Making Sense of American Regional Literature, 1865–1914

MAKING SENSE OF AMERICAN REGIONAL LITERATURE, 1865–1914

Emma Calabrese

A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature.

Chapel Hill 2018

Approved by:

Eliza Richards

Elizabeth Engelhardt

Jennifer Ho

Tim Marr

Jane Thrailkill

ABSTRACT

Emma Calabrese: “Making Sense of American Regional Literature, 1865–1914” (Under the direction of Eliza Richards)

While a recent turn toward sensory studies has increasingly led critics to examine what literary representations of the sensorium can tell us about American cultural history, scholars have yet to consider the prevalent role of sensory experience in American regional literature.

This dissertation argues that, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American writers analogize acts of writing and reading to a variety of sensory experiences bearing strong associations with place. They do so in order to approximate the sensory pleasures of local life for readers across the nation at a moment of rapid industrialization when middle-class consumers felt increasingly estranged from localized cultures, folkways, and communities.

Each chapter examines turn-of-the-century representations of a different sensory experience bearing strong associations with a particular U.S. region: sugar production and consumption on Louisiana plantations and in New Orleans shortly before and after the Civil

War; intense visual experience in the nation’s first Chinatowns in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York; women’s perfume-making in New England; and, in the dissertation’s coda, the sensations of making and drinking Appalachian moonshine as depicted at the end of the nineteenth century and as contemporary writers continue to portray it today.

Taken together, these chapters attend to how the language of sensory pleasure has allowed readers to virtually occupy spaces, inhabit cultures, and access identities not their own.

The legacies of this language remain with us today, from a contemporary vogue for recovering

iii craft industries among middle-class hobbyists to the appropriation of marginalized cultures across popular media. Today, as middle-class Americans increasingly grapple with the damaging effects of their own claims over regional folk cultures and industries, it is imperative that scholars trace the history of these forms of entitlement. Through the intersectional prisms of race, gender, and class, this dissertation examines expressions of regional pleasure that coopt and monetize local cultures, as well as remarkable moments of literary resistance to these processes.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express enormous gratitude to those who have guided and supported me as I have worked to complete this dissertation. First and foremost, I offer thanks to Eliza

Richards, my dissertation advisor, who has read countless drafts and spent many hours helping me to conceive and execute this project. I cannot imagine having completed it without the benefit of her subtle and creative thinking and her invaluable mentorship. Thanks also to the rest of my committee members, Elizabeth Engelhardt, Jennifer Ho, Jane Thrailkill, and Tim Marr, each of whom has been instrumental in the project’s development.

Thanks also to the colleagues, friends, and family members who have offered their support and cheer during a challenging few years. Among the many people who have provided a sense of community through the ups and downs of graduate school, I extend especial love and gratitude to Yik Lam, Andrew Calabrese, Bridget Bacon, Rosa Calabrese, Rachel Norman, Lina

Kuhn, Laura Broom, Kym Weed, Leslie McAbee, Ocean Eerie, and Steph Bryant. A passion for literature brought me to pursue this project, but it’s all of you who gave me the confidence and perseverance to complete it.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES...... viii

INTRODUCTION...... 1

Making Sense...... 1

Defining Regions...... 8

Approximating Pleasure...... 15

Politicizing Fantasies...... 16

Reading Local Dispatches...... 19

Works Cited...... 24

CHAPTER 1: CRAVING SUGAR IN LOUISIANA REGIONALISM...... 27

Introduction...... 27

Grace King’s “Carte Blanche”...... 34

The Louisiana Planter and the Racialized Poetics of Sugar-Making...... 48

The Future of Whiteness in George Washington Cable’s “Café des Exilés”...... 60

Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Bitter New Orleans...... 75

Works Cited...... 82

CHAPTER 2: VISUALIZING CHINATOWNS IN TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY PRINT CULTURE...... 85

Introduction...... 85

Early Chinatown Optics...... 93

Storied Chinatowns...... 96

Sightscapes in Circulation...... 116

Edith Maude Eaton’s Subjectivities...... 128

Works Cited...... 141

CHAPTER 3: FRAGRANCE, PUBLICATION, AND THE POLITICS OF DISSEMINATION IN THE WORKS OF DICKINSON, FREEMAN, AND JEWETT...... 145

Introduction...... 145

Meaning and Olfaction in New England...... 152

Emily Dickinson and the Gender Politics of Passive Labor...... 157

Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Poems and Potpourris...... 166

Sarah Orne Jewett’s Diffusions...... 185

Works Cited...... 198

CODA: LITERARY MOONSHINE, YESTERDAY AND TODAY...... 204

Introduction...... 204

Appalachian Moonshine in History and Literature...... 208

Today’s Literary Spirits...... 216

Conclusion...... 226

Works Cited...... 229

vii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 - Wores, T. Shopkeeper...... 100

Figure 2 - Wores, T. Fishmonger...... 101

Figure 3 - Wores, T. Restaurant corner...... 103

Figure 4 - Street scene. Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton)...... 109

Figure 5 - Duncan, Walter Jack. Title image...... 111

Figure 6 - Evans, J.W. Shop scene...... 112

Figure 7 - Duncan, Walter Jack. Babies and dragon...... 113

Figure 8 - Riis, Jacob. Man on the street in New York’s Chinatown...... 122

Figure 9 - Cover of Mrs. Spring Fragrance...... 137

Figure 10 - Title page of Mrs. Spring Fragrance...... 138

viii

INTRODUCTION

Making Sense

As industrialization led to the instantiation of class hierarchies in the U.S., an educated, affluent, and racially homogenous American middle class emerged, eager to access a rich variety of regionalized cultures that seemed exotic by comparison. Building upon this history, this dissertation attends to the central but as yet under-acknowledged role that language of sensation has played in granting middle-class Americans an impression of access to cultures and identities not their own. Through representations of the sensory experiences of making, distributing, and consuming goods in American regional literature at the turn into the twentieth century, writers create analogies between their own texts and locally made products that seem to confer access to otherwise inaccessible spaces. In doing so, they figure literary representations of sensation as a means by which the products of remote, alluring, disappearing, and forbidden artisan economies and local industries can be recreated across the nation.

The resonance of these representations among turn-of-the-century readers depended upon an emergent sense of entitlement among members of the middle class to lay claim to folk cultures and local industries. In her study of class division in nineteenth-century American literature, Amy Schrager Lang affirms the views of historians who have argued that “the deep economic inequalities of the mid-nineteenth century” precipitated the creation of an American middle class (10).1 Ironically, Lang outlines, the defining qualities of this class have been

1 As Amy Schrager Lang points out, “That an unjust distribution of the ‘avails’ of industry had in fact divided their world into a ‘high’ and a ‘low’ class could hardly have escaped the notice of urban Americans” (Lang 2). 1 disavowed by its own members: the middle class, in her framing, can be understood in terms of

“the characteristic, even definitive, denial of class by the nineteenth-century middle class” (10).2

In Lang’s assessment, the social and economic privileges conferred by membership in the middle class allow for a refusal to grapple with trenchant forms of disparity that continue to endure today (Lang 13). Amy Kaplan builds on this perspective in her analysis of the appeal of literary constructions of region at the end of the nineteenth century: for economically comfortable and racially privileged middle-class readers, “The native inhabitants of regional fiction could be rendered…as ‘the folk,’ the common heritage from which urban dwellers had simply moved, always available for return” (Kaplan 251). According to both Lang and Kaplan, middle-class privilege afforded affluent readers opportunities to indulge in the pleasures of social difference without acknowledging the ways in which they benefitted from systemic inequality. Middle-class readers are, by Lang’s and Kaplan’s definitions, invested in affirming the cultural power conferred by economic, racial, and gender privilege.

I argue that, by reveling in the sensory pleasures associated with the nation’s byways, readers might imagine themselves to be connecting with people and cultures that lack these forms of privilege—while also refraining from confronting the damaging effects of both privilege and its absence in American society. Regional texts take on the sensory qualities of the spaces that they describe in order to make localized customs, populations, and landscapes both portable and palatable: to consume a text that conveyed the pleasures of regional life obviated the risks and challenges of encountering regional cultures and their members more directly.

2 As Lang points out, historians have navigated the denial of identity inherent to middle class experience by characterizing the middle class in terms of “demonstrable changes in the character and experience of work, in family strategies and organization, in customs of deference and styles of self-presentation, in residential patterns, and in patterns of consumption at midcentury to argue for middle-class formation” (10). 2

Each chapter in this dissertation explores a different set of regional fantasies made possible by evocations of sensory experience: representations of sweetness in Louisiana literature conveying nostalgia for an antebellum moment unmarred by racial divisions; optical fetishizations of the exotic in Chinatown stories; fragrance in New England regionalism’s seemingly contradictory fantasies of female enclosure and transgression; and, finally, the intoxicating and potent pleasures of moonshine in representations of clandestine experience in nonfiction about Appalachia. These fantasies demonstrate how versatile language of the senses is in catering to consumers who seek to access seemingly inaccessible spaces. Taken together, the three chapters and coda that comprise this dissertation examine how turn-of-the-century literatures of place evoke sensory experience in order to romanticize local life. In turn, these texts claim to carry the very sensory qualities that they describe, themselves becoming commodities available for purchase across the nation.

The first and second chapters examine exoticizing representations of racial difference in literatures of Louisiana and the nation’s earliest Chinatowns, respectively. The first chapter, on literatures about sugar production in antebellum New Orleans and nearby plantations, explores texts that evoke sweetness in order to call up nostalgic fantasies of antebellum modes of life, seemingly lost in the wake of the Civil War, and convey them to readers across the nation. In focusing on Louisiana writings, I examine a fusion of urban and rural pleasures: writers express nostalgia for an idyllic Old South imagined to have been lost by evoking the pleasurable candies, liqueurs, and other sweet delicacies available for purchase in the city. For example, George

Washington Cable’s short story “Café des Exilés” (1876) memorializes a group of immigrants from the West Indies that gathers over sweet liqueurs and lemonades in a New Orleans café in

1835. In expressing nostalgia for the aesthetic pleasures of ethnic difference in New Orleans

3 through images of tropical liqueurs, the pleasure of reading the story itself analogizes the pleasure of consuming sugar. In formulating this analogy, Cable figures his story as a proxy for the sweet delicacies that he describes.

In the second chapter, I explore the distribution of visual experiences associated with

Chinatowns in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. This chapter examines literary expressions of fascination and frustration with Chinatowns’ seemingly inscrutable goods, buildings, and unassimilated residents, catering to a prevailing culture of xenophobia among middle-class readers at the turn of the century. In these texts, Chinatowns’ visually arresting qualities seem not to yield deeper insight into these spaces, as journalist D.E. Kessler suggests when he describes San Francisco’s Chinatown as a kaleidoscopic image, “always new and glitteringly attractive” but ultimately illegible (445). Further compounding a sense of

Chinatowns’ inscrutability, publishers and writers recapitulate them optically in the striking but often also disorienting and enigmatic illustrations and photographs that accompany written works. Taken together, these texts and the paratextual images accompanying them indicate attempts, among a largely white and middle-class reading public, to overcome its own limited access to culturally and ethnically coded spaces through acts of looking.

The third chapter turns from representations of race to gender in literatures of rural New

England. In seeking readers, female New England writers show, they risk encountering dismissal and contempt for their dual “minor” statuses as women and inhabitants of non-cosmopolitan

New England hamlets.3 Emily Dickinson, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Sarah Orne Jewett each cogitate on the limitations they face in pursuing an art form considered to be primarily the

3 Literary critic Louis Renza developed the concept of “minor literature” as a “conservative justification for an established if variable concept of ‘major literature’” (Renza 3). In other words, minor literatures by definition stand in contrast with literatures demarcated as “major” by prevailing literary sensibilities.

4 province of city-dwelling men.4 They set out to overcome these limitations through evocations of scent, comparing their works to perfumes that are capable of wafting beyond the New England homes that contain them and attracting attention on behalf of their creators. For example, in The

Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Sarah Orne Jewett dramatizes commonalities between the fragrances emitted by a woman’s herb garden and the writings on this subject published by her female characters and herself, as narratives and scents alike transmit powerful understandings of

New England life seemingly unmoored from their creators. This chapter thus reflects on the challenges faced by writers who identify “too” strongly with the regional cultures and underprivileged populations about which they write, and writerly attempts to circumvent this problem by catering to readers beyond these spaces through the language of enticing scent.

Writers and publishers thus appealed to readers with the promise that, through literature, locales that had been previously inaccessible to middle-class readerships were packaged for their delight and readily available for consumption. I end the dissertation with a coda on the powerful legacies of such forms of dissemination in nineteenth- and twenty-first-century nonfictional accounts of Appalachian “moonshine”—illicitly produced whiskey, usually made of corn.

Indeed, the stakes of these legacies of nostalgia, longing, and fantasy are immense, as today we inherit a mainstream culture controlled by middle-class white consumers and the corporations that cater to them. In the twenty-first century, the cultural appropriation of underrepresented populations is widely sanctioned and encouraged; the gentrification of neighborhoods historically occupied by economically and racially marginalized people is widespread; and

4 Women’s writing was often coded as sentimental “trash”—as Nathaniel Hawthorne referred to it in his infamous attack on “that damned mob of scribbling women” (Hawthorne). Even male authors who wished to praise their female contemporaries often revealed condescension toward women as writers of more minor and picturesque works, as did Henry James when he lauded Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs as a “beautiful little quantum of achievement” (James 30). 5 enormous media conglomerates and corporations, from Time Warner to Amazon, ensure cultural homogeneity even as they pay lip service to diversity of perspective and background. Some of the writers and publishers whom I examine in this dissertation were integral in cultivating among mass consumers a sense of entitlement and access to spaces not their own. Others demonstrate resistance to such a strategy, and instead lament the entry of literary tourists and consumers into spaces that, they imagine, are vulnerable to change.

Ultimately, the Industrial Revolution brought on a new publishing culture of purchasable pleasure: in buying texts, middle- and upper-class, primarily white consumers were also buying experiences, or at least approximations thereof. This dissertation is therefore a study of the late nineteenth-century origins of a particular type of American consumer privilege: a sense of entitlement to occupy, control, and claim others’ regional and cultural spaces. Writers alternately endorse and critique, consolidate and question, this culture of privilege during the decades of its inception.

Serving Up the Local to the Masses

As scholars of American literature have noted at length, regional writers at the turn of the century celebrated imagined regional pasts through narrative; Richard Brodhead, Amy Kaplan, and Donna Campbell supply influential examples of this perspective. For example, Campbell notes regionalism’s preoccupation with describing “dying economies and vanishing folkways”

(Campbell 8). In this dissertation, I take up these perspectives in order to advance a more radical claim about the relationships of readers and writers to notions of place at the turn of the century.

Responding to Kaplan’s and Brodhead’s theorizations of “literary tourism,” which highlight the roles of middle- and upper-class reading publics in popularizing depictions of place at the turn of the century, I argue that writers see themselves not only as archivists or preservationists, but also

6 as active participants in the perpetuation of local industries. By implying that products of declining industries and the sensory experiences that are associated with them can be reconstituted in texts’ rhetorical, formal, compositional, and material qualities, writers figure themselves as local workers. In these works, narrators, authors, publishers, editors, and illustrators bear similarities to craftspeople, industrial laborers, agriculturalists, enslaved plantation workers, shop owners, street vendors, and other working contributors to regional economies.

As writers analogize their own craft to localized forms of production, distribution, and consumption, they work from the premise that texts are capable of reaching broader audiences than locally produced and sold goods: sensory experiences that seem accessible only within geographically contained areas become transmittable via text, and in this way writers figure themselves as local producers with access to far-flung consumers. I therefore argue that the sensorium not only plays an important role in advancing writers’ efforts to memorialize local experience; even further, by approximating the sensory pleasures they describe in writing, authors fundamentally reconfigure the relationships between local economies and American consumers in a turn-of-the-century consciousness. In approximating sensory experience textually, writers of regional literature served their readers delights that were heretofore only available—or imagined to be available—within the confines of the nation’s regionalized landscapes, from the cottage industries of rural communities to the tourist economies of the nation’s earliest ethnic enclaves.

In this way, a vogue for literatures about place in the second half of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth centuries reflects a growing consumer culture: these literatures sell themselves to audiences by exploiting consumers’ desires to access fading, jeopardized, isolated,

7 and otherwise seemingly inaccessible landscapes by imagining sensory contact with the products of these landscapes. Regional literature represents an early experiment in mobilizing the sensorium—and the forms of exoticism, longing, and nostalgia that it provokes—to sell products to eager consumers.

To encounter the sensually pleasurable qualities of local life through contact with books, periodicals, advertisements, and other texts seemed to grant a sense of rootedness, belonging, and community that felt evermore out of reach to American consumers at the advent of mass industry. Through processes of textual transmission, sensory experiences that once seemed possible only within particular, geographically circumscribed spaces became widely accessible to mass consumers. This period thus saw the emergence of well-to-do readers who claimed affiliation with regional identities. The consequences of this development remain with us today in a culture that idolizes products designated with words like “artisanal,” “heritage,” “local,” and

“authentic”—indicating the extent to which the rhetorics that prevailed in turn-of-the-century regional writing continue to dominate our attitudes toward local life. Likewise, websites like

Etsy and Pinterest respectively disseminate and instruct in the making of handmade and locally produced goods to a globally connected public. A vogue for textually approximating a set of sensory experiences associated with local life at the turn into the twentieth century thus constitutes the advent of a mainstream American predilection for embracing and appropriating local experience.

Defining Regions

To explore the strategies by which writers disseminated textual approximations of local experience to consuming publics, working definitions for both “region” and “regional literature” are necessary. I argue that creators of written media mobilize the sensorium in order to transmit

8 the experience of existing within geographically, culturally, and economically demarcated spaces: New Orleans and its rural environs, the nation’s first Chinatowns, small-town New

England, and backcountry Appalachia. Invoking Benedict Anderson’s theorization of “imagined communities,” I characterize a “region” or “place” as a space that is not always or necessarily bound geographically; rather, my definition of “regionalism” echoes Anderson’s definition of

“nationalism” insofar as the spaces I examine function as “imagined political communit[ies]” that are “conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (Anderson 7). I focus especially on the ways that particular cultural markers—from women’s handicraft in New England to the shared visual qualities of Chinatowns across the nation—constitute region in an American imaginary.

Sometimes authors and characters express ownership of these markers, as do Freeman and Jewett in their celebrations of female craft; sometimes, conversely, such markers are imposed on members of regional communities without their own participation, as does Cable when he conflates West Indian immigrants with tropical syrups in New Orleans. I define a

“region” or “place” as a geographical space that writers demarcate through sensory language, contained within but also distinct from the nation as a whole.

In turn, I define works of “regionalism,” “regional literature,” and “literature of place” as texts—newspaper and magazine articles, novels, poems, tourist guides, and more—that contain representations of places, as well as the industries and products that constitute them. Such broad characterizations of region and regionalism open up possibilities for studying interrelated phenomena: the advent of a print culture that distanced consumers from sites of economic production, and subsequent readerly longing to inhabit these sites.

The case studies that comprise this dissertation highlight the often messy and conflicting images of place that different sets of publishers and readers have imagined, from those

9 conventionally understood as “regional fiction” and published in high-brow periodicals like the

Atlantic Monthly, to poems and articles published in the trade journal The Louisiana Planter and

Sugar Manufacturer, to poems by Emily Dickinson—who famously refrained from publishing by conventional means during her lifetime.5 I take up this assortment of writings in order to demonstrate the breadth of turn-of-the-century literatures about place that mobilized the sensorium in order to serve up fantasies of place to readers—or, in the case of an author like

Dickinson, whose refusal to publish indicates an unwillingness to commodify the spaces from which she wrote. To what extent should the pleasures of local life be made available to buyers across the nation? In purchasing these pleasures, were consumers morally obligated to acknowledge localized pain and violence, as well? My goal is not only to examine the rhetorical and compositional strategies by which writers explored these questions, but also to document the ideological variety that emerged from their pursuit of such questions. I am therefore interested in characterizing what I call “regional literature” in somewhat broader terms than scholars have conventionally defined it, in order to highlight the versatility of sensory language in both creating and dismantling fantasies of place.

Attempts to categorize works of literature that focus on place remain fraught in today’s scholarship. I therefore characterize my capacious approach to defining regionalism in opposition to scholarship that takes pains to catalog generic differences among these works. As

Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse have noted, anthologies of American regionalism at the end of the century labor over distinctions among regionalism, local color fiction, realism, and

5 Many scholars of regional literature take up a less capacious body of works in order to focus on the generic and linguistic conventions that cut across texts that share publishers and audiences. For example, Nancy Glazener’s landmark study of what she calls the “Atlantic group” of publications explores the shared audiences, ideological leanings, and stylistic patterns of a group of periodicals, exemplified by the Atlantic Monthly, that were popular at the turn of the century. The texts that I examine are more varied: while Glazener differentiates the more high-brow works that appeared in the Atlantic group from contemporaneous “story papers and dime novels” (9), I am interested in the ideological patterns and conflicts that emerge across these texts. 10 naturalism, and consensus over the differences among these categories remains elusive.6

Fetterley and Pryse themselves likewise attempt to distinguish between local colorists and regionalists by designating the former set’s mission to “entertain and satisfy the curiosity of late- nineteenth-century urban readers,” and the latter group’s goal to “present regional experience from within” (American Women Regionalists xii). However, elsewhere Fetterley and Pryse express interest in destabilizing these categories altogether by introducing a “crisis-creating

‘third’” set of writers who “cannot be contained in either category, as evidenced in part by the instability of their assignment in contemporary anthologies” (Writing Out of Place 9).

Following Pryse and Fetterley’s attentions to ideologically unstable texts, I define the regional mode capaciously in order to emphasize the complicated means by which authors variously codify and dismantle understandings of local experience. My analysis focuses on the messy forms of overlap between sensory experience and ideology in these texts and the violence that often occurs when writers and readers mistake one for the other: by describing and inducing sensory pleasures, writers risk dismissing or obscuring race-, class-, and gender-based violence in the locales that they describe. Moving away from definitions of regionalism that emphasize particular generic qualities, I therefore take up a range of texts that portray the transmittable qualities of place, from literary confections that celebrate a mythically sweet Louisiana plantation history to the visually arresting Chinatown cityscapes that allow readers to revel in the exoticism of racial difference during the early decades of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Such a focus on localized sensuality, I argue, constituted a response to market forces on the parts of writers and publishers: at a moment in U.S. history when many Americans

6 Pryse and Fetterley cite The Portable American Realism Reader, edited by James Nagel and Tom Quirk (1997) and American Local Color Writing, 1880-1920, edited by Elizabeth Ammons and Valerie Rohy (1998) (Writing Out of Place 8). 11 understood the nation to be homogenizing, readers enjoyed fantasizing about the remote, romantic, and exotic qualities of its unique locales. They were able to do so all the more easily when the very texts that described local life served as proxies for the goods that were produced in and circulated within these locales. In recent years, literary critics including Stephanie Foote,

Hsuan Hsu, Tom Lutz, and J. Samaine Lockwood have advanced fascinating studies of the relationships among regional writers, their works, and their reading publics. Each of these scholars has followed Kaplan and Brodhead in attending to the ways by which writers mobilize representations of place in order to comment on national political, economic, and social conditions, and the types of audiences susceptible to these representations. While these studies all explore how turn-of-the-century regional literatures reflect and determine the prevailing values of national audiences, this study is unique in highlighting the central role of the sensorium to this process. Here, I explore the longstanding consequences of replicating sensual pleasures, which had once seemed geographically circumscribed, for boundless reading publics.

Sensing Places

In support of this dissertation’s focus on the emergence of rhetorics of sensuality in

American history, I examine the crucial role of the sensorium in representations of relationships between people and the object world. I argue that, through a variety of linguistic, narrative, compositional, and material strategies, writers and publishers sought to bind their texts to the material world—and thus to establish these texts in proximity to physical space. By this formulation, texts exist as things, they occupy space, and they engage the senses. Thus responding to scholarship in the emergent and influential field of New Materialism, I attend to the mutually constitutive relationship between linguistic and material meaning in turn-of-the- century print culture.

Bill Brown’s work resounds here, as he examines relationships among people and things in American regional literature. Investigating the cultural significations of material objects in turn-of-the-century regionalism—his analysis of the work of Sarah Orne Jewett being exemplary—Brown seeks to address “the set of questions raised by the effort to turn matter into meaning” (Brown 84). Yet, with this dissertation’s focus on sensation, I introduce a third category to his inquiry. I argue that, in many works of regional literature at the turn of the century, emphases on sensory pleasure result in conflations of meaning with matter: when a text about New England perfume-making is disseminated across the nation for readerly consumption, it takes on the diffuse properties of scent that it describes.

Writers and publishers thus yoke sensory encounters with the material world to the meanings that people assign to place. In other words, they blur boundaries between sensory contact with material objects and the thoughts, values, and ideas born of this contact. The stakes of this blending are immense. By drawing meaning from pleasurable encounters with the object world, writers and publishers imply that things possess inherent meaning—that inside each thing bearing strong cultural associations with place, there exists an essential form of regional particularity. This dissertation therefore aims to explore how they further evoke the pleasurable sensations associated with meaningful things, in order to appeal to readerships. Taking Brown’s theoretical framework and applying it to the coterminous rise of mass industry and popularization of regional writing, I explore how writers and publishers sold the pleasures of place to a broad consumer base. For the first time, buyers could imagine gaining access to seemingly inaccessible things—and, as publishers quickly discovered, developments in print production and distribution provided easy access to textual approximations of these things.

I therefore additionally draw from scholarship in the field of sensory studies. While a scholarly turn to representations of sensory experience in literature is still in a nascent phase, several recent studies offer insight into how works of literature mobilize the sensorium in formations of ideology. Especially relevant to my own project, for example, is the work of Kyla

Wazana Tompkins on the racially burdened language of taste and eating in nineteenth-century

American literature; and June Hee Chung on how literary catalogs of decorative ornaments in turn-of-the-century American literature perpetuate Orientalism.7 Beyond such intersections of sensory and literary studies, I take up work on the sensorium by scholars in other fields, such as

Sidney Mintz’s influential world history of sugar; April Merleaux’s more recent cultural studies analysis of sugar’s history in the U.S.; Constance Classen’s and Jonathan Reinarz’s cultural histories of smell; and Elizabeth S.D. Engelhardt’s work on how writers mobilize representations of Appalachian foodways, from tomato canning to moonshine making, to define and explore notions of gender.

Each of these studies evokes the sensorium in order to draw conclusions about the political, economic, cultural, and literary histories of a variety of geographies: the globe, the nation, and even the nineteenth-century domestic interior, as Diana Fuss has explored. However, scholars have not yet considered the function of the sensorium in mediating among a variety of scaled geographies, from rural New England and the plantation South to bustling metropolitan hubs. The notion that people across the country and world could access places by consuming the meaning-laden essences of local life has emerged over a period of more than a century. During this period, middle-class, largely white consumers have assumed the privilege of appropriating

7 Other recent studies of sensory experience in literature include Catherine Kesyer’s analyses of taste and color in twentieth-century representations of the food industry and Hsuan Hsu’s ongoing work on how writers invoke olfaction to comment on environmental injustice. 14 local spaces through experiences of sensory pleasure. For the privileged consumer, texts render every place knowable.

Approximating Pleasure

I attend specifically to evocations of sensory pleasure in regional literature because, in portraying American regional life as pleasurable, turn-of-the-century writers were able to simplify and sugarcoat—and otherwise obscure—lived experiences of isolation, violence, and hardship within local communities. They did so, I suggest, in order to capitalize on feelings of readerly longing to inhabit the nation’s remote byways, fading regional pasts, and unfamiliar neighborhoods: By evoking the sensory pleasures associated with these seemingly inaccessible spaces, writers satisfied this longing. I therefore define sensory pleasures as the forms of satisfaction, contentment, indulgence, and intoxication enabled by the senses, which writers both describe in their works and approximate at the level of narrative and poetic form and composition.

Further, I make the argument that texts stand in even more effectively for place than the goods that they evoke and imitate: though not all middle-class Americans had the resources to browse the visually appealing paraphernalia available in Chinatown shops at the turn of the century, they gained access to these experiences by reading books and periodicals; while perfumes made by hand in rural New England were not distributed on a mass market, stories about them could be; while the sweet delicacies produced in antebellum New Orleans were no longer available for purchase in the postbellum South, consumers could still seek out narratives of these delicacies; and while today’s consumers cannot return to nineteenth-century Appalachia, depictions of corn whiskey that cultivate nostalgia for this setting allow buyers to imagine what inhabiting it might feel like. Thus, texts function as even more powerful versions of the objects

15 that writers compare them to, by reaching consumer bases that less transportable objects could not. Texts exceed their analogs. Indeed, at the turn of the century, they were uniquely versatile and portable in their capacity to create a sense of place for public consumption.

I thus understand publishers and popular writers as a vanguard of economic thinkers that viewed industrialization as an opportunity to sell pleasurable experiences to eager audiences. By figuring texts as conveyors of sensually potent reading experiences, authors and publishers were able to cultivate a new consumer culture by selling fantasies of local experience to people across the country. And, in seeking to consume narratives of geographical isolation, disappearance, and exoticism, middle-class readers demonstrated a desire to gain access to experiences associated with non-mainstream cultures that were perceived to exist only in circumscribed spaces. With the approximation of these experiences in printed texts, instantiations of local life could be distributed to broad readerships.

Politicizing Fantasies

Here, I explore the expansive effects of these forms of literary influence, which can be both productive and damaging, progressive and conservative, therapeutic and violent. By inducing pleasure in readers, many writers minimize the strife faced by the regional populations that they describe. As I show, these writers often sugarcoat, smooth over, soften, and otherwise diminish complicated and sometimes violent political, economic, and cultural events afflicting a variety of communities during the latter half of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. Often, they do so in order to sell more product. To be sure, the pleasures of local experience are more marketable than the complicated racial, gender, and class dynamics that undergirded many communities during this period.

Such forms of minimization often yield even more violence, erasure, and disenfranchisement, as George Washington Cable’s “Café des Exilés” (1876) demonstrates: in codifying his story as a sweet treat, Cable figures the West Indian immigrants whom he describes as embodied delicacies available for readerly consumption. Beyond this example, I attend to the forms of violence and erasure that ostensibly pleasurable texts inflict on localized communities, from unmarried women in rural New England to the ghettoization of Chinese immigrants in

Chinatown fictions. Yet, even as regional writers sought to market representations of regional life to national audiences during this period, such efforts frequently met resistance. I therefore attend not only to texts by writers who seek to sell sensually pleasing regional landscapes to consumers; I also examine works that push against, question, and dismantle these commercializing efforts. Offsetting the sweet flavors that Cable evokes and approximates in

“Café des Exilés” is Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s “The Praline Woman” (1899), which imagines and induces the pleasures of eating candy only to imply that these pleasures are superficial—indeed, that they mask the underlying bitterness inherent in a city built on racial hate.

In each chapter, I thus trace the ideological tensions that characterize regional literatures.

These literatures variously aim to sell pleasurable understandings of American regional cultures by evoking the sensorium and aim to highlight the forms of effacement that such acts of commodification entail. Taken together, the texts I examine demonstrate the mutually constitutive histories of American regional imaginaries and American publishing strategies at the turn into the twentieth century. A vogue for seeking out the pleasures of the nation’s heterogeneous regions and enclaves led writers and publishers to capitalize on fantasies of local life, which they did by granting readers fictive access to geographically remote and circumscribed locales.

I therefore attend to a wide range of regional literatures in order to demonstrate the significant power that writers and publishers wielded to determine predominant understandings of American regional landscapes. As the publishing industry underwent massive transformations with the advent of mass print culture and global distribution networks, large publishing houses created and perpetuated powerful regional fantasies. As Janice Radway and Karl F. Kaestle note in their new history of American print culture, developments in all areas of industrial life, from transportation to mass production and “infrastructures of distribution,” contributed to the instantiation of mass print culture. As daily and weekly newspapers sprang up across the nation after the Civil War,8 print magazines and periodicals gained ever larger readerships with the introduction of advertising;9 and with the increasing consolidation of book and magazine publishers within a few urban centers (namely New York and Boston), these transformations allowed writers to reach ever-expanding reading publics.

Thus, in attending to texts produced in the final decades of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth, I make a case for regional writers’ roles in creating, popularizing, and perpetuating an enduring understanding of the nation’s heterogeneous landscapes as sites of sensual pleasure. By framing the significant role that rhetorics of sensory experience have played in attracting readers to narratives of place, I make a case for the powerful social and economic functions of these rhetorics. Further, the forms of pleasure, violence, and privilege that attend such rhetorics remain with us today, as I explore in the coda: in my discussion of today’s

8 As Radway and Kasetle describe, newspapers “proliferated” in the late nineteenth century (Radway and Kaestle 11). For more on the growth of dailies and weeklies during this period, see the work of Ted Curtis Smythe, who remarks that “the transformation of mainstream journalism” took place in both urban and rural publishing settings (Smythe ix); and Michael Emery, Edwin Emery, and Nancy L. Roberts note that between 1870 and 1900, “the number of daily newspapers quadrupled” (Emery, Emery, and Roberts 157).

9 See Radway and Kaestle for more on the replacement of subscription-based models of profit generation with advertisement-based models at the turn into the twentieth century (103).

18 nonfictional depictions of craft moonshine distillation, I reflect on the forms of economic privilege that enable participation in this micro-industry, and the corresponding feelings of

Appalachian belonging that often attend such privilege. These strategies affect consumers’ understandings of their own access to local spaces.

In the twenty-first century, consumers continue to associate a vast array of mass- produced goods with geographically localized cultural and economic practices. This dissertation therefore serves as an opportunity to reflect on the forms of cultural and economic privilege that have allowed consumers to use their purchasing power to claim local belonging for over a century, and the forms of violence that often attend these acts of buying. Taken together, the texts that I examine demonstrate how forces of capitalism emerged with the advent of mass industry to supply fantasies of local life to a consumer base that could afford to buy and enjoy these fantasies—and, coincidentally, a rise in voices that oppose such capitalism and its effects.

For, as I additionally examine, histories of fantasies about local life are also histories of resistance to such fantasies.

Reading Local Dispatches

In the following chapter summaries, I articulate the political, economic, and cultural stakes of these representations across four different sets of regional literature, each of which characterizes place through evocations of the sensorium.

In the first chapter, “Craving Sugar in Louisiana Regionalism,” I examine representations of the production, processing, sale, and consumption of sugar in literature about New Orleans and nearby plantations at the turn of the century. I argue that Louisiana writers strive to reconstitute a sense of what it meant to live as a well-to-do white person in the antebellum South by figuring their representations of sugar and sweetness as proxies for sugar itself. At narrative

19 and figurative levels, stories and poems about sugar replicate the forms of pleasure, satisfaction, and social status that the consumption of sugar itself confers. Postbellum authors of Louisiana literature describe a loss of economic status, which appears in their works in the once-great antebellum sugar industry, the infrastructure of which was largely destroyed in the war.

However, they counteract this loss by imagining parallels between antebellum sugar and postbellum stories about sugar, thereby recuperating lost economic status with an emergent literary tradition that strives to glorify and romanticize Louisiana’s economic past. By expressing nostalgia for lost economic capital, writers thus strive to gain cultural capital. After examining several works that alternately yearn for and strive to recover an imagined vision of a thriving antebellum New Orleans, I turn finally to Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s incisive short story “The

Praline Woman.” While this story at first appears to recapitulate an analogous relationship between sugar and stories about sugar—“The Praline Woman” is as compact and pleasurable as a praline—in the end it dramatizes the bitter racial conflicts that continue to reside in New

Orleans as legacies of pre-war economic practices.

In Chapter 2, “Visualizing Chinatowns in Turn-of-the-Century Print Culture,” I turn to representations of visual experience in literature about the nation’s first Chinatowns, in San

Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. With the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in

1882, works of Chinatown literature functioned as sites of representational tension over the cultural and economic impacts of Chinese immigrants on mainstream Anglo American society.

In this chapter, I explore how writers and publishers enact a racist project of depicting

Chinatowns and their residents as visually arresting but ultimately illegible. Publishers further perpetuate this perspective by analogizing Chinatown neighborhoods to paratextual matter, or the

20 visual components of the texts that describe these images.10 Drawing from the images accompanying Chinatown writings as well as representations of visual media for sale in the nation’s Chinatowns by authors including Edith Maude Eaton, Helen Hunt Jackson, Jacob Riis, and several authors of Chinatown tour guides, I argue that writers at the turn of the century alternately affirmed, negotiated, and resisted notions of Chinese inscrutability. Recurring images of Chinese people and the spaces they inhabit as inscrutable, flattened, and vacant icons of racial difference allowed writers and publishers to stoke readers’ feelings that the Chinese posed a threat to Anglo American culture—while consolidating this threat in a visually alluring package that attracted readers eager to stoke the flames of xenophobia already alight in the U.S. Such rhetorical formulations indicate the violence wrought by imagining human bodies as objects of sensory enjoyment. At the same time, I identify several moments where writers critique their own impulses to flatten Chinatowns’ human residents by inhabiting Chinese subjectivities.

The third chapter, “Fragrance, Publication, and the Politics of Dissemination in the

Works of Dickinson, Freeman, and Jewett,” examines representations of New England women who make and disseminate fragrances. I argue that Emily Dickinson, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Sarah Orne Jewett analogize processes of making and sharing fragrances to processes of writing and distributing poetry and fiction. In comparing a feminine artisanal practice—perfume- making—to the labor of writing, Dickinson, Freeman, and Jewett explore women’s efforts to gain recognition for forms of craft that both their local communities and influential members of a turn-of-the-century print culture seek to discredit. These authors, I show, compensate for a

10 The term “paratext,” which was coined by literary theorist Gérard Genette, denotes the supplementary material and stylistic qualities accompanying a literary text, such as the cover, illustrations, prefatory text, and typographic qualities. Genette defines paratext in his 1997 Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Genette). Georg Stanitzek usefully outlines the theoretical challenges that this term has posed to scholars in “Texts and Paratexts in Media” (Stanitzek 27-42). 21 prevailing culture in which women artists were discouraged from seeking recognition by imbuing the products of their work—texts and perfumes alike—with the autonomy to travel outside of seemingly enclosed New England parlors and gardens, and attract recognition on the behalves of their creators. Ultimately, Dickinson, Freeman, and Jewett express fantasies of passive ambition: although the women who appear in their works may suffer the consequences of reaching overtly for readers beyond the confines of their small New England communities, readers might better appreciate texts that seem to waft through space unattached to their female creators. Detached from their gendered creators, these texts are enticing to readers who might otherwise be skeptical of the value of female authorship in a male-dominated print culture.

In the coda, “Today’s Appalachian Outlaws and Their Nineteenth-Century Progenitors,” I examine how contemporary representations of moonshine are informed by late-nineteenth- century literature about corn whiskey production in Appalachia. Here, I trace the consolidation of the mythic figure of an intoxicated, clannish, and violent moonshiner, which I trace back to late nineteenth-century works of fiction about the Appalachian backcountry. From here, I turn to both nineteenth- and twenty-first-century nonfictional accounts of moonshine culture that articulate an alternative moonshiner persona: an independent-minded figure whose commitment to earning money for his family drives him to distill liquor illegally. This version of the

Appalachian moonshiner, I argue, appeals to middle-class readers seeking to indulge in fantasies of transgression while maintaining a sense of moral uprightness. I argue that nineteenth-century portrayals of corn whiskey and the renegades who make it cater to ideals of capitalism, self- sufficiency, and masculinity—all of which have combined to inform a contemporary “DIY” culture in which only the economically privileged can afford to participate. I thus end this dissertation by reflecting on how images of place, transportable via the senses, operate in

American culture today: inherited from nineteenth-century progenitors, these images strengthen class hierarchies by catering to a population of Americans who have the financial resources and leisure hours to spend pursuing liquor distillation as a hobby.

Ultimately, in figuring texts and the goods that they mimic as extensions of place, authors and publishers imply that seemingly unique and self-contained locales can be moved, conveyed, transposed, and transplanted to buyers across the nation. The legacies of this notion remain with us today, in an American culture where consumers regularly lay claim to non-dominant cultures by ingesting stories about these cultures. At the turn into the twentieth century, changes in immigration flows and mass industry fundamentally altered the way that Americans in positions of privilege—privilege conferred by racial, gender, and economic status—interacted with place.

Though consumers during this period might have found themselves estranged from particular regions geographically, they laid claim to the sensual qualities of these spaces through acts of reading.

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CHAPTER 1: CRAVING SUGAR IN LOUISIANA REGIONALISM

Introduction

In 1888, an article entitled “The New Birth of the Sugar Industry in Louisiana” appeared in the fourth issue of the weekly publication The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer. In the piece, an unnamed contributor reflects on the history and future of the sugar industry in the

South. The author illustrates the effects of the Civil War on this industry with a striking image: after “the destruction of slavery, the dispersal of the laborers, the burning of the buildings and the conversion of hundreds of sugar plantations into semi-tropical wildernesses,” the author writes, little remains to suggest its recent presence. In fact, he writes that now only “an occasional chimney or brick wall discovered among the enormous growth of weeds, willows and cottonwood…could suggest to an uninformed traveler the existence there of former civilization and activity” (35).11 The author’s description of dilapidated sugar-houses overgrown with foliage conveys an image of a decayed southern agrarian ideal, a broken industry in the process of fading from relevance and memory.

However, after lingering momentarily on this image, the author contradicts it, calling the postbellum sugar industry “live and progressive” despite appearances. He writes, “We are today on a better footing than ever before, because we have been taught by the errors of the past, and every step we take seems to be a sure one” (35). He further insists that the journal’s creators and promoters aim to develop the industry by establishing dialogue among “the whole planting

11 While we have no way of knowing the author’s gender, the overwhelming preponderance of men working at all levels of both the sugar industry and the journalism industry (from field worker and chemist to writer and editor) during this period means we might hazard a guess that this writer is male. 27 fraternity” (35). The Louisiana Planter author thus acknowledges the economic and geographical ruptures caused by the Civil War, yet also insists on the continuation of industrial progress and improvement in the years afterward. This tension between regression and progress is central to literary depictions of sugar production in postbellum fiction of Louisiana; authors from George

Washington Cable to the anonymous poets whose work would appear in the Louisiana Planter over the next few decades articulate nostalgia for antebellum sugar plantations in order to reflect on the uncertain futures of white southerners in a transforming industrial world. As the sugar industry in the South—and especially in Louisiana, the largest sugar-producing state in the South before the Civil War—struggled to regain its footing and advance technologically in the years after the war, writers mirrored this struggle by exploring the challenge of reconstructing southern identity after a period of social, political, and economic upheaval.

