Folklore and Creolization in United States Literature

Abstract

Beardslee, Karen E. 2001. Literary Legacies, Folklore Foundations: Selfhood and Cultural Tradition in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Literature. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. $27.00 hc. xxiv + 202 pp. Cartwright, Keith. 2002. Reading Africa into American Literature: Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. $36.00 hc. 270 pp. Karen E. Beardslee's Literary Legacies, Folklore Foundations: Selfhood and Cultural Tradition in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Literature and Keith Cartwright's Reading Africa into American Literature: Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales offer provocative research and insight into the cultural influences that have shaped the literature of the United States of America. In their respective volumes, Beardslee and Cartwright examine the roles folk art and vernacular narrative [End Page 203] strategy play in various literary texts, Beardslee showing the ways that folk practices such as quilting and storytelling shape fictional works from the nineteenth through the twentieth centuries, Cartwright discussing the creolized nature of the United States and the extent to which African culture, speech, and narrative inundate its literature. These books both offer information and insight that will likely prove foundational in future examinations of the rich and variegated cultural bedrock of writing in the United States. In this, her first book, Beardslee blends scholarly and pedagogical concerns as she presents an innovative approach to thinking about and teaching literature, that of exploring the ways folk culture connects texts to other texts and to students' lives. Her argument is that people achieve self-awareness and self-consolidation by means of connecting with a folk community. This thesis results from her own past difficulties with selfhood when various pressures caused her to lose her sense of rootedness and selfhood, which she regained by reconnecting with her father's storytelling, a folk practice that restored her identity and grounded her professionally and personally. Beardslee cites "search for self" as a universal problem and identifies it as an important connecting point for college students trying to find themselves in their new surroundings and budding adulthood. Beardslee therefore approaches her teaching of literature by stressing "search for self" as a way for students to understand the relation between literature and their lives. Observing that students often cannot relate to older texts, Beardslee shows how this theme appears and functions in both old and new works and thereby forms a constant in literature that students can understand and see as relevant to their own experiences. And so, in her book Beardslee pairs nineteenth-century with twentieth-century texts to show the common thread of folk culture and its ability to facilitate one's reconnection with self and the past. Beardslee allots one chapter for each of her pairings; though related by the book's overarching theme and by some intertextual connections, each chapter stands alone as an essay on their respective works. Her first chapter, "With This Needle . . . : Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing and Whitney Otto's How to Make an American Quilt," is by far the most developed, materially based, and provocative, and it introduces and argues her thesis capably: that the folk arts of spinning, needlework, and quilting enable women to find themselves. When the protagonist in Stowe's novel loses her lover and finds no solace in religion, she turns to the practice of spinning to regain happiness and self-fulfillment; the main character in Otto's novel learns of life, love, and marriage from the advice and patch-worked stories of a quilting community that she joins. The significantly shorter second chapter, "Everybody Loves a Good Story: Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman and David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident," successfully shows how rejection [End Page 204] of capitalistic and scientific methods of recording history in favor of the folk method of historization—story-telling—brings Uncle Julius, of Chesnutt's novel, the ability to draw his white landowners into his culture. It brings John, of Bradley's novel, into a full and positive understanding and acceptance of himself and...