WOMEN REGIONALISTS REVISITED
The Limits of Local Color

Left: detail from "In the Garden" (Celia Thaxter),
by Childe Hassam (1894)


   Harriet Beecher Stowe--the "mother of us all," according to Sarah Orne Jewett--was highly influential to a school of New England women writers who practiced in the local color tradition. Stowe is frequently associated with the village tradition, a form which links her (and the women who followed) to a long line of writers both in America and abroad. The village sketch lent itself particularly-- though not exclusively-- to the literary productions of white, middle-class women. 1 The genre's capacity of to foster sympathy and understanding between differently-situated groups of readers is a quality intimately associated with the village tradition as well as with the highly related genre of domestic realism. Jewett affirms this connection in the preface to her first novel, Deephaven,:

There is a noble saying of Plato that the best thing that can be done for the people of a state is to make them acquainted with one another. It was, happily, in the writer's childhood that Mrs. Stowe had written of those who dwelt along the wooded seacoast and by the decaying, shipless harbors of Maine. The first chapters of The Pearl of Orr's Island gave the younger author of Deephaven to see with new eyes, and to follow eagerly the old shore paths from one gray, weather-beaten house to another where Genius pointed her the way. 2

Jewett carefully links her authorial voice not only to Stowe (whose "Genius" here rubs off on the author of Deephaven by virtue of the vagary of the pronoun "her"--the muse seems to serendipitously lead them both), but also to George Sand, whose Legendes Rustiques she quotes in the preface, and to Elizabeth Gaskell through textual references to Cranford. The image she creates is the one which has been evoked so vividly by a generation of feminist scholars, that is, of a transnational community of women simultaneously engaged in aesthetic production and the cultural commerce of hostessing--in effect, helping her guests/ readers to get acquainted. In the early 1980s, studies by feminist critics like Josephine Donovan and Emily Toth broke important new ground by asserting that regional writing had been persistently used by a group of interconnected (largely forgotten) women to defend "female values." 3

(Left: Harriet Beecher Stowe)

    Stowe's depictions of village life in the Northeast, along with those by Rose Terry Cooke, graced the pages of the very first issue of the Atlantic Monthly in 1857: "Sally Parson's Duty" appeared alongside Stowe's "The Mourning Veil." However, a significant number of regional writers used Stowe's example as a model, not for her fine portraits of the quiet backwaters of New England, but rather for her highly political regional writing in service of social causes--abolition, the radical reformation of Calvinism, and women's education. Throughout her career Stowe would continue to use her productions of place to promote social and political reforms: e.g. her impassioned defense of education for the freedmen in Palmetto Leaves (1873).

   Uncle Tom's Cabin is almost never named as a local color text today, yet it always occupied a place at the edges of the genre, for in it Stowe had done nothing so much as sketch from the abolitionist perspective an accurate picture of the nation's various regions and regional types (managing to include all but the Far West, with which she had not had any contact). When Charles Chesnutt was casting around for models of politically-charged depictions of region in the late 1870s and early 1880s, he lighted upon Uncle Tom's Cabin and its reconstruction sequel Albion Tourgee's A Fool's Errand (1879) for his founding texts. In fact, Bret Harte, even as he energetically defended western writers and their contribution to a truly "vigorous," democratic American Literature, mentions Uncle Tom's Cabin when he discusses the development of the movement he claims to have fathered: Topsy and Miss Ophelia were accurately depicted, he grudgingly admits in Cornhill Magazine in 1899. 4

(Right: frontipiece and title page
to 1891 edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin)

   In short, Harriet Beecher Stowe was often seen not only as Jewett renders her--walking rapidly, sketching, and visiting amongst the decayed docks and weathered houses of small New England villages--but as 'the little lady who started the Civil War,' emblematic of and often an explicit role model for a whole cluster of writers of both sexes, including Jewett herself. Nor was this the only example of regional writing with an overtly political edge during the late nineteenth century; politically-motivated, regionally-aligned texts were produced in a persistent fashion throughout the period. Octave Thanet wove her political ideas into her local color stories: "Trusty, No. 49," for example, condemned the brutality of the convict labor system as she saw it being practiced in Arkansas (Century, June 1890). She, like Phelps and Stowe, was a prolific essayist, frequently speaking her mind in a variety of genres. During roughly the same period, Hamlin Garland used the stories in Main-Travelled Roads to support Populist reforms for small farmers. Garland, in fact, is often categorized as a naturalist despite the ties to local color writing he emphatically proclaimed in Crumbling Idols. Joaquin Miller and Prentice Mulford collaborated on Life Among the Modocs (1873) in an attempt to generate British support for tribal resistance to the reservation system, while Helen Hunt Jackson also called attention to continuing atrocities against Native Americans in her book Ramona (1884). 5

