The World of Regionalism

THE WORLD OF REGIONALISM: AMERICAN LOCAL COLOR AS A VISUAL PROBLEM, 1820-1900 By JENNA-MARIE BAINES LEWIS A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English written under the direction of Dr. Brad Evans and approved by ______________________ ______________________ ______________________ ______________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October 2013 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The World of Regionalism: American Local Color as a Visual Problem, 1820-1900 By JENNA-MARIE BAINES LEWIS Dissertation director: Dr. Brad Evans In order to understand American regionalist aesthetics, we must look abroad. This dissertation tells the story of nineteenth-century regionalism as a locally-specific textual expression of a transnational problem, specifically a problem of vision. A critical preoccupation with the relays between region and nation in regionalist texts has diverted attention away from the transatlantic circulation of aesthetic styles within which American regionalism took shape, thereby producing a narrow view of the formal properties of regionalist texts. By excavating these neglected aesthetic contexts, I show that nineteenth-century anxieties about the arbitrary and conditional nature of human perception—anxieties that both permeated various art forms and transcended national boundaries—are constitutive elements of regionalist literary form. Regional sources constitute a particularly vibrant archive that speaks to how American literature of the late nineteenth century became a site for the circulation of a strikingly modern aesthetic grammar—one that regionalist writers not only drew upon but were actively engaged in developing. Regionalist writers such as George Washington Cable, Washington Irving, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Murfree, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and Constance Fenimore Woolson were deeply engaged with aesthetic preoccupations that transcended ii national concerns. Regionalism therefore resonates with contemporaneous innovations in European fine arts—Impressionism, Paul Cézanne’s landscape paintings—as well as with avant-garde French performance art and the bohemian fin-de-siècle. Attending to regionalism’s investment in the scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic explorations of the problem of vision enables a new way of categorizing the literary production of this transitional period of American literature. By making local color writing recognizable as a visual problem, I draw together unfamiliar constellations of texts by means of their relationships to visual styles, visual technologies, and aesthetic movements. Mark Twain’s mode of vision in his foreign travel writing aligns with the disintegrative visual experience of Impressionist representations; George Washington Cable’s magazine writing echoes French Orientalist painting and the gestural language of Parisian cabaret performers; and Mary Murfree’s landscape descriptions resonate with Paul Cézanne’s late landscapes. These case studies add a new layer to our understanding of regionalism in a postnational context. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND DEDICATION My heartfelt thanks go out to Meredith McGill, Edlie Wong, and Bill Brown, who read this dissertation thoughtfully and provided invaluable feedback and advice; and most of all to Brad Evans, who read, encouraged, prodded, questioned, and generally helped me make this project far better than it would otherwise have been. Thank you to all of the family members and friends who had my back, and especially to Dayalan, who didn’t turn his. I dedicate this achievement to Nana, Pop, and Kamala. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS TITLE PAGE i ABSTRACT ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND DEDICATION iv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS vii INTRODUCTION: American Local Color as a Visual Problem 1 CHAPTER 1: The Contrasting Visions of Local Color 20 1.1 The mirror and the kaleidoscope 28 1.2 Fixed pictures and dissolving views 35 1.3 Twain’s Claude glass 46 1.4 The “modern spirit” of the ancient pyramids 53 1.5 “the sun isn’t the spectacle,—it’s us” 57 Coda: Constance Fenimore Woolson’s competing visions 60 CHAPTER 2: George Washington Cable’s “Paris in the swamps” 66 2.1 Nervous maladies as “fashionable entertainment”: from Paris to the pages of American magazines 74 2.2 The “terrible delights” of Cable’s Congo Square 93 2.3 The “machine-like tune-beat” of The Grandissimes 107 v CHAPTER 3: Landscape Painting and the Visual Scale of American Regionalism 114 3.1 The panoptic view: American landscape art and Washington Irving’s sketches 120 3.2 Jewett’s inversions of visual scale 131 3.3 Murfree’s moons 151 WORKS CITED 176 vi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Unless otherwise