Mary Noailles Murfree

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Mary Noailles Murfree: A Reappraisal

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SOURCE: Dunn, Durwood. “Mary Noailles Murfree: A Reappraisal.” Appalachian Journal 6 (1979): 197-205.

[In the following essay, Dunn reevaluates Murfree in light of previous criticism and concludes that Murfree's stereotypical portrayals of Tennessee life obscured a true understanding of the mountain people.]

Even at the height of her brief popularity in the 1880's, Mary Noailles Murfree's literary reputation rested largely on the momentary uniqueness or novelty of her materials—the mountains and mountaineers of the Cumberland Mountains in middle Tennessee and their counterparts in the more rugged Great Smoky Mountains in east Tennessee. Murfree herself realized the primacy of these materials in her work and, with few notable exceptions, mined the mother lode of the Tennessee mountaineers to exhaustion in novel after novel, long after her early popularity had been eclipsed. Indeed one biographer, Edd Winfield Parks, maintained that had she died after writing The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains (1885), “her reputation as a novelist would be far higher than it is today.”1

Admittedly, her reputation has never recovered its brief pinnacle of the 1880's. For almost a century, critics have lamented her episodic plots, the overblown descriptions of mountain scenery, and the stock characters, such as the beautiful maiden, scolding old woman, tyrannical infant, etc., who reoccur with monotonous regularity in her writing.2 Ironically, however, at the same time these critics were decrying her skill as a creative artist, they accepted her portraits of Tennessee mountaineers as authentic. Richard Cary summarized this growing consensus when he wrote in 1967 that Murfree “gave expression to a place, a people, and a moment in time which may never again see its duplication in the history of our civilization.”3 In other words, such critics believe that Murfree's literary sins should partially be overlooked because she accurately preserved a rare snapshot of Tennessee mountain community before modern industrialism destroyed all such enclaves of local culture.

The acceptance of the authenticity of Murfree's mountain portraits in the popular mind of America during the latter part of the nineteenth century was fraught with momentous implications. More than any other writer, she fixed a stereotype of the Southern mountaineer in the American consciousness which remains durable to this day. For decades after her popularity ended, Henry Shapiro argues, her writings “remained the principal text used to understand the peculiarities of mountain life.”4 Another scholar asserts that so successful was Murfree in fixing her interpretation on a later generation “that writers who have attempted to present a literary mountaineer based on any type of real mountaineer other than the one she selected have met with an indifferent popular success.”5

Despite Murfree's later importance in determining our image of Appalachia, no scholar has examined in depth the sources of Murfree's fictional mountain world to assess the authenticity of her descriptions. Though her stereotypes of mountain people may certainly be questionable, her greatest claim to authenticity has ironically been considered her worst failure as an artist—her over-elaborate description of mountain scenery. William Allen White complained that “her mountain landscapes were done after the painting of the period, bright, lovely, gorgeous, and—alas—unreal.”6 Other critics have argued that these descriptions grew more pronounced in each succeeding novel and overshadowed or dominated the plot. But Murfree, though lame, had actually visited Gregory's Bald and Thunderhead, and her descriptions, while admittedly repetitious, are both accurate and real.

Murfree was exposed to the Great Smoky Mountains in frequent summer trips there after 1871. This biographical detail, however, has escaped the notice of practically all later critics. As late as 1978, one scholar asserted that she wrote The Prophet without actually having seen the Smokies.7 Even Murfree's major biographer believed that her first visit to Montvale Springs in east Tennessee occurred in September 1885.8

Yet in a 1932 interview, Murfree's sister Fannie stated that the family took frequent trips to Smoky Mountain resorts during the 1870's. There Mary rode on horseback to many of the surrounding balds she would later describe in her fiction. On one such trip the entire family lodged several days in a mountain home.9 Thus, long before her first mountain story appeared, Murfree had had extensive exposure to the mountains, coves, and homesteads of east Tennessee, all of which were in easy reach of Montvale Springs, the resort which the family probably used as their headquarters.

