ENG 201: Southern Literature

 

ENG 201: Southern Literature

Lesson 8: Regional Fiction
Dates: October 13, 2003

Objectives

By the end of this lesson, you should be able to do the following:

  • Describe the life and literary contributions of Kate Chopin, Joel Chandler Harris, and Thomas Nelson Page.
  • Interpret themes and other literary features of “Desiree’s Baby,” “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story,” and “Marse Chan.” 
  • Define or identify relevant terms, names, dates, and quotations.

Assignment

Read “Kate Chopin” (299-301), “Desiree’s Baby” (301-305), “Joel Chandler Harris” (288-289), “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story” (289-290), “Thomas Nelson Page” (309-310), and “Marse Chan” (310-325).

Activities        

Think Fast: Respond to the questions I assign you in classes.  These questions generally will cover objective information, such as names, dates, and terms.

 

Presentation: Regional Fiction (Professor Canada)

 

Cooperative Learning:  Discuss one of the “Questions for Discussion” with the other members of your group.

 

Discussion: During this time, we will discuss the insights and questions that have emerged during our “Think Fast” exercise, my presentation, and cooperative learning.

 

Conferences: During these one-on-one conferences, I will review some of your writing, orally quiz you on lesson objectives, and field your questions.

 

Think Again: Write your own response to one of the “Questions for Discussion.”

Identifications

Make sure you know the meaning and significance of each of the following:

  • Kate Chopin
  • “Desiree’s Baby”
  • Georgia
  • Joel Chandler Harris
  • local color
  • “Marse Chan”
  • New Orleans, Louisiana
  • Thomas Nelson Page
  • Uncle Remus
  • “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story” (1881)
  • regionalism

Resource

All American: Joel Chandler Harris features a detailed chronology of Twain’s life, study questions, and more. 

Updated October 9, 2003
© Mark Canada, 2003
mark.canada@uncp.edu
 

Introduction

In this lesson, we examine a literary movement called “regionalism,” which has connections to realism. 

Notes

Background

If the antebellum period of American history was a time of seeking and becoming, the postbellum era was a time of seeing and being. The Civil War, which ended in 1865, had largely resolved the political division between the northern and southern states, and the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 marked the fulfillment of the country's "manifest destiny," at least in practical terms. Now that the period of division and expansion was largely over, America began to take shape as its modern self: a pluralistic, industrialized, and commercial society. During Reconstruction, the period of rebuilding after the Civil War, the United States ratified constitutional amendments designed to end slavery and to secure citizenship and voting rights for black Americans. Meanwhile, women widened their role in the culture, and immigrants started to flood into the United States. Between 1870 and 1910, some 16 million people immigrated to America from Ireland, Germany, Italy, and other countries, many of them coming through Ellis Island in New York. Many Native Americans, on the other hand, remained on the margins, having been forced from their homes onto reservations. Over the course of the postbellum period, as well as the ensuing modern era, these various groups overcame Jim Crow laws, the Ku Klux Klan, and other forms of oppression and persecution on their way to entering and diversifying the American mainstream. Many of these "new" Americans helped to shape the new America by going to work in factories and stores. Despite Thomas Jefferson's early hope that America would be an agrarian paradise, the United States now was clearly an industrial and commercial country. Americans such as Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt made fortunes in the steel, railroad, and other industries. Like diversification, industrialization brought both adversity and growth as a strong labor movement developed to cope with poor working conditions, child labor, and other problems.

Some cornerstones of modern American culture were laid between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the beginning of World War I in 1914. As the modern populace and economy took shape, so did modern technology, transportation, and recreation. Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone and Thomas Edison's work in the areas of lighting, the phonograph, and the motion picture revolutionized the culture perhaps more than anything else, setting the stage for the information age to come. Similarly, the Wright brothers and Henry Ford laid the foundations for modern transportation by developing the airplane and automobile. Even many modern forms of recreation took shape as Coney Island emerged as a popular amusement park, and spectator sports--especially baseball, boxing, automobile racing, and rowing--became major forms of entertainment.

One of the major literary developments of the postbellum era was something that has come to be known as “regionalism,” or “local color.”  Like the realists, writers of regional literature often strove for authenticity.  In fact, many regionalists might be considered realists.  Capitalizing on the popularity of magazines, regionalists used details of landscape, dialect, and character to provide magazine readers in northeastern cities with a taste of life in exotic locales in other parts of the country.  Because of its distinctive dialects, mixtures of people, and more, the South was a particularly popular source of regional fiction.  Writers of this brand of fiction, however, captured very different characters and characteristics of Southern culture.  One of the best-known of these writers, Joel Chandler Harris, for example, drew on African-American culture in rural Georgia to create his famous Uncle Remus stories, such as “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story” (1881).  Hundreds of miles away, Kate Chopin portrayed life in New Orleans, Louisiana—perhaps America’s most exotic city—in short stories such as “Desiree’s Baby” (1893), as well as her novel The Awakening (1899).  Finally, Thomas Nelson Page looked back at life before the Civil War in Virginia in his most famous story, “Marse Chan” (1887).  Like Harris and Chopin, Page made extensive use of dialect, but his intentions seem different from those of other regionalists.  Rather than focusing on life as it was currently lived in one part of the country, “Marse Chan” tends to romanticize the “good old days” before the Civil War.

Questions for Discussion

1.    Race: Compare the depictions of African-Americans in “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story” and “Marse Chan.”

2.      Regionalism: How do “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story” and “Desiree’s Baby” capture life as it is lived on one region of the country?

3.      Realism: In what ways do “The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story,” “Desiree’s Baby,” and “Marse Chan” resemble realistic fiction?  In what ways do they deviate from realism?

Conclusion

In our next lesson, we will visit the Agrarians, an important group of Southern writers in the first half of the twentieth century.