[On November 18,
1865, Mark Twain’s short story “The Celebrated
Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was first published in The New York Saturday Press (under its
original title, “Jim Smiley
and His Jumping Frog”). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy “Frog” and four
other local color short stories, leading up to a special weekend post on
teaching such American texts.]
On a far more
serious story that both relies upon and challenges stereotypes.
No literary
movement or genre has a single origin point, of course; and while Twain’s
“Jumping Frog” was certainly an early example of American local color
writing, the first (late 1860s) publications from Bret Harte
represent another influential early voice in that budding genre. Harte was
friends with Twain from their days as a pair
of youthful California journalists, and the two writers even co-authored
the script for a play (1877’s Ah Sin, although by the time it
premiered Harte
had largely left the production). But despite that relationship and the
similar Western geography of their early lives, careers, and publications,
Harte’s version of local color writing was far less consistently humorous than
Twain’s, and far more consistently sentimental and sad. Exemplifying this more
serious version of local color is Harte’s second published short story, “The Outcasts of Poker Flat”
(1869), the tragic tale of a group of characters who are exiled from a frontier
mining town for perceived crimes and immorality and meet a brutal fate amidst (and
because of) the harsh Western landscape.
One persistent,
if understandable, problem with local color stories is their reliance upon
stereotypes, their creation of characters who seem to embody “typical” roles
within their particular local worlds (this was especially troubling for Southern
local color writing, on which more in Friday’s post). Harte’s portrayal of
his frontier mining community certainly suffers from the same shortcoming, as
the four titular outcasts are: “John Oakhurst, gambler” (the story’s narrative
perspective so slightly more nuanced, yet nonetheless a gambler through and
through); two prostitutes, “a young woman familiarly known as ‘The Duchess’;
another, who had won the title of ‘Mother Shipton’; and ‘Uncle Billy,’ a
suspected sluice-robber and confirmed drunkard.” By putting their names in
quotation marks Harte seems to indicate his awareness that these are stereotypical
identifications and roles; but in many ways the story bears them out, both when
characters live up to the stereotypes (Uncle Billy drinks heavily and then robs
his fellow outcasts) and when they don’t (the prostitutes are revealed to have
hearts of gold, an early example of what would become a very
stereotypical character type).
Yet if the story’s
focal characters embody frontier stereotypes, the overall situation that drives
its plot actually challenges the very notion of them. Oakhurst and his
compatriots are outcast because of “a change in [the town’s] moral atmosphere
since the preceding night, … a Sabbath lull in the air, which, in a settlement
unused to Sabbath influences, looked ominous.” It’s not just that the town
(Poker Flat) hasn’t practiced such morality in the past—it’s that by expelling
a few individuals chosen seemingly at random, the town can pretend to a present
morality it in no way possesses (we’re told that those expelling Oakhurst for
gambling were at the table with him the night before, for example). Indeed,
Harte suggests that it is the casting out—and the far worse punishment of
lynching, embodied in the “two men who were then hanging from the boughs of a
sycamore in the gulch”—which comprises the true immorality in this place and
moment. Those immoral punishments operate by identifying individuals deemed “improper
persons”—by, that is, associating them directly with both their own
stereotypical identities and the stereotypical (and false) image of a virtuous
community. A pretty nuanced and important theme for a local color story, and
one of many reasons to keep reading Harte’s text.
Next short story
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
this story? Other local color stories you’d highlight?
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