Philip Joseph
In 1932, author, environmentalist, and feminist Mary Austin published “Regionalism in American Fiction,” an essay that speaks to both the difficulty and, for many writers and critics, the urgency of defining American regional literature. Austin encouraged her readers not to flinch “from the task of competently knowing, not one vast, pale figure of America, but several Americas, in many subtle and significant characterizations” (Austin 1932: 98). Austin’s exhortation to know the literature of “several Americas” reveals that regionalism, more than most literary classifications, depends on variation and multiplicity within its generic borders. In order to have regionalism in literature, we must have the potential for writing of the South, New England, the Desert Southwest, the Midwest, the Pacific Coast, and so on, each with its own distinctive attributes. By definition, literary regionalism exists only when writing can be pluralized. At the same time, Austin’s impulse to define the category specifically in terms of its Americanness reminds us that variation has its limits. For Austin and for all subsequent writers and critics who use the term either positively or negatively, differences exist under conditions of likeness. Kinship between geographical varieties allows us to speak of them collectively, in groupings that transcend the local placement of individual texts.
The history of regionalism as a critical category revolves around this unresolved opposition between geographical variation within and likenesses across the tradition. If we are to add to the discussion, we must inevitably answer questions that help to make sense of that tension: To what extent do we grant advocates of regionalism, such as Austin, the diversity and the regional autonomy that they seem to be claiming? Is regionalism’s attention to local differences within American life instructive and redeemable at all, or is it merely an obfuscation of a nationalist project or a reactionary politics? Is it possible to identify a common geographic space or a common system of values underlying regionalism’s claims of diversity? Or might we be better off breaking up the tradition into ideologically defined groups or non‐national geographic areas, each with its own internal variation? These are some of the questions that continue to roil the discussion as critics try to resolve and redirect regionalism’s twinned commitments to geographical variation and to common spaces and projects.
As the starting point for a synthesis of regionalism’s mid‐twentieth‐century history, Austin’s article is significant for a number of reasons. First, it allows us to see the concrete exclusionary effects that inevitably enter into discussions of regionalism’s capaciousness and diversity. At the end of her article, Austin famously writes Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) out of the regionalist tradition, arguing that “[t]he hero is […] a Frenchman by birth, a Catholic by conviction and practice, a priest by vocation, there is little that New Mexico can do for him besides providing an interesting backdrop against which to play out his missionary part” (Austin 1932: 105). While Austin points to Cather’s problematic celebration of the French Jesuit administrative control over the region, she also writes of “New Mexico” as if it were a stable spatial entity, with fixed and unchanging borders. Austin, we might say, responds to US territorial expansion in the Southwest by imagining New Mexico, an American state, in an unaltered precolonial form. In Cather’s work, by contrast, New Mexico appears to us in the guise of a place formed by history, contingent for its identity on the collision of US territorial expansion, French religious administration, Native American societies, and Spanish–Mexican border cultures. Cather’s fictional history invites us to see New Mexico as unfinished and in flux, and as taking on a coherent regional profile only as a result of its colonial past. Cather places US jurisdiction over the area in a narrative of modernization and progress, overlooking the violence and coercion of the French priests. Yet in her work, focused as it is on the formation of a region rather than the protection of its identity against the acids of modernity, New Mexico is the result of decisions, force, the drawing of borders, and the attempt to synthesize colliding cultures. It does not arise naturally out of a preexisting culture, waiting to be assimilated into the national territory.
In its exclusion of Cather’s novel, Austin’s essay offers a window into the values that underlie not only her own regionalist ethos but that of a wide‐ranging movement in American culture during the interwar period. Described by its adherents as the “new regionalism,” in contrast to the local color of the nineteenth century, this movement identified the American region as a holdout against the standardization and artificiality of modern American life. Regions were spaces where closely knit folk cultures could thrive amidst the mass movement and alienation pervading the mainstream. The new regionalists flourished in and around a number of medium‐sized college towns and tourist destinations – Santa Fe, New Mexico, home of an artist colony that included Austin; Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where sociologist Howard Odum held sway; Norman, Oklahoma, the adopted residence of folklorist B.A. Botkin; Nashville, Tennessee, center for the Southern Agrarians who wrote the pro‐southern manifesto I’ll Take My Stand (1930); and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, headquarters of Robert Penn Warren’s Southern Review. As Robert Dorman (1993) has described, the movement’s common object of attack was American modernity. The idealized region offered an alternative way of life, whereby individuals were settled rather than uprooted, fully integrated into distinctive communities rather than isolated within mass networks of communication.
