George Washington Cable Research Articles

Truly strange New Orleans: The unstable city in George Washington Cable's Strange True Stories of Louisiana

The New Orleans that emerges from George Washington Cable's 1888 collection, Strange True Stories of Louisiana is effectively a Caribbean city as much as a US one, and European imprints are strong in both these strands of identity. Cable acts ostensibly as a collector of remarkable factual accounts of New Orleans and Louisiana, but his own narrative presence is at least as strong as the original tellers and characters of the tales themselves. While constructing a more or less chronological overall narrative of the city and the wider region(s), Cable presents a multitude of voices merging and clashing with each other, blurring lines of fact and fiction as they blur boundaries of identity. In these tales, as often poignant and tragic as they are melodramatic, Cable shows the many truths of New Orleans to be strange indeed, and emphasises its status as a nodal point in relations within and between old and new worlds.

Real Change: George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes and the Crime of '73

MICHAEL GERMANA Real Change: George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes and the Crime of '73 Speech may be silvern and silence golden; but if a lump of gold is only big enough, it can drag us to the bottom of the sea and hold us there while all the world sails over us. George Washington Cable, "The Freedman's Case in Equity" To say george Washington cable's The Grandissimes (1880) is set in New Orleans at the time of the Louisiana Purchase but grapples with the problems of Reconstruction is to repeat old news. Replete with an unwelcome new '"Yankee government'" (161), carpetbaggers arriving to establish new businesses, and resistant Creoles lamenting Louisiana's '"trampled rights'" while swearing she '"will rise again'" (326), Cable's first novel contains so many references to Union occupation and to post-Civil War rhetoric that only a handful of contemporary reviewers and even fewer modern critics have treated The Grandissimes as anything other than a parable for Southern culture's struggles after the fall of the Confederacy. True, many who read the novel serially in Scribner's Monthly (November 1879-October 1880) or in book form prior to Cable's emergence as an advocate for civil rights in the mid-1880s failed to see how its critiques of slavery applied to post-bellum America.1 But once Cable became a household name publishing polemical works like "The Freedman's Case in Equity" (1885) and hitting the lecture circuit as a social reformer rather than a local Arizona Quarterly Volume 61 , Number 3, Autumn 2005 Copyright © 2005 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1610 76 Michael Germana colorist, few had any trouble detecting Cable's allusions to Reconstruction or critiques of its shortcomings in The Grandissimes. But while Cable's politics became clearer over time, their relationship to the convictions of his protagonist, the American immigrantturned -apothecary Joseph Frowenfeld, did not. In fact, few readers seem to know quite what to make of Frowenfeld, whose arrival in Louisiana at the beginning of the novel coincides with a yellow fever epidemic that wipes out his entire family, and who, upon recovering from the fever himself, suddenly becomes the axis upon which all of New Orleans society turns. Given the biblical proportion of the plague that smites his family and the miraculous nature of his own resurrection as New Orleans's chosen one, it's no wonder that Cable's critics react to his protagonist with incredulity. In fact, there's even an ongoing debate amongst scholars to decide whether the well-intentioned but overzealous apothecary is a protagonist at all, or if he's just a "chorus" giving voice to and thus becoming the conscience of the novel's real hero, the white Honoré Grandissime.2 To make the waters surrounding Frowenfeld even murkier, no one has satisfactorily explained the significance of the apothecary's hobbies of astronomy and meteorology to Cable's tale of American encroachment and Creole resistance aside from observing that Frowenfeld, like his father before him, believes in an ordered universe.3 The critics' lack of success in deciphering Frowenfeld's character is, on the one hand, a testament to the apothecary's enigmatic status. But it is also symptomatic of a broader shortcoming in Grandissimes criticism, which has yet to adequately analyze Cable's narrative strategy much less Frowenfeld's role in it. For while Cable's critics have had no trouble recognizing that The Grandissimes critiques Reconstruction and its failures, few have satisfactorily explained how the novel does its rhetorical work. As a result, extant scholarship has yet to describe how the novel's form and content inform one another, what Frowenfeld's role in this hermeneutical play is exactly, or how the novel's critique of postwar American politics emerges from the resulting fold. An investigation into the shifting monetary policies of the United States during Reconstruction facilitates a new reading of The Grandissimes that addresses all of these shortcomings. For such an examination makes it clear that Cable's novel not only restages the drama of Reconstruction-era monetary reform at every turn, but that The Gran- Real Change 77 dissimes conforms to the self-same...

