Dear Appalachia: Readers, Identity, and Popular Fiction since 1878 (review)

Emily Satterwhite, in the appropriately titled Dear Appalachia, develops a substantive understanding of how the reading public, from 1878 to the present, interprets best-selling novels about the southern mountain region. And the author’s methodology–what she terms “reception geographies”–is as intriguing as what she discovers.

Through a rigorous study of both readers’ reception of regional fiction (through fan mail) and their geographical relationship to Appalachia (inmigrants, out-migrants, regional elites, tourists, and missionaries), the author comes to a surprising conclusion: contemporary readers of “Appalachian-set” fiction have interpreted the region in much the same way as those who indulged in best-selling Appalachian works in 1878. The similarity in the reception of readers over time, Satterwhite suggests, may be due to the similarities between the Gilded Age (1865–1890) and the Neo-Gilded Age (1981–2003, roughly) in which regional literature saw increased popularity.

The innovative methodology and the comparative study of Appalachian best sellers in two distinct but similar historical periods teases out reasons why Appalachian literature persists as a palliative to soothe national anxieties over seismic cultural, social, and political shifts. More importantly (and perhaps disturbingly), Satterwhite argues that the American reading public–regardless of their relationship to Appalachia and regardless of the historical time in which the novels were read–seeks out southern mountain fiction in order to confirm reified notions that Appalachia is a static place isolated from modernity’s advancements and its attendant problems. Readers also consistently go to Appalachian-set stories to bolster deep-seated desires for corroboration of an “authentic” regional or local identity and to reaffirm white ethnic difference–and thus power–in an increasingly pluralistic world.

The study is limited to six novels that are defined as “best-selling,” either because they sold widely and rapidly in a time when there were not best-seller lists, or because they appeared on a best-seller list, as published by the New York Times or Publisher’s Weekly. The novels include: Mary Noailles Murfree’s In the Tennessee Mountains (1884), John Fox Jr.’s The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908), Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker (1954), Catherine Marshall’s Christy (1967), James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970), Jan Karon’s At Home in Mitford (1994), Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1997), Adriana Trigiani’s Big Stone Gap (2000), and Silas House’s Clay’s Quilt (2001).

While the novels under consideration are starkly different stories in their own right, Satterwhite nonetheless shows how readers respond to these fictions in startlingly similar ways. Whether examining responses to John Fox’s pejorative representation of mountain people in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine or letters written in support of Silas House’s celebratory representation of the people in eastern Kentucky in Clay’s Quilt, readers tended “to view Appalachia as whiter than the South but more questionably white than New England or the Midwest, less foreign and more rural than “Cajun” New Orleans, and poorer and more downtrodden than the West” (19). This tendency to essentialize and exceptionalize the place and people of Appalachia satisfies the insatiable postmodern appetite to consume what is perceived as authentic, to engage “the real thing.”

Satterwhite expertly handles the trifold job of unveiling authorial relationships to the region (which frequently challenges the perceived readerly desire to connect with an “authentic” Appalachian storyteller), critiquing the fictional story lines (which utilize common and oft-repeated mountain literature tropes, figures, and themes), and examining readers’ responses (which are remarkable in their consistency over time)– all in the service of showing us the cultural work that is performed between fiction writers, fiction readers, and the too comforting social imaginaries these interactions create.

Dear Appalachia has the markings of a landmark study. It advances not only our understanding of how Appalachia continues to be a created and malleable concept that serves the political and identity needs of the American public, but it also gives scholars a new methodological tool to peer into the...