Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870–1900

By Bill Hardwig

Drawing on tourist literature, travelogues, and local-color fiction about the South, Bill Hardwig tracks the ways in which the nation's leading interdisciplinary periodicals, especially the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and the Century, translated and broadcast the predominant narratives about the late-nineteenth-century South. In many ways, he attests, the national representation of the South was controlled more firmly by periodical editors working in the Northeast, such as William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and Richard Watson Gilder, than by writers living in and writing about the region. Fears about national unity, immigration, industrialization, and racial dynamics in the South could be explored through the safe and displaced realm of a regional literature that was often seen as mere entertainment or as a picturesque depiction of quaint rural life. The author examines in depth the short work of George Washington Cable, Charles Chesnutt, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Lafcadio Hearn, Mary Noailles Murfree, and Thomas Nelson Page in the context of the larger periodical investment in the South. Arguing that this local-color fiction calls into question some of the lines of demarcation within U.S. and southern literary and cultural studies, especially those offered by identity-based models, Hardwig returns these writers to the dynamic cultural exchanges within local-color fiction from which they initially emerged.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780813934068

Book preview

Upon Provincialism

Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870–1900

Bill Hardwig

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2013 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

First published 2013

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hardwig, Bill.

Upon provincialism : southern literature and national periodical culture, 1870–1900 / Bill Hardwig.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8139-3404-4 (cloth : acid-free paper)

ISBN 978-0-8139-3405-1 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

ISBN 978-0-8139-3406-8 (e-book) (print)

1. American literature—Southern States—History and criticism. 2. Journalism and literature—Southern States—History—19th century. 3. Multiculturalism in literature. 4. Southern States—In literature. I. Title.

PS261.H24 2013

810.9’975—dc23

2012046820

A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.

For Peggy, Lily, and Ezra

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Creative Potency of Hunger: Travel Writing, Local Color, and the Charting of the Postwar South

2. Unveiling the Body: Literary Reception and the Outing of Charles W. Chesnutt and Mary N. Murfree

3. On the Fringes: Local Color’s Haunting of the Unified South

4. Wooing the Muse of the Odd: New Orleans at the Gate of the Tropics

Epilogue

Notes

Illustrations

1. Mary Noailles Murfree with Walter Hines Page and others in Boston, 1885

2. Woodcut by Lafcadio Hearn accompanying Exthract from the Spach Ov Paddy Whack, 4 June 1880

3. Woodcut by Lafcadio Hearn accompanying Illustrated Letters from the People, 1 July 1880

4. Woodcut by Lafcadio Hearn accompanying Shine?, 19 July 1880

5. Woodcut by Lafcadio Hearn accompanying Washerwomen, 31 August 1880

6. Woodcut by Lafcadio Hearn accompanying Morning Calls—Very Early, 7 July 1880

7. Woodcut by Lafcadio Hearn accompanying Des Perches, 30 August 1880

8. An example of an embedded advertisement in The Adventures of Jonathan Bradly

9. Jonathan comes upon a threshing machine with Three-Hitch Gearing

10. Advertisement embedded in The Adventures of Jonathan Bradly

11. An advertisement for bedroom furniture in The Adventures of Jonathan Bradly

12. Jonathan and General Brown at a large raffle in The Adventures of Jonathan Bradly

Acknowledgments

Appalachian literary imaginings often turn to the symbol of the freshwater mountain spring. In this literature, the spring stands as a vital source necessary for both survival and daily routines, providing both succor and comfort. This book, and its focus on southern spaces and routines, would not be possible without the benefit of many springs.

I would first like to thank the University of Tennessee English Department’s Hodges Research Award for providing the time and funding for much of the writing of and research for this project. A Professional Development Award from UT’s Graduate School allowed me to spend a month in the archives of the Newberry Library in Chicago, where I found much of the travel writing about the South that appears in this book. Thanks to the Newberry reference staff for making my visit to the library in the summer of 2009 so productive and enjoyable.

Tracking down, getting hold of, and digitizing some of the images and texts discussed in this book became a project in and of itself. I would like to thank Michelle Brannen, Chris Caldwell, Marie Garrett, and Nick Wyman—all from the University of Tennessee libraries—for offering far more assistance than could have been expected. Without their help, this book would be much less vibrant and informed.

A different version of a small section of the material on Murfree in chapter 2 originally appeared in my introduction to an edition of the collection of her short stories In the Tennessee Mountains (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009). I would especially like to thank Scot Danforth of UT Press for all his assistance, insight, and support as I began my work on Mary Noailles Murfree.

