The Columbia History of the American Novel

claim to a common inheritance.' The decentralization -250- of literature contributes to solidifying national centrality by reimagining a distended industrial nation as an extended clan sharing a 'common inheritance' in its imagined rural origins.

The celebration of regional difference has several contradictory functions in the national agenda of reunion. On the one hand, regionalist fiction expands the boundaries of the imagined community and democratizes access to literary representation, which can be heard in the multivocal introduction of the vernacular through the dialect of different regions. On the other hand, regionalism contained the threatening conflicts of social difference, just as dialect itself bracketed the speaker as uneducated and inferior to the urban narrator with his standard English. This hierarchy structured the conditions of literary production for regionalist writers as well, who were published by a highly centralized industry located in Boston and New York that appealed to an urban middle-class readership; this readership was solidified as an imagined community by consuming images of rural 'others' as both a nostalgic point of origin and a measure of cosmopolitan development. By rendering social difference in terms of region, anchored and bound by separate spaces, more explosive social conflicts of class, race, and gender made contiguous by urban life could be effaced. The native inhabitants of regional fiction could be rendered, on the one hand, as 'the folk,' the common heritage from which urban dwellers had simply moved, always available for return. Even regionalists like Garland, known for depicting the punishing conditions of a squalid Midwestern farm life, still excavated this folkish figure from the social rubble when, for example, he identifies a veteran returning to his farm as Walt Whitman's 'common American soldier.' Ironically, the commonality of the folk here is mediated through literature. In contrast to this rooted national identity, regional inhabitants could also be rendered as exotically other, with the quaint and strange customs and speech of New Orleans Creoles, for example, painted with the luster of empire. Their exoticism makes them more familiar and less threatening than the feared flood of immigrants whose foreignness lay too close for comfort in an urban context.

At the World's Columbian Exposition where Turner identified the frontier as the fundamental Americanizing influence, Garland, in his lecture 'Local Color in Fiction,' propounded regionalism as an in-251- digenous movement, undefiled by artificial foreign influence, as though Turner's receding frontier could be dispersed and frozen in timeless island communities. Although Garland claimed that 'the tourist could not write the local novel,' tourists did and could read local color fiction, which, after all, could not be read by the people it depicted. Like the subjects of anthropological fieldwork (developing as a scientific discipline in this period), native inhabitants possessed primitive qualities that made them worthy of study also and left them in need of interpretation by outsiders. Regionalism performs a kind of literary tourism in a period that saw the tourist abroad and at home as a growing middle-class phenomenon; tourism was no longer limited to the grand tours of the upper class. Regionalists share with tourists and anthropologists the perspective of the modern urban outsider who projects onto the native a pristine authentic space immune to historical changes shaping their own lives. If historical novels invent pasts, regionalists invent places as allegories of desire generated by urban centers. Yet the reader of regionalism often finds less the nostalgic escape desired than a contested terrain with a complex history that ties it inseparably to the urban center.

America's best-known regionalist, Mark Twain, started his career with an immensely popular parody of the American tourist in Europe and the Middle East, The Innocents Abroad (1869). One of the multiple meanings of 'innocence' is the tendency of tourists to sever a place from its historical context by literally ripping off specimens and souvenirs as fetishes. Yet their violent innocence makes them vulnerable to the social context they efface. This double 'innocence' of the tourist is dramatized within regional fiction by the figure of the outsider: in Jewett's unnamed urban narrator in search of a quiet retreat where she can meet her publishing deadline; in Mary Murfree's amateur archaeologist of In the 'Stranger People's' Country (1891); in Hamlin Garland's young men returning home from the city or the war in Main-Travelled Roads (1891); and most often in the narrator who comments on, interprets, and translates the life of the natives to an urban audience.

