Together by Accident: American Local Color Literature and the Middle Class

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This fascinating account of the regional travel accident motif within American local color literature offers a reassessment of the cultural work done by authors writing during the Gilded Age. Stephanie C. Palmer shows how events like broken carriage wheels and missed trains were used by local color authors to bring together bourgeois and lower-class characters, thus giving readers the opportunity to see modernity coming into contact with both rural and urban life. Using the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and others, Palmer traces the use of the regional-travel-accident motif and how local color writers employed it to give critiques on class, society, and modern life. Exploring the themes of regional identity, modernity, and interpersonal relationships, Together by Accident offers an intriguing evaluation of the innovations and inconveniences associated with life during the industrializing Gilded Age in America. Stephanie C. Palmer is assistant professor in the Department of American Culture and Literature at Bilkent University in Turkey.

For orders and information please contact the publisher LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706 1-800-462-6420

ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2494-9 ISBN-10: 0-7391-2494-3

Together by Accident

“Stephanie C. Palmer’s Together by Accident: American Local Color and the Middle Class is theoretically savvy and historically conscientious. Treating travel—and the accidents that can ensue—as a literary trope with concrete roots in historical facts allows Palmer to revise much of what has been said about local color fiction. Just as important, the book also affirms the value of keeping the gap between historical events and their literary representation: mining that distinction allows for a richer understanding of the ways literature interacts with but does not capitulate to history. In other words, the success of Palmer’s study is no accident.” —Augusta Rohrbach, associate professor of English, Washington State University

Palmer

Literature • American Studies

Stephanie C. Palmer

Together by Accident American Local Color Literature and the Middle Class

Together by Accident

Together by Accident American Local Color Literature and the Middle Class

Stephanie C. Palmer

LEXINGTON BOOKS A Division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Palmer, Stephanie C. Together by accident : American local color literature and the middle class / Stephanie C. Palmer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2494-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7391-2494-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-3212-8 (e-book) ISBN-10: 0-7391-3212-1 (e-book) 1. American literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Accidents in literature. 3. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Local color in literature. 5. Travel in literature. 6. Middle class in literature. 7. City and town life in literature. I. Title. PS217.A25P35 2009 810.9'355—dc22 2008034685 Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction Chapter 1

Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5

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Can the Genteel Writer Write the Local Novel?: Caroline Kirkland, Eliza Farnham, and Rose Terry Cooke

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Travel Delays in the Commercial Countryside: Bret Harte and Sarah Orne Jewett

53

Travel Delays and Provincial Ambition: Rebecca Harding Davis and Thomas Detter

77

Realist Magic in the Country and the City: William Dean Howells

99

Angry Reform from Elsewhere in New England: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

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Epilogue

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Notes

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Bibliography

201

Index

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About the Author

225 v



Acknowledgments

Writing this book was mostly a solitary endeavor, but there are people and institutions I would like to thank for intellectual sustenance, financial assistance, or moral support. Cathryn Halverson remains an invaluable source of intellectual companionship. She read the whole manuscript more than once; without her visit to walk the Lycian Way, the book would not have emerged as it did. The British students in my American Studies seminar in fiction and film at the University of Leicester made me recognize how deeply gender, nation, class and other identity positions shape reader response—both to social difference within a nation and to accident motifs in art. In the students’ eyes, it seemed characteristically American to consider accidents to be an opportunity for optimism, agonism, didacticism, or rejuvenation. Craig Ireland and Nicholas Everett frequently urged me to write when teaching seemed the more urgent task. Also beneficial were conversations with, among others, Alison Easton, David Faflik, Lucy Frank, Robert Johnston, Mary Suzanne Schriber, Naomi Sofer, and Sarah Wilburn. Fergus Bolger, Cameron Bolger, and Sandrine Berges provided moral support. Charlie and Rosemary Palms offered hospitality. The book evolved out of my Ph.D. dissertation, and I thank June Howard, Jonathan Freedman, Patricia Yaeger, and David Scobey for their intellectual direction at the dissertation stage. Research librarians at the University of Michigan and the Houghton Library at Harvard advised on which materials to consult in transportation collections and business records. Bilkent University provided a Research Development

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Grant for the trip to Houghton Library, Columbia University Library, and the New York Public Library. I thank Houghton Library and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company for permission to quote from the Houghton Mifflin archives. Chapter 4 is a revision of my article, “Realist Magic in the Fiction of William Dean Howells” in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Autumn 2002, published by the University of California Press. Chapter 2 appeared in an earlier form as “Travel Delays in the Commercial Countryside with Bret Harte and Sarah Orne Jewett” in Arizona Quarterly, Winter 2003, published by the Arizona Board of Regents. I thank the presses for their permission to reprint.



Introduction

The running of the first train over the Eastern Road from Boston to Portsmouth—it took place somewhat more than forty years ago—was attended by a serious accident. The accident occurred in the crowded station at the Portsmouth terminus, and was unobserved at the time. The catastrophe was followed, though not immediately, by death, and that also, curiously enough, was unobserved. Nevertheless, this initial train, freighted with so many hopes and the Directors of the Road, ran over and killed—LOCAL CHARACTER. —Thomas Bailey Aldrich, An Old Town by the Sea (1893) But who could have foreseen such an accident as this? —Sarah Orne Jewett, “A White Heron” (1886)

Texts in many genres continually generate narrative by catching traveling characters in an unfamiliar locality that is anomalous, picturesque, provincial, or exotic. The specific device used might be malignant nature, faulty technology, a human foe, or traveler error. As a result of the entrapment, the traveling characters sometimes retreat into their own solipsism, and sometimes they accept help from local characters from a position of humility and cooperation. The motif of the travel accident is familiar and eminently available for commodification. But it also offers itself up for many different critical analyses. The motif indexes an age-old conflict between independence and connectedness. In different texts, it can often serve as a critique of the

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Introduction

traveling characters’ inability to see or deal with the people or places they are visiting, as if the travel trouble they experience is punishment for their sins or their lack of social responsibility. Often the motif hints at the politics of writing about one place for a readership of people not from that place. The motif also asks questions about how anyone comes to be identified with any community. In An Old Town by the Sea, Thomas Bailey Aldrich invokes the motif of a travel accident to argue that the travelers of the late nineteenth century were defeating the local inhabitants: a heavy, linear train crushes a helpless pedestrian. He treats the railroad as an inessential, accidental change that kills New England’s essential character. As he argues, the best young men of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, left on the railroad, draining the town of its vitality, while idle pleasure seekers arrived on the railroad, draining the town of its authenticity. For Aldrich, the rail accident evokes loss—the loss of uniqueness, a producer economy, political independence, and likely the utility of the category of region itself. He invokes technology as a transcendental signifier, a sublime, connoting standardization, deracination, slaughter, and relentless change. In 1893, Aldrich understandably believed that New England towns were slated to disappear or remain chronically disempowered vis-à-vis urbanity and modernization, and he invoked the motif of the travel accident to symbolize their demise. The current tendency in cultural criticism is to locate the politics of culture in the social and historical uses of a particular utterance, rather than in an essential trait of the utterance itself.1 And yet Aldrich uses the motif of the train killing local character in a universalizing way: in his reading, the deaths of all localities seem inevitable. Aldrich adopts a rhetoric that was part of the modernization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a rhetoric in which change is inevitably linear and irrevocable and often sublime. Other insightful observers of the nineteenth-century American local color movement have taken Aldrich’s lead in how to read this motif of travel accident in relation to the genre of local color. Both Jay Martin, in Harvests of Change (1967), and Donna Campbell, in Resisting Regionalism (1997), approvingly quote Aldrich to argue that local character is destined to disappear and that the local color project of recording and legitimating particular places is doomed.2 The conclusions of these scholars, however, are often challenged by local color writers themselves. Sarah Orne Jewett, for example, a leading writer of the movement, invokes a motif of travel accident in a very different way. In “A White Heron,” Jewett uses the word “accident” to refer to a chance meeting between a girl and an ornithologist that results not in the death of the girl or her treasured bird but in independence for the

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girl and life for the bird. Jewett’s story suggests that the accidental encounter made possible by the modern, translocal practices of tourism and the natural sciences can bring about resistance and mutual influence as well as death. To state this point in the terms of Aldrich’s metaphor, in local color fiction, the train does not always kill local character; sometimes local character wrecks the train. Similar motifs of travel accidents dot other local color texts, and reading for the motif opens up a useful reassessment of the cultural work done by the genre. As we will see in the following readings of local color fiction, the motif of the travel accident appears in ambiguous ways. That is, it generates a range of political meanings in different texts. The presence of the regional travel motif in numerous nineteenth-century local color stories and novels suggests that the texts are not just parochial renditions of a locality, but depictions of the relation between a locality and the processes of capitalist development, urbanization, and modernization.3 In local color writing, the country and the city are not polarities but different points on the same continuum. The genre reflects on how modern culture penetrated into rural as well as urban life. The study of local color writing can be brought into line with studies of the other genres and cultural practices of the Gilded Age. Thus, local color writing published outside the region for the reading pleasure of outside readers is not falsely conscious, but rather differently conscious than would be writing produced by and for a local community. The motifs in the writing of interrupted or disastrous travel or travel that brings about unexpected and uncomfortable interactions with strangers suggest that modernization and urbanization are challenged within the text. Nineteenth-century Americans associated rural places, small towns, and the interior with democracy, a lack of social hierarchy, hard work, and the source of the nation’s virtue. In contrast, they associated cities with money, steep class divides, wicked pleasures, and idleness. In local color literature, traveling characters often serve as agents of urbanity, whether because of their wealth, their connections to national institutions or organizations, or their readiness to cultivate an aesthetic appreciation of the landscape and the social types that inhabit it. The motif serves as a class critique of these characters. In the aftermath of textual accidents, elite traveling characters become thwarted in their expectations, intentions, or physical mobility. They are forced to become humble and hence more capable of learning about the harsh realities of provincial life, not just its picturesque elements. Once they are humbled, the text forms a ground upon which different types of characters can converse in a relatively equitable and effective way. By stopping these agents of modernization and translocality, the motif imagines that there is a space

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within modern culture for small-scale, face-to-face communities in which everyone knows each other and participates personally in communal decisions. Thus, the motif of travel accident generates narratives about democracy, and it raises questions in particular about how people with money and urban social connections can come to truly belong in a democratic setting. This class critique that takes place within local color literature can be viewed as somewhat ironic, for local color literature emerged only in the process of modernization, and it was associated both with urbanity in general and middle-class values in particular. Industrialization made social class an important dimension of life in the country as well as the city, where it hardened existing class boundaries and created new ones. As the basis for the economy changed, members of the expanding middle class in small towns across the country devised organizations and social activities that helped them assert and maintain social position and influence over neighbors who might prefer the saloon or the storefront as a site for social intercourse. Thus, their class identity was defined not only by how much money they had but by what activities they participated in. These activities and organizations included not only banks, churches, schools, and voluntary organizations, but also print culture, including not only newspapers and newsletters of national organizations, but literary journals and books of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. In addition, these activities included the then novel practice of taking a summer vacation to a cool lake or a winter vacation to a sunny shore. Through organizations like universities, professional organizations, and a national literary market, people with middle-class occupations (such as attorneys, physicians, ministers, clerks, schoolteachers, or owners of small businesses) sought to transcend local communities and acquire their identity from afar. Thus, the men and women born around the 1840s or 1850s were the first U.S. generation to associate social class with physical mobility.4 For Thomas Bailey Aldrich, this association was literal, because he lived most of his life outside his birthplace of Portsmouth, and when he wrote An Old Town by the Sea, he was serving as the editor of the prestigious national literary magazine, the Atlantic Monthly. For other less fortunate people who aspired to middle-class status but lacked the means or the connections to leave home, this association between social class and physical mobility was symbolic. Mobility in this sense largely meant that their lifework mattered beyond the bounds of their city of residence. Thus, there is irony in the literary prospect of traveling characters being thwarted by the region. Members of the middle or upper classes were the very people who were not kept in the region, except by calamitous and unusual misfortune. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues that modernity and post-

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modernity are characterized by an inequality between mobility for the rich and immobility for the poor.5 The late nineteenth century witnessed the U.S. origins of this divided experience of mobility, and local color literature, with its ironic and multi-faceted reflections on this experience, can serve as a major resource for understanding how people thought about this problem. Despite the rural settings of local color literature, the genre, that emerged in the 1840s with texts like Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? (1839) and lost its appeal after texts like Hamlin Garland’s Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly (1899), participated in the postbellum era’s push toward quality literature that would unite the nation and would showcase its vitality and quality. The genre was written mostly by writers who were members of the expanding middle class, by virtue of their financial security (they tended to live above what Stow Persons called the “economic threshold of gentility”), and by virtue of their activity of writing for a national audience that demanded adherence to high literary conventions.6 Often when twentieth-century literary historians have struggled with how to read and categorize local color literature, they have struggled with the problem of the genre’s genteel style and politics. Hamlin Garland famously proclaimed that the tourist cannot write the local novel; before the twentieth century, all tourists claimed a certain economic and social standing, and the popularity of tourism meant that all middle and upper class people were at least occasionally tourists. Garland might well have asked whether the middle-class writer can write a worthy local novel.7 And yet, as the following chapters make clear, middle-class writers commonly wrote local novels. The following chapters will examine how various writers negotiated between people like farmers, fishermen, day laborers, or domestic servants that they readily identified as regional, as stuck in place, people they often found fascinating yet threatening, and the bourgeois tourists and readers residing either in or outside the region whose views they sought to shape. The motif of travel accident exposes the conflict and ambivalence and irony of that endeavor. By stopping business travelers or vacationers in poor villages that refuse to be picturesque among people who refuse easy legibility, these writers seek to correct vacationer fantasies of unconstrained movement and unlimited access to specific communities. In a gesture that often distinguishes middle-class from elite texts, the motif sometimes underwrites the middle-class ideological project of lifting itself above the ignorant folk and showcasing its moral superiority over the idle rich. More frequently, and more interestingly, however, the motif exposes a desire for carving a personal space among those folk. The motif of travel accident hints at social conflict, trouble, resistance, and a need to revise plans (in prosaic terms) or a caesura (in poetic terms).

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It suggests that different writers were at least occasionally concerned on a subconscious level with whether or not their class status prevented them from creating representations of communities that were fair to their neighbors, convincing to their audience, and comprehensive enough to compete alongside the new and increasingly professionalized social sciences. Sometimes in the texts, as I discuss in the following chapters, there is evidence that reveals a writer’s conscious concerns about his or her personal place in a specific community. Yet I have found little evidence that the writers I am discussing here felt consciously guilty about the way that local color literature put them in a position of usurping other people’s authentic experiences of poverty; furthermore, I have found little evidence that writers purposefully chose the motif in order to stage that guilt and ameliorate it by bringing elite characters into equitable interactions with humble characters. Some writers have put some of their intentions in evidence: for example, Sarah Orne Jewett wrote about consciously avoiding condescension in her portrayal of people from Maine. One writer, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, so regularly deployed motifs of travel accident and discussed her plans so candidly that we can glean more about her intentions than those of other writers. The questions the texts raise collectively, however, about how any person comes to belong in any community, are of more than autobiographical importance. They tell us about how a whole class of people suffer, and cause suffering, because of their feeling of dysfunctional and inadequate belonging in particular face-toface communities. Aldrich’s anecdote can be read as a parable of the forces of good and evil, with the train being evil and local character being good. As I will argue in the following chapters, critics who have criticized the inauthenticity or exclusiveness of some local color writing have sometimes relabeled local character as bad and the train as good. In this book, however, I move away from championing some writers for being progressive because of their representations of subordinate places and condemning others for being conservative. One of my arguments about class and geographical identity is that a variety of people have come to belong to a place in a variety of ways, and that it is difficult, if not impossible, to consider some as more worthy local citizens than others. The motif vivifies in a highly physical and entertaining way the important question of how any person, elite or otherwise, comes to belong in any community. It points to the historical way that American regions are places where people of different classes were commonly moving and adapting themselves to communities new to them. Thus, historically, many Americans belonged to particular places as if “by accident,” or in other words, as a result of

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a random, constraining event, or a decision to stay that is based on imperfect knowledge or temporary contingencies rather than primordial blood connections or deep feelings of loyalty. In the terms of Aldrich’s motif, these people are the train, not the local character. Both literary critics and the wider public have tended to associate regional literature of this and later periods with the past, long-term residence, and an unquestioned sense of belonging. Yet this significant counternarrative of accidental residence stresses a contingency of regional belonging that deserves further examination. In order to explain the import of this motif for readings of American Gilded Age literature and society, the remainder of the introduction contextualizes the motif within the literary-critical history of the local color genre, within studies of genre, and within the modern experiences of travel and travel accident.

Local Color: Democratization or Tourism? Traditionally, the greatest advocates of nineteenth-century local color stories and novels have credited the genre with the democratization and decentralization of literature. Feminist recuperative work of the 1970s and 1980s mostly reprinted and interpreted texts that treat poor, rural residents with dignity.8 More recently, both feminists and historicists have argued that the genre worked in its time to consolidate national rather than local solidarities; for example, it portrayed rural residents as merely premodern, quaint, or exotic, and therefore slated to disappear. These critics have focused on how the writing fulfils the imaginative needs of the middle- and upper-class readers who served as the genre’s primary audience and who were newly able to vacation and sightsee.9 These debates particular to late-nineteenth-century literary study coexist and overlap with recent work on nationhood that examines regionalism rather skeptically. It treats regionalism as a residual discourse that dangerously appeals to an organic unity undivided by economics, gender, race, or creed. While regionalism might seem to celebrate the same heterogeneity as the ethnic revivals of the 1970s or the multiculturalism of the 1990s, Roberto Dainotto, for example, argues that regionalism in its European as well as American manifestations is on the contrary an invocation of a false and dangerous origin myth. While history is conceived as change and eradication, region is a no place, a u-topos of memory and therapeutic restoration.10 Carrie Tirado Bramen similarly argues that white Americans use the notion of regional affiliation or pride to spatialize their own individuality while neglecting the spatialization of other people’s identity; they ignore the laborers who do the most to give particular places economic and spiritual meaning.11 This

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turn in scholarship strikes me as counterproductive. These critical arguments usefully challenge readings that uncritically champion all writing from any social margin as progressive, and they justify stretching the definition of regional writing to include works by authors from lower class and ethnic minority backgrounds. But it seems that such arguments might also merely reproduce in the present day the class-specific feelings of displacement and deracination expressed by Thomas Bailey Aldrich and shared by many elite and middle-class writers who were coming to define themselves in opposition to regional places. In this book, I do not seek to determine whether local color writing democratizes or caters to the taste of bourgeois tourists; critics on both sides of this debate about local color have made important arguments, and I am indebted to both groups.12 In the following chapters, I analyze which strands of local color writing are democratizing and which can be challenged for consolidating class power. But more centrally, I examine a blind spot shared by both groups of critics: the assumption that writers can only be good regional citizens if they are lower class. Unwittingly, critics suggest that the middle and upper classes do not belong in places beyond the urban Northeast, and that their only relation to such places can be aptly captured with Amy Kaplan’s stirring epithet, “literary tourism.”13 Critics who point to the connections between local color and tourism usefully historicize and temper the literary-critical habit of celebrating the power of great writers for giving voice to place, a category which literary criticism has traditionally considered as factual and subliterary.14 Although this habit of considering place to be merely factual and great authors as the sole creators of place’s symbolic significance is waning in recent decades, it remains dominant among literary critics who do not consider the connections between literature and geography to be part of their specialty. As valuable as the scholarship that has linked local color to tourism is, it often treats “tourism” merely as a metaphor for modern inauthenticity or superficial commitment. Rather than accept either the laudatory or derogatory reading of local color writers as tourists, we can draw insights from recent historical work on sightseeing and touring to contextualize fictional texts within a social history with many actors, motivations, and consequences. Such a contextualization of literature within the history of tourism and transportation is part of the purpose of this study. Another central purpose is to challenge the critical conflation of regional identity and lower class identity. Both literary critical discourse on regional literature, of this period and other periods, and the wider public discourse commonly equate regional identity with poverty, farming, or laborers. This slippage between regional identity and lower class identity requires rethink-

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ing. Although it stems from a laudable attempt to widen the terms of inclusion for American literature, it also contributes to the reticence in American intellectual thought about cultivating a more precise discourse of social class. The word “region” is often used when the word “class” should be used, and the word “class” is used when the word “region” is more apt. This reticence is related to the distaste for considering the constraints on the liberal subject in his pursuit of his own potential. It is born of a fear that Americans, particularly white Americans but not only white Americans, might be excluded permanently from economic and social opportunities. Thus, instead of identifying a writer or a character as working class, scholars identify the writer or character as regional. Rather than creating social opportunities for real people, however, this reticence contributes to the obscuring of class inequality, and it distorts regional, racial, and gender relations as well.15 Because I do not equate regional status with subordinate status, I consider writers of the middle class and even writers who were wealthy or well connected enough to be considered elite, writers like Owen Wister, as regional. Whether or not individual writers shared twentieth-century literary critics’ worry about the eroding claim over a region held by an upwardly mobile writer, the fiction itself hints at recurring feelings of displacement and selfeffacement. It should be noted that these feelings of displacement and selfeffacement were specific in this time period to a group of people who drew their earnings and social power from their affiliations with translocal knowledge and organizations and who, as a result, felt superior to other locals. These feelings of displacement are worth reflecting upon for what they more broadly reveal about a chronic, and often counterproductive, sense of inadequate belonging among Americans. Some of this displacement is compellingly invoked through variations on the motif of the regional travel accident.

The Motif of the Regional Travel Accident Middle-class writers use the motif of the regional travel accident as if to invite themselves into communities where they feel they would not otherwise belong and to perform this act with humility, introspection, and humor. The motif usefully turns a narrative of self into a narrative of community. It breaks the divided temporality through which most members of the middle and upper classes viewed American space during the mid to late nineteenth century. Generally they perceived rural areas in the eastern, settled half of the country to be degenerate and backward, similar to Dainotto’s “no place” of memory. Yet the details of the texts discussed in the following chapters reveal that

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the motif of travel accident in the local color genre often works to bring the privileged visitor into the same temporality as that of other residents. Rather than denying class difference, as local color literature is often accused of doing, the motif is fundamentally about class—recognition of class difference, class envy, class revenge, class appropriation, and the drawing and redrawing of class boundaries. It indexes the class difference between those who could travel pleasantly and for pleasure and those who could not because of the obligations, hardships, or disabilities of lower class life. The motif encourages ruminations on society’s dependence on labor. It can be used to express a fear of class slippage but also a desire for class slippage, or, to be more precise, a desire to belong as an equal rather than as a money-bearing guest. As a consequence, the motif helps to move a text outside of a genteel frame. In this way, by writing about a place, a middle-class writer who works for the national literary market does not destroy that place but rather indexes the way that the place acts upon the middle-class writer. In some ways, Thomas Bailey Aldrich was right to argue that the railroad killed local character: the railroads decreased the autonomy of small towns and cities, not only by fixing the price of carrying agricultural goods to market, but also by creating a national literary market for representations of town life. The railroads also changed the context in which literature was read, by inviting people to read representations of town life and city life side by side, and thus by inviting them to consider faceless cultural alternatives to the local authorities of schoolmasters, ministers, patriarchs, or squires; although these local authorities might consider themselves to be the local gatekeepers of translocal knowledges, railroads and print culture made translocal knowledges available to other regional inhabitants directly.16 Despite the numerous ways that local people lost autonomy during the postbellum years, however, the writing carried by the railroad conveys signs that the railroad did not kill local character but rather created a contact zone, an antagonistic zone of mutual influence between local character and the urban-identified writer.17 This ability of a place to affect the writer makes the writer as regional as anybody else. By focusing on the ways in which larger regional populaces and ecologies act upon middle-class writers, then, this study seeks to invite writers back into the provinces. Readings of local color that assume that only humble people belong in the provinces serve a dubious purpose of banishing writers from places characterized by economic or cultural deprivation. The anticapitalist sentiment that informs such readings will not be served by banishing writers with membership in, or aspirations for joining, the national cultural elite. In the twentieth century, the cultural elite, as well as people with eco-

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nomic or cultural power more generally, did more harm by ignoring the complex realities of regions than by fetishizing their sentimental qualities; for example, people have generally voted against regional industries, rural school districts, and social services, and voted for highways, gated communities, or private schools. In this way urban centers have become one more forgotten region among others. Cultural geographers argue that capitalism works by spreading itself across space and neglecting places where resources have been depleted, labor made expensive, and markets saturated.18 In contrast, much regional writing aspires to keep forgotten people and places in view. The accident motif is a literary motif, not a reference to an actual event in social life. A motif is not just any plot element, but rather one that generates extended narrative. It retrospectively orders the prior world, enabling some narrative outcomes and foreclosing others. Thus a motif creates new stories, new plotlines. Any literary motif’s definition, essence, or borders can never be fixed precisely. Furthermore, in a high literary genre that values originality and uniqueness, there will inevitably be huge variations in the deployment of any motif, even though we can identify lasting subtleties in a motif that are amplified in different combinations.19 I have defined the “regional travel accident” motif to highlight particular recurring plot patterns in local color literature, not to describe what happens in any fictional or nonfictional narrative about any kind of a travel accident, and it therefore has limiting, specific qualities. A regional travel accident requires a distressing or surprising event that occurs to a character in transit. It must shift the grounds of sociability in the text, so that the traveling character is obliged to rely on locals to a greater and more humiliating degree. A travel accident challenges a traveler’s identity, independence, or power. A travel accident also changes the relationship between the traveling character (who becomes a thwarted traveler) and the implied reader. If an accident occurs, the reader is encouraged to question the character’s virtue. In this way, the motif or device also becomes a historical allegory of the different social groups and their competing claims over American space. A list of the plot developments that I classify here as “regional travel accidents” will illustrate what I mean by the term: the texts examined in the book feature lady characters whose carriages capsize in mud holes and teach them a lesson about carrying poetic ideals into the wilderness; a group of travelers who are forced by a washed-out bridge to eat dinner and spend the night in the home of a stranger who keeps a bear for a pet; a man who sprains his ankle and is forced to stay in a Maine town beyond the end of the hunting and fishing season; another who capsizes his carriage and must rely on a woman doctor in another Maine town; a father and daughter who miss their

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train, lose their luggage and money, and have no choice but to be taken in by strangers; an urban transport strike that resolves conflicts between quarreling characters; an automobile accident in which an arrogant chauffeur runs over a country boy; and a four-day train delay during which a cowboy foreman rallies his men by entertaining and feeding hapless Eastern tourists. All of these incidents interrupt travelers’ plans, compromise their identities (the lost luggage), independence (the hunger), or power (the broken vehicles and body parts), and all of them force the traveling characters to become more polite to, more cognizant of, and more cooperative with nontraveling local inhabitants. As a result, the texts focus more on the locals and less on the travelers. In some texts, travel mishaps are compared implicitly with the worksite accidents that so frequently killed or maimed laborers, and one of these textual events, the horse-car strike in A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), refers to a specific incident of labor-capital conflict, the 1886 Haymarket Square affair (in which a bomb was thrown in the midst of protestors calling for an eight-hour work day, policemen were killed, and several labor leaders were eventually given the death penalty). Yet unlike worksite injuries, or injuries as a result of political resistance, travel injuries rarely cause alienated suffering. That is, they tend to result from a voluntary activity that is undertaken in order to increase autonomy and self-determination. Their appearance in a piece of fiction tends to inspire readers to irony rather than pity. Tales of injuries born in travel accidents can be poignant, and it is always difficult to attach a value to the pain and suffering of anybody, and certainly that of a literary character. But from the perspective of class critique, a vacationer’s twisted ankle pales in comparison to a brakeman’s lost arm or leg. All these travel mishaps happen in regional places. In this usage of the term, regional means a place that is economically, culturally, or politically subordinate.20 Regions are not necessarily undeveloped, agricultural, or exotic; towns and even industrial cities like Lawrence, Massachusetts, can be regional. Thus the immigrant street in New York City that the Marches accidentally drive down in A Hazard of New Fortunes fits the pattern. What matters in this definition is less the uniqueness of the place—whether through its exoticism or its authenticity—than its distance from centers of cultural prestige. This distance fosters feelings of cultural inferiority in residents of high and low class status alike. Second, the incidents arise as a result of travel as represented in the narrative via an itinerary of movement across space.21 In this study, travel does not mean grand leisure tours; it often denotes no more than the everyday activity of commuting to work or visiting family. Over the course of the nine-

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teenth century, travel, whether for necessity or pleasure, became dramatically more democratic. The nineteenth century brought relatively fast, efficient, and accessible forms of transport to a large percentage of the nation’s population. For example, a greater percentage of the population could purchase a railroad ticket than that which could previously ride a stagecoach or own a horse. Most men, women, and children were accustomed to traveling to work, school, and the market and visiting friends and family. Many people traveled, within the spreading cities, between the cities and the countryside, and even between continents. At mid century, American railroad cars and hotels struck many Americans and foreign visitors as central symbols of America’s socially mixed and rough and ready society. At the same time, and increasingly throughout the century, travel became a key way of differentiating people along the lines of class, gender, race, and nation. Only the middle class and the elite could afford to take vacations; farmers who could not afford full-time employees had to oversee production, and factory workers were not granted paid vacations until the twentieth century.22 Once people were on the road, the new mass transportation systems rendered status especially visible. Modes of transport have always divided people into different castes; some can travel in luxury, others have to bear discomfort, and still others are barred from traveling at all. Public mass transport in the form of steamboats, the railroad, the horse-car (a precursor to the electric streetcar in which horse-drawn carriages ran on fixed rails), or the streetcar rendered this timeless experience more systematic, both in the way that the vehicles were internally organized and in the way they moved through and shaped external space.23 Beginning in the 1870s and 1880s and gaining steam by the turn of the century, responding to the vociferous demands of their wealthiest and most powerful customers, railroad companies began adding dining and sleeping facilities as well as cars designated for ladies, gentlemen (in the form of “library cars” or “palace smoking cars”), blacks, Chinese, and immigrants. As a result, passengers interacted less with the local populace and more exclusively with travelers of their own social rank. Yet vehicles of mass transport did not entirely fix social differences into rigid hierarchies. People sued companies over the exclusivity or lack of their first-class facilities and satirized the distinctions in their travel writing and conduct books; vehicles of transport became arenas of performance and contestation around urban and rural, black and white, and male and female identities.24 Literary critics often draw on Paul Fussell’s distinction between travelers who journey independently of a commercial industry and tourists who are uniformly duped by that industry, yet in the nineteenth century, as James

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Buzard has argued, this distinction was largely a class designation that emerged from the elite’s reaction against the newly rich, non-whites, and middle-class families who were beginning to frequent travel routes in Europe and North America.25 Another, more relevant way of classifying different types of leisure travel is suggested by historian Cindy Aron, who argues that while the general activity of vacationing became common among the American middle class by the 1850s, the specific activity of sightseeing remained expensive and exclusive until the 1920s; after the Civil War, the cost of tickets and hotel rooms at hot springs or the seashore dropped, while tickets to sites invested with great historic or patriotic significance tended to remain high. However, even this distinction between vacationing for the middle class and sightseeing for the elite was occasionally blurred. Working professionals who attended conventions, for example, often brought their wives and children along to see an unfamiliar city.26 The incidents discussed in the book are accidental in that they are events that appear to the traveling characters to be unexpected, unplanned, unwelcome, and uncomfortable, and they force the traveling characters into new obligations to people outside their social group. The word “accident” gained new currency in the nineteenth century; although the word in English had long been used to refer to negative events as well as chance incidents, the increased severity and frequency of damage to life and limb in industrial travel and manufacturing meant that the word began to be used more frequently to refer to negative chance events.27 In local color literature, too, the concept of accident is often negative. The incidents I summarized in the list above do not all relate directly to the type of travel accidents that a travel accident insurer would consider worthy of the name, but they do all challenge the idea of the bourgeois liberal subject who presumes that he is able to effect his own destiny. They place such a character in direct contrast to a provincial, an unfortunate other, who is presumed to be immobilized by circumstance. No one text discussed here carries out this ideological resonance of the accidental in exactly the same way—the traveling characters are a motley collection in comparison to the ideal of the liberal subject, and the provincials are not all entirely beaten down by circumstance. Nevertheless, all the texts work with or against this pattern. The traveling characters perceive these events to be “accidental” because they are unexpected by the travelers themselves and because they cut through existing narratives of what life is supposed to be like in that particular place. Often the events trouble the images of pastoral bounty promulgated by promotional writers hoping to attract settlers westward or by local authorities in the Northeast or Middle West who

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hoped to deny the economic stagnation in their towns.28 The events are scripted as unplanned because they break the traveler ideal of comfort, a coded term during the era that referred rather hopefully to the ability of the ladies’ car, the tourist guidebook, federal weather signal stations, and other modern conveniences to prevent hardship or danger in American space.29 The incidents are not only scripted as unplanned but as present only by chance and inessential to the traveling characters’ larger conception of themselves as people in control of what happens to them.30 Thomas Bailey Aldrich codes the train as an anomaly within Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and alien to the town’s deeper, more primordial and essential character; by invoking the motif of accident, Aldrich actually makes a value judgment about what belongs in his place and what does not, and in this instance, he privileges tradition over change. In a similarly politically loaded way, these incidents in which traveling characters lose their power, autonomy, or status are coded as accidental to their own identities. A narrative theorist might argue that this definition of accident is untenable because all events in a plot might count, for events unite into a plot mostly because they add to (or decrease from) instability.31 This caveat should be kept in mind; it means that the motif of accident cannot be equated with a reference to an actual event an insurer would care about. It also demonstrates that the notion of accident in narrative is a large topic because accident and narrative are inevitably intertwined concepts in ways that extend beyond the argument of any one book.

Local Color in the Postbellum System of Fiction Genres The motif of the regional travel accident is a turn within a larger narrative and not a genre in itself, but local color can be considered a genre. The terms local color and regionalism were used interchangeably in the 1870s and 1880s, but I use the term local color to refer to a genre important in the turnof-the-century period and the term regionalism to refer to a thematic concern shared by texts with different formal properties written in different time periods. I define genre according to both historicist and structuralist theories. Genres are considered to be loosely defined sets of formal characteristics and ideological propensities that operate within texts. They do not determine the texts in their entirety, but they do make the texts distinguishable from contemporaneous texts that competed for the same readers’ attentions.32 Genres represent a social contract between writers, publishers, and audiences, as writers agree to work within particular formal and thematic constraints, editors edit and package texts appropriately, and readers agree to read for particular

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Introduction

conceptions of time, space, morality, and entertainment.33 Genres do not have predictable political effects on all readers, but they do promote only a limited set of ideological directions to their implied readers.34 Not all of the incidents discussed in this book happen in novels that are typically classified within the genre of local color writing. The writers featured in this study include expected writers like Bret Harte, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Rose Terry Cooke and less expected ones like Rebecca Harding Davis, Thomas Detter, and William Dean Howells. These writers and texts have been selected in order to emphasize different aspects of the genre than critics have formerly emphasized. For the most part, literary historians have tended to cordon off local color writing from other literary genres and from larger historical trends. Some scholarship on local color has shown these truisms about generic parochialism to be misleading.35 The truisms are misleading partially simply because of the nature of genre, in which all texts mix genres: in the following chapters, for example, I suggest how some texts operate at the border of local color and travel writing, such as the sketches by Bret Harte and Thomas Detter, and at the border of local color and urban realism, such as the novels by William Dean Howells.36 But the truisms are also misleading, more importantly, because a more diverse set of authors tried their hand at local color writing than scholars have heretofore appreciated. Because this study considers the genre as major and connected to social life, and because it focuses on the place of the middleclass subject in the provinces, it focuses on a number of texts at the fuzzy borders of the genre. Urban-identified authors like William Dean Howells or Rebecca Harding Davis wrote a few tales about romantic rural settings that engage the motifs of the genre. They, too, helped shape the genre. Literary history has downplayed the presence of urban-identified, genteel writers in the genre, because the genre has usually been defined as minor and pastoral.37 Writers with significantly less class power, urban connections, and education, like the African American Westerner Thomas Detter, also engaged romantic descriptions of nature and strategically deployed dialect to artistic ends. His participation in the genre suggests that aestheticizing the act of belonging to a place appealed to a wider range of people than the prestigious Atlantic Monthly contributors. Detter also wrote essays about the economic potential of various cities; such essays were common in the arts and letters magazines of the time and should be considered more frequently in studies of local color. Studying marginal texts at the fuzzy borders of the genre reveals new things about the center of the genre. Specifically, the book finds more room for writers, whether male or female, or black or white, whose texts endorse the widened mental horizons and social opportunities of modern social life.

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These texts can help us read so-called traditional local color stories differently. For example, in short stories like Sarah Orne Jewett’s “The Life of Nancy” that are traditionally classified as local color, the writing is less cordoned off from social life than some criticism has formerly implied, but similarly, texts openly immersed in such issues as regional economic development, like Thomas Detter’s city essays, raise local color questions, such as how places can be represented, defined, and granted spiritual meaning, or who belongs to those places and how they come to do so. The book joins others in complicating the conventional understanding of the gender of the local color genre. Many of the critics who have contributed the most valuable work to local color scholarship have been feminists focusing on women writers. Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse in particular have divided the local color movement into sympathetic female writers and ironic male writers.38 Regardless of the sex of the writer, critics like Donna Campbell have argued persuasively that the local color genre is feminine. In contrast, this book demonstrates how male and female writers participated in a shared tradition. In many cases, monographs that study male and female writers side by side continue to place the women writers in the male tradition without attending to the depth of the female countertradition or its roots in popular literature or female experience. I seek to avoid that trap by showing how both rural local color and urban realism are strongly influenced by the feminine plot of feeding, entertaining, and caring for strangers. As a result, I challenge the conventional association between accident and manliness in the form of physical suffering, heroism, and adventure. A feminine dimension to accident narratives exists across time periods, and the traditionally feminine genre of local color explores its subtleties in both celebratory and mocking ways.

Accident, the Novel, and Modernity The motifs of accident in the following texts are shaped by both literary convention and changes in historical reality. Lost luggage and capsized carriages are examples of a motif found in both ancient romances and modern novels, akin to shipwrecks, kidnappings, or rescues. Margaret Doody, an innovative theorist of the ancient romance and the connections between the romance and the modern novel, identifies a trope common to both the romance and the novel in “the breaking trope.” The breaking trope as Doody defines it occurs early in a narrative, and it beckons readers to cut themselves off from their life and characters to embark on a journey toward rebirth. Like many prose critics, Doody uses the term “trope” to mean not only

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Introduction

a figure of rhetoric, but also a turn in narrative, rather than a turn in meaning, a method for directing the readers’ attention.39 This flexible terminology is appropriate for a discussion of the motifs in the unsystematic genre of the novel, including the novelistic motif of the regional travel accident, since the accident sometimes appears as an event in the plot, and at other times as a character (a tourist with a broken ankle, for example), and in all cases is not merely a theme, but a catalyst for further plot development. In the breaking trope, Doody argues, violence is intrinsic, but it is a “fetal” rather than a “phallic” violence, harsh, but generative of something new.40 After the break, characters embark on a painful but necessary transition and ritual of rebirth. The trope of the travel accident can be considered a subcategory of the breaking trope. In local color fiction, as in the romances of antiquity, characters generally survive their accidents. Death, as in Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s anecdote of the train coming to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is present, but repressed or forgotten. As Doody argues, while the romance might have borrowed the motif of the shipwreck from the epic, this habit of survival is part of what distinguishes the romance from the epic. While Nietzsche condemned the romance for its blind faith in the ordinary individual and his capacity for survival and self-determination, genre theorists of the romance from Northrop Frye to Frederic Jameson to Doody have found critical potential in the romance because of this very faith in the individual and his agency.41 At the same time, local color fiction is formally closer to the realist novel than it is to the ancient romance. While realism had the reputation in the mid-twentieth century of naively and passively portraying social life, theorists of realism from Georg Lukács to Amy Kaplan emphasize that the genre actively grapples with changes in social life.42 An important component of realism is its correction of the emotionalism, didacticism, and plot extravagance of antebellum sentimentalism. Local color fiction invokes accidents that are quotidian, small in scale, and akin to real-life occurrences. Characters who interpret these accidents often entertain notions of a divine explanation, but they usually settle on scientific explanations. Because the accidents in the ensuing texts are plausible, they appear to the readers to be real-life events. In these real-life events, the material world catches up with the idealistic tourist. More abstractly, the accident motif contributes to realism’s general focus on how social conditions radically influence and limit character motivation and destiny.43 While this aspect of realism has considerable strength as social critique, the narrative outcomes of the accidents often reveal the political weakness of realism: dramatic shifts in fortune and character rarely occur, and the accidents rarely effect long-lasting connections between strangers.

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The utopian possibilities of the trope, therefore, become most evident in texts that do not fulfill literary realism’s requirement of plausibility. While literary accidents are so often a ritual of rebirth, these particular literary accidents are often linked to the modern age: the texts show how romantic accident morphs into modern accident. Mishaps in transit symbolize the startling and unexpected effects of the expanded horizon of consciousness brought about by modernity’s expanded mental and physical horizons.44 The representations in the text of accidental meetings and friendships represent human commitments outside of the traditional foundations of family or religion. For example, as I argue in chapter 4 about The Undiscovered Country (1880), when a strange young man (Edward Ford) squeezes Egeria Boynton’s hand at a séance, his casual flirtation is made possible by the distended and anonymous nature of modern social life. Egeria’s father treats the incident as one more travel accident among others: it is a shocking consort with a stranger, it humiliates him, it happens while he is away from home and without a social place, and it links his fate to that of Ford. Ford even rather sardonically calls his own surreptitious fondling an “accident.”45 Social theorists such as Walter Benjamin have explored the prevalence of this type of fleeting interpersonal connection in modernity.46 The genre of realism is formally and thematically engaged in exploring such incidental, antifoundational commitments to other people.47 In the genre, social meaning appears as impermanent, and a fixed moral order does not determine the rightness of any given action. Together by Accident provides one case study of whether antifoundationalism fosters more inclusive and more egalitarian communities. In the texts, accidental social connections often do foster wider solidarities among characters. But at the same time, antifoundationalism encourages readers to value the experience of being swept away without a plan—and to substitute this experience for long-term attention to plans and the many banal aspects of the task of making a society just. If readers take this same glorification of helplessness into their political participation, they might impede good long-term governance. In the less rose-colored texts at the edges of the local color movement, motifs of travel accident are even more directly linked to modernity: they involve crushed iron and mangled limbs. Such narratives point to the hazards, more than the opportunities, of life in the modern age. As traffic on railroads and roads moved more swiftly, mishaps did not become more frequent, but they became far more deadly. Thus, beginning in the 1870s, mass transportation became associated with violence and chaos more than comfort or convenience. On average, travelers were less likely to suffer an accident on a streetcar than they were on a horse and wagon. The accidents, however, were

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Introduction

of a different order of magnitude; individuals had less ability to avert accident; and passengers on the rails posed a far greater risk to others.48 In many ways the motif of travel mishap is difficult to separate from other motifs that local color uses to focus on cross-class community—and no more striking. Local color literature devises many methods of bringing together strangers divided by class, race, ethnicity, or gender, which range from the motif of the visit between friends, the visit of a traveling salesman, or the native returning home, to the tall tale that a native tells a stranger. The literature’s representation of dialect works in a similar fashion: although dialect in fiction helps to polarize class and race hierarchies, dialect also holds the capacity to antagonize the genteel standard it ostensibly presupposes.49 But the motif of the regional travel accident is worthy of special focus because it emphasizes the amount of social upheaval that people think necessary before cross-class friendships can occur. When local color literature deploys the motif of accident, it reflects on society’s dependence on labor and the arbitrary, fleeting nature of socially prescribed status.

Local Color and Industrial Accident Scholars from many disciplines have plumbed the depths of the cultural rhetoric of accident in a number of interesting ways. The motif of accident appeared in a dazzling variety of literary and cultural genres—ranging from newspapers, folk ballads, postcards, or film, to staged rail accidents at amusement parks.50 Accidents did not mean the same thing in all of these genres, or even in every text within a genre. While the connection between the urban, virile topic of accident and the rural, attenuated, conflict-evasive genre of local color might seem a stretch, local color can actually contribute important insights to the general scholarly focus on accident in the age of modernity. For one, local color helps correct a focus on the bourgeois passenger in trauma theory’s use of actual transportation accidents. It has often been remarked that psychological trauma is at the very center of modern personhood.51 Physicians’ studies of railroad accident victims played a large role in the formation of the idea of psychological trauma; this is largely because of the money involved in bourgeois passengers’ law suits against the railroads. Some victims of accidents walked away unhurt and only later experienced symptoms like headaches, vague aches and pains, insomnia, or feelings of helplessness and dispossession. These symptoms were unknown to victims of carriage wrecks. Physicians called the new disease railway spine, and eventually they attributed the disease to psychological causes.52 This medical and

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cultural debate over railway spine was related to debates over neurasthenia, in which people had similar symptoms but could not attribute them to a single traumatic event. Both railway spine and neurasthenia help explain why tourists in local color fiction, like Annie in Charles Chesnutt’s conjure tales, often suffer from chronic melancholy or mysterious physical complaints, although it must be said that tourists left home to escape the yellow fever and other communicable physical diseases as well.53 At the same time, however, to focus so exclusively on these traveling characters’ “trauma” is to apply trauma theory with strokes that are rather broad. As Ruth Leys has written, some trauma theorists have argued that all modern subjects inhabit the space of the accident victim, and they have defined an “accident” to be a contingent and unpredictable occurrence, one without clear cause. They have not distinguished enough among victims or considered situations in which there is a clear person or process to blame.54 Mass transport accidents do not quite fit the generalized theory of accident, for they were occurrences in which poor government regulation of capitalist industries were clearly to blame, and all modern subjects did not inhabit the same space of being a traumatized victim. The poor were more likely to be injured by a streetcar or rail car: statistics show that working-class passengers, hobos, and trespassers on the rails (who were usually men looking for work) were hurt in far higher proportion than bourgeois passengers. Despite this imbalance, and distressingly, the symbolic accident victim that came to occupy Gilded Age newspaper readers’ attention was not the employee or the hobo who walked the rails.55 At least until the first decade of the twentieth century, the symbolic accident victim was the passenger. Although nearly all nineteenth-century people could afford to purchase a streetcar ticket or ride the train, the passenger is still symbolically closer to the middle or upper class than to the working class. In addition, newspaper readers and doctors generally assumed that victims of psychological distress would be desk workers and white, because these passengers were the most likely to receive medical attention, and white laborers and blacks were assumed to have stronger constitutions.56 Silas Weir Mitchell, founder of American neurology, acquaintance of Rebecca Harding Davis and doctor to Owen Wister, put a positive spin on this supposed bourgeois susceptibility to nervous shock; he associated an “intensified capacity to suffer” with “our process of being civilized.”57 The trope of work injury that appears in many permutations in working-class writing reveals the class myopia behind such bourgeois ruminations on the identity of and meaning of the nervous accident victim.58 The details of local color narratives also show up problems with thinking about trauma as a general and shared experience. In local color accidents,

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Introduction

injured characters often feel that their troubles define them, make them exceptional, and give them the license to vacation and sightsee. However, many (though not all) local color narratives critique such attitudes. They remove the reader’s focus from the injured traveler and his feeling of exceptionalism.59 Carew in Sarah Orne Jewett’s “The Life of Nancy” (1895) is marginalized to the point where the students to which I have taught the story do not even remember him. The story contrasts his twisted ankle to Nancy’s far more serious and far more memorable rheumatism, which is exacerbated by her physical and social distance from up-to-date medical help. The point of Carew’s accident is to make it possible for his friend Tom Aldis to meet people who are not travelers but who are also modern; the story is a critique of the bourgeois viewpoint rather than a commemoration of Carew as a modern subject. Local color accidents also remove the focus from the accident victim and his personal growth in order to focus on the dynamics of a group. This is part of what scholars of the genre mean when they say that the genre privileges the community over the individual. Because of the class differences and social conflicts between the characters, work is required to make the community run smoothly; the forcefulness of the accident symbolizes that work. In the time period in which local color stories were written, the rapid shrinking of time and space occurring because of the railroad would seem to make community building an inherently risky, and perhaps pointless, exercise—and at any rate, the presence of the traveler figure in the stories suggests that post-accident communities are fleeting and a mere substitute for the real thing. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, however, argues that all community building requires a moment of deliberate, risky activity and violence toward people or the environment.60 The accidents in local color literature refer partially to the generalizable violence in any community’s emergence, and partially to the specific conflict between classes in the Gilded Age. Similarly to the railroad ballads that feature engineers who valiantly choose whether to die at the wheel or save themselves from the fate that will greet the ignorant passengers on a train heading toward collision, local color literature offers stories of transportation and modernity that do not privilege the viewpoint of passengers. Local color literature also helps to correct the emphasis in studies of accident on the city. Walter Benjamin, a theorist who returned in several essays to the tropes of shock and industrial accident, speculates that modern experience has atrophied into a series of shocks because industrialism is too painful to gaze at directly and because the modern press isolates experience into a series of crises. Charles Baudelaire, Howells, and many readers of

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modern shock focus on the modern city.61 In Benjamin’s work on Baudelaire, he finds the experience of modern life best crystallized in the urban crowd, with its opportunities for chance meetings and passing glimpses of strangers. For Benjamin, the job of the modern writer is to protect us from modern life by imitating shocks and habituating consciousness to registering shocks so that they cease to seem traumatic.62 This seeking out of chance meetings and passing relationships appealed to Howells, who seems to nod to the lyric poet of Baudelaire’s “A Lost Halo” who loses his halo in the gutter, when, in A Hazard of New Fortunes, Basil March loses his suitably more prosaic hat while crossing the street. The incident portends not the loss of the conditions of possibility of the genre of realism, because the incident becomes an opportunity for social interaction (when March stops to retrieve the hat he meets his wealthy benefactor). Realist travel accidents set in rural locations also use shock to generate social narrative. They remind us that rural life was also caught up in an attenuated web of temporary relationships. Modern pressures are identifiable in local color fiction—characters are not in control of their movements, they suffer from vague complaints related to shattered psyches, and they are dependent on synchronic and random commitments to strangers. Local color fiction also uses mishaps and chance meetings to stop the current of history and interpret it from a more egalitarian perspective. Another discourse for contextualizing local color accident narratives is that of nineteenth-century theories of society and political economy. Marxists, capitalists, and Social Darwinists alike invoked the trope of shipwreck, trainwreck, carriage wreck, or industrial disaster to describe the contemporary crisis of capitalist society. Accidents in literary narrative often became a harbinger of the predicted social explosion, in which the working class rise and the bourgeois sink, in a more intense class slippage than Caroline Kirkland’s fictional bourgeois pioneers underwent when their buggy got stuck in the muck. By the late nineteenth century, there was a Social Darwinist dimension to such accidents: an accident removes the thin veneer of civilization and provides an opportunity for the fittest to prove their worth and for the weak to perish. Cultural historian Ralph Harrington, for one, reads the literary response to accident as a predominately Social Darwinist response. He writes, The railway, the great symbol of technological achievement, could, in a moment of catastrophe, strip the mantle of civilization from its passengers and make them revert to the level of beasts. Such themes are found in many contemporary works, from Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848) to George

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Gissing’s In the Year of the Jubilee (1894), but perhaps attained their most dramatic expression in Émile Zola’s La Bête Humaine (1890).63

This statement about how transportation accidents entered literature and the nature of the cultural work they did, however, is too linear and abrupt. It illustrates one of the common problems that result when interdisciplinary scholarship turns to literature without considering the whole system of literary production. Harrington’s periodizing erases minor genres, texts, or authors: both lowbrow genres like oral ballads of train wrecks and highbrow genres like local color literature. In contrast to Harrington, Richard Slotkin argues that this Darwinian view of reality was “no less partial, tendentious, and theoretical than the Christian idealism of reform-minded sentimentalists.”64 Social Darwinism was not a coherent ideology with a unified school of adherents and guaranteed political effects; socialists as well as liberals applied Darwin to promote the idea that civilized societies had the power to protect the weak.65 Darwin’s ideas were applied to social life to different political ends, and the fact that accident stories derive some of their meaning from Social Darwinism does not provide the only interpretive key to specific texts. The accidents in local color literature share more similarities with the rhetorical trope of disaster as used by Marxist and Progressive social reformers. Marxists and Progressives invoked tropes of transportation accident to galvanize the bourgeois against the harms of industrial capitalism and to change their cognition so that they can see the exploitation of others. In The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1844), Friedrich Engels compared society to an unseen shipwreck that is engulfing the poor through no fault of their own and that threatens to engulf the whole society. Rebecca Harding Davis invoked the same trope in a description of a news feature in Life in the Iron Mills (1861) to suggest that readers saw the wreck, but had consciences too sullied by sensational newspaper writing to care.66 In Looking Backward (1888), Edward Bellamy described society as a coach driving along a sandy and hilly road that is subject to constant bumps and jolts. Driven by hunger, the coach is pulled by the masses of humanity. At the top of the coach are comfortable seats filled with passengers who never get out and pull, even on the steepest of ascents. The only thing that prevents them from forgetting the masses altogether is their fear of the bumps and jolts, for often, one of their own slides out and loses his seat, never to gain it back. Occasionally the entire coach overturns.67 Like so many imaginative visions of industrialism, Bellamy’s novel mixes socialism with a belief in the transcendent purpose of the nation.68 Bellamy’s choice of a stagecoach rather than a train

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or ship is connected to his focus on solutions and hope; if society is a stagecoach, it can be righted easily, and an upset does not guarantee death. Stagecoaches also forced people into an uncomfortable intimacy that appealed to many champions of democracy. Nevertheless, Bellamy treats “the accident victim” far more suspiciously than do many trauma theorists. Walter Benjamin similarly suggested that industrialism smoothed out the lives of the middle and upper classes and encouraged them to forget about their dependence on other people’s labor, while the shocks of urban traffic threatened to expose the comfortable classes to the powerlessness with which workers were so obviously familiar.69 The transportation disaster, as opposed to the factory or mine explosion, illustrated how the bourgeois was also imperiled by industrialism. Some of the most notorious disasters of the industrial age remain in the collective memory of the twenty-first century as warnings about the hazards of reckless development: railroad wrecks so famous they were given names (the Revere Disaster, the Angola Horror); the Johnstown Flood of 1889, which occurred when a dam constructed for the sport of corporate magnates flooded over the humble homes of farmers and factory workers in the valley of Johnstown, Pennsylvania; the Galveston, Texas hurricane of 1900; the San Francisco earthquake of 1906; and the 1912 sinking of the Titanic.70 However, as scholars have noted, Gilded Age survivors were not always immediately overcome by a sense of their own hubris. They often wrote literature and histories that praised the community of good feeling born in the disaster and expressed sympathy for victims, but such narratives rarely translated into safer or more egalitarian social policy.71 Furthermore, capitalists found reasons to interpret disasters as a sign that capitalism is the best moderator of nature’s cruelty. Kevin Rosario shows how members of the nineteenth-century capitalist class actually praised the destruction wrought by natural disasters because it paved the way for new development.72 The research into the rhetorical use of disaster by theorists of political economy has shown that people of a range of political opinions are drawn to the rhetorical trope of disaster. Different subtleties in the trope support different beliefs about justice and human nature. When invoking a disaster trope, capitalists hope that the bourgeois will work harder to secure their own position, while Marxists hope that the bourgeois will come to see the value in sharing seats with workers. In order for the Marxist or capitalist reading of the disaster to work, both theories of political economy require readers who are willing to see the world the way the theorists do and accept their arguments about human nature. It is only because capitalism remains in power in the United States that the Marxist trope of disaster, including the partially

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Introduction

Marxist trope of accidents in local color fiction, strikes many contemporary readers as utopian. The contrast of usages shows that one should separate one’s ideas about the meaning or potential of a specific technology from its use under a particular politico-economic system. The contrast also shows that doubt is warranted. Historians like Carl Smith and David McCullough have sometimes implied that people are not very capable of deriving longstanding pedagogical value from disasters. Although having more sympathy with the Marxist interpretation of disaster, I find that the sheer proliferation of uses of the trope makes it necessary to say that the trope of disaster has little inherent meaning. Nevertheless, when storytellers give meaning and intention to an event that is by definition unintended, they can provide value, both in practical consolation and far-ranging intellectual vision. Thus, the mishaps in local color literature do indeed draw from earlier literature, but they also have a modern dimension. They refer to the historically specific concern with neurasthenia and nervous shock, and often participate in the cultivation of neurosthenia among the bourgeois. At the same time they also offer something new to the literature on nervous shock by putting nervous people in the context of others who lack the social credentials for obtaining a diagnosis for nervousness. Given that athletes and vacationers who suffer from ailments are often marginalized in the stories, local color literature offers a critique of the bourgeois accident victim, a kind of staged literary comeuppance. Finally, local color literature brings modern life to the country and shows that country life can also be characterized by an increased but attenuated sense of personal causality and fleeting commitments to people outside one’s kin group.