Barriers between us: interracial sex in nineteenth-century American literature

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Race and Nation in Nineteenth-Century Interracial Fictions 1. The Last of the Mohicans or the First of the Mulattos? Slavery and Native American Removal in Cooper's American Frontier 2. A Land without Names: National Anxiety in The Slave or, The Memoirs of Archy Moore 3. Reconstructing America in Lydia Maria Child's A Romance of the Republic and Frances E. W. Harper's Minnie's Sacrifice 4. Doubles in Eden in George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes 5. I will gladly share with them my richer heritage: Schoolteachers in Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy and Charles Chesnutt's Mandy Oxendine Epilogue: Formulating a National Self Notes Bibliography Index

The Ethnic Garden in Portuguese‐American Writing

Writing about the garden in American literature has a long tradition, but this does not apply to emergent contemporary American literatures, especially the Portuguese-American one. In my exploration of this issue, I will briefly outline the scholarly work on the American garden -ranging from contemporary ecocriticism (Lawrence Buell), to the pastoral ideal (Leo Marx), and finally, to the georgic mode (William Conlogue) to understand the essence and importance of the garden in Portuguese-American writing, especially in the fiction of Katherine Vaz (1955-) and Frank Caspar (1946-), and in the poetry of the latter. While I aim at focusing on these PortugueseAmerican voices, I will also contrast canonical, mainstream representations of the garden to argue that Edith Wharton (1862-1937), George Washington Cable (1844-1925), and Jack London (1876-1916) viewed the garden as a pleasure, leisure ground. In contrast, in contemporary Portuguese-American fiction, the garden is a place where one can grow vegetables and flowers; a place for preserving one's ethnic identity and ancestral rural way of life; or a retreat from the alienating conditions imposed by the factory, commercial fishing, the whaling or dairy industries, and intensive farming - activities in which the first generations of Portuguese immigrants excelled in the three traditional areas of settlement in the United States: New England, California, and Hawaii. While the first two mainstream writers, Wharton and Cable, were fascinated by the refinement and social status entailed in owning a garden, in The Valley of the Moon (1913), London's character Billy Roberts ridicules the Portuguese agrarian ways and mentality. With this novel as a case in point, my goal is to focus on the garden as emblematic of the gulf between the American mainstream and some of its peripheral minority voices, and how it highlights conflicting responses toward culture and life. While assessing some of these notions in Portuguese-American writings, I will also note, in passing, how the garden is a forceful presence in Italian-American writing as well. Since the nation's inception -that is, with Jeffersonian and Jacksonian agrarianism-the garden and the machine have been at the heart of the American experience, and these realities have galvanized American scholars and writers. Contemporary ecocriticism scholars such as Lawrence Buell (in Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond) have called our attention to the dangers of pollution on the American landscape and its physical environment. However, in his attempt to distinguish between green and brown landscapes -that is, the landscapes of exurbia and industrialization (7) - this framework is not applicable to Portuguese-American writings. In the Californian landscapes and gardens of Katherine Vaz's fiction, and those from Massachusetts in the fiction and poetry of Frank Caspar, Buell's discourse does not find a congenial home. References to the ethnic garden abound m the fiction of Katherine Vaz, especially in Saudade (1994), and in Frank Caspar's novel Leaving Pico (1999), as well as his three volumes of poems, The Holyoke (1988), Mass for the Grace of a Happy Death (1995), and A Field Guide to the Heavens (1999). The gardens in these writings are not polluted with toxic waste or invaded by the ominous sound of civilization as represented in, for example, the emblematic whistle of the train in Thoreau's Walden (1854). My contention is that in Portuguese-American writing, these matters are nowhere to be seen. Instead, the gardens in Portuguese-American literature bring to the fore aspects that are quintessentially marked by immigrant experience. Surrounded by the hustle and bustle of public, mainstream life, the gardens in some of these writings reflect aspects inherent in the private, intimate side of the Portuguese ethnic experience in the United States.1 In addition, these gardens are depicted as oases of tranquility, providing cultural and spiritual sustenance. …