For some literary critics, the core value system articulated so clearly and often stridently by the new regionalists is, in fact, the system that underlies all of regionalism’s history. Roberto Dainotto, for instance, has argued that while the regionalism promoted by writers like Austin purports to reflect distinctive local places, it actually gives us the same fantasy of premodern community over and over again. In reaction to a modern urban reality that is radically diverse and heterogeneous, regionalism, according to Dainotto, offers up the ahistorical fantasy of “cultural homogeneity” (Dainotto 2000: 20) at the local level. Tom Lutz also collapses together regionalists of many stripes, although he does so by foregrounding not the reactionary politics embedded in the movement, but rather its larger commitment to diversity and inclusiveness, its “ethos of cosmopolitan openness to difference” (Lutz 2004: 14). For Lutz, despite attempts by each wave of regionalism to differentiate itself from predecessors, the movement is actually quite uniform. The common embrace of cosmopolitan openness overrides contradictions that might divide up the tradition. While the two critics differ considerably in their respective approaches, they share a belief that regionalism is remarkably consistent. In the one case, regionalism’s commitment is to a quasi‐fascist vision of social purity, in the other, to democratic inclusiveness.
For those who see the tradition as viable, although compromised in some of its forms, any attempt to engage regionalism’s instances requires sorting through and comparing the different value systems and geographic scales at play. I want to suggest that many of the current approaches to regionalism are both comparativist, in the sense that they assume significant differences between groups of regionalist texts, and presentist, in the sense that they actively seek to reformulate the tradition so that it can furnish models of locality and diversity for current readers and writers. The type of comparative rubric that I have in mind, and that characterizes so much of contemporary criticism on regionalism, looks at the tradition through a variety of critical lenses, shaped by theories of feminism (Fetterley and Pryse 2003), civil society (Joseph 2007), architecture and planning (Reichert Powell 2007), nationality (Bramen 2000; Glazener 1997; Jackson 2005), and cultural geography (Giles 2011; Hsu 2010). These angles lead to the privileging of different writers and different texts. What they share, however, is a belief that regionalism is alive and well in the contemporary world, provided that we engage in a selective way with the persistent attention it gives to local differences. The crucial thing is to inquire into the specific features characterizing and differentiating life at the local level (geography, dialect, the gendering of values, etc.), as well as the approaches that writers take to situating this life within encompassing territories and networks.
Twentieth‐century regionalism lends itself to this selective approach because its production and consumption are not nearly as concentrated as they are in the late nineteenth century. As Richard Brodhead (1993) has shown, a significant amount of late nineteenth‐century “local color” fiction was published in three major monthly magazines of the period (The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Monthly, and The Century). Editors of these magazines chose fiction, and exerted pressure on writers, in accordance with the tastes of an urban class of readers seeking to establish their class status and national centrality. Local color offered these readers touristic encounters with populations at the margins, envisioned as vestiges from an early stage of the nation’s development. In contrast to the tight institutional framework of the late nineteenth century, regionalism’s publication history in the twentieth century is much more diffuse, with “little magazines” in the South (The Fugitive and The Southern Review), the Midwest (Reedy’s Mirror, The Little Review, Poetry, The Midland, The Prairie Schooner), and the Southwest (New Mexico Quarterly Review and Southwest Review) all offering to connect writers from the underrepresented fringes to a literary marketplace broken up into niches.
