treats as disposable. Hugh cannot dismantle the mills or larger industrial economy in which they take part, but it does provide him the tools by which he tactically bears witness to its human costs (57).

The novella suggests that Hugh Wolfe’s subjectivity cannot be entirely erased while the korl woman exists. The narrator reflects, “I have it in a corner of my library. I keep it hid behind a curtain…sometimes,—tonight, for instance,—the curtain is accidently drawn back, and I see a bare arm stretched out imploringly in the darkness, and an eager, wolfish face watching mine” (74). She thus affords the korl woman subjectivity and the agency required to gaze back at the middle-class reader and demand recognition. If we take the library as a metonym for the text, then Davis’s novella suggests that, though marginalized, local subjectivity is always and already present in literature. Life in the Iron Mills crafts a realistic portrayal of Wheeling’s industrial economy and anticipates the work of meta-localists who represent local subjectivity through tactical engagements with material culture.

31 CHAPTER OVERVIEWS

In the chapters that follow, I treat four textual pairings that work together to illuminate how diverse material cultures function in local engagements with power.

Because it reassesses local color through Appalachia’s contexts, this project focuses on texts written from 1870-1920. This period witnessed the confluence of local color’s popularity; a number of prolific women authors; a bourgeois concern over consumption; and what scholars like Shapiro and Whisnant dub the consolidation of “Appalachia” in the cultural imaginary. Despite the project’s engagement with a relatively coherent literary-historical period, its chapters offer four different “Appalachias,” each of which highlight the heterogeneity and heterodoxy of local color writing.

Chapter two, “Tourism and Performativity in Rebecca Harding Davis’s

Appalachia and Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Creole Louisiana,” argues that stories included in

Davis’s Silhouettes of American Life (1892) and Dunbar-Nelson’s The Goodness of St.

Rocque (1899) make visible the extent to which urban, northern middle-class expectations of local cultures relied on stereotypical material goods and picturesque aesthetics. To establish a baseline understanding of how local colorists engage in tactical generic maneuvers, this chapter conducts the project’s most sustained analysis of local color as a form of material culture. Davis and Dunbar-Nelson depict two of the late- nineteenth century’s most popular tourist destinations; as a result, I read their work as a response to travel literature of the 1870s and 1880s. Both authors utilize the conventions of local color to undercut popular stereotypes perpetuated by middle-class culture. The stories attend to how local actors (or agents) use stereotypical forms of material culture to 32 maintain a measure of control over tourist encounters. In Davis’s “The Yares of the Black

Mountains,” for instance, mountaineers use stereotypes of feuding mountaineers to undercut tourists’ access to the local. In Dunbar-Nelson’s “M’sieu Fortier’s Violin,” a

Creole violinist pushes against the easy acquisition of his folk art and artifact. The texts featured in chapter two contain diverse material tactics that provide local agents ways to maneuver within consumer culture. Some characters find ways to repurpose the commodified local. Other characters exert their agency by refusing to allow outsiders to dictate what the commodified local looks like. This chapter lays the groundwork for the range of material tactics discussed in chapters three and four.

Chapter three, “The Local Production and Curation of Folk in Emma Bell Miles’s

Appalachia and Mary Hunter Austin’s West,” reads Miles’s The Spirit of the Mountains

(1905) and Austin’s The Land of Little Rain (1903) in relation to two seemingly contradictory impulses: the preservation of indigenous cultures and the assimilation efforts of Progressive reformers. As I show through archival research on school newspapers, settlement diaries, and folklore journals, reform efforts sought to educate mountaineers and American Indians into middle-class cultural standards even as they helped to commodify folk art. Miles’s and Austin’s anxieties over the disappearance and commodification of local cultures are expressed in the formal and material cultural terms set forth in these Progressive-era texts. Thus, Miles connects beer bottles on the roadside, and Austin connects tin cans on the forest floor, with middle-class attempts to manage local forms of consumption and production. While we see here fewer characters engaging in de Certeau’s tactics than we see in other chapters, the authors rework terms like 33 “civilization” and “home.” Through mass-produced goods and the detritus they become,

Miles and Austin argue capitalism is itself trashy, and not the populations that

Progressive reformers attempt to manage. I argue that Miles and Austin critique consumer culture by offering the indigenous home as an alternative to the increasing commodification of middle-class domestic practices. The productive indigenous home serves as a way for local tacticians to reclaim the right to preserve their own cultures and determine if and how folk objects circulate.

Chapter four, “‘Loving to fool’ with Things in the Industrial Towns of Grace

MacGowan Cooke’s Appalachia and Mary Wilkins Freeman’s New England” argues

Cooke’s The Power and the Glory (1909) and Freeman’s The Portion of Labor (1901) contributed to existing Progressive-era conversations about industrialization and social uplift through an examination of the local. Thus, they complicate our understanding of

Appalachia as synonymous with the hollow and New England with the village. I show that these novels valorize neither folk—an emerging and increasingly valued form of

“Culture”—nor traditional forms of Arnoldian high culture. Instead, heroines Johnnie and

Ellen are poachers who repeatedly reassemble and reuse the products of mass consumer culture to undercut the class ideologies that sustained industrial capitalism. Johnnie and

Ellen repeatedly resist strict adherence to middle-class dictums concerning how women should “buy into” emergent consumer markets. In The Portion of Labor, a store’s window display becomes both a tool for understanding the indirect costs of production and an occasion for working-class solidarity. In The Power and the Glory, a cheap pair of

34 slippers indicts the class hierarchies through which female reformers validated their uplift work and maintained their own privileged social position.

A coda, “Aesthetics, Trash, and the War on Poverty” extends the literary history of abject localities to contemporary fiction. Although criticism about local color has overlooked the out-of-place, the ongoing rhetoric of the “War on Poverty” relies heavily on the Progressive-era reform culture detailed in chapters two and three. The 1960s popularized a previously made connection between accumulated trash and cultural degeneracy. I show that Holly Farris’s Lockjaw (2007) and Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a

Cracker Childhood (2000) combat this association by imagining the trashy landscapes of central Appalachia and south Georgia as rich cultural contexts for local characters who generate new creative, material, and relational possibilities. In Lockjaw and Ecology, junk is remarkable precisely because it makes visible the logical end of a capitalist system based in mass consumption. The presence of junk extends the orthodox cycle of goods— from extraction, production, and consumption to disposal—by forcing a confrontation with capitalism’s material excesses. Farris and Ray work to disassociate economic and cultural impoverishment, and, like the local colorists before them, use unexpected forms of material culture to call into question the ideological content of “Culture” as a concept.

35 CHAPTER TWO: Tourism and Performativity in Rebecca Harding Davis’s Appalachia and Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Creole Louisiana

INTRODUCTION

“Across the Gulf” resides at the textual center of Rebecca Harding Davis’s 1892 collection Silhouettes of American Life and stages the encounters with which local color is so often concerned. Originally published in 1881 in Lippincott’s Magazine, the story depicts travelers on a southbound train headed for Baltimore. When the train falls off a trestle bridge, the interactions between Reverend William Imlay and a troupe of “players” extend into the domestic sphere as the traveler recuperates in the homes of the actors.

Enjoying the intimacy of the domestic sphere, Imlay assumes that he has been adopted

“as one of themselves” (117). He even convinces himself that one of the actors, Janey, loves him.24

I begin here with “Across the Gulf” because Imlay’s desire for access and authenticity represents the nineteenth-century tourist and reader writ large. While in the homes of the actors, Imlay wants to experience authentic belonging. To this end, he decides he must have “whatever it is [Janey] represents,” that thing that had “been lost out of his own life” (130). Imlay believes he can and must possess her as “the only real thing” (130). Janey is a cure for the enervating forces of modernity and the reverend’s cloistered life filled with wealthy people “whose manners and religion alike were pliable, inoffensive, and elegant” (133). In her descriptions of Imlay, Davis demonstrates a meta-

24 The story’s use of dramatic irony is key as the reader realizes Janey does not love Imlay (124). When she rescues him from the train’s rubble, Janey emphasizes the fact that she would have aided any human being, including “a tramp or a darky” (122). 36 fictional interest in accessibility and how the acquisition of subject material can serve to

(re)constitute middle-class subjectivity.

Imlay is unwilling to acknowledge that the people he meets have their own subjectivities; yet Davis’s treatment of the players within a domestic space attunes us to how her non-middle-class, local subjects also act within the drama of encounter. These actors exercise agency by maneuvering within a middle-class culture through which they circulate as commodities. Janey maintains the distinction between her commodified public exterior and the private interior monologue to which we as readers are sometimes privy. For example, when Janey sings a mournful ballad, Imlay weeps because it seems to him that her “soul is in it” (130). He interprets the song as an authentic expression meant just for him, but Janey is actually wondering if Bob needs a new coat (130).

“Across the Gulf” imagines individuals who find ways to manipulate how they are consumed and, thus, deny easy familiarity. Davis’s story resists the collapsing of public and private implied by the touristic desire to possess and be made one of the family.

Imlay embodies what Silhouettes of American Life critiques as the schizophrenia of tourism in the late nineteenth century: it is underwritten by the desire to escape middle- class culture even it uses every encounter to recapitulate middle-class subjectivity and its desires.

Davis’s interest in subjectivity as it relates to literary subject matter is characteristic of her short story oeuvre; it also stands in contrast to critical studies that prioritize urban middle-class subjectivity by theorizing local color as a genre that facilitates class solidification or empathetic connection with locals. In particular, 37 prominent historicists have discussed the intersection between tourism and literature as one that consolidates middle-class identity and promotes rural escapism. Richard

Brodhead argues that local colorists execute “literary tourism,” which coheres an urban middle class by replicating the purpose of actual tourism where elites meet one another and recognize themselves as peers (119-124).25 Brodhead’s discussion of literary

“touring” provides the groundwork for Amy Kaplan’s use of the trope of tourism in

“Nation, Region, and Empire.” She contends, “Regionalists share with tourists and anthropologists the perspective of the modern urban outsider who projects onto the native and pristine authentic space immune to historical changes shaping their own lives” (226-

7). In other words, Brodhead and Kaplan agree that local color is primarily concerned with what regions and tourism meant for bourgeois subjectivity and that the regions depicted are essentially anti-modern in nature. Even feminist literary critics Judith

Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse prioritize the thematic importance of middle-class subjectivity within the trope of encounter. They argue that regional women writers empathetically portray marginalized populations, acting as translators or interpreters for the imagined urban reader who seeks a new relationship to the nation’s rural spaces

(116).26

This chapter advocates for a shift in the critical paradigm; weary of the much-

25 Sandra Zagarell’s “Troubling Regionalism,” Elizabeth Ammons’s Conflicting Stories, and June Howard’s New Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs build upon this reunion thesis. Emily Satterwhite similarly argues that readers’ interest in the aesthetic culture of regions waxed and waned in relation to US imperialism and attendant concerns about race, geographic and upward mobility, and the alienating effects of modernity (3).

26 See also Stephanie Palmer’s Together By Accident: American Local Color and the Middle Class.

38 canvassed “transformed tourist” critical trope, it instead draws attention to local colorists who are more interested in local subjectivity than respite or empathy (Tangled Roots 54).

Rebecca Harding Davis and Alice Dunbar-Nelson depict two of the late nineteenth century’s most popular tourist destinations, Appalachia and Creole Louisiana. This chapter focuses on local color stories included in Davis’s Silhouettes of American Life

(1892) and Dunbar-Nelson’s The Goodness of St. Rocque (1899) that stage literal

“confrontations” between locals and northern middle-class tourists. Despite very different career arcs, both authors are meta-localists who use their collections to formally reflect on how literature—itself a form of material culture—aestheticizes the local. Unlike Bill

Hardwig, who argues local color mirrors travel writing about the South, I read their work as a rewriting of the form, content, and purpose of travel-themed literature in the late nineteenth century (3).27 This chapter uses Michel de Certeau’s “practices of everyday living” to understand the formal interventions Davis and Dunbar-Nelson undertake. He theorizes that this kind of practice “indicates a social historicity in which systems of representations or processes of fabrication no longer appear only as normative frameworks but also as tools manipulated by users” (21). That is, Davis and Dunbar-

Nelson take the “inventory and repertory of combinations” offered to them in the form of settings, stock characters, and images in order to engage in a reworking of local representation (de Certeau 23).

27 In Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870-1900, Hardwig argues this overlap makes sense because the forms shared the objective of translating the South to readers unfamiliar with the region (3).

39 Using Davis’s “silhouette” and Dunbar-Nelson’s concept of “the genteel crystal” as departure points, I argue that these meta-localists use material culture in their narratives to undermine the monochromatic nature of common middle-class aestheticizations of “the South.”28 In this chapter, I refer to the South as a “region” and focus on southern Appalachia and Creole Louisiana as “localities” within the South. I do so because, while northern tourists were aware of differentiated populations south of the

Mason-Dixon line, they expected those populations to share the purported backward, isolated, and folksy qualities of the South at large. These authors offer an alternative to popular plantation fiction, but, more than that, they mitigate against what Brodhead calls the middle-class “imagination of acquisitiveness” by deconstructing stereotypical representations about mountaineers and creoles that circulated through literary culture

(133).29 Davis and Dunbar-Nelson repeatedly imagine local scenes filled with out-of- place objects, dynamic material cultures, and local subjectivities that refuse to be assimilated into the tourist’s or reader’s expectations.

The formal maneuvers undertaken by these local colorists provide a context in which their characters might also engage in recuperative material tactics. Davis and

Dunbar-Nelson imagine local identity as performative, thus undermining the conservative

28 Hardwig argues local color and travel participated in the nineteenth-century, urban reader’s search for the “real” South (3). See also Scott Romine’s The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction.

29 The latter is at the heart of their formal interventions. As Hardwig argues, the mythology of a homogeneous plantation South is largely a critical construction. Davis and Dunbar-Nelson’s contemporary readers sought out literature written about the margins of the South (3-5).

40 force of authenticity.30 Thus we see nonlocals convincingly masquerading as locals and local characters utilizing material culture to exert some agency over tourist encounters.

Local materials give individuals room to maneuver because they function as a form of what de Certeau calls “tactics.” In other words, material culture gives characters a way to be in a socio-economic and cultural system over which they have little control. Davis and

Dunbar-Nelson imagine the local subject’s notoriously ephemeral “ways of using things or words according to circumstances” as “agents and authors of conjunctural operations”

(de Certeau 20). Whereas Brodhead emphasizes local color’s role as “cultural elegy” for a past that was rapidly being replaced by modern movements, the locals in these short stories are not passive subjects caught in the inevitable rising tide of civilization. Nor are they rustics isolated from changes occurring in the late nineteenth-century United States.

Rather, local characters maneuver within popular stereotypes to hold off the homogenizing force of middle-class subjectivity.

SILHOUETTES AND GENTEEL CRYSTALS

Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910) and Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935) may not seem the likeliest participants in meta-localist work that undermines middle-class aestheticization of regions, their people and things. After all, both writers understood and perpetuated middle-class values in their own lives even as their experiences provided

30 I use “performative” and “performativity” as described by editors Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Performativity and Performance. Performativity refers to speech, gestures, and other forms of semiotic expression that can be used to construct and perform an identity. Performativity can be profoundly disruptive, but it relies upon and is enforced by discursive power that is already situated within larger social contexts.

41 them a more fleshed out sense of life in various localities. Born to a mother from a genteel western Pennsylvanian family and an Englishman, Davis described herself as part of an easy-going, though downwardly mobile, generation (Bits of Gossip 6). Davis lived in Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia) from 1836 until 1863 when she married

Lemuel Clark Davis and settled permanently in Philadelphia (Tichi 5-10).31 Although

Davis criticism fixates on Life in the Iron Mills, she was extremely prolific, producing by one count nine novels, two hundred and ninety-two stories and serials, and one hundred and twenty-four juvenile pieces (Tichi 13). Sustained analyses of Davis’s corpus have been curtailed by criticism that considers her shorter works inferior to the novella.

Consequently, Davis’s relationship to local color and Appalachia, more specifically, has received little critical attention.32

Though her class affiliations were complicated by her mixed race status, Dunbar-

Nelson also enjoyed some of the advantages of a middle-class upbringing. She was born in New Orleans to an African American seamstress and white marine merchant. She was well educated, attending Straight University, Cornell University, Columbia University,

31 For more on Davis’s life, see Gerald Langford’s The Richard Harding Davis Years: A Biography of a Mother and Son, Tillie Olsen’s “A Biographical Interpretation” in Life in the Iron-Mills, Jean Pfaelzer’s “Legacy Profile: Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910),” and Jane Atteridge Rose’s Rebecca Harding Davis.

32 For negative appraisals of Davis’s other work, see Robert Shulman’s “Realism” in The Columbia History of the American Novel, 160, and Judith Fetterley’s Provisions: A Reader from 19th-Century American Women, 309. Richard Cary does argue that Davis is important to our understanding of Appalachian local color because her 1875 “The Yares of the Black Mountains” may have influenced Murfree’s 1878 “The Dancin’ Party at Harrison’s Cove” (22). Kenneth Noe makes a similar claim that “‘The Yares’ greatly influenced Mary Noailles Murfree’s early work” (79). For more on “The Yares” and Appalachia, see also Elizabeth S.D. Engelhardt’s The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature, 46-64. For a general examinations of Davis’s connection to local color see James C. Austin’s “Success and Failure of Rebecca Harding Davis,” 44, and Arthur Hobson Quinn’s American Fiction,181-190.

42 and the University of Pennsylvania. Dunbar-Nelson was reputed to be strong-willed but very much a “lady” who liked pretty things. She took art, piano, and cello lessons; did lacework; and frequented the theatre (Hull 14-24). While some critics demean her skill as a writer, the controversy in Dunbar-Nelson criticism typically centers on whether or not she “whitewashes” her representations of New Orleans in The Goodness of St. Rocque and Violets and Other Tales.33 Scholars note that Dunbar-Nelson could and often did pass for white (Menke 81). There are those who read her work as a challenge to regionalism’s

“white authorial veil” while others like biographer Gloria T. Hull associate Dunbar-

Nelson with the accommodationist “genteel tradition” in Black life and letters (Menke

77, Hull 23).34

Certainly there is potential incongruence between being born into or aspiring to middle-class status and using local color—a genre with a predominantly middle-class readership—to push against middle-class aestheticization of local life. Yet, as writers with liminal class and racial statuses, Davis and Dunbar-Nelson do just that. Davis’s local color writing continues the work of her novella by undercutting the very genre that she

33 Critics rarely gloss over the fact that Dunbar-Nelson is a local colorist. However, in discussing literary representations of New Orleans, literary critics tend to pass over her in favor of George Washington Cable or Kate Chopin. For critiques of Dunbar-Nelson’s narrative simplicity and melodramatic content, see Jordan Stouck’s “Identities in Crisis: Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s New Orleans Fiction,” Roger Whitlow’s “Alice Dunbar-Nelson: New Orleans Writer,” and Anne Razey Gowdy’s entry “Alice Dunbar-Nelson” in The History of Southern Women’s Literature.

34 For other assessments of how Dunbar-Nelson employs race to resist rigid hierarchies, see Judith Irwin- Mulcahy’s “American Heteroglossia: Open-Cell Regionalism and the New Orleans Short Fiction of Alice Dunbar-Nelson,” Kristina Brooks’s “Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Local Colors of Ethnicity, Class, and Place,” and Elizabeth Ammons’s Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn of the Century, 59-85. See “Race and Gender in the Early Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson” for Violet Harrington Bryan’s contention that Dunbar-Nelson’s racially indeterminate characters reflect the author’s own racial ambivalence.

43 helped initiate. She often indicts her own class for its privilege and maintenance of social divisions that negatively impact those at the bottom of class and racial hierarchies;

Dunbar-Nelson’s racially ambiguous Creoles thwart the ability to identify and classify at a time when the middle class is particularly invested in doing so.35 In fact, these local colorists employ metaphors—the silhouette and “genteel crystal”—to critique the practice of viewing local life through middle-class norms.

Davis’s use of the “silhouette” to title her 1892 collection, Silhouettes of

American Life, tells us something about how she conceptualized the work of local color.

The silhouette is, after all, a distinctly middle-class form of material culture. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the popularity of the silhouette was practical, aesthetic, and ideological. Like local color, the silhouette combined the pulls of past and present. It had its roots in the ancients but increasingly involved machine technology, symbolizing a forward-looking nation (Rutherford 188-211). A silhouette involves tracing the shadow cast by light and the sitter, not the thing itself. In referencing a form of portraiture that depicts a backlit object, the collection calls into question local color’s claims to authoritative representation of cultural difference. Davis’s work reflects an interest in the ways that the “backlighting” of local subjects by middle-class expectations results in a monochromatic version of local life. In her 1891 essay, “Women in Literature,” Davis describes an ideal form of local color writing: “Genre pictures of individual characters in

35 In “‘You…Could never be mistaken’: Reading Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Rhetorical Diversions in The Goodness of St. Rocque,” Thomas Strychacz convincingly argues that Dunbar-Nelson’s strategies of rhetorical diversion challenge absolute determinations at a time in history when there was a great investment in defining race.

44 our national drama, each with his own scene and framing, we must have; and, indeed, we already have many of them, drawn with power and delicacy” (612). Here Davis values writing that depicts complex local subjects rather than types. As we will see, her stories depict local subjects who defy the assumptions of tourists and confront the reader with material cultural evidence of how local populations negotiate tourist encounters. This inversion of narrative subjectivity is characteristic of much of Davis’s work, which she once described as “a perverse inclination to see the other side of the question, especially if there was to be little to be said for it” (“Men’s Rights” 212).

Likely familiar with Davis’s propensity for literary inversion, Dunbar-Nelson exchanges the silhouette for the “genteel crystal.” She uses the concept of the “genteel crystal” to warn her readers about the distorting influence that middle-class norms can have. Reviewing Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbo, a historical novel set during the third century BCE, Dunbar-Nelson cautions the collection’s hypothetical middle-class reader:

“Viewing the characters through the genteel crystal of nineteenth century civilization, they are all barbarous, unnatural, intensified” (69-70). Instead, Dunbar-Nelson advocates for cultural relativism and humility towards the characters in Salammbo. She urges readers to consider “the age in which they lived” (70). Dunbar-Nelson’s articulation of her own writing practice also reflects this insistence on historical and cultural specificity.

In a letter to Paul Laurence Dunbar, she once explained her struggle not to homogenize

Louisiana: “I always think of my folk characters as simple human beings, not as types of race or an idea” (Letters 272). This letter suggests Dunbar-Nelson was attuned to the way

45 that “genteel” or “white” culture flattened out the complexity of folks by reducing them to a racial type or aesthetic norm.

In articulating the concepts of the silhouette and genteel crystal, both Davis and

Dunbar-Nelson mitigate against the middle-class “imagination of acquisitiveness” that seeks familiar, static types (Brodhead 133).36 In the 1870s and 1880s, the local functioned as a “crucial commodity,” and local subjects were considered good “literary material”

(Shapiro 69). As Barbara Ewell and Pamela Menke note, a rise in local color coincided with an increased interest in touring “the South.” In the 1870s, Northern publishers began printing travelogues, illustrations, and stories, and advertisements for resorts, hotels, and railway lines appeared in the same magazines that published local color stories (xxxvi).37

Thus, the region quickly became a prime commodity. As rural areas of Appalachia and

Louisiana became increasingly accessible through the nation’s growing infrastructure, the mobile northern middle class began seeking out tourist destinations for their perceived anti-modernism.38

Thumbing through the pages of the era’s major periodicals, one quickly gets the sense of how often Appalachia and Creole Louisiana were singled-out and reduced to

36 See also Stephanie Foote’s Regional Cultures, 19.

37 See also Hardwig, 11 and 17-18.

38 Nina Silber extensively details the way that the South, and the southern mountains, in particular “provided [northerners] an escape from the distressing uniformity and alienation of the mass consumer society” (69). Davis actually explores this commodification in a series of travel sketches. “By-paths in the Mountains” (July 1880) depicts vacationers exploring the Cumberland Mountain, and “Here and There in the South” (July 1887) heavily focuses on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast South as visitors flocked to the area for the 1884 Cotton Exposition. Travel, of course, was made increasingly possible with the addition of seven new railroads in the South from 1880-1892 (Rabinowitz 60). See also Kevin O’Donnell, 20-21, and Ronald Eller’s Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers, 100-102, for specifics on Appalachian tourism. 46 type. For example, reporter Edward King’s work is rife with ambivalence towards the future of these southern localities as part of a reconstructed United States. From late 1873 through 1874, King explored the South, detailing for northern readers the effects of the

Civil War and the economic potential of the region (Noe 75).39 King treated the southern mountain region in two installments and Louisiana in one installment of his Scribner’s

Monthly series, “The Great South.” In this series, King concluded that the southern mountains and Louisiana were both emerging from Reconstruction full of promise and danger. While he saw both localities as rich in land and resources, King worried that the

Civil War’s divisiveness in mountain communities and Louisiana’s persistent, unassimilated Creole culture would make difficult their reintegration into a national economy and culture.40

Both populations were stereotyped as backward and resistant to social and economic progress, albeit for very different reasons. Their perceived failure to fully assimilate into a national culture and economy contributed to the folk of the Appalachia and Louisiana being discussed in terms of racial ambiguity. As Michael Elliott demonstrates, the late nineteenth century saw a profusion of social scientific and literary texts focused on the observation of difference (xiii). However, a review of some of these

39 See also Robert Underwood Johnson’s Remembered Yesterdays, 97. The resulting articles and illustrations were gathered in The Great South: A Record of Journeys in Louisiana, Texas, the Indian Territory, Missouri, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland, published in 1875.

40 For more on King, see Christopher Benfey’s Degas in New Orleans, 105-108; Johnson’s Remembered Yesterdays, 96-9; Silber’s Romance of Reunion, 45 and 75; Anne Rowe’s The Enchanted Country: Northern Writers in the South, 1865-1910, xi-xx.

47 texts suggests that not all forms of cultural difference were equally appreciated. By the late 1870s, Davis would have been familiar with popular conceptions of mountaineers as primitive people who actively refused civilization—and to their detriment (Stewart 187).

National newspaper stories on illegal moonshine stills and bloody, savage feuds played a key role in the creation of this stereotype (Shapiro 110).41 In her 1879 Lippincott’s article,

Louise Coffin Jones claimed Carolina mountaineers belonged to a class of “poor white trash” that had degenerated due to geographical and cultural isolation (756). Jones’s deployment of the concept of “trash” tapped into a cultural logic that equated trashy landscapes with trashy people, a pattern of thought still prevalent today.42

While mountaineers were a degenerate and downwardly mobile indigenous population, Creoles were considered a “foreign element” in the national population.43 As a New Orleans native, Dunbar-Nelson would have been aware of social scientific and literary texts examining the city’s alterity. For example, in “The Louisiana Creoles”

(1873), Albert Rhodes described Louisiana as a former French colony hindered by the influence of “African fetishism” and its resistance to speaking English (255). Like the lawless moonshiners and feuders, commentators characterized Louisiana Creoles as not entirely assimilated into political, economic, and cultural norms. They were depicted as a

41 The New York Times offered extensive coverage of the “moonshine wars” that began over conflicts with revenuers in 1877 (Stewart 187). As the 1878 and 1879 Harper’s Weekly and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine articles “Law and Moonshine” and “Moonshiners” demonstrate, popular culture racialized mountaineers’ perceived lawlessness.

42 See Ellen Churchill’s 1901 “The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: A Study in Anthropogeography.”

43 See, for example, Joseph Edgar Chamberlin’s “The Foreign Elements in Our Population,” 761-771. 48 self-styled aristocracy that was scornful of modern business practices and bitter about having lost out to the “American invasion” after the Louisiana Purchase (Thompson 4).44

Popular literary depictions of Appalachians and Creoles had real consequences as local color shaped real-world expectations, a fact that would not have been lost on Davis and Dunbar-Nelson. During the period, literature often corroborated sociological theories, predetermined touristic expectations, informed missionary endeavors, and guided business enterprises.45 For instance, George E. Vincent’s 1898 sociological text, “A

Retarded Frontier,” helped authorize the aggressive industrialization of the Appalachian region in the early twentieth century; in it, he explicitly cited local color as supporting his conclusions about the region: “Only recently have we fully realized this fact (isolation) made vivid by the stories of Miss Murfree, John Fox, Jr., and other writers” (1). George

Washington Cable’s popular Old Creole Days (1879) included now-familiar stories of voodoo, quadroon mistresses, pirates, haunted houses, and embittered Creoles. Viewed by many as the arbiter and moral judge of Creole culture, Cable was the guide most sought after by Stewart King, Mark Twain, and Lafcadio Hearn when they visited New

Orleans (Benfey 16, 121).46 Davis and Dunbar-Nelson offer us opportunities to trace an

44 See also Benfey, 14-15.

45 Henry D. Shapiro argues that the interest in the southern mountains generated by, and generating, literature meant that the “Appalachia they discovered would be the Appalachia of the local colorists” (57).

46 For more on Cable’s biography and literary legacy, see Anna Elfenbein’s Women on the Color Line: Evolving Stereotypes and the Writings of George Washington Cable, Grace King, Kate Chopin, 18-25; Arlin Turner’s George W. Cable: A Biography; and Paul Haspel’s “George Washington Cable and Bonaventure: A New Orleans Author’s Literary Sojourn into Arcadiana.”

49 alternative literary history of local color, one that includes texts committed to undermining cultural acquisitiveness and commonly held stereotypes.

PERFORMATIVITY AND THE LOCAL

Making Davis and Dunbar-Nelson a part of the critical conversation is an important intervention because they give us alternative ways to understand what local color can do. They represent a tradition of meta-localists interested in the subjectivities of the people populating the nation’s so-called hinterlands; thus, they deny the hegemonic poetic unity sought by tourists and northern middle-class readers.47 Surely aware of literature’s ability to shape cultural encounters, Davis and Dunbar-Nelson put the same damaging stereotypes and familiar images generated by local color to very different uses.

That is, Davis and Dunbar-Nelson take the “inventory and repertory of combinations” offered to them in the form of settings, stock characters, and images in order to engage in a reworking of local representation (de Certeau 23). They work within popular assumptions about their localities in order to craft a more complex representation of life in Appalachia and Creole Louisiana.

One way that Davis and Dunbar-Nelson rework the typical tourism plot is by imagining the kinds of performativity that might proliferate when the markers of local

47 I borrow the term “poetic unity” from Allen Batteau’s examination, The Invention of Appalachia. He argues that local colorists crafted a literary vision of regions as in but not of America. This literary vision grappled with the dilemma of a region’s existence rather than the realities of daily life for its populations. Thus, he contends, there is a poetic unity to literary representations of region (6-8).

50 cultures are so easily recognizable and, thus, reproducible.48 Their work suggests that, because middle-class tourists repeatedly judge the value and authenticity of a local culture against stereotypical material goods and a picturesque aesthetic, tourists are also terrible judges of who and what are actually “local.” Silhouettes of American Life and The

Goodness of St. Rocque both include a story in which an outsider convincingly plays the role of a stereotypical local subject. Underwritten by consumable, reproducible stereotypes, these stories raise the specter of performativity—that one needs only the right material accoutrements to appear authentic. In Davis's "A Wayside Episode," the

Woottens of New York take some youth on an expedition through the southern United

States a few years after the Civil War. There Mrs. Emily Wooten meets a wild-looking stranger. Dunbar-Nelson's "The Fisherman of Pass Christian" features Annette, a young

Creole from New Orleans vacationing at the Mexican Gulf Hotel; Annette’s “tall fisherman”; and Natalie, a local Creole girl.

For Emily Wootten, the southern mountains represent ample wild space to struggle against middle-class norms, and the stranger—ostensibly a wild mountaineer— represents an authentic self unhampered by society's restrictions.49 Speaking to one of the young women she chaperones on the trip, Emily articulates an elaborate metaphor for society. It is "one of those glass boxes which you see in an apothecary's window, in

48 See Regina Bendix’s In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies and Jeff Karem’s The Romance of Authenticity: The Cultural Politics of Regional and Ethnic Literatures for more on the conservative uses of authenticity.

49 Relatively little work has been done on “A Wayside Episode.” Engelhardt briefly mentions the story, arguing Emily is the “transformed tourist” figure (The Tangled Roots 54). I am less interested in Emily’s transformation than I am in what her attraction to the stranger suggests about the performative nature of local identities. 51 which a few gold-fishes and minnows swim round and round, eying each other year in and year out, and bumping their noses against the sides" (150). That is, Emily describes society as a kind of jail in which one is forced into small, repetitious routines; it is all about eying and being eyed. She appears exhausted by the constant scrutiny under which she must maintain the moral, religious, material, and domestic codes of urban middle- class culture.

The southern mountains represent a crack in that glass box, an escape from society’s routines into a more vital existence. As Emily looks off into the distant mountain wilds, it is as if she is "searching for something [she] has lost out of [her] life"

(152). Just as she wishes she were a wild animal free of societal constraints, a stranger appears. The narrator describes him as "clothed in a hunting-shirt made of deer-skin, and short breeches of the same, covered with dust; on his feet were leather soles strapped like sandals; his knees and throat were bare and tanned the color of the leather; his long red hair and beard were untrimmed and his head was a cap made from the skin of a coyote"

(152-3). Thus clothed, the stranger is interchangeable with his things; the narrator describes "the hunting shirt and wolf-skin cap" saying, "hello" (153). This interchangeability suggests that stereotypical material goods often act as metonyms for the authentic local. Emily assumes this half man, half animal has "no law, no rule of propriety to hamper him” and must be a mountaineer trapper with “none of the smallness of receptions and flower pillars and draperies" to which she feels beholden (154). He is a symbol of the resources the mountain wilds can offer a subjectivity such as her own, tired from the burdens of urban social life. 52 Just as the southern mountains provide Emily an occasion to explore the contrary pulls of nature and society, the narrator of "The Fisherman of Pass Christian" depicts the seaside village as a locality characterized by opposing forces. Though Annette may be initially unaware of it, this tension is evident in the opening scene in which Dunbar-

Nelson describes the Gulf coast breezes that “meet and conflict as though each strove for mastery of the air” (37). Indeed, the very meaning of local authenticity is in play as people with vastly different social positions converge in Pass Christian. The story’s primary conflict coalesces around the chance encounters and ensuing relationship between Annette and the titular fisherman. The man displays the technique of a local fisherman (“look how he uses his teeth!”) and thus seems like an interesting local color

“study” for Annette. He quickly becomes “her fisherman” as Annette takes a proprietary interest in him (45). She even finds his home and invites herself over unannounced, taking liberties that would never be allowed among her own class in New Orleans. One of the story’s funnier moments unfolds as the fisherman chases crabs around the room and remarks, “You see I am busy, but make yourself at home” (48). And Annette does, just as she has previously ventured beyond the hotel, forged a friendship with Natalie, and made herself feel at home amongst the locals of Pass Christian. Her presumption is no doubt rooted in her privilege, as well as her belief that she is visiting the home of a lesser social being. Though he lives in a stereotypical “small, two-roomed, white, washed, pine- boarded” hut “with the traditional mud chimney,” Annette learns while looking at his curios that Monsieur Le Conte is only summering in Pass Christian (50). But she nonetheless thinks him a humble—if not, strictly speaking, “local”—fisherman. 53 Although the stranger and the fisherman avail themselves of the material cultural goods by which both Emily and Annette identify them as familiar local types, the reader becomes aware that the tourists are mistaken about their men. The men’s speech is incongruent with their surroundings. The Woottens notice that the stranger "speaks

English like an educated man" (158); Annette notes that the correctness of her fisherman’s French suggests “an excellent education” (38). Seemingly every aspect of a local identity might be easily acquired, faked, or performed except for the dialect. The stranger eventually admits to Emily, “I am here because I was tired. I tried one business after another . . . . Drudge, drudge, day in and day out!” (160-1). He now subsists by hunting deer and raiding eagle's nests like any boy in the mountains, hoping—like

Emily—to “[get] back to his original condition” (159-160). Meanwhile, at the famed

New Orleans Grand Opera House, Annette discovers that “her fisherman” is actually the famous new tenor. She is still delighted by the revelation, going “behind the scenes” to laughingly accuse him: “How you deceived me” (59). Fittingly, Le Conte is still in his costume from the show as he smilingly admits to coming early from France and going

“incognito” in Pass Christian (59). The disguised Le Conte points to the performative nature of his stint as a fisherman and, indeed, the performative nature of the local.