Blood talk: American race melodrama and the culture of the occult

The United States has seldom known a period of greater social and cultural volatility, especially in terms of race relations, than the years from the end of Reconstruction to the First World War. In this study, Susan Gillman explores the rise during this period of a remarkable genre - the race melodrama - and the way in which it converged with literary trends, popular history, fringe movements, and mainstream interest in supernatural phenomena. Blood Talk shows how race melodrama emerged from abolitionist works such as Uncle Tom's Cabin and surprisingly manifested itself in a set of more aesthetically and politically varied works, such as historical romances, sentimental novels, the travel literature of Mark Twain, the regional fiction of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable, and the work of W.E.B. Du Bois. Gillman then uses the race melodrama to show how racial discourses in the United States became entangled with occultist phenomena, from the rituals of the Klu Klux Klan and the concept of messianic second-sight to the production of conspiracy theories and studies of dreams and trances. A work of ambitious scope and compelling cross-connections, Blood Talk sets new agendas for students of American literature and culture.

Liberal Visions of Reconstruction: Lydia Maria Child's A Romance of the Republic and George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes

You ought ... make some other arrangement, or presently you, too, will be ... under shadow of Ethiopian. --The Grandissimes When Lee surrendered Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 8, 1865, what has since been labeled first modern had come a sobering conclusion. At a cost much higher than expected by either of warring parties, some old and tenacious issues were finally resolved. As historian David Potter puts it, was dead, secession was dead, and six hundred thousand men were dead. (1) Yet, despite Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, ratification of Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, and Supreme Court's subsequent affirmation of indestructible Union, what would prove be most volatile issue gripping postwar America had been left unresolved. (2) Observed Philadelphia lawyer Sidney George Fisher in 1866: It seems our fate never get rid of question. No sooner have we abolished slavery than a party, which seems [to] be growing in power, proposes suffrage, so that problem--What shall we do with Negro--seems as far from being settled as ever. (3) While Lincoln's inaugural admonition to do all which may achieve and cherish a and lasting among ourselves seemed have been embraced almost universally, profound disagreement prevailed as precise nature of this just peace and practical means by which nationalization could or should be accomplished. Where white supremacists such as Thomas Nelson Page contended that disfranchisement of Negro was permanent good of both radical black activists such as Frederick Douglass demanded inclusion of the in body politic, warning that if black men have no rights in eyes of white men, of course whites cannot have any in eyes of blacks. The result is a war of races, and annihilation of all proper human relations. (4) Amidst this polarized debate between old-school white supremacists and newly energized black activists, white authors writing in Anglo-American humanist tradition, with its deep roots in abolitionist movement, found themselves in an uneasy double bind. On one hand, they clearly recognized legitimacy of demands for unrestricted racial equality and a truly egalitarian society. On other hand, however, they also perceived necessity of asserting undiminished moral and political leadership of their own liberal white middle class. Tarnished by dehumanizing experience of slavery, humanism, apply Georg Lukacs' analysis, had reaffirm itself as both source and standard bearer of social progress. (5) Prior Civil War, bourgeois liberals had habitually professed social progressiveness through their embrace of more or less radical abolitionist tenets and a firm commitment free market economy, which was said reveal a fundamental harmony of interests across class and race lines. Of course, in light of growing labor unrest in industrialized North, such outspoken agitation against chattel slavery and ringing endorsements of free market were hardly void of self-interest. As David Brion Davis has shown within British context, liberal denunciations of slavery opened new sources of moral prestige for dominant social class, helped define a participatory role for middle class activism, and looked forward universal goal of compliant, loyal, and self-disciplined workers. (6) Still, white abolitionists' rejection of racialist thinking and allegiance democratic universalism certainly boded well for four million blacks who escaped bondage after war. In fall of 1865, George William Curtis, former abolitionist circuit speaker and since 1863 editor-in-chief of Harper's Weekly, augured that America's Good Fight would soon result in the total overthrow of spirit of caste by reminding his readers that Government of United States was made by men of all races and all colors, not for white men, but for refuge and defense of men. …

