Dear Appalachia: Readers, Identity, and Popular Fiction since 1878 by Emily Satterwhite (review)

Like many studies on Appalachia before it, Dear Appalachia: Readers, Identity, and Popular Fiction since 1878 maintains that the concept of Appalachia is an ahistorical, stereotyped fabrication that has been maintained through commercial processes and various forms of cultural symbolism. For author Emily Satterwhite, this symbolism can be seen in nine national best-selling novels set in Appalachia that added legitimacy to the idea of an “authentic Appalachia” during the times that those novels were authored. However, Satterwhite is not merely interested in the narrative representations of Appalachia in the novels. Instead, in an innovative methodology, she maps “reception geographies” out of fan mail and reader responses to the books to study how people have constructed a regional perception of Appalachia, based on their own geographic location, since the 1870s. These geographies take seriously “the relationship between each individual and each individual text, the consequences of that relationship for each reader, and the potential consequences for that relationship for regional residents and the politics of culture” while, at the same time, recognizing that the texts have meant “different things for readers in different times and locations” (p 229).

Dear Appalachia is divided into five chapters followed by a conclusion. Beginning in 1878, the first chapter covers familiar territory in the Gilded Age by highlighting local writer Charles Egbert Craddock who, to the astonishment of many, turned out to be a woman named Mary Noailles Murfrees. Due to Murfrees’ masculine, adventurous prose that encompassed the frontier attitude prevalent among middle-class males at the turn of the century, small town readers and other writers backed the authenticity of Murfree’s writing and her ideal version of “pure” mountain life as depicted in her 1884 novel In the Tennessee Mountains. In other words, during the Gilded Age, white, male metropolitan/urban readers linked Murfree’s writing to the masculinity that was perceived missing from their lives and that was succumbing to the feminizing effects of the emerging managerial class and the industrializing market economy. Thus, as urban men were actively pushed to engage in masculine activities such as hunting, fishing, and camping in order to recapture their savage roots, Murfree’s In the Tennessee Mountains captured the myth of a primitive Appalachia untouched by the advance of industrialization and immigration. Outside of rural Appalachia, the region was perceived as an idealized, nostalgic frontier isolated from the rest of the capitalist world.

Chapters two and three bring Satterwhite’s analysis into the 1950s via John Fox Jr.’s The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908) and novelist Harriet Simpson Arnow’s The Dollmaker (1954). In both cases, Satterwhite categorizes readers’ identities as local, national, or transitional based on the reviews and fan letters that revealed their social, geographical, and historical circumstances. With the exception of those locally categorized that were offended by Fox’s rendering of feuding Appalachian residents resistant to law and order, each group expressed a different romantic version of Appalachia based on their socioeconomic circumstances. For example, for middle-class readers (academic and casual) who had migrated out of Appalachia to seek new lives in northern cities, Fox’s and Arnor’s writings were deemed authentic accounts of mountain life that fostered within them a sense of empowerment, nostalgia, and place. This, according to Satterwhite, is based on their regional displacement and romantic identification with the characters and visualizations of their former homes.

Chapter four, “City to Country,” constructs reception geographies around reader responses to Catherine Marshall’s Christy (1967) and James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970) and is Satterwhite’s best work. For Satterwhite, the novels are indicative of the perceived demarcation between United States modernity and Appalachian mountain wilderness. As Deliverance author James Dickey writes of his modern explorers entering the Georgia backwoods, the “change was not gradual; you could have stopped the car and got out at the exact point where...