The Mountain Woman: In Fact and Fiction of the Early Twentieth Centry

The Mountain Woman IN FACT AND FICTION OF THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTRY by Danny Miller Parti THE STEREOTYPE "I've got a girl at the head of a hollow, Hay, didyum, didyum dum day, She won't come, and I won't follow. Hay, didyum, didyum dum day. Old man, old man, I want your daughter, Hay, didyum, didyum dum day, To bake me bread and carry me water. Hay, didyum, didyum dum day."l The mountaineer of the Southern Appalachian region, known in earlier days as the "Southern Highlander," has interested the sociologist, historian and writer of fiction for over a century now. Since his first fully-dramatized treatment in the postCivil War short stories of Mary Noailles Murfree, and his subsequent interest to the sociologist and historian, the mountaineer had probably had one of the most notorious and degraded careers, as well as one of the most misunderstood, of any class or type of American in both fact and fiction, although many writers about the region, including Miss Murfree, tried to show him objectively and sympathetically. Yet, "of all places in America," as Robert J. Higgs writes, "none is more enveloped in misty myths than that region of the South known as Southern Appalachia .... Those who know anything at all about the area know that there are now and have always been a wide diversity of peoples and cultures within this region, but mythologizers of all stripes have either implicitly or explicitly lumped its inhabitants into stereotypes."^ It was unquestionably the mountain man who first captured the public imagination and was first mythologized and stereotyped; he has been dealt with extensively in writing. But the mountain woman was and is as interesting a subject, and she underwent the same process of typing. Even though "many of the myths and stereotypes 48 about . . . women in our society have been discredited in recent years as a result of both a critical re-examination of the underlying assumptions of earlier studies and in-depth scholarly research," as Stephen L. Fisher says, ^ the mountain woman has found it hard to shake some of the myths which surround her; she has two strikes against her: she is a woman, and she is a mountain woman. The socio-historical essays and books which began about the turn of the century to attempt an analysis of the highland culture and its people, the first and most wellknown ones written mostly by "observers" from outside the area, did much to strengthen the prevailing notions of what the mountaineer's life was like. All of these articles presented the mountain woman in a typical, stock way: she was pretty but ignorant, married young, bore a houseful of "youngens," led a life of endless drudgery often tinged with "unaccountable" or "unconscious" melancholy, became old at thirty-five, and ended her life sitting on the front porch of her cabin with a corncob pipe in her mouth and a black sunbonnet on her head. In a paper of this length 't would be impossible to cite all of the comments pertaining to the mountain woman found in these early essays, but a selective sample of statements from some of these treatises will suffice to illustrate the stereotype. William Goodell Frost, at that time president of Berea College, wrote one of the first definitive statements about the mountaineer in 1899. In his article, entitled "Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains," Frost stated: A word deserves to be said of the native refinement of many of the mountain women. The staid combination of a black sunbonnet and a cob pipe is not unusual, and the shrill voice that betokens desperation in life's struggles may be heard .... Yet there is withal a real kindliness and a certain shy modesty, and often a passionate eagerness to note points of superiority which may be imitated. Frost's "word" on the mountain woman pointed out several of the traits which were then and afterwards typically associated with her: the sunbonnet and pipe, the modesty and shyness, the "passionate eagerness" to improve her state (or at least to imitate "points of superiority"), and the desperation of her "life's struggles." This description changed little...