Realism and Regionalism

This is Unit Eleven of American Literature, part one of two: the movement that set out to show life as ordinary people actually live it. Unit ten closed on two poets inventing new instruments. This unit is the prose of the same decades, and its governing idea, which part two pays off, is that realism defines itself against something. The romance had given readers improbable heroes and rescues and a usable past; realism chose commonplace subjects, plausible motives and consequences that follow from character, and it treated a novel as a way of telling the truth about a society. The conditions arrived together: a war, industrial growth, immigration, the railroad, and a national magazine market that paid for short fiction and shaped what got written. Beside realism ran its other half, regionalism, also called local color, which records the speech and customs and work of one particular place before they disappear. That is the label the board attaches to Jewett, Chopin and Twain in its fifth sample question. We take the programme first, then Twain, who made ordinary American speech carry a whole novel, then the regionalists of the mining camp, the Maine coast and the Louisiana bayou. By the end you will be able to state what realism claimed and what regionalism adds. To account for Twain and the vernacular. To place both river novels and the second one's moral climax. To describe the late Twain and two harder regionalists. And to place Jewett, Freeman and Chopin.

Five entries on the programme: what realism was against, what produced it, the editor who promoted it, and the label the board uses.

Ordinary lives, plausible consequences.

AML 1001 What Realism Claimed and Against What

Realism set out to show life as ordinary people actually live it, against the romance's improbable heroes and rescues. Its writers chose commonplace subjects, plausible motives and consequences that follow from character, and they treated the novel as a way of telling the truth about a society. Realism defines itself against the romance rather than in isolation.

War, railroads, magazines, a changed country.

AML 1002 The Conditions That Produced It

The Civil War, industrial growth, immigration, the railroad and a national magazine market all arrived together, and they gave writers a country changing fast enough to want describing. Realism is the literature of a nation that had stopped being rural and was not yet sure what it had become. The magazine market shaped the writing directly.

An editor who could make careers.

AML 1003 William Dean Howells and the Realist Program

Howells, an Ohio newspaper editor's son, joined *The Atlantic Monthly* in eighteen sixty-six and edited it from eighteen seventy-one to eighty-one. From that chair he promoted realism as a programme, and the anchor names him with Twain and James as one of the movement's main advocates and theorists. His power was editorial as much as literary.

A fiancé sent by a phrase.

AML 1004 "Editha" and the Cost of Romantic Talk

In "Editha" a young woman thrilled by patriotic language urges her fiancé to enlist, and he is killed almost at once. Confronted by his mother, she is wounded in her feelings and comforted by a painter who calls her expression beautiful. The story indicts the vocabulary that sent him, so the satire aims at romantic language.

One place, recorded before it changes.

AML 1005 Regionalism and Local Color

Regionalism, also called local color, records the speech, customs, landscape and work of a particular place before they disappear. Its practitioners write dialect carefully, often frame a tale through an outside visitor, and treat a region as worth the attention a capital usually gets. The board calls Jewett, Chopin and Twain regionalists in its fifth sample question.

Three entries on Twain's beginnings: where the name came from, the story that made him famous, and what he did with American speech.

A printer, a pilot, a river.

AML 1006 Mark Twain: The Name and the River

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, and grew up in Hannibal on the Mississippi, which supplied the settings for his best work. Apprenticed as a printer, he spent eighteen months learning to pilot riverboats, and took his pen name from a riverman's call for the depth of water. The board spells the surname Clemens.

A frog, and a pocketful of shot.

AML 1007 "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"

A polite eastern narrator asks after Leonidas Smiley and is trapped by an old miner who tells him instead about Jim Smiley, a compulsive better whose champion frog loses when a stranger fills it with quail shot. The comedy is a refined voice being trapped by a vernacular one, which is the story's real subject.

Ordinary speech, carrying a book.

