A Companion to the American Short Story
Page 5
well. Harper ’ s Magazine , which had been established in 1850, abandoned its initial
practice of publishing mostly reprints of British material and began soliciting Ameri-
can writers. Although Putnam ’ s (1853 – 7) did not last very long, other magazines soon
provided a meaningful market for short fi ction, including The Galaxy (1866 – 78),
Lippincott ’ s Magazine (1868 – 1915), and Scribner ’ s Monthly (1870 – 81) and its successor,
The Century Magazine
(1881
–
1930). Unfortunately, book publishers continued to
believe that collections of short stories were unmarketable, and a writer needed to
earn a substantial reputation before publishers would risk bringing out a volume of
short fi ction. That changed in the 1880s, when Scribner ’ s discovered that it could
successfully market collections of short stories if they were focused on life in a specifi c
region of the United States. The result was the wave of regionalist fi ction known as
the local color movement. Although publishers tended to favor collections of short
stories that shared a common setting and sometimes a recurring cast of characters,
American writers of short fi ction fi nally had access to both strong periodical and book
markets by the end of the nineteenth century.
The major shift in the development of the American short story during the last
half of the nineteenth century was the rise of realism, which dominated American
fi ction for most of the period following the Civil War. Although it is possible to fi nd
many antebellum precursors and sources for the emergence of realism, at least two
deserve special emphasis in any treatment of the short story: the Southwestern humor-
ists who brought a fresh vitality to the comic story and the group of New England
women writers who established the basic traits of the realistic short story. There are
14
Alfred Bendixen
multiple examples of pre - Civil War writers who fashioned short fi ction out of regional
material and the American frontier, including the western stories of James Hall,
Timothy Flint, and William Joseph Snelling, but the Southwestern humorists had
the most enduring impact. For most scholars, the classic example of the genre is
Thomas Bangs Thorpe
’
s
“
The Big Bear of Arkansas
”
(1841), but the works that
established this important sub - genre of American fi ction include Augustus Baldwin
Longstreet ’ s Georgia Scenes (1835), Johnson Jones Hooper ’ s Some Adventures of Captain
Simon Suggs (1845), Joseph Baldwin ’ s Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (1853),
and George Washington Harris ’ s Sut Lovingood ’ s Yarns Spun by a “ Nat ’ ral Born Durn ’ d
Fool ” (1867). While mainstream authors tended to use a highly artifi cial and ornate
literary language, these writers embraced the American vernacular and pioneered the
development of American dialect in short fi ction. They offered tall tales of tricksters
and conmen, boastful frontiersmen and prodigious hunters, brave fi gures who defi ne
themselves and measure themselves against the vast and magnifi cent American wilder-
ness. The worst of these tales – the anecdotes about Mike Fink, a brawling bully who
appears in some of the stories about Davy Crockett – are marred by crude humor,
physical cruelty, bad practical jokes, and blatant racism. The best of them offer bril-
liant accounts of class confl icts usually derived from the contrast between a highly
educated and somewhat pompous narrator from the cities of the east and the more
vibrant, more vivid speech of a fi gure who lives the most natural of lives on what
was then the American frontier. Although these stories were largely considered sub -
literary in their own time, scholars have recognized their infl uence on writers as
important as Mark Twain and William Faulkner. In their insistence on honestly
confronting the harsh realities of life and their affi rmation of a narrative language that
affi rms the plain, honest, sometimes earthy speech of simple people, these works also
opened paths that would be crucial to the development of realism.