Chapter Overviews By going back to the earliest critical discussions of the local color movement, the first chapter discusses how what is defined as aesthetically and politically worthy local color writing has always been a matter for dissent, both in the criticism and in the writing itself, especially when literary traditions associated with different regions are taken into account. When the genre came to be preserved in the early twentieth century, writers and editors assumed that poor, unskilled, and uneducated people were the most legitimately regional. Yet the writing itself continually depicts conflicts between regional characters of varying levels of education, financial security, and social connections. To illustrate this point, the chapter examines Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? (1839), Eliza Farnham’s Life in Prairie Land (1846), and Rose Terry Cooke’s “Miss Lucinda” (1861). All three texts invoke accident

Introduction 

27

motifs as if to ensure that middle-class characters are peacefully and inoffensively integrated into provincial environments. The earlier two texts are really proto-local color narratives that could be, and sometimes are, categorized as overland narratives of frontier settlement. The similarities between the three texts suggests that the motif in local color literature evolved partially out of women’s literature and overland narratives; the latter type of writing, like local color, lends plot and meaning to the question of why people come to settle in a particular place. The second chapter traces another “source” of the motif in local color literature, tourist tales, as they are used and reconfigured in stories and sketches by Bret Harte and Sarah Orne Jewett. Unlike Harte’s and Jewett’s better known work, the texts discussed in this chapter comment directly on how commercialized tourism has changed the local economy and society. As an organized tourist industry emerged in many areas of the nation in the 1850s and 1860s, travel writers and journalists began to focus on the newly antiquated feel of receiving assistance, food, or shelter from people outside of this industry. Different writers co-opted the ideological potential of these stories for different purposes. The stories of spontaneous hospitality that appeared in the arts and letters magazines focused more and more on such moments as opportunities for illustrating the sightseer’s superior modernity. In contrast, Harte and Jewett themselves encourage readers to feel like they are bumping up against people who are as modern as themselves. Chapter 3 examines texts by Rebecca Harding Davis and Thomas Detter that add a critical twist to the motif of the thwarted traveler who is spiritually healed through a travel accident. Detter works within the conventions of Western local color that were established in part by Harte, while Davis deploys some of the conventions established by Stowe, Jewett, and other New England local colorists. In different ways, their texts dampen the genre’s celebration of travel delay. In these texts rural, upwardly mobile figures express a desire not to be caught in regional travel accidents. Davis’s rural white women characters and Detter, who writes more or less autobiographically as a black gentleman who has traveled the country, express fear that regional backwaters will keep them in their current states, without contact to cultural resources or political power. The texts critique the elitism of tourism, but, perhaps surprisingly, they do not advocate the end of travel, modernization, or tourism, but rather its spread. Chapter 4 considers the close relation between rural local color and urban realism. In Howells’s fiction of the 1880s, we find a complicated aesthetic of accident. Through chance meetings, injuries during travel, and feelings of accidental entanglement, his fiction fosters cognitive and emotional connections

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Introduction

between people who do not share a history, community, family, or political party. His novels respond to the modern tension between community and migration in both country and city by positing the viability of temporary emotional coalitions and incidental responsibility outside the obligations of religion or state in both his country and city novels. The chapter traces the similarities and differences between the way that Howells deploys accident motifs in his country novels and city novels. At first examination, this “realist” and “urban” writer seems to debunk the rose-colored vision of local color, as these accident devices fail to foster lasting social connections, and the novels, particularly the city novels, emphasize that social fragmentation cannot be combated with serendipitous meetings alone. The city novels contrast accidental activists unfavorably with socialists and reformers: accidental activists are redeemed by the random meetings of modernity, but socialists are crushed in similar events. While Howells’s novels provide a valuable critique of accidental activism, in the final analysis, it becomes clear that his realist, urban novels are structured by the very hopefulness they call into question. While explaining what this contrast meant for Howells’s novels specifically, the chapter also comments on the general project of comparing optimistic and pessimistic readings of accidental social connections that occupies this book. Most of the texts discussed in the book are lesser known stories or novels by their authors. It would be inadvisable to pose theories of why a motif appears where it does or why some novels become more popular or critically acclaimed than others. Perhaps the motif’s very conventionality made it inappropriate for novels that achieved the originality and depth of character that editors and reviewers expected at the time, or perhaps the social issues raised by the motif were so alarming that authors could not extend stories generated by regional accidents into fully fledged literary masterpieces worthy of canonization; an exception is Moby-Dick (1851), but that novel takes place not in a subordinate place but in a sublime place, the ocean, so clearly threatening to national control and supremacy. It is also impossible to know whether the authors were conscious of the cultural work they were engaging in when deploying motifs of travel accident; as I discuss in the following chapter, some authors betray a sense of the conventionality of the motif, though not of its cultural work. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, however, is a partial and interesting exception. Phelps used motifs of travel accident continually—in her serious writing, in her hack writing for money, in her early utopian writing and late cynical writing. She exhibited a multi-faceted interest not only in travel accident, but the moral and metaphorical narrative potential of injury, invalidism, and disaster more generally. As in the fiction of other authors studied in this

Introduction 

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book, accidents in Phelps’s fiction figure intimacy among strangers in places characterized by moving people, ideas, and capital. But her plots and devices continually point toward the social explosion that seemed necessary for such conversations to occur and are unusually positive about such explosion. Because the motif was so central to Phelps’s oeuvre, and because archival material on Phelps’s relations to her editors is extensive, it is possible in chapter 5 to pose theories about Phelps’s motivation for using the motifs. Phelps’s accidents are tied to Christian sentimentalism: they punish the rich and reckless, showcase the strength of small-town middle-class women eager for an intellectual proving ground, and reward the poor and dutiful with the promise of an afterlife. Phelps’s fiction provides a specific and telling link between the high literary fiction of the nineteenth century and the mass culture of the twentieth. Although local color literature ceased to be a culturally powerful genre in the twentieth century, other high and low genres picked up and reconfigured the motif of the regional travel accident, and the motif has undergone extreme and interesting vicissitudes. The epilogue discusses some of these shifts.

C H A P T E R

O N E



Can the Genteel Writer Write the Local Novel?: Caroline Kirkland, Eliza Farnham, and Rose Terry Cooke

Although regionalism has interested scholars in many fields lately, literary scholars have approached the postbellum local color movement with a degree of caution.1 One of their major worries is that local color writers were primarily middle-class people who viewed their material from above and addressed their writing to outside readers rather than the people of their region. In a telling aside, one prominent critic rejects the notion that local color literature can be defined as regionalism at all, since it was not produced by and for communities, but by “upper-class writers who had what they thought was intimate contact with the dialect speakers of their locality.”2 As is common in genre criticism, this view combines definition with evaluation, and it does so, moreover, only by imposing a 1930s definition of regionalism on an earlier movement, a movement from a time when nearly all literary genres were produced within and for the middle and upper classes. Some critics view the nationalist and even imperialist strands in local color literature as opportunities for new readings of the literature’s surprisingly ambitious aims.3 Most, however, fault proponents of the genre and sometimes the writers themselves for being ideologically blind.4 Underlying sophisticated and valuable literary critical arguments about local color are sometimes problematic accusations like these: while local color writers are praised for investing humble lives with dignity, they were actually feeding elite appetites for images of oddity and ignorance, and by doing so, were paving the way for their own entry into a cultural elite with national affiliations. While local color writers are renowned for preserving

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Chapter One

byways in danger of modernization and standardization, they were actually creating nostalgia for the very ways of life that people of their cultural standing were helping to erase. Thus writing local color served as a paradoxical form of class and national consolidation—and one that exhibited a certain naiveté. This chapter argues to the contrary that both literary texts that participate in the genre and many of the literary-historical overviews of the genre communicate an anxiety about how to write justly about a region and still be middle class. Both the literature and the criticism have dealt with this question of elite belonging in the regions in interesting ways. The chapter examines the analogy between nineteenth-century local color writing and the activity of tourism. While agreeing that the genre is largely middle class in its production, distribution, and aesthetics, I point to ways in which the standard practices of tourism differed from the writing. In the second part of the chapter I show how some early local color narratives invoke accident tropes to integrate middle-class women and men into provincial environments. I chose three narratives by women writers to complicate the equation between accidents, adventure, and manhood. My readings attempt to show that women’s use of the trope is distinct from an expression of sympathy to subordinate people, a sympathy that has been associated with both women local color writers and feminist literary critics.

Writing and Reading Good Regional Literature The local color genre was never defined in a systematic way. The term local color was first applied to French writing of the 1830s that combined romanticism, realism, and exoticism.5 In both France and the United States, the genre was often inseparable from the genre of realism, as both urban and rural writing contended with the task of representing the effects of modernization across space.6 Thomas Bailey Aldrich and Rebecca Harding Davis associated U.S. local color with intense, densely detailed, dignified descriptions of humble spinsters in New England who were left behind when industrialization and able-bodied men moved westward.7 These spinsters often embodied middle-class rather than working-class values, values like frugality, cleanliness, domesticity, and a work ethic, often to the point of pathology. In contrast, William Dean Howells’s definition of the movement conflates lower class status with Westernness in ways are inaccurate at best.8 In Literary Friends and Acquaintance (1900), Howells associated the movement with Western or Southern writers who successfully challenged the New England politics and customs that had predominated in Bostonian literary circles,

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writers including Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Constance Fenimore Woolson, James Whitcomb Riley, Edith Thomas, Octave Thanet, and Hamlin Garland.9 Most of these writers were also middle class by virtue of their income level, occupation, or activities. Somewhat in contradiction, Howells associated the movement with any writer who wrote about poor but decent folk, including the New Englander Mary Wilkins Freeman or the immigrant writer Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson.10 Many of the stated or unstated questions that continue to plague literary criticism on local color were approached in the 1870s and 1880s but were not answered, including whether local color widens the bounds of representation across geographical, class, or ethnic lines, and whether middle-class writers can be worthy local color writers. By the 1890s, the local color genre had fallen out of favor with authors and reviewers, largely because it mixed middle-class values and egalitarian subject matter. Some reviewers rejected the genre’s egalitarian impulses because they feared race or class rebellion. Paradoxically, many other reviewers and young authors complained that the genre was too genteel in its values and its form, with its authors turning working-class characters into clowns and avoiding cruder topics like money, labor rebellion, sex, or violence.11 When literary historians came to preserve the genre in the early twentieth century, however, they increasingly assumed that poor, uneducated, or working-class people were the most legitimately regional. At the level of history, literary historians’ claims about who most justly belongs in the regions and can speak for them can be disputed. In the nineteenth century, laborers, tenant farmers, servants, or even skilled artisans had the least control over where they lived or how that place was organized or defined. Christine Pawley’s analysis of Osage, Iowa, demonstrates how one powerful rhetoric about the identity of the local community was produced not by working-class inhabitants, but by a select group of middle-class Protestant Anglophones who enjoyed nearly complete control of the schools, libraries, banks, churches, voluntary organizations, and newspapers.12 In most parts of the country, agricultural and industrial workers moved often, lived in rented rooms, or were separated from other members of their family by seasonal work. In most towns, over half of the residents no longer lived in the same area after ten years.13 Thus, arguably, middle- and upper-class people were generally just as local as people in the lower classes, and in some senses, perhaps more so. In the second encyclopedic history of American literature (Literary History of the United States [1946]), two essays discuss nineteenth-century local color literature, Carlos Baker’s “Delineation of Life and Character” and Wallace Stegner’s “Western Record and Romance.” Both critics wonder how writers could be middle class, and thus sufficiently versed in the traditional

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techniques of literature, and yet capable of capturing the essence of the cruder and more authentic elements of regional life. Significantly, they referred to failed regional fiction as a form of tourism.14 Stegner faults writers for writing about “the common man” from the outside, and encourages critics to read nonfiction by geologists, explorers, surveyors, mountain climbers, and naturalists to get a truer and fuller picture of the region.15 In contrast, Baker assumes that writers inevitably approach their material from above, but not because of their biographical credentials, but because of the nature of the literary form. In Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven (1877), he maintains, “the narrator seems (though she was not) a summer resident in search of the quaint and unique; without looking down on the people she is never quite at one with them, and her experiments with scenes are sometimes tentative and unsure” (846).16 In The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), though, the same author achieved depth of sympathetic involvement and weightiness of detail. Baker’s point is important to contest claims that good regional writing is a natural effect of geographical rootedness or democratic politics; it requires literary skill. And the literary skill required involves both sympathy and control. Baker’s definition of literary skill requires knowledge of the tourist perspective but a literary rather than biographical capacity for moving beyond it to create images that are wide and deep. The same question about whether middle-class people can write good regional literature and still be middle class plagues critics today. This problematic characterizes a 1982 anthology edited by Leonore Hoffman and Deborah Rosenfelt, entitled Teaching Women’s Literature from a Regional Perspective. The volume is worth discussing at length here because while some feminist work of the 1980s and 1990s assumes a natural fit between women writers, regions, and sympathy for subordinate people, contributors to this volume explain their choices and voice their disagreements. The volume shares concerns with the heritage revival of the 1960s. In a departure from earlier literary historians, contributors firmly define regionalism as literary or extra-literary writing with local rather than translocal relevance. Entries examine texts by poor writers, black writers, and immigrant writers. The word “region” operates as a tool for forging alliances within a locality apart from the exclusionary alliance of family ties. Contributors struggle over how to judge upperclass white writers who depict the black poor in demeaning ways. They discuss how to combine aesthetic with political judgment. They quietly disagree over whether women writers are necessarily more virtuous or sympathetic than male writers. This is important, because the historicists of the 1990s sometimes dismissed earlier feminist scholarship as if it were monolithically celebratory of female culture and narrative strategies of sympathy, or as if the

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sympathy approach were the only existing alternative to their own.17 Yet many of the contributors in this volume draw from socialist and black feminist literary theory.18 On the anthology’s pages, however, one central assumption is rarely interrogated explicitly—that students are local while professors are alienated from their locality. Hoffman states that the project is “based on the assumption that the teaching of literature would be improved if students read works close to their own experiences and lives rather than those currently in the literary canon and actively participated in the recovery and presentation of these works.”19 Many of the contributors mention that most of the students in the state universities where they work are related to long-term residents in the area and will necessarily lose touch with the locality through upward mobility and a university education. In contrast, most professors do not identify their own geographical roots, and they discuss teaching from a regional perspective as a pedagogical approach that does not come naturally to them, that involves a steep learning curve. In doing so, the professors are simply responding to a material reality of twentieth-century life over which they have little control. The social classes in the United States have always been defined through their differing relation to space. Historian Robert Wiebe has written about this process most thoroughly: early in the nineteenth century, the nation was divided between elites based in a single city, a middle class of independent farmers and skilled laborers that was also locally based, and a multi-ethnic lower class holding the least rewarding jobs and the least secure stake on a place. By 1900, these class relations shifted into a national class, a local middle class, and a sinking lower class. The national class (which other scholars often call the professional managerial class) drew employment and cultural authority from a rhetoric of efficiency and science and were even more translocally identified than the mid-century middle class. The local middle class drew its power from local politics and tangible assets like real estate.20 Thus when the professors admit their ignorance about their locality, they simply acknowledge their primary affiliation with the national class—as embodied by such associations as the Modern Language Association, who in fact commissioned the anthology and the project it records through the MLA Commission on the Status of Women. At the same time, however, some of the contributors seem to be working to strengthen this set of class relations by encouraging students they identify as lower in class status (or “upwardly mobile”) to reacquaint themselves with what is usually identified as only the students’ place, geographically and socially. For example, Margaret Jones Bolsterli, who was working at the University of Arkansas, describes how her students have become “culturally ‘as

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smooth as eggs’” as a result of their families’ getting off the farm to work in the war plants of World War II. Ashamed of their former poverty, the students have lost access to their family’s past and lack a sense of their own identity.21 Unlike most contributors, however, Bolsterli identifies herself as a graduate of the same university and asserts that a formal course strengthens her own appreciation of the region’s complexities as well. Thus the anthology plays out an ethical dilemma. To write or read regional literature is to devise a comprehensive view of a region that takes into account interactions between people and politics, economics, religion, and geology, and to give working people a voice. Therefore it is an act associated with good citizenship and justice for all people. But lower class people have more direct access to this regional comprehensive view, so upwardly mobile college students and professors are obligated to view their own attempts as partial at best. It is possible that while some scholars who pick up the anthology will make an effort to recuperate formerly suppressed voices from their region of residence or long-term roots, many scholars will prefer to remain culturally as “smooth as eggs.” Doing otherwise threatens their class affiliation via threatening their sense of what makes them authoritative and virtuous. To be sure, many contributors find useful ways out of the ethical dilemmas raised by the project. Gloria Hull at the University of Delaware studied Alice Dunbar-Nelson, who only lived part of her life in Hull’s residential state of Delaware, and Hull was content that students recognized references to Delaware’s present rather than its past.22 In Barbara Hilyer Davis’s course, a regional perspective required coming to terms with racial guilt, another source of shame over one’s spatial identity. Her Oklahoma students shared the feeling of being outsiders, not only because of contemporary social inequality, but also because of Indian relocation and frontier settlement, which had taken place in Oklahoma in some of their lifetimes.23 Elizabeth Hampsten notes that poverty means “rootlessness.”24 Adele Friedman designed her class around foreign-born women in California.25 Part of the challenge for the anthology, one that it faces mostly very well, was to theorize region across sites with different migration histories and racial atrocities, a problem that plagues any definition of American regionalism. A better theory of cultural regions, however, would question whether residents in most U.S. cultural regions are rooted in the region and include those residents who are committed to the place as one social site among others. The anthology Teaching Women’s Literature from a Regional Perspective goes far toward reaching that conclusion, but not far enough.

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Some of the critical writing of the 1990s, in contrast, attributed a naiveté to earlier proponents of regional literature. Arguments about the illegitimacy of middle-class writers or critics in regionalism rose to prominence.26 Although scholars debated many issues, such as the genre’s connections with imperialism, ethnography, and populism, the assertion that the genre was scandalously no better than tourism became a jokey but cutting insult.27 As I mentioned earlier, earlier critics had recognized the similarities between travel writing and local color literature. Yet only critics of the 1990s implied that local color writers were not aware of the connections between their activities and tourism. Amy Kaplan and Richard Brodhead wrote early statements that exemplify this new turn in local color criticism, although their arguments differ somewhat. Amy Kaplan acknowledges that local color literature served a range of cultural functions, even though she criticizes the tendency within local color for fostering urban escapism as “literary tourism.”28 In contrast, Richard Brodhead views tourism as the main function of the genre. Unlike Kaplan, Brodhead bases his argument on the cultural location in which local color literature was indeed often first distributed and read, the quality magazines that followed the style of the Atlantic Monthly. He argues that the readers of such magazines cultivated their ideas of their own superiority and modernity by reading travel literature about primitive cultures abroad and fiction about primitive subcultures nearby. Other critics have partially corroborated and partially refined Brodhead’s claims about the audience for which local color was intended. While Nancy Glazener acknowledges occasional skirmishes between the elites based in different cities, June Howard traces more sustained differences between the Atlantic and the New York–based Harper’s Monthly, which “never became so strictly highbrow as the Atlantic; it included the same prestigious writers but put them in a more mixed setting.”29 Other recent research shows that local color literature was disseminated in a variety of newspapers and magazines to wide secondary audiences who were encouraged to read—and actually did read—the literature against the prescriptions of the national elite.30 As fruitful as these reception studies have been at showing the porousness of the high/low generic divides and the ability of the nineteenth-century audiences to read creatively and in resistant ways, the central equation between the tourist and the local color writer still deserves re-examination.31 Kaplan’s and Brodhead’s tourists are merely metaphors. Kaplan follows Dean MacCannell’s characterization of the tourist as the proverbial average man, a modern subject who believes that “reality and authenticity” are “elsewhere: in other historical periods and other cultures, in purer, simpler lifestyles.”32

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While Kaplan’s metaphor of the tourist summons up images of awkward dupes of modernization, Brodhead’s tourist, who partakes of regional hamlets and European cities with equivalent ease, summons up the ideal traveler of modern critical theory.33 Actual travelers sometimes resembled one of these models or the other, but they rarely fitted either profile perfectly. They varied in their social status, in their physical ability, and in their motivations. The writers discussed in this study imagined that tourism could become not elite and exploitative but a ubiquitous, stimulating reciprocal exchange of communitarian feeling and money. Sometimes, for some people operating small-town hotels or restaurants, as well as some tourists, it seemed to be such a mutually beneficial activity. The accumulative effect of tourism has been difficult to summarize.

Touring Well Thus, the literary criticism of local color literature can benefit from a finer and denser understanding of tourism. Close readings alone will not yield this insight. Textual correspondence to extra-textual forces is not just historical background useful for archivists but part of the text’s past and present cultural work. On this topic, literary critics are profiting from interdisciplinary work coming out of cultural geography, agricultural history, and regional history. Attention to geographic space, contextualized within discussions of human action, including state and national politics and economics, proffers a more pungent intersection between literature and tourism than that engendered by discussions of journey metaphors and motifs in the writing alone. One prominent historian, Patricia Nelson Limerick, notes that the demonic figure of the tourist provides historians with a scapegoat upon which to impose their own anxieties about holding middle-class occupations and thus being outsiders to the authentic region or poachers of its untouched cultures.34 One can add to Limerick’s analysis that anxiety about tourism is often anxiety about being part of the national class. Or it might mask anxiety about not being part of the national class, of possibly belonging to a place as an immobilized insider, and therefore not being a very good intellectual. Furthermore, anxiety about tourism often masks a Puritanical disapproval of pleasure. In this way, it is no accident that intellectuals’ ambivalence toward regionalism, which is associated with poor, downtrodden people who are the caretakers for the nation’s virtue, is connected to their ambivalence toward tourism; intellectuals feel that one can be either a pleasure seeker or a regional subject, but not both.

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Before the Civil War, the effects of tourism upon most U.S. regional economies and cultures was small. During the colonial period, only a very small group of elite colonials and foreigners could vacation or sightsee. In the 1820s, it became common for the wealthy to frequent spas and seaside resorts. Most visitors to the resorts identified their primary motivation as health; they left urban areas in order cure gout, sleeplessness, or diarrhea, or to avoid summer epidemics of cholera and yellow fever. Sightseers visited not only natural formations like Niagara Falls or Mammoth Cave but also monuments of civic progress like city halls and prisons.35 Just before the Civil War, touring and vacationing became more accessible to men, women, and children of the middle class. This partial democratization occurred because unlike farmers, clerks, schoolteachers, journalists, and government officials could arrange for time off. By late in the century, most firms gave white-collar staff at least one week of paid vacation. Less expensive and faster modes of transport made quick week-long excursions possible. In contrast, the working class and agricultural workers did not vacation until the twentieth century. Although some employers and charitable organizations established country cottages where workers were expected to combine cultural uplift with the restoration of their health and strength, the vast majority of industrial workers were not given paid time off until after the labor shortages of World War I in the 1920s and 1930s. While the wealthy could roam the country looking for a cure for their physical and psychological ailments, poor people usually suffered where they were. Sight-seeing and vacationing were also more difficult for ethnic minorities. As discussed further in chapter 4, wealthy blacks, Jews, and other minorities needed to rely on hoteliers of their own group when traveling and relaxing.36 After the Civil War, not only the tourists, but also the activities involved in sightseeing and vacationing diversified. Religious leaders encouraged ventures from the cities by arguing that vacations were spiritually rejuvenating. For middle-class vacationers still uneasy about sinful recreation, Lake Chautauqua’s summer adult education classes in art, music, and literature were established in 1874, and by the turn of the century, about two hundred similar programs were held across the country. The middle classes began to admire physical valor for men and women, and bicycling and gymnastics became popular. People traveled to cities to visit exhibitions, institutions of high culture, wealthy neighborhoods, and picturesque immigrant slums. This interest in and availability of tourism spread across the United States far beyond the sphere of influence of the New York, Boston, or Philadelphian elite; in this sense, tourism became regional rather than national in character.37

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Far more so than antebellum tourism, postbellum tourism changed the nature of regional economies and cultures. It helped convert formerly autonomous agricultural, mining, ranching, or shipping communities, as well as areas still inhabited by Indians, to a standardized service economy. Vacationers themselves became shaped by the experience, as tour operators tried to make them glamorous, and Chautauqua camp organizers tried to educate them. This aspect of vacationing is important, in that writers who view locals with an ignorant or apolitical gaze are not simply being bad individuals but rather expressing a group power relationship, both their power over the poor and the industry’s power over them.38 The connections between local color writing, sightseeing, and vacationing are countless and conspicuous. With the exceptions of Sarah Orne Jewett, Caroline Kirkland, Rose Terry Cooke, and Eliza Farnham, all the writers discussed in this study wrote sketches, travel books, or stories in order to get their vacation expenses paid. Only after their writing earned them financial independence did Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and William Dean Howells embark on the activity of searching for the perfect summering and wintering destinations. Davis wrote about industrial capitalism and the plight of the slave and the freedman, but she also wrote pastoral fiction and essays that drew on her summer trips to Point Pleasant in New Jersey, along the seashore of Delaware Bay, and in the Allegheny Mountains such as “Out of the Sea” (1865), Earthen Pitchers (1873-74), “The Yares of Black Mountain” (1875), “The House on the Beach” (1876), and “By-Paths in the Mountains” (1880). The Phelps texts that fall most neatly into the category of local color writing, The Madonna of the Tubs (1887) and “Jack” (1887), are set in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where Phelps summered only after writing the bestselling The Gates Ajar (1868). Owen Wister turned the writing that was prescribed as part of his West Cure for nervousness into The Virginian (1901).39 Actual tourism often focused on pleasure, relaxation, glamour, or physical valor. In contrast, fictional narratives of travelers who are obliged to interact with humble people operated as a forced look back to a slower and apparently more democratic type of touring. By the 1870s, interacting with locals of other social and cultural ranks became an unusual experience to reflect upon and treasure. For this reason, literary critic Dorothy Webb argues that local color characters who interact with and adopt the norms of the communities they are visiting seem to aspire to explorer status.40 Such characters arguably resemble the real life middle-class people identified by Paul Fussell as “antitourists,” those who shirked the most common tourist sites in favor of others frequented by locals of a discerning sort.41 Real tourists who ended up in

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squalid villages might have identified themselves as “travelers” or “antitourists.” Such an attempt to gain distinction in an age when tourism was becoming a cliché, when writers of travel books worried about entering a saturated market, undeniably informs local color writing. I agree with these critics’ descriptions of the class politics of the writing, but I depart from their method of reading the writing. Their readings focus on the traveler, even if they emphasize his or her bourgeois blindness and vanity. In contrast, I show how such motifs represent something other than traveler desire for deeper and more meaningful, or even more invigorating, knowledge about a place. The motifs represent a traveler bumping up against a competing cultural system and being forced to work within that system’s norms. For the writers, there were simply easier and more certain ways of gaining literary respect and cultural prestige than deploying fop-in-the-country motifs similar to that illustrated in figure 1.1. For twenty-first-century readers, it is possible to look over the

Figure 1.1. “The Dismal Wilderness,” illustration for “The Raquette Club” by Charles Hallock, Harper’s Monthly 41.243 (August 1870): 321. Courtesy of Cartoon Research Library, The Ohio State University. Depending on a person’s social status, physical ability, or taste, the fellow in the pond might appear obnoxious, brotherly, sinister, pitiful, or vulgar. Like the rube in the city, the figure serves to express anxieties about proper comportment in an unfamiliar setting.

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ironic shoulders of a jaded traveler and see beyond his frame of reference. When readers do so, they produce critical regionalism.42

Writing the Middle-Class Self into the Region Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? (1839), Eliza Farnham’s Life in Prairie Land (1846), and Rose Terry Cooke’s “Miss Lucinda” (1861) invoke motifs of interrupted and disturbed travel in order for the writers to write themselves or other middle-class people into provincial environments dominated by people who are skeptical about the value of book learning and middle-class manners. The texts feature travel for the purposes of migration rather than pleasure; indeed, the novels and short story serve as extended answers to the question, often so difficult to answer, of why a particular person has settled in a particular place. Since the migrating characters have class aspirations and use them to claim superiority over their neighbors, these characters function as agents of urbanization and modernization, though they exhibit and express very different degrees of middle-class power. Kirkland’s and Farnham’s protagonists are semi-autobiographical, although the characters are separable from the writers themselves. Cooke’s “Miss Lucinda” is more straightforwardly a fictional representation of a regional middle-class lady. The narratives detail negotiations between middle-class characters who seek to draw a class line between themselves and their neighbors at the same time as they reveal a more secret desire to belong as equals rather than class superiors. Meanwhile, the neighbors do not honor that line; they view the middle-class figures as not particularly special and sometimes as downright humorous. Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? is a novel inspired by Kirkland’s own move from Detroit to Pinckney, Michigan, where she and her husband lived between 1837 and 1843. Eliza Farnham’s Life in Prairie Land similarly fictionalizes the author’s own move to Tazewell County, Illinois, where Farnham lived between 1836 and 1840. Both writers were from New York state, and they wrote for an audience of refined readers back home in the Northeast or possibly Europe who might be contemplating their own relocation along the frontier. Although French hunters and lower class Anglo families had occupied these prairielands and swamplands since the seventeenth century, the earlier frontiersmen built few churches or schools. In contrast, Kirkland and Farnham were part of a wave of higher income migrants who brought such institutions with them in the wake of the final defeat of the prairie Indians in the Black Hawk War of 1832 and a nationwide economic depression.43 Thus, these places were undergoing a dramatic

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change in local character when Kirkland and Farnham were writing, and Kirkland and Farnham, both in person and as writers, were typical of the nationally identified middle-class people who were busy with the process of shaping and laying claim over these places. A New Home, Who’ll Follow? and Life in Prairie Land participated in this process of changing local character. The novels illustrate that white women’s narratives about place are often ideologically mixed: they criticize the imperialist and capitalist nature of westward expansion even as their writers participate in the process. Both novels are structured by tropes of falling. These tropes do the work of dispelling Eastern idealism and warning prospective migrants about the hardships and moral ambiguity of moving westward. They provide a physical analogue to the mental process of adapting to a new community that disappoints yet excites. In Kirkland’s text, the first trope of falling is when the heroine Mary Clavers encounters a Michigan mud hole. Before encountering the mud hole, Mrs. Clavers had “some floating idea of ‘driving a baroucheand-four anywhere through the oak-openings,’” but the mud hole teaches her that emigrants should drive only heavy lumber-wagons and that paper-soled ladies’ shoes will not survive the state of the roads.44 The mud hole also places Mrs. Clavers under obligation to another human being who knows more about the local topography. In keeping with the class critique of the text, as well as the rose-colored lens of the nascent local color genre, it is a dialect-speaking hunter who helps her, and although he initially appears fearful, he proves to be soft spoken and polite. Eliza Farnham’s novel describes a similar encounter with a “slue” (more commonly spelt “slough” as in the slough of despond from The Pilgrim’s Progress [1678]), which interrupts her admiration of the prairie. Just after Farnham exclaims over her first precious glimpse of the much storied prairie—“I can never forget the thrill which this first unbounded view on a prairie gave me”—the trees close in, the turf grows soft and wet, and she receives a “practical demonstration, much more impressive than the most eloquent description.”45 Her wagon approaches a long narrow line of stagnant water, and the driver plunges forward, only to get stuck. This contrast between pretension and material reality is an important part of the organizing structure of both novels.46 The lesson learned in both Kirkland’s and Farnham’s novels is that moving to Michigan or Illinois is more difficult, more estranging, and more damaging to one’s respectability than promotional writers acknowledge. Kirkland’s and Farnham’s allusions to swamps draw on long-standing literary convention even as they reflect on the material realities of a largely undeveloped frontier. As Margaret Doody has written, marshes, mud, and sloughs, not only in Pilgrim’s Progress but in countless other novels as well,

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serve as symbolic points of embarkation rather than geological features.47 Doody argues that these features represent an individual’s plunge into a world of immanence. By plunging into the world of immanence, characters liberate themselves from their born identities and gain knowledge, not by descending into egotism, but by becoming curious about other individuals. One can see how the mud holes of Michigan and Illinois serve similarly in these prairie novels to punish the idealism of the protagonists and mark their initiation into a new community. (In Victorian novels, marshes tended to be amorous while sloughs tended to be dirty. In Mrs. Clavers’s encounter with the hunter, the mud hole certainly does appear more amorous than dirty, which gives the text a twist on conventional middle-class ideology, in which all mud is to be avoided.) Kirkland’s tropes of physical and financial falling are ubiquitous and well known48: in addition to the mud holes, ruined shoes, and rutted roads, there are women who comb their hair over the dinner table; pieces of furniture that must be thrown outside to make room in smaller living quarters; and an entire family prostrated by the ague after a romantic evening stroll. Similarly, in Farnham’s text, growing feet symbolize the loss of the character Eliza’s middle-class refinement. When the character Eliza enters the household of a Sucker (i.e. Illinois) family, she is shocked at the filth and lack of decorum. The foot of the lady of the household is exposed, “a broad flat foot, partially clad in a homeknit stocking of brown linen” (74). As both barefoot and a lady, the woman is a frightening hybrid. When the lady’s children touch Eliza’s dress in awe of its crisp whiteness, Eliza fears that her own feet will miraculously pop out looking dirty and swollen like those of her fallen neighbor. In the texts by Kirkland and Farnham, these tropes serve to undercut the promotion of Western space as the next Eden. In Tazewell County, following the advice of such Eastern homemakers as Catherine Beecher, Eliza’s sister Mary and other local women plant gardens around their homes to provide aesthetic relief, but they temper Eliza’s more confident belief in the uplifting potential of nature with memories of grief, loneliness, and uncertainty. The tropes also teach the heroines that locals are not as unintelligent as they initially appear to the Eastern observer. When Eliza treats the Anglo settlers of the earlier waves as mere rubes, Mary warns Eliza not to underestimate them. When Eliza is introduced to Mrs. S., the only apple seller in the neighborhood, she laughs at the woman’s pronunciation of almanac (nalmanic, 112) and her belief that planting apple trees when the moon is in parrighee (probably at parity) will improve their yield. Eliza treats the prevalence of illness among her neighbors as a product of ignorance—amazingly, considering that

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Farnham’s own child died in the yellow fever epidemic recorded in the text. However, once Eliza moves in to her newlywed home, she gains new respect for the lady with the big feet and the slovenly kitchen; her house is similarly too small to board lady guests in separate rooms; pigs roam around her backyard as well; her stove is not dependable enough to cook dinner for her husband’s colleagues; and she keeps house without a servant. Critics often turn to frontiering texts or local color in order to find dignified and authentic images of the most downtrodden people of nineteenthcentury society. In the case of these two novels, however, such an approach is likely to fail. For the earlier waves of Anglo immigrants that Clavers and Farnham must contend with were hardly the victims of frontiering: only the Indians did not profit at all from the process. The authors are not primarily interested in Indians. In Kirkland’s novel, Indians play a marginal role, as only occasional visitors of Mrs. Clavers’s husband. In Farnham’s novel, Indians are treated more nobly, as a vanished race, but that is only because the text treats them as largely hypothetical. Another critical reading that maintains some commitment to democracy and justice is to examine the extent to which Clavers and Farnham become active and tolerant members of a regional community that is inclusive of the entire cast of characters. Although neither character succeeds completely in this endeavor, they both improve over the course of their respective novels. Mrs. Clavers learns more than the character Eliza does, and Kirkland’s text tends to read in a less elitist manner today. Yet this is largely an effect of the form of the novel rather than a direct effect of the writer’s politics or her class status. Eliza Farnham was a marginal member of the middle class. Her refined manners and education were won after only a year at a seminary in New York state. In contrast, Kirkland’s education was unusually wide and deep for a woman, though financially speaking she was only the wife of a schoolteacher. Yet it is Farnham’s text that expresses more conventional middle-class disdain for dirt and the unwashed classes. David Leverenz has argued that the comfort Kirkland’s text expresses in mixing with different classes of settlers resembles a patrician ease with the villagers rather than a democratic ethos.49 I agree with that reading; however, it seems to me that Kirkland’s critique of westward expansion extends beyond the interests of a patrician. Kirkland reveals the inhumane side of capitalism and westward expansion: she plays with the words “wildcat” and “wildcat banks”; she shows how both new and old immigrants neglect the comfort and health of their families in favor of making more money; and she details how settlers cheat their neighbors in property and banking schemes. Her text stresses that settlers often had shameful reasons for migrating westward, from Mrs. Danforth’s story of a

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nasty property dispute in New York state, to Clara Hasting’s story of a patrician family falling on hard times. The tropes of falling in these novels are simultaneously fortunate and unfortunate. Falling is invoked to bemoan class slippage and to delight in making new acquaintances, both ultimately positive activities. Moving away from the idealism of Western promotional literature, the tropes mark the characters’ adjustments to the new community as they occupy themselves with the pragmatic task of becoming a good neighbor. Since these are semiautobiographical texts, we can speculate about how Kirkland and Farnham might have channeled their own feelings about belonging on the frontier into the text. The writers seem to use the tropes to gain power for themselves, to stake out a claim as exceptionally creative and refined people. The fact that the writers had to fall in order to land on the frontier grants them status as a special kind of resident: ones who can communicate both above and below their social place, ones who know English literature, Quakerism, and phrenology, ones who still deign to chat with the ignorant neighbors. In this way the fall asserts the writers’ class power. At the same time, the fall is invoked to warn against the dangers of property speculation, and it thus marks a turn toward moral ambiguity rather than a benevolent divine plan.50 It undercuts the monetary aspirations that motivated the migration of the new and old settlers alike. In formal terms, A New Home, Who’ll Follow? anticipates local color literature in its use of the sketch and an episodic structure. It is the episodic structure that helps the text avoid the didacticism exhibited by Farnham. In that sense, the text seems an especially good candidate for being read as a forerunner of the local color genre. This particular text lends itself more to the reading of local color as an imperialist, nationalizing venture than as a way of expressing sympathy for deprived regional inhabitants. The activities of keeping house, milking cows, attending sewing circles, and borrowing brooms are explicitly related to claiming land inhabited by Indians and French-speaking hunters. Moreover, historically, the ideal of sympathy emerged only in large-scale communities where people have become individuated and divided from each other, not in places such as frontier settlements. Thus, to praise Kirkland for being sympathetic to subordinate characters would be to assume a social distance between the writer and her ideal Eastern readers on one hand and her neighbors on another that her neighbors did not always honor.51 Kirkland numbers among those local color writers whose neighbors reacted angrily to their published renditions of them; as a result of this and her family’s financial failure, she left Michigan and never wrote such a pungent book-length piece again.52 Considering that her book

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makes prescient points about the capitalist speculation that continues to ruin investors, her neighbors’ reactions demonstrate how difficult it is to decide who has the right to claim and shame a place. While A New Life, Who’ll Follow? and Life in Prairie Land invoke mud holes and sloughs to write their authors into the prairie frontier, Rose Terry Cooke’s significantly later story “Miss Lucinda” uses a runaway pig and a broken leg to write two literary characters into the settled fictional village of Dalton, Vermont. The story satirizes a character, Lucinda Manners, who resembles the semi-autobiographical heroines of Kirkland’s and Farnham’s novels. Lucinda’s stern clergyman father comes from a family of good stock, and he taught her mathematics, metaphysics, Latin, theology, and French, along with a decided sense of superiority. In her youth, Lucinda responded to his teachings by refusing to marry any of the village men: “there was not a man in the parish who did not offend her sense of propriety, and shock her taste.”53 Similarly, she never made women friends because for old maid as she was, poor and plain and queer, she could not bring herself to associate familiarly with people who put their teaspoons into the sugar-bowl, helped themselves with their own knives and forks, gathered up bits of uneaten butter and returned them to the plate for next time, or replaced on the dish pieces of cake half eaten, or cut with the knives they had just introduced into their mouths. (156–57)

Instead of a husband, Lucinda manages to scrape by on the interest of family savings and occasional work for the neighbors that she euphemistically calls “chores” (159). Lucinda’s marginal status within the middle class is significant, because it complicates a prominent reading of the story and its role in local color literature by Josephine Donovan.54 Donovan reads this story as one of several that detail a hierarchical relation between modernization, in the form of disciplinary discourses urging progress, labeling, and time keeping, and rural life, which is given to eccentricity. Although the argument usefully reveals how intricately local color literature combines a focus on both rural life and modernity, Donovan draws a line that is too neat between the two, a line that the narrator and characters in this story cross several times. For example, even though Lucinda is as local as anyone else in the story (and serves as an example of subordinate locality in Donovan’s reading), Lucinda looks down on her fellow townspeople. In turn, the villagers do not honor Lucinda’s family’s drawing of this hierarchy. When Lucinda’s father preaches Calvinist sermons about the hell fires of damnation (Calvinism being a

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prime disciplinary discourse), the villagers joke that they would prefer hell fires to their own bitter winters. The village girls look down at Lucinda just as much as she them. They flock to the French dance lessons, and it is they— not the educated narrator—who laugh at Lucinda’s old-fashioned dress and clumsy steps. Lucinda’s servant Israel, who is in a similar economic situation as Lucinda since he also lives off the money from chores, serves as an ironic commentator on the story’s proceedings. The characters of Israel and the village girls illustrate that there are class divisions within the village itself, even though the story satirizes how thin the divide between the Manners family and the rest of the villagers actually can be in practice. Local color stories and novels rarely play out a simple binary between a modern city and a backward country; nor do they play out a class binary of rich and poor. They detail class divisions within rural villages or towns, and characters across the class divide sometimes long for urban values or commodities. Other than Lucinda Manners’s Calvinist father, the story features two more agents of the modern, disciplining world. These are not sightseers, as in the archetypal local color story, but rather a census taker and a French dancing master, Monsieur Jean Leclerc. Like Lucinda Manners, Jean Leclerc is not permanently one class or the other—his class status is somehow inscrutable and slippery—he is a servant of the French elite who has relocated to Vermont in an attempt to escape from democratic feeling in France. The census taker serves as a catalyst for the disciplining force of marriage. Jean Leclerc, in contrast, is pulled into the eccentric, democratic village itself, perhaps, because as a bringer of pleasure rather than government accountability, he suits the villagers’ disciplinary laxity. Since Lucinda holds herself aloof from quilting circles and gentlemen callers, she pours her need for love and companionship into caring for animals and sick people. One day, the census taker pulls her away from tending her pig. The pig breaks free, and Jean Leclerc, who happens to be passing by, recaptures the pig, but breaks a leg and requires a long period of convalescence. Feeling beholden to Leclerc, Lucinda nurses him to health, and they marry and settle down in the village. Leclerc summons up what is for him an uncharacteristically masculine fortitude and kills the pig out of Lucinda’s sight. Leclerc’s accident of the broken leg is a typical motif of women’s novels from those of Jane Austen onwards, an injury suffered by a male suitor that ameliorates the hierarchy of male over female and leads to marriage.55 At the same time, Leclerc’s broken leg serves as a regional travel accident of sorts: when the narrative opens, he is an itinerant dancing master traveling around the world, but the unwanted, calamitous event of the broken leg interrupts his travels, makes him beholden to a woman, forecloses other narra-

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tive possibilities, and turns him into a local. The accident choreographs both him and Lucinda into normative village life by forcing upon them a brush with material reality, in the form of a pig, and curing them of their belief in their class superiority. In the story, both Leclerc and Lucinda believe they are in Dalton only because of random decisions made in migration rather than any essential characteristic within their being: in other words, only contingently or by accident. Both characters require some dramatic reason for deciding to call Dalton their home. Thus in Vermont, as in the more obviously placeless prairielands of the 1840s, there is an element of displacement in characters’ identities, not the tangible displacement of needing to leave home to look for work, but the displacement of not feeling that one belongs. Lucinda is descended from an august family of the area, but because of her genteel aspirations, she feels as alienated from Dalton as does the newcomer Leclerc. Part of the appeal of the story is that it is an origin story of Lucinda and Leclerc’s “emplacement,” or, in other words, their active and symbolic as well as physical process of coming to belong in a place.56 As Tom Lutz has also noted, the story begins with a rather strange preamble of multiplying geographical references.57 This preamble stages what were perhaps Rose Terry Cooke’s autobiographical reflections on the difficulty of, embarrassment of, and perhaps even shame over choosing one’s locality: the story delights in a contingent, slippery, impermanent sense of heritage that local color writers are simply not supposed to believe in. Many local color texts feature origin stories of how characters came to settle in particular towns or villages. This local color story, however, hints particularly strongly about conflict and violence. The story forces a marriage upon two characters who might have been better off remaining single. A dark subtext lies beneath the story’s celebration of human companionship: before getting married Leclerc had to break his leg, and thus symbolically injure his masculine potential, and Lucinda had to overcome her squeamishness about controlling unruly animals and men. Her squeamishness refers to a civilization discourse in which it is women’s role to create order in the household, and it is men’s role to be the armed protector against evil and violence.58 This point is emphasized by the fact that it is only at the story’s conclusion that the death of the pig is revealed. Thus the basis of a happy home is violence, and a woman character who exhibits many of the typical feminine traits of her time has difficulty managing this violence alone. This thematizing of violence has been called typical of Rose Terry Cooke.59 Here it is important to note that Cooke’s concern with violence helps her plumb the morally ambiguous depths of a trope of travel accident—which obviously

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involves some amount of violence—that other authors like Howells and Phelps invoke in order to lead characters to greater degrees of moral righteousness. Like Kirkland and Farnham, Rose Terry Cooke argues that the genteel writer can write a good local color story. She does so not by sympathizing with the most downtrodden residents but by plumbing the morally ambiguous depths of becoming a better neighbor.

Conclusion From the waning of the local color movement in the 1890s to the present, critics have queried whether a writer with education and elite status can write a good local novel. Twentieth-century reviewers and critics have faulted middle- and upper-class writers for their ignorance of or demeaning characterizations of the regional poor, in many cases with good cause. By drawing a class line between the true and the falsely regional, these critics have contributed to a stereotypical image of the regions as crude places inhabited only by racy, authentic people who are permanently caught in a backward temporality. They assume the poor are the most regional, whereas many nineteenth-century communities were inhabited by migrating poor people and rich people who controlled local banks, libraries, or schools. The accusation that middle-class and upper-class writers are simply “tourists” wandering through seasonal landscapes is part of a larger question about who counts as regional. Literary criticism can benefit from refining its concept of a cultural region that considers class hierarchy and regional identity as separable categories. Both class identity and regional identity involve hierarchy; lowly clerks in New York city offices could easily condescend to bank owners visiting the metropolis from Vermont or Iowa, but the bank owners would determine if the clerk got a loan once he migrated westward. Critics interested in regionalism might well study all the people who inhabit a place, however temporarily, precariously, or ignorantly, or however much they balance their commitment to it with their commitment to other places. This suggestion is not just a postmodern embrace of indecisiveness, contingency, and ahistoricity, because the nation has always been a place of migration and change. Local color fiction reflects this migration and change in many ways, from direct descriptions of characters with different levels of education, ethnic backgrounds, or religion, to the irony and intricacy of motifs of falling into being a good neighbor. The motif of falling indexes how a community acts upon an elite character. Many local color stories deal with the question of how to write such a person in, how to emplace him or her. While the char-

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acters are often arrogant, the implied reader is directed to be more humble and respectful. Such texts teach readers how the writer, or the editors and conventions that inhibited her writing, believed one should behave in a provincial environment. Sometimes writers guide readers’ behavior not to enact class revolution but merely to produce more egalitarian middle-class residents. This is not necessarily a laudable endeavor, since, for example, Farnham’s and Kirkland’s texts tend to treat middle-class residents as an especially persecuted lot. Critics like Roberto Dainotto who fault regionalism for being a u-topos of memory and therapeutic restoration can look to the accident motif for how the texts also embed a rude awakening into historical time.60 Many middleand upper-class people viewed places like Pinckney, Michigan, or Dalton, Vermont, through the lens of a civilization discourse, such that the places were set back in time and that reading about them would mean a fall to an earlier stage in human development. Mud holes, unclad feet, and unruly male pigs are all ready metaphors for such earlier stages in human development. However, the texts’ dense detail and focus on everyday activities and quarrels remove the focus from typological race and class destiny and toward a less fear-mongering understanding of how civilization gets embedded in particular historical circumstances. Regional travel accidents move these texts from a narrative of self, as in the bildungsroman, to a narrative of community. This is especially true of first person or third person limited texts such as A New Home, Who’ll Follow? and Life in Prairie Land. Writing regionalism involves leaving one’s own household and becoming nosy about one’s neighbors, regardless of one’s class or racial status. Even the farmer Hamlin Garland found his personal experience not quite adequate for writing regional fiction; as an adult, he regretted that he did not take the time to chat with the customers while tending a store counter in Dakota so that he could later use their anecdotes in his writing.61 Increasing class stratification and antagonism, as well as the turn toward statistical accuracy in the social sciences, made this nosy act more difficult to carry out with any hope of success.62 Rather than read this poaching element of local color as part of its ideologically mystifying work, I argue that the texts do not hide or mystify this poaching element but reflect on it with wit and a serious set of questions about who belongs, who decides who belongs, and how that decision is made. As the century continued, competition for publishing local color writing increased, and weariness with vacation writing grew. Perhaps as a result of the decreasing novelty of vacation writing, the motif of a genteel figure thrown in among lower status figures more frequently appeared to be used as

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a straightforward tool of self interest. Tourists admitted to staging real accidental encounters without any pretense of forging a more inclusive community. For example, Margaret Fuller admitted to strolling by the shelter of a group of Pottawattamie Indians during a light rain shower “though it was obvious that the visit, which inconvenienced them, could only have been caused by the most impertinent curiosity.”63 Eliza Farnham longed for rainstorms so that she could satisfy her curiosity about how settlers less refined than herself managed their households. Writers invoked the motif so that they could steal other people’s racy difference. Such parodies of accidental encounters entered local color fiction. Constance Fenimore Woolson had a philosophical camper meet an authentic hunter only by accident in “The Lady of Little Fishing” (1874). In her story “In the Cotton Country” (1876), a Northern sightseer stumbles across a dilapidated lowland house and concocts a story about needing a glass of water in order to be let in. The lady of the house spots the lie because the water is known to be bad in the lowlands. Yet perhaps surprisingly, the use of the motif in some texts for the purposes of poaching did not prevent writers from writing narratives that critique the tourist figures. The next chapter shows how some stories and sketches by Bret Harte and Sarah Orne Jewett use the motif less as an act of self-empowerment than a means of coercing jaded travelers into what actually do turn out to be uncomfortable interactions with poverty and disability.

