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Romancing Whiteness: Popular Appalachian Fiction and the Imperialist Imagination at the Turns of Two Centuries Emily Satterwhite The ancestry of our mountain folk is . . . almost wholly Revolutionary and British. . . . [T]he “leading families” of the mountains are clearly sharers in the gracious influences which formed the English and Scottish people. . . . [The mountaineer] certainly belongs to the category of the “native born.” . . . And while in more elegant circles American families have ceased to be prolific, the mountain American is still rearing vigorous children in numbers that would satisfy the patriarchs. The possible value of such a population is sufficiently evident. —William Goodell Frost, 1899 Appalachia, a region of the United States often understood as coterminous with the southern portion of the Appalachian mountain range, has served as both a symbol of quintessential American whitenessandasaproxyforunderstandingandmanaging “group-baseddifference .”1 In the geographical imagination of middling and elite white Americans at the close of the nineteenth century, Appalachia represented a bounded, isolated reservoir of racially “pure” white Americans whom William Goodell Frost observed were oddly “behind the times” (311). Anglo elites understood true “Americanness” as linked to whiteness and British ancestry. When northeastern urban elites feared immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe would overrun “their” country, they looked to Appalachia as a source for nativeborn Americans of “creditable” Revolutionary War–era ancestry purportedly uncontaminated by contact with foreigners, Negroes, or the Emily Satterwhite 94 institution of slavery (315). The supposed existence in the southeastern mountains of a pool of desirable “Saxon” stock served to reassure elites that their vision of America could be replenished thanks to prolific white mountain people who, according to Frost, sustained a respectable “pioneer” way of life in the face of modernity.2 Popular stories and novels in Frost’s time embraced this vision of simultaneous Appalachian whiteness and otherness. John Fox Jr. (1862–1919), author of the best-selling novel The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908), was one of the most popular early twentieth-century writers to articulate mountaineers’ group difference through racialist constructs . In popular novels published a century later, representations of Appalachia again served as both a celebration of white folkways and a case study for readers dealing with group difference understood as exotic but nonthreatening. Trade paperback novels from the latter era that linger on ethnicized Appalachian whiteness include Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1998) and Silas House’s Clay’s Quilt (2002). In parallel ways, popular fiction set in the region offered readers at both the turn to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a vision of a safely white domestic space. At the same time, Appalachia proffered the comfort or discomfort of a differentiated whiteness. White American readersmight see themselves as rightful rulers or innocent victims, or both, depending upon the degree to which they identified with mountain characters or intervening outsiders in Appalachian novels. Beginning with the local–color literary movement (c. 1868–1910), stories and essays published in middle- and highbrow periodicals constructed and drew upon an imagined geography of Appalachia as a region of preindustrial white folk. Popular fiction played a crucial role in perpetuating and molding assumptions about the supposedly irrevocable correlation between American nativity, American character , whiteness, frontier self-sufficiency, and national superiority. At the same time, popular fiction reflected and shaped elites’ conflicted attempts to articulate mountaineers’ precise social and class status. Concerns about mountain residents’ supposed ignorance, crudeness, and violence confounded elite observers’ hope that white mountain people might be models of unsophisticated salvation from modernity. Writers cast about for the appropriate language to describe mountain whites’ perceived difference. In actuality, that difference was one of class disparity wrought by the uneven development Romancing Whiteness 95 of capitalism in the postbellum southeastern mountains. But writers adopted a more ready-to-hand racial vocabulary to explain mountain distinctiveness.3 In their efforts to pinpoint Appalachia as a resource for national whiteness yet distinguish Appalachian Americans from sophisticated , elite, white readers, commentators like William Goodell Frost utilized racialized language that associated mountain residents with the barbarian tier of civilization according to cultural evolutionism. As “barbarians,” Appalachian residents were considered just one step above “savages,” who were generally understood as nonwhites. Frost worried over “whether the mountain people can be enlightened and guided so that they can have a part in the development of their own country, or whether they must give place to foreigners and melt away like so many Indians” (319; emphasis added). According to Gilded Age commentaries, mountaineers were both “us” and “them.”4 From perspectives...

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