Of the magazines mentioned above, the midwestern ones were instrumental to the careers of several writers who migrated to Chicago from small towns and formed what came to be known as the “Chicago Renaissance” in letters. Authors who participated in the movement included the fiction writers Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser; poets Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, and Vachel Lindsay; and editor‐poet‐playwright Floyd Dell. If the sense of a common geographical origin and destination was partly what gave this group its identity, even more significant was their shared opposition to centralization within American literature. Whether they were writing about the tough realities and bold renegade spirit of Chicago (as was the case for Sandburg and Dreiser) or the struggles of unorthodox characters in small heartland villages (Masters and Anderson), these writers sought to challenge the hegemony of east coast writers and editors. The objective was to open up the field of American literature to subject matter and perspectives from recently settled places, distinguished at least partly by their distance from Europe. Writers who turned their attention to the heartland and to the West were doing their part to root American literature in American soil and to realize the national ideal of “E pluribus unum.” The indigenization of American writing and its geographic diversification went hand in hand.
For Sherwood Anderson and Edgar Lee Masters, the processes of American diversification taking place at the midwestern margins were impeded by Victorian norms and by the social policing characteristic of the provincial village. Paradoxically, however, the repression of the village was itself the grounds for what Anderson described as the “grotesque” characters of his Winesburg, Ohio (1919) collection. Anderson’s story “Paper Pills,” which deals with the hidden reality of abortion and its effect on the emotional lives of both women and men, uses the metaphor of gnarled apples to capture the eccentricity that arises out of an environment of local repression: “On the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected […] Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples” (Anderson 1947: 20). Anderson sees himself as one of the “few” gatherers capable of appreciating those sweet, gnarled apples. If genteel Victorian taste tends toward abandoning the unseemly, the modernist regional writer and reader attend to the midwestern village precisely in order to find and relish it.
Because Anderson and Masters depicted the rural village as a site of Victorian repression, critic Carl Van Doren placed them at the center of what he called the “revolt from the village” school (Van Doren 1921). Van Doren argued that in the Victorian era, the rural region had been imagined as a sanctuary for besieged modern subjects, but for these new chroniclers of the midwestern village, it was a place of stifling convention. Indeed, George Willard, the central character of the Winesburg stories, escapes Winesburg at the end of Anderson’s collection for the more liberated space of the city. What Van Doren’s emphasis on “revolt” misses, however, is the return to the village implicit in Anderson’s collection. While George Willard leaves Winesburg to escape the pressures of conformity, Sherwood Anderson returns to gather those valuable, neglected, gnarled apples that are themselves the organic products of local soil.
From a comparativist standpoint, Anderson offers a quite different vision of national diversification relative to the new regionalism taking root in places like Santa Fe and Nashville. What Austin was celebrating, often by strategically utilizing the Native American community as a model, was a communitarian ideal, whereby collective norms and responsibilities grew organically out of a natural environment and the properly settled individual subordinated herself or himself to group norms. For their part, Anderson and Masters placed the individual who deviated from group norms at the center of the locality. For the one type of regionalist, national diversity rested in the autonomy of the local community; for the other, in the autonomous expression of the local misfit.
While the common embrace of diversity connects Anderson and Masters to the new regionalists, their very different visions of both local community and the nature of American plurality point to a significant division within the tradition. John Steinbeck’s portrayal of California’s Salinas Valley and Monterey Bay communities provides yet another occasion for comparing interwar regionalisms. On a certain level, Steinbeck’s work stretches the approach to regionalism implied in this essay, insofar as his most acclaimed novels, Grapes of Wrath (1939) and East of Eden (1952), cover vast tracts of national territory rather than remaining fixed on a specific locality. Grapes of Wrath maps the journey of a migrant laborer family from dust bowl Oklahoma to the Salinas Valley, whereas East of Eden links the Salinas region to New England. In both cases, Steinbeck seems motivated to write a “great American novel,” of a size and scope commensurate with American territory and the migratory nature of American life. Regionalism, on the other hand, tends to explore life within a relatively limited area, albeit an area with inevitable links to the outside world. From an aesthetic standpoint, regionalism has often defined itself in terms of realism and the close, at times ethnographic, study of a local group. By scaling down, the writer achieves a more accurate representation of the place and culture, or so the argument goes. For the committed regionalist, in other words, adequate coverage of American diversity usually requires a piecemeal approach rather than an overarching attempt to get at the multiplicity of collective life all at once.
