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Winter 1-1-2012
American Women Writers, Visual Vocabularies,
and the Lives of Literary Regionalism
Katherine Mary Bloomquist
Washington University in St. Louis
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WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS
Department of English
Dissertation Examination Committee:
Vivian Pollak, Chair
Ruth Bohan
Anca Parvulescu
Daniel Shea
Akiko Tsuchiya
Rafia Zafar
American Women Writers, Visual Vocabularies,
and the Lives of Literary Regionalism
by
Katherine Mary Bloomquist
A dissertation presented to the
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
of Washington University in
partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy
December 2012
Saint Louis, Missouri
© Copyright 2012 by Katherine Mary Bloomquist
All rights reserved.
Table of Contents
List of Figures iii
Acknowledgements iv
Dissertation Abstract v
Introduction: 1
Of Maps and Memoirs
Chapter 1: 30
Self and Other Portraits:
Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron” as Human Documents
Chapter 2: 79
As If They Had a History:
Documenting the Things Named in Willa Cather’s Regional Fiction
Chapter 3: 137
In Place of Picture-Postcards:
“Some Measure of Privacy” in Ann Petry’s Wheeling
Chapter 4: 190
“Some Kind of a Writin’ Person”:
Regionalism’s Unfinished Women Writers
Bibliography 245
ii
List of Figures
Figure 1: 29
Cover Image of The Local Colorists: American Short Stories 1857-1900, ed.
Claude M. Simpson.
Figure 2: 78
Cover and Back Images of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed
Firs and Other Stories, Selected and Arranged with a preface by Willa Cather.
Figure 3: 136
Back cover of Ann Petry’s Country Place.
Figure 4: 189
Frontispiece to Annie Trumbull Slosson’s “A Local Colorist.”
iii
Acknowledgements
A dissertation focused upon life narratives has no doubt grown stronger with the
many people shaping mine. My thanks first to Vivian Pollak for her support and always
thorough reading of my writing. It has been a privilege working and teaching with her
and I cannot imagine my graduate experience without her influence. Thanks also to
Rafia Zafar, Anca Parvulescu, Dan Shea, Ruth Bohan, Akiko Tsuchiya and Bill Maxwell
for their insightful readings and conversations. Thanks to the librarians at the Houghton
Library at Harvard University and the Howard Gottlieb Research Center at Boston
University (in the Sarah Orne Jewett and Ann Petry collections). Thanks to Washington
University in St. Louis for generous support, especially the Dissertation Fellowship.
Thanks to Kathy Schneider and Dorothy Negri for good conversations whenever I
walk into Duncker 116. To Chuck Sweetman, Amy Pawl, Debie Lohe, and Heidi Kolk
for first teaching me to teach. To Rick Godden, Tarah Demant, and Courtney Bates for
their support and mentoring. To my students, for asking me about my work and
challenging themselves to become the writers that they are. To the members of the
dissertation workshop for their careful readings and responses to my chapters in progress.
To three superb undergraduate professors: Kate Baldwin, John Duffy, and Valerie Sayers.
Thanks also to my many teachers, who introduced me to letter people, keyword books,
the writing process wheel, and the habits for a lifetime of learning.
To my family for their love, support and home-cooked meals: my brother Mike
for his unfailing sense of humor; my father Dave, for reminding me to have fun, but to be
careful; and my mother Chris—this is what happens when you give your daughter a
library card at age four.
iv
Dissertation Abstract
American Women Writers, Visual Vocabularies, and the Lives of Literary Regionalism
by
Katherine Mary Bloomquist
Doctor of Philosophy in English and American Literature
Washington University in St. Louis, 2012
Professor Vivian Pollak, Chairperson
This dissertation reads American literary regionalism through its visual
vocabularies—such as sketches, photographs and portraits. Though critics often deemed
this genre inferior or unfinished, using visual vocabularies of the “sketch” or “local
color,” later books of regionalism simply brim with visual vocabularies, when characters
are seeking the lives of others or filling in the blanks of their own. The writers in my
dissertation—Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, and Ann Petry—ground literary
regionalism in the politics of writing places, but draw also from the arts of life writing
circulating in the late nineteenth-century literary marketplace: through slave narratives,
suffragist autobiographies, and travel narratives.
