[I’ve already apologized
to West Virginia in this space, but this week I’ll go further:
AmericanStudying Appalachia through five compelling sets of cultural texts; and leading
up to a special weekend post highlighting a few wonderful resources for further
Appalachian analyses.]
On three
compelling reasons to read one of Appalachia’s most talented writers.
One of the most successful
local
color writers of the 1870s and 1880s, the era when such regional fiction dominated
the American
literary landscape, didn’t quite exist. By 1885 Charles Egbert Craddock had
published numerous stories of
Appalachian local color in the period’s magazines (as well as two impressive
books, on which more momentarily); but in March 1885, as fellow AmericanStudier
and blogger
Rob Velella highlights in this
great post, Craddock was revealed to William
Dean Howells and others in the Boston literary scene (by one of the Atlantic Monthly’s editors, Thomas Bailey
Alrdich, who had himself only learned of Craddock’s true identity the
previous night) to be in fact a woman, Mary Noailles Murfree. Plenty of 19th
century women writers wrote under male pseudonyms, but I don’t know of a
revelatory moment quite as striking as Murfree’s.
Even without
that striking literary moment, however, Murfree’s Appalachian stories would be
well worth reading. She was and remains best known for the short story
collection In the Tennessee
Mountains (1884), considered one of the masterworks of American regionalism.
Like much local color writing, Murfree’s stories often straddle the fence
between nuanced realism and stereotypical exaggeration, just as her own
identity existed both inside (she grew up in Murfreesboro, a town named after her
own great-grandfather) and outside (that ancestor was a Revolutionary war Colonel
and serious blue blood, and Murfree’s family was wealthy enough to vacation at the
Beersheba Springs resort every summer of her childhood) the Tennessee
Appalachian community. But of course, we’re all both insiders and outsiders to
our childhood communities, much like each community and region bears a complex relationship
to the nation as a whole, and Murfree’s collection presents a funny, engaging,
thought-provoking way to consider all those questions.
Just as
impressive, and far less well-known, is Murfree’s 1884 Civil War/Reconstruction
novel Where the Battle
Was Fought. In some ways the novel embodies a genre that by 1884 had
become an American cliché: the romance
of reunion, with former Union and Confederate families brought together by
a conventional love story plot. But Murfree’s novel pushes beyond that stereotype,
in ways that I would argue embody a far more under-narrated and distinctly
Appalachian history: the experiences
of a border state, the areas that bore dual and shifting allegiances
throughout the Civil War. West Virginia, as I argued in that aforementioned
apology post, came into existence as precisely such a state; but Kentucky and
Tennessee occupied similar geographical and ideological territory, and Murfree
uses her novel’s families and stories to depict those border histories with
depth and power. Just another reason to spend some time in her Appalachian
mountains.
Next Appalachian
text tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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