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Travel Delays in the Commercial Countryside: Bret Harte and Sarah Orne Jewett

In 1869, Bret Harte published “Miggles” in the Overland Monthly, a story in which a washed-out bridge obliges stagecoach passengers and employees to spend a stormy night in the Sierra Mountain home of a former prostitute. An 1895 issue of the Atlantic Monthly included Sarah Orne Jewett’s “The Life of Nancy,” a story that focuses on the lifelong but intermittent friendship between a Harvard socialite and a young woman from a Maine fishing-farming community. The events of Jewett’s story begin when the Harvard man stays beyond the hunting and fishing season as a boarder in the young woman’s family farmhouse because his friend is nursing an ankle injury. Both stories bring about interactions between local and tourist characters with the literary motif of weary and unexpectedly halted travelers; and, in both stories, the motif appears to be vaguely old fashioned. Despite the motif’s outworn feel, it actually serves as shorthand for a local and translocal story of change. By using this motif, Harte and Jewett reflect on how the places where they became adults and began to write have changed because of the emergence of a full-scale tourist industry. The short story and two novels discussed in the previous chapter reflect on how to belong virtuously to a regional community as an elite resident. “Miggles,” “The Life of Nancy,” and other sketches discussed in this chapter, in contrast, reflect on how to tour a regional community virtuously as an elite visitor. In the course of the 1850s through the 1890s, mass tourism came to both New England and California, and it dramatically reshaped the way that travelers interacted with local inhabitants. Travelers continued to stop unannounced

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in private homes, as they do in the stories, but they did so in the context of other options, and such spontaneous or unplanned visits took on the cast of being antique and unusually democratic. The stories and sketches discussed in this chapter respond to these changes in regional economies and local character, and they comment on the in-between location of a local color writer in telling this story of change. By weaving the motif of the regional travel accident into their writing in the way they do, Harte and Jewett work to correct some of the inaccurate and offensive stories about California and Maine repeated by the increasingly numerous travelers, tourists, and tour operators moving through those places. They write not from the perspective of the subordinate regional inhabitant, but from the perspective of local cultural arbiters. At first glance, it might seem as if these stories look back to an earlier time of slower, more personable, and more democratic interactions between visitors and locals in a particularly rose-colored way. Indeed, literary critics have often taken local color writers to task for telling versions of history that evade social conflict and other negative aspects of a place.1 Although Jewett has not been taken to task as habitually as has Harte, some scholars have argued that her fiction evades history by hiding signs of tourism and industrialism.2 Other scholars have applied arguably limiting theories of history to Jewett’s work. For example, Richard Brodhead and Sandra Zagarell argue that to read Jewett’s work in terms of history should entail paying attention to the way it reinforces the power of the Northeastern elite.3 A few scholars have disputed this directive. While agreeing with Zagarell and Brodhead that Jewett privileges elite values, June Howard shows how Jewett’s “A Late Supper” (1878) weaves together the nineteenth-century ideal of hospitality with modern knowledge of the stock market. This combination of temporalities is not Jewett’s naive reading of her own historical moment, argues Howard, but a sense of history as a process not so easily segmented into periods.4 Jacqueline Shea Murphy argues that the focus on the interests of the Northeastern elite in Jewett’s fiction wrongly assumes that this power was uncontested in Jewett’s time, and she shows how Jewett’s work did not prevent nineteenth-century Abenaki Indians from telling other stories about Maine.5 Murphy works from a decentered theory of history in which many different historical actors are granted agency.6 In this chapter, I argue that Harte and Jewett’s particular way of invoking the regional travel accident motif hints at these decentered contestations between different historical groups. I also argue that in these stories, Harte and Jewett do represent history, and that they do so in an active manner. Their manner does not entirely remove readers’ focus from a genteel perspective, but neither is it exactly nostalgic about a putatively conflict-free past nor always evasive of the writers’ modern present.

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Travel, Regional Economies, and Emergency Hospitality Stories The stories become readable as optimistic but not inaccurate stories about historical change when one considers them next to the growth of tourism that occurred from the 1850s to the 1890s. In the course of these decades, large-scale tourism came in different ways to both New England and California.7 Migrants, business travelers, and tourists continued to arrange their own hospitality with individuals in their homes or small businesses, as they had done throughout the European settling of the American continent. But for the first time in the continent’s history, they did so in the context of many other options. Travel became speedier and more commercial during the century.8 For eating, sleeping, or resting, travelers relied decreasingly on local people and increasingly on translocal corporations, travel agents, government agencies, and travel guides. The wealthiest travelers were able to choose between different levels of cost and comfort. Elite hotels, with private rooms, private washrooms, and increased personal services, were built in new cities and tourist destinations, modeled after the Tremont Hotel in Boston (established 1829) and the Astor House in New York (established 1834).9 Or travelers could stay in lower-priced hotels, boarding houses, or tent cities. On trains and steamboats travelers had always been separated by race, class, and family status, and by the end of the 1880s, travelers with money who were not forced onto the race-specific black or Chinese cars chose between eating and sleeping in the luxury Palace Pullman cars or cooking their own food in the Tourist Pullman cars, which were equipped with stoves and ice chests.10 Thus, for the first time in U.S. history, travel hindered rather than fostered interactions between travelers of different classes and between travelers and people outside the travel-service industry. Modernization happened unevenly across the country, but as soon as luxury accommodations or transportation choices were available in a specific location, travelers who could afford to use them did so. Thus, on a local level, modernization was swift and seemingly irrevocable. Local business people were forced to adjust. People who previously made money by doing travelers’ laundry, cooking their meals, or transporting them by stage had to cooperate with refined and efficient competitors who were quickly and powerfully changing the rules of the trade. For example, according to the travel writer W. G. Marshall, a local man in Yosemite was forced by the large hotels to remove his sign advertising laundry services from one of the area’s viewpoints.11 When the man discussed the event with Marshall, the man speculated that

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the park officials were interested not only in preserving the natural view but also in keeping competing businesses at bay.12 While these changes in regional economies were occurring, people changed the stories they told about hospitality. They began to focus on the newly antiquated feel of spontaneous, bartered hospitality. Suddenly instances in which travelers received assistance, food, or shelter from people outside the travel industry felt unusually human and warm. Throughout the century, narratives of emergency hospitality appeared widely: in pioneer diaries, in travel literature of the elite and middle classes, and in genteel American or European fiction. In the 1830s, entering the home or “crude” inn of a stranger was something that travelers and tourists did when alternative accommodations were not available, as did Caroline Kirkland and Eliza Farnham in their trips to the Great Lakes region in the 1830s and 1840s. Although writers mention the incident, they do not always remark upon it at length.13 But by the 1850s, the act was both a practical activity and a meaningful piece of supposedly authentic experience worth fantasizing about beforehand and narrating afterward, as it was for Albert Richardson in his travels as a reporter through the Great Plains—in one incident, after taking shelter in an Indian cabin on a stormy night, he returned with his wife so that she could experience the Indians’ hospitality first hand.14 By the end of the 1860s, such visits in most parts of the United States were ready candidates for intense and unique experience. Emergency hospitality stories reflect on the possibility of egalitarian and unscripted moments within a travel culture that is otherwise hierarchical and formulaic.15 They suggest that human interactions coexist with market transactions, sometimes even in the present day. The ideological potential of such stories is mixed and can be co-opted for different purposes by different authors and audiences. Some stories emphasize that kindness can occur in the present time in spite of economic inequality, and others shore up readers’ sense of themselves as modern and distinct from the quaint accommodations and people of the past. In the specific cultural location in which Harte’s and Jewett’s stories were first published, arts and letters magazines too expensive for most middle- and lower-class people to buy, the message of the writers’ superior modernity became the more prevalent. Stories of unplanned visits with lower-class locals appeared, albeit infrequently, in similar magazines between the 1860s and the 1890s. In 1867, the Atlantic Monthly published a story, M. Edward Brown’s “A Winter Adventure on the Prairie,” in which four day trippers drive a horse to death, run from Indians, and spend the night in a cabin of a French-Indian family.16 The traveling party consists of

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residents of a prairie town and their female friend from the East, who serves as the story’s narrator. Bridging two publishing fields, this story resembles those narrated in overland diaries and fiction as well as those published in the high literary monthlies; the death of a horse would have been a major financial blow for prairie residents, and the night sleeping on a mixed-race family’s floor would have registered as a foray into barbarism for many middleclass people, including those who lived on the prairies. The story is witty, with the narrator expressing resignation to the moment rather than fear of humiliation or pride in her own ability to endure.17 In 1871, the pages of Harper’s Monthly included a quaint old man who invited tourists into his home on the outskirts of Key West,18 and in 1875 the magazine printed a story about a group of sport fishermen who spent a pleasant night in a rude backcountry hotel on the Maine-Canadian border.19 In these later stories, the device of emergency hospitality serves as a moment of novelty, a way to market stories as more authentic to a real locale outside of the standardizing forces of mass tourism. Writes the traveler who visited the old man in Key West, “We are fond of these choice bits of living pictures” (Holder 314). Premised on readers’ sense that sleeping on the floor means crisis, discomfort, and danger, the latter stories build readers’ sense of themselves as modern and cosmopolitan because they are able to tolerate unpleasantness with the knowledge that it will not last forever. Yet emergency hospitality stories of any stripe did not overtake the pages of the arts and letters monthlies; lest one overstate their appeal for the cultural elite, one should remember that Henry James’s character Lydia Touchett in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) dislikes all American hotels, much less the backcountry ones. And to read all emergency hospitality stories solely from the travelers’ perspectives is to reassert the supremacy of the late nineteenth-century cultural elite. Harte and Jewett emphasize in their emergency hospitality stories that such events were instances in which travelers bump up against competing modern realities, against people who are as modern as themselves, albeit in different ways.20 They at once encourage readers to think about the possibility of friendly acts between strangers and remind readers of the social antipathy that made such friendliness difficult in real life. The stories reflect on the in-between role of local color fiction writers in the telling of a national history. Although local color fiction is commonly faulted for uncritically celebrating the work of women in the private sphere, these stories are notable because they do not romanticize or obscure the feminine work of feeding and caring for others; they treat this work as rewarding, but also thankless and costly.

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Harte and “Frontier” Hospitality In some of the newspaper sketches that Harte wrote before he left California, he strives to occupy a middle position between California residents and newcomers from the East or elsewhere. In the process he complicates the idea of a tourist by emphasizing that some of the California natives are capable of aestheticizing the landscape and that there are places worth visiting other than Yosemite or the Sequoia Trees, like the Santa Clara valley, or, in “Miggles,” the cabin of a single woman who manages to take care of a disabled man. The newspaper sketches are set in Harte’s own present and are open and overt about modernity coming to California. “Miggles” is much less overt, but it retells a story of the past in a way that challenges elite values by focusing on the hypocrisy of respectable men about sex outside marriage. Harte’s story of stagecoach passengers who spend a night in a “frontier” home relies upon a history and mythology of road travel and backcountry accommodations. Before the railroad, road travel by foot, horseback, or horsedrawn vehicle was legendarily difficult. It exposed travelers to weather, terrain, and the volatile wills of animals and people. Travelers had to stop often and randomly. They relied on networks of settlers, traders, missionaries, and Indians.21 Private families and innkeepers alike took on extra roles in times of need. They regularly cared for guests who were ill, and they sometimes served as physicians or undertakers in the absence of alternatives.22 Even elite travelers like Margaret Fuller accepted help from humble farmers and Indians. These aspects of road travel and backcountry accommodations fed the ideal known then and now as “frontier hospitality,” in which different social groups in sparsely settled areas freely provided guidance, supplies, and shelter to travelers in boundless and spontaneous ways. During the years in which Jewett and Harte were writing, people moving to cities ceased to rely on neighborhood networks, not just for a room or a meal, but also for building houses, disposing of garbage, or stopping criminals as well; frontier hospitality is fondly remembered because it differed from the increasingly bureaucratic urban public services.23 Yet the actual experience of individual travelers and residents behind the ideal has been much debated. Scholars who emphasize social conflict as well as consensus have shown that class, ethnic, and sexual friction abounded in real frontier hospitality. Paton Yoder has documented that even inns in developing areas were run by managers working under absentee owners, a fact that should modify fantasies of salt-of-theearth folk who care for strangers out of the goodness of their hearts.24 Travelers and hosts from different ethnic groups or political parties were

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sometimes friendly to each other and sometimes hostile. Many travelers struggled with their disgust over the hygienic standards of roadside taverns. The seventeen-year-old Bret Harte arrived in Oakland, California in 1854, at the tail end of a boom. The Gold Rush had recently brought large quantities of Eastern money, luxury hotels, construction, and people to the San Francisco bay and the Sierra Nevadas. Born in Albany and raised mostly in New York City, Harte was part of that influx, and by most accounts, an outsider in the eyes of settlers who predated the boom.25 Granted, he served briefly as a stagecoach expressman, and in the 1850s he recuperated in the cabin of miner Jim Gillis for four days, thus experiencing frontier hospitality first hand.26 He also lived on a ranch and in Uniontown, a town of five hundred people—but not as blacksmith or farmer, producing things those communities would have valued, but as tutor and printer’s assistant. In the words of Harte biographer Alex Nissen, “Frank [Bret] Harte would emphatically not do in the eyes of the ‘rougher element,’ as contemporary witnesses attest. . . . As a young man in Oakland, Uniontown, and San Francisco, Frank Harte was never one of the boys.”27 Instead Harte followed his personal desires and worked to become an artist, a writer. Although Richard Brodhead emphasizes the elite dimension of some local color writers’ backgrounds, Harte was born in a middling state. He came from a family that valued book learning but lacked the money and status to afford him a comfortable life as a writer. So he searched for work. He was discovered and befriended by San Francisco cultural leaders Thomas Starr King and Jessie Frémont, who introduced him to local editors and helped him secure work as a clerk in various government offices. He wrote and edited for local and national papers, and after he married in 1862, his wife augmented the family income by singing in a church choir.28 The Harte family lived in increasingly fashionable houses, and by 1865, it was possible for them to take vacations in the Santa Clara countryside. Unlike Jewett, Harte initially aspired to be a writer of universal rather than local subject matter, and he seems to have been drawn into writing about California through market pressure. In the decade when Harte began writing, San Francisco’s literati and businessmen were taking an interest in the Gold Rush and Spanish California as the state’s “past,” a past that they could market as part of California’s unique identity and yet assure its passing by attracting the railroad and outside investors. A Sacramento newspaper criticized Harte in 1865 for editing a volume of California verse that included no poems with local subject material.29 Yet the sketches he published in this period discuss a range of local topics, both urban and rural: a San Francisco bank explosion, memories of the city’s defunct German beer garden, a

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flood in a country village, the social types of a Western stage, and the intrigue of a night-time stageride.30 These sketches deal with small-scale interactions between the people of California “past” and California “present.” They also reveal Harte’s in-between subject location. In Harte’s newspaper work, he placed himself as an observer of both the emerging elite and the established agrarians. “In the Country” (1865), a sketch published in The Californian, a San Francisco-based literary journal, marks an upper and a lower class and leaves unmarked a bohemian middle ground, from which the authorial persona speaks. Describing a country place along the route of fashionable travel, the sketch expresses regret over the destructive influx of economic development. But it also codes local rural people as tragically barbaric: There was something peculiarly Californian in the occasional odd juxtaposition of civilization and barbarism. . . . Yet in the midst of this wilderness, a turn in the rough mountain trail brings you suddenly upon a vision of smoothlyshaven faces, pork-pie hats, bright dresses, ribbons and light-colored gloves, in a smart rockaway, drawn by well-groomed horses with shining harness. Perhaps a few yards further on you meet the indigenous oxteam, toiling along with its load of rails, preceded by the teamster, unshaven and unshorn, looking as if he might in time so closely assimilate to his oxen as to change places with them. Such is the influence of civilization, however, that it is the ox team which seems the intruder. The teamster recognizes the fact as he turns out of the way to let you pass. (16–17)

Harte’s persona is not equidistant from the ox driver and the pork-pie hats. The interest in the details of the excursionists’ dress and the attitude toward the ox driver, as well as the assurance that the ox driver is a member of a “vanishing race,” place Harte’s unmarked middle ground closer to the ground of the wealthy city people. In spite of erratic finances throughout his life, he exemplifies the disposition that Bourdieu associates with the artist as a dominated member of a dominant class.31 Although he narrates another scene in which a well-dressed horseman imperiously orders him off a plot of land, he ridicules local residents who fail to answer his questions for directions along the minor roads: [The] effect of a question upon the rural mind was similar to a blow. After the first stunning effect was over, recovery was followed by the attitude of resistance. When an answer could be extracted from these people, it was usually given in a vague, unsatisfactory manner. . . . There were allusions to such land marks as Jones’ Mill, Brown’s Store and Robinson’s Field—local authorities of course utterly unknown to the stranger. (17–18)

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Here he is teased by the locals no differently than an excursionist might be, and he sounds humiliated. The speaker’s earlier attempt to dominate the locals stems from the fear of such humiliation. Thus scholars should read Harte as between rather than affiliated with either the uncultured locals or the excursionists, but in a way that forces him into moral complicity with the economic changes that were benefiting the comfortable middle class and elite. The very journal in which the sketch was published had higher cultural aspirations than any other previous San Francisco venture, and “ironically, its very existence was made possible by the increased wealth, luxury, and spirit of materialism that the paper would disparage in its columns.”32 Harte tried to argue that he was a better source of information about California than the New England and European sightseers whose travel narratives, lithographic plates, and photographs were being published worldwide. In a letter Harte wrote as the California correspondent for the Massachusetts Springfield Republican, he locates himself in his own retreat of the Santa Clara Valley, a valley closer to San Francisco, and thus less expensive to visit, than the world-famous tourist destinations of Shasta, Yosemite, or the Sequoia Trees, which Harte calls “the heroics of California scenery” (131). As he strolls through the low-level bureaucrats’ summer retreat, he explains why wealthy tourists find Californians impassive and ignorant. It is because the tourists act so silly and hysterical about the scenery: “It is not pleasant to have people around you falling into spasms of admiration and enthusiasm after an hour’s acquaintance with things you think you have thoroughly comprehended and which you admire—if at all—with a judicious calmness” (133). He spins a fantasy about laborers who talk back to Coleridge on Mount Blanc and let the hapless romantic poet fall down a crevasse, thus narrating a travel accident as cultural critique. He voices sympathy with “the half-superciliousness and ill-disguised scorn which characterize most guides” (133). Sympathizing with one’s guides rather than with one’s fellow tourists was common among self-identified cosmopolitan sightseers. Guides were usually young locals who hired themselves out to help tourists up mountains or through caves. Many wealthy sightseers resented guides’ impudence, but like Harte before him, Rudyard Kipling, literally on the proverbial Cook’s tour, preferred them to Daisy Miller–like tourists who were increasingly populating the American tourist routes.33 By sympathizing with guides, Harte is saying that he can lead people through California in an authentic and learned way. More so than the Harper’s Monthly writer who claims to be fond of “these choice bits of living pictures,” Harte sought to individualize himself with a unique travel experience that separates him from less experienced travelers. James Buzard calls such efforts at traveler individuality a sign of a

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writer’s degree of acculturation to his increasing cultural status.34 This was surely the case with Harte, but this particular move is also a bargain with necessity; Harte had to write about a California that Massachusetts readers will recognize even though the California he knows is different, so he praises the California he knows to make himself feel better. In the story “Miggles,” which Harte wrote soon after he was invited to become editor of the newly created Overland Monthly, Harte’s in-between persona is less evident, but it is somewhat evident in the form of a well-spoken narrator who views both the stagecoach driver and a garrulous judge from some distance. Like the sketches, it details small-scale negotiations between California “past” and California “present.” The story creates a temporary community comprised of the narrator/passenger, a stagecoach driver (the famous Harte character Yuba Bill), an expressman, a judge, a genteel couple from Virginia City, a traveler from the Washoe region of Nevada, a French lady, an Irishman who rides on the roof, the former prostitute Miggles, her paralyzed lover Jim, her tamed bear, and her pet magpie.35 It would have been highly unlikely for such a group to interact without serious tension in an actual Western public establishment, before or after the railroad. Actual frontier hospitality was human in its prejudice and pettiness as well as its sympathy and humor. So Harte’s decision to make this community a pleasant one is an act of defiance. The story suggests that people from different social groups can coexist peacefully even if they do not usually get along. The story narrates a shift in reader expectation from masculine hostility to feminine cooperation. The first lines detail the atomizing dreariness of American travel complained about by many travel writers of the day.36 Although the passengers and driver are physically crowded in the stagecoach, they are metaphysically isolated. They sit in silence during a jolting eight miles, and the ladies fade into an anonymity, a “wild confusion of ribbons, veils, furs, and shawls.”37 The rest of the narrative works to undo this anonymity. The next lines encourage readers to view the turn of events as a challenge to the characters. Readers think suspense and the unknown; the passengers catch only snatches of the shouted exchange between the driver and a horseman who relays the news “bridge gone,” “twenty feet of water,” “can’t pass,” and “Try Miggles,” and they wonder aloud to each other about the identity of the person with such a strange name (37–38). Once they arrive at a barred and boarded gate, the decision of what to do next becomes a battle of class styles between the driver and the expressman on the one side and the judge on the other. The driver Yuba Bill’s strategy of violently penetrating the gate follows the code of rough masculinity associated throughout the nineteenth century with the lower classes.38 At first, his strategy appears the more pro-

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ductive. Bill calls into the gate forcefully and orders the passengers to do the same. They are answered by what sounds like a belligerent male voice, and Bill assumes that a man inside is challenging him. Meanwhile, the judge calls toward the house to kindly “consider the inhospitality of refusing shelter from the inclemency of the weather to helpless females,” a line whose gentility is rendered ridiculous when it too is answered by the belligerent male voice (40). It is only when Bill walks into the building, shines his lantern in the eyes of a wrinkled man, and tips him over that the party discovers that the man is paralyzed: “To our great dismay, as Bill removed his hand, the venerable stranger apparently collapsed—sinking into half his size and an undistinguishable heap of clothing” (41). They soon realize that the belligerent male voice was an echo of their own from the beak of the magpie. The significance of these realizations is that when they dismantle the only visible man of the household, Bill’s anticipation of rough challenge becomes irrelevant. Obviously, there is no real patriarch, no man in the cabin who wishes them harm. Rather than choosing the aggressive masculine script, Harte chooses to make the characters work together in a semblance of harmony. He is less subverting all literary convention for once and all time than choosing a literary convention that suits his purpose, and the literary convention that he chooses is similar to that of the other local color writers examined in this book as well. The judge’s middle-class self-control and penchant for quoting poetry help to an extent, as he directs the men in sitting the figure back up in his chair before the fire. But it is Miggles who brings the group into a difficult state of sociability, assistance, and discretion. Once she appears, her presence encourages the passengers to change their habitual ways of interacting with people. First, they are shocked that the odd name “Miggles” refers to a woman. Coming in from the rain, Miggles sprays them with raindrops, drops a hairpin while fixing her hair, and asks them to help her pick it up. The ladies shrink from her comfort with the situation; women who worked in, managed, or owned public establishments were in danger of being considered “loose.”39 But at her request, the men of the party (from the judge to the expressman) help Miggles grind the coffee, build the fire, and slice the bacon. All present from the judge and the French lady to Yuba Bill and Miggles sit down at the table together to eat. The point of this scene is that human interactions can continue in a relatively peaceful manner despite serious social antagonism. This social antagonism is not swept away in the writer’s attempt to portray the social groups in question as less harmful to each other than they actually were in history. The Irish passenger has to ride on the roof in transit even

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though he rooms with the rest of them in this extraordinary circumstance. The genteel ladies of the party never quite accept Miggles, and the male writer Harte never renders them much less anonymous than they are in the opening scene. They are sent to sleep in a side room before Miggles explains the reason for her cohabitation with Jim—she left the Polka saloon for her lover and client who was suddenly struck by paralysis–a piece of her life story which serves as the story’s climax. Harte scholars argue convincingly that Harte was willing to speak out on the behalf of Indians, Chinese, and Jews in his editorials for various newspapers, and that his infamous poem “Plain Language from Truthful James” was intended to satirize Irish racism against the Chinese.40 But the narrator/passenger most similar to Harte writes as if the lower status characters are lower on an evolutionary track: Jim is an “invertebrate,” Yuba Bill “growl[s]” and his devotion to Miggles makes him a Caliban to her Miranda (41, 43, 45). Furthermore, the burden of mollifying the fragile community is displaced onto a woman, and even more predictably, a “loose” woman. In nearly all North American cultures, the work of feeding and caring for strangers went to women whenever women were around. In Susan Lee Johnson’s analysis of the domestic life of the Gold Rush diggings, male miners had to cook and clean for themselves. But many men, particularly white North Americans or Englishmen, likened themselves at these tasks to white women at home or gendered other races female when they considered such work easier for the supposedly neat Chinese or culinary French.41 In the more organized context of the Great Plains in the 1850s, Albert Richardson accepted food and sleeping quarters from men and women. But when Mexican, Indian, or white women were around, they did the cooking, and often they did not eat with the rest of the party. Granted, being the one household around with the resources for housing strangers gave members of that household status—they got the news first, and they maintained temporary control over where the travelers went and what they knew. Some women probably enjoyed this opportunity, even though it came with strings attached. To Harte’s credit, though, the story encourages readers to see that getting people to be friendly is feminine, thankless work.42 It is clearly Miggles’s discretion and her ability to win over the men of the party that makes it possible for the party to coexist; it is her responsibility to charm the men, appease the ladies, and protect her powerless lover. The narrator highlights the fact that Miggles bears a burden no one else shares: [T]he meal was a culinary success. But more, it was a social triumph—chiefly, I think, owing to the rare tact of Miggles in guiding conversation, asking all

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the questions herself, yet bearing throughout a frankness that rejected the idea of any concealment on her own part, so that we talked of ourselves, our prospects, of the journey, of the weather, of each other—of everything but our host and hostess. (46)

Relative peaceful coexistence would not be possible without Miggles’s ability to appear frank yet be discreet. In this way the story does not simply shore up readers’ (and potential tourists’) sense of self or comfortable fantasies of the Wild West. It does not provide a depiction of a woman boarding house proprietor from a woman boarding house proprietor’s point of view. The story does, though, raise issues of gender, sexuality, and class that other literary fiction of its decade (and the next two decades) does not. Miggles makes it clear that she thinks some of the polite men in the room might have used her services when she was a prostitute. Suddenly she asks, “Is there any of you that knows me?” and when the answer is no she exclaims, “Think again! I lived in Marysville in ’53. Everybody knew me there, and everybody had the right to know me” (50). In the fictional mise en scène, the ladies are not present. But actual ladies read the story. So the story is a safe but potent way for Harte to point to middleclass society’s hypocrisy about prostitution and cohabitation outside marriage. The story “Miggles” hides the commercial nature of the interaction between Miggles and the stagecoach passengers. The story discussed in the previous chapter, Rose Terry Cooke’s “Miss Lucinda,” lends considerable drama to the question of payment for spur-of-the-moment hospitality: when Monsieur Leclerc offers to pay Lucinda for nursing him during his convalescence even though he is very poor, Lucinda tactfully asks him for dancing lessons instead. In real life, it was expected that travelers would have paid people who took them in to their home, or at least offered to pay them, but in Harte’s story there is no discussion of payment.43 Nor is there any hint that in the 1850s and 1860s, nearly every traveler to California was also a tourist, interested in the pleasure of the experience and following to some extent a beaten track.

Jewett and the Lifelong Summer Boarder Unlike “Miggles,” “The Life of Nancy” comments directly on what commercialized travel has done to the place the author knew well and suggests that human interactions can coexist with commercial transactions into the present day. The story makes a number of subtle moves that counter the typical

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gender and space politics of emergency hospitality stories and other urbanrural stories of the age. While most emergency hospitality stories depict friendships that are temporary, in this story, Jewett relates what might happen if a friendship begun with emergency hospitality lasted a lifetime. While most emergency hospitality stories depict a mildly battered and temporarily immobilized traveler, this story contrasts the Harvard socialite’s sprained ankle to the major immobilization of rheumatism which confines the village woman to her family’s farmhouse. The story’s premise is social-sexual betrayal: the power imbalance and cultural differences between the Harvard socialite (Tom Aldis) and the village woman (Nancy Gale) never leave readers’ attention. For instance, the story makes clear that the rheumatism of Nancy’s adulthood grows severe because she lacks access to the first-rate medical help a city woman might secure. Yet rather than turn Nancy into a case study of provincial hardship, a case study that might merely assure readers of their own mobility, Jewett encourages readers to view Nancy as a spiritually strong counterpoint to the city; the title phrase “the life of” makes the story something of a hagiography. Jewett writes about changes to travel, tourism, and hospitality in a very different context from Harte’s, the New England village. By the time of Jewett’s birth, New Englanders were beginning to recognize that “progress” was moving elsewhere, in part to Harte’s country in the West. The traditional industries were not growing, and residents and government officials who were identified with urbanity in their class and occupational status saw leisure tourism as an appealing economic option—in this odd sense, middle-class residents who worked to replace a farm economy with a tourist economy can somewhat fairly be dismissed by residents like Hamlin Garland as mere tourists. Unlike California, where many of the prospective travelers to whom Harte was writing came with the intention of settling down or investing in a new economy, people came to New England to relax or invest in private or public vacation property. By the 1860s, as Dona Brown has shown, the summer vacation had become available not only to artists or the wealthy but also to schoolteachers, ministers, and shopkeepers.44 This new class of tourists was more likely than wealthy tourists to use inexpensive accommodations, and so the long-standing practice of taking in boarders turned into a formal business. Farming families began reading government publications and advertising in the newspapers to find ways to attract city families to their homes. Although city boarders were often demanding, ignorant, or condescending, they paid cash, which enabled farming families to enter the cash economy more effectively than they could with farming alone. Moreover, it was usually the women’s task to care for these city dwellers, and some women main-

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tained individual control over this extra income. Jewett dated the first summer boarders in her hometown of South Berwick, Maine, to the mid 1860s.45 Thus in New England when the story was written, people did not only stop at private homes in times of emergency or need, they were expected and planned for, and they paid an arranged fee. The relationship between host and boarder was in this sense overtly commercial. “The Life of Nancy” depicts these changes in New England tourism in precise detail. The Bostonian character, Tom Aldis, visits East Rodney, Maine, twice in the story. In the first visit, he is a student, accompanied by his student friend Carew, who plans to spend the summer hunting and fishing near his father’s property. Tom and Carew stay as paying guests in the Gale family farmhouse. This visit might take place around 1868. The second visit is twenty years later, when Tom is a married businessman planning to sell his father’s property in East Rodney; this time, Tom stays in a grand hotel owned by a man new to the village. Even though both grand hotels and homes that took in boarders already existed in Maine in the 1860s, this shift in the story serves to symbolize the tourist industry’s growth and sophistication. During this shift, Jewett herself responded to tourism in contradictory ways. She once claimed that her motivation for writing stemmed from a desire to defend Maine residents against insensitive and ignorant summer boarders. She wrote of this desire with a mixture of condescension and respect for Maine people: the way they [the city boarders] misconstrued the country people and made game of their peculiarities fired me with indignation. I determined to teach the world that country people were not the awkward, ignorant set those people seemed to think. I wanted the world to know their grand simple lives; and, so far as I had a mission, when I first began to write, I think that was it.46

Throughout her life, she defended the pleasures of living in Maine to Boston friends who urged her to stay in Boston year round. Even Annie Fields found South Berwick boring,47 and by the 1890s Fields was Jewett’s primary source of companionship and love. In 1893, about the time she wrote “The Life of Nancy,” 48 Jewett wrote privately that tourism had become financially and spiritually valuable for both New England and Eastern cities: It has certainly been a great means of broadening both townsfolk and country folk. I think nothing has done so much for New England in the last decade; it accounts for most of the enlargement and great gain that New England has certainly made, as if there had been a fine scattering or sowing broadcast of both thought and money!49

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Jewett found appeal in both South Berwick and Boston—she liked South Berwick’s history and supposed coherence and Boston’s intellectual stimulation, adventure, and heterogeneity. Louis Renza and Sandra Zagarell have interpreted this contradiction in Jewett’s thinking as a change over time, in which Jewett eventually became sanguine about the problems that had initially inspired her to write.50 But the second statement and “The Life of Nancy” suggest that even in her maturity Jewett continued to hope that tourism could benefit many classes of New Englanders. During Tom’s first visit, his friend Carew injures his ankle, an event that provides Tom and Carew with the excuse to stay beyond the hunting season. While Carew nurses the injury, Tom socializes with the local youth, including the popular Addie Porter and the respected Nancy Gale. Unlike Jewett’s real-life urban friends, the fictional Tom is not bored; Nancy’s dancing is superlative, he thinks, “one of the most ideal things he had ever known in his life; it would be hard to find elsewhere such grace as hers.”51 Tom and Nancy Gale become so friendly that Tom sends her Christmas presents and letters, and when Nancy visits Boston that winter, Tom accompanies her sightseeing. When Tom returns to East Rodney twenty years later, he visits Nancy, long since bedridden by her rheumatism. His appreciation of their friendship and Nancy’s shrewd advice convince him to make East Rodney his family’s summer residence. As a sign of their renewed friendship, a dirt path forms between Nancy’s farmhouse and Tom’s estate. Like the washed-out bridge in Harte’s story, Carew’s sprained ankle serves the purpose of bringing separated people into closer proximity so that readers can neither deny nor take for granted the distinctions between those people. Carew’s immobility enables Tom to interact with the young people of East Rodney as a friend, not an upper-class outsider. Since there is no one to keep him company while hunting, Tom joins the local youth in activities unspoiled by mass culture like sailing, haycart parties, prayer-meetings, sewing societies, and, most memorably, dancing in the schoolhouse hall and new barns. It is this change to Tom’s ordinary routine that makes possible his friendship with Nancy. Jewett pushes this initial impetus into the background; Carew’s ankle is discussed only in passing after we see Nancy and her uncle Ezra on their trip to Boston. Thus, the story nearly buries the ankle incident which, if narrated in full, might prompt readerly sensations of disjunction and danger; like Harte in “Miggles,” Jewett considers a narrative of traveler and male humiliation and chooses against it. This subtlety is typical of the story’s pushing away of conventional heterosexual scripts. The travel delay and sporting injury were common devices in popular and high literary fiction of the 1880s and 1890s for prodding active and speedy urban figures

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into the leisurely realm of courtship. Typically, the immobilized traveler was male and the nurturer was female; this fiction perpetuated the idea that women were nurses rather than travelers in search of adventure or relaxation themselves.52 In contrast, Jewett’s story avoids the scene of nurture and healing; we never see Nancy waiting on Carew at his bedside, serving Tom tea, or even gathering herbs. Readers are never encouraged to visualize Nancy in a service role. Writing about these social types in this situation, Jewett could have written a typical summer boarder romance, in which a wealthy city boy attracts an innocent country girl only to betray her. Jewett avoids what was a conventional plot of nineteenth-century fiction.53 The story makes clear that Tom and Nancy fall a little bit in love when they first meet. Together Tom and Nancy are electric: Tom “scurrie[s]” down the steps of his club to meet her, and they tour the city on “the fleetest and lightest of feet,” and “talked all the way” (3, 13). Nancy wants to visit Boston so that she can let Tom know that Addie never cared for him, and while she is struggling to relay this information and its full import to Tom, Tom thinks of his East Rodney “boyish gallantries” (presumably with Nancy and Addie) “with a little uneasiness” (12). It is his feeling for Nancy that prevents Tom from revealing his near engagement to another girl. Yet they go their separate ways, remembering each other until Tom’s later visit, when the affection is rekindled (or described as?) friendship. While Tom is married to a nameless, faceless urban wife and is spiritually unhappy, Nancy is not married and, perhaps as a result, is the center of a community that relies on her for leadership tasks like teaching and the redrawing of school district lines. Thus the story suggests that the most permanent and satisfying of relationships is friendship, not marriage. To further diminish the importance of a conjugal plot, Addie Porter’s flirting with Tom and the other boys has no serious moral consequence for her or anyone else. Tom is uneasy when he remembers his “boyish gallantries,” but he may read such socializing differently than a country girl would; in these years country youth socialized more comfortably with the other sex than did city youth of any class.54 As an adult, Addie forgets Tom’s place in her trail of broken hearts, while Tom wistfully recalls his heady East Rodney flirtations. East Rodney women are eminently capable of handling city men; sex emerges from tourism, but sex is not exclusively an arena of conflict for New England girls.55 The story’s style is designed around the potential for social/sexual disconnection. Marcia McClintock Folsom has shown how Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs has an “empathic style,” in which the local Mrs. Todd and the narrator, a city boarder in Mrs. Todd’s home, understand each other

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even before they speak.56 But Nancy and Tom often misunderstand each other, and the effect is dramatic irony, where the author and the readers know something that Nancy or Tom does not know. For Nancy, the trip to Boston is a wonderful experience that fulfills her dream of seeing first-rate dancing. For Tom, the visit is a delight, but a trial. He does not enjoy waking up early to meet Nancy on the morning after a Harvard assembly, and when Nancy asks him to take her to dancing, he dreams up an excuse instead of accompanying her to a lesson for children, the only dancing to be found so early in the day. Nancy is available in the evening, as a matter of fact, since her kind city cousins invite her to stay, but Tom feels the situation to be futile: he is “mindful of his own gay evening the night before, and of others to come, and the general impossibility of Nancy’s finding the happiness she sought” (15). We have already seen that Tom deceives Nancy by not telling her about his engagement. Twenty years later, Tom walks into East Rodney expecting people to remember him and to care about the same things they did when they were young. But Addie does not remember him; the youth have new ways of entertaining themselves, and Nancy is happier than he. His misrecognition of East Rodney renders ironic his earlier thought about the impossibility of Nancy’s happiness, or his imperious condescension earlier in the story—“Tom had an intimate knowledge, gained from several weeks’ residence, with Nancy’s whole world” (11). The latter clause, which initially appears to be written in the third-person omniscient, as if Jewett is stating an objective truth about Tom’s ability to possess East Rodney, appears on a second read to be Tom’s indirect discourse. As for Nancy, rather than chastising Tom for neglecting to write or never taking her to a real dancing class, she speaks only of fond memories. When he muses at Nancy’s bedside that he is reconsidering the decision to sell his land, one wonders whether Nancy’s behavior is intended to help him decide in the way that is best for her. The narrative structure emphasizes economic subtext. The third section of the five part story, about Tom’s return to East Rodney, is narrated from a third-person limited viewpoint. Tom and his male companion view the coast from an arriving steamer. They scrutinize the shore for its property value: “The two passengers were on the watch for landings and lookouts; in short, this lovely, lonely country was being frankly appraised at its probable value for lumbering or for building-lots and its relation to the real estate market” (22). Because of Nancy’s shrewd optimism, she plays a key role in the economic subplot. When Tom visits at her bedside she never encourages him to feel guilty for neglecting her; she even apologizes for not writing to him.

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Nancy’s ability to teach Tom how to be happy again is what encourages him to change his plan to sell his East Rodney land. As Tom muses about the idea of building rather than selling, Nancy replies from an economic standpoint. She remarks that his living in East Rodney would raise the property value and therefore be a good investment for him and other land speculators. Indeed, Tom’s decision to heed her advice leads to a small East Rodney boom: “It would be difficult to give any idea of the excitement and interest of East Rodney, or the fine effect and impulse to the local market” (39). In turn, Nancy receives a carrying chair, which expands her social life and mobility. Jewett has been faulted for hiding the commercial nature of Maine country boarding by Elizabeth Ammons and Stephanie Foote. The famous friendship between the city narrator and Mrs. Todd of The Country of the Pointed Firs is, after all, a commercial one—the narrator is a paying guest in Mrs. Todd’s home. The narrator is like Tom in that she is returning to a place she visited before in the hopes of recreating a wonderful experience. Elizabeth Ammons is right to point out that the repeated phrase “business” in descriptions of Mrs. Todd’s home in the opening lines of The Country of the Pointed Firs ideologically masks New England’s factories and bigger businesses.57 Such observations are important to keep in mind but misleadingly imply that boarding was not a business. It could be, however, a very big business: the boarding houses listed as private residences in railroad guides of the 1880s and 1890s sometimes accommodated ten to twenty people in as many as thirteen guest rooms.58 By representing boarding, Jewett is representing New England business; in “The Life of Nancy,” she begins to hint at the economic dimension of that business, more than she does in The Country of the Pointed Firs. In the story, Nancy does not play the typical role of a provincial who never travels, whose only knowledge and power are local. There is a parallel between bedridden Nancy and paralyzed Jim in Harte’s story; an immobilized provincial is someone that the implied reader does not want to become. And as Sandra Zagarell has shown, Jewett portrays the passing on of the older values of a local gentry to a delegated readership of the “right sort” of urban elite.59 Just as Uncle Ezra knew Tom’s grandfather, Nancy passes on her older values—respect for one’s aunt, for instance—to Tom, the right sort of Boston businessman. Jewett does indeed use the sprained ankle to reveal the difference between the gracious, cosmopolitan Tom and the weak, arrogant Carew. Tom enjoys the local entertainment, because “[h]e had known enough of the rest of the world to appreciate the little community of fishermen-farmers” (12), while Carew turns into “but a complaining captive with a sprained ankle” (11–12). But as discussed above, such statements about Tom’s knowledge

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need to be read alongside evidence of Nancy’s knowledge.60 And Nancy does not just teach Tom, she travels herself. The story opens with a section about Nancy’s visit to Boston, which is explained as an incidental and natural extension of a farmer’s circuit between home and market. She accompanies her uncle Ezra, who lives in the hills just outside Boston, in his regular delivery of peaches from his farm. At first the incongruousness of the country girl in the city streets is highlighted, but as in Harte’s story, such misgivings are overcome: the gruff Ezra forbids Nancy from going to the theater, but he relents when he recognizes that a Maine girl is used to walking the four-and-a-half-mile distance between the depot and his home. Just as the sprained ankle helped Tom socialize with country youth on their terms, a traffic jam stops the wagon long enough for Nancy and Tom to obtain Uncle Ezra’s permission. While Ezra goes about his business, Nancy becomes a tourist, and Tom her native guide. Together Tom and Nancy tour Faneuil Hall, Charlestown, and other sights that “thrill” her “patriotic heart” (13). Although Nancy can no longer tour Boston when she grows old, her joy in society and movement continues to lend her life meaning: when moralists chide her for thinking about dancing on her deathbed, she cites David dancing before the lord. Thus the story portrays sightseeing not as an elite activity, but as a ubiquitous and reciprocal one. Folsom remarks that Jewett’s empathic style “allows full expression to what is, but implies stasis.” For this reason, it “tends away from action, change, and the future” (89). But “The Life of Nancy” is all about the changing relationship between East Rodney and Boston. The story is remarkable in the degree to which it does not preserve East Rodney as it was in the early days of Nancy and Tom’s friendship. Hence it should add to critics’ understanding of the variation within Jewett’s corpus. The story is not focused on the urban elite and their ethically correct or incorrect attitudes toward country people, it is focused on the colliding of country and city. Some critics have praised Jewett’s reading of New England’s historical change because she builds scenes of understanding and non-invasive intimacy between essentially unlike people. In the process, these critics have overemphasized the degree to which Jewett’s unlikely friendships focus on dominant-subordinate relations between an educated, mobile narrator and marginal, regional characters.61 By praising Jewett’s “ethical” relation to her characters, they construct Jewett’s characters into subordinate people, but in this story, Nancy is not portrayed as subordinate. Like Jewett herself, Nancy is a regional person with biographical and spiritual affiliations both inside and outside of high culture circles.

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Conclusion Some critics have faulted Jewett for hiding the presence of tourism and industry in her depiction of place, but such a claim cannot be made about the writing by Harte and Jewett discussed here. Neither is this writing reducible to what Amy Kaplan calls “literary tourism,” because there are differences as well as similarities between this writing and the rampant commercialization of particular places—the replacing of all human interactions with commercial transactions— as well as between the writing and the consolidation of the power of the cultural elite. Harte and Jewett write about a practice of human relations between travelers and locals that characterized their places and was in danger of passing away. During Harte’s final years in California, more people were visiting the West as prospective residents, investors, health seekers, or tourists, and the most powerful of these newcomers influenced the way strangers greeted each other on the road or the way that residents made a living. Harte’s sketches suggest that there are local stories that a modern traveler will not see unless nature or faulty technology, which is always a natural force interfering with human plans, obliges him to look more carefully. In “Miggles,” Harte’s in-between status and the contemporaneity of stagecoach travel—a staple of tourist routes in California into the 1880s—are relatively hidden. But the story forces travelers into sociability with other people’s realities. It corrects traveler fantasies just as would a good tourist guide. Jewett’s story takes slow, personable travel into her present day. The story suggests that economically sophisticated tourist development does not necessarily prevent locals and travelers from having to understand each other. If travelers come back twenty years later, the locals may have changed, and they may have become interested in shaping economic development. Like Harte’s story, the story figures unequal social relations in its portrayal of bodies; travelers’ sore limbs are contrasted to more severe medical problems among the local residents. The stories use travel accidents to showcase the strength of marginal people, who appear in the form of caregivers. Feminist scholars often view the prevalence of male invalids and female caregivers in domestic fiction as a feminine rather than feminist element of the fiction. Elizabeth Ammons, for example, discusses the fact that Rose Terry Cooke plays with the fantasy of a wounded man being tamed by the love of a woman in “Miss Lucinda” as if the motif detracts from the story’s sexual politics.62 Emily Abel’s history of women’s informal caregiving complicates this interpretation. While informal caregiving was a burden and restricted women’s opportunities for direct power, caregiving granted carers certain satisfaction

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and prestige. The intense emotions with which women viewed caregiving suggest that by taking on the task they were not merely meeting social expectations.63 Both stories celebrate values known then and now as feminine, but in a wry rather than conventional way. The feminine is removed from its customary role of redemption. The stories focus on the work and self-compromise of women and others who are assigned the tasks of making meals, shelter, or sociability. Harte’s story reminds readers that the people who make travel comfortable and possible are in danger of being considered “loose,” while Jewett removes the characters Nancy and Addie from what might be construed as demeaning service roles. Most disappointing to those tourists who expect sex as well as comfort, the women’s romantic desire for someone other than the tourists, and the women’s ability to negotiate that relationship successfully, is made clear. Both stories vacillate between a danger and seduction script and a script more empowering for both the female characters in the story and actual women reading the fiction. Harte and Jewett portrayed an activity of unplanned intimacies between strangers that they perceived to be nearly extinct, and therefore twenty-firstcentury readers might think emergency hospitality can be written off as yet another nineteenth-century activity that shifted from necessity to recreation during these years. The experience of emergency hospitality became commodified in their lifetimes, and they contributed to its commodification. Yet commodification, like economic development more generally, is not monolithic. Hospitality was commercial as well as sociable even in the nineteenth century, as documented by Paton Yoder’s study of absentee tavern landlords and Dona Brown’s study of rural men and women working to attract city boarders. The present-day bed and breakfast, clear descendant of the boarding house, has commodified the experience of intimacy between traveler and host less ambiguously than Harte’s and Jewett’s writing did. Countless commercial ventures also attempt to cash in on people’s nostalgia for a more personable and hospitable past. To choose from among numerous examples, British Airways advertisements in The New Yorker in the 1990s tried to convince passengers that flying their planes felt like a return to the mother—a classic mother from the era of their youth. This message elides both flight crews, who work for money not love, and travelers’ real mothers.64 As far afield from local color stories as this ad might seem, the criticism that has equated local color stories with tourism has asked us to consider Harte and Jewett’s fiction as part of the discourse of capitalism. This criticism has also considered capitalism only from the vantage point of large corporations like the airlines. Undoubtedly, it is useful to consider literature as part of the dis-

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course of capitalism. However, we can make a distinction among participants in a capitalist discourse, even though there is no one key for making those distinctions. In comparison to British Airways, Harte and Jewett are slightly subversive in their attempts to write a version of history in which nature and other people’s bodies impinge on travelers into the present day. Furthermore, in spite of Harte’s and Jewett’s belief that unplanned intimacies during travel would become extinct, such intimacies continued throughout the authors’ lives. Harte slept in a hayloft in a hamlet near the Wallenstadt Lake in Switzerland long after any “frontier” had closed there, and he complained about it bitterly.65 In the twenty-first century, unscripted and uncommodified human interactions continue to coexist with commercial interactions, everywhere one goes. Such interactions rarely have the solitary effect of shoring up a cosmopolitan sense of one’s own superiority. In this regard, by writing stories in which strangers are forced to be kind to each other, Harte and Jewett were trying to pave the way for sociable futures.

C H A P T E R

T H R E E



Travel Delays and Provincial Ambition: Rebecca Harding Davis and Thomas Detter

Although Rebecca Harding Davis and Thomas Detter only rarely appear in discussions of local color literature, their fiction and sketches can be read productively as part of the genre. They used some of the techniques of the genre, but they disagreed in reviews and via their fiction with some of the genre’s dominant conclusions. Rather than focusing on higher class characters who are imperfectly rescued through face-to-face meetings with lower class characters who are critical of them, Detter’s sketches republished in Nellie Brown, or The Jealous Wife, with Other Sketches (1871) and Davis’s novella Earthen Pitchers (1873–74) feature middle-class regional characters who strive not to be caught in a region. Like the character Edward Ford in William Dean Howells’s The Undiscovered Country discussed in the next chapter, these characters fear that the country will keep them in their current states, without contact to such amenities as singing lessons, libraries, physical safety, or political power. In the writing by Detter and Davis, regional communities appear virtuous and rejuvenating, but also deprived and limited. Local color often describes both the positive and negative aspects of a particular community, but these texts focus on the negative, and they argue that the constricting aspects of life in an economically stagnant or intellectually isolated place limit the local inhabitants with ambition but no connections most irrevocably. They suggest that the prospect of a forcibly prolonged vacation in a remote picturesque location lacks appeal for people without firm connections to a job, social status, or an intellectual community. As such, their work offers an interesting variation on the theme set forth by Harte and Jewett.

