Hillbilly Talk: Southern Appalachian Speech as Literary Dialect in the Writings of Mary Noailles Murfree

Hillbilly Talk: Southern Appalachian Speech as Literary Dialect in the Writings of Mary Noailles Murfree by JOE NICKELL ^ One of her stories, "The Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove, has been described as "the touchstone of all local color writing on southern Appalachia" (Higgs and Manning, p. 133). And of her book in which that story appeared, it has been said that the year of its publication may be called the annus mirabilis in the history of the mountain people in fiction, for 1884 definitely marks the time at which the Southern mountain people had become generally recognized as a people possessing their own idiosyncrasies, and not to be confused with other southern types. (Cratis Williams in Higgs and Manning, p. 132) Given the historic significance of Mary Noailles Murfree's local-color writings, together with Paul Hull Bowdre, Jr.'s observation that the local colorists of the late nineteenth century sought "to provide an impression of the actual sound of the speech of their characters" (p. 182), one may well wonder how well Murfree succeeded in representing the regional dialect of southern Appalachia. The question is all the more important given the rather mixed reviews her dialect writing has prompted, including the changed opinion of Charles Forster Smith who was once highly critical of her localisms but who later ranked her among the best such writers in the South (Smith in Carey, 37 p. 52). In order to attempt an objective assessment of Murfree's use of dialect, we must first briefly consider the subject of literary dialect itself. The definitive study in the field is Sumner Ives's "A Theory of Literary Dialect," first published in 1950, that largely dispelled some earlier (1925) notions of George Philip Krapp. Krapp had assumed there was both a standard American speech and a uniform, non-standard "dialectal" speech which he termed "low colloquial." But whereas Krapp felt that dialect writers essentially relied on the "low colloquial," Ives (p. 149) stated that, in developing his theory, ...I have assumed that the authors of literary dialects have been seriously concerned with the validity and justice of their representations; consequently, I have based my analysis on an examination of the actual practices followed by the authors, and I have generalized from the practices rather than from a hypothetical concept of perfection. Ives pointed out that writers attempting to represent dialect were limited by certain constraints: the difficulty of representing true phonetic values with English spelling; the necessity of using one's own regional pronunciation as a 'standard'; a tendency to generalize "so that the literary dialect is likely to be more regular in its variants than the actual speech which it represents"; and a reliance—to a greater or lesser degree—on so-called "eye dialect," phonetic spellings of features everyone uses, employed by the writer as "a sort of visual signal to the reader that the dialect speaker is not literate." (The latter is the subject of a more recent—1964—study by Bowdre, "Eye Dialect as a Literary Device.") Krapp had pointed out that "it may be safely put down as a general rule that the more faithful a dialect is to folklore, the more completely it represents the actual speech ofa group ofpeople, the less effective it will be from a literary point of view" (Krapp in Bowdre, p. 179). Ives provides this additional assessment: To the extent that an author relies on this purely visual dialect, he can be said to be deliberately overstating the ignorance or illiteracy of his characters. Some of it, however, seems to be inevitable even in the most carefully done literary dialect. In fact, some of it actually facilitates the reading. (p. 154) The extent of an author's reliance on eye dialect and the degree of his faithfulness to a region's true speech—in terms of pronunciation, grammatical features, and vocabulary—represent objective criteria which can obviously facilitate critical judgment of a ballad or play, story or novel. In addition, as 38 Ives observed (p. 177): ...if it can be decided that a particular author is, in general, reliable, it is possible that his literary dialect will supply details, especially in vocabulary and...