The first chapter features Sarah Orne Jewett’s little-known 1893 essay “Human
Documents” in a rereading of her best-known fiction, arguing that the essay’s language of
photographs and portraits recasts the lives of “A White Heron” and The Country of the
Pointed Firs. While many readers are familiar with Willa Cather’s singular phrase “the
thing not named,” we have not acknowledged, as my second chapter does, how Cather’s
language of things appears so frequently at the end of her fiction and relies upon visual
vocabularies to challenge the gendered limitations of her characters’ lives. My third
v
chapter focuses upon Ann Petry’s unnamed heroine of her Wheeling fiction cycle, who
writes daily accounts of her life—working with a variety of written and visual media—as
she learns about her family’s precarious racial position in Wheeling.
My concluding chapter places these many unnamed women writer-characters in
conversation with representations of nineteenth-century poetesses. I argue that
regionalism offers us an archive of writers framing debates about authorship with these
writer-characters; even a brief mention of a poetess often leads to more careful
consideration of the daily lives of women writers—in their early careers, daily practices,
and deaths. The books of literary regionalism draw both from local impressions and self-
expressions: illustrating the lives of others through visual vocabularies, sketching the
daily realities and practices of current writers. These unfinished lives provide the finish
to their books.
vi
Introduction: Of Maps and Memoirs
In the summer of 1906, Sarah Orne Jewett visits her childhood home, South
Berwick, Maine. She remembers reveling in its pleasing “uninterruptedness” when she
1
stayed there a decade ago, but this time something feels different. As she prepares to
leave for Boston, she comments in a letter: “I feel like a dissected map with a few pieces
gone, the rest of me seems to be put together right!” (218) Unlike the more coherent and
nostalgic geographies for which her Maine fiction is known, Jewett expresses her
selfhood in pieces: dissected, exposed. But Jewett is not simply commenting on her
exhaustion after time in South Berwick, since she relates this fragmented, mapped self to
another change she experiences, when she reads “the life of Miss Catharine Sedgwick”
with a friend (218). Jewett admits how mistaken she was about this book’s quality: “I did
not know how good it was. I fancied it had been written in the dull time of ‘Memoirs,’
but I was quite wrong; it was just as well to wait and grow a good deal older before I
went back to it” (218-219). As she compares her current self to that map, she realizes
that her expectations for the older genres of life writing, like the Memoir, have also
changed. She begins to piece together her dissected map only after she remembers a
passage from Sedgwick’s life: “there is a page, too, about the advantages of country life
that made me ‘fire up’ about Berwick as I used in my best days!” (219) Before reading a
diverting memoir, Jewett is a dissected map; after her reading, she reflects upon
authorship with renewed enthusiasm. In Jewett’s letter, it takes a map to break her
regionalist writing in pieces and a memoir to put it back together, anticipating the
influential legacies of life writing in nineteenth-century regionalism for later twentieth-
century women writers.
1
Reading a memoir—which surpasses her expectations—influences how Jewett
articulates the older, more familiar map of her regionalist fiction, since she distinguishes
her current attitude from her earlier “best days.” Reaching its peak in popularity between
1865 and 1914—in both magazines and novels—American literary regionalism has been
both praised and admonished for its attention to smaller locations on maps and lives that
we would not expect to read in memoirs, it is time to acknowledge just how invested this
genre has been in granting women writers a place for interrogating and assembling
women’s lives: not just in featuring women characters more prominently and
consistently, but in plotting the lengthier processes through which other characters gather,
report on and sometimes even silence the lives of women. When Elizabeth Hampsten
studies the life writing of Midwest women, she acknowledges that, to her surprise,
writing easily classified as regional does not read regionally: “These women’s writings
do not do that; their ‘place’ is not where we had expected to find them. In much of this
writing, for all its particularity, it is hard to tell (if the postmark is missing) where the
2
writers are, for they do not bother to tell us in words we are used to.” Regionalism does
not always behave regionally; often, other things are taking place. As Cecelia Tichi has
put it, “They were regionalists—but not solely in the ways critics have conventionally
thought. The geography of America formed an important part of their work, but
essentially they charted the regions of women’s lives, regions both without and within the
3
self.”
Even in Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), which has long
epitomized literary regionalism, readers do not receive an exhaustive map of Dunnet
Landing but are more likely to encounter characters who seek the lives of others from
2