The Invention of a Memory

Was Congo Square—now Armstrong Park—in New Orleans, the birth place of jazz music? Very little reliable historical information is available about the place but what we know for certain is that three men, one musician and two journalists, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, George Washington Cable, and Lafcadio Hearn, did construct Congo Square as the starting point of Black music over the course of the nineteenth century. After 1885, Congo Square could be considered as an established part of New Orleans folklore. Gradually the music that started there came to be identified as a central part of American identity.

Songs of the Reconstructing South: building literary Louisiana, 1865-1945

Foreward: Artful and Crafty Ones of the French Quarter by Robin Miller Introduction: Building Literary Louisiana Women, Work, and Culture in Reconstruction Louisiana Under Reconstruction: Lafcadio Hearn in New Orleans (1877-1887) by Richard Collins Sallie Rhett Roman of the New Orleans Times-Democrat: Race, Women, and Southern Aristocracy in the Novellas, Tonie (1900) and Folette of Timbalier Island (1900) by Nancy Dixon Do You Not Know That Women Make Money?: Women and Labor in Louisiana Literature by Tiffany Duet Living Amid Romance: Ethnic Cultures in Ruth McEnery Stuart's New Orleans Stories by Joan Wiley Hall Louisiana During the Modernist Period 1919-1945 William Faulkner's Two-Basket Stories by Jo LeCoeur Cakewalks, Cauls, and Conjure: Folk Traditions in Arna Bontemp's God Sends Sunday and Summer Tragedy by Lisa Abney Huey Long as Deep South Dictator: A Lion is in the Streets as Novel and Film by Philip Dubuisson Castille Depictions of Race and Class 1865-1945 Behind The White Veil: Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Creole Color, and Goodness of St. Rocque by Pamela Glenn Menke Masking and Racial Passing at Mardi Gras in Lyle Saxon's Have a Good Time While You Can by Larry D. Griffin The nigger that's going to sleep with your sister: Charles Bon as Cultural Shibboleth in Absalom, Absalom! by Erin E. Campbell All-Seeing Eye in Grace King's Balcony Stories by Susie Scifres Kuilan Irreducible African: Challenges to Racial Stereotypes in George Washington Cable's Grandissimes by R. Allen Alexander, Jr. Why Don't She Stay in Her Class?: Caste Structures in Lyle Saxon's Children of Strangers and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God by Suzanne Disheroon-Green Bibliography Index

George Washington Cable and Bonaventure : A New Orleans Author's Literary Sojourn into Acadiana

