Local Color in American Literature
Over the course of the nineteenth century, America expanded—tripling in land mass over
this hundred year span. Starting in 1803 with the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from
France, America greatly increased its territory, and accordingly allowed for a dispersion of its
people and a more varied type of American experience throughout those new lands. The country
expanded yet again with the conclusion of the Mexican-American War and the annexation of
those territories once belonging to Mexico. As a result, the country increased its size by half
again. Pioneering of that land, however, really took off after the Civil War had settled the
question of slavery in those newly settled lands. Additionally, mid-century, gold was discovered
in the California area, luring more Americans there to seek their fortunes. On top of these
economic incentives, the government offered free land through the Homestead Act to those who
had remained loyal to the federal government and would commit to farm that land for five years.
The population of America increased as a result of the land increase. Immigrants came
from Europe and Asia to take advantage of these opportunities, further diversifying the American
cultural heritage and the pioneer effort itself further diversified the American experience.
Concomitant with this diversification was an increase in publication technologies, making the
printing and distribution of magazines and periodicals cheaper and more widespread.
Additionally, the invention of the telegraph and the expansion of the railroad connected people
who had been previously disconnected. This connection in word combined with disconnection
in space, the curiosity about other ways of life, and the increase in periodical publications created
an environment ripe for local color literature—a genre extremely popular at the end of the
nineteenth century which allowed readers a glimpse into a life separate from theirs.
The Merriam Webster Encyclopedia of Literature defines local color literature in this
way: “Style of writing marked by the presentation of the features and peculiarities of a particular
locality and its inhabitants. The name is given especially to a type of American literature that in
its most characteristic form made its appearance just after the Civil War.”
Local color literature emphasizes the environment over the people, the habits and
customs of the group that inhabits a place. Often it will include dialect to accurately depict the
cadences of speech peculiar to that place.
The frontier novels of James Fenimore Cooper have been cited as precursors of the local-
color story, as have the New York Dutch tales of Washington Irving. Set during the California
gold rush, Bret Harte's “The Luck of Roaring Camp” (1868), with its use of miners' dialect and
western background, is among the early local-color stories. Many authors first achieved success
with vivid descriptions of their own localities: Mark Twain described Mississippi River life;
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, and Sarah Orne Jewett wrote of New England;
George Washington Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, and Kate Chopin described the Deep South;
T.N. Page did the same for Virginia; Edward Eggleston wrote of Indianafrontier days; Charles E.
Craddock told stories of the Tennessee mountaineers; and O. Henry chronicled both the Texas
frontier and the streets of New York City.”
Though sometimes local color writing is seen as a subset of realism proper, 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).
For example, Sarah Orne Jewett, a local color writer of Maine, according to Cynthia Bily,
for sentimentalist reasons: she practiced her literary craft out of concern for the proper depiction
of her home. “To her contemporaries, Sarah Orne Jewett was primarily a local color writer. Her
stories and novels were peopled with typical villagers speaking in dialect, going about their daily
work as country doctors or farmers or seafarers, moving about among the flora and fauna and
landscape of New England. As a young avid reader, Jewett had admired the work of Harriet
Beecher Stowe, especially her depictions of the common folk of the South, with their strengths
and short comings. One of Jewett's aims as a writer was to present the people of her native Maine
in the same honest and respectful light. But if her characters' speech and dress and mannerisms
were identifiably regional, their concerns and problems were not. Like all the
best local color writing, Jewett's fiction uses regional settings, but explores themes that are
universal.”
Different areas of the country had authors associated with them. Life in New England,
for example, was chronicled by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, Mary E. Wilkins
Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and others. The South was literarily depicted by Mary N. Murfree,
Kate Chopin, Charles Chesnutt, and Joel Chandler Harris. The Midwest by Edward Eggleston,
Hamlin Garland, and James Whitcomb Riley, the Great Plains by Zitkala-Sa, and the West by
Bret Harte and Mary Austin.
Notice that many of these writers are women. As Eric Sundquist explains, the local-color
label has sometimes been used to limit a writer, to describe it as worth less literarily than another
writer’s work, "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."
Russell Whitaker and Kathy Darrow explain that through the local color label, women’s
concerns were somehow seen as less important than men’s concerns: “Women writers' works
occupy a larger share of local color and regional literature than any other type of literature
produced by women during this era. The focus upon everyday, domestic life in this type of
fiction lent itself naturally to American women's realm of experience, and they experimented
with and expanded upon the form as a vehicle for expressing a wide range of uniquely female
concerns that had previously been excluded from American discourse. Harriet Beecher Stowe,
according to such critics as Josephine Donovan, established the anti-romantic, sensible, and
assertive woman archetype in her stories in The Mayflower; or, Sketches of Scenes and
Characters among the Descendants of the Pilgrims (1843). Stowe, who was a vocal advocate of
women's suffrage, and of the rights to equal employment and education for women, presented
women in her stories who were firmly rooted in reality, yet refined and morally upright; these
characters served not only to offer an ideal portrait of womanhood but a contrast to the passive
and weak-willed female characters that populated the majority of literature until that time.
