Regionalism and Local Color

ENG 442 – Survey of American Literature II

American Regionalism and Local Color Literature

Regional or local color literature is fiction and poetry focusing on characters, dialects, customs, and geography particular to a specific region (whether it be New England, the South, the Midwest, the West, or even the southern plantation, a subset of the genre). Influenced in many ways by Southwestern humor, it was a prevailing mode of writing between the end of the Civil War and the first part of the twentieth century.

According to the Oxford Companion to American Literature, “In local-color literature one finds the dual influence of romanticism and realism, since the author frequently looks away from ordinary life to distant lands, strange customs, or exotic scenes, but retains through minute detail a sense of fidelity and accuracy of description” (439). Richard H. Brodhead, in The Columbia Literary History of the United States, contextualizes regionalism this way: “Regionalism, the staple literary form of the postwar decades, has as its social background the draining of life from an old agrarian culture to the new cities, and the supersession of local cultures by the new national culture modern transportation and marketing opened up. But in terms of its cultural production the literature of regionalism is a product of more particularly of the high-cultural literary establishment” (474).

Some of regionalistic literature’s weaknesses may include nostalgia or sentimentality. The customary form of this mode of writing is the sketch or short story, although Hamlin Garland argued for the novel of local color. Regional literature incorporates the broader concept of sectional differences, and in many ways can be directly linked to realism. Eric Sundquist defines the difference between realism and local-color writing this way: “Economic or political power can itself be seen to be definitive of a realist aesthetic, in that those in power (say, white urban males) have been more often judged ‘realists,’ while those removed from the seats of power (say, Midwesterners, blacks, immigrants, or women) have been categorized as regionalists.” Some critics have argued that this literary movement, in chronicling the nation’s various cultural regions, helped to reunify the country after the Civil War, and that it contributed greatly to the late-nineteenth-century ideas of national identity.

Some characteristics of regional or local-color literature:

Setting: The emphasis is frequently on nature and the limitations it imposes; settings are frequently remote and inaccessible. The setting is integral to the story and may sometimes become a character in itself.
Characters: Local color stories tend to be concerned with the character of the district or region rather than with the individual: characters may become character types, sometimes quaint or stereotypical. The characters are marked by their adherence to the old ways, by dialect, and by particular personality traits central to the region. In women’s local color fiction, the heroines are often unmarried women or young girls.
Narrator: The narrator is typically an educated observer from the world beyond who learns something from the characters while preserving a sometimes sympathetic, sometimes ironic distance from them. The narrator serves as mediator between the rural folk of the tale and the urban audience to whom the tale is directed.
Plots. It has been said that "nothing happens" in local color stories by women authors, and often very little does happen. Stories may include lots of storytelling and revolve around the community and its rituals.
Themes: Many local color stories share an antipathy to change and a certain degree of nostalgia for an always-past golden age. A celebration of community and acceptance in the face of adversity characterizes women's local color fiction. Thematic tension or conflict between urban ways and old-fashioned rural values is often symbolized by the intrusion of an outsider or interloper who seeks something from the community.
Voice: It includes the use of dialect to establish credibility and authenticity of regional setting. It also is characterized by detailed descriptions, no matter how small or insignificant, that may be central to the understanding of the region.
Structure: The framed story is frequently used in the presentation of the central narrative(s), where the speaker tells of some tale he or she has heard from or about some region.

Some regional authors include Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Rowland Robinson (in the New England); Kate Chopin, George Washington Cable,

Constance Fenimore Woolson, Charles W. Chesnutt, Thomas Nelson Page, and Joel Chandler Harris (in the South); Edward Eggleston, Hamlin Garland, and James Whitcomb Riley (in the Midwest); and Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and Mary Austin (in the West)