Rhetorics of Literacy In memory of my mother Rhetorics of Literacy The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry Nadia Nurhussein THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS • COLUMBUS Copyright © 2013 The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nurhussein, Nadia, 1974– Rhetorics of literacy : the cultivation of American dialect poetry / Nadia Nurhussein. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1216-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1216-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9317-1 (cd) 1. Dialect poetry, American—History and criticism. 2. American poetry—19th century— History and criticism. 3. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Lit- eracy in literature. I. Title. PS323.N87 2013 811.009—dc23 2012038435 Cover design by James A. Baumann Type set in Adobe Sabon Typeset by Juliet Williams Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 contents List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction • “Mere Mutilation”: Becoming Literate in Dialect Poetry 1 Chapter One • The Difficulty of Dialect Poetry 18 Anthologizing Dialect Poetry 26 Marketing the Mass Poet 32 Performing Dialect Poetry 36 Silent Reading and Silent Film 42 Dialect and the Phonograph 48 Chapter Two • Plain and Peculiar Dialects: Bret Harte and James Whitcomb Riley 57 Voicing Harte’s Truthful James and Ah Sin 59 Riley’s Child Writing 71 The Spelling Bee Poem 82 Chapter Three • Lettered Dialect: Paul Laurence Dunbar I 90 Dunbar’s Performances 92 The Epistolary Dialect Poem 99 Dunbar’s Class in Spelling and Reading 110 The Spelling Bee Poem Redux 114 vi • Contents Chapter Four • Cultivated Dialect: Paul Laurence Dunbar II 117 The Ease and Labor of Dialect Poetry 121 The Commerce of Magazine Verse 126 Dialect, Advertising, and the Century 131 The Cultivation of Dialect Performance 137 Chapter Five • Gendered Dialect: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Maggie Pogue Johnson 143 Harper’s Aunt Chloe and Her Literacy 147 Femininity, Fashion, and Dialect 155 Johnson’s Education and Idleness 164 Chapter Six • Annotated Dialect: Claude McKay and Langston Hughes 172 From Showman to Spokesman: The Unlettered Poet 174 Hughes’s Typography 179 Hughes’s Marginal Literacy 182 McKay’s Dialects and Poetic Diction 194 Conclusion 208 Notes 215 Bibliography 259 Index 276 list of illustrations Table 1. Selected textbooks and anthologies, 1898–1935 27–28 Table 2. Selected elocution and recitation manuals, 1885–1903 29 Figure 1. Illustration of James Whitcomb Riley by Art Young, from Authors’ Readings (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1897) 46 Figure 2. Illustration of James Whitcomb Riley by Art Young, from Authors’ Readings (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1897) 47 Figure 3. Illustration from Bret Harte’s Heathen Chinee (Rock Island and Pacific Railroad, 1872) 69 Figure 4. Illustration from Bret Harte’s Heathen Chinee (Rock Island and Pacific Railroad, 1872) 70 Figure 5. An advertisement for The Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley, published in the December 1917 Biblical World 78 Figure 6. Paul Laurence Dunbar reading at the National Cash Register Company, 1904 140 • vii acknowledgments I am deeply indebted to a number of foundations and organizations for the fellowship support that aided the completion of this book: the Ameri- can Council of Learned Societies, the Lilly Library at Indiana University, the Ford Foundation, and the Bancroft Library at the University of Cali- fornia, Berkeley. In addition, I have benefited from the assistance of librar- ians and archivists at the Lilly Library, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia Univer- sity, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the University of Virginia Library, the New York Public Library, the Bos- ton Public Library, the Dayton Metro Library, the Ohio Historical Society, and the American Antiquarian Society, among others. The staff at my own university’s Healey Library has been of enormous help, particularly Janet Stewart in the Interlibrary Loan department. Jeff Opt at the Archive Cen- ter at Dayton History, Jeff Codori, and Waltye Rasulala were exceptionally helpful and forthcoming with useful information related to Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Whitcomb Riley, and Maggie Pogue Johnson respectively. It was my privilege as a student to work with such exemplary scholars as Christopher Nealon and Susan Schweik, who steered the development of the dissertation from which this book evolved and who have continued to be generous with their time and their mentorship in the years since. Other faculty in the English department at the University of California, Berkeley—especially Stephen Best, Anne Cheng, Samuel Otter, and George Starr—raised productive questions and problems that moved this project • ix x • Acknowledgments forward in unexpected ways. My year at Mount