   Responding to market pressures to subordinate these political themes, many regional writers gravitated toward the stylistic preoccupations which increasingly marked 'highbrow' literature. For example, Richard Brodhead has argued that those writers who produced highly crafted, aesthetically polished regional sketches were accorded minor status in the ranks of the publishing elite; he further argues that Jewett accepted this status, and thus lost a larger audience, in exchange for a sense of her artistic work as justifiable and necessary for a genteel woman. 6 But as June Howard's recent essay points out, Jewett did in fact write about more controversial topics, including characters who are mill workers, hotel maids, and Irish farmers in her writing, as well as championing the right of middle-class Anglo-American women to enter the professions. 7

Negotiating With a Publisher
From Mrs. M.L. Rayne
What Can a Woman Do:
Or, Her Position in the Business and Literary World
(1893)

   While the production of such texts continued unimpeded throughout this period, the reception of such work was often dismal--evidence shows that both the content and the "tone" of regional writing was often subject to a form of generic boundary 'policing,' particularly along gendered and racial lines. William Dean Howells, who played a highly visible role in establishing the generic categories of local color and realism as an editor and author, scathingly reviewed the "bitter, bitter" tone of Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition in 1901. 8 Editors such as Howells had actively solicited writing from Chesnutt that addressed the "race question," only to dismiss the resulting work as incompatible with their visions of American Realism. Regional forms provided an accessible but limited point of entry for writers on the cultural margins of the American literary establishment at the end of the nineteenth century; Chesnutt's entry into local and national markets via the local color form is considered in greater detail elsewhere in this site. However, Chesnutt's subsequent inability to successfully extend his efforts to other generic forms later in his career points toward the considerable limitations of regional writing as well. Rose Terry Cooke alleged that her best stories were often refused, citing a rejection letter which said

"'that the canons of taste forbade the editor to accept a story so sad in its motive; that it was a duty to brighten life for the public, not darken it with melancholy detail; so with much regret, etc., it was returned.'" 9

Under other circumstances, she might have deferred to the editor's judgment, except that in the next issue she was irked to find "a ghastly story by Turgenieff, [sic] beside which [her] simple detail of a common New England family was really hilarious; and also a dreary story of confused woe and despair from a popular American (male) author!"

   Printing a clear public indictment of the period's highly-gendered editing practices, Cooke's anecdote suggests why women did not take an even larger part in the emergence of naturalism (or write bleaker realism) than they might have otherwise. Cooke--along with Alice Cary, Constance Fenimore Woolson and Mary Wilkins Freeman--did present a darker vision of regional life than many of her contemporaries; however, her complaints suggest that beyond the genre's particular suitability to bourgeois women's cultural experiences, there were editorial and market pressures on women writers that pushed them towards the more utopic village sketch as a generic form.

(Right: Constance Fenimore Woolson)

However, these strong influences 'from above' may have been somewhat counteracted by the writers in their dealings with one another; for example, both Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Hamlin Garland wrote Jewett, chastising her for treating the brighter side of Maine life and neglecting its darker aspects.10

   Ultimately Harriet Beecher Stowe's regional writings were used as a model, and should be clustered generically with two constellations of local color tales. First, one finds strong ties with the village tradition, a sub-genre thoroughly associated with bourgeois, Anglo-American women's networks. Works such as Uncle Tom's Cabin and Palmetto Leaves, point towards a consistent strain of regional writing which aimed (explicitly) at timely political issues, though as I have demonstrated, the boundaries in this sub-genre were both directly and indirectly policed along the lines of race and gender. Each of these situations poignantly emphasizes the complex pressures which shaped white female participation in local color writing: the unveiling of Charles Egbert Craddock along with the frustrations of Rose Terry Cooke about gendered expectations for subject matter and tone; the motherly image of Harriet Beecher Stowe rendered by Jewett which ignores, or at least downplays, Stowe's politically engaged writing. These are forces which, whether enabling or debilitating, were not felt as a major influence in the careers of their white, bourgeois, male counterparts.

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"Nineteenth-century Regional Writing in the United States" is the work of Dottie Webb. For suggestions, complaints, cattle-rustling schemes or gossiping over the fence in neighborly fashion, send your e-correspondence to dot@traverse.com

This document was last modified 3/12/98.