In 1888, when George Washington Cable, the New Orleans author who had gained fame through his Creole stories and novels, published three stories of Acadian Louisiana as a novel tided Bonaventure, the book was the product of a longstanding interest on Cable's part in Acadiana and its people. Yet the book also became a way in which Cable could step away briefly from the controversies in which he was involved regarding civil rights for African Americans--a cause he espoused in the face of bitter opposition from much of the white South. In a very real sense, Bonaventure, with its emphasis on romance and its idyllic descriptions of Acadian life, became a kind of literary vacation on its author's part. That status contributes to both the novel's virtues--careful recreation of Acadian language patterns, realistic description of the Acadian landscape--and its sentimental flaws. Cable had been interested in the Acadian area of Louisiana as far back as 1866. Then a young man of twenty-three, Cable was considering a career as a surveyor and had joined a surveying party collecting data in the Atchafalaya River area (Butcher, Cable 91). But his work as a rodman for the surveying party ended on July 23, when he was stricken with a case of malaria so severe that he did not recover fully from the ravages of the disease for another six years (Turner 37). Cable returned to Acadiana a decade and a half later, at the behest of Colonel George E. Waring, Jr., who was collecting data for the tenth census of the United States. While on his way to New Orleans in 1880, Waring read Old Creole Days, and he was so impressed by Cable's painstaking recreation of Louisiana life that he looked up the young author and hired him as an assistant (Turner 109). Cable's research assignment took him into Acadiana. While there, he recorded his observations regarding the Acadian people and their landscape. By coincidence, Cable happened to be in Acadiana at one of the greatest times of change in the region's history. The 1880 completion of the Southern Pacific Railroad had brought to Acadiana many people of non-French background, affirming the economic vitality of the rice-growing region but also creating a situation that seemed to threaten the Acadians' traditional culture (Rushton 135). It is interesting to wonder if the dynamic social situation of Acadiana at that time might have interested Cable in writing one day about the Acadians, as he had written about the Creoles during a comparably fluid time in Creole history. The Acadian notes Cable took turned out not to be useful for census purposes, but they later provided a foundation of fact on which Cable built the fictions of Bonaventure (Butcher, Northampton 64; Rubin 191; Turner 235). By late 1883, Cable had sent a draft of an Acadian story to the offices of the Century magazine in New York (Turner 235-236). Throughout the mid-1880s, Cable continued to express an interest in the Acadians and their unique history. In January of 1885, for example, while Cable was in the midst of a reading tour with Mark Twain, he expressed to a reporter for a St. Louis newspaper his intent to write about the Acadians. In the interview, Cable acknowledged that the Acadians had faced much disdain from the Creoles; but he insisted on the beauty of the Acadians' cultural heritage, and set forth his belief that they would provide Louisiana with its leaders at some future date (Cardwell 41). Cable added, intend to write of before long, and hope to express that which I allude to in them (qtd in Lorch 481). Two months later, as the reading tour ended, Cable paid another visit to the parishes of Acadiana (Turner 236). That same year, Cable published his first collection of civil rights essays, The Silent South. The book's well reasoned call for civil and political equality for African Americans caused a considerable stir in Cable's native South; but the author and his family, having relocated to Northampton, Massachusetts, were at a safe remove from the controversy. …

Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Out of many, one - e pluribus unum - is the motto of the American nation, and it sums up neatly the paradox that Stephanie Foote so deftly identifies in Regional Fictions. Regionalism, the genre that ostensibly challenges or offers an alternative to nationalism, in fact characterizes and perhaps even defines the American sense of nationhood. In particular, Foote argues that the colorful local characters, dialects, and accents that marked regionalist novels and short stories of the late nineteenth century were key to the genre's conversion of seemingly dangerous political differences - such as those posed by disaffected midwestern farmers or recalcitrant foreign nationals - into appealing cultural differences. She asserts that many of the most treasured beliefs about the value of local identities still held in the United States today are traceable to the discourses of this regional fiction, and she illustrates her contentions with insightful examinations of the work of Sarah Orne Jewett, Hamlin Garland, Gertrude Atherton, George Washington Cable, Jacob Riis, and others. Broadening the definitions of regional writing and its imaginative territory, Regional Fictions moves beyond literary criticism to comment on the ideology of national, local, ethnic, and racial identity.

