Castle Nowhere: Lake-Country Sketches by Constance Fenimore Woolson (review)

"A region as fresh and new as any that American literature has touched." This was how Appletons' Journal described the Midwest of Constance Fenimore Woolson's Castle Nowhere. This collection of local-color fiction was published in 1875 by J.R. Osgood & Company of Boston; all but the title story had already appeared in publications such as Harper's, Scribner's, and The Atlantic. The lake country of which she wrote was both new and achingly old: new to the American literary canon and as old as its Precambrian geology.

Woolson's later novels, in particular Anne (1880)—which outsold Henry James's Portrait of a Lady, published the same year, ten to one—were extremely popular in her time, but they are little read now. Nearly 150 years after the publication of Castle Nowhere, the region she wrote about is still "fresh and new" and still largely uncharted territory on the American literary map.

Though local-color literature was popular in late-nineteenth-century America, Woolson gave the genre her own enlightened spin. According to Woolson scholar Anne Boyd Rioux (Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist, 2016), the author employed a stock local-color character—the "metropolitan narrator visiting remote regions"—as a foil to reveal "the limitations of her urbane visitors' perception." In Woolson's stories, the sophisticated outsider repeatedly underestimates and misinterprets lake-country inhabitants and is frequently confounded by the geography she or he traverses. Although often good-intentioned, these smug commentators cannot help but remind readers of a literary establishment that held (and still holds) limiting views of the regional writer in general and of the region Woolson wrote about in particular.

Meghan O'Gieblyn (Interior States, 2018) speaks of the pressure many midwestern writers feel to "ignore precisely what was most unusual and interesting about [the midwestern experience] and reach instead for images that would be easily legible to coastal readers." She reminds us that Indiana's Marguerite Young (Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, 1965; Angel in the Forest, 1944) called for midwestern writers to abjure the easily legible and to embrace "the odd, the unexpected . . . whatever is eccentric, devious, strange, singular, and out of this world." Ninety years before Young gave this advice, Woolson was already populating her Midwest fiction with strange and singular figures, like the aged grenadier on Mackinac Island who prays to a portrait of Napoleon ("The Old Agency") or the Ohio coal miner whose paintings of Old Testament queens bear the likeness of his disapproving wife ("Solomon"). Far from the expected "rustics" of stock local-color narratives, these characters and the situations they find themselves in show Woolson's understanding of the complexity and even mystery of the lake country. Mystery, as writer and critic Phil Christman said in his 2018 address to the Midwestern History Association "doesn't have to be sought— just noticed."

Indeed, it is when Woolson goes from noticing to seeking that her stories disappoint. In the novella "Castle Nowhere" (from which the collection takes its name), Woolson attempted a "purely imaginative" tale, but she wound up with a semi-gothic mess of fogs, floating castles, and a Lake Michigan more Sargasso Sea than Great Lake. Readers loved the story, but William Dean Howells declared it "disagreeably fantastical," and Woolson herself called it "far out of my natural style." The writing, she confessed, made her feel as though she were "telling a thousand lies."

When Castle Nowhere was published, Woolson, who had grown up in Cleveland, was just beginning a literary career that would burn brightly although briefly. To this day, her legacy has been complicated—and sometimes minimized—by her close friendship with Henry James, whose work she greatly admired. She didn't meet James until 1880, five years after Castle Nowhere was published. Hence, she was not writing under the critical eye of "the master," who, according to Brenda Wineapple had a "negative effect on [her] later, flatter work" (New York Times, 6...