IN THE TENNESSEE MOUNTAINS

In the Tennessee Mountains, a collection of eight short stories published in 1884 by Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, is the first book of Mary Noailles Murfree (1850–1922), most of whose work appeared under the pseudonym Charles Egbert Craddock. Writing in an era when women's voices in literature were barely beginning to gain credence, Murfree chose to camouflage her identity in the belief that her fiction would find a wider audience under the guise of male authorship. Whether gender mattered in her case cannot be known, but Murfree's fiction gained popularity almost from the outset. Each story in the collection was initially published in a separate issue of the Atlantic Monthly, starting in 1878 with "The Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove" and continuing through March and April of 1884 with "Drifting down Lost Creek." Her editors at the Atlantic, first William Dean Howells and then Thomas Bailey Aldrich, were so impressed with her writing and the response it generated that Aldrich urged Houghton, Mifflin to bring out a volume of the stories. The editors' beliefs in her talent, her topic, and the tastes of the reading public were not ill founded. During Murfree's lifetime In the Tennessee Mountains sold out twenty-four printings. Since her death on 31 July 1922 it has gone through several more.

Despite this record, Murfree has nothing approaching the name recognition or literary acclaim of contemporaries such as Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James. Part of the reason lies with the genre she chose to pursue: local-color fiction. A relatively short-lived movement from the end of the Civil War until around 1900, local colorism served to highlight specific regions of the country and their inhabitants. Relying heavily on descriptions of the natural environment, along with the peculiar customs and unique dialect of a region, the local colorists ignored character development and were not especially mindful of plotting. In the opinion of the critic Nathalia Wright, they leaned toward anecdote of the Washington Irving variety rather than toward Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne's kind of penetration into characters' motives and the effects of their actions. Their work can be aptly likened to the melodrama of the sentimental novel, with emphasis on a nostalgic reverence for the simple life, usually of a past time or, as in the case of Murfree, of a place where time appears to stand still—the Appalachian Mountains. Murfree's fiction is generally considered to be the first full portrayal of southern Appalachian mountaineers as a distinct type, be that for good or ill.

MURFREE'S CHOICE OF TOPIC

How did a genteel, slightly lame, southern lady from an aristocratic family in the late 1800s come to write about a remote, sometimes treacherous, allegedly violent area of the country? Primarily through the opportunities money can buy and the nurturing of her interests and talents by educated parents, especially her father who was an attorney, author, and editor of legal publications as well as a wealthy plantation owner. The opportunities included summering with her family in Beersheba Springs in the Cumberland Mountains of middle Tennessee, a refuge from the heat of the Murfree estate, "Grantland," in the lowlands near Murfreesboro, a town that derives its name from the family's.

Every year from age five until she reached her early twenties, Mary observed mountain people who came to the resort to provide services for the "summer people." As she became more accomplished in the music loved by her mother, an accomplished pianist, she would from time to time offer impromptu piano concerts in the wide hall of the fashionable and luxurious hotel situated at the brink of a spectacular mountain view. She and family members occasionally rode into the mountains to buy fresh vegetables and eggs from residents with whom they had become acquainted. Mary paid close attention to the cabin homes and their surrounds. She listened to the speech patterns and took in the dialect, syntax, grammar, and colorful expressions common among southern mountaineers. She noted the tone of voice, the emotion or lack of it, the physical appearances, the topics of conversation. As a young adult, encouraged by her father, she began to record her observations in story form. Thinking she had the beginnings of a novel in "The Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove," she agreed at her father's insistence to submit it for publication to the Atlantic Monthly. Howells accepted and published it, and so launched a career that was to span more than forty years, eighteen novels, and seven collections of short stories.

Literary scholars generally consider In the Tennessee Mountains and the novel The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains (1885) to be Murfree's best works, both coming early in a long career that diminished in importance with the turning of the century and a general movement toward realism and determinism in popular fiction. Nonetheless, the historical significance of In the Tennessee Mountains must not be minimized. Despite literary weaknesses that mark the local color genre and this specific representation of it, Mary Murfree's picture of southern Appalachian mountaineers became fixed in the national mind and has not faded entirely. Over the years much of the effect of that portrayal has been negative, as indeed was often the case with subjects of local color writing.

RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN OUTSIDERS AND INSIDERS

Murfree presents authentic characteristics and speech patterns but does so in such a way as to set her characters apart and mark them as alien from the mainstream of people who would be the readers of her fiction. While her intentions appear sympathetic to mountain people and she deserves credit for elevating them to literary status, she wrote patronizingly, especially in stories with interactions between outsiders and insiders. As descriptions of natural beauty soar off into hyperbolic purple prose, the mountain habitations and natives compare poorly to the sophisticated outside world of characters such as Reginald Chevis in "The Star in the Valley" and John Cleaver in "The Romance of Sunrise Rock." Cleaver in the opening scene sarcastically considers the question of a companion, described as a "hairy animal, whose jeans suit proclaimed him man," but determines that it is "not worth his while to enlighten the mountaineer" (p. 183). Later the narrator, whose consciousness is Cleaver's, muses that "it would have been impossible to demonstrate to [the mountaineers] that they stood on a lower social plane. . . . As to the artificial distinctions of money and education,—what do the ignorant mountaineers care about money and education!" (pp. 196–197). Obviously Murfree disparages the superior airs of Cleaver but at the same time points out the pitiable "innocence" of mountain people.

In "The Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove" old Mr. Kenyon, a lay preacher in the Episcopal Church and a summer visitor to the mountain, must step in to settle an explosive conflict between two feuding mountaineers, Rick Pearson, an outlaw, and John Kossuth, a much younger man, both of whom have drawn their guns and are ready to shoot. Murfree allows authority, as represented by Kenyon and the church, to override the mountaineers' own codes of justice and social behavior. Mitigating circumstances exist between Kenyon, the "old fightin' preacher" (p. 242) and Pearson—they fought together in the Civil War—but this does not account for events in the story where the famed independence of the mountaineer is surrendered in deference to the stern outsider and the institution he represents.

The following excerpt from the chapter "Drifting Down Lost Creek" illustrates the majestic personification of the mountains in Murfree's work and the powerful pull the mountains have on the mountaineer.

The sun had gone down, but the light yet lingered. The evening star trembled above Pine Mountain. Massive and darkling it stood against the red west. How far, ah, how far stretched that mellow crimson glow, all adown Lost Creek Valley, and over the vast mountain solitudes on either hand! Even the eastern ranges were rich with this legacy of the dead and gone day, and purple and splendid they lay beneath the rising moon. She looked at it with full and shining eyes.

"I dunno how he kin make out ter furgit the mountings," she said; and then she went on, hearing the crisp leaves rustling beneath her tread, and the sharp bark of a fox in the silence of the night-shadowed valley.

Murfree, In the Tennessee Mountains, p. 72.

PATRONAGE TOWARD MOUNTAIN PEOPLE AND THEIR HOMES

In stories where no outsider appears, the omniscient narrator takes on patronizing tones even while complimenting humble homes and humble residents. Witness the description of Mother Ware engaged in Monday's washday industry in "Drifting down Lost Creek":

She paused to prod the boiling clothes with a long stick. She was a tall woman, fifty years of age, perhaps, but seeming much older. So gaunt she was, so toothless, haggard, and disheveled, that but for the lazy step and languid interest she might have suggested one of Macbeth's witches, as she hovered about the great cauldron. (P. 3)

The family home is described thus: "The house had a very unconfiding aspect; all its belongings seemed huddled about it for safe-keeping. The beehives stood almost under the eaves; the ash-hopper was visible close in the rear; the rain-barrel affiliated with the damp wall" (p. 17). But in the eyes of daughter Cynthia's suitor, it becomes "the embowered little house, that itself turned its face upward, looking as it were to the mountain's summit. How it nestled there in the gorge!" (p. 18). A similar description of a house as refuge occurs in "Over on the T'other Mounting":

When [Mother White] turned back to the door of the little hut, the meagre comforts within seemed almost luxury, in their cordial contrast to the desolate, dreary mountain yonder and the thought of the forlorn, wandering hunter [Tony Britt]. A genial glow from the hearth diffused itself over the puncheon floor; the savory odor of broiling venison filled the room as a tall, slim girl knelt before the fire and placed the meat upon the gridiron. (P. 261)

In "The 'Harnt' That Walks Chilhowee," Murfree grudgingly compliments an impassioned response from the widower Simon Burney, a would-be suitor for Clarsie Giles's hand: "The expression of [her father's] views . . . provoked Simon Burney to wrath; there was something astir within him that in a worthier subject might have been called a chivalric thrill, and it forbade him to hold his peace" (p. 287). Later in the story she describes Burney's compassion and generosity:

There was only a sluggish current of peasant blood in Simon Burney's veins, but a prince could not have dispensed hospitality with a more royal hand. Ungrudgingly he gave of his best; valiantly he defended his thankless guest at the risk of his life; with a moral gallantry he struggled with his sloth, and worked early and late, that there might be enough to divide. (P. 321)