Commentator Elaine Sargent Apthorp observes that Rebecca Harding Davis and other women
authors of local color and regional fiction were uniquely aware of the hardships and adversity
faced by the characters they depicted because of their own experience as women living in a
patriarchal society. Unlike sentimentalist or naturalist writers who emphasize religion and morals
or objectivity, women writers of local color and regional fiction celebrate humankind's subjective
perspective on the world around them, and take pains to actively portray their characters' inner
consciousness.”
However, despite its often limiting connotations, local color literature has served as a
major force in American literature, allowing women writers—and other local writers—to make
their voice and experience known and thereby to claim a place in the American identity.
America has always had a complicated societal make-up. At once marginalizing large
groups of people, disenfranchising them from political and social power, while simultaneously
allowing individuals from those marginalized groups a public voice. During the nineteenth-
century, this conflicted stance defined the lives of several writers who came from marginalized
groups yet were offered a speaking position within the literary establishment. Even while getting
this position, however, these writers were often doubly bound because they felt they had to meet
certain public expectations to be accepted.
William Dean Howells perhaps exemplifies this conflicted American stance toward the
disenfranchised. In his position as editor of the Atlantic, Howells promoted the writings of women
and African-Americans, publishing the writings of Mary Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, Charles Chesnutt, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Additionally, he wrote much criticism
promoting the works of these marginalized figures, as the Cenegage American
Literature website explains: “Howells's late critical writing as his reviews of Wilkins's stories in
1891 and Chesnutt's stories in 1900 and his introduction to Dunbar's Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896)
Minority Voices in American Literature
illustrate his sponsorship of women writers and writers of color. (Howells also endorsed women's
suffrage and was one of the founding members of the NAACP in 1909.).”
However Howells himself seemed unaware of the limitations imposed on these writers,
both within his own magazines and within the larger society. Dunbar and Chesnutt, for example,
felt almost trapped in writing in the “plantation tradition” because that’s what the public
demanded from them. Freeman and Gilman could break free from gender stereotypes only
subversively. Yet Howells spoke naively about the lack of a “color line” that would bar minorities
from reaching the pinnacle of American fiction.
Regardless, though, amidst the limitations of their larger groups in society and the
political sphere, many individual writers were able to find a place to voice their opinions, to claim
their experiences as valuable and worthy of the hearing.
Charles Chesnutt was the son of free blacks, both whom had white ancestry. Chesnutt’s
formal schooling ended before he reached high school, but was self-educated in algebra,
philosophy, education, Latin, history, literature, Greek, German, French, gardening, piano, organ,
shorthand, and law (passed the Ohio bar exam in 1887). He aspired to publish novels on the
artistic level of Dickens and Thackeray combined with the social impact of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s
Cabin. His short fiction incorporates characteristics of both formal and folk art, relying es on oral
tradition based on African folkways, mannerisms, and beliefs. Chesnutt’s major
publications include he Conjure Woman (1899), The Wife of His Youth (1899), Frederick Douglass
(1899), The House Behind the Cedars (1900), The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and The Colonel’s
Dream (1905).
During his time, Chesnutt was popular, at least briefly. He published two collections of
short fiction, one biography, and two novels within two years; his later work, though, deviated
from the “plantation tradition” of his early stories and, as a result, cost him readership. When
Harlem Renaissance began in the 1920s, Chesnutt’s reputation suffered from a perception that
his works pandered to racial stereotypes, but his reputation was revived in the 1960s when a re-
evaluation of his work determined that, through their ironic depiction, his inclusion of such
stereotypes actually critiqued the status-quo of his society. Today, Chesnutt is remembered
primarily as a short story writer in the local-color tradition; he is the first notable African-
American fiction writer and one of the first literary authors to offer an honest examination of
racial problems, particularly in the South, after the Civil War.
Reared in an orthodox Congregationalist family, Mary Ella Wilkins spent her early life
in Randolph, Massachusetts. In 1873, she began writing poetry and short stories; her first
significant work appeared in Harper’s Bazaar and Harper’s New Monthly in the early 1880’s.
Her first two collections of stories for adults, A Humble Romance, and Other Stories and A New
England Nun, and Other Stories, generally considered her finest work, established her reputation
as a professional writer. Notable among her later works are two novels, The Shoulders of Atlas,
which won the New York Herald’s transatlantic novel-writing contest, and The Whole Family: A
Novel by Twelve Authors (1908), written collaboratively with William Dean Howells, Henry
James, and others.