attributed, all images are reproduced via the Rutgers University Libraries’ subscription to ARTstor Digital Library. Under the ARTstor terms and conditions, these images are only approved for use in a dissertation. No reproduction or distribution of these images without permission from the copyright holder is allowed. Fig. 1: Anonymous, Fashionable Entertainments* 79 Fig. 2: Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Polaire* 81 Fig. 3: Color lithograph poster for “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”* 81 Fig. 4: C. Léandre, La Femme-Torpille* 82 Fig. 5: Henri Regnault, Summary Judgment Under the Moorish Kings of Granada 88 Fig. 6: Edward Windsor Kemble, The Bamboula* 101 Fig. 7: Edward Windsor Kemble, The Voodoo Dance* 101 Fig. 8: Jean-Leon Gérôme, The Snake Charmer 103 Fig. 9: Jean-Leon Gérôme, The Dance of the Almeh 103 Fig. 10: Thomas Cole, The Oxbow 122 Fig. 11: Paul Cézanne, Large Bathers II 172 Entries marked (*) denote images that are in the public domain. vii 1 Introduction American Local Color as a Visual Problem In order to understand American regionalist aesthetics, we must look abroad. In the pages that follow, I tell the story of regionalism as a locally-specific textual expression of a transnational problem, specifically a problem of vision. I contend that emergent nineteenth-century anxieties about the arbitrary and conditional nature of human perception—anxieties that transcended national boundaries and permeated various art forms—are constitutive elements of regionalist literary form. Because of its engagement with the vicissitudes of vision, regionalism functioned not only as a conservative force of national cohesion in the post-bellum era, but also as a crucible of what Ernest Daudet, in his memoir Mon Frère et Moi (1882), referred to repeatedly as the “modernité” of Alphonse Daudet’s literary endeavors (James, ADC 229). Henry James called the term modernité a “barbarous substantive,” yet he continued to use it to describe various facets of the new, modern school of writers who were intent on conveying “all the newly-developed, the newly-invented perceptions” (ADC 229) of modern life. James claimed that this “new sense” was “not easily named or classified, but recognisable in all the most characteristic productions of modern art,” and was best described as “a more analytic consideration of appearances” (229). Daudet was “peculiarly modern” because he had “a wonderfully large allowance” of this emergent style that, James wrote, “traces [the associations awakened by things] into the most unlighted corners of our being, into the most devious paths of experience. The appearance of things is constantly more complicated as the world grows older, and it 2 needs a more and more patient art, a closer notation, to divide it into its parts” (230). Yet art that successfully expressed these associations and divided the world into its parts was also “inveterately synthetic” (James, “Guy de Maupassant” 526) in its attempts to represent “the latest and most composite things” (ADC 229). A fundamental element of this “more patient art” was a particular facility with vision; “to describe [places and things],” James wrote, “we must see them, and some people see, on the same occasion, infinitely more than others. Alphonse Daudet, James pronounced, “is one of those who see most” (ADA 217). James, in these comments about Daudet and other French writers, was not describing American local color or regionalist writing—he was interested in the relationship between literary realism and what he perceived as French writers’ cultivation of a capacity for “quickness of vision, combined with a talent for specifying and analyzing what they see” (ADA 217). However, to the extent that a central element of the modernité he was describing emerged from a tension between increasingly complex understandings of perception and issues of literary and pictorial representation, then local color, I will argue, should be at the center of that discussion. Nineteenth-century regionalist and local color writing also possessed a “tendency to resolve [their] discoveries into pictorial form” (James, ADC 229) and resonances with “the newly- developed, the newly-invented, perceptions” that James found in Daudet’s writing. American regionalism and local color writing of the fin-de-siècle represented the problem of locality in highly visual language that situated local particularities in the web of international aesthetic preoccupations described by James. Indeed, one might go so far as to argue that local color was more engaged with the aesthetic problems of modernité than 3 other American literary genres, a fact that became apparent in the twentieth century with Faulkner, but which, I contend, was true from its origins. Regionalism was once considered a primarily elegiac genre, a form that

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