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Stretching the boundaries of the genre to include writers who participate in the genre only ambivalently widens the terms of inclusion of who can write local color, and by extension, of who can speak as an insider of particular places. Born in Washington, Pennsylvania, but raised in Big Springs, Alabama, and Wheeling, Virginia, and thus biographically well-positioned to become a female local colorist, Davis explicitly distanced herself from her female local color compatriots because she believed that Jewett, Freeman, and others were failing to examine the reasons for the hunger, pennilessness, or petty complacencies that they dramatized in their fiction. In Davis’s fiction and essays, women’s immersion in a region appears debilitating. The issue of a writer like Thomas Detter, who was African American, being labeled as regional is controversial; when a scholar refers to an African American writer as a New Englander, Middle Westerner, Westerner, or Southerner, it is often a rhetorical move meant to unsettle conventional understandings of what a regional person is; after all, race in the nineteenth century was a legal category with direct consequences, whereas regional identity was mutable and of indirect political and legal relevance.1 Recent studies of local color literature or regionalism do analyze the literature of African American writers.2 Charles Chesnutt is the black writer currently most canonized for his contributions to the local color genre, not only for his conjure tales, but also for the folk elements in his other fiction.3 Chesnutt’s popularity among critics and teachers is warranted. His conjure tales and their production and publication history dramatize the fascination that half-understood tales of “the simple but intensely human inner life of slavery” held for white vacationers, white editors, and for light-skinned, educated, and economically successful blacks like Chesnutt himself.4 The conjure tale “Hot-Foot Hannibal” (1899) features an openly contrived travel delay, in which Uncle Julius takes John and Annie by a road which makes the mare balk, giving him time to tell his story. More abstractly, all of the conjure tales work as a travel delay: they enchant the white vacationing Ohioans of John and Annie and trick them into granting Uncle Julius control over the resources of the North Carolina plantation country. Chesnutt’s device of the enchanted vacationers also gives him the opportunity to reveal the callous and degrading side of plantation life, as well as call into question readers’ complicity in reiterating African American folk culture outside its original context. In this sense, the conjure tales involve an unintended and unwelcome immersion into a specific social place. At the same time, however, Chesnutt’s conjure tales, as well as his own complaints about the constraints of writing within the dialect form, all the more irrevocably fix the binary of poor, worthy regional subject and wealthy, voyeuristic outsider that

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hampers many literary-critical discussions of the genre.5 Unlike the conjure tales, Chesnutt’s other fiction thematizes class and ideological differences among blacks, but many of his works, such as The Marrow of Tradition (1901), or the color line tales, treat these differences as a gulf between middle-class accommodationists and working-class radicals or supplicants. The persona developed in Thomas Detter’s own much less extensive writing falls between Chesnutt’s stark divisions. In terms of region, class status, and aesthetic sensibilities, Thomas Detter can be profitably read in relation to not only other black writers, but also Bret Harte. Both Earthen Pitchers and Detter’s stories and sketches mourn the elite nature of tourism and sightseeing. They describe travel problems that are caused by the characters’ economic or cultural insecurity. Black travelers, as well as other travelers who were not classed as Anglo-Saxon, had severe difficulties while touring.6 Like most Westerners and most elite African Americans from anywhere in the country, Detter traveled for business and relocation as well as for pleasure.7 His analysis of his vacations and relocations around Maryland, Washington D.C., California, Nevada, Idaho, and Washington supports historian Cindy Aron’s claim about non-elite Gilded Age tourists. Although they suffered from discrimination and harassment, their motivations to travel resembled those of the Anglo-Saxon elite. Rather than rejecting touring as an irretrievably elitist activity, Detter writes as if he has the same desires to tour as anybody and is unjustly and perhaps only temporarily obstructed by discrimination. In a related manner, Detter insists on the rights of people of all races to benefit from national development. In his writing, Detter positioned himself as a sightseer, a businessman, and a gentleman, and thus a traveler. bell hooks argues that the term “journey” is more appropriate than the term “travel” for African Americans because their journeys have often been motivated by desperation or coercion, they encounter terrorism on the road, and what homes they have, whether physical or imaginary, are sources of bitter and painful memory.8 Calling Detter a traveler or even a tourist, however, grants him the class privilege he desired. As with other members of the African American elite such as Chesnutt or Du Bois, this privilege can be viewed in both a positive and a negative light: Detter was a leader of the black community who fought for reforms in politics and education that were meant to benefit all blacks, but at times, his writing can be as dismissive of poor or uneducated blacks as that of the milder of his white contemporaries.9 Somewhat similarly, in the novella Earthen Pitchers, Rebecca Harding Davis portrays two provincial women characters who desire both to understand their native Delaware shore in aesthetic terms and to achieve artistic

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success in Philadelphia or beyond. Supporting Cindy Aron’s argument that tourism for aesthetic purposes democratized more slowly than tourism for rest and relaxation,10 the women characters in the novella fail to become tourists and artists. They fail due to both inadequate finances and a lack of emotional support from their rural community, which expects them to become wives and mothers. The novella reminds readers of social obstacles, but rather than mourning the sightseeing provincial girls as tragic martyrs, it makes readers want to search for a freer and more cosmopolitan nation in which the obstacles to travel fall away and the privilege to vacation is extended. Thus, neither local color text discussed here mourns the inherent elitism of tourism; rather, both writers seem to want to extend tourism’s benefits to a wider group of people.

Frontier Hospitality and the Black Gentleman We have lived to see a higher state of civilization, and rejoice in its progress. We love the land that gave us birth, and all we ask of the white man is to give us an even chance in the great race of life. —Thomas Detter, “Give the Negro a Chance”11 We of these nominal free States, where our characters are so imperfectly understood, and where our condition is so anomalous with that of the so-called superior race, must consolidate our resources, and imitate the freedmen in the States lately reconstructed, by acquiring the broad acres of land, so that our children may not, like us of this generation, trudge in the toils of meniality and humble dependence, subject to the bias of opposing forces, but may with the proudest of the land become producers as well as consumers. —Thomas Detter, Address at Fifteenth Amendment Celebration in Virginia City, Nevada, 187012

Thomas Detter expressed fascination with the technology and trade that were changing the face of the country. He called the railroad the “great achievement of the age” and praised the “noble fathers of the enterprise” for “despair[ing] not” and going “forward making the hilly ways level and the rough smooth” (“Central Pacific Railroad” 109). He sang praises to the work ethic. The West held out particular promise to him because the mountains and harsh climate served as such apt metaphors for “the battles of life.”13 Detter’s praise for people who use the natural resources of American land to make a higher civilization, while perhaps sounding like bland imitation of

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American imperial discourse to twenty-first-century ecocritical ears, resembles that of other African Americans who reflected on the processes by which African Americans were making the transition from being a natural resource to becoming a human shaper of the landscape.14 While Detter shares commonalities with Booker T. Washington, Du Bois and others, he also shares some biographical commonalities with Bret Harte. Somewhat like Harte, Detter was born into a middle rank in society (Detter was the son of a freedman, probably a stonemason and landowner) and he was born in the East (available biographical sources suggest Maryland or the District of Columbia).15 Like Harte, Detter held many occupations (he worked as a Methodist minister, a barber, a journalist, and possibly a miner). Detter moved to California in 1852, two years before Bret Harte did, and like Harte, he began his literary career by writing for newspapers and magazines published in San Francisco. As with Harte, his precarious foothold into the middle class might be related to his rhetorical awkwardness about writing as a Westerner: he seems to desire to speak for the territory but avoid being targeted as a mere provincial. Apart from Detter’s own journalism for the San Francisco Elevator and the Pacific Appeal, not much is known about his life, and so one must speculate about his degree of optimism about the prospects for blacks in the West. He was already literate and outspoken when he moved to California. Finding that the new state denied blacks the right to vote, serve on a jury, or testify against whites in a civil or criminal case, he and other African Americans organized state conventions, petitioned the stage legislature, built schools and churches, and tried to free slaves. Beginning in 1857, while still based in California, he traveled from Idaho to Washington Territories, searching for new mines. In 1869 he left California for Elko, Nevada (around the same time Harte left California for Boston), perhaps unsatisfied with the lack of progress in California for black civil rights. As he had in California, Detter became a leader of the black community in Nevada, although the Nevada black community was tiny.16 Continuing to write for the Elevator and the Pacific Appeal probably helped Detter maintain contact with black leaders in other Western states. Detter’s sketches are characterized by his interest in building and laying claim to membership in an African American elite. More so than many other writers who dabbled in writing related to local color sketches or Southwestern humor, he is nourished by a nationally identified community rather than any one face-to-face community. Elite African Americans tended to stress cultural refinement, and although blacks in the West were less concerned with signs of gentility, nationwide, vacationing among the right people was

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an important part of keeping up with the community’s news and being admitted to the group.17 Detter shared these values. The pieces collected in Nellie Brown in 1871 were most likely revisions of articles published in the San Francisco black press to be read by intellectual and politically active African Americans.18 The pieces on various cities provide information about where people might want to migrate. Detter advertised the completed volume in the black press.19 The collected sketch “My Trip to Baltimore” looks back to the discrimination and ignorance a dark-skinned black man faced in the recalcitrant East. Of all Detter’s collected sketches, this one best fits into the category of local color writing. The piece is set in the past before the oncoming of modernity, as signaled by its self-consciously folksy and hyperbolic tone (“About this time the stage coaches were transmogrified into railroad cars, and horses manufactured into steam engines. That, you know, added greatly to their speed”) (105). The narrative explains the “perplexities so common to colored men” that these men experienced while riding by horseback (despite the alleged options of the railroad) from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore (108). Significantly, it is through moments not only of travel, an archetypal arena for African American ruminations on race and status, but also of emergency hospitality that Detter’s fictionalized persona learns the limits of white people’s knowledge and acceptance of African Americans. He first visits a light-skinned friend who passes for white, William Savoy. He only discovers that Savoy is passing when Savoy sends him to the milk woman for some milk. Since it is raining, Detter is eager to be invited inside, but the woman slams the door in his face, even though she regularly invites Savoy in. Once Savoy, “to carry the joke out,” assures the milk woman that his guest is his father’s slave, the woman takes the narrator into confidence and asks him whether Savoy is wealthy and whether rumors about the black blood in him are correct.20 Detter replies that Savoy is a man, perhaps a better man than most, because he is part Moligascar, part English, part French, and part Irish, and it takes “a good many ingredients to make a man” (106). The vignette illustrates how dangerous seeking food or shelter could be for African Americans. When requesting spur-of-the-moment hospitality, they had to contend with white people’s most casual, and therefore most revealing, fear and hostility. A socially secure tourist might become individuated by an emergency experience. But a black tourist was more likely to lose his individuality and be identified solely as a member of an unwanted race. If a black tourist was light enough to pass, first meetings might have been worrying in a different way. Detter was listed on the Nevada census as black rather than mulatto.21 Although it would be wrong to read the essay as straightfor-

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ward autobiography, it is safe to say that the essay expresses envy for lightskinned people who can pass even as it criticizes Savoy for literally leaving his darker friend out in the rain. Detter’s characteristic response to the incident is to mourn the lady’s ignorance from a vantage point of higher virtue. He associates her ignorance with the fact that she is from New York. The point of the essay is that it is the uneducated Northerners and Middle Westerners who create problems, not the Southerners of good breeding. After leaving Savoy, Detter rides to a hotel kept by a man named Henry Watson for dinner. He is allowed to eat in the dining room with everyone else, and the hostler is very grateful when Detter picks up his horse and offers him a tip. Watson does not charge him for the dinner. Historian Elmer Rusco suggests that the narrator in this sketch is treated so well because he is passing, or in Detter’s words, “get[ting] amalgamated,” but the narrator attributes Watson’s behavior to the fact that he is a gentleman: “I saw at a glance that he was a gentleman” (106). This reading meshes with Detter’s remarks about good breeding in his sketch, “Boise City.” The detail that Detter is not charged for dinner is odd, and might be explained by Watson being a black man himself; the epicenter of the African American elite was Washington D.C., so if a black hotelier were to be a plausible plot element, it would be there. Next Detter stops for the night at a farm owned by a couple from Indiana. The farmers treat him so badly that he proclaims that the lady of the house “did not understand as much about the ingredients the Negro is composed of as the milk-woman at Bladensburg” (108). Although the farmers consent to take him in, they cannot look him in the eye. He and the lady of the house have a conversation about whether blacks can ever become successful in business. She “remarked where she came from, there were very few [blacks], and they were the biggest thieves that ever lived” (107). Growing sarcastic, Detter writes, “I concluded that the treatment I had received was not owing to my being black, but it was on account of those thieving Negroes in Indiana” (107). He tells her that Negroes are not all alike. She replies that yes, there was one good black man in Indiana, but he failed because the whites felt he was getting uppity and refused to patronize his business. The narrator politely explains how difficult it is for a black man to become successful in business unless he “is humble in the extreme, and has a grin for everybody. With many, he must forget that he is a man, to succeed” (108). This repeated language of being a man, not a thing, illustrates how travel was becoming a fundamental expression of personhood and status for African Americans as well as others. The conversation is brought about only by the fact that the narrator is making a journey and requires hospitality. In this moment

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of enforced and temporary intimacy, the Indiana woman might have recognized her visitor’s politeness and intelligence and rid herself of the fear of unfamiliarity, but she does not. Before Detter leaves in the morning, he steals a blanket, thus becoming a thief like the Negroes in Indiana, and he remarks that “This was the only redress I could get” (108). One could argue that he shifts strategies toward trickster tactics, much as he uses a folksy or sarcastic tone throughout the essay. In the volume as a whole, however, Detter’s preferred weapon is that of class. He always portrays himself as acting politely and reasonably.22 In the Indiana household, he enacts a kind of revenge by bemoaning for his black readers the lack of hygiene and amenities. Although of all the essays in the volume, this essay invokes the most techniques one associates with local color, it is very clear that Detter does not want to claim the authority of a lower class regional person. He invokes dialect and the inflated rhetoric of frontier humor only to lampoon the ignorance of white folk. In an inversion of local color techniques, the whites are regional, and he is not. The essay’s invocation of some of the conventions from local color writing (such as dialect and the folk denouement) illustrates the generic overlap between local color fiction and non-fictional travel writing. In other essays in the volume, compared to this tale of humiliation in the East, Detter writes optimistically about being given a fair chance in the West. The sketch “Central Pacific Railroad” sings the praises of the capitalists who built the Pacific Railroad and expresses hope that his new railroad-side home of Elko, Nevada, will flourish. The sketch “Progress of America” proclaims the nation to be “one of the greatest that inhabits the globe” and associates its spirit of freedom and bravery with Crispus Attucks, the black man who was one of the first to die for the rebels in the Revolutionary era, and Daniel O’Connell, hero of the Irish struggle for political independence (113). Thus, black uplift is conceived as likely within the physical boundaries and political mythos of the United States. However, the other Western sketches call Westerners to task for not realizing this promise.23 The key symbol of this failed promise is discrimination on travel routes—in those same face-to-face interactions between strangers that many white authors hoped would be utopian sites for democracy building. On a steamship between Sacramento and San Francisco, “colored people” are forced to share the deck with the cows (117). On the stagecoach, they are forced to wait until all other passengers get in and, if there is no room, ride in the trunk or on the roof. Perhaps because of his own inclinations, perhaps in deference to his black readership, Detter does not specify what he means by “colored” nor address what happens to Chinese or Mexican passengers, even though Chinese in Nevada were subject to more legal restrictions than were blacks.24 The travel

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sketches refer casually to Indians as an uncivilized people, and Detter’s happiness to be part of this civilizing nation seems genuine. When he first visited Boise City in 1864 he wrote about it favorably,25 but the sketch about Boise City in his published volume is a set piece on the special hazards that black gentlemen face when traveling through the West. Subservient blacks and all black women are served in public establishments, but black men who aspire to be gentlemen are rudely turned away. While trying to find a saloon accompanied by a “swarthy, but generous-looking Spaniard,” Detter alone is turned away because of his dark skin (115). In the parts of the United States that were won from Mexico, former Mexican citizens were often treated as non-white, but not in this case.26 Detter claims that if he had approached the owner Mr. J. Old “with my hat in my hand, trembling like a quarry slave, I have no doubt this proud Saxon would have accommodated me” (115). Detter has lived in mountain towns where “the lowest and basest females, white and colored, could be served with meals. If a respectable colored man desired a meal, the landlord would politely invite him to be seated in the kitchen” (115–16). Even so early in the postwar era, then, Detter notes the stereotyping of black men, not black women, as the real threat to white civilization. References to whites helping subservient blacks in emergency situations do indeed pervade mid-nineteenth-century culture, in, for example, depictions of the runaway slave in “Song of Myself” or Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But fellowship with blacks in times of trouble does not translate to civil rights for blacks once times are good. As Detter writes: “I have seen many like Mr. Old come to naught, and who would gladly accept a favor, though extended by a Negro” (115). In de Tocqueville’s theory of American democracy, the “accidents of the moment” such as those Detter details should become opportunities for new, more egalitarian ways of thinking and interacting with others.27 But in Detter’s experience, such emergency situations only expose the lack of hospitality among whites and their adherence to an “old” order, one signified in Mr. J. Old’s name. As the lack of references to Chinese or Mexican people begins to imply, Detter is less interested in fostering intimacy among all strangers than in furthering his own people. In his work there is even an element of unfriendly competition with either black or white women; women are often depicted as ignorant, manipulative, or deceitful. Despite the volume’s occasional misogyny, however, the pieces serve as an intriguing window into life on the road for one black gentleman. Ultimately, resorting to class as his favored tool of gaining respect and recognition, Thomas Detter places the most blame for ill treatment on whites.

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After Reconstruction, discrimination against blacks increased throughout the country. The handful of blacks who lived in Nevada in 1890 (242 were listed on that year’s census)28 lost money along with other state residents in some unusually hard winters, but their economic status declined further because they lost their white clientele as the longing for white racial redemption swept the nation. Hotels and restaurants in the Washington, D.C., area that formerly admitted blacks began to close their doors to them.29 By this time, however, wealthy African Americans across the country had begun building their own hotels, restaurants, and resorts.30 Thus African Americans vacationed more, but they became more segregated from people like Detter’s Indiana farmers and New York milk women. The racism in the larger culture made successful interactions between strangers in fiction, as in life, less imaginable. The question remains whether Detter was attempting with this volume to make a statement of geographical as well as racial affiliation. The novel “Nellie Brown, or the Jealous Wife” is set in Virginia (perhaps to make it likely that all servants will be black) and another about divorce (“Octoroon Slave of Cuba”) is set in New Orleans and Cuba. Except for “My Trip to Baltimore” the short sketches are set in the West. Divorce can be considered an issue associated with Western states and territories, though not yet a specifically Nevadan issue, for many of the new territories’ laws were more liberal than those of the Eastern states.31 In a broader sense, divorce appears in the volume to be one of the “vices” of an advanced civilization best understood, perhaps, in association with the most apparently advanced and forward-looking parts of the continent. Detter was not rooted because he spent so much time searching for places where he could escape discrimination and prosper. Yet he wrote, nevertheless, about places where he lived, loved, and achieved political and social acclaim. I think it is useful to consider Detter as part of a dialogue on regional fiction not because he is subversive or anomalous; as Cathryn Halverson’s work on anomalous Western women writers shows, once we examine an anomalous person or text, we often find there are more precedents for it than scholars formerly appreciated, and that person or text ceases to appear anomalous.32 The value is to illustrate how both regional culture and black culture were internally diverse.

Women’s Emancipation Versus the Railroad In the novella Earthen Pitchers, Rebecca Harding Davis deploys some of the typical motifs associated with local color: a shift from the city to the country,

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urban characters who comment insensitively on country customs, a group of fishermen and farmers who speak in dialect, and some especially clever local characters who long for wider horizons. However, Davis deploys these motifs in a way that questions whether the country and the city can ever be economically and socially separate. She does this by making the city characters, Jenny and Niel, originate from country settings, coastal Delaware and Iowa respectively. Jenny is a daughter of a shoemaker (although also a descendant of a woman of property) and feels inferior to the country heroine, Audrey, who in turn is a faded descendant of an even higher-ranking colonial family. Davis also demonstrates the dependency between city and country by making her two heroines Jenny and Audrey only half of an ideal female artist. Jenny and Audrey long for the formal artistic training, patrons, mental stimulation, and guilt-free vacations afforded to urbanites secure in their finances and social connections. At the same time, they are in danger of burn out and thus need to maintain some ties to the family and nature at home. They can achieve this not by being pushed into temporary intimacy with country strangers, but by becoming better acquainted with the country aspects of themselves that have been repressed under layers of shame. The novella is neither pro-country nor pro-city, for while the two heroines need the city for their self-empowerment, it is the railroad, that symbol of urbanity and modernity, that is the catalyst for their retreat into marriage. The strange appearance in the story of twinned travel accidents demonstrates the inappropriateness of comic McGuffins in tales about female empowerment. When comic McGuffins, or devices that bring characters together, are used in stories about women, they make women look weak and inconstant. The motifs in Davis’s novella illustrate that tales of “loitering” when applied to women are in continual danger of becoming tales of seduction.33 The novella is one of Davis’s most formless and difficult, with the first two chapters slow and cut off from the rest of the story, Gothic tropes that appear incongruously in the middle of a typical genteel narrative (the novella was serialized in the genteel monthly Scribner’s Monthly), and a hasty conclusion. This raggedness might stem from the fact that the novella voices emergent and conflicting ideas. One, women need economic independence. Two, women with economic independence will help marginalize agricultural and small town life. Three, for a modern public, stories about women artists will not be interesting without harsh publicity. Writing a decade earlier to an intimate audience of black Westerners, Detter was not concerned with the problem of making his voice heard above the din of a crowded literary marketplace. In most other texts discussed in this book, however, literary accidents are an attempt to be heard above such a din. And more than any other

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text, Earthen Pitchers makes this problem its theme. In this novella, Davis appears to try on for size different motifs and ideologies. The novella is neither a local color story that immerses women in a rural environment for their own good, nor a female artist story that mourns the artist’s lack of a support network. Ultimately the novella seems divided between the natural locality and women’s advancement. Reading this text, one might experience a split between reading as a regional advocate and reading as a feminist. The novella follows the movement of four characters between Philadelphia and the Delaware coast: Jenny Derby, an aspiring journalist notorious for her independence who occasionally longs for a man who can make her feel feminine and beloved; Niel Goddard, the self-absorbed would-be artist Jenny wants to marry; Audrey Swenson, an aspiring singer based in Lewes, Delaware, who draws her artistic inspiration from the sea; and Kit Graff, cousin to both Audrey and Jenny, also based in Lewes, who is college educated but currently works as a farmer. Both Jenny and Audrey are thrown prematurely into marriage with the literary device of a travel mishap. This device is typically comic, but Davis inserts a mystical near-death by quicksand and a deadly train explosion into the structural slot. While eavesdropping on Audrey and Niel as they walk along the beach, Jenny is trapped in quicksand. She manages to escape only to relinquish her ancestral claim on Stonepost Farm so that Niel can live there with Audrey. Audrey turns down Niel’s proposal of marriage because she wants to devote her life to singing, but she changes her mind about marriage when her neighbor Kit is blinded in the train explosion. After the train explosion, Niel marries Jenny, who devotes her life to financing his dubious art career, and Audrey marries Kit. Like the proverbially deceptive woman of literature, Kit regains his sight once he is married, while his wife loses her singing voice giving music lessons. First, the narrative suggests that artistic women help extract cultural and economic capital from rural life. At first read, the narrative seems to explore the conflict between a feminine world of nature and a masculine world of culture, with Audrey/Lewes representing nature and Jenny/Philadelphia representing culture.34 However, the novella itself significantly complicates that equation. Neither Lewes nor Audrey are so exclusively associated with nature. The novella taps into the long-standing discourse of rural life as the seat of the nation’s virtue, but it discards the patriarchal binaries of country / female / nature versus city / male / culture. The narrative populates the country with the same railroad, land claims, slave trade, transatlantic travel, and the belief in education that characterize its visions of Philadelphia.

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More importantly, what is good for female characters, the fragile and homely “earthen pitchers” of the title, is not necessarily good for the Delaware countryside. While Delaware women like Jenny and Audrey will have greater opportunities for achieving artistic distinction once the city comes to Delaware, farmers and fishermen in Lewes will be forced to compete with landowners who can command high prices for land and with vacationers who are willing to pay well for beach-front property. In the year the novella began serialization (1873), the Methodist Episcopal Church built a new summer meeting ground based in the town of Lewes and the nearby Rehoboth Beach.35 Jenny is the socially engaged, economically successful half of the ideal female artist. As Jean Pfaelzer has argued, Jenny’s life in Philadelphia is dominated by style and fashion rather than substance and conviction. Jenny is paid to write letters from European cities she has never visited. She refers to her poetry as “shop-work” and the countryside as “capital” and “matériel.”36 One cannot take this evaluation of Jenny’s writing at face value, however, because Jenny’s off-hand remarks seem to hide a deeper passion, for at one point Jenny “[stands] quite quiet with her hands covering her eyes for a long time as she always did when she was planning the plot of a story” (227). Jenny’s literary salon seems cruel and fraudulent to Kit, but the salon is based on a novel idea, since it brings together struggling writers with wealthy people in need of material.37 Thus Jenny’s mistake is not moving to the city per se, but rather trying too hard to win others’ esteem. She spends her energy fitting into market preconception. As with Faust, the process of her selfdevelopment recreates a wasteland inside herself, and she is afraid of the past.38 This past is a specifically slave-trading and Indian-killing one. Jenny associates Delaware with the past and views it primarily as material for shopworn writing about Indians, West Indies trade, and white ladies guarded by black slaves. In Jenny’s nervous imagination, slavery is merely local color, not an opportunity to address the plight of freedmen in the present. Unsurprising given her upbringing in Wheeling, then in Virginia, Davis drew her politics from both Northern and Southern views on African Americans. Although she disliked the dogmatism of abolitionists and portrayed the slaves of Wheeling as contented, in her writing she expressed sympathy for the freedmen.39 In Earthen Pitchers readers are encouraged to view Jenny’s search for immediately evident local color material as both bad aesthetics and bad politics. Audrey does not concern herself with racial history. She is sealed off from both politics and all urban trends. Although her uncle disciplines her talent,

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her inspiration comes directly from nature. The contrast between the heroines becomes clear in the way they react to the accidents. After Jenny’s near death by quicksand, Jenny is only “driven in on herself by the hold of death” for “a little while” (253–54), but Audrey wonders at nature in its malignant state. Alone on the stormy beach she finds her calling: She wandered down the beach; she would have penetrated into the heart of this eternal world if she could; its mysteries, its vastness, its infinite, inaccessible repose, even in this transient outcry, reached through her flesh to something within which awoke and answered again. . . . She would find words for this unknown hope; her message had been close to her to-night. Some day she would reach it. (262–63)

Naomi Sofer reads the idea of art expressed in this passage as typical of postbellum women writers searching for a new, national, urban-identified ideal, one in which art is strictly aesthetic, not religious, or concerned with particular social sites or social problems.40 However cosmopolitan her vision, though, as a character, Audrey fails because she remains too closely tied to her immediate family roots. After the reverie she worries that her Aunt Ann will call her an idiot and her cousin Kit will think her mad. Like Edna Pontellier in The Awakening in Helen Taylor’s reading of the novel, Audrey’s aesthetic responsiveness to the natural world is potentially more joyous and yet potentially more tragic than that of men because of the expectation that she will raise children rather than become an artist.41 Audrey’s worries about madness would not have been taken lightly by Davis herself, who felt absolutely no nostalgia for the bout of nervous illness she had experienced in 1864. Audrey is no more capable than Jenny at choosing a husband, and her disregard for market values appears dangerous and ludicrous—even a mere fish seller can cheat her of her money. If Jenny is too much a subject of others’ design, Audrey is limited by being cordoned into a space outside history and society. In life as well as in this novella, Davis rejected rural separatism and viewed the city as a necessary life force for women. When Davis wrote this novella she lived in Philadelphia and enjoyed its intellectual friendships, theaters, and libraries.42 She knew the Mid-Atlantic shore only as a vacationer. With her husband and children she had summered at Point Pleasant, New Jersey, since 1864; the legend of Jenny’s ancestors (the Cortrells who refused to help shipwrecked sailors) is similar to that of the Pirates of Barnegat Bay, New Jersey, whose exploits also occupied the young Stephen Crane and continue to be invoked at tourist festivals.43 Davis’s newspaper sketch “The House on the Beach” is a fascinating ode to the federal signal stations that coordinated and

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centrally managed weather prediction; the sketch assumes that farmers and housewives are better off trusting the federal government for the weather reports than their own weather vanes.44 In her fiction, Davis often groaned about romantic and misguided vacationers who combed the shores for romance, but she reserved greater criticism for women who remained loyal to unviable towns. In her story “Marcia” (1876), the financially secure narrator admires the raw material available to Marcia, a Mississippi girl, but she thinks that Marcia needs years of study before she will ever write anything worth reading.45 Such moments in Davis’s fiction correspond to Davis’s published views about the responsibilities of regional writers: the essay “In the Gray Cabins of New England” (1895) praises the intellectual accomplishments of the New England tradition of thought, but it criticizes Jewett, Freeman, and the New England local colorist Annie Trumbull Slosson for failing to examine the economic reasons why New England women lead such tragic lives. Davis argues that the writers should discuss the economic devastation caused by the closure of the textile mills, and, significant for Earthen Pitchers, she also argues that women can be cured of their neurasthenia by having a child.46 Like many of her era, Davis equated New England local color with chastity and spinsterhood and the absence of pleasure, change, risk, or other aspects of modern life. She was systematically critical of rural isolationism. While the novella’s characterization argues in favor of bringing the countryside into dependence of the cities, its plot devices, in contrast, signal problems with urbanization. The quicksand incident and the railroad explosion are narrated in a way that makes them seem not only inappropriate to women’s fiction, but also inappropriate to an age of iron and steam power. By placing the near death by quicksand and the rail explosion in the same story, Davis is comparing historical epochs. In nineteenth-century novels, quicksand was a common literary device for representing sex, a threshold between stages in life, or a cure for selfishness.47 In local color terms, the quicksand can be read as a means of immersing Jenny in the countryside and encouraging her to be more sensitive to other people. The scene in which Jenny nearly drowns is a particularly detailed narrative of what is not supposed to happen when a tourist is coerced into closer contact with less fortunate people. In some ways, the scene fits well into the local color genre, in that a tourist’s mishap brings together socially divided people. Dialect-speaking neighbors arrive and the reader becomes better acquainted with them. A man named Pike, for example, humorously prevents the hapless Niel from drowning in the quicksand himself while Audrey proposes a successful plan of rescue involving ropes and planks. Thus, in the female-dominated genre of local color, it is

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appropriately a heroine who uses a tourist’s mishap to showcase her own native know-how and strength. The wrong behavior of the failed cosmopolitan Niel is contrasted to the right behavior of the local potentially cosmopolitan Audrey.48 Yet in other ways, the scene plays up some disturbing elements of the local color genre. First, the scene emphasizes that to immerse someone in the countryside is to define them solely within the terms of family and racial history. Both the locals and the countryside are openly deterministic in their belief in the power of family history. Audrey and Kit interpret the quicksand as a sign of the curse on Jenny’s family. (Jenny is a Cortrell and a distant relative of the man who refused to rescue the dying sailors off the shore. Ever since one of the dying sailors cursed the Cortrells, the sea has stretched its hands inward to punish selfishness.) The curse seems to be borrowed from the frightening Gothic stories that Davis wrote for popular women’s magazines, and its presence in the story trades individual agency for blood determinism.49 Second, neither tourist figure learns anything much of value from the scene. Niel does not learn not to rush in and be a hero. While a funeral in The Country of the Pointed Firs helps the urban narrator feel at home in Dunnet Landing, Jenny notes acerbically that her own brush with death is useless for either her personal growth or her artistic production, because “there was something so ridiculous in being swallowed in a quicksand” (256). There is a difference between reading for regional commitment and reading for female self-determination. Readers invested in Jenny’s professional success may not want Jenny to be immersed in her past. Like Jenny herself, they might read the quicksand device as backward. In contrast, Audrey and the fishermen read the quicksand in a gloomy and determinist way. Ultimately Davis does not use blood determinism to resolve the narrative, because neither Jenny nor Audrey gets married as a result of the quicksand incident. It is only after the train explosion that Jenny and Audrey marry. On the way back to Philadelphia, the train carrying Jenny and Niel is derailed by an explosion. The explosion serves as a way of chiding the urbanites for so casually commuting to Philadelphia; while Davis firmly believed in science and was not an avid church goer, she still believed that everything in human life happens for reasons related to God’s gentle providence.50 Injuries suffered by Niel and Kit finally encourage Niel to propose to Jenny and Audrey to agree to marry Kit. In some sense the train explosion operates in exactly the same way as the quicksand, as a trope for the proximity of death and the subsequent urgency of marriage and child bearing. But there is an obvious lack of parallel to the train explosion. The near-death by quicksand

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happens slowly on a moonlit night accompanied by legends of a shipping past. Fishermen gather round and argue knowledgeably. The body in danger is isolated rather than en masse. Audrey’s knowledge of how people handled this quicksand in the past and Kit’s religious faith contribute to their success. In contrast, the train explosion happens suddenly, in between known communities, and cannot be combated by cooperative neighbors alone. The rail explosion represents a loss of individual control over body, mind, status, and community. Audrey’s epiphany demonstrates that the quicksand can be turned into art, while the rail explosion is at once too frightening and too mundane. The disappointed Jenny and Niel boarded the train to flee the face-to-face community of Lewes for the opportunity for forgetfulness and change in the city. The crash sends them back in time to their bodies and personal history. The rail explosion renders the female characters’ bad decisions to marry into loud, monumental mistakes. This interpretation of the rail explosion explains an odd paragraph in the novella. When Jane is following Niel and Audrey down the beach, the narrative voice shifts from the objective description of realism to the conspiratorial confession of popular sentimentality: There is so little to tell of these two who were going down together, and of Jane following behind, that I am tempted to give up the story. But after all what is all life but the history of some man and some woman—lovers, or husband and wife, or mother and child, with a background of sea sand or farm-house or city street, trying to catch hands—to find in each other something which they lack in themselves or in God? Marriage seldom makes a break in the story. Sometimes the knife or pistol interferes to put a vulgar, bloody, cluttered end to the fine tragedy or comedy, and then it becomes public. (248)

The paragraph rejects realism and invokes the Gothic only to cast it similarly aside, for ultimately none of the available genres of women’s fiction are suitable. The rail explosion is this story’s bloody knife. It renders the private trauma of a bad marriage and a lost career into a large-scale and public problem, for it was only in this decade that Americans began to view rail accidents not as a fact of nature but a preventable matter for public concern.51 Dissatisfaction with marriage did not make the front page of the Philadelphia papers, but rail crashes often did. While the rail explosion might seem like nothing more than a handy way to spice up the narrative, it ultimately reflects on the paradoxical empowerment and subordination of women writers within urbanity. The rails brought a national print culture to women and released them from the holds of their fathers, ministers, or seminary teachers, yet the rails also created a reading formation that was distracted and

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confused. Any audience that needs a rail crash to spice up a story about female artistry is not ideal. The notion of the rails as a source of modern shock was prevalent among Davis’s acquaintances, who included Silas Weir Mitchell, the neurologist who was known as an expert on neurological injuries as well as neurasthenia, and who lived in Philadelphia like Davis did. The 1870s saw the medical and legal debates about whether train accidents were different in kind or degree from riding accidents. In 1875, John Eric Erichsen argued that a rail accident had unique qualities in that the victim has no time to prepare, no warning, and is deeply afraid.52 By invoking a train crash in a story about the private dissatisfaction of particular women, Davis makes marriage not an expected outcome, or even a throwback to myths about Atalanta and the apples, but a current event, a matter of immediate and collective importance. When public policy makers began viewing train accidents as events that required government intervention, government commissions worked to prevent accidents and help people sue for damages, but they also increased state and corporate authority over everyday life.53 Art followed this new statistical urge. In the year the novella began serialization (1873), Leland Stanford hired Eadweard Muybridge to photograph his horse in motion to determine whether there is a moment in a horse’s trot when all four feet leave the ground. Muybridge’s photographs led to the technology of film. His next forays into the new medium involved photographing naked women and men in movement, and even in these first moving pictures, there is the tendency of film to pinpoint the moving female body as a problem for representation.54 If we can treat Jenny and Audrey as real people whose feelings extend beyond the written page, we can say that for them it is not only the suddenness of the train explosion but also the sense that they will be publicly measured for their reaction, for their progress, for their female bodies’ ability to withstand what Silas Weir Mitchell understood as the drain of nervous energy brought about by brain work, that encourages them to give up art and get married. Both Audrey and Jenny fight not to be measured.

Conclusion These texts by Detter and Davis are worth considering together because of their shared critique of local color themes. In both Nellie Brown, or the Jealous Wife, With Other Sketches and Earthen Pitchers, the regional accident motif is ironized because it is applied to upwardly mobile figures who want to gain self-possession rather than lighten the load of self-awareness created by

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too much self-cultivation or corporate work. Readers are exhorted to want the same. The fact that Jenny is originally a Delaware woman makes the quicksand incident less a pleasing release from urban experience than a gloomy retreat into biological determinism. The fact that Audrey, regardless of her lofty roots, is likely to become the wife of a farmer, makes her epiphany a sign of madness, not an artistic temperament, and not even the bearable bourgeois malaise of neurasthenia. Readers might also sympathize with Thomas Detter when he writes about stealing the blanket from the Indiana couple who so sourly take him in. Through the novella’s structure, Davis asks how much meaningful interaction vacationers will get in an age of steam and rail travel, and how much meaningful social concern readers can develop in a public sphere awash with print. Although they celebrate sightseeing, Davis and Detter voice skepticism about the utility for lower status people of stories of minor travel injuries as a way of fostering egalitarian feeling. As the next chapter will discuss, the genre of realism, of which local color is a subcategory, forms meeting grounds for different social groups and stages minor accidents to create a desire that equitable and successful communication between the groups will occur, but the requirement of plausibility—the fact that no one character is allowed to stray far from his or her given social role—prevents representations of widespread change. It also imperils characters who are trying to rise above a disadvantageous social role. Davis’s and Detter’s texts reveal discrimination and misunderstanding on the part of higher status characters, the kind that Elsa Nettels and Kenneth W. Warren discuss in their criticism of the genre of realism.55 Yet the texts demonstrate that whether or not higher status characters overcome their prejudices, chance meetings only get in the way of the upward movement of white farm women or African American gentlemen, who want plans rather than good feeling. In different ways, the so-called natural state that occurs when the trappings of society fall away imperils both white women and African American men. African American men are only accepted in the temporary community created by an accident if they act like humble victims and refute all possibility that they will take advantage of the situation to rise. White women have to contend with heroes who want to treat them as weak and turn them into wives and mothers. Furthermore, in the specific case of Earthen Pitchers, the female protagonists are not renewed by more sensitive and self-reflexive contact with local workers, because both country and city are contained within the protagonists themselves. They need the city for artistic training and support, and they need the country for a space apart in which to restore their strength and artistic inspiration, even if this means joining the vacationers

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on the beaten path. Taken together these texts suggest that lower status people need a chance to work on themselves before they can worry about an egalitarian community of national scale. While Davis and Detter object to some elements of industrialization, they remain proponents of the type of progress promised by industrialism. Jean Pfaelzer documents Davis’s concern for those disenfranchised by industrialism.56 There is no evidence, in the one volume of his work that is available, that Detter was similarly concerned about industrialism.57 In his collection of essays, Detter writes enthusiastically about railroads and the building of new Western towns. His essays seem genuine in their promotion of business as long as business is coupled with opportunities for African Americans. Similarly in many of Davis’s local color sketches, she expresses pride in the scientific and industrial revolution that swept the country and changed the nature of the places she is describing. Literary history tends to separate writers identified as “regional” from politics, urban trends, industrialism, and nationalism. Yet neither Davis nor Detter accepts a binary between country and city. Nor do they accept a binary between the communitarianism of a regional travel accident narrative and the individualism of a bildungsroman. However, both writers advocate a degree of separatism for people on the edges of the bourgeois. Like Elihu, the Shaker leader in The Undiscovered Country discussed in the next chapter, the black gentleman and the white country female artists would be better off occasionally promising nothing. For Detter a separate space might be considered the San Francisco black press. For the fictional Jenny and Audrey, the most available separate space is psychological. It might require relaxing on the Delaware coast, but it is unlikely to be preserved under the institution of marriage. Interestingly, the authors do not reject the regional travel accident motif on the grounds of its potentially Social Darwinist logic in which the weak are wiped out by a purifying return to savagery. If anything, they invoke the motif to prove just how clever and resilient their characters really are. Neither Detter nor Davis appreciates that element of the rescue motif that encodes women as victims or black men as villains. “So like a woman! . . . She has run open-eyed into a swamp, and cries to be taken out of it” (251), Niel cries, but Niel comes across as an imperceptive weakling. In the American context, almost any argument against the random loitering entailed by vacationing or literary writing takes on a tinge of Puritanism. In these examples, however, it is fairly clear that vacationing and writing are to be considered good things for African Americans and good things for provincial women. In their texts Detter and Davis propose that

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everyone in the country should have access to tourism. Everyone should hunt for new cities to wonder at, new romantic legends to treasure, new books to read, and even new conversation topics. Although in this text and elsewhere Davis expresses significant misgivings about modernization, both authors embrace the benefits associated with modernity, from the guilt-free holiday to tolerance for cultural difference to creative expression.

C H A P T E R

F O U R



Realist Magic in the Country and the City: William Dean Howells

In William Dean Howells’s novel The Undiscovered Country (1880), urban travelers venture into the Massachusetts countryside, only to be caught up in a series of events involving missed trains, lost luggage, chance meetings, spontaneous hospitality, illness, and injury. The novel redacts rose-colored visions of rural and small-town people with scenes in which the town hosts are apathetic about providing refreshment and conviviality to their urban guests. In these scenes, the novel redacts the pastoral, including the pastoral strands of local color literature. Even more sharply than the stories by Harte, Jewett, and Davis, this novel undercuts the idealism of the hapless tourist and grapples with the class conflict that deepened in U.S. society after the Civil War. Howells’s urban novels are full of similar chance meetings, injuries during travel, and feelings of accidental entanglement. These devices comprise an aesthetic of accident that Howells developed in an especially programmatic way but that he shared with a number of other realists like Caroline Kirkland. The similarities between The Undiscovered Country and the Harte story, for example, suggest that Howells developed this realist aesthetic of accident in competition with local color literature. Critics have already argued that Howells developed his realist aesthetic in competition with mass culture.1 When the character Bartley Hubbard in his novel A Modern Instance (1882) brags that the ideal newspaper would solicit “an account of suicide, or an elopement, or a murder, or an accident” from “every fellow that could spell, in any part of the country,” he appears to voice Howells’s own misgivings about the popular press.2 Howells felt

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that newspapers, particularly cheap newspapers, treated accidents as an opportunity for sensation, just as they more generally created a public that was unified around no more than the basest emotions of fear and puerile curiosity. Rather than inspiring public unity for the purpose of preventing further suffering, newspaper accounts of accidents tried to thrill readers solely for the purposes of prestige and circulation. Editorials in papers that tried, like Howells, to speak above the public, papers like the New York Times or Harper’s Monthly, complained that readers’ outrage never lasted long enough to create enough political will to fight corruption or pass safety legislation.3 Howells wanted to discover what type of literature would inspire people from different economic, political, and religious backgrounds to see each other as respected members of a human community and to work together to improve that community. When devising literature to achieve this end, Howells avoided sensational tales of fortune and disaster, perhaps both out of a self-interest in maintaining his new status as upper class and out of a sense that the populist rhetoric of the press served market ends.4 Howells’s most common devices for bringing about social cohesion are devices of accident that are toned down, as if to avoid either the sensation of the press or the rose-colored vision of local color literature. In his novels, chance meetings and injuries during travel serve the purpose of fostering cognitive and emotional connections between social groups. In contrast to Jewett’s use of similar devices, the devices in Howells’s novels fail to foster longlasting connections: the novels emphasize that social fragmentation cannot be combated with serendipitous meetings alone. And yet, similar to local color, the novels use the devices to foster conversations that might serve as the first step toward lasting social cohesion in the future. Howells’s particular use of accident was tied up in his generic program of literary realism, and it is significant that accidents appear frequently in his fiction of the 1880s, the decade in which he was developing that program. Although scholars have not discussed accidents as an ingredient in American literary realism, they have suggested that the genre was fundamentally about democratic aspirations and failures. Their arguments can shed light on the specific ways that accidents in Howells’s novels do and do not foster social cohesion, and an examination of these accidents adds to the existing conversation about democracy in realism. Scholars have debated the success of the genre’s democratic aspirations, many of them focusing on the fiction and criticism of Howells. Howells formulated realism around the principle of extending literary representation beyond the genteel classes to groups formerly neglected or idealized in literary representation. He was often a generous promoter of provincial, black, Jew-

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ish, and socialist authors, and his personal politics became increasingly socialist in the late 1880s.5 Yet his novels and criticism include both democratic and antidemocratic impulses. As Amy Kaplan, Elsa Nettels, and Kenneth W. Warren have argued, Howells’s fictional attention to social environment tends to fix characters within a rigidly stratified world. Kaplan emphasizes that Howells’s novels try to pave meeting grounds between his middle-class readership and the upper and lower classes, but that they organize these meeting grounds around a middle-class sense of the familiar; as a result, his novels work to contain the threatening, competing realities of labor-capital conflict and mass culture.6 Nettels and Warren argue that dialect, slang, immigrant speech, and the crude manners of characters like the Dryfoos sisters make it appear that people not born into gentility cannot master the skills required to be granted membership in genteel circles.7 Howells portrays other characters, such as the country bumpkin Egeria in The Undiscovered Country or the black janitor in A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) as romantically different, an identity that prevents them from making their opinions heard in the genteel circles of the “foregrounds” of the novels.8 Enriching these readings, Brook Thomas focuses more on realism’s democratic promise. In American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract, Thomas asserts that realism’s wide social fabric is formally and thematically shaped around a contractual conception of justice: social problems are solved through human negotiations, not references to a cosmic order, and conceptions of right and wrong change with history. Thomas argues that this nineteenth-century conception of justice remains an ideal worth taking seriously, despite the discrimination pointed to by Warren and Nettels that makes some players more powerful negotiators than others. In an assertion that is important for my argument, Thomas emphasizes the necessity of spoken communication in Howells’s fiction: he writes, “Howells tried to imagine how a more equitable social order could be achieved through immanent exchanges within a heterogeneous society made up of competing interests. Invested in a vision of social harmony, he saw his role not as an imposer of order, but as a translator facilitating communication among various social groups.”9 These critics do not address the means by which effective meeting grounds are formed—the means by which the middle-class containment described by Kaplan gives way to the communication between social groups described by Thomas—and their arguments can be extended by discussing these means. The accident-devices of chance meetings, transportation injuries, and accidental entanglement bring about the necessary shifts in Howells’s fiction from a stratified space to one that is less stratified, less frenetic,

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and more appropriate for communication. To the extent that Howells’s novels enact a desire for facilitating communication, accidents work as the fulfillment of an authorial wish.10 Missed train connections and chance meetings force the middle-class characters of the novels’ “foregrounds” into a realization of train schedules, labor politics, tramps, slum dwellers, and morally compromised millionaires. More abstractly, these incidents entangle the lives and interests of disparate characters—they are a sign for readers of the involvement of bourgeois individuals in industrialism and a socially divided nation. Yet, more sharply and programmatically than in Jewett’s fiction, in Howells’s novels this authorial wish for communication is imperfectly fulfilled or disastrously unfulfilled. While many local colorists nurtured accidental social connections in their fiction, Howells and other realists remind readers of these connections’ implausible nature.11 In doing so, realism emphasizes the deep-seated effects of social inequality upon human interaction. By calling this dynamic “accident” I am codifying a characteristic of Howells’s writing that is known but has not been named. For example, William Alexander identifies Howells with an ability to represent how middle-class people live richly detailed lives without acknowledging the people, institutions, and events that lie outside their horizons of consciousness.12 Tony Tanner has remarked that Howells’s novels are filled with chance meetings that attempt to break down this atomism.13 And Amy Kaplan explains this double pull of Howells’s work as a response to a society made more connected yet more distended by the media, corporations, and complex institutions.14 Howells’s trope for this type of modern relation, I contend, is accidental entanglement. Accident serves as a kind of magic in Howells’s fiction. His criticism on realism defends literature against the magical elements—such as dei ex machina, ghosts, or shipwrecks—of popular fiction and the high literature of previous periods.15 Yet faulty train connections and express trains that run over innocent pedestrians would not have registered with Howells’s 1880s readers as novelistic contraptions alone, but as signs of the immanent present, as technologies that could wreak havoc with the natural world of chance and make the economic risks that men and women take all the more damaging. And Howells’s accidents do not signal the residual moralism of which critics have accused him.16 They do not produce morally pleasing endings or radically changed societies; instead, they remind readers of the need for, and the difficulty of, maintaining cognitive and emotional connections in a heterogeneous society. They are just as modern as other modern understandings of “accident” as a concept and event that were coming to occupy social ob-

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servers in the nineteenth century: accident as a media commodity, accident as proof of the necessity of the insurance industry, and accident as a signal for an unconscious wish. In The Undiscovered Country, Annie Kilburn (1888) and A Hazard of New Fortunes, Howells alludes to all of these associations, which suggests that he was actively choosing rather than passively accepting a kind of modernity.17 I begin my reading by tracing the way that chance meetings and other accidents function in The Undiscovered Country. This novel suggests that “realist” accident evolves in part from “pastoral” accident. Yet rather than replacing the pastoral with images of irreconcilability between rural and urban people, Howells posits a modern hope that connections made by accident might lead to permanent understanding and coherence. A similar realist device of accident informs the later novels Annie Kilburn and A Hazard of New Fortunes. In contrast to The Undiscovered Country, these two later novels represent the social coherence made possible through accident as only an imperfect solution to social fragmentation and inequality. In Annie Kilburn Howells’s faith in the social fiction of accident shifts into a critique of the subject that relies most frequently on the accidental to generate social change—that is, the well-intentioned but cloudy-headed middle- or upperclass subject. Yet the novels themselves enact accidents in an attempt to make readers connect, and in A Hazard of New Fortunes Howells refines and partially refutes some of Annie Kilburn’s criticism of the well-intentioned middle- or upper-class subject.

