Together By Accident: American Local Color Literature and the Middle Class (review)

Stephanie C. Palmer's Together by Accident is a rewarding reexamination of the nineteenth-century American local color tradition from the vantage point of the travel accident trope. This is a remarkable find by Palmer, who demonstrates the ubiquity of travel accidents in local color narratives and in the lives of nineteenth-century Americans.

Palmer's book reshapes the dialogue about the virtues and intentions of nineteenth-century American local color writing in powerful ways. She charts an historical genealogy of the changing face of travel and tourism from the relative exclusivity of early-nineteenth century elite traveling to its extension into the middle class and then into the working class. Along the way, she refutes recent critics who argue that local color writers view region imperialistically. Although traveling characters within a local color story are often elitist, Palmer argues, local color authors themselves portray such characters ironically. Often local colorists depict "poor villages that refuse to be picturesque among people who refuse easy legibility," so that when accidents thwart traveling characters' "expectations, intensions, or physical mobility . . . [they] are forced to become humble and hence more capable of learning about the harsh realities of provincial life." Eschewing easy generalizations, Palmer consistently notes how a traveler's implantation in a local community seldom effects a thorough democratization of the traveler's perspective.

Palmer examines the onset of regional writing in the 1840s and '50s through its decline as a formal genre in the twentieth century. Her central chapters closely read the accident trope in Caroline Kirkland, Eliza Farnham, and Rose Terry Cooke; Bret Harte and Sarah Orne Jewett; Rebecca Harding Davis and Thomas Detter; W. D. Howells and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. So many accidents occur in Phelps' fiction that Palmer throws up her hands and resorts to a three page list.

To begin, Palmer finds the origin of the local color story in the migration narratives of Kirkland, Farnham, and Cooke (A New Home, Who'll Follow?, Life in Prairie Land, and "Miss Lucinda"). Accidents in Kirkland's and Farnham's autobiographical narratives show how their Eastern heroines become humbled through literal falls, disabused of cultural pretensions to superiority over Michigan and Illinois women. By contrast, Cooke's "Miss Lucinda" shows "class divisions within rural villages or towns," signifying that a town itself cannot be read as a monolithic entity.

As travel tourism became increasingly institutionalized and market oriented, Palmer argues, Harte, Jewett, Davis, and Detter somewhat anachronistically implement narrative events of "emergency hospitality" to imagine how intimate travel encounters could "coexist with market transactions." In Harte's "Miggles," a washed-out bridge causes stagecoach travelers to spend an evening in the Sierra Madres in the home of a former prostitute. A sprained ankle and a traffic jam in Jewett's "The Life of Nancy" cause "unplanned intimacies" between East Rodney, Maine, and Boston. Detter in his semi-autobiographical sketches Nellie Brown, or the Jealous Wife dramatizes how unplanned intimacies for an African American traveling through Maryland, Washington, D.C., California, Nevada, Idaho, and Washington State are wrought with both opportunity and peril. And for Davis in Earthen Pitchers, a fatal railroad accident and a near-death by quicksand show the inextricability of coastal Delaware from Philadelphia, and the coercive marriage plots tied to these mishaps show "a difference between reading for regional commitment and reading for female self-determination."

Before wrapping up with an epilogue on the fate of the travel accident trope in the twentieth century, Palmer writes single author chapters on Howells and Phelps. Howells' fiction shows that social transformations become more provisional in the realist genre. Particularly noteworthy are the strong readings of A Hazard of New Fortunes and Annie Kilburn. Palmer argues that Howells distinguishes between middle-class "accidental entanglements" and fatal accidents that occur to his genuine social activists. Howells' realist skepticism expresses a view that social reform through accidents is fairly implausible, its democratizations at best...