American Regionalism and Its Discontents in Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “In Sloane Street”
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Constance Fenimore Woolson is among those whom scholars have for long been trying to rediscover and add to the list of representative American writers. The primary methodology has been regionalism, based on the fact that most of her work portrays remote, exotic regions in and out of America. Still, Woolson remains obscure to general readers as well as literary critics outside a small circle of her scholarship. This essay attributes that obscurity to Woolson scholars’ blind reliance on regionalism’s nationalistic assumption in reading Woolson’s multifaceted writing, and proposes to explore her nationally and regionally displacing view of the rigidly stereotypical and ideologically biased binary opposition between the center and the margin in postbellum America. The essay takes as an example the only story by Woolson that has never been reprinted or anthologized until very recently, “In Sloane Street,” and examines why it resists the scholarly endeavor to regional categorization. The examination especially focuses on how the story exposes the Americanizing conceptualization of the region and its limits. The essay concludes with an attention to the story’s ending where Woolson abruptly yet deliberately introduces a form of almanac as the main character Gertrude’s mode of daily record. The attention to that uniquely hybrid genre in the American literary tradition, which encompasses the public and the private, the universal and the local, sheds light on Woolson’s authorial intention to deconstruct the Manichean view of literary regionalism.
Abstract
Constance Fenimore Woolson is among those whom scholars have for long been trying to rediscover and add to the list of representative American writers. The primary methodology has been regionalism, based on the fact that most of her work portrays remote, exotic regions in and out of America. Still, Woolson remains obscure to general readers as well as literary critics outside a small circle of her scholarship. This essay attributes that obscurity to Woolson scholars’ blind reliance on regionalism’s nationalistic assumption in reading Woolson’s multifaceted writing, and proposes to explore her nationally and regionally displacing view of the rigidly stereotypical and ideologically biased binary opposition between the center and the margin in postbellum America. The essay takes as an example the only story by Woolson that has never been reprinted or anthologized until very recently, “In Sloane Street,” and examines why it resists the scholarly endeavor to regional categorization. The examination especially focuses on how the story exposes the Americanizing conceptualization of the region and its limits. The essay concludes with an attention to the story’s ending where Woolson abruptly yet deliberately introduces a form of almanac as the main character Gertrude’s mode of daily record. The attention to that uniquely hybrid genre in the American literary tradition, which encompasses the public and the private, the universal and the local, sheds light on Woolson’s authorial intention to deconstruct the Manichean view of literary regionalism.
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