In this chapter, I examine the ethical problems that arise when these writers romanticize the history of a place in the service of imagining its future, and how southern writers negotiate these issues in representations of the sugar industry in and around New Orleans. New Orleans regionalism is preoccupied with images of the transformation of sugar cane into more potent and refined forms via the language of taste and sight. Moreover, many post-war representations of

New Orleans exhibit a commitment to consolidating a prevailing narrative of white southerners’ loss of wealth and power after the war. In this sense, white writers who lamented that the South had lost economic ground strove to compensate for this sense of loss by recovering ground literarily: though they narrate the economic disempowerment of southern whites, their works of fiction highlight white writers’ enduring control over fables of southern industry. Even as white writers narrate the obstacles preventing white southerners from producing sugar after the war, they figure themselves as producers of stories about sugar, capable of rehabilitating the South’s

28 place on a national stage through the written word. Both the content and form of New Orleans regionalism demonstrate fascination with processes of refinement: How is sugar made from cane? How is story made from history? What kinds of pleasure do these products offer to consumers? What are the political motivations that drive this pleasure, and what are its ethical implications?

I thus explore the relationship, in New Orleans regionalism, between two kinds of sweetness: the images of sugar that these texts contain, and, at a meta-narrative level, figuratively sweet, consumable, and pleasurable stories themselves. Sugar historian April

Merleaux refers to “cultures of craving” that emerged in the U.S. with a rise in the availability of sugar at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries (8). I suggest that, along with a culture of craving for sugar, a corresponding craving for stories about sugar emerged during this period. The implications of this analogy between the sweetness of sugar and the sweetness of story are far-ranging: writers during this period perceive a contested zone where white southerners, having lost control over the means of producing sugar, confront the region’s vulnerability by trying to recuperate this control both economically and ideologically for middle- class readers through narrative. Literary formulations of sweetness thus stand at the center of a late nineteenth-century conceptual apparatus that promises a new future of empowerment to southern whites.

This study is invested in exploring the variety of significations that the status of whiteness carries in the literature of this period, as well as the forms of cultural and economic currency that whiteness affords writers and characters who possess it. I argue that writers mobilize the language of sweetness in the service of a racial hierarchy in which whiteness figures as a refined counterpoint to the exotic appeal of darkness: in making a case for the symbolic

29 function of refined sugar as an indicator of racial purity, I characterize whiteness as a visual signifier of this purity. Whiteness and sweetness, then, figure as interconnected agents of the pleasures afforded by observing racial difference. Writing about the ways in which images of sugar refinement have been mobilized to signify racial hierarchy, Merleaux writes, “As the twentieth century progressed, many people in the United States understood that while sugar might appear pleasingly white in seaboard cities, it linked them to global racial impurities that were best excluded, segregated, or cleansed” (55). Meanwhile, on the flip-side, “African

Americans and residents of the island territories were commonly associated with less-refined forms of sweetness” (57), including brown molasses. Building on Merleaux’s analysis, I make the case for reading representations of sugar as coded forms of commentary on racial relations, in a post-Civil War New Orleans literary culture seeking white uplift.

In order to explore the linguistic strategies by which writers essentialize racial difference through language of taste, color, and refinement, I investigate a legacy of racial injustice facilitating the advancement of the sugar industry—a legacy that endures today. In his seminal work Sweetness and Power (1985), Sidney Mintz links the sugar trade to the slave trade, implicating the sugar industry in the sustained enslavement of human beings beginning with colonization and never truly ending. Though Mintz discusses the effects of the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean and the U.S. over the course of the nineteenth century (68-70), he also acknowledges the enduring legacy of the slave trade on today’s sugar economy: “The track sugar has left in modern history is one involving masses of people and resources, thrown into productive combination by social, economic, and political forces that were actively remaking the entire world” (211). Indeed, the second half of the nineteenth century saw the flowering of what

Merleaux calls the “U.S. sugar empire” (14), a sprawling economic network of sites—within the

U.S., in its colonies, and in countries with whom the U.S. traded—where sugar destined to be consumed by Americans was produced. By the end of the century, this network most prominently included the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hawaii, and Louisiana (Merleaux 14-

15). My aim is to consider the Louisiana literature that is the subject of this chapter in light of the global economy that informed this body of work. Most noteworthy are the United States’s trade relations in the West Indies, given the proximity of sugar-producing countries like Cuba to the

U.S., and to New Orleans ports in particular.

Indeed, the aim of this chapter is not only to tease out the cultural conditions responsible for the prevalence of metaphors of sweetness in turn-of-the-century literature of Louisiana, but also to situate this Louisiana context within a larger, globalizing nation. The immense human rights violations that characterized the sugar industry in Louisiana during the nineteenth century also characterized sugar plantation life for many workers in the Caribbean, Polynesia, and elsewhere. As Richard Follett has written in his history of antebellum cane country in the U.S.

South, “The grueling rigors of the sugar industry placed an unfathomable strain on the human body”; Follett cites a “punishing labor regime,” malaria, cholera, intestinal worms, summer heat, yellow fever, and infection as major sources of physical, psychological, and emotional pain

(Follett 78). Notably, conditions similar to these continue to afflict workers to this day in parts of the world, an extreme example being the Dominican Republic: a majority of plantation workers in the D.R. today are Haitians laboring under conditions of “semicoerced exploitation” (Martinez

57). These conditions parallel those under which southern American enslaved people worked during the nineteenth century—and just as the human rights violations in the Dominican

Republic remain unknown to the vast majority of Americans who regularly consume Dominican sugar, the violations endured by nineteenth-century enslaved laborers in Louisiana are

31 conspicuously absent from a body of literature that often seeks to revel in the sweetness and whiteness of a product while turning a blind eye to the suffering of the black bodies responsible for its production.

Whiteness and blackness are therefore not only visual signifiers, though a focus on the gradations of sugar’s color in Louisiana regional literature does suggest the importance of visual culture. Additionally, I argue that whiteness at the turn of the century functioned as an ethos— the essentialist stance that the superiority of whiteness and all its cultural signifiers, from skin color to clothing and accent, is a foregone fact. In this chapter, I investigate several works that reinforce this notion to different degrees. These works are not all written by racially “white” authors, but all of the texts are in some way invested in producing whiteness at a conceptual level.12 While authors’ racial identities are not irrelevant to my readings, I am more interested in the ways that these authors reinforce (and sometimes also resist) whiteness as a value system.

Beginning with Grace King’s short story “La Grande Demoiselle” and then taking up two anonymously written poems that appeared in an 1889 issue of The Louisiana Planter and Sugar

Manufacturer, I argue that these writers dramatize white southerners’ abrupt loss of social and economic power during the late nineteenth century through images of sugar production. In these works, white bodies become subject to the same industrial processes as white sugar. By conflating disempowered people with mass-produced goods, King and the Louisiana Planter poet articulate a myth of white victimization at the hands of African American laborers as well as the more abstract figure of the modern factory. I argue that we might read these representations of victimization as ironic: by virtue of their publication and distribution to white, well-to-do

12 For example, I discuss two poems written by an anonymous author whose race cannot be confirmed but who is committed to bolstering and reinforcing white experience. 32 audiences (King published in The Century), these texts undermine their own pretense to white disenfranchisement.

Next, I turn to George Washington Cable’s short story “Café des Exilés” (1876), which likewise focuses on white subjects and, with its publication in Scribner’s, reached an audience of primarily white readers. I argue that Cable offers a solution to the problems posed by King and the Louisiana Planter poet. While these writers dramatize white southerners’ loss of control over

Marxian instruments of labor—the factories and slave labor that allowed for the production of wealth in the antebellum South—Cable redirects our focus. His story is less interested in the literal means by which sugar is produced than the figurative production of narratives about sugar. By exoticizing the sensory pleasures of New Orleans, the circum-atlantic sugar trade that makes these pleasures possible, and the black bodies with which he associates this trade, Cable suggests the power of white narrators to distill and preserve the city’s past. In this sense, he imagines a new economic role for white southerners, not as manual laborers nor as the objects of this labor, but as guardians and interpreters of pleasurable southern histories. In his post-war, post-industrial context, sugar-making becomes a metaphorical process rather than a literal one.

Finally, I turn to a work of short fiction by Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Dunbar-Nelson’s contribution to narratives about the New Orleans sugar trade is fascinating and unusual for its self-conscious investigation of the biases and prejudices inherent in the act of storytelling. In

“The Praline Woman” (1899), she complicates and resists the prevailing forms of white storytelling that I document in the first two sections of this chapter. I make the case that Dunbar-

Nelson is not only a historian but a historiographer; she theorizes the processes by which regional writers instantiate their own status as guardians and champions of southern history.

Further, she expresses ambivalence about her own ability to revise prevailing accounts of New

Orleans’s sweet past by implicating the American publishing industry in her own and others’ romantic vision of New Orleans. Ultimately, she suggests that both the sugar and publishing industries in the U.S. are complicit in the ethically fraught representational matrix of remembering sugar, using sugar to remember, and the pleasures of both.

Each of these writers thus establishes her- or himself as a producer of metaphorical sweetness, if not literal sugar. King, the Louisiana Planter poet, and Cable situate white southern subjectivities as the central lens through which southern history should be understood, and in this way they imagine a future for the white South in a changing America marked by drastic social, political, and economic inequalities.13 The aims of this chapter are three-fold. First, I unpack the socioeconomic motivations mobilizing these writers. Second, I illustrate how several white writers instantiate their own status as curators of American regional history—in this case, the history of the South, and of Louisiana in particular—by rendering the labors of making, selling, buying, and eating sugar in nostalgic and appealing terms for their readerships. Finally, I highlight forms of skepticism and resistance to the primacy of these white subjectivities, exemplified by Dunbar-Nelson’s story. To be sure, in a post-Katrina world where New Orleans signifies a disorienting mixture of trauma and sensuality, the effects of these depictions are still with us today.

Grace King’s “Carte Blanche”

Grace King’s “La Grande Demoiselle,” a short story originally published in The Century

Magazine in 1893, is about a French Creole woman named Idalie Sainte Foy Mortemart Des

Islets and her family’s sudden fall from stature after the Civil War. The Des Islets’ loss of wealth

13 I define “essentialism” as a trenchant, deeply-rooted cultural belief in the innate qualities of a particular demographic. This chapter is especially interested in forms of racial essentialism.

34 and status reflects the experience of many formerly wealthy southerners in postbellum Louisiana and the South more generally. The story’s focus on this loss suggests that it inhabits a mode of pro-Confederate “Lost Cause” literature.14 However, while King’s narrator seems to mourn the

Des Islets’ loss of wealth and power, her grief is also a pretense for the story’s critique of southern aristocratic values and consumer practices. Ultimately, “La Grande Demoiselle” is an expression of apprehension about the future of a sugar industry borne from these values.

This critique takes the form of condemnation for practices of conspicuous display and consumption among the wives and daughters of the southern landholding elite. Idalie is the story’s focal character, and it is through her behavior that King’s narrator conveys the decadence and overconsumption of her aristocratic class. By identifying Idalie as a representative of this class and condemning her for its faults, the narrator suggests that white women’s transgressions signify, and even exceed, a trend of southern overindulgence before the war. This emphasis on female excess suggests that white, wealthy women’s insatiable capacity to consume is responsible for the degeneracy of the southern aristocracy.

“La Grande Demoiselle” explores the consequences of this consumerism through symbolically laden images of sugar production and consumption. The lavish lifestyles and expensive dresses and finery that the Des Islets women import from Paris are funded by the production of sugar cane on the family’s plantation and the slave labor responsible for refining this cane into a sellable product. In their analysis of Kate Chopin’s representations of Louisiana’s

Creole culture, Andrew Dix and Lorna Piatti identify a literary focus on sweet, European delicacies. They argue that, in Chopin’s works, “luxurious desserts and confectionery imply

Creole use of cane sugar at its whitest and purest.” Meanwhile, “abjected social groupings”

14 Famous contributors to this genre include Thomas Nelson Page and Margaret Mitchell, both of whom idealized antebellum white southern aristocratic society. 35 including African American and Cajun populations “turn to viscous, dirty-colored molasses”

(62). According to Dix and Piatti, Chopin aligns an elite French Creole class with the purity of refined sugar; Chopin’s work foregrounds “the substance’s aesthetic and gustatory appeals but tend[s] to repress knowledge of the labor by which these are achieved” (60). King complicates this representation of white sugar by highlighting the transformations undergone by the

American sugar industry in the years after the Civil War. This becomes a story about the horrors of domestic sugar production, and the uncertain futures of members of a formerly elite class who not only lose control of the means of producing sugar, but themselves become metaphorical products of this industry.

Indeed, sugar occupies places of both literal and metaphorical significance in “La Grande

Demoiselle.” Literally, sugar facilitates the Des Islets’ women’s consumer lifestyles; by producing sugar on their plantation, the Des Islets can afford to import expensive goods from

Paris. King further aligns the women with images of purified, white sweetness in her reference to a blank check that Idalie sends to her dressmaker in Paris: “It was literally, not metaphorically, carte blanche.” This reference to Idalie’s “white check” reiterates the story’s association of wealth and opulence with the whiteness of sugar. Yet, moving beyond this literal understanding of sugar’s crucial function in bolstering and reflecting the Des Islets’ wealth, we might also read the women themselves as confectioneries. Idalie embodies a conflation of women with confectionery: she wears the “handsomest silks,” “real lace,” buttons made of “real gold and silver” and “precious stones” (26-27), all of which transform her into a delicacy that is sumptuous to the eyes, if not the tongue.15 Even the Parisian dressmakers contribute to this

15 This is one of many examples in postbellum regional works about sugar production and distribution that suggests a synesthetic relationship between tasting sugar and “seeing” sugar. Idalie is a visual confection for her many suitors. Likewise, fiction readers imaginatively access the experiences of seeing and tasting sugar through the medium of reading, another visual experience. King’s extensive lists of Idalie’s many indulgences are themselves a 36 image, “plastering [her dresses] inside with gold” as a French pâtissier might burn the surface of a crème brûlée or fill an éclair. Idalie occupies an ambiguous space between a consumer and an object of consumption: she profits from the wealth generated by slave labor on her family’s plantation, which allows her to import expensive dresses; in turn, by wearing these dresses, she herself becomes consumable.

The narrator further implies Idalie’s status as a kind of human delicacy by emphasizing the way that she is unwrapped from her clothes after wearing them: after returning from a ball in the evening, “…She would throw herself down upon her bed in her tulle skirts…and make her maid undress her in that position; often having her bodices cut off her, because she was too tired to turn over and have them unlaced” (27-28). Just as the dressmaker turns Idalie into a confection, her maid must unwrap her as a child would a piece of candy. The narrator further emphasizes the conspicuous waste of these luxurious dresses: after Idalie wears them once, they are “cast aside, thrown upon the floor, given to the negroes—anything to get them out of sight”

(27). Like an edible delicacy that can only be consumed once, the same logic applies to the opulent dresses that Idalie wears. In this way, the narrator suggests that Idalie is as consumable as the sugar produced on her family’s plantation. In fact, Idalie’s decision to “go into society”

(25)—her very reason for attending ball after ball in all of this finery—positions her as an object worthy of male consumption.

King’s conflation of the landed aristocracy with confectionery extends beyond Idalie. The sugar plantation itself is as consumable as she is. In vivid language, the narrator describes its

“stately walls, acres of roses, miles of oranges, unmeasured fields of cane, colossal sugar- house—they were all there, and all the rest of it, with the slaves, slaves, slaves everywhere,

kind of indulgence, pleasurable in their comprehensiveness. To read, for King and for others, is to participate in an enjoyable sensory experience akin to seeing and tasting. 37 whole villages of negro cabins” (24). Heaping image upon image and detail upon detail, the narrator forms a picture of the plantation’s sprawling grandiosity; her overwrought language echoes the images she describes. She thus paints an image that is visually “sweet”—a text to be consumed, with pleasure, by her readers. And, in addition to serving as a figuratively enticing confection for King’s readers, the plantation is also a literally sweet expanse of citrus and cane.

King’s narrator emphasizes the moral problems of displaying images of enslavement in aesthetically gratifying ways in a panoramic description of the plantation. With her repetition of

“slaves, slaves, slaves everywhere,” the narrator suggests that slave labor is a very part of the luxury, opulence, and conspicuous display that characterizes the plantation. A superficial veneer of grandiosity and abundance fails to repress the mechanism responsible for its creation; in fact, enslaved people are an intrinsic part of this image. The narrator reflects on this problem of how to fit these people into an otherwise appealing image in her reference to “the moral sine qua non, as some people considered it, of the wealthy slaveholder of aristocratic descent and tastes” (24).

By drawing a connection between morality and “aristocratic tastes,” she suggests that matters of aesthetics and morality are intertwined, but she undermines this suggestion with the phrase “as some people considered it.” Implicitly, the narrator acknowledges that the slaveholders’ moral superiority is up for debate, and that what “some people” consider a moral prerequisite for owning people might not be so moral after all. In this way, King launches a critique of the refined “tastes” of southern elites.

The narrator’s consideration of how enslaved people fit into images of the Des Islets’ plantation extends into further descriptions of the land: “It was a plantation…the richness and luxury of which are really well described in those perfervid pictures of tropical life, at one time the passion of philanthropic imaginations, excited and exciting over the horrors of slavery” (24).

This reference to “perfervid pictures” suggests two-dimensionality; the narrator describes the plantation as a flat product of writers’ and painters’ imaginations. She goes on to illustrate the dangers of understanding plantation life in these two-dimensional terms: when an image of the

“horrors of slavery” is flattened and aestheticized, it “excites” its viewers. King implies that even anti-slavery philanthropists are easily swayed to romanticize images of plantation life when confronted with its “richness and luxury.” She thus implicates not only the southern plantation elite in the “horrors of slavery” but also consumers of narratives about this elite, warning readers of fiction and viewers of art about the hypocrisy of becoming “excited” over images of enslavement.

King thus incriminates the Des Islets, her own readers, and even herself for aestheticizing slave labor. For King, the act of consumption is a violent one—an assertion of ownership and control. The only characters exempt from the ethical morass of overconsumption are the enslaved plantation workers themselves, who are the opposite of consumers; they are producers.

As the story’s insatiable consumer, Idalie attempts to transform them into consumers as well, by giving them her used-up dresses. Idalie views enslaved people as second-tier consumers, receptacles for the used-up finery that she no longer wants. In this sense, she understands them as extensions of herself, imagining them as users of the waste that she produces. Yet, though everyone is a consumer in Idalie’s eyes, in fact the enslaved workers are performing a kind of labor by absorbing the no-longer-desirable dresses that Idalie flings at them. King thus further emphasizes the mechanism responsible for processing material belongings in this story: just as enslaved people generate the wealth necessary for Idalie to purchase expensive dresses, so too do they hide these dresses away once they have been used, in a damning critique of Idalie’s conspicuous waste.

By emphasizing the economic role of enslaved people as producers, King’s narrator disrupts their consumability. Though the image of “slaves, slaves, slaves everywhere” might seem to be an enticing one when it appears amid orange trees and cane fields, ultimately we are not allowed to forget that it is their labor that makes these images possible in the first place.

Enslaved people therefore occupy a unique and counterintuitive position of agency that is not available to Idalie or the story’s other wealthy women: while they possess some physical agency, the white women in this story seem to be incurably static, always vacillating between the role of consumer and object of consumption. They purchase expensive foreign goods that are funded through the labors of Louisiana’s enslaved people; in turn, once they adorn themselves with this foreign finery and “go into society,” they transform into objects of male control, subject to the advances of male suitors. The narrator lays bare this lack of mobility in her description of the

(presumably black) housemaids who must cut Idalie out of her dresses after evenings of dancing that leave her too exhausted to move. Her name, too, suggests stasis: quite literally, Idalie is idle.

Idalie and her female relatives also become subject to the military choices of their husbands and fathers. Idalie’s father becomes a soldier, leaves to fight for the Confederacy, and inevitably dies—“[The Des Islets men] were always among the first killed” (29), the narrator tells us, and the women are left behind, immobile once more. The effects of this immobility reach a climax in an apocalyptic scene of destruction that comes partway through the narrative.

After New Orleans is captured in the Civil War, the narrator tells us that a “colored company” from the North arrives to occupy the Reine Sainte Foy plantation. Though the narrator does not accuse the black soldiers of intentionally setting fire to the Des Islets’ mansion, she implies that the fire begins, whether by accident or on purpose, at the hands of these soldiers. In a story preoccupied with appearances, the narrator describes the destruction of the plantation with the

40 same wealth of detail she applies to Idalie’s dresses and the plantation’s landscape. “Well!” exclaims the narrator, “Every one knows what happened after ’59. There is no need to repeat”

(28). However, she does “repeat” the story of the white women whose home has caught fire:

[The ladies] were seized in their beds, and carried out in the very arms of their enemies; carried away off to the sugar-house, and deposited there. No danger of their doing anything but keep very quiet and very still in their chemises de nuit, and their one sheet apiece, which was about all that was saved from the conflagration… (29-30)

In this passage, the white women hiding in the sugar-house become symbolic images of sugar, the very commodity that guaranteed their wealth in the first half of the story. Hidden away in the sugar-house in nothing but nightgowns and sheets, they are stripped down to purified versions of themselves, in a process not unlike the sugar refinement that takes place in this very location. It is significant that the black “enemies” start the fire at the women’s mansion and deposit the women in the sugar-house. Black labor is responsible for processing cane into refined granules in the first half of the story; in a symbolic iteration of this process, black soldiers are the agents of purification who figuratively process the white women in the sugar-house. Further, the fire that surrounds the sugar-house mimics the heating process used to refine and granulate sugar. Just as laborers in the plantation sugar-house boil cane juice to separate molasses from refined crystals, the women hiding in the sugar-house are literally heated and stripped down to their white interiors.

This image definitively positions the Des Islets women not as consumers but as commodities. In a story that implicates white women in the overindulgences of the plantation elite, their purification in the sugar-house serves as a commentary on the social and economic changes wrought by the Civil War. By conflating the wealthy wives and daughters of plantation owners with the sugar produced on their plantations, King suggests that the war transforms women into the very commodities that previously sustained their lives of opulence. In this way,

41 the black enslaved people and soldiers enact a perverse revenge on the women whom they cache away: in carrying these women out of the mansion and into the sugar-house, the black soldiers enact a form of labor akin to that of the plantation workers, processing the women as the workers processed sugar. While these black laborers maintain the same economic role throughout the story, the women transform from the beneficiaries to the objects of this labor.

By commodifying women in these terms, King suggests that the future of the plantation elite is a future not of agency but of passivity. In the remainder of the story, the narrator proceeds to emphasize Idalie’s lack of control over her future and her inability to reclaim her family’s lost wealth. In this way, King dramatizes the destabilization of the white aristocracy through a radical reimagining of southern economics: once the story’s consumers are stripped of their finery, they are revealed not to resemble imports from Paris, but the sugar produced on their fathers’ and husbands’ own land. By dramatizing Idalie’s and her female relatives’ fall from status at the site of their family’s production of wealth, King expresses anxiety about the failures of local economies to support white landholders and their families.

In this sense, King suggests that aristocrats who funneled their wealth into finery from abroad were, in fact, only obscuring the inevitable rupture of their own domestic economies.

Indeed, this anxiety about the instability of local economies taps into contemporaneous economic discourses relating to the South’s uncertain future within a world economy. The controversial

1890 McKinley Tariff raised duties on many foreign imports in order to protect domestically produced goods, but removed a tariff on sugar, leaving the industry vulnerable to high competition from foreign producers. In 1888, the editors of the Louisiana Planter lamented the impending policy change, and hoped for its failure: “…The evident unfairness of such a course in singling out sugar alone, of all the articles on the tariff list, for slaughter, would rally every

42 friend of Louisiana to our defence” (9). In the eyes of industry insiders, domestically produced sugar was under threat.

King builds on this sense of threat, but her narrative suggests that domestic sugar was not threatened by U.S. legislators or the global sugar market, but by southerners themselves—and the African American soldiers and enslaved people they were incapable of controlling. By metaphorically processing the white women into a purer form, the black soldiers attain a symbolic control over the plantation’s means of production. This contrasts with the passivity of the women hiding away in the sugar-house, whose resemblance to confectionery throughout the first half of the story culminates in their own metaphorical granulation. These women no longer objectify themselves by displaying themselves as embodiments of their own wealth; rather, a more passive construction is necessary to describe their experience in the sugar-house: they are processed by the black people who formerly served and who now dominate them.

This is not to say that King celebrates black experience; it is worth noting that none of the black workers or soldiers in the story are given names, nor does the narrator individuate them.

“La Grande Demoiselle” is less a critique of racism or racial inequality than it is an expression of fascination by the economics of whiteness in the years after the Civil War. The story suggests that the overindulgences of white aristocrats reach an apotheosis when they lose control over the means by which they produce their wealth. An ethic of self-commodification in the first half of the story gives way when black revolutionaries take control of the Des Islets’ plantation, and a distortion of this self-commodification occurs: Idalie no longer commodifies herself, but she and her mother and sisters do remain commodities, processed into a purer, whiter substance in the sugar-house just like cane. This climactic moment functions as a kind of distorted form of wish

43 fulfillment: the white women who long to transform themselves into the objects’ of others attention are, finally, objectified—but not on their own terms.

In this sense, “La Grande Demoiselle” is a commentary on the bleak and uncertain futures of formerly wealthy white women in the years after the Civil War. Once their husbands and fathers have fallen in war, it becomes clear how little control the Des Islets women have over the production of their own wealth. King’s narrative of the collapse of southern industry taps into contemporaneous anxieties about the future of the southern sugar industry in a competitive global market. “La Grande Demoiselle” expresses this sense of impending suppression of white industrial control, though her story lays this suppression at the feet of black revolutionaries, rather than market forces: Idalie and her female relatives are produced by the black laborers who they used to command. The story thus perpetuates a racist narrative of southern history that attributes southern economic failures to the emancipation of enslaved people. Further, King suggests that white women bear the burdens of these failures, culpable as they are for the overindulgences that led to their own demise. With their husbands and fathers all dead in the war, the austere image of stripped-down, humbled, and purified women hiding in the sugar- house suggests the passive suffering of disempowered white southerners. The women are revealed to be little more or less than usable products, created for the purpose of being consumed by others.

King further implies this transformation of women into objects by emphasizing their silence after the war, and suggesting that they effectively disappear from prevailing narratives of

Civil War history. Before the war, Idalie’s social calendar was a remarkable and memorable matter of historical record. The narrator says, “Whether she went, or did not go; what she said, or did not say; what she wore, and did not wear—all these became important matters of discussion,

44 quoted as much or more than what the president said, or the governor thought” (23). This description of Idalie reinforces a sense that she self-constructs and self-objectifies: Idalie performs a public persona, maintaining control over what people think and say about her. By the end of the story, not only has Idalie lost her status and her access to fine new things from Paris, but the Des Islets have also lost control of a historical narrative in which they are the protagonists. While Idalie first appears to us as an object of fellow aristocrats’ rapt attention, by the end of the story her actions and belongings are characterized by anonymity and speculation.

Indeed, King’s narrator indicates that, in the wake of war, the stories of the women who hide in the sugar-house are not publicly available: “Only the good God knows” (35) precisely what happened to Idalie in the end, though the narrator hints to us that she goes on to marry a decrepit fellow member of the “nouveaux pauvres” (32) class and teach the black children of the

Reine Sainte Foy plantation’s formerly enslaved workers. By emphasizing the ambiguity of

Idalie’s circumstances after the war, the narrator suggests that the telling of this story has transformed from a matter of transcription to speculation. After highlighting the public’s rapt attention to “what she said, or did not say” at the beginning of the story, the narrator underplays her own creative license in the telling of this story; the Des Islets’ story is so well known that it does not require reinterpretation. This approach to storytelling contrasts sharply with the narrator’s uncertainty at the end of the story: “How the ladies ever got out of the sugar-house, history does not relate; nor what they did. It was not a time for sociability, either personal or epistolary. At one offensive word your letter, and you, very likely, examined…” (31). Madame

Des Islets died not long after this, the narrator tells us, but “that was about all the public knew”

(31). The narrator’s previously straightforward reportage transforms into epistemological uncertainty after the war.

This uncertainty is deceiving: while it seems to suggest that the narrator is powerless to interpret history, in fact it suggests the narrator’s crucial role in recounting this story. What this narrative lacks in historical detail, the narrator makes up for in imaginative interpretation. She begins her discussion of Idalie’s post-war fate with the words, “It might have been ten years according to some calculations, or ten eternities,—the heart and the almanac never agree about time…” (31). By vacillating between the suggestion that it’s been ten years (according to the almanac) and ten eternities (according to the heart), the narrator emphasizes her own subjectivity—the extent to which this is ultimately a story based on speculation and interpretation, rather than a reliable historical record based on letters or an almanac.

The significance of this historical ambiguity becomes apparent in the narrator’s pronouncement that “a woman seems the quickest thing forgotten when once the important affairs of life come to men for consideration” (31). Idalie no longer commands the attentions of men whom she previously entranced. Yet, we might read this story as an attempt to redirect the public’s attention to disempowered, female members of the fallen aristocracy. Even as the narrator suggests that Idalie and the other women have been “forgotten,” this very story insists on continuing to talk about them. What Idalie “said, or did not say” is as paramount as ever, the narrator suggests.

In this way, “La Grande Demoiselle” makes a case for treating disgraced southern aristocrats with respect and humanity, and for memorializing their roles in histories of the South and the Civil War in particular. Though Idalie and her relatives are processed in the sugar-house as objects, after which they go on to labor in relative obscurity for the enslaved workers who used to serve them, the narrator insists that these female aristocrats are worth inscribing into

American history. Grace King’s own life becomes relevant here: she herself was born to an

46 aristocratic southern family that lost everything in the War. As a writer who began to make a living from her work, King understood the power of the written word to reconstitute a broken reputation. King’s characters, too, are able to perform a rise from anonymity via their narrative centrality: though this is a story about a southern plantation society that forgets about Idalie, this story forces her back into the center of a narrative of southern history.

In this way, the story represents Idalie and her female family members in ambivalent terms. They appear to us insistently and consistently as objects: first as aestheticized delicacies whose primary purpose is to be consumed, and later as disempowered goods, processed and refined in the sugar-house like cane. On the other hand, “La Grande Demoiselle” turns these women into subjects, characters whose stories are worthy of attention. The scene in the sugar- house speaks to both of these formulations: though this is the moment at which the women of the family retreat from public life, the narrator’s description of the women huddled with nothing but their chemises-de-nuit suggests an immediacy belied by her insistence that their experience has been lost to history.

To modern readers, this representation of white experience is fraught with contradictions: we might read “La Grande Demoiselle” as a proto-feminist depiction of wealthy southern women whose selfishness and extravagance should not result in their erasure from history. Yet, this validation of white, female experience comes at the expense of the story’s nameless black characters, who command little readerly attention or sympathy in a story preoccupied with the future of white culture and industry. Mark J. Noonan might account for this ideological morass by pointing to the complex network of editors, writers, and readers that went into the making of

The Century, where this and other stories by King were published. Noonan argues that the

“northern intellectual elite” who produced The Century were invested in “corral[ing] disparate

47 and far-flung geographic regions and cultural topics into a coherent publication,” but that this nationalistic project did not always work: “Certain literary works called into service to reinforce the magazine’s nationalist goals at times reacted against this mission” (Noonan x). We might understand “La Grande Demoiselle” as a work that strives to highlight female agency and acknowledge female subjectivities; or we might see this story as affirming a preoccupation with white experience that predominated in The Century and other northern publications during this time.

King’s seemingly ambiguous commentary on the future of white women comes into focus in the sugar-house. Despite her later claim that “history does not relate” how “the ladies ever got out of the sugar-house,” King takes pains to highlight the symbolic and material significances of this site of wartime production. Despite making claims to her own lack of knowledge about historical fact, ultimately “La Grande Demoiselle” distills white experience to a moment in time and place: for King, the New Orleans sugar-house figures as an omen of white women’s futures in a new southern economy where they are vulnerable to the inexorable transformations of modern industry. In this way, “La Grande Demoiselle” itself functions as a delicacy for readers eager to consume an unfolding drama of white pain and uncertainty. In the following reading of two poems published in The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, I further examine how writers have mobilized images of sugar production in order to comment on the futures of white laborers in the post-war South.

The Louisiana Planter and the Racialized Poetics of Sugar-Making

I turn now to a work that more overtly expresses anxiety about the futures of white sugar producers in Louisiana, in the wake of massive industrial transformation and an attending sense of material and emotional loss. This poem appeared in an issue of the third volume of The

Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, published in 1889. Titled “The Sugar Chemist’s

Dole,” it is a humorous existential lament for the ennui of the industrial sugar chemist by an anonymous contributor:

I have talked so much that I long to be dumb, I have written so much that I’ve palsied my thumb, I have thought till my brain is reduced to a crumb, I have figured so long that my fingers are numb, For the sake Of a cake— Sorghum, and beet, and cane—cane, and sorghum, and beet— Till the cup of life is sweetened so sweet That I long to lie in my winding sheet, Where never the bees will hum. For the honey they make Would compel me to wake, And begin on the same old sum. (“The Sugar Chemist’s Dole”)

The speaker bemoans his lot as a chemist whose life’s work is the optimization of sugar production. His tone is comically hyperbolic, as he expresses a desire for a death that will deliver him from the monotony of making calculations over honey. Yet, in spite of this humor (or perhaps as a result of it), the poem strikes at the core of late nineteenth-century apprehensions about systematized forms of production, and nostalgia for a moment before plantation sugar- houses were replaced by factories. In his seminal 1952 work on the history of the American sugar industry, J. Carlyle Sitterson outlines the industrial transformations that prompted such expressions of cultural and economic shock as “The Sugar Chemist’s Dole”:

The modern sugar factory of the early twentieth century was a far cry from the sugarhouses of the early post-Civil War years. Larger, lighted with electricity, and equipped with the new mills and machinery, all laid out to emphasize more effective operations, it was truly a forerunner of the contemporary raw sugar factory. Equally as important as the new and larger machinery in distinguishing the new from the old was the important place now given to applied science. Improved methods of chemical control assured more effective results. (285)

Sitterson’s analysis of the changes undergone by the sugar industry after the war sheds light on the poet-chemist’s despair: his job is to apply the science of sugar production to the sugar industry in the South, in order to maximize production and profit. The poet attaches a sense of monotony to this drive toward profit. By repeating “Sorghum, and beet, and cane—cane, and sorghum, and beet—”, he suggests that types of sugar are interchangeable, if not in practical terms then in philosophical terms. His role as both an industrial chemist and a philosopher of

American industry allows him to speak ironically; he demonstrates awareness of the needs of the market by emphasizing the repetitiveness and constancy of his attention to “sorghum, and beet, and cane,” but he also dwells on the existential despair that results from this attention.

Like King’s dramatization of the abrupt transformation of white southerners’ lives during the war, the poet-chemist laments the socioeconomic changes that have led to his life of tedium.

In a poem about sugar, it is conspicuous that the poet refrains from a discussion of sensory experience, instead focusing on the brain-work of sugar chemistry. In the few instances where the poet does refer to the sensory experience of tasting sugar or the natural processes by which cane grows, he juxtaposes these images with the theoretical and mechanical work of sugar chemistry, and the existential crisis induced by this work.

The representation of a bee collecting honey—classically an image of peaceful industriousness and even sensuality—transforms into a reason to wish for death, when situated in the context of industrial sugar production. The speaker expresses a counterintuitive desire for escape from a sound typically portrayed as pleasurable. He goes on to rhyme “Where never the bees will hum” with a description of his compulsion, brought on by the humming of the bees, to

“begin on the same old sum.” The sound of bees collecting nectar is not occasion for enjoyable rumination, but an alarm urging him to continue working. In the context of a poem about the

50 factory production of sugar, we might read the bees’ humming as the factory noise that both resembles and, by the end of the nineteenth century, seemed to have supplanted, the sound of bees making honey. The poet frames his despair as an ambiguous product of the disappearance of more natural or folksy forms of labor: the bee harvesting nectar would strike most readers as a quaint image, yet the poet suggests that the bee’s work becomes oppressive in the hands of modern industry. In this sense, the speaker creates a revisionist account of history in which a bee not only signifies the inevitable hum of modern industry; even further, the speaker reimagines the natural process of pollination in these industrial terms. The past is retroactively marked by the whirring of machinery in the mind of a speaker who can no longer recall a moment when he wasn’t saturated in noise. In this sense, the past no longer exists for him as a moment that is separate from the sensory realities of the present.

The narrator thus implies that the tedium of his life is the inevitable result of history’s inexorable march toward greater and greater monotony. The work of sugar production—even a prelapsarian vision of a bee collecting honey—is defined throughout the entire poem in terms of stagnation and paralysis. It is fitting, then, that the poem ends with a death fantasy: the stasis of death seems to be the natural culmination of the lethargy induced by the speaker’s work. An example of this longing for death appears in the rhyme of the lines, “…Till the cup of life is sweetened so sweet / That I long to lie in my winding sheet…” In the first of these two lines, the poet seems to describe both a metaphorical and a literal sweetness: he is literally working with sugar, but his reference to the “cup of life” suggests a figurative production of pleasure. By rhyming “sweet” with “sheet” in the second of these two lines, the poet rejects the productivity and pleasure that he conveyed in the previous line.

Just as the humming of the bee counterintuitively reminds the speaker of factory equipment, he suggests the same sense of industry’s inevitable domination in his discussion of death. The speaker frames death as the desirable conclusion of a life defined by monotony. In the first lines of the stanza, he describes the repetitive rhythms of sugar science as antithetical to life:

“I have talked so much that I long to be dumb, / I have written so much that I’ve palsied my thumb, / I have thought till my brain is reduced to a crumb, / I have figured so long that my fingers are numb…” The speaker describes a life of extreme tedium where infinite silence is a welcome antidote to constant speaking, where hands “write” and “figure” so much that they lose sensation, where constant thinking makes the brain stop thinking. The word “palsy” conveys an especially telling image of motion-in-place; a palsied thumb is seized with involuntary tremors, caught in perpetual but unproductive motion, prohibiting work but also prohibiting rest.

In this poem, images of static motion characterize modern labor, and the speaker “longs” for delivery from this state of constant oscillation. In fact, articulations of longing drive the poem forward, as the speaker begins the poem with his longing to be “dumb,” and begins the last stanza with an expression of longing for his “winding sheet.” The word “long” also takes on an alternative meaning, in the line “I have figured so long that my fingers are numb”: “long” indicates infinity, a state of perpetually unfulfilled aspiration for death. This sense of oscillation is fitting in a poem about modern industrial production, as the industrial production of sugar is an iterative process that requires the repetition of steps: the cane is processed to break down its fibers, its juice is extracted and purified, and then this juice is boiled until the sugar granulates. In

“The Sugar Chemist’s Dole,” the speaker emphasizes the extent to which he himself is beholden to the same repetitive processes as a piece of machinery. His body and mind talk, write, think, and figure to the undulating hum of beelike machinery, and the only event capable of ending this

52 rhythmic repetition is his own loss of consciousness. There is no room in the poem for deviation, the speaker suggests, except in the nothingness of death.

By describing industrial sugar production as a rhythmic progression toward an inevitable and welcome death, the speaker frames modern industry as teleology: his purpose, and the broader purpose of sugar production, is eventual annihilation. The image of oscillation that prevails throughout the poem suggests this inevitable progress toward oblivion: the speaker longs to escape a mechanical world where objects move indefinitely. Ultimately, though, he is unable to alter the laws of physics. His only salvation from unending tedium is a loss of consciousness—not an annihilation of the rules that dictate the physical world, but an annihilation of the self.

The teleology that drives the speaker’s poem suggests that industrial production has an end point in obliteration. The speaker is unable to look forward, because the sugar industry—or at least his place in it—has no future. On the same page as “The Sugar Chemist’s Dole,” another poet-speaker expresses an alternative to the chemist’s inability to look forward: he looks back.

This poem’s speaker inhabits the subject position of a formerly enslaved person who longs to return to the plantation sugar-house. “The Nigger’s Wail” was, like “The Sugar Chemist’s Dole,” written anonymously. It is unclear whether these poems were penned by the same poet, but the poems’ shared interest in the existential despair brought on by modern sugar production suggest that they were. However, they do share one marked difference; “The Nigger’s Wail” is written in black dialect:

Befo’ de wah, when de sugar we made Was biled in de ole fashioned kettle, De grindin’ time was a merry-go-round For us niggers, bofe big and little; But now dese mens, wid de spy glass and chubes,

Biles de juice in a cast iron drum; Dey makes all de stuff into crystals and cubes, And leaves no merlasses for rum. De boss tink he know Mo’ dan ebber befo,’ Since dem kemmis done show him some nonsense; But de nigger say, “Hi! We goan all of us die, For we got to drink whisky in consikence.” (“The Nigger’s Wail)

The speaker’s dialect is suggestive of blackface minstrelsy—a black subject position inhabited by a white author for the entertainment of white readers. This speaker seems to share little in common with the speaker of the previous poem: one is a white chemist lamenting the tedious work conditions in the post-Civil War food industrial complex, and the other is a black person longing to return to a happier life on the antebellum plantation.

Yet, a sense of yearning runs through both poems. The white chemist longs for a death that will deliver him from the monotony of the central factory system, while the black speaker desires a comparable kind of delivery: rather than wishing to move forward to death, he exemplifies racist contemporaneous representations of formerly enslaved people who wish to move back to a simpler and more pleasurable time, characterized here by happy labor in the plantation’s sugar-house. The chemist produces “juice in a cast iron drum,” which he then makes into “crystals and cubes.” The speaker conjures an image of a sterile setting where chemists produce clear liquid and uniform crystals—the stuff that would go into Chopin’s delicacies, as

Dix and Piatti outline. Meanwhile, the other poem’s representation of “merlasses for rum” suggests nostalgia for a moment before postbellum innovations made the plantation system a relic of the past.