Despite the scope of the two novels mentioned above, however, Steinbeck’s work belongs in a discussion of interwar regionalism for two reasons. First, Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945) do indeed focus narrowly and intensively on the communities of Monterey. Second, and perhaps more interestingly, those novels that follow migrant characters return us, time and again, to the same locality of coastal California that Steinbeck examines throughout his career. Steinbeck’s work reminds us that the classification of a text as regionalist often depends not simply on the geographical scale of the text itself, but also on the geographical focus of a writer’s oeuvre over time. More to the point, his kind of regional focus presents us with the paradox that a truly penetrating exploration of coastal California will – as a result of the migratory trends that envelop the region – take the researching writer well beyond his local place. The fact that Steinbeck continues to examine coastal California communities in narratives that exceed the local world tells us something about both his area of focus and the kind of modern group formations that he privileges.
Through Steinbeck, we begin to see how migration has frequently defined the identity of the far West as a region – how the western regional writer faces, as almost a condition of writing, a need to reconcile the desire to settle with the attraction of leaving. Steinbeck’s organic metaphors (much like the apples of Anderson) are telling in this respect. In the short story “The Chrysanthemums” (1938), for instance, Steinbeck’s protagonist Elisa Allen lives on a small farm in the Salinas Valley, tending to her flower garden while her husband manages the cattle business and apple orchards. Elisa has “planters’ hands” (Steinbeck 1995: 11) – a talent for growing things – but a particular affection for and skill with chrysanthemums, a flower that she appreciates specifically because it thrives on being transplanted. Her identification with this flower, we learn, reflects her own concealed desire for movement, change, greater challenge, and a wider sphere of influence. When a traveling repairman, on the road from Seattle to San Diego, passes by the farm and mentions a lady he knows who desires chrysanthemum seeds (part of an effort to swindle Elisa out of a pot), she thrills at the idea of giving her own sprouts to the salesman, who can then pass them along to the unknown lady. If Elisa cannot herself escape the domestic limits of her own farm, she can at least do so vicariously through the chrysanthemum sprouts. What makes them so felicitous for her is their size, strength, and beauty under novel conditions. Much like her imagined self, chrysanthemums grow best at a distance from their point of origin.
The propensity for migration and re‐rooting is embedded in the natural world for Steinbeck. In chapter three of The Grapes of Wrath (1939), he creates a character out of a slowly moving turtle crossing a highway – a character whose entire ecosystem is shaped and reshaped by the natural inclination toward relocation, with one organism serving as vehicle for another: “sleeping life waiting to be spread and dispersed, every seed armed with an appliance of dispersal” (Steinbeck 1992: 14). Both mover and moved, the primordial turtle carries seeds along with him as he is knocked to the far side of the highway’s embankment by a passing car, but not before he leaves “three of the spearhead seeds stuck in the ground” (16), dragging dirt over them. Journeys end at least temporarily, seeds adapt themselves to soil. Out of this environment, both diasporic and conducive to settlement, comes Tom Joad, carrier of the turtle, who himself depends on others for movement as he journeys toward his temporary home in the Salinas Valley.
What matters here is the unique approach to place, to regional difference, that distinguishes Steinbeck from other regionalists. Characters take root, much like the seeds, but inner drives and the material forces of history are constantly pulling at those roots, prefiguring the next home of the characters. It might be tempting to say that Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row are exceptions to the rule insofar as they offer examples of sedentary Monterey communities. But even here, as Steinbeck holds up what he called the human “phalanx” or group formation as an alternative to American individualism, he also accents the moving parts in the local ecosystem. There is, in other words, nothing autochthonous about Steinbeck’s coastal California characters, who are part of an interdependent local world while maintaining a predisposition toward migration.
