SOURCE: “Origins of American Literary Regionalism: Gender in Irving, Stowe, and Longstreet” in Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women's Regional Writing, edited by Sherrie A. Inness and Diana Royer, University of Iowa Press, 1997, pp. 17-37.

[In the following essay, Pryse explores the advent of regionalism by comparing Harriet Beecher Stowe's “Uncle Lot” to Irving's “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle.”]

Any attempt to construct a narrative of the origins of regionalism must begin by acknowledging the problematic status of such an attempt in a critical climate where both “origins” and “regionalism” are themselves contested terms. In a survey of this problem, Amy Kaplan builds her discussion of late-nineteenth-century regionalism on the post-Civil War cultural project of national reunification. For Kaplan, this project involved forgetting a past that included “a contested relation between national and racial identity” as well as “reimagining a distended industrial nation as an extended clan sharing a ‘common inheritance’ in its imagined rural origins” (“Nation” 242, 251). My own project in this essay takes up the concept of origins from an earlier historical point than does Kaplan. In her first published fiction, “A New England Sketch” (1834) (or “Uncle Lot,” as she later retitled it when she included it in The Mayflower [1843]), Harriet Beecher Stowe associates regionalism with remembering that American literary culture emerged from a contested relation in which men were victorious, that, for Stowe, the values of women's sphere offered a moral ground for the construction of nation, and that any subsequent reinvention of national origins that did not take into account the contest over men's and women's “spheres” of influence would indeed serve as cultural “forgetting.”

Philip Fisher complicates our understanding of the term “regionalism” by defining it as a series of “episodes” in American cultural history that have in common a politicized “struggle within representation,” an ongoing cultural civil war that serves as “the counterelement to central myths within American studies” (243, 233). For the nineteenth century, sectional voices split along geographical lines; in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, massive immigration between 1870 and 1914 produced “a regionalism of languages, folk customs, humor, music and beliefs” set against processes of Americanization; “the regionalism of our own times … is one of gender and race” (242-43). Suggesting that such a counterelement makes a critical move from myths (of a unified America) to rhetorics (as sites of cultural work), Fisher identifies Harriet Beecher Stowe as one of the “masters” of “collaborative and implicational relations between writer or speaker and culture” (237). For critics interested in how literature accomplishes what Jane Tompkins in Sensational Designs described as “cultural work,” Stowe appears to have joined the late-twentieth-century conversation over the relationship between literature and culture.

Far from viewing Stowe herself and the particular form of regionalism she took for her fiction as a “diminished thing,” a “subordinate order” (to cite James M. Cox's dismissive critical assessment of regionalism in Columbia Literary History of the United States [764-65]), we can view her work as engaged in a rhetoric of cultural dislocation, a project of inventing alternatives to national views on slavery, women's education, the profession of literature, and women's roles in nation building. Joan Hedrick observes in the preface to her recent biography of Stowe that the hostility to Stowe's writing that judged her work “to be amateur, unprofessional, and ‘bad art’” emerged “in the 1860s between the dominant women writers and the rising literary establishment of men who were determined to displace them” (Harriet Beecher Stowe ix). As I shall demonstrate, although Stowe began writing before the Civil War and appears to equate regionalism with a geographical concept—and memory—of New England life in her first published work, she was from the beginning engaged in the kind of rhetorical contestation Philip Fisher associates with “new Americanist” concepts of regionalism. For Stowe, this cultural work involved gender and the role of women in the nation—a rhetorical struggle that remains unresolved.

In writing her first sketch Stowe discovers that the process of conversion, a distant forerunner of what feminists in the 1970s termed “consciousness raising,” can provide the narrative intention for a work of fiction, thereby allowing ministers' daughters (both Stowe herself and Grace Griswold in the sketch) to imagine expanding their authority in literary and domestic spheres. My own understanding of conversion in Stowe is similar to that of Jane Tompkins, who writes in her analysis of Uncle Tom's Cabin that for Stowe, “historical change takes place only through religious conversion” but that such conversion for Stowe has “revolutionary potential” (133, 145). Tompkins argues that Stowe pushes her beliefs “to an extreme and by insisting that they be applied universally, not just to one segregated corner of civil life, but to the conduct of all human affairs, Stowe means to effect a radical transformation of her society” (145). In “Uncle Lot,” conversion becomes a model for narrative form as well as a transformative theme: Stowe is attempting to “convert” her (male) readers to the power of women's narrative authority.