We Promised You Nothing Critics have often identified The Undiscovered Country as a transitional novel between two periods of Howells’s production: the 1860s and 1870s, which were dominated by his travel books and humorous courtship novels, and the 1880s, in which his major works were realist novels of the city.18 Nearly all Howells critics consider the novel to be minor, and many judge it an aesthetic failure.19 Their judgments may be related to the novel’s discontinuous generic code: it combines the genres of pastoral, realism, and Hawthornesque romance of the psyche in a seemingly aimless way. While the first fourteen chapters ironically expose the fraud of spiritualism and the impossibility of harmony between different social groups, the final ten chapters soberly explore the psychology of interpersonal influence and love. This discontinuity makes the novel difficult to read and interpret. The greatest advocate of The Undiscovered Country has been Kermit Vanderbilt, who makes a strong case for its major status in the Howells canon on

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the basis of its being a post–Civil War reenvisioning of the pastoral.20 In the novel, two sets of weary urban characters (Boynton and Egeria and Ford and Phillips) venture into the countryside, where the powers of “nature” restore their physical, emotional, and spiritual health. The novel is a revision of the pastoral, argues Vanderbilt, because it emphasizes the social stratification and social changes (breakdown of sexual and familial morality) that affected both country and city in the 1860s and 1870s. Rather than peace and timelessness, the characters find figures whom they interpret as uprooted or disreputable, including prostitutes, tramps, migrant woodcutters, poor Southern whites and blacks, and noisy lower-class tourists. The revision of the pastoral in The Undiscovered Country is even more intricate than Vanderbilt’s reading reveals, for the representation of country space in the novel indexes a struggle between competing generic ideologies of human cohesion. In the novel’s opening the urban characters generally assume that country people will be charming, generous, and unthreateningly different, as country characters would be in a pastoral. But instead, the country characters are complex and subject to the same spiritual quests and economic concerns as the urban characters themselves. Howells replaces the urban characters’ assumptions of boundless country hospitality with an idea of accidental entanglement that characterizes his later novels about the city. In addition, dissenting characters voice skepticism about whether such accidental entanglement is meaningful or helpful. There are three aesthetics of accident in The Undiscovered Country: pastoral accident, realist accident, and part-Puritan, part-utilitarian critiques of realist fictionalizing around accident. The plot is important to the argument, for it demonstrates how accidents are not just a theme, but an aspect of the novelistic structure. In this novel, we can readily see how actual travel accidents, involving trains and luggage, are structurally and thematically similar to other accident motifs, including coincidental encounters and feelings of accidental entanglement. All of these motifs of accident bring characters together across social divides; characters treat all of these motifs as calamities created by the shocking heterogeneousness of modern society; characters are forced into companionship with others brought to them by the accidental situation; and they feel linked together, as if by a modern sense of fate. The novel begins in Boston, where Mr. Boynton, a man from Maine, experiments with using his acquiescent but hesitant daughter, Egeria, as a spiritualist medium. They consort with a fashionable but not quite respectable group of men and women, the boarding house crowd, in which they meet Edward Ford, an indecisive young man unable to find satisfaction in either

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chemical experiments or magazine writing. In the novel’s first chance meeting, Ford and his friend Phillips visit a séance arranged by Boynton’s landlady, in which Boynton demonstrates his powers over Egeria. Out of scientific skepticism rather than malice, Ford disrupts the séance with actions that Boynton attributes to the spirits: he squeezes Egeria’s hand so hard that he injures her, and he lights a gas lamp. Ford’s squeezing of Egeria’s hand constitutes the novel’s first major social accident in the sense that it is a sudden, unwelcome event that serves to link the fates of Ford and Egeria. Ford then incenses Boynton by revealing that the entire séance was a fraud, and he refuses Boynton’s request to restore Boynton’s honor through another séance. Feeling defeated, Boynton attempts to return to Maine, but his journey is interrupted in the novel’s second major accident, which is more obviously a “travel accident”: his eagerness to listen in on the conversation of a group of Shakers at Ayer Junction causes him and his daughter to miss their train. They mistakenly board the southbound instead of the northbound connection and find themselves without their luggage or money at the next stop, near Egerton, Massachusetts. After many unsuccessful attempts at finding shelter and assistance, during which Egeria falls dangerously ill with fever, they house with a Shaker community in the town of Vardley. Feeling himself to be at home in a community of spiritualists, Boynton endeavors to interest the Shakers in his own spiritualist experiments. But they resist his entreaties, preferring his acquiescent and humble daughter, who gains independence and confidence in the course of picking berries and pretty leaves in the neighboring fields. At the very moment that the latent hostility becomes explicit between Boynton and the Shaker Elihu, Ford and Phillips arrive at the Shaker community, stopping for the night during an antique-buying expedition. In the novel’s third major accident, Ford stumbles across Boynton sleeping outside. Remembering Ford as the man who dishonored him, Boynton attacks Ford, hits his own head in the struggle, and suffers from apoplectic seizures and contusions that send him into a decline ending in death. Bidding good-bye to Phillips, Ford remains in Vardley to assist the Boyntons. In the course of conversations in the meadows and at Boynton’s bedside, Ford and Egeria fall in love, and Ford and Boynton resolve their difference of opinion about science and spirituality. After Boynton’s death, Ford and Egeria move to the Boston suburbs, where Ford’s patent for a common household chemical earns them a middle-class living. The novel’s representational codes redact the pastoral. By providing precise detail about people and places, the novel complicates the pastoral plot in which city people go to nature in order to be rejuvenated. These codes

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resemble those of Howells’s urban novels of the 1880s, codes that Amy Kaplan identifies as realist. Kaplan explains how realism contrasts a middle-class domestic “foreground” to the “unreal” city composed of the working classes and capitalist elite. She identifies the middle-class couple in A Hazard of New Fortunes, Basil and Isabel March, as vehicles for representing a middleclass response to the new, unsettling anonymity of city life. For Kaplan, the Marches are mobile, realist characters preoccupied with “the problem of inhabiting and representing rented space.”21 The characters in The Undiscovered Country similarly help historicize and correct the myth we receive from fiction of “urban” versus “rural.” The Boyntons are not at home anywhere: in Boston they develop neither a social network nor knowledge of city life, and Boynton’s single-minded dominance over his daughter has alienated them from their remaining relative in Maine. Similarly, the Shakers come from diverse backgrounds: Brother Humphrey speaks in heavy country dialect, yet Sister Francis has a fashionable sister in Boston, and while some of the Shakers find Boynton’s spiritualism religiously inspiring, others consider it a corrupt modern practice, and still others see it as a welcome source of entertainment. Rather than portraying rural people as quaint and generous, the novel reminds readers of the absence of communal feeling between socially separated groups in the modern Massachusetts countryside. Noting Egeria’s shabby dress, the conductor of the train does not believe their story about the northbound money and luggage and orders them off at the Egerton stop. Without money, Boynton and Egeria wander through a vacation community, forests, hobo camps, and vacated farmland. When seeking assistance or shelter, they are mistaken for tramps, drunks, and a reform school dropout and her accomplice. The Shakers eventually house them, not out of spontaneous feeling between equals, but because they have a policy of accommodating tramps as well as paying guests. The novel represents the countryside as a space of class conflict and modern unknowability. Much as Howells used the Marches’ walks through the poor neighborhoods of New York City, he uses the Boyntons’ buggy rides through the country to capture competing versions of modern reality. While recovering from her fever, Egeria is rejuvenated by her wanderings through the neighborhood in the traditional pastoral fashion—she gathers flora and picks berries, and with each walk, she gains energy, happiness, and confidence. Yet her idea of nature coexists with the nature worked by poor fieldhands and inhabitants of rickety shacks. For example, migrant Canadian woodcutters, hired by the Shakers, salvage firewood from the same cleared

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grounds where the Shaker women and Egeria pick berries. Like the city, and like death (to which the novel’s title explicitly alludes), the Massachusetts countryside is rendered into an “undiscovered country.” One of the startling lessons that readers learn while looking over the urban characters’ shoulders is that the (at least somewhat) hospitable Shaker characters do not share the Boyntons’ expectations of a common ground.22 Knowing that the Shakers practice spiritualism, Boynton expects them to be thrilled at the news of his success in calling the spirits, and Phillips arrives ready to bargain for their furniture and ornaments. But the Shakers thwart these expectations, and friction between the guests and the host comes to the fore. It is significant that this friction is expressed through the Shaker Elihu’s reinterpretation of the accident of Boynton boarding the wrong train. Boynton interprets this occurrence as a divine sign—he speaks joyfully of the “chance” meeting at the train depot that led him into the Shakers’ fold (181). But the Shakers distrust him, and, sensing this, Boynton appeals to his own ideal of hospitality: “You led me to believe that among you I should find the sympathy and support which are essential to success” (223). Brother Elihu replies: “We led you to believe nothing. . . . An accident threw you among us, after we had fully and fairly warned you that we should not receive you or any one without deliberation. We welcomed you kindly, and you have had our best” (223). Elihu thus expresses the possibility that chance meetings and accidental social connections are not to be trusted as a basis for communal feeling. Elihu brings to the fore the novel’s question about the social construction of the meaning of accident—about whether an accident should be made to signify something beyond itself. According to Elihu, Boynton’s accident in boarding the wrong train is meaningless, and Elihu’s words (while softened in another scene) crystallize an important counterargument to Howells’s dominant argument. Howells is famous for proposing that reading good literature, thinking morally, and finding meaning in everyday life are key, related ways of combating the modern fragmentation caused by mass culture and class conflict. The essays that he wrote for Harper’s Monthly between 1886 and 1892 and included in revised form in Criticism and Fiction suggest that realism can be a moral force only if created by a careful author. Yet Howells also expressed indecision in this regard, suggesting in some essays that the author’s addition of meaning is important, while suggesting in others that reality, morality, and good art are inseparable regardless of the author’s conscious intentions.23 Thus Elihu’s outburst connects to a central question that Howells was considering at

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this point in his career, the question of whether social fictions (and hence realist literature) can be meaningful and hence powerful. Elihu’s reply is a counterpoint to Howells’s critical speculations about the viability of attaching meaning to common events: Elihu suggests that Boynton’s accidents do not constitute moral phenomena—that is, they are not a significant sign of the rightness of the fit between Boynton and the Shakers. To Howells’s question of what cohesive fictions might be powerful enough to replace the outdated institutions of hospitality, Elihu replies: nothing. In that sense, he throws into relief the constructedness and hopefulness of both local color and realist literature. The narrative puts forth two other rationalist perspectives on the place of accident in modern life, perspectives that had become commonplace in society at large. One is voiced by the Boyntons’ friend Hatch, who accompanies them to the Ayer railroad depot. When Boynton exclaims that he overheard the Shakers discussing “the life hereafter . . . and the angelic life on earth,” Hatch replies, “Well, I don’t know about the last, but the first is a good subject for a railroad depot. Makes you think whether you’ve brought your insurance ticket” (118–19). The conjunction of death and the railroad make Hatch think of damage to life and limb: this is the definition of accident that the insurance industry developed in the early nineteenth century. Hatch’s wry remark hints at a worldview in which chance is bothersome, even destructive, and to be avoided, and in which the best way to avoid it is by purchasing a market product. In this insurance worldview there is no reaching beyond the realm of the social and the calculable.24 Thus in The Undiscovered Country we see the insurance worldview, a worldview we might readily associate with the nineteenth century, in tension with another equally “modern” worldview, in which accident is to be embraced as a secular, social path to human connectedness newly important in an age when people must continually consort with strangers. The other rationalist perspective on accident is expressed by Ford in Boston, at the beginning of the narrative, when he objects to social niceties, white lies, and fictions. Ford criticizes Phillips and Hatch for dabbling in activities in which they have only provisional faith: “He [Hatch] dabbles in ghosts as you [Phillips] dabble in bricabrac. He believes as much in ghosts as you believe in your Bonifazios. They may be genuine; in the mean time, you like to talk as if they were. Upon the whole, I believe I prefer blind superstition” (86). Ford abhors Phillips’s and Hatch’s way of enjoying fashionable activities that they themselves acknowledge to have merely socially constructed value. Similarly, Ford abhors using an accident as an excuse for an

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individual’s irrational decisions: when Boynton attributes his tardiness in confronting Ford about the séance to needing to save a child who had been run over in the street, Ford considers the occurrence “rather too opportune” (92).25 But in the narrative’s second half, once Ford feels “accidentally” enmeshed with Boynton and Egeria, he very much embraces modern social fictions. He begins to enjoy walks in the forest, and he accepts a moral interpretation of his fight with Boynton; as he explains to Phillips, “I can’t say that I am responsible for the misfortunes of this man, but somehow I am entangled with him, and I can’t break away without playing the brute” (269).26 To Elihu, who accuses him of courting Egeria in a way that might tempt the Shakers (committed to celibacy) to fall in love themselves, Ford equivocates: “Do you think these are the circumstances for love-making? I am here very much against my will, because I can’t decently abandon a friendless man” (350). It is significant that Howells has Ford understand and narrate his change in thinking with the language of being abducted or enchanted: the narrative posits a premodern way of enchanting characters into embracing the risks and pleasures of the modern world, in which people are thrown in with strangers and encounter sexual temptation. Thus, the novel does not privilege the rationalist and utilitarian interpretations of accident—and, by extension, modern life in general; rather, the conclusion embraces the possibility that accidental meetings and conversations can be meaningful. Through a realist social fiction of accident, Howells in The Undiscovered Country posits hope for modern social connections among people who do not share a history, community, family, or political affiliation. He most clearly mobilizes this concept of modern social connection in Ford and Egeria’s courtship, but he also deploys it in order to portray provisional relations between communities and places. Ford and Egeria become friendly with the Shakers not because they are essentially like them, but because they are in circumstances that provide them with a common ground for friendship. Howells responds to the modern tension between community and mobility in both country and city by positing the viability of temporary emotional coalitions. These emotional bonds make possible the peaceful yet probing conversations between Egeria and Ford, Ford and Boynton, and Boynton, Ford, and the Shakers. Yet these emotional bonds remain selective: the Shakers are a relatively knowable and similar country group for the urbanites to be thrown in with, and Ford is a relatively sympathetic Howellsian, rising “brute” character. In the late 1880s, however, the same realist deployment of accident for the purpose of fostering social cohesion is not as successful.

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Chance Decisions in the City In both Annie Kilburn and A Hazard of New Fortunes, the motifs of the chance meeting, the sense of accidental entanglement, and sudden death during travel all serve purposes similar to those of the accidents in The Undiscovered Country: they foster meetings between socially divided people and devise ways for the novelistic narrative to move beyond its middle-class foreground. The sense of accidental entanglement vivifies a means by which middle-class characters might deal with their expanded horizon of social impact by expanding their horizon of consciousness. All three figures of accident signal the involved yet partially ignorant role of the individual within complex organizations, which in these novels take the form of voluntary associations, the literary marketplace, and city space. With accidents, Howells constructs new forms of “incidental,” or antifoundational, responsibility that are appropriate for a modern world in which an individual’s actions and thoughts affect people outside of his family or community. Accidents in these novels reveal the characters’ complicity with the economic or socially oppressed, with the local gentry with whom Annie Kilburn associates, and with the capitalist who supports the artistic production of Basil March, Alma Leighton, and Angus Beaton. In examining the expanded horizons of social consciousness brought about by modern transportation and communication, I draw on Thomas L. Haskell’s theory about the connection between the growth of the humanitarian sensibility in the eighteenth century and the growth of a market economy. Haskell argues that the humanitarian sensibility required a “broaden[ing of] the sphere within which a person may potentially feel himself to be the cause of an evil.”27 He speculates that this broadening came about as a result of a market economy that habituated people to making transactions across stretches of time and space—thus, a national literary market might have habituated actual nineteenth-century readers to feel social obligations across distance. Howells’s two later novels thematize the possibilities and problems of the expanded but attenuated consciousnesses of readers. On this point, Wai-Chee Dimock argues that in The Rise of Silas Lapham(1885) and The Minister’s Charge (1887), Howells proposes an “economy of pain” in which characters who do not limit their humanitarian actions court disaster.28 But how do they decide which obligations to act upon? Howells’s use of accidents to urge his characters to a decision suggests that there is a certain amount of arbitrariness and circumstance built into the system of modern humanitarianism. In Annie Kilburn and A Hazard of New Fortunes, all devices of accident are not of equal value: Howells thematizes a contrast between “accidental en-

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tanglement” and “activism-theory.” He identifies a sense of accidental entanglement primarily with middle- or upper-class characters who feel a desire to contribute to the cause of social justice, and he encodes it as feminine because it is unthinking and often ineffective. I label such characters the “wellmeaning bourgeois.” Howells identifies activism and theory with the Reverend Peck, the socialist Berthold Lindau, the religious would-be minister Conrad Dryfoos, and the committed altruist Margaret Vance—the “activisttheorists.”29 These characters resist bourgeois ideas of comfort and American ideas of innocence by reading socialist thought, participating in worker cooperatives, and actively attempting to make the upper class and small business owners recognize their role in increasing social inequality. While the well-meaning bourgeois characters experience a sense of accidental entanglement, activist-theorist characters experience fatal injuries during travel. In Annie Kilburn, Mr. Peck is hit by an express train while crossing the depot on his way out of Hatboro to set up a cooperative house and school for millhands in another town. And in A Hazard of New Fortunes policemen shoot Conrad and club Lindau while the two men, wandering through the city, attempt to intervene in a demonstration by streetcar strikers. The message transmitted by the different effects of accidental entanglement and accidental death is that truly activist characters are too good, and in some ways too extreme, to exist in the novels’ worlds of middle-class plausibility— the deaths serve as a wake-up call for readers. The historical Howells cannot be simplistically identified with either accidental entanglement or activismtheory.30 The novels clearly endorse the theoretical viability of the activiststheorists, yet they do not portray the accidentally entangled characters as simple foils. Instead, these characters demonstrate how difficult it is to deal with expanded horizons of causality—or in other words, how difficult it is to perform actions that bring about more than personal fulfillment. In Annie Kilburn, Howells compares three methods for building common ground among the established gentry, rising elite, summer people, immigrant workers, and farm laborers of a New England factory town. The least viable method is that of a group of Hatboro residents, comprised of the local elite and the rising entrepreneurs, who attempt to establish a social union for the town’s factory workers. The organizers’ union appears unlikely to meet the long-term needs and short-term desires of the factory workers, and it smacks of condescension and social control. The meetings illustrate that these reformers are primarily motivated by a desire to ensure social influence, and in portraying them, Howells lampoons social reform. The second method is that of the radical Reverend Mr. Peck, who openly criticizes the philosophical assumptions of the social union organizers. He

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explains that working-class people have fundamentally different needs that cannot be understood with middle-class intuition alone. The social union organizers see Peck as frighteningly emotionless and abstract, and they see his apparent neglect of his child (he is a single parent) as proof of his heartlessness. The third method is that of Annie Kilburn, a well-meaning bourgeois character, who mediates between the unthinking reformers and the emotionless, theoretical Peck. A member of the Hatboro gentry who returns from Washington, D.C., and Europe to the home of her youth because she is tired of the disoccupation of expatriate communities, Annie reestablishes herself in Hatboro with inarticulate longings to “be of some use” and “try to do some good.”31 She exemplifies a modern, privileged longing for the perceived permanency and mutually supportive nature of life in an American small town. Howells constructs Peck as thinking and Annie as feeling. For example, when Annie sends two sickly children to the seashore in hopes of a cure, she is acting on her own intuition, without consulting a physician. Similarly, she is unable to explain why she dislikes the idea of the social union until Peck offers his reasons, and then she feels that “Mr. Peck had given her a point of view, and though she believed she did not agree with him, she could not escape from it” (742). Annie’s reactions here reveal her method of reform to be an unwilled, felt impulse. In this novel Howells suggests that this method is both harmful and helpful: it enables Annie to question the status quo and examine her own actions, yet her actions contribute to a child’s death, as one of the sickly children dies during the journey to the seashore. Thus Annie’s sense of entanglement is an example of the modern individual’s ability to effect good or evil: an individual may try to do good across time and distance, but because of natural and human-made chance, he or she may fail. At the same time, however, Annie’s impulsiveness is inseparable from the aspects of her character that Howells labels as feminine and neurasthenic. In the first half of the novel, Howells describes Annie’s indecisiveness with lines like this one: “She never could tell by what steps she reached her agreement with the minister’s philosophy; perhaps, as a woman, it was not possible she should” (864).32 In his other novels as well, Howells represents women as cloudy-headed, given to opinions acquired merely by accident, and incapable of the individualistic strength that leads to drastic solutions or heroism and, hence, an early death. In A Hazard of New Fortunes, the activist-theorist Margaret Vance does not die along with Conrad, whom she urges into the strike’s fray, but rather is pushed to the margins of the novel’s conclusion, in which she appears as a nun.33 As with Egeria in The Undiscovered Country,

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Vance in Hazard exemplifies feminine suffering and enduring (as opposed to masculine suffering, acting, and dying young).34 And yet Howells proposes no alternative for these “feminine” approaches to bringing about social equality and harmony; he may gently scorn feminine forces in his novels, but they are always useful and necessary to the narratives, just as putatively feminine forces are useful in Bret Harte’s stories about frontier companionship. For example, over time, Annie Kilburn becomes more vocal and logical in her analysis of social stratification in Hatboro. At the novel’s conclusion, it is evident that her indecision, coupled with her determination to carry on Peck’s legacy, might help the town’s factory workers and poor. Rather than being the leader of a factory worker cooperative (as Peck had tried to be), Annie works for a cooperative run by the factory workers. The narrative becomes transcendental in its positive description of her accidental method: She remained at her door looking up at the summer blue sky that held a few soft white clouds, such as might have overhung the same place at the same hour thousands of years before, and such as would lazily drift over it in a thousand years to come. . . . A perception of the unity of all things under the sun flashed and faded upon her, as such glimpses do. Of her high intentions, nothing had resulted. . . . Nothing of what was established and regulated had desired her intervention; a few accidents and irregularities had alone accepted it. . . . She was aware of the cessation of a struggle that has never since renewed itself with the old intensity; her wishes, her propensities, ceased in that degree to represent evil in conflict with the portion of good in her; they seemed so mixed and interwoven with the good that they could no longer be antagonised; for the moment they seemed in their way even wiser and better, and ever after to be the nature out of which good as well as evil might come. (858–59; emphasis added)

The passage appeals not to the civil and social as one would expect a realist novel to do, but to a Romantic permanence, creativity, and release of selfwill inspired by nature.35 The novel as a whole raises problems with this viewpoint, but the passage nevertheless offers hope that Annie’s sense of accidental entanglement is a meaningful and worthwhile method for helping the cause of justice. In contrast, Howells portrays Peck’s activist-theorist method of effecting justice as not viable in the realist world. It leads to his collision with the express train, which prevents a radical conclusion to the novel by keeping Peck from setting up a cooperative and giving his radical message to the congregation. Just as the Boyntons’ missed train eventually led to social unity, so too Peck’s accident fosters an opportunity for unity among Hatboro residents.

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The Savors, a working-class family of reformers, take Peck’s severely injured body into their home, and when a crowd, which includes the gentry, enters to visit him, the Savors offer the “vulgar kindliness” of coffee (850). But this upwelling of feeling associated with spontaneous hospitality is short-lived, leaving Hatboro’s social divisions just as strong at the end of the novel as they are at the beginning. The death by express train is a familiar metaphor for the relentless, destructive forces of modernity that Howells seeks to ameliorate by making probing yet peaceful conversation possible, and it is significant that in his aesthetic, these forces are most dangerous to a radical character.36 This hope in the power of accidents to encourage privileged people to work toward social cohesion with a wider populace is missing from the ending of A Hazard of New Fortunes. This novel’s goal is similar to that of Annie Kilburn: it revolves around the possibility of uniting people diverse in region, gender, and political opinion, this time through the literary magazine Every Other Week. In the opening episodes, Fulkerson, Vance, and Basil March discuss how to please both New York readers and provincial readers. But different staff members interpret the aim of the magazine differently: publisher Conrad Dryfoos, the son of the magazine’s nouveau-riche natural gas millionaire, hopes that the literary editor’s sketches of New York City’s neighborhoods might serve as a first step toward a world in which the comfortable people understand and care about how the uncomfortable people live; the literary editor Basil March vaguely imagines that the magazine will give young artists a chance; and the magazine’s advertising head, Fulkerson, suggests soliciting first-hand material from a streetcar striker merely for the purposes of profit and prestige. In the course of the novel, the fragile coalition of the magazine’s staff becomes increasingly difficult to maintain and increasingly unlikely to bring about social harmony. The novel contrasts the methods of activist-theorists (the foreign submissions translator Berthold Lindau, Conrad Dryfoos, and Margaret Vance) with those of characters who vaguely desire to do good (Basil and Isabel March).37 Howells consistently uses the language of accidental entanglement in relation to the well-meaning bourgeois characters: Basil recognizes Lindau’s socialist rhetoric because he has read similar rhetoric in labor newspapers that he came across “accidentally” (Hazard 194); during the strike demonstration, “Something stronger than [Basil’s] will drew him to the spot” (422). Such characters exclaim hopefully that city space might contain a magic that would inspire social cohesion and social action: Margaret Vance, for instance, speculates that “there seems to be some solvent in New York life that reduces all men to a common level, that touches everybody with its potent

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magic and brings to the surface the deeply underlying nobody” (243; emphasis added). While the experiences of these characters prove their initial hopes wrong, the narrative itself uses similar devices of accident to knit people together. During their apartment hunt, Basil and Isabel March view a block of tenement houses “accidentally” (64), because the driver of their hired coupé steers down that street without orders to do so.38 The magazine staff is bound together through accidental, chance meetings in public city space: March does not come to hire his long-lost teacher Lindau because he remembers the man’s strengths but because he runs into him in a restaurant; Conrad is inspired to intervene in the strike because Margaret Vance encounters him on the street. These incidents suggest that social connections across communities might happen spontaneously in the opportunity-filled streets of the city. Thus, in the realist novel, the modern city space becomes a space especially appropriate for fortunate as well as unfortunate social shocks or “accidents” small and large. In contrast, the narrative’s conclusion in the horse-car strike and the dissolution of the magazine’s staff dramatizes the idea that city accidents fail to create a common ground in which socially conflicted characters can come to consensus or understanding. The horse-car strike is the narrative’s most significant accident device. Kaplan argues that the strike is a return of the repressed that connects the narrative’s middle-class, familial foreground to its background of the unreal city; by implicating its bourgeois characters in the immediate physical experience of the strike and the accompanying social disorder, Howells undercuts the tendencies of yellow journalism to cordon off urban life and workingclass protest from middle-class reality.39 Unlike Mr. Peck’s tragic death, the deaths of Conrad and Lindau do not inspire the less politically radical characters to put into action their ideas for change. Kaplan reads the strike violence as a wake-up call about the failure of the realist genre to foster social cohesion that works, and she reads Basil March’s quandaries about God and economic chance as the impossibility of attaching meaning to terrible events. It is true that the novel’s overall generic program and its accidents in particular fail to bring about social cohesion on a macro level, but it is possible to read in the narrative’s ending the notion that accidental entanglement may motivate disparate characters to work together on a personal level: the strike, for example, gets the conversational ball rolling again among the surviving magazine staff. After the disastrous staff dinner and before the strike, none of the staff members were speaking to each other about Conrad’s distaste for the job that made him valuable to them, the lack of seriousness about the legacy of slavery on the magazine’s pages, or Dryfoos’s miscomprehension of the situation between Christine Dryfoos and Angus

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Beaton. After the strike, however, the surviving members try to act on a newfound feeling that they are connected to each other and that they might very well try to make amends. For example, the superficial Fulkerson is the one who tells Basil March that Lindau is dying. Dryfoos admits to Basil that he wishes he could explain his political convictions to Lindau and Conrad, even though the strike will eventually show him that his desire for discussion has come too late. Basil March is surprised at his own change in attitude, about “the willingness he had once felt to give this old man [Dryfoos] pain” (449). When his wife wonders how it became possible for Dryfoos to change his attitude, Basil replies that only inner voices, not outer events, change people: “it is the still, small voice that the soul heeds, not the deafening blasts of doom” (485). It is significant to an argument about travel accidents getting written into the structure of the novel, of course, that Basil and Dryfoos meet again only when Basil crosses Fifth Avenue in a daze, gets his hat bumped off his head by a horse, and is standing in the middle of the road blocking traffic when Dryfoos’s coupé drives by.40 The accidents in the narrative provide a space for the characters to hesitate, rethink, and make decisions—they provide a space within modern life for heeding the “still, small voice.”

Conclusion In the realist version of accident, the devices of fatal injury and accidental entanglement create the perception that the destinies of all people are linked through involuntary and intangible connections. Fatal injuries serve to remind readers of the violence of the contemporary world and the social upheaval that would be necessary for social leveling to occur. Yet rather than suggesting in the novels that such violence is the inevitable, final word about what modern life and experience are, Howells also vivifies and analyzes a particularly modern sense of accidental entanglement, which seems to arise from the causal bonds created by modern travel and circulation, bonds that are easy to form, but difficult to control. The characters that Howells identifies most strongly with a sense of accidental entanglement tend to be above the economic threshold of gentility and to have ample access to communication and transportation networks but to not be in charge. That is what makes them psychically as well as economically middle class. He uses the accidents that these characters experience on trains or horse cars, or in reading, in order to expand their horizon of consciousness beyond their privileged circles. In both Annie Kilburn and A Hazard of New Fortunes, Howells draws sharp contrasts between radical characters who act on the inequalities around them and bourgeois characters who accidentally stumble onto good

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works or radical views. Rather than focusing on the superiority of the heroic over the timid—although his texts certainly warrant such a reading—he reflects on how difficult it would be to inspire actual privileged people to think beyond their densely self-interested perspectives. In the course of these three novels, Howells expresses less and less hope in the liberating potential of realist accident. In The Undiscovered Country, only isolated characters critique the naturalness of human bonds created through accident, and the narrative ultimately upholds the social fiction of bonding through and by accident. In Annie Kilburn, an accidentally entangled character is contrasted to an activist-theorist with a better sense of the changes that need to occur before Hatboro’s conflicted residents feel a sense of togetherness, yet in the course of the novel, Annie’s sense of accidental entanglement eventually inspires her to help working-class reformers put Mr. Peck’s plan into action. In this way, the narrative offers a sense of hope for the efficacy of accidental entanglement as a catalyst for action. A Hazard of New Fortunes offers less hope that the literary magazine and its well-meaning staff will decrease social fragmentation or social inequality, but it offers some hope on a micro level. This development suggests that Howells found less and less usability in realist accident in the course of his writing during this decade. Significantly, this is also a decade in which his personal political views became more resolutely socialist. Later Howells novels organized around random social connections, such as An Imperative Duty (1893) and The Landlord at Lion’s Head (1897), do not mobilize the words and images of accident to nearly the same degree that the earlier novels do. Realist accidents read positively as the impulse toward conversation and concern in a nonviolent modern world. They also undercut the idealism of the pastoral strands of local color literature. However, as Howells himself may have believed, the accident devices in these novels possess social and narrative limits: they stop short of fostering social transformation within the world of the novel, and hence, perhaps they also stop short of fostering a radical social imagination among readers. Once the radical characters of Annie Kilburn and A Hazard of New Fortunes die, the world they leave behind is focused on plausibility and personal security rather than change. These realist accidents resist more challenging social alliances, such as alliances between Egeria Boynton and tramps, the literary magazine writers and striking workers, or Margaret Vance and the Dryfoos sisters. Kenneth W. Warren points out that realism was produced by and helped reinforce a postbellum politics in which African Americans were considered stuck in their current socioeconomic positions, and realist fiction avoided the melodramatic tropes of rescue and escape that had been central to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle

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Tom’s Cabin (1852) and other sentimental texts.41 Realism’s focus on the difficulty of producing social change can lead to inaction as well as more effective action. As I have argued, one conservative consequence of Howells’s aesthetic of accident lies in the way his novels treat the belief in social fictions, like a sense of commitment that emerges from a fateful encounter, as feminine, and therefore bad for one’s health. His novels devalue this putative feminine even though they rely upon it. Both in his personal statements and his twentieth-century legacy, Howells has been instrumental in the gendering of optimism as feminine. Such a gendering has helped fix the boundaries between Gilded Age genres like realism, local color, and naturalism, as well as the evaluation of prose fiction from a broader time period.42 The details of the texts discussed so far demonstrate that a distinction between the optimistic reading of history in local color and pessimistic reading in realism can be upheld, even though the optimism and pessimism in these genres appear to be without inherent politics.

C H A P T E R

F I V E



Angry Reform from Elsewhere in New England: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

While Jewett, Howells, and Rebecca Harding Davis used accident tropes occasionally, accident tropes absolutely pervade the work of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. In some respects, accidents in Phelps’s work—as well as related motifs of injury, invalidism, and disaster—serve similar narrative and political purposes as do accidents in fiction by Jewett or Howells. Accidents create a textual space for cross-class intimacy in which social problems are solved through spoken agreements between equalized actors in places characterized by moving people, ideas, and capital. In other respects, though, Phelps’s fiction differs formally and politically. Her fiction draws on popular genres like sentimentality, melodrama, or ghost stories, and it emphasizes action, emotional intensity, and dramatic turns in fortune and character; for examples, see table 5.1. Her fiction revels in the social upheaval that would have to take place before successful negotiations between people could occur, and it often evokes forbidden mental states like anger, exasperation, the desire for vengeance, or the desire for sudden change.1 Because of the differences between Phelps and other writers, as well as the sheer number and variety of examples she offers us for analysis, Phelps’s work deserves its own chapter. Early in Phelps’s life, an actual mill fire raised her awareness of the plight of Massachusetts mill workers, of their very different experience of Massachusetts as a place. Following from that fire, her early fiction uses worksite and travel accidents as a means of bringing together factory workers, fishermen, the idle rich, and middle-class characters who resemble herself. In her early fiction, we see both the progressive and conservative consequences of the reform impulse: she

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Table 5.1. Selected Injuries, Accidents, and Disasters in Writing by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (b. 1844 d. 1911)

Initial Serialization Phelps Text

Quality Journals

“The Tenth of January” Working girl dies in Pemberton Mills fire.

Atlantic Monthly 1868

The Silent Partner Offstage, a factory owner is crushed at freight depot, enabling his daughter to become a partner in his factory. In front of an awestruck crowd, a disabled working girl dies in flood.

Published as a book by Osgood Co. 1871

“Zerviah Hope” A Northern woman doctor and male nurse travel to to South Carolina and nurse a freedman in a yellow fever epidemic; based on a real epidemic.

Scribner’s Monthly 1880

“Is God Good?” Discussion of volcanoes; questions whether nature is beneficent or cruel.

Atlantic Monthly 1881

Doctor Zay Bostonian lawyer has carriage accident in rural Maine.

Atlantic Monthly 1882

Beyond the Gates Train engineer who saves trainload of passengers is honored in heaven.

Published as a book by Houghton, Mifflin, 1883

The Madonna of the Tubs Coastal Maine woman tells story of watching the near drowning of her husband.

Harper’s Monthly 1885

Middling Journals

Initial Serialization Phelps Text

Quality Journals

“Conemaugh” Telephone operator dies alerting customers of flood; based on 1889 Johnstown Flood.

Independent 1889

Middling Journals

“A Lost Hero” White boy and black man save train from derailment.

Youth’s Companion 1890 (children’s journal)

Chapters from a Life Retelling of Pemberton Mills Fire; Newsboy run over by electric train; other accidents

McClure’s 1895–96

The Successors of Mary the First Family servant is run over by a train. Mother slips while interviewing prospective servants; during her convalescence, a genteelwidow restores order and happiness to the household.

Ladies’ Home Journal 1900–01

Avery Neglectful husband newly appreciates the suffering of his invalid wife after he has a dentist-gasinduced dream of death by boating accident.

Harper’s Monthly 1901

Confessions of a Wife Same storyline as Avery without the accident device: wandering, deceitful husband and disillusioned wife.

Century 1902

“Dea ex Machina” Professional man rescued from boating accident,

Harper’s Monthly 1904

(continued )

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Table 5.1.

Chapter Five (continued)

Initial Serialization Phelps Text

Quality Journals

Middling Journals

and his wife rescued from invalidism, by a woman doctor.

A Chariot of Fire Wealthy man saves life of country boy whom his chauffeur injured in an automobile accident.

Harper’s Monthly 1905

The Man in the Case House fire; respectable woman nearly reveals renegade brother.

Ladies’ Home Journal 1906

Walled In Professor injured in automobile accident becomes attracted to his sister-in-law while wife has illicit affairs. Wife dies with lover in canoeing accident.

Harper’s Bazar 1906–07

“The Chief Operator” Telephone operator dies alerting customers of flood.

Harper’s Monthly 1909

raises bourgeois readers’ social awareness, but contains the lives of working-class characters within her own moralizing vision. I also argue that there are strong biographical reasons for her interest in the misfortune of others. She seems to deploy accidents to escape her own constricted upbringing. For Phelps, imaginatively witnessing others’ accidents (that of a mill girl, and that of an idle rich man) fulfils a class- and gender-specific wish fulfilment of being accepted in the provinces as a virtuous, useful professional woman. Phelps’s late fiction is not as well received by her critics, but it is worth examining here because the tropes from the earlier fiction carry through and get amplified in ways that serve as allegories for her difference from high literary contemporaries.2 Realist fiction restrains emotion and buries topical references to specific protests, streetcar strikes, economic depressions, or reform movements, whereas modernist fiction projects social relations into the psyche.3 Phelps disobeyed both these generic prescriptions. Her fiction is

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openly Christian and sentimental: it punishes the wicked, showcases the strength of small-town middle-class women eager for an intellectual proving ground, and rewards the poor and dutiful with the promise of an afterlife. In her later work, this sentimentalism takes on a sadomasochistic dimension: characters must suffer before they undergo a conversion.4 Largely as a result of Phelps’s disobedience to highbrow generic codes, she suffered irreparable riffs with her publishers Houghton Mifflin and the Century Company as well as peers like William Dean Howells. Because accidents and similar motifs occur so frequently in her fiction, and because detailed correspondence with her publishers exists, we can turn to Phelps for an analysis of how and why fictitious accidents sold to audiences. Thus, this chapter departs from the largely textual readings of previous chapters to consider what Phelps thought or might have thought about the motifs in her fiction. The correspondence with her publishers demonstrates that writing accident stories, and writing in general, was a business venture, for many writers, but particularly for Phelps. The fact that it was so clearly a business venture demonstrates a link between the high literary fiction of the nineteenth century and the popular genres of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which the trope of travel accident occurs just as habitually. In terms of formal politics, Phelps was less sympathetic with socialism or racial justice than writers like Howells or Thomas Detter, and her fiction often is rather conservative. Yet her plots and tropes obsessively point toward social explosion, and this social explosion is not always an object of fear. In order to appreciate accidents in her fiction, one has to overturn some conventional ideas about the concept of a social body. As Wai-Chee Dimock has written, nineteenth-century theorists of society associated tales of disabled workers with the notion of a diseased social body. Such a notion of a “whole body” in danger of being fractured is central to both Western political theory and Western theories of illness.5 But in Phelps’s fiction, social as well as individual bodies are most whole after they have undergone disruption and inclusive change.6 In Phelps’s fiction, an accident becomes not a sign of a diseased social body in need of casting out its others but, on the contrary, of a diseased society in need of welcoming in its others. In particular, Phelps associates extreme mental states not with a barbarism to be cast away, but a barbarism to be cherished. Emotional mental states will help create self-fulfilment and social change.

Witnessing Accidents, Escaping Andover Phelps’s relation to the pastoral, female-dominated New England depicted by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, and Sarah Orne Jewett is tenuous

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for various geographical, temperamental, aesthetic, and political reasons.7 In her fiction, Phelps depicted industrial cities, fishing communities undergoing a transition into a tourist economy, and suburbs. The difference stems partially from her upbringing in Andover, a town dominated not by women but by conservative male theologians and rowdy male students. Phelps herself was raised to be an educated but submissive minister’s wife. Crucially, though, she was hugely dissatisfied with that prospect. She identified with her mother in their joint longing for wider horizons. When Phelps was young, her father Austin Phelps was the minister of a prominent Congregational church, and her family moved to the more provincial seminary town of Andover, Massachusetts when she was four years old. Her mother missed Boston’s high culture and felt alienated from God and the religious men around her.8 As it was for many other writers, telling tales about other people’s accidents was a means for Phelps of authorizing tales about people outside of her family group. Unusually, however, Phelps tells tales of work injuries, automobile accidents, yellow fever epidemics, and earthquakes.9 Such tales seem to have helped her escape her particular New England home. She focuses on the euphoria of witnessing newsworthy disasters, the adrenaline rush, the sense that experience and history suddenly descend upon private life. Middle-class women are typically associated with private, psychological wounds rather than physical or collective pain. Although Phelps suffered psychological distress, in her fiction, physical as well as mental injuries serve as a convenient motif over which to drape personal grief, frustration, wonder, and desire. Her accident motif links women to the realm of work and physicality.10 In her autobiography Chapters from a Life (1896), Phelps dates her first escape from her home and its values to the 1860 burning and collapse of the Pemberton textile mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, which buried hundreds and killed around ninety workers. Her description tropes father-daughter conflict, as she explains that her father allowed one of her younger brothers to travel the four miles to the mill to witness the event but kept her at home. As a consequence, she had to rely on secondary sources when she wrote “The Tenth of January” (1868). The mill burning alerted her to the gulf between her own emplacement and that of the workers: To the pages of the gazetteer Lawrence would have been known as a manufacturing town of importance. Upon the map of our young fancy the great mills were sketched in lightly; we looked up from the restaurant ice-cream to see the ‘hands’ pour out for dinner, a dark and restless, but a patient throng; used, in

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those days, to standing eleven hours and a quarter—women and girls—at their looms, six days of the week, and making no audible complaints; for socialism had not reached Lawrence, and anarchy was content to bray in distant parts of the geography at which the factory people had not arrived when they left school.11

Similarly, the story “The Tenth of January” revises village sketch literature, taking a typical, noncontroversial opening phrase (“The city of Lawrence is unique in its way”) and following it with nightmarish descriptions of sandheaps, spoiled food, and “jaded faces and busy feet.”12 In the autobiography, the sense of the mill burning as an isolated crisis is relegated only to her youthful naiveté. As an adult, she understands the burning to be a symptom of chronically harsh conditions. However, even as an adult she posits a huge gulf between middle-class women and workers and explicitly rejects socialism: even in her wise old age, then, she is not egalitarian.13 In both autobiography and short story, the mill burning becomes a tool for Phelps’s own entrance into public and political discourse. At the beginning of the story it is a polished and educated narrator who introduces Lawrence, urges the audience to linger over the death of a working girl, and speaks on the working girl’s behalf: “These pages are written as one sets a bit of marble to mark a mound. I linger over them as we linger beside the grave of one who sleeps well; half sadly, half gladly,—more gladly than sadly,—but hushed” (306). The disjointed punctuation betrays authorial indecision about the certainty with which one might speak of another person’s happiness to die, yet the narrator is still a patronizing guardian figure rather than someone on equal ground with the dead girl. The narrator hushes the girl in the process of enacting her own entrance into political discourse.14 In the story as a whole, however, additional types of authority compete with the narrator’s patronizing voice. Phelps draws on managerial discourses like telegraph messages and newspaper reports and a populist tale of heartbreak featuring the working girl Asenath Martyn (Sene). The story’s conflict parallels the conflict of Phelps’s autobiography: Sene, like Phelps, must choose between her family destiny and her personal desire. Yet unlike Phelps, Sene’s destiny is to die young without sexual fulfillment because of a problematic inheritance: her mother was an alcoholic, and her father is an old-fashioned artisan who is unable to teach her the modern virtue of pluck. Sene is engaged to a boy, Richard Cross (Dick), who recognizes her inner qualities, but who is also attracted to a pretty and self-confident working girl, Del Ivory. Believing that it would be wrong to deny Dick the opportunity to love a better woman, Sene struggles to break off the engagement. Phelps’s decision to punish her

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heroine this way might stem from her belief in birth control for the lower classes.15 The mill burning is what finally prompts Sene’s decision. When the building collapses and she is half buried by flooring and wires, she is torn between the desire to live—“Sene’s heart leaped within her. Out in the wind and under the sky she should stand again, after all! Back in the little kitchen, where the sun shone, and she could sing a song, there would yet be a place for her” (346)—and the desire to fulfill her family destiny—“The latent heroism in her awoke. All her thoughts grew clear and bright. The tangled skein of her perplexed and troubled winter unwound suddenly. . . . God had provided himself a lamb for the burnt-offering” (348). Granted, Phelps grants Sene a small amount of agency over her destiny when she has Sene consider whether to call out to be rescued from the fallen timbers around her. Yet the serendipity of the building collapsing at that very moment provides Sene with a means of escape from decision making (339). This is a familiar narrative of a woman who is mesmerized by greater powers into self-deprecation and self-abandonment. While Sene chooses to embrace a submissive, asexual destiny, Phelps notably escaped a similar destiny by writing ambitious literature and marrying anyway. Although many aspects of the story speak to Phelps’s conservativism—her willingness to speak for the working girls and determine which ones remain in the gene pool—the girl characters in the story revel in their new-found independence by discussing dress patterns and taking the theater train to Boston with young men. The story’s focus on a few working-class characters invites readers to consider how multiple human stories were caught up in the real-life event. Scholars often assume that middle-class women reform writers move from the social to the personal. Wai-Chee Dimock’s reading of female worker identity in Life in the Iron Mills helps one reconsider such binaries.16 As Dimock argues, nineteenth- and twentieth-century social observers have assumed that the effect of industrial work on a worker’s body is the summation of its effect on the worker as a whole. However, historical evidence shows that many women experienced factory work as a disjunction between an aching or maimed body and a newly stimulated mind, and thus their delight in popular amusements is actually quite relevant to the story of their factory work. While Phelps appears to exploit the girls’ stories to plot her own escape from Andover, their stories spin out of her control. More than any other text discussed in this book, the novel Doctor Zay (1882) turns an accident story into a story of outright revenge. The carriage wreck in the novel is an epistemologically clear outcome of patrician recklessness and transcendental idealism. It is an obvious vehicle for regional and female revenge even though the novel turns this revenge into an opportunity

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for comedy. Waldo Yorke’s carriage wreck enables Phelps not only to resolve the conflict between a woman’s career and marriage (which is how the novel is usually read) but also to resolve the conflict between the Boston Brahmins and the state of Maine. At the same time, it carves a space in rural Maine for working women professionals. This final outcome can be read as Phelps’s autobiographical wish fulfillment. Waldo Yorke’s carriage accident is a metaphor for the necessity of the forceful guiding of elite urban readers to a respectful and informed understanding of Maine. The novel is primarily interested in power skirmishes between the provincial middle class, the urban middle class, and the urban elite. Representing the urban elite is the Yorke family. The Boston elite had succeeded in the previous decade in forming a coherent status group with hegemony over what they organized into “high” art, music, and literature.17 Waldo Yorke’s mother embraces this elite identity. She lives in Beacon Street and thinks of her son as a man of leisure even though he has a law degree. She treats the family’s country cousin, Uncle Jed, with pity. While much has been written about the pastoral strand in local color literature, Mrs. Yorke’s fully negative view of agricultural New England was dominant in the 1880s. The state of New Hampshire was considered a site of moral and social decay, which is why the state governor sought to change that image by attracting tourists with gimmicks like “Old Home Week.”18 Uncle Jed is an example of the Boston Brahmins’ country connections. At his death he left behind lumber and shipping interests in Sherman, Maine, that were worth $4,000 (approximately equivalent to $77,000 in 2008).19 Many of the residents on Beacon Street had similar relatives, or had recently made money in the provincial businesses themselves before relocating in the 1870s and 1880s.20 Waldo himself illustrates an ambivalence over new-found leisure. His manhood is challenged by his strong mother and his nation’s belief in respect through work. He is miffed to have to remind his mother that he has a law degree himself, and in a reaction formation against her, he chooses to remember Uncle Jed as exotic rather than sordid; he remembers sitting on the man’s lap and stroking his “grizzled cheek.”21 Yorke finds in Jed an erotic mediator between his European-identified self and the barbaric American ground, a mediator that is not an absolute other, but “an acceptable, complementary, renewing other.”22 The fact that Waldo Yorke exoticizes New England rather than dismissing it wholeheartedly makes him a suitable match for Doctor Zay. Zay’s social affiliations place her in the emerging national class, which began to assert itself in the following decades. She is the daughter of the richest man in Bangor, she attended medical schools in New York, Zurich, and Vienna, and she speaks of Boston opera with a stagy

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hunger that demonstrates a preference for opera in its new high performance style.23 Yet unlike Yorke’s mother, she values hard work. Yorke thinks about his uncle Jed as he travels by buggy rather than train, a vehicular choice that marks his transcendental sensibility. Yorke’s transcendentalism is tied to insensitivity. Readers looking over his shoulder as he enters Sherman notice how he compares a rough-speaking country woman to a sign post. When he spots Doctor Zay in her carriage, “he wondered if she did him the credit not to take him for a cut-throat” (23). Sexual harassment was rife along tourist routes, and many authors were willing to treat all travel trouble involving women as metaphorical rape. With Phelps’s interest in women’s wider world of chance, she rejects the conventional rape metaphor by putting it in the mouth of a discredited male character. Once in Sherman, Yorke puts up with the apparently shabby Sherman hotel for only twentyfour hours before seeking more palatable housing in the private home of Uncle Jed’s executor, Isaiah Butterwell. Yet Yorke condescends even to Isaiah by calling him a “fine old country gentleman” (27). While Yorke is out in his buggy, and Isaiah warns him about a faulty bridge ahead, Yorke ignores Isaiah’s warning to focus on classifying rural types (Isaiah and his wife become “these two lonely people” [32]). The material world impinges on Yorke’s idealism, and the bridge destabilizes his buggy. After the buggy wreck, Yorke becomes aware of his dependence on the people he catalogues, and the novel’s representation of Sherman becomes qualified by long dialogues exploring other people’s points of view. For example, while prostrate in bed, Yorke notes that Isaiah is a member of the Freemasons and a collector of Austrian glass, although Yorke is mostly at the mercy of Sherman’s women, beginning with Isaiah’s wife Sarah. Since it is Sarah who cares for him most, he learns that she is not “lonely” and narrow but busy with theological, political, and moral entanglements, all of which she criticizes with pungency and aggressiveness.24 In contrast to the Yorke family, the Butterwells’ dialect speech, Freemason membership, and disdain for the local poor all mark them as part of what Robert Wiebe calls the local middle class.25 Yorke learns that the fashionable “girl” he saw in the forest is the successful woman doctor. Yorke learns about East Sherman, which is populated by Irish and French lumber families. Riding along on doctor’s visits with Zay, he sees a drunken man threaten his family with a loaded gun, people mourn the loss of a child, an unmarried pregnant girl (Molly) beg Zay to give her an abortion, and the mill worker father of Molly’s unborn baby, Jim Paisley, try to commit suicide. The narrative as a whole mitigates both Yorke’s effort to treat Maine residents as examples of country types and Zay’s efforts to control Molly’s sexual freedom, because

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readers see the other Maine characters several times over in the course of their daily activities. Many local color narratives guide an idle vacationer to a more informed understanding of the local populace. This novel, however, is unusual in that its vacationer is so obviously dragged into knowledge he does not want to have. The sensation and violence of the buggy wreck might suggest an exasperation on the part of the author in her peers’ way of depicting New England as a peaceful society that will safely appeal to vacationers. The novel emphasizes class and ethnic division within a community. Some local color critics who claim to be revisionary continue to write as if place is a unified entity; Nancy Glazener’s suggestion that readers might have criticized the romanticizing of their own place while enjoying the romantic depictions of others assumes that people have knowledge of, and ownership over, their own place. But Sherman is divided between Yankee Protestants and French and Irish Catholics. The Butterwells hold themselves aloof from the secondrate hotelier and all of East Sherman; Mrs. Butterwell is amazed that Doctor Zay will venture into East Sherman and hold people’s dirty babies in her arms. Zay wants to connect with the working class, but she also wants to control them: she says to Yorke “You cannot conceive the ignorance and recklessness that we have to manage” (112) and of Molly’s desire to marry, “that is the way with these women” (145). These social divisions justify the novel’s language of abduction into an exotic space: when Yorke’s buggy goes down, he is “scooped into the overturned buggy-top, and dragged, and swept away” (34). With its big accident, long convalescence, and gossip about social divisions, this novel dramatizes the effort required to make an idle urbanite see the working as well as the pastoral aspects of New England life. Such literature preaches revenge rather than justice, but narrating an accident is not necessarily to advocate the rigging of real bridges. Both womenkind and provincial Maine wreak their vengeance on Yorke. As scholars have noted, Yorke’s injuries turn him into an invalid lady.26 With his sexist bias he considers femininity to be a prison of fatedness and irrationality, one in which he has no control over his body: “‘I must get well,’ said the young man aloud; as if that result awaited only the expressed intention on his part, and fate, like woman, needed nothing but the proper masculine handling” (82-83). Nor can he maintain his control over his mind, since he enters emotional states that he codes as barbaric as well as feminine: He knew that he had made himself successfully wretched until he should see her once more. He knew that he had followed to the verge of folly a pathological,

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and therefore delusive, track in that region which lay marked upon the map of his nature as “unexplored.” (82; emphasis in the original)

And yet, Timothy Morris has argued, the resolution of the novel relies on Yorke’s heterosexuality; like many men who underwent wilderness cures, Yorke emerges better adjusted to his gender.27 In the novel, the state of Maine is also viewed as a space of irrationality and lack of control. The winter weather in particular challenges Yorke; in a stagecoach scene he becomes the butt of everyone’s joke, much as was Bret Harte when he was lost in Santa Clara Valley. A passenger makes a joke about the weather that shows he is as good as Doctor Zay at understanding the connections between the physical and psychic body: “We allers do hev everything wuss than other folks,” said a passenger in the Bangor mail-coach. “Freeze and Prohibition, mud and Fusion. We’ve got one of the constitooshuns that take things. Like my boy. He’s had the measles ‘n the chicken-porx and the mumps and the nettle-rash, and fell in love with his school-marm ‘n got religion and lost the prize for elocootin’ all in one darned year.” (216; emphasis in original)

Yorke cannot view his situation so humorously and thinks of the stage ride as a frightening foray into gloomy determinism: Inside the stage, lunatic gloom and the chill of the Glacial Period descended upon the unfortunate travelers. The straw was cold and thin. The blankets were icy and emaciated. The leather seats seemed to have absorbed and preserved the storms of winters, the rheumatism of the past, the sciatica of the future. The Boston passenger, though protected by his individual traveling blanket and highly-becoming seal-bound coat, expressed an opinion that he was freezing to the cushions, which the jocose passenger honored by a stare and the comforting observation,— “Why, we expect to.” (217)

It is a truism of contemporary studies of travel writing that travel writing reveals more about the traveler than the places visited. But here, as in Harte’s travel sketches, we see three points of consciousness: the jocose passenger, who is insular, and who posits New England as the obvious reference point and the seedbed of the nation’s virtue; Yorke, whom we are supposed to easily dismiss as an idle vacationer and a naive young man; and Phelps herself, who mediates somewhat sadistically between the idle urbanite and the local yokel.