After the big reveal, Davis resolves Emily's disgust with society and her attraction to the stranger by jumping ahead nearly a decade. The Woottens start a seed farm in

California and have several children. If the man she met in the mountains is to be believed, Emily is happy because "she had what she needed, —work and children. A woman at a certain age wants to nurse and something to do" (170). Indeed, it appears that 54 Davis wants us to take the mountaineer at his word. The story ends with the encounter dying out of Emily's memory, for she is "too much absorbed in her children to give much thought to anything else" (171). "A Wayside Episode" suggests that romanticizing a locality as an escape is the luxury of the idle, bourgeois woman.

In contrast, Dunbar-Nelson more explicitly links the fisherman, Pass Christian, and performativity, taking us behind the scenes of local and cultural production. She does so by showing how an outsider might convincingly play a familiar local type—the humble fisherman. In fact, it seems as easy as wearing the proper clothing, engaging in a stereotypical form of labor, and surrounding oneself with the domestic and material goods usually associated with the fisherman’s hut. If Annette’s experience in rural

Louisiana has been manufactured, the reader might well wonder the extent to which all material, circulating forms of local culture are similarly contrived. It is little wonder then that Annette sighs, “I wish for the old days at Pass Christian” (61). Even though the old days were built on a farce, a lie, then she believed herself in love with a humble fisherman and at home in a locality where every day was filled with fish fries, sailing, and run-ins with romantic local color.50 Such nostalgia is not surprising. Annette’s new awareness of performativity and cultural production necessarily destabilizes her position in the world, as it turns out that “the vast and bridgeless gulf” is between her and a

European sophisticate, not a fisherman (54). Dunbar-Nelson’s story reveals power as relative and shifting throughout the course of the story. At any moment, cultural

50 At the story’s end, Annette has a broken heart and little desire to continue her vocal training. Critics tend to focus on whether or not Le Conte really married or if Annette too easily believed the veracity of this gossip; for the purposes of my reading, this is beside the point. 55 exchange might reveal that agency resides in the Paris sophisticate, the self-satisfied New

Orleans Creole, or even the patois-speaking folk promoting local wares.

TOURIST TRAPS

The fact that stereotypes can be so easily performed urges readers to ask unsettling questions about local authenticity and agency. As meta-localists, Davis and

Dunbar-Nelson make visible through their formal maneuverings the extent to which middle-class expectations of local cultures are reducible to stereotypical material goods and picturesque aesthetics. This reliance on easily reproducible material goods to define the local raises the possibility that local characters might also use the material to maneuver and maintain a measure of control over tourist encounters. Indeed, Davis and

Dunbar-Nelson allow their local characters the same performative tactics as the sophisticated former businessman and opera singer. As de Certeau observes, “Everyday life poaches in countless ways” (xviii). Far from being passive, poachers produce their own “signifying practices,” for everyday practices from walking to cooking are tactical in nature (de Certeau xviii). As an agent, the poacher finds creative “ways of using things or words according to circumstances” (de Certeau 20). Davis and Dunbar-Nelson craft stories in which local characters maneuver within popular stereotypes and the homogenizing force of middle-class culture by putting material culture to different, tactical uses.51 An attention to the out-of-place material culture in the work of Davis and

51 The resistance versus accommodation paradigm is particularly unhelpful when talking about subordinate populations. de Certeau’s “tactics” reference the everyday ways people make habitable a world they did not create. 56 Dunbar-Nelson reveals that the localities these poachers and tacticians help construct are heterogeneous, dynamic, and not easily assimilated into middle-class expectations.

Davis’s “The Yares of the Black Mountains,” published in 1875 and later collected in Silhouettes of American Life, depicts dynamic local cultures that thwart the ability of acquisitive tourists to extract only those portions of local life they find usable or psychically pleasing.52 In this story, Miss Cook, a journalist, vacations in the North

Carolina mountains. She explains to a fellow traveler, the young widow Denby, “I can get farther from my usual rut, both as to scenery and people, here than anywhere else.

I’ve been writing on political economy lately, and my brain needs complete change of idea” (242). Miss Cook contrasts a standardized urban scene with the simplicity and natural grandeur of mountain life. She assumes the primitive mountains are the logical place to escape complex questions concerning the uneven circulation of wealth and goods. She needs Appalachia to fulfill its role as pastoral escape if she is to plumb its aesthetic and cultural resources.

However, the material culture Davis describes as actually existing in this locality undercuts the tourist’s inclination towards respite and renewal. For instance, ubiquitous and dirty calico wrappers are of serious concern to Miss Cook. Because she expects homespun garments, the women of the mountains fail to meet her aesthetic standards.

She argues, “[The Appalachian woman] would be picturesque, under a Norman peasant’s

52 “The Yares” is typically read as critical of local colorists’ reductive pursuit of copy. See Jean Pfaelzer’s “Engendering Nature/Denatured History: ‘The Yares of the Black Mountains’” and “The Politics of Nature” in Parlor Radical: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Origins of American, 189-204; Sharon M. Harris’s Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism, 249-53; and Engelhardt’s The Tangled Roots, 46- 64. 57 coif and red umbrella, but in that dirty calico wrapper—bah” (244). Miss Cook can only use mountain women as aesthetic commodities if they are wearing garments that recall a bygone era. The cheap, mass-produced calico wrappers are out of place and, thus, disrupt

Miss Cook’s desire to feel as if she has traveled across time as well as space.53 Jean

Pfaelzer astutely contends that “The Yares” exposes “aesthetic constructs that invited either hegemonic or solipsistic reactions” (“Engendered Nature” 229). Indeed, on more than one occasion, Miss Cook expresses dismay with mountain scenes that do not conform to the kind of idyllic agrarian past for which she is so desirous.

The narrator describes Miss Cook’s orientation to the local as sketching, collecting, and assembling materials, which serves to highlight the incompleteness of her representations:

She had sketched the outline of the mountains that walled in the table-land on

which the village stood…. She portioned out the facts as material for a letter in

the Herald. The quaint decaying houses, the swarming blacks, the whole drowsy

life of the village set high in the chilled sunshine and bound by its glittering belt

of rivers and rampart of misty mountain-heights, were sketched in a sharp,

effective bit of word-painting in her mind. (250)

Davis’s use of the word “portioned” to describe Miss Cook’s gathering of facts points to the active role the journalist plays in constructing a particular image of the village;

53 Twentieth-Century American Fashion describes calico as a basic fabric produced through mass manufacturing in the late nineteenth century (Welter 2). Newspaper advertisements suggest calico wrappers were widespread, cheap, and often bought readymade. For example, see “Local Notices” in Nebraska’s The Columbus Journal, “Just to Please the Ladies” in North Dakota’s Bismarck Tribune, and “Personal Adornment” in Tennessee’s The Milan Exchange. 58 “portion” also implies the incompleteness of the “word-painting” she has constructed.54

Nevertheless, the story acknowledges that Miss Cook’s selection of quaint houses,

“swarming” blacks, and drowsy village life forms a compelling and coherent aestheticization of the mountains. It carries with it the force of poetic unity. Yet, however sharp, the narrative’s attention to the act of sketching suggests that Miss Cook has only succeeded in outlining the portions of local life she finds aesthetically pleasing. Her sketches and word-paintings are as monochromatic, as static, as the silhouette, yet they will become a commodity that circulates in the market and serves to reproduce particular understandings of Appalachia.

In "The Yares," Davis uses out-of-place material culture to disrupt Miss Cook’s plans for utilizing mountain scenes for a coherent and culturally useful literary sketch. As they journey to the mountain village, “Miss Cook [takes] out her notebook and pencil, but

[finds] it impossible to write” (243). She notes that this particular scene—full of glassless huts, ruins of cabins, and women plowing the fields—is “nothing to take note of” (243).

Unlike the mountain ranges and fog-covered villages that she sketches, these images of inferior homes and women engaged in laborious fieldwork do not meet her aesthetic standards. They provide no useful material for her sketches. She literally deems them

“nothing.” This is not the quaint, preserved ruralism for which she had hoped after reading a magazine piece that described the North Carolina mountains as “almost unexplored, although so near the seaboard cities” (246).

54 Louisa Baker’s 1898 novel Cis Martin; or, Furriners in the Tennessee Mountains similarly includes a narrator who gathers anecdotes and sayings. 59 The story demonstrates that Miss Cook’s propensity for reductively aestheticizing mountain life is a negative one rooted in the assumed authority of middle-class subjectivity. When asked by the widow how she will ever collect enough facts to account for the “Causes of the Decadence of the South,” “Miss Cook laugh[s] with cool superiority: ‘Why, child, I have them all now—got them this morning. Oh, I can evolve the whole state of society from half a dozen items. I have a faculty for generalizing”

(251). Later she even triumphantly tells the widow Denby, “This orange I have sucked dry” (252). Miss Cook thus characterizes Appalachia as a resource that can be extracted.

Once it has fulfilled its role as a foil for New York City, she has no use for the local scene. Although Miss Cook boasts of her powers of extrapolation, the widow Denby voices an obvious concern that the journalist will “need so many facts” (251). Given her

“cool superiority” and use of “child” to demean the widow’s objection, the story is clearly critical of Miss Cook’s confidence in accessing the “facts” of local life. “The

Yares” renders suspect the possibility of extrapolating the whole of “The Social and

Moral Condition of North Carolina”—much less “the South”—from a single location in the mountains (251).

Despite the widow Denby’s skepticism towards Miss Cook’s endeavor, she also traffics in stereotypes that the out-of-place material goods on Black Mountain will push against. The widow expects all mountaineers to be members of the Ku Klux Klan and to live like beasts (253). Seeking purer air for her sick infant, she nonetheless hitches a ride

60 from the village to the Yares’ distant cabin (253).55 When she arrives at the Yares’ home, the widow is met not by wild beasts but by a matriarch with a sallow face, dirty calico dress, and bare feet. The widow thinks, “Human nature could reach no lower depths of squalor and ignorance than these” (257). A pig runs freely and the one-room cabin appears to be rudely pieced together with mud and logs (257). She reads these readily observable forms of material culture as evidence of degeneracy. Although the cabin and its inhabitants do not meet middle-class standards of hygiene or domestic comfort, once inside, the widow sees the incorrectness of her initial impressions. The cabin is, in fact,

“a snug boarded room with half a dozen pictures from the illustrated papers on the walls, and a fire of great logs smouldering in the hearth” (257). The presence of these illustrations disrupts expectations of an isolated and anti-modern Appalachia, suggesting that print circulates even in the so-called hinterlands.

Yet the widow Denby never strays too far from the prescriptive force of her middle-class subject position, and the story is pessimistic about the possibility of the widow making room for local subjectivity and cultural norms. In fact, the story concludes with the widow literalizing the acquisitive drive of the middle-class tourist, a drive the

Yares ultimately resist. Finding the family good company but poorly clothed and fed and lacking what she deems “Culture,” the widow “urge[s] them again and again to come out of their solitude” (266). Finding just enough to value in the Yares, she seeks to annex the family by literally removing them to New York. She assumes their life is one of solitude,

55 Silber notes that the sickly northerner looking for a healthy climate was a key stock character for local colorists. She even titles one chapter “Sick Yankees in Paradise” (66-73). 61 drudgery, and danger in the mountain wilds (266). Nancy Yare articulates why their acquisition will never come to fruition: "The Yares hev lived on the Old Black for four generations, Mistress Denby. It wouldn't do to kerry us down into towns (267). Nancy’s use of the verb “kerry” positions the Yares as objects being acted upon by the widow.

Her word choice implies an awareness of the way that mountaineers circulate as objects through a middle-class consumer culture eager to acquire the local. Thus, in refusing the offer, Nancy refuses to participate in her objectification. While the mountain woman asserts herself as a subject, the widow flounders at one of critics’ most dearly held literary tropes: transformation via an authentic engagement with the local. Even in the mountains, the widow’s privileged subjectivity means she will continue along dominant culture’s conventional paths. With an air of finality, Davis eschews the “transformed tourist” trope in favor of a local politics of agency that does not depend upon a shift in middle-class subjectivity.

As demonstrated through Nancy’s awareness of her status as a commodified object, “The Yares” imagines mountaineers as agents in the encounters and exchanges it stages. The story balances the tourist-centric impulse of some local color and travel literature with local subjects who display agency. Mountaineers perceptively engage the socio-economic systems that bring tourists to their doors and through which “the local” circulates as a commodity. For example, the stage driver undercuts Miss Cook’s characterization of mountain life as inert. Seemingly at a loss as to how to assimilate displeasing Appalachian scenes into a unified rendering of “the real,” Miss Cook asks him, “Is there no business, no stir of any sort, in this country?” (243). This question 62 functions as a reaffirmation of the superiority of her urban, middle-class subjectivity; it shifts the terms of her appraisal of the local from the anti-modern to the modern. Now

Miss Cook employs the cultural and socio-economic distance of the mountains from urban life as a way to demean the mountaineers as backward rather than quaint. These calico-wearing mountain folk have failed to perform an acceptable form of primitivism or modernity. The driver notes that while things are fairly quiet now, “Thar war mica-mines.

But ther given over. An’ thar war a railroad. But that’s given over too” (243). His emphasis on temporality points to the ebb and flow of an increasingly national economy and the uneven spread of capital across time and space. This history reveals that what

Miss Cook reads as perpetual stagnation is actually evidence of economic modernity. The market’s influence on local life has everything to do with the issues of political economy she hopes to escape. The driver’s response is an unwelcome infusion of the shifts in time attributed to modernity; it unsettles the fly-in-amber quality Miss Cook attaches to a local scene that fails to stir.

Yet within the very same paragraph, the stage driver appears to reverse course and capitulate to Miss Cook’s stereotypical ideas of backward mountain life. He draws on sensational narrative forms by offering to show the tourists a recent murder site. He suggests, “I was a-goin’ to ask you ladies ef you’d wish to git out an’ see whar the traveler was murdered last May, up the stream a bit. I kin show you jest whar the blood is yet; which, they do say, was discovered by the wild dogs a-gnawin’ at the ground” (243).

The stage driver is clearly aware of the reputation mountaineers have for violence, a

63 reputation I have briefly characterized above.56 He plays to the tourists’ expectations by offering to take them to what would have been a notorious attraction for those interested in feud sites as an early form of thanatourism.57 It is probably safe to assume that little blood would remain from an event that occurred last May, for it is now the following summer (239). Indeed, the driver’s emphasis on acting as a tour guide—“I kin show you jest whar” and “they do say”—suggests his awareness that it is the narrative he has supplied that will successfully turn the local into a commodity.

While the driver intentionally bolsters tourist assumptions about the violence of mountain culture, he also takes the opportunity to undercut their assumptions of safety, privilege, and access to an authentic local experience. For the murder of which he speaks did not occur as a result of infamous local feuds or nosy revenuers. Rather, a traveler was accosted. His suggestion that the women get out of the stage and walk “up the stream a bit” to the murder site is frightening enough that the widow grows “unusually pale”

(243). She seems struck not by the gruesomeness of the scene but by her own vulnerability as a tourist, particularly as a woman on foot away from the main-travelled roads. When the party declines his offer, the stage driver reverses course yet again by taking on a less appeasing, “discontented air” (243). He warns, “Thar’s been no murder in the mountings for five years, an’ ‘tisn’t likely there’ll be another” (243). In this brief

56 While Kentucky was home to the most famous feuds, North Carolina and other Appalachian states were stereotyped as violent. In 1903, Walter Q. Tavistock wrote in Mansfield News (Ohio), “The border counties of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and West Virginia men are today to be found imbued with the same spirit that prompted the Scotch border raids, the spurt of repaying real or fancied wrongs by declaring war to the death” (4).

57 By 1920, enterprising citizens and businessmen in Appalachian were embracing stereotypes about Appalachia for the purposes of a developing tourism industry (Huber 74). 64 interchange, Davis gives the reader a mountaineer who is aware of popular stereotypes and performatively undercuts and plays to tourist expectations. That is, “The Yares” shows instances in which local subjects find ways to maneuver within a market and culture through which they so often circulate as commodities.

The driver’s narrative maneuverings indicate the way that tourism requires local subjects to tactically hover between the interconnected registers of hospitality and profit.

And if, as readers, we begin with the assumption that locals are actors in such economic and cultural exchanges, even the tourists’ monochromatic viewpoints serve to illuminate a distinctly local subjectivity. Although they could not seem more different, the widow and Miss Cook foreground the poles between which mountaineers must maneuver in order to remain a popular tourist destination. The widow Denby receives much unsolicited and uncompensated hospitality from the locals; for example, her sick infant often enjoys warm bottles and flannel petticoats (247). Miss Cook understands such interactions as economic exchanges, which allows her to feel guiltless for compensating her impoverished hostesses so little. She insists, “Oh, they expect to make something out of you” (245). In contrast, the widow emphasizes the locals’ kindness and the sense that she is “coming among old friends” (249). Both women are correct; all of the interactions northern tourists have with locals are not reducible to economic exchange, but neither are they entirely altruistic. While we might read Miss Cook’s orientation to the local as an exploitative one that short-circuits new affective kinship paths, the widow’s desire for adoption, community, and friendship masks the privilege that allows her to indulge in this fantasy. Indeed, this very mentality cloaks the exchanges that occur and the fact that the 65 widow, too, utilizes the local as a resource. Mercenary Miss Cook gives voice to the uneasy idea that presumably authentic, organic, anti-capitalist local experiences might be motivated by profit. As we have discussed, these experiences might even be performative moments in which locals actively engage reductive middle-class narratives of mountain life. Davis’s story draws our attention to these methods and the local maneuverings within the tourism industry that render either form of assimilation incomplete.

Dunbar-Nelson was almost assuredly aware of “Yares” and the 1892 collection in which it eventually appeared. We can read her story “The Praline Woman” as part of the meta-localist tradition in which women writers worked to decenter middle-class subjectivity within representations of the local. Yet the story’s title—“The Praline

Woman”—initially leads the reader to believe this will be a stereotypical sketch in which a middle-class outsider gazes upon and describes the local object. Indeed, the fact that the title is her moniker rather than her name—Tante Marie—attunes us to the commodification of local subjects; as good literary material, Tante Marie is both a ware and interchangeable with her wares. The story even begins with the conventional third- person narrator describing the titular character “by the side of the Archbishop’s quaint little old chapel on Royal Street, and slowly wav[ing] her latanier fan over the pink and brown wares” (175). She sells her pralines on one of New Orleans’s most travelled streets, availing herself of the foot-traffic generated by the city’s many tourist sites.

Like “Yares,” Dunbar-Nelson’s story takes its impetus from tourist encounters, and, like “Yares,” it makes room for local subjectivity in a genre often accused of eliding it. However, Dunbar-Nelson dispenses altogether with the middle-class tourist’s 66 subjectivity. Aside from two descriptive intrusions by the narrator, the complexities of

New Orleans culture and economy are rendered through the titular character’s first- person remarks. It is the black praline woman—rather than the economically advantaged white woman to whom she sells—who establishes for the reader the racial and economic differences between tourist and local. The titular character responds to the customer’s query, “Sho’ chile, ma bebe, ma petite, she put dese up hissef. He’s hans’ so small, ma’amzelle, lak you’s, mais brune. She put dese up dis morn’” (176). The praline woman has the narrative privilege of drawing attention to a series of implied and stated contrasts between the women—youth/age, white/brown, delicate/coarse, and rich/poor.58

Dunbar-Nelson privileges local ways of knowing. Through the praline woman’s monologue, we come to understand that local knowledge entails myriad ways of establishing differences. For example, there are telltale signs that distinguish between native New Orleanians and the Yankees upon whom the local tourism economy largely depends: “I know you etranger. You don’ look lak dese New Orleans peop’. You lak’ dose Yankee dat come down ‘fo’ de war” (176). As readers, we are not privy to the local knowledge that allows Tante Marie to establish such differences; the effect is that local forms of knowledge remain local, and unfettered middle-class access to the authentic local is short-circuited.

58 Reader’s familiar with New Orleans’s tourism would have known the race of the Praline Woman even without her commentary. According to The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book brown pralines made of pecans and sugar were “sold by the old Creole negro women of New Orleans” near Canal and Bourbon or Royal Street (374). 67 Through the praline woman’s running monologue, one that continues even after a sale has concluded, we also learn that New Orleans is a city comprised of complicated racial and economic structures not reducible to black and white, rich and poor. As Judith

Irwin-Mulcahy argues, “It becomes increasingly evident to readers of Dunbar-Nelson’s short fiction collections that the cultural uniqueness she tries to identify in the spaces of

New Orleans is not about extracting a pure, undiluted Creole culture. Creole identity is rather the product of social overlap and in many cases, ethnic ambiguity” (129). That is,

Dunbar-Nelson’s New Orleans is a city with significant internal differentiations and multiple local subjectivities. In fact, Tante Marie, understanding herself in competition with fellow racial others, remarks, “Here come dat lazy Indien squaw. What she good fo’, anyhow? She jes’ sit lak dat in de French Market an’ sell her file, an’ sleep, sleep, sleep lak so in he’s blanket. Hey, dere, you, Tonita, how goes you’ beezeness” (176-7). The praline woman traffics in racial stereotypes of her own, ones that are rooted in local racial politics and economics. This is an internally complex New Orleans that defies easy stereotypes.

Like Davis’s mountaineers, Dunbar-Nelson depicts her local character as maneuvering within the economic and cultural hierarchies arising from the tourism industry. Although Tante Marie depends upon tourist dollars, she is also a tactician who performs in ways that manipulate consumer desire for the authentic local. She flatters ma’amzelle by noticing her delicate white hands and draws a pitiful scene of a young child rising early to engage in the kind of labor that classed hands are spared. Like the stage driver in Davis’s “Yares,” the praline woman reverses course from obsequiousness 68 to curses when the woman seems as though she will leave without buying: “You tak’ none? No husban’ for’ you den!” (176). The curse highlights two things. First, the abrupt tonal shift suggests the performativity of local encounters between the tourist and consumer.59 Second, the use of a curse points to the praline woman’s awareness of tourist fascination with New Orleans voodoo culture, as well as her willingness to use white anxiety about “African fetishism” to her benefit. The curse seems to work, for in the next breath, Tante Marie offers a blessing, “Ah, ma petite, you tak’? Cinq sous, bébé, may le bon Dieu keep you good!” (175). The reader may well imagine the young woman breathing a sigh of relief or feeling virtuous in this goodness, but Dunbar-Nelson’s narrative thwarts the reader’s desire to see how the consumer makes sense of this exchange. The praline woman’s narration disrupts any expectation the reader may have had of understanding the exchange through the middle-class tourist’s eyes. The young woman is gone from the story as soon as she makes her purchase, and Tante Marie is on to the next customer.

The story suggests that the tourist’s subjectivity is insignificant because money and consumer goods are the only “real” things being exchanged. Yet the praline woman tactically attaches a quintessential New Orleans product to a pathos-rich personal tidbit when it suits her. She understands that the tourists on Royal Street are not just buying pralines; they are buying interaction with her as a representative of authentic Creole New

Orleans. With each pitch, she sells herself and the mirage of meaningful encounter, the

59 Strychacz argues that these tonal shifts undermine our certainty that we can settle on a perspective that manages the story’s multiple perspectives (77). I suggest that these diversions are performative and undermine the reader’s ability to access the authentic local. 69 very empathetic exchange feminist critics so often attribute to local color. She asks one gentleman, “Me’sieu, would lak’ some fo’ he’s lil’ gal’ at home? Mais, non, what’s dat you say? She’s daid! Ah, m’sieu, ‘t is my lil’ gal what dies long year ago. Misère, misère!” (176). Then again, “Pralines, madam? I lak’ you’ face. What fo’ you wear black? You’ lil’ boy daid? You take one, jes’ see how it tas’. I had one lil’ boy once, he jes’ grow ‘twell he’s big lak’ dis, den one day he tak’ sick an’ die. Oh, madame, it mos’ brek my po’ heart” (177). Intermingled with the sympathy and sharing are familiar selling tactics: flattery (“I lak’ you’ face”), samples (“You tak’ one”), lagniappe (“Dix sous, madame, an’ one lil’ piece fo’ lagniappe fo’ madame’s lil’ bebe”), and, ultimately, connection (“I had on lil’ boy once”).60 We can choose to read her storytelling as an earnest attempt to foster empathy despite the impersonal tendencies of commodity exchange, as Judith Fetterley does (“Not in the Least” 887); or we can see the woman’s storytelling as an engagement with a commodity culture that promises middle-class consumers authentic connection to local people and places.61 Indeed, Tante Marie’s habit of referring to herself in the third person suggests that she understands herself as a sought after commodity (178-179). In the figure of the praline woman, Dunbar-Nelson imagines the affective and ideological functions of narrative and material culture as interconnected.

A confection, the praline functions as a multivalent symbol of the story’s meta- localist work. Ascribing the adjective “praline” to the titular woman points to the fact that

60 According to Irwin-Mulcahy, the southern Louisiana practice of lagniappe is when a shopkeeper gives a small bonus with a purchase to promote patronage and good feeling. The practice—as well as the word’s etymology—is reflective of a range of cultures (126).

61 While Menke attends to the deceptions by which “any momentary affiliation is offset,” she describes Tante Marie as less an agent than a suppressed, despairing, and angry woman (84-86). 70 she literally sells candied nuts; it also refers to Dunbar-Nelson’s resistance to contrived, flattened out local subjects and the type of local color sketches that function as amusing, if unsubstantive, examples of the genre. Finally, the “confection” references the maneuverings afforded the local subject who participates in the story’s scenes of encounter. When it suits her purposes, the praline woman concocts herself as the sweet taste left on the consumer’s tongue. She performs the role of a gregarious, folksy local who offers visitors a presumably authentic piece of Creole New Orleans.

RESISTING SYNECDOCHE AND METONYM

Finally, Davis and Dunbar-Nelson also rewrite the typical tourist encounter by imagining locals who disrupt the tourist’s acquisitive drive when they refuse to consent to the conditions under which the local circulates as a commodity. Hans of Walhalla and

Fortier of New Orleans are not anti-moderns or quaint rustics. In fact, the localities in which they reside contain heterogeneous material cultures made up of out-of-place objects like patent beehives, trains, and electric lights, as well as traditional carved panels and folk violins. Even if they wanted to, neither Hans nor Fortier could opt out of consumer culture wholesale. However, Davis’s “Walhalla” and Dunbar-Nelson’s “M’sieu

Fortier’s Violin” afford both men the ability to say “no” within a specific set of potential exchanges. They use “no” as a tactic for maneuvering within a consumer culture that they cannot structurally change. Hans and Fortier assert their agency by refusing to allow tourists to dictate terms of value and the conditions under which the local can be acquired

71 and consumed. They resist the process by which they come to function as synecdoches, and their art as metonyms, for “the local.”

In “Walhalla,” Hans maneuvers within the consumer culture in which he is caught by resignifying value and repeatedly refusing his commodification as a local object.62

Pomeroy and Reid seek out the titular German settlement for pleasure but also for business: the former’s brother, a house decorator, is looking for a famed woodcarver reported to reside in this South Carolinian mountain village. The fact that Pomeroy and

Reid are a house decorator’s emissaries shows Davis once again interested in the encounters between local and middle-class material cultural norms. The encounter between Walhalla’s residents and the men is, thus, one of competing values, tastes, and, thus, cultures. To identify the famed woodcarver, Pomeroy and Reid organize a panel- carving contest. Its theme, “Flight from Egypt,” is heavy-handed to say the least. The prospect of fame and riches in New York send the residents into a competitive tizzy. In particular, George Heller has “ambition to conquer the world” (51). The narrator describes him as a “vehement fife” for the rest of the locals who heed his refrain:

“success . . . dollars . . . dollars!” (52 ellipses in the original). Even as the carvers represent the biblical escape from the land of slavery, promises of money and success tempt the villagers into what the story suggests is the land of bondage, New York.

When his love interest, Christine, questions his manhood, Hans’s tactic is to call on the village’s built and natural environments as witnesses to the value of the local.

Christine urges Hans to demonstrate ambition by entering the contest, for “a man should

62 Later collected in Silhouettes, “Walhalla” was originally published in 1880 by Scribner’s Monthly. 72 not be satisfied with a kitchen garden” (53). She insists, “If a man has the real stuff in him let him show it to the world” (53). The nature of “the real stuff” as well as to what one refers when speaking of “the world” is at issue here. Christine chides him for being satisfied with subsistence living rather than profit. She genders the former by referencing the kitchen garden, an extension of the domestic space and the primary responsibility of women in the late nineteenth century (Mess of Greens 12). In aligning the local with the domestic sphere, Christine also sets “the local” in opposition to “the world.” She prioritizes urban norms for masculinity, success, and material life. Hans, however, looks around at Walhalla’s things—the well-built barns, piggeries, patent beehives, and cherry trees—and decides, “These things would speak for him” (52). Walhalla’s built surroundings are given their own agency, the ability to speak a vision of a still-thriving locality into being. Hans believes all of this would tell Christine “how little account money was” (53). Even if Walhalla’s beehives and mountain ranges are not quantifiable—are not countable like dollar bills—Hans believes they are “the real stuff,” the things that count in the world he inhabits.

Not only does Hans redefine “the real stuff” as the built and natural makings of everyday life in Walhalla, he also complicates the notion that an artifact like the panel can act as a metonym for the local by capturing and commodifying the essence of the southern mountains. It seems impossible to him to “cut that red weed or the sky into [the] wood” (55). So when he enters the contest at Christine’s prompting, he sticks to carving

Joseph and Mary riding on a mule (56). Ironically, it is Heller’s panel that elicits Hans’s tears, for the protagonist sees in the face of the mother bending over her child “that 73 inscrutable meaning which he found in the quiet valleys, the far heights” (58). Hans notes that Heller, oddly, does not seem to see this inscrutable meaning. He is too busy talking dollars and cents, appraising “nice bits of chipping” for which he will ask some fifty dollars (58). Hans’s reaction to the panel suggests several things. First, he resists conceiving of the panel and its subject matter in terms of market value. His resistance towards such commodification is further affirmed when he breaks his own panel in half.

Hans’s emotional reaction to the piece, as well as Heller’s inability to see “that inscrutable meaning,” also points to the fact that subject matter and meaning are fluid with each reader of the text. Finally, although one cannot “cut the red weed or the sky into [the] wood,” Hans sees in Heller’s mother and child the quiet valleys and far heights, reaffirming scenes of everyday life over the picturesque vista.

In the resolution to “Walhalla,” Davis continues to imagine Hans refashioning the contours of both manhood and “the world” so that his community might remain habitable for him despite challenges from more powerful forces. His tactics include rejecting material gain and written accolades after an act of heroism. When Heller is declared the contest winner, Hans assumes Christine will welcome the victor’s romantic attentions.

Our defeated protagonist retreats to the woods. The narrator explains that Walhalla is a mere six miles from the trunk line of the Atlanta and Richmond Railroad. A travel accident nearly occurs as the train comes barreling down on a prisoner passenger car stopped on the tracks. After unsuccessfully trying to warn the conductor, Hans moves the car by himself, a job we are told should take four men (61). He disappears after saving the day, but the passengers vote for a testimonial, which eventually grows into a large 74 sum of money and a promise of a lifetime “situation” with the railroad. This scenario is the woodcarving contest all over again. Despite the notice circulating in newspapers, over national telegraph lines, and around town, Hans refuses to come forward.

Hans’s refusal to claim the testimonial and praise critiques the representational politics involved in the circulation of local subjects. Like the more well known tale of local color heroism, Kate Chopin’s “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche,” “Walhalla” sets a high bar for how locals might earn the right to dictate how their image circulates within middle-class literary culture.63 In Chopin’s story, Mr. Sublet wants to take a photograph of Evariste in his work attire—pantaloons, coat tore, and skin dirty—and publish it in a magazine. After he saves the photographer’s son, Evariste is allowed to wear his best clothes and pick the caption for his picture, “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche” (164).64

Whereas Evariste can only choose to dictate the terms of his representation, Hans is given the choice of rejecting representation altogether. He opts out of a narrative that would inevitably cast him as a synecdoche for Walhalla.

In refusing to claim the testimonial, Hans also remains consistent in his belief that money and fame are not “real things” and that “the world” might just encompass a place

63 Critics have read Chopin’s story as progressive in its attention to the politics of representing local subjects. For instance, Susan Castillo argues Chopin “skewers the objectification of Cajuns that was characteristic not only of much local-colour writing but also of its reception by the eastern critical establishment” (67). John A. Staunton argues that Chopin’s sketch brings the “contexts of self-definition into question and leaves the reader to imagine alternative outcomes for individual lives in light of competing narratives of locality” (215).

64 Dunbar-Nelson’s “La Juanita” reverses the narrative in “Walhalla” and “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche” in which a local gains entry into a national, or “American” (read “white, middle-class”) community. In it, a “pale-eyed youth” gains acceptance into the Creole community by saving his fellow sailing contestants during a storm (200). 75 like Walhalla. Local experience, materials, landscape, economy, and kinship might constitute the things that count. When Davis resolves the romantic triangle with Christine choosing Hans, whom she loved all along, the story endorses Hans’s refashioning of manhood as local and subsistent. This resolution honors his tactical absences, even allowing that they can function as a powerful way of maneuvering within the constraints of a socio-economic system over which he has little control but of which he is nonetheless a part.65

Dunbar-Nelson’s “M’sieu Fortier’s Violin” also imagines what happens when a local agent refuses to participate in his own commodification. It tells the story of an old musician who experiences financial difficulties and decides he must sell his beloved violin.66 He lives in the dynamic city of New Orleans with material and economic realities that are far from stereotypical. The narrator describes, “Gas and electricity were but faint splotches of light on the thick curtain of fog and mist. Around the opera was a mighty bustle of carriages and drivers and footmen, with a car gaining headway in the street now and then” (67-8). Simply put, New Orleans is home to many of the material markers of a modernizing city at the turn-of-the-twentieth century. The buzz of electricity and hum of cars serve to dispel myths of an Old World New Orleans.

