Literature: Local Color and Realism

Sources

Regional Fiction. After the Civil War local-color fiction gained widespread popularity in America. Bret Harte (1836-1902) acquainted the country with the western miner in stories such as “The Luck of Roaring Camp” (1868) and “The Outcasts of Poker Flats” (1869), while in the late 1870s the Atlanta Constitution began publishing the dialect stories of plantation life in the Deep South that Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) later collected as Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings (1880). George Washington Cable (1844-1925) wrote of Creoles and the bayou country near New Orleans in popular magazine stories, later collected in Old Creole Days (1879). Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) wrote Oldtown Folks (1869), a representative portrayal of life in New England. Later New England also figured prominently in the stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930). Local-color writers depicted nearly every region of America, lending realism to their stories by describing customs and manners and re-creating dialects. Because these authors usually set their stories in their regions as they remembered them from their own youth, however, they often blended realism with nostalgic sentiment. Many Americans found this mixture appealing, and local-color stories filled the pages of the leading magazines until the end of the nineteenth century.

EMILY DICKINSON: THE RECLUSE-POET

If members of the mid nineteenth-century American reading public were alive today, they would most likely be shocked to discover that by twentieth-century standards one of the greatest American poets of their time, is someone they never heard of: Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). It is also likely that most of Dickinson’s contemporaries would have hated her poems if they had read them. The few people who did see them considered them incompetent and amateurish. Yet today most scholars consider only Walt Whitman to be Dickinson’s equal and relegate nineteenth-century favorites such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Sidney Lanier to the second rank.

Dickinson’s life is wrapped in a mystery that may never be solved. Some time between 1858 and 1862 she had a traumatic experience. No one knows what happened, but many believe that she was in love with a married man who did not return her affection. Suffering profound psychological distress, Dickinson withdrew from the world and spent the rest of her life at family home in Amherst, Massachusetts. She dressed only in white and devoted most of her time to writing more than fifteen hundred poems, polishing nearly nine hundred of them to what she considered finished form and tying them together in forty-three little manuscript books.

Dickinson sent some fifty of her poems to a family friend, Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican. Bowles thought women should write light, sentimental poems, and he disliked Dickinson’s irreverence in regard to religious and social orthodoxies and her uncompromising approach to fears of madness and death. Eventually, however, he published in his newspaper five of the seven Dickinson poems, all unsigned, that appeared in print during her lifetime. Dickinson also sent more than one hundred poems to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, literary editor of The Atlantic Monthly. He told her they were unpublishable. He considered her rhyme and meter too rough and unmelodic, her word choice far too eccentric, and her punctuation exceedingly strange.

After Dickinson’s death, Higginson helped a friend of her family edited some of her poems for publication. They “cleaned up” her writing, making it more “graceful” and conventional, but even then most critics considered them peculiar and even “ungrammaticaL” Yet the reading public was fascinated. Three collections of Dickinson’s poems were published in the 1890s, and all sold well. An edition of the poems based on the original manuscripts was published in 1955. By then Dickinson was already held in high esteem by critics and readers alike. Tastes in poetry had changed dramatically. Dickinson was praised for her original images, her spare language, and her modern, skeptical point of view—all the things Higginson and others had disliked in her poems.

Dickinson’s personal life continues to fascinate. She is the subject of a popular one-woman show. Writers continue to speculate about what happened to turn her into the mysterious recluse of Amherst, always gowned in white, the poet who wrote:

The Soul selects her own Society—
Then—shuts the Door—
To her divine Majority—
Present no more—

Source: Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson, 2 volumes (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974).

Drawn From Life. Realism as a literary movement began in the mid nineteenth century as a reaction against romanticism. Whereas romantic literature presented an idealized vision of human existence, realistic works were intended to be accurate portrayals of life, depictions of the world based on careful observation. As such, realism was a literary response to the development of the modern scientific method, substituting experimentation for philosophical speculation and recognizing the flawed nature of the real world instead of aspiring to transcendental perfection. This new literary creed emerged primarily in the novel. The three major American realists began their careers in this period. They stand in interesting relationship to each other. At one extreme is the self-educated Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), who wrote under the pen name Mark Twain, a product and a chronicler of the frontier. At the other is the educated, cosmopolitan Henry James (1843-1916), whose novels usually portray Americans in Europe who confront an old, rigid, and traditional society. Clemens and James were not personally acquainted, but each was a good friend of the third realist, William Dean Howells (1837-1920), who as a native of rural Ohio and a part of the Boston literary establishment embodied both the provincial and the cosmopolitan literary bents of his two friends.