This picture of plantation life is an example of a prevalent and disturbing stereotype of the happy slave in the South. The poem is an illuminating example of white attitudes about

54 slavery during this period; its caricature of black life strives to justify slavery, while dismissing the nation’s history of brutality against enslaved people. “The Nigger’s Wail” reveals how white writers, including this poet, used blackface minstrelsy to negotiate their own feelings of uncertainty about the future of southern industry. Projecting his own sense of longing onto the enslaved workers whose labor seems to symbolize a more pleasurable and meaningful American past, the author of this poem articulates a desire to inhabit an enslaved person’s perspective in order to escape his own fraught role in modern American industry.16

In his expression of longing for the antebellum plantation, the speaker in this poem resists the sense of teleology that prevails in “The Sugar Chemist’s Dole.” Indeed, in the antebellum sugar-house that the speaker describes, time does not represent an inevitable progression toward death, but rather a “merry-go-round.” This image of circularity frames plantation life as holistic, self-sustaining, and joyful, as opposed to the profit-driven exigencies of industrial sugar production that provoke despair for the poet-chemist in the other poem. In fact, we might say that the merry-go-round image is a positive image of movement-in-place, an optimist’s version of the endless oscillation that we see in “The Sugar Chemist’s Dole.” A merry-go-round is as endlessly repetitive as the tedious brainwork of the sugar chemist, and yet the speaker in “The Nigger’s

16 It is worth drawing a comparison between this poet’s use of black dialect to comment on southern sugar culture, and that of Paul Laurence Dunbar in his poem “Little Brown Baby” (1899). As a black poet invested in recovering and elevating black culture through poetry, Dunbar’s speaker resists the self-mockery that characterizes the speaker in “The Nigger’s Wail,” even as he indulges in a comparably comic tone. The poem’s speaker is a father who teases his young son that the “Buggah-man” is going to come and “swaller him,” because his mouth is covered in molasses. However, the prospect of the “Buggah-man”’s arrival ultimately elicits the father’s sympathy and protection, and he exclaims, “Go back, ol’ buggah, you sha’n’t have dis boy. / He ain’t no tramp, ner no straggler, of co’se; / He’s pappy’s pa’dner an’ play-mate an’ joy” (Dunbar 47-53). Like “The Nigger’s Wail,” this poem conjures a comical scene of imminent death brought on by sugar—the black man’s sense of monotony in the modern sugar factory, the molasses-covered “Little Brown Boy’s” consumption by the “Buggah-Man.” Yet, while the death of the black speaker in “The Nigger’s Wail” is the poem’s punchline, Dunbar ends his poem on a note of fatherly devotion, humanizing the black figures in the poem in a way that the Louisiana Planter poet does not. 55

Wail” frames this repetition as infinite pleasure, rather than misery that ends in death. He therefore highlights a commonality between preindustrial and postindustrial labor; both are repetitive processes requiring laborers’ constant attention and engagement. While a postindustrial moment impels the speaker in the first poem toward a death wish, preindustrial work seems to offer a pleasure that is blissfully endless.

Yet the poem’s conceit is that this pleasure does, in fact, end. The speaker laments his irrelevancy, now that he has been replaced with “des mens, wid de spy glass and / chubes.” In fact, the speaker mimics the poet-chemist who wishes for death when he mourns the disappearance of rum with the advent of modern processing: “But de nigger say, ‘Hi! / We goan all of us die, / For we got to drink whisky in consikence.’” In his formulation, modern industry is too efficient: in the postindustrial factory, molasses no longer exists, because the process of producing refined sugar no longer results in a byproduct.17 Significantly, this speaker blames the disappearance of molasses on “dem kemmis,” who have shown the factory owner “some nonsense.” In this sense, both poems attribute the transformation of industry to chemists—sugar scientists who have taken a process of pleasurable work yielding pleasurable products and turned it into an experience devoid of joy. In combination, these two poems imagine the far-flung effects of industrialization: the formerly enslaved person, as well as the chemists and white laborers who perform labor in his stead, are all subject to the obliterating effects of modern industry.

In a poem about how modern industry has forestalled a need for black labor, the image of the disappearance of molasses is especially significant. As Dix and Piatti suggest, a popular imaginary conflated blackness with unrefined sugar. The speaker’s reference to “merlasses”

17 This disappearance exists only in a popular imaginary; molasses continued to be produced along with refined sugar after the Civil War. 56 exemplifies the racialized “viscous, dirty-colored molasses” to which Dix and Piatti refer. The poet thus aligns “merlasses,” and the rum that it is used to make, with the life of enslavement; molasses acts as a synecdoche for back bodies. The speaker suggests that with the abolishment of slavery comes the disappearance of a substance that, in a mythos of antebellum slavery, stands for pleasure and sensuality. In this narrative, chemists’ overly efficient methods leave no refuse from which to make molasses, such that by 1889 (the year of the poem’s publication), it only exists in memory. By failing to produce molasses in this poem, the white “kemmis” and “boss” also metaphorically fail to produce an economic role for black workers—a role that this speaker longs to reclaim.

At the level of form, the speaker mimics the disappearance of molasses. The poem begins with eight roughly uniform lines, alternating between outdented and indented margins. The last of these lines makes reference to the “merlasses for rum” for which the speaker longs. After this line, the poem adopts a different structure: two extra-indented lines create a visual break in the poem and begin a new structural pattern: an outdented line followed by two more extra-indented lines, and finally another outdented line. The line “And leaves no merlasses for rum” thus figures at a structural break, a site of rupture where molasses disappears from the poem itself.

With the line, “…We got to drink whisky in consikence,” the speaker suggests that the disappearance of molasses prompts the deaths of black formerly enslaved people—not the other way around. In losing access to the means of producing molasses and rum, and in being forced to drink whiskey instead, the speaker implies that his economic role has transformed from that of producer to consumer. Like King’s narrator, the speaker in this poem is preoccupied with the uneasy relationship between makers and consumers of products. Both King and the Louisiana

Planter poet define economic roles along racial lines, and yet these roles seem unfixed,

57 intimating uncertainty about the future of white and black participation in southern economic life.

Both “La Grande Demoiselle” and “The Nigger’s Wail” are preoccupied with the question of who controls the means of production: the black insurgents of “La Grande

Demoiselle” figuratively refine Idalie and her female relatives in the sugar-house, suggesting that white women are products of slave labor. The Louisiana Planter poet is similarly interested in the uneasy relationship between producers and consumers in the wake of the Industrial

Revolution, and in how this uneasiness is amplified by racial dynamics. In “The Nigger’s Wail,” a black speaker laments his removal from the production process, and expresses longing to return to an antebellum moment when he controlled the means of production.

Yet, of course, the speaker’s voice does not align with the author’s. Since the poem was likely written by a white poet, his racial background does not align with that of the poem’s speaker. This poem is therefore less about black experience than white anxiety. Like “The Sugar

Chemist’s Dole,” this poem is ultimately an expression of dread about the burdens of industrial production on white laborers: as the black speaker articulates his own removal from a pleasurable mode of production that has become a relic of the past, he describes his own replacement by white sugar scientists who turn cane into “crystals and cubes.” In this sense, the poem is an expression of dread about the burdens of industrial production on white laborers.

Significantly, the Louisiana Planter was a pro-industry publication whose editors advocated for the interests of domestic sugar producers. It might therefore seem surprising to find an expression of white dissatisfaction with the state of modern sugar in poems published in this journal. The author of these two poems uses humor to mitigate his critique: the speakers in both “The Sugar Chemist’s Dole” and “The Nigger’s Wail” are hyperbolically dissatisfied with

58 the state of modern industrial sugar production, such that real concerns about the uncertain future of white laborers are rendered less threatening through comic overstatement and exaggeration. In

“The Nigger’s Wail,” the speaker even further mitigates his own (and his readers’) investment in the fraught relationship of white sugar scientists to their field of work: he adopts the subject position of a black speaker who appeals to white anxieties. By articulating these worries through a black subject position, the speaker is able to speak to uncertainties about the future of the modern sugar industry in a way that might seem incompatible with the goals of a publication whose mission is to encourage the development of this industry.

In this sense, “The Nigger’s Wail” is as much about escaping a white future as it is about returning to a black past. In both this poem and “The Sugar Chemist’s Dole,” the speakers impart a sense of apprehension about the future of an industry that does not afford its workers satisfaction. “The Nigger’s Wail” fantasizes a solution to this problem. By imagining a return to

(ostensibly) pleasurable labor forms, the author of this poem conjures a poetic world where sugar production is not an anxiety-inducing reality but rather a delightful escape for white readers. The speaker thus seeks to recapture and preserve the pleasures of sweetness through narrative: though he suggests that his work producing molasses has ended, he continues to work to preserve it in memory. In this way, the poem stands in for molasses, preserving sweetness in language where it has been lost to taste. Significantly, language and taste are both linked to the mouth, and the speaker’s minstrel speech echoes the pleasure of eating molasses and drinking rum; his black language mimics the sweetness of black sugar.

The speaker’s conflation of molasses with a poem about molasses allows the poet to appropriate a black subject position. In this poem, a formerly enslaved person describes his loss of a mode of work that he longs to reclaim, suggesting that he is powerless to return to an

59 antebellum moment characterized by happy plantation and factory work. The poet thus obscures an antebellum history of violence and enslavement, instead metaphorically sugarcoating this history through an expression of longing for an imagined, sweet past. Not only does he appropriate a narrative of black experience by repackaging oppression as pleasure; he also makes this pleasure available exclusively to the white readers who formed the main audience for The

Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer. By imagining poetry itself as a kind of sweetness— a pleasurable and sensual reminder of the past—the poet makes this sweetness available only to the set of literate readers who subscribed to The Louisiana Planter. In doing so, he not only appropriates black experiences of slavery, he also limits his narrative of this experience to fellow white, educated, well-to-do readers.

The poet thus strives to accomplish the narrative control that seems lost in King’s “La

Grande Demoiselle.” He mimics the speaker’s memory of transforming cane into molasses by transforming the history of American slavery into a humorous myth of antebellum black contentment. By publishing this poem in a journal produced by and distributed to sugar industry leaders, the poet situates a prevailing myth of black antebellum experience under the purview of white writers, editors, and readers. In the following reading of George Washington Cable’s 1876 short story “Café des Exilés,” I further examine literary formulations of longing for the exotic pleasures of Louisiana’s antebellum sugar trade, written by white writers and for white readers.

The Future of Whiteness in George Washington Cable’s “Café des Exilés”

In “Café des Exilés,” Cable’s narrator dines with an old friend, Galahad Shaughnessy, and during this meal the two characters wax nostalgic about a time, decades ago, when

Shaughnessy frequented a café that welcomed all manner of “exiles,” especially those fleeing political turmoil in the West Indies. We learn at the end of the story that the narrator of “Café”

60 has received this story second-hand from Shaughnessy, not having witnessed the events he describes in person. However, a sense of immediacy characterizes his narration, creating the illusion that he speaks as a first-hand witness. In retelling the story to his readers, the narrator lingers over descriptions of sweet liqueurs, served up by the Dominican café owner, M.

D’Hemecourt, to a colorful variety of characters: “the exiles came like bees, pushing into the tiny room to sip its rich variety of tropical sirups, its lemonades, its orangeades, its orgeats, its barley- waters, and its outlandish wines, while they talked of dear home—that is to say, of Barbadoes, of

Martinique, of San Domingo, and of Cuba” (189).18

Though the narrator takes pains to detail the exiles’ experiences visiting the Café, he expresses uncertainty about his facts. The story may or may not take place in 1835: “I think he said thirty-five” (85), the narrator tells us at the beginning of the story, and confesses that he doesn’t remember the exact location of the café either, nor does he tell us the name of the “he” who provided this account, though we later learn that the “he” is Shaughnessy.19 The haziness of the narrator’s memory immediately alerts us to his unreliability. Like “La Grande Demoiselle,” this tale is a rumor, an account told by a narrator who didn’t bear witness to the events he chronicles. At the end of this story, the narrator projects his tale into the future and finally

18 In his study of race and culture in the writings of New Orleans regional writers, James Nagel outlines the conditions in Cuba, San Domingo, Barbadoes, and Martinique that led its people to flee to the U.S. He writes, “Cuba…belonged to France from 1791 to 1809, but the loss of the war with Spain in 1808 forced French citizens to leave the country” (40). Nagel goes on to generalize, “As was common throughout the Caribbean, they fled to New Orleans as did a spectrum of other nationality groups” (40). Arguably, by emphasizing the powers of attraction that syrups and nectars hold over the bee-like exiles, Cable deemphasizes the exiles’ political reasons for leaving their countries, and instead underscores New Orleans’s alluring qualities. While political conflicts in the West Indies provide his story context, these conflicts are incidental to the drama of New Orleans life that forms the basis of Cable’s story.

19 In fact, as Alice Hall Petry points out, “Cable’s New Orleans contemporaries would be acutely aware that the narrator is wrong on two counts: the events of the story actually took place ten years later, in 1845, and the Café des Exilés was situated on Rampart Street, not Burgundy” (50). These inaccuracies suggest the mythical qualities of Cable’s antebellum New Orleans, and of the café more specifically; though these events took place only a few decades prior to the story’s telling, its details have already been distorted with retellings. 61 enlightens his readers as to his source of information, saying, “Only yesterday I dined with the

Shaughnessys” (116). He confesses that he and Shaughnessy may have taken creative “liberties”

(117) in the telling and retelling of the story, suggesting that its accuracy is less important than the power of its effect: the pleasurable experience of imagining a near-forgotten past.

In this way, Cable’s white narrator and his friend Shaughnessy figure themselves as creators and preservers of New Orleans’s cultural heritage. By laying claim to stories about sugar, Cable positions white writers and readers as cultural historians whose job it is not to produce sugar itself, but to articulate and curate its place in a history of New Orleans. In the following reading, I build on King’s and the Louisiana Planter poet’s formulations of the future of the sugar industry, and the uncertain place of southern whites in this future. While King and the poet imagine this future in apocalyptic terms, Cable imagines a new role for a set of white southerners whose economic roles seem increasingly circumscribed by the exigencies of modern industry: he is not interested in the material production of sugar, as described by King and the

Louisiana Planter poet. Instead, he describes the production of representations of sugar through story. Adopting the compensatory logic of white southerners who reacted against a perceived loss of status after the war, Cable asserts their enduring relevance as keepers of the region’s socioeconomic histories, if not keepers of modern industry itself. In this way, Cable offers white readers and writers a meaningful way forward in a post-war context where many white southerners struggled to envision a future for themselves.

The central role of Cable’s first-person narrator underscores the story’s preoccupation with white experience, even in a story that is ostensibly about West Indian exiles. Cable never names his narrator, but the narrator’s voice is so strong that he seems to be a character—an impression that Cable affirms at the end of the story when the narrator enters the world of the

62 story with the line, “Only yesterday I dined with the Shaughnessys.” Sitting with Shaughnessy and Shaughnessy’s Dominican wife Pauline at the end of the story, the narrator acts as an interlocutor for the primarily white, middle-class readership of Scribner’s Monthly, where

“Café” was originally published. While Noonan argues that Cable’s contributions to The Century advocated for “more active measures to ensure a nation-state marked by equality, opportunity, and protection for all” (77), it is worth pausing to consider how Cable goes about this advocacy.

While “Café” champions a multiethnic vision of New Orleans’s past, it asserts this vision through white subjectivities. This representation of white storytellers who take it upon themselves to memorialize New Orleans’s diverse and exotic history is paternalistic: rather than resisting inequality, as Noonan suggests, Cable demonstrates that even an outspoken advocate of racial equality is susceptible to subtle forms of racism. By ending his story with a dinner shared by the narrator, Shaughnessy, Pauline, and the couple’s children, the narrator effectively eliminates the story’s West Indian characters from the narrative and puts their story into the mouths of the only two white characters who remain to tell it. (The narrator is clear that he received his account from Shaughnessy and not Pauline.) Cable suggests that while New

Orleans’s history might be characterized by racial diversity, this history has come under the guardianship of white historians.

In her theorization of “literary tourism” in American regional fiction, Amy Kaplan has argued that regional writers function as cultural interpreters for well-to-do audiences. Kaplan emphasizes the ways in which these interpreters are beholden to a “contested terrain that ties

[their work] inseparably to the urban center” (252). It is worth noting that Kaplan assumes a rural vs. urban dichotomy here, in which writers render an exoticized rural landscape for city-dwelling readers. With reference to Cable, we might revise this formulation: Cable exoticizes New

Orleans as an urban “other” for northern publishers and readers who occupy an imagined northern center of American thought. Cable’s presumably white, male narrator operates as a figural embodiment of this cultural interpreter, doing the quasi-ethnographic work of the regional writer within the world of the story. As both a cultural interlocutor who stands in as a surrogate for Cable and as a character with his own motivations, this narrator provides a glimpse into the cultural and economic interests that fueled white representations of southern experience during the late nineteenth century. By focusing on these interests, we may better understand how “Café” is not only a sketch of a moment in New Orleans history perceived to be at risk of being forgotten, but an example of how white southerners displayed their ownership of this history during the late nineteenth century and beyond.

An examination of the narrator’s central and secondary areas of focus sheds light on the ways by which he privileges white experience. As critics James Nagel and Alice Hall Petry have discussed in their analyses of this story, two plots drive the narrative forward: one centered on a love story, and another on the West Indian exiles’ plot to return to the Caribbean and fight as revolutionaries for Cuban independence. While Nagel emphasizes the interconnectedness of these two stories and refers to them as a “double plot” (41), in fact it is the love story that structures the narrative, and with the resolution of this plot arrives the end of “Café des Exilés.”

The dominance of this storyline suggests that the narrator’s primary interest is reveling in the personal dramas and romances of the city’s inhabitants—with the story’s sole white exile,

Shaughnessy, at its center.

A brief overview of the story’s two plotlines highlights their discrepant functions in the narrative. The story’s central drama revolves around a love triangle. The Dominican café owner,

M. D’Hemecourt, has a beautiful daughter named Pauline, and two exiles who frequent the café

64 vie for her hand in marriage: the upright and boisterous Irishman Captain Shaughnessy and a shifty, swarthy Cuban man named Manuel Mazaro. The story is propelled by Mazaro’s underhanded manipulations, as he attempts to convince D’Hemecourt that Shaughnessy intends to take advantage of Pauline, and thereby marry Pauline himself. At the end of the story,

Shaughnessy proves his innocence and beats the duplicitous Mazaro for Pauline’s hand in marriage; and in the story’s final paragraph, we learn that the entire story has been a collaboration between Shaughnessy and the narrator: describing Shaughnessy and Pauline’s children, he tells us, “…There isn’t one can tell a tale as their father can—’twas he told me this one, though here and there my enthusiasm may have taken liberties” (117). In this way, the final lines of the story reflect on its creators, who are, tellingly, also its only white characters.

Conversely, the prominent non-white characters in the story all fade from the narrative:

D’Hemecourt’s café burns to the ground (116), Mazaro drowns (116), and though Pauline appears in the story’s final scene alongside the narrator and Shaughnessy, she does not enjoy their status as one of the story’s creators. Instead, her position in the story remains that of a prized object, a trophy finally won. The rest of the exiles are inconsequential enough that, even before collectively disappearing at the end of the story to join a political coup in Cuba, many of them “need no mention” (87) in the first place, as the narrator asserts. The many West Indian exiles who populate the story’s backdrop thus do not enjoy Shaughnessy and the narrator’s position as both characters and storytellers at the end of the tale.

Indeed, the exiles’ disappearance is part of the story’s secondary plot: during their hours in the café, the exiles form a plan to smuggle rifles to Cuba by forming a fake burial society and packing weapons instead of bodies into coffins. At the end of the story, a plague appears to eradicate the exiles, but we learn that they have departed to fight in the revolution in Cuba when

65 it is discovered that the burial society’s coffins have been filled with “not dead men, but new muskets…” (116). The café closes its doors, and the many exiles from the West Indies vanish from the story’s action, relegated to the hazy 1835 or 1845 moment that the narrator conjures.

Shaughnessy’s racial and national difference from these exiles sets his narrative arc apart from theirs. Shaughnessy lacks ties to Cuba, and, importantly, as an Irishman he is also a member of a more privileged class than the West Indian immigrants who never make a permanent home in New Orleans. In his study of the Irish in the South during the mid-nineteenth century, historian David T. Gleeson identifies the gradual integration of Irish immigrants and their descendants into mainstream southern society from 1815 to 1877.20 “Café” gestures toward this process of integration, as Shaughnessy undergoes a transformation from exile to husband, from homeless drifter to head of household and chronicler of the café’s history.

A privileging of white experience over the experiences of characters of color thus drives the narrator’s distinction between the upright Shaughnessy, who ultimately wins the day by marrying Pauline, and the many exiles, who occupy the story’s background and ultimately fade away altogether. In fact, we might read the narrator’s comparison of Shaughnessy to his rival,

Mazaro, as emblematic of the racist system of human valuation that drives the story. Cable’s narrator invokes value-laden racial signifiers to praise Shaughnessy and diminish Mazaro:

Mazaro’s “small, restless eyes” are “black and bright as those of a mouse” (87), as opposed to the “boyishness” of Shaughnessy’s “sea-blue eyes” (88). In contrast with the narrator’s reference

20 Gleeson argues that, though the “Irish of the Old South” did not “see themselves as victims,” many of them did “see themselves as exiles” (6). However, by the Reconstruction period, this sense of displacement had largely given way to a sense of belonging, according to Gleeson: the southern Irish were largely pro-Confederate, recognizing that their own acceptance into mainstream American society depended on the marginalization and subjugation of African Americans. Having involved themselves in the war effort and in politics more generally over the course of the mid- nineteenth-century, by the Reconstruction period, “Native southerners recognized the Irish loyalty to race and finally accepted them as fellow, if still somewhat distinct, members of southern society” (186). 66 to Shaughnessy’s “boyishness,” his racialization of Mazaro implies that he resembles a woman: he has a “dark girlish face” whose “locks curled prettily and so wonderfully black” (87-88).

Even the narrator’s description of Mazaro’s hands is racially loaded: he has the “hands of a woman, save that the nails were stained with the smoke of cigarettes” (88). We might read the stains on Mazaro’s feminine fingers as a physical darkening, reifying the story’s commitment to a racial hierarchy that situates Shaughnessy’s white masculinity at its top. In contrast with

Mazaro’s dark, feminine, and “restless” countenance, Shaughnessy wears “white duck” and a

“brass-buttoned roundabout” (88). The narrator racializes Shaughnessy with this reference to the white cotton fabric that he wears, and his brass buttons suggest his brassy, confident, and upright personality. Represented by the shifty and unmanly Mazaro, the West Indian characters fade from the narrative, leaving room for the story’s hero to claim the happy ending that we expect.

Thus, while the beginning of the story dramatizes the power of sensory experience to evoke the tropical homelands of a group of Caribbean exiles, the end of the story transfers this nostalgia to the story’s white subjects. Just as D’Hemecourt and his fellow exiles long for a lost home, by the end of the story Shaughnessy and the narrator long for the vanished exiles and the images of the West Indies that they conjured. After highlighting the displacement of a group of people from their homeland and their attempts to recall the pleasures of this land through sensory experience, ultimately the story is more preoccupied with white longing. Indeed, the narrator transforms the exigencies that drive the story’s secondary plot into a nostalgic tale of antebellum

New Orleans life. In doing so, he internalizes the exiles’ longing for the West Indies as longing for New Orleans, downplaying West Indian political crisis in favor of reminiscence over the exiles’ brief stints in the U.S.

The story’s preoccupation with Shaughnessy’s and the narrator’s subjectivities results in the relegation of the West Indian exiles to the status of narrative ornaments, not unlike the

“slaves, slaves, slaves” that decorate the Des Islets’ plantation in “La Grande Demoiselle.”21

Their aestheticized bodies provide the story’s backdrop, and occasion Shaughnessy’s and the narrator’s nostalgia for the café. What’s more, the narrator aestheticizes these bodies through invocations of sweetness: the exiles’ bodies contain the sugary substances that they imbibe. The exiles become representations of sweetness; they are sugar personified. The narrator thus lays claim to the history of sugar in New Orleans by describing a set of people with whom he identifies this sugar. By situating the history of Caribbean sugar within this metaphorical realm, the narrator is able to claim ownership of the history of this substance through story.

To establish this metaphor, the narrator formulates a parallel construction between the café’s visitors and the drinks that these visitors consume, identifying each through a catalog of detail: the exiles are “of Barbadoes, of Martinique, of San Domingo, and of Cuba”; and they drink the café’s many syrups and liqueurs. These tropical drinks are products of the same regions as their peregrine drinkers. In this way, Cable exoticizes the exiles by conflating them with the beverages of their homelands. He further suggests that immigrants from the West Indies seek out and imbibe these syrups “like bees” (189). This image further aligns the West Indian exiles with sugar, suggesting that they carry it in their very bodies. Cable emphasizes this image of ingestion in his description of M. D’Hemecourt, who claims that his European ancestors have “blood as pure as that wine and a heart as sweet as this honey; come, a glass of orgeat!” (192). While the

21 Cable’s The Creoles of Louisiana (1910)—a social, political, and economic history of Louisiana—also bears mentioning here. In Creoles, Cable traces the flowering of the sugar industry in Louisiana during the eighteenth century. Not unlike the dominance of white subjectivities in “Café,” Cable’s’ description of early sugar-houses in this work centers around a French Creole “of a distinguished Norman family” (109-110) named Etienne de Boré who, Cable writes, took a financial gamble by abandoning the indigo business to grow sugar in 1794. Cable’s discussion of the skilled Haitian laborers who facilitated the sugar industry’s growth in Louisiana is, by comparison, brief. 68 narrator exoticizes both the café’s syrups and its visitors, D’Hemecourt literalizes this conflation: with blood made of wine and a heart of honey, he asks us to read his body as a composite of the café’s sweet syrups and liqueurs. Cable frames West Indian bodies—like distilled beverages—as sweet and delectable products of their homelands, who lend a sense of colorful variety to New

Orleans social life.

The recent critical turn toward food studies has led literary scholars to examine representations of humans as food, perhaps most notably in the work of Kyla Wazana Tompkins,

April Merleaux, and Timothy Morton, who analyze representations of consumable black bodies in American literature and culture. Morton uses the concept of the “blood sugar” topos to frame his discussion: he argues that, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political writing in the transatlantic world, “the sweetened drinks of tea, coffee and chocolate are rendered suddenly nauseating by the notion that they are full of the blood of slaves” (173). Reiterating Morton’s point, Tompkins argues that the American Free Produce Movement, a boycott against goods produced by enslaved people, “echoed this cannibalistic imagery” (219). As Tompkins aptly describes nineteenth century constructions of race, “blackness is put in” bodies (11); these bodies are made consumable from the inside.

While Morton’s blood sugar topos functions as a form of political rhetoric in the service of abolition, in “Café” the message is not so straightforward. In this story, immigrants carry, consume, and are even composed of sugar, but this image does not serve an anti-slavery agenda.

On the contrary, the image of D’Hemecourt’s body filled with sweet wine and honey is an intoxicating one; just as his body is saturated with sweetness, Cable’s lurid language saturates the story, creating an image of a vivid and rich New Orleans. In this sense, Cable does not humanize, but rather aestheticizes, black bodies by conflating them with sugar. Tompkins, who

69 discusses how literary constructions of eating lend themselves to the enforcement of racial hierarchy, examines “those bodies that carry the burdens of difference and materiality, that are understood as less social, less intellectual, and, at times, less sentient: racially minoritized subjects, children, women, and, at times, animals” (8). In Cable’s “Café,” the narrator’s fetishization of West Indian blood suggests objectification and the “burdens of difference” to which Tompkins refers.

Cable’s cannibalistic imagery echoes a prevalent construction of delectable black bodies in writing about the circumatlantic world. A striking example of this imagery appears in

Lafcadio Hearn’s travel narrative about his voyage through the West Indies. In order to situate

Cable’s “Café” within the context of a prevailing rhetoric of edible West Indian bodies, I turn briefly to Hearn’s “A Midsummer Trip to the Tropics” (1890). In this narrative, Hearn compares the black bodies that he sees on his travels to a variety of colorful fruits native to the West Indies.

Describing his impressions of the town of Frederiksted,22 he writes, “…Through open shop- doors one occasionally catches glimpses of a pretty quadroon face,—with immense black eyes,—a face yellow like a ripe banana” (26). He further describes the inhabitants of Martinique:

“…As you observe the bare backs, bare shoulders, bare legs and arms and feet, you will find that the colors of flesh are even more varied and surprising than the colors of fruit. Nevertheless, it is only with fruit-colors that many of these skin-tints can be correctly compared…” (46). Hearn then catalogs the resemblance of a range of skin tones to tropical fruits in painstaking detail:

The sapota or sapotille is a juicy brown fruit with a rind satiny like a human cuticle, and just the color, when flushed and ripe, of certain half-breed skins. But among the brighter half-breeds, the colors, I think, are much more fruit-like;—there are banana-tints, lemon- tones, orange-hues, with sometimes such a mingling of ruddiness as in the pink ripening of a mango. (46)

22 Frederiksted is located on the present-day island of St. Croix in the Virgin Islands. 70

Like Cable, Hearn romanticizes a circumatlantic world where people and fruit alike symbolize an exotic tourist destination for both himself and his readers, who visit this world virtually. In conflating West Indian bodies with the sweet fruits native to this region, Hearn and

Cable also sexualize these bodies. In “Café,” the pleasures of the café’s sweet beverages are associated with their server, Pauline. Like the colorful bodies that Hearn compares to tropical fruit, Pauline resembles the café’s sweet syrups both by association and conflation. Remarking that an exile’s “throat is dry,” D’Hemecourt exclaims, “Let my dear child herself come and mix you a lemonade.” Pauline arrives with a glass and pitcher “before the swarthy wanderer” (93) and the café’s visitors stand and stare, consuming her with their eyes just as they consume the lemonade that she has brewed for them. In this way, Pauline serves as a metaphorical incarnation of the café’s syrups and beverages, herself as provocative and consumable as the drinks that she serves.

Pauline’s resemblance to the delectable consumables that D’Hemecourt sells from his café is perhaps never clearer than when she hides in a closet off the café’s back parlor at the end of the story, while D’Hemecourt confronts Shaughnessy about his intentions: “In the closet full of bottles the maiden smiled triumphantly. She also wiped the dew from her forehead, for the place was very close and warm” (102). In these lines, Pauline joins the bottled liqueurs and lemonades that her father stores in this back room. In fact, we might even say that she adds to this collection with the “dew” that she wipes from her brow. Pauline’s sweat becomes yet another intoxicant whose allure compels the story’s action and, thus, our interest as readers. The narrator further describes Pauline as the café’s “preserving influence” (91), suggesting that her presence immortalizes the café much like the wines, orgeats, and honeyed liqueurs that

D’Hemecourt serves remind the exilés of home. Like these beverages, Pauline thus functions as

71 an emblem of a time and place. In this way, she is an object of desire whose consumption facilitates a return to a fantasized past.

In his discussion of “Café,” Nagel stresses Pauline’s saintliness and innocence in the story, a point that he explains with the narrator’s comparison of Pauline to the biblical Rebecca.

“Lust is never suggested at any point in the action,” Nagel argues, and this is a valid point, especially when we contrast the narrator’s treatment of Pauline with Hearn’s more licentious comparison of tropical fruit to the “bare backs, bare shoulders, bare legs and arms and feet” of

West Indian “flesh” (46). However, I posit that Pauline still functions as a sexual object in this story, situated as she is along with the café’s heady distillates as an object of desire and a portal to a longed-for past.

Just as the liqueurs and nectars that Pauline serves up at the Café evoke home for the exiles, by the end of the story Pauline fills this narrative role: she is the only remnant of New

Orleans’s exotic Caribbean past that persists through the end of the narrative, a pleasant signifier of the city’s all-but-forgotten history. Like the syrups that remind the exiles of home, Pauline is more evocative than active, a portal to the past whose role in the story is that of a consumable treat eliciting pleasurable nostalgia in the men who surround her. Though the narrator never describes Pauline in overtly sexual terms, the similarity between her own narrative function and that of the naked bodies that Hearn describes is striking: like tropical lemonades and orgeats,

Pauline serves as a point of access for white men to embark on a fantasy of antebellum New

Orleans life.

The narrator’s personal relationship with the Shaughnessys ties their present moment, sitting at the dinner table and remembering “Old Creole Days,” to what, until this point, seemed to be a remote past. The exotic history of a city populated by exiles and saturated with sweet

72 liqueurs no longer seems so distant, as we learn that the characters who make up the story’s drama still live, breathe, and dine together. Further, Pauline’s presence at the table suggests that the sensual pleasures of this past have not been lost entirely. Thus, in “Café,” an ostensibly distant past becomes accessible to the story’s readers in 1876.

Just as Cable suggests that writing and reading about liqueurs may stand in as a satisfying substitute for consuming the liqueurs themselves, Hearn makes a similar move in a piece entitled

“Scenes of Cable’s Romances,” which he published in The Century Magazine (formerly

Scribner’s, where “Café” was published) in 1883. In his essay, Hearn conjures an image of himself strolling through the New Orleans streets featured in Cable’s Old Creole Days. When he arrives at Rampart Street, “where Mr. Cable found the model for his ‘Café des Exilés,’” he laments, “…Hereafter, alas! the visitor to New Orleans must vainly look for the window of

Pauline…Scarcely a week ago, from the time at which I write, the antiquated cottage…was ruthlessly torn away, together with its oleanders, and palmettoes, and pomegranates, to make room, no doubt, for some modern architectural platitude” (Hearn 45). Hearn deplores the modernization of New Orleans, and the disappearance of what he paints as a richer, more vivid and luxurious aesthetic, with Pauline at the center. A sense of urgency characterizes Hearn’s narrative: the New Orleans images of Cable’s fictions are in the process of disappearing, and soon may not exist at all.

However, like Cable, Hearn implies a solution to this problem when he chronicles the wealth of oleanders, palmettoes, and pomegranates that have been destroyed to make room for

“some architectural platitude.” These descriptions function as narrative substitutions for the things themselves; though the palmettoes and pomegranates, not to mention Pauline herself, may no longer exist on Rampart Street, they exist on the Rampart Streets of Hearn’s and Cable’s

73 imaginations. Hearn suggests that, by reading regional writing about New Orleans, readers may experience the sensory pleasures—in this case, the opulent sights—that they could no longer find were they to visit New Orleans themselves. Both Hearn and Cable thus assume the roles of cultural historians of New Orleans, keepers of the city’s sweet history. They thus resist the sense of white southerners’ inconsequentiality and powerlessness that runs through King’s and the

Louisiana Planter poet’s writings: by metaphorizing sugar, they claim its history. Advances in sugar production become irrelevant to Cable and Hearn, who strive to import the imagined glories of sugar’s past into the present day through narrative. This perspective is political, formulating white readers and writers as culturally important and relevant guardians of a rich, exotic history of the American South.

Kaplan argues that regionalists inhabit the perspective of “the modern urban outsider who projects onto the native a pristine authentic space immune to historical changes shaping their own lives” (252). While Kaplan is right to identify an idealization of “pristine authentic space” in regional writing, Hearn and Cable suggest that this space is not as “immune to historical changes” as she describes. Rather, they suggest that these pristine, historically significant spaces are subject to the influences of modernization, and that the best way to preserve them is to narrate them. In striving to capture the history of New Orleans through narrative, they necessarily articulate this history through the perspective of white, educated, male interpreters, for audiences that are likewise primarily white and educated. In the last section of this chapter, I turn to the work of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, who resists these white narratives by situating a non- white subject at the center of her 1899 short story “The Praline Woman.”

Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Bitter New Orleans

Alice Dunbar-Nelson, born Alice Ruth Moore in New Orleans in 1875 (Hull 14), was relatively rare as a highly educated black woman in the nineteenth century. She was the object of some notoriety as the wife, and then ex-wife, of Paul Laurence Dunbar, whom Gloria T. Hull describes in her biography of Dunbar-Nelson as “America’s first famous Black poet” (15).

However, Dunbar-Nelson’s historical significance should not be attributed to her relationship with Dunbar. During her own life and in academic circles today, Dunbar-Nelson was and is recognized as an influential fiction writer, essayist, and poet in her own right. In a work of short fiction that take place in New Orleans, Dunbar-Nelson complicates the formulations of sugar’s symbolic significance that appear in works by King, the Louisiana Planter poet, Cable, and

Hearn. “The Praline Woman” is incisive and poignant in its critique of the impulse to romanticize troubling aspects of southern history—in this case, the sugar industry. The story originally appeared in a collection of short stories by Dunbar-Nelson about life in New Orleans, titled The Goodness of St. Rocque and published in 1899.

“The Praline Woman” is narrated almost entirely by a Creole candy seller who voices opinions, prejudices, and pains from a street corner. The “Praline Woman,” who calls herself

“Tante Marie,” ironically peddles not only candy but a narrative of the suffering and hatred to which she is both susceptible and that she wishes to inflict on others. Herself of mixed-race

Creole background, Dunbar-Nelson depicts forms of racial hatred and violence that underpinned the city’s economic structure.23 Dunbar-Nelson thus launches a critique of the conventions of regional fiction, juxtaposing sugar’s sensory pleasures with the discomfiting backdrop of its production and distribution.

23 This economy, in turn, enabled writers such as Cable and Hearn to construct a mythic New Orleans, celebrated for its diversity of flavors and colors, foods, and people. 75

In doing so, she launches a critique of her own generation of regional writers, and of the publishers and readers who solicited and consumed idealized images of a diverse New Orleans.

At the same time, she suggests that she herself is implicated in this process of sugarcoating. The idealization of place that she condemns is knitted into the conventions of the regional mode;

“The Praline Woman” is, despite the social critique that it contains, a pleasure to read. Dunbar-

Nelson suggests that New Orleans fiction is so steeped in the language of sensual pleasure that it becomes impossible to reckon honestly with the city’s social and economic injustices.

However, Dunbar-Nelson does resist reducing the complexities of the sugar industry to sheer pleasure. If it is the business of the marketplace to repackage socioeconomic disadvantage and racial strife as palatable treats, Tante Marie thwarts this process by frankly narrating her own pains and hostilities. Unlike her pralines, Tante Marie’s monologue contains bitterness. The personal experiences she narrates are tragic, and her mode of delivery often downright vitriolic.

When a passing woman is uninterested in buying from her, Tante Marie exclaims, “You tak’ none? No husban’ fo’ you den!” (175). Tante Marie suggests that she has the power to withhold husbands from women who refuse to buy from her. This exclamation resembles an act of performative speech—a declaration that does not only describe reality, but alters it. As readers, we doubt the efficacy of Tante Marie’s curse; her words are funny because she lacks the power to withhold husbands in actuality.

Yet, the effectiveness of Tante Marie’s performative speech might not be the point. Her power lies in her ability to verbalize an act of violence against a woman—violence to which she herself is also susceptible. We can infer that Tante Marie is a member of several disadvantaged populations. As a Creole woman selling wares on the street, she signifies a form of racially obscure and working-class femininity that is historically susceptible to racism and sexual

76 violence. Tante Marie perpetuates the very misogyny of which she herself is potentially a victim.

Later in the story, she shouts to a passing woman, “I lak’ you face” (177), adopting the subject position of a misogynist, a cat-caller on the side of the road.

Tante Marie likewise directs racial hatred toward an Irishman passing by: “Here come dat lazy I’ishman down de strit” (179). The sight of this man prompts her to recall another encounter with an Irishman, which she recounts: the man asked her why she talked the way she did, and she replied that he talked strangely. She counters his ethnic prejudice with her own.24 Similarly, she spots an “Indien squaw” selling filé, a powder made from sassafras leaves and used in gumbo.

Like the Irishman, the Indian woman is “lazy,” according to Tante Marie (176), who implies that the woman’s idleness is due to racial inferiority. Yet, we might assume that she herself occupies the bottom tiers of race, class, and gender hierarchies. The rhetoric she uses to condemn and curse others is conventionally mobilized to oppress people inhabiting her own subject position.

By absorbing and recapitulating forms of violence of which she is at risk, Tante Marie indicates that cycles of discrimination repeat infinitely.

Praline-peddling seems to be a strange occasion for a story that also peddles an endless supply of vitriol and hostility. Considering the anger that Tante Marie directs toward passersby,

Dunbar-Nelson frames the New Orleans street corner not as a pleasurable public gathering place but as a locus of communal in-fighting and hate. Likewise, the praline figures less as a delicacy that gives flavor to a colorful city than as a sweet treat ironically passed among the city’s bitter inhabitants. We might therefore understand “The Praline Woman” as a critique of regional

24 Gleeson’s discussion of Irish immigrants’ uncertain social and economic position in the U.S. during this period resounds here; Tante Marie views the Irish as an ethnic minority subject to a similar (though by no means identical) set of prejudices as those that she herself might encounter as a Creole woman. 77 fiction that aestheticizes at any cost. Dunbar-Nelson acknowledges the forms of violence, prejudice, and social disparity undergirding an industry that deals in sweetness and pleasure.

Anger is not the only manifestation of pain that punctuates this story; Tante Marie also narrates personal loss. Offering to sell a man pralines to give to his daughter, she learns that his daughter is dead, and replies, “Ah, m’sieu, ’t is my lil’ gal what died long year ago. Misère, misère!” (176). Just a few paragraphs later, a woman passes by, and Tante Marie asks why she is wearing black. Learning that her daughter has passed away, Tante Marie exclaims that her son has passed, as well.

It remains unclear whether Tante Marie is telling the truth. As she appeals to readers’ sympathies, we must wonder whether her stories are a marketing ploy. This ambiguity lies at the crux of Dunbar-Nelson’s political statement: ultimately, it becomes impossible to separate personal experience from economic agenda. Tante Marie is either insincere in her grief but savvy as a saleswoman, or she is genuine in her pathos, and pralines are secondary to the “realer” story of her personal history. Dunbar-Nelson asks us to consider both of these competing possibilities.

In this way, she simultaneously emphasizes the power of regional fiction to convey pathos even as she suggests that the mode also may function as a tool of manipulation. The fleeting taste of nostalgia and the pleasure of Tante Marie’s eccentricity soothe a readership whose role it is to consume unreflectively.

Of course, this is not to say that Dunbar-Nelson’s readers were unreflective. Rather, she suggests that regionalism is a mode that does not invite readerly skepticism. “The Praline

Woman” is a meditation not only on purveyors of candy, but also on purveyors of fiction; like a praline, this story masquerades as a palatable and digestible treat, a taste of New Orleans that requires little scrutiny of the cultural and economic mechanisms responsible for its existence.

“The Praline Woman” does not quite resist romanticizing Creole life, but this is the very point of the story.

Overlaying Dunbar-Nelson’s critique is a set of generic conventions that asks us to see

Tante Marie as an oddity, and her venue as a quaint setting where colorful lives unfold. She speaks in dialect, highlighting her position in the story as a curiosity to be heard and consumed by white readers. The pleasurable sound of Tante Marie’s Creole accent mirrors the pleasure of eating pralines. It is not a coincidence that both speaking and eating are associated with the mouth; the experience of reading Tante Marie’s exotic dialect stands in for the experience of eating her pralines.25 Further, her performative speech might not be as performative as she makes it out to be; lacking the power to curse passersby, her articulations of violence might strike us as charming. In a collusion between writer, publisher, and readers, Dunbar-Nelson repackages violence as eccentricity.

By copping to these generic conventions, she suggests the inevitability of regional fiction’s social and economic conservatism. Even in a story that embraces the subject position of a socially and economically underprivileged Creole woman and provides her a forum to voice grievances, hatreds, and losses, ultimately this is a story to be read, enjoyed, and digested. Like the sugar industry of which Tante Marie is a part, the publishing industry sweetens hardship.