65 As in “Across the Gulf,” Davis intersperses “Walhalla” with insider and outsider perspectives. That is to say, Walhalla residents and the men who fancy themselves explorers looking for “hidden” and “undiscovered genius” are each afforded interiority (46). However, once Reid and his friend Pomeroy propose the contest, they disappear from the story. This is in marked contrast to Murfree’s “The Star in the Valley.” Whereas Chevis gets the final say in Murfree’s sketch, Davis leaves the implications of the encounter to be adjudicated by the locals.

66 Scholarship on the story is sparse. Robert C. Clark’s reading of “M’sieu Fortier’s Violin” in the context of late nineteenth-century New Orleans culture and society is a notable exception.

76 Unlike Davis, Dunbar-Nelson sees the socio-economic forces transforming the city as more ominous in their consequences. Dunbar-Nelson shows a city significantly transformed by impinging corporate forces.67 We discover that the opera house has been corporatized and turned over to an American “trust, a syndicate, a company immense and dishonest” (76).68 Dunbar-Nelson stages this scene of corporate takeover at the opera house for maximum impact. The French Grand Opera House was nationally renowned for its acoustics and opulence; as a result, it was a popular tourist destination (Clark 166-

7). In other words, “M’sieu Fortier’s Violin” depicts a quintessentially New Orleans cultural monument being nationalized, corporatized, and commodified as “a guarantee business with a strictly financial basis” (76). Worse still, Fortier will lose his position because of the takeover: “the new manager, who was now in France, would not only procure the artists, but a new orchestra, a new leader” (77). Dunbar-Nelson considers the impoverishment that can result when cultural production becomes commodified and increasingly disconnected from a particular people or place.

The story suggests that this corporate takeover of local cultural production is of a piece with the tourist’s acquisitiveness. Both attempt to take from local producers the right to dictate cultural and material exchange. We see this in the story’s major conflict.

One night after the opera, Fortier runs into the wealthy Courcey and his friend, Martel.

The Creole violinist sings his favorite chorus while walking the streets only to be jolted

67 See Alan Trachtenberg’s The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age for an account of the rise of the corporate conglomerate.

68 Based on the details given in the story about the opera’s subject material, Clark dates it to the 1892 opera season (170).

77 from his reverie with a rude proposition. We learn that Courcey has long pursued

Fortier’s violin: “I know nothing save that I want that violin of yours. When is it to be mine?” (72-3). His language is presumptuous, for he assumes he will inevitably attain the desired object from Fortier. Like “Walhalla,” “M’sieu Fortier’s Violin" treats the two tourists as arrogant plunderers of New Orleans’s material and cultural wealth.69

As a tourist in the city, Courcey assumes his right to collect local artifacts— including Fortier—at will. In fact, Courcey puts such importance on the violin that it becomes a metonym for Fortier. Courcey refers to the violinist as “that little Frenchman.

He’s a unique specimen. He has the most exquisite violin I’ve ever seen…. We are good friends. Picked him up in my French-town rambles. I’ve been trying to buy that instrument since” (73). The language of acquisition—“picked him up” and “buy”— suggests the interchangeability of the man and his instrument. Courcey refers to the violinist—not just the violin—as a “unique specimen.” He objectifies Fortier as a familiar type that can be possessed by acquiring his most beloved instrument as an artifact of

French-town. As a literal tourist and “reader” of local culture, Courcey might genuinely appreciate Fortier’s ability to “make the music leap, sing, laugh, sob, skip, wail,” but he is also busy appraising the beloved violin’s monetary value and cultural capital (73).

Courcey’s presumption of friendship—a friendship that the story gives us no indication

69 One wonders if there is anger underneath Fortier’s friendly exterior. “The Revenge of James Brown,” one of Dunbar-Nelson’s unpublished manuscripts penned sometime between 1900-1910, chronicles the crisis caused by the opening of the Pure in Heart Mission. Brooks reads this story as an example of Dunbar- Nelson contesting the idea that the reader or aristocratic visitor could ever be an insider, that intrusion could be met with anything but hostility (18-9). 78 Fortier reciprocates—shows he believes that he alone has the right to own the local object; he also seems to think that he can dictate the terms of cultural encounter.

The story suggests that the violin also functions as a synecdoche for the city itself.

Martel has harsh words for the acquisitive Courcey. He accuses his friend, “You are like the rest of these nineteenth-century vandals, you see nothing picturesque that you do not wish to deface for a souvenir…but must needs destroy it in a vain attempt to make it your own” (73-4). Martel’s characterization of “nineteenth-century vandals” sounds much like the account critic Brad Evans gives of the production of culture: “the circulation of something like ‘cultures’ became a sign of ‘Culture’ in the late nineteenth century; the contact with or appreciation of this kind of multiplicity was a mark of being ‘cultured’”

(Evans 4). Indeed, Martel suggests that Courcey’s desired acquisition of the violin is rooted in the tourist’s desire for perpetual connection to New Orleans even once he is home. His desire also initiates the discontinuity upon which the marketing of cultural commodities was based—a disconnection of cultural things from a particular people or place as they circulate through various local and nonlocal markets. Martel’s critique pointedly identifies that this disconnection is not a question of inauthenticity but of extraction. Dunbar-Nelson suggests that, in acquiring the picturesque aspects of local life, tourists impoverish that life by assuming control over its material and aesthetic conditions.

Like Hans, the presumably powerless Fortier exerts some agency within a socio- economic system over which he has little control by both overvaluing and refusing the commodification of his violin. In Dunbar-Nelson’s sketch, the Creole’s violin functions 79 as a site of contestation and power. Though Fortier is quite gifted and depends upon his position as a principle for his livelihood, his fate is largely dictated by the whims of socialites, opera patrons, and, as we have discussed, the corporation. Fortier’s economic wellbeing is already precarious, as indicated by the fact that in the opera’s off-season, he works as a cigar-maker (70).70 Yet Fortier refuses to sell his prized violin to Courcey. We should not underestimate the magnitude of this initial decision. Indeed, Dunbar-Nelson characterizes Fortier as an artist willing to subsist on little for the joy of playing “music into which one can put some soul, some expression, and which one must study to understand” (70).

We might read the opera’s corporate takeover as an inevitability signaled by the initial descriptions of the theatre’s dimmed lights; we might read Fortier as powerless, antiquated martyr who must yield to the changing times.71 But the violinist valiantly struggles to hold on to his prized possession until he can no longer afford the cheapest seats in the opera house. When Courcey and Martel later find him shivering in a corner and faced with starvation, he agrees to sell the violin for fifty dollars (81). In this moment, it appears Courcey was right: it was only a matter of time before circumstances forced Fortier to relinquish his violin to one with more power, money, and cultural capital. Courcey seems not to mind the tears in Fortier’s eyes or the fact that he is taking

70 According to Lester Sullivan’s research on “Composers of Color of Nineteenth-Century New Orleans,” Fortier’s time as a cigar-maker raises the possibility that he is mixed race or a Creole of color. See also Clark for more on cigar-making (170).

71 The narrator introduces Fortier with “a halo about [his] white head” (67). However, my reading of Dunbar-Nelson’s sketch resists constructing Fortier “as a dying breed, an embodiment of moribund Old World values in a progressive American city” (O’Neal 276). 80 advantage of another’s need. Though Martel grumbles “about the essentially sordid, mercenary spirit of the world,” Fortier’s dispossession appears to be a complete (81).

Dunbar-Nelson, however, concludes the story with an unlikely twist. Whereas the father in Chopin’s sketch, “A Very Fine Fiddle,” sadly accepts that his daughter has traded his fiddle for money, Fortier cannot accept having sold part of his identity. Though

Fortier has much to lose, he refuses to accept the “mercenary spirit” of an increasingly corporatized and commodified world in which, under the right conditions, everything is available for purchase. Six days later, Fortier asks Courcey for the violin back, declaring,

“I starve befo’ I live widout. My heart, he is broke, I die for mon violon” (82). His tactics involve reclaiming the local object from commodification within middle-class consumer culture. Exactly why Courcey agrees to return the violin we will never know. And, in truth, Fortier cannot stop the corporate takeover of the opera house and the subsequent loss of his livelihood. However, he can and does refuse to part with his violin even if it means de-prioritizing good food, clean clothes, and a respectable home. For Fortier, the world is only habitable if he retains possession of his beloved instrument.

ON GENRE AND THE PERSISTANCE OF THE LOCAL

In Davis’s travel narrative, “By-paths in the Mountains,” an anxious question pervades the tourists’ expedition: Is there anything “distinctly Southern” left (598)?

When they find some of the same material goods in the mountains as they would in any northern city, Morley insists there is “no variance in the U.S.” (168). In Davis’s “Here and There in the South,” Mr. Ely maintains that they will “see more distinctive life in the

81 country,” but he and his wife can never entirely leave behind the fashion and bric-a-brac of New York (240). The tourists in Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “In Search of the

Picturesque” address this material impingement by holding on to the belief that if they can just get a little further away from the city, they might find the “real Arcadia” (162).

All signs seem to point to localities in the late nineteenth-century South being rapidly homogenized and assimilated into national consumer culture.

Yet the local color work executed by Davis and Dunbar-Nelson in Silhouettes of

American Life and The Goodness of St. Rocque complicates claims like Brodhead’s that local color memorializes dying ways of life (119).72 These authors represent a meta- localist tradition that is, first and foremost, committed to exploring the local as local, as a context in which to live. Davis and Dunbar-Nelson utilize the local color genre as an opportunity to theorize how the local gets fashioned in material ways despite a variety of odds. For these local colorists, what is most remarkable about the local is its dynamic persistence in the face of consumer culture and the homogenizing force of middle-class subjectivity. The localities of Appalachia and Louisiana imagined by Davis and Dunbar-

Nelson demonstrate that local cultures are rapidly evolving and creatively adapting. Local cultures are not, however, disappearing. Davis and Dunbar-Nelson take issue with popular stereotypes of their localities and undercut inherently conservative late nineteenth-century notions of authenticity. In place of static, homogenous folk cultures

72 See also Jay Martin’s Harvests of Change: American Literature, 1865-1914, 135, and Donna M. Campbell’s Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fictions, 1885-1915, 209 n. 41. 82 and objects, they suggest that local culture is dynamic and performative. To lament change would be to deny local actors agency.

de Certeau’s formulation of “tactics” or “maneuvering” has been particularly useful for this chapter by allowing it to discard the old binary of resistance and accommodation in relationship to both authorial agendas and characters. The fiction of

Davis and Dunbar-Nelson asserts that creative local tactics do not require middle-class awareness. Miss Cook does not have to agree that mountain culture is dynamic for it to be demonstrably so. In fact, many of the stories’ tourists never manage to perceive the gulf between expectation and reality or stereotype and local subject, much less close the gulf between locals and nonlocals. Instead, the tactics utilized in de Certeau’s “practice of everyday life” are recognizable in the creative maneuverings of local characters. Hans and Fortier push against the easy commodification of art and local artifacts. We see mountain residents engage the stereotypical “things” circulating in the public imaginary and make tourism work for them. Davis and Dunbar-Nelson imagine locals who use the material contexts given them to influence the contours of cultural encounter, production, and circulation.

While consumer goods can to an extent be standardized, the material cultures that grow up around those goods cannot, for use is highly contextual. It varies across space, time, class, race, and gender. When assessing the local color genre, critics are similarly faced with questions of use. For there is nothing inherently liberatory or conservative about local color writing. As we have seen, stereotypes of murderous mountaineers can be called upon to reinforce narratives of violence or undercut untroubled middle-class 83 access to the local; a simple violin can represent a nostalgic vision of old New Orleans or a local resistance to a rapidly modernizing, increasingly corporate city. Yet the critical tendency is to narrowly circumscribe what counts as local color, effectively replicating the late nineteenth-century tourist’s search for the “real Arcadia.” Narrow formulations of the genre’s cultural work lends literary representations of the local the very poetic unity critiqued by the meta-localists in this chapter. By extending our analysis of local color fiction to the less familiar stomping grounds provided by writers like Davis and Dunbar-

Nelson, we might better understand the genre—like the localities it depicts—as resolutely material and, thus, tactical in nature.

The meta-localists discussed in this chapter imagine localities engaged in a range of material tactics—from co-opting narratives about feuds, to tactically saying “no.”

Davis and Dunbar-Nelson present the reader with a remarkably anti-essentialist understanding of “the local” as a performative category. The diverse tactics in chapter two lay the groundwork for the more clearly delimited material tactics analyzed in chapters two and three. As we will see in the following chapter, Emma Bell Miles and

Mary Hunter Austin have a narrower sense of how indigenous local populations should manage socio-economic and cultural pressures. Within the context of the Progressive era’s two seemingly contradictory impulses—the preservation of indigenous cultures and the assimilation efforts of Progressive reformers—they imagine local agency as achieved through folk production and commodification.

84 CHAPTER THREE: The Local Production and Curation of Folk in Emma Bell Miles’s Appalachia and Mary Hunter Austin’s West

INTRODUCTION

During the height of the local color movement, Emma Bell Miles and Mary

Hunter Austin published in many of the era’s “quality journals” and would have been easily recognizable to readers interested in the genre (Brodhead 80). Miles was known for her depictions of southern mountaineers and Austin for her treatments of life in the

West’s sometimes-unforgiving deserts.73 To our knowledge, Miles first published in 1904 when two of her poems appeared in Harper’s Monthly.74 That same year, Miles’s “Some

Real American Music” appeared in Harper’s Monthly and was reprinted in 1905 as chapter eight of her first book-length project, The Spirit of the Mountains. Similarly, by the time she published her first book-length work, Austin was well known for stories such as “The Wooing of the Senorita” and “The Conversion of Ah Lew Sing,” which

73 According to Heike Schaefer, Austin published more than thirty books and two hundred articles in more than sixty-five periodicals. Because Miles died in 1919 at age thirty-nine, her corpus is significantly smaller. Aside from a forthcoming edition of Miles’s journals, Once I Too Had Wings, the most complete bibliography on Miles can be found in the University of Tennessee’s edition of The Spirit of the Mountains. By its count, she published eleven poems, ten short stories, a series of editorials and columns for the Chattanooga News, two poem collections, an excerpt from The Spirit of the Mountains, and two book- length collections. In researching this chapter, I discovered four additional publications using the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America: “Sun Song” (verse) in the July 20, 1905 New York Tribune, “The Witch Hazel” (verse) in the December 1905 Pearson’s, “Mallard Plumage” in the August 1909 Red Book Magazine, and the 1910 “In the Track of the Storm” (story) in Pearson’s. As archival holdings become digitized, we may discover Miles published more widely than previously thought.

74 The poems were “Difference” and “Homesick.”

85 appeared in Overland Monthly in 1897.75 When she published The Land of Little Rain in

1903, readers had already encountered portions of it in Atlantic Monthly.76

Despite the fact that bourgeois readers of the era’s “quality journals” were the largest consumers of their work, Miles and Austin felt themselves out of place in the turn- of-the-twentieth-century home—at least as it was defined by middle-class standards of domesticity. Miles reflected in her July 17, 1908 journal entry, “For years I felt rebellious and bitter at not having a home on the face of a hostile earth-at being obliged to move from shack to cabin and from cabin to shack, each seeming more dirty and dismal than the last. But now . . . . Home is to me a matter of atmosphere and flora, instead of being confined to a particular roof” (“Journal Excerpt”). Similarly, in her 1890 Tejon Journal,

Austin lamented, “I can not make [mother] understand that I am never homesick out of doors, but that in peoples’ houses, especially in homes that she calls ‘home-like’ and

‘beautifully furnished’ I am often very homesick” (quoted in O’Grady 131-2 and

Goodman 10).77 Their personal journals suggest an alienation from the clean, nicely decorated drawing rooms critic Jennifer Fleissner argues are prototypical of most local color settings (76). In part, Miles and Austin seem to be reacting against normative conceptions of domestic life that were depicted in, and fueled by, print mediums. These

75 While Austin did not consistently publish until the close of the century, her first publication was “The Mother of Felipe” in the November 1892 issue of Overland Monthly.

76 This includes “Jimville—A Bret Harte Town,” “A Land of Little Rain,” and “The Little Town of the Grape Vines” in 1903.

77 Austin’s autobiography, Earth Horizon (1932), similarly expresses alienation from her stepmother who is described as caring about “household arts” (22).

86 mediums included Progressive era manuals and periodicals that increasingly defined women as consumers and the middle-class home as a site of carefully managed consumption.78 As I will demonstrate, their journal entries show a recoding of “home” that helps us make sense of Miles’s and Austin’s participation in the contests surrounding folk cultures.

This chapter contends that Miles’s The Spirit of the Mountains and Austin’s The

Land of Little Rain contribute to the “politics of culture” that emerge when a dominant middle class encounters and attempts to assimilate the nation’s hinterlands.79 As meta- localists who engage in the formal poaching I elaborated on in chapter two, Miles and

Austin explicitly react to the ways that reformers mapped race, class, gender, and cultural deficiency onto regional spaces. Doing so allows them to take on the role of what David

E. Whisnant calls “interveners” and, thus, adjudicate the cultural value of the problem populations of Appalachia and the West (All That is Native and Fine 260).80 By reading their work within the context of settlement homes and off-reservation schools, I highlight

78 Jennifer Scanlon argues that 1880s periodicals began tapping into the women's market and promoting a domestic ideology that defined women as consumers (3). See also Peter Stoneley’s Consumerism and American Girls’ Literature, 1860-1940, Jane Hunter’s How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood, and Lori Merish’s Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth Century American Literature.

79 I borrow this phrase from David E. Whisnant’s All That is Native and Fine. He explains why he uses the term politics of culture: “As one looks closely at some of these cultural endeavors—especially if one attempts to understand them in the context of the region’s economics—one becomes gradually aware that the manipulation of culture (at least, of culture construed in certain ways) inevitably reflects value and ideological differences as well as the inequalities inhering in class. Thus one must sooner or later consider the politics of culture” (8).

80 Stephanie Foote comes closest to what I am advocating. She argues local color is “the genre most efficient at discussing and mediating the place of social and cultural difference itself” (27).

87 Miles’s and Austin’s use of formal structures similar to those found in the sociological and ethnographical explorations of educational reform magazines. These meta-localists use the full “inventory and repertory of combinations” available to them (de Certeau 21).

As a result, their heterogeneous collections include more recognizably local color narratives as well as sayings, bars of folk music, records of mountain songs, topographical accounts, drawings of artifacts like Seyavi’s basket, and American Indian watermarks.81 Spirit and Land lend truth to what Brad Evans and Michael Elliot describe as an entanglement of art and anthropology at the turn of the century (8, xiii).

However, while Evans is interested in showing how “Culture” was increasingly defined by its intimacy and comfort with the articulation of ethnographically coded peoples, tales, and objects, this chapter instead focuses on how Miles and Austin imagine consumer culture operating within specific localities. Although Evans and Elliot correctly describe local color as a genre that both enables and troubles the commodification of cultures, they fail to consider the Progressive movements to which local colorists like

Miles and Austin are clearly speaking. Even if Evans is correct that the decades around the turn of the century eventually gave rise to the anthropologically based culture concept, the Progressive movement was nonetheless invested in theories of cultural evolution that made uplifting certain populations a civic duty.82 We cannot understand

81 Austin’s 1909 collection, Lost Borders, also includes drawings of old American Indian watermarks and trailheads recorded by the collection’s narrator.

82 Theories of cultural evolution looked to difference as a means of measuring and revealing the mechanics of progress. In contrast, the anthropologically based “culture concept” theorized that culture is not universal but specific to a people (Evans 22, 25 and Elliot xiii). 88 the uses of ethnography imagined by local colorists without putting them in conversation with the rhetoric and technology utilized by middle-class cultural imperialists.

In failing to consider local color in the context of the era’s social reform efforts and emphasizing instead the era’s investment in consuming folk as a marker of “Culture,” critics like Evans and Elliot downplay the extent to which the cultural imaginary was just as invested in dictating what unassimilated populations consumed, how they dressed, kept a home, and maintained personal hygiene. Such arguments about local color find us right back in the drawing rooms that Miles and Austin reject in their journals; these arguments ignore local colorists who are not primarily interested how material culture is functioning within dominant middle-class culture but with what emerging consumer markets and the unevenness of capital across space mean for local populations.83 In other words, Miles and Austin are concerned with how consumer markets impact localities, for better or for worse. Local colorists like Miles and Austin are not simply purveyors of local color as an ethnographical artifact. Rather, they also resist the aesthetic and material fetishization—as well as the cultural discontinuity—that occurs when folk commodities are consumed by middle-class acquisitors.84

Miles and Austin see material culture as the locus of both local disempowerment and local agency. Because Progressive acculturation exerted especial pressure on lifestyle, both writers respond in kind by employing material culture to resist middle-

83 I borrow the language of unevenness from Neil Smith. He theorizes that underdevelopment in one area is a necessary component of development in another area, creating an uneven geography across which capital advantageously moves.

84 For more on middle-class acquisition, see Richard Brodhead’s Cultures of Letters, 133, and Foote’s Regional Fictions, 19. 89 class notions of what it means to be civilized. Spirit and Land highlight the pitfalls of

“progress” by engaging the material ways that socio-economic and cultural change transforms local life. This is a departure from the local colorists in chapter two who mostly validated the creative adaptability of locals. The local subjects in Spirit and Land are tacticians of out-of-place objects; “according to circumstances,” they use ready-made clothing, roll dough with beer bottles, and build dwellings out of shipping containers (de

Certeau 20). However, these texts find such material tactics disturbing because they are symptoms of a disturbing non-local encroachment. In describing material clutter, they argue that capitalism and consumer culture—rather than local cultures—are trashy.

As an antidote to non-local encroachment, Miles and Austin valorize a different kind of indigenous tactician. This tactician produces folk objects and has a say in how they circulate within consumer markets. Spirit and Land argue for the internal preservation and commodification of local cultures. Locally curated folk objects may not be out of place like the beer bottles and shipping containers, but they do de-center the middle-class acquisitor’s subjectivity. The folk objects that Miles and Austin describe are no longer authentic cultural artifacts promising consumers intimacy with local cultures.

Indeed, even within the context of the local home, these folk objects are not spared what

Bill Brown calls “the logic of capitalism” (13). The texts make literal the idea of internal preservation by imagining the indigenous home as the locus of production and, thus, local agency. They promote the domestic, natural, and local economies of indigenous populations as viable alternatives to the middle-class home and the consumer habits that cohere there. Miles and Austin are interveners who attempt to define authentic forms of 90 local material tactics. The texts’ representational politics are complex and potentially essentializing.

TEACHING THE PROGRESSIVE HOME

Putting Miles and Austin into direct conversation with one another highlights similarities in their biographies that might account for why they were so attuned to, and at odds with, the tenets of Progressive material norms. Born in the Midwest, both were young transplants to the regions for which they would become known. Miles was born on

October 19, 1879 in Evansville, Indiana. Austin was born a decade earlier on September

9, 1868 in Carlinville, Illinois.85 In 1890 when Miles was just nine, she moved to Rabbit

Hash, Kentucky and then to Walden Ridge on Signal Mountain in eastern Tennessee. In

1888 when Austin was nineteen, she relocated to California with her stepmother and brother. Although both women experienced economic hardships growing up, they also benefited from advanced educational training. Sponsored by wealthy Chattanooga philanthropists, Miles studied art in St. Louis for two years but returned to Walden Ridge in 1901 to marry G. Frank Miles. After majoring in science at Blackburn College in

85 Unless otherwise noted, the biographical information that follows is taken from Whisnant’s introduction to The Spirit of the Mountains, xvii-xix, and Marjorie Pryse’s introduction to the Country of the Lost Borders, viii-xiv. While reliable information is scarce, additional biographical information on Miles can be found in Elizabeth S.D. Engelhardt’s The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature, as well as in earlier and sometimes erroneous sources like Grace Toney Edwards’s 1981 dissertation, “Emma Bell Miles: Appalachian Author, Artist, and Interpreter of Folk Culture,” George Brosi’s “The Heart-Wrenching Life of Emma Bell Miles,” Adelaide Rowell’s “Emma Bell Miles: Artist, Author, and Poet of the Tennessee Mountains,” and Abby Crawford Milton’s introduction to the 1930 edition of Miles’s Strains from a Dulcimer. Biographical information on Austin is more plentiful. See Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson’s Mary Austin and the American West, the introduction of Schaefer’s Mary Austin’s Regionalism: Reflections on Gender, Genre, and Geography, Reuben J. Ellis’s introduction to the collection Beyond Borders: The Selected Essays of Mary Austin, Esther F. Lanigan’s Mary Austin: Song of a Maverick, and Augusta Fink’s I-Mary: A Biography of Mary Austin.

91 Illinois, Austin briefly taught at California’s Kern County Schools and married Wallace

Austin in May of 1891. Neither woman enjoyed wedded bliss, and while Miles remained in her dysfunctional marriage, Austin eventually divorced. Both knew what it was to support their families with the money raised from publications. Miles also sold her paintings to tourists in eastern Tennessee, experiencing a grinding poverty made palpable in journal entries that describe rented cabins, hunger, and newspaper lining the walls

(“Journal Excerpt: April 28, 1915”). Occupying complicated class positions and experiencing alienation from middle-class domestic norms, both women found inspiration in Carmel-by-the-Sea, a collaborative artist commune.86

By reading The Spirit of the Mountains and The Land of Little Rain together, we might understand them as born out of larger Progressive era trends. Appalachia and the

West were both undergoing profound socio-economic transformations and, consequently, their cultural meanings were in flux. Miles’s Spirit describes life in turn-of-the-twentieth- century Walden Ridge. In the 1880s, the area experienced a boom in non-agricultural employment such as mining, logging, mills, and, for Walden Ridge, in particular, tourism industries (Eller Miners xix).87 Similarly, speculators, entrepreneurs, and corporations

86 Both Miles and Austin knew the sisters Grace MacGowan Cooke and Alice MacGowan who were also authors and sometime-residents of Chattanooga. Miles frequently collaborated with the sisters on their novels (Tangled Roots 136). Although Miles never joined Cooke and the MacGowan sisters at the California artist commune, Carmel-by-the-Sea, we know that Austin spent time there in 1905 (Gaston 119). We do not know if Miles and Austin ever met or corresponded, but it is likely that they collaborated on some of the same projects.

87 We will discuss Appalachian industrialization more fully in chapter four. See Alfred E. Cowdrey’s The Land, This South: An Environmental History, Ronald L. Lewis’s Transforming the Appalachian Countryside, 1880-1920, and Benita J. Howells’s Culture, Environment, and Conservation in the Appalachian South.

92 inundated the California Austin depicts in Land (Goodman x). Economic development in the nation’s hinterlands meant the increased scrutiny of marginal populations by

Progressive reformers. At the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, historian Frederick Jackson

Turner announced that the Western frontier was closed. In declaring the West won, he advocated for the opening of a new cultural frontier that Euro-Americans would have to conquer in spite of indigenous resistance to “progress.” Progressive reformers identified the Appalachian mountains and American West as two such cultural frontiers.

Mountaineers and American Indians were “problem” populations increasingly at the center of larger cross-racial and interregional discourses mobilizing Progressive social agendas.88 In her 1879 Lippincott’s article, Louise Coffin Jones claimed Carolina mountaineers belonged to a class of “poor white trash” that has degenerated from Anglo-

Saxons to the point that they compare “unfavorably with the native Indians” (756). This article evidences the fact that reform rhetoric linked southern mountaineers and American

Indians through racialization and perceived degeneracy.89 They were deemed expendable impediments to socio-economic transformation.

With the emergence of “problem populations” came efforts to redeem them. “The poor and ignorant, the neglected and despised” for whom organizations like the American

88 Although the explicit labeling of Appalachia as a “problem” did not occur until 1906 in Samuel Tyndale Wilson’s The Southern Mountaineers, an overview of turn-of-the-twentieth-century periodicals makes clear that the nature and viability of mountain culture was hotly contested in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. See also Thomas R. Dawley’s 1910 explication of “our mountain problem.” As I will detail in chapter four, the “cotton mill debates” also helped frame Appalachia as a national “problem.”

89 An 1879 Harper’s Weekly article, “Law and Moonshine,” similarly racialized mountaineers, describing them as “big boned, semi-barbarian people” (667). Jonathan Baxter Harrison also described them as a racialized Other with low foreheads and prominent noses (90). For more attitudes towards Appalachia in the early 1870s, see Bruce E. Stewart’s “‘These Big-Boned, Semi-Barbarian People.’” 93 Missionary Association (AMA) labored were understood as congregating primarily in the

“South” and “West,” broadly construed (“36th Annual” 3).90 The AMA’s periodical, The

American Missionary (1878-1901) contained sequential reports on “Mountain Work” and

“Indian Work” as early as December 1883. Reformers galvanized support by framing need as endemic to the South and the West, arguing “solutions for the race problems . . . most clearly affect them” (“Message from the Printer” 1). Because cultural and economic deficiencies were concentrated geographically, reformers reasoned that efforts should target specific regions for uplift. Moreover, both mountain and American Indian populations were attractive subjects for reform because they were seen as indigenous.91

As AMA reports make clear, missionaries to the Appalachians and the West felt themselves in competition with one another for funds, volunteers, and organizational energies.92 Laying the groundwork for systematic Progressive reform efforts, religious

90 In the 1880s and 1890s, the AMA worked among “the colored people, the mountaineers of Appalachian America, the Indians, the Esquimeaux of Alaska, the Chinese of America, and among the inhabitants of our new possession, Porto Rico” (Thomson 3). The association of mountaineers with American Indians and other minority racial groups was common.

91 This is a point S.B. Capen made explicit in his report to the AMA. He criticized his readers for the fact that they will protect a German, Swede, or a “howling anarchist of any nation under the heavens” but “an Indian has no rights in America” (353).

92 Reverend G.S. Burroughs described “the great destitution of these [mountain] people as regards intellectual, moral, and spiritual things” (351). In 1901, Pastor Robert F. Campbell similarly argued, “No people in the world offers so promising a field to the philanthropist who desires to make the best possible investment in Christian education” (114). As early as 1883, Charles Fairchild of Berea College reminded the AMA of the mountaineers’ supposed sympathy with northern principles, which validated northern missionary work in deserving “mountain white” communities (Shapiro 87). See also Thomas Wilson Humes’s 1888 The Loyal Mountaineers of Tennessee and Charles Jackson Ryder’s 1892 AMA address, “The Debt of Our Country to the American Highlanders.” American Indian work, in turn, was often framed in terms of the nation’s moral debt. Capen cites systematic murder and disenfranchisement as a “foul stain on our national honor” (352). He insists that his readers address “our Indian problem” through civilization as a form of reparations.

94 organizations embraced the rhetoric of cultural conquest.93

As the nineteenth century came to a close, sectarian-based reform steadily gave way to systematic philanthropy that was similarly invested in creating acceptable identities for mountaineers and American Indians. Progressive ideas appealed to the kind of women with which Miles and Austin likely came in contact. These women were privileged, young, educated, and eager to transform the nation (All That is Native and

Fine 22). As uplift efforts accelerated in the early twentieth century, central Appalachia saw an influx of reformers that sought to assimilate mountaineers into middle-class cultural standards.94 Katherine Pettit (1868-1936) and May Stone (1867-1946) established the Hindman Settlement School in 1902 as the area’s first permanent settlement and one of the first rural social settlement schools in the nation (Stoddart 17).95

As part of a post-Civil War Peace Policy, government officials framed new treaties that

93 Burroughs argued, “We do not believe that the conquest of the West is of more importance to our Home Mission work than is the conquest of these Southern highlands to that of the A.M.A” (351).

94 For instance, only six settlement homes existed in the US in 1891, one hundred by 1900, and four hundred by 1910 (All That is Native and Fine 22).

95 For more on Progressive era settlement work, see Walter I. Trattner’s From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America, Allen F. Davis’s Spearheads of Reform: The Social Settlements and Progressive Movement, 1890-1914, Robert Crunden’s Ministers of Reform: The Progressives’ Achievement in American Civilization, and Carl J. Schneider’s American Women in the Progressive Era, 1900-1920. The earliest settlement work in the mountains began at Vassar graduate Susan Chester’s Log Cabin Settlement near Asheville in the mid-1890s (All That is Native and Fine 60). For a discussion of Appalachian modifications of urban settlement homes, see Whisnant’s All That is Native and Fine, 17-102, and Henry D. Shapiro’s The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920, 133- 56. For more on Pettit and Stone, see Engelhardt’s Tangled Roots, 18-20; Jesse Stoddart’s “Introduction,” 17-57; Whisnant’s All That is Native and Fine, 24-37; and Elizabeth S. Peck’s “Katharine Pettit,” 56-58.

95 included provisions for formal education (Trafzer 11).96 Indian policy sought to transform

American Indians from “savage” to “civilized” beings. By the turn of the century, the

Carlisle Indian School’s mission of assimilation was well under way.97

Reform was animated by the belief that education and national progress were inextricably intertwined. Yet this commitment to helping impoverished, underdeveloped populations was implemented in extremely prescribed and proscribed ways. Peter Hayes

Mauro argues that “aesthetic transformation” played a significant role in converting unassimilated populations from assumed states of degenerate Otherness to model

American citizens (1). Mauro demonstrates that advocates of cultural assimilation conceived of the journey from “savage” to “civilized” in ritualistic terms, whether assimilation occurred at Carlisle, Hampton, or Hull House in Chicago (4). Indeed, a survey of Pettit’s journals and Indian school newspapers reveals that Progressive workers urged assimilation along material and, thus, aesthetic lines.

Settlement homes and off-reservation schools rooted reform in the material, teaching students how to properly consume and, thus, organize their bodies and domestic lives. By addressing the habits of individuals, reformers hoped to encourage personal and familial wellbeing, local economic development, and a more literate citizenry (Shapiro

96 See Michael C. Coleman’s American Indian Children at School, 1850-1930 for more on the Peace Policy. Officials assumed that American Indians lacked systems of education, government, and religion, (Trafzer 4). Clare Sue Kidwell’s “Systems of Knowledge” debunks this assumption (369-403).

97 By 1907, there were twenty-five off-reservation Indian schools modeled on Carlisle (Mauro 44). For more statistics on Indian schools, see Margaret Szasz’s Education and the American Indian: The Road to Self-Determination, 1928-1998. General historical studies on boarding schools include David Wallace Adams’s Education for Extinction and Coleman’s American Indian Children at School. For a critical examination of assimilation efforts, see Frederick E. Hoxie’s A Final Promise. 96 144).98 Consequently, reformers invested significant energy into training their pupils in the ways of a middle-class home that was increasingly defined by habits of consumption and use. For instance, Pettit and Stone came to eastern Kentucky in the summer of 1899 and began their civilizing mission by replicating middle-class domiciles in the construction of settlement facilities.99 As Elizabeth S.D. Engelhardt argues, most

Progressive social reformers who entered the mountains held on to the “unshaken belief in progress and capitalism, loyalty to essentialist ideas of womanhood, and Progressive status quo domesticity” (Tangled Roots 100).100 Indeed, Pettit and Stone professed a hope that the settlement’s “model home” would show “by example the advantages of cleanliness, neatness, [and] order” (94). By fixating on the dirt, dust, and fleas, they justified their regimentation of the Appalachian body and home. Pettit and Stone’s concern over women engaging in hard labor and the mountaineers’ poor housing, lack of sanitation, primitive health conditions, and bad food frequently appear in school

98 See also Stoddart’s “Introduction,” 30, and Dewey Grantham’s Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition, xvi-xviii.

