Soft Canons: American Women Writers

Deepening Hues to Local Color: George Washington Cable and Sarah Barnwell Elliott

George Washington Cable’s and Sarah Barnwell Elliott’s often similar literary response to matters of genre and culture in the last decades of the nineteenth century underscores the urgent need for volumes such as Soft Canons, for studies investigating the limits of “separate sphere” criticism and challenging the apparently unbridgeable distances between “masculine” and “feminine ” literary traditions.1 When read together, Cable and Elliott’s work invites the critic to acknowledge the flexible connections and negotiations between these traditions, and the ways in which they are mutually appropriated and transformed. Myra Jehlen was one of the first critics to suggest reading women’s writings in the context of what she defines as the “parent tradition,”2 that is to say, in relation to canonical male texts. According to Pamela Glenn Menke, Jehlen’s model can be improved, because “Jehlen’s comparative method suggests cultural perceptions [that] appear to be powerfully arranged around binary oppositions.” Although she initially agrees with Jehlen on the “importance of shared textual form,” Menke proposes that, when comparing texts by women and men, “the basis for selection [should] rest on additional articulated moments of similarity shared by the woman writer and a male author. These shared moments may be historical, racial, ethnic, or ideological.”3 Jehlen’s suggestions provide a useful starting framework in which to discuss Cable and Elliott’s writing on the South, for the authors share a similar “textual form,” both contributing to the Deepening Hues to Local Color: George Washington Cable and Sarah Barnwell Elliott aranzazu usandizaga genre of local color or regionalism. But Jehlen’s models of comparison must immediately be expanded in order to account for Cable’s own complex dialogue with the “parent tradition,” as well as Elliott’s attempts at transforming it. Their mutual tensions with it result in their shared “moments of similarity,” often articulated in formal practices intimately connected to ideology. For example, Cable’s changes in narrative perspective in his early work on the South and his dehierarchization of authorial voice dramatically affect accepted social and aesthetic norms. Similarly, Elliott’s decision to tell her mulatto heroine’s story in “The Heart of It” from the character’s perspective forces the reader into an unprecedented process of identification with a black person. As Elaine Sargent Apthorp suggests in her study of women regionalists, “our intimacy with [the characters’] perspectives forces us to feel withthem,notmerelytoevaluatethem.”4 Suchformalchangesare the result of these authors’ “moments of similarity” in their perception — and fictionalization — of history, as well as in their understanding of social change and racial conflict. Though modernism discredited the genre of local color, in the past few years, besides inviting critics to discover the literary and cultural relevance of much forgotten writing in late-nineteenthcentury America, canon revision has also encouraged them to reread neglected genres such as local color and regionalism. Many critics believe that local color and regionalism, particularly in the South, tended to provide rhetorical models with which to sublimate regional frustration by projecting falsified memories of the past as well as romanticized illusions of the present. Some recent critics,however,havehighlightedtheimportanceofeconomicand political pressure on local color writing. According to Barbara C. Ewell, the literature of local color and regionalism in the South contributed to disguising the truths about Southern life at the end of the century because “the post-war prosperity of the United States, largely identified with the industrialized Northeast, depended on re-establishing the semi-colonial status of the South, an arrangement that was effectively accomplished after the Civil War.” But more important, “local color served to name and contain as ‘regional’ many of the disturbing differences that remained unsolved by the Civil War and its aftermath.”5 This capacity to control and mask the unsolved problems of the times made the genre immensely popular in its initial phase but destroyed it in 142 : genre matters the long run. Other recent critics who trace the origins and development of American regionalism attribute its failure to account for the true complexities of regional difference to the limitations of the poetics of realism: “Regionalism flourished under the poetics of realism. . . . the romantic yearning for cultural homogeneity is merely replaced by a realist desire to frame regions in a homogeneous, one-world ontology.”6 Nevertheless, some scholars have recognized local color and regionalism as often innovative and capable of incorporating important political and ideological dimensions...