Lighting Out for New Territory. Born in the small town of Florida, Missouri, Clemens moved with his family to Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi River, when he was four years old, and it was in this river town that he grew up, gathering the material for his most famous stories. After the Civil War cut short his career as a riverboat pilot, Clemens went west to Nevada, where he became a reporter on the Virginia City newspaper and wrote the humorous sketches collected in The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867). He next combined personal anecdotes and humorous commentary in two travel books: The Innocents Abroad (1869), a bestseller about his 1867 tour of Europe and the Holy Land with a group of his fellow Americans, and the less successful Roughing It (1872), which drew on his experiences in Nevada. After he and his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner wrote The Gilded Age (1873), a satire on political corruption, Clemens turned to his childhood on the Mississippi, writing his classic novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and the autobiographical Old Times on the Mississippi (1876), later expanded as Life on the Mississippi (1883). During the 1880s and 1890s Clemens’s output included Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), his masterpiece, which expanded the literary possibilities of common, everyday American speech, and the historical novels The Prince and the Pauper (1882), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), which he considered his best work.

A Timely Man. Howells was not only the author of important realistic fiction but also a literary critic, who as assistant editor (1865-1871) and then editor of The Atlantic Monthly used his considerable influence to promote realism in American fiction. While working as a reporter and editor for the Ohio State Journal in Columbus (1857-1861), Howells wrote the poems collected in Poems of Two Friends (1860). In that same year his campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln (1860) launched his career. After Lincoln took office in 1861, he named Howells American consul at Venice. While Howells wrote the sketches he revised and collected in Venetian Life (1866) after settling in Boston in 1865. After receiving positive reviews for this book, he drew again on his experiences abroad for Italian Journeys (1867) and collected his sketches of life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in Suburban Sketches (1871). The following year he published his first novel, Their Wedding Journey. This and his next two novels, A Chance Acquaintance (1873) and A Foregone Conclusion (1874), are sometimes called steps toward the realism of Howell’s finest mature fiction. By the end of the 1870s Howells had found his true literary voice in The Lady of the Aroostook (1879), which, like his previous two, portrays an American girl in Europe—the

international theme developed most successfully by his friend Henry James. Howells wrote his finest realistic fiction during the 1880s, portraying character types and treating social questions of American life in his times in Dr. Breen s Practice (1881), A Modern Instance (1882), The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Annie Kilburn (1889), and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889). Taken together, Howells’s novels give a full picture of American life in the last years of the nineteenth century.

The Complex Fate of Being an American. One of the most productive and influential American novelists, Henry James was a master of fiction. Marked by a highly individual method and style, his innovative writings enlarged the possibilities of the novel. The younger brother of philosopher William James (1842-1910), James was born in New York City and educated by private teachers before entering Harvard Law School in 1862. Dropping out at the end of one academic year, he began writing short fiction and reviews. His first published story appeared in the March 1865 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. After much travel, he decided in 1875 to live in Europe, going first to Paris but settling in London in 1876. By the time he arrived in Paris he had collected some of his short fiction in A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other Tales (1875) and some travel essays in Transatlantic Sketches (1875). He had also completed his first published novel, Roderick Hudson (1876), about a young American sculptor in Rome. Having established his international theme, James wrote several novels in quick succession— The American (1877), about a wealthy Civil War veteran who goes to Paris in search of a wife, and The Europeans (1878), about two young, Europeanized Americans who visit cousins in New England. His next book, the short novel Daisy Miller (1878), became one of his biggest popular successes. The story of a young American girl who falls prey to a corrupt Italian gigolo, the book introduces a theme that appears in much of his writing: the clash between the innocence and exuberance of the New World with the corruption and wisdom of the Old. Known for his skill in portraying the complex psychology of his characters, James wrote some of his best fiction in the 1880s, including The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Washington Square (1881), The Bostonians (1886), and The Princess Casamassima (1886). His later works include The Tragic Muse (1890), What Maisie Knew (1897), The Turn of the Screw (1898), The Awkward Age (1899), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904).

Sources

Josephine Donovan, New England Local Color Literature: A Woman’s Tradition (New York: Ungar, 1983);

Leon Howard, Literature and the American Tradition (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960);

Eric Sundquist, ed., American Realism: New Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).