New South Narratives of Freedom: Rereading George Washington Cable's "'Tite Poulette" and Madame DeZphine

Although George Washington Cable is now widely known as a perceptive writer on transracial subjects, it was not until his third short story, (1874), that Cable introduced black-white racial issues in his published fiction. Indeed, a number of central concerns which Cable developed in writings throughout his career, including social construction of racial categories, possibilities of changing natural feelings about racial difference, interrelated race and gender issues, as well as legal ramifications of interracial relationships, are compellingly presented in this first of Cable's published fictions ofrace. With Poulette, too, Cable for the first introduces engaging, if still largely stereotyped, women characters, as well as a more developed and integrated central male figure, the young Dutch immigrant Kristian Koppig, one of a series of portrayals of an alternate masculinity, a Southern masculinity vulnerable to change, that reflects a key interest of Cable throughout his writing life. and in his related narrative of Madame Delphine (1881) (1) Cable explores possibilities for change in the South of his own young manhood, a volatile Period after emancipation and before segregation was sanctioned by the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling of 1896. that window of when it seemed to many that the future was open, Cable wrote against any idea of looking back to an idealized, monolithically-conceived past of male supremacy as a basis for constructing a New South. With a conception of fiction as parable and believing that progress in the South required change of individual Southern men and Southern women, Cable modeled with individual characters possibilities of transformation of familiar Southern values and cultural practices regarding men's and women's roles, race, and, especially in Madame Delphine, religion. I As in many of his early short stories, at the opening of Poulette, the plane of Cable's third person narration is set near the of the story's composition, New Orleans in the early 1870s, toward the end of Reconstruction. Interweaving recollections of the old New Orleans of the of Kristian Koppig with touristic impressions of the Vieux Carre of his own postbellum era, the narrator suggests an interpenetrating past and present in which the past continues to impinge on and shape contemporary time. a pivotal phrase toward the end of the opening frame narrative, Cable's narrator introduces the story of Kristian and `Tite Poulette with a mellow, once upon a time intonation: In the good old times of duels, and bagatelle-clubs, and theatre-balls, and Cayetano's circus (214). The bland, ingenuous tone here teases the reader with a hint of a picturesque New Orleans of honor and grace. Such a conventional, sanitized vision of an idyllic prewar Louisiana was promulgated in Cable's day by the prominent Creole writer and spokesman Charles Gayarre and others and served to buttress supremacist ideology in the postbellum era. (See Tregle 169-70, 173-74, 178-83 and Tunnel 1-7.) Central to the mythic, ideal Southern vision were men who would physically fight for honor and women of grace and virtue, virtue respected and actively protected by men of honor. (See Wyatt-Brown 34-55; 227.) Early on we learn that is socially, not just physically, determined, and that for white-appearing 'Tite Poulette and her mother, Madame John, not being real white (221) is the most important thing to know about the two central women characters. an indirect fashion, easy to miss on first reading, Cable's narrator suggests how Madame John's socially imposed race and gender status as quadroon lad[y] (217) is fundamental to her identity in her immediate Vieux Carre Creole community as well as her possibilities in life: [W]ho was this Madame John? …

Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America

Late-nineteenth-century America was crazy about dialect: varieties of American English entertained mass audiences in local color stories, in realist novels, and in poems and plays. But dialect was also at the heart of anxious debates about the moral degeneration of urban life, the ethnic impact of foreign immigration, the black presence in white society, and the female influence on masculine authority. Celebrations of the rustic raciness in American were undercut by fears that dialect was a force of cultural dissolution with the power to contaminate the dominant language. In this volume, Gavin Jones explores the aesthetic politics of this neglected cult of the vernacular in little-known regionalists such as George Washington Cable, in the canonical work of Mark Twain, Henry James, Herman Melville, and Stephen Crane, and in the ethnic writing of Abraham Cahan and Paul Laurence Dunbar. He reveals the origins of a trend that deepened in subsequent literature: the use of minority dialect to formulate a political response to racial oppression, and to enrich diverse depictions of a multicultural nation.