99 The women were invited by Reverend Mitchell of Hazard, Kentucky to train others in domestic science and modern housekeeping (Pettit 60). Pettit’s record of Camp Industrial in Knott County, Kentucky from June 12-August 1, 1900 details the construction of a sitting room and china closets, as well as the unpacking of utensils, tinware, bedspreads, songbooks, toiletries, dresses, sunbonnets, and even an organ (71-2).

100 Although this chapter demonstrates the conservative and decidedly material nature of Progressive reform efforts, there exists a wealth of differing opinions on the movement. Shapiro and Whisnant were the first to extensively critique Progressive era do-gooderism. Engelhardt follows in this vein. Trattner argues that social reformers of the era were fraternal rather than paternal. However, as Loyal Jones notes, these reformers could be just as intolerant of unkempt houses and poor cooking habits as the religious missionaries before them (3). Even a sympathetic Stoddart admits that they brought with them the cultural biases of urban, middle-class Progressives (29, 325). See also Stoddart’s Challenge and Change in Appalachia: The Story of Hindman Settlement School; Ronald Eller’s Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers, xxi; and Rhonda England’s, “Voices from the History of Teaching: Katherine Pettit, May Stone, and Elizabeth Watts at Hindman Settlement School, 1899-1957.”

97 records.101 Without regard for the laws of health, Pettit insists, “how can the people be strong, mentally or morally” (63). She argues that the viability of mountain culture depends on the population achieving middle-class domestic standards. Hindman thus provides an example of how Progressive women attacked the problems of status and the conditions of women by promoting modern homemaking, health, and hygiene (56).102

Pettit and Stone looked at mountain homes for evidence that the skills and values taught at the school were being implemented. In Pettit’s journals, Mrs. Stacy’s place repeatedly serves as a validation of their presence and Hindman’s curriculum. Pettit praises the mountain woman for keeping her home “clean, neat, and really artistic.” They women approve of the fact that Mrs. Stacy has a well-kept yard, cultivates flowers, enjoys three immaculate rooms, and covers her walls with pictures. Best of all, the journal glowingly reports, “She has used everything we had given her to decorate the house“ (Pettit 84). The woman’s crowning achievement is that her home mimics the urban middle-class aesthetics imported by the reformers. Only in this mimicking does

Pettit praise it as “really artistic.” The women take Mrs. Stacy’s adoption of middle-class domestic standards as affirmation that their efforts are paying dividends.103

101 The unhealthy cooking of fat, bacon, and cornbread as well as sparse, dirty interiors were among the problems considered endemic to the region (Pettit 62-3). The journals also lament women and young girls in the fields hoeing (75).

102 See Pettit’s journals for an account of cooking classes (106).

103 Pettit also considers Mrs. Stacy’s use of the toothbrush a triumph: “Like Booker Washington, we believe in the Gospel of the toothbrush and have given many away and really they take more readily to this than to most of our customs” (264). This “gospel” is based on middle-class norms. One must not simply keep her teeth clean but must do so with a toothbrush.

98 Similarly, off-reservation schools demonstrated the efficacy of their assimilationist mission through tales of conversion to middle-class material, aesthetic, and domestic standards.104 School officials validated their civilizing mission by valuing

Christianity over spiritualism, competition over tribalism, and physical hygiene and mental discipline over the supposed dirt and sloth of reservation life (Trachtenberg xiv- xvi). Boarding school officials began the process of acculturation by focusing on a child’s outward appearance; by cutting students’ hair and taking away their clothing, schools tried to sever material ties with native communities (Trafzer 17). Zitkala-Sa, an American

Indian writer and former Carlisle student, would remember the loss of her hair as a loss of spirit (“School Days” 187).105 Civilizing efforts attempted to work from the outside into the hearts and minds of the students, a transformation narrativized in before-and- after photographs taken by the schools. We also see this logic in an article for Hampton’s

Southern Workman; a “Miss Tileston” recounts the distribution of ribbons and hats as well as her elation at seeing the Dakota children looking like any school in a white community: “Out of sixteen women and girls at church eleven had on white women’s

104 This formula was so powerful in Progressive era rhetoric that it is even replicated in works that critique assimilationist efforts. For instance, Zitkala-Sa finds the world of Carlisle far from the idealized alternative home she had imagined. Yet it is not as if she can simply return home. Her Atlantic Monthly writings chronicle the material ways in which her mother’s home changes. In fact, even before the girl leaves, the wigwam has been outfitted with canvas instead of buffalo skin. The reservation already bears material evidence of Carlisle and its educational philosophy (“Impressions” 37, 45). Eventually, her mother gives up the wigwam entirely in exchange for curtained windows and rude, unstained logs (“An Indian Teacher” 384).

105 Despite this, the narrator of Zitkala-Sa’s “School Days of an Indian Girl” rebels against the school’s Progressive agenda. The Dakota girl over-mashes the turnips and with a broken slate pencil, scratches out the devil’s eyes from an illustration in The Stories of a Bible (188-9). When she visits the reservation, she refuses to wear a muslin dress and throws away her shoes in favor of moccasins (192). As I will discuss, assimilation and resistance are both material in nature.

99 dresses. Aren’t we glad” (“Hats for the Indians” column F).106 Here the presence of a white women’s dresses, ribbons, and hats, functions as proof of the school’s success.

Assimilation is material and aesthetic.

Off-reservation schools also applied contemporary theories of efficiency when modeling middle-class domestic standards.107 New educational policies worked to instill their charges with an appreciation of hard work, money, and middle-class values.

Students learned trades, agricultural techniques, and “domestic sciences,” a field of study that taught girls how to be good wives, housekeepers, and maids (Trafzer 14). Curriculum emphasized learning “white men’s ways,” which included making wheat bread and learning to wash clothes (“Indian work” 151).108 We can see ample evidence of this in

Carlisle’s newspapers, the Indian Helper, published weekly between 1885 and 1900.

Controlled by the school’s administration, its target audiences were students at the school, children who had gone out to work for families in the Pennsylvania area, and

Carlisle-educated individuals who had returned to their reservation homes to continue the assimilation process (Fear-Segal 100).109 The Indian Helper’s anonymous editor, known

106 Luther Standing Bear’s My People the Sioux also repeatedly describes the government’s material attempts to acculturate his tribe. In one instance, he recalls returning to the reservation and seeing issued “hundreds of tin cups, coffee pots, and buckets” (147).

107 See Hoxie, 194-207, for more on how schools used theories of efficiency.

108 For more on why and how officials encouraged a curriculum of academic and vocational subjects, see Clifford E. Trafzer’s “Introduction: Origin and Development of the American Indian Boarding School System,” 12; Mauro’s The Art of Americanization, 16; and Brenda Child’s Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940.

109 For instance, the newspaper heralded the wide reach of their civilizing efforts by offering examples such as “The mother of one of our little girls in Carlisle is going to school at Albuquerque because she 100 only as “The Man on the Bandstand,” lectured about Christian morality and the conduct necessary for achieving success in America (Fear-Segal 112). He would give approval to reinforce material indicators that Carlisle’s curriculum was successful. For example, he praised, “The girls are buying rugs for their rooms when they have a little spare cash and the Man-on-the-bandstand is pleased to see the bright, cheery and home like effect it has upon their rooms” (2).110 Newspapers like the Southern Workman and Indian Helper reveal the extent to which their institutions shared with mountain settlement schools an investment in educating unassimilated populations into middle-class domesticity and standards of consumption. Seemingly, middle-class acculturation might be attained and demonstrated by learning how to select, buy, and place just the right rug. Robert Warrior argues that the boarding school system was nothing short of a form of colonialism, one—

I might add—that used material culture as its primary tool (105).111

Most Progressive reformers and institutions were at least as committed to teaching and placing formerly problem populations into what Pierre Bourdieu calls “the wants to keep up with her daughter in her studies. How could there be better evidence of the influence of schools upon the Indians?” (“Letter” 3). For a discussion of the disciplinary aspects of the Indian Helper, see Jacqueline Fear-Segal’s “The Man on the Bandstand at Carlisle Indian Industrial School.” Carlisle was not unique in its emphasis on middle-class domesticity as a primary means of acculturation. See also an 1883 report on “The Indian School at Hampton” from the Southern Workman, reprinted in The Vermont Watchman, and “Reports from ex-Students” in the January 1892 Southern Workman.

110 “The Indian School at Hampton” similarly emphasized proper housekeeping: “This year has been marked by the occupation of Winona, the new building for Indian girls. It has done more for them in some ways than ten years’ schoolwork. The Pride they take in the building is an education in itself” (3). This report is positioned next to a Royal Baking Powder ad in The Vermont Watchman, demonstrating the connection between middle-class domesticity and consumption, a connection that would only solidify as the century came to a close.

111 Warrior describes Carlisle as a “crucial turning point” when the wars and imprisonment of the previous era’s Indian policy transformed into a national native educational policy. It is telling that some of Carlisle first students were Richard Henry Pratt’s former prisoners at Fort Marion (107-8).

101 social hierarchy of the consumer” as they were in ameliorating structural inequities (2).112

Curriculum, particularly as it was directed towards mountain and American Indian girls, taught students how to interact with material culture in the domestic sphere. It is in the era’s dysfunctional investment in replicating middle-class cultural values that Miles and

Austin see themselves intervening.113

REJECTING MIDDLE-CLASS NORMS

While there was much native resistance to assimilation—often by students at the schools—Miles and Austin both critique Progressive efforts by using formal structures that are similar to those found in educational reform magazines.114 Consequently, although Miles and Austin were recognizable as local colorists by the early 1900s, the structure and content of The Spirit of the Mountains and The Land of Little Rain cause

112 In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Bourdieu describes consumption as something that can be learned, “a stage in a process of communication, that is, an act of deciphering, decoding, which presupposes practical or explicit mastery of a cipher” (2).

113 Even school newspapers like Southern Workman contain local color sketches that resisted acculturation. For instance, see Edith Kessler’s “The Eviction.” Fear-Segal also finds student resistance in Carlisle’s Indian Helper. She notes that The Man on the Bandstand warns against running away and complains about children marching out of time (114). See also Hampton’s student-run newspaper, Talks and Thoughts (1886–1907) and Jacqueline Emery’s “Writing against Erasure: Native American Students at Hampton Institute and the Periodical Press” for an examination of resistance found in it.

114 Even school newspapers like Southern Workman contain local color writing that resists acculturation. For instance, see Edith Kessler’s “The Eviction.” Fear-Segal also finds student resistance in Carlisle’s Indian Helper (114). See also Hampton’s student-run newspaper, Talks and Thoughts and Jacqueline Emery’s “Writing against Erasure: Native American Students at Hampton Institute and the Periodical Press” for an examination of resistance in found in it.

Industrial school publications such as the Southern Workman included “local sketches”; American Indian and African American folklore; and a forum for the discussion of ethnological, sociological, and educational problems. The same can be said of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, a text—not unlike Spirit and Land—that wants to set the parameters of future conversation about race and education. 102 genre confusion among today’s critics.115 In form and theme, they differ dramatically from more easily identifiable local color stories that were being published in the era’s

“quality journals” by writers like Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Murfree. As meta-localists responding to the discourses undergirding Progressive reform, Miles and Austin use sociological and ethnographical forms to construct local color writing that undercuts assimilation efforts.

The Spirit of the Mountains criticizes area settlement schools for disrupting local domestic economies through the imposition of middle-class norms; it contains an entire chapter that is dedicated to justifying the idiosyncrasies of Appalachia’s “Cabin Homes.”

This chapter begins by unpacking the meaning of “poor” and calling into question what constitutes a viable local culture. The narrator recalls riding up Signal Mountain with a woman from Sawyers’ Springs. When a bluff crowned with pines comes into view, the elderly woman exclaims, “Now, ain’t that finder than any picter you ever seed in your life?—and they cal us pore mountaineers! We git more out o’ life than anybody” (18).

The woman’s observation shows an awareness of how she is perceived by the dominant

“they”; it also shows a resistance to the idea that she leads an impoverished existence by

115 I make this claim about their recognizability based on what we know about their publishing venues. To my knowledge, there exist no reviews of Miles’s work. In contrast, there are many reviews that explicitly praise Austin for her authentic portrayals and identify her as an author of Western literature. For examples, see The Literary News, 355, and Out West Magazine, 682. Shannon Brooks suggests that Miles’s text masquerades as sentimental local color tales while Katerina Prajzernova Masaryk argues that it blends the genres of the travel narrative, environmental history, and cultural history to create “stories of place” (165, 1). Brosi calls it a “comprehensive study of Southern Appalachian culture” whereas Engelhardt refers to it as a semi-autobiographical work and is careful to distinguish between the collection’s narrator and Miles, its author (11, Tangled Roots 136). Similarly, Ellis describes The Land of Little Rain as a “loosely structured collection of sketches” in the tradition of Thoreau (9). Mark Schlenz contends that Austin synthesizes the nonfiction tradition of nature writing with the fiction tradition of local color writing while Janet P. Stout labels Land “a book of essays” (189, 77). 103 virtue of living in Appalachia, a region notorious for failing to live up to middle-class material norms. The woman assigns value to nature’s things rather than any pictures that might adorn the walls of a “proper” home.

The narrator elaborates on this point by insisting that a mountaineer’s rejection of normative material standards can be a choice rather than a sign of cultural, educational, and socio-economic poverty. For “[The mountaineers] know well enough that elsewhere they might sit by the flesh-pots…All alike cling to the ungracious acres they have so patiently and hardly won, because of the wild world that lies outside their puny fences, because of the dream-vistas, blue and violet, that lead their eyes afar among the hills”

(18-19). The city’s flesh-pots might offer luxurious and unrestrained pleasure, but they cannot replace the symbiotic relationship between nature and the mountaineer’s aesthetic and material life.

Through an attention to the idiosyncratic aspects of daily life, Spirit works to alienate the hypothetical reader from the urban middle-class home as a normative form of aspiration. The collection argues that in choosing, constructing, and maintaining a home- site, mountaineers implement a different set of cultural values and practical considerations. For instance, the narrator notes,

The site of a cabin is usually chosen as near as possible to a fine spring. No other

advantages will ever make up for the lack of good water. There is a strong

prejudice against pumps; if a well must be dug, it is usually left open to the air,

and the water is reached by means of a hooked pole which requires some skillful

manipulation to prevent losing the bucket. Cisterns are considered filthy; water 104 that has stood overnight is ‘dead water,’ hardly fit to wash one’s face in. The

mountaineer takes the same pride in his water supply as the rich man in his wine

cellar, and is in this respect a connoisseur. (19)

This detailed explanation of the importance of water and the way that it shapes domestic life effectively demonstrates that local material practices are no more arbitrary than are normalized practices like wine collecting. Similarly, there is no reason a cabin would need windows. Mountaineers value pure air, but encourage circulation by other means:

“A cabin door is always open, save at night or during the worst weather. This, with the cracks and ‘cat-holes’ where the chinking falls out, naturally renders windows superfluous, and they are rarely found in old homes” (20). In describing windows in a cabin as superfluous, the narrator suggests that many of the tenets of Progressive hygiene and housekeeping are rooted in aesthetics rather than practicality. That is, windows are a class-based anachronism in the context of rural mountain life. Miles’s collection demonstrates the arbitrariness of domestic standards that have less to do with health than they do with normalizing the practices that undergird middle-class respectability.

Instead of using the dirty Appalachian home as a call to action, Spirit explicitly criticizes the logic of Mrs. Stacy’s material acculturation at the hands of Pettit and Stone.

The narrator’s explication of mountain homes is an integral part of her meditation on the mountaineers’ closeness to nature. It effectively renders the Progressive fixation on bodily and domestic hygiene irrelevant within the context of local life. We see this intervention most clearly when she takes a moment to address readers, noting, “Of course, many habits of cabin life would seem uncleanly to dwellers in a better 105 civilization…Nearness to the soil is not so much a mere figure of speech as we are apt to imagine. If you will think, you will see that this must be so” (20). The narrator insists that the closeness of nature transcends the anesthetized aesthetic appreciation valued by the dominant middle class. Indeed, this closeness is physical and has material consequences.

In using “seem” to describe the way cabin life would appear to proponents of scientific housekeeping, the narrator undermines the universal authority given middle-class prescriptions.116 Once again, Spirit puts before the reader a clear example of the arbitrariness of such norms and the impracticality of applying them to cabin homes.

The shifting point of view indicated in the use of “we” and “you” when the narrator addresses the reader reflects the complex affiliations Miles established as a downwardly mobile resident of Walden Ridge and the beneficiary of Chattanooga’s elite.

Her liminal status permeates Spirit in the way that the narrator operates as both observer and participant. For example, the narrator argues that it is unfair to expect locals to comply with urban, middle-class norms when rural life affords fewer material goods:

“What wonder if there are not dishes enough to go around when company comes, and children must eat from their parents’ plates or a wife drink from her husband’s coffee- cup? I have seen a woman carry water, dress a fowl, mix bread, feed her cow and pick up chips all in the same big tin pan, simply because it was the only vessel she had” (22). One can imagine proponents of scientific housekeeping scandalized by what would have been considered unsanitary. In the cabin home, a pan never has only one use. Maybe these

116 Chapter four will discuss domestic manuals and scientific housekeeping in more detail. For an example, see Marion Talbot and Sophonisba Breckinridge’s The Modern Household. 106 practices are not ideal, the narrator seems to say, but it is unfair to conclude that mountaineers need the outside management of Progressive reformers. The narrator is eager to defend domestic practices conditioned by the scarcity of material goods and currency, but distances herself from the actual practices. She claims no affiliation here, using the third person to refer to mountaineers who engage in these domestic practices. In the next instance, however, the narrator claims communal belonging. She notes, “Yet, though we violate every rule of hygiene, we are a strong people, sound of wind and limb, making light of hardship and heavy labor” (24). This shifting point of view suggests the narrator’s discomfort with the reader imagining her actually engaged in specific non- normative domestic habits even though she defends the practicality of them.

In fact, the narrator provides the reader an example of the disruptions that can occur when the standards of Progressive hygiene are imported: “I have seen pies rolled out and potatoes mashed with a beer-bottle found in the road” (22). Raising the specter of mountain women rolling pies out with trash, the narrator implicates reformers in creating many of the contexts that so dismay them (22). By salvaging bottles from the roadside and using them as rolling pins, mountain women engage in practices that Progressive reformers would have considered unhygienic. Yet mountain women’s need for rolling pins is itself attributable to schools educating mountaineers out of their culinary traditions. Flour-based pies and biscuits were largely Progressive-era imports. As

Engelhardt details in A Mess of Greens, women who engaged in “mountain work” encoded food with racial, gender, and class divisions (64). Thus, although corn bread and corn pone were local, easy-to-make dishes, settlement workers insisted that corn was 107 unhygienic and low class. Waging what some derisively called the “beaten biscuit campaign,” settlement workers maintained that aspiring mountain women should instead make flour-based pies and breads (A Mess of Greens 52). As the use of bottles suggests, these recipes required cooking utensils that were not readily available. Thus, Spirit points out, Progressive reform efforts have only served to disrupt the mountaineers’ pre-existing economies, which results in homes that have reclaimed trash in order to approximate middle-class culinary standards.

The Land of Little Rain also deconstructs Progressive social agendas, ridiculing those who label as “primitive” what is not considered “respectable.” The collection suggests social reformers wrap their prejudice in genteel trimmings, and the rhetoric of respectability justifies the forcible acculturation of peoples deemed unfit to act as stewards of their own futures.117 For example, the narrator of “The Little Town of Las

Uvas” insists that Progressive standards of cleanliness and hygiene are culturally relative and have little basis in objective fact. In describing life in the Mexican-American town, she ridicules reform-minded urban-dwellers: “We breed in an environment of asphalt pavements a body of people whose creeds are chiefly restrictions against other people’s ways of life, and have kitchens and latrines under the same roof that houses their God”

(148). The narrator implies here that the Castilian residents of Las Uvas would think it taboo or disrespectful to have kitchens and latrines within their houses of worship. Yet

117 Austin explicitly mentions “government teachers” in “Shoshone Land,” a sketch in which the narrator describes heaven as a place where “one has leave to live in it according to his liking” (61). A driver in “Agua Dulce” from Austin’s collection Lost Borders vocalizes the line of thought criticized here: “There’s some folks…that thinks Indians ain’t properly folks, but just a kind of cattle” (197).

108 urban dwellers never consider the relativity of their spatial arrangements, for “such as these go to church to be edified” (148). In other words, the narrator recognizes how certain beliefs come to structure dominant class, racial, religious, geographical, and gender hierarchies. The story suggests there exists a no more deeply entrenched fetish than the religious, moral, domestic, or material creed imported for the sole purpose of restricting another community’s ways of life.

It is a theme Austin continues in “A Case of Conscience” from the 1909 collection, Lost Borders. The story points to the fiction of middle-class values, despite how often they are taken as god-given truths and used to subjugate those who resist compliance.118 In this story, Saunders, a white man, has fathered a child with a Shoshone woman. When he leaves the American West for England, Saunders decides he must care for his child and separate her from her mother. According to the narrator, “But then it was a question of duty. Duty is a potent fetish” (171). By labeling Saunders’s sense of duty a

“potent fetish,” the story reverses the assumption by dominant culture that “fetish” applies to primitive peoples’ religious practices and beliefs (171).119 Through this

118 Sherrie A. Inness argues that writers such as Austin use local color to critique a traditional East/West division in which the East is perceived as a “civilized” source of knowledge and culture (320). I agree with Inness, but with an important caveat. She uses Austin’s 1932 essay “Regionalism in American Fiction” as her primary proof. This is representative of a larger trend in Austin scholarship. She reads Austin’s corpus in the context of the 1930s regionalist movement. Unfortunately, the common strategy of using Austin’s later work to validate arguments about her earlier work often results in critics distinguishing her texts from “bad” or “nostalgic” local color. I wish to deal with Austin’s earlier work in its own historical and discursive contexts, which means reading The Land of Little Rain as part of the local color genre.

119 As early as 1760, Charles de Brosses provided a materialistic theory of the origin of religion, which contained the first occurrence of the word "fétichisme.” In 1825, Auguste Comte proposed a theory of the evolution of religion in which fetishism functioned as the earliest and most primitive stage. The religious fetish was theorized as shifting attention away from the relationship between people and God and establishing false causality for natural events. 109 reversal in which “duty” becomes the fetish whose constructedness has been mystified within dominant culture, “A Case of Conscience” highlights the damage done by arbitrary standards of white, middle-class, Christian morality. The frightened child is thankfully saved by her mother who tracks Saunders and insists “Mine, not yours!” (173).

When he releases the child back into her care, the story treats this as a positive resolution.

The child is back where it belongs: “The little dark arms went around her neck, prehensile and clinging; the whole little body clung, the lines of the small face softened with a sigh of unutterable content” (173). This ending is a metaphor for systematic, paternalist attempts to educate American Indians in the ways of the white middle-class. It reveals the norms that animated reform efforts as little more than fetishes. The “case of conscience,” then, occurs not when the white man decides to take the child from her native home but when he realizes he has no intrinsic right or duty to do so.

CATALOGUING CIVILIZATION’S TRASHINESS

Miles and Austin deconstruct normative habits through their emphasis on local material practices and, thus, push against the growing inextricability of national belonging and middle-class norms.120 In the mountaineers’ clothing, manners, morals, music, religion, moonshining, and feuding, Stone and Pettit saw a disturbing absence of

“American” habits (Shapiro 110). Inspired by their tour of Berea College and Tuskegee

Institute, as well as the theories of John Dewey and Jane Addams, they Americanized

120 The mutually constitutive nature of Progressive social reform and middle-class dictums concerning consumption can be witnessed in the pages of periodicals like the New York Tribune. Next to columns on “Woman’s Relief Work” are advertisements for gowns of organdie and hats by the Hass Brothers (5).

110 mountaineers by melding industrial or vocational training, practical education, and academic preparation (Stoddart 41).121 Making salient the curricular connections between civilizing the mountain home and national belonging, Pettit and Stone taught mountaineers how to celebrate the Fourth of July properly while also providing cooking lessons for risen bread and beaten biscuits (Stoddart 60-2, 76, 23). A survey of federal

Indian school papers similarly suggests that the citizen was imagined as a particular kind of consumer. Schools encouraged American Indian youth to dream material dreams.122

As one Phoenix merchant urged in the Native American: “Early to bed and early to rise,/

Love all the teachers and tell them no lies/ Study your lessons that you may be wise/And buy from the men who advertise.” Particularly for women, the Bureau of Indian Affairs hoped that the maintenance of a middle-class home would encourage American Indians to view “America as home.”123 Settlement and off-reservation schools thus endeavored to

Americanize their charges through the domestic arts and middle-class forms of material culture.124

121 Pettit and Stone visited Hull House just months before launching the school (Stoddart 41).

122 Even the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Francis Leupp proclaimed while talking to Los Angeles teachers, “Sordid as it may sound, it is the dollar that makes the world go around, and we have to teach the Indians at the outset of their careers what a dollar means. That is, in some respects, the most important part of their education” (331).

123 I quote here from the words of Indian Commissioner Thomas J. Morgan (quoted in Coleman 42). In 1902, Superintendent Hall described Sherman Institute’s school curriculum as one that taught American Indian girls housekeeping so that, he argues, “They will thus learn what home means, and the method of making and keeping one (quoted in Paxton 182, emphasis mine). For more on the Sherman Institute, see Katrina A. Paxton’s “Learning Gender: Female Students at the Sherman Institute.”

124 This fact is made explicit in later texts like Pearl Idelia Ellis’s 1929 Americanization Through Homemaking. 111 Yet, as we have seen, Spirit and Land are critical of the Progressive urge to solve social problems through the imposition of middle-class values, aesthetics, and standards of consumption. In fact, they demonstrate that “civilization” is itself trashy, and not the local tacticians that reformers are attempting to uplift into normative material habits. The localities Miles and Austin depict are thoroughly enmeshed in the era’s evolving socio- economic structures, particularly expanding consumer markets. In American Women

Regionalists, Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse argue that women regionalists presented an American society that was grounded not only in folk traditions and physical environments but also in the domestic sphere of nineteenth-century women’s culture (xiii, xix). Fetterley and Pryse’s description of the genre insists on the fixedness of material culture circulating within and through regions. They describe regions as untroubled folkways and domestic spaces. In contrast, Miles and Austin depict localities, peoples, and materials in flux. These meta-localists urgently counter aestheticized, idyllic versions of the local by focusing instead on the meaning of out-of-place consumer goods. Spirit and Land show, in material terms, that so-called progress and economic development are not always untroubled or positive forces. They demonstrate that the tactics arising from material dreams have profoundly disrupted local forms of economy.

As we have already seen in its reference to the “beaten biscuit campaign,” Spirit amasses material evidence that “civilization” is not automatically superior to mountain ways. In doing so, it critiques “the oncoming tide of civilization that drowns as many as it uplifts” (190). The destructive tide of civilization is profoundly material. Miles’s mountaineers drown in the accumulation of goods that comes with tourism, summer 112 settlement schools, and textile mills. In fact, they are all too willing to adapt to mass consumer culture, and the narrator is distressed by the material ambitions women have absorbed. The tourism worker “does not willingly return to sunbonnet and homespun.

Her old mother cares little for the new clothes, but sees at once how much easier it is to buy blankets than to spin and weave. So the loom and wheel are consigned to the bar loft, where they fall to pieces with dry-rot, and the woman forgets her coverlet patterns” (192).

Spirit warns of the decay of mountain traditions, as the Appalachian home becomes primarily a center of consumption rather than production. The narrator sees mountaineers being “mesmerized” by consumer goods and the money it takes to buy them (197). Using the language of mesmerism, she implies that consumer culture, and the wage-labor that fuels it, is a cult that dramatically limits local agency.

In fact, Spirit sees current forms of economic development and consumerism as literally and figuratively impoverishing mountaineers. It describes them as newly debased wage laborers:

The old dignity has slipped from them before they are aware, and they grasp but

vainly after that alien possession, an education, which they are told would

establish them in the new. At last some, more thoughtful than the rest, awake to

the fact that they are growing old in a service which provides no pension…He has

become a day laborer, with nothing better in store, and can give his sons no

heritage but the prospect of working by the day. If he is wise he counsels them

against entering the treadmill of one-dollar-a-day. (194-5)

113 The narrator describes a people no longer free. Education, such as it is, has failed to establish them in “the new” because it is alien to the specifics of local life. She debunks the logic of city people who look at material indicators and argue, “Have we not served them in many ways? Are not church, school and newspaper a true benefit in light of their ignorance? In short, haven’t we paid them well?” (195). Spirit sees these semblances of prosperity as purely aesthetic, for the attainment of middle-class norms is a veneer. After all, what does it matter if a mountaineer has ice cream in the summer or a hat trimmed in silk if it means selling her birthright for a mess of pottage (195)? Mountaineers enter seasonal service work despite the fact that it reduces them to day laborers dependent on outside capital.

Spirit links mountaineers entering the treadmill of wage labor to their desires for more and mostly inferior consumer goods. Unfortunately, “civilization”—used by the narrator as a synonym for consumer culture—only makes bad habits easier to indulge.

The narrator acknowledges that mountaineers can sometimes suffer from dyspepsia as a result of their diets, but she expresses frustration that reformers act as emissaries of an impotent, if tyrannical, socio-cultural order. She argues, “Civilization is not soon likely to remedy this evil (dyspepsia), since it substitutes drugged whiskey for their own moonshine, and badly compounded plugs for home-grown ‘scrip’ tobacco. It also introduces cheap baking powders and the salicylic acid which is so dangerously convenient in canning fruit” (24). Thus, the narrator rejects middle-class material

114 standards as a viable means of reforming mountaineer habits. If this is what “civilization” has to offer, then it fails to make meaningful, locally relevant change.125

In “Jimville—A Bret Harte Town,” Austin engages in similar meta-localist work by detailing out-of-place material goods. The story depicts Jimville as a “cove of reminder” that, in its material particularities, can help the reader track capitalism’s disfiguring movement across space (65). It begins with Bret Harte, a popular local colorist of western scenes. According to the narrator, the author “did what he considered the only safe thing, and carried his young impression away to be worked out untroubled by any newer fact. He should have gone to Jimville. There he would have found cast up on the ore-ribbed hills the bleached timbers of more tales, and better ones” (65). The story of Jimville is meant to contrast the untroubled depictions of western towns that

Harte helped popularize. The Silver Dollar, an old Saloon that is figuratively and literally at the town’s center, got its name from prosperous bygone days when an individual prospector could make a go of it. As historian Patricia Limerick details, by the time

Austin penned her collection, industrialized mining companies had mostly taken over operations (106). Defined by its recent underdevelopment in an age of corporate mining,

Austin depicts Jimville as a repository for capitalism’s material excesses.126 It exists

125 In a similar vein, Engelhardt conducts a lovely reading of Spirit’s Mary Burns. She argues that Miles’s text ridicules models of feminist uplift that would tell the mountain woman to clean herself up and do her hair. In critiquing the Progressive era’s offering of middle-class grooming standards as a solution to Burns’s poverty and unhappy marriage, Miles instead celebrates mountain women’s hard work and resilience (Tangled Roots 148-9).

126 The town of “Las Uvas” functions as Jimville’s foil. Critics sometimes make tone-deaf arguments that Austin values Las Uvas as an idyllic local color town. However, the narrator frequently speaks tongue-in- cheek. The narrator refuses to tell the reader “where it lies, how to come to it” (143). She describes it as a 115 “between the ore dumps and solitary small cabins, pieced out with tin cans and packing cases” (68). Jimville is composed of remainders that make visible a capitalist system that thrives on imbalance, on the uneven geography across which capital advantageously moves (68).127 As a result, modern systems of production and consumption have disrupted what Austin elsewhere calls the “greatest economy” of nature by introducing material excess.128 Like Miles, Austin allows the reader to track the material consequences of socio-economic development throughout her collection.

In “The Mesa Trail,” The Land of Little Rain also goes on to demystify the conditions under which a pound of wool gets made by turn-of-the-century agri- businesses. Describing the production of wool, the narrator forces the reader to count the indirect costs of production. She laments, “But one feels by day anything but good will to note the shorn shrubs and cropped blossom-tops. So many seasons’ effort, so many suns and rains to make a pound of wool! And then there is the loss of ground-inhabiting birds

utopia, a nowhere, in which the residents are both the most devout of US patriots and “authentically” Mexican. Las Uvas experiences no conflict, no oncoming tide of civilization, no mass consumer culture as witnessed in Jimville.

127 In “House of Offence“ from Lost Borders, civilization doesn’t bring progress. Rather, the fluctuating number of girls working at the whorehouse marks the ebb and flow of capital across space (248). Foregoing subtlety, Austin makes the brothel the place where people see the latest fashions (247). Materialism is a concern that spans her career. In her 1924 The Land of Journeys’ Ending, Austin describes modern Americans who “go about with a vast impediment of Things, clanking on trails of our Frankenstein culture” (345). See also Earth Horizon,188-9.

128 See “Water Border,” 113-119, in which the narrator highlights the economy of flora and fauna. In other instances, we are told nature knows no excess, for the scavenger eats the meat left by the predator (40). In contrast, the works of man threaten Austin’s land of little rain, for “no scavenger eats tin cans, and no wild thing leaves a like disfigurement on the forest floor” (40). Mining corporations also leave the soil sick with alkali-collecting pools powerfully described as “black and evil-smelling like blood” (128).

116 that must fall from the mesa when few herbs ripen seeds” (90).129 Wool does not just require land. Sometimes it also requires the very lives of those creatures that live off of a land transformed by commodity production. Exacting perhaps the greatest cost, wool has also altered indigenous cultural practices as huge herds of sheep devastate the native hackberry, a Paiute food source (21).130 Austin thus works to defetishize raw materials and goods like silver and wool by showing the conditions of their extraction and production.131 Ultimately, both Miles and Austin depict a landscape materially scarred by the westward march of “civilization.” By fixating on capitalism’s out-of-place objects, their cluttered landscapes function as a protest against what some might call progress in regions whose populations were known for resisting development.

CURATING THE LOCAL AND THE INDIGENOUS HOME

The Spirit of the Mountains and The Land of Little Rain argue that Appalachians and American Indians must be allowed to develop tactics for addressing modernity from

129 Similarly, in Lost Borders, the narrator reveals that men had camped so close to the watering holes that the bighorn died of thirst instead of going to the “man-infested springs” (159).

130 See also pages 83 and 117 for Austin’s discussion of detrimental herding practices. For more on her views, see Barney Nelson’s “The Flock: An Ecocritical Look at Mary Austin’s Sheep and John Muir’s Hoofed Locusts” and Paul O’Grady’s Pilgrims to the Wild: Everett Ross, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Clarence King, Mary Austin.

