ROURKE, Constance Mayfield

Born 14 November 1885, Cleveland, Ohio; died 23 March 1941, Grand Rapids, Michigan

Daughter of Henry B. and Constance Davis Rourke

Constance Mayfield Rourke was an only child; her father was a lawyer, her mother a kindergarten teacher. Rourke moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, at age seven when her father died. Her close relationship with her mother, who passed on an appreciation for painting and handicrafts, probably encouraged Rourke's later concern for Native American folk arts. In addition, Rourke's professional interest in the details of ordinary life may have been a Midwestern inheritance. This regard for the near-at-hand was never mere provincialism, however; for she understood, as have all the best Midwestern writers and critics, the profound relationship between local details and national myth, between particular experience and its more universal implications.

Rourke attended Vassar College (B.A. 1907); her primary interests were aesthetics and literary criticism. From 1908 to 1910 she was a researcher at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the British Museum in London. She became an English instructor at Vassar in 1910, but in 1915 resigned from Vassar to live with her mother in Grand Rapids and to do freelance research and writing on American history and culture.

Rourke is best known for her advocacy of a native American culture, her use of popular culture and other "living research" sources and methods, and her popular, highly readable prose style.She argued from a social and anthropological view of history against a belief that the quality of American society made it difficult for "culture" to live and prosper in the U.S. She saw a significant relationship between low and high cultures, and believed that America had a robust cultural tradition wherein unique native arts grew and flourished. Rourke proposed that American culture, woven from a great number of low-and high-culture strands, was more unified and vigorous than some scholars had believed.

Implicit in Rourke's work, especially in American Humor: A Study of the American Character (1931), is the belief that American culture need not be judged against European models. Rather, it has its own characteristics, resulting from the particular conditions of the national history that produced it. The first part of American Humor recreates the rich climate in which this culture arose. Rourke traveled widely and used personal interviews, oral history, and popular culture documents as well as traditional historical materials to present a vivid picture of the rise of American humor. She saw this humor as an essential element in the definition of American character and culture. The second part of the book analyzes mainstream-or high-culture American writers in relationship to their antecedents in native American humor.

In American Humor, Rourke demonstrates a remarkable harmony between style and thematic approach. She writes in a lively, nonacademic prose, often using fictional narration and the present tense, which makes history come alive and which celebrates ordinary American experiences and the common man.

Although American Humor and The Roots of American Culture (1942) include the most explicit statements of Rourke's ideas, Charles Sheeler: Artist in the American Tradition (1938) is also a convincing application of Rourke's theories about the interrelations between the popular American cultural experience and the mainstream art it produces. Similarly, Troupers of the Gold Coast; or, the Rise of Lotta Crabtree (1928) exemplifies Rourke's approach. This is the lively biography of two women: Mary Ann Crabtree and her actress-comedienne daughter, Lotta. Like all of her social histories, it provides a myriad of everyday details from America's past. Lotta Crabtree's story is not only the chronicle of an important life, but the vital dramatization of San Francisco in the latter days of the gold rush, and of the popular theater and American humor on the Gold Coast.

Critics have attacked Rourke for overstating her case on behalf of American culture and the interdependence of popular and so-called "high" arts; however, her reputation has been sustained not only by later studies supporting her views but by the increased use of Rourke's popular culture research methods and by the continuing influence of her readable, scholarly books.

Other Works:

Trumpets of Jubilee (1927). Davy Crockett (1934). Audubon (1936).

Bibliography:

Belman, S. I., Constance M. Rourke (1981). Brooks, V. W., Preface to The Roots of American Culture (1942). Hyman, S. E., The Armed Vision (1948, 1955). Luedtke, L. S., ed.,The Study of American Culture: Contemporary Conflicts (1977). Rubin, J. S., A World Out of a Wilderness: Constance Rourke and the Search for a Useable Past (dissertation, 1974). Rubin, J. S., Constance Rourke and American Culture (1980).