In sharp contrast to the Southwestern humorists, whose works often rely on the
portrayal of male violence, are the northeastern women writers who pioneered a dif-
ferent kind of realism in their stories. Although she is best known for her abolitionist
novel, Uncle Tom ’ s Cabin (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe also deserves credit for devel-
oping the kind of realistic story of New England village life that we now know mostly
through the works of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett. The best of
Stowe ’ s short works were collected in The Mayfl ower (1843, rev. 1855), Oldtown Folks
(1869), and Sam Lawson ’ s Old Town Fireside Tales (1871), and represent the beginnings
of a tradition of realism which recognized the domestic life of ordinary citizens as
worthy of literary treatment. Stowe emphasizes domestic spaces, kitchens and fi re-
sides, as sites for both storytelling and the dramas of daily life. She focuses primarily
on the study of character and the exploration of the normal but sometimes complex
relationships between men and women within a social community. Her writing
clearly values the ordinary speech of average individuals and attempts to represent it
with accuracy and precision as they struggle to express their aspirations and frustra-
tions. As Rose Terry Cooke demonstrated in the more than 200 stories she wrote
throughout her long career, this new realistic mode was equally effective in the comic
Emergence and Development
15
defl ation of pretense and the depiction of the quiet tragedies of repressed lives. In her
stories about Polly Mariner, an independent single woman, Cooke helped make the
“ spinster ” into one of the mainstays of the New England feminist tradition. Her bold
treatment of bad marriages and her critique of the repression of women within the
Calvinistic tradition of New England add force to many of her best works, particularly
her grim masterpiece, “ Too Late ” (1875). Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward also helped
to introduce a feminist literary tradition in some of her short fi ction, the best of which
appears in Men, Women, and Ghosts (1879) and Sealed Orders (1880), but her major
contribution is the creation of a social fi ction that seeks both compassion and justice
for the working poor. The most powerful of the new realistic stories about poverty is
almost certainly “ Life in the Iron Mills ” (1861) by Rebecca Harding Davis, who went
on to produce other important pieces of realistic fi ction, some of which were eventu-
ally collected in Silhouettes of American Life (1892).
Women writers played a decisive role in the establishment of realism after the Civil
War and in making realism into the dominant literary mode for most (but certainly
not all) major American women writers. This is partly because realism tends to be more
interested in the dynamics of gender relationships and social relationships within spe-
cifi c kinds of communities than some forms of romantic fi ction, which may focus on
individuals confronting a symbolic landscape or deal with
situations in which women
play relatively minor roles, sometimes serving largely as moral touchstones by which
one measures the virtues or failings of a central male fi gure. Women tend to play more
substantial roles in realistic works of fi ction, including those written by male writers.
For instance, whenever Henry James attempted to defi ne the special nature of Ameri-
can life, he almost always found himself writing explicitly about women protagonists
and their relationships with men. A number of now neglected male writers also helped
to institute realism as the dominant literary mode of the last four decades of the nine-
teenth century. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who was one of the most admired writers of
his time, made the surprise ending into an important device for short story writers with
his epistolary masterpiece, “ Marjorie Daw ” (1873), and he produced other effective
pieces, most of which appear in the collections Marjorie Daw and Other People (1873)
and Two Bites at a Cherry (1894). Frank Stockton won fame with his puzzle story, “ The
Lady or the Tiger ” (1882), a work that raises complex questions about both the reality
and the perception of women; the comic fables that appeared in his The Bee Man of Orn
(1887) also once attracted a great deal of attention. Of the early writers of realism, none
attracted more initial acclaim than Bret Harte with his stories of life in the California
mining towns. Although his works can now seem surprisingly sentimental and even
conventional, his continuous satire of moral pretense and his apparent fascination with
disreputable characters were once considered daring.
The major writers of American realism – William Dean Howells, Henry James,
and Mark Twain – are best known for their novels, but all produced a signifi cant
number of short stories. Although contemporary polls often ranked him as the most
important American writer of his time, Howells ’ s great importance now appears to
lie primarily in his work as an editor and as an advocate for realism. Of his many
16
Alfred Bendixen
stories, the only one now anthologized is “ Editha ” (1907), which is both an anti - war
story and an attack on the romantic imagination that glorifi es warfare. Twain ’ s best -
known short works are really comic sketches that were heavily infl uenced by the
Southwestern humorists, particularly the work that fi rst gave him a national reputa-
tion,
“
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
”
(1865). Although his
imagination was at its very best when it had the space provided by the novel or the
novella (which he called the “ beautiful and blest nouvelle ” ), Henry James made several
signifi cant contributions to the American short story. He produced many thought
provoking stories about artists and the creation of art, thus endowing short fi ction
with a new kind of critical self - consciousness, a new kind of self - referential capacity
for aesthetic examination. James also revived the Gothic, transforming it into what
Leon Edel has called the “ ghostly tale, ” a work that relies less on the trappings of
supernatural literature and more on a full exploitation of its psychological possibili-
ties. Finally, in his last phase, he produced works like “ The Beast in the Jungle ”
(1903), which transform realism into a densely psychological form of impressionism
that ultimately led naturally to the stream of consciousness and stylistic experimenta-
tion central to high modernism. James was among the most infl uential writers of his
time, not only on the modernists who followed him, but on a group of women writers
who began their literary careers with stories highly imitative of his work, most notably
Edith Wharton and Willa Cather.