131 Here I am drawing from Marxist rhetoric. In his 1867 Capital, Marx theorizes “commodity fetishism.” He describes it as the central social form of the modern industrial economy whereby social relations between people metamorphose into relations between things. Marx argues that the commodity fetish erases the labor required to produce it and allows the dominant class to continue exerting economic control. Austin works against the mystification of the relations among nature, things, animals, and humans.

117 within their local contexts.132 Miles advocates, “Let us be given work that will make us better mountaineers, instead of turning us into poor imitation city people” (198). In her

1906 follow-up to Land, Austin similarly argues, “It is wiser for Indians to become the best sort of Indians rather than poor imitation whites” (The Flock 219). Both writers employ the descriptors “poor “ and “imitation” to disparage Progressive acculturation efforts. Seemingly, to be an imitation is not negative in and of itself. However, Spirit and

Land insist that their respective local populations can only ever be poor imitations because reformers are attempting to mold them into forms to which they are unsuited.

Urban middle-class practices are nonsense in rural indigenous contexts.

If the threat to local life is material, then so, too, is the antidote. These collections argue for the value of folk production as a way to address the needs of local populations experiencing socio-economic transformation. They are not alone in this. For even as reformers were working to acculturate minority groups at the turn the twentieth century,

Euro-American researchers and activists lamented the cultural disappearance of these same groups. Salvage ethnographers took it upon themselves to externally preserve minority memory and traditions, particularly through the collection of cultural objects

(Deloria 64).133 Acculturation and preservation efforts might seem to work at cross-

132 Schaefer argues Austin rejected forced assimilation, and advocated ethnic and cultural diversity because she believed that a synthesis of European American, Native American, and Hispanic cultures would serve as “our best bet for utilizing the utmost potentiality of the American idea” (2-3). Again, Schaefer uses a 1925 essay, “The Future of the Southwest” as proof.

133 “Salvage ethnography” was a term originally coined in the 1960s. Although I am using the term more broadly here, it is most often used to describe Euro-American attempts to “preserve” American Indian culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For more on nineteenth–century salvage ethnography, see 118 purposes, but both practices assumed bourgeois superiority and local non-agency.

Minority cultural traditions could be absorbed into the national fabric but only if their material cultures were dissected and aestheticized in a way that the urban middle class found palatable. As Evans notes, “Culture” was increasingly defined by its intimacy and comfort with articulations of ethnographically coded peoples, tales, and objects that circulated in various forms through consumer culture.134 In fact, the same institutions that sought to assimilate mountaineers and American Indians sometimes championed handicrafts, emphasizing folk production as one way that schools might become self- sustaining.135 Such production was so lucrative because Americans’ interest in homespun and handicrafts gave rise to, for example, the Arts and Crafts movement.136

Unlike reformers or salvage ethnographers, however, Miles and Austin value indigenous material cultural production for its ability to disrupt urban middle-class value systems, not underwrite them. Spirit and Land valorize the indigenous tactician who produces folk objects and has a say in how they circulate within consumer markets. The

Philip Deloria’s Playing Indian, Ronald Niezen’s Spirit Wars, and Evan’s examination of participant- observation and the collection of folklore in Before Cultures.

134 For instance, during the Progressive era, the collection of mountain and Indian folklore and music became of especial interest to the American Folklore Society. For an example of Appalachian materials collected, see J. Hampden Porter, "Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Mountain Whites of the Alleghenies” in Journal of American Folklore. For examples of American Indian Folklore see any volume from the 1890s, although volume 4 includes an interesting account, “Folk-Lore of Stone Tools,” by Frederick Starr (27).

135 For example, see Max West’s U.S. Bureau of Labor report, “The Revival of Handicrafts in America” (1904) and Jennie Lester Hill’s “Fireside Industries in the Kentucky Mountains” in Southern Workman. Appalachia would come to be understood as a folk manqué after WWI and the 1930s saw the creation of the Indian Arts and Crafts board, but these preservation efforts still prioritized external interventions (Shapiro 185-199 and Warrior 124).

136 See Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s The Age of Homespun, T. Jackson Lears’s No Place of Grace, and Miles Orvell’s The Real Thing. 119 texts minutely detail the material contexts of daily life in their authors’ adopted regions.

In doing so, they resist a middle-class aestheticization of local life that selectively salvages cultural artifacts. Spirit and Land advocate for the local curation of indigenous material culture in hopes that such efforts will lead to economic independence and cultural preservation. In this scenario, not even the folk object is spared the logic of capitalism—what Brown calls “the tyranny of use” (13). What the folk object is spared is the tyranny of the middle-class acquisitor, for folk becomes a way to move the acquisitive imagination out of place. The folk objects Miles and Austin describe offer no intimacy with local cultures. By advocating for local control over the production and commodification of folk, they imagine the local agencies that might proliferate if middle- class consumers no longer have exclusive control over the circulation and meaning of these objects.

Rather than seeing the backward tendencies of mountaineers and American

Indians as a liability, Spirit and Land treat their attachment to the past as a vital resource for engaging modernity. Making literal the idea of internal curation, the texts explore the indigenous home as the primary site of this engagement. Miles’s “primitive people” and

Austin’s “forgotten race” retain bits of old economies, forms of labor and production, and material culture (55, 157).137 This retention rejects the narrative transition from “savage” to “civilized.” Their interest in how local economies undercut narratives of progress is intimately tied to the ways in which they imagine mountaineers and American Indians as

137 See also the description of mountaineers as aborigines and having a “bygone air,” as well as the claim that their dialect originated in the sixteenth century (Spirit 18, 163). 120 offering an alternative type of “home.” Spirit and Land argue that local indigenous populations provide a viable alternative to middle-class domesticity and the consumer culture that gives it its shape. They offer visions of a home free from bourgeois standards of domesticity and narrowly proscribed “culture.” Spirit and Land instead imagine the indigenous home as a space that facilitates local self-articulation through pleasure, production, and economic independence.

Spirit suggests that cultural survival and economic health will not come from external forces but from mountaineers’ internal drive to define themselves and thus

“awaken to consciousness of themselves as a people” (200). It offers mountain women a specific path to self-articulation that is based in the home as a site of production. The narrator argues, “These very women who are breaking health and spirit over a thankless tub of suds ought surely to turn their talents to better account, ought to be designing and weaving coverlets and Roman-striped rugs, or ‘piecing’ the quilt patterns now so popular” (198). She encourages Appalachians to engage in the kind of work that uplifts rather than degrades. This work balances the demands of the marketplace with existing indigenous talents. Only by pursuing development that is not foreign to their nature can mountaineers be a vital resource to the nation as “a race that shall stand for freedom political and industrial; a race that can no more endure unjust rule than it can thrive in the tainted air of the low country” (200). Only then might mountaineers model how to be in the world without the class divisions encouraged by a capitalist system built on wage labor and prescribed forms of mass consumption. Spirit frames Appalachia as a cultural resource that calls the nation back to its founding principles. It imagines a future in which 121 mountain localities are no longer occupied by an alien force and the one-way flow of culture from center to margins.

Spirit offers the mountain woman creating folk art in her “house with a history” as the key tactician in this mountain awakening (65). The narrator appreciates the mountain home filled with material culture constructed out of the remainders of other lives. She describes,

[The mountain woman’s] carpet even, so gay on the rude puncheons, was made of

old clothes and scraps of clothe. Who wove the cloth? It was woven on her

grandmother’s loom. Yes, and she knows who built the loom. The marks of his

simple tools are on its timbers still. Into her pretty patchwork she puts her babies’

outgrown frocks, mingling their bright hues with the garments of a dead mother or

sister, setting the pattern together finally with the white in which she was married.

(65)

This is a material culture characterized by an accumulation of encounters, associations, and repurposings. These traces of remembered things arrest linear progression by collapsing the past into the present. Spirit figures the mountain home as the locus of history rather than shelter from it. Unlike the fetishized objects of mass consumer culture, the domestic objects of Miles’s mountain home have a history of labor and relationships.

The narrator suggests that remembering can be a burden, but it is one that gives mountain women “consciousness of the vastness of human experience and the nobility of it” (66).

The mountain home may not meet middle-class domestic standards but, unlike the twentieth-century home being advertised and prescribed within Progressive reform and 122 literary culture, it is filled with living things that have origins and lineages known to the mountain woman. She preserves tradition in a home that functions as a repository of history and local material cultural poetics.

It is integral to the work’s intervention in reform discourse that this meditation on the house with a history follows the chapter in which the general condition of cabins is defended as something that local life necessitates. Miles presents the reader with a windowless mountain home in which dirt, beer bottles, homespun, and looms coexist.

That is, the very idealized folk objects for which the turn-of-the-twentieth-century urban middle class developed a taste have their genesis in the culture Progressive reformers are attempting to uplift. The structure of Spirit highlights the fact that outside attempts to selectively acculturate and preserve cultural practices can only hinder the reappearance of productive mountaineers.138

In less explicitly nationalistic terms, The Land of Little Rain also advocates for practices that arise from the conditions of local life. It admires American Indians’ ability to use the land according to its own fashion. For example, in “Shoshone Land” the narrator tells us about the titular homeland through the eyes of the homesick Winnenap.

This account highlights how, historically, American Indians have adapted to the particularities of the land in which they live. It details,

The manner of the country makes the usage of life there, and the land will not be

lived in except in its own fashion. The Shoshones live like their trees, with great

138 Miles’s argument wields particular weight given the symbolic importance of the mountain cabin. Shapiro details the role of log cabin in discussions of Appalachian otherness (90), and Nancy Carol Joyner argues it is the key symbol at the center of stereotypes about the Appalachian region (11). 123 spaces between, and in pairs and in family groups they set up wattled huts by

infrequent springs…Their shelters are lightly built, for they travel much and far,

following where deer feed and seeds ripen. (57)

The impermanent huts described in “Shoshone Land” exist in stark contrast to the claustrophobic homes Austin writes of in her journal. This piece is representative of Land as a whole and its investment in contrasting mass consumer culture with the American

Indians’ local economy. For they conform to the land and, in doing so, find “a use for everything that grows within these borders” without feeling compelled to accumulate goods or conquer the land and its bounty (57). Theirs is an economy of enoughness and sufficiency, the opposite of capitalism’s disfiguring material excesses.

If Winnenap’s “Shoshone Land” provides the template for a way of life that no longer exists in the West, Austin’s “The Basket Maker” provides a model for how

American Indians might act as tacticians despite the external pressure of middle-class consumer culture. The titular basket maker exemplifies an alternative economy. Seyavi, a

Paiute, is a woman who “when she lost her mate in the dying struggle of his race, she never took another, but set her wit to fend for herself” (93). She eschews the expectation that she will seek another husband to care for her and her son and instead makes and sells baskets for income. Yet the narrator is careful to note that in her basket making, “she had gone beyond learning to do for her son, and learned to believe it worthwhile…Seyavi made baskets for love and sold them for money” (95). In believing her work to be “worth while,” Seyavi deems the primary value of the baskets as the time and care she puts in to them. They bring her more than money; they also bring satisfaction, pleasure and 124 purpose. Seyavi enjoys making the baskets, which were once used as cooking pots “when cooking was done by dropping hot stones into water-tight food baskets” (95). Strictly speaking, they have no more utility for her than they do for the consumers of “a generation that prefer[s] iron pots for utility” (95). The baskets are expressly aesthetic rather than ethnographic artifacts. For love and money, Seyavi decorates them with the plumed crest of the valley quail. In other words, as she produces the artifacts so prized in the Progressive era, she balances her artistic sensibilities with a consideration of the marketplace.

Seyavi demonstrates that to be at home in the world is to maintain some control over how these cultural artifacts circulate as commodities. We see this most clearly in the narrator’s acquisitive desire for presumably authentic forms of American Indian culture.

She expresses frustration about the times that Seyavi holds back: “But it was not often she would say so much, never understand the keen hunger I had for bits of lore and the

‘fool talk’ of her people” (96). The narrator does not consider that Seyavi may understand her hunger perfectly but, as a tactician, may purposefully thwart the woman’s attempts to possess bits of her culture. When the narrator expresses her desire to add Seyavi’s baskets to her “collection,” she asks, “What good will your dead get, Seyavi, of the basket you burn?” The basket maker retorts, “As much good as yours of the flowers you strew” (97).

Seyavi is determined to burn the baskets in honor of the dead, in keeping with the lore of her clan. She refuses to sell her wares except under specific conditions. Seyavi reserves the cultural artifact for use within the context of American Indian life, and refuses the narrator’s attempts to sever the commodity from its local context. 125 Like The Spirit of the Mountains, The Land of Little Rain ultimately makes a case for native agency in the commodification and circulation of folk objects. Miles and

Austin work to demystify the local object and, thus, undercut local subjugation. They embrace folk objects as commodities rather than authentic artifacts through which consumers achieve ethnographic intimacy. Thus, their collections work to demonstrate the efficacy of folk tacticians who maintain some control over how these goods are produced, used, and circulated.

ON GENRE AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

While I have argued that local colorists Miles and Austin critique white, middle- class efforts to reform marginal populations, a significant body of scholarship treats the local color genre as complicit in imagining homogenously white, longed for points of national origin.139 In particular, local color writing about Appalachia has been implicated in the formation of the white national family. Nina Silber extensively details the era’s cult of Anglo-Saxonism, which drew on ideas already being advanced in Europe. A number of Americans, many of them prominent, applied notions of Anglo-Saxon supremacy to their own developing view of American nationalism (Silber 69). According to Silber,

Northerners’ new racial discourse was based in the recognition of southern racial purity and homogeneity. She argues that northerners believed that white southerners sharply contrasted their own motley mixture of ethnic groups. The southern mountains were presumably untainted by the legacy of slavery and, thus, were pure white (Silber 136-42).

139 See especially Kaplan’s “Nation, Region, and Empire,” 256.

126 So, the argument goes, Appalachia and local color written about its localities were key to the reconciliation of a white national family.140

Writers like Miles and Austin offer a counter-narrative to literary histories that insist only certain genres and imagined places functioned as key sites for contesting the stability of the white national family. As we have discussed, Miles and Austin depict

Appalachia and the West facing complex economic and cultural questions at the turn-of- the-twentieth century. Progressive culture mapped need onto the problem populations of these regions and sought to assimilate the mountaineer and American Indian by teaching the middle-class home. As both The Spirit of the Mountains and The Land of Little Rain show, the Progressive era readily marked populations that resisted mastering the codes of middle-class consumption and domesticity. By considering local color writing within relevant Progressive-era contexts, we can begin to make sense of the precariousness of

Appalachians’ status as mountain whites.

Miles and Austin work to undercut efforts by reformers to manage problem populations. In attending to the material cultures of localities in southern Appalachia and the American West, they rethink the concept of “home” in and for their adopted regions.

Thus, they attempt to undermine what Amy Kaplan has described as “manifest domesticity.” By calling into question the universal applicability of middle-class material norms, Miles and Austin seek to interrupt the circuit between “the imperial project of

140 See also Grace Hale’s Making Whiteness, 9. 127 civilizing and the conditions of domesticity” (“Manifest Domesticity” 582).141 Their championing of folk should not be read as confirmation of local color as a pastoral retreat from the social conflicts of consumer culture and industrialization.142 Rather than creating an idyllic refuge for the reader, these local colorists utilize areas marked by socio- economic development as a protest against the tyranny of dominant middle-class culture.143 As we have seen, Miles and Austin enact this critique by depicting indigenous homes as the center of tactical engagements with systems of production and commodification.

Like the meta-localists in chapter two, Miles and Austin understand themselves as part of a literary marketplace in which local color subjects circulate as consumable products. They even see themselves as correcting reductive depictions of indigenous cultural difference.144 The Spirit of the Mountains critiques newspapers that emphasize an

141 See also Laura Wexler’s essay, “Tender Violence: Literary Eavesdropping, Domestic Fiction, and Educational Reforms.” She argues that sentimentalism served to dehumanize and exclude those without a “domestic lineage” from the pursuit of an ideal domestic space as defined by the white, middle class attempting to propagate itself as the American norm (16). While Wexler and Kaplan specifically analyze “sentimentalism,” I am persuaded by Wexler’s definition of the term as a communal social campaign. She argues that “sentimental ideology” matured in power through institutions such as prisons, schools, and churches well after the 1870s, when literary studies typically halts its study of the genre (19).

142 See Brodhead and Amy Kaplan’s “Nation, Region, Empire.”

143 As I have argued in the introduction, this view of the literary region as an anti-modernist haven takes its cues from many of the field’s early critics. For instance, Van Wyck Brooks insisted that Austin failed to “establish real relations with the world beyond the desert” (218). In contrast to his trivialization of Austin’s regional concerns, this chapter reads the ways in which Austin responds to turn-of-the-century, middle- class mass consumer and domestic cultures. Although it does not specifically treat The Land of Little Rain, Anne Raine’s “‘The Man at the Sources’: Gender, Capital, and the Conservationist Landscape in Mary Austin’s The Ford” similarly rebuts claims about local color’s anti-modernism by arguing that Austin explores how gender and capital shape the West.

144 Goodman and Dawson argue Austin’s work reacted against texts such as Helen Hunt Jackson’s popular Ramona (1884), which was a romance about a part-Indian orphan raised among Spanish aristocracy (12). 128 Appalachia of material and moral disorder (198); it also disparages the “studies in dialect” of John Fox and Mary Murfree, two prominent Appalachian local colorists (172).

Austin similarly understands the role of literature in legitimizing and ultimately commodifying local cultures. In the collection’s titular sketch, “The Land of Little Rain,” the narrator finds herself seduced and constrained by familiar tales of lost mines and the desert’s mystery (16). Miles and Austin are sensitive to literature’s role in commodifying certain types of cultural authenticity.

Yet their own visions are fraught with an investment in a rather narrowly defined authenticity and, as Jeff Karem would argue, the dangers of commodifying difference

(11). Throughout his study, Karem highlights the dangers of such commodification, which facilitates a definition and explication of difference that can often serve as a mechanism of control. Indeed, in arguing for interventions that cultivate “better” mountaineers and American Indians, Miles and Austin suggest that an individual can also be a “bad” version of these populations. With the best intentions, perhaps, Spirit and

Land work to redefine what constitutes worthwhile cultural production, here problematically over-determined as folk. These texts thus dramatically limit the conditions under which local subjects can be understood as tacticians who positively engage modernity.

Thus, they argue, she wrote against the grain of sentimental romances that endorsed unexamined visions of the American West, as well as writings like John Van Dyke’s The Desert (1901), which presented the desert as antagonistic (60, 57). Using Austin’s 1932 “Regionalism in American Fiction,” Inness similarly argues that Austin offers a complex view of American culture by using a genre that allows readers the possibility of exploring many Americas (319). 129 Indeed, the representational politics involved in their works are tricky—for Austin most of all. She argues for the dignity of indigenous practices and the right of American

Indians to determine how cultural artifacts circulate as commodities. Yet she is a white woman promoting specific habits on behalf of American Indian cultures. This is why many scholars have criticized Austin’s local color writings as a form of appropriation and the colonization of American Indian beliefs.145 While Miles may have had some claim to insider status, neither woman was in a position to know exhaustively and dictate the terms of their adopted populations’ engagements with encroaching socio-economic systems. In articulating their discomfort with prescriptive forms of middle-class domesticity, Miles and Austin are perhaps guilty of conflating their terms with those of the populations they represent.

While Miles and Austin see folk ways and objects as the means by which local tacticians might control the terms of the Progressive era’s burgeoning consumer markets, chapter four analyzes a different kind of engagement with early twentieth-century material goods. The novels we will discuss valorize neither folk nor Arnoldian forms of

“Culture.” Rather, they articulate a radically non-essentialist understanding of culture through their interest in how material goods get repurposed and recoded within industrialized localities.

145 See Elizabeth Ammons’s Conflicting Stories, William Scheick’s “Mary Austin’s Disfigurement of the Southwest,” and Exploring Lost Borders: Critical Essays on Mary Austin. For more on the history of Austin criticism, see Graulich’s introduction to Exploring Lost Borders and Nancy Porter’s “Afterword” to A Woman of Genius. 130 CHAPTER FOUR: “Loving to fool” with Things in the Industrial Towns of Grace MacGowan Cooke’s Appalachia and Mary Wilkins Freeman’s New England

INTRODUCTION

In the opening pages of The Power and the Glory, Grace MacGowan Cooke describes the rhizomatic Passmore cabin: “The rich, broken light from a cavernous fireplace filled the smoke-browned interior full of shadow and shine in which things leaped oddly into life, or dropped out of knowledge” (6). This scene describes the role of the readerly eye as analogous to the fire. Cooke dramatizes the power of the gaze in determining what achieves visibility—and how it is aestheticized—within a culture. In other words, the scene is a metaphor for how literary and cultural accounts are both produced and consumed. It highlights the difficulty and fruitfulness of surveying familiar literary-critical ground. Cooke offers readers a way to engage formal possibilities if only they are willing to examine a different set of things. Like the heroines it will discuss, this chapter works to put old literary objects and critical truisms to new use.

Richard Brodhead and Amy Kaplan have suggested that the local color movement

“compos[ed] a certain version of modern history” (Brodhead 120) and rendered difference in terms of region so that “social conflicts of class, race, and gender made contiguous by urban life could be effaced” (Kaplan 251).146 Unsurprisingly, their emphasis on a middle-class desire for escape means framing local color as antithetical to industrial scenes at the turn of the twentieth century. Brodhead and Kaplan imagine

146 See also Emily Satterwhite’s Dear Appalachia.

131 localities as agricultural, homogenous, and patriarchal during an era anxious about women’s role in the public sphere.147 This pastoral model presents a challenge for interpreting novels such as Grace MacGowan Cooke’s The Power and the Glory (1909) and Mary Wilkins Freeman’s The Portion of Labor (1901).148 The authors set their novels in late nineteenth-century factory towns with bustling business districts, well-stocked shops, crowded boardinghouses, and clearly delineated class and racial hierarchies. Yet they imagine Cottonville, Tennessee and Rowe, Massachusetts as part of their respective regional economies and cultures.149 This chapter utilizes The Power and the Glory and the concept of Appalachia as a lever for rethinking New England local color, long treated as synonymous with Jewett’s rural village. It explores the opening up of the genre that can occur by examining texts—especially those set in the “land of spinning-wheels, patchwork quilts, feather beds, and fireplaces”—that depict industrial towns (Ryan

363).150

147 As detailed in the introduction, we can trace the idea of characters more connected to an agrarian past than to the present to early Americanist studies on Sarah Orne Jewett. However, this conception of local color has never been uncontested. As Hamlin Garland argues in Crumbling Idols (1894), the local colorist explores “subtle changes of thought and of life that have come with the rise of a city like St. Paul or Minneapolis; the life of the great saw-mills and shingle-mills” (Kindle Locations 172-3).

148 By defining regionalism as a literary strategy for managing difference, Stephanie Foote reads unconventional texts set in “partially unassimilated or unstandardized territories” (14). While this redefinition does enable Foote to read regionally urban texts, she does not question the regional/urban binary. Reading urban texts regionally is different from discussing regions as rhetorically constructed places that may contain agricultural and industrial localities.

149 Alan Trachtenberg describes specialized mill and factory towns like Cottonville and Rowe as “distinctly cities, yet hardly metropolitan.” They thus functioned as intermediary localities within their respective regions as vehicles of urban influence and market expansion (113).

150 According to Henry D. Shapiro, the more positive articulation of mountain culture in the early twentieth century drew on the “discovery” of an indigenous craft tradition in Appalachia, which William 132 Like the other local colorists we have discussed, Cooke and Freeman are meta- localists who engage in formal poaching. Cooke drew from her four decades of residency in Chattanooga, Tennessee when she set The Power and the Glory in the Unaka

Mountains.151 The novel’s heroine, Johnnie Consadine, is embarrassed by her family’s reputation for borrowing rather than buying. She leaves her mountain home to secure work in the textile mills of Cottonville, located in the lower Tennessee Valley. Once there, Johnnie must face brutal labor conditions, poverty, and the hypocrisy of an Uplift

Club, and she eventually marries the mill owner, Gray. Johnnie’s family, the Passmores, enjoy altered circumstances when her Uncle Pros finally finds his lost mine. Similarly, in

The Portion of Labor, Ellen Brewster is forced into a Massachusetts shoe factory due to the reduced circumstances of her family.152 We witness the heroine’s transformation from a young, doted on child to a singularly intelligent shoe factory worker who foments and then resolves a labor strike. She, too, must pass through brutal working conditions, the prospect of abject poverty, and misplaced patronage. However, by the end of the novel,

Goodell Frost, Berea College president from 1893-1920, first saw as proof of a “historical” rather than “degenerate” origin of otherness. The work of John C. Campbell from 1912-1919 would similarly conclude that the needs of rural-life Appalachia legitimated the appropriateness of crafts rather than industrial training for children.

151 Cooke was born in Grand Rapids, Ohio in 1863 and moved to Chattanooga at the age of two. For additional biographical information on Cooke, see Kay Baker Gaston’s “The MacGowan Girls” and Charles I. Switzer’s “The MacGowan Sisters.” Though peripatetic, Cooke repeatedly returned to the mountains in her fiction. For example, see her “The Capture of Andy Proudfoot,” collected in Harper’s Novelettes (1907) and “The Flight of Robert Sevier” in Lippincott’s (January 1909). Cooke also published sketches set in the fictional Big and Little Turkey Track Mountains (Switzer 98).

152 Freeman was born in Randolph Massachusetts in 1852 and raised in Brattleboro, Vermont (Marchalonis 2). For a detailed biography, see Brent L. Kendrick’s introduction in The Infant Sphinx: Collected Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.

133 Ellen and the young factory owner, Robert, overcome their differences and wed. Even the mine that her father, Andrew, speculated on has suddenly begun to pay dividends.

Despite their industrial settings, one could argue that the novels’ endings are more sentimental than political. Each novel symbolizes the resolution of class conflict by inter- marrying labor and capital. Cooke’s and Freeman’s use of the marriage trope might seem to align their works most closely with the concerns of nineteenth-century domestic novels rather than industrial novels.153 In fact, this is indicative of their meta-localist manipulation of literary form. As we have discussed, formal poaching “indicates a social historicity in which systems of representations or processes of fabrication no longer appear only as normative frameworks but also as tools manipulated by users” (de Certeau

21). Cooke and Freeman take the repertory of combinations available to them in domestic, industrial, and local color writings and offer readers the local as a way to think through the cultural and economic contests arising from industrialization. Thus, they expand the contests and tactics in which critics understand local color as engaged.

Looking at material culture allows us to see a range of ideological effects within the novels. The Power and the Glory and The Portion of Labor mediate the ruptures created by centralization, standardization, urbanization, mechanization, and consumer culture, and trace the everyday experiences of socio-economic development from within local contexts. The previous chapter featured writers who saw the encroachment of

153 In Women’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels By and About Women in America 1820-1870, Nina Baym argues that sentimental novels during this period offer variations of a single plot: a young girl who is forced to make her way in the world—usually into marriage (11-12).

134 middle-class material norms in their adopted regions and responded by advocating for the local curation of folk goods. This chapter examines two local colorists who provide counterbalances to potentially essentializing conceptions of folk production as the primary source of local agency.154 I demonstrate that The Power and the Glory and The

Portion of Labor valorize neither folk nor “high brow” forms of Arnoldian “Culture.”155

Nowhere do we see Bill Brown’s sentimental object spared the logic of capitalism (4). In fact, most of the material culture circulating through the novels is out of place. The novels articulate radical conceptions of anthropologically based cultures that call into question the universality of middle-class norms. These cultures are rooted in the actions of local agents who use the mixed materials of their industrial towns to construct their working-class identities and fix a broken economic system.

The novels feature heroines who “fool” with things and, consequently, push against a culture that is deeply invested in prescribing what type of goods should be desired and how they should be used. Indeed, turn-of-the-twentieth-century periodicals and Progressive manuals reveal that material culture was a vital part of how places and subjects were othered by a dominant middle class. Women uplifters used the dictums contained in these manuals to assimilate populations like the new wage laborers depicted

154 As discussed in the introduction, see Bill Brown’s A Sense of Things for an example of critical assumptions about the objects meaningfully occupying local spaces and the ways in which the objects emphasized in criticism contribute to arguments that literary regions act as isolated alternatives to the urban-industrial setting. See also Nancy Glazener’s Reading for Realism and Gillian Brown’s Domestic Individualism.

155 Matthew Arnold described “culture” in 1869 as “a pursuit of our near total perfection by means of getting to know…the best which has been thought and said” (5). For more on Arnold, see Brad Evans, 25; Lawrence W. Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow; and John F. Kasson’s Rudeness and Civility. 135 in The Power and the Glory and The Portion of Labor. Within this context, the novels’ heroines can be understood at “fooling” when tinkering with or repurposing objects in ways that resist prescriptive forms of culture. “Fooling” is another way to describe the poacher’s notoriously ephemeral “ways of using things or words according to circumstances” as “agents and authors of conjunctural operations” (de Certeau 20).

Through their fooling, the heroines undercut the middle-class subject’s ability to organize the world via material cultural norms.

The novels suggest that, because Johnnie and Ellen see the world through the

“eyes of love,” they are able to undercut the double violence of uplift and industrial capitalism—both constitutively structured on inequality. In refusing to assimilate,

Johnnie and Ellen turn their energies to the task of illuminating and improving the conditions of local laborers. This chapter’s comparative reading reveals the ways in which both novels use material culture to defetishize the workings of capitalist systems.

In The Power and the Glory and The Portion of Labor nothing entirely escapes the conditions of its production—not dolls, slippers, and certainly not literary texts. In insisting on the specifics of their respective localities the novels work to defetishize the commodity and reintegrate the laboring body. They imagine the demystification of production and Karl Marx’s commodity fetish as a reintegration of capitalism’s most dangerous element—people—back into its processes. That is, Cooke and Freeman make visible the labor required to produce consumer goods through the heroines’ unsanctioned uses of material culture. They theorize a relationship to material culture that reconnects what has been severed by the abstraction of people into “labor,” “capital,” and 136 “consumer.” As we will see, Cooke and Freeman offer the local as a context ripe for the tactical blending of sentiment and practicality, the back looking and forward looking.

LOCAL COLOR AND “THE LABOR QUESTION”

Reviews of The Power and the Glory and The Portion of Labor reveal that readers understood the novels as both industrial and local. This may be due, in part, to that fact that, by the time of their book-length works, both Cooke and Freeman had published short stories, poems, and sketches in magazines known for local color.156 Critics sometimes assume that contemporary readers understood the southern mountains as synonymous with the hollow and New England as synonymous with the village.

However, reviews suggest that readers were able to imagine regional and generic complexity, and took for granted that both industrial and agricultural localities comprised larger geographical and cultural regions. In imagining industrialized localities as part of

Appalachia and New England, contemporary readers also expressed the belief that the problems arising from industrialization were most meaningfully discussed in local terms.

Reviews emphasized the specificity of industrialized scenes, as well as local color’s participation in a larger discourse that rhetorically and imaginatively connected industrial

Appalachia with New England.

156 Cooke published over 135 items in many of the era’s national magazines, including Atlantic Monthly, Century Magazine, Harper’s, and Munsey’s. Little critical work has been done to connect Cooke to local color. Elizabeth S.D. Engelhardt’s The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature helps place her Progressive era feminism and environmentalism within the Appalachian region. Freeman published her first adult story during what Frank Luther Mott has called "the most brilliant decade in the long history of Harper's Magazine . . . the 1890s" (History 43). Critical work on Freeman is ample.

137 With its initial print run of 15,000, Cooke’s “story of the humor and heroism of some lives in a Southern mountain town” entered a widespread debate (“The Power and the Glory” 193). This debate centered on whether or not economic development could solve the cultural and social problems that Northern investors and social reformers attributed to the isolation of the Appalachian mountains.157 Hence, the New York Times emphasized the success with which Cooke “wr[ote] of the mountain folk both on the heights and in the valleys, in their nobler and their baser moods and characteristics”

(“Mrs. Cooke’s Mountain Folks” 3). According to Henry D. Shapiro, after 1880, propagandists for the cotton-mill campaign commonly argued that the introduction of cotton manufacturing would function as philanthropy that might cure “the Appalachian problem” by offering opportunities to backwoods mountaineers (163, 170).158 With the publication of The Power and the Glory, Cooke joined fellow skeptics of the positivist industrialization-as-uplift narrative, such as Bessie and Marie Van Vorst of New York.

The Van Vorsts published a 1903 expose, The Woman Who Toils; Being the Experiences

157 Chicago sociologist George E. Vincent dubbed the mountains a “retarded frontier” (1), and in 1899, William Goodell Frost described its “Rip Van Winkle sleep” (311). Appalachian culture was (and is) frequently viewed as a survival from an earlier stage of historical development. While the defenders of enterprise emphasized the mountains as the land of hookworm, trachoma, poor nutrition, illiteracy, poverty, and isolation, proponents of labor reform found it necessary to defend the “peculiarity” of mountain life and the heartiness of the mountaineers. See, for instance, Alexander McKelway’s “The Mills or the Farm” (1910). For an overview of cotton mill critiques, see Shapiro’s chapter 7. He dates the “cotton mill debate” from 1907 to 1914 (182).

158 Samuel Tyndale Wilson coined this phrase in his 1906 mission-study, The Southern Mountaineers (19). He argued that uplift could occur in a single generation through a development of trade, the public school system, and more home missions and other philanthropic organizations. In 1910 Thomas R. Dawley alternately dubbed “The Appalachian Problem” “our mountain problem.” Those applauding American enterprise as the solution were myriad and included August Kohn whose articles for Charleston, South Carolina’s News and Courier described the welfare work being accomplished in southern mill towns.

138 of Two Ladies as Factory Girls.159 As stunt journalists, the sisters disguised themselves as working-class women and sought work in factories from Massachusetts to Georgia.160

They reported markedly worse conditions in the South than in New England, observations that became the basis for Marie Van Vorst’s South Carolina mountain novel, Amanda of the Mill (1905).

Somewhat counter-intuitively, then, industrialized localities of the New South and

New England were often inseparable in turn-of-the-twentieth-century debates about labor reform.161 A significant increase in the amount of northern capital invested in southern industries led some critics to wonder if the New South was beginning to look a lot like the old North (Trattner 51). Many decried southern mill owners that kept hours long and wages low to compete with better-established factories in New England, thus creating a dependent, “pauperized class” (Shapiro 168). As The Woman Who Toils attests, labor unrest in New England was seemingly an issue of the past, and child labor and poor

159 The Woman Who Toils was first published serially in Everybody’s Magazine in 1902. Everybody's Magazine ran from 1899 to 1929 and was published out of New York. In 1903, it had a circulation of 150,000 (Sketches 72-87). Employing sentimentality, the Van Vorsts attended to the effects of factory life on the vitality of families and future generations of Americans. Their accounts earned the praise of Theodore Roosevelt and laid the groundwork for a 1907 Bureau of Labor study.

160 With little formal education or professional training as journalists, female stunt reporters transformed their amateurism into an asset by telling truths based on physical sensation. In the same volume of Everybody’s Magazine, Lillian Pettengill also published observations made while disguising herself as a domestic servant. For more on stunt reporting, see Jean Marie Lutes’s “Into the Madhouse with Nellie Bly: Girl Stunt Reporting in Late Nineteenth-Century America.”