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The characters Dr. Z. Atalanta Zay and Sarah Butterwell fulfill another authorial wish, of belonging in working New England not as a submissive minister’s wife but as a professional and independent woman. Zay is depicted as out of place. She only came to Sherman as a vacationer, and she returned only because of an act of fate which killed her mother. She made the decision to return because there were so many lonely women in Sherman who would appreciate a female doctor.28 Although the fact that Sarah Butterwell is a humorous character who speaks in dialect reveals her local middle-class status, Butterwell is also treated as an independent intellectual. Her husband calls her a professor: “She and I used to argey one spell about profession. Sarah is a professor. Seems at first she could n’t sit down to it that I should n’t profess alongside of her. But she gave it up after a while” (101). In Phelps’s autobiography, she uses the same language of accidental belonging that she attaches to Zay. Like Zay, she expresses regret over the contempt with which Gloucester fishermen view the summer people. While the Gloucester fishermen run the most important fishing port in the world, the summer people do not even recognize the correct terminology for the different sails. The fishermen contest local color writing: even writers who put Gloucester adoringly into the magazines out of the impulses of our loyal and loving hearts, and are hated accordingly of all men for the tribute’s sake. . . . Perhaps every line of this page may cost its writer a friend in Gloucester—who can tell? (200)

Like Zay, Phelps becomes better integrated into the main economy and society when “fate” strikes and she is halted on a drive at the sight of a crowd gathering around a tavern (198). She learns that a murder has just occurred in the tavern, and the news inspires her to take up temperance work among “my Gloucester people” (212). The language Phelps uses in this anecdote is elitist and sentimental. The language of accidental belonging is designed to, but fails to, mitigate her maternalism. Now, some literary critics of local color fiction might conclude from this anecdote that the workers whose labor shapes a local economy most deserve to elegize a place.29 Yet this anecdote also illustrates the negative consequences that occur when a professional person cultivates the belief that she belongs nowhere at all. Phelps’s politeness puts the brakes on her condescension, but it also encourages a strained drawing of boundaries that has the potential to lead professionals to believe that they had better isolate themselves from any local community.

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The Selling of Moral Misfortune Stories about accidents and disasters serve as allegories for the compromises Phelps was obliged to make with the publishing world. As Susan CoultrapMcQuin has shown, by the late 1870s, the publishing market was shifting in ways that did not suit Phelps.30 Her long-term publisher Houghton Mifflin began to favor detached, timeless fiction over sentimentality or didacticism.31 As early as 1871, Phelps’s letters include references to the differences between her taste and that of the editor William Dean Howells.32 By the 1890s, as part of changes in business organization, consumer taste, and aesthetic philosophy, both Houghton Mifflin and the publishers of the new tencent monthlies preferred fiction that was entertaining rather than philosophical or moralist. Editors stopped soliciting moral realism and began asking for energy, inventiveness, and entertainment. Thus the divide between high and popular fiction that had deepened in the 1870s began to lose its significance by 1900. After 1888, Phelps became all the more eager to earn a lot of money, because she had to support an extravagant husband and pay large medical bills.33 She continually negotiated with publishers for higher prices. She also paid close attention to cover illustrations and advertising methods.34 But at the same time, Phelps complained about the industry’s tighter deadlines—which made fictional caesuras all the more inviting—and the greater focus on entertainment and sales.35 If we examine the archival evidence, it seems that accident fiction served as a compromise that Phelps struck with the changing publishing industry: it allowed Phelps to be entertaining and moralist at the same time. Phelps’s response to the changes in the publishing industry such as the breakdown of loyalty between author and publisher was not monolithically old fashioned.36 Similar to many of the other authors who were weathering a changing market, Phelps adjusted in contradictory, improvisational ways, asking her editors to advertise with temperance organizations here, appealing to a pure aesthetic of timelessness there. She sought to maintain a relationship of loyalty with her editors not out of habit alone but also out of a calculated desire to increase sales and royalties. For one, her appeals to loyalty were met in kind and sometimes even amplified by the quality publishers.37 This language, then, is a product of institutionally determined interpersonal relations. This becomes clear if we consider some of the arguments she had with her publishers during these transitional years. For example, George Mifflin responded to Phelps’s queries about advertising methods with the language of loyalty, especially after Henry Oscar Houghton’s death in 1895, perhaps to smooth his path into leadership: “We

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regard you as one of our best friends business as well as personal and we shall be glad in this as in all other ways to show our appreciation of your confidence and friendship,” he wrote in 1896, while the big seller Chapters from a Life was going to press.38 Mifflin used similar language with Mary Noailles Murfree, again for defensive reasons, since Murfree like Phelps was requesting flat rate payments and larger advances.39 An exchange that took place when Phelps’s The Life of Christ sold poorly serves as another example that the old-fashioned language of loyalty was shared. The low sales figures made Phelps nervous since she had received $4,000 in advance for the book, and Houghton Mifflin believed they had lost money on it, regardless of how much they were making on Phelps’s combined titles overall. Phelps blamed their marketing methods, and offered the services of her husband, Herbert D. Ward, in advertising. Judging from the Houghton Mifflin archives, the house advertised all books in roughly the same way—all pamphlets feature an author photograph, a list of books in print, and excerpts from reviews.40 Given the nineteenth-century fascination with images of crowds and trainwrecks, something other than a photograph of the author might have piqued new interest; with her accident fiction Phelps was selling chance and the reconfiguration of identity, not a stable authorial essence. In any case, since her husband’s lack of business acumen was well known, it is not a surprise that George Mifflin turned down her offer. But it is remarkable that he responded with such condescension: If it is wise from a business point of view to advertise the “Life” extensively at this time, it is the business of the publishers and not of the author to do this.41 .... a publisher could not have his business conducted for him any more than authors could expect to have their writing done for them. . . . From one point of view (a purely selfish one) I am sorry you do not undertake the proposed extra advertising for I am sure you would then have a keen object lesson of the exact effect of advertising under the present conditions of demand for the “Life.” We make a study of these things and we have studied this book specially.42

The reference to authors having their writing done for them seems especially curt given that Phelps often sounded out plot ideas with editors. Phelps worked less with Houghton Mifflin in the following years. At another publishing house that focused on high art, the Century Company, Phelps suffered not only because her aesthetic of moral art had gone out of style, but also because that very aesthetic had become too controversial. In

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the 1880s the Century’s editor Richard Watson Gilder had nurtured respectable art that advocated change, and political writers depended upon the journal’s respectability to cloak the radicalism of their message. By the 1890s Gilder submitted to pressure and became more cautious about combining literature and politics.43 When Phelps’s short story “Jack” came out in the Century in 1887, the company received a letter from a New Jersey clergyman protesting the story’s immorality, sensational tone, and inappropriateness for a magazine “trying to elevate and educate the mental and moral taste and tone and character of the reading public.”44 Gilder apparently expressed his support for Phelps because Phelps began her reply by thanking him for his praise and only then added, “More than half the success of ‘Jack’ is owing to its great moral artery; as with ‘Uncle Tom’ on the larger plan” (original emphasis). In this context, her reference to moral artery is not an overarching artistic creed but a reassurance to an editor who is worried about complaints.45 Four years later Phelps reassured Gilder again after he received a protest letter disputing her facts in a short story about the Ku Klux Klan.46 Phelps’s references to the respectability and morality of her work should be read as a pledge to couch reform within the house’s framework, not an expression of personal antiquarianism.47 There was a clear result of these editors’ questions about Phelps’s worth as a writer: her fiction grew to be packaged as if it were solely driven by drama, as if it were about disaster without the reform impulse. An advertising pamphlet for the 1895 new popular edition of The Madonna of the Tubs (originally published 1887) features the most dramatic, active illustration from the original edition, of a woman and girl peering through a telescope at a man drowning in the sea.48 In the story, the incident is told only eight years after the fact and emphasizes the spectator’s anguish, not the shipwreck itself, as a fisherman’s wife witnesses her husband’s near drowning. The illustration captures this gap between the observer and the wreck with focal points, to the far right and left (figure 5.1, “For the Sea Broke Over ‘Em”). The illustration’s diagonal lines, though, emphasize the action of the wreck itself. The illustration demonstrates the shift in Phelps’s writing from accident as a story of trauma and interiority to accident as entertainment and adventure. Phelps most likely participated in cloaking this tale of inner trauma as if it were an action adventure; over the years she came to request dramatic illustrations, and she speculated on whether her new Gloucester tale had enough fresh, dramatic material to warrant a theatrical dramatization for a lucrative mass audience.49 By 1906, Phelps had been quarreling with George Mifflin for a decade. In 1904, an employee at the firm defended the firm’s efforts to advertise her novel Trixy (1904), explaining that railroad stalls and booksellers were no longer willing to stock anything but cheap sensational fiction.50 Privately,

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Figure 5.1. “For the Sea Broke Over ‘Em,” illustration by Ross Turner and George H. Clements for The Madonna of the Tubs, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Houghton Mifflin, 1887. Image courtesy of Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, The Ohio State University.

the editors wrote with genuine appreciation of Phelps’s continuing ability to spin a good tale with Trixy, despite its didacticism, but complained of the “extreme expression that has alienated some of her old readers.”51 Then, the editors spotted Phelps’s book The Man in the Case serialized in the ten-cent monthly Ladies’ Home Journal in 1906. The book is a light-hearted mystery. In response to their query as to where Phelps planned to publish the book, Phelps wrote that she considered the book to be merely a money maker and beneath their interest. They disagreed. The reader’s report in the Houghton Mifflin archives is no more than a cut-out newspaper advertisement that plays up the story’s drama and entertainment: In this latest novel it will take a very clever reader to guess at any point what will happen in the next chapter. The mystery deepens as the story unfolds, and the interest is maintained at a high pitch until the end. It is the story of a fine-natured woman living in a small town, who is hounded out of sewing-circles, church membership, and from her social set by gossip connecting her good name with “the man in the case.” The plot is based upon the mystery surrounding the personality and the identity of this man. The heroine’s lover is naturally baffled, and the more so because, for some reason which she says she is unable to divulge, she will not tell him what foundation the tale-bearers and scandal-mongers have for their suspicions. At the very end, an accident clears it all up. It is a story of a very human love and great devotion; and is to be classed in its literary and narrative power with the best of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s books.52 (emphasis added)

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The accident mentioned is a housefire, which serves as a metaphor for forbidden passion, and threatens to disclose the presence of a man in a single woman’s house.53 In an earlier decade, Houghton Mifflin would have objected to the story on the basis of its reference to illicit sexual relations and its sensationalism. But by the twentieth century, the high cultural editors preferred entertainment to morality. Illustrations of Phelps’s fiction play up the action of accident all the more (figures 5.2 to 5.4).

The Intractability of the Social and the Escape to the Psyche This theory of a need to compromise with publishers goes some way, but not all the way, in explaining the ubiquity of accident and disaster in Phelps’s fiction. Writing about accidents was neither the readiest nor most certain strategy for gaining critical acclaim or market share. If Phelps solely wanted critical acclaim, she might have focused on stories about coastal fishing communities not ridden by alcoholism. If she solely wanted sales, she could have focused on her Sunday school fiction. She did pursue the initial monetary success of The Gates Ajar with two more Gates novels, but these novels share rather than depart from her other fiction’s focus on the question of chance and the human capacity for finding solutions to problems.54 In all her fiction—highbrow, lowbrow, heavenly, or earthly—Phelps invoked accidents and disasters because they helped her render concrete the modern experience of becoming an interrupted and fragmented subject in response to tumultuous social change. In her early fiction, both working-class and bourgeois characters were capable of becoming fragmented selves. In Phelps’s late fiction, however, only bourgeois characters survive long enough to experience self-fracture. Working-class characters merely die. Like a Progressive reformer, Phelps grew fascinated by collecting data about the different outcomes that modern life entailed for people of different genders, classes, and races. Her male characters are more likely to be injured in an accident, while her female characters are more likely to suffer long-term illnesses. Lawyers and college professors can be reformed by accidents, but mill workers, vegetable growers, factory workers, telephone operators, black men, and servants remain fixed in their material states or die heroic deaths with an assurance of change in the afterlife. The politics of this pattern of representation is mixed; on the one hand Phelps emphasizes that industrialism heightened the perils of daily life differently and disproportionately.55 The worksite deaths depicted in “The Tenth of January” and “The Chief Operator” (1909) were common, and the maid in The Successors of Mary the First (1900) who is injured by a train on

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her way to work was part of a larger pattern of women domestic workers who used the streetcars to cross cities segregated by class. Once injured, people who worked with their hands were more likely to lose income because they could no longer do the same job. Since many of them were internal migrants or immigrants, they were less likely to have a familial safety net during convalescence. In The Successors of Mary the First, Phelps never reveals what happens to Mary once readers hear that both of her legs will be amputated. On the other hand, the representations of suffering workers suggest that workers are unable to act for themselves. The narratives construct a gulf between a mobile national class and the immobile local middle and lower classes. They cater to elite distaste for lower-class mobility. The stories distinguish between good lower-class characters who travel only to visit family members and bad ones who travel for pleasure (like the working girls in “The Tenth of January” who ride the theater train, or the Irish maid in The Successors of Mary the First who uses mass as an excuse to leave the house every evening). In “The Tenth of January,” working-class characters evade the author’s grasp and travel anyway, but in the later stories, the understandable desire for beauty and entertainment receive less authorial attention. Even more so than the earlier fiction, the tropes of accident and injury in Phelps’s later fiction convey an indignation and exasperation at the intractability of social problems. They vivify the difficulties of getting the rich to care for the poor, the poor to be moral, and men and women to stay in love. In the continual return to such tropes, the social world becomes like easy-to-shape clay in sadistic authorial hands. Two later stories about working-class disasters, the children’s story “A Lost Hero” (1890) (co-authored with her husband, Herbert D. Ward), and “The Chief Operator” illustrate Phelps’s growing conservatism. They drop the emphasis in “The Tenth of January” on technological and social cause and focus on the old-fashioned virtues of the heroes. “A Lost Hero” takes place in Summerville, South Carolina, the site of Phelps’s winter home in 1889 and 1890.56 A white boy who is waiting for his father to arrive by train and an elderly black man who is traveling by foot along the tracks to visit his dying daughter are united by an earthquake which threatens to derail an excursion train. Together the boy (Donny De Mone) and the black man try to stop the train before it runs over the broken track. The black man acts heroically, “the strong black fist . . . clenched in the approaching monster’s face” (306), by throwing himself on the rails to stop the train.57 Only the white boy lives to be honored by the train passengers. The black man symbolizes all the workers who created the nation’s wealth but are not benefiting from it. Like Sene in “The Tenth of January,”

Figure 5.2. “Run For ‘T! Run!” illustration by Frank T. Merrill for A Lost Hero, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward and Herbert D. Ward, Roberts Brothers, 1891. Courtesy Rare Books & Manuscripts Library, The Ohio State University. Frank T. Merrill’s illustrations for the book edition of A Lost Hero emphasize havoc, action, and cooperation.

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the old man is dead and silenced, though rewarded in heaven. The story is reminiscent of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). In both stories a white boy and black man are brought together by danger, but in both cases the danger is orchestrated in ways that bring the white boy to ethical maturity but denies the black man the freedom that was officially available to him. In “The Chief Operator,” a telephone operator (Sarah Raven) remains at her post despite her supervisor’s order to leave when a flood threatens her life.58 In the story, Mrs. Raven is a throwback to the mid nineteenth century: her air was “self-possessed, but gentle; the old-fashioned word modest might have said it better than any of the newer feminine adjectives.”59 As with the previous working-class accident tales, Phelps speaks in Mrs. Raven’s place; Mrs. Raven is happy in death because it allowed her to reunite with her beloved husband. In contrast, Mrs. Raven’s young coworkers sob childishly and immediately leave their posts. The deferral of justice to the afterlife is especially conservative given that Phelps’s depictions of heaven in the Gates trilogy include few working class men and no black characters. The only self-reflexive story about the author’s tendency to destroy lower status characters is the children’s novel, A Chariot of Fire. In this story Jacob Dryver, a man who lives outside Gloucester and makes a living working for summer boarders, misses his train in Beverly on the way to Annisquam, where his son is dying after being hit by a car. A wealthy lapsed Christian, Mr. Chester, recognizes the need for speed and takes Dryver in his automobile, a symbol for illicit, reckless mobility. Mr. Chester saves the boy’s life by driving quickly, and Phelps implies conservatively that the Dryvers receive more money and good will directly from the Chesters than they would have received had they gone through the courts. After the uplifting experience, Mr. and Mrs. Chester learn that their own chauffeur was the miscreant who hit the boy, and hence the technology of the car is revealed to be the source of the problem rather than its solution. Later, the Chesters learn that the Dryvers knew the identity of the driver all along, a plot twist that renders the Chesters’ renewed virtue absurd; while the Chesters might feel more virtuous, the Dryvers are fully aware that their wealthy compatriots are at fault. Consciously, Phelps might have considered the story an illustration of the importance of choosing good servants. Unconsciously, she might have noted the futility of using accident tales to reform people. In contrast to these two stories, the middle-class characters in Phelps’s late fiction become psychologically more complex. Their subjectivities wander and change under the difficulties of marriage and the temptations of modern amusements; they have modernist selves. A pair of novels Phelps wrote at the turn of the century, Avery (1901) and Confessions of a Wife (1902), argue

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Figure 5.3. “Birds Seemed To Sing Through the Air,” illustration by Frank T. Merrill for A Lost Hero, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward and Herbert D. Ward, Roberts Brothers, 1891. Courtesy Rare Books & Manuscripts Library, The Ohio State University.

that to keep a man interested in marriage is a task of endless drudgery. Confessions of a Wife was published under a pseudonym in The Century. While Avery plays up the contrivance of Phelps’s accident/injury mix, Confessions of a Wife delves deeper into the emotional content; it is as if Phelps disposed of the contrivance under her old name and broke ground under the new. In Avery, the neglectful husband Marshall Avery suffers from toothache, which makes him realize what his sickly wife (Jean Avery) feels everyday. When his dentist puts him under nitrous oxide in preparation for tooth extraction, he enters a dream state. Phelps expressly states in the novel that the dentist uses nitrous oxide rather than chloroform, as if to make a point about nitrous oxide, which was a recreational drug popular among intellectuals: William James, for one, wrote that nitrous oxide led him to an experience of “intense metaphysical illumination” that deserved to be treated as authentic, empirical perception of reality.60 Marshall Avery also experiences a hallucination that is metaphysically illuminating. He dreams that the tooth is pulled easily, he goes yachting in Long Island Sound with his bachelor friends, the yacht sinks, and he narrowly escapes drowning. He recognizes the

Figure 5.4. “I’ve Got to Get to Gloucester, Sir!” illustration for A Chariot of Fire, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Harper and Brothers, 1910. Courtesy Rare Books & Manuscripts Library, The Ohio State University.

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similarity between his physical state and that of his wife, whose heart condition makes her feel like she is drowning. After emerging from the water, he returns home to discover that his wife has read an erroneous news story of his death and died of grief.61 This news launches Avery into penitence. Suddenly he wakes up and he and the readers discover that the yacht wreck and his wife’s death were only a dream, although the near-death experience is repeated again when she does nearly die and is saved by her doctor. Thus Marshall Avery is granted a chance to become a good husband because the accident was merely a vicarious experience.62 The clumsiness of the novel’s vehicles for reforming an insensitive man (the yachting accident, the dentist gas, the news of a loved one’s death) suggest an author who was recycling old techniques to express interpersonal conflicts and psychological states that were deeply felt but hard to articulate. The novel Confessions of a Wife is one of Phelps’s richest, best crafted, and most substantial, and in it Phelps found different textual strategies for conveying interpersonal conflict and psychological lability. Similar to Avery, Confessions of a Wife features a wandering husband and a devoted wife. But this time, the husband is addicted to opium and probably unfaithful, the wife fully recognizes that the spark of infatuation went out for both partners soon after the ceremony, and she feels not heartbroken but rebellious and angry about it. Since the novel is written in diary form, it expresses the wife’s, Marna’s, most secret thoughts. The beginning of her relationship with the man who becomes her husband, Dana Herwin, is sadomasochistic, lifting both of them into a fantastic realm of tyrant and subject, sublimity, religious fervor, and erotic fear. Dana looks like a god, has the sensitivities of a modern man, and the persistence of a savage. When Dana orders Marna to do things, she feels “suddenly and strangely, less like a girl in love than like a girl at prayer.”63 Marna’s awareness of her own savagery encourages her to believe that love with Dana will never entail total self-abandonment. Marna’s oftdiscussed reference to herself as a “wilderness girl” is one component of the relationship’s sadomasochistic dimension.64 While the image of a respectable woman hiding a savage being inside her is certainly striking, during the course of the novel, Marna discovers that the essence of a marriage is not legible, if it exists at all. A mentor advises Marna that “marriage is full of phases” that should not be mistaken “for finalities” (149). At the novel’s conclusion, Marna puts aside her wilderness rebellion and aspires to support her husband however she can. The travel accidents in other works by Phelps also symbolize life’s contingencies, shifting identities, and jolting changes in life course—the difference being that in the late fiction, change is feared.

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Phelps’s early novels consider the growth of social consciousness to be a necessary dimension of the quest for individual identity.65 In Doctor Zay, for example, Yorke’s sporting accident brings him closer to the wider community. In contrast, the later novels focus on the internal complexity of the identities that characters develop, and as a result, they drop the focus on widening one’s social consciousness. This change brings about a narrower and more self-interested perception of a place. Like Confessions of a Wife, the novel Walled In (1907) features a failed marriage in the professional classes of a provincial college town. The risk of building a life upon the slippery sands of sexual desire is dramatized in Walled In’s two sporting accidents. Myrton Ferris, a handsome, athletic, and successful professor, crashes his sporty automobile on a bridge and spends the rest of the novel in bed. In a violation of character, Myrton becomes very old-fashioned, and the attention of his young wife Tessa wanders. Tessa carries on affairs with a student, and at the end of the novel, she and the student die in a scandalous manner when their canoe is capsized. Meanwhile Myrton becomes attracted to Tessa’s sister, a nurse who arrives to care for him. Yet while Yorke and Zay toured the fractious districts of the countryside with genuine effort to understand Maine from other perspectives, Myrton Ferris rails against electives (which were designed to enable students from non-traditional academic backgrounds to take courses that would help them gain employment) and prides himself on being named the Matthew Arnold of America.66 Whether because of publishers’ fears or her own conservatism, Phelps’s late fiction no longer combines the two foci of social justice and complex subjectivity.

Conclusion Unlike contemporaries who wrote fiction that fits more neatly into the categories of sentimentalism, local color, realism or modernism, Phelps was continually drawn to the potential for injury, accident, and disaster to become metaphors for personal change and social revolution. Early in her career, when she wrote “The Tenth of January,” the tropes of accident and injury helped her bridge male and female fields of expertise and therefore escape the staidness of official Christianity and a provincial college town. In “The Tenth of January” and Doctor Zay, the tropes facilitate the exploration of a socially diverse region. They helped her escape her destiny of being an educated but submissive minister’s wife and become an ambitious and socially minded middle-class professional woman who belonged in both provincial and urban New England. They helped her resist the tendency of realism and

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local color literature to endorse the status quo by disallowing dramatic change. Yet they introduced not only opportunities, but also political limitations. In Doctor Zay, a revenge narrative is good for venting anger, but bad for fostering lasting solutions to social problems. Conflict is dramatized so much that readers are suspicious when it diminishes; readers are taught to believe that the relationships between the urban elite, the national middle class, and the working class, and between women and men, will be inherently antagonistic. Phelps’s later fiction illustrates how local color literature did not merely disappear but got fragmented and reconfigured in different genres, like modernism.67 Novels like Confessions of a Wife and Walled In express the difficulty of dealing with wandering desire and wandering selfhoods. At the same time, in this later fiction, working-class characters are not granted the same internal complexity or fractured subjectivities as the professional class characters. The working-class characters are held back not just by statistical faithfulness to the real cost of industrial work but by Phelps’s determination to speak for them. In the first decades of the twentieth century, such authorial moralizing about working-class selves became palatable to fewer editors and audiences. As I discuss in the epilogue, Theodore Dreiser, Ellen Glasgow, and other twentieth-century writers write against Phelps. Their ambitious lower status characters, they make sure, are never left stranded in the provinces. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s work also traces the connections between local color and the commercial genres of the twentieth century, which similarly revel in tales of injury, accident, and disaster with an artistic and moral touch. We can see clear connections between Phelps’s implausible plots and the emerging genres of film and television. The way she reworks the same material again and again with slight variations anticipates the strategies of the sitcom. Hollywood films like The Beguiled (1971) and Misery (1990) recast the same thwarted traveler motif that she perfected in her fiction. Perhaps because Hollywood, unlike middle-class literature of the 1880s, has been dominated since the early 1970s by male directors writing for young male audiences, the motif is recast as a masculine fear of castration rather than a female fantasy of using male injury to prove oneself in the wide world. The film Groundhog Day (1993), like Avery (1901), suggests that one accident is not enough to force an urban man to respect provincials or commit to a romantic relationship. The connection between Phelps and these recent films, while far-fetched, is also provocative because of Phelps’s open religiosity. Her social gospel strives to convert the reader, invoke intense

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emotional states, refuse Calvinist despondency, link the quotidian world to scripture, and link God’s will to the risks that humans take during travel. Thus, the apparently secular film and TV genres draw some of their structure, themes, and moral messages from the openly religious narratives of the nineteenth century.



Epilogue

As a way of closing, I will look back at the use of the motif of the regional travel accident in local color literature and explore what happens to the motif in the twentieth century. In local color literature, the motif enters in a way that reveals the mixed ideological horizons of the genre. When we trace the motif through twentieth-century novels, stories, or films, it becomes clear that their ideological horizons, while also mixed, differ markedly from those of local color. The twentieth-century texts register changing predictions of the outcome of modernization, of the viability of democracy in a socially stratified nation, and of the prospects for economic security and cultural vitality in places rendered all the more marginal through modernization. Most especially, the twentieth century witnessed both the radical democratization of travel and increasing pessimism about coming together through accident.

Accidents in Local Color Literature In local color literature, the motif of the thwarted traveler reveals the literature’s strong comparative impulse. The literature depicts a contact zone between a geographically specific place and a number of translocal institutions, ideologies, and people. This contact zone is a place of mutual influence in which the locality is granted the power to act upon translocal institutions and people. Local color narratives often stage interactions between poor regional characters and insensitive elite traveling characters, with all characters viewed through a spectatorial distance. A recurring character in the

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genre is a local character who feels exceptional, who longs for wider horizons yet feels defensive affection for the locality, even though the character insists that he or she only accidentally exists in the place. This local citizen is often a narrator or character who stands in for the writer. Although the exceptional local citizen may not exclusively come from the middle class, he or she often stands in for the middle class in the provinces. Thus one previously underappreciated element of local color literature is the literature’s focus on the middle-class person in the provinces, and on his paradoxical snobbery and neediness in that social location. While the critics who most advocate local color literature often champion its potential to lend dignity to the lives of the poorest regional residents, there is a good reason to focus also on the middle class. The literature often performs the ideological work of lifting the writer above poor regional workers or spinsters, but the literature also exposes a desire for a legitimate place among the locally based working class. If we read local color literature looking for moments when the middle class character seeks to belong as an equal, then we see how middleclass culture does not always or only further middle-class economic interest. The narratives’ frequent references to tourism, travel, and vacations can be misleading: they do not reveal that local color literature is mere literary tourism. First, during the 1880s and 1890s, the archetypal tourist perspective grew more difficult to define because the group of people who were able to become tourists was becoming more diverse. Second, real tourists were less likely to stop and linger at every hamlet, whereas the fiction enacts an attempt to make them linger. In doing so, the fiction attempts to make modernization work for everybody. When the texts land elite characters with an injury or a sense of accidental entanglement, they force a caesura, a return to the material world and a correction of idealism, individualism, runaway economic development, and speed. The texts encourage readers to pay more attention to the wide variety of rural and urban people who were not the beneficiaries of urbanization or modernization. Characters who get caught in a regional travel accident often resort to the Social Darwinian myths popular in the period. They believe they are journeying backwards into a more primitive time, and the texts’ opening sequences uphold the divided temporality through which native born middleclass people viewed American space, with the city representing the frightening future and the country representing a peaceful past. However, the narrative’s progress breaks this temporal logic by placing traveling characters in a situation in which they must communicate with other characters in the present time, where locals believe that they too reside in the present time, and where locals talk back to the travelers and correct their misinterpreta-

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tions. Different texts do not carry out identical ideological operations. For example, didactic texts direct readers into a right way of thinking. This retributive dimension is also present in texts that adhere more closely to the generic prescriptions of realism, but in general realist texts register the waning of a fixed moral order. Without such an order, characters suffering from an accidental event are obliged to negotiate among themselves without ready answers to their problems. In these ways, the texts seek to correct one important fantasy offered by the tourist industry: that far-flung places will be beautiful, knowable, and welcoming. Although the motif of the regional travel accident draws from ancient stories of shipwreck or travel catastrophe, it more pressingly refers to a new and frightening reality in nineteenth-century social life, an expansion yet attenuation of any one person’s ability to effect change outside his or her immediate environs. Authors often use the motif to remind elite travelers that they are vulnerable to new risks in this new life in which they effect things outside their realm of immediate knowledge. Elite travelers typically believe they are shielded from the hazards of trains, boom and bust economies, and the other hazards of industrialism. But accidents remind them of their vulnerability before these things and also their dependence on laborers, the people who are more clearly imperiled by industrialization. Although the genre of local color contains no guaranteed ideological consequences, local color novels usually offer optimistic predictions of how particular cities or towns contend with urbanization and modernization. In narratives of the metropolis, the motif is connected with pessimism about the possibility of social cohesion across class boundaries. But in texts about medium-sized or smaller towns, conversations and storytelling seem more promising. The chance meetings and caring for strangers that emerge after mishaps suggest that everyone is infinitely connected to everyone else. These serendipitous meetings also imply that good decisions to become more virtuous might be made out of sheer good luck. This faith in chance and randomly determined social relationships offers a useful corrective to the belief, present in most versions of regional literature, that only some people have an essential claim on a place. An ideal of belonging through accident has the potential to be more flexible and inclusive than an ideal of belonging based on family roots, but only if one remembers that this new belonging is accompanied by loss, pain, and difficult adaptations. Furthermore, the pain that accompanies the flexibility is not shared equally. The fiction’s pairing of bourgeois figures whose lives are inconvenienced with more politically active or less powerful characters whose lives are ruined reminds us that people suffered the cost of modernization

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differently and disproportionately. At the same time, the lack of travel opportunities for working-class characters does not hold up an accurate mirror to social reality, for in the twentieth century, more and more workingclass people began to travel and tour.

Dehumanization in the Early Twentieth Century The fictional thwarted traveler does not gain an ability to journey unscathed with the advent of the twentieth century, although he does suffer in different guises and combinations. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, increased fear of violent class rebellion and fatigue with the optimistic guise of genteel literature meant that the trope often appeared dystopically. In this respect, Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian (1902) is an especially telling text. Although the novel is often read as a prototype for the twentieth-century Western, formally it works just as well as a transition text between local color and the Western.1 The novel consists of loosely connected sketches, and it lacks the unity and drive associated with the Western. Like local color stories, the novel is structured around devices of accidental meetings during travel that bring together diverse characters. In this case, these characters are Easterners and Westerners, patricians and workers, and Indians and whites. The Virginian rescues Molly out of a capsizing stagecoach, he gets shot by Indians, Molly rescues the Virginian after the Indians shoot him, the narrator and the drifters Scipio le Moyne and Shorty miss a train in North Dakota territory, and a washed-out bridge strands several passenger trains and freight trains in Billings, Montana.2 These accidental events only seem to bring about dramatically new democratic relations. Molly Wood, proud daughter of a Vermont mill owner, marries a humble cowboy, and a wealthy Eastern health seeker similarly learns to accept the cowboy’s view of lynching and duels. However, the cowboy is the quality who rises above the equality, and the West creates the conditions for a new man to hone his ability to become a managerial leader on a large ranch owned by a member of the Eastern establishment. The chaos of travel accidents and labor relations serve not to foster new cross-class cooperation but to awaken the innate ruling capacity of the Anglo-Saxon. The novel argues that the youthful communitarianism of cowboys—and indeed, of local color literature itself—must make way for this new leader. At the same time, the chapters in which this message is most clearly broadcast, the four chapters entitled “The Game and the Nation,” resist this ultimate message. These chapters delight in the social mixing that the novel associates with the nation’s past, even as they beckon in a purified and efficient

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future. Thus they contain an imperial nostalgia for a community that Wister and his novel indirectly destroyed.3 The novel emerged after editors at Harper’s Monthly solicited sketches of Western life from the author, and the novel bears the traces of that episodic beginning. The “Game and the Nation” chapters were serialized together, so it is appropriate to read them as a unit.4 The scenes are made possible by a series of chance meetings, missed trains, and the long delay at the washed-out bridge. They fulfill a readerly desire for dilatoriness and self-determination—to have a large, complex system rendered more humane. In the first chapter, where the narrator meets the Virginian at an Omaha restaurant, readers witness the Virginian’s vulnerability. He is ignorant about the fashionable delicacy of frog legs on the menu, and because he has been promoted to foreman, his former comrades resent him and he eats alone. By the fourth chapter’s train delay scene, the Virginian has risen from his vulnerable state to entertain a crowd with the tall tale about frog legs. The narrator delights in the vision of a national community united by joint admiration for the Virginian: “Travellers stood and sat about forlorn, near the cars, out in the sage-brush, anywhere. People in hats and spurs watched them,” and Indians sell souvenir bows and arrows.5 Everyone must work together, since the town is out of food. Only a local knows where the frogs are (local resources), but only the Virginian knows that frogs can be turned into food (cosmopolitan knowledge and managerial acumen). This is an imaginative space of broad social scale where individual people matter.6 When the Virginian begins his tall tale, the women wander off in disgust, but the men bond across class and race. Yet unlike in the local color and realist texts, this accidental community is united by its joint inadequacy in front of a hero. The community becomes a mob that needs a leader. Changes in beliefs about the viability of humanitarianism in a modern society become evident in the way the novel was adapted for film in the following decades, the first sound film directed by Victor Fleming for Paramount in 1929, and the second time directed by Stuart Gilmore for Paramount in 1946. In the films, the novel’s allegory of a worker becoming a manager appears relevant to the present, but the novel’s dilatory and peaceful travel accidents appear only as a sign of an innocent past. Both films write a new train delay scene into the plot. Just before Molly’s train pulls in to Bear Creek, the train stops for cattle on the track. Molly is frightened, but two passing cowboys, the Virginian and Steve, reassure her. In the same scene in the 1945 film, when the conductor asks the men to stop chatting on the tracks, Steve retorts, “have you got no humanity?” Steve symbolizes the funloving laborer left behind by Progressive Era efficiency and speed.

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Other early-twentieth-century texts employ the thwarted traveler motif even more sardonically. As it became harder to make a living from ranching or farming alone, and as young men and women continued to leave New England and Midwestern villages for the cities, it became increasingly difficult to see the provinces as anything but a place of self-denial and poverty. Women as well as men demanded paid employment outside the home. While the countryside had once meant fresh air and fresh food, advances in medicine and public works and a consumerist approach to health now made the city seem healthier than the country.7 In Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911), an engineer is present to narrate the frame tale only because his stay in the Berkshires is extended by a carpenter’s strike and a snowstorm. In a departure from the timeless thematic of much local color, the strike announces topical class and labor strife. The tale the engineer hears is one of unmitigated misery, repression, and illness, suggesting that New England has become a hopeless dead-end.8 In my mind, the most cynical uses of the thwarted traveler motif appear in Ellen Glasgow’s Barren Ground (1925) and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925). In these novels, a street accident and a boating accident are the opposite of the fetal break of romance: they destroy rather than create life. Both events dispose of illegitimate pregnancies and free upwardly mobile provincials to seek their fortune in the city. In Barren Ground, Dorinda Oakley flees to New York City without a plan. When she faints and is run over by a horse cab, she loses her unborn child, and after a moment of “relief, in which there was a shade of inexplicable regret” she gives up forever the human activities promoted in rose-colored local color texts: love, joy, hope, and companionship.9 Glasgow connects Dorinda’s determination to her Presbyterian steely rejection of nineteenth-century evangelical “sentimentality” (156). Because of the accident, Dorinda meets a doctor and learns about the scientific farming techniques that she takes home to modernize and improve her failing family farm. Like many accident tales, the critically and popularly acclaimed An American Tragedy drew on a real event. Dreiser makes explicit the nineteenth-century connection between boating accidents and extramarital sex. Clyde Griffiths is not simply fortuitously saved from the inconvenience of Roberta Alden carrying his baby while he tries to woo the aristocratic Sondra Finchley—he intentionally stages a sporting accident to kill the pregnant Roberta. Clyde tricks Roberta out onto a pleasure lake on the pretense of a honeymoon. With the incident, Dreiser renders the popular amusement that was shared among all classes into a materialist and futile farce. An American Tragedy

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thoroughly demystifies the earlier ideology of the countryside as a font of health and democracy.

Regionalisms of the Twentieth Century and the Working Class In the economic crisis of the 1930s, most writers lost faith in the ideologies of efficiency and progress and viewed modernization as an unambiguously dehumanizing process. They searched for signs of native or international alternatives to runaway capitalism in small-scale democracy and communitarianism.10 Regionalism in literature became popular again, and the motif of the regional travel accident again served a comparative impulse—a desire to record disparate social groups with the ultimate purpose of unifying them. In Eudora Welty’s short story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman” (1936), car trouble sends a traveling salesman into the modest home of a Mississippi hill couple. The story draws on the contrast between the mysterious primitive “other” and the unmoored and bereft modern “self,” but its representation shifts away from primitivist representation into a realist representation of two modern groups that coexist in the present time. While the salesman habitually murmurs commercial ditties (“There will be special reduced prices on all footwear during the month of January”), the hill people walk a mile to borrow a burning stick for their fireplace.11 Yet they also chat to the salesman about personal details so that the salesman realizes the couple are not “remote” or “mysterious” people living in a godforsaken place but “private” and “simple” like himself, making do with what they have (129). The New Critical paradigm of much Welty scholarship has obscured the way that the story represents two conflicting modern groups.12 Like Eudora Welty’s work, John Steinbeck’s also captures the specific interests of this particular historical moment. Although The Grapes of Wrath (1939) suggests that any meeting between Oklahoma tenant farmers and other travelers on Route 66 will be deadly for the Okies, his novel The Wayward Bus (1947) is based on the community that is formed after a bus breaks down on a minor east-west Californian road. The Wayward Bus is one of many mid-twentieth-century American texts about people and communities left behind by the highways, just as previous generations were left behind when trains cancelled stops at small stations. The regional literatures of the late twentieth century engendered further shifts away from the genteel frame of local color literature, as well as from the dehumanizing impulses of the revolt from the village literature that followed

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it. In many nineteenth-century genres, working-class people lack real choices or interesting inner selves. Accidents render the characters mere victims of their social states. Two recent novels create a direct contrast to that trend: Tomás Rivera’s . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra (. . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him) (1971) and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980). In these novels, working-class characters experience travel accidents, are reborn through the process, and possess complex subjectivities. The novels break down the nineteenth-century differentiation between higher status characters who are healed in an accident and lower status characters who die outright. As a result, these two contemporary novels disseminate the empowerment and rejuvenation of travel beyond the urban bourgeoisie. At the same time, travel in the novels still holds the capacity for sudden, soul-shattering violence, even more so than in the earlier texts. Although some prescient nineteenthcentury antecedents contained the seeds of both these developments, And the Earth Did Not Devour Him and Housekeeping plumb their depths. In both novels, accidents vivify the cost of modernization. In Rivera’s novel, the misfortunes of Anglos are trivial compared to those of Mexican Americans. The Anglo woman who crashes her car and kills sixteen workers was drinking simply because her husband left her, and the boss who shoots and kills a child for drinking from a tank reserved for cattle cannot manage to kill himself. In contrast, the bodies of Mexican American migrant workers are treated cheaply—they literally burn. Workers suffer sunstroke in the fields; children are burned to death when they imitate a movie star; and a man jumps into electric cables after losing his lover because of seasonal work. The migrants’ relation to place is vexed. Not only does the harshness of the natural world threaten to devour them, but they must move every few months, and no matter where they go, Anglos control all social space. Anglos order the migrant workers’ children to get out of their shops and off their streets, and Anglos decide which Mexican Americans are defined as good and bad. As its awkward, tentative title suggests, the novel is highly fragmented, composed of loosely related stories and interstories. Arguably, its fragmented existence stems from the fact that it portrays a people who are struggling to gain political and aesthetic representation.13 At the time the novel was written, in Rivera’s birthplace of Crystal City, Texas, Mexican-American activists in the Brown Power Movement worked to gain control over local political seats and revise racist school curriculums. The structure of the novel corresponds, in Ramón Saldívar’s words, to “a reality into which the subject of the narrative’s action seeks to enter, all the while learning of its own ideological closure” (5). The novel counterpoises scenes that demystify the re-

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ligious idealism of the Mexican Americans or the Freudian psychology of the Anglos with “equally crucial scenes that seek to identify an affirmative ground for a collective cultural unity beyond the realm of the individual subject” (Saldívar 85). The most crucial of these scenes is a travel accident scene. In the chapter “When We Arrive,” a truck carrying migrant workers from Texas to Minnesota breaks down. Since the incident happens at night in a hostile environment where no local is likely to help, it creates an especially liminal space. Whereas previous chapters of Rivera’s novel uphold the social and literary convention that women’s place is in the home, in this chapter, men and women stand together. The chapter is narrated as a series of internal monologues with no unifying consciousness: some voices are resigned, some are practical, some search for transcendence, some are angry, some are profane. Although some voices focus on arrival and the possibility of better luck in the ensuing job, these voices express what readers are supposed to see as misguided hope. Because the novel worked alongside the extra-textual Brown Power movement, it offers more than stray hope: it gathers up such voices and moves the readers toward recognizing that the cycle of arriving and departing should not be the community’s final goal. The vehicle breakdown gets the workers out of the futile cycle of the American dream and moves them toward becoming political subjects. By the end of the narrative, the recurring character of the unnamed boy ties together the novel’s fragments in a monologue of the lost year. The novel ends with a child in a treetop believing that he is not fragmented or lost, profiting from a caesura that makes future travel and self-determination possible, a frozen moment of time that is an uncanny echo of “A White Heron.” Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping begins with a railroad bridge accident. Although the accident is described only briefly, many readers consider it the most memorable event of the novel. The description of the derailment that sends a passenger train into the depths of a large lake contains the typical ingredients of a newspaper accident story, with a porter and waiter who provide eyewitness accounts, town boys and men who dive into the lake to retrieve bodies, and journalists, railroad officers, family members of the deceased, and others who form a crowd of sightseers. The accident occurs in the town of Fingerbone, Idaho, and it is a striking example of dramatic emplacement. Although the accident is reported in newspapers as far away as Denver and St. Paul, it has special significance for the people of Fingerbone, because it widows three women and the train remains buried under the lake, never to be found. The lake symbolizes death, permanence, the collective unconscious, and the promise that social life will decay. The lake

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harbors unacceptable people and activities, and every spring it threatens to rise up and reclaim the houses and stores of Fingerbone. At the same time, other events famous for symbolizing the violence of modernization dot the narrative—like car crashes, abandoned pioneer homes, and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Technically the train wreck is not the reason why the Foster family lives in Fingerbone, but its traumatic and accidental overtones serve as a metonymy for their fated yet tenuous connection to the town. The wreck killed Edmund Foster, the narrator Ruth’s grandfather, who was working as a trainsman at the time (Ruth believes he was either a watchman or a signalman), and his death in the accident is what Fingerbone remembers about the family even several years later. Edmund Foster only ended up in Fingerbone accidentally, having simply asked at his Midwestern home for a ticket to the mountains. A restless man who spent his life reading travel literature, Edmund Foster was only truly settled once he was dead, sealed beneath the lake’s ice. The event is only one of the family’s many sudden losses: Ruth’s mother commits suicide by driving a car into the lake, and Ruth and restless Aunt Sylvie suffer a fake accident, invented by the community’s local newspaper when the pair disappears over the railroad bridge. By abandoning “housekeeping,” Ruth and Aunt Sylvie choose life’s higher permanence over the town’s petty propriety. They symbolize the opposite of Rivera’s characters: they flee being subjects of history. This is the reason why their intermittent fascination with the Fingerbone landscape so often takes on a Gothic tinge, because propriety becomes frightening for them. It is a mark of change from the nineteenth century that a mere laborer features in the text’s most spectacular and poignant accident. Although of working-class origins, the Foster family feels alienated from its provincial neighbors, much like middle-class nineteenth-century characters. “All my kin and forebears were people of substantial or remarkable intellect, though somehow none of them had prospered in the world,” Ruth recounts.14 “People always interpreted our slightly formal manner and our quiet tastes as a sign that we wished to stay a little apart” (75). Unlike the earlier characters, however, Ruth recognizes that her family’s superiority lacks substance or legitimacy: this standoffishness is only “the fairest description of our best qualities, and the kindest description of our worst faults” (74). These two contemporary novels illustrate that some things have changed in regional travel accident narratives while others remain the same. While writers of nineteenth-century accidents often express nostalgia for slower and more authentic travel experience, twentieth-century accidents tend to relish in the glaringly horrifying consequences of the modern lust for speed. Twen-

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tieth-century transportation networks seem more violent because they are so much more effective at shuttling large quantities of people across the globe. In the twentieth century, a wider range of people could travel and reap travel’s benefits. In storytelling, working-class and non-white characters experience the renewing characteristics of textual accidents: from wandering subjectivities, to a community of suffering, to most significantly, a more meaningful stake on the land. Housekeeping and And the Earth Did Not Devour Him plumb the depths of this longing for a more meaningful and satisfying stake on the land with opposite vectors: while the Mexican American migrant characters have a tenuous hold on the land because the white people who dominate the land systematically bar them from it, the Fosters’ hold is tenuous because people emplace white women in an especially stifling and domesticating manner. Every text finds slightly different uses for the motif. Nevertheless, many narratives that use the motif share an inspiring, humorous, but ultimately melancholy note. For while in recent texts, a wide range of characters has come to plausibly belong to the national landscape, they continue to belong only accidentally. As often as they experience like-mindedness with their neighbors, they suffer conflict in the form of recurrent crashes and collisions. The thwarted traveler continues to offer a key to the spatial and social configurations of American literary history and American subjectivity. He is not, it appears, going anywhere soon.



Notes

Abbreviations Century Company Records Century Company Records. Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Houghton Mifflin Houghton Mifflin Correspondence and Business Records. Houghton Library. Harvard University.

Introduction 1. Lora Romero, Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 6–7. 2. Both critics quote a shortened version of the lines. Jay Martin, Harvests of Change: American Literature 1865–1914 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 135; Donna M. Campbell, Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885–1915 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997), p. 209 n. 41. 3. I use the term “modernization” to refer to the shift in the 1870s through the 1910s in the United States away from island communities and small businesses into extended social, political, and economic networks, corporate employment, and a consumer economy. I use the term “modernity” to describe the states of being and thinking that emerged at the same time as modernization, such as consumerism, instant gratification, the quest for authentic experience, the continual redefinitions of personhood and status, and the tendency to identify with translocal authorities and organizations.

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4. This description of the shift from island communities to translocal organizations is described in Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order: 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 1–10, 111–32. Robert Wiebe continues to define social class partially in terms of people’s thought and activities, and most especially in terms of their geographical location and affinities in Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Christine Pawley describes how industrialization rearranged class identities in Osage, Iowa (one of the places where Hamlin Garland grew up), and how people with middle-class occupations such as attorneys, physicians, clerks, teachers, or small business owners used print culture and participation in national organizations to assert their authority over farmers and people in such working-class occupations as carpentry, millinery, day laboring, or domestic service; see Pawley, Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in Late-Nineteenth-Century Osage, Iowa (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 5–6, 14–19. 5. Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 6. Stow Persons argues that gentility was not exclusively a category of economics, but that the practice and identity did require a minimum economic threshold. See Stow Persons, The Decline of American Gentility (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973). 7. Hamlin Garland proclaims that the tourist cannot write the local novel in “Local Color in Art,” Crumbling Idols: Twelve Essays on Art Dealing Chiefly with Literature, Painting and the Drama (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960, 54). 8. Influential examples of this line of scholarship are Josephine Donovan, New England Local Color Literature: A Woman’s Tradition (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983); Emily Toth, Regionalism and the Female Imagination (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1985); Sandra A. Zagarell, “Narrative of Community,” Signs 13, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 498–527; Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, ed. American Women Regionalists, 1850–1910 (New York: Norton, 1992); Sherrie A. Inness and Diana Royer, Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997); Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 9. Influential examples of this line of scholarship are Helen Taylor, Gender, Race, and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989); Amy Kaplan, “Nation, Region, and Empire,” The Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 240–66; Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); June Howard, ed. New Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 10. Roberto Dainotto asks, “It is possible that regionalism’s search for a heartland is the desire for an ethnic purity that we have lost in the city—a desire we cannot find a more urbane way to express?” Roberto Maria Dainotto, “‘All the Regions Do

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Smilingly Revolt’: The Literature of Place and Region,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 502. 11. Carrie Tirado Bramen, The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National Distinctiveness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 124–55. 12. Other critics have argued for bridging the divide between the feminist and historicist readings of local color, and I address their work in the subsequent chapters: see especially June Howard, “Unraveling Regions, Unsettling Periods: Sarah Orne Jewett and American Literary History,” American Literature 68, no. 2 (June 1996): 365–84; Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, “On ‘Reading New Readings of Regionalism,’” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 15, no. 1 (1998): 45–53; Tom Lutz, Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); and Emily Satterwhite, “Reading Craddock, Reading Murfree: Local Color, Authenticity, and Geographies of Reception,” American Literature 78, no. 1 (March 2006): 59–88. 13. Kaplan, “Nation, Region, and Empire,” 252. 14. Lately, the category of place has enjoyed a resurgence of interest across such disciplines as geography, anthropology, sociology, and American Studies. Scholars have shown how place operates as a site that is made socially meaningful, physically as well as symbolically, via human action. A good introduction to the American regional boundaries and what historical and geographical forces have shaped them is David Mauk and John Oakland, eds., American Civilization, 4th ed. (London: Routledge, 2005). Recently some literary critics have treated place as a dynamic social product (rather than a mere documentary fact) by drawing from other disciplines, mostly cultural geography. See Patricia Yaeger, “Introduction: Narrating Space,” The Geography of Identity, ed. Patricia Yaeger (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 1–38; Cheryl Temple Herr, Critical Regionalism and Cultural Studies: From Ireland to the American Midwest (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996); Sara Blair, “Cultural Geography and the Place of the Literary,” American Literary History 10, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 544–67. 15. Amy Schrager Lang makes this point about how the euphemisms that writers use when discussing class distort our understanding of other types of inequality in The Syntax of Class: Writing Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). Eric Schocket links the reticence about class inequality to American beliefs that white workers should have social mobility in “‘Discovering Some New Race’: Rebecca Harding Davis’s ‘Life in the Iron Mills’ and the Literary Emergence of Working-Class Whiteness,” PMLA 115, no. 1 (Jan. 2000): 46–59. 16. Ronald Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 69. 17. The notion of a contact zone is from Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992). It is a notion that should be used with caution when applied to a national as opposed to imperial context in

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which citizens of the nation-state have some ability through formal political power to determine state or private forces of urbanization and modernization. Most Americans welcomed and profited from factories, railroads, and other forms of modernization, and the argument that they were a passive population impinged on by an external force rings falsely. 18. David Harvey describes this process of capitalist accumulation in The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1989). 19. “Motif,” A Handbook to Literature, ed. C. Hugh Holman and William Holman, 7th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), 330–31. The concept of subtleties that can be amplified in different combinations is drawn from Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (London: HarperCollins, 1997). 20. One of the reasons for the ambivalence of literary critics toward regional fiction and regions more generally is the lack of sophisticated discussion about the concept of a cultural region in American intellectual thought, which is related to the U.S. reticence to speak of social inequality. What prevents people from discussing regional identities and regional boundaries is that they realize that as citizens they are expected to know what the regions are even though, because of this reticence, they do not. Gavin Jones discusses the difference between American regional variation (via his discussion of dialect variation) and the regional variation in European countries in Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 8, 25–36. Jones argues that regional variation in the United States does not “know its place,” by remaining important to only lower-class people, and yet, at the same time, compared to European regional identities, American regional identities are less uniform within any given region. The fact that American regions do not look like classic European regions contributes to some people’s confusion about whether regions are significant in American society. 21. Justin D. Edwards provides helpful language for broadening the definition of travel literature to include not only conventional “non-fiction” accounts in which “the traveler transforms his or her experiences into a textual form that chronicles the events set out by an itinerary” but also hybrid texts that mix autobiographical travel accounts and fictional forms and, finally, travel guides in which the narrator has an open didactic agenda. See Justin D. Edwards, Exotic Journeys: Exploring the Erotics of U.S. Travel Literature, 1840–1930 (Hanover, NH: University of New Hampshire, 2001), 13. 22. Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 23. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Ronald Zboray, A Fictive People; Barbara Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 255–70; Amy G. Richter, Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity (Chapel Hill: University of

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North Carolina Press, 2005). Riverboats divided passengers into saloon passengers and deck passengers. 24. See Welke, Recasting American Liberty, and Richter, Home on the Rails, for contemporary accounts. Robin D. G. Kelley offers a particular vivid example of how the space of public transport became an important public space for contesting social inequality in his discussion of Southern blacks who used segregated busses for daily acts of insubordination, acts that paved the way for the formal activism of the Civil Rights Movement; see Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), 55–75. 25. Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 26. Aron, Working at Play. 27. Judith Green, Risk and Misfortune: A Social Construction of Accidents (London: University College London Press, 1997). See also Ross Owen Ford Hamilton, “‘And Nothing Pleaseth But Rare Accidents’: A Literary History of Accident.” (Ph.D. diss. Yale University, 1995). 28. Dona Brown discusses the development of Old Home Week in New England as a ploy designed to attract tourism in Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1995), 139; Christine Pawley describes various booster publications extolling the virtues of Osage, Iowa, and she shows how the town’s newspapers presented the community as “cultivated, genteel, and progressive” with poverty and ethnic and labor strife being mere blips on the far horizons in Christine Pawley, Reading on the Middle Border, 177; see also Pawley’s discussion on 12, 177–83. 29. M. H. Dunlop, Sixty Miles from Contentment (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 30. The definition of accident as “present by chance and therefore non-essential” has existed in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, since the medieval era and has been applied in particular in theology and textual criticism. See “Accident,” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989. 31. Jakob Lothe, Narrative in Fiction and Film: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 2–5. 32. Doody (The True Story of the Novel) and Mary Louise Pratt (“The Short Story: The Long and Short of It,” Poetics 10, no. 2–3 [June 1981] 175–94, 178) demonstrate that structuralist genre theory can avoid reducing texts to larger patterns. Both critics explicitly caution against structuralism’s totalizing tendency. Pratt argues that “the system-oriented, structural approach needs to be complemented by a genre criticism that concerns itself not only with criterial features of genres, also but with nonessential and occasional ones.” Doody associates structuralism’s totalization with nineteenth-century positivism and the expansion of the Western imperial gaze. 33. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 106.

