Hamlin Garland's Under the Wheel: Regionalism Unmasking America

Hamlin Garland's Under the Wheel: Regionalism Unmasking America WARREN MOTLEY I In his regional social drama Under the Wheel (1890), Hamlin Garland sought not simply to expose the related oppressions of immigrants in the East and farmers in the West, but finally to challenge his audience's vision of American society as a whole. To appreciate the contribution Garland made to realism in the drama, critics must navigate around the depressing and regressive aspects of his later career and direct their courses to Boston in the late 1880'S and early 1890'S, when Garland spoke for literary innovation and social reform. In those years William Dean Howells praised the stories of Main-Travelled Roads (189I), Garland's best known work, for evoking "the bitter and burning dust; the foul and trampled slush of the common avenues of life: the life of the men who hopelessly and cheerlessly make the wealth that enriches the alien and the idler, and impoverishes the producer. ... "I ButGarland's innovations extended to the drama as well. As Main-Travelled Roads helped to turn fiction toward the contradictions between the myths and the real conditions of the American West, so Under the Wheel directed American drama toward the serious treatment oflower-class characters and social and economic problems. Garland wrote Under the Wheel for the 1889/1890 season of James Heme's theater company. He hoped to make it a showcase of American realism.2 Although finally Garland and Heme could not find a theater manager who would produce the radical play, Garland's regional drama influenced Heme's more successful plays and represents a step toward the distinctive qualities of American dramatic realism. As a Midwesterner, Garland struggled from the outset against the provincial connotations of regionalism. If audiences in Boston and New York perceived Western drama or fiction as a literary backwater, his work would be discounted. Fighting for his position as a writer, Garland boldly developed a WARREN MOTLEY theory to challenge this prejudice: regionalism, he proposed, was the source of all true American realism. America, he argued, was "too large and too varied to be treated adequately in one [work] or by one writer."3 A broad treatment would inevitably be superficial. Only a close examination of a limited region would probe with sufficient depth to discover the economic and social forces and the hidden values that were in fact characteristic of the whole. If writers wanted to expose the truth about the United States, they should stick to the regions they knew in their bones, for, as Garland stated in the preface to Under the Wheel, "no section of life, carefully considered, fails to present phases of shortcomings , injustices, and sufferings." The problems of the region, whether rural or urban, would unmask the problems of the larger society. Garland found the American theater especially cut offfrom native sources of material and "lost in a tumult of English melodrama."4 In Crumbling Idols, Garland's polemical contribution to the battle for realism, he wrote that " ... American drama ... has intensified and carried to the farthest absurdity the principle of dependence upon other times and countries for models" (p. 69). Audiences collaborated in this disgrace by tolerating stupidities on the stage that would "disgust them in the novel" (p. 70). Even when Americans "rose to the delineation of native scenes," Garland observed, "no landscape was remote enough or wild enough to keep out the tender English maiden and the villain in top-coat and riding-boots" (p. 69). The few plays which moved toward regionalism before Under the Wheel remained convention-bound and superficial ; they failed, as did "picturesque" regional fiction, because they were written by tourists to amuse rather than by artists compelled to tell the truth about their native place (p. 54). The only people to break through imported theatrical conventions, Garland believed, would be those few genuine regionalists whose "loyal love ... for certain local phases ofAmerican life" was so great, that in being true to their material they were able "to override, in some degree, barren conventions, and to produce lifelike groups of characters" (p. 75)· Garland's ideological conviction that "the common people ofthe nation form the sustaining...