Regionalism and local color fiction (1865 – 1895)
Local color or regional literature
- local color or regional literature is fiction and poetry that focuses on the characters, dialect, customs, topography and other features particular to a specific region
- readers wanted to know about other sections of the country, so many writers specialized in describing places (detailed descriptions), events, manners, and even the speech of specific regions
- writers frequently used a frame story in which the narrator hears some tale of the region
According to the Oxford Companion to American Literature
- the local-color literature one finds the dual influence of romanticism (nostalgia or sentimentality, idealizing their subjects and setting) 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
Regional writers
- Bert Harte – The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Stories – region Far West
- Edward Eggleston – The Hoosier School Master – Decatur County, Indiana
- George Washington Cable – Life among the Louisiana Creoles
- Joel Chandler Harris – Uncle Remus stories – Georgia
- Thomas Nelson Page – Virginia
- Sarah Orne Jewett – Maine
- Mary E. Wilkins Freeman – rural Massachusetts
- Kate Chopin – Louisiana
Kate Chopin (1851 – 1904)
Life
- she was born in St. Louis, daughter of an Irish immigrant
- her father died when she was four, and she was raised by her Creole (descendants of the French and Spaniards who had colonized Louisiana) mother’s family
- she received convent schooling
- in 1870 she married Oscar Chopin, a cotton broker, they lived in Louisiana (New Orleans and large plantation near Cloutierville – a region whose varied people – Creoles, Cajuns, Blacks – she was later to write about
- after her husband’s death (widowed at thirty-two) she moved with her six children back to St. Louis
- Chopin died at fifty-three of a brain haemorrhage
Chopin’s writing
- At Fault – first novel (she was nearly forty years old)
- her stories began to appear in Century and Harper’s Magazine
- two collections of stories: Bayou Folk (1894), A Night in Arcadie (1897)
- working steadily from 1889 to 1901, she published two novels, thirteen essays, translations of Maupassant, poems, and over a hundred stories
- her last major work is The Awakening (1899)
- she admired woman writers of her day, such as the Maine realist Sarah Orne Jewett
- Chopin also read Maupassant Zola, and other new (scandalous) French naturalist writers
- she stopped being a Catholic and accepted the Darwinian view of human evolution
The Awakening (1899)
- it is Chopin’s masterpiece
- it shocked reviewers and readers throughout America
- in St. Louis the novel was taken out of the libraries, and Chopin was denied membership in the St. Louis Fine Arts Club
- her third collection of short stories was rejected by her publisher at the end of 1899; Chopin felt herself a literary outcast; she wrote very little in the last years of her life
- Edna Pontellier – seeks sexual and professional independence
- she withdraws from her marriage and her place in society; is her suicide a failure, tragedy or triumph?
- Edna’s suicide is an occasion for exploring consciousness; it is an act of complexity and significance
What affronted the reviewers and readers of the 1890s?
- Chopin wrote frankly about women’s emotions in their relations with men, children, and their own sexuality
- she wrote freely on the subject of sex and love
- Chopin began to bring into American fiction some of her hard-eyed observation and passion for telling unpleasant truths
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