Along with her husband and white regional writers including Cable, King, and Chopin, Dunbar-

Nelson published The Goodness of St. Rocque with a New York publication house. In addition to

25 Dunbar-Nelson is not the only writer to imply a connection between the pleasures of speech and the pleasures of taste. In 1903, Célestine Eustis published a book that borrows its title from Cable’s volume of short fiction, titled Cooking in Old Creole Days. The recipe book begins with an introduction by the famous physician and writer S. Weir Mitchell, who articulates an imagined link between the consumption of food and the consumption of sound. He writes, “I am sure there are many who will be charmed by the pretty little songs in the Creole patois of the far Southern kitchen, and will in a double sense appreciate the taste for the receipts, and the effort to preserve the folk- lore of the Southern cook” (Mitchell xiv). For Mitchell, not only do these recipes contain the power to evoke tastes of the past, but also its sounds. 79 publishing her first husband’s work, Dodd, Mead & Company also published work by such mainstream white writers as Oliver Wendell Holmes and Agatha Christie.

In this sense, Dunbar-Nelson was not unlike writers such as Cable, King, and Chopin, whose fiction about New Orleans frequently appeared in northern publications aimed at white, educated readers. Dunbar-Nelson contributed to a publishing environment that monetized mythologies about New Orleans for the pleasure of well-to-do readers everywhere. On the other hand, by publishing with a large house, Dunbar-Nelson was able to reach audiences to which most black authors (especially most black woman authors) still lacked access. As Hull points out,

Dunbar-Nelson “helped to create a black short-story tradition for a reading public conditioned to expect only plantation and minstrel stereotypes” (xxiii). In distributing her fiction to a mainstream audience, Dunbar-Nelson gained prominence as a black woman author, but she also risked distilling the experience of a black woman living in New Orleans to stereotype.

In her examination of late nineteenth-century American reading practices, Nancy

Glazener labels publications such as Harper’s Monthly, The Century, The Nation, Scribner’s, and The Atlantic Monthly as the “Atlantic group” of publications (Glazener 5), suggesting that these publications all circulated short fiction that shared a set of relatively socially conservative ideologies and catered to white, well-to-do readers. It is worth noting that, unlike a writer such as

Cable, whose work frequently appeared in Scribner’s, Dunbar-Nelson mostly did not publish with periodicals in this group. More often, she published essays and works of fiction in periodicals aimed at black readerships, such as The Crisis, The Messenger, and The Journal of

Negro History. In this sense, her works reached a demographic different from the white, educated readers who tended to consume fiction by popular white writers like Cable.

Dunbar-Nelson’s sets of audiences—both the mainstream audience that would have had access to The Goodness of St. Rocque and the black readers who read periodicals where she published later in her life—reveal the dual meanings that compete and enrich her fiction. “The Praline

Woman” appeals to a set of readers who sought delectable narratives of Louisiana life—while also calling attention to the forms of violence wrought by such fantasies of sweetness. The following chapter, on representations of the nation’s early Chinatowns, further reflects on the violence undergirding turn-of-the-century representations of the racial dynamics of sensory experience—in this case through portrayals of visual culture.

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Bryan, Violet Harrington. The Myth of New Orleans in Literature: Dialogues of Race and Gender. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1993. Print.

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Dix, Andrew and Lorna Piatti. “‘Bonbons in Abundance’: The Politics of Sweetness in Kate Chopin’s Fiction.” Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Ed. Monika Elbert and Marie Drews. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 5369. Print.

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Dunbar-Nelson, Alice. “Mr. Baptiste.” The Goodness of St. Rocque, and Other Stories, 111-124. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1899. Web. HathiTrust. 23 Jun. 2015.

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Hearn, Lafcadio. “A Midsummer Trip to the Tropics. Two Years in the French West Indies, 13- 98. New York: Harper & Bros., 1902. Web. HathiTrust. 13 Nov. 2015.

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CHAPTER 2: VISUALIZING CHINATOWNS IN TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY PRINT CULTURE

Introduction

In a journalistic sketch called “Night Scenes in Chinatown, San Francisco” published in

Eclectic Magazine in 1895, author W.H. Gleadell describes his perception of being looked at by the neighborhood’s residents: “…The same stony, unemotional gaze met our eyes wherever we looked” (379). Nonetheless, Gleadell’s dislike of this gaze does not prevent him from looking voraciously at Chinatown’s sights: among other things, he describes “a blaze of color from the myriads of paper lanterns of every conceivable shape, size, and hue”; the “Mongol”’s

“monoton[ous]…blue breeches gathered tight around his ankles, black smock, yellow parchment-like skin, almond eyes, shaven forehead, and long black pigtail”; “gaudy signs in the vernacular”; “scrolls of red paper and black hieroglyphics” on “the the lintels and door-posts.”

Gleadell summarizes the scene, “…Everywhere there was that unmistakable sheen of Oriental tawdriness which irresistibly strikes the Western eye when viewing an Eastern scene for the first time” (379). With these words, Gleadell describes entering San Francisco’s Chinese quarter and gazing at a striking array of visually enticing but foreign and illegible objects, only to feel disconcerted when he finds that he is being stared at in return.

This passage exemplifies a body of turn-of-the-cenutry tourist literature, journalistic writing, and ethnographic work in which white visitors foray into the nation’s early

Chinatowns—most typically in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York—to take in the sights, and become alarmed when the visual delights they encounter are illegible to outsiders.

These works capture a prevailing impression that Chinatowns were the creations of an incommunicative and unassimilated labor force responsible for the dissemination of foreign goods on American soil. Gleadell’s narrative exemplifies a catch-22 at the center of these accounts: on display in the nation’s Chinatowns were an array of visually fascinating people, objects, and architecture that attracted tourists from around the nation; at the same time, the very qualities that attracted these visitors also unsettled them, as they failed to understand what they saw.

This chapter examines and accounts for such expressions of anti-Chinese xenophobia, which emphasize a pervasive yet invisible and incomprehensible Chinese population that nonetheless yields beautiful, ornate, and visually arresting commodities. Taking up both narrative descriptions of Chinatowns’ visual qualities and the myriad illustrations and photographs that often accompanied these writings, I argue that representations of Chinatowns’ sightscapes during this period reflect an unresolved desire to access forms of interiority perceived to be missing. Unlike the feelings of regional access and belonging conferred by tasting in the previous chapter, in this chapter the ability to see the colorful and ornamental goods available in Chinatowns fails to facilitate understanding of the people or cultures responsible for creating and disseminating these goods.

Indeed, Anglo-American writers during this period often express a desire to understand the people responsible for creating Chinatown goods and infrastructure, and frustration when opportunities for such understanding are not available. These moments of desire and frustration convey Anglo American anxieties about economic and geographic displacement at the hands of

Chinese immigrants. Despite the rich and stimulating visual experiences on offer to Chinatown visitors and to readers of Chinatown literatures during this period, many depictions of these

86 neighborhoods exhibit a preoccupation with the ostensibly unassimilated or hidden people responsible for creating these experiences. Turn-of-the-century Chinatowns offered forms of visual delight that tourists sought in increasing numbers during this period and that readers enjoyed across the nation; yet, a part of their fascination derived from a fear of unperceivable economic domination and cultural influence on American soil. In Chinatown, what ground did

Anglo Americans risk ceding while they busied themselves seeing the sights?

The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which codified racial inequality into law and sanctioned myriad forms of racial discrimination, emerged from and further fostered a climate of anti-Chinese racism grounded in such fears. According to historian Yuning Wu, the act forbade Chinese laborers—both skilled and unskilled—from entering the U.S. as a result of a

“grassroots anti-Chinese sentiment.”26 Citing California Senator John F. Miller, Yuning describes how the Chinese represented a perceived threat to Anglo American workers: they were, in Miller’s words, “machine-like…of obtuse nerve, but little affected by heat or cold, wiry, sinewy, with muscles of iron.” Literary scholar Hsuan Hsu further highlights such understandings of the Chinese as robotically productive and illegible, referring to “widespread conceptions of the Chinese as a stoic, mechanical, effeminate, and unassimilable group” (Hsu

15). These perceptions of Chinese immigrants both led to and justified their exclusion from the

U.S.: their efficiency was seen as a risk to Anglo-American jobs and livelihoods; and their seemingly mechanical, non-human qualities legitimized their persecution.27

26 Amy Ling articulates the devastating consequences of the Chinese Exclusion Act: it had the effect of “forbidding entry to all Chinese except five classes of people who were admitted in small regulated numbers: tourists, merchants, diplomats, students, and teachers. This law officially confirmed the inferiority and undesirability of the Chinese and seemed to sanction any expressions of hatred so that, particularly in the western states, Chinese were robbed, assaulted, lynched, burned, and entire populations driven out, even murdered with impunity” (24).

27 As literary scholar Yoon-Young Choi notes, “The idea of Chinatown as a self-contained and alien society…justified persistent acts of surveillance, investigation, and statistical surveys that ‘scientifically’ corroborated…racial classification” (1024). 87

As Hsu points out, public sentiment toward Chinese workers “was expressed in dozens of often violent purges of Chinese settlers from towns across the western U.S. in the 1880s,” resulting in the resettlement of Chinese immigrants and people of Chinese descent in urban

Chinatowns (15-16). As these neighborhoods grew, they became tourist destinations for Anglo-

American visitors, as well as a popular subject of fiction and journalism for white writers and readers.28 In these texts, vivid surfaces reveal little. When Chinatown inhabitants seem capable of showing white onlookers only a superficial and mediated vision of Chinese culture, entire segments of America seem to become unavailable to Anglo American readers and tourists. In dramatizing perceptions of inscrutability, writers and publishers suggest that American values of transparency and assimilation are under threat: narrative and visual representations seem incapable of illuminating Chinatowns’ dark corners, not to mention the minds of the immigrants who built it.

Scholars of regional literature including Amy Kaplan, Lora Romero, Hsuan Hsu, and

Stephanie Foote have examined the ways by which late nineteenth-century regional fiction mobilizes images of the local, domestic, and diminutive to advance far-reaching political and economic agendas. Yet, while these scholars have attended to the ways that conceptions of region bear on conceptions of nation, they have not as extensively examined how the publishing industry negotiated a perceived lack of access into regional spaces. As literary scholar Yoon-

Young Choi notes in her analysis of contested spaces in San Francisco’s Chinatown, “The space

28 As I discuss in the following section of this chapter, Chinese authors and readers also attended to the subject of Chinese experience in America; most texts reflecting on these topics were published in Chinese-language newspapers in the nation’s early Chinatowns, and are thus outside the scope of this dissertation. For more information, see Xiao-huang Yin’s Chinese American Literature since the 1850s (2000) and “Between the Local and the Global: Characteristics of the Chinese-Language Press in America,” and Yumei Sun’s chapter on the Chinese- language press from 1900-1920 in the U.S. in Print Culture in a Diverse America, ed. James P. Danky and Wayne A. Wiegand (1998). English-language Chinatown writings also make an appropriate object of study given this project’s focus on sensory evocations of place for mainstream middle-class readerships across the nation. 88 of Chinatown was depicted as the dark, uncivilized subterranean world which stands in direct contrast to the decent, rational aboveground space of white Americans” (1025). Choi’s reference to notions of rationality invokes twin values of cultural assimilation and transparency of knowledge, understood by many white Americans to be at risk with the urban growth of a

Chinese immigrant population. Because this population’s constituents shared common systems of knowledge and communication, white visitors found themselves barred from full access to or participation in the Chinatown communities through which they forayed.

Building upon Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities, I thus take up a definition of regionalism that focuses less on geographically bounded spaces than on spaces sharing common defining attributes—in this case, a set of optical qualities that seems to bar viewers from deeper insight into Chinatowns’ inner workings. In the service of fascinated readers across the country, publishers capitalized on the appeal of these qualities by purveying them in print, so that visual signifiers of Chinatown life traveled far beyond the neighborhoods’ geographic borders. Like a decorative Chinese vase or an embroidered doll, the narrative and visual representations of Chinatowns that populated periodical publications and books during this period contributed to and affirmed prevailing understandings of Chinese visual culture.

In his examination of how magazines helped to create a “national mass culture” at the turn of the century (Ohmann vii), Richard Ohmann makes a case for the mutually constitutive and interdependent meanings of image and text at the turn of the century. In periodicals, he writes, “The initial impression, and perhaps the appeal, was as much of pictures accompanied by print as vice versa” (224). Thus, while images had previously functioned primarily as paratextual—existing in support of the written text alongside which they appeared—their increasing place of prominence enabled publishers to imitate visual signifiers of Chinese culture,

89 from decorative floral motifs to representations of traditional Chinese costumes.29 Chinatowns thus came to function in a popular imaginary as geographically disparate places that were nonetheless connected by virtue of how they signified not only to Chinatown visitors but to readers across the nation. Literary representations of Chinatowns and the paratextual images accompanying them combine to form a composite picture of an alluring but illegible Chinese culture. This chapter seeks to examine text and paratext side by side, as each one bears on and constitutes the meanings of the other.

By developing and disseminating a visual language of arresting but inscrutable Chinese cultural forms, publishers encouraged American readers to understand Chinatown residents in these terms, in the service of a xenophobic stance on Chinese presence and employment in the

U.S. The images and narratives conveying these attitudes largely fail to offer insight into the rich visual cultures, creative decisions, or forms of handicraft responsible for the development of the nation’s Chinatowns. Such a lack of insight, in turn, serves to dramatize the potential threat to

Anglo American culture posed by Chinese presence in the U.S. In the following examinations of the representations and imitations of Chinese visual culture that appeared in print at the turn of the century, I explore a range of attitudes toward Chinese presence in the U.S. on the parts of publishers, writers, illustrators, and photographers. I begin with a brief historical section examining the factors and events that led to notions of Chinatowns as unassimilated and opaque spaces in America. In turn, this lack of legibility came to represent a threat to a free and transparent exchange of knowledge, information, and understanding in America.

In the next sections, I trace how the publishing industry responded to this perceived threat. I turn first to several works of popular literature that narrate the visual pleasures on offer

29 The term “paratext” was originally coined by literary theorist Gérard Genette, in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997). 90 in American Chinatowns in journalistic sketches by D.E. Kessler and Will Brooks, and several illustrated short stories by Eurasian author Edith Maude Eaton, all of which exhibit a fascination with Chinese decorative objects. These textual interpretations of Chinese visual culture demonstrate a preoccupation with optically arresting surfaces that fail to reveal their origins or meanings.

In the third section, I turn to three texts that dramatize the consequences of this perceived lack. Jacob Riis’s foundational work of photojournalism How the Other Half Lives (1890) and

Frank Norris’s short story “The Third Circle” (1909) evoke the visually striking streets of New

York’s and San Francisco’s Chinatowns, respectively—only to suggest that hidden and possibly dangerous channels of communication undergird these neighborhoods, unbeknownst to visiting tourists. In her short story “The Chinese Empire” (1878), Helen Hunt Jackson takes a small step in bridging this perceived communication divide: after mocking the preponderance of seemingly identical illustrations of Chinese men for sale in San Francisco’s Chinatown, she encounters a real man who exhibits “Christian patience” under her “insulting and curious gaze” (63). Here,

Jackson briefly relinquishes her desire to understand in favor of acknowledging his forebearance.

In the chapter’s final section, I take up a story by Eaton that allows for the possibility that

Chinatown’s visual enticements are, in fact, meaningful components of a rich and intelligible culture. At first, “‘Its Wavering Image’” (1913) seems to recapitulate the coded language that she and other authors frequently use to conjure an image of a visually arresting but unintelligible

Chinatown—but she also identifies the forms of human creativity and feeling responsible for creating this neighborhood. Even further, she insists that it is up to white visitors—not

Chinatown residents—to cultivate the forms of trust that would allow these visitors to gain access not only to the neighborhood’s beauty, but to the rich emotional life that this beauty

91 engenders in those who care to appreciate it. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of the cover and visual matter inside the pages of the first edition of Eaton’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance

(1912), and the ways in which Eaton and her publisher combined signifiers of both Anglo and

Chinese American cultures to advance an incipient ethic of racial harmony.30

Taken together, the sections comprising this chapter reflect broadly on how trends in immigration, resulting politics of exclusion, and a compensatory culture of suspicion informed representations of American Chinatowns as visually alluring but ultimately incomprehensible spaces at the turn into the twentieth century. In turning to Jackson and Eaton at the end, it also considers a few of the rare portrayals of these neighborhoods that seek to remediate these negative associations.

While not all middle- and upper-class Americans had the means, opportunity, or desire to visit Chinatown neighborhoods in person, many nonetheless participated in a culture of literary tourism, enjoying the visual pleasures of slumming from the comfort of their own homes. At the same time, a print culture informed by a political climate of exclusionary rhetoric ensured that these readers maintained skepticism about the validity of these pleasures: who might be lurking behind Chinatown’s vivid surfaces, they ask, and what might they take from us? These questions reveal the extent to which writers, publishers, and readers dramatized the limits of sight to confer ownership of place or feelings of belonging.

30 Prominent Eaton scholars including Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks have focused on locating her on an ideological spectrum between, on one hand, an adherence to the racist, orientalizing rhetorics that prevailed in many contemporaneous writings about Chinese culture in America and, on the other hand, a socially progressive iconoclasm that replaces such rhetorics with a celebration of Chinese culture. However, Eaton scholars such as Dominika Ferens, Hsuan Hsu, and Mary Chapman have offered more tempered readings of Eaton’s progressivism. For example, in what we might consider a direct response to Ling’s comparison of the Eaton sisters, Ferens writes that “when criticism indulges in the ‘good sister–bad sister’ paradigm, both Winnifred’s subtle antiracist interventions and the muted orientalism of Edith’s work go unnoticed” (2). Hsu and Chapman have historicized Eaton’s roles as a transnational writer, a cosmopolitan writer (Hsu 22-23), and a writer of sentimental and popular fiction (Hsu 21), thereby elucidating Eaton’s place in the complex socioeconomic dynamics of turn-of-the-century publishing, further complicated by her racial status and the racial themes that she advanced in her work. 92

Early Chinatown Optics

The widespread conception of Chinatowns as enticing products of a hidden and unassimilated labor force can be attributed, in part, to rapid globalization at the turn of the century. The coterminous rise of consumer capitalism and increased immigration and trade at the end of the nineteenth century fomented a proliferation of imported objects on American soil. As literary scholar June Hee Chung notes, “The large numbers of imported people and things” in

Chinatown “made the rise of international trade especially conspicuous” to the American public

(34). Philip P. Choy traces the commercialization of Asian goods to the middle of the nineteenth century, when, “Embarking from the Atlantic States, ships would sail around the Horn of South

America, cross the Pacific to Canton, and return carrying hundreds of Chinese laborers and cargoes of Chinese goods” (Choy 30). Choy provides a list of the types of imports that could be found in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the second half of the nineteenth century: bedsteads, lounges, furniture, silk, shawls, ivory work, stoneware, and more (30). Goods such as these came to project competing meanings for white Americans: they were attractive as collectible objects at a moment defined by “decoration crazes of Chinoiserie” (Chung 29), but, crowded together within the crowded shops and streets of Chinatown, they came to signify an optical bombardment of foreignness.

The architecture of the neighborhood, too, reflects the increasing presence of Chinese imports in the U.S. As Choy describes, “Hundreds of prefabricated wooden houses added to the

City’s housing inventory” during the nineteenth century, many of which were “imported from

Canton” and “put up by Chinese carpenters” (30). In addition to these wooden homes, “…Brick and stone buildings” made of Chinese granite “were built on California, Sansome, Battery, and

Montgomery Streets” (Choy 32). The very source of these buildings—many of them tenements

93 inhabited by Chinese immigrants—not to mention the Chinese laborers who installed them, announced the material presence of Chinese people on American soil.

These architectural signifiers of Chinese presence did not last: a massive earthquake destroyed much of San Francisco’s Chinatown on April 18, 1906. As Bonnie Tsui has written in her Chinatown history, the earthquake “presented an opportunity for city developers to force the relocation of the Chinese American community and claim the valuable real estate that the neighborhood occupied” (16). While the old buildings had not been constructed to serve the sensibilities of Anglo American tourists, new buildings were: in collaboration with white developers, Chinese merchants wanted “to change the community’s image from that of a vice- filled slum and ensure its continuing survival as, in part, an attractive tourist draw” (16), according to Tsui. With these goals, the architects of San Francisco’s Chinatown reinvented the neighborhood from a “typical American frontier settlement, only with Chinese characters” (Tsui

22) to a new “Oriental City” (Choy 44) that catered to tourists. “Their challenge,” Choy writes, was to transform popular images of “pagodas and temples with massive curved roofs with eaves curled at corners…into a new Sino-architectural vocabulary using Western methods of construction and local building materials” (45). City developers reinvented the neighborhood in order to serve the sensibilities of Anglo American tourists who were largely unfamiliar with

Chinese culture, but who had nonetheless inherited attitudes about how this culture manifested in

Chinatown’s architecture, goods, and residents. White developers, paid by Chinese merchants, were largely responsible for the neighborhood’s new look, which was “appealing and acceptable to a general public that had come to view the Chinese with racist eyes” (Tsui 21).

To be sure, this re-development benefited the residents and shopkeepers of San

Francisco’s Chinatown in making the neighborhood an attractive destination for visitors—and

94 also benefitted the inhabitants of other Chinatowns, designed in this one’s image. Yet, simultaneously, xenophobic rhetorics of disease, profligacy, and criminality continued to circulate: as Choi notes, “The images of cramped, hidden, and subterranean living quarters that resembled ‘pen’ [sic], ‘dens,’ ‘coffins’ and ‘dungeons’ were common” in accounts of Chinatown during this period (1029). Taken together, these stereotypes “framed the endurance of the

Chinatown ghetto as a living repository of the strange, the peculiar, and the unassimilable in San

Francisco” (Choi 1029), even in the aftermath of the fire. Thus, the competing optics of

Chinatown as a space of visually exotic architecture and curiosities worthy of touristic exploration and a space defined by hidden, illegible, and dangerous signifiers of racial difference came together to complicate narrative representations of these neighborhoods and the communities inhabiting them.

Indeed, as Barbara Berglund has pointed out in her analysis of the history of tourism in

San Francisco’s Chinatown, through journalistic and literary representations of this neighborhood, “Chinese immigrants entered the racial imagination even in places where they had not settled and where people may have never actually seen an Asian person” (Berglund 6). For many Americans, literature served as the only—or one of the only—frames of reference for making sense of the nation’s emerging Chinatown neighborhoods. Significantly, the vast majority of English-language representations were written, illustrated, and disseminated by white people, as most published works by Chinese people in the U.S. during this period were written in

Chinese. For example, Ng Poon Chew founded the popular Chinese-language Chung Sai Yat Po in 1900 in San Francisco; it continued to run until 1951. At least seven Chinese-language newspapers and periodicals were published in San Francisco’s Chinatown at the turn of the

95 century, and many others were published in other Chinatowns across the country (Yin, “Between the Local and the Global” 54).

The linguistic divide between English- and Chinese-language publications served to compound the notion that Chinatowns contained hidden worlds unavailable to visitors, concealed by immigrants who were unable or unwilling to communicate. Choi suggests that writers compensated for this perceived opacity by seeking to reveal the dynamics of these hidden spaces:

“The sensationalized reality represented in these narratives offered the readers the disclosure of private reality of the city” (1027), she writes. Yet, in the readings that follow, I seek to show how writers, illustrators, and publishers struggled to reconcile Chinatowns’ visually arresting surfaces with a sense of their illegibility; looking, in these works, often did not confer understanding of a

“private reality.” I begin this discussion by attending to several depictions of Chinatowns as fragments and shards of China itself—optically fascinating but without context, and therefore seemingly illegible to white Americans.

Storied Chinatowns

In a journalistic sketch that appeared in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1881, C. Baldwin describes San Francisco’s Chinatown as “a verifiable slice of the ‘Middle Kingdom,’” (123). His language of Chinatown’s fragmentary appearance was prevalent at this time, as writers negotiated the impression that the urban spaces populated by Chinese immigrants and people of

Chinese descent were products of another continent, transplanted in the U.S. as mere pieces of a whole, and therefore lacking context, meaning, and legibility. Indeed, writers of tourist literature and popular fiction frequently portrayed American Chinatowns as amalgamations of a wide assortment of visually arresting fragments: shards of glass, pieces of broken China, assorted curiosities plucked from where they belonged and transplanted among random other objects.

For example, writing for the San Francisco-based Overland Monthly in 1907, journalist

D.E. Kessler suggests in a piece titled “An Evening in Chinatown” that the neighborhood constantly re-constitutes itself into new images by drawing on a limited supply of materially identical components. Kessler builds his description around a metaphor of a kaleidoscope: “This much written of, strangely fascinating place, was nevertheless always new and glitteringly attractive through each separate pair of eyes that viewed it, much as the successive turns of a kaleidoscope revolve the same bits of colored glass into ever new, ever glittering patterns, although always formed of the same bits of glass” (445). By comparing Chinatown to an image viewable through a kaleidoscope, Kessler imagines the neighborhood as a set of vividly colored glass shards whose perpetual movement and rearrangement suggest the creation of brand new images. The constantly shifting pieces conferred by Kessler’s kaleidoscope image suggests the fleeting quality of visual pleasure, as well as a lack of origin and substance. Though the glass shards remain the same, they never cohere into a single or intelligible expression of meaning.

Further echoing Kessler’s representation of Chinatown as an image constituted by so many shards of glass, writer Will Brooks described Chinatown thusly in “A Fragment of China,” an 1882 piece that appeared in The Californian, a magazine out of San Francisco: “It is as perfect a bit of broken china as might be: not an Alladin’s [sic] palace alone, transported by magic in the night; but a city, almost a country, in itself, picked up from the Flowery Kingdom and set down in its entirety here in our midst” (6). With these words, Brooks further aligns Chinatown with an image of shards—in this case a fragment of china, implying that Chinatowns are derived materially from China itself. Having been removed from the “Flowery Kingdom” where it originated, Chinatown seems somehow coherent and incoherent, whole and part, all at once: it is a “bit of broken China”—yet, as Brooks notes qualifies, a “perfect” one that has been “set down

97 in its entirety” in America. Brooks’s description of a perfect and entire shard is a contradiction, exemplifying an attempt to negotiate Chinatown’s status as both an extension of a nation halfway around the world and a self-sustaining community in its own right. In considering this status, he demonstrates the extent to which Chinatown’s unfamiliar origins and seeming incoherence interested American writers, publishers, and readers.

Brooks conjures a similarly piecemeal visual plane in the following description of a shop owner whom he encounters: “…Let us look upon him for himself, regarding him more as a piece of animated bric-à-brac—which he largely resembles—than anything else” (7). Like

Kessler’s kaleidoscopic shards and Brooks’s fragment of china, again the language of pieces describes Chinatown’s contents—in this case a man who, along with the goods that he sells, appears as a bit of clutter. Brooks encapsulates his impression of this shop owner in a description of him as “perhaps unpleasant, but yet undeniably picturesque” (7). Like the perfect shard of china that is Chinatown, this man is visually compelling, even beautiful—but, at the same time, unappealing in his status as a piece of a hodge-podge of objects.

Brooks’s language of animation further indicates a discomfort with the man’s relationship to his surroundings. As a piece of “animated bric-a-brac,” the man appears less as a human being than as a magically or mechanically activated object—a kind of human-sized wind- up toy that is captivating to look at but whose status as an animated doll gives him an uncanny quality that Brooks finds “unpleasant.” Brooks’s description of the man thus builds upon his description of Chinatown, as in both cases he expresses discomfort with a perceived lack of familiarity: Chinatown’s far-flung origins render it partially incoherent in America; and a

Chinatown shopkeeper’s resemblance to his wares makes him unreadable as a human being, though “picturesque” as an object.

Several wood engraving reliefs accompany this story, and a couple in particular augment

Brooks’s categorization of Chinatown’s human residents as “bric-à-brac” for sale. One relief depicts a Chinese merchant in his shop, surrounded by a variety of what Brooks might refer to as

“bric-à-brac”: bottles on shelves to the right; baskets, cookware, a burlap sack, and two whole fish hanging along a pole to the left; a variety of dried herbs hanging overhead; and an array of vegetables on the counter in front of him. In the center of the picture, the merchant weighs a small package, and though he stands at the visual center of the image, he is not in its foreground.

Instead, he is set back from the vegetables and scale that sit on the counter in front of him, and his shoulder is even partially obscured by one of the dead fish hanging at the left of the image.

We might therefore read the merchant as an object among objects, blending in as he does with the goods that he sells.

This impression is compounded by the illustration’s resemblance to a still life painting, which by definition depicts non-living objects. The preponderance of food and plant matter in this image, and its representation of commerce and trade, are suggestive of the still-life mode

(Liedtke). In a picture populated by inanimate objects that invokes an artistic genre devoted entirely to depicting such objects, the presence of the merchant deemphasizes his humanity.

Fig. 1. Wores, T. Shopkeeper. “A Fragment of China,” by Will Brooks. The Californian, July-

December 1882, pp. 13. Google Books. Web. 23 Apr. 2018.

In a similar relief that appears just a few pages earlier, a “fish-monger” empties a basket of fish onto a countertop. This image, too, resembles a still-life. The man is positioned in the upper right corner of the frame, while the dead fish that tumble from his basket occupy the image’s foreground. Further suggesting his lack of prominence in the picture is a group of fish strung up and hanging from the ceiling in the top left corner of the illustration; as these fish and the fishmonger each occupy a corner of the illustration, they create a visual balance and frame for the larger pile of fish in the center of the image. In this way, the composition of the engraving

100 implies the visual similarities between the hanging fish and the fishmonger who presumably strung them up. The shading of the image further pronounces these similarities: the fish and the fishmonger’s face appear in shades of white and light gray, while the rest of the image is cast in relative darkness. Indeed, the image is full of bright white, spherical faces, almost all of which are those of inanimate, nonliving fish. Though the fish-monger is living, his resemblance to the dead fish that in his basket and on the countertop create a visual similarity to them.

Fig. 2. Wores, T. Fishmonger. “A Fragment of China,” by Will Brooks. The Californian, July-

December 1882, pp. 11. Google Books. Web. 23 Apr. 2018.

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Both of these illustrations affirm Brooks’s language of “animated bric-a-brac.” The men depicted in both of them appear as kitsch, occupying the same background space as the goods for sale in their shops, yet both also seem to possess a greater agency than their goods: one looks intently at the basket of dead fish as he tips them from his basket, his perceptive eyes contrasting with the dead eyes of the fish that lie on the counter. Likewise, the shop owner in the other illustration gazes at a scale on which he measures several items, further suggesting his abilities of perception. Like the uncannily “animated bric-a-brac” that Brooks describes, these images convey a sense of partial or approximate humanity; just as we look at these figures in their shops, they, too, are capable of looking, yet their resemblance to the goods that they sell suggests to readers that, though they resemble humans, they are not fully human.

The first image to appear alongside Brooks’s narrative occupies most of the essay’s first page, and provides an even starker example of the extent to which The Californian’s publishers sought to throw Chinatown residents’ legibility into question. This engraving, captioned

“Restaurant Corner,” shows a collection of trinkets and decorations that signify the Far East: in the foreground, an intricate vase; leaning against it, a Chinese long-necked lute (called a sanxian). Hovering above all of these objects is an ornate metal window frame evoking eastern symbols and figures: the outlines of elephants and lotus flowers wind through the frame. A

Chinese lantern hangs from this frame, visually prominent as it occupies the top center of the image. The décor of this Chinese restaurant is the focus of the engraving, visually conveying

Chinatown’s exoticism. Somewhat less prominent in the engraving are a potted plant set behind and slightly to the right of the large vase and lute, and a smaller vase filled with flowers in the upper right corner of the image that seems to hover over the small column of text that appears in the bottom right corner of this otherwise heavily illustrated page.

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Fig. 3. Wores, T. Restaurant corner. “A Fragment of China,” by Will Brooks. The Californian,

July-December 1882, pp. 6. Google Books. Web. 23 Apr. 2018.

Yet, while this plant and flower vase appear diminutive behind the more prominent objects in the engraving, they are nonetheless more pronounced than a painting that occupies the 103 engraving’s backdrop, dim and hazy in shades of gray. This painting features several human figures, barely recognizable as such save for the exaggerated racialized features that demarcate them as Asian. These figures are far less vividly drawn than the figures that sit in front of them: the blurry lines and grayish colors of the painting differ from the more pronounced lines and dark/white contrast of the vases, plant, lantern, and lute. Further augmenting these optics is the fact that the only human figures to appear in this engraving appear in a painting: these are not representations of people occupying the restaurant alongside the objects that dominate the engraving; rather, as illustrations hung from a wall, they are decorations on display for visitors and readers. In fact, it is fitting that this engraving’s caption identifies it as a “restaurant”— though no food is pictured, readers are invited to devour all of these objects, including the painting, with their eyes.

Similarly, in Edith Maude Eaton’s short story “The Gift of Little Me,” Chinese children figure as decorative objects and dolls that occupy an uncertain space between human and object worlds. In this reading, I suggest that the young Chinese residents of San Francisco’s Chinatown in Eaton’s story occupy a liminal status between dolls and people. Echoing Brooks’s description of a Chinatown man as an animated and picturesque object, Eaton’s doll-like children further demonstrate attitudes toward the Chinese as object-like figures that nonetheless possess their own forms of agency. As neither objects nor people, Eaton’s Chinese children claim attributes associated with both of these categories: they are aesthetically pleasing but also disruptive and willful. Ultimately, these traits combine to reflect Eaton’s place in a print culture where questions of Chinese belonging and agency were pervasive. While Eaton scholars such as

Annette White-Parks, Amy Ling, and Dominika Ferens have worked to locate Eaton’s representations of Chinese culture in America on ideological and political spectrums, here I

104 characterize her writing as ideologically untethered, attaching to prevailing perceptions of

Chinatown residents as un-categorizable and therefore unreadable while also resisting such impulses.

In “The Gift of Little Me,” a young Chinese boy in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Little

Me, competes with his classmates to offer valuable gifts to their white teacher, Miss McLeod.

From the story’s first paragraph, the thematic significance of the neighborhood’s visual qualities is clear: for Chinese New Year, “The schoolroom was decorated with banners and flags wrought in various colors. Chinese lanterns swung overhead. A big, green, porcelain frog with yellow eyes squatted in the centre of the teacher’s desk. Tropical and native plants: azaleas, hyacinths, palms, and Chinese lilies, filled the air with their fragrance” (95). Echoing popular portrayals of enclosed Chinatown spaces crowded with assorted decorative objects, Eaton conjures an image of Little Me’s classroom as a space populated not only by children but by ornaments. As she goes on to demonstrate, the distinction between these categories is obscured when Little Me attempts to turn a person—his own baby brother—into an object by giving him away to his teacher as a gift.

Foreshadowing this turn of events, Eaton blurs the line between children and objects in her descriptions of the holiday attire of Little Me’s classmates: Han Wenti wears “loose, flowing sleeves, upon each of which was embroidered a yellow dragon”; San Kee’s “Americanized” father has dressed him in “stiff and slim American store clothes”; Little Choy wears a “checked louisine Mother Hubbard gown”; sisters Fei and Sie appear in “their native costume of bright- colored silks flowered with gold”; and Little Me wears a “blue cotton tunic and pantaloons”

105

(96).31 In these vivid descriptions of the children’s costumes, Eaton characterizes Little Me and his classmates in visual terms, privileging the appearances of their garments over any other quality or trait.

In this way, Eaton’s story is in conversation with contemporaneous portrayals of Chinese children as dolls. For example, Kessler describes the Chinese children in San Francisco’s

Chinatown as “quaintly picturesque in a miniature, embroidered replica of the attire of their elders” (445). Echoing Brooks, the narrator’s use of the word “picturesque” introduces his portrayal of Chinese children as decorations to be looked at. Further augmenting this portrayal is his use of the phrase “miniature, embroidered replica” to describe the children’s garments. As a

“replica” of adult clothing, Kessler suggests that children’s clothes are imitative copies—further enhancing children’s ambiguous status as both people and ornaments.

Both Eaton and Kessler thus obscure divisions between children and things, and in doing so imply that children are meant to be looked at. Indeed, the ambiguous position that Chinese children occupy between human subjects and decorative objects bears out over the course of

Eaton’s story. Its drama revolves around the gifts that Little Me and his classmates give Miss

McLeod in celebration of Chinese New Year, and ultimately Eaton suggests that even human children can function as gifts: Little Me deposits his baby brother in Miss McLeod’s tenement without anyone’s knowledge, fomenting panic in Chinatown and despair in his parents.

On the other hand, the baby’s status as a gift does not preclude his humanity. When the baby is discovered in Miss McLeod’s apartment, accusations of kidnapping arise until Little Me explains to Miss McLeod in front of the crowd of onlookers that he heeded her words when she

31 Little Me’s tunic and pantaloons are evocative of a turn-of-the-century fad for dressing young boys in formal clothing, precipitated by Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy (1885-1886). In this sense, Eaton is perpetuating a widespread cultural trend: the decoration (and, by extension, objectification) of children. 106 referred to Jesus Christ as a “free gift” (98): “You say baby boy best gift, so I give him to you when my father and mother not see” (109). If Jesus was a gift, Little Me thinks, then his baby brother can be, too. Little Me’s implicit comparison of his brother to Christ marks a departure from his mother’s description of him as jewel or blossom. Eaton assigns a kind of wisdom to

Little Me that allows him to value his brother as more than a decoration—as, indeed, a figure of incomparable meaning. “The Gift of Little Me” seems to frame children as dolls occupying a visual plane of assorted Chinatown ornamental objects, but ends with an assertion that children possess a value far greater than objects—and that a young Chinese boy, Little Me, alone possesses the insight and feeling necessary to recognize this fact. While Little Me’s literal interpretation of Miss McLeod’s description of Christ as a “free gift” is humorous, the story presents his ingenuousness as a positive trait, as even his stern father declares his pride in Little

Me (110).

In spite of Eaton’s ambivalent portrayal of the relationship between children and decorative objects in “The Gift of Little Me,” this and other stories by Eaton are highly mediated by the artwork that accompanied them in print. Though as an author Eaton was not responsible for editorial decisions about the artwork accompanying her stories and essays, such artwork nonetheless interacts with her narratives. The illustrations that accompany many of Eaton’s published works thus indicate the complicated ways in which image and language bear on each other in turn-of-the-century writings about Chinatown. In the case of “The Gift of Little Me,”

Eaton’s ultimately nuanced and humanizing portrayal of Little Me and his brother is undercut by the illustrations that accompanied the story in the December 1909 issue of Minneapolis’s broadsheet The Housekeeper.

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Complementing Eaton’s initial vision of children as decorative objects, the story’s most prominent illustration positions Miss McLeod as the story’s protagonist—the primary human subject, surrounded by bodies that are less clearly drawn than hers. This image is centered in the page, and Miss McLeod is its most distinguishable character: she wears a black dress, and her bright, white face peaks out from beneath a smart-looking black hat. Meanwhile, many Chinese residents of the neighborhood crowd around her in shades of gray clothes and gray skin. Even

Little Me blends into this mass of bodies, not immediately recognizable as the story’s title character. Miss McLeod appears in two of the three illustrations on this page; Little Me only appears in one; and his baby brother is completely absent. These artistic choices echo the painting of hazy-looking figures in Brooks’s Chinatown account in The Californian—both images suggest the status of the district’s Chinese residents as formless background images, barely legible on the page.

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Fig. 4. Street scene. Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton). “The Gift of Little Me: How a Quaint

Little Chinese Almost Turned the Christmastide into a Tragedy.” The Housekeeper, Dec. 1909, pp. 9. Personal communication with Mary Chapman, 16 Apr. 2018.

This illustration is emblematic of the decorative status occupied by children in many other images accompanying Eaton’s published works. For example, a number of Eaton’s stories feature images of cherub-like Chinese children with exaggeratedly racialized features, clothing, and accessories that would have signified to white readers as Asian. These stories include “Half-

Moon Cakes,” “Ku Yum and the Butterflies,” “The Heart’s Desire,” “The Tangled Kite,” and

“What About the Cat?,” “The Crocodile Pagoda,” “The Sugar-Cane Baby,” and “A Chinese

Boy-Girl”—a (not exhaustive) selection of Eaton’s illustrated children’s stories that capitalize on

109 visual stereotypes. All but the final three of this selection were published in Good Housekeeping and illustrated by George F. Kerr, a white artist from Brooklyn who illustrated a variety of children’s books and short stories during the first half of the twentieth century, including working as a cartoonist for the Raggedy-Ann books (David Saunders, “Pulp Artists”). Kerr’s illustrations for Eaton’s stories project caricatures of Asian children: with round faces, exaggerated features, and clothing that would have seemed outlandish to white readers, these figures guarantee that Eaton’s stories stand out from other works published in Good

Housekeeping as visually exotic.

Yet, the artwork accompanying Eaton’s work sometimes also suggests Chinese children’s ambiguous position not only as decorative objects but as people in possession of agency. For example, Eaton’s short story “A Chinese Boy-Girl,” which appeared in the Century Magazine in

1904, contains a couple of different types of images: the first and last illustrations in the story are dependent on caricature and capitalize on readers’ desire to exoticize Chinese children’s bodies; however, an illustration sandwiched between them is a more realistic sketch of a scene in the story, disengaged from the objectifying impulses that animate the other two images.

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Fig. 5. Duncan, Walter Jack. Title image. Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton). “A Chinese Boy-

Girl.” The Century Magazine. Apr. 1904, pp. 828. Web. UNZ.com, http://www.unz.com/print/Century-1904apr-00828/. 2 May 2018.

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Fig. 6. Evans, J.W. Shop scene. Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton). “A Chinese Boy-Girl.” The

Century Magazine. Apr. 1904, pp. 830. Web. UNZ.com, http://www.unz.com/print/Century-

1904apr-00828/. 2 May 2018.

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Fig. 7. Duncan, Walter Jack. Babies and dragon. Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton). “A Chinese

Boy-Girl.” The Century Magazine. Apr. 1904, pp. 831. Web. UNZ.com, http://www.unz.com/print/Century-1904apr-00828/. 2 May 2018.

Though different in their messaging about race and culture, all three of these images are by the same artist: Walter Jack Duncan, who was a magazine illustrator during the early twentieth century and went on to work as a World War I artist (“Walter Jack Duncan”).

Duncan’s skills as a war artist are on display in the story’s realistic central drawing, which depicts the three primary characters: a young “girl” (who turns out to be a boy) named Ku Yum,

Ku Yum’s father, and Ku Yum’s teacher, all gathered in the father’s shop in Los Angeles’s

Chinatown. Notably, this image relies far less on racial caricature than Eaton’s corresponding description of the same scene, in which “They found Ten Suie among his curiosities, smoking a very long pipe with a very small ivory bowl.” As Ten Suie “calmly surveyed the teacher through a pair of gold-rimmed goggles,” the narrator describes, teacher Miss Mason admired “the little carved animals, jars, vases, bronzes, dishes, pendants, charms, and snuff-boxes displayed in his handsome show-case” (Eaton 831). The narrator’s evocation of Ten Suie’s opium pipe and his collection of exotic curiosities reinforces attitudes about Chinatowns and its shops, goods, and

113 people; significantly, Duncan’s illustration does not allude to these tropes: all three characters are dressed in western clothing—a neutral image—and Duncan does not draw attention to the exoticism of the goods for sale in Ten Suie’s pharmacy. Instead, he draws readers’ attention to the interaction among the three characters, as their triangulated stances suggest dialogue.