The Massachusetts Historical Society offered timely and professional assistance with the digitization of the images from Eliza Ross, and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities’ Publishing Initiative Grant allowed for the rediscovery and digitization of many of Lafcadio Hearn’s woodcuts from the New Orleans newspaper the Daily City Item, images that originally appeared in The New Orleans of Lafcadio Hearn (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007). Delia LaBarre is the scholar responsible for collecting and preserving digitally these wonderful woodcuts and for editing the stellar book on Hearn mentioned above. Delia’s generosity and knowledge about Hearn were indispensable to this book, especially its final chapter on literary New Orleans.

This book would not have been possible without Cathie Brettschneider at the University of Virginia Press, whose willingness to take on this project I greatly appreciate and whose sage advice helped in every step of its development from a manuscript to a book. Thanks, too, to the entire staff at University of Virginia Press, as well as the external readers of the manuscript, who offered astute comments and suggestions. The folks at the American Literature Initiative were wonderful in helping the book take its final shape, most especially Tim Roberts and Edward Batchelder.

I would like to thank the University of Tennessee’s interdisciplinary Americanist Reading Group for providing the lively academic discussions that both energized and provided a refuge from this project during the many years of its development. I also appreciate the insight and dedication of my graduate classes (ENG 551 and 661) that gamely took up and explored my fascination with regional literature. I appreciate the guidance provided by my department heads Charles Maland and Stan Gardner, and cherish the friendship and support of all my English Department colleagues, especially Kirsten Benson, Marcel Brouwers, Katy Chiles, Dawn Coleman, Amy Elias, Elizabeth Gentry, Martin Griffin, La Vinia Jennings, Ben Lee, Michael Lofaro, Gichingiri Ndigirigi, Mary Papke, Steve Pearson, Urmila Seshagiri, and Lisi Schoenbach.

Allison Ensor served as a wonderful resource and sounding board in the early stages of this project. I learned so much institutional and disciplinal history during our car drives to Atlanta that I feel I should have paid tuition. Thanks to Jesse Graves for the conversations about Appalachia and Americana music, and to Tom Morgan for in-depth discussions in Boston, San Francisco, Boston, San Francisco, Boston, and San Francisco about all things local color.

Tom Haddox has been my official departmental mentor, my unofficial southernist mentor, and a close colleague and friend. He has been so generous with his time, knowledge, and insight that I cannot begin to thank him enough. And, finally, I would like to thank David Leverenz, who read every single word of a couple of drafts of this project. Without David, I don’t think I would have made it through graduate school over a decade ago. Without him, this book would not be nearly what it is today.

Introduction

Local-color writing concerning the southern United States from 1870 until 1900 reveals as much about national readers and editors as it does about the region itself. That is the central claim of this book. The final three decades of the nineteenth century represent the height of the popularity of local-color literature, and the excitement and clamor for southern examples of this writing chiefly focused on its purported authenticity. The fiction promised readers a glimpse into little-known aspects of the post–Civil War South. This unmapped cultural terrain became the imaginative ground upon which many national dramas—such as shifting ethnic demographics, increasing immigration, indeterminate class structures, postemancipation race relations, and changing political loyalties—were given play in locales far removed from the nation’s urban centers.

The inclusion of national periodicals in the book’s subtitle acknowledges the disparate narratives that were constructed and broadcast about the South in US literary circles, as well as the cultural work that these narratives performed. However, this project coalesced around a more personal imagining. Several years ago as I was working on a new edition of Mary Noailles Murfree’s 1884 collection of stories In the Tennessee Mountains, I came across a photograph of Murfree meeting Atlantic Monthly editor Walter Hines Page (figure 1). Before Murfree traveled to Boston for this meeting, national editors and readers assumed Murfree to be an uncouth mountaineer, one who lived the experiences she wrote about in her fiction. The photograph documenting this meeting in Boston captured for me the disparity between the editors’ expectations about Murfree and the refined author who they found in their presence. More acutely, though, the photograph illuminated the enormous gulf between the communities depicted in Murfree’s dialect stories about the Tennessee mountains and the readership of the Atlantic Monthly in which these stories appeared.

Looking at the image of Murfree encircled by an attentive group of the nation’s cultural elite, I saw Boston Brahmin families in their libraries enjoying vicariously the tales of Appalachian moonshine, duels, and ghost tales. Returning from a stressful day at work, men in their waistcoats and loosened ties were reading of Cynthia Ware’s heroic defense of the mountain blacksmith and alleged murderer Evander Price: ’T warn’t Vander’s deed! Women in their ruffle-lined gowns were sitting spellbound in their favorite chairs as they browsed Murfree’s account of the outlaw Rick Pearson’s drunken threat at a mountain dancing party.¹ What did these educated northeastern readers seek in these stories? What were they responding to in Murfree’s stories?

