Realism and Regionalism

This is Unit Eleven of American Literature, part two of two: a contested last page, and the writers who followed manners rather than places. Part one ended with Edna Pontellier leaving her husband's house for a small one and finding her freedom had nowhere to go. This part opens on where she goes next, and on a page that a century of readers has refused to agree about. That is the governing idea arriving at its payoff: realism's writers kept taking the narrator's verdict out of the book. Chopin gives no verdict on the water. James builds a ghost story that supports two readings without ruling either out, and then makes the limited centre of consciousness a principle, telling a story through one mind and letting the gaps be the interest. Gilman narrates a collapse from inside the collapsing mind. Chesnutt frames plantation tales inside a northern buyer's narration and lets the buyer be the one who is educated. Wharton describes a society whose rules are absolute and never spoken. Then two procedures, one sorting realist from regionalist and one for reading dialect. By the end you will be able to report the argument about that ending. To state James's theme and place his major works. To describe his late style and his technical legacy. To account for Gilman, Chesnutt, Lazarus and Wharton. And to sort a realist from a regionalist and read a dialect passage.

Five entries: the ending nobody agrees about, and the novelist who made the American abroad his permanent subject.

A swim out, and no verdict.

AML 1028 Edna Pontellier and the Ending

The last pages return Edna to the water, where she swims out past her strength remembering childhood. Readers have argued for a century over whether the ending is a suicide, a defeat, a release or a refusal, and the novel gives no narrator's verdict at all. The course reports the disagreement, because the meaning is contested rather than settled.

An American, loose in an older society.

AML 1029 Henry James and the International Theme

Born in New York in eighteen forty-three to a wealthy, travelling family, James studied at Harvard Law and settled in Europe. His characteristic subject is the American abroad: innocence, money and directness meeting an older society with rules the newcomer cannot read. The theme is a collision of manners rather than a quarrel between countries.

A girl misread to death.

AML 1030 *Daisy Miller*

A young American woman in Europe behaves as she would at home, walking out with men unchaperoned, and the expatriate community reads her freedom as vulgarity. She dies of Roman fever after a night at the Colosseum, and the narrator Winterbourne understands too late what she was. The story is told by the man who misjudges her.

A free choice, arranged for her.

AML 1031 *The Portrait of a Lady*

Isabel Archer, an American with an unexpected fortune, refuses two suitors in order to choose freely, and then chooses a man who was arranged for her by a friend she trusts. The novel is about what she does once she understands that. Its climax is a woman sitting still and thinking, which is a real climax and not an absence of one.

Ghosts, or a governess who sees them.

AML 1032 *The Turn of the Screw* and the Ambiguity

A governess narrates her conviction that two ghosts are corrupting the children in her care, and the story can be read as a haunting or as her delusion without either reading being ruled out. James builds the ambiguity deliberately, and the argument about it has never closed. The text is built to support both readings at once.

Nine entries: a style that moves the plot offstage, a technique the century adopted, and four more writers of the period.

Long sentences, tracking a mind.

AML 1033 James's Late Style

James's late novels are written in long, qualified sentences that track a consciousness weighing impressions, with the important events often happening offstage. The difficulty is the method rather than an obstacle to it: the subject is what a mind makes of what it half sees. The plot's events move out of view on purpose.

One mind, with the reader inside.

AML 1034 Point of View as James's Contribution

James made the limited centre of consciousness a governing principle: tell the story through one mind, let the reader learn only what that mind learns, and let the gaps be the interest of the book. Later writers took the technique as standard, and the exam treats it as his. It is his lasting technical legacy.

A prescribed rest, and a wallpaper.

AML 1035 Charlotte Perkins Gilman and "The Yellow Wall-Paper"

A woman confined to an upstairs room for a nervous condition, forbidden to write, records in secret her growing obsession with the room's wallpaper, until she believes a woman is trapped behind the pattern and begins to creep. The narrator's collapse is narrated from inside the collapsing mind, which is what makes the story work.

A treatment, answered with a story.

AML 1036 The Rest Cure and the Story's Argument

Gilman had been prescribed a rest cure that forbade work and writing, and she said afterwards that it nearly destroyed her. The story turns the treatment into fiction and was written, she said, to reach the physician who had prescribed it. It argues that the enforced idleness is itself the illness, and Gilman named that purpose herself.

Plantation tales, told against the plantation.

AML 1037 Charles W. Chesnutt and the Conjure Tales

Chesnutt, born in Cleveland to free Black parents, taught school in North Carolina and later passed the bar. Light enough to have identified as white, he chose not to. His conjure tales frame plantation stories inside a northern buyer's narration, and the frame narrator is the one being educated by them.

A devoted servant, acting throughout.

AML 1038 "The Passing of Grandison"

A young southerner takes his father's most loyal enslaved man north repeatedly, trying to get him to escape and failing each time, until Grandison returns home apparently devoted and then disappears with his entire family. The loyalty was a performance from the first page, and the joke is on everyone who believed it.