In presenting conversion as both the source of action and the goal of fiction in “Uncle Lot,” Stowe anticipates the empathic point of view characteristic of women regionalist writers and their narrators, thus originating the cultural and literary developmental line of the regionalist tradition. If for the Beechers conversion required a “private change of heart” (Sklar 27), the conversion of evolving American literary culture would require a cultural change of heart. And in this way, from her earliest published sketch, Stowe attempted to transform the direction of American fiction with the same passion that her sister Catharine addressed to the transformation of the profession of teaching; for both sisters, teaching and storytelling were forms of preaching, and women were suited to practice all three. By the time Harriet Beecher came to view herself as a writer, she already knew that American women wrote and published their work. Yet creating a legitimate arena within which American women might exert national influence would require for Stowe not the overt confrontation with paternal authority which had characterized her sister's experience of conversion, during which Catharine proved unable or unwilling to achieve conversion on her father, Lyman's, terms (Sklar 31-38), but the subtle, persuasive, affectional process of eliciting inner change. For women to achieve a position in American literary culture, Stowe's early work indicates, men, especially those men like Washington Irving who were already producing an “American” fiction, must also be “converted” to those same qualities that Catharine Beecher had argued “placed women closer to the source of moral authority and hence established their social centrality” (Sklar 83). Such an argument requires fuller elaboration and a more detailed and historicized reading than we have previously granted Stowe's first sketch and its rhetorical strategies. For while literary historians have recognized the contributions of humor of the Old Southwest, another “minor” literary tradition, to the development of American fiction, we have yet to acknowledge regionalism as either a narrative tradition in its own right or one that substantially influenced the direction of American literature.¹

Although “Uncle Lot” has been ignored by literary historians, critics, and theorists alike, the sketch marks a significant moment in the development of American literature in the nineteenth century, and I read it in the context of this moment. Remaining within a critical regionalism that continues to define itself along the lines of Philip Fisher's “struggle within representation,” I trace evidence of both conflict and influence that established Stowe from the beginning, even before the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852, as a writer for whom civil war was as viable a cultural concept as it became an economic and political one by the 1860s.

“Uncle Lot” locates Stowe's early rhetorical position on the question of women's potential contribution to American authorship, and the position involves cultural battle lines and opposing sides. I suggest that we may view literary regionalism as the emergence of the “Ichabod Crane school” of American narrative, despite Crane's ignominious defeat at the hands of Brom Bones, and that we can identify Stowe's sketch as her attempt to “convert” American readers to the values of what Irving had termed, albeit disparagingly, the “female circle” and the “sleepy region.” In the process Stowe creates the possibility of regionalism itself as a literary form capable of conferring literary authority on American women. What we might term the “Brom Bones school” emerges through the work of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet in Georgia Scenes (1835) and in the fiction of the Old Southwest humorists of the 1840s and 1850s, who respond to the question of gender either by relegating women characters to the source and object of sexual humor or by omitting women from their tales altogether. Stephen Railton's extensive discussion of south-western humor and its “national audience of men” (91) makes a clear case for the gendered separation of early-nineteenth-century American fiction, suggesting that “gentlemen” themselves felt “excluded and powerless” in American society but “could find vicarious compensation in the rough world of the humorists, where it is women who do not matter, except as occasional objects of unfrustrated resentment” (103-04). The women writers of domestic and didactic scenes of American life, Catharine Sedgwick, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, and Stowe's sister Catharine Beecher, who influenced both Stowe and later writers in the regionalist tradition, occupied entirely different rhetorical and cultural territory from the humorists. Even the editors who published the works of these writers—William T. Porter and his Spirit of the Times, and James T. Hall and the Western Monthly Magazine—take up opposing or “separate” positions on the topic of women as cultural subjects. We can view the humor of the Old Southwest and early regionalism as manifestations of two possible but mutually exclusive gender-specific directions for the development of American fiction before the Civil War.

