Eastern Kentucky as a Model of Appalachia: The Role of Literary Images

Southeastern Geographer Vol. XXXI, No. 2, November 1991, pp. 75-89 EASTERN KENTUCKY AS A MODEL OF APPALACHIA: THE ROLE OF LITERARY IMAGES Tyrel G. Moore Shortridge recently identified literary images as a means by which places acquire meaning in American culture. Regionally based novels, for example, were especially effective in establishing popular notions of regional identity during the 19th century, and the image of the South, with its "chivalric plantation" and the "cavalier myth," seems to have been established before 1840. Appalachia also found its identity established in American literature. (1) The literary concept of Appalachia provided an important basis for the geographical knowledge about the region. Thus, the literary regionalization of Appalachia provides an intriguing example of the interplay among the writers, the geographical perspectives they took, and the geographical meaning of the area they carried into print. Images of Appalachia that idealized it as a separate and distinct region of America first emerged in the so-called "local color" literature of the late 19th century. The movement employed a descriptive style that often followed a format of travelogues set in remote areas of scenic beauty. Somewhat romantic and escapist, local color stories were immensely popular among an urban middle-class readership, appearing in novels and on the pages of magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and Lippincott's. (2) They engendered a regional awareness which, although highly impressionistic, would prove durable. Their initial view of Appalachia as a picturesque and quaint place suggested, as well, a human triumph against a rugged environment and implied a process of regional development different from that in the rest of the nation. But the early literature also painted a different picture ofAppalachia. During the last three decades of the 19th century, it was seen as a "strange land and a peculiar people," a land of "rugged little farms" with settlements comprising little more than "poor shanties." (3) Human ocDr . Moore is Assistant Professor of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in Charlotte, NC 28223. 76Southeastern Geographer cupation of the mountains was seen as involving a race of mountaineers marked by lawlessness, clannish feuds, and shiftless ignorance that steadily gained "a reputation for having one of the worst backwoods populations on the continent, or, for that matter, the world." (4) By the late 1890s, scholarly views paralleled these negative literary notions to portray the region as a "retarded frontier of America," occupied by a people so different that they were regarded as "our contemporary ancestors ." (5) Although observers such as Ellen Churchill Semple were awed by the "purity of their Anglo-Saxon stock," they were even more impressed by their proclivity for lawless moonshining and feuding. (6) That divergent sense ofplace was formed with a dominant geographical bias because the descriptive images of Appalachia were based almost exclusively on observations ofeastern Kentucky. Today, nearly a century later, these early perceptions remain strong as Appalachian culture is depicted as "yesterday's people" living in a land "where time stood still." (7) Eastern Kentucky's prominence as a setting for early characterizations of Appalachia has been acknowledged frequently. The geographic accuracy of extending observations from one part of Appalachia to the whole of the region has been questioned only in passing, although the early writings about Appalachia formed the bases ofgeographical knowledge of the region. This was particularly true during the period of the region's initial recognition by the public and by the scholarly community . The places that these writers observed, what they chose to write about, and the ways in which their writings were interpreted became a significant construct for subsequent views of the region. The geographical validity of the literary perspective was limited in two important respects. First, generalizations about eastern Kentucky were geographically founded on observations of its most remote and least-developed areas. Resource-based economic change occurred in peripheral areas to the north and west throughout much of the 19th century as the coal industry slowly moved southeastward. (8) Second, those generalizations were extrapolated to represent all of Appalachia. In both respects, a regional diversity of resources and development patterns was overlooked . The perceived homogeneity of conditions in Appalachia have...