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34. Of all the literary critics involved in debates around local color, June Howard and Nancy Glazener have been the most concerned with genre theory. See June Howard, “Introduction: Sarah Orne Jewett and the Traffic in Words,” New Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs, 1–38; Nancy Glazener, Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Literary Institution, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 35. Other scholars have also fruitfully stretched the definition of local color beyond texts that were initially categorized as being part of the local color movement. Carrie Tirado Bramen discusses María Ruiz de Burton’s novel The Squatter and the Don (1885) in The Uses of Variety. In fact, both Marjorie Pryse and Judith Fetterley on the one hand and Tom Lutz on the other have shown that such stretching of the definition of local color has always occurred in the literary history of the genre. They argue that early-twentieth-century literary histories included a wide variety of texts by women and men, whites, blacks, and Indians, under the rubric of local color writing. See Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, Writing Out of Place and Tom Lutz, Cosmopolitan Vistas. Nevertheless, these scholars have tended to stretch the definition to include ever more socially marginal writers. Since I am actually stretching the definition to include more “major” writers, my choice needs to be justified differently. 36. In this way, the study resembles Donna Campbell’s Resisting Regionalism in that it emphasizes how local color literature influenced other contemporaneous fiction genres. My approach to genre differs somewhat, however. Campbell describes an antagonistic relationship between local color writing and naturalism. As such, her study resembles the theory of how texts mix genres as elaborated by Thomas Beebee, who argues that a particular text’s ideology reveals itself most clearly when a scholar identifies the generic ideologies it is vacillating between. I have drawn many of my ideas for how to read for a mixing of genres from Beebee. At the same time, I find that an antagonistic model of generic mixing can indirectly simplify the understanding of the ideological possibilities within local color by exaggerating the antagonism between the writers associated with different movements. See Thomas O. Beebee, The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). 37. This general literary-historical tendency to divide pastoral writing from industrial writing is not found in the scholarship focused on Rebecca Harding Davis. Davis biographers Sharon Harris and Jean Pfaelzer have already placed her writing in the context of both pastoral nature and industrial culture. See Sharon M. Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), and Jean Pfaelzer, Parlor Radical: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Origins of American Social Realism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996). 38. Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, introduction to American Women Regionalists, 1850–1910, xi-xii. Fetterley and Pryse continue to work from this distinction in Writing Out of Place. This gender-segregated approach to local color literature, and to postbellum literary history more broadly, has proffered many useful insights, in important monographs like Donna Campbell’s Resisting Regionalism, and Gavin Jones’s Strange Talk.

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Nevertheless, the tendency to treat literary history as gender segregated is under widespread challenge. June Howard finds Fetterley and Pryse’s sympathy/irony polarity (in which female writers convey sympathy toward their humble characters, while male writers express irony toward them) to be dependent on claims about reader reception that remain, and on a theoretical level must always remain, unproven, “Introduction: Sarah Orne Jewett and the Traffic in Words,” in New Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs, 1–38. 39. Doody, The True Story of the Novel, 303–18. Despite her explicit redefinition of the literary term “trope,” Doody uses the term interchangeably with terms like motif, device, metaphor, and figure. Other critics who employ the term “trope” similarly are Mary Louise Pratt in Imperial Eyes and Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing 1930–1990 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000). 40. Doody, The True Story of the Novel, 312–13. 41. Doody, The True Story of the Novel, 7, 54–55, 320, 327–28; Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 54, 135–36; Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 103–50. 42. Georg Lukács argued that it is realism’s tendency to undercut outmoded conventions that lends readings of realism a critical force (Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism [New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964]). Amy Kaplan argues that American literary realists did not passively represent but anxiously grappled with the aspects of modernity that they did not understand, like urbanization and mass culture, in The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Brook Thomas shows how realists tried to engage readers in a world as complicated as history in American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). In an important dissenting view, Nancy Glazener (Reading for Realism) argues that the political significance of realism resides in its reception by editors and readers of the 1880s and 1890s rather than in its form. Glazener argues that editors who read for realism encouraged readers to read in ways that asserted bourgeois and nationally identified control over American culture. They welcomed accurate and sympathetic portrayals of lower class people only as an exception that proved the rule. Disagreeing with Glazener, I find that realist novels and short stories offer formal evidence that the bourgeois establishment was not a monolith. It included some writers who were humanitarians and others who worked surreptitiously to contest bourgeois control over business or politics. 43. Critics have long argued that realism is based on the ancient romance. They argue that if realism is distinguishable generically from the romance at all, it is so by virtue of its juxtaposition of romance conventions to material that resists those conventions, that refuses to be ordered by those conventions. That material is then coded in as “the real.” Northrop Frye considers realism to be “displaced romance”; it takes the plots, characters, and images of romance and renders them quieter and more plausible (Frye, The Secular Scripture, 15). Harry Levin explains this toning down in terms of thematic content rather than form, in that authors tone down

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social conventions that are beginning to appear outmoded in The Gates of Horn: a Study of Five French Realists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 56. 44. For the expanded horizon of consciousness associated with modernity, see Thomas L. Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 1,” The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 107–35. 45. William Dean Howells, The Undiscovered Country (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1880), 42. 46. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 155–200. 47. Both Brook Thomas and William Morgan discuss antifoundationalism in realism. See Brook Thomas, American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract; William Morgan, Questionable Charity: Gender, Humanitarianism, and Complicity in U.S. Literary Realism (Hanover, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2004). 48. Welke, Recasting American Liberty, 20. Barbara Welke provides the most detailed discussion of how rail accidents became fundamentally modern categories of experience (8–20); see also Ralph Harrington, “The Railway Accident: Trains, Trauma, and Technological Crises in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930, ed. Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 31–56. 49. Jones, Strange Talk, 39. 50. See Norm Cohen, Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 71–72; Hal Morgan, Prairie Fires and Paper Moons: The American Photographic Postcard, 1900–1920 (Boston: D.R. Godine, 1981). Norm Cohen’s findings about railroad ballads are especially interesting. He notes that the use of the railroad in American folk ballads follows the trend that Barbara Welke traces in bourgeois attitudes toward the train; it might have seemed adventurous and romantic before the 1870s, but it only became associated with woe in the 1880s and 1890s. Interestingly, Cohen found a ballad by Bret Harte that was published in a workingman’s newspaper and another by local colorist Constance Fenimore Woolson, proving that local color and popular genres were not so distant (Cohen, Long Steel Rail, 173). 51. See Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, ed. Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (New York: Routledge, 1996); Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Ross Owen Ford Hamilton, “‘And Nothing Pleaseth But Rare Accidents’: A Literary History of Accident.” 52. Eric Michael Caplan writes the most fully about the medical and legal debates surrounding the new disease, or the new diagnosis anyway, of railway spine. Initially doctors searched for a physical cause, but it was for both medical and financial reasons that they eventually proposed that the problem lay in the mind. Eric Michael

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Caplan, “Trains and Trauma in the American Gilded Age,” in Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930, ed. Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 37–77. Other scholars who examine the connection between railway spine and the emerging definition of psychological trauma are Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 134–49; and Barbara Welke, Recasting American Liberty, 139–249. 53. On neurasthenia, see Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980 (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1985). Neurasthenia was inescapably associated with the bourgeois. However, as Tom Lutz argues, discussions of the disease often worked less as a tool of class consolidation, than as a means by which the bourgeois worked through its maladjustment to modernity. 54. Leys, Trauma, 2, 279. That said, though, one should add that transportation systems could not have grown as astronomically as they did without removing a judicial focus on attributing blame. Accidents grew too expensive to be borne by individual companies and too complex to be attributed to single cause. The insurance industry introduced the concept of no-fault insurance during the nineteenth century. Nan Goodman demonstrates that literature helped to enforce the shift in thinking that made no-fault insurance commercially viable in Shifting the Blame: Literature, Law, and the Theory of Accidents in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 55. Edward Chase Kirkland, Men, Cities, and Transportation: A Study in New England History, 1820–1900 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1968), 2: 350–97; Welke, Recasting Liberty, 16–21, 49–53, 64. 56. Historians of science have extensively theorized about the symbolic class, gender, and race of the nervous shock victim. For my purposes, the most significant finding is that American cultural arbiters and policy makers imagined a nervous shock victim to be a white brain worker who was susceptible to suggestion (and therefore female or feminized); see Eric Caplan, “Trains and Trauma in the American Gilded Age,” 64–66, 73–74; Welke, Recasting American Liberty, 64, 171–73, 185; Ruth Leys, Trauma, 8, 13, 67. Welke argues that brain workers were more likely to be prevented from working by psychological symptoms than were the working class and thus were more likely to seek medical help and receive a diagnosis; in contrast, workers suffered more economically from physical complaints and thus sought help more often for them. 57. S. Weir Mitchell, “Civilization and Pain,” Journal of the American Medical Association 18 (1892): 108, quoted in Barbara Will, “The Nervous Origins of the American Western,” American Literature 70 (1998): 294–316. 58. See, for example, in addition to Norm Cohen, Long Steel Rail, the writing in Janet Zandy, ed. Calling Home: Working-Class Women’s Writings: An Anthology (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990) and Janet Zandy, ed. Liberating

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Memory: Our Work and Our Working-Class Consciousness (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995). 59. A story published in Ladies’ World, a magazine read by rural farmwomen, shows up the narcissism and privilege of elite nervous patients even more markedly than the fiction discussed in this book; in the story, city women make fools of themselves by riding pigs to alleviate their symptoms. The story demonstrates that the habitual motifs of local color literature were noticed and contested outside the boundaries of genteel literary monthlies. Ellen Gruber Garvey has brought this humorous story to the attention of scholars in “Making Hay of the Yellow Wallpaper: ‘The Boveopathic Sanatorium’ Proposes a New Remedy for Neurasthenia,” Studies in American Humor 3, no. 6 (1999): 49–59. 60. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 183. 61. Another reader of modern shock who focuses on the city in a very useful way is Laura Marcus, who discusses Virginia Woolf’s use of modern shock as a way into the experience of intersubjectivity in the city; see Laura Marcus, Virginia Woolf (Plymouth, UK: Northcote Publishers, 1997). 62. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 160–62, 192–94. On the connections between modernity, the crowd, modern shock, modern writing, and Freud’s theory of accident neuroses, see also Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, 262–63; Walter Benjamin, “The Railway Disaster at the Firth of Tay,” Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Vol. 2 1927–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 563–68. 63. Ralph Harrington, “The Railway Accident: Trains, Trauma, and Technological Crises in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” 54. Sheila Hones traces motifs of volcanoes, earthquakes, and floods through the fiction and nonfiction of the Atlantic Monthly and connects them to Darwinist debates in geology over whether the earth’s history was chaotic or purposeful. She claims that the Atlantic articulated and assuaged its writers’ concerns about social instability. In my mind she treats the magazine’s contributors a little too monolithically and assumes that for them fear always overrules fascination. Significantly, a near-drowning on vacation (in which a bourgeois girl is saved by a local poor boy) and an article by Phelps are two of her examples. Sheila Hones, “Distant Disasters, Local Fears: Volcanoes, Earthquakes, Revolution, and Passion in The Atlantic Monthly, 1880–1884,” American Disasters, ed. Biel, 170–96. 64. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: HarperPerennial, 1992), 157. 65. For example, William Graham Sumner advocated laissez-faire capitalism and Thomas Malthus’s doctrines, but he was influenced by political economy more than by Darwin. Lester Frank Ward was more inclined than Sumner to apply Darwin’s rules to social life, but Ward used Darwin to argue that human beings have evolved a control over their animal destiny that they should use to benefit the weak. “William Graham Sumner” and “Lester Frank Ward,” in The American Intellectual

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Tradition: A Sourcebook, Volume II: 1865 to the Present, 3rd ed., ed. David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 29, 39. 66. The examples from Engels and Davis are discussed by Ralph James Savarese, “Piecing Together What History Has Broken to Bits: Air Florida Flight 90 and the PATCO Disaster,” in American Disasters, ed. Biel, 361–62. 67. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887, ed. Cecelia Tichi (New York: Penguin, 1982), 38–40. 68. Carl Smith discusses the faith in the transcendence of the nation among survivors of the Chicago Fire, both capitalist and progressive. See Carl Smith, “Faith and Doubt: The Imaginative Dimensions of the Great Chicago Fire,” in American Disasters, ed. Biel, 129–69. 69. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” 70. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Notes on Railroad Accidents (New York: Putnam, 1879); David McCullough, The Johnstown Flood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968); Patricia Bellis Bixel, “‘It Must Be Made Safe’: Galveston, Texas, and the 1900 Storm,” in American Disasters, ed. Biel, 223–46; Ted Steinberg, “Smoke and Mirrors: The San Francisco Earthquake and Seismic Denial,” in American Disasters, ed. Biel, 103–26; Steven Biel, Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster (New York and London: Norton, 1996). 71. The selective and fickle nature of public outcry is a theme in Charles Francis Adams’s Notes on Railroad Accidents; see also Carl Smith, “Faith and Doubt,” American Disasters, ed. Biel; Bixel, “‘It Must Be Made Safe,’ in American Disasters, ed. Biel; and Steinberg, “Smoke and Mirrors,” in American Disasters, ed. Biel. 72. Kevin Rosario, “What Comes Down Must Go Up: Why Disasters Have Been Good for American Capitalism,” American Disasters, ed. Biel, 72–102.

Chapter 1 1. Sara Blair comments on the ways in which American literary scholars are ashamed not only by regionalism, but also by the categories of place and space more generally, in “Cultural Geography and the Place of the Literary,” American Literary History 10, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 544–67. She argues that the new attention to place runs the risk of merely reinscribing the stubborn mythologies of space that are associated with American nationalism. In particular, it is easy to define a region in terms of a dominant or apparently intrinsic cultural value rather than the experiential history of all the people who have inhabited that place, and it is easy to define the nation as a composite of its regions rather than a set of ideas that include imperialist ventures beyond the continent’s borders. Although Blair blames literary scholars for making these mistakes, Robert D. Johnston usefully argues that new Western historians are also prone to falling back on old mythologies of American space. He claims that the new Western history debunks the old myths of the West but only by creating new myths of the West as monolithically capitalist, a myth that evades politics. See Robert D. Johnston, “Beyond ‘The West’: Regionalism,

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Liberalism, and the Evasion of Politics in the New Western History,” Rethinking History 2.2 (Summer 1998): 240. 2. Gavin Jones, Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 7. 3. See the essays by June Howard, Sandra Zagarell, Michael Davvit Bell, Susan Gillman, and Elizabeth Ammons in June Howard, ed. New Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 4. In addition to Gavin Jones, Richard H. Brodhead relies on the rhetoric of the ideological blindness of authors and critics in Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), as does Donna Campbell in Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885–1915 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997) and Stephanie Foote in Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001). Nancy Glazener concurs in Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Literary Institution, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), although her reading of the cultural work of the Atlantic magazine group emphasizes not blindness but knowingness and unscrupulousness; see Glazener, 13. 5. Taylor, Gender, Race, and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 17. 6. Eric Sundquist, “Realism and Regionalism,” in The Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 501. 7. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, An Old Town by the Sea, prepared by Susan L. Farley, Project Gutenberg, 1999, http://promo.net/pg; Rebecca Harding Davis, “In the Gray Cabins of New England,” in A Rebecca Harding Davis Reader, ed. Jean Pfaelzer (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 409–16. 8. Nancy Glazener criticizes the common scholarly habit of equating Howells’s person and the democratization of American literature in Reading for Realism. 9. William Dean Howells, “Literary Boston as I Knew It,” in Literary Friends and Acquaintance: A Personal Retrospect of American Authorship (1901; New York: Harper and Brothers, 1911), 113–15. 10. Donna Campbell discusses Howells’s uncollected 1870 review of Bjørnson in Resisting Regionalism, 17. 11. Taylor, Gender, Race, and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin, 156, Elsa Nettels, Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells’s America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), 66; Donna Campbell, Resisting Regionalism, 47–48; Gavin Jones, Strange Talk. 12. Christine Pawley, Reading on the Middle Border: The Culture of Print in LateNineteenth-Century Osage, Iowa (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001). 13. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 14.

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14. Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse also examine these two essays; they argue that Wallace Stegner follows a masculine approach to regional writing, while Carlos Baker follows a feminine approach. See Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 44–55. 15. Carlos Baker, “Delineation of Life and Character,” in Literary History of the United States, ed. Robert E. Spiller et al., vol. 2 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1949), 843–61; Wallace Stegner, “Western Record and Romance,” in Literary History of the United States, vol. 2, 862–77. Subsequent references to these essays are to this edition and will be cited in the text. 16. Bernard De Voto uses similar analogies of a tourist and a lady of the manor when pointing to the weaknesses of Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911). He says the Berkshires were a “seasonal landscape for her through which one drove with Henry James,” and “The villagers portrayed in her book . . . are a version of village life by the great lady of a Lenox manor, a kindly and sympathetic but completely uncomprehending outsider—a version which is practically indistinguishable from a literary convention that was hardening into cliché when she wrote and has since ossified.” Bernard De Voto, introduction to Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1938), ix. 17. For example, Nancy Glazener writes, “Feminist readings shaped by the politics of the 1970s tended to overemphasize and universalize the utopian possibilities of the female-dominated spaces, benevolent matriarchs, and domestic expertise that they found in regionalist works, isolating those features from the historical circumstances in which they functioned” (Reading for Realism, 216). 18. Leonore Hoffman and Deborah Rosenfelt, ed., Teaching Women’s Literature from a Regional Perspective (New York: Modern Language Association Press, 1982). Hereafter cited in the footnotes as TWLFRP. 19. Hoffman, introduction to TWLFRP, 1. 20. Robert Wiebe, Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 140–46. 21. Margaret Jones Bolsterli, “On the Literary Uses of Private Documents,” TWLFRP, 45. 22. Gloria Hull, “Alice Dunbar-Nelson: A Regional Approach,” TWLFRP, 64–68. 23. Barbara Hillyer Davis, “New Forms for New Research,” TWLFRP, 163–71. 24. Elizabeth Hampsten, “Tell me All You Know: Reading Letters and Diaries of Rural Women,” TWLFRP, 60. Similarly Susan H. Armitage discusses a diary of Amelia Buss who moved from New York to Fort Collins, Colorado, in “‘Aunt Amelia’s Diary’: The Record of a Reluctant Pioneer,” TWLFRP, 69–73. 25. Adele Friedman, “Public Presentation Report,” TWLFRP, 159–62. 26. Gavin Jones similarly makes the argument that dialect literature has been prone to repeated polarizations in critical response, whereby one generation celebrates its democratic promise, and the next generation denigrates its elitist cultural work. See Jones, Strange Talk, 8.

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27. Helen Taylor is one critic who is critical of the writers’ elitism but does not play the tourism card; she merely assumes that the Southern white women she examines frequented resorts and incorporated resort themes and social types into their fiction as a matter of course. See Helen Taylor, Gender, Race, and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin. 28. Amy Kaplan, “Nation, Region, and Empire,” in The Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 256, 252. 29. Nancy Glazener, Reading for Realism; June Howard, Publishing the Family (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 87. 30. The publication histories that have been uncovered for specific local color writers suggest that the genre as a whole had a significant and vocal secondary readership beyond the theoretical reader implied in the expensive monthlies. Nationwide newspapers reprinted syndicated stories by Jewett, Freeman, and Chopin for a wide, not necessarily educated, poor, rural, and female audience. However, whether because of the actual rules of provincial life or Jewett’s and Freeman’s perception of those rules, the fiction they wrote for syndicators Irving Bacheller and S.S. McClure was uncharacteristically heterosexist by the writers’ usual standards. See Charles Johanningsmeier, Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace, 1860–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 41, 46, 120; Charles Johanningsmeier, “Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins (Freeman): Two Shrewd Businesswomen in Search of New Markets,” New England Quarterly 70 (March 1997): 57–82. Nancy Glazener argues that stories by Jewett, Harte, and Murfree were reviewed in the 1890s in The Arena, a reform magazine which encouraged readers to value books with direct social messages and to look for recognition of their own opinions (Glazener, Reading for Realism, 206). Monika Elbert has noted that Mary Wilkins Freeman published in the inexpensive women’s magazine Harper’s Bazar, and that her frugal heroines share that magazine’s interest in dress and fashion. Monika M. Elbert, “Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Devious Women, Harper’s Bazar, and the Rhetoric of Advertising,” Essays in Literature 20.2 (Fall 1993): 251–72. Emily Satterwhite argues that local color writing appealed in particular to the rural gentry. Satterwhite very rightly challenges the equations in local color criticism between “urban” and “elite” and between “rural” and “less privileged.” See Emily Satterwhite, “Reading Craddock, Reading Murfree: Local Color, Authenticity, and Geographies of Reception,” American Literature 78, no. 1 (March 2006): 59–88. At the same time, however, Satterwhite also seems to imply that there is a clear class difference between the local gentry and the populations depicted in local color writing: this works for Murfree’s writing, but not for all local color. Other reception studies show that some rural readers fought against its snobbery. Dorothy Webb’s dissertation and internet site analyze multiple episodes of people talking back to their neighbors who wrote about them in a demeaning manner. Dorothy Webb, “Particular Places: Local Color Writing in the United States, 1870–1910,”

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(Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1997); Dottie Webb, Local Color: Regional Writing in the United States, 1870–1910. www.dotwebb.com/regional_writing/. Black intellectuals talked back to local color writers who romanticized black folk life by writing their own regional fiction. Not only Charles Chesnutt but W.E.B. Du Bois, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Gertrude Dorsey Brown[e], and Pauline Hopkins wrote stories that engage the strategies of local color writing. See chapter 3 of this volume for a further discussion of the issues involved in African American regionalism. Reception also shows that what was read as uncontroversial writing by the literary establishment appeared daring to readers who felt culturally insecure and welcomed any signs of resistance to Eastern gentility. Harold Bush shows how Western editors interpreted Mark Twain’s dinner speeches differently than Ralph Waldo Emerson did. Harold Bush, “The Mythic Struggle between East and West: Mark Twain’s Speech at Whittier’s 70th Birthday Celebration and W.D. Howells’ A Chance Acquaintance,” American Literary Realism 27.2 (Winter 1995): 53–73. These reception studies demonstrate that the writing’s meaning was not determined by its initial publication venue or the social positions of its authors. 31. Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse have responded to the historicist critics by arguing that the new readings of regionalism are not actually always all that new in that they merely change the terms with which the academy dismisses women writers, in “On ‘Reading New Readings of Regionalism,’” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 15, no. 1 (1998): 45–53. June Howard and Tom Lutz have written more sustained attempts to bridge the feminist and historicist divide. June Howard argues that Jewett’s work supports both readings well: Jewett was both a knowing writer of female subcultures and a cultural broker of modern circuits of communication and transportation; see June Howard, “Unraveling Regions, Unsettling Periods: Sarah Orne Jewett and American Literary History,” American Literature 68.2 (June 1996): 365–84. Tom Lutz argues that local color’s goal was not exactly populism anyway but a balance between dense local detail and aesthetic judgment, or local commitments and cosmopolitanism. Unlike another recent local color critic, Brad Evans, Tom Lutz does not equate cosmopolitanism with a class position or an urbane disposition but with textual evidence of aesthetic judgment and discernment. Lutz’s book is inviting because of his refusal to separate regionalism into good or bad practitioners and his refusal to eschew older generations of critics or “boring” geographical spaces in favor of a romance with the margins. Lutz does, however, merely bracket the class standing of authors and the class significance of the cultural work of the genre in his effort to turn the conversation. See Tom Lutz, Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Brad Evans, “Howellsian Chic: The Local Color of Cosmpolitanism,” ELH 71, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 775–812. Emily Satterwhite (“Reading Craddock, Reading Murfree”) argues that the existing terminology for categorizing local color writers as good or bad, or “insiders” or

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“outsiders” as she calls them, is inadequate; it flattens the complexity of the writers’ social positions and authorial stance. 32. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken, 1976), 3. 33. James Clifford points out that critical theory’s metaphor of the traveler is inaccurate because it hides the constraints on real people, constraints like economics, gender, race, or nation. James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 96–116. 34. As an alternative to demonizing tourists, Patricia Limerick suggests distinguishing more finely among tourists and encourages scholars to find ways to educate tourists about the environmental and cultural history of the area. Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West,” in Over the Edge: Remapping the American West, ed. Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 15–31. One should add here that it is humanities scholarship on the left that seems the most responsible for this demonization of tourism. Queries and announcements on the H-Travel list are split between business scholars and administrators who seek to make the tourism industry grow around the world, some with the intent of developing tourism in more environmentally or socially responsible ways, and humanities scholars who study tourism’s role in deracination. 35. Cindy Sondik Aron, “Vacations and Resorts,” in The Reader’s Companion to American History, ed. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 1107–10; John Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998); Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1995), 23–40; Lee H. Warner, “Cracker Resorts,” in Victorian Resorts and Hotels: Essays from a Victorian Society Autumn Symposium (Philadelphia: Victorian Society, 1982), 71–76. 36. Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Aron, “Vacations and Resorts,” 1109; Brown, Inventing New England. 37. Compare Brown, Inventing New England; Valerie J. Fifer, American Progress: The Growth of the Transport, Tourist, and Information Industries in the Nineteenth-Century West (Boston: Globe Pequot Press, 1988); Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1993), 68–85; Susan Armitage, “Another Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains,” Women and the Journey: The Female Travel Experience, ed. Bonnie Frederick and Susan H. McLeod (Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 1993), 25–38. 38. Aron Working at Play; Sears, Sacred Places. 39. For Howells, see Brown, Inventing New England. For Davis, see Sharon M. Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 112; Jean Pfaelzer, Parlor Radical: Rebecca Harding Davis and the

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Origins of American Social Realism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 13–14. For Phelps, see Carol Kessler, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (Boston: Twayne, 1982). For Wister, see Darwin Payne, Owen Wister: Chronicler of the West, Gentleman of the East (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985). 40. Dorothy Webb, “Particular Places: Local Color Writing in the United States, 1870–1910”; Dottie Webb, Local Color: Regional Writing in the United States, 1870–1910, last updated Feb. 28, 2000, www.traverse.com/people/dot/default.html. 41. Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 37–49. 42. When Cheryl Temple Herr uses the term “critical regionalism,” she is not proposing that a critic look for artistic work that is uniformly oppositional. By combining archival work with canon building, that is a mistake that literary critics sometimes make. Rather Herr offers suggestive forays into reading regionalism in the novel, film, and architecture alongside economic analyses of agriculture. The critical nature of the regionalism then resides in the criticism. Cheryl Temple Herr, Critical Regionalism and Cultural Studies: From Ireland to the American Midwest (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996). 43. John Hallwas, introduction to Life in Prairie Land, by Eliza Farnham (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), xxiii–xxiv; Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). 44. Caroline M. Kirkland, A New Home, Who’ll Follow?, ed. Sandra Zagarell (New Brunswick, NY: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 6. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited in the text. 45. Eliza Farnham, Life in Prairie Land (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 26, 27. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited in the text. 46. John Hallwas makes this point about Farnham’s novel, and although Kirkland’s novel uses the rhetorical technique of contrast less programmatically, the point holds true for her novel as well. John Hallwas, introduction to Life in Prairie Land by Eliza Farnham. 47. Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 474–75, 332. 48. David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 151; Sandra A. Zagarell, Introduction to A New Home, Who’ll Follow?, by Caroline Kirkland, xxx–xxxv. 49. Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance. 50. Judith Fetterley emphasizes that the pleasure of Kirkland’s text derives from the irony of the class slippage it details—people like Kirkland moved west to boost their wealth. See Fetterley, “Caroline M. Kirkland,” in The Heath Anthology of American Literature, gen. ed. Paul Lauter et al., Vol II, 3rd ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 2284–286. 51. June Howard shows how nineteenth-century American sentimentality draws from Adam Smith’s moral philosophy, and for Smith, “fellow-feeling was . . . a mark of the immense distance that separated individual minds rather than a sign of their

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commonality” (Jean-Christophe Agnew, qtd. in Howard, Publishing the Family, 228–29). 52. Zagarell, introduction, A New Home, Who’ll Follow?, xvi-xvii. 53. Rose Terry Cooke, “Miss Lucinda,” in “How Celia Changed Her Mind” and Selected Stories, ed. Elizabeth Ammons (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 154. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be cited in the text. 54. Josephine Donovan, “Breaking the Sentence: Local-Color Literature and Subjugated Knowledges,” in The (Other) American Traditions, ed. Joyce W. Warren (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 226–43. 55. Helen Papashvily names this motif the “mutilated male” motif in All the Happy Endings: A Study of the Domestic Novel in America, the Women Who Wrote It, The Women Who Read It in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). Feminist literary critics have understandably disagreed considerably as to whether the motif inverts patriarchal gender relations, shirks them, or reinforces them. See, for example, Naomi Z. Sofer, Making the ‘America of Art’: Cultural Nationalism and Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005), 193–94. I discuss the sporting injury as a means of hastening courtship in popular fiction by men and women in chapter 2. 56. The term “emplacement” is used in this way by Sara Blair (“Cultural Geography and the Place of the Literary,” 544–67). 57. Lutz, Cosmopolitan Vistas. 58. Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 17–19. 59. Elizabeth Ammons, introduction to “How Celia Changed Her Mind” and Selected Stories, by Rose Terry Cooke. 60. Roberto Maria Dainotto, “‘All the Regions Do Smilingly Revolt’: The Literature of Place and Region,” Critical Inquiry 22.3 (Spring 1996): 486–505. 61. Stephanie Foote discusses this anecdote and treats it as a demonstration of local color’s ideological mystification of its own tendency to poach others’ racy difference (Regional Fictions, 47). 62. Phillip Barrish argues that realist authors responded to the increasing prominence of the social sciences by distinguishing their writing from the sciences, and the same can be said about local color writers as well. Phillip Barrish, American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1885–1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 63. Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, pp. 69–225 in The Essential Margaret Fuller, ed. Jeffrey Steele (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 141.

Chapter 2 1. For example, in Wallace Stegner’s introduction to an edition of Harte’s stories, much as in his contribution to Literary History of the United States, he expresses unease over the presence of foppish intellectuals in the West by criticizing Harte’s de-

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piction of the Gold Rush. Wallace Stegner, introduction to The Outcasts of Poker Flat and Other Tales, by Bret Harte (New York: Signet, 1961), vii–x. In Tripmaster Monkey (1989), Maxine Hong Kingston rejects Harte as a precursor for her own writing because of Harte’s refusal to look at Chinese Californians beyond the famous racist caricature of Ah Sin. Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey (New York: Knopf, 1989), 9–10. One recent critic who does not get bogged down in the question of Harte’s elitism is Janet Floyd, in “Mining the West: Bret Harte and Mary Hallock Foote,” Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 202–18. 2. See Louis A. Renza, “A White Heron” and the Question of Minor Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 56; Elizabeth Ammons, “Material Culture, Empire, and Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs,” in New Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs, ed. June Howard (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 81–100; Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 3. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters; Sandra A. Zagarell, “Response to Jacqueline Shea Murphy’s ‘Replacing Regionalism,’” American Literary History 10.4 (Winter 1998): 691–97. 4. June Howard, “Unraveling Regions, Unsettling Periods: Sarah Orne Jewett and American Literary History,” American Literature 68.2 (June 1996): 365–84. 5. Jacqueline Shea Murphy, “Replacing Regionalism: Abenaki Tales and ‘Jewett’s Coastal Maine,” American Literary History 10.4 (Winter 1998): 664–90. 6. Elsa Barkley Brown defines a decentered theory of history as one in which “History . . . is everybody talking at once” and “The events and people we write about did not occur in isolation but in dialogue with a myriad of other people and events.” Elsa Barkley Brown, “What Has Happened Here? The Politics of Difference in Women’s History and Feminist Politics,” in Second Wave Reader: A Reader in Feminist Theory, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1997), 274. 7. Valerie Fifer’s history of the tourism, information, and transport industries in the West, and Dona Brown’s history of the invention of the idea of New England demonstrate that tourism cannot be studied separately from economic development. See Valerie J. Fifer, American Progress: The Growth of the Transport, Tourist, and Information Industries in the Nineteenth-Century West (Boston: Globe Pequot Press, 1988); Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1995). 8. See Fifer, American Progress, on the West; Brown, Inventing New England, on New England and the Northeast; M. H. Dunlop, Sixty Miles from Contentment (New York: Basic Books, 1995), on what are now the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan; and John Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), on Niagara Falls, the Connecticut and Hudson River valleys, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Yellowstone, and Yosemite.

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Many readers will recognize that these changes in eating, sleeping, and travel arrangements are also amply documented and commented upon by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Bayard Taylor, Harriet Martineau, Maria Cummins, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Isabella Bird, and Theodore Dreiser, but recent historical accounts are more systematic than the writers in their discussions of finances and class segregation, and hence I cite them instead. 9. Paton Yoder, Taverns and Travelers: Inns of the Early Midwest (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 80; Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 10. Fifer, American Progress, 327–33. 11. W. G. Marshall, Through America: Or, Nine Months in the United States (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1881), 343–44. 12. Stanford Demars, The Tourist in Yosemite, 1855–1985 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991), and Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), document similar battles between various social groups in determining how Yosemite National Park would be run. 13. As discussed in the previous chapter, one telling exception is women homemakers, who take these opportunities to learn about other people’s domestic practices and sometimes to draw conclusions about their level of civilization. 14. Albert Richardson, Beyond the Mississippi (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Co., 1867). See James Buzard,rB am uzaJd,The se Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 5–8, on cultured travelers’ quest for the special, original experience not found in tourist guidebooks. 15. I say story and not motif to emphasize the aftermath, the way emergency hospitality generates social narrative. 16. M. Edward Brown, “A Winter Adventure on the Prairie,” Atlantic Monthly 19 (1867): 501–09. 17. The narrator is female, but searches in Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature, the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, and nineteenth-century editions of Who’s Who in America yielded no information about the author, who may be male or female. 18. J. B. Holder, “Along the Florida Reef,” Harper’s Monthly 42 (1871): 355–63, 515–26, 706–18, 820–30. 19. Julius Ward, “Moosehead Lake,” Harper’s Monthly 51 (1875): 350–65. 20. Although Michael Hoberman does not discuss decentered theories of history, his rereading of Welty’s emergency hospitality story helped me think through this point. Michael Hoberman, “Demythologizing Myth Criticism: Folklore and Modernity in Eudora Welty’s ‘Death of a Traveling Salesman,’” The Southern Quarterly 30 (1990): 24–34. On “competing reality” as a motif of realism, see Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 21. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987), 38–41; John D. Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across:

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The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 268. 22. Yoder, Taverns and Travelers, 33–34. 23. Robert Wiebe discusses the demise of neighborhood support networks in The Search for Order: 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 14. 24. Yoder, Taverns and Travelers, 6, 13, 9. 25. While investors came from many cities and countries, Fifer documents that Bostonians and New Englanders (rather than New Yorkers or Chicagoans or Philadelphians) were the most prominent as consumers, investors, entrepreneurs, tour organizers, promoters, writers, and publicists (10). 26. Alex Nissen, Bret Harte Prince and Pauper (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000), 43–44. 27. Nissen, Bret Harte Prince and Pauper, 55. 28. George R. Stewart, Jr. Bret Harte: Argonaut and Exile (1935; Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1959), 140, 173. The danger is that this detail will stand for Harte’s apparently humiliating feminization, but it usefully documents the everyday nature of leisure and middling or high culture in the West as well as Harte’s middling state. 29. Nissen, Bret Harte Prince and Pauper, 81. 30. See Letter 33, Springfield Republican, 11 Sept. 1867, Bret Harte’s California, ed. Gary Scharnhorst (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), 130–35; “On an Extinct Public Institution,” Californian, Sketches of the Sixties, by Harte and Mark Twain (San Francisco: John Howell, 1926), 19–24; “Notes by Flood and Field,” 1870, The Works of Bret Harte, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883), 60–86; “Stage-Coach Conversations,” Californian, 1866, Stories and Poems and Other Uncollected Writings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 155–57; “A Lonely Ride,” 1870, The Works of Bret Harte (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883), 46–53. 31. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 33–34, 37–40. In American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880–1995, Phillip Barrish recasts Bourdieu’s idea of the artist for the American context, in which a controlled closeness to whatever is defined as most recalcitrantly real proffers intellectual prestige. Unplanned meetings certainly fall into the category of most real and thus provide further evidence for Barrish’s idea. 32. Nissen, Bret Harte Prince and Pauper, 77. 33. Rudyard Kipling, American Notes, ed. Arrel Morgan Gibson (1891; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981), 76–112. The fact that Kipling was on a Cooke’s tour is from Fifer, American Progress, 205. 34. Buzard coins and conceptualizes the term “token of acculturation” (The Beaten Track, 157–59) to denote experiences and objects valued by travelers as signs of their increasing cultural prestige, one of which was an evening spent in a peasant’s cabin. Although Buzard focuses on British and American travel in Europe, this aspect of his analysis applies.

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35. With its group of disparate people who are brought closer together in the face of a challenging environment, it resembles the film Stagecoach (1939). Harte’s story differs from the film in that its characters feel the lack of sympathy in their group and temporarily regain it without the threat of marauding Indians. Following Thomas Beebee’s theory of generic instability, in which a text’s ideology is most visible in its vacillations between specific genres, then, one can say that Harte’s story vacillates ideologically between Westerns and local color fiction. See Thomas O. Beebee, The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). 36. See for example William D. Howells, “By Horse-Car to Boston,” in Suburban Sketches (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898), 91–115; Bayard Taylor, “Travel in the United States,” Atlantic Monthly 19 (April 1867): 477–83. 37. “Miggles,” The Luck of Roaring Camp, Susy, A Story of the Plains, Argonaut Edition (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1899), 37. 38. Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 17–19. 39. Susan Lee Johnson, “Sharing Bed and Board: Cohabitation and Cultural Difference in Central Arizona Mining Towns, 1863–73,” in The Woman’s West, ed. Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 77–92. 40. Gary Scharnhorst, Bret Harte (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), 3–4, 19; Alex Nissen, Bret Harte Prince and Pauper, 27–30, 55–56, 75–76, 109–11; Gary Scharnhorst, “‘Ways That Are Dark’: Appropriations of Bret Harte’s ‘Plain Language from Truthful James,’” Nineteenth-Century Literature 51, no. 3 (Dec. 1996): 377–99. 41. Susan Lee Johnson, “‘Domestic’ Life in the Diggings: The Southern Mines in the California Gold Rush,” Over the Edge: Remapping the American West, ed. Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 99–138. 42. Gary Scharnhorst singles out “Miggles” as unique in Harte’s oeuvre because it satirizes traditional gender roles, which is surprising given Harte’s dislike for feminism. Scharnhorst argues that the story ironically reverses sex roles, such that Miggles is unmarried and economically independent and the men in the story bicker and gossip like weak women. The story expresses sympathy for women suffering because of their gender, and it does reflect provocatively on nineteenth-century gender roles in the West, but the fact that cohabitation and economically independent women were more common in the West than elsewhere in the country somewhat complicates the argument of a gender role reversal. See Scharnhorst, Bret Harte, 28–29. 43. Caring for the ill and housing travelers were paid work, as documented by Yoder, Taverns and Travelers, and Barbara Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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44. Brown, Inventing New England, 150. 45. Clara Weber and Carl J. Weber, A Bibliography of the Published Writings of Sarah Orne Jewett (Waterville, ME: Colby College Press, 1949), viii–ix. 46. Clara Weber and Carl J. Weber, A Bibliography of the Published Writings of Sarah Orne Jewett, viii–ix. 47. Paula Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994), 90. 48. Jewett sent the first draft to Horace Scudder in November 1894, Letter to Horace E. Scudder, 22 November 1894 Sarah Orne Jewett Letters, ed. Richard Cary (Waterville, ME: Colby College Press, 1967), 71. 49. Letter to F. M. Hopkins, 22 May 1893, Sarah Orne Jewett Letters, 64–65. 50. Louis A. Renza, “A White Heron” and the Question of Minor Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 47–55; Sandra A. Zagarell, “Troubling Regionalism: Rural Life and the Cosmopolitan Eye in Jewett’s Deephaven,” American Literary History 10.4 (Winter 1998): 638–63. 51. Sarah Orne Jewett, “The Life of Nancy,” The Life of Nancy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895), 15. 52. Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 106–34. I discussed the recurring motif of sporting accident in courtship plots in women’s literature in chapter 1 as well. These sporting injuries are a variation on the popular rescue motif, also put to use frequently by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Rescues had been ubiquitous rhetorical devices in American literature since the travel narratives, captivity narratives, and sentimental novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In print, Indians rescued white people, adults rescued children, and men and women rescued each other. For treatments of the rhetorical device of rescue in American literary and political discourse, see Leslie A. Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American (New York: Stein & Day, 1968), and Diana Reep, The Rescue and the Romance: Popular Novels Before World War I (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Press, 1982). Leslie Fiedler shows how male writers were influenced by women antecedents; for example James Fenimore Cooper imitated Jane Austen, who regularly employed the motif of the mutilated male in her fiction, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Stein and Day, rev. ed. 1966), 186. 53. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar (1868) alludes to a young woman hurt by a summer boarder’s casual flirtation as a story so familiar that it need not be elucidated; Jewett’s novel A Marsh Island (1885) features a young man who nearly proposes to the daughter of a farming family; and William Dean Howells’s The Landlord at Lion’s Head (1897) features the son of a country inn owner who fell in love with a guest but only managed to marry her after her disastrous first marriage to a dishonest Italian. The thwarted romance between Alma Leighton and Angus Beaton in Howells’s The Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) also counters convention. They meet in St.

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Barnaby’s, New Hampshire, where Beaton boards in Alma’s home. Although it is Beaton (callow urban aesthete) who spurns Alma (aspiring provincial artist) when she arrives in New York City, it is Alma who finally rejects Beaton. 54. On the differences between country and city courtship and other socializing among youth, see Estelle B. Freedman and John D’Emilio, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 74–77. William Dean Howells fondly writes in The Landlord at Lion’s Head that kissing and holding hands were more acceptable in the country than they were in the city. 55. This marginalizing of the threat of seduction and self-abandonment makes the story very different from the contemporaneous urban-rural romance text of The Virginian (1902). Like Willa Cather in My Ántonia, Jewett centers attention on a regional figure but avoids a romantic connection between the urbanized narrator and Ántonia. For this reading of Cather and Wister, see John J. Murphy, “The Virginian and Ántonia Shimerda: Different Sides of the Western Coin,” Women and Western American Literature, ed. Helen Winter Stauffer and Susan J. Rosowski (Troy, NY: The Whitston Publishing Co, 1982), 162–78. 56. Marcia McClintock Folsom, “‘Tact is a Kind of Mind-reading’: Empathic Style in Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs,” in Critical Essays on Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Gwen L. Nagel (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1984), 76–88. 57. Elizabeth Ammons, “Material Culture, Empire, and Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs,” in New Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs, ed. June Howard (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 81–100. Ammons writes, “These absences imply that in Dunnet there is no division between home life and work life because there is no developed capitalist-based class system with managers (the rich) and workers (the poor)—both of which by the time Jewett wrote The Country of the Pointed Firs were standard features not only of city life but also of small-town life” (84). By emphasizing this point, Ammons extends and complicates her discussion of how Jewett’s novel invokes the language of business to refer to and highlight not hard industry but the women’s work of building social support networks; see Elizabeth Ammons, Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 47–49. Both perspectives on the notion of “business”—that tourism and women’s culture were economically important, and that they were not the only basis for the economy in New England—should be kept in play. Stephanie Foote comments on the consumerist perspective of the metropolitan narrator of Country, in “‘I Feared to Find Myself a Foreigner’: Revisiting Regionalism in Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs,” Arizona Quarterly 52, no. 2 (1996): 24. Foote reads the narrator as a consumer of Dunnet Landing who engages in acts (like looking through a window) associated with urban realism and the city as the preeminent space of commodity display. While perceptive, this argument equates consumerism with exploitation, an equation “The Life of Nancy” seeks to mitigate. 58. New York Central and Hudson River Railroad Co., Summer Homes and Excursions Embracing Lake, River, Mountain and Seaside Resorts (Albany, NY: Mrs. S.S.

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Colt, 1871), 134; Green Mountain Railroad, Green Mountain Byways (New York: Press of American Bank Note Co., 1888); Maine Central Railroad Company, The Front Door-Yard of the Country, and What It Contains (Boston: Passenger Dept., Maine Central Railroad, 1888). 59. Zagarell, “Troubling Regionalism: Rural Life and the Cosmopolitan Eye in Jewett’s Deephaven.” 60. For example, she teaches all the academic subjects except Greek to a local boy who attends Bowdoin College, the same college the New England writer Nathaniel Hawthorne attended. 61. For example, the entry on Jewett in Fetterley and Pryse’s anthology of women regionalists characterizes Jewett’s relation to her characters as an ethical dilemma: “how can she [Jewett] portray the lives of regional people without betraying them? How can she create the conditions necessary for silent persons to speak their secrets without writing fiction that will ‘stuff’ her characters and put them in a sideshow for gawkers to mock?” (Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, ed. American Women Regionalists, 1850–1910 [New York: Norton, 1992], 186). Dona Brown’s analysis of poor New England women’s role in promoting tourism indicates that New England women were not entirely silent. 62. Elizabeth Ammons, introduction to “How Celia Changed Her Mind” and Other Stories, by Rose Terry Cooke (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), xxxii. 63. Emily K. Abel, Hearts of Wisdom: American Women Caring for Kin, 1850–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 273. 64. The first ad, “The new Club World seat. Lullaby not included” (New Yorker, 5 Feb. 1996:3), features a black and white photograph of a young white woman holding a baby in her arms. Her hair is in a modest 1950s wave, and she is wearing a simple sweater and a single strand of pearls. The baby’s head is replaced by a color shot of the head of a portly fifty-something white business man leaning against the blue airline seat. A few months later, a similar ad designed around a black business man and his own classic childhood appeared (“The new Club World seat. A huge improvement” New Yorker [11 March 1996:8]). Both ads seek to reinforce the symbolic maleness of all travelers from the nineteenth century to the present and the symbolic femaleness of the people in the hospitality industry. 65. Nissen, Prince and Pauper, 176.

Chapter 3 1. Carrie Tirado Bramen makes such a rhetorical move when she reads W. E. B. Du Bois as a New Englander and a writer of regionalism; see Carrie Tirado Bramen, The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National Distinctiveness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 75–105, 124–55. 2. Elizabeth Ammons’s and Valerie Rohy’s anthology of local color writing places black, Jewish, Irish, and Indian writers within the broad regional categories of South,

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Midwest, or Northeast, although Ammons and Rohy concede that turn-of-the-century published definitions of the genre appear mostly in the work of successful white writers; see Elizabeth Ammons and Valerie Rohy, eds., American Local Color Writing, 1880–1920 (New York: Penguin Books, 1990). There is a debate among African Americanists as to whether African American literature should be read in relation to the land, and this debate must be addressed before one can adequately “include” an African American writer in a discussion about local color. Many scholars point to radical displacement as the defining spatiality of African Americans, while others complain that the rural South has received far too much emphasis in African American studies, obscuring the role of the city. It is clear that both African American studies and environmental criticism need to challenge their traditional categories before scholars can adequately appreciate the ideas of the “land” that have taken shape within the African American tradition. See Scott Hicks, “W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Richard Wright: Toward an Ecocriticism of Color,” Callaloo 29, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 202–22; Riché Richardson, “The World and the U.S. South,” American Literature 78, no. 4 (Dec. 2006): 722–24. 3. See, for example, an analysis of folk elements in Chesnutt, William L. Andrews, “The Significance of Charles W. Chesnutt’s ‘Conjure Stories,’” in Charles W. Chesnutt: Selected Writings, ed. SallyAnn H. Ferguson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 370–87; Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 271–434. 4. Charles Chesnutt, “Dave’s Neckliss,” in The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales, ed. Richard H. Brodhead (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 124. 5. Although Charles Chesnutt is the most canonical African American local colorist, Chesnutt scholars question whether Chesnutt can or should be used to “represent” African America, both because of his class snobbery and because of his interest in matters other than race. See SallyAnn H. Ferguson, “Introduction: Charles W. Chesnutt: An American Signifier,” in Charles W. Chesnutt: Selected Writings, ed. SallyAnn H. Ferguson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 1–11; Henry B. Wonham, “What Is a Black Author? A Review of Recent Charles Chesnutt Studies,” American Literary History 18, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 829–35. 6. Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 207–27; Amy Richter, Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 7. Both traveling to urban centers and vacationing at renowned resorts were important ways that the African American elite cultivated its solidarity and power; see Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). For the particular circumstances of African Americans in the West, see Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998).