In contrast to the realism of this central image, the first and last images bear a resemblance to Kerr’s Good Housekeeping illustrations: the first depicts a Chinese boy in non- western garb, standing in front of a lattice fence that supports the branches of several spindly, flowering plants extending from Chinese vases on the ground. Like the illustrations accompanying Brooks’s account of San Francisco’s Chinatown, this image visually conflates the child with the decorative objects that surround him. The branches of one of the plants extends in front of the body of the boy, relegating him to the background. In fact, his body stands parallel to the lattice fence, such that he seems to occupy the same visual plane as the fence’s two- dimensional branches. Like the fence, he occupies a background, in front of which the story’s title is printed in bold-face type.

An even more striking instance of visual caricature appears in the story’s last illustration, just underneath the final paragraph. Here, three laughing, cherub-like Chinese children—even younger than the child who appears in front of the lattice fence in the story’s first image—tumble through the air while a long, lizard-like Chinese dragon twists its body among them, spitting fire.

While the image does not conflate these children with the dragon circling them, it aligns them through proximity; the children are not dragons, but they do appear creature-like as they rollick and laugh across the dragon’s body. Both the children and the dragon appear as manifestations of

Chinese culture—or at least a notion of Chinese culture that appealed to America’s reading public. Decorative and whimsical, all of these creatures share a common, ornamental purpose.

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The narrative of “A Chinese Boy-Girl” contains some of the same ambivalences about the humanity of Chinatown’s inhabitants. Set in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, this story describes a young “girl” named Ku Yum whose classroom misbehavior is a continual grievance to her white teacher. Notably, the narrator describes her as a “little creature” who spends her time with

“boyish figures” in the neighborhood. At the story’s end, Miss Mason discovers that Ku Yum is a boy and not a girl; his father calls him a girl after losing several sons, in the hope that the evil spirit who took his sons will leave Ku Yum alone. Inhabiting the role of a Chinese girl, Ku Yum is not quite human, as Eaton emphasizes in her reference to Ku Yum as a “creature.” Eaton’s depiction of Ku Yum as a boy hidden behind a feminine exterior plays into notions of the

Chinese as effeminate and decorative. The word “creature” thus combines with the feminine façade that Ku Yum presents to the world to suggest a doll-like inhumanity. Yet he remains a surprisingly vividly drawn character, as Eaton asks her readers to sympathize with him and his desire to play in the streets with his friends. In the story’s final lines, he smiles “wistfully,” saying, “Good-by, teacher…I never be good girl, but perhaps I be good boy” (831). Ku Yum’s earnest expression of emotion reminds readers of his personhood, even though the narrator and illustrator undercut his humanity elsewhere in the story.

Kessler, Brooks, and Eaton, and the images accompanying their works, exemplify questions about the legibility of Chinatowns and their residents occupying writers’, editors’, illustrators’, and publishers’ attentions during this period. Was Chinatown a place with a coherent and accessible culture, or a space assembled of random and contextless parts? Were its residents fully individuated and intelligible subjects, or uncanny approximations? Mainstream authors answered these questions with varying degrees of tolerance and acceptance of racial and cultural difference—and varying degrees of suspicion about the extent to which the nation’s

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Chinese population was encroaching on American values of transparency and assimilation. Yet, a prevailing fascination with these questions demonstrates their resonance in an English- language print culture where Chinese immigrants, people of Chinese descent, and the spaces that they inhabited were understood to be opaque figures whose visually arresting facades concealed inscrutable interiors. In the following section, I turn to several texts that dramatize attempts to access these interiors, and the forms of xenophobia that such attempts reveal.

Sightscapes in Circulation

Beginning with Norris’s depiction of San Francisco’s Chinatown in his short story “The

Third Circle” (1909), I examine this story’s racial alarmism in depicting the seedy underbelly of

San Francisco’s Chinatown. In catering to an American readership predisposed to see

Chinatown’s residents as a threat, Norris portrays the neighborhood as a space where people are transfigured into insentient and unseeing instruments of mass production. This reading sets the stage for my examinations of Jacob Riis’s discussion of New York’s Chinatown in How the

Other Half Lives and Helen Hunt Jackson’s short story “The Chinese Empire,” about San

Francisco’s Chinatown, as both Riis and Jackson further seek to dramatize the hidden worlds that

Chinatowns’ vivid facades conceal.

In “The Third Circle,” Norris’s narrator seems to present a romantic image of San

Francisco’s Chinatown as a destination for a happy American couple, only to replace this image with a stark scene of the forms of enslavement and drug trafficking that undergird the neighborhood. The story begins when Harriett Ten Eyck and her beau, Hillegas, visit Chinatown as tourists. As they explore the neighborhood’s shops and restaurants, Hillegas becomes distracted by some silks for sale. When he looks for Harriett, she has gone missing. “He never saw her again,” the narrator tells us. At this point the story skips forward in time to the narrator’s

116 description of a visit that he takes to Chinatown to look for the long-lost Harriett (21). As an amateur sleuth who has heard the story from the neighborhood’s Chinese detectives (13-14), the narrator has a contact who tells him to look for an enslaved white woman called Sadie who, though usually so addled by the effects of opium that she is mute, speaks freely when drunk.32 In the second half of the story, the narrator pays her a visit to ask her whether she knows where

Harriett might be. Sadie is unable to recall much, and it appears that the narrator’s visit to this den is a dead-end until the final line of the story, when the narrator discovers that Sadie is

Harriett. “She thrust out her left hand, and I saw a butterfly tattooed on the little finger” (27), the narrator describes—the same tattoo that Sadie had whimsically acquired from a Hawaiian man the day she went missing.

With her enslavement, Harriett joins the many goods for sale in Chinatown, as described by Norris’s narrator. Norris’s narrator describes the neighborhood’s visual qualities in detail: as

Hillegas and Harriett enter one of the neighborhood’s restaurants early in the story, they observe the “huge hanging lanterns, the gilden carven screens, the lacquer work, the inlay work, the coloured glass, the dwarf oak trees growing in Satsuma pots, the marquetry, the painted matting, the incense jars of brass, high as a man’s head, and all the grotesque jim-crackery of the Orient”

(15). Sadie appears at the end of the story as yet another piece of kitsch, echoing Kessler’s kaleidoscopic shards. Her butterfly tattoo drives this point home, as an ornamental talisman of

Chinatown’s decorative aesthetic. Harriett had gotten the tattoo as a tourist whose whiteness puts her in the privileged position of shopping for souvenirs of Chinatown life; by the story’s ironic end, the tattoo brands her as a curiosity on display. As Sadie and the den’s other enslaved women

32 Norris’s story is not the only one to dramatize slavery in Chinatown: Mary Austin’s short story “The Conversion of Ah Lew Sing” (1897) and Edith Maude Eaton’s “The God of Restoration” (1912) provide emblematic examples of popular fiction about enslaved women in Chinatown. 117 roll opium, their fingers, as the narrator describes, are “twinkling with a rapidity that was somehow horrible to see” (24). Visually grotesque, they figure as objects of fascination for slumming tourists. In this way, Sadie becomes a very part of the environment that makes

Norris’s Chinatown frightening.

Not only is Sadie integrated into Chinatown’s visual backdrop; she also loses her own capacity to comprehend what she sees. Before her abduction, Harriett does possess the power to see, referring to the neighborhood as “a little bit of China dug up and transplanted here” and going on to wonder that “the Nineteenth Century” is visible “just around the corner,” where “you can even see the Palace Hotel from the window” (15). To Harriett, Chinatown is visible in its entirety; in keeping with Brooks’s representation of Chinatown as a shard of China itself, it is only a small piece of mainland China, seemingly transported from the past and across an ocean to be consumed by tourists’ eyes in the span of an afternoon’s visit. Yet, by the end of the story,

Norris suggests that Chinatown’s transparency and consumability is an illusion, as the opium- addicted Sadie loses the capacity to interpret her surroundings. Silent, she “looked straight before her, wide-eyed” (27), apparently disengaged from her environment. Norris thus dramatizes the neighborhood’s inscrutability, as American tourists foray into Chinatown to take in the sights only to end up being integrated into these sights as unthinking cogs in an impenetrable system.

Norris’s “The Third Circle” thus exploits prevailing anxieties about Chinese influence in

America by dramatizing Chinatown’s capacity to render a wealthy, white tourist sightless and incapable of comprehending her surroundings. Even further, Chinatown, in his framework, is a space of dangerous transformation, where human individuals go to encounter fascinatingly foreign sightscapes only to risk being integrated into them. Even the narrator, who retains the power of sight as he gazes aghast at Sadie, is powerless to comprehend the seemingly alien

118 environment in which he finds himself: having inherited the story of Harriett second-hand, his only direct encounter with her is her altered proxy, Sadie, whom he describes as a “dreadful- looking beast of a woman, wrinkled like a shriveled apple, her teeth quite black from nicotine, her hands bony and prehensile, like a hawk’s claws” (25). In this description, it becomes clear that no description of Sadie’s appearance can lend insight into the workings of her mind; the narrator’s ability to see does not grant him the ability to understand.

Norris’s language at the beginning of the story sets up this problem: he describes

Chinatown’s hidden layers of vice, which he insists will remain invisible until the “swamp” of crime and squalor are drained away “and we shall be able to see the strange, dreadful life that wallows down there in the lowest ooze of the place” (13). Beholding Sadie in the story’s final pages, the narrator implies that he finally beholds this “ooze”—a grotesque and compelling spectacle that remains inscrutable in spite of its visibility. “The Third Circle” is a story of looking but not comprehending, and the threat that such lack of comprehension posed to

American tourists seeking to make sense of their nation’s least intelligible spaces.

In How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis likewise expresses frustration when he fails to assign meaning to the visual components of New York’s Chinatown. When he does not encounter Chinatown’s residents on the street, he writes, “Chinatown as a spectacle is disappointing,” further explaining, “Next-door neighbor to the Bend [a district of slums in New

York City], it has little of its outdoor stir and life, none of its gayly-colored rags or picturesque filth and poverty” (93). Ironically, in these lines Riis seems to denigrate Chinatown for a lack of

“filth and poverty” that sets it apart from seedier neighborhoods in the city, regretting a loss of

“spectacle.” With this word, Riis indicates Chinatown’s purpose, as far as it concerns him: the neighborhood should make itself intelligible to him as a slum that resembles others that he has

119 seen. When Chinatown does not fit into this framework of knowledge, it becomes an object of criticism and disappointment.

A lack of visibility continues to perturb Riis: “Whatever is on foot goes on behind closed doors. Stealth and secretiveness are as much part of the Chinaman in New York as the cat-like tread of his felt shoes” (94). We may attribute Riis’s boredom to the invisibility of the neighborhood’s residents; with no people on the street, the streets offer him little to interpret. In portraying Chinatown’s inhabitants as stealthy and secretive, Riis expresses exasperation that the neighborhood’s people and culture are not readily available to him. Irritated when the act of looking does not yield insight, he criticizes the district’s population as enigmatic, furtive, and sly.

Indeed, Riis’s treatment of Chinatown and its inhabitants differs from his discussions of the city’s other communities—the Italian, Jewish, and African American communities,

Bohemians, working women, etc. As Stephanie Foote has written, “For Riis, the Chinese are visible, but they are not legible through any of the strategies he has used to describe other ethnic groups.” Foote focuses on Riis’s agitation upon finding Chinatown’s streets empty, its inhabitants concealed from view in their tenements. She argues, “The Chinese…trouble Riis because they have become a mysterious site of agency outside the city’s controlling gaze” (Foote

144). According to Foote, Riis’s derogatory descriptions of the Chinese are a response to his frustration with their abilities to “elude” him (Foote 143).

Riis’s frustration exemplifies the contradictory desires inherent in turn-of-the-century tourism: to seek out and make sense of racial difference without being challenged or threatened by such difference. He resents the visual absence of Chinatown’s residents from the neighborhood’s streets, but he is not as comfortable when confronted with Chinatown’s human inhabitants, who must sometimes leave their tenements (to read the notices hung around town,

120 we might infer) and who possess their own agencies and subjectivities. While he expresses a desire to see Chinatown’s residents, the visual matter accompanying his writings (and those of his contemporaries) suggest otherwise. The photographs published alongside Riis’s ethnographic writings about Chinatowns cultivate prevailing feelings of fear and fascination among audiences: they display Chinese bodies while asserting that these bodies remain illegible.

Indeed, Riis’s discussion of Chinatown in How the Other Half Lives exemplifies the extent to which a published work about the visual experience of visiting the neighborhood serves to replicate this experience for its readers. A photograph appearing in the book’s first edition features a Chinese man who strolls by a telegraph pole, hands in his pockets, staring intently at the camera that photographs him (Riis 100). A few pages before the appearance of this photograph, Riis clarifies the significance of the telegraph pole in this image, writing:

Red and yellow are the holiday colors of Chinatown as of the Bend, but they do not lend brightness in Mott Street as around the corner in Mulberry. Rather, they seem to descend to the level of the general dulness, and glower at you from doors and windows, from the telegraph pole that is the official organ of Chinatown and from the store signs, with blank, unmeaning stare, suggesting nothing, asking no questions, and answering none. (93-94) In this passage, Riis personifies Chinatown’s built environment, imagining that the red and yellow decorations appended to the poles and store signs are eyes that peer at visitors like himself. With his emphasis on the blank appearance of these eyes, which neither invite nor offer interaction, Riis projects an image of Chinese people onto the Chinatown landscape.

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Fig. 8. Riis, Jacob. Man on the street in New York’s Chinatown. How the Other Half Lives:

Studies Among the Tenements of New York, by Jacob Riis. pp. 100. New York: C. Scribner’s

Sons, 1895. HathiTrust. Web. 30 Sep. 2017.

As Madeline Y. Hsu has written in her analysis of the rhetorics used to ostracize and exclude Asian immigrants in the late nineteenth-century U.S., “ethnic Asians have been viewed as essentially foreign, inassimilable, and therefore probable threats to national security if allowed to enter and remain in the United States” (5). Riis’s language exemplifies these attitudes, as he depicts Chinatown as a space populated by “unmeaning” eyes that spy on newcomers without conveying their intentions. Undercutting the efficacy of official and transparent lines of

122 communication represented by the telegraph, Riis suggests, Chinatown’s inhabitants communicate using an eye-catching but nonetheless unintelligible written language.

Several pages later, he refers again to the telegraph pole as the “official organ of

Chinatown”:

As the wires serve us in newspaper-making, so the Chinaman makes use of the pole for the same purpose. The telegraph pole, of which I spoke as the real official organ of Chinatown, stands not far from the Joss House in Mott Street, in full view from Chatham Square. In it centres the real life of the colony, its gambling news. Every day yellow and red notices are posted upon it by unseen hands, announcing that in such and such a cellar a fan tan game will be running that night… (Riis 100-101)

With this excerpt, Riis seems to make reference to the photograph of the Chinatown resident who walks down the street with his hands in his pockets—his hands, like the “unseen hands” that post

“red notices” on the telegraph pole, are invisible. Stephanie Foote notes the significance of the image of “unseen hands” in both the text and the photograph, arguing that Riis “cannot detect the source of these secret communities or ‘read’ the messages they post…The photograph suggests that the very hidden hands that are so dangerous might belong to this anonymous man” (145-

146). Building on Foote’s analysis, I suggest that Riis’s fixation on “unseen hands” indicates anxiety about the invisible activity of Chinatown’s residents: the neighborhood’s inhabitants create a Chinatown for tourists to view without making themselves equally available to these visitors. Despite constructing a landscape that serves outsiders, they remain unassimilated.

Thus, even when one of these residents does appear—as does the man in the photograph that appears alongside Riis’s narrative—he seems to take on the qualities of the built environment that his “unseen hands” invisibly created. Indeed, the man in this photo looks and functions much like the telephone pole beside him. Situated next to one another, these two figures maintain the same distance from the camera. Because the man and the pole occupy the same space a few feet from the camera, visual similarities between them become apparent: they

123 are roughly the same width, and in the black and white photo the creases in the man’s light- colored jacket mimic the shadowy cracks in the pale wood of the pole. Adding to this impression of sameness, the two figures are so close together that their shadows mingle on the ground, inseparable from one another.

The parallels between these two figures extend beyond shared physical attributes. In addition to looking similar, both the pole and the man function as machines of secret communication. The man’s “unseen hands” are responsible for posting notices on telephone poles and in windows for neighbors to read; and the telegraph pole both displays these notices and facilitates communication between Chinatown’s residents. Indeed, we might even say that the man (and the Chinatown inhabitants whom he represents) is less communicative than the pole. Foote does not acknowledge the significance of the telegraph pole as a transmitter of information; it is worth noting that the pole not only broadcasts information in the form of the notices attached to it, but can also disseminate information beyond the confines of Chinatown.

Capable of disseminating messages both over the air and to those who can read the information attached to it, the pole seems to stand as a more coherent transmitter of information than the man beside it.

Riis’s reference to the architecture’s “unmeaning stare,” too, invites a comparison with the man he encounters on the street—who, caught strolling down the street, glances at the camera without a clear expression of emotion or intention. Foote’s reference to Riis’s anxiety about Chinese immigrants as “unassimilable” resounds here: in conflating this man’s gaze with the “stare” of inanimate buildings and poles, Riis suggests that communication is impossible.

Though the man—like a telephone wire, or like the “yellow and red notices” posted around town—communicates silently with other residents of the neighborhood, his face signifies nothing

124 to an outsider. With the inclusion of this photo in How the Other Half Lives, Riis participates in a transitional moment in the history of American Chinatowns. While Riis’s reputation as a progressive thinker sets his writing apart from predecessors who actively sought to demonize

Chinese immigrants, he more subtly advances an image of Chinatown’s inhabitants as unreadable components of the neighborhood’s infrastructure.

While Norris and Riis respectively incite fears about the encroachment of Chinese culture on American soil and lament the inscrutability of this culture and its people to non-Chinese visitors, Helen Hunt Jackson’s representation of San Francisco’s Chinatown acknowledges tourists’ roles in perpetuating such cycles of anxiety, frustration, and nonunderstanding. Jackson has been widely recognized for the progressive political agenda advanced in her body of work, and while her short story “The Chinese Empire” (1878) contains some of the trappings of stereotype that predominated during her moment, it is a rare example of a story about Chinatown that ventures not only to examine the neighborhood’s Chinese residents but to turn the looking glass onto herself.33

In this story, Jackson’s first-person narrator describes a day spent meandering through

San Francisco’s Chinatown. The story begins with a description of Chinese influence that extends from China to San Francisco—and, from there, disseminates across the United States. In

Jackson’s narrative, Chinese influence on American soil occurs by way of a collection of visually enticing commodities: objects for sale that are plastered with lurid Chinese paper. In the story’s first paragraph, the narrator exclaims:

Those who are unable to visit [Chinatown] in person, as we did, can learn just about as much by a careful and imaginative study of Chinese fans and the outsides of tea-chests. Never did an indefatigable nation so perpetuate faithful fac-simile of itself, its people,

33 Jackson is especially well-known for her activist work on behalf of Native American communities in the western U.S., most famously in her novel Ramona (1884). 125

customs, and fashions as the Chinese do in the grotesque, high-colored, historical paper with which they line, cover, and wrap every article of their merchandise. (62)

In these lines, Jackson conjures images of some of the popular souvenirs, imported from China, available to tourists visiting San Francisco’s Chinatown. She suggests a sense of visual consistency across a range of different souvenirs, from “fans” to “tea-chests”: all are printed with images of people. In “The Chinese Empire,” the “line[d], cover[ed], and wrap[ped]” objects that appear before the narrator impose an experience of replication.

The narrator further emphasizes this sense of visual replication in her observation of a

Chinese man, whom she calls “Chow Chong,” and whom she follows into Chinatown:

It was amusing to see him in motion; but as for his face, figure, and gait, I had known them since my infancy. In my seventh year, I possessed his portrait. It was done on rice- paper, and set in the lid of a box. Afterward, I had him on the outside of a paper of crackers, and fired him off to celebrate our superiority as a nation. (62)

Here, the narrator makes reference to cheap and popular paintings that were produced in China and exported around the world as souvenirs.34 She characterizes the man as yet another iteration of the same figure that she has seen many times over on a variety of products sold in Chinatown, such that he, too, seems to be a “fac-simile” of China and its people and customs.

In comparing the man to one of the objects on display in Chinatown, she evokes a variety of two-dimensional images: the surface of a tea chest, rice paper lining a box lid, the paper in which firecrackers are wrapped, and myriad other forms of “merchandise” wrapped in similar bright paper. These many flat pictures suggest a lack of interiority: all of the images to which the narrator refers project bright and lurid color that attract the eyes, but nothing seems to be concealed behind these images. By yoking her description of a man in Chinatown to the flat images plastered across Chinatown’s many surfaces, the narrator suggests a lack of interiority:

34 The term “rice paper” is a misnomer, as the paper to which the narrator refers was actually made of the Tetrapanax papyriferum plant, and so was more properly also called “pith paper” (Harvard Magazine). 126 like a painting, he is pure image. It seems impossible to glean more knowledge or understanding of him than the visual signifiers available to the narrator’s eyes.

However, while Norris and Riis stop short of reflecting further on their own reasons for such a perception of illegibility, Jackson’s narrator considers her own role as an observer. After describing how she has “fired him off” in the form of a firecracker to celebrate Independence

Day, she expresses doubt about her portrayal of him: “I did not feel so sure of our superiority when I came to walk behind him” (62), she says, and goes on to describe his fine shoes and the

“general neatness and cleanliness of his attire” (62). She goes on to note, “I followed him at a respectful distance; and he led me into the heart of his country” (63). With these words, the narrator seems to reject the forms of anxiety and frustration that Norris and Riis incite; instead,

Jackson’s narrator ventures to express “respect.” Significantly, she offers this respect in the absence of the forms of knowledge or insight that her contemporary writers seem to seek: she still only knows what she can see with her eyes. Even so, her superficial understanding of the man and his culture do not inhibit her desire to extend to him her consideration. She is rewarded, she suggests, in being “led into the heart of his country.”

The narrator even further clarifies her reasons for refusing to indulge in negative descriptions of the man in a conversation with a white policeman whom she meets on the street.

The policeman tells her that the neighborhood is safe to walk through,

“But I would not advise you to let them see you taking notes, however,” he added, glancing at my notebook. “They are suspicious.” “They have been so hardly treated, it is no wonder,” replied I. (63)

This reference to the narrator’s notebook suggests a desire to uncover, interpret, and understand

Chinatown and its inhabitants. In cautioning the narrator not to take notes, the policeman indicates that notetaking will be viewed as unwelcome prying. Where Riis disparages a desire for

127 privacy as potentially devious, Jackson’s narrator recognizes that the reasons for such desire are grounded in persecution. In this way, she absorbs responsibility for her own lack of understanding or insight into Chinatown’s hidden interiors and subjectivities. In venturing to acknowledge her own limitations as an observer in Chinatown, Jackson’s narrator resists the forms of entitlement that characterize Norris’s and Riis’s texts. Unlike these writers, Jackson extends to Chinatown’s residents the prerogative not to share knowledge of their neighborhood’s spaces with uninformed visitors.

As I explore in this chapter’s final section, Edith Maude Eaton’s “‘Its Wavering Image’” takes Jackson’s tolerance for inscrutability a step further. In this story, Eaton describes a young, half Anglo American, half Chinese American woman named Pan who, upon befriending a white journalist in San Francisco’s Chinatown, must decide whether—and to what degree—she should grant him access to the neighborhood’s hidden interiors. In ultimately showing Pan to reject this white outsider in favor of allegiance to her neighborhood’s people, Eaton celebrates values of racial and cultural difference.

Edith Maude Eaton’s Subjectivities

As George Anthony Peffer has detailed in his history of Chinese Americans and an emergent ethos of multiculturalism in the early twentieth-century U.S., such forms of celebration were, as yet, incipient at the time of Eaton’s writing (Peffer 85-86). In “‘Its Wavering Image,’”

Chinatown’s arresting visual qualities demonstrate the rich cultural forms cultivated by the neighborhood’s inhabitants, which Eaton sought to affirm. While these forms remain obscure to the visiting journalist Mark Carson, intent on writing a sensational exposé, Eaton shows them to represent an array of human subjectivities and meanings. Eaton thus critiques a media apparatus that sensationalized and denigrated Chinatown and its residents for a perceived lack of legibility

128 or desire to assimilate.35 Pan’s emotional experiences exemplify the rich subjectivities that constitute Chinatown; further, forms of meaning born from these experiences attach to the neighborhood’s many decorative objects and visually arresting spaces. The processes of commodification, fragmentation, and obfuscation that seem to render all Chinatowns (and their residents) incomprehensible in many works of literature are not operative in “‘Its Wavering

Image,’” as they are replaced with an emphasis on deep interiorities.36

Over the course of the story, Pan and Carson fall in love—a love that Eaton spatializes as

Pan gives Carson access to Chinatown’s most private spaces, only to be devastated at the end of the story when he publishes a sensational account of the neighborhood based on the knowledge and experience that she gave him. Indeed, it is only because she grants him access to

Chinatown’s various private spaces—the joss house37, a variety of secret societies and clubs, and the interiors of her own friends’ homes—that Carson is able to conjure up an image of

Chinatown in the first place, which he renders in salacious detail for his readers. For example, the narrator goes on to describe how Pan leads Carson “about Chinatown,” “in full trust and confidence” (87). Together, they make visits to the joss house, the neighborhood astrologer, and several secret societies including the “Water Lily Club” and the “Sublimely Pure Brothers’ organization,” which admits Carson as “one of its honorary members, thereby enabling him not only to see but to take part in a ceremony in which no American had ever before participated”

(87). Eaton’s references to these secret societies implicitly evoke organized crime networks

35 Chapman notes that the original place of this story’s publication remains unknown (Chapman 264).

36 Literary scholar June Howard renders this story’s tensions between flat stereotype and richer forms of human subjectivity in visual terms, arguing that Eaton figures San Francisco’s Chinatown as a place that is “at once particular and curiously unlocated, existing in multiple cities” (Howard 153). With this spatial language, Howard indicates the extent to which Eaton’s Chinatown both resembles other Chinatowns and asserts its own unique identity.

37 A joss house refers to a Chinese temple, and can be used for worship by people of various denominations. 129 associated with the Chinese and Chinese Americans living in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and rendered in sensational terms by her contemporaries.38

Yet, while many of Eaton’s contemporaries trafficked in sensationalism in their portrayals of Chinatown, Eaton takes a more realist approach. Describing Pan and Carson’s favorite retreat, she describes a “high room open to the stars, with its China bowls full of flowers and its big colored lanterns, shedding a mellow light,” from which they are able to observe the busy, festive streets below: “Sometimes there was music. A Chinese band played three evenings a week in the gilded restaurant beneath them…Just below the restaurant was her father’s bazaar…” (88). Soon after this description, the narrator provides another glimpse of this view, as

Pan and Carson watch “the lantern-lighted, motley-thronged street beneath them” (89). From the lanterns over their heads to the crowded and colorful streets below them, in this scene the narrator invokes iconic images of San Francisco’s Chinese quarter using understated language that emphasizes the neighborhood’s foreignness and exoticism without sensationalizing. In this sense, “‘Its Wavering Image’” appears to derive its appeal from a set of conventions that highlight the neighborhood’s foreignness and exoticism. In this way, Eaton resists the easy forms of racial and cultural categorization that sensational language offers; unlike Norris’s Chinatown, hers is neither fully villainized nor glorified.

38 For example, Mary Austin’s short story “The Conversion of Ah Lew Sing” revolves around the enslavement of a Chinese woman by Chinese men who are involved in organized crime in San Francisco. Raymond W. Rast usefully contextualizes the prevalence of secret societies in American Chinatowns at the turn of the century: “Chinese San Franciscans responded [to harassment by white non-Chinatown dwellers], in part, by seeking strength in their social organizations.” He further describes, “In the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act, working-class Chinese shifted much of their allegiance to secret societies. As the strength of these organizations surged, the opium dens, gambling halls, and brothels that they controlled flourished. Chinatown thus became notorious for its overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, its growing vice industry, and its violent internal conflicts…during the 1880s and 1890s” (35). Rast thus draws a line between the secret societies to which Eaton makes references and the negative stereotypes about Chinatown that came to circulate in periodicals and tourist literature. 130

Ultimately, Pan renounces the simplistic binary between white and Chinese cultures upon which Carson insists in his newspaper piece, which takes “sacred and secret” parts of Chinatown and “cruelly unveiled and ruthlessly spread” them before his audience (92). She sees not only

Chinatown but also herself as more complex and multi-dimensional than the stock images and stock characters that Carson conjures and monetizes. “‘Its Wavering Image’” thus dramatizes the damaging effects of sensational reportage: while Carson portrays Chinatown as seedy, Pan knows better, and she rejects Carson and the Anglo American culture he represents. We might therefore read Eaton’s story not as a perpetuation of stock images, but rather as a commentary on the flatness of these images. Such a reading becomes possible when we turn to the story’s representations of race. Carson reveals his penchant for categorizing people into stock types when he returns to the newspaper offices after his first encounter with Pan. Questioning his editor about the “girl who had puzzled him,” he wonders, “What was she? Chinese or white?”

(86). In addition to objectifying Pan with the word “what,” Carson demonstrates the same impulse to categorize again later in the story, when he insists, “Pan, don’t you see that you have got to decide what you will be—Chinese or white? You cannot be both” (90). The racial category that Carson tries to impose on Pan reflects an uncompromising attitude about racial difference—an attitude to which he gives voice in his sensational journalistic account (or so the narrator tells us).

In keeping with Carson’s myopic attention to racial difference, the story’s narrator racializes characters with vivid descriptions of their physical bodies. As Pan and Carson sit together watching the bustle of Chinatown, “A little Chinese boy brought tea and saffron cakes.

He was a picturesque little fellow with a quaint manner of speech” (90). In these lines, Eaton reinforces stereotypes of the Chinese as decorative. Pan, too, takes on ornamental qualities when

131 the narrator emphasizes her “small hands” gripping her tea-bowl. Both the boy and Pan function in this scene as ornaments indicating Chinatown’s “quaint” beauty.

However, on the following page, Carson resists the narrator’s association of Pan with the neighborhood’s Chinese residents when he proclaims that she is white. Carson attempts to present evidence of Pan’s racial identity after quoting a passage from Henry Wadsworth

Longfellow’s poem “The Bridge” (1845). When Pan weeps at the beauty of the lines he quotes,

Carson remarks, “Oh, Pan! Pan! Those tears prove that you are white” (91). In her discussion of this moment in the story, June Howard notes that “Carson is invoking something like the notion of sentimental education. He asserts that Pan’s deep interiority, developed by books, and her responsiveness to natural beauty and poetry, index her race” (154). Howard thus suggests that, in

Carson’s perception, the capacity to exhibit deep feeling serves as a demonstration of her whiteness. The notion that a capacity to exhibit deep feeling functions as a signifier of bourgeois, white womanhood contains a paradox: by racializing the capacity to feel, Carson figures the expression of a complex and sophisticated emotional interiority as a tool of binary racial categorization.39

Indeed, Carson’s implicit association of interiority with a particular type of person—the white woman with a “sentimental education,” to take Howard’s term—simply creates another category for the containment of stock characters. While Carson positions Pan’s expression of exquisite feeling as evidence of her alignment with a particular brand of white sophistication, such a notion of white sophistication, visibly expressed through tears, is as “stock” as any of the images of Chinatown that Carson perceives, disdains, and disseminates to his reading public. In

39 It is worth noting the significance of Pan’s status as a half-white, half-Chinese woman. Arguably, “‘Its Wavering Image’” would not have carried the same appeal for a primarily white turn-of-the-century readership if Eaton had portrayed her as fully Chinese. 132

Carson’s formulation, Pan’s tears make her white. In this sense, her whiteness makes her decorative in much the same way that her small hands—signifiers of her Chineseness—rendered her picturesque on the previous page. While these two images of racial display seem to be in competition with one another, ultimately they demonstrate that such visible signifiers of race are superficial and incomplete. Taken together, the images demonstrate the narrator’s and Carson’s inabilities to imagine Pan as multi-dimensional, as they insist on aligning her with seemingly mutually exclusive binaries.

In this way, Eaton cautions against the idea that Pan possesses a true or authentic white identity that she must recognize and display over a Chinese identity that is in competition with it.

Both of these racial designations are stock personas that Carson and the narrator variously impose on Pan. Despite Carson’s insistence on categorizing Pan and her community according to a racial logic, Eaton is clear that Pan does not fit neatly in the categories that he offers her. In her initial characterization of Pan, the narrator describes, “She was a born Bohemian, exempt from the conventional restrictions imposed upon either the white or Chinese woman…” (86). Pan appears here as a unique figure who defies racial categorization.

In a key moment in the story, Carson recognizes Pan’s depth of character. Eaton describes this moment of recognition through language of vision. After spending a full paragraph enumerating Pan’s rich emotional and psychological interiority—her assertiveness, her sense of self, and her strong ties to her Chinese community—the narrator declares, “All this Mark

Carson’s clear eyes perceived, and with delicate tact and subtlety he taught the young girl that, all unconscious until his coming, she had lived her life alone” (87). Though Carson recognizes

Pan’s depth, he flattens it for the sake of a good story. “‘Its Wavering Image’” thus serves as a commentary on American print culture’s damaging over-simplification of the rich variety of

133 subjectivities thriving in the U.S. Eaton’s critique of Carson’s flattening reportage is damning, encapsulating the myriad stock images of America’s Chinatowns that I have discussed in this chapter, and even including some of Eaton’s own representations of these neighborhoods. For its time, Eaton’s story is remarkable in its resistance to categorizing impulses.

When Pan renounces Carson and the forms of white control that he represents, and fully embraces a Chinese identity at the end of the story, Eaton dramatizes the limited options available to people inhabiting multiple categories of racial identity. After Carson’s sensational article appears in print, he returns to Chinatown, expecting Pan to have forgiven and forgotten his betrayal—though, in keeping with Eaton’s emphases on the depths of human feeling, “For all these soothing reflections, there was an undercurrent of feeling which caused his steps to falter on his way to Pan” (93). Despite his discomfort, Carson is nonetheless surprised to see a transformed version of Pan: “Mark Carson felt strangely chilled. Pan was not herself tonight. She did not even look herself. He had been accustomed to seeing her in American dress. Tonight she wore the Chinese costume. But for her clear-cut features she might have been a Chinese girl. He shivered” (94). By appearing in Chinese clothing, Pan seems to pronounce allegiance to a

Chinese identity category. After insisting on her whiteness throughout the story, Carson is troubled by Pan’s visible pronouncement of allegiance to Chinese culture and community—an allegiance that becomes more explicit when she asserts to Carson, “I am a Chinese woman” (94).

However, Howard usefully frames Pan’s behavior at the end of the story as more nuanced than an unequivocal commitment to one of two racial identities: “This is a strategic essentialism…; it does not arrest the fluidity of race in Sui Sin Far’s work. It declares her independence from Mark Carson’s values” (155). According to Howard, Pan’s declaration that she is a “Chinese woman” is a product of circumstances that have led her, understandably, to

134 reject one stock persona in favor of its alternative. In this sense, Pan seems to acquiesce to

Carson’s insistence that she choose between two limiting options, thereby abandoning her status as a “Bohemian girl” who defies categorization. And yet, the effect of the story’s drama is not only to drive Pan to embrace her Chinese identity, but to provide a character arc to a biracial woman whose situation leads her to make a series of particular choices about her values. In this sense, although Pan’s identity seems to simplify at the end of the story as she strives to embody traditional Chinese values, in fact this seeming simplification comes about as a result of Eaton’s nuanced character portrait. Eaton’s psychological realism reminds us of the challenges faced by

Asians living in an Anglo American culture where racial ambiguity was often not tolerated. Such realism is antithetical to the stock personas that Carson imagines for her. Eaton implies that, for better or worse, Pan’s world is made up of categories, stock images, and types that she must strive to reconcile in one way or another with her own personal experiences.

In this way, Eaton establishes a cultural logic in which people, things, and communities frequently exceed the limitations imposed by objectifying and essentializing categories—and yet these categories nonetheless carry power. While Eaton at times invests in the narrative appeal of stereotype and stock imagery, she also mobilizes a realist mode that allows her to delve into the particular circumstances that lead characters to conform to various social pressures. In doing so,

Eaton writes a story that simultaneously reproduces and critiques stock characters and images associated with race.

These tensions define Eaton’s opus, as she simultaneously validated Chinese presence in the U.S. and appealed to readerships accustomed to flattening stereotypes. Despite her adherence to some tropes that render Chinese spaces and people as inscrutable and unassimilated, Eaton supplies a measure of nuance, care, and empathy to a body of popular literature about

135

Chinatowns in an era when such empathy was still rare. Peffer attributes the emergence of this ethos to the years immediately following WWII: “…Members of the dominant culture seemed to have changed their minds about Americans of Chinese ancestry. Although still viewing this ethnic group as ‘exotic,’ they no longer expressed concern over what was called yellow peril”

(79). While Peffer is right to align these feelings of inclusion with the 1943 ending of the

Chinese Exclusion Act, Eaton’s opus indicates that such feelings were already being voiced decades prior.

The visual qualities of the cover of the first edition of Mrs. Spring Fragrance exemplify this emergent trend. The book’s bright red cover features decorative images of lotus flowers and dragonflies in front of a full moon; above these images is the book’s title in English, “Mrs.

Spring Fragrance”; and to the bottom right, the Chinese characters representing daffodils appear; fittingly, the Cantonese pronunciation for daffodils is Sui Sin Far, Eaton’s pen name, meaning that her name appears on the book’s cover in both English and Chinese. Inside the book, the combination of English and Chinese words continues with the Chinese characters for happiness, prosperity, and longevity appearing at the bottom right corner of each recto page, so that Chinese and English words appear side-by-side on each page spread. Every page also features images associated with a Chinese visual aesthetic: “a crested bird on branches of plum blossoms and bamboo” (Ling 41).

136

Fig. 9. Cover of Mrs. Spring Fragrance. Mrs. Spring Fragrance, by Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude

Eaton). Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1912. HathiTrust. Web. 30 Sep. 2017.

137

Fig. 10. Title page of Mrs. Spring Fragrance. Mrs. Spring Fragrance, by Sui Sin Far (Edith

Maude Eaton). Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1912. HathiTrust. Web. 30 Sep. 2017.

Annette White-Parks emphasizes the thematic significance of what she calls “the visual and textual conjunction between ‘Chinese’ and ‘American’ images” in Mrs. Spring Fragrance.

She goes on:

The balance between English letters (on the front cover’s left top) and Chinese characters (on its right bottom) introduces this motif. The joining of “Mrs.”—an English term of address—with “Spring Fragrance”—a common name for women in rural China—in the book’s title, title story, and that story’s main character positions this cultural oxymoron at the book’s center. (204)

138

White-Parks’s emphasis on the “conjunction” between images and characters associated with

Chinese and American cultures indicates an attempt on the part of Eaton’s publisher, A. C.

McClurg & Co., to reach American audiences through representations of cultural harmony.

While White-Parks is right to identify connections between this paratextual material and Eaton’s stories, it is worth noting that Eaton was likely not responsible for (or had minimal involvement in) selecting this material. The paratextual images accompanying the first edition of Mrs. Spring

Fragrance (1912) show that it was not just Eaton but also her publisher who saw an opportunity to articulate values of cultural and racial diversity through the intermingling of the English language, Chinese characters, and images associated with Chinese culture. Indeed, a long history of scholarship debating the extent of Eaton’s progressivism does not account for the ways in which a contemporary print culture alternately bolstered and worked against her values. A. C.

McClurg & Co.’s first edition of Mrs. Spring Fragrance demonstrates that Eaton was not alone in advancing representations of cross-cultural exchange.

None of this is to say that this book’s cover is revolutionary; the pretty images of lotus flowers and the Chinese characters at the bottom of the cover and pages play into an American vogue for Chinese aesthetics that was prevalent during the time of its publication. At its worst, this vogue indicated deep-seated discomfort with the presence of Chinese immigrants and

Chinese Americans in the U.S., as authors and publishers often purveyed images and descriptions of pretty surfaces in order to suggest the hidden and unknowable people and cultural forms that might lurk behind them.

Yet, here, in conjunction with a collection of stories that largely strive to humanize and grant subjectivities to the Chinese in America, a Chinese decorative aesthetic instead seems to work against American print culture’s most paranoid impulses. While Anglo American readers

139 would not have been able to comprehend the Chinese characters appearing on the book’s cover and in its pages; and while they would not necessarily recognize the lotus flower or the plum blossoms by name; they are nonetheless encouraged to appreciate the visual effect of the familiar and unfamiliar comingling on the page. In this way, the paratextual material appearing in this volume offers readers a way to think about their own inability to make sense of a culture not their own: the images and words that they encounter here might represent not a threat but an opportunity for forbearance, curiosity, and acceptance. To not fully know another culture, this first edition of Mrs. Spring Fragrance suggests, need not preclude the ability to appreciate difference.

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CHAPTER 3: FRAGRANCE, PUBLICATION, AND THE POLITICS OF

DISSEMINATION IN THE WORKS OF DICKINSON, FREEMAN, AND JEWETT

Introduction

In 1891, Herman Melville published “The Rose Farmer,” a poetic rumination on the aesthetic and economic value of perfume.40 Melville’s speaker, an aging man who has inherited a

Persian rose farm, deliberates between selling his roses in full bloom and distilling them into intensely fragrant essences: “Shall I make me heaps of posies, / Or some crystal drops of Attar?”

(lines 52-53), he speculates. He encounters a fellow rose farmer on the road who cautions him that “attar, why, it comes so dear / Tis far from popular, that’s clear” (lines 119-120), implying that practitioners of perfumery are perennially unrecognized for their craft.41

In the final lines of his poem, the speaker compares the rose farmer’s craft to another art form: poetry-writing. Addressing his reader directly, he parrots his fellow rose farmer, describing the drawbacks of distillation:

But here arrest the loom—the line. Though damask be your precious stuff, Spin it not out too superfine: The flower of a subject is enough. (Melville lines 190-193)

Melville’s speaker suggests that, just as it is better to sell flowers whole, the flower of a

“subject” is also preferable to more intense and pungent distillations of meaning. These final lines are ironic: as a famously inscrutable and profound poet and fiction-writer, Melville was

40 “The Rose Farmer” appeared alongside a number of Melville’s other poems about roses, and plant life more generally, in a volume called Weeds and Wildings, Chiefly: With a Rose or Two.

41 Rose attar is the fragrant oil extracted from rose petals through a process of steam distillation. 145 never one to treat the “flower of a subject” as “enough.” This poem, a prolonged and dense reflection on the economic and artistic forms of value that we attach to two types of craft, writing and perfume-making, exemplifies the very kind of distillate against which he cautions. Melville is a master at “spin[ning]” meaning “out too superfine.”