A similar compulsion to construct a western regional identity that accommodates the reality of movement pervades the work of Wallace Stegner. Stegner dedicated his career to providing a deep and extensive representation of the entire North American West. He understood his own life as exemplary of this wider region specifically because it took its shape from the condition of movement. “Like many western Americans, especially the poorer kinds,” he writes, “I was born on wheels” (Stegner 1992a: 3). In his breakout novel, The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), Stegner tells his own paradigmatic story of western relocation, tracking the Mason family’s movement from Minnesota and the Dakotas, across the northern border to Canada, then back south again to Montana, Salt Lake City, and Nevada, all in pursuit of the father Bo’s mythic dream of an autonomous future of wealth and relative ease. Although Bo’s quest takes a terrible toll on the members of the family, Stegner never disavows the experience. Out of a history of migration – a history both personal and collective – comes the deep appreciation of place, and indeed the desire to protect it from mindless overconsumption, that Stegner is known for. Looking back at his own novel, he conflates the departure of Bruce Mason (son of Bo) from Saskatchewan with his own experience of departure from the same region: “In the very thrill of leaving, it struck him – me – all of a sudden what he and I were leaving” (Stegner 1992a: 12). The fusion of motion and deep attachment defines the representative western life: “It is not an unusual life‐curve for Westerners – […] to go away for study and enlargement […] and then to return to what pleases the sight and enlists the loyalty and demands the commitment” (Stegner 1992a: 20–21).
The migration that interests Stegner is sometimes out of the West, but more frequently within its vast space. Characters move from one place to another, simultaneously mourning the place of departure and developing attachments to new localities. In Stegner’s work, region is always variegated; to call oneself a westerner is implicitly to accept and embrace a multiplicity of homes within an encompassing territory. Yet this multiplicity of place within region also has its limits. Just as Austin invoked a common national border surrounding the literature that she discussed, Stegner gives his transnational, multicentered West an identity, joining together places as varied as Saskatchewan, Salt Lake City, and Santa Fe through an emphasis on the unifying ecological trait of aridity: “despite all the local variety, there is a large, abiding simplicity […] Aridity, more than anything else, gives the western landscape its character” (Stegner 1992c: 46).
Aridity also generates human interventions that alter geology, leading to “Lake Mead and Lake Powell and the Fort Peck reservoir, the irrigated greenery of the Salt River Valley and the smog blanket over Phoenix” (Stegner 1992c: 47). Implied in such sentences is the notion that life in the West has always required such human interventions – which are as natural and inevitable as the rock formations of the Grand Canyon. Stegner seeks out examples of sustainable interventions from the past, lionizing figures such as John Wesley Powell, the subject of his biography, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954). Interestingly, Powell provides an example of how to learn from the irrigation systems of Native American, Latino, and Mormon residents. Too often in western history, settlers have ignored both the fact of aridity and the adaptations of other cultures to it. As Stegner writes in his essay “Striking the Rock,” “We have tried to make the arid West into what it was never meant to be and cannot remain, the Garden of the World and the home of multiple millions” (Stegner 1992b: 78).
Anglos are questionable sovereigns in Stegner’s West not so much because they have stolen the land from people who were here first, but rather because they have managed its natural resources, and especially its water, so incompetently, rendering it inhospitable for other species and cultures. The sense of an uncertain sovereignty haunts the future of the region in Stegner’s writing. At points, he gives glimpses of a vision in which nature catches up to the arrogant, self‐deluding builders of Anglo‐American civilization. In the very title of his essay “Striking the Rock,” he gestures to the impetuous act of Moses, who, after striking the rock for water rather than speaking to it, is denied habitation in the promised land by a punishing God. Echoing the conservationist Jeremiahs who preceded him, Stegner warns of a future when the thoughtless and aggressive pursuit of water will leave the West unlivable, a no‐man’s‐land of mountain and desert. If life beyond the 100th meridian is distinctive within North America as a result of both its migratory character and its arid conditions, its future distinction may lie in its status as an ungoverned territory.