Strange Talk: The Politics of Literature in Gilded Age America (review)

Reviewed by: Strange talk: The politics of literature in Gilded Age America by Gavin Jones Edwin Battistella Strange talk: The politics of literature in Gilded Age America. By Gavin Jones. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Pp. 288. Interest in American regional speech and its consequences is as old as the nation itself. The period following [End Page 402] the Civil War was a particularly interesting period in that it saw the rise of dialect literature and the rise of commentary on dialect literature as well. In Strange talk, Gavin Jones argues that late nineteenth-century American culture—that of the so-called Gilded Age—was fundamentally ambivalent about dialect—seeing it as both representative of the vitality of American culture and as carrying the seeds of cultural fragmentation. The book consists of a brief introduction and conclusion and six main chapters. J has organized his book largely around different literary topics and genres which illustrate cultural attitudes and reactions to social change. Ch. 1, titled ‘Contaminated tongues: American philology and the problem of dialect’ (14–36), describes the attitudes toward dialect reflected in the scholarly work of the day—including that of William Dwight Whitney, Thomas Loundsbury, and E. A. Shelton, first president of the American Dialect Society. Their views reflect in part those of earlier scholars and writers that a common language of the American masses would emerge in the United States, but they also demonstrate occasional sympathy to the tradition of verbal criticism and correction of such writers as Richard Grant White, William Mathews, and George Perkins Marsh, who saw dialect use as a sign of moral degeneration and of the vulgarization of higher culture. In Ch. 2 (37–63), ‘Cult of the vernacular’, J discusses the use of dialect literature as a form of satire and as a reflection of literary realism. An assumption of the time was the idea that language reflected ways of thinking as well as ways of speaking. J notes that such writers as Mark Twain were ambivalent toward regional literature—both celebrating it and fearing its influence—and that this ambivalence is reflected in narrative inconsistency toward regional dialect. Ch. 3, ‘Language, gender and disease’ (64–97), treats the correlation between ‘faulty speech’ and social and cultural disease that was common in novels of the time. J especially focuses on ways in which Herman Melville and Henry James connected speech defects and defects of social and cultural behavior. Two psychological disorders much discussed in the Gilded Age were heterophony (confusion of words) and neurasthenia (nervousness), both of which were seen as symptoms of the corruption of cultural authority. Of special interest is J’s discussion of James’s essay on ‘The speech of American women’, which attributed indirection in language to the speech of women. In ‘White writers, creole languages’ (Ch. 4, 98–133), J examines the dialect literature of George Washington Cable and others whose work suggested a racially-mixed definition of Southern speech unsettling to white sensibilities of the time. J argues that literary and scholarly depictions of black English served two functions: to reinforce the view of black language as deficient but also to make the connection between black English and African and Caribbean languages (providing a counterview to the literary representation of black language as derivative of white Southern speech). The representation of dialect was complex rather than homogeneous, and the rhetorical features of African-American speech—including the potential for subversive humor—made it an effective narrative vehicle. Ch. 5, ‘Accents of menace alien to our air’: Language and literature in turn-of-the-century New York City’ (134–60), discusses the treatment of immigrant language in the tenement and immigrant fiction of the 1880’s and 1890’s—particularly the work of Stephen Crane and Abraham Cahan who extended local color writing from dialect literature to the immigrant experience. J notes that Crane’s approach focused on treating New York speech as decayed while Cahan’s focused on the hybrid nature of New Yorkese. The two approaches represent contrasting literary interpretations of urban life, one an attempt to capture the decay of language and the other an effort to characterize its transformation by immigrant voices...

Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable

Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable

Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable.

Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable.