Holyoke College was also invaluable. Mary Jo Salter, Jeffrey Santa Ana, Michelle Stephens, Donald Weber, Elizabeth Young, and others helped to foster an environment that made my transition from graduate student to faculty member relatively painless, and I appreciated the precious time I had there that allowed me to make progress on this book before diving into full-time teaching. The community to which I have been lucky enough to belong at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, deserves considerable thanks, in par- ticular my colleagues Matt Brown, Bob Crossley, Sari Edelstein, Holly Jackson, Betsy Klimasmith, and Eve Sorum. Thanks, also, are due to my research assistant, Brad Smith. My students have provided me with a wealth of original thought and fresh readings of the literature discussed here. I have learned a great deal from those enrolled in my M.A. courses, especially those enrolled in the Spring 2012 “Poetry and Performance” seminar, who have been among my most valuable interlocutors and whose views on Riley’s “The Phonograph” prompted me—first grudgingly, then gratefully—to revisit and completely rewrite that section of my first chapter. Colleagues I have met over the course of my career, at conferences, symposia, and elsewhere, have offered extremely valuable feedback on my work. They are too numerous to list in any comprehensive way, but a pre- liminary list must include Robin Bernstein, Joanne Braxton, Mike Chasar, Brad Evans, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Gene Andrew Jarrett, A. Yemisi Jimoh, Gavin Jones, Meta DuEwa Jones, John Lowe, Meredith McGill, Koritha Mitchell, Thomas Morgan, Stephen Railton, Arnold Rampersad, Joseph Skerrett, James Smethurst, Edlie Wong, and Richard Yarborough. As a graduate student, I had the great fortune to benefit from the friendship of and conversations shared with Elizabeth Chang, Mai-Lin Cheng, San- dra Lim, and Asali Solomon. Our writing group—short-lived and irregular though it was!—contributed to the shaping of many of the ideas driving this book. At The Ohio State University Press, I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to work with Sandy Crooms, Malcolm Litchfield,E ugene O’Connor, and Laurie Avery, all of whom have been a pleasure to work with. Thank you also to Ed Hatton and his eagle eye. The anonymous readers of the book manuscript perused my work carefully and pains- takingly, giving me insightful suggestions for improvement, seeing things in my work that I did not see myself. The editors and anonymous read- ers at American Periodicals and African American Review, journals in which earlier versions of chapters 3 and 4 appeared, also gave me gener- Acknowledgments • xi ous comments and constructive criticism; grappling with those suggestions improved those chapters significantly. Thank you, too, to the employees and owners of the many cafés where I occupied valuable real estate, espe- cially Caroline and Andy at Three Little Figs, who didn’t seem to mind my sitting and reading and writing for hours on end. This book has benefited immensely from the boundless encouragement of my father, Mohammed, my sister Siham, my brother Safy, and my entire extended family. Although my mother, Zahra, is not here to witness my finishing of this book, the traces of her loving guidance are present in it everywhere, and I dedicate it to her memory. Lastly, this project would have been inconceivable without the support and inspiration of Nicho- las Nace, who has always been my greatest advocate when I couldn’t or wouldn’t be my own. He remains my best reader. introduction “Mere Mutilation” Becoming Literate in Dialect Poetry • With a desperate thrust of his long fingers through his Bard of Avon locks the young man confronted the beautiful girl. “Refuse me,” he hissed, “and I shall do something that the whole world will regret!” The beautiful girl shuddered. “Oh, Archibald,” she pleaded, “you—you are not going to write love poetry for the magazines?” “Worse still. I shall start writing dialect poetry.” Thinking of the terrible calamity that could be thwarted by a woman’s “yes,” she accepted him on the spot. —Anonymous, “Terrible Threat” Around 1880 poetry turned into literature. —Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter • In the April 1897 issue of the Century Magazine, humorist Charles Battell Loomis published a short story titled “The Dialect Store.” In it, a newspaper writer narrates a dream in which he shops at a store sell- ing “[a]ll kinds of dialects . by the yard, the piece, or in quantities to suit.” Browsing, he inspects their stock of Scotch, black American, West- ern, German, French-Canadian, Yiddish, Yankee, Irish, and English “dia- lects.” All of the clerks assisting him are stereotypes of their ethnicities, repositories of exaggerated literary dialect in themselves: the black man selling black dialect is sycophantic and eager to please, the Jewish clerk obsessed with bargaining.