His articulation of an analogy between perfumery and writing provides the organizing principle of this chapter, but in the following analysis, I turn to works by three female New

England authors. Through a variety of rhetorical strategies, Emily Dickinson, Mary Wilkins

Freeman, and Sarah Orne Jewett all reflect on the scope of women writers’ artistic influence by analogizing labors of perfume-making to authorship. While Melville’s poem invokes perfumery in order to ruminate about meanings so “superfine” that they are not at all “popular,” these female authors conversely compare writing to perfumery in order to consider how these forms of craft offer opportunities for self-promotion.

To be sure, these authors join Melville in noting the extent to which labors of making perfumes and making literature are often dismissed as insignificant or undesirable efforts at artistic creation. Yet, diverging from Melville’s representation of meanings and sensations so potent that they lose their appeal, they strive to gain recognition as participants in a print culture that tends to undervalue the products of their labor. As women writers interested in depicting the particularities of New England life, they must negotiate the fact that the “flower of [their] subject” was frequently deemed not enough. In this way, Dickinson, Freeman, and Jewett reflect on a catch-22: to seek popular audiences for their reflections on New England life was, potentially, to invite reproach, as reflections on place—often cultivated by and therefore associated with women—were commonly viewed as lower-brow than their umbrella category, realism. As Marjorie Pryse and Judith Fetterley have written, “Realism, since it could be seen as

146 theorized by Howells and practiced by Mark Twain and James as well as by Howells himself, achieved status as a major mode of late nineteenth-century writing, and many of the writers and texts that we consider regionalist survived in literary history by being subsumed under the category of realism” (43). Regional writing, in Pryse and Fetterley’s framing, was by definition positioned in nineteenth-century literary culture as secondary.

Pryse and Fetterley go on to outline the consequences of this categorization for women’s writing about place: “Within this framing, women practitioners of local color are read in terms of their dependence on and imitation of male precursors, relations among women writers are ignored, and the possibility that a male writer might have modeled his work upon a female precursor is nonexistent” (43). In this context, we might understand the extent to which women writers who reflected on New England life faced a seemingly inescapable double-bind to achieve recognition for their efforts while also avoiding the forms of chastisement that always threatened to diminish women’s literatures of place. To seek audiences was to risk castigation or underestimation, but to ignore these audiences was to forego the possibility of authorial recognition altogether. Differing expectations for men’s and women’s artistic pursuits thus help to account for discrepancies between Melville’s analogy of poems to perfumes and those by contemporaneous female writers. Dickinson, Freeman, and Jewett faced forms of scrutiny, suspicion, and contempt from intellectual elites and leaders in a literary marketplace from which they have been historically excluded, but, uncompelled to confront such cultural barriers,

Melville could chalk his unpopularity up to the elusive power of his poetry.

Working against these circumstances, female New England writers adopted authorial passivity as a positive strategy of self-promotion. Like fragrances, the influence of Dickinson’s,

Freeman’s, and Jewett’s works is paradoxically invisible and potent, understated and pervasive.

147

These authors imply that distillers of New England scents and narrators of New England life might achieve recognition on the behalves of their makers. In response to a turn-of-the-century literary culture in which the works of female New England artists were undermined as minor in scope, these artists refrain from zealous expressions of artistic ambition at the risk of admonishment; instead, they assume a passive stance, allowing their fragrant and narrative creations to travel outside of their homes and gardens and make themselves known on the behalves of their creators. In these authors’ analogies between scent and writing, the relationship between passivity and that which passes comes to bear: scent passes through the air without allowing itself to be grasped. It is impossible to interact with fragrance directly, requiring anyone who experiences it to remain passive.

Indeed, these three New England authors frame women’s writing as scent-like, passing through space unacknowledged and unappreciated but affecting nonetheless. While they and their characters refrain from proclaiming the literary, artistic, or economic magnitude of their works, scents and words alike announce their potency to those who consume them, in spite of the seemingly circumscribed New England spaces from which they travel. Thus, through representations of the creation and dissemination of scent, New England women writers suggest that the mere coming into being and (possibly only momentary, theoretical, or hypothetical) sensory impact of a text bespeaks its worth. They imagine the power of their creations to sally forth into the world: a text and a scent might exceed their intended audiences, gaining influence as they permeate air and culture.

What, then, can we make of texts and essences that proclaim their own inconsequentiality while also advancing beyond a perceived minorness? Louis Renza defines “minor literature” as a mode constituted by women who work outside of (but necessarily still in relation to) cultural and

148 industrial centers. In his influential examination of Jewett’s short story “A White Heron,” he convincingly argues that this story stakes out a space for itself that is deliberately “minor,” existing outside of and as an alternative to works of canonical, “major” literature (Renza xxviii).

He thus figures minorness as a purposeful subject position and aesthetic, rather than as an accidental byproduct of literary inferiority. Pryse and Fetterley echo this perspective in their more recent analysis of American women’s regionalism: “We may observe that as ‘woman’ and

‘region’ share similar locations within dominant discourses, are each the ‘marked’ case, women become in effect regionalized and regions become in effect feminized…” (37). For Dickinson,

Freeman, and Jewett, minorness inheres in the small, understated, and private New England spaces that women inhabit.

This ethic of minorness seems to be undermined when these writings and fragrances waft outward. Yet, these writers suggest that their commitment to minorness—manifesting in a refusal to command attention overtly—might nonetheless allow the products of their labors to circulate while also proclaimimg the depth of meaning and sensation available in small New England spaces—obviating the need to make such a proclamation themselves. Scholarship on New

England literary regionalism has highlighted the ways by which women writers imagine spaces conventionally coded as feminine—from the parlors and kitchens of women’s domestic fictions to the rural locales of many works of women’s regionalism—not as enclosed but as radically permeable. Critics including Judith Fetterley, Marjorie Pryse, Lora Romero, Elizabeth Young,

Gillian Brown, and Amy Kaplan have done important work arguing that women’s regional and domestic literatures, while often seeming to be preoccupied with highly localized images of

149 neighborhoods and homes, are in fact deeply invested in projects of national consolidation, social activism, and political commentary.42

In light of such scholarship highlighting the social and political influence of women’s regional writing, my inquiry examines how women’s representations of seemingly enclosed New

England spaces and communities negotiate notions of permeability: while scholars are right to highlight the far-reaching influence of women’s domestic and regional writings, I am interested in how these authors underplay this influence in order to exert it. Dickinson, Freeman, and Jewett all pursued ambitious authorial agendas; each of them wrote a great deal, Freeman and Jewett additionally published a great deal, and in their writings they all also reflected on the scope, influence, and shelf life of their works. Yet, in order to participate in a nineteenth-century print culture that undervalued women writers as second-rate and minor, all three advanced a strategy of passive influence in which their texts could circulate autonomously.

Indeed, each of these writers is invested in questions of circulation: while Freeman and

Jewett are both usually categorized as New England regionalists dedicated to portraying rural

New England in prose, Dickinson is fascinated by images of domestic space and the possibility of enacting poetic influence from a place of ostensible enclosure. All three authors have come to stand as voices for a non-cosmopolitan version of New England, during a period when urban centers in the American Northeast—Boston and New York, especially—were being increasingly industrialized and cosmopolitanized. Dickinson, Freeman, and Jewett’s shared attention to

42 For example, Romero reads the March sisters of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women as “relocating” within the walls of the home “the heroism traditionally identified with the battlefield” (24); Young likewise reads the domestic scenes of Little Women as meditations on national consolidation. Kaplan’s concept of “Manifest Domesticity” radically recasts the domestic sphere, traditionally viewed as feminine and subordinate to a masculine political realm, as responsible for informing the politics of an imperial project of a “male arena of Manifest Destiny” (The Anarchy of Empire 18-19). More recent critical interventions similarly make a case for the impact of domestic and regional women’s literatures on national identity and politics, including those by Hsuan Hsu, Martin Brückner, Stephanie Foote, and Bill Brown. 150 women’s artisanal craft in the rural and small-town locales outside of metropolitan New England demonstrates their interest in the social and economic value and potential impact of women’s art.

Literary scholar Mary Kelley could well be describing these authors when she refers to nineteenth-century women writers caught between “private domestic existence” and “a public literary career” (Kelley xi).

Each of these writers uses the language of fragrance to articulate and negotiate this divide. By emphasizing the geographical circumscription of women’s artisanal labors, these authors imply a corresponding cultural devaluation of fragrance: in Dickinson’s poem “Essential

Oils - are wrung - ” (1862), Freeman’s short stories “The Scent of the Roses” (1887) and “A

Poetess” (1890), and Jewett’s collection of sketches The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), female writers and perfume-makers practice forms of craft that have long been seen as inessential domestic niceties. Indeed, fragrances continue to be understood as luxury goods even in the twenty-first century. Jonathan Reinarz, a cultural historian of smell, writes that studies of smell often “commence by noting a devaluation of olfactory experience as peculiar to the Global

North and its intellectual traditions” (Reinarz 2). Even in close geographical proximity to northeastern American cities such as Boston and New York—emblems of a “Global North” that

Reinarz associates with “intellectual traditions” that lack “attention to olfaction” (2)—these writers nonetheless express an adherence to enclosed spaces and small communities, as well as a commitment to allowing the products of their labors to venture beyond these boundaries.

Yet, as these writers show, an analogy of fragrance to narrative can be imperfect: perfumes and writings disseminate in different ways. As Reinarz notes, “Smell is a fleeting sense, said by some to leave no traces,” though they are also capable of evoking “spontaneous recollections” (6). The volatile power of distillates (fittingly also sometimes called “volatile oils”

151 because they vaporize so easily) to vanish and reappear stands in juxtaposition to the seemingly more permanent existence of the printed word. Indeed, authorship implies a form of influence across space and time that cannot be sustained by perfumes whose scent carries only a short distance before fading away.

Thus, as an ostensibly more permanent and influential form of artistic expression than perfumery, writing at times proved to be a risky trade. Freeman and Jewett, in particular, dramatize the forms of chastisement that await women who write, as compared to the culturally sanctioned—because not culturally threatening—work of perfume-making. In negotiating the potentialities and limits of their analogy, Dickinson, Freeman, and Jewett reveal the extent to which a desire for far-reaching and long-lasting influence drives their artistic practices. The next section explores the literary and olfactory cultures in which they wrote, before I turn in the following sections to their writings.

Meaning and Olfaction in New England

The passive strategy of self-promotion that these writers enacted hinged on the fact that each of them maintained some degree of control over their authorial personas, as well as access to the types of readers whom they sought. Indeed, however passive their writerly personas were,

Dickinson, Freeman, and Jewett possessed forms of economic and racial privilege that allowed them to participate in a print culture that proved entirely inhospitable to many of their contemporaries—especially women (and men) of color who lacked opportunities to publish their work.43

43 Scholars have even explored the complicated racial dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that characterize Dickinson’s, Freeman’s, and Jewett’s works; and the blind spots and systemic prejudices that led each of them to alternately take whiteness for granted and to exoticize and Other non-white subjects. See, for example, Eliza Richards’s “‘How News Must Feel When Traveling’: Dickinson and Civil War Media,” Erica Fretwell’s “Emily Dickinson in Domingo,” and Wesley King’s “The White Symbolic of Emily Dickinson”; Stephanie C. Palmer’s “‘No More Appreciative Readers Than in England’: Anglo-Saxonism and Dissent in the English Craze for Mary Wilkins Freeman”; and Sandra A. Zagarell’s “Country’s Portrayal of Community and the Exclusion of Difference,” 152

For example, while Dickinson famously resisted publication, she did seek recognition and acknowledgment from a small coterie of established and influential writers and editors, including the popular poet Helen Hunt Jackson, writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and

Springfield Republican editor Samuel Bowles.44 And, as June Howard describes, Jewett

“emerged as a writer through a small but very influential New England literary elite that had been consolidated during the 1850s, by an earlier generation” (Howard 3). While Freeman’s life was marked by financial hardship (Glasser 6), she did receive an education, she published broadly in elite publications such as Harper’s New Monthly during her lifetime (Westbrook 16), and she enjoyed correspondences with successful authors including Jewett (Glasser 1, 29, 47).45

Perhaps the most relevant feature of Freeman’s life, as articulated by biographer Leah

Blatt Glasser and as might also be applied to Dickinson and Jewett, is the fact that “expectations of passive conformity to contemporary standards of femininity…were an implicit part of her upbringing” (Glasser 1-2). While Glasser frames these expectations as a set of “limiting codes” against which Freeman struggled, in this chapter I suggest that Freeman—as well as Dickinson and Jewett—additionally reconfigured passivity as an opportunity for permissible creative expression. And, indeed, the forms of educational, social, and racial privilege that these authors enjoyed afforded them the opportunity to take up societal expectations that they remain passive

“Material Culture, Empire, and Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs,” for, respectively, commentaries on Dickinson’s, Freeman’s, and Jewett’s representations of race and racial difference.

44 As Domhnall Mitchell has written, Dickinson “did have a contemporaneous audience, a group of people in or from her local community who were to a greater or lesser extent aware that she wrote,” going on to note that Dickinson circulated over 500 poems among members of this reading audience (Mitchell 22).

45 There are striking similarities between Freeman’s and Dickinson’s Massachusetts childhoods: both attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for only a year or less; the families of both endured periods of financial stress; and both spent most (in Freeman’s case) or all (in Dickinson’s) of their lives unmarried. 153 and, rather than adhere to these expectations on society’s terms, reimagine them as avenues for new expressions of authorial power.

In this sense, this chapter builds on the two previous chapters in its examination of the authorial strategies that become possible for writers who inhabit positions of social privilege and disadvantage simultaneously. My examinations of Louisiana and Chinatown literature highlight writers who were empowered by racial, economic, and gender privilege to lay claim to local cultures; and countervailing attempts, on the parts of a few of those cultures’ members and champions, to resist such formulations. In this chapter, I attend instead to writers who don’t inhabit one or the other of these categories. Rather, Dickinson, Freeman, and Jewett draw on educational backgrounds and professional and personal networks, made possible by their racial and economic privilege, to negotiate the forms of gender discrimination that they faced. This chapter thus serves as a reflection on the tools of self-promotion available to authors and subjects bearing a complicated relationship with a print culture that both conferred privilege (based on race and class status) and stifled possibilities for success (based on gender). These tools, in the works of Dickinson, Freeman, and Jewett, often manifest as representations of scent production, which bears an analogous relationship in their works to representations of authorship.

At first glance, Dickinson, Freeman, and Jewett’s shared focus on areas outside of metropolitan centers seems to be at odds with the growth of the perfume industry during the latter half of the nineteenth century, on both global and national scales. As the French city of

Grasse emerged as the perfume capital of the world and perfume retailers popped up across

Europe’s major cities (Aftel 31), a global perfume trade materialized, but this trade is conspicuously absent from their works.46 Rather, these authors disregard the global economic

46 As early as the 1860s, it was possible to visit the local drugstore in a small city outside Boston and purchase a bottle containing floral and citrus essences that had been manufactured and produced a continent away. And, though 154 networks that allowed for large-scale production and distribution of perfumes, instead highlighting seemingly isolated, rural pockets of domestic artisanship. By focusing on small- scale production of fragrances in rural New England, they frame these locales as bastions of creativity removed from the global trade routes and factories where colognes, pomades, potpourris, and other essences were produced in large quantities and distributed to Americans at newly affordable prices.47 Instead, scents and texts possess their own powers of migration; seemingly not reliant on trade routes or publishers, they appear capable of traveling far and wide of their own volition.

And, even as the center of the global perfume trade remained in Europe during the nineteenth century, notions of olfactory experience nonetheless occupied a prominent role in

American literary culture during this period. As Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony

Synnott note in their cultural history of smell, “Odour might have been divested of any real power in the nineteenth century, but its symbolism remained intact, making smell an eminently useful literary device for creating a moral atmosphere at once forceful and indirect” (85). While their discussion centers on nineteenth-century European writers such as Victor Hugo, Honoré de

Balzac, and Emile Zola, the same might be said of American authors whose descriptions of the heady scents of New England gardens and interiors helped to define their regional mode. To be sure, olfaction tended to be undervalued in nineteenth-century American culture as a sense with little to offer—especially as, according to Classen, Howes, and Synnott, germ theory displaced

industrial perfume production in the United States remained nascent, burgeoning peppermint and spearmint factories in Michigan and New York at the turn of the century suggested that America, too, was on the brink of a perfume production boom (Rabak 34-35).

47 Though evidence of this global industry is not visible in works of New England regionalism by Freeman or Jewett, other authors make reference to the development of the industry during this time. For example, in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), Amy March declares that for Christmas she will get her mother a “little bottle of Cologne” (Alcott 5), referring to a blend of essential oils made famous in the French city of the same name. 155 the notion that illness travelled through smells, making “odours…inessential” (89). Yet, authors’ representations of scent in literature took on their own figurative forms of power.

A corresponding trajectory characterizes notions of New England women’s experience during this period: while women’s labor and the products of this labor may have lacked “real power” in an economic culture that valued marriage and maternity over other forms of production, women authors nonetheless constructed a paradigm of literary meaning that located female workers at the center of rural New England culture. In her study of a project of colonial revivalism among women in nineteenth-century New England, literary scholar J. Samaine

Lockwood argues that women regionalists attempted to reshape New England landscapes according to the region’s feminine and queer past (1); building upon Lockwood’s configuration of women’s reclamation of a different moment in time, I turn instead to the spatial dynamics of

New England women’s ambition and influence during this period. While Lockwood describes women writers who claim particular narratives of the past to define their present-day experiences, I argue that female regionalists including Dickinson, Freeman, and Jewett similarly look to reimagine the hamlets, gardens, and parlors that make up their day-to-day lives as amazingly expansive. To produce a scent, a poem, or a story, for them, is to enact a power of geographical amplification: as a fragrance or a text, New England can be anywhere. These women thus formulate New England experience by way of a paradox: they underplay the power of their creations even as they speculate about how far these very creations might reach.

Literary critic Michael Davitt Bell writes that Jewett portrays “a movement out of ‘the world of men’s activities,’ a withdrawal into a rural world of women’s communities” (179).

Foote likewise notes “regional writing’s strategy of protecting local identities by preserving them in literature” (4). My readings reflect on how New England women writers counterbalance this

156 sensibility of inwardness, projecting their identities outward even as they maintain an appearance of enclosure. Scent—a paradox of both potent and inconsequential experience—functioned as an apt metaphor for the competing exigencies that women writers felt to embrace the “minor” meanings of small New England spaces and also to fling these meanings afield.

Emily Dickinson and the Gender Politics of Passive Labor

Though Dickinson’s productivity as a writer peaked thirty years before that of either

Mary Wilkins Freeman or Sarah Orne Jewett, she is an early and emblematic example of the complementary forms of meaning that writers assigned to making perfume and writing about

New England life during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, while Dickinson is not often labeled as a regional writer, scholars have attended to her representations of geography and environment, especially with respect to her reflections on the contours of domestic experience.

For example, Diana Fuss has attended to the Amherst interiors where Dickinson spent much of her life, reflecting on both the cultural factors that resulted in her domestic environment and on the sensory impact of this environment on Dickinson. As Fuss writes, “More than any other writer, Dickinson has been intimately associated with her house” (9). Literary scholar Ryan Cull has noted, Dickinson scholarship has highlighted “how historicist and print-culture methodologies can illuminate the social nexus of even a notoriously reticent figure” (Cull 38).

As an author “acutely aware of her spatial surroundings” (Fuss 9), Dickinson reflects on the spatial reach of perfumes and poetry alike: do walls limit the scope of scent and word? If given the opportunity, how far might they travel beyond their makers? While “Essential Oils - are wrung - ” is generically and thematically different from Freeman’s and Jewett’s narrative reflections on New England life, this poem exemplifies the strategy of passive self-promotion that characterizes their short stories. In this sense, we might consider Dickinson a proto-

157 regionalist. Like the regional writers who followed her, she expressed a preoccupation with how creative expressions might, of their own volition, travel beyond the small spaces inhabited by their creators.

In “Essential Oils - are wrung - ” (Fr772, 1863), an analogy between fragrance and poetic meaning allows Dickinson to imagine a vital literary-material world that proclaims its presence and autonomy: opaque poems and invisible odors circulate autonomously, creating spaces of meaning that seem to be immune to human mediation. Dickinson thus analogizes the dissemination of poetic meaning to the dissemination of scent: once created, these forces circulate independently of their makers.

Readings of Dickinson’s life and work tend to characterize her as a genius committed to hiding her oeuvre from public eyes, devoted to living out her life in the safety of her childhood home, and curiously invested in cultivating a persona of passivity bordering on agoraphobia. As

Eliza Richards writes, “…When asked to imagine Dickinson, readers may picture a woman dressed in white, sitting at a small desk in her bedroom, receiving ‘Bulletins all Day / From

Immortality’…” (1). The embodiment of this persona, I suggest, appears to us in “Essential Oils

- are wrung - ”, a poem whose subject is a craftswoman whose presence seems less impactful that that of the scents that she renders. Yet, in empowering her creations to announce themselves on her own behalf, Dickinson nonetheless commands readerly attention: to attend to the products of her labor is, on some level, to attend to her creative prowess.48

By comparing the experiences of writing and reading poetry to making and smelling perfume, Dickinson suggests that a poem, like a scent, indicates its creator even as it misdirects

48 “Essential Oils - are wrung - ” is not Dickinson’s only poem about perfumery. As in “Essential Oils - are wrung - ”, in the poem “This was a Poet - ” (Fr446) Dickinson’s speaker likens the distillation of plants into “amazing sense” to a poet’s work of creative expression; and in “Kill your Balm - and it’s Odors bless you - ” (Fr309), the speaker describes the heady scents that emanate from a balm made from jessamine flowers. 158 attention from her. In this way, Dickinson destabilizes a prevailing logic of poetic worth that operates under the assumption that poets control disseminations of meaning. If we are not privy to a poet’s labors, then where might we turn to consider a work’s meaning? How does the language of intangible fragrance allow Dickinson to envision a paradigm of value unmoored from its author, and how might this vision be in tension with a competitive nineteenth-century literary marketplace? Given that Dickinson herself was famously averse to conventional forms of publication—though she did seek recognition in the form of epistolary exchange—I posit that she negotiated an aversion to self-promotion by figuring her poems as autonomous. Even as she refrained from broadcasting her work publicly or seeking broad audiences, she imagined that her poems were capable of doing just that.

The historical circumstances that may have led Dickinson to seek forms of meaning that elude human control come to bear here. As Michael Kearns points out in his analysis of

Dickinson’s place in a nineteenth-century culture of private publication, “Portfolio poetry was unlikely to be consecrated” during this period (Kearns 48). Dickinson’s poems seek to address a cultural tendency to devalue unpublished work by imagining poems that do not need to be

“consecrated” by taste-makers or mass audiences, because they possess their own powers of consecration. Hers is a poetry of self-consecration in which ethereal essences extend laud to themselves and their creators.

In turn, these historical circumstances shed light on Dickinson’s representations of autonomous meaning. According to Virginia Jackson, designating Dickinson’s poems as “lyrics” has allowed scholars and lay readers since the nineteenth century to characterize her work as unmediated—devoid of historical referents and not requiring context to be fully understood.

Elaborating on this characterization of a “contextless or sceneless” “lyric social imaginary”

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(Jackson 6-7), I expand upon and revise Jackson’s formulation of the contextless lyric. Because

Jackson focuses primarily on Dickinson’s generic legacy, I suggest that she misses an opportunity to read Dickinson herself as engaged in cultivating the ethic of non-mediation that she sees in subsequent interpretations of Dickinson’s work. “Essential Oils - are wrung - ” maintains an ambivalent sense of its own indebtedness, proximity, and availability to readers. I suggest that it is worth grappling with the social and economic circumstances that might have led

Dickinson to reject an author-centered paradigm of literary value.

In my reading of this poem, I echo a number of scholars—including Elizabeth Petrino,

L.C. Knights, and George Monteiro—who have made the case that rose attar in this poem functions as a metaphor for poetry. The first of the poem’s two stanzas reads:

Essential Oils - are wrung - The Attar from the Rose Be not expressed by Suns - alone - It is the gift of Screws -

By the end of this stanza, we are left to speculate about who is responsible for creating

Attar—or, setting aside the metaphor, about who is responsible for creating a poem. The speaker tells us that the Attar is “expressed by Suns”, representative of natural processes such as fermentation and decomposition, but we might still ask who drives the “Screws,” which evoke the mechanisms of human distillation.49 The speaker thus seems to imply that human agency is responsible for the creation of material fragrance and, correspondently, figurative meaning: just as a person can literally express Attar from rose petals, she can figuratively express poetic

49 Given that Dickinson was fascinated by methods of plant preservation—she kept her own herbarium, which is available online from Harvard University’s Houghton Library—and that she wrote several poems containing images of the making and use of perfume, Dickinson likely would have known that rose attar is typically extracted through a process of steam distillation. In this process, rose petals are collected in a still and then heated by steam. The rose- infused steam then returns to liquid form after making contact with cool pipes. This process results in the separation of the valuable rose oil from excess water. After undergoing this process a second time, the oils from both batches of petals are combined. 160 thoughts. The speaker’s emphasis on the analogous processes of human-driven material invention and poetic creation therefore seems to lie at the heart of the poem. However, in the next stanza, this formulation becomes secondary to the more central formulation of the Attar itself as a creator:

The General Rose - decay - But this - in Lady’s Drawer Make Summer - When the Lady lie In Ceaseless Rosemary -

With these words, the speaker highlights the Attar’s own contribution to the world: it “Make

Summer.” The Attar’s fragrance confers a sense of life, represented by “Summer - ”, on its creator even after she has passed. It does so through a linguistic form of gesture, as the word

“this” indicates the Attar in the “Lady’s Drawer”. In a striking revision to the fantasy of a human creator that stands at the center of the first poem, in this poem it is the Attar that is uniquely capable of exerting transformative influence on the world. Dickinson displaces autonomy from a human source to a nonliving—but nonetheless lively—force.

Thus, rather than focusing on a person’s creation of poetry, she reflects on poetry’s power to act upon its creator. When the Attar “Make Summer - ”, it illuminates a physical space that belongs to the Lady, her “Drawer”. Taking on the godlike power of seasonal change, the Attar festoons the Lady’s physical world with the fragrance of life, even after her death. In her formulation of Dickinson’s “ornamental aesthetics,” Theo Davis describes the act of ornamentation in Dickinson’s work as “a means of marking out persons, objects, and the world…for attention and praise” (Davis 1). In “Mak[ing] Summer”, I argue, the Attar in

“Essential Oils - are wrung - ” performs just such an act of ornamentation.

Further informing my discussion of the analogous relationship between effervescent substances and poetic meaning in Dickinson’s work, Davis goes on to frame poetry as an

161 ornament. Davis argues that by reflecting on how poetry ornaments the world, readers have the opportunity to gain insight into how “authors’ human existence…might bear a laudatory and attentive relation to the world” (3). Davis’s articulation of poetic creation as an act of ornamentation helps to clarify the analogous relationship between perfume and poetry in

Dickinson’s work; however, I am interested in exploring an instance where Dickinson’s poem deviates from Davis’s formulation.

In the following reading of two moments of gesture in this poem, I first examine a moment that conforms with Davis’s conception of poets who ornament the physical world through language, followed by a moment of aberration from this construction. With the word

“this” in the line “this - in Lady’s Drawer”, the poet-speaker recognizes and gestures toward the

Attar in the Drawer, singling it out for attention. This gestural act functions according to Davis’s analysis. However, in the very next line, the speaker displaces her own agency onto the Attar itself, which “Make Summer” in the Drawer. I propose that we should read the act of “Mak[ing]

Summer - ” as an additional act of gesture, in which the Attar (and its metaphorical referent, poetry) indicates the physical world of its creator in her absence.

In this sense, the speaker’s role in indicating objects in the world for attention and praise is displaced onto one of the objects of her attention; in turn, this object becomes an actant capable of bestowing its own forms of recognition and praise. Dickinson advances a worldview in which essences—poetry and its metaphorical counterpart, rose Attar—take on the powers of a poet-speaker, capable of observing and identifying subjects for readerly attention. While Davis is interested in the ways by which poetry allows human authors to praise the world, in my reading of “Essential Oils - are wrung - ”, this formulation is reversed. Nonhuman subjects—the ethereal

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Attar and its referent, poetry—acknowledge a passive human object, the “Lady” whose dead body lies inert.

In contrast with the autonomous Attar, the passive voice in the first line of the poem,

“Essential Oils - are wrung - ”, introduces a sense of passivity on the part of the Attar’s creator.

While we might assume that Dickinson’s Lady made the Attar that adorns her body in death, the speaker forbears from crediting her with this labor; and, not privy to the Lady at work, we can only imagine the labor that she completed before death. The speaker’s description of the extraction of rose Attar from petals further highlights her passivity: the speaker refrains from assigning agency to the person who performs this work, instead crediting its creation to the “gift of Screws - ”. The second stanza contains more active verbs, but the speaker assigns them not to the Lady but to the flowers themselves, as in the lines, “The General Rose - decay - ”, and “this - in Lady’s Drawer / Make Summer - ”.

Likewise, when she “lie / In Ceaseless Rosemary - ” in the poem’s final line, her prone and immobile body belies the active verb “lie”. In fact, the word “lie” is a fitting emblem of the poem’s ambivalence over active and passive forms of labor: it is an active verb that describes inaction. The speaker thus undercuts linguistic action with the physical passivity of the unmoving Lady. In a revision of Davis’s formulation of the ways by which authors ornament the world through their poetry, in this poem the Attar, a metaphor for poetry, ornaments the world of its creator. In this reading, Attar plays the roles of both decorator and decoration when it creates

“Summer - ” in the Lady’s Drawer.

Anne-Lise François’s compelling analysis of an ethic of passivity in Dickinson’s poetry bears mentioning here: François examines what she calls the “deflective, leveling gestures” by which Dickinson’s poems move into a space of “disinterested affirmation” (François 131).

163

According to François, Dickinson’s poems demonstrate a commitment to approaching moments of decision and possibility and letting them pass by. The lifeless body of the passive Lady whose labors go unseen in “Essential Oils - are wrung - ” seems to offer support for François’s claim.

However, I respond to François’s concept of passivity by exploring how Dickinson’s poem does not do away with action altogether, but rather attributes action to a nonhuman entity. This poem exhibits a commitment to passivity only as long as we attend to the roles of the speaker and the

Lady. Once we shift focus, an ethic of passivity is replaced by a creative force: the Attar’s godlike making of “Summer - ”.

I further argue that we might understand Dickinson’s representation of an animated material world as a surreptitious strategy of authorial self-promotion. In death, the Lady abstains from seeking credit for the creation of the Attar; yet, in diverting our attention toward this Attar, the speaker indirectly highlights the products of the Lady’s work. In this way, Dickinson’s speaker and the human subject who appears in her poem solicit attention to the products of the very labors they have ostensibly sought to obscure. In other words, they abstain from moments of action by reorienting attention toward the ethereal products of human labors—which, in turn, redouble their attentions back toward their creators.

This cycle of attentions can be further observed in Dickinson’s own seeming disinterest in publishing her work. To explore this claim, I offer a brief consideration of a famous letter,

Dickinson’s first ever to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1862. In the letter, Dickinson responds to Higginson’s “Letter to a Young Contributor,” a piece that had appeared in the

Atlantic Monthly earlier that month. Famously, Dickinson opens her letter with a question: “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” A couple of lines later, she returns again to this image of living Verse with a reference to breath: “Should you think it breathed - and had you

164 the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude - ” (Letter 260). By asking Higginson whether or not her Verse lives and breathes, Dickinson seems to affirm New Critical valorizations of self- referential meaning that helped to precipitate her work’s canonical status: if Verse can live, then it achieves its own agency, and thereby seems to render the intentions and labors of its creator irrelevant.

However, I offer an alternative reading of Dickinson’s formulation of autonomous Verse by re-historicizing the ramifications of this autonomy. The forms of nonhuman autonomy on display in this poem allow Dickinson to imagine a passive creator—the Lady—who refrains from seeking recognition directly, even as she achieves this recognition indirectly by way of her own poetry’s forms of reciprocal attention. Likewise, Dickinson’s fascicles perform a cycle of deferred attribution similar to that of the Attar whose fragrance disseminates across the physical space inhabited by its passive creator. Even as Dickinson refrained from seeking public recognition for her work, since her death her fascicles have done the work of marking their author out for praise. Like a fragrance, her poems inevitably draw our attention toward their source. Dickinson’s Verse may not be Alive—it may not be sentient—but it is clear that she understood her poems as vital and mobile actors, capable of gesturing toward their creator.

Dickinson lived at a historical moment when women writers were rarely celebrated in unequivocal terms, and were more often indicted as members of a “scribbling mob,” to quote

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s infamous jab (Hawthorne). Through her work, Dickinson allows us to bear witness to the animation of poetic language that, like a fragrance, disseminates through space and performs acts of acknowledgment that a female writer could not hope to expect upon entry into a patriarchal literary marketplace. All the same, her poems exhibit ambivalences about the particular forms of influence and reach enacted by such language. These ambivalences, I

165 posit, highlight the complicated constraints that would later embolden female regionalists like

Freeman and Jewett to explore passive methods of self-promotion.

Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Poems and Potpourris

Like Dickinson’s poems, Freeman’s short stories demonstrate her interest in feminine forms of craft, including both perfume-making and writing. Just as Dickinson demonstrates immense knowledge of botany in her many poems about flowers, Freeman, too, was familiar with a wide variety of plant species, and this familiarity informed her short fiction.50 As Susan

Garland Mann points out in her study of Freeman’s representations of gardening, a proliferation of short story titles that include flower names highlights the prominence of plants in Freeman’s works (Mann 33). However, despite scholarly attention to the function of gardening in

Freeman’s short stories, critics have given little attention to the significant role of a variety of modes of scent preservation in Freeman’s work.51 While my reading of perfumery in Freeman’s work focuses on the short story “The Scent of the Roses,” several other works by Freeman also reflect on women’s labors of perfume-making, including “A Gatherer of Simples” and “A New

England Nun,” Freeman’s most famous story.

“The Scent of the Roses,” which originally appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1887 and was collected shortly afterward in the 1891 edition of Freeman’s short story collection A New

England Nun, and Other Stories, features the art of potpourri-making. In this story, Clarissa May makes potpourris out of rose petals in order to recapture a scent that reminds her of a lost love.

Unmarried, Clarissa transforms an abiding experience of loneliness into a sense of personal

50 Scholars have attended to Dickinson’s vast knowledge of plant life. For example, Christine Gerhardt figures Dickinson as an ecologist, and Judith Farr analogizes her writing to her gardening.

51 Despite a dearth of scholarship on Freeman’s representations of essence-making, George Monteiro’s comparative study of perfume-making in “A New England Nun” and several poems by Emily Dickinson provides an important acknowledgement of these writers’ aligned interests in describing the production and consumption of perfumes. 166 gratification and success through her work preserving and disseminating scent to an audience of neighbors, friends, and family members. In this way, Freeman asserts that unmarried women who engage in feminine-coded forms of handicraft are in a position to gain approval for their labors—in contradistinction to subsequent scholarly work that positions Freeman’s female protagonists as reclusive and repressed.52

In further alignment with Dickinson’s thematic focus on the parallels between perfume- making and writing, Freeman establishes a comparable analogy in another short story that bears comparing to “The Scent of the Roses.” In “A Poetess,” which originally appeared in Harper’s

Magazine in 1890 and was also collected in A New England Nun, and Other Stories, Betsey Dole writes a “a few lines” (Freeman 143) lamenting the death of the son of her neighbor, Mrs.

Caxton. Betsey transforms her own personal suffering and solitude into words of comfort, offering a figurative balm for Mrs. Caxton’s grief. In this way, both Clarissa and Betsey demonstrate the opportunities for acclaim available to unmarried women whose labors are often at risk of being ignored or denigrated. From Clarissa’s and Betsey’s shared penchant for feminine forms of craft (potpourri-making and memorial poetry-writing, respectively), to their desire for recognition from their communities, both stories trace the transformation of personal loss, pain, and obscurity into opportunities for recognition and praise.

In “The Scent of the Roses,” Freeman establishes the forms of self-realization and recognition that become possible when seemingly isolated and unproductive single women work.

Clarissa spends her days filling jars with “layers of rose leaves and salt” to make potpourri, and

52 Indeed, Freeman’s work has been burdened with a long history of scholarship that positions her unmarried female protagonists as neurotic, beginning as early as 1965 with David Hirsch’s influential commentary on the “obsessive neurosis” of “A New England Nun”’s Louisa Ellis (Hirsch 125). More recently, critics including Monika Elbert and Jennifer Fleissner have argued that Freeman’s protagonists exhibit “senseless and compulsive behavior reflected in frenzied and repeated activities, such as spending money, sewing incessantly, or collecting knick-knacks” (Elbert 192), as well as an “appallingly obsessional excess” (Fleissner 78). 167 abstaining from the more vibrant social life of her sister, Anne. Indeed, the story’s narrator is quick to establish Clarissa as the aging, melancholy, and lonely correlate to Anne, who is youthful, happy, and marriageable.

As Clarissa packs rose petals into jars, Anne urges her to put away the flowers and accompany her to a town picnic. When Clarissa expresses reluctance to attend the picnic, Anne exclaims in frustration, “The idea of you shutting yourself up here, packing a mess of rose leaves into a jar! There isn’t any sense in it,” to which Clarissa replies evasively, “You know I’d rather stay at home” (199). Clarissa is immediately recognizable as one of Freeman’s seemingly neurotic single female protagonists. Anne, meanwhile, appears to be Clarissa’s normative counterpart: where Clarissa maintains unerring focus on her solitary work of rose preservation,

Anne desires to leave the house, meet people, and enjoy herself. In this way, the narrator introduces Anne as a foil for Clarissa, highlighting Clarissa’s oddity and showing us what

Clarissa might look like as a more conventional protagonist.

Further illustrating Clarissa’s apparent neuroticism is the emotional drive that accompanies her potpourri-making: the source of Clarissa’s investment in packing roses into jars, we soon learn, is her association of this process with a lost lover. “Years ago Gilman Lane had taught her how to make her first pot-pourri,” the narrator tells us, and “The two had packed a little blue ginger jar with those old rose leaves” (204). The ginger jar, which remains in “the best parlor” in Clarissa’s house and has held the same old rose leaves for years, is a reminder to

Clarissa of an opportunity lost: Gilman Lane, we learn, left for California ten years ago, before making good on his intention to marry Clarissa. In this sense, Clarissa’s potpourri-making seems to be an exercise in masochism: the fragrance of preserved roses is also “the fragrance of old memory, which was better conserved than the rose leaves” (204). Clarissa fills her home with an

168 irrepressible reminder of a man whom she expects never to see again, and who she has reason to believe never loved her back.

However, after establishing Clarissa’s ostensible neuroticism early in the story, Freeman spends the rest of her narrative complicating it: over the course of the story, the narrator asks us to empathize with Clarissa and to share in her commitment to jarring roses, rather than to see her work as a manifestation of obsessive compulsion. Freeman’s narrator frames the pain of remembrance, counterintuitively, as a kind of relief or even pleasure: “[Clarissa] was bent, in her graceful parsimoniousness, on saving all that she could of the sweetness of the world; no matter how poorly she might live herself, her delight in this would not forsake her, but she still got a little comfort out of her unselfishness and her roses” (211). There mere act of preserving fragrance is, in the narrator’s formulation, a moral act: “It is doubtful if she did not unconsciously think it wrong to let a rose leaf entirely perish, with all its sweetness, while she could save it” (211). The narrator thus encourages us to see Clarissa’s behavior as morally good and personally cathartic, however pointless it seems to Anne—and also, potentially, to readers.

Her daily practice in this way resembles a religious ritual of self-purification. In claiming for herself the occupation of “saving all that she could of the sweetness of the world,” Clarissa performs an act of self-sacrifice: she endures the personal pain of preserving this sweetness for the sake of guaranteeing that it exists for the “world” to enjoy, a good “work” that further aligns her labor with an ethos of monastic piety.53 This act of selflessness suggests that that the effects of Clarissa’s labor yield tangible rewards. Though Anne scoffs at Clarissa’s myopic desire to jar petals, we might see Clarissa’s preservation of “the sweetness of the world” as an act of

53 Freeman invites this comparison even more overtly in her representation of “A New England Nun”’s Louisa Ellis, who in the last lines of the story sits “prayerfully numbering her days, like an uncloistered nun” (“A New England Nun” 17). Freeman’s sustained comparisons of the household labors of unmarried women to monastic ritual demonstrates her emphasis on the moral and social value of this work. 169 charity—a contribution to the neighbors and acquaintances that she resists encountering in person.

Laughing at Clarissa, Anne exclaims, “She’s gone to filling jars for the neighbors this year” (211), and while Anne views this behavior as a symptom of her sister’s oddity, it also serves as an example of Clarissa’s tangible contributions to a community of people who fail to recognize her value even as they enjoy the products of her labors. Gilman Lane, who has returned to town and (to Clarissa’s discomfort) seemingly struck up a flirtation with Anne, responds that “It’s real good of her” to fill a jar for her neighbor Mrs. Lamson, to which Anne replies, “Of course it is. Clarissa never does anything that isn’t good, but she is so funny” (211).

Clarissa’s simultaneous goodness and funniness stand at the thematic center of a story that figures perversity as an ironic but necessary starting-point for meaningful artistic expression.

Indeed, the story’s central image, a jar of potpourri, reiterates Freeman’s interest in how the dispersal of flowers’ fragrance might reflect positively upon its creator. According to the

Oxford English Dictionary, “potpourri” may refer to either a collection of fragrant petals, or to a collection of “literary extracts” (“Pot-pourri”). If we map this two-layer meaning onto the “potpourri” of Freeman’s story, we might understand “The Scent of the Roses” itself as a potpourri of Clarissa’s life history and experience, transformed into a moral guide for generosity and disseminated to both Clarissa’s fictional neighbors and to a real-life audience that accesses the

“scent” of this morality through the act of reading. The potpourris that Clarissa makes, then, stand as emblems of Clarissa herself, whose “good”ness wafts toward others along with the fragrances that she shares. In a painful encounter with Gilman Lane after his return to town,

Anne tells Clarissa that she should refill the little ginger jar because the petals have gotten old, and “don’t smell much.” Lane agrees with Anne, and Clarissa is devastated to learn that “He had

170 forgotten all about it…His man’s memory could not keep such small precious things” (208).

Where Gilman Lane’s “man’s memory” falls short, Clarissa’s excels: just like the ginger jar, her mind, too, is a container for the past. In this way, the narrator compares Clarissa to the contents of the ginger jar, the very rose petals whose fragrance she works to preserve.