In many cases the 'region' first appears as the projection of a desire for a space outside of history, untouched by change, but this projection is always challenged by a counter story and a prior history. Jewett's narrator is disappointed to find her hoped-for retreat at Mrs. -252- Todd's too noisy, too cluttered with a complex society and social intercourse, so she retreats farther to the isolated schoolhouse to write. But she ends up abandoning her writing in order to adopt the role of listener and participant, which cedes to the local the authority to define itself through its vernacular history, conversation, natural rhythms. Yet this movement from outsider to insider oversimplifies Jewett's complex narrative, which charts a struggle between the inhabitants, who have a highly particularized cosmopolitan view of their own history based on international trade, and the narrator, whose desire it is to turn Dunnet's Landing into a place both outside history and at the origin of human history. She sees eternal childhood in the aging inhabitants, in whose lives she finds vestiges of ancient Greek myths and Norman conquerors. In these premodern analogies she can posit a common inheritance, more ennobling than the alternative view of the countryside she momentarily grasps as 'a narrow set of circumstances [that] had caged a fine able character and held it captive.' Yet to view the rural life as entrapping, as do Garland and Freeman, is not simply more realistic than idealizing it; such a response could also be seen as the projection of the outsider's desire to view his or her life as less confining, more sophisticated and 'adult.' Tourists, after all, do go home.

Most regional fiction that posits a still timeless island community is characterized paradoxically by restlessness and motion, by the repeated acts of escape and return that frame many of Garland's stories and that produce the sense of a settled space. In 'God's Ravens,' an overworked and underpaid city newspaperman moves to the country in search of regeneration, only to find an oppressively narrow small town. When he falls sick, the community rallies to his side, and he comes to appreciate its truly human generosity beyond his own caricature. Only his illness and delirium, however, can conjure this idealized image.

In response to the complexity of place, which never remains outside historical time, the regionalist often projects a more distant remote retreat. Twain dramatizes this dynamic in Roughing It (1872), which starts with an escape to the West, to the 'new and strange,' and repeats this movement again from the West to the farther West of Hawaii, which appears at first as a kind of Eden, defined simply in terms of the absence of San Francisco's complexity. But very soon -253- the Edenic landscape of the most remote islands is shown to be inscribed by the history of colonial conquest, a history itself subject to prior political struggle over interpretation, as the monument to Captain Cook demonstrates.

Other texts in less extreme ways enact this movement of receding retreat to the more remote primitive spaces. Jewett's narrator not only looks farther back in time for analogies in which to cast the native inhabitants but also restlessly seeks more remote islands to explore, as though Dunnet's Landing has become a stifling center with its own periphery, whether in the folksy domestic Green Island, or the more exotic island of Joanna, who is compared to a medieval nun. Lafcadio Hearn also depicts this infinite regression in Chita (1889), where he moves from Grand Isle to more isolated islands, only to show that none could escape either the devastating storm or the historical devastation of the Civil War, and that the reunion with the past, in the father's longing for his missing daughter, is tantalizingly close but never achieved. Hearn's career enacted this restless motion structuring regionalism, as he moved from writing of the Gulf of Mexico coast to the French Caribbean of colonial times, and finally to Japan, where he could imagine time and space meeting in his discovery of 'fairy-folk' of childlike charm and simplicity, the subject that made his career as the best-known popularizer of Japanese culture. Domestic regions are often doubled with more remote colonial spaces.

Kate Chopin has rightfully been removed by feminist critics from the confines of local color in which she made her career. Yet even The Awakening (1899) uses local color tradition against itself. Edna Pontellier, as the outsider to Creole culture, projects onto this highly hierarchical confining culture her own desire for sensuality and freedom, and she seeks more remote exotic retreats from Grand Isle to the fairy-tale-like acadian island, and ultimately to the sea. Yet her novel was so scandalous to reviewers because of its sexual frankness and also, as with later work of Chesnutt and Cable, because it deployed the local periphery to cast a critical eye on the national center in a critique of the social oppression that linked region and nation.

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, in her stories and in her novel Pembroke (1894), stayed within domestic regional boundaries while subverting them as centers of social protest. Deromanticizing small-town -254- New England, she exposes its oppressive denial of mobility and independence to women in its class stratification that controls even the remote village through its elders, its church, and collective gossip. Women protest their confining conditions and assert their independence, often paradoxically by denying desire and transforming their denial into creative power, as in 'A New England Nun,' or by turning