"The Delightful Accent of the South Land": Ruth McEnery Stuart's Dialect Fiction

Abstract

"THE DELIGHTFUL ACCENT OF THE SOUTH LAND": RUTH McENERY STUART'S DIALECT FICTION Gena McKinley The University of Virginia 'Neath that flow of song and mirth Runs the current of despair; But the simple sons of earth Know not the dead are there! —Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, "The Revel"1 "I should have liked to spirit Mrs. Stuart away—out through a window or defenseless back door," Kate Chopin recalled of her 1897 visit with Ruth McEnery Stuart. "I wanted to take her up and set her down beside my sitting-room fire: to lock the door against receptions, luncheons, and the clamor ofmany voices . . ."2 Because oftheir pressing social and literary engagements, these two successful writers must have welcomed an escape from the demands of professional life. Sitting by a fire, chatting, and sipping tea—away from the "clamor" of the outside world—seems to represent in Chopin's imagination the last vestiges ofthe "Southern Lady" ideal, a way oflife that both women had exchanged for authorhood and one that was quickly eroding in the post-Reconstruction South. A century after this tête-à-tête in New Orleans , Chopin is by far the more famous of the two, in part because of her literary challenges to this very ideal. And yet Chopin was enchanted by Stuart whose voice, she wrote, had a "melting quality that penetrates the senses, as some soothing ointment goes through the skin." If Chopin's desire to "spirit Mrs. Stuart away" belies her own longings for a lost way of life, it also reminds us that the parlor provided a refuge from more general instabilities and uncertainties in society . At the turn of the century, Americans witnessed an increase in social and political upheaval and a sharp rise in racial violence, particularly in the South. Much ofthe violence stemmed from a resistance to integration and renewed legal efforts to limit the rights of blacks.3 Ironically, this heightenedracial tension paralleled a resurgence ofplantation myth fiction that harked back to the antebellum romance tradition ofthe 1830s and 1840s. The pages ofprestigious New York-based literary journals such as The Century and The Atlantic were filled with 98Gena McKinley stories from the "Southland," and Northern editors courted Southern writers with much the same zeal—and profit—with which other industries sought cheap labor in the struggling post-Reconstruction South.4 As Albion Tourgee would declare accurately in 1888, American literature became "not only Southern in type, but distinctly Confederate in sympathy" in the decades following the Civil War.5 After enough time had passed to heal the immediate wounds of war, America longed for reassurance of its national unity. The plantation myth served this purpose by masking the reality of ongoing racial injustices. Stuart's "negro dialect" fiction, firmly rooted in this genre, assured her predominantly white readership that race relations were harmonious— just as her tea party conversation calmed Chopin' s more ineffable anxieties . In Stuart's success as a popular Southern writer, we witness a complex relationship between race and region, between imagined identity and the business of literature. Left destitute by the death of her wealthy husband after only four years of marriage, Stuart began writing, as many women did in the decades after the war, in order to gain some measure of financial independence .6 Like Chopin, George Washington Cable and Grace King, Stuart mined the ethnic diversity of her native New Orleans for subject matter; but she could also contrast this culturally rich city with the desolation of mral Arkansas, where she had lived with her planter husband . Between the two places, Stuart encountered Irish and Italian immigrant communities, the Creole culture of Louisiana, tenant farmers , and former slaves—all of whom she sought to capture in her fiction . Her Simpkinsville tales, for example, feature enterprising and independent mral Arkansas women stmggling to survive in the postwar South. Perhaps because these stories challenged conventional portrayals of Southern women, recent scholars engaged in "resurrecting" Stuart have focused on them rather than on the plantation myth fiction that launched and, indeed, sustained her career.7 Despite the heterogeneity to which she was exposed, Stuart' s social, racial and economic distance from these communities...