Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) Winter 1-1-2012 American Women Writers, Visual Vocabularies, and the Lives of Literary Regionalism Katherine Mary Bloomquist Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd Recommended Citation Bloomquist, Katherine Mary, "American Women Writers, Visual Vocabularies, and the Lives of Literary Regionalism" (2012). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 997. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/997 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of English Dissertation Examination Committee: Vivian Pollak, Chair Ruth Bohan Anca Parvulescu Daniel Shea Akiko Tsuchiya Rafia Zafar American Women Writers, Visual Vocabularies, and the Lives of Literary Regionalism by Katherine Mary Bloomquist A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2012 Saint Louis, Missouri © Copyright 2012 by Katherine Mary Bloomquist All rights reserved. Table of Contents List of Figures iii Acknowledgements iv Dissertation Abstract v Introduction: 1 Of Maps and Memoirs Chapter 1: 30 Self and Other Portraits: Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron” as Human Documents Chapter 2: 79 As If They Had a History: Documenting the Things Named in Willa Cather’s Regional Fiction Chapter 3: 137 In Place of Picture-Postcards: “Some Measure of Privacy” in Ann Petry’s Wheeling Chapter 4: 190 “Some Kind of a Writin’ Person”: Regionalism’s Unfinished Women Writers Bibliography 245 ii List of Figures Figure 1: 29 Cover Image of The Local Colorists: American Short Stories 1857-1900, ed. Claude M. Simpson. Figure 2: 78 Cover and Back Images of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories, Selected and Arranged with a preface by Willa Cather. Figure 3: 136 Back cover of Ann Petry’s Country Place. Figure 4: 189 Frontispiece to Annie Trumbull Slosson’s “A Local Colorist.” iii Acknowledgements A dissertation focused upon life narratives has no doubt grown stronger with the many people shaping mine. My thanks first to Vivian Pollak for her support and always thorough reading of my writing. It has been a privilege working and teaching with her and I cannot imagine my graduate experience without her influence. Thanks also to Rafia Zafar, Anca Parvulescu, Dan Shea, Ruth Bohan, Akiko Tsuchiya and Bill Maxwell for their insightful readings and conversations. Thanks to the librarians at the Houghton Library at Harvard University and the Howard Gottlieb Research Center at Boston University (in the Sarah Orne Jewett and Ann Petry collections). Thanks to Washington University in St. Louis for generous support, especially the Dissertation Fellowship. Thanks to Kathy Schneider and Dorothy Negri for good conversations whenever I walk into Duncker 116. To Chuck Sweetman, Amy Pawl, Debie Lohe, and Heidi Kolk for first teaching me to teach. To Rick Godden, Tarah Demant, and Courtney Bates for their support and mentoring. To my students, for asking me about my work and challenging themselves to become the writers that they are. To the members of the dissertation workshop for their careful readings and responses to my chapters in progress. To three superb undergraduate professors: Kate Baldwin, John Duffy, and Valerie Sayers. Thanks also to my many teachers, who introduced me to letter people, keyword books, the writing process wheel, and the habits for a lifetime of learning. To my family for their love, support and home-cooked meals: my brother Mike for his unfailing sense of humor; my father Dave, for reminding me to have fun, but to be careful; and my mother Chris—this is what happens when you give your daughter a library card at age four. iv Dissertation Abstract American Women Writers, Visual Vocabularies, and the Lives of Literary Regionalism by Katherine Mary Bloomquist Doctor of Philosophy in English and American Literature Washington University in St. Louis, 2012 Professor Vivian Pollak, Chairperson This dissertation reads American literary regionalism through its visual vocabularies—such as sketches, photographs and portraits. Though critics often deemed this genre inferior or unfinished, using visual vocabularies of the “sketch” or “local color,” later books of regionalism simply brim with visual vocabularies, when characters are seeking the lives of others or filling in the blanks of their own. The writers in my dissertation—Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, and Ann Petry—ground literary regionalism in the politics of writing places, but draw also from the arts of life writing circulating in the late nineteenth-century literary marketplace: through slave narratives, suffragist autobiographies, and travel narratives. The first chapter features Sarah Orne Jewett’s little-known 1893 essay “Human Documents” in a