The area most important in her later descriptions is Cades Cove, which, because of its proximity to Montvale Springs, had earlier been used in the fiction of Sidney Lanier.10 If internal evidence alone were not overwhelming, we have verification from a contemporary observer, Charles Forster Smith, a Vanderbilt University professor who visited Cades Cove in July of 1885 and later recognized its description in Murfree's novels. According to him, the cove occupied a position of geographic centrality, stretching “along by the side of the Great Smoky Mountains from the foot of ‘the Bald,’ where ‘Pa'son’ Kelsey used to pray, almost to ‘Thunderhead,’ around which were enacted scenes of In the Clouds. …” He accurately identified Tuckaleechee Cove, a neighboring community, as the home of “Mis' Purvine” and her steer “Buck,” characters from In the Clouds. He also pointed out that Peter Giles' farm in “The ‘Harnt’ that Walks Chilhowee” is completely fictitious, since the long mountain ridge of Chilhowee was at that time “covered with a dense growth of timber from one end to the other, and totally uninhabited. …”11

Although most of her stories in In the Tennessee Mountains clearly are based on scenes from the Cumberland Mountains of middle Tennessee, at least one, “The ‘Harnt’ that Walks Chilhowee,” contains internal evidence indicating that its setting was on Chilhowee Mountain in east Tennessee.12 There is indisputable internal evidence, however, that she used Cades Cove and its environs in The Prophet, first published serially in the Atlantic Monthly, January-August 1885. Both Tuckaleechee Cove and Cades Cove are specifically mentioned, and the surrounding balds are described in the opening paragraph.13

Her description of both Tuckaleechee Cove and Cades Cove is accurate in reference to roads, settlements, mills, log cabins, and streams. Cades Cove is described as Piomingo Cove in In the Clouds:

Sequestered, encompassed by the mountains, rugged of surface, veined with rock, its agricultural interest is hardly served by its picturesque aspect. The roofs of a few log cabins at long intervals peer out from among scanty orchards and fields. Tobacco flourished down the sides of steep funnel-shaped depressions worked exclusively with the hoe, and suggesting acrobatic capacity as a co-requisite with industry to cultivate it. The woods make heavily into the cove, screening it from familiar knowledge of its hills and dales.14

Murfree usually changed place names: her Piomingo Bald is the real Spence Field, and Tuckaleechee Cove is called Eskaqua Cove, while Little River is termed Scolacutta River. Thunderhead, Silar's Bald, Gregory's Bald, and Parsons' Bald retain their proper names. Maryville became the fictional Shaftesville and was given a reasonably accurate description in In the Clouds. Blount County became the fictional Cherokee County, and Sevier County was Murfree's Kildeer County, whose real seat, Sevierville, she usually called Colbury. Knoxville, the metropolis closest to these mountain towns, was called Glaston. Only Nashville retained its real name throughout her writings.15 It is somewhat remarkable that so many of Murfree's fictitious names were used over and over again, even in her later juvenile stories; this very durability suggests the deep impression their models had earlier made upon her.

Whatever name she gave Cades Cove, however, its physical description remained essentially the same in novel after novel. It is Broomsedge Cove in The Despot of Broomsedge Cove; Eskaqua Cove in The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains; Piomingo Cove in In the Clouds; simply “the Cove” in both His Vanished Star and In the “Stranger People's” Country; Etowah Cove in The Juggler; Lonesome Cove in “'Way Down in Lonesome Cove”; and Holly Cove in “The Moonshiners at Hoho-Hebee Falls.” As late as 1911, though it was now called Tanglefoot Cove, its description was still remarkably accurate, “some four miles long, and its average breadth … little more than a mile,” surrounded on all sides by the Great Smoky Mountains.16

Occasionally she enlarged Abram's Creek which ran through Cades Cove into a river, particularly when so compelled by the demands of her plot. It was necessary to locate old Gus Griff's mill on a larger body of water, for instance, in order to allow sufficient depth for his idiot grandson, Tad, to be supposed drowned in In the Clouds.17 But her repeated description of the cove and its surrounding mountains usually remains as unchanging as the personalities of her stock characters.

That Murfree was not describing areas or coves in the Cumberland Mountains in these later novels is evident from internal evidence alone. Frequently she points out in the beginning of a novel that the setting is in the Great Smoky Mountains. Often the Unionism of east Tennessee is used as a dominant theme; no such division existed on so large a scale in the mountains of middle Tennessee. The names Murfree selected are used to show geographical proximity which could only fit towns in east Tennessee. When these names are used in other stories, with no mention of the coves, the reader still has a ready index or key. In The Ordeal, for instance, Glaston is again Knoxville; Shaftsville is Maryville; and the resort hotel is obviously Montvale Springs. There is also considerable evidence that the hotel at New Helvetia Springs in The Windfall is actually Montvale Springs; its description and its proximity to the Great Smoky Mountains and to the large metropolis of Glaston (Knoxville) offer a compelling argument that Murfree was not in fact describing Beersheba Springs in the Cumberland Mountains. The cave described in The Windfall fits the description of Gregory Cave in Cades Cove.18 Thus one can identify these place names from novel to novel, since they appear consistently to represent the same location in Murfree's mind.