AML 1008 The Vernacular as a Literary Instrument

Twain wrote American speech as people actually spoke it, with regional pronunciation, grammar and idiom, and made that speech carry a whole novel rather than decorate a comic scene. The decision changed what American prose could sound like, and later writers dated their freedom from it. Dialect on the page is composed rather than transcribed.

Five entries on the river novels: a boyhood remembered as adventure, and a sequel that takes the comfort back.

A fence, a funeral, a treasure.

AML 1009 *The Adventures of Tom Sawyer*

Twain's novel of eighteen seventy-six follows a boy in a Mississippi town through whitewashing a fence, attending his own funeral, witnessing a murder and finding a treasure. It is written for a general audience and remembers boyhood as an adventure, which is exactly what its sequel refuses to do. The sequel undoes this book's comfort.

A boy's voice, carrying everything.

AML 1010 *Adventures of Huckleberry Finn*

Published in eighteen eighty-five, the novel is narrated throughout by Huck in his own speech, and follows him down the Mississippi on a raft with Jim, a man escaping slavery. Episodes ashore let Twain examine feuds, frauds, mobs and the respectable people who own human beings. The narrator's limits are the book's method.

The raft against the shore.

AML 1011 Huck, Jim, and the Raft

On the raft Huck and Jim make a small society with its own rules, and ashore the society they meet is violent and dishonest. Jim's dignity and his grief are shown through a boy's narration that does not always understand them. Huck understands less than the reader does, and that gap is where the novel does its work.

A boy choosing hell, and right.

AML 1012 "All right, then, I'll go to hell"

Huck writes a letter turning Jim in, feels good about it, remembers Jim's kindness, and tears it up, deciding he will go to hell rather than betray him. He believes he is choosing damnation, which is why the moment is the novel's climax and its sharpest irony. Huck's conscience is the one the book indicts.

A freed man, held for a game.

AML 1013 The Ending of *Huckleberry Finn* and Its Critics

The last chapters return Tom Sawyer, who turns Jim's escape into an elaborate game long after he knows Jim is legally free. Readers have argued ever since about whether the farce ruins the book or exposes how the country treated the question, and the course reports the argument. The quarrel is still open.

Six entries on the darker side: travel books, a suppressed sermon, a satire that turns on its hero, a mining camp and a hanging.

Travel, memoir, and tall tale.

AML 1014 *Life on the Mississippi* and *Roughing It*

Twain also wrote from his travels: *Roughing It* on the western territories, and *Life on the Mississippi*, half a memoir of piloting and half a return years afterwards. Both mix tall tale, reporting and complaint in the same chapters. The comic persona was a paying performance as much as a temperament.

A prayer, translated into consequences.

AML 1015 "The War Prayer" and the Late, Dark Twain

In "The War Prayer" a stranger interrupts a patriotic service to spell out what the congregation's prayer for victory is actually asking God to do to the enemy's families. Twain's publisher refused it, and the piece appeared after his death along with much of his late work, which was too dark to print in his lifetime.

A Yankee, a round table, a massacre.

AML 1016 *A Connecticut Yankee* and the Satire of Progress

A nineteenth-century mechanic wakes in King Arthur's Britain and sets about modernizing it with factories, newspapers and gunpowder, and the experiment ends in slaughter. The book begins as a joke against chivalry and turns into a doubt about technology and about the people it is meant to serve. The satire turns on its own hero.

Virtue, found among the outcasts.

AML 1017 Bret Harte and the Mining Camp Story

Bret Harte made the California mining camp a literary setting, populating it with gamblers, prostitutes and drunks who behave better than the respectable people who expel them. His formula of sentimental reversal was enormously popular and set the pattern for western fiction. The reversal became a formula very quickly.

Four outcasts, one snowstorm.

AML 1018 "The Outcasts of Poker Flat"

A town expels four undesirables, who are trapped by snow along with two young travellers. The gambler gives away his rations and dies with a note pinned to a tree, and the Duchess dies holding another woman so that the snow cannot tell them apart. The moral reversal is the story's design rather than its surprise.

An escape that never happened.