161 See Shapiro’s chapter 7; C. Vann Woodward’s Origins of the New South, 416 forward; and Elizabeth H. Davison’s Child Labor Legislation in the Southern Textile States.

139 working conditions were negligible.162 People increasingly imagined New England and its rapid industrialization as the signature phenomenon of the antebellum era. So, the thinking went, New England’s labor strife had come and gone, reaching its peak in the

Lowell era; thus, literary output that wrestled with questions of labor reform in New

England localities had waned by the 1880s.163 If contemporary New England was the

New South’s counterpoint, the old New England was the New South’s historical counterpart.

The Portion of Labor, then, would have been understood in relationship to early- twentieth-century debates about labor in localities of the South. For instance, the “labor question” was on readers’ minds as we see in a review by Octave Thanet.164 Freeman’s novel participated in a national debate that often couched its discussion of the failures or successes of industrialization in ways that compared regions. However, contemporary critics of the novel also saw her treatment of the labor question and New England local

162 As the work of Cooke, the Van Vorst sisters, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, and Frank Norris attests, industrialization was increasingly imagined as a problem facing the West, portions of the New South, and the metropolises of New York and Chicago. Aside from Freeman’s novel, Jewett’s “The Gray Mills of Farley,” and Rose Terry Cooke’s “The Deacon’s Week,” few turn-of-the-century local color pieces directly engaged the labor question through the lens of a New England locality.

163 For instance, see the Factory Girl’s Album, and Operatives’ Advocate and Lowell Offering for condemnations of factory conditions and local color descriptions of New England village factory life such as the former’s “The Factory Girl.” After the Civil War’s conclusion, there was a spate of retrospectives on antebellum New England life, including texts like Eliza Jane Cate’s “The Old Mill at Amoskeag” in Peterson’s Magazine. See also Abigail Mussey’s autobiographical retrospective on the 1830s textile mills, Life Sketches and Experiences and “People of a New England Factory Village” in Atlantic Monthly.

164 Indeed, Thanet cannot assess Freeman’s treatment of the labor question without offering his own opinion, suggesting how salient was the drama of industrial capitalism: "The American-born workman's discontent comes out of the envy of a wider vision, not out of failing fortunes and oppression. Because he gets better wages and is better educated and has better ways of living than before, he is able to realize more keenly how much (which he sees others have) he lacks" (380).

140 color as mutually constitutive.165 For example, Thanet sees the characters’ critique of capital and the decision, finally, to strike as attributable to the “New England logical elaboration of details” (380). He thus understands the rhetoric and actions employed by the Rowe shoe hands as legible only within a local framework. 166 Thanet’s oscillation between local and national scales reflects the novel’s use of the local as a way to address the cultural and economic contests of industrialization.

CRITIQUING MATERIAL “UPLIFT”

In particular, the Progressive uplift movement grew alongside industrial wage labor and played an integral role in how proponents imagined industrialization as a positive social force. Because culture was associated with leisure and leisure with women, women were considered the primary arbiters of culture, assimilators of citizens, and promoters of a better material life (Trachtenberg 145).167 As the home became

165 Similarly, Henry Alden Mills did not see The Portion of Labor as a dramatic break from Freeman’s local color stories. Today, however, Freeman is mostly known for her village stories—a precedence set by early anthologies such as The Best Stories of Mary E. Wilkins (1927) and continued by collections like Marjorie Pryse’s Selected Stories of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1983). Certainly there were reviewers, such as James McArthur and William Dean Howells, who thought her short works best. However, the continued critical emphasis on her village stories obscures how some of her contemporary readers responded.

166 Thanet finds no contradiction in Ellen’s rootedness and the novel’s attention to social problems. He notes that Ellen grows out of “chilly soil” and praises how “the soul of the New England ‘shoe hand’ is laid bare” (379). See also Laurence Hutton’s review.

167 As Jennifer Scanlon argues, periodicals like Ladies’ Home Journal promoted a domestic ideology that defined women as consumers (3). Indeed, Caroline L. Hunt in her treatise Home Problems from a New Standpoint (1908) argues for the housewife’s importance in “her capacity as consumer and not in that of producer” (Kindle Locations 793-797). Peter Stoneley’s Consumerism and American Girls’ Literature demonstrates that young women became key to describing how turn-of-the century women were “buying into womanhood” through the acquisition and management of buying power. See also Jennifer Fleissner’s Women, Compulsion, Modernity, Jane Hunter’s How Young Ladies Became Girls, and Lori Merish’s Sentimental Materialism. 141 defined by consumption, anxiety about domestic life resulted in a spate of manuals and treatises on housekeeping.168 Domestic manuals like Marion Talbot and Sophonisba

Breckinridge’s The Modern Household argued “the modern spirit” was one of obligation to the community, and the “true citizen” conformed to extra-legal standards like proper home sanitation, food preparation, and dress (23).169 Manuals advocated intense social programming and reform because they saw "good taste [as] one of the most effective of missionaries” (“Brains in Egress” 57).170 As Thorstein Veblen argued in his 1899 The

Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, “taste” was important to class identity, for it indicated “Culture,” which could only be attained through time, application, and expense (48).

What historian Alan Trachtenberg describes as “the politics of culture” thus crystallized in response to anxieties about industrial development—an immigrant workforce, the dying countryside, mechanization, and the invasion of the marketplace

168 The Pittsburgh Survey found that capitalism was a system of both economic and social production. Consequently, conceptions of family, community, and the home were undergoing crisis. See Margaret Byington’s contribution, Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town.

169 The phenomenon of linking citizenship to proper consumption and standards of cleanliness did not simply appear in the 1890s. The 1876 International Exhibition commemorating the country’s centennial included a magazine, The New Century for Women, which featured titles such as “Cooking as an art” and “Ethics and Aesthetics of Dress.” As these titles suggest, material culture and good citizenship were linked as early as 1876.

170 Similarly, Emily G. Wetherbee’s “The Working-Girls” in Poems and Addresses of Emily Greene Wetherbee praises German, Scottish, Irish, Swedish, and English immigrants for trying to better themselves through night school; studying dressmaking, millinery, cooking, gardening, housekeeping; and keeping a quiet reading room (57). From 1887-1890, the New Century Guild issued The Journal of Women’s Work. The Guild offered “mental improvement” lectures, a library, a gymnasium, and lessons on dress making, literature, writing, reading, and spelling. Essays in the magazine reported on health, education, and gave advice on conduct.

142 into the home.171 As one early-twentieth-century historian pointed out, the rise of consumer culture and global trade lead to the “working association in one’s mind” that

“questionable consumption meant a questionable consumer” (Hoyt 95). “The other half” often served the purpose of “proclaiming what the true America was not,” thus spawning a normative idea of culture (Trachtenberg 144). Consequently, when an individual or group deviated from prescribed standards of desire, consumption, or use, the deviation was thoroughly analyzed and used to maintain the logic of class and racial hierarchies.

The “cultural pathology” of certain groups was often validated on the basis of what and how they consumed (Hale 10).172 In other words, much was at stake in properly desiring, obtaining, and using objects so that they said the desired things about individuals, populations, and the nation at large.

As Elizabeth S.D. Engelhardt argues, the Progressive era often gave rise to uplift movements that relied on middle-class domestic solutions to social problems (Tangled

Roots xxiii).173 Uplifters threw themselves into ameliorating the pitfalls of industrialization by prescribing the material standards to which girls like Johnnie and

171 As Trachtenberg notes, “culture” was conceived of as "nonutilitarian activities and goods: the arts, religion, personal refinement, and formal higher education.” Culture was "a privileged domain of refinement, aesthetic sensibility, and higher learning” and a deliberate alternative between two extremes: the opulence of the rich and the squalor of the very poor. Because culture was based on education, it ostensibly offered a democratizing influence for anyone willing to raise him- or herself to the status of “American” (143).

172 “Brains in Egress” from The New Century for Woman argues, “Vice always degenerates into the coarse, the squalid, and at last the disgusting” (87). As chapter three demonstrated, the association of vice and squalor explains why reformers taught their charges to comply with white middle-class norms. See also Hale, 156-8.

173 For more on the Progressive Era, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s Disorderly Conduct and Dorothy Schneider and Carl J. Schneider’s American Women in the Progressive Era.

143 Ellen should aspire. It was, after all, the province of the non-laboring classes to reform the degenerate poor, isolated, and laboring populations.174 Culture was a key instrument in social control and reform efforts, two processes Stuart Ewen argues worked in tandem

(152).175 Like the various educational institutions detailed in chapter three, women’s uplift groups sought to usher in “a new era of improvement” through the universal application of middle-class material and cultural norms (Jordan-Finley 79).176 Within this new social agenda, culture and refinement came to define aspiration, which was increasingly understood as the desire for a better material life (Trachtenberg 160).

Initially, Johnnie’s desire for work in the cotton mills seems to conform to reformers’ emphasis on consumption as a means of uplift. She wishes to escape her association with a “peculiar people” because she feels the “dull ache of mortification” at being known in the community as a “borrowing Passmore” (14).177 The novel suggests

174 In contrast, periodicals read by antebellum factory workers sought to help new wage earners— particularly women—resist temptations to spend money rather than coach them on which goods to buy. The writings of mill worker Harriet Farley in Lowell Offering are examples of antebellum labor periodicals and the emphasis they placed on properly using wages and leisure time. See Farley’s “The Evening Before Pay-Day” and “Harriet Greenough” (1841).

175 In Captains of Consciousness, Ewen argues that Progressivism linked the desire of rational social order as applied to the production of goods and more humanistic reforms (19). According to Ewen, consumption became a key means of neutralizing unrest as time-motion studies, taylorism, and “scientific management” increasingly mystified the production process for the laborer (14). Thus, we might interpret a text like Robert Coit Chapin’s The Standard of Living Among Workingmen’s Families in New York City as a form of social control because it dictates to working-class households exactly how much income should be spent on certain items.

176 Home Problems from a New Standpoint explains, “The woman who spends” must promote consumption that “represents the ‘higher life’” (Hunt 42). For more on how women approached issues of benevolence in their writing and lives, see Our Sisters’ Keepers: Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature by American Women.

177 Will Wallace Harney’s 1873 sketch, “A Strange Land and a Peculiar People,” coined the phrase that would be associated with southern Appalachia for decades to come. See also Brown’s “A Peculiar People.” 144 that Johnnie is familiar with middle-class material norms even before she enters the labor force due to the circulation of print material.178 It appears these norms influence her desires and that Johnnie has internalized the cultural logic of the hillbilly figure, which highlights the progress that more cosmopolitan Americans have made (Harkins 7-10).179

This is a racialization in which the novel itself sometimes seems complicit. Although

Cooke’s mountaineers supposedly descend from the first English and Scottish settlers in the region, they are repeatedly infantilized and racialized in the novel (9).180 For instance,

Johnnie’s mother, Laurella Passmore, is described as having a “gypsy beauty” (7). She has to be cared and provided for by her daughter, Johnnie, as she takes on the aspect of a child playing with mud pies or a doll (15, 16, 210).181 It is this life that Johnnie wishes to escape.

The novel tell us that Johnnie aspires, but “the wings of her desire were clipped, because she must needs put her passionate young soul into longing for food . . . for shoes

178 This suggestion is confirmed when Johnnie recognizes Gray’s automobile from illustrated magazines. With the advent of the United States Post Office’s rural free delivery in 1898 and the late nineteenth- century proliferation of catalogs like Montgomery Ward and Sears and Roebuck, even the most rural parts the country were being assimilated via print (“Rural Free Delivery”). See Hale’s chapter, “Bounding Consumption,” in Making Whiteness for more on rural free delivery, catalogues, and trade cards.

179 The historical racialization of “white trash” is difficult to parse. While pure Anglo-Saxon roots were valued, “white trash” seemed, paradoxically, to be too white by virtue of isolation that lead to degeneration through enervation. As Annalee Newitz and Matthew Wray argue, white trash (alternately called redneck, cracker, and the familiar hillbilly) is marked “as something that must be discarded, expelled, and disposed of in order for whiteness to achieve and maintain social dominance” (169).

180 The myth that Appalachians were of purest Anglo-Saxon heritage was a cherished one. For example, see Ellen Churchill Semple’s “The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: A Study in Anthropogeography” (1901).

181 For additional examples of racialization, see pages 21, 38, and 283.

145 . . . the yet more urgent wish to feed the little ones” (14). That is, the overshadowing need for basic necessities does not allow Johnnie to pursue aspiration, which—as we have already discussed—was increasingly defined by the desire for a better material life.182

Those goods Johnnie does own while living on the mountain are marked by their inferiority. Her shoes are a particular source of embarrassment. They are “big, shapeless, cowhide affairs” (19). In an era that placed increasing importance on buying and what and how a person eats, dresses, and relaxes, Johnnie feels denied what Grace Hale describes as “consumption’s centrality to how she understands and locates her very self”

(7). The borrowing Passmores thwart her desire to self-fashion and define her place within society through the purchase of both essential and nonessential consumer goods.

As a representative of a generation of mountain youth, it is significant, then, that Johnnie makes her decision to seek millwork. For Johnnie, Cottonville is a literal “storehouse” promising her plenty of cheap goods and leisure activities, as well as the wages needed to purchase them.183 The narrator ironically reflects, “To desire—to want—to aspire—thus shall the individual be saved; and surely this is the salvation of the race. And Johnnie felt vaguely that at last she was going out into the world where she should learn what to desire and how to desire it” (14).184 Johnnie seeks an education that will lift her from the

182 As Hale notes, markets expanded in terms of class and space. Both depended upon and created a new geography of shopping (125).

183 The novel describes mountain women as men’s industrial machines. They make no wages despite the labor they provide the household (Cooke 32). As Hale notes, the supposedly moral benefits of romanticized agrarian life often actually translated into meager or no pay for labor (143).

184 This sentiment is in line with a 1906 advertising editorial, in which John Wanamaker famously described America as the “Land of Desire” (Leach 99–132). 146 ignominy of a family that fails to desire and consume the right things. However, the narrator’s tone foreshadows that the “things” Johnnie learns to desire are not the consumer goods she initially expects.

Johnnie’s material aspirations are complicated by the conditions awaiting migrants in the mill town. In fact, her access to inferior goods only increases once she joins the labor force in Cottonville. Populated by diasporic communities and marked by the proliferation of trash, this industrial landscape would have been anxiety generating for reformers. “Scattered like refuse,” the meager board shanties contain rooms mostly for rent and insulated with newspaper like the slave cabins of Thomas Nelson Page’s In

Ole Virginia (36, 219, 54). Ashes and tin cans line backyards, and workers sleep among broken and unused goods that have accumulated under the boardinghouse stairs.185

Hoarding, of course, was at odds with Progressive notions of housekeeping as an art or a career.186 Those reformers relying on middle-class domestic solutions to the social problems of new wage laborers, would have found in these scenes ample need for uplift.

Thus, because Johnnie seeks and—by reform standards—so clearly needs instruction on what to desire and how to desire it, the women of the local Uplift Club take her on as a project. Lydia Sessions, a well-to-do New England native, deems it well to help mill girls like Johnnie achieve cultural and spiritual growth (96). The first significant interchange between the women reveals the way that “Culture” requires not just the

185 Such descriptions of southern mill towns were not uncommon. For instance, Marie Van Vorst goes so far as to describe “children playing in the heaps of rubbish” (Amanda of the Mill Kindle Locations 1005- 1006).

186 See Katharine Hanson’s “The Imperishable Art” in The New Century for Woman and Talbot and Breckinridge’s The Modern Household, 88. 147 acquisition of material goods, but also the taste necessary to aspire to the right kinds of things for the right reasons. As an eager learner, Johnnie asks Lydia, “If a body wants a thing bad enough, and keeps on a-wanting it—oh, just awful—is that aspiration? Will the thing you want that–a-way come to pass?” (104). Lydia responds by telling Johnnie,

“You have to want the right thing, of course” (104). Lydia feels the need to qualify her answer. It seems aspiration does not lead to wish fulfillment unless a young woman has learned to desire the “right” things, as defined by the middle class.

The misunderstanding between Johnnie and Lydia that follows is key to the novel’s critique of the uplift movement’s use of consumer culture as a way to maintain class hierarchies and validate uplift work. Johnnie agrees with Lydia’s qualification and concludes, “I’d ‘low it was certainly the right thing, if it was what good folks—like you—want” (104). At first, Lydia is gratified. Johnnie has demonstrated her willingness to learn from uplifters and publically held Lydia up as a virtuous example (104).

However, our heroine then commences cataloguing; her eyes travel from Lydia’s neck to belt and shoulder to wrist. Johnnie proclaims, “There ain’t anybody in this room I’d rather go by as by you….I think I never in all my life seen anything more sightly than that dress-body you’re a-wearin’” (104-5). Johnnie has interpreted the “right things” literally and materially. By emphasizing the dress body, she uses Lydia as a “pattern” with which she might make herself over in the ways of middle-class fashion. Lydia scolds her, insisting “what is a mere blouse like this to the uplift, the outlook, the development we are striving to offer? I confess I am deeply disappointed in you” (105).

Yet there is something disingenuous in Lydia’s disappointment that her pupil has 148 interpreted uplift in primarily material terms. Even Lydia’s attempt to direct Johnnie away from material aspiration uses the language of materialism: “I’ll try to furnish you more suitable objects for your ambition” (106). In her language, Lydia ironically reaffirms Johnnie’s desires for an education in middle-class material norms.

A fellow uplifter, Mrs. Hexter, calls Lydia on the hypocrisy of denying Johnnie material aspirations in a society that maintains class hierarchies through material indicators. She scolds, “You took a lot of trouble and spent a lot of money to get that

[dress body]. I noticed you were careful to tell me it was imported, because I couldn’t see the neck-band and find out that detail for myself. That blouse is a dream—it’s a dream. If it’s good enough aspiration for you or me, why not for this girl?” (106).187 Lydia, mortified to have attention drawn to the attention she has paid to her person, insists it is a

“gross, material idea to aspire after blouses and suchlike, when the poor child needs— er—other things so much more” (106). Mrs. Hexter continues to sow animosity between

Johnnie and Lydia by encouraging the mill girl to “aspire as hard as [she can] in that direction” as she mischievously gazes upon Johnnie’s attractive figure (107). Here Mrs.

Hexter puts a finger upon the hypocrisy of Lydia’s Uplift Club: If the women foster nice young mill girls who learn to desire the right things through an attainment of middle-class culture, then why should they not have the fine linen worn by their benefactors? 188 The

187 In relation to Lydia’s blouse, see Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption. He observed that the upsurge in consumption was driven by the need to clarify uncertain social statuses by accumulating material things and creating a model of fashion to follow (65-101).

188 The question of the morality of material aspiration is a vexed one throughout the novel as we see Pap Himes and Shade Buckheath lie, kidnap, and hire out children in order to procure money, patent rights, and the location of Uncle Pros’s mine. 149 novel highlights the fact that it is not innate worth that separates the society woman and mill girl, but the tastefully chosen outfit. This is to say, it is actually the tenuousness of class hierarchies that explains Lydia’s commitment to discouraging Johnnie’s material aspirations.

Another mountain girl, Mandy Meacham, pinpoints—and, in pinpointing, is able to critique—the Club’s reliance on material criteria to maintain the hierarchies that justify their uplift efforts. As Johnnie prepares for an uplift function, Mandy cautions her against looking too nice: “Them thar ladies ain’t a-carin’ for you to look so fine. They’ll attend to all the fine lookin’ theirselves. What they want is to know how bad off you air” (97).

Mandy tells Johnnie that she should not disabuse the uplift club of their notions about her inferiority by dressing too well. Essentially, the uplifters want to look around and instantly know that they are superior to the mill girls they patronize. Unsurprisingly, these middle-class reformers are not interested in the women as individuals with subjectivities but, rather, as mountain types whose cultural deficiencies are visible. The logic of their uplift work depends upon the material maintenance of class hierarchies.

The novel executes its thematic disentanglement of material goods from virtue through Johnnie, a fact that Mandy also observes. She recognizes in Johnnie “the challenge she would have flung in the face of the enemy” (95). She likens her friend to a standard-bearer in a battle over who gets to define cultural value. In this scenario, the uplifters are pitted against the mountain people that they, predictably, treat as perpetually inferior. The novel suggests that Johnnie functions as a challenge because her worth and potential are so clearly independent of middle-class material norms. Even a faded, coarse, 150 and mildew-spotted dress cannot detract from Johnnie’s youth, hope, and expectations

(95). Her innate dignity undermines middle-class material culture as a viable form of uplift. Indeed, Lydia cannot help but begrudgingly notice in Johnnie “the ineradicable dignity of the true mountaineer” (98). Mandy senses that Johnnie vexes Lydia’s insistence that all mountaineers are alike and in need of uplift.189 Johnnie thus serves as the novel’s primary means of criticizing Progressive reform clubs because she needs no uplifting, just some new clothes. Her ability to elevate the coarse dress undermines the logic that a population is perpetually deficient because of its connection to inferior material goods.

Gray Stoddard, the mill owner, also picks up the thread of Mandy’s critique by vocally criticizing Lydia’s efforts. He rejects the idea that Johnnie needs to be fashioned into an ingratiated disciple of middle-class material and cultural norms. When Lydia charges Johnnie with being ungrateful, hateful, and the least satisfactory of her uplift girls, Gray responds, “It is as certain as that two and two makes four. You have pauperized and degraded them, and they hate you for it…People who believe as I do, regard that sort of philanthropy as a barrier to progress” (236-7). He reiterates Mandy’s point that uplift women are the enemies of laboring populations. What the modern world calls charitable work, Gray regards as a form of enslavement. He implies that, even if

Lydia’s appraisal is true, Johnnie’s lack of gratitude is an indication of her good sense.

189 Lydia insists, “These mountaineers are all alike” (129). Implicit in this comment is the idea that perhaps the mountaineers are unworthy of her benevolence efforts, a view many held, particularly when a series of feuds erupted in the region at the turn of the century. See Shapiro, 102 forward, for more on the impact of feuds on uplift work. 151 For in the abstract, at least, he believes that the imposition of middle-class norms serves only to rob populations of their pre-existing cultural resources. From Gray’s perspective, uplift efforts leave non-urban middle-class subjectivities impoverished and occupied by imposed cultural imperatives.

Here Gray comes very close to advocating the anthropological view of culture(s) described by Brad Evans, a view that is antagonistic to prescriptive definitions of

“Culture.”190 While Lydia has been unsuccessfully trying to create an imitation lady,

Gray has been lending Johnnie books and corresponding with her. He argues, “You underrate [Johnnie] when you speak of her as ignorant and uncultured. She knows a good deal more about some things than either of us. It is her fund of nature lore that makes

Thoreau and White of Selbourne appeal to her” (126). When he suggests that culture has nothing to do with social class, Gray’s opinion of Johnnie threatens the very social order on which Lydia’s theories of uplift are based. Lydia bristles at Gray’s liberal understanding of culture, protesting, “But surely you would not call her cultured—a factory girl who has lived in a hut in the mountains all her life?” (126-7). Although Lydia uses “factory girl” and “hut in the mountains” as two strikes against the idea that Johnnie is a cultured being, Gray advocates for development that is governed by Johnnie’s unique cultural competencies. In doing so, Gray rejects what he describes as “the ready-made education plastered on the outside” (128). As his use of “plaster” suggests, Gray eschews the uplifters’ attempts to address social inequalities through ineffectual aesthetic practices

190 Although Gray’s anthropological understanding of culture emphasizes native competencies, he does not emphasize the kind of folk production Evans discusses.

152 that too often involve teaching mill girls how to dress, dance, attend lectures, and press flowers. As Gray would have it, Lydia should not make assumptions about the culture of a mountain or factory girl, for social class ultimately reveals very little about culture.

In contrast to Johnnie’s initial interest in material uplift, The Portion of Labor’s

Ellen is immediately resistant to material forms of acculturation.191 When Cynthia

Lennox happens upon the runaway Ellen, her attentions are described as a form of enslavement. Cynthia approaches as the child gazes into a store window. Having been taught well by the display, Ellen quickly places the woman within a class hierarchy:

“[Cynthia’s] black garments draped her with sober richness, and there was a gleam of dark fur when the wind caught her cloak. A small tuft of ostrich plumes nodded from her bonnet. Ellen smelt flowers vaguely, and looked at the lady’s hand, but she did not carry any” (19). The scent of flowers signals to the reader that Cynthia wears perfume and that the reason Ellen cannot identify the source of the smell is because her family does not have the money to buy this product. From the details of her dress, Ellen understands that

Cynthia is well to do. Though much younger than Johnnie, the girl has already learned that consumer goods convey class. After all, Ellen muses, why else would Mrs. George

Crocker read women’s papers and promptly beautify her home with old-soap boxes and rolls of Japanese paper (26)?192

191 Ellen does go through a phase during high school in which she idolizes Cynthia. Combined with Johnnie’s interest in learning what to desire, this phase bears out Stoneley’s argument about the importance of teenage girls in negotiating the meaning and effects of mass consumer culture.

192 These items were extremely popular in middle-class periodicals of the 1880s like the Ladies’ Home Journal. For instance, see the June 1888 issue. Ladies’ Home Journal became solidly identified as a 153 Because Ellen is attuned to prescriptive middle-class aesthetic values, she finds herself unable to verbalize her desires under the tyranny of class difference. Indeed, the narrator tells us, “[Ellen] wanted to run, but the habit of obedience was so strong upon her mind that she feared to do so. This strange woman seemed to have gotten her in some invisible leash” (20). The invisible leash is not simply based in an age differential, but also in the class-based power differential that, even as a child, Ellen understands and resents. She feels powerless to openly resist Cynthia’s attempts to acquire and assimilate her. The older woman desires the girl whose “face looked out from between the soft folds

[of the shawl] with the absolute purity of curve and color of a pearl” (20). She treats Ellen as an aesthetically pleasing object that she has a right to possess. Her acquisition and appreciation of such an object, however, requires an erasure of eight-year-old Ellen’s history.193 As if an empress not to be denied, Cynthia “embrac[es] all her delicate little body with tenderest violence” (41).194 She takes Ellen home and tries to assimilate her into a new life. Cynthia attempts to stifle the little girl’s cries for her parents with parrots and hothouse pinks. Striving to absorb Ellen’s subjectivity into the aesthetic logic of the bourgeois home, Cynthia dresses her like a proper girl and outfits her with a doll and

Royal Sevres cup that once belonged to her nephew, Robert.

"handbook for the middle class" (Steinburg 3). For more on Japanese wallpaper, see David E. Hussey and Margaret Ponsonby’s Buying For the Home, 98 forward.

193 Notably, once Ellen returns to her family and grows into a young woman, Cynthia has little personal interest in her.

194 Laura Wexler’s essay, “Tender Violence: Literary Eavesdropping, Domestic Fiction, and Education Reform” has interesting resonance with this moment in The Portion of Labor. The phrase suggests the potential tyranny of sentiment. 154 Ellen repeatedly undermines Cynthia’s mothering her by asking, “What right had this strange woman, dressed in a silk dress like that, to be leaning over her in the morning, and looking at her like that” (41)? Ellen negates the tyranny and foreignness of the silk dress by imagining the material specifics of her home life. For example, Ellen meditates on her grandmother’s gilt-lettered “A Gift of Friendship” cup, which she thinks is quite a bit prettier than the expensive Royal Sevres (43). She feels herself conquered, but her loyalty to the material underpinnings of the working-class home silently block

Cynthia’s acquisitive impulse. Thus, we witness how a young Ellen resists being assimilated into a bourgeois domestic scene that requires the negation of her past affiliations. Cynthia’s home is like the store window for Ellen: aesthetically pleasing but divorced from use. She persists in seeing it as a display rather than as a home. Like the store display, which reinforces class hierarchies through material goods, Cynthia’s home threatens subjugation. Ellen risks becoming yet another object that solidifies the acquisitive force of bourgeois subjectivity.

Lyman, Cynthia’s long-suffering beau—gives voice to Ellen’s sense of injury as he delineates classed ways of interacting with material culture. Key to the novel’s project is the fact that he does not belittle the Brewsters’ disinterest in artistic accessories. Like

Gray, Lyman articulates an anthropological—rather than prescriptive understanding—of culture. He scolds Cynthia for keeping Ellen and giving her the Royal Sevres cup, an item that could identify her as the kidnapper. Luckily, Lyman explains, the Brewsters

“have a knowledge for the most part of the fundamental properties of the drama of life, such as bread-and-butter, and a table from which to eat it . . . artistic accessories, such as 155 Royal Sevres, which is no better than common crockery for the honest purpose of holding the tea for the solace of the thirsty mouth of labor, is beneath their attention” (71). The

Brewsters value practical, affordable material goods rather than rare objects that serve as conspicuous markers of class privilege.195 Lyman appreciates the fact that the Brewster’s emphasis on an object’s use rather than its artistic qualities connects them to the everyday experiences of laborers.

He even goes on to debunk Cynthia’s assumptions about homogeneity amongst the working classes. Lyman articulates one of the novel’s key points: rich or poor everyone finds seemingly idiosyncratic ways to participate in a capitalist system that relies increasingly on “stylistic obsolescence.”196 Cynthia wants to do something for the

Brewsters, an idea Lyman scoffs at because, he explains, “Pride finds its native elements in all strata of society, and riches are comparative . . . . They have seen the tops of their neighbors’ heads as often as you or I” (82). Cynthia assumes that it is her right to dispense charity, but Lyman points out that the Brewsters should be the ones to decide when and if they have material needs (82). Indeed, Mrs. Zelotes Brewster repeatedly bears out the truth in Lyman’s observations, for she believes her paisley shawl and velvet bonnet as fine as sealskins and floating plumes, her household art better than any

Chippendale or First Empire furniture, and her cookery the finest (118, 5). Even relative poverty permits consumer eccentricity.

195 See Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class, 65-101.

196 Roland Marchand details this concept in Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity. 156 Robert and his Aunt Cynthia, however, ignore Lyman’s insight into the class- specific ways that material culture circulates. For, as in The Power and the Glory, uplift efforts in The Portion of Labor are undergirded by the belief that questionable material goods make for questionable consumers. Robert becomes Ellen’s suitor and, thus, is invested in distancing her from a domicile that does not befit the future wife of a factory owner. The Brewsters’ parlor functions as a symbol for all the reasons that Robert wants

Ellen removed. In particular, he fixates on a lamp: “This lamp was hideous, the shape was aggressive, a discordant blare of brass, and the roses on the globe were blasphemous” (209). In calling it “blasphemous,” Robert points out two key aspects of the lamp. First, it subverts domestic material and aesthetic norms that the middle class adheres to with religious fervor. Second, the lamp is so offensive an object that it threatens to change Ellen’s person and character. Indeed, Robert can hardly manage to focus on Ellen at all, but when he does, she has lost some of her beauty. Her suitor even wonders, “If it were possible for one’s spiritual nature to be definitely damaged by hideous lamps” (209).197 Robert’s musings make plain the material foundations of

Progressive reform logic. Even a good girl can be made bad by bad material surroundings. Mrs. Brewster is particularly proud of this lamp, confirming in Robert’s mind the taint of her inferior, often racialized, ancestry and the urgency with which he must remove Ellen from such negative influences.198

197 Robert also anxiously wonders if Ellen could have made the “immoral” postage-stamp plate (210).

198 Casting class antagonism as a working-class pathology, even Ellen’s father, Andrew—who is of traceable Puritan lineage—feels keenly the “taints of his wife’s ancestry” (440). Mrs. Brewster’s sister, 157 With her nephew’s desires in mind, Cynthia offers to send Ellen to Vassar. Ellen tries to be grateful for such patronage but cannot shake the feeling that she is being

“robbed instead of being made the object of benefit” (244). The doll, given to her all those years ago by Cynthia, sits in the corner and presides over the scene. It serves as a reminder that, indeed, Ellen is being made an object yet again. While gazing at the doll,

Ellen feels a familiar sense of injury inflicted by the gift’s “sharp edge” (247). The doll bears witness to the fact that Cynthia’s offer means educating Ellen out of her class, out of her home. It is another tender violence that would deny Ellen agency. In fact, when

Ellen must refuse Vassar and work in the factory to help support the family because of her father’s speculation, Robert’s initial proposal only perpetuates this violence. He speaks to Ellen of uplift rather than mutual love and respect. Enraged by his disparagement of her working-class subject position, Ellen responds, “There is nothing for me to be lifted out of . . . you speak as if I were in a pit. I am on a height” (390).199

She insists that labor is full of honor, and she is an agent who willingly undertakes factory work. As they face the pressures of middle-class acculturation, we will see both our heroines find increasingly material ways to resist the devaluation of working-class subjectivity.

Eva, also has a taste for the garish. Her clothing choices serve to racialize her by warranting comparisons to an “Indian chief in the old pictures” (113).

199 See also pages 445 and 474. 158 LOVING TO FOOL WITH THINGS

Cooke’s and Freeman’s novels entered the literary marketplace amidst a prescriptive turn-of-the-twentieth-century culture invested in constructing new standards for material life. Our heroines are thus faced with the challenge of learning how to aspire without forsaking familial and communal bonds. As working-class loyalists, Johnnie and

Ellen want to honor all forms of honest labor even when they are faced with opportunities for uplift into middle-class respectability. Precisely because class hierarchies were maintained through material goods, the novels’ local color characters challenge middle- class cultural norms through the use of consumer goods. As Michel de Certeau explains, a poacher is a consumer who produces her own “signifying practices” in the process of everyday living (xviii). When Johnnie and Ellen reuse and resignify objects, those objects are out of place because they appear in contexts for which they were not originally intended. Thus, even the most prescriptive forms of material culture can become what

Jane Bennett calls “vibrant matter.” The object can grown luminous with “vital materiality” that runs through and across both human and nonhuman bodies. In the novels, this fooling with vital matter often serves to interrupt what Karl Marx describes as the central social form of the modern industrial economy: the commodity fetish. He argues that the commodity fetish transforms social relations between people into a relation between things. It thereby erases the labor required to produce it and allows the dominant class to continue exerting economic control. Cooke and Freeman imagine vital matter as a way for poachers to create new historical, relational, and creative possibilities despite material norms that are being underwritten by commodity fetishism. 159 As the Passmores prove, even when motivated by need there can be great pleasure in extending the life of a mass-produced object beyond that sanctioned by middle-class norms. The family drinks mountain spring water from a tin tomato can with a string bail attached (14). This is an out-of-place object if for no other reason than it indicates that the mythical urban/rural boundary is a permeable one. The repurposed tin tomato can and string also establishes the Passmores’ mechanical proficiency and competency for improving on what already exists. The Power and the Glory frames this as “loving to fool” with things, and the repurposed mass-produced object signifies not only an expansion of mass-marketed convenience foods but also the creative potential of de

Certeau’s poacher (122).200 Uncle Pros engages the materials given him and constructs the makeshift water pail from a disposable container meant for the trash heap. Similarly, he borrows a broken cradle and radiates pleasure at the fact that with a few nails and some twine it will be as good as, if not better than, new (3).

