Together by Accident: American Local Color Literature and the Middle Class

235 Pages·2008·1.61 MB·English

by  Stephanie C. Palmer

TogetherAccidentPODLITH.qxd 10/23/08 11:29 AM Page 1
Literature • American Studies P
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“Stephanie C. Palmer’sTogether by Accident: American Local Color and l Stephanie C. Palmer
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the Middle Classis theoretically savvy and historically conscientious.
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Treating travel—and the accidents that can ensue—as a literary trope r
with concrete roots in historical facts allows Palmer to revise much
of what has been said about local color fiction. Just as important,
the book also affirms the value of keeping the gap between historical
events and their literary representation: mining that distinction T
allows for a richer understanding of the ways literature interacts with
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but does not capitulate to history. In other words, the success of
Palmer’s study is no accident.” g
—Augusta Rohrbach, associate professor of
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English, Washington State University
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This fascinating account of the regional travel accident motif within h
American local color literature offers a reassessment of the cultural
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work done by authors writing during the Gilded Age. Stephanie C.
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Palmer shows how events like broken carriage wheels and missed
trains were used by local color authors to bring together bourgeois
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and lower-class characters, thus giving readers the opportunity to
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see modernity coming into contact with both rural and urban life.

Using the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, Bret Harte, William Dean A
Howells, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and others, Palmer traces the use
of the regional-travel-accident motif and how local color writers c
employed it to give critiques on class, society, and modern life.
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Exploring the themes of regional identity, modernity, and interpersonal
relationships, Together by Accidentoffers an intriguing evaluation of i
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the innovations and inconveniences associated with life during the
Together by
industrializing Gilded Age in America. e
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Stephanie C. Palmer is assistant professor in the Department of
t Accident
American Culture and Literature at Bilkent University in Turkey.
American Local Color Literature
For orders and information please contact the publisher
LEXINGTON BOOKS ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2494-9 and the Middle Class
ISBN-10: 0-7391-2494-3
A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200
Lanham, Maryland 20706
1-800-462-6420
Together by Accident

Together by Accident
American Local Color Literature and the Middle Class
Stephanie C. Palmer
LEXINGTON BOOKS
A Division of
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
LEXINGTON BOOKS
A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200
Lanham, MD 20706
Estover Road
Plymouth PL6 7PY
United Kingdom
Copyright © 2009 by Lexington Books
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Palmer, Stephanie C.
Together by accident : American local color literature and the middle class / Stephanie
C. Palmer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2494-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-7391-2494-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-3212-8 (e-book)
ISBN-10: 0-7391-3212-1 (e-book)
1. American literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Accidents in
literature. 3. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Local
color in literature. 5. Travel in literature. 6. Middle class in literature. 7. City and
town life in literature. I. Title.
PS217.A25P35 2009
810.9'355—dc22 2008034685
Printed in the United States of America
(cid:2)™
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
(cid:2)
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 Can the Genteel Writer Write the Local Novel?:
Caroline Kirkland, Eliza Farnham, and
Rose Terry Cooke 31
Chapter 2 Travel Delays in the Commercial Countryside:
Bret Harte and Sarah Orne Jewett 53
Chapter 3 Travel Delays and Provincial Ambition:
Rebecca Harding Davis and Thomas Detter 77
Chapter 4 Realist Magic in the Country and the City:
William Dean Howells 99
Chapter 5 Angry Reform from Elsewhere in New England:
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps 119
Epilogue 147
Notes 159
Bibliography 201
Index 219
About the Author 225
v

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Acknowledgments
Writing this book was mostly a solitary endeavor, but there are people and
institutions I would like to thank for intellectual sustenance, financial as-
sistance, or moral support. Cathryn Halverson remains an invaluable
source of intellectual companionship. She read the whole manuscript more
than once; without her visit to walk the Lycian Way, the book would not
have emerged as it did. The British students in my American Studies sem-
inar in fiction and film at the University of Leicester made me recognize
how deeply gender, nation, class and other identity positions shape reader
response—both to social difference within a nation and to accident motifs in
art. In the students’ eyes, it seemed characteristically American to consider
accidents to be an opportunity for optimism, agonism, didacticism, or reju-
venation. Craig Ireland and Nicholas Everett frequently urged me to write
when teaching seemed the more urgent task. Also beneficial were conversa-
tions with, among others, Alison Easton, David Faflik, Lucy Frank, Robert
Johnston, Mary Suzanne Schriber, Naomi Sofer, and Sarah Wilburn. Fergus
Bolger, Cameron Bolger, and Sandrine Berges provided moral support. Char-
lie and Rosemary Palms offered hospitality. The book evolved out of my
Ph.D. dissertation, and I thank June Howard, Jonathan Freedman, Patricia
Yaeger, and David Scobey for their intellectual direction at the dissertation
stage.
Research librarians at the University of Michigan and the Houghton Library
at Harvard advised on which materials to consult in transportation collections
and business records. Bilkent University provided a Research Development
vii
viii (cid:2) Acknowledgments
Grant for the trip to Houghton Library, Columbia University Library, and the
New York Public Library. I thank Houghton Library and Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt Publishing Company for permission to quote from the Houghton
Mifflin archives. Chapter 4 is a revision of my article, “Realist Magic in the
Fiction of William Dean Howells” in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Autumn
2002, published by the University of California Press. Chapter 2 appeared in
an earlier form as “Travel Delays in the Commercial Countryside with Bret
Harte and Sarah Orne Jewett” in Arizona Quarterly, Winter 2003, published
by the Arizona Board of Regents. I thank the presses for their permission to
reprint.
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Introduction
The running of the first train over the Eastern Road from Boston to
Portsmouth—it took place somewhat more than forty years ago—was at-
tended by a serious accident. The accident occurred in the crowded sta-
tion at the Portsmouth terminus, and was unobserved at the time. The
catastrophe was followed, though not immediately, by death, and that
also, curiously enough, was unobserved. Nevertheless, this initial train,
freighted with so many hopes and the Directors of the Road, ran over
and killed—LOCAL CHARACTER.
—Thomas Bailey Aldrich, An Old Town by the Sea(1893)
But who could have foreseen such an accident as this?
—Sarah Orne Jewett, “A White Heron” (1886)
Texts in many genres continually generate narrative by catching traveling
characters in an unfamiliar locality that is anomalous, picturesque, provin-
cial, or exotic. The specific device used might be malignant nature, faulty
technology, a human foe, or traveler error. As a result of the entrapment, the
traveling characters sometimes retreat into their own solipsism, and some-
times they accept help from local characters from a position of humility and
cooperation. The motif of the travel accident is familiar and eminently avail-
able for commodification. But it also offers itself up for many different criti-
cal analyses. The motif indexes an age-old conflict between independence
and connectedness. In different texts, it can often serve as a critique of the
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