The narrator further conflates Clarissa with the ginger jar’s fading roses by comparing

Clarissa and her sister to roses at different stages of life: while Anne “was the rose of this spring, her sister was one of last” (198). By comparing Clarissa to an aging rose, the narrator implies that we should read Clarissa as one of the roses whose youthful scent is in danger of fading, and who must be packed up and preserved before losing her beauty irrevocably. Clarissa’s “dull blond hair,” her “tintless and faintly lined skin,” and her “thin lips” (198-199) suggest her similarity to a fading rose, while Anne’s luminous hair and complexion and her “full and red” lips (199) indicate that she, like the “pink rose-buds” (198) she wears pinned at her throat, approaches the peak of her bloom. By comparing Clarissa to the faded flowers that she has packed into jars, the narrator implies that she is uniquely situated to comprehend the value of these flowers. It takes a woman’s memory to conserve life’s sweetest and bitterest memories— which, for Clarissa, are one in the same. Freeman’s rich psychological portrait of Clarissa’s melancholy not only explains but justifies her behavior, augmenting a sense of her immense accomplishment transforming personal pain into shareable pleasure. As a literary proxy for the fragrances that Clarissa distills, the story itself reflects positively upon Clarissa; though she remains meek and un-self-congratulating, this story of her labors seeks congratulation on her behalf.

The narrator further suggests the value of Clarissa’s work with aphoristic language, positioning the story as a vehicle for Clarissa’s diffusion of scent and meaning; the double

171 meaning of “potpourri” as “literary extracts” resounds here. The narrator’s third-person limited perspective allows us not only to glimpse into Clarissa’s mind, but to receive an interpretation of her thoughts from a third party, the narrator. This third-person narration functions as an act of narrative dissemination, as the narrator glimpses into Clarissa’s mind, interprets her thoughts, and then broadcasts these thoughts for Freeman’s readers. To be sure, at times the third-person narration resembles free indirect discourse, suggesting that descriptions of Clarissa are in fact her own. For example, when the narrator says that Clarissa “had lost love and youth and beauty, but she still got a little comfort out of her unselfishness and her roses” (211), we might read these words as Clarissa’s own thoughts. A sense of despair accompanies the narrator’s catalog of “lost love and youth and beauty,” such that it seems to emerge from Clarissa herself; by the same token, the “comfort” that she derives from her “unselfishness” suggests an attempt at self- justification, further indicating that the narrator’s words in this sentence reflect Clarissa’s own thoughts.

However, the narrator does not always adhere so loyally to Clarissa’s own subject position, as at other moments the narrative style slips into a more truly third-person voice. The very next sentence reads, “One is not entirely desolate while one can follow his instincts” (211).

The narrator’s aphoristic language and gender-switching in this sentence create a sense that

Clarissa’s experience is universal: the generalized “one” suggests that the narrator is taking

Clarissa’s personal experience and applying it to a more general population. Even more conspicuous is the narrator’s reference to “his instincts,” as the narrator defaults to a discussion of a masculine community. The process of universalizing Clarissa’s experience necessitates masculinizing it, so that Clarissa is ironically excluded from the very aphorism that the narrator has distilled from her consciousness. With this transformation of Clarissa’s pains and pleasures

172 into a pithy expression of universal experience, we are invited to see how Clarissa’s mind resembles the potpourris that she creates: the narrator’s summarization of the contents of

Clarissa’s mind mimics a dispersion of scent. The dissemination of Clarissa’s moral values parallels the wafting aroma of preserved rose petals.

In the final pages of the story, Freeman indicates that Clarissa’s labors of dissemination are uniquely suited to unmarried women whose intense introspection and solitary work prevent them from demanding recognition overtly. In a climactic moment, Gilman Lane reveals that, despite his seeming romantic interest in Anne, he still harbors feelings for Clarissa, and intends to ask her to marry him. Anne, blindsided and distraught, hides her disappointment. As Gilman

Lane goes inside the sisters’ house to propose to Clarissa, leaving Anne alone in the garden, the narrator’s third-person limited perspective switches from Clarissa to Anne. Now, it is Anne’s despair and humiliation to which we are privy; as Clarissa’s burdens are alleviated, Anne absorbs them.

As the story’s perspective switches, so does Anne’s behavior: she adopts Clarissa’s emotional state and mannerisms. Echoing the narrator’s previous reference to Clarissa’s

“unselfishness,” the narrator tells us that, as Anne “sauntered among the bushes, pulling roses here and there,” she “laughed, with the most unselfish amusement, in the midst of her girlish chagrin and sorrow” (214). Anne’s experience of losing Gilman Lane thus replicates

Clarissa’s—a replication that reaches completion in the last lines of the story. As Anne stands in the garden picking flowers while Clarissa and Lane talk inside the house, Anne’s friend passes by, and asks her why she is picking so many roses. The last line of the story reads, “‘I don’t know but I shall go to filling up jars with them, like Clarissa,’ said Anne.” With these final

173 words, Anne’s imitation of Clarissa becomes complete. She takes on the burdens of potpourri- making that, we can assume, Clarissa no longer feels compelled to pursue.

The story’s ending thus suggests that the emotionally painful work of packing rose petals into jars is a task reserved for unmarried women. In this sense, Freeman implies, perhaps ironically, that unmarried (and also, we can infer, childless) women are uniquely capable of the forms of self-abnegation and ascetism required to produce a product, such as potpourri, that can be shared and enjoyed by an entire community. The “unselfish amusement” that Anne feels in her “girlish chagrin and sorrow” might seem trivial as it is summarized by the narrator, but the narrator’s dismissiveness is belied by a narrative structure that insists on both the story’s attention to and fascination with single women’s labor.

In this sense, the New England home that serves as the setting for Clarissa’s and Anne’s internal dramas functions as a space where single, aging women have the opportunity to contribute tangibly to a community. When Anne sends Lane inside to talk to Clarissa, she remains defiantly in the garden with the roses, exclaiming to herself, “They’ll see I ain’t shut up in my room, crying” (214). By identifying the house’s interior with a sense of abjection and humiliation, Anne indicates an association between her own experience of pain and the enclosed space of the home. The home thus figures as yet another form of enclosure—much like the ginger jar or even Clarissa’s mind, with its metaphorical rose petals—where personal pain undergoes a process of transformation into pleasure. After all, it is inside this very home that

Clarissa and Lane rekindle their mutual affection, thereby enacting a transformation of Clarissa’s despair into hope and mirroring her transformation of dying petals into sweet scents. And, while

Anne defiantly stays in the garden so that she won’t be seen “in my room, crying,” this defiance

174 emerges from the expectation—indeed, the inevitability—that a woman like her, with no marital prospects and no social outlet, belongs within the confines of her home.

“The Scent of the Roses” thus conflates the containment of rose petals in jars with the containment of unmarried women in houses. And, just as Clarissa is bent on packing jars indefinitely, only to be replaced by Anne when Clarissa’s status as a so-called “spinster” has run its course, Freeman implies that a comparably endless cycle organizes the lives of single women.

We might thus understand Clarissa and Anne as the inheritors of a trade—the transformation of pain into pleasure—for which they should be recognized and celebrated. Freeman thus challenges a cultural tendency to see unmarried and aging women as incapable of or unwilling to seek affirmation; in the world of “The Scent of the Roses,” the creation of pleasurable experiences speaks for itself.

At a meta-narrative level, Freeman’s own fiction-writing craft reiterates the abilities of seemingly non-influential women to exert influence via the products of their labors, as the publication of her works performed a dispersal of meaning comparable to the diffusion of the scent of Clarissa’s potpourris. Indeed, Freeman more directly addresses the social and economic impact of women who publish in “A Poetess.” Like “The Scent of the Roses,” this story contains a portrayal of an unmarried woman who labors to serve her New England village, but while

Clarissa enjoys a conventionally happy ending in marriage, the fate of Betsey Dole in “A

Poetess” is a more pessimistic exploration of the limitations faced by women who exhibit ambition. The discrepancy between the endings of these two stories highlights significant differences between the cultural significations of Clarissa’s and Betsey’s differing artistic expressions. Clarissa’s creation of fragrances situates her safely within the bounds of conventionally feminine craft; perfumery is not a craft typically associated with ambition or

175 striving. On the other hand, Betsey is punished for pursuing aspirations as a writer. Rather than letting her art speak for her, Betsey herself attempts to speak—and is met with disdain.

Like Clarissa, Betsey’s solitary life of gardening and writing seems isolated; she has little reason to travel beyond her home or yard. However, Betsey strives to reach beyond these boundaries through her writing. By engaging with her community from within the space of her home and garden, Betsey dismantles a nineteenth-century ideology of “separate spheres” for women and men. Recent scholarship has highlighted the ways by which a number of nineteenth- century authors undermined this ideology; for example, in her compelling examination of a nineteenth-century culture of privacy, Milette Shamir frames the domestic parlor as a social space caught between private and public, “literally positioned between the street and the deeper recesses of the home” (Shamir 36). In “The Scent of the Roses,” Freeman likewise hints at the porousness between Betsey’s home and the world beyond: “The house was very close to the road, from which a tall evergreen hedge separated it, and the view to the side was in a measure cut off” (140). Here, Freeman’s narrator indicates that, despite the fact that the house seems to be secluded from the rest of Betsey’s village by a “tall evergreen hedge,” in fact she is “very close” to this community. Freeman further emphasizes the permeable boundary between Betsey’s home and the village that lies beyond it by describing the house’s open door, through which “green light from the tall hedge” travels, and through which Betsey’s neighbor, Mrs. Caxton, walks

(140). In this way, Freeman takes care to figure Betsey, like Clarissa, as the resident of an ambiguous space between public and private realms.

In her reading of another short story by Freeman, “An Honest Soul,” Jennifer Ansley highlights the absolute isolation of protagonist Martha Patch, who labors to produce quilts for her neighbors from a house that lacks a window looking out onto the front road. After reaching a

176 point of exhaustion that leads her to collapse, Martha is finally rescued by neighbors who offer to build her a front window. Ansley argues that this story demonstrates the isolating effects of human labor that is geographically separated from the community that it serves (Ansley 447-

448)—a comparison that invites connections to a world economy dependent on factory production and outsourced labor. However, while Martha’s life might resemble that of a worker in a proto-sweatshop, alienated as she is from the community that she serves, Betsey enjoys a partial seclusion that still affords access to her community. Unlike Martha’s alienating and dehumanizing work, Betsey’s seemingly solitary writing reflects a commitment to communicating with others, both in person and through her writing. Indeed, while Clarissa shares her potpourris with friends and neighbors, Betsey pursues a different form of craft: poetry writing. When Mrs. Caxton walks through Betsey’s door at the beginning of the story, it is to ask

Betsey to write a memorial poem for her deceased son, Willie. Betsey gladly agrees, “if I can do

’em to suit you” (“A Poetess” 144), again reiterating Clarissa’s investment not only in pursuing her craft but in sharing the fruits of her labors with others.

Betsey’s poem even resembles Clarissa’s potpourris, evoking the secondary definition of

“potpourri” as a collection of “literary extracts.” Like the rose petals that Clarissa packs into jars,

Betsey begins her project with a large and diverse collection of materials, writing her poem

“upon the backs of old letters and odd scraps of paper,” and resulting in “a portfolio…piled with a loose litter of written papers” (145). Betsey’s poem then undergoes a process of condensation much like the petals that wilt and diminish, once Clarissa packs them in jars with salt and water: the next day, “She wrote it out on both sides of note-paper, in a neat, cramped hand…When the poem was fairly copied, she rolled it neatly and tied it with a bit of black ribbon; then she made herself ready to carry it to Mrs. Caxton’s” (148). Thus, in the same way that Clarissa creates a

177 concentration of rose petals only to disperse it among her acquaintances, Betsey transforms a prodigious set of notes and drafts into a neat and compact final product. While Freeman does not draw an explicit comparison between perfume-making and writing in “A Poetess,” Betsey’s craft does evoke the processes of material concentration that fascinate Freeman in “The Scent of the

Roses.”

In fact, in publishing her poem, we might even say that Betsey’s authorial reach surpasses

Clarissa’s, at least by Betsey’s own estimation. Betsey imagines herself taking on the role of a professional writer: when Mrs. Caxton expresses admiration for her poem, “It was to [Betsey] as if her poem had been approved and accepted by one of the great magazines. She had the pride and self-wonderment of recognized genius” (150). Betsey’s self-conceptualization as a professional magazine writer is further realized when Mrs. Caxton suggests that they print two dozen copies of the poem for distribution. When Betsey sees the printed copies, “It was to Betsey like a large edition of a book. She had written obituary poems before, but never one had been printed in this sumptuous fashion” (151). The narrator’s limited third-person perspective in these lines shows us a progression, in Betsey’s mind, from hobbyist to professional, as she strives to surpass her status as an amateur writer and gain wider recognition as an author.

Yet, while Clarissa’s labors of concentration and diffusion are successful in attracting admiration from those around her, Betsey meets resistance in her more deliberate pursuit of acclaim. After the poems have been printed and Betsey has reveled in “self-wonderment,” her success is dashed when Mrs. Caxton reports a rumor that the town’s minister has criticized her work. In italics that suggest the confidential tone of Mrs. Caxton’s sensational news, she tells

Betsey, “Sarah Rogers says that the minister told her Ida that that poetry you wrote was jest as poor as it could be, an’ it was in dreadful bad taste to have it printed an’ sent round that way.

178

What do you think of that?” (153). In these lines, the very act of gift-giving that animates “The

Scent of the Roses” becomes a breach of etiquette, indicating that perfumes and poems signify differently to the recipients of these objects—and that Betsey’s professional approach to her work is perceived by the minister, Mr. Lang, as an attempt to enter a realm of which she is not a rightful member.

Mr. Lang, on the other hand, represents the ultimate arbiter of taste in their rural hamlet, having published poems of his own in a magazine (153) and attended a “country college” (157).

Mr. Lang’s “country” education is revealing, as it situates him above Betsey and Mrs. Caxton in status, even as it serves as a reminder that he remains a “country boy” (157). By further describing Mr. Lang as “gaunt” and “awkward” with a “homely, impetuous face,” Freeman ironically figures the town’s most educated scholar as an emblem of provincialism along with the story’s other characters, Betsey and Mrs. Caxton. The fact that his words about Betsey’s poetry carry via women’s gossip further demonstrates the extent to which he is beholden to a small- town culture that he both disdains and remains a part of.

Despite the narrator’s association of Mr. Lang with a form of provincialism that belies his status as an educated minister, ultimately he is not punished for this provincialism—but Betsey is. “A Poetess” thus implies a double-standard that allows country-born men to strive for recognition, while women who pursue comparable forms of success are met with shame and humiliation. Indeed, the minister’s criticism of Betsey’s behavior and his dismissal of her work represents an effort to disparage her efforts as a professional writer, and in this way Freeman’s story operates as a critique of the suppression of overt expressions of female ambition.

In fact, Betsey’s act of publication is doubly offensive because it trades in the tropes of a feminine, sentimental mode that the minister rejects as a “dreadful waste of time,” as Mrs.

179

Caxton reports (153). Indeed, the narrator emphasizes Betsey’s sentimental mode in descriptions of her writing process: “It seemed as if one, given the premises of herself and the room, could easily deduce what she would write, and read without seeing those lines wherein flowers rhymed sweetly with vernal bowers, home with beyond the tomb, and heaven with even” (147). Here, the narrator speculates that Betsey’s sentimental mode is so formulaic that it is possible to infer the contents of her poem without even reading it.

The narrator further emphasizes Betsey’s sentimental mode by describing her emotions as she writes: “Tears stood in her pale blue eyes; occasionally they rolled down her cheeks, and she wiped them away. She kept her handkerchief in her lap with her portfolio…” (147). Betsey’s demeanor as well as the poem itself signify her status as a sentimental author. In her discussion of the gender politics of sentimental writing in late-nineteenth-century print culture, Nancy

Glazener outlines nineteenth-century publishers’ and readers’ perceptions of the “emotionally irresponsible,” “amateur,” and “undisciplined” author “whose feelings might be genuine enough…but were not tempered by moral and artistic judgment” (125). Glazener seems to describe Mr. Lang’s reaction against Betsey’s poem, concerned as he is with its “poor” quality and Betsey’s “dreadful bad taste” in circulating it.

The minister’s implicit association of Betsey with a distasteful sentimental mode leads

Betsey to absorb a sense of illegitimacy and unprofessionalism, and ultimately to renounce her own art form. Gesturing to a metaphor of fragrance that puts “A Poetess” into further conversation with “The Scent of the Roses,” Betsey articulates her own shame through a metaphor of scent, comparing herself to the sweet-pea flowers in her garden, and her writing to their odor, with the despairing question, “S’pose them sweet-peas shouldn’t be smellin’ the right way?” (154). Betsey suggests that, just as sweet-peas are defined by their scent, she has been

180 defined by her writing—and that now this once-intrinsic characteristic has been taken away.

Freeman thus gestures once more to the metaphor of diffusion that frames this story, as Betsey laments her failure as a writer to spread meaning as flawlessly as a sweet-pea spreads fragrance.

Disavowing her ambition as a professional writer, Betsey invokes yet another metaphor that characterizes both this story and “The Scent of the Roses”: a metaphor of condensation.

Having failed to share her writings widely with the public, she adopts a set of feminine domestic practices that allow her to privatize her work. Evoking yet another metaphor of sweetness,

Betsey figuratively “cooks” her writings by burning her writing paper and printed poems in her oven, saving the ashes, and collecting them in a sugar bowl. With this act, Betsey transforms herself from professional writer to domestic cook, radically shifting the terms of her own work from an act of authorship to a household chore. By baking her poems and putting them into a sugar bowl, Betsey acquiesces to the minister’s suggestion that she ought to stop publicizing her writing, and recasts her writing as private domestic work. In fact, we might even say that the sugar bowl filled with ashes resembles Clarissa’s ginger jar of potpourri: neither of these objects seems to pose a threat to the perceived sanctity of a masculine literary culture that derives legitimacy by defining itself in terms of artistic merit and good taste.

Betsey further privatizes her previously-published work when, on her deathbed, she meets with the minister and asks him to have the sugar bowl, still filled with her poem’s ashes, buried with her. In this sense, the afterlife functions as a space of total privacy, where Betsey can appreciate her poetry without the anxiety of neighbors’ critiques. While a permeable boundary between Betsey’s home and the rest of her village leaves her susceptible to the demands and opinions of fellow villagers, Betsey’s request to be buried with her sugar bowl of poetry represents a new attempt to obtain privacy for her work. In fact, Betsey’s desire to lay privately

181 with the ashes of her poems echoes the image of Dickinson’s Lady whose body is scented with rose attar—though, in the Lady’s case, her attar gains recognition on her behalf, while in

Betsey’s case seeking privacy is a form of retreat after her failed attempts at gaining similar recognition.

Indeed, on her deathbed Betsey makes one additional request that indicates an aspiration to be further inscribed in public record: she asks Mr. Lang to write a memorial poem about her when she dies. Thus, while Betsey’s humiliation leads her to privatize her poem, she simultaneously expresses a wish for herself to be poetically immortalized and publicized. As in

Dickinson’s “Essential Oils - are wrung - ”, “A Poetess” ultimately expresses ambivalence about the relationship of women to literature: should they be its creators, or its subjects? Shamed into retirement and then death, Betsey rejects her identity as a poetess and instead asks Mr. Lang to memorialize her as a poetic subject. With this request, Betsey reifies Mr. Lang’s status as a voice with the authority to inscribe her into poetry, and diminishes her own role from creator to subject.

While “A Poetess” seems to be a pessimistic critique of an American literary culture in which a dominant set of male taste-makers possess the power to undervalue, criticize, and stultify female artists seeking recognition for their craft, a closer look at Freeman’s own authorial status allows us to read her story somewhat more optimistically. By understanding “A Poetess” itself as an incarnation of a feminine mode of writing, we as readers bear witness as Freeman flies in the face of Mr. Lang’s critique: the same short story in which he denigrates women’s writing and authorial aspirations was, after all, written and published by a female author. In this sense, Freeman resists a patriarchal literary culture that suppresses women’s authorial ambition and disparages the sentimental mode in which not only Betsey but Freeman herself wrote.

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Indeed, while Freeman is primarily known for her quiet realism, this story bears traces of the popular sentimentalism to which she makes reference: the story’s many descriptions of physical manifestations of emotion indicate Freeman’s engagement with a sentimental mode centered on readerly sympathy.54

For example, when Betsey hurls her poem into the fire, her face “twisted as if the fire were curling over it also” (155); and, in the last lines of the story, having made her final request that Mr. Lang write a poem about her, “She smiled, and the sweetness of the smile was evident through the drawn lines of her mouth as the old red in the leaves of a withered rose” (159). In this final image of sweetness, which echoes the story’s references to Betsey’s sweet-peas and sugar bowl, Betsey’s mouth becomes a rose. This image of a mouth made of dried rose petals further aligns Betsey’s dying body with the prettiness of the lifeless Lady in Dickinson’s poem.

Betsey’s mouth, which might previously have represented her poetic voice, no longer stands for vocalization but, rather, for a prettified, feminine silence. The story ends on this ambiguous note:

Betsey’s transformation from a poetic speaker to a passive subject stands in contrast to

Freeman’s persistent narrative voice, which ultimately found an audience in the readers of

Harper’s magazine and, later, in the generations of purchasers of her collected works.

In writing for popular audiences, Freeman thus pursues the kind of ambitious authorial agenda for which Betsey is admonished. By contrast, Freeman’s Clarissa is ultimately rewarded for her diligent and pious attention to making perfumes, and Betsey’s turn inward toward her home (and the images of baking that accompany this turn) provide her a respite from her humiliation. In this way, Freeman compares the crafts of writing and perfumery in order to

54 For more on self-referential treatments of sentimentality, see Faye Halpern’s Sentimental Readers. Here, Halpern compares Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets to sentimental fiction by saying that Maggie’s narrator highlights the clichés inherent in expressions of sentimentality, whereas sentimental literature does not draw this kind of attention to its own clichés (Halpern xiii). 183 highlight not only their common features, but also their differences: while both perfumes and writings both attract recognition on the behalves of their creators, Freeman shows how the act of writing proved more fraught than that of perfumery for nineteenth-century women. While perfume-making was considered a craft appropriate for women working within their homes, the act of writing threatened to surpass home and neighborhood. For Freeman, literature was a potentially more potent substance than fragrance; while a scent might hang over a garden, a story or a poem could reach readers across the nation.

In a nineteenth-century publishing apparatus that sought to undermine women’s authorial accomplishments, it thus became expedient for writers to downplay the reach of their own craft.

An analogy between writing and fragrance-making was, then, useful: if the act of writing was only as powerful as the often-disregarded art of perfumery, then surely it posed little threat to the patriarchal print culture through which is circulated. Regional writing served as an apt site for this analogy: women writers could diminish the scope of their own writing by imagining that their work carried only as far as a scent on the air. By considering the geographical limits of women’s writing, it became possible for women regionalists to fly under the radar: their reflections on the limited influence of their craft was often silently undermined by their own authorial success.

In this chapter’s final section, I turn to Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed

Firs (1896), which exemplifies this strategy. In this collection of sketches, the small Maine town of Dunnet Landing contains two craftswomen: the character Mrs. Todd brews beer from spruce trees and creates fragrant medicinal tinctures from the herbs in her garden, while the novel’s narrator consolidates these practices in narrative and imbues them with meaning. While Mrs.

Todd lays claim to forms of authority and influence limited to the geographical boundaries of

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Dunnet Landing, Jewett and her narrator look beyond—while simultaneously underplaying the scope of their work. Jewett’s apparent celebration of what Renza might call “minor” crafts that adhere to the contours of country kitchens, gardens, and schoolrooms is belied by her narrator’s—not to mention her own—wider reach.

Sarah Orne Jewett’s Diffusions

As a grower and distiller of herbs, Mrs. Todd serves an audience of neighbors the spruce beer and herbal tinctures that she creates from her garden, complementing the rose attar and potpourris that Dickinson and Freeman describe. Sarah Orne Jewett’s novel-length collection of sketches about the fictional Maine village of Dunnet Landing has perhaps attracted more critical attention than any other work of women’s regional fiction about New England; and, among the variety of characters that populate Jewett’s sketches, the widowed herbalist Mrs. Todd has surely attracted the most discussion among scholars. Her role as an unmarried woman has long interested feminist scholars, while her work as a producer of herbal remedies has more recently attracted the interest of scholars in the medical humanities.55

At the crux of critics’ interest in Mrs. Todd is her dual status as a simple country herbalist and a kind of mystic, in touch with her region’s secret past. For example, while literary critic

Christine Wilson emphasizes Jewett’s portrayal of “the quiet lives of rural women involved in the daily matters of keeping house” (299), Sarah W. Sherman’s interpretation highlights the power rather than the quotidian qualities of Mrs. Todd’s work: “At the heart of The Country of the Pointed Firs is the narrator’s recognition of Mrs. Todd, her growing reverence for the other woman’s power and numinous presence” (63). This tension between Mrs. Todd’s role as a creator of powerful goods and as a “rural [woman]” occupied with “keeping house” indicates the

55 For an example of the former, Marjorie Pryse and Judith Fetterley and done important and enduring work; for an example of the latter, see, for example, Mark Storey’s Rural Fictions, Urban Realities (2013). 185 extent to which critics have struggled to reconcile Mrs. Todd’s geographically contained domestic labor with the powerful fragrances that she produces.

Jewett’s description of Mrs. Todd’s garden helps to illustrate this tension. The narrator writes:

If Mrs. Todd had occasion to step into the far corner of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its fragrant presence known with all the rest. Being a very large person, her full skirts brushed and bent almost every slender stalk that her feet missed. You could always tell when she was stepping about there…and learned to know, in the course of a few weeks’ experience, in exactly which corner of the garden she might be. (Jewett 4)

With these words, Jewett’s narrator establishes the scale of Mrs. Todd’s outsize influence over her small domestic plot: her large body needs only to move through her garden to create potent aromas that waft outside the boundaries of the garden plot and into the house. Yet, even as the narrator emphasizes Mrs. Todd’s large size and influence, she also reminds us that her domain is small indeed: the stalks that she brushes are “slender”—susceptible, we might infer, to being crushed by even a light touch. In this way, the narrator establishes an image of Mrs. Todd as a powerful force even as she notes the narrow domain over which she presides. Indeed, where a character like Freeman’s Betsey Dole is punished for seeking to reach beyond the boundaries of her country hamlet with her poems, Mrs. Todd’s garden never threatens a similar overreaching; a scent can only carry so far.

Like Betsey, Jewett’s narrator advances a more complicated notion of female influence in her role as author. The nameless narrator is a newcomer to Dunnet Landing whose room and board are supplied by Mrs. Todd in exchange for her assistance in producing medicinal concoctions, which Mrs. Todd sells to the village’s residents. While this narrator lacks Mrs.

Todd’s expertise as an herbalist, she possesses an analogous form of expertise as a writer. Just as

Mrs. Todd produces remedies, the narrator produces stories about these remedies, and The

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Country of the Pointed Firs thus stands as a narrative approximation of the healing tinctures that

Mrs. Todd produces from the herbs in her garden. In this way, Jewett invites us to consider Mrs.

Todd’s herbalism and the narrator’s writing as correspondent forms of artistic expression.

Ultimately, the narrator of The Country of the Pointed Firs aims to claim greater cultural authority and a broader audience for this authority through her writing than Mrs. Todd does through her fragrant tinctures and medicines. As a result, Jewett’s narrator crosses a line that

Dickinson’s Lady, Freeman’s Clarissa and Betsey, and Mrs. Todd never cross: as an authorial surrogate for Jewett herself, she aims to command the attention not only of a New England village but of a nation, and her mode of reaching this audience is not material but linguistic. The narrative authority of Jewett’s narrator and the implied scope of her audience have led critics to balk at her tone, question her motives, and dismiss her claims to authenticity. This critical history, I suggest, reveals the limits of female artisans to actively command power and respect— a limit that literary critics and lay readers alike frequently continue to impose today.

Like my readings of Dickinson’s and Freeman’s works, my reading of The Country of the

Pointed Firs has a basis in analogy: Mrs. Todd’s material transformations of aromatic herbs into medicinal essences are akin to the narrator’s more figurative labors. She transfigures her impressions of Mrs. Todd’s herbs and concoctions into a potent and enduring narrative of both the prehistory and human history of rural Maine. Reflecting on Mrs. Todd’s garden, she tells us:

There were some strange and pungent odors that roused a dim sense and remembrance of something in the forgotten past. Some of these might once have belonged to sacred and mystic rites, and have had some occult knowledge handed with them down the centuries; but now they pertained only to humble compounds brewed at intervals with molasses or vinegar or spirits in a small caldron on Mrs. Todd’s kitchen stove. (4)

In these lines, Jewett’s narrator joins Maine’s ancient history to a more recent history through her description of the garden’s aromas: scents that at one time signified “sacred and mystic rites”

187 now denote “humble compounds.” By articulating a history of the significations of the odors of rural Maine, Jewett’s narrator also succinctly traces the region’s history from pre-modern through modern experience. Maine’s vast regional history is thus condensed into a few lines about the scents of herbs in a garden, an act of linguistic concentration comparable to Mrs.

Todd’s brewing of herbs with molasses, vinegar, and spirits.

Given the analogous roles of Mrs. Todd as a distiller of matter into essences and tinctures, and her apprentice as a distiller of sensory experience into story, it is worth exploring the significant differences between these roles. First of all, the unnamed narrator lays claim to greater authority than Mrs. Todd does. Jewett is clear that Mrs. Todd does not attempt to reach beyond her role as Dunnet Landing’s herbalist; her remedies do not challenge but rather complement the country doctor’s medicines. In fact, Jewett’s narrator even undermines Mrs.

Todd’s expertise when she jokes that “the good man may have counted upon the unfavorable effect of certain potions which he should find his opportunity in counteracting” (5), suggesting that Mrs. Todd does not cure but rather creates maladies, increasing the doctor’s business. In this way, the narrator hints at the limited scope of Mrs. Todd’s medical authority, despite her popularity among their neighbors.

By contrast, Jewett’s narrator claims the role of the chronicler of Dunnet Landing’s ancient and recent histories. Her voice is authoritative: though she is a first-person narrator, she is sparing in her use of the personal “I,” preferring to speak in an omniscient voice that enhances her position as Dunnet Landing’s seemingly objective interpreter. In fact, at the beginning of

Country, the narrator sustains a sense of this omniscience for several pages before ever speaking in the first person. Tellingly, the first chapter is called “The Return” rather than “My Return.” On a number of occasions before referring to herself directly, the seemingly omniscient narrator

188 utilizes the inclusive “one,” the passive voice, and infinitive verb forms in order to avoid referring directly to herself. For example, in the first paragraph, she writes, “When one really knows a village like this and its surroundings, it is like becoming acquainted with a single person” (2); this choice of phrasing echoes Freeman’s use of the word “one,” which implies that

Clarissa’s experience is universal in “The Scent of the Roses.” She thus creates a distancing effect between herself and her experience by suggesting that this experience is not unique to her, but shared by many.

At the beginning of the book’s second paragraph, the narrator adopts the passive voice and a third-person perspective, further distancing herself from the experiences she describes:

“After a first brief visit made two or three summers before in the course of a yachting cruise, a lover of Dunnet Landing returned to find the unchanged shores of the pointed firs, the same quaintness of the village with its elaborate conventionalities; all that mixture of remoteness, and childish certainty of being the centre of civilization of which her affectionate dreams had told”

(2). Referring to herself obliquely as “a lover of Dunnet Landing” and configuring her “first brief visit made two or three summers before” without reference to an active subject, she echoes the impersonal chapter title, “The Return.” In these lines, the narrator juxtaposes her impersonal perspective with an emphasis on her familiarity with Dunnet Landing, highlighting her recognition of the “unchanged shores of the pointed firs” and the “same quaintness of the village.” In this sense, her use of the impersonal third person has the paradoxical effect of situating her closer to the community of Dunnet Landing. By speaking about herself in the third person, she is able to make a study of herself as a member of the village that is the subject of her story; she figures herself not as the teller of this story, but as one of the story’s many curious subjects.

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The most striking example of this tension between the narrator as expositor and the narrator as a subject of exposition appears when she adopts a first-person perspective for the first time, partway through the book’s second chapter: “My hostess and I had made our shrewd business agreement on the basis of a simple cold luncheon at noon, and liberal restitution in the matter of hot suppers, to provide for which the lodger might sometimes be seen hurrying down the road, late in the day, with cunner line in hand” (6-7).56 In these three short lines, the narrator refers to herself in both the first person (“My hostess and I”) and the third person (“the lodger”), demonstrating her complicated relational stance to the village where she resides. A third-person perspective allows her to lay claim to a position of authority as a seemingly omniscient interpreter of Dunnet Landing’s folkways. However, the third person is also limiting, as it situates the narrator outside of the community that she strives to interpret. The narrator solves this problem by adopting a first-person perspective in addition to more omniscient forms of speech, allowing her to lay claim not only to the authority of a cultural interpreter but also to the authenticity of a member of the community itself.

The narrator’s ambivalent status as both a member and an interpreter of Dunnet Landing has attracted skepticism and even contempt from literary scholars. Jennifer Ansley compares

Jewett’s narrator unfavorably to one of Freeman’s first-person narrators, arguing that Jewett’s narrator is “in fact an outsider, both geographically and economically, and so the reliability of her insights is suspect” (440). For Ansley, the narrator of Country of the Pointed Firs is a quintessential example of a work of regional fiction that aims to “solidify an imagined community of primarily white, middle-class, urban denizens” that projects itself against “a

56 A cunner line is a fishing line used to catch cunner fish. 190 nostalgic image of a provincial, pre-industrial, national past” and “created the rural townsperson as other” (439).

Ansley’s critique of this fixture of American regional fiction, the educated cultural interpreter who exoticizes inhabitants of rural America, builds on other work. A number of scholars have highlighted the ambiguous role of Jewett’s narrator as both an educated urbanite and a lodger in Dunnet Landing; as early as 1975, critic Catherine Barnes Stevenson described

Jewett’s narrator as “an inhabitant of two worlds who is incapable of exclusive devotion to either one” (2). Likewise, according to Michael Holstein, the question of whether the narrator “should stand in her material or outside of it” drives this collection of stories (Holstein 39). Amy Kaplan has described Jewett’s narrator’s voyage from the city to the country as a form of “literary tourism” (Kaplan 252) that tells us more about the urban context from which she comes than it does about the rural hamlet she describes.57 To be sure, these critics pick up on an important and prominent aspect of Country, and both Kaplan and Ansley wisely scrutinize the forms of class privilege that allow Jewett’s narrator to claim authority over the stories of Dunnet Landing’s inhabitants. Yet, at the same time, critics’ investment in the status of Jewett’s narrator as either an insider or an outsider sheds light on an enduring tendency to gauge and qualify women’s influence—both its parameters and the intentionality driving it.

Indeed, Jewett’s narrator confronts the predicament of lacking authority before her story even begins. A male voice carries a level of confidence that is out of reach to Jewett’s female speaker. We might locate instantiations of this authoritative male voice in the famous

57 Kaplan’s reading is enduring and influential, but it has also met some resistance from feminist scholars. Marjorie Pryse has argued, in response to Kaplan’s discussion of literary tourism, that Kaplan “relies more on the politics of critical reception than on careful rereadings of Jewett’s texts,” and that her readings “reduce Jewett’s complexity and destabilize the power of her work for culture analysis, especially for gender relations” (Pryse 517-518). My reading takes into account the best of both Kaplan’s and Pryse’s points, by both acknowledging the class politics undergirding the narrator’s representation of Dunnet Landing and also addressing the gender politics that, I suggest, have driven critical response to her narration. 191 proclamation of identity by Herman Melville’s Ishmael, the swagger of Mark Twain’s Huck, or the retrospective certainty of Willa Cather’s Jim Burden, all of whom are celebrated protagonists of nineteenth-century regional novels. Indeed, while Ishmael, Huck, and Jim show themselves to be flawed, their flaws weaken their narrative authority only retroactively, once their stories are underway. The voice of a female narrator, on the other hand, is expected to be personal, confessional, self-deprecating, and unambitious in scope from the beginning, and to earn the confidence of readers through honest narration.

Jewett’s narrator makes efforts to inhabit this role, infantilizing herself by figuring herself as a hybrid of teacher and student, learned authority and uneducated child. Describing her use of the Dunnet Landing schoolhouse as a makeshift office, she says, “I hung my hat and luncheon- basket on an entry nail as if I were a small scholar, but I sat at the teacher’s desk as if I were that great authority, with all the timid empty benches in rows before me” (13). Richard Brodhead describes Jewett’s narrator as a “literary worker” (Brodhead 175), but in these lines, Jewett expresses ambivalence about her narrator’s significance as a thinker and writer: is she a towering figure of authority, or an unenlightened pupil? This ambivalence has posed problems for literary scholars who seek to reconcile two versions of Jewett’s narrator: she can be read as a representative of the humble, uneducated, regular folk of rural Maine; on the other hand, critics such as Ansley question the authenticity of an educated, urban narrator who speaks on behalf of

Dunnet Landing’s residents.

As literary critic Tom Lutz argues, the narrator’s “move to the schoolhouse takes the narrator away from too close a proximity to everyday life, which makes writing impossible, giving her the prospective distance she needs,” and yet she nonetheless remains yoked to images that undercut her writerly authority: “first, an infantilizing one of the narrator hanging her lunch

192 box on the wall like a ‘small scholar’; then a falsely aggrandizing one of her sitting at the teacher’s desk ‘as if I were a great authority, with all the timid empty benches in rows before me’; and finally, a defamiliarizing one of the occasional ‘idle sheep’ stopping to take a long look at her” (53). We might attribute the narrator’s dual role as cultural authority and community member to an American literary culture that confronts female writers with a catch-22: a woman seeking an audience must disavow her own pursuit of this audience by underplaying her own literary influence. At the same time, to achieve success as a widely read author, she must lay claim to a reading public that extends beyond the small community over which cultural norms allow her to preside.58

Shortly after she figures herself as both scholar and pupil, Jewett’s narrator goes on to more clearly establish the social role that she sees for herself in Dunnet Landing: “At sundown I went back, feeling most businesslike, down toward the village again, and usually met the flavor, not of the herb garden, but of Mrs. Todd’s hot supper, halfway up the hill” (13). In these lines,

Jewett inhabits the role of a man who leaves for work at the beginning of the day and returns home in the evening to a wife cooking dinner for him. By placing her narrator in the masculine position of an office worker, Jewett further constructs this narrator as a figure of authority, in contrast with the housewife-figure of Mrs. Todd; though both women are unmarried, their domestic arrangement leads them to take on the roles of husband and wife.59 While Jewett implies connections between Mrs. Todd’s work of essence-brewing and the narrator’s work of

58 Bill Brown figures Jewett as an anthropologist, for whom descriptions of objects “work synecdochically to represent a self-contained culture” (199). In this way, he emphasizes Jewett’s role as a cultural theorist, figuring her as a scholar of regional culture rather than as a product of it.

59 As Maura D’Amore has noted, during the late nineteenth century men negotiated the experience of spending long hours in urban office settings by looking beyond their professional roles and cultivating personal, hobby-based identities at home. D’Amore writes, “…Writers, editors, architects, and reformers urged men to leave their work behind in the city at the end of each day” (3), a routine to which Jewett seems to gesture in her description of the narrator returning home from a long day writing at the schoolhouse. 193 writing, ultimately the narrator lays claim to a masculine role that establishes her work as more culturally valuable and far-reaching than Mrs. Todd’s. The writer who leaves home to work every day in a professional setting shares more in common with the country doctor than with

Mrs. Todd, and this role grants her social stature that, arguably, accounts for critics’ misgivings about her authenticity.

Jewett, too, engages in the very forms of cultural interpretation that occupy her narrator, and that have drawn the skepticism of Ansley and others.60 Her interest in the roles and responsibilities of authors can be found in her correspondences with her close friend Annie

Fields, with whom she shared her thoughts on authorship. In his seminal discussion of Jewett’s

“minor” mode, Louis Renza cites a letter to Fields in which Jewett imagines an ideal writing scenario where authorship is liberated from the limitations and pressures of the marketplace:

“Sometimes, the business part of writing grows very noxious to me, and I wonder if in heaven our best thoughts—poet’s thoughts, especially—will not be flowers, somehow, or some sort of beautiful live things that stand about and grow, and don’t have to be chaffered over and bought and sold” (Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett 62-63). Renza reads these lines as an expression of desire to transform “the pressure to construe writing as serious artistic work into the desire to preserve it as ‘pleasure’” (Renza 155). This desire to recast “serious” work as “pleasure” is echoed in the juxtaposition between her narrator’s “literary employments,” “so vexed with uncertainties” (Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett 8), and Mrs. Todd’s pleasurably fulfilling occupations, given that she is an “ardent lover of herbs” (Country 4).

60 Stephanie Foote makes a case for drawing comparisons between Jewett and her narrator, making reference to the “biographical similarities between the two” and arguing, “It is not difficult to see how Jewett herself implicates herself in [an] economy of stranger and native” (186). 194

In this sense, Jewett’s comparison of “poet’s thoughts” to flowers, and her association of her narrator’s writing with Mrs. Todd’s occupations as an herbalist, highlights important differences between these crafts: while Jewett presents the growth and processing of plants as an organic practice requiring little or no human intervention, she laments the fact that books must be

“chaffered over and bought and sold.” Renza correlates Jewett’s expression of desire to be rid of the economic and political exigencies of authorship to her “constant determination to imagine an ideal private reading of her sketchy stories” (160), indicating a wish to escape the market and inhabit a writerly role not beholden to the demands of publishers and readers. It is worth noting that Mrs. Todd provides a contrast to Jewett’s sense of needing to operate within an institution over which she has no control, as Mrs. Todd’s artisanal labors neatly sidestep the exigencies of mass production.

Jewett’s representation of the imperfect correspondences between flowers and thoughts, distillates and writings, goes a long way in clarifying some of the problems that The Country of the Pointed Firs has posed for literary critics. As Jewett’s surrogate, Jewett’s narrator asks us to consume her sketches just as Mrs. Todd’s neighbors consume the scents that emanate from her yard and the concoctions that she brews in her cauldron. However, the moment that readers attend to the manipulations of language and the crafting of meaning that go into the creation of these sketches (as they go into any piece of writing), suspicions arise; knowing that Jewett sought out and wrote for an audience has led readers to ascribe an ambition to her that they are less likely to read into Mrs. Todd. To be sure, Mrs. Todd has her own client base—but, as they are less geographically vast in scope than Jewett’s, they are less likely to come under suspicion.

