A History of American Literature

Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 243

in A Cumberland Vendetta, the mountaineers were “a race whose descent ... was

unmixed English; upon whose lips lingered words and forms of speech that

Shakespeare had heard and used.” This character was then allowed to demonstrate its

primitive nobility in formulaic narratives of violence and adventure: with beautiful

mountain girls rescued from the hands of savage villains, and feuds waged with an

antique sense of honor amid the grim beauty of the mountains. These stories conse-

quently reveal one animating impulse of regionalism or local color writing more

clearly than most do, which was to visit, briefly and imaginatively, a lost or vanishing

America. What was on offer in such writing was a world that was determinately

other, definitely different from the society that emerged after the Civil War.

A more powerful sense of otherness, and the sometimes oppressive strangeness of

older Southern cultures, is to be found in the work of two women writers associated

with New Orleans, Grace King (1852–1932) and Kate Chopin (1851–1904). King led

a curiously ambivalent life. A woman of the privileged class, she experienced poverty

after the Civil War and was forced to live in a working-class neighborhood of New

Orleans. A devout defender of the South, she was drawn to feminists in the North

and writers interested in imaginatively exploring female disadvantage and oppres-

sion. Her first published work, Monsieur Motte (1888), for instance, shows the influ-

ence of Villette by Charlotte Bronte. A bilingual Protestant, she also wrote from the

position of an outsider about the Roman Catholic Creoles of New Orleans, and a

position that involved both identification with and critical unease about the complex

racial and sexual codes she observed. Something of this mix of feelings is to be found

in her story “The Little Convent Girl” (1893), which also shows how often in the

South issues of race, gender, and identity become entwined. The tale is simple.

A young girl travels down by riverboat to New Orleans to join her mother, after

spending most of the first twelve years of her life with her father in Cincinnati and

in a convent. On arrival in New Orleans, it turns out that her mother is “colored.”

One month later, when the riverboat returns to New Orleans, her mother takes the

little convent girl on a “visit of ‘How d’ye do’ ” to the captain. The little convent girl

takes the opportunity to jump from the boat into the Mississippi, and disappears

under the water. A summary of the story, however, hardly does justice to the sense of

mystery, hidden depths, it engenders. There is an element of racism, certainly,

running through it, in the account of the “good-for-nothing lives” of the black roust-

abouts, with their “singing of Jim Crow songs, and pacing of Jim Crow steps, and

black skins glistening through torn shirts, and white teeth gleaming through red

lips.” But there is a subtle understanding here of the dark history of the South, that

makes knowledge of self contingent on knowledge of race – and transforms identity,

and self-identification, so much for one young woman, when she discovers that she

does not come from the privileged race entirely, that she feels life is no longer worth

living. About halfway through this story, the riverboat pilot, who befriends the little

convent girl, confides to her his theory that “there was as great a river as the

Mississippi flowing directly under it – an underself as a river.” At the end, we are told,

the body of the drowned girl may well have been “carried through to the underground

river, to that vast, hidden, dark Mississippi that flows beneath the one we see; for her

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