Uncle Pros’s poaching sets the stage for Johnnie’s “fooling” with things once she arrives in Cottonville. She sees nothing to be ashamed of in loving to fool with machinery, even if she is a girl. This attitude results in her developing a safety device for the looms. She tells Gray, “I never did get enough of tinkerin’ around with machines” when they get “out of order” (82-3). Johnnie’s interest in machinery leads to Gray asking her if she would like to pilot the automobile. When she first drives it, he dismissively fancies her a child with a toy (83). However, the next time she drives the automobile,

200 By 1900, branded food and household conveniences, which included canned foods, were commonplace even in the country stores of rural localities (Hale 170). 160 Johnnie saves Gray from a kidnapping plot. Amidst buckshot and bullets, she still has time to feel a sense of power from the very fact that Gray “could not help her. She must know for herself and do the right thing” (345). Johnnie capably drives the novel’s prevailing symbol of modernity down the Unaka Mountains. Her gender-bending habit of

“loving to fool” is a tendency that just may have taken root in the cradle she first rested in, patched up as it was by Uncle Pros (3).

“Fooling” in The Power and the Glory also describes using an object to ends for which it was not intended. Learning to fool is an integral part of Johnnie’s education out of her flawed desires for uplift. Although she initially wants to pattern herself after Lydia, it is not long before Johnnie actively reroutes her heredity through a cheap pair of slippers. A fellow boarder, Mavity, lends Johnnie her daughter’s slippers for a club dance. Mavity explains that these slippers are the “cheap, ill-cut things” that her daughter

Louvania took off and set on the bridge. Able to climb the netting more easily, Louvania then threw herself into the Tennessee River (140). The reader may well wonder how many workers climbed over netting to end their suffering in the waters below. Not simply

Marx’s fetishized or Brown’s sentimental object, the slippers act as vibrant matter that conjures the dead girl.201 Indeed, Louvania is a present absence at the dance, for the out- of-place slippers make visible her distaste for millwork, as well as the labor it takes to create the capital that supports uplift clubs. Johnnie embraces the cheap pair of slippers and thus aligns herself with Louvania rather than the uplift women. Society men watch

201 Similarly, in Amanda of the Mills, Amanda wears her dead grandmother’s slippers after she has left the cabin for millwork. These slippers make palpable the grandmother’s opposition to millwork and her loneliness at being left by all but Amanda. 161 this mill girl and wonder, “What would you say, in her heredity, makes a common girl like that step and look like a queen?” (154). This likening of Johnnie to a queen suggests that she could pass for middle class, but she instead uses the slippers actively to reroute her heredity through working-class subjectivity. In doing so, Johnnie refuses to play the part of a sentimental heroine who is “naturally” middle class.202

As we see at a party thrown by Cottonville’s country clubbers, Johnnie also refuses to perform white womanhood in a way that satisfies Progressive middle-class standards. For the most part, African American servants populate the novel’s background as stable boys, fiddlers, drivers, and housemaids.203 Johnnie, however, occasions racial visibility and anxiety when she puts on a servant’s uniform and decides to serve Lydia’s guests alongside the African American house staff. She needs a chance to talk to the hostess about her young sister’s premature entry into the labor force, and Johnnie settles on her course of action after looking in on the society party. She “force[s] herself to look in and take note of the difference between those people in there and her own lot in life”

(232). After recognizing that she labors to make the wealthy wealthier, she intentionally positions herself in the role of servant so that she might advocate for her sister. In a moment of potentially transgressive minstrelsy, everyone and everything seems out of place, and Gray uneasily tells Lydia that they should see “that [Johnnie] doesn’t—in her youth and ignorance—fall into such errors as this” (234). That is, Johnnie must be made

202 Karen Sánchez-Eppler describes the sentimental convention of reading the body as a sign of identity (99-104).

203 Notable examples can be found on pages 141, 276, 277, 278. 162 to understand and perform her whiteness in the type of labor she performs, the company she keeps, and the clothes she wears. What he fails to understand is that Johnnie’s actions are not a youthful error. She makes the choice to ally herself with the working classes rather than capital.

Like Johnnie, Ellen repeatedly uses material goods to align herself with the working class despite opportunities to do otherwise. However, Ellen learns to fool at a much younger age. Her first experience “fooling” with things occurs in front of the store window and works to demystify the conditions of production. The Portion of Labor thus demonstrates that even consumer culture’s most hallowed sites of inculcation can become focal points for formulating everyday resistance.204 Looking in the store window, the runaway Ellen experiences intense desire and aesthetic appreciation, feeling keenly that the beautiful fruits have nothing to do with the beefsteak, potatoes, and squash on the table at home; in this moment they are unconnected to “the ends of physical appetite, though she had not had her supper” (18). The narrator suggests—a bit tongue-in-cheek, given the project of this novel—“It takes a child or an artist to see a picture without the instrument of its second dimension of sordid use and gross reflection of humanity” (18).

In the context of this scene, the former subject position is not permanently tenable; the latter, “artist,” is used pejoratively, for it requires one to remain in childlike ignorance of the processes of production and use. It is the sight of dead partridges, grouse, and rabbits

204 Little critical work has been written about Freeman’s labor novel. However, in “Where are the Ladies?”: Wharton, Glasgow, and American Women Naturalists” Donna Campbell argues that Ellen's abduction uses the most common trope of desire in naturalism—the glass window. In this moment, the birth of Ellen’s social consciousness occurs because of individual desire. 163 hanging that allows the people in the background of this tableau to come into focus. For the first time, Ellen sees the butchers, cashiers, and consumers as the people who kill and benefit from the killing. The narrator reflects, “All at once everything was spoiled, for her fairy castle of illusion or a higher reality was demolished, and that not by any blow of practicality, but by pity and sentiment” (18). The store is no long a dazzling mosaic of color and form. Whereas Ellen had previously fetishized the scene as high art, her compassion and indignation open her eyes to “the hard actualities of things” (19). She reconnects the idealized spectacle of consumption to the conditions and costs of its production.205

The store window should be the ultimate display of commodity fetishism—a girl’s entry into consumer culture. Ellen instead fools with its intended purposes and uses it to complete the circuit of production, consumption, and use as The Portion of Labor defetishizes consumer culture.206 While it is sentiment that destroys her fairy castles, the destruction has practical repercussions. In part, it is her experience at the window that arms her against her kidnapper’s material persuasions. When Cynthia finds Ellen with her mouth “curved like an inverted bow of love,” we might well connect Ellen’s disavowal of bourgeois consumer culture to the store window, which becomes a tool of class- conscious resistance (19).

205 The specter of this market window and the dead animals comes to the forefront during Robert’s first visit to the Brewster home when Amabel Tenny asks about the sable collar in which he wraps her (380).

206 In “A Goddess Behind a Sordid Veil”: The Domestic Heroine Meets the Labor Novel in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s The Portion of Labor,” Dorothy Berkson argues it is Ellen’s “qualities of perfection” and self-sacrifice rather than her material poaching that reveal the connection between domesticity and industry, between the public and private spheres (150). 164 Similarly, the fine doll given to Ellen by Cynthia is out of place when it unexpectedly becomes one of the novel’s tools for resistance and class-consciousness.207

As her father and other factory workers debate about profit rights, Ellen goes to her room and disciplines the doll, which functions as her double. She shakes the doll and accuses it of being naughty: “What right have you to be livin’ with rich folks, and wearin’ such fine things, when other children don’t have anything. What right had that little boy that was your mother before I was, and that rich lady that gave you to me?” (107). She turns an object meant to garner her affections back on the gift-giver for purposes that are out of place within the logic of bourgeois material norms because they could not have been anticipated. Grasping the concept of symbolism, Ellen insists on making a dress for the doll out of her mother’s old brown calico (111). Clad finally in a remnant of a dress in which housework had been done, Ellen compels the doll to never again wish for silk dresses when others have so little (112). Thus, the heroine’s interaction with the doll and its clothing transforms it into transgressive vibrant matter. Its very presence poses one of the novel’s prevailing questions: what right? In asking this question, the doll symbolizes

Ellen’s class loyalty and rejection of middle-class material cultural norms.

Finally, both heroines defetishize books that, as a symbol of culture, all too often function as objects that reinforce class hierarchies. Johnnie and Ellen demonstrate that there are ways to “fool with” even a most sacred form of material culture. For example, instead of using books as a way to distance herself from the working class, Johnnie uses

207 Campbell similarly argues that “trapped in Cynthia Lennox's house, Ellen is made an object, a physical fetish. Ellen must choose between class solidarity and upward mobility (“Where are the ladies?” 158). 165 Gray’s books as an affective medium that threatens class distinctions. She spends much of her time “passing her fingers over [a volume of English verses], as one strokes a beloved hand, or turning through each book only to find the penciled words in the margins” (217). Johnnie also values Gray’s annotations more than the poetry. She experiences the sensation of holding his hand as she touches each leaf of the volume. She values the abilities of the book as a material object. As she looks over Gray’s letters, she gathers “the sheets together and press[es] them to her face as though they were . . . the hands of little children” (367). For Johnnie, these texts gain an affective significance that is intimately tied to use, labor, and production. The repeated mention of “hands” here is telling given the novel’s repeated use of “hands” to describe those laboring in the mills.

For Johnnie, the book completes a circuit linking her, Gray, and the mill hands. In emphasizing touch, Johnnie recalls the mill’s morning procession of “tired-faced women with boys and girls walking near them, and, in one or two cases, very small ones clinging to their skirts and hands” (34).208 In the leaves of the paper, Johnnie brings together Gray and the “hands” needed to produce the materials and capital that must exist for a commodity like the book to even exist. By relating to the book as a material—rather than a high cultural—object, Johnnie uses text as a material conduit through which one can reconnect capitalism’s processes.209

208 Johnnie’s interaction with the leaves of this book contrasts desire disordered by fetishism, which the novel suggests removes even those closest to us from the equation. See for instance Pap Himes’s fetishization of his bankbook and Laurella’s fetishization of a necklace, which seems to distract her from protecting her children from mill labor (206, 292).

209 While critics often speak of sympathy as the primary literary and political goal of antebellum women writers, Elizabeth Hoyt’s 1928 retrospective on late-nineteenth-century print mediums argues, “The printed 166 In The Portion of Labor, Ellen is explicit about this imperative to defetishize the book as a material object, for its production is fully enmeshed in capitalist systems. When

Robert encourages Ellen to aspire to “something better,” she hotly responds, “Where would even books be without this very labor which you despise—the books which I should have learned at college? Instead of being benefited by the results of labor, I have become part of labor. Why is that lower?” (389). Ellen highlights the circuit of production, consumption, and use by reminding Robert that labor and consumer goods like books are part of a mutually constitutive system. Ellen thirsts for knowledge and reads every book she can procure, but if books are good, then so too is the labor that produces them. She refuses to be ashamed of her working-class identity. Like The Power and the Glory, The Portion of Labor see objects such as the book as potential vibrant mediums of communication between the author, laborer, reader, and literary subject. As we will see, the novels caution that affective connections must bring to the surface— rather than subsume—the conditions of an object’s production for the marketplace.210

page has furnished a means for bringing different groups into sympathy with one another” (78). The industrial and/or regional literary subject is often depicted as a form of text. For instance, in The Woman Who Toils, Marie Van Vorst describes a fourteen-year-old boy in the Columbia mill as one of many “parchment editions of childhood on which Tragedy is written indelibly. You can there read the eternal condemnation for those who have employed them for the sake of gain.” In Amanda of the Mills, she also describes Henry Euston’s body as bearing “the record acutely of all he had undergone” (Kindle Locations 1176-1177). Lindsay Denison’s “The Unregenerated” (1902) records “An Episode in the History of the Outlaw Folk of the Virginia Blue Ridge.” Ginny, a mountain woman, is described as having flesh that takes on the aspect of “yellow parchment” (440). The body-as-text raises questions about what writers imagined local color could do and the extent to which many writers were aware that theorizing the body as text and vice versa could lead to objectifying the subject.

210 This is a marked break from “literary domestics,” Mary Kelley's term for popular women novelists of mid-century, and Robyn Warhol’s "engaging narrator" who encoded thematically and formally expectations that books are personal communication produced and consumed entirely within the domestic setting. 167 LOCAL SOLUTIONS AND THE MARRIAGE TROPE

Like their heroines who fool with books by using them as conjuring mediums,

Cooke and Freeman set out to accomplish similar work. Their novels address contemporary debates about labor and uplift by putting people back into a counter- version of industrial history. This is transgressive because, as Ewen argues, “Beyond selling goods, American industry was developing and selling a version of current history which extricated the most dangerous element—people—from its process” (108). Both

Cooke and Freeman reject the idea that, by overlaying middle-class material norms onto local workers, social problems could be solved in America’s industrial settings. They also reject national socialist movements and one-size-fits-all unionism in favor of local solutions.211 Instead, the novels imagine factory workers as agents and owners as people who can work together at the ground level to fix a broken capitalist system. After all, if the world changes in character “with a changing point of view,” only individuals can hold a point of view (The Portion of Labor 33). The Power and the Glory and The Portion of

Labor suggest that the abstractions of “labor” and “capital” allow enmity and economic disparity to grow. The novels employ “the local” as a tool for defetishizing industrial capitalism and the consumer culture that underwrites it. In seeking to dissolve economic abstractions, Cooke and Freeman prioritize the subjectivities of their working-class characters.

211 Berkson argues that Freeman’s ending prevents any structural solutions by utilizing the individualistic language of grace and redemption and depicting Ellen as the “angel in the house” who acts privately to change one individual capitalist (166). 168 The novels reintegrate people into the story of labor through the marriage plot; it functions as the novels’ prevailing metaphor for the efficacy of local, contextual solutions. The legal and affective commitments made by Johnnie and Gray, as well as

Ellen and Robert, are akin to what the novels argue must transpire between workers and capitalists. Within these cross-class unions, the heroines also embody a local point of view from which capitalists like Gray and Robert must learn to see. Both The Power and the Glory and The Portion of Labor describe this point of view as the “eyes of love.” The

“eyes of love” offer mothering and Christ-like care as an alternative to the relational violence perpetuated by Lydia and Cynthia.212 This perspective is one that the novels tie to Johnnie’s and Ellen’s abilities to open up new relational, creative, and historical possibilities by fooling with the things in ways that are relevant to the contexts of daily life. Through their rejection of materially based uplift efforts, Johnnie and Ellen reverse reader expectations. They must re-educate Gray and Robert. Cooke and Freeman do not use the marriage plot as a sentimental device in which one only has to “feel right” to ameliorate inequality. Rather, they imagine the solutions that might be agreed upon when local commitments have political and affective ramifications.213

During the scene in which Lydia scolds Johnnie for aspiring to the dress shirt, a

Mrs. Archibald encourages the mill girl to be “the character which gives much love, takes much interest in those about it, makes itself one with other people and their affairs”

212 Indeed, a quick Google Books search between the years 1880 and 1910 indicates that the “eyes of love” was most commonly attached to mothers and the biblical Jesus.

213 Shirley Samuels describes nineteenth-century reform literature’s use of sentimentality to “set up rules for how to ‘feel right,’ privileging compassion in calibrating and adjusting the sensations of the reader” (5). Cooke and Freeman view sentiment as a doorway, not a destination. 169 (108). She sees in Johnnie Walt Whitman’s democratic “fluid and attaching character” whose charm “mocks beauty and attainment” (“Song of the Open Road” 125).214 As the novel’s heroine evolves, she becomes this fluid and attaching character, capable of disrupting and fixing those things and systems that are broken. The only way she can do this is by attuning herself to the struggles that workers face every day, on the ground. Her ability to see individuals as more than types effectively mocks the superficial way that

Lydia organizes the world. This ability to recognize and value the subjectivities of others is a competency that Gray learns from Johnnie. We see an example of his re-education at the uplift dance. As our heroine glides around the floor in her suicide slippers, Gray converses with Mandy because he knows she is important to Johnnie. Their interchange completes a cross-class circuit for which Johnnie acts as the conduit. Mandy marvels that

Johnnie called her pretty, and his reaction is paradigm shifting; it exemplifies the novel’s logic of social change: “Gray turned and looked into the flushed, tremulous face beside him with a sudden tightening in his throat. How cruel humanity is when it beholds only the grotesque in the Mandys of this world. Her hair was pretty—and Johnnie had the eyes of love to see it” (145-6). In the course of this passage, we see Gray shift from the general/abstracted to the local/concrete. The “Mandys” as a type are grotesque, but

“Mandy” as an individual, she has beautiful hair. In this moment, he takes on Johnnie’s democratic fluid and attaching character by seeing through the eyes of love.

214 Johnnie’s “loving outreach to all humanity” is contrasted with other workers’ cynicism (26). For instance, child labor is something Johnnie hopes she never “gets used to” (34-5). 170 According to the novel, the eyes of love inform and are informed by the material.

As a couple, Johnnie and Gray refuse to traffic in abstractions, generalizations, or superficial correctives. Their solutions address specific needs within the Cottonville community, always in consultation with the laborers themselves. Johnnie endeavors to meet needs that are ignored by the prescriptive Uplift Club. She makes sure Mavity and

Mandy are well cared for at the old boarding house. Gone are the lectures and dances.

Instead Johnnie ensures that they have a truck-patch, cows, chickens, and help in the house (359). Gray reconnects capital to labor by implementing a profit sharing program so that mills workers can have a more equitable portion of the profits they produce (266).

He gives $10,000 to found a school that will allow children options by teaching them trades (267). Finally, he is working with Uncle Pros to set up a model mining village and cotton mill (361). Gray has learned to mirror Johnnie’s propensity for fooling. As the predatory Pap Himes incredulously says about the owner, “An’ he’ll do it… He’s juest big enough a fool for anything….A man like that’ll do anything” (266-7). While Pap uses

“fool” pejoratively (mainly because it will interfere with his exploitation of poor workers), the novel has established “fooling” as the transgressive reworking of what is broken. While trying to insult Gray, Pap actually confirms for the reader that the owner’s re-education is practically complete.

In The Portion of Labor, the doll initiates the shift in perspective that Robert will need in order to address the labor question as it relates to Rowe. When Robert finally manages to avert his eyes from the hideous parlor lamp, he catches sight of the doll

Cynthia gave Ellen. He realizes the doll was once his own, and pieces together the fact 171 that his aunt took her all those years ago (218). In his gratitude for Ellen’s silence, he ceases to “repelled” by Mrs. Brewster’s shameless pride in the lamp (220). Indeed,

“through his insight into the girl’s character, he had seemed to gain suddenly a clearer vision of the depths of human love and pity which are beneath the coarse and common.

When Fanny stood beside her daughter and looked at her, then at Robert, with the reflection of the beautiful young face in her eyes of love, she became at once pathetic and sacred” (220). Ellen’s pity towards the foibles of his aunt allows him to momentarily see beyond the foibles of her mother. Thus, Robert’s emergent understanding of the sacredness of even working-class love and pride, however coarsely expressed, is triangulated through the doll.

Robert’s journey, however, from the general/abstract to local/concrete is not a linear one. His self-assurance that he conducts business while “standing on a firm base of philanthropic principle” prevents him from seeing individual laborers instead of the capital that the aggregate—“labor”—creates (499). Robert uses philanthropy as an abstract ideal to be strictly adhered to without consideration of individuals whose needs and viewpoints might differ from his own. Thus, he refuses to tell the workers that he has reduced wages to stave off closing the factory. Robert believes that his paternalistic principles should not need explanation or consent, for they are empirically best (499).

Robert justifies his silence by telling Lyman, “They are all alike; they are a different race.

We cannot help them, and they cannot help themselves, because they are themselves”

(499). Any headway he made in the Brewster parlor is wiped out by his retreat into abstractions and the circular logic upon which class hierarchies are based. 172 Even Ellen finds herself in need of self-correction after she descends into the lofty rhetoric of unionism and class antagonism. Freeman’s labor novel is more explicitly anti- unionist and socialist than is The Power and the Glory. It argues that even well meaning union ideas traffic in damaging abstractions. In vowing to do “whatever it takes to defeat injustice,” Ellen foments a labor strike at the shoe factory (474).215 Yet problems begin to arise when the aggregate “labor” does not honor the agency and needs of the individual laborers. The workers strike for valid reasons; no one wants their pay cut by ten percent, but “justice” is an abstract ideal when children are starving, people are dying, and hearts are breaking. It is precisely this realization that leads Ellen to break the strike she fomented. She tells her fellow factory workers, “I did not count the cost. All I thought of was the principle, but the cost is a part of the principle in this world, and it has to be counted in with it. I see now. I don’t think the strike ought to have ever been. It has brought about too much suffering upon those who were not responsible for it” (516).

Ellen feels profoundly that she has denied justice to those who did not have the power of consent but were caught up in the collective action. Now they must end the strike without having their demands met. In attempting to assert workers’ rights using force—a strategy typically associated with the oppressor—, the novel suggests that the union can become yet another form of oppression that incurs costs far beyond what Ellen can anticipate.

Robert only hears and appreciates Ellen’s rationale for breaking the strike because he loves her. His feelings for her allow him to finally see himself and the industrial

215 The counterpoint to Ellen’s singular pursuit of principles like justice is Sadie Peel’s total disinterest in the strike because she wants to be able to afford her new nearseal cape (474). 173 system with clarity. In this moment, Ellen fulfills a function similar to that of her double—the doll—in the parlor. Robert’s struggle to assimilate the idea of Ellen as a laborer finally leads to a shift in perspective that means seeing laborers as individuals with whom he might partner rather than as an aggregate from which he requires submission.216 Told from Robert’s point of view, his first day back after the broken strike begins like this:

Robert stood in the midst of them, these fellow-beings who had bowed to his

will, and saw, as if by some divine revelation, in his foes his brothers and sisters.

He saw Ellen’s fair head before her machine, and she seemed the key-note of a

heart-breaking yet ineffable harmony of creation which he heard for the first

time. He was a man whom triumph did not exalt as much as it humiliated. Who

was he to make these men and women do his bidding? (540-1)

Generalizations and dismissive stereotyping become less tenable once he cares for someone who self-identifies as a laborer. Robert cannot berate the mill workers without berating Ellen. She is the “key-note,” the link that forces him to understand that labor and capital are mutually constitutive. In asking, “who was he?,” Robert again asks the question “what right?” The answer is “none.”

While it is important that Robert comes to see his workers through the eyes of love, The Portion of Labor insists that an affective response is not enough. The novel refuses to firmly remain in the realm of the sentimental. Rather, it treats his shift in

216 Berkson argues Ellen joins earlier nineteenth-century fiction in presenting heroines as “spiritual guides” (160). While Ellen does finally model defetishization for Robert, the novel makes clear she has her own foibles. 174 perspective from the abstract to the concrete, and the general to the local, as the groundwork for practical outcomes that will impact daily life in Rowe. Robert agrees to a compromise, a plan that he plainly communicates to the laborers. He announces, “I realize it will be hard for you to make both ends meet with the cut of ten percent. I will make it five instead of ten percent, although I shall actually lose by so doing unless business improves” (541). Robert takes into consideration that his employees are human beings with families and needs. A five percent reduction in wages is not ideal, but it does mean that capital and labor will evenly share in the austerity necessitated by a depressed market. Luckily, business so improves two months later that Robert returns the wages to their previous levels (561). By demanding the Robert see her as a worker, Ellen brings about the resolutions that strike could not. His affective response towards Ellen defetishizes Rowe’s industrial system and thus blends sentiment with practical action.

Indeed, the eyes of love open up the contingencies of history-in-the-making.

ON GENRE AND THE USES OF NOSTALGIA

An examination of The Power and the Glory and The Portion of Labor suggests that the industrial labor question was not just adjudicated in the realist texts of male writers such as Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, and Stephen Crane.217

These novels expand critical understanding of the contests in which local color engages, as well as the solutions local color offers in response to those contests. It does bear

217 In The Virtues of the Vicious, Keith Gandal focuses on male authors because interest in the slums was “decidedly masculine and fiercely anti-sentimental” (11). The work of Cooke and Freeman give us a chance to see how women writers engage the conditions of industrial towns. 175 mentioning, however, that the novels’ resolutions depend upon a virtually defunct form of industrial ownership and management. By the early twentieth century, the single- family owner was increasingly being replaced with that of the anonymous corporation, the conglomerate (Trachtenberg 4). Cooke’s and Freeman’s engagement with anachronistic capitalist structures could be used to prove the regressive qualities of local color.218 And, indeed, The Power and the Glory and The Portion of Labor are thick with nostalgia for what has come before, for the homeplace.219

The novels, however, fool with nostalgia. They use nostalgia not as a retreat into the past, but as a way of rewriting it and, in rewriting the past, they author an alternative future. These local colorists insist on the relationality of the past, present, and future.

They use the local as material for interrupting the linear flow of time. Their refusal to let go of the past is analogous to holding on to trash, reusing and resignifying goods that rework narratives about the nation’s inevitable march of progress. In “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” Paul de Man argues, “Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure” (150). That is to say, self-congratulatory moderns requires a severing of the present from the very pasts that

218 For more on the dangers of nostalgia, see Richard Gray’s Writing the South.

219 Indeed, in a letter to Garland, Freeman admitted, “Yes I do consider that I am writing about the New England of the present day . . . I have however a fancy that my characters belong to a present that is rapidly becoming past” (71). In “Looking Backward: In Defense of Nostalgia,” Lears notes that the word “nostalgia” was popularized by nineteenth-century European physicians and meant homesickness. The word lingered in medical literature through WWII as a term characterizing provincials' inability to adapt to the requirements of the military or a modern, placeless market. An attachment to place, in this view, is a pathological, psycho-physiological complaint. 176 local color often narrates. Using the local color genre as an opportunity to fashion literary accumulations, these local colorists unpack abstract principles like “uplift” and

“progress” through the locally specific. The Power and the Glory and The Portion of

Labor are novels that imagine themselves as modern in their nostalgia, each ending providing “a generative moment . . . a principle of origination” in which history’s contingencies might lead to a different future (de Man 152). Cooke and Freeman use nostalgia to insist that the past might just contain something worth holding on to, something of value that could, T. Jackson Lears argues, “accompany a profound and nuanced sense of history” capable of resolving the social problems arising from industrialization (60).

The Power and the Glory makes clear that there is no going back, but that a former time and place can be used as powerful ideological tools. Johnnie repeatedly poses the question that mobilizes the novel’s use of nostalgia as a form of critique: “Is it, the power and the glory, the love and laughter and sunlight, all back there in the heights”

(35)? The answer, of course, is no. After all, the novel ends with a chapter called “The

Future” that promises the blending of sentiment and practical, locally based action. But posing the question is key, as is the homesickness of Johnnie’s loved ones. Their concrete material longings inform the future to which the novel points. For example, falling prey to unhealthy lodgings and pollution, Johnnie’s mother wishes, “If I could oncet lay down befo’ a nice, good hickory fire and get my feet warm (220). When Johnnie’s little sister is sickened by factory work, she remembers playing among clear water and giant trees with her homemade doll and “the house they had built of big stones and bright bits of broken 177 dishes” (242). While forward-looking, self-congratulatory “residents of Cottonville never admitted that roses, or anything else desirable, could be lost in the mills,” the mountaineers’ homesickness animates the construction of a new dwelling place (100). In other words, characters use the past as a form of protest and the material needed to raise a new home in the valley from the disorder of stones and broken dishes. The sunlit mountain heights are the backdrop before which a future can be reconstructed.

The root of Ellen’s critique is also nostalgia, which The Portion of Labor makes concrete through the natural landscape surrounding the Brewster house. Growing up in sight of Norway Spruces, Ellen has long meditated on the paradoxes and uses of the past.

She imagines the spruces “advanc[ing] several paces towards their native land” (1). The idea of advancing back collapses the oppositionality of past and present. Unlike Walter

Benjamin’s backward-looking angel, Ellen does not flee the past, and contemplates the future face-to-face (“Theses” 257-8).220 Just before she delivers her pro-labor valedictory,

Ellen sits under the tree and promises, “Looking backward, looking forward. I will never forget”(187). For Ellen there is no choice between past and future because “the flowers for her always bloomed against a background of the past, and nodded with forward flings of fragrance into the future” (188). In other words, the past is actually before Ellen,

220 In “Compositionist Manifesto,” Bruno Latour reinterprets Benjamin's backward-looking angel: “The Modern who, like the angel, is flying backward is actually not seeing the destruction he is generating in his flight since it occurs behind His back! Here Benjamin depicts the angel of history, wings outspread, looking backwards, seeing a catastrophe of multiple wreckages, wanting to fix things, but not being able to stay because a brewing storm propels him forward” (485-6). The brewing storm is progress. 178 giving form to a future that is as concrete and rooted as the flower blooms. In The Portion of Labor, nostalgia is a tool for seeing the destruction caused by modernity. 221

Local colorists like Cooke and Freeman prioritize the relationality of the past, present, and future. They use the local as material for reproducing social memory that runs counter to narratives of inevitable progress. The novels remember a time just before the corporation when the future could have unfurled in myriad ways. They imagine what might happen if the capitalist circuit of production and consumption took place between individuals granted subjectivities rather than abstractions like “labor,” “capital,” and the commodity fetish. Instead of figuring the past as inert, The Power and the Glory and The

Portion of Labor employ nostalgia as a way to explore the open-endedness of local history. Like the material cultural with which Johnnie and Ellen fool, the past becomes a cultural space in which to chart alternative political, economic, and social pathways.

Filled with local tacticians who fool with material, time, and space, these novels share aesthetic and ideological investments with contemporary regional writing. The material cultures found The Power and the Glory and The Portion of Labor bring us incredibly near the trashy landscapes for which Appalachia is known today.

221 I agree with Martha Satz’s assertion in “Going to an Unknown Home: Redesign in The Portion of Labor” that “this work, ostensibly a social protest novel dealing with the inequities of the economic and social fabric, functions on a visionary level as well” (185). 179 Coda: Aesthetics, Trash, and the War on Poverty

HEIR TO THE PROGRESSIVE THRONE

This project has offered a literary history of abject localities filled with out-of- place material culture. This history is an ongoing one. The very material cultural items overlooked in criticism on the local color genre—the mass-produced, the repurposed, and the discarded—have become integral to representations of modern-day Appalachia and the rural lowland South. Teasing out the through-line between local color writing and today’s white trash hillbilly figure requires our return to Deliverance. The urban tourists see the Oree gas station’s junk and find it remarkable because it makes visible the logical end of a capitalist system based in mass consumption; its junk is horrific because accumulation extends the orthodox cycle of goods—from extraction, production, and consumption to disposal. In effect, nothing ever “finishes up.” Capitalism’s material excesses mean that trash has to reside somewhere. As an abject space, James Dickey’s

Appalachia forces readers to encounter the trash heap. This, in turn, means confronting an economic system that trashes both landscapes and people in order to justify their sacrifice to the gods of Progress and Prosperity. In the novel, the urban tourists’ survival depends upon their ability to transfer the horrors of capitalism onto the hillbillies they encounter.

As Deliverance reveals, by the 1970s, the mass-produced consumer goods that make up the trash heap are no longer out of place in Appalachia, but they remain resolutely out of place within the orthodox cycle of material goods.

180 Deliverance provides us an iconic example of trashy, dangerous Appalachia. Its resonance within popular culture had much to do with President Lyndon Baines

Johnson’s War on Poverty. As part of the “Great Society” that Johnson envisioned, the

War on Poverty was the ideological and political progeny of the Progressive reform era detailed in chapters two and three. Unsurprisingly, its policies also focused on

Appalachia. The War on Poverty shared with its Progressive predecessors the belief that perceived social problems could be best addressed materially.222 Rather than promote structural reform, the era’s paradigmatic federal programs and texts promoted the normalization and extension of “middle-class values, life-styles, and assumptions about the social order” (Whisnant Modernizing 118).223 This explains why Jack Weller’s iconic

Yesterday’s People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia (1965) expresses the socio- economic status of Kentucky’s mountain people in terms of culture: “Like most middle class Americans, I had always assumed that in our modern, mobile society we have a fairly homogenous culture…. We commonly assume that all of us in America, wherever we live, have the same goals, the same ideals, the same drives, and that most of these are oriented upward” (1). Weller identifies the region’s root problem as cultural, not economic. In its implementation of idealized middle-class social organizations and

222 David E. Whisnant argues that, like Progressive-era missionaries, officials and sociologists believed that mountain children could only be saved if “they learned which side the fork goes on” (Modernizing xix).

223 Scholars such as Alan Brinkley and Numan V. Bartley argue that growth-oriented liberalism represented a backtracking from redistributionist politics of the New Deal and failed to challenge structural inequalities (265-271, 38-73). For more on the era’s emphasis on infrastructure also see Tony Badger’s “Lyndon Johnson and Albert Gore.” 181 lifeways, the War on Poverty effectively defined “the nation” as white, middle-class, predominantly urban, and northern.224

In particular, the trash heap came to function as a symptom of undesirable cultural difference and non-participation in national economic prosperity. By this logic, degenerate, trashy people were caught in a cycle of poverty that needed to be broken through the implementation of middle-class material norms.225 Henry Caudill’s Night

Comes to the Cumberlands (1962) is a prime example of how worrisome trash had become to reformers. He observed, “As idleness continued and as pride and self-respect drained away, family dumps were established in back yards or on nearby creek banks.

Heaps of ugly refuse began to dot the coal camps, stinking, breeding swarms of flies and nourishing whole armies of rats” (Kindle Locations 3485-3490). Caudill’s text provides us just one example of an Appalachian locality fast becoming synonymous with its trash heaps.226

Thus, when President Johnson announced in his 1964 State of the Union, “The administration, here and now, declares war on poverty in America,” Appalachia was

224 Even Henry Caudill fell prey to this rhetoric in Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of A Depressed Area (1962): “The nation will not be allowed again to forget its southern mountaineers” (xiv). He perpetuates the idea that Appalachia is not part of “the nation.” For more on attempts to assimilate poor rural communities into an idealized middle-class culture, see The Southern Common People and John Gaventa’s Power and Powerlessness.

225 In The Affluent Society (1958), John Kenneth Galbraith argues that poverty can only be addressed if society ensures “that it is no longer self-perpetuating” (330). By this logic, poverty can only be alleviated by middle-class cultural and economic intervention.

226 See also Thomas Morgan’s “Portrait of an Underdeveloped Country,” published in the December 4, 1962 Look magazine. The article’s photographs supply familiar images of rural poverty in an “other America.”

182 already widely understood as a region of endemic cultural and economic poverty (Eller

Uneven 67).227 In the 1960s, people were examining pockets of rural poverty through the lens of southern Appalachia (Eller Uneven 65).228 This had the effect of blurring the lines between mountain populations and other rural poor in the South. In The Other America

(1962), sociologist Michael Harrington could claim, “The main concentration of rural poverty has been southern” (47). When Harrington utilized spatial rhetoric to describe poverty as an “invisible land of the other Americans,” he further solidified the idea that endemic poverty was an intrinsically southern phenomenon (11).229

This programmatic and ideological emphasis on southern rural poverty continues today. Popular culture makes ample use of the connection between accumulated trash and cultural degeneracy—a previously made connection that the War on Poverty solidified.230

Holly Farris’s Lockjaw: Collected Appalachian Stories (2007) and Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (1999) provide us an opportunity to consider how contemporary

227 In May 1962, Newsweek took note of the “permanent poverty” of the region. It published a summary of a recent study organized by Berea College and edited by the University of Kentucky sociologist Thomas R. Ford. The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey was patterned after the 1935 Economic and Social Problems and Conditions of the Southern Appalachians. The Ford Foundation study sought to demonstrate that the entire region was a problem (Batteau 153).