Stegner embeds a vision of history in his western regionalism, giving it moral weight through his use of religious imagery and overtones. In doing so, he reveals that writers construct regions not only by analyzing their distinctive geography, but also by situating them in time. Using a term from Mikhail Bakhtin, we can say that the identity of a literary region is inevitably a matter of its “chronotope,” the connectedness between a fictional space and the approach to time that defines it (Bakhtin 1981: 84). Bakhtin’s term recalls critic Roberto Dainotto’s polemical understanding of regionalism as a reactionary literature, “the figure of an otherness that is, essentially, otherness from, and against history” (Dainotto 2000: 9). Clearly, Dainotto’s blanket statement about regionalism’s chronotope does not match up with Stegner, a self‐declared and highly visible twentieth‐century regionalist. For Stegner, the West is arid, but this general condition of spatial difference does not lead to stasis in time. Quite the contrary, it requires radical adjustments in landscape and culture, giving rise to such geological changes as Lake Mead and Lake Powell. If history is shaped by the natural condition of aridity, the opposite is also true: nature is reshaped, for better and worse, by waves of human habitation and intervention. In his autobiography, Wolf Willow (1962), Stegner marks the innocence of himself and his fellow pioneers by describing their common belief “that a new country had no history.” In retrospect, he notes, “[t]he history of the Cypress Hills had almost as definite effects on me as did their geography and weather” (Stegner 1980: 28–29). These unconscious effects on the innocent child are the result of history’s inscription on those hills. From “grizzlies, buffalo, and Indians still only half possessed of the horse and gun […] to Dust Bowl and near‐depopulation” (29–30), history is integrally woven into place. According to Stegner’s vision, nature is shaped by history, while historical changes appear fully natural.
In Flannery O’Connor’s South, historical change unfolds just as inevitably but much less gradually – through abrupt violence and its effect on the consciousness of her southern characters. Her ethical commitment as a writer is to sudden and explosive change in a character’s way of seeing and judging. O’Connor complains that as a southern writer, she is “judged by the fidelity [her] fiction has to typical Southern life” (O’Connor 1969b: 38), objecting simultaneously to the aesthetic value of “fidelity” and the social value of typicality. For O’Connor, these two types of standards are mutually reinforcing. The more writers accept that they are reproducing the “manners and customs” of a culture, the more they reify the conventional appearances on the surface of life, and the more they ignore “the deeper kinds of realism” (O’Connor 1969b: 40, 39) that emerge in literature through the mode of the grotesque. O’Connor’s fictional world is full of characters who embody the traditional values celebrated by the Southern Agrarians. One thinks instantly of the grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1955), whose “collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace” so that “[i]n case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady” (O’Connor 1983c: 11); or, in “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (1965), Julian’s mother, who wears hat and gloves to her weight reduction class and tells her son “to remain what you are […] Your great‐grandfather had a plantation and two hundred slaves” (O’Connor 1966: 6). In O’Connor’s work, these are figures who will be wrenched out of their complacency and their superficial belief system by an unexpected violent action.
The shallow beliefs of these “typical” southern characters involve not only ideas about proper etiquette and wholesome living, but also assumptions about race, gender, and class hierarchies, passed along immutably through the generations. In other words, these kinds of characters tend to accept a worldview according to which individuals are born into a social station that defines them for life. Thus, the fragile identity of Julian’s mother as a southern lady is tied to her equally fragile belief in young black boys as grateful recipients of her pennies; while Mrs. Shortly in “The Displaced Person” (1955) fears the foreigner Guizac not only because she cannot “place” him in her own regional world, but because “he shook [the hands of black laborers] like he didn’t know the difference, like he might have been as black as them” (O’Connor 1983a: 214). O’Connor expresses her deeply Catholic vision through the blindness of characters clinging to an old regional order: What these characters miss is the underlying mystery of human lives, together with the deep connection between souls that has been blocked by the habit of social classification.