Although “Uncle Lot” announces a departure in American fiction from the sketches of Stowe's male predecessors and contemporaries, her own female successors would more fully delineate the features of regionalism and more explicitly link these features to women's lives in nineteenth-century America than Stowe herself did. Conversion based on “private change of heart” (Sklar 27) in Stowe reemerges as the “collaborative and implicational relations between writer or speaker and culture” (Fisher 237), to extend Fisher's formulation beyond Stowe herself, and becomes a feature of regionalist narrative. Later in the century, beginning with Alice Cary's Clovernook sketches of the early 1850s and including such writers as Rose Terry Cooke, Celia Thaxter, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Zitkala-Sa, Grace King, Kate Chopin, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Sui Sin Far, and Mary Austin, American women writers would refine regionalism as an approach to narrative that would develop parallel to but divergent from the techniques and forms of local color fiction. Judith Fetterley and I have made this argument in the introduction to American Women Regionalists, our collection of some of the central works in the regionalist tradition, and an analysis of the cultural moment in which “Uncle Lot” first appears provides early evidence that regionalism and “local color,” though often conflated, do represent different articulations of and attitudes toward regional subjects.

Without Stowe's own later work, “Uncle Lot” would not assume the significance it does, but Stowe further elaborated the themes of “Uncle Lot” in her most important fiction. Uncle Tom's Cabin, as I have indicated, further develops the theme of conversion. The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862) establishes women's development and education as a contested site (see Fetterley, “Only a Story”). And in great late works, Oldtown Folks (1869) and Sam Lawson's Oldtown Fireside Stories (1872), Stowe continues to propose regionalism as a direction for American fiction. Sam Lawson, Stowe's narrator in these works, is a more successful and benign version of Rip Van Winkle. Stowe's persistence in developing these themes gives her first published sketch renewed significance in our own century, as we attempt to trace the origins of literary authority for American women writers and attempt, as well, to fairly assess their contribution to nineteenth-century American literature. Writing regional sketches in particular gave Stowe a way of educating her contemporaries. Stowe makes it possible for her readers to take a second look at characters others might find laughable or without literary value, such as Uncle Lot himself, or, later, in The Pearl of Orr's Island, Aunts Roxy and Ruey—rural, female, elderly, and otherwise disenfranchised persons. Reading “Uncle Lot” in its various contexts thus opens up, to use Stowe's own language in the sketch, a “chestnut burr” of genre in American fiction; the sketch kept alive for Stowe the possibility that her female successors might experience the authority of authorship, thereby “converting” her own readers to the idea that women's voices and women's values can influence her own postrevolutionary and our own postmodern American culture.

Two conclusions become possible from reexamining Stowe's first sketch within the context of early-nineteenth-century writers' responses to gender: first, that while some women began to make an issue of women's roles and rights after 1835,² the question of whether American fiction itself would follow lines confirmed by the cultural ideology of “separate spheres” remained as yet unanswered in the 1830s, so that ultimately our analysis of “Uncle Lot” presents a moment not unlike our own, in which gender as a cultural construct was much more fluid than it would be for at least the next century (or in our case, the previous century); and second, that the very consciousness of gender and its relation to narrative for early-nineteenth-century American writers created an opening for the development of “separate genres” or narrative traditions within which women writers might develop their authority as storytellers. Regionalism has its origins both in this as-yet-indeterminate relationship between gender and genre and at the same time in a consciousness of gender in Stowe's early work and the writing of her male and female contemporaries.

“Uncle Lot” makes for interesting reading in its own right: it is the first published sketch by an important American writer; it coincides with the influential Beecher family's move to Cincinnati and thus presents New England life and values to a western audience; and it is a work which has remained in the archives of American literary history.³ But it becomes an even more interesting text read as the young Harriet Beecher's awareness of an emerging American fiction and her attempts to redirect that fiction by revising Washington Irving. An analysis of the significance of “Uncle Lot” as a cultural moment therefore begins with a discussion of “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