AML 1019 Ambrose Bierce and "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"

A Confederate sympathizer stands on a railway bridge with a noose around his neck, the rope breaks, and he escapes to his own gate, where the story reveals that the escape was one instant of imagination. Bierce writes war without consolation, and the shift in time is the story's whole device.

Eight entries on three regions: a Maine coast, a New England farm, and the Louisiana bayou, all written by women before those places changed.

A doctor's rounds, turned into fiction.

AML 1020 Sarah Orne Jewett and the Maine Coast

Born in South Berwick in eighteen forty-nine, Jewett rode with her doctor father on his country rounds, wanted to become a doctor herself, and was stopped by ill health. She read her way through his library instead and turned the coastal villages she knew into her subject. The medical ambition shaped her eye for people.

A tree climbed, a secret kept.

AML 1021 "A White Heron"

A girl living with her grandmother meets a young ornithologist who offers money for the location of a rare heron. She climbs a great pine at dawn, finds the nest, and then refuses to tell him. Loyalty to the woods beats both money and attraction, and the refusal is the story's argument.

A summer of listening, made a book.

AML 1022 *The Country of the Pointed Firs*

Jewett's linked sketches follow a summer visitor boarding in a Maine fishing village, listening to her landlady and to the village's remaining old people. Almost nothing happens, which is the form's claim: a place and its talk are enough to build a book on. Plotlessness here is the design rather than a failing.

A wife who moves into the barn.

AML 1023 Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and "The Revolt of 'Mother'"

Freeman wrote New England villages of thin soil and hard economies, usually from a woman's side. In "The Revolt of 'Mother'" a farm wife whose husband builds a new barn instead of the promised house moves the family into the barn while he is away, and she wins. Her women win by acting rather than by speaking.

A widow with six children, writing.

AML 1024 Kate Chopin and Louisiana

Born Katherine O'Flaherty in St. Louis in eighteen fifty, Chopin married at twenty and moved to New Orleans and then to Cloutierville among the Creole and Acadian communities. Her husband's death in eighteen eighty-two left her in debt with six children, and she began publishing after settling the estate. The Louisiana years supplied her settings.

An hour of freedom, then a verdict.

AML 1025 "The Story of an Hour"

Told that her husband has died in a rail accident, a woman with a heart condition weeps, goes upstairs, and whispers that she is free. Her husband then walks in unharmed and she dies, of what the doctors call the joy that kills. The doctors' diagnosis is the story's last irony.

Written, and never offered anywhere.

AML 1026 "The Storm" and Its Suppression

In "The Storm" two former lovers, each married to somebody else, are shut in together by a passing storm, and afterwards everyone is happier. Chopin never submitted it, and it was published decades after her death, which measures exactly what the magazines of the eighteen nineties would take. The suppression is evidence about the market.

A woman learns to swim, and leaves.

AML 1027 *The Awakening*

Edna Pontellier, a wife and mother summering on Grand Isle, learns to swim, falls in love, leaves her husband's house for a small one, and finds that her freedom has nowhere to go. The novel of eighteen ninety-nine was attacked and forgotten, condemned at publication and dropped from print for decades.

That is the programme, Twain, and three regions. Part two takes that novel's ending and the writers of the drawing room. You can state what realism claimed, ordinary life with plausible motives and consequences that follow from character, and what it defined itself against. You can name the conditions that produced it and the editor who promoted it from the chair of a magazine. You can place Howells's story indicting patriotic vocabulary, and give the board's own label for Jewett, Chopin and Twain. You can account for Clemens taking a pen name from a depth call, trapping a refined narrator with a vernacular one, and making ordinary speech carry a whole novel. You can place both river books, the torn letter where a boy chooses hell and is right, and the argument about the ending that is still open. You can describe the late Twain too dark to print, a satire that turns on its own hero, a mining camp where the outcasts behave best, and a hanging that happens in an instant of imagination. And you can place a girl who climbs a pine and says nothing, a wife who moves into a barn, and a woman who learns to swim.