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The Mountain Woman IN FACT AND FICTION OF THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY By Danny Miller PART II THE STEREOTYPE IN FICTION "Come all you young and handsome girls, Take warning of a friend, And learn the ways of this wide world, And on my word depend. I know the minds of girls are weak, And the minds of boys are strong, And if you listen to their advice, They will sure advise you wrong."! In our present decade the status of women in society is undergoing extensive evaluation. Today, women as the authors and subjects of fiction are assuming a greater importance in literary criticism than ever before; anthologies of writings by and about women are now not uncommon texts in literature, sociology and history courses in most colleges. The representation in fiction of the mountain woman, however, although it has been discussed in the works of a few literary critics, has enjoyed only secondary or peripheral attention at best. Mrs. Sidney Farr, for one, has done an admirable job of attempting to rectify this situation with her recent article on the mountain woman as she is presented in James Still's River ofEarth. In this section of my paper I would like to consider the mountain woman's depiction in fiction earlier than Still's, at a time when she had not yet assumed the stature and strength so typical of Still's Alpha Baldridge or Grandma Middleton. Specifically, I wish to discuss here the post-Civil War stories of Mary N. Murfree, who was the first writer to realistically portray the mountaineer in fiction. Mary Noailles Murfree began to publish her mountain stories in the 1870's, under the pseudonym of Charles Egbert Craddock: in 1884 she published a collection of these stories under the general title of In the Tennessee Mountains. It was through 66 these stories that Americans got their first real look at the mountain woman in fiction. The stereotype of the mountain woman which Murfree presents in these stories had been anticipated, if not fully defined, however, by some of the writings which preceded her. "Forerunners of Murfree in the field of fiction," writes Dr. Cratis Williams, "began to catch glimpses of the highlander as early as 1824. That he wasn't defined and brought into focus until after the Civil War, however, is not surprising , for he had not crystalized as a regional type distinguishable from the old hunter, the frontiersman, the ruffian of the border, or the poor white until he had been subjected to a generation of debilitating poverty and cultural despair that turned him backward in time."^ It was Miss Murfree who first presented the crystalized type to the public in literature. In her introduction to the recent edition of In the Tennessee Mountains Nathalie Wright has summarized the picture of Miss Murfree's mountaineers. They are: . . . tall and thin . . . the young men tending to be "gawky"and "awkward," the young girls "lithe" .... In countenance and general appearance they are "melancholy," "sad," "grave," and "stolid," though often the eyes of the men are "fierce" and those of the young girls "liquid." . . . Their clothing is "coarse" and homespun, the men wearing brown jeans, the women calico dresses and sunbonnets .... Miss Murfree 's mountaineers are also typed mentally, being variously called "ignorant," "untutored," "untaught" and "primitive."3 Indeed, Murfree did much in her fiction, as Robert J. Higgs states, to fix in the public imagination the image of the mountaineer as "primitive, untutored, and quaintly barbaric."4 Murfree's short stories were an outgrowth of the realistic movement in literature, "an attempt at authentication and preservation of the picture of life in various parts of America threatened by progress,"^ but, as Higgs points out, Murfree's work was in the main "closer to the romantic tradition than to the realistic."" Murfree 's picture of the mountain woman was romantically stereotyped, and the mountain woman as she was depicted in Murfree's fiction shares much with the sociological explorations of the mountaineer of about the same time. Like Mrs. Sidney Farr, who chose to present an old woman, a mature woman, and a young girl in her paper dealing with the mountain women...

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