RACE, REGION, AND REALISM IN THE POSTBELLUM FICTION OF ALBION TOURGÉE, CHARLES CHESNUTT, GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE, AND MARK TWAIN by KATHERINE BROWN BARROW (Under the Direction of James Nagel) ABSTRACT In the literary movements of Regionalism and Realism that emerged in the wake of the Civil War, Albion Tourgée (1838-1905), Mark Twain (1835-1910), George Washington Cable (1844-1925), and Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932) contributed to the growing field of Southern fiction within these traditions. With varying degrees of verisimilitude, romance, and satire, all four of these authors placed issues of race and nationhood at the thematic center of their most influential novels. In many of their postbellum works of fiction, such as The Grandissimes, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins, A Fool’s Errand, Bricks without Straw, Mandy Oxendine, The Conjure Woman, The House Behind the Cedars, and The Marrow of Tradition, they explored the persisting racial problems of American life in the last quarter of the nineteenth-century and developed themes that suggested that the nation was still mired in the problems of its past. Perhaps the most significant aspect their postwar novels share is the manner in which they present African American protagonists who actively pursue a better life for themselves by challenging the white patriarchal order. Through various methods of empowerment, such as verbal trickery, escaping slavery, passing into white life, educational and economic advancement, as well as the subversive acts of protest, violence, and revenge, these characters refuse to submit to the social hierarchy to which they are bound by either custom or law. INDEX WORDS: Albion W. Tourgée, Charles W. Chesnutt, George Washington Cable, Mark Twain, Realism, Regionalism, Local-Color, African American Fiction, Southern Fiction, Postbellum Fiction, American Civil War, Federal Reconstruction, The Grandissimes, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins, A Fool’s Errand, Bricks without Straw, Mandy Oxendine, The Conjure Woman, The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow of Tradition, The Quarry, Paul Marchand, F. M. C. RACE, REGION, AND REALISM IN THE POSTBELLUM FICTION OF ALBION TOURGÉE, CHARLES CHESNUTT, GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE, AND MARK TWAIN by KATHERINE BROWN BARROW A. B., University of Georgia, 2001 M. A., University of Georgia, 2005 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2013 © 2013 Katherine Brown Barrow All Rights Reserved RACE, REGION, AND REALISM IN THE POSTBELLUM FICTION OF ALBION TOURGÉE, CHARLES CHESNUTT, GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE, AND MARK TWAIN by KATHERINE BROWN BARROW Major Professor: James Nagel Committee: Hubert McAlexander, Jr. Hugh Ruppersburg Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2013 iv DEDICATION For my husband, Charlie v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to James Nagel, for his support and guidance. His example of professionalism, his love of American literature, and his unending enthusiasm for the pursuits of his graduate students have made an enormous impact upon my graduate studies at The University of Georgia and a lasting impression upon my understanding of what it means to be an exemplary scholar and mentor in our field. I have worked with many wonderful professors at The University of Georgia, and it is with much admiration and gratitude that I thank Hubert McAlexander, Jr., whose legendary Southern literature seminar I had the privilege of attending, and Hugh Ruppersburg, for his participation on my graduate committee. My family and close friends have been a constant source of encouragement during my doctoral work. Thank you to my parents, Marie and Milburn Brown, for their enduring love; my sister, Mary Ashby, for being a second-mother to her nephew, Charlie, who was less than one- year-old when I was writing in the Spring of 2012; and to my wonderful Savannah family, for all of their love, laughter, and support. I would especially like to thank my aunt Rachel Sanborn, who was there for me, in countless ways, every step of the way. A special note of thanks is also owed to Joseph Whitehorne, for introducing me to the works of Albion W. Tourgée at a Thanksgiving table in Madison County, Virginia. The writing of this dissertation would not have been possible without the patience and devotion of my husband, Charlie. For his support, and for the incredible delight we share in our little boy, I am filled with boundless love and gratitude. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................................................v CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................1 2 ALBION TOUGÉE AND THE FICTION OF SOUTHERN RECONSTRUCTION…........................................................................................70 3 AMERICAN BLOODLINES IN GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE’S THE GRANDISSIMES AND MARK TWAIN’S PUDD’NHEAD WILSON ...............115 4 PASSING AND PERSONAL ADVANCEMENT IN THE FICTION OF CHARLES CHESNUTT ........................................................................................................195 5 CONCLUSION ..........................................................................................................267 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................306 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In the literary movements of Regionalism and Realism that emerged in the wake of the Civil War, Albion Tourgée (1838-1905), Mark Twain (1835-1910), George Washington Cable (1844-1925), and Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932) contributed to the growing field of Southern fiction within these traditions. With varying degrees of verisimilitude, romance, and satire, all four of these authors placed issues of race and nationhood at the thematic center of their most influential novels. During the same period that they were achieving literary success, black Americans were experiencing the incremental loss of their newly won civil liberties. The historical movement towards disfranchisement that followed the end of Federal Reconstruction in 1877, for instance, would be extended in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, which limited the protection of the 14th Amendment and overturned the Civil Rights Bill of 1875. With Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the post-slavery practice of legal discrimination already in place in the Jim Crow South was legitimized by federal law. Using antebellum legal precedent, the U. S. Supreme Court upheld Act 111 of the Louisiana state-law under which Homer Plessy, a man one-eighth black and seven-eighths white, was arrested for boarding a "white only" railway car four years prior. The ruling against Plessy resulted in the “separate but equal” doctrine of citizenship for black Americans that existed until Brown v. The Board of Education in 1954. By holding that Homer Plessy was “colored” on account of the imperceptible fraction of his bloodlines that were of African descent, America's highest court legalized the cultural tradition 2 of “one drop” determinism. It is from this paradox of American life that emerge the representational worlds of Tourgée‟s A Fool’s Errand (1879) and Bricks without Straw (1879); Cable‟s The Grandissimes (1880); Twain‟s Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894); and Chesnutt‟s Mandy Oxendine (1897), The House Behind the Cedars (1901), Paul Marchand, F. M. C. (1921), and The Quarry (1928). Though they are seldom studied together, these works are united thematically within the postwar period of American literary history by the reformist manner in which the authors engaged the persisting issues of racial inequality in the Deep South. Except for Tourgée, who was a Northerner and a Union veteran, all of the writers were Southerners born before the Civil War who published their most enduring fiction in the post-emancipatory period. Despite the fact that Cable and Twain were born into slave-holding families and very much devoted to the Confederate cause at different points of their youth, they both came to see slavery as a grave injustice and a national travesty, a reality that Chesnutt, as an African American and descendent of slaves, understood all-too-well throughout his early life. Tourgée, for his part, came to understand the deep-seated racial problems in the South when he moved to North Carolina after the Civil War, witnessing first-hand the rise of Ku Klux Klan and its program of terrorizing not only the freed slaves but also those individuals, such as himself, who challenged the status quo. All of the authors, despite the various ways in which they were exposed to the racial hostility and sectional resentments that in large part defined their contemporary Southern culture, integrated these themes into their fiction with a power and prescience anomalous to the larger currents of mainstream fiction in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Albion Winegar Tourgée was the defense attorney who represented Homer Plessy in 1896, and he was also the first American author to fictionalize the Reconstruction South in 3 popular literature. Born on May 2, 1838 in Williamsfield, Ohio, Tourgée grew up in a rural farming community located in the Northeast region of the state, which was commonly