Murfree was also generally accurate in describing the log cabins she had visited, particularly their interiors. Puncheon floors, strings of red peppers hanging from the ceiling, gourds and piggins, wide fireplaces with large pots hanging over them, brightly colored quilts piled high on goosefeather beds, cane-bottom chairs, and warping bars with equidistant pegs holding sizing yarn were typical of the average cove homestead in the 1880's. Clothing—homespun jeans for the men and occasional calico dresses for the women—was also faithfully represented. The basic cleanliness and orderliness of the homes, the abundance of simple food, and the healthiness of the cove dwellers were duly noted by Murfree, although she was not unaware of the rather high infant mortality of this period.19

Despite the accuracy of Murfree's descriptions of log cabins, she neglected to mention any other types of dwellings encountered in the Tennessee mountains during the 1880's. As Cratis Williams points out, there is “ample evidence that homes varied much in construction and style” during this period.20 By the 1870's, frame houses had appeared in both Cades Cove and Tuckaleechee Cove; often traditional log structures were modernized by a frame facade. Log cabins also varied considerably in size and style.21 Some larger “cabins,” with upstairs and several wings, bear little resemblance to the more primitive log cabins—usually without windows—which are described with monotonous regularity in Murfree's fiction.

The enormous devastation and suffering resulting from the Civil War were so obvious in the lives of the cove people that Murfree could not fail to take heed and incorporate tales of guerilla raids and bushwhackers into her fiction. Her portrayal of the predominant Unionism of east Tennessee and of the defenders of Cades Cove during the war in one story seems remarkable and somewhat uncharacteristic for its historical accuracy:

Few and feeble folk were they. The volunteering spirit rife in the early days of the Civil War had wrought the first depletion in the number. Then came, as time wore on, the rigors of the conscription, with an extension of the limits of age from the very young to the verge of the venerable, thus robbing, as was said, both the cradle and the grave. Now only the ancient weaklings and the frail callow remained of the male population among the women and girls, who seemed mere supernumeraries in the scheme of creation, rated by the fitness to bear arms.22

If Murfree could not fail to see the overwhelming impact of the Civil War, she nevertheless saw these effects in basically static terms. No other event during the nineteenth century caused such enormous upheaval and change in Cades Cove. For almost four years, rebel raiders terrorized and robbed the helpless inhabitants. But Murfree recorded only the immediate poverty and depression of the people in the aftermath of the conflict as though they had never experienced a more prosperous lifestyle before 1860. Never with any of her writings does the reader imagine that life in these coves was quite different, more prosperous, and more in the mainstream of American life during the 1850's. Nor does Murfree give any hope of change or relief in the future.

This impression, subtly and implicitly conveyed, that life in the coves in 1885 was essentially the same as it was in 1855 or would be in 1905, was perhaps Murfree's greatest single misconception in shaping our later image of Appalachia. It was occasioned by the intermittent nature of her visits to the Great Smoky Mountains and her lack of any real insight into the daily lives of the people she encountered there. Unfortunately, the historical record which clearly refutes this stereotype has proven completely inefficacious in eliminating or at least qualifying her conception of an unchanging, or changeless, society.23

Murfree's representation of mountain dialect was an integral part of her success as a local colorist, yet some critics early challenged the authenticity of the speech of her fictional characters. E. C. Perrow, folklorist and professor of English at the University of Louisville, had grown up in the mountains of east Tennessee and pronounced Murfree's stories “untrue as to dialect.”24 Waldo Frank complained that she shifted from the Cumberland Mountains of middle Tennessee to the Great Smoky Mountains of east Tennessee “without a corresponding change in the characteristics of the people.” He further charged that she erroneously gave the impression that “dialect talk is the only speech among the mountaineers of all degrees.”25

