A History of American Literature

224 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900

the notion of the “true woman,” keeper of the domestic pieties, was gradually being

replaced by that of the “new woman,” relatively independent and mobile. The change

might be regretted by the more traditionally minded, or even by those who saw it as

a symptom of a larger change to a culture of insecurity, denial of community. But

it was nevertheless acknowledged. And women writers were a part of it. Many of

them became writers precisely in response to the new economic opportunities

or necessities, because they wanted or needed to find a job. Many of them, like

Augusta Jane Evans (1835–1909), Amélie Rives (1863–1945), and Mary Johnston

(1870–1936), wrote for the new mass audience and enjoyed a wide readership. Some

of them, with less immediate public success in most cases, adopted a tougher, more

critical stance toward either the risks women faced in the new dispensation or

the restrictions they still suffered from the old. In doing so, they measured a change

in writing practice among many American writers during this period, female and

male: from depicting the mythic possibilities of America to describing its material

inadequacies. They, and those like them, responded to the drastic economic and

social alterations occurring in the nation around them by turning ever further from

romance to realism, and then later to naturalism.

The Development of Literary Regionalism

From Adam to outsider

Realism was described by Ambrose Bierce as “the art of depicting nature as it is seen

by toads” and having “the charm suffusing a landscape painted by a mole, or a story

written by a measuring worm.” That definition would have delighted Mark Twain,

born Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), because of its mordant wit and

because all of his work could be seen as a series of negotiations between realism and

romance. “My books are simply autobiographies,” Twain insisted once. True of every

American writer, perhaps, the remark seems especially true of him. He relied,

frequently and frankly, on personal experience: in accounts of his travels, for

instance, like The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and A Tramp Abroad

(1880). Even those books of his that were the results of strenuous imaginative effort

can be read as attempts to resolve his inner divisions, and create some sense of

continuity between his present and his past, his critical investment in common sense,

pragma tism, and progress and his emotional involvement in his childhood and the

childhood of his region and nation. The inner divisions and discontinuity were, in

fact, inseparable. For all of Twain’s best fictional work has to do with what has been

called “the matter of Hannibal”; that is, his experiences as a child in the slaveholding

state of Missouri and his years as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. This was not

simply a matter of nostalgia for the good old days before the Civil War, of the kind to

be found in other, simpler writers born in the South like, say, Thomas Nelson Page or

Richard Malcolm Johnston (1822–1898). Nor was it merely another example of the

romantic idealization of youth, although Twain did firmly believe that, youth being

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