The regional environment renders this faith in social station – and in the conventions that accompany it – entirely precarious, poised on the precipice of a great “Fall.” In “[t]he present state of the South,” O’Connor writes, “the things that have seemed to many to make us ourselves have been very obvious things, but now no amount of nostalgia can make us believe they will characterize us much longer” (O’Connor 1969a: 57). The South has had its false faith ripped away in the form of a cataclysmic war, giving southerners, almost by birthright, “a vision of Moses’ face as he pulverized our idols” (O’Connor 1969a: 59). O’Connor’s characters often continue to dance around their golden calf, even in its pulverized form. But they do so with the hour of reckoning approaching, when they will confront the transcendent humanity of fellow human beings.
If O’Connor tears the golden calf of the old social order away from her ostensibly “typical” southern characters, she also refuses to offer her “progressive” readership a comfortable position on the outside of the region, looking in at its sins. Aware of how the myth of a backwards South has been used by liberal America to define itself as modern, enlightened, and free of tyranny, she populates her fiction with figures who measure their historical progress by juxtaposing it against the manners and conventions of the South’s upholders of tradition. Examples of characters convinced of their advanced historical status include Julian himself from “Everything that Rises,” who, in witnessing his mother’s racism on the bus, gets “a certain satisfaction to see injustice in daily operation” (O’Connor 1966: 12), and Joy‐Hulga from “Good Country People” (1955), who “had made it plain that if it had not been for her [heart condition], she would be far from these red hills and good country people” (O’Connor 1983b: 175). Joy‐Hulga and Julian lean on the idea of the Old South just as much as characters like Mrs. Hopewell (Joy’s mother) or Julian’s mother, although they lean on it in denial rather than positive faith. Idol worshippers themselves, they too become unhinged by the unexpected episodes that defamiliarize the South, whether in the form of a stroke that suddenly deprives Julian of his mother after she has been knocked to the street by an African American woman, or the seduction of Joy‐Hulga by an apparently innocent Bible salesman. The critic John Matthews has written that the new Southern Literary Studies explores “how the US South functioned as a disavowed Other in fantasies of national unity and purity” (Matthews 2011: 295) O’Connor exposes something similar in her fiction. Characters like Joy‐Hulga and Julian sustain and then lose their fantasy of otherness, and with it their own sense of stability. As grotesque events transpire, they reckon not only with the sudden strangeness of an individual whom they thought they knew, but with their own blindness and vulnerability, characteristics that they had previously projected onto regional counterparts. Self and other become suddenly confused for these characters, who find that they do actually live within this local world and that their identities are much less certain than they had previously realized.
In “The Displaced Person,” O’Connor uses the figure of a refugee from war‐torn Europe to comment on the feeling of displacement that pervades her entire literary region. Like the refugee Guizac, O’Connor’s white southern characters are violently uprooted, not in the physical sense of the word, but rather from an expectation of belonging and territorial consistency. When Guizac arranges a marriage between a black farmworker and his own Polish cousin who is still overseas, Mrs. Macintyre, the owner of the farm, must envision a local world where miscegenated relations take place as a matter of course. She responds by allowing Guizac to be killed by a white farm laborer, who feels his own place in the social order threatened by the hardworking immigrant. The attempt to maintain traditional order through violence ironically leads not to the restoration of Mrs. Macintyre’s familiar world, and her secure placement, but rather to her radical estrangement from a “country” she can longer claim: “She felt she was in some foreign country where the people bent over the body [Guizac’s family and a priest] were natives, and she watched like a stranger while the dead man was carried away in the ambulance” (O’Connor 1983a: 250). Southern violence, removed in this story from the familiar black–white binary, leads to the perception that the land now belongs to a non‐English‐speaking immigrant family with alien customs. Likewise, the violence turns the previously native figure into a sudden stranger in that same region. At such moments, O’Connor’s region forces itself on a character’s perception as something no longer identifiably southern or American, discontinuous with the past and with the surrounding national space. Her southern characters experience a dislocated place and future, impossible to describe or to predict with any certainty.