This latter charge is particularly true in reference to the inhabitants of Cades Cove. Considerable diversity of speech existed from family to family; there certainly was never a uniform dialect which all the cove dwellers spoke.26 Other scholars who studied the speech of the inhabitants of the Great Smoky Mountains in the twentieth century continue to challenge the authenticity of Murfree's dialect. “With allowance for the fifty-five years which have passed since she wrote The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains and the changes which a dialect may undergo in that length of time,” concluded Joseph Hall in his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University in 1942, “it is still difficult to believe that the people of the Smokies ever spoke quite as she makes them speak.”27

In contrast to her usual acumen in describing their physical environment, Murfree failed in many important respects to depict accurately her human fixtures in the Tennessee mountains. Often she used her mountaineers as Tacitus had used the German barbarians—as a sort of negative correlative of virtues lacking in modern society to which she wished to call attention. When such individuals in her fiction show particular virtue or courage, they are illustrative of both what is missing in modern society and what is, in glaring contrast, strikingly absent in the typical mountaineer. She frequently talked about the universality of human nature, but in practice such universal characteristics appear in her writings in a highly selective and distorted form.

The best, most admirable mountaineers in her fiction are neither real people nor are they meant to be typical of their class. They are, in fact, almost metaphors, in that they represent a single virtue or a cluster of similar virtues abstractly: faithfulness, constancy, or simply superior moral sensibility. Her ordinary people are no more capable of assuming these virtues than are her paragons liable to human frailties. If these paragons suffer any faults, they are minor sins, like stubbornness in maintaining what they believe to be the right course. Alethea Sayles in In the Clouds is an excellent example of this type of heroine, and Murfree seems to go to great lengths to illustrate how alienated such superior beings inevitably become from their fellow mountaineers.28

These misrepresentations of mountain life and society have occasionally been noted by literary critics from Waldo Frank to the present. If her failures had been confined to literature, perhaps little harm would have occurred. But according to an extremely perceptive study by historian Robert Love Taylor, Jr., she entered the realm of politics by unveiling during the 1880's a “discernible policy for Southern Appalachia.” Convinced that the Tennessee mountain people were a separate caste completely cut off from mainstream America, Murfree argued through her fiction that these people must be protected from the “inevitable menace” of a “sophisticated, often acquisitive lowland society.” According to Taylor, the caste system she consequently championed was “never consciously invidious,” but its effect would be to isolate permanently the mountaineers and prevent their assimilation into either contemporary American life or the approaching twentieth century.29

Taylor offers convincing evidence that Murfree considered her mountaineers sui generis. For example, she never allowed her cove dwellers to marry outsiders or to succeed in the mainstream of American life beyond the mountains. Believing that mountaineers could never be happy or adjust in any environment other than the one in which they were born, she created a powerful impression throughout her fiction that the Tennessee mountaineer could only survive by eschewing any encroachment into his domain of modern industrial America. A careful reading of Murfree's novels verifies this “message”: the mountaineer must remain in his own world or risk losing his identity, happiness, or even his life.30

Fortunately the mountain people of Southern Appalachia were not limited by Murfree's efforts to save them from the perils of modern society. Scholars of the region have not been so fortunate. Murfree's stereotypes continue to haunt any research simply by dominating the types of questions asked. Particularly enduring has been her assumption that a relatively homogeneous, static society with a common dialect existed in the Tennessee mountains. In reality such enormous diversity has existed both within the region and within relatively small mountain communities such as Cades Cove that to approach an analysis or study of such an area with any of Murfree's preconceptions invites confusion. Yet so implanted in the American consciousness are her stereotypes, as Henry Shapiro argues, that we cannot easily ignore or readily discard them.31 In the final analysis, Murfree's simplistic distortions and selective perceptions of Tennessee mountain society have obscured rather than enlightened our continuing efforts to understand the historical realities of Southern Appalachia.

Notes

  1. Edd Winfield Parks, Charles Egbert Craddock (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1941), pp. 171-206.

  2. Cratis D. Williams, “The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction,” Ph.D. Dissertation (New York University, 1961), pp. 729-37; Lucy Lockwood Hazard, The Frontier in American Literature (New York: Frederick Ungar, Pub., 1927), pp. 81-2; Fred Lewis Pattee, A History of American Literature Since 1870 (New York: Century Co., 1917), pp. 310-16.

  3. Richard Cary, Mary N. Murfree (New York: Twayne Pub., 1967), p. 174.

  4. Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1978), pp. xv, 13-20.

  5. Williams, p. 666.

  6. William Allen White, “Fiction of the Eighties and Nineties,” in American Writers on American Literature, ed. John Macy (New York: H. Liveright, Inc., 1931), p. 395.