228 Appalachia was a “domestic testing ground” for strategies promoting economic growth and behavior modification (Eller Uneven 2). It is the only region with its own federal commission. In 1963, Kennedy charged the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) with preparing a comprehensive action plan. The ARC’s lack of accountability led critics to dub it the “Bureau of Indian Affairs for Appalachia” (2). See Allan Batteau’s The Invention of Appalachia and Whisnant’s Modernizing the Mountaineer for more on the ARC.

229 See also Wayne Flynt’s Dixie’s Forgotten People, 94.

230 Trashy people in trashy landscapes have become a favorite theme for representations of “the South.” One has to look no further than TLC’s Here Comes Honey Boo Boo when it features the Georgia family “shopping at the local department store,” a euphemism for dumpster diving (“Shh!”).

183 meta-regionalists conduct their generic maneuverings in response to these dominant narratives.231 Holly Farris (born 1959) grew up in southwest Virginia; Janisse Ray (born

1962) was raised in the outskirts of a town called Baxley in rural south Georgia; much of

Lockjaw and Ecology are set in these places—epicenters of federal and sociological efforts—during the 1960s War on Poverty.232 Their hometowns are connected in the popular imaginary by a through-line of trash and poverty.

Farris and Ray compose regional texts that engage assumptions about what a habitable landscape and culture look like. Of course, doing so means they have to rework formal components of the homogenizing narratives produced by the War on Poverty, as well as the region-as-pastoral theses we have discussed.233 Farris and Ray are notable because, instead of emphasizing folk or pastoral forms to salvage a region’s cultural worth, they embrace the rural regional landscape filled with discarded goods and populated by the “trashy” hillbilly figure.234 Thus, Farris and Ray reject middle-class desires and norms through the disassociation of economic and cultural impoverishment; they do so by imagining trashy landscapes as contexts for generating new creative,

231 In the coda, I have chosen to describe contemporary work as “regional” because “local color” as a generic term largely fell out of favor in the late-1920s. Consequently, I also describe their formal maneuverings as “meta-regionalist” rather than “meta-localist.”

232 In particular, we know relatively little about Farris. For more biographical information, however, see “Holly Farris” at Gival Press and “Janisse Ray” in the New Georgia Encyclopedia.

233 For examples of the region-as-pastoral thesis, see Richard Brodhead’s Cultures of Letters, Wendy Griswold’s Regionalism and the Reading Class, and Emily Satterwhite’s Dear Appalachia.

234 In the 1970s, regional colleges introduced courses in Appalachian studies. This movement in many ways tended towards the anti-modern by defending traditional lifestyles, emphasizing authentic forms of folk production, and romanticizing Appalachian culture (Eller Uneven 171). 184 material, and relational possibilities. Farris and Ray depict their local characters creatively producing Michel de Certeau’s “signifying practices” through tactical engagements with their material surroundings. Characters put old material goods to new uses within local contexts as needs arise in everyday life. In Lockjaw and Ecology, trashy landscapes and people are no longer purely objects of horror; they are affective and political tools.

AT THE CROSS-SECTION OF POVERTY AND THE PASTORAL

Critics do not know what to do with Lockjaw and Ecology because their settings disrupt both anti-materialist expectations of a pastoral region and the still-powerful War on Poverty images of degenerate rurality. Farris’s and Ray’s creative utilizations of regional discourses “indicate a social historicity in which systems of representations or processes of fabrication no longer appear only as normative frameworks but also as tools manipulated by users” (de Certeau 21). Like the meta-localists before them, they take the

“inventory and repertory of combinations” offered them in the form of settings, stock characters, and images in order to engage in a tactical reworking of regional representation (de Certeau 23).

Farris and Ray maneuver at the level of setting by presenting us with a regional aesthetic characterized by the accumulation of discarded consumer goods—a landscape lousy with trash. Although they both set their stories in rural or small town localities, the trashy Appalachian and Georgia landscapes are home to neither idyllic pre-industrial communities nor, conversely, cultural wastelands. "Bloom," the first piece in Lockjaw, is

185 a nine-line prose poem. The poem acts as a lens through which we can read the collection’s interest in how the ruined and abandoned can provide a setting for tactical backtalk to a dominant order.235 Farris depicts persistent local life among the “ruined country chimneys,” “fencerows,” and “pocked fields” (3). Similarly, new relational possibilities arise behind a local gas station surrounded by rotted, rusted, pawned furniture in the collection’s title story, “Lockjaw” (38).236 To an even greater extent than

Lockjaw, Ray’s autobiography foregrounds trash.237 Ray recounts growing up in a literal junkyard by alternating between the natural history of the endangered longleaf pine forests, family history, and her own memories. She attends to the role of mass-produced material objects in local ecology, which Ray shows as giving rise to particular, context- based ways of living.238 In fact, Ray insists, “What I come from has made me who I am”

(33). Here Ray emphasizes “what” she comes from versus “where” she comes in the formation of identity. As Ecology chronicles, the “what” includes consumer culture’s

235 Lockjaw’s “Laid,” “Tilt,” “Decidida,” and “Snakes” also make significant use of trash or ruined settings. “Bloom” first appeared in Poetry Midwest, Spring/Summer 2003.

236 “Lockjaw” first appeared in Frontiers, Summer 2004.

237 Throughout her career, Ray has resisted being pigeonholed into one specific form. She has also published a memoir, Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home (2003); a co-edited non-fiction collection, Between Two Rivers: Stories from the Red Hills to the Gulf (2004); a non-fiction chronicle of environmental restoration, Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land (2005); a poetry collection, A House of Branches (2010); the nonfiction Drifting into Darien: A Personal and Natural History of the Altamaha River (2011); and the sustainable living tract The Seed Underground (2013).

238 Critics emphasize the effectiveness of Ray’s formal and thematic interpolation of humans, flora, fauna, and earth in articulating a radically inclusive regional ecology but rarely consider inorganic material goods as part of regional ecology. For example, see Adele H. Bealer’s “Reading Out Loud” and Bart Welling’s “’This is What Matters.’” The one exception is Jay Watson’s “Economics of a Cracker Landscape” In this article, Watson argues the junkyard is a kind of wilderness in its own right and makes Ray more aware of the nonhuman environment (507-508).

186 trash and a modern, post-industrial ecology that includes the inorganic. Even today, Ray acknowledges, “My people live among the mobile homes, junked cars, pine plantations, clearcuts, and fields” (3). Neither Farris nor Ray disavows the trash heap with which poor, rural southern populations have been associated.

The 1960s fixation on accumulated, out-of-place trash was rooted in the belief that trashy landscapes make trashy people. Farris and Ray also find ample opportunity to maneuver within this association at the level of characterization by utilizing the

“hillbilly,” “redneck,” “cracker,” or “white trash” figure. Heavy migration in the 1950s and 1960s meant that urban dwellers were quick to imprecisely identify newcomers from anywhere in the rural south as “hillbillies.”239 In February 1958, Albert N. Voctaw argued, “The city’s toughest integration problem has nothing to do with Negroes . . . It involves a small army of white, Protestant Early American migrants from the South— who are usually proud, poor, primitive, and fast with a knife” (64). Hillbillies were stereotyped as a regressive and violent race of men that had degenerated because of its isolation in rural areas of the South.

In part, then, Farris and Ray rework the “hillbilly” stock character simply by representing the point of view of the rural women through whom they work to

239 As Jerry Ray Williamson puts it, ““The hillbilly lives not only in hills but on the rough edge of the economy, wherever that happens to land him” (ix). “Hillbilly” was defined by Julian Hawthorne in a 1900 New York Journal article as "a free and untrammeled white citizen of Alabama, who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him." Now it is often used interchangeably with cracker, redneck, and white trash although technically each term can be used for greater regional specificity: cracker in Georgia and hillbilly in West Virginia (Hartigan 53). See also Clyde B. McCoy and Virginia McCoy Watkins’s “Stereotypes of Appalachian Migrants.” 187 disassociate economic and cultural poverty.240 In “Bloom,” Farris uses violent rhetoric to describe flora staking “an aboveground claim” amongst ruined chimneys and fencerows.

Farris takes the most pastoral of settings and transforms it into something angry, even dangerous. The flowers’ actions become increasingly militant, and recall violent accounts of knife-wielding hillbillies like that supplied by Voctaw. Their efforts progress from

"ruffle/nod" to "riot," "mutiny," and "march” (3). The bulbs, once dozing, are now

"exploding" like arsenal (3). The “wayward” flowers and “odd” potato are unsanctioned, a metaphor for those deviant Appalachian hillbillies (3). “Lockjaw” features Janelle and

Brenda, two gas station employees who are “trashy” in many stereotypical ways. Janelle is a pregnant high school drop out who looks at Brenda and despairs: “somehow I counted the chances we’d both inherited but I had given away” (41). The narrator feels exploited and discarded by an absentee father and a boy from the high school who has left her pregnant. In contrast, the U.S. Army affords Brenda her big escape—a familiar story in many small towns (37).241 Ray actually literalizes the connection between trashy places and people that Farris only implies. Ecology begins with a creation story in which

Ray recounts how she was found amongst the piles of her father’s junkyard on a cold

February evening. The infant Ray is literally produced from the junkyard and found

240 Williamson demonstrates that the “hillbilly” has historically been coded as male (ix).

241 Lockjaw reflects the intentionality of a collected volume. Along with the hillbilly figure in stories like “Lockjaw” and “Laid,” Farris gives voice to a range of often-unconventional characters: an African American woman who has lost a grandmother and an arm, a nurse interfacing with female migrant farm workers, estranged lesbian lovers, and even a cat who has been recently spayed. Formally, her stories range from a nine-line poem with no clearly defined speaker to the more traditional first-person narrative voice in “Lockjaw.” Her fifty published stories, poems, and nonfiction articles range from vampire micro-fiction and a remembrance in Appalachian Life Magazine, to erotica in Bad Attitude. 188 among the trash as if she is but another piece of it. And, in fact, she recalls that it did not take her long to understand how others interpreted her worth based on her upbringing: “I was a Southerner, a slow, dumb, redneck hick, a hayseed, inbred and racist, come from poverty, condemned to poverty” (30).

Farris and Ray’s recuperative work is twofold. First, they refuse to take for granted the cultural worthlessness of trashy places. Second, they also refuse to take for granted the region’s pastoral separateness from mass consumer culture. Lockjaw and

Ecology do not formally discount, dispose, or disavow trash—people or things. Farris and

Ray offer tactical maneuverings by their hillbilly figures as a critique of, and alternative to, the aesthetics of middle-class respectability. These meta-regionalists do so because middle-class respectability is apt to devalue the kinds of rural poor that they depict, for it often uses the hillbilly figure as a way to offload the sins of the nation onto some other constituency elsewhere (Harkins 7-10). The proliferation of trash and discarded consumer goods on the landscape forces the reader to confront these southern localities as, in fact, a witness to the kinds of material excesses on which consumer culture relies.242 The visibility of accumulated trash allows Farris and Ray to explore the deeply contextual, unpredictable material tactics by which individuals construct viable local cultures within the materials, systems, and structures given them.

242 Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray similarly argue poor white trash (alternately called redneck, cracker, and the familiar hillbilly) is the specter of the middle class, a repository for "displaced middle-class rage, excess, and fear” about the threat of downward mobility (183). 189 TRASH-HEAP TACTICIANS

Farris’s and Ray’s formal maneuverings provide a literary context in which their characters might also engage in recuperative material tactics. They depict the poacher’s notoriously ephemeral “ways of using things or words according to circumstances” (20).

Michel de Certeau argues that his poacher is akin to Claude Levi-Strauss’s bricoleur, the folk recycler in The Savage Mind who works with “the materials at hand” and readjusts

“the residues of previous construction and destruction” (quoted in 174). The poacher’s and recycler’s choices may not be limitless within the constraints of their historical contexts, but Farris and Ray show the ways in which their characters act as agents who resignify an object’s meaning, value, and the terms of its use. This resignification is inherently disruptive because it denies a dominant cultural and economic order comprehensive control over the meaning of local life.

In errant flowers and potatoes, Farris imagines one instance in which local forms of life flourish despite myriad structural forces. This is “Bloom” in its entirety:

When you awake in spring, watch for wayward flowers. Around ruined country

chimneys, clay stripes like new cuts. Soil stigmata weep. Daffodil heads ruffle

and nod; purple iris leapfrog across pocked fields. Tulips riot calico, in midday

sun. Flowers either mutiny or they march fence rows. Bulbs, having dozed all

winter under sod coverlets, explode. Come early thaw, every odd potato self-

planted sprouts, staking an aboveground claim. (3)

The ruined chimneys and fencerows of Farris’s prose poem suggest an abandoned homestead that was recently cultivated. This setting consciously draws on the 190 outmigration and absentee land ownership experienced by Appalachia as a result of the

War on Poverty.243 For instance, the Appalachian Regional Commission’s (ARC) strategic planning consisted of a “growth center” strategy that assumed urban life represented the ultimate goal of regional development. The ARC hoped rural populations would migrate to carefully-planned, medium-sized cities within or near the region so that less urbanized parts of Appalachia might be developed as a “playground” for tourists or as a resource for corporations (Eller Uneven 183-4). By August 1972, Caudill was convinced that depopulation was a part of the “ARC’s scheme, not because it will benefit people but because it will clear the land for a new round of exploitation by the absentee companies” (quoted in Whisnant Modernizing 248).244 Farris's use of adjectives—

“wayward” flowers and “odd” potatoes—suggests that the material tactics of these life forms are not sanctioned. They are out of place. If we read “Bloom” as a metaphor for all forms of regional life, including the human, then Farris’s use of verbs like “mutiny,”

“march,” and “explode” to describe the flowers’ persistent occupation of that land

243 Writing in the early 1970s, Whisnant argues that attempts to open up the region to economic development are part of the problem: “Corporate monopolization of major resources leads to an inequitable and undemocratic economic and political system which leads to political powerlessness, economic and cultural exploitation and environmental destruction which lead to poor education and social services, minimal income, hopelessness, and out-migration which facilitate further corporate monopolization of major resources” (Modernizing 99). By 1964, only 30 percent of farmers were tenants versus 75 percent in 1930. While farm families made up only 7 percent of families in America in 1960, they accounted for 16 percent of the poor. Of the more than sixteen million rural persons in poor families in 1960, three-fourths were white and over half lived in the South (Flynt 97).

244 Tom Gish similarly argues, “The [ARC] is planning genocide in the mountains . . . No mountain residents, no mountaineers, no mountain poverty, no problems” (14). Mountain Eagle dubs the era’s general strategy of depopulating the region as the “land-use move-‘em-out plan” (quoted in Whisnant Modernizing 247). 191 suggests that local life has been systematically and ideologically undermined. It takes an act of will to occupy and resignify Appalachia’s ruined spaces.

We might also read Farris’s depiction of life emerging from the broken

Appalachian ground as a reference to the region’s environmental devastation. She describes a violence having been done to the very ground, which makes any attempt to thrive a profound event. “Bloom” describes flowers bursting forth from “clay stripes like new cuts.” The clay stripes might refer to the erosion caused by poor corporate farming practices, and for anyone who has seen a strip-mine, it is difficult not to associate the image of cut earth with this mining technique. The line “Soil stigmata weep” directs our attention to a martyred Earth with pocked soil weeping flowers instead of blood. Farris’s use of the stigmata draws on the rhetoric and iconography of biblical sacrifice, which, in turn, recalls the Appalachian Alliance’s famous 1978 argument that Appalachia had become a “national sacrifice area” (Appalachia 1978).245 The kind of awakening to consciousness and life that she describes can thus be read as rebellion against the region’s subordination to national economic interests and corporate profits.

The ruined, abandoned Appalachian home site works as a series of images that mediate the legacy of the War on Poverty and the exploitative industries it promoted.

Thus, the flowers battle against structural and institutional disadvantages that continue to

245 In the early 1980s, a detailed analysis of over 20 million acres in the region revealed not only that ownership of land and minerals in Appalachia was concentrated in the hands of a few corporate giants but also that these corporations were increasingly subsidiaries of multinational energy conglomerates. Large corporations controlled almost 40 percent of the lands and 70 percent of the mineral rights in the survey (Egerton 42-5). See also the Appalachian Landownership Task Force’s “Who Owns Appalachia?” While the mechanization of strip mining increased productivity, it provided employment for fewer miners. Central Appalachia (TN, VA, KY) witnessed the worst decline with a drop of 7.3 percent in personal income and 5% rate of population loss over 1980s (Eller Uneven 210). 192 impact the region today. Farris does not present us a sanitized version of these disadvantages or a romanticized version of unchanged folk culture. Whether flowers or local women, her Appalachian subjects exude frustration even in the text’s most hopeful moments. Farris depicts blooming in spite of a national and corporate agenda that inflicts pain, weeping, and wounds. Farris’s language suggests there is a war being waged, but it is not against poverty per se. These resilient life forms stake an “aboveground claim” among the ruins of a federal agenda that designated Appalachia as a raw material to be used in the name of national progress. Farris suggests that, like the flowers, the people of

Appalachia find ways to assert their agency despite a dominant culture that continues its exploitative management of the region.

In Farris’s “Lockjaw,” trash functions as a challenge to modern conceptions of the

American Dream; trash is also the material with which local characters make their lives meaningful and their worlds habitable. The retrospective story is set early in the federal anti-poverty campaign. When Janelle and Brenda take a break from staffing the local gas station, they head out back and flop down on a set of rusted bed springs “left over from when Shuff accepted furniture pawns” (38). A central tenet of the capitalist system is that the good life is based on an expansion of markets and consumer demands, and, as Miles

Orvell points out, trash is "a symptom of disorder, of things gone wrong, of waste, a negative in the balance sheet of civilization” (287). “Lockjaw” depicts a trash-filled “end of the line” that suggests that the capitalist vision of the good life has failed. The accumulation of trash outside Shuff’s gas station and the lack of options Janelle sees available to her do not suggest the path to universal abundance. Yet even though junk is a 193 symbol of a disordered socio-economic system, it is also raw material ripe for reworking.

The first-person narrator, Janelle, recalls a conversation with Brenda that eventually creates new affective and relational possibilities. During the conversation that ensues,

Farris never lets us forget that the women bond amidst discarded material goods. Janelle kicks at gravel mixed with beer caps, and Brenda finishes her beer and then throws

“brown glass against what could have been the top of a bedroom dresser or kitchen cabinet” (38, 42).

“Lockjaw” immediately alerts the reader to the presence of junk and poverty.

After all, tetanus is a disease most often contracted from rusted metal objects and associated with underdeveloped countries. Brenda tells Janelle about the time she stepped on a nail while wading in the creek that ran below the barn’s main floor (40). Here Farris takes up one of the most popular recurring images of the War on Poverty: the trashy mountain stream. Both Weller and Caudill worried about the environmental, health, and cultural impact of streams made to look like trash heaps.246 Brenda recalls contracting,

“Honest-to-God-lockjaw. My body locked up so tight the least little thing’d send me off…Broke all my teeth inside my own mouth I locked so. Then, I went home and my momma combed my hair constant for a month. They had chopped whatever curls I had

246 Weller described, “Heaps of stinking refuse, old cans, bottles, bedsprings, and cartons made the banks of every stream look like a continuous trash heap. Swarms of flies covered the refuse, and a mass of rats grew fat on it. The bridges of the area were nicknamed ‘garbage tipples,’ as families threw their refuse over the side into the water or onto the bank. Tin cans tinkled down the streams day and night” (98-9). Caudill similarly worried, “For the first time in their history most of what the people consumed was being carried home in paper, glass and tin containers, and the problem of getting rid of them was becoming serious. Sometimes the boxes were piled up at a convenient place near the house and heaps of discarded containers blossomed out everywhere. Increasingly miner and farmer alike turned to the creeks and streams and disposed of trash and garbage by dumping them in these waterways” (Kindle Locations 3491-3496). 194 short. Tetanus left” (41). Strangely, Brenda survives a sickness for which there is no cure in the days before antiserum. It is as if she experiences a psychosomatic disorder in which a mental condition mimics a physical illness. Though there is no definite way to know if

Brenda’s recovery is truly a “miracle,” her mother’s care has a curative power (37).

In “Lockjaw,” junk does not always function as a liability. In fact, if we accept that the junked gas station setting is not incidental, junk emerges as the material with which Janelle and Brenda generate new relational possibilities. It is among consumer culture’s discards that Brenda finds space and opportunity “to tell the miracle that she got better without special medicine” (37). In taking its name from the disease that painfully locks the mouth, prohibiting one from speaking or eating, the story suggests that this telling is the true miracle. A rusted nail may have given her lockjaw, but the rusted bedspring pawned and forgotten is the object on which Brenda suns her body and tells her tale. Junk can have a range of consequences depending on the context. Janelle takes their physical closeness on the bedspring as an opportunity to dote on Brenda, noting her

“knobby knees pointed toward the sun” (38). Through this lovely turn of phrase, Brenda's upturned legs recall the flowers in “Bloom.” We can read Brenda’s telling as a form of claim-staking not unlike the meta-regional work Farris attempts by re-aestheticizing and re-valuing Appalachia through its trash.

Only after the telling do we witness acts of same-sex care and eroticism. It is as if, in the telling and staking of a claim, both the word and the material object have become flesh. The narrator continues the acts of care begun by Brenda's mother, noting “I felt she needed me, needed someone, so she could spit out how it was to be so alone and then feel 195 her way back….I wanted to remind her that people stay all around, whether or not you welcome them at a certain point” (42). To remind Brenda that she is there, Janelle steals an orange Popsicle from the store for the two of them to share. Brenda catches Janelle’s meaning and senses the pregnant girl’s own longing. In Brenda’s hands, the cheapest and most innocuous summer treat becomes an object of desire and healing:

With that, an orange staying inside its wrinkled paper wrapper, single stick leg

poking out, Brenda aimed her Popsicle half along my neck back and shoulders

behind, down my spine’s too-snug tank top, and around front to where my jeans’

belt loops hid under my belly hanging right out. Circles and circles she drew, the

paper envelope catching what sweet melted until its little leg twisted. (43)

The stick leg recalls Brenda’s own legs in the sun. In a lovely moment of eroticized care, the Popsicle acts as a mouth caressing the body and the narrator’s body acts as a mouth for Brenda, melting the orange away down to its mealy core. Through this double surrogacy, both women know “there’s no feeling better than returning from alone”

(43).247 The desires fulfilled in this moment are as stolen as the Popsicle with which they are fulfilled.

“Lockjaw” depicts small town Appalachia in the 1960s as both impoverished and trash-filled, but it rejects the era’s belief that anything of value had degenerated among

247 Lockjaw’s “Tiny Dancer” features a girl who uses her doll to practice kissing her girlfriend (92); in “Snakes,” the exiled homosexual narrator recalls using the “Anatomy” entry in Compton’s World Book as a way to appreciate the naked male form (143). In Farris’s “Lives of the Saints,” included in Best Lesbian Erotica 2010, lovers PJ and Miranda use a kneeler from church to “fuck in every which way PJ can think of using the kneeler” (64). Farris has a penchant for creating characters that use objects in unintended ways.

196 the trash heaps.248 In fact, Janelle and Brenda both engage in material maneuverings that we might understand as mitigating the frustrated desire for which “lockjaw” becomes a metaphor. Brenda describes her illness as an experience analogous to eating the Popsicle:

“My teeth touch that mealy frozen wood. That’s lockjaw, teeth points clamping, on edge, wanting to bite in, nibble something good, but me not knowing how to stop if I did” (42-

3). She likens lockjaw to sublimated hunger for something that society says should not be desired. Lockjaw might be a frustrated desire for a father's attention, meaningful sexual encounters, options for the future, another woman, or the chance to tell the miracle of survival. Above all, Brenda’s lockjaw seems to be caused by a feeling of constraint. It is against this immobilization that Farris imagines her characters making their lives habitable. Her poachers do so by telling tales of survival and using materials goods to construct the meaningful affective connections that dominant culture would view as out of place among the trash.

In Ecology’s “Junkyard” chapter, Ray retells the genesis of her family’s business.

As in “Lockjaw,” the central role of junk in her childhood works to demystify the disappearing act that discarded consumer goods seem to effect. We learn Ray’s grandfather originated the idea in 1955. He reasoned that over five million motor vehicles were processed in US plants that year. Two out of every three cars and three out of every four trucks manufactured were sold as replacements for scrapped vehicles, and there was

248 Indeed, unemployment increased when traditional off-farm employment such as furniture making, logging, and textiles declined in the 1950s. By 1960, Appalachian unemployment was almost twice the national average. Only one in three Appalachians over the age of 25 had finished high school; almost 47 percent had less than an 8th grade education (Eller Uneven 30-31). 197 money to be made off these discarded goods (71). The resulting junkyard and its “ten acres of failed machines” questions inherent “progress” in our nation’s consumer growth by reminding us that those objects discarded for new ones accumulate somewhere (23).

The visibility of the junkyard from Highway 1, then the major thoroughfare from Maine to Florida, has the effect of making the post-war, 1950s economic boom considerably less romantic. Moreover, Baxley’s local economic conditions necessitated car repair and thus kept the junkyard afloat. Ray notes, especially in the rural south, “Most people were poor enough and handy enough to fix their own cars” (71). As has always been the case then, growth is experienced unevenly. The junkyard is material evidence of this.

Ray reveals through her family history that junk does not always signify a cultural deficit but might actually generate new creative possibilities in the form of bricolage. In the chapter, “Native Genius,” she explicitly employs the anthropological concept of folk recycling. There is remarkable overlap between Ray’s and de Certeau’s use of the bricoleur as a way to describe creative agencies. Ray employs the term to explore the material tactics she learned from her father and, thus, to disassociate economic and cultural impoverishment. She writes,

I know now my father’s occupation has an actual title; he is a bricoleur, a term

given by French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss to folk recyclers, people of

creativity, vision, and skill who use castaways for purposes other than those

originally intended, sometimes for art. Theirs is a native genius—as Joe Graham

explains in his paper about milusos, meaning thousand uses, of Mexico—that

198 goes beyond simply making do with what one has. Native geniuses are able to

take the materials and technology at hand and solve complex problems. (89)

Ecology is littered with examples of her father creatively solving problems and meeting needs with the materials at hand. For example, her father uses old leather boots and shoes as a source of slow fertilizer, knowing that leather is rich in nitrogen (90). He builds guns from junk and engineers a nut-removing tool out of a lawnmower blade and two or three pieces of flatiron (90). Like the folk recycler, Ray’s father poaches from the materials at hand, which he gives new meaning through reassembly.

As we see in the interchange between Janelle and Brenda, the tactical maneuvering or bricolage in Ecology is not just about eking out a living or “making due.”

Ray repeatedly returns to her father’s most enduring lesson: the sheer pleasure that goes into material (re)creation. She admires the grape arbor he constructs by “welding together truck dive shafts, hollow metal rods that connect engines to tires, like iron logs” (90). Ray describes this creation as “the leafy joy of wire and vine” (90). She learns this joyful play from her father and brings it to her own bricolage. She does not seek the reader’s pity for her childhood because the junkyard is a playground of possibility. A young Ray filches stubs of chalk and uses a bluish-green 1950 Nash as a chalkboard for pretend school (17).

She invents games like the “Thingfinders Club” so that she and her siblings can imaginatively ransack junked cars for valuables (24). Poverty and hardship exist in the rural South, but such economic realities yield much more than the despair of tarpaper shacks and bent-over women. Like many of the tacticians in “Losing Appalachia,” Ray

199 and her family find purpose in extending the life of things beyond those uses imagined by consumer culture and middle-class material norms.

Defying regional writing’s pastoral mode, Ray primarily uses the junkyard— rather than Georgia’s pristine long-leaf forest—to critique capitalism’s material excesses.

Repurposing and reuse constitute a kind of backtalk to the dominant order that is inherently dangerous. As Ray notes, “‘Genius is inspired by necessity and encouraged by opportunity, is not satisfied with merely the status quo’” (91). Her father’s bricolage calls into question the lifecycle of material goods, the very logic and sustainability of the planned obsolescence upon which the modern economy is built. His collection and use of trash suggest that there is no once-and-for-all “end of the line” for material goods. In rejecting the status quo lifecycle of commodities, Ray and her father shift the emphasis from market value to production and use value, allowing the lifecycles of material goods to spin off into multiple creative and practical possibilities.249

Without romanticizing poverty or her upbringing, Ray’s autobiography suggests that generative forms of sustainable living are not limited to the pristine wilderness retreat.250 Moreover, regional life appears in literary forms more diverse than the pastoral paeans on which critics so often fixate. The lesson of the junkyard is the surprising adaptability of things, both organic and inorganic, material and formal. Ray describes growing up among “hordes of rubber tires that streaked [her] legs black, among

249 Sarah Robertson similarly argues that Ray’s account of her father’s skills undermines the wastefulness of the privileged classes (169).

250 For instance, though Ray advocates for the value of southern cultures, she is honest about having felt isolated from the world and hampered by strict religious practices (115).

200 pokeweed and locust” (127).251 Ecology suggests we must think differently about those people, places, and things we consider “trash.” Thus, it is in her meditation on the “clump of pitcher plants that still survives” that we find what Ray values most: “the glory of purpose no matter how small” (128). The wonder she feels in the carnivorous plant’s design teaches us not to discount the scarred mountaintop, clear-cut landscape, piles of trash, or “trashy” people. This wonder is the final gift of the bricoleur who sees “value in things most of us wouldn’t glance at twice” (74). Farris and Ray would have readers look again, to reassess dominant definitions of “value” and “Culture.” New creative possibilities are but a maneuver away as the practice of everyday life provides countless opportunities to become tacticians, to bloom in the gap of a dominant socio-economic and cultural order.

ON GENRE AND THE STEADFASTLY LOCAL

This project has attempted to reassemble an alternative literary history of local color. When Emily Satterwhite concludes her study of pastoral local color writing by lamenting the lack of diversity in literary depictions of the local, she elides literary and critical discourses (210). The tendency of critics to see local color as a reiteration of urban middle-class subjectivities says more about the orientation of critical discourse than the literary field. As “Losing Appalachia” demonstrates, meta-localist writers have

251 Ray explores this idea of adaptability in the Wild Card Quilt chapter, “In This House We Are Not Separate.” Ray catalogs holes in her grandmother’s house and the creatures that take advantage of these openings. She is trying to rehab the house, but is drawn to the comingling: “In the openness of our house, I didn’t feel separated from the rest of life. It was a fine habitat” (214).

201 long produced diverse texts, but they so rarely find their way into studies that examine the local color genre. In the case of Farris and Ray, their works have received little critical attention, despite several prestigious nominations.252 Farris had to shop around her unorthodox collection before it finally found a home with Gival, a small press out of

Arlington, Virginia.253 Similarly, various presses refused to publish Ecology unless Ray removed all natural history from the manuscript, and reviewers have had mixed responses to Ecology’s formal hybridity (Raver and Davis).254

I have detailed a literary history of meta-localist writings that are, first and foremost, interested in local subjectivities. In this coda, I have sought to extend my analysis of writers who imagine what local color can tell us about the local that exceeds the urban middle-class imaginary. The writers included in this study utilize the genre as an opportunity to consider how local subjects repurpose forms and objects to maneuver within a socio-economic and cultural system over which they have little control. Perhaps meta-localists are largely omitted from studies of the genre precisely because, in using

252 Farris has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and Lockjaw was a finalist for the 2007 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Debut Fiction. Lockjaw was reviewed very briefly by George Brosi in Appalachian Heritage and by Theresa L. Burriss on the Appalachian Voices website. Ecology was a New York Times Notable Book; was selected as one of Bloomsbury Review Editors’ Favorite Books; and received the Southern Environmental Law Center Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment, Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, Before Columbus Society American Book Award, and Southern Booksellers Award.

253 In 2003, Banyan Review reports that Farris is shopping around a collection then called To Have and to Hold.

254 Jan Z. Grover finds the natural history sections “feel a bit like thin filling surrounded by sumptuous bread,” (11) and Orion Magazine continues the food metaphors by arguing Ray “lards her narrative with mini-essays on south Georgia’s natural history” (75). Tony Horwitz belittles “Ray’s paeans to pokeweed and yellow point” as “repetitive” whereas Publisher’s Weekly finds “Ray’s writing is at its best when she recalls her most harrowing memories . . . These scenes resonate during the interpolated naturalist chapters.”

202 literature to think theoretically about place, they ask us to actually read local color as steadfastly local. They defy simple generic classification because they depict local subjects who tactically resist being fully assimilated into urban middle-class norms. It is my hope that “Losing Appalachia” will serve as a catalyst for the exploration of new, diverse textual connections within local color writing, as well as an increased critical awareness of the subject positions from which these connections are made. As critics, our work produces knowledge. It is, therefore, inherently social and political.

There are many entryways on the map.

203 Afterword: Dynamite-Crate Doors

I never learned to be ashamed of trash. An old washstand sits in my kitchen that was not nice even when it was new. Cheap and mass-produced, it sat nearly sixty years in

“Julie’s house” at the edge of my family’s property on Hazel Mountain—a high spot just over the Dickinson County, Virginia line. The washstand came to me with dynamite-crate doors that were scavenged from the coal company’s warehouse. The bricoleur who repaired it cared about the details. She fashioned the doors precise and even. When something simpler might have sufficed, she made pulls out of a wooden spool cut in half and secured them with rusted nails and leather washers. A history of coal mining, exploitation, consumption, poverty, and ingenuity coheres in this washstand.

The doors make sense to me. I think of my father stretching out the bridge of his new work boots with canned goods made wider by electrical tape and newspaper. Or watching an old glove wave at me from the windshield of our pickup, a replacement for a busted wiper. This creativity is motivated by generations of need and scarcity, but also by a joyful, exuberant play. Manipulating material goods in unorthodox ways highlights the non-linearity of the extraction-production-consumption-disposal cycle. I see in this manipulation a refusal to comply with material norms that seem to justify the logic of class hierarchies. Instead, my family learned to be suspicious of new things. My grandfather believed that the only people who had nice things stole and cheated to get them. Perhaps this is the mentality of a life lived in an extraction zone where wealth and resources never belong to the people or land that produces them.

204 This dissertation has attempted to trace out the literary and cultural antecedents of dynamite-crate doors. It has taken an admittedly personal experience with bricolage as a provocation for rethinking the stories that critics tell about local color’s people, places, and things. For what are critics but bricoleurs—de Certeau’s tacticians and poachers? We repurpose, reuse, and reassemble things others would not glance at twice. From specific subject positions, we pursue various investments by imagining the formal and political possibilities that literary study offers. We reassemble until we are left with an old washstand and its dynamite-crate doors—a critical object grown luminous in its historicity.

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