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8. bell hooks, “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation, by bell hooks (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 171–75. 9. Making a somewhat similar point, Caren Kaplan cautions against idealizing migrants and condemning travelers in Questions of Travel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 101–05. Sandra Gunning has pointed out that elite African Americans were not immune to the general habit of making chauvinistic or nationalist statements while traveling; see Sandra Gunning, “Nancy Prince and the Politics of Mobility, Home and Diasporic (Mis)Identification,” American Quarterly 53, no. 1 (March 2001): 32–69. 10. Aron, Working at Play, 149–50. 11. Thomas Detter, “Give the Negro a Chance,” in Nellie Brown, or The Jealous Wife, with Other Sketches (1871; reprint, with an introduction by Frances Smith Foster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 117. Subsequent references to Detter’s sketches are to this edition and will be cited in the text. 12. Quoted in Elmer R. Rusco, “Good Time Coming?” Black Nevadans in the Nineteenth Century, Foreword by Kenneth W. Porter, Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies, no. 15 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975), 146. 13. Elevator, May 22, 1868, quoted in Rusco, Good Time Coming, 155. 14. See Hicks, “Du Bois, Washington, and Wright.” l5. Biographical sources are Foster, introduction to Nellie Brown, vii–xxi; and Rusco, Good Time Coming. 16. Rusco, Good Time Coming, Table 1, 124. 17. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color, 138. 18. Information about the publication history comes from Foster, introduction, Nellie Brown, vii–xxi; and Rusco, Good Time Coming. 19. Rusco, Good Time Coming. 20. The whole story is in past tense, so it is unclear whether the friend is saying he still is a slave or was a slave: “The landlady asked my friend where I was from. He told her from Washington. She asked him if I was a free Negro. To carry the joke out, he told her that I belonged to his father” (106). 21. Rusco, Good Time Coming, 189. 22. Amy Richter’s discussion of black women travelers who suffered indignities while being ordered off white-only train cars used similar strategies of respectability in the face of humiliation; see Home on the Rails. 23. In her introduction to the reprinted edition, Frances Smith Foster suggests that the differing views are placed strategically. 24. In Virginia City, there were restrictions on where Chinese residents could live (Rusco, Good Time Coming, 125). 25. Rusco, Good Time Coming, 155. 26. Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

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27. David Simpson discusses this aspect of Alexis de Tocqueville’s theory of democracy; see David Simpson, Situatedness, or, Why We Keep Saying Where We’re Coming From (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 230. 28. Rusco, Good Time Coming, Table 1, p. 124. 29. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color, 45. 30. Aron, Working at Play, 210–16. 31. Glenda Riley, Divorce: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 32. Cathryn Halverson, Maverick Autobiographies: Women Writers and the American West, 1900–1936 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). 33. Ross Chambers identifies a wayward strand in Western (as in occidental) literary tradition characterized by delay, triviality, and failure, but many of his examples are by male writers or about male figures; see his Loiterature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). 34. Three other critics have read the novella differently than I do—as a cautionary tale of the dangers of the city for female artists. Harris and Sofer argue that Davis seems to prefer the heroine Audrey to Jenny. Sharon M. Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 76; Jean Pfaelzer, Parlor Radical: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Origins of American Social Realism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 212–16; Naomi Z. Sofer, “Carry[ing] a Yankee Girl to Glory”: Redefining Female Authorship in the Postbellum United States,” American Literature 75, no.1 (March 2003): 31–60. 35. Aron, Working at Play, 106–08. 36. Rebecca Harding Davis, Earthen Pitchers, in Jean Pfaelzer, ed., A Rebecca Harding Davis Reader (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 226. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited in the text. 37. Sofer, “Carry[ing] a Yankee Girl To Glory,” 48–49. 38. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988), 68. 39. Davis’s loyalty to Southern ideologies of race and region are just being examined. Davis’s autobiography Bits of Gossip (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904) outlines her contempt for abolitionists. Her biographer Gerald Langford (The Richard Harding Davis Years: A Biography of Mother and Son [New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961], 15) discusses her response to rumors about the John Brown uprising (the children teased the “old black aunties and uncles”). Dawn Henwood (“Slaveries ‘in the borders’: Rebecca Harding Davis’s ‘Life in the Iron Mills’ in Its Southern Context,” The Mississippi Quarterly 52, no. 4 [Fall 1999]: 567–92) pulls together historical material to show that despite its geographically marginal setting and the Northern capital involved in building the iron mills, most citizens of Wheeling aligned themselves with the South before the war; Davis also praised plantation fiction by women writers. Stephen Knadler argues that Davis is “all over the place” in her examination of black-white love in his “Miscegenated Whiteness: Rebecca Harding Davis, the

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‘Civil-izing’ War, and Female Racism,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 57, no. 1 (June 2002): 64–99. Eric Schocket suggests that Life in the Iron Mills whitens the working class in his “‘Discovering Some New Race’: Rebecca Harding Davis’s ‘Life in the Iron Mills’ and the Literary Emergence of Working-Class Whiteness,” PMLA 115, no. 1 (Jan. 2000): 46–59. 40. Sofer, “Carry[ing] a Yankee Girl To Glory,” 48–49. 41. Helen Taylor, Gender, Race, and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 161. 42. Jean Pfaelzer, Parlor Radical, 209; Gerald Langford, The Richard Harding Davis Years, 33–34. 43. Susan Van Dongen, “Down the Shore: Shipwrecks, Pirates, Monstrous Storms, and Salty Yarns,” 20 July 2000, Princeton Packet Online, www.pacpubserver .com/new/enter/7-10-00/shorebook.html (11 Feb. 2008). 44. Rebecca Harding Davis, “The House on the Beach,” Lippincott’s Magazine, January 1876, reprinted in Pfaelzer, ed., The Rebecca Harding Davis Reader, 380–92. 45. “Marcia,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1876, reprinted in Pfaelzer, ed., The Rebecca Harding Davis Reader, 310–16. 46. “In the Gray Cabins of New England,” Century Magazine, 1895, reprinted in Pfaelzer, ed., The Rebecca Harding Davis Reader, 409–16. 47. Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 332. 48. The concept of the failed cosmopolitan as a common character type in local color fiction is suggested by Tom Lutz in Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2004). 49. Ruth Stoner writes that Davis’s popular gothic tales encourage women to survive by preserving their natural gift, whether property or their body. If we consider Earthen Pitchers according to this logic, we can see that Jenny fails Davis’s test when she destroys her property claim to Stonepost Farm. Stoner’s essay illustrates the difference between reading for regionalism and reading for the Gothic—one sharpens our focus on a place and its economy, and the other on women and their self-determination. See Ruth Stoner, “Rebecca Harding Davis’s ‘Second Life’; or ‘Her Hands Could be Trained as Well as His’: Female Sexuality in the Short Stories of Rebecca Harding Davis,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 19, no. 1 (2002): 44–53. 50. Langford, The Richard Harding Davis Years, 54; despite the age’s reputation for secularism, this belief in divine plan was shared by many of her contemporaries, including Owen Wister, as I discuss in the Epilogue, and the geologists who believed that the earth’s changes happened smoothly rather than in a series of upheavals, as discussed in Sheila Hones, “Distant Disasters, Local Fears: Volcanoes, Earthquakes, Revolution, and Passion in The Atlantic Monthly, 1880–1884,” in American Disasters, ed. Steven Biel (New York and London: New York University Press, 2001), 170–96. 51. Barbara Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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52. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 142–43; Eric Michael Caplan, “Trains and Trauma in the American Gilded Age,” Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930, ed. Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 37–77. 53. Welke, Recasting American Liberty. 54. Linda Williams, Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 38–39. 55. Elsa Nettels, Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells’s America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988); Kenneth W. Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 71–89. 56. Pfaelzer, Parlor Radical. 57. In fact, in one sketch Detter associates Indians with useless savagery: “Her wildernesses, which were the abode of wild beasts and the Indian’s wigwam, have now become large and populous cities” (“Progress of America”, 113).

Chapter 4 1. Daniel H. Borus, Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 2. William Dean Howells, A Modern Instance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 264. 3. Editor’s Easy Chair, Harper’s Monthly 51 (August 1875): 449; “Regular Accidents,” New York Times, 2 February 1860, 4; “The Railroad Accidents in June,” New York Times, 3 July 1890, 3; “The Railroad Slaughter in July,” New York Times, 6 August 1890, 4. 4. Critics have discussed whether nineteenth-century authors’ criticism of capitalism stemmed from an elitist desire to rise above the muck of capitalism or an egalitarian desire to make civil society just. Amy Kaplan (Social Construction of American Realism) and Brook Thomas (American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997], 28) disagree about Howells on this point; Kaplan argues that Howells’s disapproval of the popular press is elitist, while Thomas argues that in the context of political corruption it was not. 5. For good analyses of Howells’s mentoring, see Sharon M. Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), who argues that the Atlantic Monthly published less fiction by women after Howells became literary editor; Joseph R. McElrath, “W.D. Howells and Race: Charles Chesnutt’s Disappointment of the Dean,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 51, no. 4 (March 1997): 474–99; and Jesse S. Crisler, “Howells and Norris: A Backward Glance Taken,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 52, no. 2 (September 1997): 232–51.

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6. Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism, 23. 7. Elsa Nettels, Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells’s America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988); Kenneth W. Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 71–89. 8. The metaphor of “foreground” is from Kaplan’s analysis of A Hazard of New Fortunes, which she argues is divided between representations of a middle-class foreground and a background of the “unreal” city (see The Social Construction of American Realism, 44–64). 9. Brook Thomas, American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract, 285. 10. Freud’s list in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) of “bungled actions” that reveal unconscious wishes includes missed train connections and carriage accidents, events similar to those in the fiction of Howells and other writers (see Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, et al. [London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953-74], 6:162–90). This similarity suggests that travel accident was a familiar motif in nineteenth-century bourgeois culture. 1l. Critics have hotly contested the generic boundaries between local color literature and literary realism because any generic description has the potential to evaluate as well as describe. In this case, local color is the subordinate term, reflecting in particular on women authors’ putatively natural smallness and rose-colored vision. Among others, Michael Davitt Bell places Jewett’s fiction within realism, which enables his reading to focus on the world of men and men’s activities represented in her fiction, in Michael Davitt Bell, The Problem of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 12. See William Alexander, William Dean Howells: The Realist as Humanist (New York: B. Franklin, 1981). 13. Tony Tanner, introduction (1965) to William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes, ed. John Dugdale (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), xvii. 14. Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism, 43. 15. Howells’s influential essays on realism in Criticism and Fiction (1891), which he published while writing Annie Kilburn (1889) and A Hazard of New Fortunes, contain lists of inappropriate devices such as heroes, goblins, hair’s-breadth escapes, murder, debauchery, arson, ghosts, and shipwrecks (see William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction, in Selected Literary Criticism, Volume II: 1886–1897, ed. Christoph K. Lohmann and Donald Pizer, et al., vol. 21 of A Selected Edition of W. D. Howells [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993], 328, 335). All of these devices obviate the necessity for authors to acknowledge the importance of social conditions in shaping the motivations and destinies of characters, and they suggest that cosmic forces may bring about changes to literary narrative or social organization. One of the classic defining elements of realism is an adherence to psychological motivation and sociological

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cause. In addition to Criticism and Fiction, see Theodore Dreiser, “True Art Speaks Plainly”, reprinted, Documents of Modern Literary Realism, ed. George J. Becker, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 156; and George Bernard Shaw, “Ideals and Idealists” (1891), reprinted in Documents, 123–28. 16. On the tendency to criticize the ending of The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), see Donald E. Pease, introduction to New Essays on “The Rise of Silas Lapham,” ed. Donald Pease (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–28. 17. In fact, Howells uses the term “accident” in ways that appear to parody its contemporary currency: he uses it in The Undiscovered Country to refer to Ford’s injuring of Egeria’s hand and to Boynton’s missing the train at Ayer Junction (see William Dean Howells, The Undiscovered Country [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1880], 42, 223). He also uses the term in A Hazard of New Fortunes to refer to Miss Woodburn’s “incredible accident of her preference of [Fulkerson] over other men” and to Beaton’s aimless hope in looking down the barrel of his revolver that it would “go off by accident and kill him” (see William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes, ed. David J. Nordloh, et al., vol. 16 of A Selected Edition of W. D. Howells [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976], 378, 491). Characters in each of the three novels resort to heated discussions over conflicting interpretations of specific accidents (such as Edward Ford’s being stuck in Vardley or Basil March being caught in the horse-car strike). Rather than encouraging readers to choose one view over another (as some critics have suggested he does), Howells makes readers imagine accepting each of the characters’ interpretations in turn. Subsequent references to The Undiscovered Country and A Hazard of New Fortunes are to these editions. 18. John W. Crowley posits these categories in “Howells in the Eighties: A Review of Criticism, Part I,” ESQ 32 (4th quarter 1986): 253–77. 19. In a detailed examination of Howells’s courtship novels, Bert Bender singles out The Undiscovered Country as singularly poor, consisting of a “nearly endless series of struggles (in what is certainly one of Howells’ most agonized and heavy-handed performances)” (The Descent of Love: Darwin and the Theory of Sexual Selection in American Fiction, 1871–1926 [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996], 73). Richard H. Brodhead dropped the novel from his examination of Hawthorne’s influence upon Howells; for a comparison of his treatments, see Brodhead, “Hawthorne Among the Realists: The Case of Howells,” in American Realism: New Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 25–41, and his The School of Hawthorne (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 81–103. 20. See Kermit Vanderbilt, The Achievement of William Dean Howells: A Reinterpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 11–48. Vanderbilt’s description of the novel’s close attention to actual social types and their meetings resembles current critical definitions of local color writing. Vanderbilt surely did not use that label because in the 1960s it would have cast the novel as minor, and he was arguing for the novel’s importance. 21. Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism, 12.

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22. Shakers were one group who actively contested representations of themselves in fiction, as Robert Michael Pugh discovered. Pugh finds that Shakers enjoyed Howells’s scrupulousness but objected to his dismissal of their sexual and marital choice. Pugh himself finds Howells’s Shakers to be quaint, and he argues that Howells sublimates the viability of celibacy as an alternative to marriage. I disagree. Howells did portray the Shakers as an outsider might, with inaccuracies and a lack of sympathy or understanding, but his Shakers are not simplistically quaint. See Robert Michael Pugh, “A Thorn in the Text: Shakerism and the Marriage Narrative” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Hampshire, 1994), 23–61. 23. For example, in arguing that attributing meaning to common facts necessarily involves a moral outlook, Howells distinguishes between a lesser realism that “heaps up facts merely, and maps life instead of picturing it,” and a better realism in which the author is “careful of every fact, and feels himself bound to express or to indicate its meaning at the risk of over-moralizing” (Criticism and Fiction, 302). In contrast, his claims discounting authorial intentions occur primarily in hortatory passages: “Morality penetrates all things, it is the soul of all things” (Criticism and Fiction, 322). 24. For more on the insurance worldview, see François Ewald, “Insurance and Risk,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 197–210. Ewald argues that the technologies of the early-nineteenth-century insurance industry began to rewrite the concepts of randomness and possibility into the concept of calculable, collective risk. 25. The sense that modern activities redound in fictitious value and meaning resonates widely in descriptions of what makes modern life modern, with, for example, T. J. Jackson Lears’s idea of the late-nineteenth-century middle-class sense of weightlessness (see Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 [New York: Pantheon, 1981]), or Walter Benn Michaels’s characterization of the period’s writing, photography, and courtship as embracing slippery signification and the aleatory (see Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987]). On this note, Phillip Barrish associates American literary realism with an author’s sense of the contingency of all things in American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880–1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 26. In the case of Ford, the sense of accidental entanglement overrides a brutishness that the uncultured Ford finds “instinctive.” Ford’s development in the course of the narrative draws on the idea that lower-class people (especially lower-class men) are brutish, and middle-class people practice self-control. His development is part and parcel of the distinction between realism, in which (roughly) accidents may be felicitous and determined by characters’ will, and naturalism, in which human life is an accident and characters’ actions are determined by their instincts. 27. Thomas L. Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 1,” in The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in

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Historical Interpretation, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 134. 28. See Wai-Chee Dimock, “The Economy of Pain: Capitalism, Humanitarianism, and the Realistic Novel,” in New Essays on “The Rise of Silas Lapham,” ed. Donald Pease (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 67–90. 29. No single character represents a pure embodiment of either activism-theory or accidental entanglement. Many of Howells’s key characters (the Boyntons and the Marches, for instance) are not economically secure enough to maintain the perfect observational distance required for Annie’s continual quandaries over her horizons of causality. Further, characters like Conrad Dryfoos feels both willed and unwilled longings to do good. Like any identity, these identities are mixed. 30. It is clear from the letters that Howells wrote during and after the composition of Annie Kilburn that he believed the novel’s message was that Peck’s revolution, not Annie’s reform, was the solution to social inequality. See Howells, letter to Hamlin Garland, 15 January 1888, in Howells, Selected Letters, Volume 3: 1882–1891, ed. Robert C. Leitz III and Christoph K. Lohmann, et al., vol. 19 of A Selected Edition of W. D. Howells (Boston: Twayne, 1980), 214–15. Yet I agree with Hamlin Garland that the novel itself ends with great hope for Annie’s eventual success at helping the factory workers on a local level. 31. William Dean Howells, Annie Kilburn, in Novels 1886–1868, ed. Don L. Cook (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1989), 645. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited in the text. 32. On Howells’s personal resistance to women who seek to work and think outside the home, see John W. Crowley, “Howells: The Everwomanly,” and “Winifred Howells: The Economy of Pain,” both in his The Mask of Fiction: Essays on W.D. Howells (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 35–55, 83–116. It is significant that Annie first takes action to do good only once her father dies, which leaves her without a male obstacle to action. 33. For this point about Vance I am indebted to Janice H. Koistinen-Harris, whose readings of Annie Kilburn and A Hazard of New Fortunes are in her Social Reform, Taste, and the Construction of Virtue in American Literature, 1870–1910 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002). 34. On the nineteenth- and twentieth-century association between male heroism and sudden “accidental” or “unnatural” death, see Susan Bennett Smith, “Virginia Woolf and Death: A Feminist Cultural History, 1880–1940” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1993). 35. In Black and White Strangers, Kenneth Warren identifies American literary realism with the civil and the social, and hence a rigid adherence to what a racist, elitist public would consider plausible. I stress that with accident Howells seeks to mediate between the realist realm and the non-realist (sentimental or romantic) realm of justice beyond plausibility. Thus, the device signals a way in which Howells attempts to produce justice within a realist aesthetic. 36. Leo Tolstoy uses the metaphor in Anna Karenina (1875–1877), in which the title character witnesses a death caused by falling under a train and subsequently

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commits suicide in the same way herself. William Alexander argues convincingly that Peck’s fatal train accident is only one allusion to Tolstoy in a novel that contains an extended argument with Tolstoy’s personal politics; he asserts that Howells had misgivings about the impracticality and ineffectiveness of living among the poor (see Howells: The Realist as Humanist, 77–78). 37. Like the Boyntons (and unlike Annie), the Marches are imperfectly detached observers: they do not come from an economic and social background privileged enough to shield them from economic downturns and working-class rebellion. Howells writes that Basil “began to feel like populace; but he struggled with himself and regained the character of philosophical observer” (Hazard, 374). 38. The Marches consider themselves to be mobile and the residents of the gay, crowded street to be fixed in place: March remarks that the residents “are not merely carried through this street in a coupé, but have to spend their whole lives in it, winter and summer, with no hopes of driving out of it, except in a hearse” (65). Politically the incident has conflicting implications; it at once alerts the middle class to the problems of the poor and ignores working-class agency. 39. See Kaplan, Social Construction, 59–64, 151–55. Kaplan, along with other Howells critics, shows that in deference to his readership Howells was less radical in his writing than he was in his private thought. See also Daniel H. Borus, Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 168–70; and Alexander, Howells: The Realist as Humanist. Thus, we cannot attribute the non-radical nature of the novel’s ending to Howells’s lack of personal conviction. 40. The incident is similar to the traffic jam in “The Life of Nancy,” discussed in the previous chapter, as well as an incident featured in Charles Baudelaire’s “A Lost Halo.” 4l. See Warren, Black and White Strangers, 71–108. 42. While discussing the boundaries between the novel and the romance, for example, Margaret Doody is more optimistic than Northrup Frye about the social and moral value of the romance, with its continual invocation of magical transformations, and Frye is far less dismissive than the very many masculinist critics of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries who have championed realism or naturalism over the romance. See Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (London: HarperCollins, 1997); Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 54, 135–36.

Chapter 5 1. For the concept of mental states that are forbidden within realism and the way they are coded socially, see Henry B. Wonham, “Writing Realism, Policing Consciousness: Howells and the Black Body,” American Literature 67, no. 4 (Dec. 1995): 701–24. Wonham focuses on how the forbidden states are coded as black, but they are also coded as feminine. 2. Lori Duin Kelly and Carol Kessler concur that Phelps’s late fiction is uneven and marred by the author’s increasing need for money and her increasing willingness

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to endorse marriage and men’s ways of doing things; see Kelly’s The Life and Works of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Victorian Feminist Writer (Troy, NY: Whitson Publishing Co., 1983) and Kessler’s Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1982). 3. On this tendency in realism, see Nancy Glazener, Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Literary Institution, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). Phelps read and wrote for timeliness and topicality. 4. I draw on Marianne Noble’s discussion of the links between sentimental literature, masochism, and Christianity in analyzing this dimension of Phelps’s vision. See Noble, The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 5. Wai-Chee Dimock, “Class, Gender, and a History of Metonomy,” in Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations, ed. Wai-Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 57–104. See also Diane Price Herndl, Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 216–18. 6. In Phelps’s fiction, the lack of horror at the prospect of an injured body is not a sign of artistic failure, but of a unique assessment of normative social life in which normative social life is the true horror and injury a potential escape. I am influenced in this argument by Ralph Poole, who has noted the lack of horror in ghost stories by Phelps and other nineteenth-century American and British women writers. See Ralph J. Poole, “Body/Rituals: The (Homo)Erotics of Death in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Rose Terry Cooke, and Edgar Allan Poe,” in Soft Canons, ed. Karen L. Kilcup (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 239–61. 7. Other critics have emphasized the difference between Phelps and other New England writers. See Josephine Donovan, New England Local Color Literature: A Woman’s Tradition (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983); Susan Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Kessler, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. 8. Kessler, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps; Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business; Susan Curtis, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 90–93. 9. Frederick Wegener reads Phelps’s story “Zerviah Hope” in terms of its use a disaster to bridge North and South, white and black, and men and women. See Frederick Wegener, “‘Few Things More Womanly Or More Noble’: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and the Advent of the Woman Doctor in America,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 22, no. 1 (2005): 1–17. 10. Lisa Long has already argued against simplistic distinctions between Phelps as a woman writer focusing on the private sphere and the public sphere of men and men’s activities. Lisa Long, “‘The Corporeity of Heaven’: Rehabilitating the Civil War Body in The Gates Ajar,” American Literature 69, no. 4 (Dec. 1997): 782. 11. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Chapters from a Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896), 88–89. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be cited in the text.

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12. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, “The Tenth of January,” in The Silent Partner, a Novel, and “The Tenth of January,” a Short Story, afterword by Mari Jo Buhle and Florence Howe (New York: Feminist Press, 1983), 305. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be cited in the text. 13. The conservative implications of emphasizing the gulf between the middle and working class has been noted by other scholars. See Amy Schrager Lang, The Syntax of Class: Writing Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003; Brook Thomas, American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and William Lynn Watson, “‘The Facts Which Go to Form This Fiction’: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Silent Partner and the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics Report,” College Literature 29, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 6–25. Caroline Levander argues against this dominant trend of focusing on the conservative aspects of Phelps’s work; she points out that Phelps granted working girl characters significant voice and subjectivity, even the right to sexual pleasure; see Levander, Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 14. Thus far the story supports Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s contention that bourgeois women writers displace the limits of embodiment onto disabled workingclass female characters as part of their own struggle to become a disembodied liberal bourgeois subject; see Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). In Phelps’s oeuvre, however, plenty of bourgeois characters experience the limits of embodiment. 15. On reform fiction by Phelps and birth control, see Dale M. Bauer, “‘In the Blood’: Sentiment, Sex, and the Ugly Girl.” Differences 11, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 57–75. 16. Dimock, “Class, Gender, and a History of Metonomy.” 17. For this view of the Boston elite, see Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America,” in Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, ed. Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 374–97. 18. Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1995), 139. 19. Robert C. Sahr, “Consumer Price Index (CPI) Conversion Factors 1800 to Estimated 2014 to Convert to CPI Dollars (1982-84 = 100),” http://oregonstate.edu/ cla/polisci/faculty-research/sahr/cvcpi.pdf (12 March 2008). 20. DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America,” 382. 21. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Doctor Zay (New York: Feminist Press, 1987), 8. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be cited in the text. 22. Renata R. Mautner, Exotic Nations: Literature and Cultural Identity in the United States and Brazil, 1830-1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).

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23. Lawrence Levine discusses the sacralization of opera during the latter half of the nineteenth century in Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 84–104. 24. Although most readings of the novel focus on Zay and Yorke, Alfred Habegger calls Sarah Butterwell one of the most memorable female humorists of nineteenth-century literature; see Habegger, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 25. Robert Wiebe, Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 117–61. 26. Diane Price Herndl, Invalid Women; Timothy Morris, “Professional Ethics and Professional Erotics in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ Doctor Zay,” Studies in American Fiction 21, no. 2 (Autumn 1993): 141–52. 27. Morris, “Professional Ethics and Professional Erotics.” 28. The sudden and premature loss of Zay’s mother is a quiet accident without the pomp of Yorke’s fall. The contrast illustrates how female injury is imaged differently from male injury. An earlier Phelps story, “A Woman’s Pulpit,” depicts a female minister who seeks out a country post because she is wary of the competition in the city, but Phelps suggests that Zay finds more, not less, professional challenge in the countryside because there are no bourgeois women to fill her office with minor ailments. 29. Carrie Tirado Bramen makes this argument in The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National Distinctiveness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 30. Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business, 167–92; for concurring analyses see Susan S. Williams, “Writing with an Ethical Purpose: The Case of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,” Reciprocal Influences: Literary Production, Distribution, and Consumption in America, ed. Steven Fink and Susan S. Williams (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), 151–72; and June Howard, Publishing the Family (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 31. Phelps first worked with editor James T. Fields of Ticknor and Fields, a publishing house that evolved into Houghton Mifflin Company. In 1895 and 1906 the firm was still known by one of its previous names, Houghton, Mifflin and Company. 32. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps to James R. Osgood, Andover, 29 June 1871, Houghton Mifflin; Phelps to James R. Osgood, 23 April 1873, Houghton Mifflin. 33. She might have been paying for an opium addiction, either her own, or her husband’s. The husband in Confessions of a Wife (1902) is addicted to opium, and in Chapters from a Life Phelps warns readers in pain about taking anodynes for insomnia in an urgent and personal manner (238–39). Phelps biographers believe such an addiction is possible, based on such hints in Phelps’s published work. See Kessler, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps; Ronna Coffey Privett, A Comprehensive Study of American Writer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 1844–1911: Art for Truth’s Sake (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003), 236, 265 n. 44. 34. Phelps to Messrs. Houghton Mifflin and Co, East Gloucester, 17 September 1883, Houghton Mifflin; Phelps to Henry Oscar Houghton, East Gloucester, 16 June

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1887, Houghton Mifflin; Phelps to Messrs. Houghton Mifflin & Co., Gloucester, 13 September 1887, Houghton Mifflin. 35. For complaints about tighter deadlines, see Phelps to Elizabeth Jordan, Newton Centre, 5 February, 1900, Elizabeth Jordan Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. 36. By arguing this, I am disagreeing with some of Susan Coultrap-McQuin’s discussion of Phelps in Doing Literary Business. Coultrap-McQuin argues that Phelps adjusted to the new ways with great difficulty because of a personally held old-fashioned belief in loyalty and trust between author and publisher. At the same time, I should add that Coultrap-McQuin’s book is responsible for bringing Phelps’s extensive disagreements with various publishers to public attention. 37. Replies from various members of the Houghton Mifflin staff are housed at Houghton Library, and so most of the evidence for this claim is from the Houghton Mifflin house. 38. George H. Mifflin to Phelps, 15 May 1896, Houghton Mifflin. 39. George H. Mifflin to Mary Noailles Murfree, 31 August 1904, Houghton Mifflin. 40. Advertising historians have written that advertisers relied on rational claims in the 1890s, but Ellen Gruber Garvey shows how the ten-cent monthlies of the 1890s appealed to the emotions; see Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Although Augusta Rohrbach argues that Howells’s care in selecting publicity photographs demonstrates a modern outlook, the exclusive use of author photographs alone is staid judging by the standards being established by the advertising industry overall; Augusta Rohrbach, “‘You’re a Natural-Born Literary Man’: Becoming William Dean Howells, Culture Maker and Cultural Marker,” New England Quarterly 73, no. 4 (Dec. 2000): 625–53. 41. George Mifflin to Phelps, 10 December 1898, Houghton Mifflin. 42. George Mifflin to Phelps, 13 December 1898, Houghton Mifflin. 43. Kenneth W. Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 14, 49–55. 44. Editors of the Observer to the Century, 9 June 1887, Century Company Records. 45. Phelps to Richard Watson Gilder, Eastern Point, Mass., 22 June 1887, Century Company Records. 46. Phelps to Richard Watson Gilder, Newton Highlands, 8 February 1891, Century Company Records. 47. In later years the Century Company declined Phelps’s offer to write about a case in the courts involving a mill and women factory workers; turned down Phelps’s antivivisection fiction; and refused to sign her antivivisection petitions. Phelps to Richard Watson Gilder, East Gloucester, 20 June 1893, Century Company Records. In the upper-left-hand corner of the letter someone has written instructions to telegraph the author no. Phelps to Richard Watson Gilder, Newton Centre, 28 March 1899, Century Company Records.

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48. Advertising pamphlet for 1895 edition of The Madonna of the Tubs. Call number MS Am 2030 (242). Pamphlet cited by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. 49. Phelps to Henry Oscar Houghton, East Gloucester, Mass., 23 June 1887, Houghton Mifflin; Phelps to Henry Oscar Houghton, 16 June 1887, East Gloucester, Mass., Houghton Mifflin; Phelps to Mr. Garrison, East Gloucester, 10 August 1887, Houghton Mifflin. 50. J. Kay to Phelps, 12 Nov. 1904, Houghton Mifflin. 51. Reader’s Report for Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Trixy or Held for Release, 5 July 1904, Houghton Mifflin. 52. Reader’s Report for Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, The Man in the Case, 9 March 1906, Houghton Mifflin. 53. The man in the house is actually the protagonist’s renegade brother, not her lover, as her neighbors suspect. 54. Even Phelps’s vision of heaven preserves a role for human agency. In the second book of the Gates trilogy, Beyond the Gates (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883), the narrator Mary remarks that life in heaven is safe (42), without ominous “forces of circumstance” (49), and without conflict between soul and body (73). Because the world has been divinely ordered, “Heaven contained no accidents, and no trivialities; as it did no shocks or revolutions” (109–10). However this binary between individual agency and divine order is broken down within the text, as it was in many spiritualist texts, by the centrality of an interpreter—the previous quotation, spoken by the narrator Mary, begins “already I was certain Heaven contained no accidents” (emphasis added)—and the continuity between earthly and heavenly physical and mental identity—in Mary’s case, she finds a use in heaven for her knowledge of physics and geography, and she is united with a lover from whom she was separated on earth. For the importance of the narrator in spiritual writing, see Sarah Wilburn, “Women’s Political Realms: Worlds Apart” (paper presented at the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies meeting, Nineteenth-Century Worlds: Local/Global, London, July 2003). 55. On the role of Progressive belief in public responses to industrial accidents, see Barbara Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 39, 49, 53 (Progressive beliefs); 53 (female domestic workers using streetcars); 64–68 (how physical accidents mattered in different ways to physical laborers and desk workers). 56. Phelps, Chapters from a Life, 244. 57. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Herbert D. Ward, “A Lost Hero,” Youth’s Companion 63 (5 June 1890): 305–06. 58. Phelps biographer Mary Angela Bennett writes that the story is based on a real telephone operator in the 1889 Johnstown Flood. See Mary Angela Bennett, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1939), 129–30). Phelps had already worked up Johnstown material in the poem “Conemaugh,” named after the valley devastated in the flood. Neither of the two full-length studies of the flood mention the operator. See David G. McCullough, Johnstown Flood (New York:

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Simon & Schuster, 1968); Michael R. McGough, The 1889 Johnstown Flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania (Gettysburg, PA: Thomas Publications, 2002). A 1908 letter to Richard Watson Gilder refers to an actual news story about a telephone operator who sacrificed herself to warn her subscribers of a coming flood in August, presumably of 1908, which she wants to write quickly before anyone else works the material. Phelps to Richard Watson Gilder, Newton Centre, Mass., 8 November 1908, Century Company Records. It is possible that the story draws on more than one real event. 59. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, “The Chief Operator,” Harper’s Monthly (1909): 300. 60. William James, quoted in Robert Fuller, Stairways to Heaven: Drugs in American Religious History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 54. 61. False newspaper reports of the death of Mark Twain, a literary rival who lampooned Phelps’s vision of heaven, were printed in 1897. 62. A letter from Phelps to George H. Mifflin suggests that Mifflin and Mr. Perry at Houghton objected to the novel’s autobiographical and “wicked” references; Phelps’s own husband was an avid yachter who was often away from home. This correspondence indicates how controversial this contrived story seemed in 1902. Phelps to George H. Mifflin, 30 July 1902, East Gloucester, Mass., Houghton Mifflin. 63. Mary Adams [Elizabeth Stuart Phelps], Confessions of a Wife (New York: Century, 1902), 43. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be cited in the text. 64. Lori Duin Kelly quotes this passage as an example of Phelps’s own rage in The Life and Works of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Victorian Feminist Writer; Susan Curtis, in Consuming Faith, quotes the passage as an example of Phelps’s own unhappiness and confusion (n. 62 p. 297). In contradistinction, in The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature, Marianne Noble reads masochism as “an effort to maximize the pleasure of a fantasy whose character has been patriarchally determined” rather than a sure strategy for subverting patriarchy (4); Noble’s reading of masochism makes Marna’s eroticism and anger seem tragic rather than empowering. 65. Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt, “Getting into the Game: American Women Writers and the Radical Tradition,” Women’s Studies International Forum 9 (1986): 364. 66. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Walled In: A Novel (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1907), 292. 67. Donna M. Campbell, Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885-1915 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997), 47–48.

Epilogue 1. Jane Tompkins similarly considers The Virginian as a transition out of a nineteenth-century genre, but out of sentimentality, not local color. See her West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 2. The gender politics of these joint rescues have been analyzed by Richard Slotkin (Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America [New York: HarperCollins, 1992], 182) and Amy Kaplan (The Anarchy of Empire in

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the Making of U.S. Culture [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002], 119–20). The novel reverses the typical male-female rescue plot in that the woman rescues the man from a greater physical danger, and the woman’s rescue is also more vibrant and central to the plot. 3. The concept of imperial nostalgia is defined by Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). 4. Owen Wister, “The Game and the Nation,” Harper’s Monthly 100 (1900): 884–905. 5. Owen Wister, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (New York: Signet, 1979), 115. 6. Darwin Payne’s biography of Wister recounts Wister’s records of his travel hardships, accidents, and delays. In his diary, Wister expressed being mystified, but charmed, when a train leaving Casper, Wyoming, stops so that the conductor, brakeman, and passengers can shoot jackrabbits. Payne reads these events through the rubric of manly character building, while I read them as an escape from bourgeois confinement for which both men and women longed. See Darwin Payne, Owen Wister: Chronicler of the West, Gentleman of the East (Dallas, Tex.: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985); Owen Wister, Owen Wister Out West: His Journals and Letters, ed. Fanny Kemble Wister (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). 7. For the consumerist approach to health and its links to the Progressive era’s ideas of abundance and success, see Diane Price Herndl, Invalid Women: Figuring Female Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840–1940 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 150–83; for advances in public sanitation, see Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Henry Holt, 2000). 8. Herndl, Invalid Women, 150–83. 9. Ellen Glasgow, Barren Ground (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), 169. Subsequent references are to this edition and appear in the text. 10. Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of the United States in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). 11. Eudora Welty, “The Death of the Travelling Salesman,” The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (New York: Penguin, 1983), 129. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be cited in the text. 12. Michael Hoberman, “Demythologizing Myth Criticism: Folklore and Modernity in Eudora Welty’s ‘Death of a Traveling Salesman,’” The Southern Quarterly 30, no. 1 (Fall 1990): 24–34. 13. Ramón Saldívar, Chicano Narrative (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited in the text. 14. Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 75. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited in the text.



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Abbreviations Century Company Records

Houghton Mifflin

Century Company Records. Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Houghton Mifflin Correspondence and Business Records. Houghton Library. Harvard University.

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Index

accident: and antifoundationalism, 7, 15, 19, 28, 49, 85, 100–118, 149, 163n30, 166n47; changing meaning of word, 14–15, 19–34, 93–94, 99–103, 166n48; and Freudian psychology, 102–3, 154–55, 168n62, 189n10; and gender, 17, 18, 32, 85, 87, 167n56, 196n28; and insurance, 15, 103, 108, 167n54, 191n24; in journalism, railroad ballads, and other genres, 20–24, 99–100, 123, 144–45, 166n50; and social class, 12, 14–15, 20–26, 82–85, 136–47, 167n56; in social reform writing, 23–26, 119–45, 120–22; sports injury, 22, 53, 68–71, 120–22, 126–31, 140–43, 152–53, 181n52; and theories of society and political economy, 23–26, 123; train or automobile accident, 1–2, 12, 19–34, 88, 91–94, 99–100, 108, 109, 111, 114, 120–22, 133, 134, 135, 136–37, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 152, 154–56; and trauma theory, 20–22, 23, 25, 93–94,

166n52–56, 168n61; work injury, 21, 24–25, 119, 120–22, 124–126, 134, 135, 136–37, 139, 144, 154–57. See also travel accident African Americans, 77–86, 87, 89, 94–97, 117–18, 136–39, 186n39, 194n1, 194n9; and local color literature, 16–17, 27, 34–36, 77–86, 100–101, 164n35, 172n30, 183n1–2; and segregation on modes of transport, 13, 55, 162n24, 185n22; and travel accidents, 136–39, 121, 138, 167n56; and travel and vacations, 39, 79, 86, 104, 183n64. See also Thomas Detter Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 1–7, 8, 10, 15, 18, 32 Ammons, Elizabeth, 71, 73, 182n57, 183n2 Angola Horror, the, 25 Appadurai, Arjun, 22 Aron, Cindy S., 14, 79, 80 Atlantic Monthly, 4, 16, 37, 53, 56, 120, 168n63, 188n5 Austen, Jane, 48, 181n52

219

220



Index

Baker, Carlos, 33–34, 171n14 Baudelaire, Charles, 22–23, 30–31, 193n40 The Beguiled (film, dir. Don Siegel), 144 Bellamy, Edward, Looking Backward, 24–25, 32–33 Benjamin, Walter, 19, 22–23, 25, 168n62 Bjørnson, Bjørnstjerne, 33 Black Hawk War of 1832, 42 Bourdieu, Pierre, 60, 179n31 Bramen, Carrie Tirado, 7 Brodhead, Richard H., 37–38, 54, 59, 170n4 Brown, Dona, 66, 74, 163n28, 183n61 Brown Power Movement, 154 Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 43 Buzard, James, 14, 61, 179n34 Century Company, 123, 133–34 Century Monthly Magazine, 87, 120, 121, 123, 133, 134, 140 chance, 2, 14–15, 23, 27, 80, 84, 91, 94–96, 99–118, 128, 133, 136, 142, 149, 151, 163n30, 191n25 Chesnutt, Charles, 21, 78–79, 173n30, 184n5 Chopin, Kate, 60 Civil War, 14, 39, 86, 99, 104 Clements, George H., 135 community, 2, 3, 6, 9, 20, 22, 25, 28, 33–36, 43–52, 53, 62, 64, 69, 71, 77, 79–81, 93–96, 100, 105, 109, 110, 129–31, 143, 151, 153, 155–57 Cooke, Rose Terry, “Miss Lucinda,” 16, 26, 40, 42, 47–50, 65, 73, 123 cosmopolitanism, 57, 61, 71, 75, 80, 90, 92, 151, 173n31, 187n48 Coultrap-McQuin, Susan, 132, 197n36 Crane, Stephen, 90 cultural geography, 38, 161n14, 169n1

Dainotto, Roberto, 7, 9, 51 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 16, 21, 24, 27, 32, 40, 77–80, 86–97, 99, 119, 164n37, 169n66; “By-Paths in the Mountains” 40; Earthen Pitchers, 40, 77, 79–80, 86–97; “The House on the Beach,” 40, 89–90; “In the Gray Cabins of New England,” 91; Life in the Iron Mills, 24, 126, 187n39; “Marcia,” 91; “Out of the Sea,” 40; “The Yares of Black Mountain,” 40 Detter, Thomas, 16–17, 27, 77–86, 87, 94–97, 123; “Boise City,” 83, 85; “Central Pacific Railroad” 80, 84; “Give the Negro a Chance” 80; “My Trip to Baltimore,” 82–84, 86; Nellie Brown, or The Jealous Wife, with Other Sketches, 77, 82, 86, 94–97; “Octoroon Slave of Cuba,” 86 dialect, 16, 20, 31, 43, 78, 84, 87, 91, 101, 106, 128, 131, 162n20, 171n26 Dimock, Wai-Chee, 110, 123, 126 disaster, 23–26, 28, 100, 110, 119, 120–22, 124, 132, 134, 136, 137, 139, 140, 143, 144, 194n9 displacement, 8, 9, 49, 184n2 Donovan, Josephine, 47–48 Doody, Margaret, 17–18, 43–44, 162n19, 163n32, 165n39, 193n42 Dreiser, Theodore, 178n8; An American Tragedy, 144, 152–53 Du Bois, W. E. B., 79, 81, 173n30, 183n1, 184n2 Engels, Friedrich, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, 24, 169n66 Erichsen, John Eric, 94 exotic, the, 1, 7, 12, 32, 127, 129 Farnham, Eliza, Life in Prairie Land, 26, 34–35, 40, 42–52, 56

Index

Fetterley, Judith, 17, 161n12, 164n35, 164n38, 171n14, 173n31, 175n50, 183n61 Foote, Stephanie, 71, 170n4, 176n61, 182n57 Freeman, Mary Wilkins, 33, 78, 91, 172n30 Frye, Northrop, 18, 165n43, 193n42 Fuller, Margaret, 52, 58, 178n8 Fussell, Paul, 13, 40–41 Galveston, Texas hurricane, 25 Garland, Hamlin, 5, 33, 51, 66, 160n4, 193n30 gender, 17, 20, 32; and accident or injury (see accident); debates over feminist literary criticism of local color, 7–9, 17, 34–38, 43, 46, 73–75 (see also Judith Fetterley; Nancy Glazener; June Howard; Tom Lutz; Marjorie Pryse; Teaching Women’s Literature from a Regional Perspective); and hospitality, 56–57, 62–75, 82–84, 85, 126–31; normative gender scripts in novelistic narrative, 62–65, 68–69, 73–75, 87, 91–94, 113, 116–18; sexual harassment in travel, 69, 128 genre, 11, 15–20, 23–24, 31, 123, 163n32, 163n34, 164n36, 180n35 Gilder, Richard Watson, 133–34 Glasgow, Ellen, Barren Ground, 144, 152 Glazener, Nancy, 37, 129, 163n34, 165n42, 170n4, 170n8, 171n17 Gothic, the, 87, 92, 93, 156, 187n49 Groundhog Day (film, dir. Harold Ramis), 144 Hallock, Charles, “The Dismal Wilderness,” 41 Harper’s Monthly, 37, 41, 57, 61, 100, 107, 120, 121, 122, 151



221

Harris, Sharon, 164n37, 186n34, 188n5 Harte, Bret, 16, 27, 33, 52, 53–65, 66, 68, 71, 72, 73–75, 77, 79, 81, 99, 113, 130, 166n50, 172n30; “In the Country,” 60–61; “Letter 33,” 61–63; “Miggles,” 53, 58, 62–65, 68, 73 Haskell, Thomas, 110 Haymarket Square affair, 12 Herr, Cheryl Temple, 161n14, 175n42 Hoffman, Leonore. See Teaching Women’s Literature from a Regional Perspective Houghton, Henry Oscar, 132 Houghton Mifflin Company, 120, 123, 132–36, 135 Howard, June, 37, 54, 161n12, 163n34, 164n38, 173n31, 175n51 Howells, William Dean, 16, 22, 23, 27–28, 32–33, 40, 50, 77, 99–118, 119, 123, 132, 170n8, 181n53; Annie Kilburn, 103, 110–18; A Hazard of New Fortunes, 12, 23, 101, 103, 106, 110–18, 181n53; An Imperative Duty, 117; The Landlord at Lion’s Head, 117, 181n53; Literary Friends and Acquaintance, 32–33; The Minister’s Charge, 110; A Modern Instance, 99; The Rise of Silas Lapham, 110; The Undiscovered Country, 19, 77, 96, 99, 101, 103–9, 110, 112–13, 116–18 Indians, 40, 42, 45, 46, 52, 54, 56, 58, 64, 85, 89, 150, 151, 164n35, 180n35, 181n52, 188n57 James, Henry, 57, 171n16 James, William, 140 Jameson, Frederic, 18 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 1, 2–3, 6, 16, 17, 22, 27, 34, 40, 52, 53–54, 56–59, 65–75, 77, 78, 91, 99, 100, 102, 119, 123, 172n30, 173n31, 189n11;

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Index

Country of the Pointed Firs, 34, 69–71, 92; Deephaven, 34; “The Life of Nancy,” 17, 22, 53, 65–75, 193n40; A Marsh Island, 181n53; “A White Heron,” 1, 2–3, 155 Johnstown Flood, 25, 121, 198n58 Jones, Gavin, 39, 162n20, 164n38, 170n4, 171n26 Kaplan, Amy, 8, 18, 37–38, 73, 101, 102, 106, 115, 165n42, 188n4, 200n2 Kipling, Rudyard, 61 Kirkland, Caroline, A New Home, Who’ll Follow?, 5, 23, 26, 40, 42–52, 56, 99 Lewes, Delaware, 88–94 liberal subject, the, 9, 14, 42–50, 103, 110–16, 195n14. See also subjectivity Limerick, Patricia Nelson, 38, 174n34 local color genre: defined, 1–17, 31–38, 168n59; formal characteristics in, 18–19, 20, 22, 32–33, 46–47, 86–89, 99, 103–10, 127, 147–50, 164n36, 189n11, 190n20; literary history of, 5–9, 26, 31–38, 54, 78, 91–92, 123–24, 163n35; motifs of accident in, 9–15, 18–26, 147–50; relationship to tourism, 3, 8, 27, 38–42, 53–75, 77–80, 125, 127–28; and social class, 3–15, 20–26, 27, 32–38, 42–50. See also African Americans; gender Lukács, Georg, 18, 165n42 Lutz, Tom, 49, 161n12, 164n35, 167n53, 173n31, 187n48 Martin, Jay, 2 Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick, 28 Merrill, Frank T., 138, 140 Mexican Americans, 84, 85, 154–55, 164n35

Middle West (U.S. region), 14, 78, 83, 152, 184n2 Mifflin, George, 132–33 Misery (film, dir. Rob Reiner), 144 Mitchell, Silas Weir, 21, 94 modernism, literary, 122, 139–44 modernization or modernity, 2–5, 17–26, 32, 37–38, 42, 47, 48, 54, 55–58, 82, 87, 91, 94, 97, 102–16, 125, 136, 139–43, 147–49, 153–56, 159n3 motif, 11–12, 15, 17–18 Murfree, Mary Noailles, 133, 172n30 neurasthenia, 21, 26, 40, 89, 90–91, 95, 112, 167n53, 168n59 New England, 2, 32–33, 44, 53, 61, 66–75, 78, 91, 111, 123–24, 127, 129, 130, 131, 144, 152, 179n25, 183n1 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 18 Northeast (U.S. region), 12, 42–46, 54, 150, 184n2 Pawley, Christine, 33, 160n4, 163n28 Pfaelzer, Jean, 89, 96, 164n37, 174n39, 186n34 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart [Ward], 6, 28, 29, 40, 50, 119–45, 168n63, 181n52, 181n53; Avery, 121, 139–42; Beyond the Gates, 120, 198n54; Chapters from a Life, 121, 124, 133, 196n33; A Chariot of Fire, 122, 139, 141; “The Chief Operator,” 122, 136, 137, 139; “Conemaugh,” 121, 199n58; Confessions of a Wife, 121, 139–42, 144, 196n33; “Dea ex Machina,” 121–22; Doctor Zay, 120, 126–31, 143, 144; The Gates Ajar, 40, 136, 139, 181n53; “Is God Good?” 120; “Jack,” 40, 134; Life of Christ, 133; “A Lost Hero,” 121, 137, 138, 139, 140; The Madonna of the Tubs, 40,

Index

120, 134, 135; The Man in the Case, 122, 135–36; The Silent Partner, 120; The Successors of Mary the First, 121, 136–7; “The Tenth of January,” 120, 124–26, 136, 137, 139, 143; Trixy, 134–35; Walled In, 122, 143–44; “Zerviah Hope,” 120 Pickney, Michigan, 42–47 Pratt, Mary Louise, 161n17, 163n32, 165n39 Pryse, Marjorie, 17, 161n12, 164n35, 164n38, 171n14, 173n31, 183n61 race, 7, 13, 20, 33, 34–36, 39, 51, 55, 56–57, 60, 64, 77–86, 89, 136, 151, 155–57, 167n56, 184n5, 186n39. See also African Americans; Indians; Mexican Americans realism, 16–17, 18–19, 23, 27–28, 32, 93, 95, 100–18, 132, 143, 144, 149, 176n62, 178n20, 179n31, 182n57, 193n1, 194n3 region and regional identity, 2–9, 11, 12, 26, 31, 32, 33–36, 38, 50, 54, 78, 162n20, 169n1, 183n2 regional literature or regionalism, 7–9, 15–16, 31–42, 50–51, 78–79, 153–57, 169n1, 175n42, 183n1, 187n49. See also local color genre Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, 89 Revere Disaster, the, 25 Riley, James Whitcomb, 33 Rivera, Tomás, And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, 154–57 Robinson, Marilynne, Housekeeping, 154–57 romance (literary genre), 17–19, 100, 103, 193n42 Rosenfelt, Deborah. See Teaching Women’s Literature from a Regional Perspective Ruiz de Burton, María, The Squatter and the Don, 164n35



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sadomasochism, 123, 142, 199n64 San Francisco earthquake, 25, 156 Scharnhorst, Gary, 180n42 sentimentalism, 18, 29, 93, 119, 123, 143, 152, 175n51, 199n1 sightseeing, 8, 14, 39–40, 52, 61, 68, 79–80, 95, 155. See also tourism Slosson, Annie Trumbull, 91 Slotkin, Richard, 24 social class: formation of, 3–7, 20–22, 35, 78–79, 127–28, 160n4, 160n6, 161n15, 162n20; and middle–class norms in narrative, 62–64; and regional identity, 8–9, 16–17, 31–38, 42–52, 50, 162n20; and travel, space, and mobility, 9–15, 35, 78–80, 106, 111, 114–15, 120–22, 124–26, 136–39, 138, 141, 167n58. See also accident; local color genre; region and regional identity social Darwinism, 23–24, 95–96, 148–49, 168n63, 168n65 South, the (U.S. region), 32, 52, 78, 83, 89, 104, 137–38, 163n24, 172n27, 183n2, 186n39 Southwestern humor, 81 space, 7, 9–15, 35, 38, 50–52, 66, 90, 95–96, 101, 106, 110, 114–16, 119, 127, 129, 130, 148, 151, 154, 155, 160n4, 161n14, 163n24, 169n1, 173n31, 182n57 Stagecoach (film, dir. John Ford), 180n35 Stanford, Leland, 94 Stegner, Wallace, 33–34, 171n14, 176n1 Steinbeck, John, The Grapes of Wrath, The Wayward Bus, 153 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 27, 85, 117–18, 123, 134 subjectivity, 136–43, 154–57. See also the liberal subject

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Index

Taylor, Helen, 90, 172n27 Tazewell County, Illinois, 42–44 Teaching Women’s Literature from a Regional Perspective, 34–36 Thanet, Octave, 33 Thomas, Brook, 101, 165n42, 166n47, 188n4, 195n13 Thomas, Edith, 33 Titanic, 25 tourism: activity of, 3, 16, 27, 32, 37–42, 41, 53–58, 65–75, 83–84, 86, 99; hospitality, 56–59, 65–67, 82–84, 85; “literary tourism,” 8, 34, 37–38, 127, 148, 174n34; representations of in literature, 53–75, 77–80, 86–97, 103–10, 126–31, 150–51. See also sightseeing; vacationing trauma. See accident travel: activity of, 1–7, 10, 12–14, 19–22, 53–59, 65–74, 79, 83–86, 88, 95, 116, 145, 147, 148; concept in critical theory, 174n33, 185n9; and social class, 9–15, 78–80, 106, 120–22, 124–126, 136–39, 138, 141, 150, 167n58; travel writing, 16, 37, 40, 84, 103, 130, 156, 162n21. See also sightseeing; tourism; vacationing travel accident, motif of: definition of and variations on, 1–7, 9–15, 41, 120–22; motifs of accidental belonging or entanglement, 6–7, 9, 27–28, 49, 99–102, 104, 110–18, 131, 148, 149; and publishing and marketing, 87, 132–36, 135, 138, 140, 141; relation to industrialism and modernization, 18–26, 87, 93–94, 99–103, 119, 124–26, 147, 150–57; relation to literary romance, 17–18, 43–44; relation to the motifs of rescue or the “mutilated male,”

17, 48, 91–92, 96, 117–18, 150, 176n55, 181n52, 200n2. See also accident; tourism Turner, Ross, 135 Twain, Mark, 33, 173n30, 199n61; Huckleberry Finn, 139 vacationing: activity of, 4, 7, 12, 13–14, 22, 38–42, 66, 78, 81–82, 86, 87, 89, 95–97; authors’ vacations, 40, 59, 61, 79, 90, 137, 171n16; representations of in literature, 5, 26, 51, 52, 77–80, 86–96, 106, 129, 130, 131, 148, 168n63. See also tourism The Virginian (film, dir. Victor Fleming), 151 The Virginian (film, dir. Stuart Gilmore), 151 Ward, Herbert D., 133, 137, 138, 140 Washington, Booker T., 81 Webb, Dorothy, 40, 172n30 Welke, Barbara, 166n48, 166n50, 167n52, 167n56, 180n43, 198n55 Welty, Eudora, “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” 153 West (U.S. region), 27, 32, 42–47, 58–65, 77–86, 150–51, 154–57, 169n1, 173n30, 182n55 Wharton, Edith, Ethan Frome, 152, 171n16 Whitman, Walt, “Song of Myself,” 85 Wiebe, Robert, 35, 128, 160n4, 179n23 Wister, Owen, 9, 21, 187n50; The Virginian, 40, 150–51, 182n55 Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 33, 166n50; “The Lady of Little Fishing,” 52; “In the Cotton Country,” 52 Zagarell, Sandra A., 54, 68, 71



About the Author

Stephanie Palmer is assistant professor of American Culture and Literature at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. She grew up in what is now called the American Midwest.

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