Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870–1900

2 / Unveiling the Body: Literary Reception and the “Outing” of Charles W. Chesnutt and Mary N. Murfree

2 / Unveiling the Body: Literary Reception and the “Outing” of Charles W. Chesnutt and Mary N. Murfree Two vignettes that emerge from the offices of the Atlantic Monthly reveal the nation’s obsession with regional difference, yoking the nation’s thirst for regional authenticity to the author’s body. Both scenes demonstrate that while local-color writing may have served as leisure literature for its readers, it proved necessary for the reading public to feel as if they were reading “real” or “true” stories about the nation’s margins. This desire for authenticity, expressed by literary editors and readers of national periodicals such as the Atlantic Monthly, created and depended upon rigid narratives about region, gender, race, and the experiences of the nation’s rural populations. In short, much of what we think we know about the rural South of this era was in fact filtered through and molded by a few literary offices in Boston and New York. The publishing history of the work of two prominent southern localcolor writers, Mary Noailles Murfree and Charles Chesnutt, exhibits how firmly this aura of verisimilitude was tied to the idea of an authentic author. Part of the experience of reading local-color literature, then, was inseparable from the belief that one was reading the work of a writer who has emerged from the culture about which s/he wrote. Readers and editors originally assumed that Murfree was an Appalachian man, as she published under the pseudonym Charles Egbert Craddock, and Chesnutt was initially believed to be a white author. Tracing the reactions to their “outing”—as female in the case of Murfree and black in the case of Chesnutt—reveals how notions of an authentic, embodied author influenced the consumption of the literary work. These “outings,” the 46 / upon provincialism “correction” of their transgressions in the periodicals, reveals an anxiety about national, regional, and racial demographics, as well as what constitutes an authentic story about the fringes of US and southern culture. As Murfree and Chesnutt’s biographical and biological authorial identities shifted in the public eye, so too did the reception of their work. I am not suggesting an absolute and undeniable link between the careers of Murfree and Chesnutt. Their different literary and political trajectories diverge in significant ways. Yet, the demands and imperatives of the cultural climate of the 1870s and 1880s, and by extension the literary tastes of the era, exert similar pressures on these authors. Both of these literary outings1 —Chesnutt’s forced racial outing and the frenzy surrounding Murfree’s disclosure of her gender—reveal the nation’s desire for authenticity in its writing about the South. A significant portion of the allure of this writing depended on a “real” southern author. For this reason, the authors’ biographical and biological “truths” become key components of the reception of their work. Whether Murfree’s stories of Appalachian ruggedness were written by a man or woman, by a mountaineer or outsider, and whether Chesnutt’s stories of the color line were written by a black or white author, determined for many readers the value and meaning of those stories. I am using the term “outing” in this context because I believe Murfree and Chesnutt’s experiences resonate with twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury debates about “coming out of the closet” for gay people, about the whens and whys of making visible the invisible. It also invokes the arguments for and against the outing of reluctant volunteers. In addition , the term signals both the power of proclaiming one’s marginalized identity (as queer or female or black) and how the revelation of this information can be stigmatizing in a public forum. Placing these two cultural moments in dialogue allows us to see both the 1880s and the present through different lenses. The parallels between Murfree and Chesnutt’s “outings” are more than mere coincidence. They expose a deep cultural apprehension about ideas of difference, exposing social fears about the invisibility of the markers that demarcate this difference. In other words, the anxiety revolves around the aspects of identity that society feels are crucial to understanding people but that cannot be encoded in physical appearance , and thus made easily recognizable. Part of the anxiety behind homophobia involves the belief that gay people can infiltrate “normal” society before they are identified. This same fear motivates much of the discussion around the outing of Murfree and Chesnutt. unveiling the body...