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman is identified as a local-color writer because her work portrays
the characteristics of a particular region and its people: New England and New Englanders. Note,
however, that her emphasis in A New England Nun and A Mistaken Charity is not on the
physical landscape of New England but on the character of its people. Invariably set in the rural
areas of Massachusetts or Vermont, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s most engaging stories focus on
troubled characters who encounter situations that jeopardize their quest for happiness and
personal fulfillment. Although she wrote about men, her most fascinating characters are women,
especially older ones, and in her best work, A Humble Romance, and Other Stories and A New
England Nun, and Other Stories, from which the following stories are taken, Freeman’s heroines
are depicted with extraordinary sensitivity and insight. The major theme running through all her
fiction is the struggle of every human being to preserve his or her dignity and self-respect when
confronted with difficult decisions.
Paul Laurence Dunbar was the son of two former slaves, born in Dayton, Ohio. He was
one of his high school’s only black students, but distinguished by his academic performance:
editor in chief of the school paper, president of the literary society, and class poet. Dunbar could
find no job after graduation; forced to work as an elevator operator. Building on his high school
writing experience, he founded the Dayton Tattler, specifically devoted to reporting on the news
of Dayton’s (OH) black community (short-lived newspaper). At his elevator operating job, he
wrote poems, and gained attention when invited to speak at the Western Association of Writers—
there, he met major literary figures James Newton Matthews and James Whitcomb Riley.
Dunbar gained opportunity to publish collection of poems, Oak and Ivy. During his
lifetime, he published six collections of poetry, four novels, and four collections of short stories.
Dunbar has two distinct classes of his poetry: those written in dialect and those written in
standard English (those written in dialect gained much more popularity during his lifetime than
those written in standard English). In the dialect poems, Dunbar presents scenes from plantation
life, mostly drawn from his parents’ experiences and stories they told him; no overt protest in
these poems, but some subversive protest is present. In the poems written in standard English,
Dunbar expands his themes and subject matter—taking on everything from love and death and
nature and religion; often these poems are lyrics and personal reflections; in these poems,
Dunbar experiments with form, drawing on his reading of John Keats, William Wordsworth,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Burns; later he would add American poets John Greenleaf
Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Whitcomb Riley to his influences.
Dunbar was a very significant poet of his time; he was the first African-American poet to make his
living by his writing: Paul Laurence Dunbar published in such mainstream journals as Century,
Lipincott’s Monthly, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Saturday Evening Post. His writing reveals the
personal tensions of black people (and specifically for him, the black artist) living within post-Civil
War America, trying to attain the equality promised to them but not yet available.
Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 3, 1860. Her
father was Frederick Beecher Perkins, and her mother was Mary Fitch Westcott. The Beechers,
including her early role model, Harriet Beecher Stowe, influenced her social convictions.
Gilman suffered bouts of depression stemming from her desire to work as artist, writer, and
advocate of women’s rights and the conflict between this desire and her more traditional role as
wife and mother. In 1886, Gilman had a breakdown and was treated for hysteria by neurologist
S. Weir Mitchell, who prescribed total rest and abstinence from work. Despite the
treatment, Gilmangrew worse and feared for her sanity. She decided to take matters into her
own hands, separated from Stetson, and moved to California, where she began to publish and
lecture on the economic and domestic dependence of women.
Gilman published social criticism and fiction throughout the next decades. From 1909 to
1916, she single-handedly wrote and published the monthly magazine The Forerunner. Charlotte
Perkins Gilman used her fiction to dramatize her vision of history, sociology, and ethics. Over
the course of her career, she published close to two hundred pieces of fiction, mainly short
stories, in periodicals or in her own Forerunner magazine.
Most of Gilman’s stories belong to two categories: realistic stories that deal with the
unhappy situations of the everyday world and utopian stories set totally in the world of the
imagination. In her fiction, Gilman suggests changes that might be made in preparation for the
future world and asserts the need to break away from the traditions that limit human
potential.While she is often identified with the feminist movement, her emphasis is on a utopian
society in which men and women would be equal, a society she portrays in the
novel Herland.Her stories are meant to be uplifting examples of her social philosophy. Because
many of these stories have an ideal ending, rather than a probable one, many critics find them
didactic or formulaic. They are not well regarded for their literary qualities. Gilman did not have
literary pretensions; she wrote quickly and without much revision. She did, however, aspire to
write with “clearness and vivacity,” so that her work would “be apprehended with ease and
pleasure.” Her style is direct; her message is clear.
These four authors represent the ways in which writers who did not have much political
or social clout were nonetheless able to bring their experience to bear on the canon of American
literature, shaping and reshaping the themes, the values, and the forms of the culture.
