FROM LOCAL COLOR TO

REALISM AND

NATRALISM

Harriet Beecher Stowe

(1811-1896)

She is widely known for only one book
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly

(1852)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

- The book supposedly earned its author the

famous greeting from Lincoln: “So you’re the

little lady who made this big war!”

- It sold more than 300,000 copies in the USA in

the first year and a million and a half worldwide

( national and international best-seller).

- It was translated into 22 languages during its

first decade.

- It might have altered the course of the nation.

- The book created international feeling on the

slavery issue.

- It was honored for its MORAL POWER.

Arguments held against the book:

• It is sentimental.

• Its characters are stereotypical.

• The book is escapist.

• It is overly steeped in religion, sermonising

• The book lacks sophisticated psychology

• Uncle Tom, long –suffering slave, may be

seen in as a negative character, conformist,

„don’t rock the boat”, „sucking up black

person”, the stereotype of humiliating

passivity.

• The full-blooded blacks speak dialect and are

comic figures, not allowed eloquence.

• Mulattos have more prestige.

Stowe’s book

• It is touching our hearts (and reason should follow,

general purpose of art and writing).

• The book is matriarchal- we are never free from our

earliest experiences as a child under Mother’s

tutelage. It emphasizes the value of love and morality.

• Feminists celebrated it as „matriarchal vision”. So far

strong male egos were making their way (male

advenutre, moral ambiguity).

• It gave confidance to succeeding generations of

women writers.

• The book relocates power from the government to the

kitchen.

• It is about women, women’s voices are heard, women

are talking about slavery.

• The book celebrates the family, the bonds and links

that unite people, rather then the fate of individual

self.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

is :

• A religious allegory – Tom- suffering Christ

(refuses to fight, to defend himself, and he

accepts his victim status, Eva- the great

redeemer, small girl-child, the “angel of the

house”, wants to abolish slavery, she wants to

teach slaves to read.

• Simon Legree is to break Tom, but the soul can

not be bought or possessed by another, no

matter “how salable the body is.”

• There is the principle of selling a man. Human

beigns are thought of, bought and sold as

things.
Can you own another person? Is a person is a

piece of property, a merchandise? Can you

break a family?

• Stowe knows how it is to lose a child.

• Pursuing slaves- Eliza and Harry, the child. Art is-

using the materials from one broken heart to

help protect another.(Prof. Arnold Weinstein).

• Reassemble the broken family. The black child

that’s going to escape, in a sense, becomes the living

child.

• Depiction of the evils of slavery- a careful look:

South –pro-slavery and fond of blacks
North- abolitionist and nauseated, fussy, “African”

option – going to Liberia, anxiety about miscegenation

(blacks and whites living together)

- Slavery and capitalism ( “The slave owner can whip

his refractory slave to death. The capitalist can starve

them to death. Ad to family security, it’s hard to say

which is worse: To have one’s children sold or to see

them starve to death at home.”)

Stowe claimed that:

• Uncle’s Tom Cabin was a Christian

book, written by God Himself, with
her merely His scribe.

• At the end of the book she says that

she wants to make the reader feel
right- to touch his heart, to change
behavior by moving the soul.

Mark Twain

(Samuel Clemens)

1835-1910

Mark Twain’s Life

- A child of the Mississippi River valley.
- Worked on the river as a steamboat pilot.
- Was a silver miner and journalist in

California.

- He lectured and performed on stage.
- He invested and lost $190,000 in the

Paige typesetter in 1880.

- He lost his two daughters, then his wife,

then his belief in America.

Mark Twain introduced a

new voice into American

writing:

• fresh
• impudent (mischievous, ironic)
• boisterous
• rough
• infantile
• Southern humor (grotesque, violent, and

often sadistic and racist).

• His writing clashed with the genteel New

England culture.

Twain’s First Successful Works:

• The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras

County (1867) is a collection of short stories that

show a new kind of humor in America, emphasizing

satire and exaggeration.

• Innocents Abroad (1869) is a study of the American

encounter with Europe.