Figure 1. Local-color writer Mary Noailles Murfree meets with Walter Hines Page from the Atlantic Monthly, Boston, MA, March 1885. Standing: Edwin Booth, Fanny N. D. Murfree (Mary’s sister), James M. Bugbee. Sitting: Mary Noailles Murfree, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Mrs. Aldrich, Miss Houghton. (Photograph reproduced by permission from Edd Winfield Parks, Charles Egbert Craddock [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941], 127)

Upon Provincialism answers these questions by asserting that the disparity between the subject matter and the readership reveals a much more complex history of reception for southern regional writing than is generally acknowledged. This book, then, considers what happens when imaginings about the South are written for, edited by, and consumed by predominantly urban, white, and affluent national audiences.² These audiences had very little, if any, knowledge of the areas about which they read, and this lack of knowledge generated a desire for authentic moments of southern experience.³ The nation’s postwar desire to know the South encouraged the publishing community to recognize and forward specific versions of the region and specific notions of authentic authorship that generally depended on the foreignness of the material and authors. The literature, then, promised a very peculiar type of verisimilitude, one that vowed to simultaneously portray realistically its subjects and emphasize their abnormal differences.

This desire for the real South elucidates a major premise of my argument: local-color fiction of the era closely mirrors travel writing about the South in form, content, and purpose. In some ways, the methodological overlap between the genres makes sense. These two modes of writing shared the central objective of translating the South to a readership unfamiliar with the region. In the late nineteenth century, there appeared in the major periodicals numerous well-funded, highly publicized, and fully developed travel studies of the region. The popularity of these accounts was matched only by that of regional fiction.⁴ With the dissolution of the relatively stable regional identities that existed during the antebellum era, in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, the South existed in a referential vacuum in the national imagination. As such, it became an especially fertile ground for the exploration of anxieties concerning the national fabric in the postwar and post-Reconstruction landscapes.

These anxieties show up in local-color fiction as the profound tension between the fact that the region must be represented as unique and exotic and the fact that it cannot be so exotic as to prove inassimilable into the national fabric. Upon Provincialism argues that local color and travel sketches reveal this anxiety more clearly than do the longer, denser novels that are often presented as more important and more illustrative of the era, such as George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes or Albion Tourgée’s A Fool’s Errand. This project focuses specifically on the often-overlooked short fiction about the region written in the final three decades of the nineteenth century. Local-color writers such as Mary Noailles Murfree, Lafcadio Hearn, and Charles Chesnutt published heavily in the most exclusive literary journals of the era. These authors rarely find their way to the center of many scholarly discussions of American culture and literature, but they were some of the most visible writers of fiction at the end of the nineteenth century.

Through the subsequent canonization and anthologization of American literature, we have been taught to understand this period as consisting of a set of major realist writers—such as William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Mark Twain—and an assemblage of lesser regional writers, such as the southern Murfree, Chesnutt, and Thomas Nelson Page. Periodical editors and readers of the era made no such distinctions. Instead, we find in the periodicals a new Murfree story, for instance, appearing alongside the latest serial installment of a novel by Henry James. Upon Provincialism explores the alternate cultural and literary histories that emerge when we resituate these writers within their original context.

Another major premise of this project is that when we examine this literature in the context of the periodical culture in which it first appeared, we discover a picture of southern literature and postwar southern identity that departs sharply from those that emphasize a distinctive southern experience. In other words, the explosion of local-color literature from 1870 until 1900 provides an alternative set of defining attributes of the South, attributes that focus on the fringes of what has typically been considered southern culture. This literature, and its focus on the margins of the South, does not rely on plantation aristocracy, postplantation culture, and the southern Lost Cause mythology as the defining elements of the region. As such, local-color writing also calls into question the notion of a coherent and separate southern culture.

Instead of demanding stories about the traumas of postwar southern aristocracy, the era’s readers and editors of local-color fiction yearned for stories that depicted the margins of southern culture—the Appalachian mountain folk, African-American communities, and New Orleans Creole cultures, for instance. These groups do not fit easily within many conventional definitions of the South, but they were the prominent sources of curiosity for the readership of end-of-the-nineteenth-century America. Upon Provincialism traces what it means to read the South not through the histories of the former southern aristocracy but through these margins, through Appalachia, black America, and New Orleans.

Hans Robert Jauss has written of the horizon of expectations of literary texts, the need to trace both the evolving diachronic horizon that reveals the changing reception of the works throughout history and the synchronic horizon that contextualizes literary texts as they first appeared.⁵ Upon Provincialism keeps in play both of these horizons. It explores in depth the period in which literature from the margins of the South was coveted by the elite national publishing houses. It also asserts that an informed understanding of this cultural phenomenon allows us to see the diachronic trajectory of narratives about the South more clearly. In mapping both horizons, this book draws on a variety of approaches—periodical studies to recover the late-nineteenth-century fascination with the South, reception theory to explain how authorial authenticity became tied to bodily identity in the reader’s mind, historical archival research to uncover and reconstruct the literary expectations of the era, and theories of creolization to express the conflicting interests of much local-color fiction. Along the way, this book presents a cartographic perspective that allows the reader to trace the national imaginings about this indeterminate region in the late-nineteenth-century periodicals.