When Rip Van Winkle comes down from the mountain and finds his new place in his postrevolutionary village as a “chronicle of the old times ‘before the war’” (40), Washington Irving creates a vocation for the American artist. At the beginning of the tale Rip has “an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labour” (Irving 30), preferring instead to spend his time telling ghost stories to children, but he awakens from his twenty-year sleep to discover that the storyteller in the new republic has an important role to play. In “Rip Van Winkle” Irving avoids prescribing a form for the American story, but he does suggest that it will have a content different from English narrative; like the image of George Washington on the sign in front of the Union Hotel, American fiction may derive from English and European models but is also “singularly metamorphosed” (Irving 37). However, despite Rip's altered perception in the tale, Irving makes it clear that certain things have not changed. George is still a George, not a Dame; Irving allows Rip a “drop of comfort” when he discovers that he has survived two wars at once, the American Revolution and the tyranny of “petticoat government,” for Dame Van Winkle is dead. And Irving spares Rip any complicity in her death; she has broken a blood vessel “in a fit of passion at a New-England pedlar” (Irving 39). Angry women do not survive to tell the story of the “old times ‘before the war.’” Dame Van Winkle cannot be a candidate for the American artist; such would be a singular metamorphosis indeed.⁴ For Irving the American storyteller, like the American hero, must be male.

By granting the postrevolutionary American artist a cultural role with secular rather than divine authority (George Washington replaces King George), Irving asserts the separation of literature from theology as the political ground for an American story. Irving's Knickerbocker tales reveal the gender anxiety that this shift created for early-nineteenth-century male American writers.⁵ In their separation from Puritanism as a cultural base, turning away from the writing of sermons and toward the writing of fiction, Irving's male contemporaries split off that anxiety, which Irving figures as the psychocultural castration image of the headless horseman. They projected “headlessness” onto women writers and asserted masculinity itself as evidence of divine authority. Irving's narrator thus fiercely refuses to take women—the already “castrated”—seriously. And just in case his readers remain insufficiently convinced that Dame Van Winkle is dead and worry that she might return to haunt them or pose a threat to Rip's postrevolutionary authority, Irving resurrects her in a literary way as Ichabod Crane in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” then frightens “her” out of town, not needing the Freudian and Lacanian theories of our own century to make the point that gender anxiety for men signifies the fear of absence, castration, headlessness.⁶

In “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Irving removes the undesirable qualities that characterized Dame Van Winkle from his portraits of the Dutch wives and projects them instead onto the character of Ichabod Crane. During Ichabod's reign over his “little literary realm,” the schoolroom, the pedagogue uses “a ferule, that sceptre of despotic power” and “the birch of justice reposed on three nails” to enforce his limited government (Irving 283). Like Dame Van Winkle, Ichabod Crane in the schoolroom becomes someone to escape, and Irving describes the scholars' early dismissal as “emancipation” (284). However, outside the schoolroom, Ichabod undergoes a transformation and becomes the embodiment of Rip rather than Dame. He has a “soft and foolish heart towards the [female] sex” like his counterpart in Irving's earlier tale. He becomes the playmate of his own charges and the congenial companion of their mothers: he would often “sit with a child on one knee, and rock a cradle with his foot, for whole hours together” (Irving 276). He seems initially content to become one of the region's “native inhabitants,” deriving pleasure from visiting, “snugly cuddling in the chimney corner,” filling the role of “travelling gazette,” and expressing his desire for the “comforts of the cupboard” (Irving 273, 278, 276, 275). And within the “female circle,” he enjoys the position of “man of letters” (Irving 276). Yet Irving does not grant him Rip's place as American artist; the extracts from Cotton Mather that Ichabod contributes to the storytelling at Van Tassel's castle do not appear to be successful in competing with the ghost stories Brom Bones tells.

Ichabod Crane will not serve as Irving's image of the American artist; neither will he provide a model for the American hero. For Irving reveals him to be a fraud—not a real contender for the love of Katrina Van Tassel but instead a glutton whose desire for Katrina derives from greed and gorging. Most startling of all, Ichabod turns out to be no settler after all but rather to have fantasies of sacking the “sleepy region” in order to invest “in immense tracts of wild land, and shingle palaces in the wilderness,” toward which he would set off, Katrina and the children on top of a wagon and “himself bestriding a pacing mare” (Irving 280). Too much a member of the “female circle,” as Irving defines women's culture, to bring off this quintessentially masculine vision, Ichabod becomes by the end of the tale merely a debased version of it, an unsuccessful suitor, an “affrighted pedagogue,” an “unskilful rider” (Irving 292, 294). Reminding us that women had produced “more than a third of the fiction published in America before 1820,” Lloyd Daigrepont suggests that Irving “instilled in Ichabod Crane the characteristics of those writers who dominated the American literary scene” in the early days of the Republic—what he calls a “burgeoning popular taste for the excessive emotionalism of the sentimental tale, the novel of sensibility, and the Gothic romance”—and that in the conclusion of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Irving “symbolically portrayed their defeat” (69-70).