rereading of her best-known fiction, arguing that the essay’s language of photographs and portraits recasts the lives of “A White Heron” and The Country of the Pointed Firs. While many readers are familiar with Willa Cather’s singular phrase “the thing not named,” we have not acknowledged, as my second chapter does, how Cather’s language of things appears so frequently at the end of her fiction and relies upon visual vocabularies to challenge the gendered limitations of her characters’ lives. My third v chapter focuses upon Ann Petry’s unnamed heroine of her Wheeling fiction cycle, who writes daily accounts of her life—working with a variety of written and visual media—as she learns about her family’s precarious racial position in Wheeling. My concluding chapter places these many unnamed women writer-characters in conversation with representations of nineteenth-century poetesses. I argue that regionalism offers us an archive of writers framing debates about authorship with these writer-characters; even a brief mention of a poetess often leads to more careful consideration of the daily lives of women writers—in their early careers, daily practices, and deaths. The books of literary regionalism draw both from local impressions and self- expressions: illustrating the lives of others through visual vocabularies, sketching the daily realities and practices of current writers. These unfinished lives provide the finish to their books. vi Introduction: Of Maps and Memoirs In the summer of 1906, Sarah Orne Jewett visits her childhood home, South Berwick, Maine. She remembers reveling in its pleasing “uninterruptedness” when she stayed there a decade ago, but this time something feels different.1 As she prepares to leave for Boston, she comments in a letter: “I feel like a dissected map with a few pieces gone, the rest of me seems to be put together right!” (218) Unlike the more coherent and nostalgic geographies for which her Maine fiction is known, Jewett expresses her selfhood in pieces: dissected, exposed. But Jewett is not simply commenting on her exhaustion after time in South Berwick, since she relates this fragmented, mapped self to another change she experiences, when she reads “the life of Miss Catharine Sedgwick” with a friend (218). Jewett admits how mistaken she was about this book’s quality: “I did not know how good it was. I fancied it had been written in the dull time of ‘Memoirs,’ but I was quite wrong; it was just as well to wait and grow a good deal older before I went back to it” (218-219). As she compares her current self to that map, she realizes that her expectations for the older genres of life writing, like the Memoir, have also changed. She begins to piece together her dissected map only after she remembers a passage from Sedgwick’s life: “there is a page, too, about the advantages of country life that made me ‘fire up’ about Berwick as I used in my best days!” (219) Before reading a diverting memoir, Jewett is a dissected map; after her reading, she reflects upon authorship with renewed enthusiasm. In Jewett’s letter, it takes a map to break her regionalist writing in pieces and a memoir to put it back together, anticipating the influential legacies of life writing in nineteenth-century regionalism for later twentieth- century women writers. 1 Reading a memoir—which surpasses her expectations—influences how Jewett articulates the older, more familiar map of her regionalist fiction, since she distinguishes her current attitude from her earlier “best days.” Reaching its peak in popularity between 1865 and 1914—in both magazines and novels—American literary regionalism has been both praised and admonished for its attention to smaller locations on maps and lives that we would not expect to read in memoirs, it is time to acknowledge just how invested this genre has been in granting women writers a place for interrogating and assembling women’s lives: not just in featuring women characters more prominently and consistently, but in plotting the lengthier processes through which other characters gather, report on and sometimes even silence the lives of women. When Elizabeth Hampsten studies the life writing of Midwest women, she acknowledges that, to her surprise, writing easily classified as regional does not read regionally: “These women’s writings do not do that; their ‘place’ is not where we had expected to find them. In much of this writing, for all its particularity, it is hard to tell (if the postmark is missing) where the writers are, for they do not bother to tell us in words we are used to.”2 Regionalism does not always behave regionally; often, other things are taking place. As Cecelia Tichi has put it, “They were regionalists—but not solely in the ways critics have conventionally thought.