***

Upon Provincialism contributes to the demythologizing of southern culture by resisting the conventional narratives of a defeated, provincial, and insular South. This study also resists many of the imperatives of new southernist scholarship that suggest the negotiated borders of a global culture render any extended consideration of region-making obsolete. Upon Provincialism asserts that there is still much to be learned about how the idea of a static South affected national and global imaginings. This book explores how these imaginings have very real effects on attitudes, policies, and narratives about the South. The idea of the defeated southern aristocracy has been documented and interpreted in perhaps too much detail over the past century. Local color’s focus on the racial, ethnic, cultural, and economic margins of the South, on the other hand, offers fresh perspectives into national investments in the region, perspectives that largely preceded the codification of the defeated-South narrative.

Regional writing is often dismissed as being provincial, as being committed to safe and nostalgic versions of the past. This is an attitude Upon Provincialism works to dispel by demonstrating how this literature engages its present. I argue, for example, that Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s attention to the economic forces pressed on New Orleans merchants by international commerce centers her quaint sketch Mr. Baptiste. Charles Chesnutt’s romantic tale of conjuring, Po’ Sandy, comments as poignantly on the racial economies of the post-Reconstruction era as it does on antebellum slave culture. Mary Noailles Murfree’s insular blacksmith in Drifting down Lost Creek leaves his mountain community to pursue cutting-edge technological advances in metalworking. Understanding that local color actually engages pressing national and international issues, rather than presenting a nostalgic alternative to them, also offers a different lens through which to envision the national imaginary in what is so often called the Gilded Age of the United States. Local-color writing appeared prominently in national publishing venues and clearly belongs in conversations about national culture. It engages the specters of US colonialism, industrial development, and robber-baron capitalism of the era, but is not subsumed by these national issues.

Paul Giles has written of the need to deterritorialize American literature. He argues that the idea of the Americanness of the literature is so ingrained that scholars, teachers, and readers have subsequently allowed a geographical consciousness to enter subliminally into American cultural narratives, thus inserting into the works a cohesive perspective that was not necessarily there originally.⁶ In southern scholarly circles, these trends towards deterritorialization have coalesced around new southern studies, a field that opposes the old reliance on nostalgic and decline narratives, narrow theories of race, and static geographic place.⁷ New southernists believe that taking note of the patterns of global cultural exchange that contest such stasis allows one to break out of the habitual ways of seeing the South in opposition to the North, as the rural and provincial alternative to the urban and sophisticated North.⁸ In the place of these familiar models of geographic and cultural distinctiveness, new southernists identify the region’s uncanny hybridity, its permeable boundaries, its participation in global circulations.⁹ Such a theoretical commitment has the potential to liberate new southern studies from the trap of fetishizing sameness.¹⁰

One hundred and thirty years before the new southern studies began gaining traction in academic circles, southern regionalist and local-color author George Washington Cable called for a similar type of deterritorialization. Cable objected to the subliminal geographical consciousness attributed to the South and southern literature. Invited to present the 1882 commencement address at the University of Mississippi on the topic of the state of southern letters, Cable spoke instead about the stultifying effects of an artificial and territorial notion of literature: When the whole intellectual energy of the southern states flew to the defense of that one institution which made us the South, we broke with human progress. We broke with the world’s thought. We have not entirely in all things joined hands with it again. When we have done so we shall know it by this—there will be no South. The danger of regionalism being a static and nostalgic abstraction is a danger that Cable, one of the leading local colorists of the era, resisted as firmly as twenty-first-century global theorists.

Anticipating by four decades H. L. Mencken’s thoughts about the sterility of southern art in The Sahara of the Bozart, Cable suggests that the idea of a monolithic territory that contains and characterizes a distinct people works against the creativity and universality of these people: We shall be the proud disciples of every American alike who adds to the treasures of truth in American literature, and prouder still when his words reach the whole human heart and his lines of light run through the varied languages of the world. Let us hasten to be no longer a unique people. Let us search provincialism out of the land.¹¹ While the scope of their projects differs somewhat, and the context in which their comments are uttered differs vastly, Cable and today’s southernists both defend the liberatory potential of deterritorializing provincial notions of literature, allowing points of global intersections to emerge, thus joining the larger movements of human progress (in Cable’s words).

New southernists’ methods of deterritorialization are typically expansive and involve moving outward, seeing the global currents running through the literature, history, and economy of the region. From this global approach, one begins with the idea of a deterritorialized world in which inflexible models of nationalist affiliation are replaced with more fluid modes of cultural exchange.