A commitment to realism transformed the American short story, making its
primary subject life in the here and now and casting away romanticism ’ s reliance on
a distant past and exotic setting. While a typical romantic story might involve a
young man ’ s adventure in the wilderness or immersion in some fundamentally sym-
bolic landscape, realism was more concerned with the complex relationships of indi-
viduals with each other in a social setting. In most works of realism, the primary
forms of violence described are more likely to be psychological than physical. While
the romantic tale prefers to emphasize action and symbolism and shows little concern
with the accurate rendition of speech, realism is not only suspicious of highly artifi cial
forms of speech and infl ated language, but it generally relies on a style that is relatively
simple and clear, emphasizing the accurate portrayal of common speech in moments
of dialogue and sometimes even insisting on the importance of capturing a specifi c
dialect with meticulous care. This preference for the plain and simple may refl ect a
distrust of the abstract rhetoric that glorifi ed the mass slaughter of the Civil War,
but it also entails a new fascination with the ways in which human beings commu-
nicate or fail to communicate. Realism tends to rely less on the big symbols that often
shape romantic fi ction and more on the creation of complex characters who make
diffi cult choices in complicated situations. In general, the depiction of setting either
defi nes the choices a character has made or the limited choices available to that indi-
vidual. The criticism of the time often cites the creation of memorable and vivid
characters as the distinguishing quality of great literature; realism ’ s great art form is
a kind of portraiture that relies on complex methods of characterization that recognize
the importance of both psychological and social realities.
Emergence and Development
17
Realism also values specifi city and verisimilitude, particularly in its commitment
to capturing the special qualities of particular places. Realists believe that who we are
is shaped partly by where we come from, and that geography is thus intimately con-
nected to the development of character. In some sense, this emphasis on regionalism
is realism ’ s response to the acute sense of fragmentation and dislocation that followed
the Civil War.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the United States of America occupied a
huge part of an entire continent, and its citizens had a natural curiosity about those
who lived in other places, other regions. In showing readers how the inhabitants of
the different parts of the country talked, dressed, and acted, realism performed impor-
tant cultural work. While presenting the distinctive qualities of particular places and
different cultures, realist writers usually affi rmed the common humanity that united
the citizens of the various regions of a vast nation. In this respect, realism was fun-
damentally optimistic in its belief that an honest confrontation with difference will
usually lead towards greater understanding and tolerance.
It is possible to fi nd realistic stories that deal with almost every part of the United
States. New England was particularly well served by the women writers mentioned
earlier who helped to create realism and later by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Sarah
Orne Jewett. The West had Bret Harte and
Mark Twain, and eventually Owen
Wister. The Midwest was represented in literature by Edward Eggleston, E. W.
Howe, and Hamlin Garland, all of whom fashioned a specifi c kind of literary landscape
that would be reshaped into the modern fi ction of Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair
Lewis. The South had Mary Noailles Murfree, Thomas Nelson Page, James Lane Allan,
Joel Chandler Harris, and Charles Chesnutt (whose short stories provided the most
signifi cant representation of African American experience of his time). Louisiana pro-
duced its own bounty of distinguished writing with masterful short stories by George
Washington Cable, Grace King, Kate Chopin, and Alice Dunbar - Nelson. There were
also writers who traveled to and wrote about a wide variety of regions and places,
such as Constance Fenimore Woolson, who produced signifi cant collections of stories
about the Great Lakes region, the American South, and Italy.
As noted earlier, gender roles are often foregrounded as a specifi c subject of
inquiry in works of realism. By the fi nal decade of the nineteenth century, it is
possible to see the emergence of literary feminism as one of the major achievements
of this literary tradition. The aspirations of women received special attention in the
stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Kate Chopin, Grace King,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and numerous other writers of the time. Although these
writers shared a concern with depicting the way women succeed or fail in a world
that is largely controlled by men, it is important to recognize the variety of forms
that this literary feminism can take. Jewett frequently focuses on the healing quali-
ties that can be found in a community of women while Freeman
’
s most famous
stories usually deal with an unmarried woman who tries to stake out a meaningful
independent existence on her own terms. Both Chopin and King write about
Louisiana, but they have very different views of the role of female desire and the
18
Alfred Bendixen
possibility for fulfi llment that can be found in marriage. Gilman devoted herself to
the production of clearly feminist fi ction, but her most effective stories are probably
her early tales of the supernatural, particularly “ The Yellow Wallpaper ” (1891). In