• It emphasizes a distrust of Europe and is characterized

by both Philistinism and honesty.

• Americans are suspicious of Europeans.

• The narrator goes crazy trying to keep exchange rates

in his mind.

• He can’t make himself understood in restaurants.

• He has these views about Europeans:

“They always spell better than they pronounce.”
“Who is the Renaissance? Where did he come from?”

Innocence

• This seemed to be the major topic of American

literature in the decade (1865-1875) following

the Civil War.

• There had been a lot of carnage, a lot of

destruction.

• Many Americans texts were a yearning to go

back to childhood innocence, such as:

• Lowell Chandler Harris - Uncle Remus stories

(Fables for understanding race relations).

• Horatio Alger, Jr. – Ragged Dick stories (An

American boy’s successful life--an urchin at the

beginning and a company president at the end).

• Louisa May Alcott - Little Women (Four sisters

grow through adolescence).

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)

• Tom--is a prankster, a trickster who skips school

and sneaks a smoke.
Most of his adventures are done “by the book”.
Having others whitewash the fence constitutes a

perfect reversal of Ben Franklin’s pious work

ethos. Twain favors performance over labor.

• Tom and Becky--the predominant romance.
• Lost in the Cave--the initiation into adulthood.
• Injun Joe--a figure of rage and anger. He is a

native American who is humiliated and wants

revenge, but he dies in the cave, his face close to

the crack of the door. He is an outsider,

marginalized, who can’t get out.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

(1884)

• It is Twain’s masterpiece (took him 10 years to

write).

• The Concord (Massachusetts) Public Library banned

it in 1885 (because of vulgarity and roughness). It

was banned from countless school districts in

America ever since the 1960s. (For using the word

“nigger” and presenting Jim as a caricature of Black

Americans).

• A great adventure on the raft for Huck (leaves

home) and Jim (a runaway slave). The mighty

Mississippi River carries an obvious danger in itself,

but the culture on both sides of it--slave hunters,

family feuds (The Sheperdson- Grangerford feud

with its pathos, humor, and horror), and con men

(The King and the Duke- con men who are as bad as

their exploiters)--is even more threatening.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

(1884)

• Huck- is a genuine outsider, never to be

assimilated to the middle class. He comes to see

Jim as a human being with his rights and dignity.

• Huck has racist views but at the same time

growing affection and respect for Jim.

• He creates his own sense of right and wrong,

and prefers to go to Hell rather than give Jim up.

• Society’s values, the mainstream values that are

talked about, the politics, the ideology-- you don’t

look in the library to find those things. You’ve

internalized it. It comes out in you. And this book

is about the moment of recognition for Huck when

he’s got to say “no” to that. He’s got to be willing

to “go to hell”.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

(1884)

• Twain’s deconstructive project.

Our conscience is a construct. Moral law is

not necessarily natural. It is constructed

and we internalize it, but it can choke us

for the rest of our lives.

• Gender is also a set of motives, it’s

behavior. (Huck pretends to be a girl).

• Jim – loves his children, and insists on the

“whole child” in the Biblical story of

Solomon, showing compassion.

Topics:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

(1884)

• race
• freedom
• childhood
• an American orphan in search of a father
• transcending racial barriers and gender

barriers to achieve brotherhood

• rites-of-passage
• mixture of nostalgia and contempt, love

and hate

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:

• In 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

emigrant.

• Her father died when she was four, and she was

raised by her Creole (descendants of the French and

Spaniards who had colonized Lousiana) 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 hemorrhage.

Chopin’s writing

• At Fault - first novel. (She was nearly forty

years old).

• Her stories begun 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 hudred 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 of human evolution.

The Awakening (1899)

• It is Chopin’s masterpiece.
• It shocked reviewers and readers throughot

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.

The Awakening

• 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 conciousness. It is an act of
complexity and significance.

What affronted the reviewers

and readers of the 1890’s?

• 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 begun to bring into American

fiction some of her hard-eyed
observation and passion for telling
unpleasant truths.