By challenging entrenched ideas about a region’s location in time and space, stories like “The Displaced Person” invite readers to raise questions about the nationality of important works typically classified as American regionalism. In the end, we might wonder whether O’Connor’s story undermines the organization of space communicated in a conventional map. Such readings of regionalism are central to Paul Giles’s The Global Remapping of American Literature (2011), which examines how the territorial boundaries of the United States came to be accepted as natural, and in what episodes those boundaries were made to feel uncertain and non‐determinative. Giles offers a framework for comparing not so much the small‐scale regions where stories and novels are set, but the larger surrounding spaces implied by given portrayals of locality – the geographic totalities, in other words, where the local world contributes to a general condition of diversity. In the history of American regionalism, the major surrounding sphere in which a given locality participates often turns out to be the US national territory. Giles notes that in many instances, “the relationship between the local and the national becomes self‐allegorizing, in the sense that the value of particular places – Willa Cather’s Nebraska or Robert Frost’s New England or William Carlos Williams’ New Jersey – are validated not by their specific local characteristics or phenomenological qualities but from their synecdochic embodiment of a national impulse” (Giles 2011: 11). Local variation, in other words, often implies the exceptionalism of American space, the many cultures contained within the one democratic territory. But Giles is of course more interested in alternatives like “The Displaced Person” (although he does not address this story), where the literary region appears to problematize the mapping of national space. Giles seeks out such examples because they better reflect our current experience of a global map in constant flux, defined by broad movements of people and capital and by contingent rather than reified borders.
By recognizing, as Giles suggests, American regionalism’s competing totalities, we open up new readings of key texts within the tradition. What happens, for instance, when we see Zora Neale Hurston’s Eatonville, Florida not simply as the first municipality in the United States incorporated by African Americans, or as the site of a rural folk community located squarely in the American South, but rather as a northern transit point for migrant laborers coming to Florida from the West Indies during the post‐plantation period? As Giles notes, Florida itself – with its Spanish history, its non‐inclusion in the Confederacy, and its appendage‐like shape refusing to conform to the smooth line of the southern Gulf Coast – invites a writer like Hurston to consider its territorial location from any number of angles. Moreover, as an anthropologist who collected West Indian practices and who was studying in Haiti while writing her most famous novel, Hurston was ideally situated to remap her hometown and state.
When we consider these contexts for the writing of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Janie’s journey into the Everglades renders her a participant in the black diasporic migrations that have historically connected Florida to the islands off its coast: “So Janie began to look around and see people and things she hadn’t noticed during the season. For instance, during the summer when she heard the subtle but compelling rhythms of the Bahaman drummers, she’d walk over and watch the dances” (Hurston 1990: 133). If this is a bildungsroman about a woman’s spiritual growth and her attempt to change a local community, Janie receives her worldly education in a space defined in large part by migrating West Indians. Like Hurston herself, who complains in her autobiography (1942) about “American negroes [with] the unfortunate habit of speaking of West Indians as ‘monkey‐chasers’” (Hurston 1996: 282), Janie too must overcome the nativist prejudices of African Americans who tease and scorn her for participating in Bahaman fire dances. Janie’s interest in Bahaman culture might also lead us to consider that Hurston gives us more than one English variant in the Everglades section. ‘Lias, one of the Bahaman boys, advises Tea Cake to leave the Everglades as the storm approaches: “Yeah man […] Ah wouldn’t give nobody else uh chawnce at uh seat till Ah found out if you all had anyway tuh go” (Hurston 1990: 147). Idioms and spellings conjure up the sound of an offshore English. Janie’s journey into the Everglades exposes her not only to the dancing and drumming of Bahaman migrants, then, but also to a range of tongues within the western North Atlantic.
According to this view of how the novel maps space, Eatonville occupies a position on the northwest fringe of an oceanic Anglophone world. Like all regionalist writers, Hurston situates her place of focus, Eatonville, in a larger context of geographic variation and multiplicity. But what makes her regionalism exemplary for contemporary criticism is how she imagines the larger container for that diversity. As suggested by the discussions of both Stegner and O’Connor, Hurston is by no means the only regionalist author who displaces a locality from the national borders established by American history, law, and custom. Through her version of Eatonville, we come to see that the sphere of diversity for regionalism is far from a given, and that alternative spheres are often as real for regionalist writers as the official borders marked on a map.
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 3 (THE LITERATURE OF THE US SOUTH).