Of course, the notion that Mrs. Todd’s labors stand outside of a capitalist economy is an illusion. Mrs. Todd, just like the narrator of The Country of the Pointed Firs or like Jewett

195 herself, seeks to sell her creations, as the narrator reminds us when she describes the “glory of making two dollars and twenty-seven scents in a single day” selling Mrs. Todd’s wares as her apprentice (8). However, the difference in the scope of Jewett’s and her narrator’s publishing aspirations and the scope of Mrs. Todd’s more localized business results in differing sets of expectations and limitations for these women: while Mrs. Todd’s influence is not so far-flung that she exceeds the bounds of propriety for female entrepreneurship, Jewett and her narrator run the risk of being read as overreaching and inauthentic. Ironically, even though we are given to believe that Mrs. Todd’s concoctions may be poisonous, she stands in an American regional imaginary as a guardian of small-town life. By contrast, the labors and works of Jewett and her narrator—both of whom have been perceived as more striving in their artistic pursuits—have undergone decades of scrutiny.

Scent, by contrast, rarely attracts such scrutiny. In his discussion of western culture’s undervaluation of fragrance, Reinarz writes, “The sense of smell remains at the bottom of the sense hierarchy, where it has lingered for centuries” (5). In a culture that undervalues olfactory sensation, it makes for a fitting metaphor for women’s writing, deprecated as it so often was in a literary marketplace largely controlled by men. Yet, it is the differences between fragrance and literature that makes an analogy between the two powerful. As Dickinson, Freeman, and Jewett show, smelling a distilled essence and reading a story or a poem are both powerfully affecting experiences; all the same, the dynamics of seeking an audience for these creations are complicated by the cultural associations attached to each craft. By describing women whose perfumes bring them recognition, honor, and respect, Dickinson Freeman, and Jewett work to enhance readers’ estimation of scent as a powerful conveyor of meaning and experience.

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At the same time, these authors’ texts lament the limits faced by women who make texts instead of perfumes. In adopting a craft not already undervalued as feminine and insignificant, women who write face an unwelcoming literary atmosphere. In drawing an analogy between text and scent, they strive to overcome the double-bind in which they find themselves: if their writings are as delicate and unobtrusive as a rose’s scent, then they might pass beyond their New

England landscapes and across American culture. It is a sign of this strategy’s success that readers read and revere Dickinson, Freeman, and Jewett today.

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WORKS CITED

Aftel, Mandy. Essence and Alchemy: A Book of Perfume. New York: North Point Press, 2001. Print.

Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. Print.

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CODA: LITERARY MOONSHINE, YESTERDAY AND TODAY

Introduction

In his theorization of the relationships among global and regional cultures, Philip Joseph argues that nineteenth-century print distribution networks alienated people from a sense of community: “Mediated by technology, encounters between individuals will inevitably exclude certain senses (touch and smell, for instance), behaviors (the handshake or hug), and threats

(physical aggression, unsolicited touching, or illness)” (Joseph 2). With this loss comes overcompensation; without “intimate communal relations,” writers and publishers seek to dazzle readers with the illusion of really being there.

Each chapter in this dissertation has traced this phenomenon in a different culturally- coded space: the first chapter explored how writings about making and eating sugar in Louisiana consolidate versions of an old and new South for broad audiences; the second chapter attended to texts that invite visual consumption by incorporating decorative aesthetics associated with the nation’s earliest Chinatowns; and the third chapter showed how New England texts, like the fragrances they describe, might waft out of even seemingly enclosed spaces. In each of these chapters, authors and publishers negotiate the definitions of regional boundaries: even as they maintain a sense of the cultural and sensory particularities unique to the spaces that they represent, they also seek to make these particularities available to people looking on from outside these locales. As nineteenth-century industrialization led to increasingly entrenched class hierarchies, a desire to escape a prevailing sense of cultural homogeneity drove middle-class

204 consumers to seek spaces associated with seemingly exotic, remote, authentic, and traditional experience.

Such feelings of estrangement and compensation endure today. In this coda, I examine contemporary representations of Appalachian moonshine in popular nonfiction and its nineteenth-century progenitors, all of which attempt to define the characteristics of moonshine and its makers and practitioners. In offering authoritative interpretations of this regional history, these texts also present themselves as genuine products of the trade, facilitating readerly feelings of belonging to a regional space romanticized for its associations with transgression and illegality. Here, I argue that portrayals of illicitly produced moonshine facilitate outlaw fantasies among middle-class Americans, as makers and drinkers both yesterday and today gain access to imagined notions of regional experience that enable and authorize illicit behavior.

Representations of moonshine culture are, it bears mentioning, not always romantic.

While the portrayals of Appalachian moonshiners that I examine in this coda exoticize the life of illicit distillation, other portrayals mock the practitioners of this trade as backward. As popular historian Matthew B. Rowley has written, a longstanding image continues to prevail in today’s culture: “uneducated Southern mountaineers, defiant, fiercely loyal to kin and clan, prone to violence and incest, and spouting a vocabulary riddled with words such as you’ins, vittles, commencin’, and boughten” (45). These stereotypes, which originated in popular writings of the nineteenth century, endure today in contemporary representations of the region, from the reality television show Moonshiners to popular songs emphasizing the violence and obliteration that moonshine induces.61 By contrast, in advancing a respectable moonshine persona in their

61 These songs range from Dolly Parton’s “Daddy’s Moonshine Still” (1971) to rap artist Savage’s “Moonshine” (2005). Moonshine representations have also enjoyed a long history in American film, beginning in 1904 with a short film called The Moonshiner and continuing “over the next two decades” with “literally hundreds of similar films,” “most of them featuring stereotyped feuding, revenooer- [revenuer]-fighting, moonshine-making Southern 205 writings, the nonfiction texts I examine in this coda portray an Appalachian culture palatable to middle-class readers because it emphasizes characteristics of moonshine and moonshiners with which readers are likely to identify. Moonshiners, these authors suggests, might embrace a rule- breaking persona without exceeding the bounds of propriety altogether.

In order to advance a vision of Appalachian moonshine culture enticing to readers, authors demonstrate a savvy understanding of the values of their readerships. Historically, moonshine has been defined by its status as an illicitly produced and smuggled good

(“Moonshine”), usually made of corn in the context of Appalachian history.62 Because corn whiskey was taxed at high rates after the Civil War, many distillers took their business underground, resulting in an elaborate mythology surrounding the illegal trade, its practitioners, and the land where they worked. In its most positive formulations, it has been romanticized as a product of a regional industry associated with fierce independence, commitment to simple living, and loyalty to kin. For nineteenth-century readers, the race and gender of the quintessential moonshiner played an important role in authorizing his transgressive labors: a white man seeking to provide for his family was seen as morally exempt from laws prohibiting the distillation and sale of liquor. The appeal of these texts was thus grounded in their alignment with values of white Appalachian men’s Anglo Saxon pedigree and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps

mountain people” (Rowley 46). According to historian Daniel S. Pierce, The Moonshiner (and its “countless imitators”) “solidified the southern Appalachian moonshiner as a stock popular culture figure and helped imbed the image of ignorant, violent, and lazy mountain people deeply in the American psyche” (53). The sitcom The Beverley Hillbillies provided a mid-century incarnation of this stereotype; infamous moonshiner Popcorn Sutton embodied it spectacularly in Me and My Likker (1999) with his self-published account of moonshining and bootlegging in North Carolina.

62 The name “moonshine” was first coined in England during the eighteenth century, and later adopted in the U.S. Today, many small-batch and mass-produced whiskeys contain more sugar than corn, but are nonetheless marketed as “moonshine.” 206 masculinity.63 In the first half of this coda, I examine early representations of this figure at the turn into the twentieth century in order to explore the questions undergirding this dissertation:

Who can rightfully claim affinity with a place? What does it mean to write authentically about regional belonging? And how might regional literature’s rhetorics of access and exclusion serve a middle-class readership invested in seeking exotic experience while maintaining a sense of its own status and worldview?

The second half of this coda addresses these questions in a modern-day context, turning to a twenty-first-century vogue for revitalizing local folk cultures in today’s craft distillation movement. Like moonshine, a moonshiner persona that offers a momentary escape from the rules governing contemporary society continues to prove intoxicating. Today, middle-class

Americans find themselves in the sway of many of the same conditions that affected their late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century forebears, including rapid developments in the dissemination of media, increasing globalization, and demographic shifts. All of these factors have driven members of an economically privileged middle class to make sense of and lay claim to regional cultures and identities not their own—while identifying strongly with permissible race, class, and gender categories. Historically, participation in moonshine fantasies has required affiliation with values of whiteness and masculinity—categories that make rule-breaking behavior more allowable. Today’s moonshine commentators—from popular historians to authors of books on how to distill at home—are reimagining the contours of these forms of affiliation, as

63 Rare examples of fiction and nonfiction representing communities not typically associated with moonshine culture do exist. For example, in her short story “Qualla” (Lippincott’s, 1875), Rebecca Harding Davis describes the effects of liquor consumption on the Eastern Cherokee inhabitants of western North Carolina. Further, Elizabeth S.D. Engelhardt attends to several texts about women moonshiners, including Mary Noailles Mufree’s In the Tennessee Mountains (1884), Lucy Cleaver McElroy’s Juletty: A Story of Eastern Kentucky (1901), George Creswell Gill’s Beyond the Blue-Grass: A Kentucky Novel (1908), Catherine Frances Cavanagh’s “Stories of Our Government Bureaus” (1911), and Sherwood Anderson’s Kit Brandon (1936). Yet such examples are far outnumbered by the vast number of texts describing stereotypical white, male moonshiners in Appalachia. 207 they broaden historical and contemporary definitions of moonshiners that include women and people of color.

Nonetheless, I explore the extent to which writers and distillers today continue to serve an exclusively economically advantaged audience. Through the analogous practices of moonshining and writing about moonshining, today Americans locate opportunities to act out fantasies of transgression and abandon within the parameters of a socially sanctioned hobby only available to those with the resources to pursue it. By turning to contemporary portrayals of the myriad sensory experiences that moonshine bestows, I demonstrate the trenchant role that language of the senses continues to play in depictions of local life today among middle-class

Americans. Indeed, while contemporary writers work to move beyond exclusionary rhetorics that align moonshine culture exclusively with white masculinity, the forms of economic privilege that continue to attach to this body of literature and its readers demonstrate that the literary pleasures of the senses are tailor-made for an American middle class ongoingly committed to serving its own fantasies. Often, readers claim this privilege at the expense of an honest reckoning with realities of enduring social and economic disparity.

Appalachian Moonshine in History and Literature

The history of Appalachian moonshine is a history of a porous region marked by traffic, migration, and trade. The history of writing about moonshine is similarly expansive, as stories about Appalachian moonshiners gained popularity on a national scale at the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, even as moonshine has been associated with cultural insularity and particularity, it has undergone a long history of traveling beyond regional borders in the forms of both material good and narrative text. In an era of rapid infrastructural development, this analogy was fitting: moonshine could be transported out of the mountains where it was distilled as it never had been

208 before. And, like the liquid corn illegally and increasingly dispatched from the mountains, stories describing the circumstances that led good men to engage in this illegal activity proliferated as well. By consuming these texts, readers might imagine themselves to be participating in the same illicit but honorable trade. The following brief history of Appalachian moonshine sets the stage for an analysis of turn-of-the-century writings on the subject.

According to Robert F. Moss in his popular history of liquor production and consumption in the American South, the illegalization of liquor distillation and distribution came about in

1867 as a result of the first Reconstruction Act, which “divided the South into military districts” and allowed federal commanders to “put a renewed emphasis on tax collection” in the name of restoring “political order” (143). The Bureau of Internal Revenue sent agents to the rural South to sniff out illicit liquor and tax (and sometimes arrest) those who made it. By the 1870s, he explains, the antagonistic relationship between Appalachia’s rural whiskey makers and northern revenuers who sought to tax them “had transformed what was once a small-scale industry operating openly on rural farms into a covert illegal enterprise,” leading distillers across

Appalachia to move their stills “into more and more remote regions,” including cliff sides and subterranean caves (147).

In her cultural history of moonshine, Jaime Joyce asserts that “illicit distilling had reached epidemic proportions in the South” by the 1870s (54).64 An economic recession and a hike in taxes on liquor distillation in the 1890s “lured…farmers back into the blockade business or into it for the first time,” according to historian Daniel S. Pierce. Meanwhile, developments in transportation networks at the turn of the century brought more and more people to Appalachia’s previously remote recesses, where they worked for timber and railroad companies. Many of

64 Moonshining had even come to represent a form of resistance to the federal government, which, many southerners thought, had imposed taxes on them in order to fund the Civil War (Joyce 54). 209 these people drank the illegally produced corn whiskey that was widely available there, creating a “virtually captive market for…moonshiners” (Pierce 40-41). Conversely, more and more illegally produced whiskey was leaving Appalachia during this period, too: without a railway, corn rotted too quickly to transport it outside the region for sale. Distilling and jarring it as whiskey allowed farmers to profit off of their crops.

Writings describing the production, distribution, and consumption of corn whiskey have traveled a similar trajectory, as a vast number of fictional works featuring Appalachian moonshine were published at the turn of the century. In the following readings of Francis

Lynde’s “The Moonshiner of Fact” (1896) and Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders

(1913), I focus on nonfictional accounts that present themselves as proxies for moonshine itself—authentic reflections of Appalachian life that cater to white, middle-class readers seeking inhabit outlaw identities.65

In 1896, Francis Lynde published “The Moonshiner of Fact” in Lippincott’s. In doing so, he dramatized similarities between making and chronicling moonshine. The narrator, who has travelled to Appalachia before, describes a friend, Pencraft, who attempts to write a story without ever having visited the region. When Pencraft finally does travel to the Tennessee mountains, he comes back angry at the narrator for not having told him that his account had been all wrong:

“You knew there were no such people as I put into that story, and yet you let me go on and write myself down an idiot along with the rest of them. Why couldn’t you give me a hint?” (67).

Pencraft goes on:

I’ve eaten with them, drunk with them, slept in their cabins, stood watch with them—in short, I’ve been a moonshiner myself for the past month. And now do you know what’s

65 For example, writers including Rebecca Harding Davis, Mary Noailles Murfree, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and James Lane Allen published accounts of dangerous travels through Appalachian moonshine country in a variety of periodicals including Harper’s and Lippincott’s. 210

going to happen? I do the “new books” for The Literary Junta, and the first fellow who comes out with a fairy-tale about these people will get himself slated. (67)

With these words, Pencraft suggests that by inhabiting the role of a moonshiner in the Tennessee mountains, “fairy-tale” illusions of Appalachian life have revealed themselves as false, and he laments that non-factual accounts of the region nonetheless continue to enjoy popularity.

The narrator uses this anecdote from Pencraft to launch his own philosophy of telling

Appalachian history: “…My own note-book will serve to illustrate further the difference between the moonshiner of the novelists and the dramatists and the illicit distiller of fact” (68). According to Lynde, the “moonshiner of fact” (75) defies stereotypes: “He is neither a bandit nor a highwayman, a disturber of the peace nor, in respect to formularies other than the revenue statutes, a law-breaker” (72), but rather a “simple-hearted” figure “who raises corn that he cannot sell and distils it because he thinks he has an inherent right so to do, be made to answer for their sins in addition to his own” (76). Having cited Pencraft as a self-described “moonshiner,” the narrator seems to liken his and his friend’s own roles as writers to those of the “simple-hearted” men they describe: with an emphasis on honesty and hard work, he joins the moonshiners whom he chronicles in expressing a commitment to straightforward storytelling.

The narrator’s positive formulation of mountain moonshiners is invested in the racial makeup of the “moonshiner of fact” whom he claims to have encountered. This moonshiner, he clarifies, is a white man. While Pencraft complains to the narrator early in the story that he came to the mountain looking for a variety of exotic types—including “the Joel Chandler Harris darky” (66)—here Lynde claims to set the record straight, describing the type of mountaineer that populates the Appalachian hills:

His forefathers, the pioneers, who cleared the way before the advancing army of agriculturists in the early settlement of the region of Virginia and the Carolinas, were distillers before they were law-breakers. Aside from woodcraft, it was their single art,

211

handed down from father to son from the days when their ancestors made poteen in the Irish hills or usquebaugh in the Scottish Highlands. (70)

Here, Lynde’s emphasis on the longstanding Anglo Saxon pedigree of the Appalachian moonshiner is important in making his persona appealing to a broad American readership: whiteness and masculinity confer a sense of legitimacy that mitigates his illegal behavior, and even makes him admirable. Likewise, in referring to this moonshiner as a man, Lynde aligns his narrative with a prevailing identification between illicit distillers and masculinity. Moonshine distillation, in his framework, is a longstanding craft passed down from father to son: to trace the history of moonshine is to trace the bloodlines of the men who have made it.

Significantly, Lynde’s narrator describes moonshine using similar language: it is a

“colorless liquid, raw and fiery to the civilized palate…Its makers know none of the arts of adulteration, hence it is pure and free from drugs” (73). With this description, Lynde evokes the very characteristics of purity (with his description of “colorless” and unadulterated liquor) and masculine independence (“raw and fiery”) that characterize the Appalachian moonshiner.

Moonshine contains the very qualities of its makers, he suggests.

By way of a further analogy, Lynde indicates that the very act of reading his account of

Appalachian life provides the same access to the persona of the mountain distiller as moonshine itself does. Pencraft’s words resound here: “I’ve been a moonshiner myself for the past month.”

The “moonshiner of fact” who has come into direct contact with the people he describes, Lynde implies, disseminates a textual product as authentic as moonshine. Readers seeking a subversive yet honorable persona to inhabit need look no further than this essay: his own factual account seems to grant access to the very forms of racial purity, longstanding attachment to place, masculine dignity, and skillful craftsmanship embodied by the Appalachian mountaineer.

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Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders (1913) even more overtly racializes this figure: in his discussion of the demographic makeup of Appalachia, he writes, “…Throughout most of Appalachia the population is almost exclusively white” (453), and, “In many mountain settlements negroes are not allowed to tarry” due to “an instinctive racial antipathy” (454).66 This accounting of the region’s population leads Kephart to advance a racist celebration of

Appalachia’s ethnic purity: “Here, then, is Appalachia: one of the great land-locked areas of the globe, more English in speech than Britain itself, more American by blood than any other part of

America…” (454), though he goes on to acknowledge that “such an anomaly cannot continue.

Commercialism has discovered the mountains at last, and no sentiment, however honest, however hallowed, can keep it out” (454). In this analysis, Kephart portrays Appalachia’s population as historically racially white, but in the process of transforming due to rapid economic growth and industrialization. With the coming of the “blare of steam whistles and the blare of dynamite” (454), he suggests, an influx of outsiders—whom, he implies, may be racially impure—threatens to enter a region previously unadulterated by non-white residents.

Kephart’s framing of a region at risk of adulteration makes its way into his description of

Appalachian moonshine, as well: “As for purity, all of the moonshine whiskey used to be pure, and much of it still is; but every blockader knows how to adulterate…” (137) Kephart goes on to list a number of additives (including lye, pepper, ginger, tobacco, and buckeyes), accounting for the addition of these substances by describing recent rises in whiskey prices, caused by the movement of the liquor trade underground. Just like the region’s population, moonshine, too, seems to transform from a pure to a diluted substance with the coming tides of modernity.

66 Kephart’s insistence that Appalachia was exclusively white is incorrect, but, strikingly, a scholarly history of African American moonshiners has yet to be written—despite the fact that, according to Engelhardt, yearly reports of federal agencies prosecuting moonshiners make reference to prosecuting residents in areas of the South dominated by African American populations (Engelhardt, personal communication). 213

Kephart thus suggests that a pure bottle of moonshine also signifies the purity of its makers, as both are sequestered from the adulterating influences of industrialization. Yet, in emphasizing the economic transformations responsible for demographic and cultural shifts in the region, he also indicates that an unadulterated bottle of Appalachian whiskey may not be available much longer.

Compensating for the possibility of its disappearance, Kephart suggests that his own book might take its place in the homes of American consumers across the nation. He thus frames his book as a bottle of moonshine—one whose truthfulness replicates a sense of the region’s historically unadulterated qualities. As he writes, “I have tried to give a true picture of life among the southern mountaineers…The narrative is to be taken literally. There is not a line of fiction or exaggeration to it” (10). Like Lynde, Kephart figures his book as being unmarred by fiction or exaggeration; rather, like Appalachia’s residents and like the moonshine created there, his book is a pure product of region.

Thus, while the people and the liquor may be at risk of changing, Kephart suggests that readers who buy and read his own book may still gain access to the forms of authenticity with which the region has historically been associated. Indeed, for Kephart, the language of moonshine distillation offers a powerful way of thinking about the region’s craggy boundaries: an illicit but portable substance, moonshine seemed to offer a rare opportunity for outsiders to come into contact with Appalachian culture. And texts chronicling moonshine production—

Kehpart’s included—seem, to him, to provide a similar opportunity. Kephart portrays both illegally distilled corn whiskey and literatures documenting this trade as two of the only substances capable of passing outside the remote Appalachian mountains to be consumed by outsiders, and granting access to these spaces and their inhabitants. In his depiction of

214 moonshine, he claims to quote a distiller who synthesizes the economic plight faced by residents of Appalachia: citing “bad roads,” the distiller says, “…Corn can’t be shipped outen hyar. We can trade hit for store credit—that’s all. Corn juice is about all we can tote around over the country and git cash money for. Why, man, that’s the only way some folks has o’ payin’ their taxes!” (123). In his representation of this man’s words, Kephart crystallizes Appalachia’s appeal in an American regional imaginary: the region seems to be so remote that it is nearly impossible to carry goods out of it; moonshine, then, is a rare portable artifact of regional culture that can pass across regional boundaries.

Similarly, Kephart emphasizes a dearth of written accounts of the region, stating that it is unlikely that “…any incidents of mountain life will leak out” (12). He goes on:

When I prepared, in 1904, for my first sojourn in the Great Smoky Mountains, which form the master chain of the Appalachian system, I could find in no library a guide to that region. The most diligent research failed to discover so much as a magazine article, written within this generation, that described the land and its people. Nay, there was not even a novel or a story that showed intimate local knowledge;…it was terra incognita.” (13)

Implicit in this discussion is Kephart’s own achievement in disseminating a comprehensive account of Appalachian life with the publication of Our Southern Highlanders. As Anne

Bridges, Russell Clement, and Ken Wise, the authors of an annotated bibliography of the Smoky

Mountains, write about Kephart, “The place of Our Southern Highlanders—first published in

1913, with an expanded edition in 1922—as one of the classics of both Southern Appalachian and regional American literature is secure” (205). Our Southern Highlanders, like corn liquor, was born in and departed from a place that was, by Kephart’s account, nearly impossible to leave.

Both Lynde and Kephart therefore appeal to a middle-class readership seeking to enjoy the excitement of rule-breaking while adhering to the social norms and identity categories

215 organizing middle-class life: to read about Appalachian moonshine was to maintain affiliations with socially valuable forms of racial purity and masculinity while also indulging in fantasies of outlaw behavior. Today, having inherited both distilling practices and the language to talk about those practices from nineteenth-century makers and writers, contemporary DIY proponents and popular historians align their work with the literary and material histories of moonshine— though, as participants in a progressive craft culture, many of them make adjustments to the rhetorics of purity that dominated nineteenth-century nonfiction. All the same, forms of inequity nonetheless trouble today’s writers: while most no longer use the language of purity to claim affiliation with white, male Appalachian outlaw identities, similar rhetorics do highlight the forms of economic disparity that allow only a privileged subset of Americans to participate in today’s craft culture.

Today’s Literary Spirits

In their 2013 distillation guide, Colin Spoelman and David Haskell demonstrate enduring associations between illicitly produced liquor and the geographical space with which it continues to be identified in a literary imaginary. They write, “Whiskey evokes the place of its making…It is, literally, a field of grain, cooked and fermented; distilled and aged; reduced to something of such great and abstract value that it is cherished next to art and literature” (28-29). As Spoelman and Haskell show, moonshine enthusiasts continue to claim affiliation with place through the practices of making and drinking liquor. And, just as Lynde and Kephart expressed over a century earlier, Spoelman and Haskell show that an analogy between “whiskey” and “art and literature” continues to resonate with readers looking to access region through the consumption of literary texts. In the following discussion of several contemporary works of historical nonfiction and instructional guides to moonshine-making, I explore how today’s writers

216 alternately take up and transfigure the language of moonshine to rethink what moonshine is and what it isn’t, where it can be from and where it can’t, and who is and who isn’t a moonshiner.

In his foundational history of Appalachian spirits Mountain Spirits (1974), author Joseph

Earl Dabney notes that “aficionados of the old school insist there is no way to make really good whiskey other than to use corn meal and corn malt exclusively with no sugar, no yeast…, no rye or barley malt” (73). Though Dabney here refers to “whiskey” rather than “moonshine,” his insistence on the use of corn rather than other types of grain mash suggests allegiance to the kind of Appalachian corn whiskey that has often been labeled “moonshine.” Dabney’s narrow definition of what constitutes moonshine echoes Kephart’s and Lynde’s representations of unadulterated liquor, suggesting that moonshine’s purity continued to signify regional authenticity through the twentieth century.

Yet, some contemporary writers have advanced more capacious definitions of moonshine. For example, how-to guide Matthew Rowley takes a more democratic approach:

“Regardless of where they lie on the hooch-to-honeysuckle spectrum, in these pages the word

‘moonshine’ respectfully represents all homemade spirits” (9). In today’s culture of craft distillation, then, it seems that we can all be moonshiners. Taking on the identities of modern-day outlaws, contemporary nonfiction writers formulate a progressive moonshiner identity based in the notion that an authentic sense of Appalachia can be shared with anyone daring enough to make, sip, or read about how to practice the craft of illegally distilled liquor. Indeed, arguably moonshine’s illegality is among its most resonant qualities among hobbyists and those who write for them.

Taking care to note that home-distilled liquor continues to be illegal in all fifty states, food writer Josh Ozersky describes moonshine in a 2010 article for Time Magazine as “an

217 artisanal product that individuals can make for themselves, unmediated by industry, law or the marketplace” (Ozersky). Ozersky goes on to synthesize the appeal of this product in contemporary culture: “The moonshine revolution…is utterly of a piece with the libertarian mood of the times; and if its illegality adds a frisson of rebellion to the pleasure of making something good all by yourself, then so much the better” (Ozersky). In Ozersky’s formulation, a libertarian ethic and an outlaw persona are all that it takes to claim membership in today’s moonshine culture. Indeed, according to Rowley, the craft distillation movement’s practitioners now include non-white, non-male, and immigrant hobbyists, all of whom—in contradistinction to historical representations of the craft—might legitimately claim affiliation with the persona of the Appalachian outlaw. Rowley’s book advances a progressive vision of a modern renegade who is not beholden to particular geographies, communities, or commitments to notions of authenticity.

Rowley’s catholic attitude toward moonshine is evident in his definition of the beverage itself, which encompasses any distilled liquor—as long as it’s been made illegally: “If it’s liquor made in secret and outside the law, it’s moonshine. And it’s the moonshiner, of course, who does the making” (9). As for Lynde and Kephart, an outlaw sensibility thus frames Rowley’s discussion of what constitutes moonshine today. For example, the book begins with a comparison between how people historically learned to distill and how they learn today: moonshiners used to learn “at the side of an established moonshiner, clandestinely helping to tote bags of sugar or sprouted corn to the still site, minding boiler fires, or filling jugs with the potent product” (8). “These days,” by contrast, “such opportunities are fewer and further between, and probably not advisable. This book is intended to be the next best thing ton an on-the-job apprenticeship” (8). Rowley evokes moonshine’s history of “clandestine” activity only to clarify

218 that such activity is no longer operative in the same ways—but that his book serves as the next best thing. In doing so, he both distances today’s craft culture from its associations with illegality and suggests that his readers might nonetheless access a comparable form of “apprenticeship.”

To read Moonshine! is, by Rowley’s account, to achieve a sense of clandestine labor while refraining from punishable behavior—to inhabit the role of an old-time moonshiner without taking on the risks.

A historically resonant outlaw identity thus informs Rowley’s portrayal of today’s craft, even as he also rethinks the regional and demographic contours of moonshine country in a modern-day context. For example, he describes a range of types of moonshine that have been produced historically in the U.S., refraining from placing higher value on more seemingly pure distillates, or those beverages more often associated with Appalachia.67 Likewise, Rowley is democratic in his characterization of the person who “does the making,” describing a variety of producers across the country and world in order to advance a capacious understanding of the

Global South: “Moonshine’s heritage may be rooted in the South, but today the stuff itself flows from stills in every state, in cities and small towns as well as backwoods hollows” (24), he writes. Rowley follows this proclamation with a list of places outside the South where

“moonshine”—which, by his definition, might include a variety of liquors, from applejack to

67 Rowley counts a variety of forms of adulterated beverages as moonshine. For example, he describes the practice of adding sugar to whiskey: “These days, the most common moonshine contains little corn. For those who make sellin’ whiskey, plain white table sugar is the lifeblood of the industry,” for reasons of economy, availability, yield, and speed of distillation (12). While Rowley notes that “the classic American moonshine is pure corn liquor, made form maize,” he does not place a value on either the pure corn or the sugar-sweetened stuff; both, by his logic, are moonshine. He goes on to describe the production of whiskey using far stranger and more dangerous adulterants than sugar, beginning with a discussion of lore about liquors accidentally adulterated by animal carcasses: “Originally and fatally attracted by the warmth and sweetness of a fermenting mash, insects, birds, dead ’possums, and pig carcasses regularly bob to the surface in antimoonshine tales” (23). Rowley also enumerates adulterants more dangerous than dead insects and squirrels. For example, he describes how the early 1930s saw a slew of Midwesterners and Southerners become permanently paralyzed after drinking “jake”—a “high-proof alcoholic extract of Jamaican ginger”—that had been adulterated with tri-ortho-cresyl-phosphate, “a chemical plasticizer used in lacquer and airplane finishes and a potent neurotoxin” (21-22).

219 grappa—continue to thrive (25).68 He likewise emphasizes a long history of women’s participation in the craft: “Despite the celebrated ‘moonshine kings’ of this or that county, we should never forget that distillation has long been regarded as women’s work,” and that women today are taking up the craft as well (151).

Rowley thus resists historically trenchant depictions of moonshiners and their distillates that glorify the figure of the white, male moonshiner. And, to drive home the point, he formulates his own book as a contribution to this progressive sensibility of diversity. In addition to framing the book itself as a stand-in for an old-fashioned “apprenticeship,” its scrapbook style mimics the sense of variety by which he defines moonshine. The book includes a range of textual and visual formats, conferring its own sense of adulteration: it is full of photographs, illustrations, and quotations drawn from a variety of historical writings about moonshine.69 The title of Rowley’s book is telling, as Moonshine! seems to be not only an exclamation of enthusiasm but also a descriptor of the book. Just like the diverse and adulterated liquors that

Rowley describes, it asserts a generic variability consistent with his philosophy of inclusivity. If

Dabney and his contemporaries sought to rescue moonshine from oblivion by recuperating and defining it in writing, then Rowley asserts a countervailing analogy: his book’s patchwork aesthetic echoes moonshine’s variable qualities and origins.

Yet, Rowley also makes some notable concessions in his reflection on the forms of diversity that characterize modern-day craft culture. While he insists on the range of beverages that can be considered moonshine, people who can make it, and texts that can capture its

68 For example, Rowley includes New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Oregon, and California in his list of places populated by modern-day moonshiners (25).

69 These illustrations are by three different artists, no less—one providing “humorous illustrations,” one “technical drawings,” and one “how-to illustrations,” according to the book’s front matter); humorous lists on topics such as “Whiskey Adulterants” (23) and “The Overdrinker’s Thesaurus” (19). 220 qualities in image and narrative, it remains clear that the craft distillation movement remains accessible only to those who can afford it. In his discussion of today’s craft movement, Rowley implies the extent to which economic privilege serves as a prerequisite for membership: for the

“armchair engineers and chemists” who distill whiskey today, “profit is almost anathema; they are tinkerers and hobbyists eking out more still efficiency and stubbornly trying to create sublime beverages to share and trade among family and friends” (49). In fact, while Rowley is careful to outlines the variety of forms that moonshine has taken historically and continues to take today, he notes that today’s home distillers are most likely “to make corn whiskey with nothing but corn, water, malt, and yeast…Because home distillers tend to drink their own product rather than sell it, they care deeply about what goes into the pot” (12). This trend in home distilling illuminates the value that many contemporary distillers place on notions of artisanship and quality—a kind of value that is necessarily expensive to uphold.

Thus, even in purveying the notion that Appalachia is accessible to any hobbyist who may wish to make or drink illicitly distilled liquor, Rowley acknowledges and practices a form of economic exclusivity that automatically leaves out large numbers of Americans. After all, not everyone is afforded access to the many guides for home distilling available in bookstores and at libraries, including his own; to the ingredients for home distillation and cocktail-making that these guides recommend; to the hours of leisure in which to pursue this hobby; or to a still, which runs anywhere from several hundred to several thousand dollars. To participate in today’s craft distillation movement requires economic privilege at odds with the circumstances of want that drove nineteenth-century moonshiners to distill and sell liquor illegally.

The outlaw persona conferred by participation in today’s moonshine culture thus provides a sense of transgression without risk, allowing middle-class moonshine writers and

221 readers, like their nineteenth-century predecessors, to avoid grappling with the forms of economic disparity that continue to drive Americans to traffic in dangerous underground industries. Max Watman exemplifies the unresolved forms of disparity that characterize the craft distillation movement in his popular history and personal account of learning the craft, Chasing the White Dog: An Amateur Outlaw’s Adventures in Moonshine. In addition to recounting his own distilling experiences, he attends at length to another kind of moonshine: liquor produced illegally and sold on the cheap to people in circumstances of poverty.

In fact, as today’s moonshine writers move away from defining moonshine in terms of its purity, they increasingly characterize it with relation to its illegal history; as journalist Clay

Risen wrote in 2011 article for The Atlantic, “If it’s sold on liquor store shelves, it’s not moonshine. If it has a fancy website, chances are it’s not moonshine. If its owners were ever arrested by the ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives], it might be moonshine” (Risen). Risen goes on to characterize today’s underground industry as being at odds with today’s craft culture: “While popular culture lauds the Prohibition-era backyard still, these days it is a dirty business, with its practitioners hustling on the cheap to produce low-quality, potentially poisonous alcohol that they sell to the most desperate of impoverished alcoholics”

(Risen). A tension thus inheres in today’s moonshine literature: on the one hand, writers gravitate toward commenting on an of-the-moment fad for making and drinking expensively produced artisanal and homemade liquors; on the other hand, the proliferation of cheap (and often dangerous) liquor on the black market affects a wholly different population of people, who (more like their nineteenth-century forebears than today’s craft distillers) make and drink moonshine out of necessity rather than as a form of leisure.

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Watman expresses a desire to capture the stories of these other moonshiners—stories that often go untold by writers who prefer to focus on high-end, small-batch liquors. All the same, in telling these stories, he situates them as narrative adornments: his book’s appeal revolves primarily around his descriptions of the exotic and transgressive pleasures of taking on an outlaw identity; and, in catering to a craft-oriented readership of hobbyists, ultimately Watman struggles to elevate his subjects as central players in his story. Instead, they add a sense of vibrancy and illicitness to a narrative seeking to define itself by its devil-may-care tone, for readers looking to revel in the pleasures of transgression conferred by a moonshine identity.

According to Watman, today this story is one of black communities: “Most moonshine is drunk by African-Americans in unlicensed bars called nip joints or shot houses” (121). He recounts time spent in Danville, Virginia, where there are many such nip joints. Before visiting one, he delivers a self-deprecating account of his naïve expectation: “In my cinematic imagination I pictured a dusty room out in a field of sugarcane and sunflowers and tall, proud women in flowing, colorful fabrics…Lots of smoke but also the smells of fried fish, bay rum, and shoe leather. Everyone sipping out of flasks, glass jugs, pint Mason jars” (121-122). Watman further imagines himself at the center of this scene, conjuring a nostalgic image of himself as a folklorist dutifully recording the authentic scene before him:

I’d be just like an old-time musicologist, one of the famed field collectors haunting the wrong side of the tracks with a recording machine in the Studebaker…My notes getting less and less legible, less and less coherent, until I’d volley one last blast of free- associative bepop scribblings and pocket my Moleskine notebook, straighten up, start buying people drinks and listening between songs for the first chirps of the birds. (122)

Here, Watman seeks a form of authenticity associated with life on the “wrong side of the tracks.”

At the same time, he acknowledges that his romantic vision of a Danville nip joint and his place in it—represented by darkened corners, down-and-out drinkers, and the intoxicating swirl of a

223 night spent writing about them—is imaginary. Watman pokes fun at himself: he’s not an “old- time musicologist,” and his nip joint vision is a product of his own impulse to romanticize.

On the other hand, elsewhere Watman does express a desire to seek out the realest, darkest corners of the moonshine world that is strikingly aligned his description of a musicologist’s “blast of free-associative bebop scribblings” in a “Moleskine notebook” (122).

For example, during his time in Danville, Watman befriends an African American man named

Skillet, who tells him about the communities residing there and their relationship to illegally distilled liquor. Skillet procures a Sierra Mist bottle full of whiskey (possibly cut with bleach, he warns), and Watman takes the bottle back to his Marriott hotel room to sample. Watman pours a shot into a glass and breathes

the aroma as if it were any other whiskey, burying my nose as keep into the glass as I could and breathing deeply, thoughtfully. A mistake. I had a recorder running and my gasp for air is violent, as if I’d been punched in the throat. (134)

Though Watman had poked fun at the romantic image of the musicologist just a few pages earlier, here he adopts the persona of a folklorist, recording his encounter with moonshine for posterity. Though the liquor’s bad smell and plastic container are at odds with more celebratory accounts of corn whiskey’s history, in its own way Watman’s narrative revels in Danville’s grit and grime, the way that these qualities map onto the Sierra Mist bottle full of bootlegged moonshine and bleach, and his own role as observer and recorder.

Indeed, Watman takes this role seriously, methodically noting every terrible scent and taste. After his first whiff, he closes the bottle, horrified; the next evening he tries again. He concludes, “Basically: it smelled like poison.” He goes on to detail the other nuances that he detects in the Sierra Mist bottle: “bile,” “vomit,” “sugar gone sour,” “experimental kerosene-

224 powered mouthwash,” “complete shit.” He concludes, “It is the only liquor I’ve ever had that made me feel that I was hurting myself” (134-135). Humorous as Watman’s descriptions are, they also begin to feel gratuitous. Amid his startlingly inventive and vivid descriptions, it’s easy to get wrapped up in imagining the sensations he describes; readers cannot avoid imagining the taste of bile on the tongue. For the reader who does not really have to ingest the stuff but is free to envision its foulness, unpleasantness begins to border on pleasure; the contents of the Sierra

Mist bottle provide to readers a sense of fascination without the threat of real bodily harm.

Before his encounter with the bad moonshine, Watman acknowledges his susceptibility to romanticizing the people who make, sell, and drink it: “Something about the nip joint had me in its clutches. Some ridiculous combination of nostalgia for the South—and especially Southern

Black culture—and my obsession with corn squeezings had me duped” (122). Though he depicts this realization as a turning point in his thinking—a moment of clarity after which he does away with nostalgia and romanticization—the clarity seems to vanish when the bottle of bad whiskey comes into the picture. Watman cannot seem to resist the drama of the sensations it imparts. The black community ostensibly at the heart of this chapter, and the social and economic disadvantages that have resulted in a dangerous underground liquor industry, offer an opportunity to experience the vicarious thrills of moonshining today—from the relative safety of his own still.

Watman thus trades on images of underground moonshine’s illegal production, unsavory qualities, and down-and-out makers and consumers in order to serve readerly fantasies of outlaw behavior. Yet, while these fantasies attach to Watman’s identity as a craft distiller and writer venturing underground to uncover moonshine’s illicit stories and sensations, he is careful to remind readers that he has the economic mobility to return to his own still unharmed. Following

225 his time with Skillet, Watman returns to his “newly purchased antique boiler.” In addition to chronicling his sojourn to Danville, in Chasing the White Dog Watman describes his own moonshining adventures, as he progresses from a novice to a home distiller capable of producing decent applejack. To be sure, his enthusiasm and dedication to the craft are compelling, admirable, and often entertaining; but his access to equipment, ingredients, time to spend refining his technique, and experts from whom to solicit advice all serve as reminders of how different his situation is from Skillet’s. In a sense, he seems to have it both ways: while his forays into bad moonshine territory give him a certain credibility as a narrator and distiller, the security of his economic resources and his own bodily safety are never in question.

Conclusion

Today, hobbyist-writers have thoughtfully considered a range of definitions for moonshine, and are seeking to acknowledge the places and populations that have been left out of moonshine histories for a long time. Due to these efforts, readers need no longer only think of pure corn liquor when they think of moonshine, and they might consider a range of regional and cultural influences beyond the mountains of Appalachia with which the word has so long been exclusively identified. These more capacious approaches to moonshine history demonstrate efforts on the parts of hobbyists and makers across the country to resist essentializing rhetorics and to embrace cultural difference. Such forms of resistance open up spaces to understand objects and texts, and the array of sensory pleasures that they confer, as amalgamations of multiple regional influences, folk practices, and meanings. At the same time, modern-day hobbyists face new responsibilities in a contemporary maker culture that remains available primarily to those who enjoy relative economic privilege. Though writers today are right to celebrate moonshine’s varied and often surprising manifestations in U.S. history, craft hobbyists

226 and authors compose a small coterie of people with access to information and equipment necessary to practice the craft.

In a 2017 article published in Eater Magazine, author Lauren Michele Jackson comments on the forms of racial and economic privilege undergirding the craft distillation movement.

Titled “The White Lies of Craft Culture,” the article chronicles the historical contributions that people of color have made to the development of distillation practices in the U.S.; and critiques their omission from many contemporary histories, as well as the racial homogeneity characterizing today’s craft movement. As Jackson summarizes, today, “Craft culture looks like white people.” This culture takes a variety of forms, from artisanal whiskey made by those who can afford to participate in an expensive hobby to books that place economically privileged white people at their center.

It can be easy for writers and readers with access to economic and social capital to take these resources for granted. Moss begins his popular history of drinking in the South with the following command: “For this chapter, you need to get your hands on a little moonshine, which isn’t nearly as hard as it used to be” (142). An ongoing lack of consensus about what moonshine was and is, and who makes it, demonstrates that this directive is not as straightforward as Moss makes it out to be—in Moss’s formulation, the contents of Watman’s Sierra Mist bottleful of toxin-laced liquor don’t seem to count. When he implores readers to get their “hands” on some moonshine, he evokes the tactile and gustatory pleasures of pouring corn whiskey into a

“stoneware jug or a tin cup” and taking a “good slug” for only those with the financial resources to craft their own high-quality whiskey, or to purchase it from another maker with those resources.

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Likewise, he writes for those who possess the resources to read about such things— literate people who can buy his book, or who have ready access to a library; and who have the leisure time to read it. As this dissertation has illuminated, the history of American consumption—of things and of texts—is a history of pleasurable sensory experiences, many of which mask entrenched disparity, inequality, and violence. Important as it is that we acknowledge this fact as it has played out in American history and literature, we must continue to discuss its relevance today.

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