The Yankee in Early American Fiction

Abstract

L OCAL COLOR writing tends to stress the peculiar setting and people of a region or an era. It focuses on what has escaped the process of cultural levelling which threatens many industrialized countries. In the United States, a distinct region such as New England offered much to the colorist. There individuality resisted conformity, and a strong sense of place battled with rootless novelty. The people seemed to base their conduct on standards taken from the enduring past. It is not surprising, therefore, that early American novelists drew a composite Yankee character type distinct from those of the South and the West. Traits that add up to this Yankee portrait may be found in the novels and tales published before 1870. While the Civil War made the United States aware of sectional differences, the roots of national consciousness go back to the Colonial period. Indeed, the evidence of early American fiction suggests that the term local should be redefined in point of time. It is true, of course, that color writing was not widely popular until Bret Harte's California stories attracted Eastern readers to the Western scene. Nevertheless, the Revolutionary War aroused a nationalistic spirit that demanded native literature peopled by recognizable American types. While dramatists like Royall Tyler supplied this demand as early as 1787, it was Cooper in his novel The Spy (182 1) who first achieved a satisfying Americanism. Where Irving's disguised German legends substituted Hudson River scenery for Rhineland settings, Cooper actually explored everyday American life and launched the historical novel based upon our national experience. Local color also needs redefining in terms of the fictional material chosen by the American writer. In New England, the writer interested in character and setting tended to avoid the city, finding in the country native types first delineated by Maria Edgeworth and Sir Walter Scott. Following these Brit-