Chesnutt’s Piazza Tales: Architecture, Race, and Memory in the Conjure Stories

Chesnutt’s Piazza Tales: Architecture, Race, and Memory in the Conjure Stories William Gleason* (bio) Architecture is not simply a mechanical contrivance but an essay in the art of communication, a complex web of memories and messages. —J. Mordaunt Crook, The Dilemma of Style 1 When Charles W. Chesnutt surveyed his literary prospects in the fall of 1889, he had every reason to be optimistic. In the previous two years Chesnutt had placed three of his conjure (or “Uncle Julius”) tales in the Atlantic Monthly, becoming the first African American fiction writer to be published by such an influential arbiter of national taste. During the same period, he had struck up fruitful correspondences with Albion Tourgée and George Washington Cable, prominent white authors and social reformers who read and commented favorably on Chesnutt’s work. New stories, including the beginning of a first novel, were flowing from Chesnutt’s pen, and a fourth conjure tale was about to appear in the Overland Monthly. Feeling sure of his talent and connections—but also ambivalent about the imaginative and professional constraints that continuing in the Uncle Julius “plantation school” vein might impose—Chesnutt plotted the next steps of his career. First, he would publish a collection of his stories, gathering the Atlantic tales together with a selection of his non-dialect work to make a book. Then he would stop writing conjure tales altogether and concentrate instead on more up-to-date representations of the American [End Page 33] color line. As Chesnutt explained to Tourgée that September, “I think I have about used up the old Negro who serves as a mouthpiece, and I shall drop him in future stories, as well as much of the dialect.” 2 Uncle Julius would thus help facilitate Chesnutt’s arrival as a book author—and then disappear. But the book that Chesnutt proposed never materialized. As critics like Richard Brodhead have shown, in the wake of that optimistic fall of 1889, Chesnutt encountered a period of “literary blockage,” not consolidated success, as white editors—even at Houghton Mifflin, the parent house of the Atlantic—rejected not only Chesnutt’s proposed collection but more signally (and despite multiple revisions) the new color line story into which he poured much of his post-1889 energy, “Rena Walden.” 3 It was not until 1898, nearly ten years later, that Chesnutt would finally strike his “entering wedge” into the literary world, although not in precisely the fashion he had imagined. For after reading through yet another of Chesnutt’s story collections, Atlantic editor Walter Hines Page decided in March 1898 to commission more “‘cunjure’ stories” to fill out a possible book of North Carolina dialect tales. Chesnutt quickly complied, hammering out six tales in seven weeks, four of which Page then matched with Chesnutt’s original Atlantic stories to make The Conjure Woman, which would appear to strong reviews in 1899. The irony here, of course, as Brodhead has aptly remarked, is that Chesnutt’s success would come only through a return to the same plantation genre—and its “preferred fictions of racial life”—that he had earlier sought to leave behind. 4 Chesnutt would have his collection, but he would have to resurrect Uncle Julius to do so. But in fact, Chesnutt had not stopped writing Julius tales at all. Three times during his “blocked” decade—and well before Page’s commission—Chesnutt turned of his own accord back to the plantation tale, to dialect, and to Uncle Julius. Why would the calculating author revisit a supposedly “used up” genre? Not, as one might imagine, in anticipatory deference to a proposition like Page’s. Chesnutt did so, I argue, in order to explore in more detail what he found he had not “used up” in the earlier Julius stories: what we might call (following Dell Upton) the “social experience” of American architecture. 5 For what we discover when we look closely at the second phase of Chesnutt’s Uncle Julius stories—the three pieces written between his 1889 letter to Tourgée and the 1898 summons from Page—is that the meticulously framed conjure tales offered Chesnutt a surprisingly versatile form through which to [End...

Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable.

Edgar Degas travelled from Paris to New Orleans during the fall of 1872 to visit the American branch of his mother's family, the Mussons. He arrived at a key moment in the cultural history of this most exotic of American cities, still recovering from the agony of the Civil War: the decisive period of Reconstruction, in which his American relatives were importantly involved. This was precisely the time when the American writers Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable were beginning to mine the resources of New Orleans culture and history. What was it about this war-torn, diverse, and conflicted city that elicited from Degas some of his finest paintings? And what do we need to know about New Orleans society to make sense of Degas's stay? Benfey gives us the answers to these questions. Degas's white relatives were among the leaders in some of the most violent uprisings in Reconstruction Louisiana, and his black relatives - whose existence this book is the first to reveal - were no less prominent.

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

"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...

Signifying Songs: The Double Meaning of Black Dialect in the Work of George Washington Cable

Signifying Songs: The Double Meaning of Black Dialect in the Work of George Washington Cable

George Washington Cable revisited

George Washington Cable revisited