A statue, given a speaking part.

AML 1039 Emma Lazarus and "The New Colossus"

Emma Lazarus, born in New York in eighteen forty-nine to a wealthy Jewish merchant family and educated by tutors, wrote "The New Colossus" for a fundraising campaign. Its sonnet gives the statue a voice that asks for the tired, the poor and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. It was written to fund the pedestal.

A closed society, described from within.

AML 1040 Edith Wharton and the Novel of Manners

Wharton wrote from inside the old New York money she was born into, anatomizing a society whose rules are unwritten and absolute. Her subject is what those rules cost the people who obey them, and she writes with a precision the witness places beside James's. The rules in her novels are never stated aloud by anyone.

Small errors, and a sledge.

AML 1041 *The House of Mirth* and *Ethan Frome*

*The House of Mirth* follows Lily Bart, beautiful and unmarried, as small social errors and debts push her out of the society she was raised to marry into. *Ethan Frome* moves to a poor New England farm and tells of a failed escape that leaves three people trapped together for life. Both books are machines of entrapment.

Three entries to close: a sorting the board asks for directly, a way of reading dialect, and the unit's capstone.

Replaceable place, transcribed speech, elegy.

AML 1042 Sorting a Realist From a Regionalist

The board asks what Jewett, Chopin and Twain are sometimes called, and the answer is regionalists, but the sorting is worth doing properly because realist and regionalist overlap. Ask three questions. First, is the place replaceable: if the story could happen in any comparable town without loss it is realism, and if the speech, work and customs of one particular place are the subject it is regionalism. Second, is there a dialect the text takes seriously, since regionalists transcribe local speech carefully and often frame the tale through a visitor who does not speak it. Third, what is being preserved, since regionalism usually carries an elegiac note about a way of life ending, which straight realism does not need. Twain, Jewett, Chopin, Harte and Freeman all satisfy these; Howells and James do not, because their subject is a class and a set of manners rather than a locality. Naturalism is the trap answer, since it also deals in ordinary people, but it adds a thesis about force and heredity that none of these three is making.

Hear it, place it, ask who is right.

AML 1043 Reading Dialect Without Mocking It

Dialect passages are common on the exam and are answered by three habits. First, read the passage aloud in your head, since dialect spelling represents sound and resolves quickly when heard rather than parsed. Second, ask who is speaking dialect and who is not, because the contrast is usually the point: a frame narrator in standard English introducing a speaker in dialect sets up a judgment, and the question is often which of the two the story actually trusts. Third, check what the dialect speaker knows, since in Twain, Chesnutt and the regionalists the vernacular speaker is repeatedly the one who understands the situation while the educated frame narrator does not. Answer from what the passage shows about competence rather than from what the spelling implies about education. The exam builds distractors that treat dialect as a marker of ignorance, and in this period's best writing the opposite is usually true.

Ordinary life, decided to be enough.

AML 1044 The Realist Settlement: What the Period Decided

Between the Civil War and the turn of the century American writing decided that ordinary life was enough, and the decision holds for a century afterwards. Realism's programme, which Howells promoted from the editor's chair and Twain and James practised in different directions, was that fiction should show life as it is lived, with plausible motives and consequences following from character rather than from a plot's need. The conditions made it possible: a war that ended a romantic idea of the country, railroads and industry that changed it fast enough to need describing, immigration that made it various, and a magazine market that paid for short fiction. Twain supplied the most consequential technical act by writing American speech as people spoke it and letting it carry a whole novel, so that *Huckleberry Finn* is narrated by a boy whose conscience was formed by the society the book indicts. Alongside realism ran regionalism, taking one place and recording its speech and work before they went: Jewett's Maine, Chopin's Louisiana, Harte's mining camps, Freeman's thin-soiled farms. The women of the period wrote the sharpest work about what the arrangements cost, with Chopin's Edna swimming out past her strength and no narrator willing to name what she is doing, Gilman's narrator creeping around a room she was confined to for her health, and Freeman's farm wife moving into the barn. James took the other road entirely, following consciousness rather than locality, and left the limited centre that the next century used as standard.

That closes realism and its regions. The next unit is the movement that added a thesis to it. You can report the argument about Edna's last swim without settling it, because the novel supplies no verdict. You can state James's international theme as a collision of manners, place a girl misread to death by the man narrating her, a woman whose free choice was arranged for her, and a ghost story built to support two readings at once. You can describe long sentences tracking a mind while the events move offstage, and name the limited centre of consciousness as the technique the exam treats as his. You can account for Gilman's narrator collapsing from inside, and for the rest cure the story was written to answer. You can place Chesnutt's conjure tales, where the frame narrator is the one being taught, and Grandison's performance. You can name Lazarus's sonnet and Wharton's two machines of entrapment. And you can sort a realist from a regionalist by asking whether the place is replaceable.