  7. Allison Ensor, “The Geography of Mary Noailles Murfree's In the Tennessee Mountains,Mississippi Quarterly, 31 (Winter 1977-78), 193.

  8. Parks, pp. 129-31.

  9. Eva Malone Byrd, “The Life and Writings of Mary Noailles Murfree,” M. A. Thesis (University of Tennessee, 1937), pp. 41-2; Eleanor B. Spence, “Collected Reminiscences of Mary N. Murfree,” M.A. Thesis (George Peabody College, 1928), p. 18. Miss Spence, a cousin, points out that all Murfree's letters were burned at her request, so the absence of such valuable source materials probably contributed to the confusion over when she first visited east Tennessee.

  10. Sidney Lanier, Tiger-Lilies (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1867), pp. 57-8; Nathalia Wright, “Montvale Springs under the Proprietorship of Sterling Lanier, 1857-1863,” East Tennessee Historical Society's Publications, No. 19 (1947), 59.

  11. Charles Forster Smith, Reminiscences and Sketches (Nashville: M. E. Church, South, 1908), pp. 404-12. See also Robert Lindsay Mason, The Lure of the Great Smokies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), p. 11. Murfree had first called In the Clouds “Thunderhead,” but her publisher insisted on its present title. See Spence, p. 37.

  12. Nathalia Wright, “A Note on the Setting of Mary Noailles Murfree's ‘The “Harnt” that Walks Chilhowee’,” Modern Language Notes, 62 (April 1947), 272.

  13. Charles Egbert Craddock, The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), pp. 1, 6, 209. Tuckaleechee Cove is present-day Townsend, Tennessee.

  14. Charles Egbert Craddock, In the Clouds (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1887), p. 21.

  15. One critic argues that Colbury was actually McMinnville. Ensor, p. 196. Note, however, the internal evidence in the stories in Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and The Despot of Broomsedge Cove which indicate proximity of Colbury to the Great Smoky Mountains and to the adjacent cove where much of the action occurs. Charles Egbert Craddock, The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895), pp. 121, 168-70, 178-9, 236-7; Charles Egbert Craddock, The Despot of Broomsedge Cove (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), p. 488.

  16. Charles Egbert Craddock, The Raid of the Guerilla and Other Stories (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1912), p. 19.

  17. Craddock, Clouds, p. 99.

  18. Charles Egbert Craddock, The Ordeal (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1912), pp. 8, 71, 101, 261; Charles Egbert Craddock, The Windfall (New York: Duffield & Co., 1907), pp. 326-30, 426-31.

  19. Williams, p. 670. For an excellent description of the cove people's grief over infant mortality, see The Prophet, pp. 92-3.

  20. Williams, p. 669.

  21. Durwood Dunn, “Cades Cove During the Nineteenth Century,” Ph.D. Dissertation (University of Tennessee, 1976), pp. 56-64. Unfortunately the National Park Service has not preserved examples of the various nineteenth-century frame structures in Cades Cove. Diversity is evident, however, in the log structures which have been preserved.

  22. Craddock, Raid of the Guerilla, p. 7.

  23. Durwood Dunn, “The Folk Culture of Cades Cove, Tennessee,” Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin, 43 (June 1977), 69-71.

  24. E.C. Perrow, “Songs and Rhymes of the South,” Journal of American Folklore, 25 (1912), 138.

  25. Waldo Frank, “Among the Southern Appalachians,” New England Magazine, 24 (May 1901), 241-3.

  26. Dunn, “Folk Culture,” pp. 74-8.

  27. Joseph S. Hall, The Phonetics of Great Smoky Mountain Speech (New York: King's Crown Press, 1942), p. 3. See also M. Jean Jones, “The Regional English of the Former Inhabitants of Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains,” Ph.D. Dissertation (University of Tennessee, 1973).

  28. Craddock, Clouds, passim. The first prototype of this heroine is Cynthia Ware in “Drifting Down Lost Creek,” a story in In the Tennessee Mountains whose setting is clearly in the Cumberland Mountains of middle Tennessee.

  29. Robert Love Taylor, Jr., “Mainstreams of Mountain Thought: Attitudes of Selected Figures in the Heart of the Appalachian South, 1877-1903,” Ph.D. Dissertation (University of Tennessee, 1971), pp. 103-05.

  30. Ibid., pp. 60-103.

  31. Shapiro, pp. 19-20.

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