ILL EFFECTS OF LEAVING THE MOUNTAINS

In stories where mountaineers have left the mountains for the world beyond, the result is invariably negative, as demonstrated by Rufus Chadd, who went off to study law and become a politician in "Electioneerin' on Big Injun Mounting." Losing his sense of neighborliness and hospitality among the "town folks down thar at Ephesus" (p. 156), he is redeemed only by nearly losing his life at the hands of one of his constituents. As if from a sudden revelation, he pleads from his sickbed that his attacker not be prosecuted. That noble impulse is enough to get him reelected in a landslide for attorney general of the state. Another backslider, Evander Price in "Drifting down Lost Creek," seemingly forgets his mountain home and homefolks, including the love-struck Cynthia Ware, when he is sent away to prison for a crime he did not commit. There he learns iron-working skills that he plies to advantage in the outside world. Although he comes back eventually to take his family away, he never undergoes redemption nor makes amends to Cynthia, who won his pardon from prison and spent her life waiting in vain for him. In "A-Playin' of Old Sledge at the Settlemint" no one leaves the mountains permanently, but young Josiah Tait goes away to "the Cross-Roads" (p. 96), a microcosm of the world beyond, long enough to learn a card game called Old Sledge. Dubbed by disapproving old-timers as "this hyar coal o' fire from hell" (p. 95), Old Sledge proves to be the undoing of Tait. Only his opponent Budd Wray's generosity of spirit and the abolishment of the "coal o' fire from hell" save Tait and the settlement.

POSITIVE TRAITS OF MOUNTAINEERS

On the other hand, mountain people repeatedly display their "hearts of gold," a local color theme developed by Bret Harte, who initiated the genre in the late 1860s. From the first story to the last, one mountaineer after another commits acts of generosity and self-sacrifice. Cynthia Ware in "Drifting down Lost Creek" spends years of physical and emotional energy seeking a pardon from prison for Evander Price. Budd Wray in "A-Playin' of Old Sledge at the Settlemint" gives back all the material goods he won from Josiah Tait. Celia Shaw in "The Star in the Valley" walks fifteen miles in a snowstorm to the detriment of her own health to warn a family of renegades about an attack. Rufus Chadd in "Electioneerin' on Big Injun Mounting" forgives his assailant and foregoes prosecution. The outlaw Rick Pearson and young Kossuth Johns in "The Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove" decide not to shoot each other to settle their feud. Despite attempted murder and alleged murder, Tony Britt and Caleb Hoxie in "Over on the T'other Mounting" ultimately become friends, albeit with a skittish relationship. Both Clarsie Giles and Simon Burney in "The 'Harnt' That Walks Chilhowee" show compassion for the "ghost" Reuben Crabb, and Burney ultimately takes in the ingrate to defend, feed, and clothe.

CONCLUSION

In summary Murfree's portrayal of Appalachian mountaineers—both positive and negative, exaggeration and reality—established a type that prevails into the early twenty-first century. She was a pioneer in her use of authentic dialect of the region, even though its representation through phonetic spelling often seems contrived to modern readers. Her decision to write about the Tennessee mountains led to a depiction of the mountains themselves as characters whose impact is equal to or greater than that of her human characters. Indeed a major criticism of her work is that she fails to penetrate the minds and emotions of her characters as thoroughly as she examines the qualities of the mountains. A strength, on the other hand, is her development of the concept of inseparableness of mountains and mountaineers. These are not people, she recognizes, who can easily leave their place and flourish elsewhere. Ultimately her greatest gift may be the start of a long, ongoing conversation about the identity of southern Appalachian mountaineers and the mystical attraction of the mountains in which they live.

See alsoRegionalism and Local Color Fiction

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Work

Murfree, Mary Noailles. In the Tennessee Mountains. 1884. Introduction by Nathalia Wright. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1970.

Secondary Works

Cary, Richard. Mary N. Murfree. New York: Twayne, 1967.

Clement, Russell. "Mary Noailles Murfree." In Tennessee Authors, Past and Present. Tennessee Authors Project. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Libraries, 2003. Available at http://www.lib.utk.edu/refs/tnauthors/authors/murfree-m.html.

Dunn, Durwood. "Mary Noailles Murfree: A Reappraisal." Appalachian Journal 6, no. 3 (1979): 197–204.

Ensor, Allison R. "What Is the Place of Mary Noailles Murfree Today?" Tennessee Historical Quarterly 47, no. 4 (1988): 198–205.

Miller, Danny. Wingless Flights: Appalachian Women in Fiction. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1996.

Parks, Edd Winfield. Charles Egbert Craddock (Mary Noailles Murfree). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941.

Warfel, Harry R., and George Harrison Orians, eds. American Local-Color Stories. New York: American Book, 1941.

Williams, Cratis D. "The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction." Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1961.

Wright, Nathalia. Introduction to In the Tennessee Mountains. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1970.

Grace Toney Edwards