Irving creates Brom Bones instead as Crane's triumphant adversary and as an image of American manhood. “Brom Bones … was the hero of the scene,” a man who has tamed Daredevil, a man “in fact noted for preferring vicious animals, … for he held a tractable well broken horse as unworthy of a lad of spirit” (Irving 287). As Daniel Hoffman observes, Brom Bones “is a Catskill Mike Fink, a Ring-Tailed Roarer from Kinderhook” (89). Brom Bones above all represents masculinity, a quality absent in Irving's characterizations of both Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane, and this masculinity gives him authority over Ichabod. The “burley, roaring, roystering blade” has a “bluff, but not unpleasant countenance,” “more mischief than ill-will in his composition,” and “with all his overbearing roughness, there was a strong dash of waggish good humour at bottom” (Irving 737). The excesses of the “female circle” may threaten the cultural order with “petticoat government,” but the excesses of masculinity merely contribute to our national health—we all have a good laugh at Ichabod Crane's cowardice, incompetence, and basic cultural impotence. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” turns the folktale into a tall tale: sobered by the seriousness of his own attempt to reflect American identity in the Republic's fiction, Irving rejects as “sleepy” any literary authority the Dutch wives might claim and establishes the “roaring blade” as the literary descendant of Rip Van Winkle.

Like many other writers in the 1830s, Stowe begins “Uncle Lot” by reworking Irving's “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Most of these writers, however, as Hennig Cohen and William B. Dillingham observe, imitated what they term the “ingredients of a typical sketch of Southwest humor: the physically awkward, ugly, and avaricious Ichabod; the good-natured but rowdy Brom Bones and his friends, who love a practical joke; the desirable plum, Katrina Van Tassel.” Cohen and Dillingham report that “it would be difficult to estimate the number of Southern tales directly influenced by ‘Sleepy Hollow,’” and they cite some examples: Joseph B. Cobb's “The Legend of Black Creek,” William Tappan Thompson's “The Runaway Match” and “Adventures of a Sabbath-Breaker,” and Francis James Robinson's “The Frightened Serenaders” (xii). Thus Stowe was not alone in modeling a work of fiction on “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”⁷ However, Stowe's text critiques Irving, thereby establishing the context for regionalism, an approach to the representation of rural and regional people and values that involves respect and empathy and grants voice to regional characters in the work, an approach that differs markedly from that of the “humorists,” who created such characters as objects of derision rather than subjects of their own agency.

Stowe's text specifically reveals similarities between her village of Newbury, “one of those out-of-the-way places where nobody ever came unless they came on purpose: a green little hollow” (“Uncle Lot” 2), and Irving's “little valley, or rather lap of land among high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole world,” a “green, sheltered, fertile nook” (272, 279). Stowe notes the “unchangeability” of Newbury, particularly in its “manners, morals, arts, and sciences” (“Uncle Lot” 2); Irving describes the “population, manners, and customs” of his “sleepy region” as “fixed” (274). Both authors introduce their characters as representatives of the larger citizenry. Irving's Ichabod Crane “was a native of Connecticut, a state which supplies the Union with pioneers for the mind as well as for the forest” (274), and Stowe describes James Benton as “one of those whole-hearted, energetic Yankees” who possessed a “characteristic national trait” (“Uncle Lot” 3). Like Ichabod Crane, James Benton is a newcomer to the village of Newbury, he “figured as schoolmaster all the week, and as chorister on Sundays,” he makes himself at home “in all the chimney-corners of the region,” devouring “doughnuts and pumpkin pies with most flattering appetite,” and he generally “kept the sunny side of the old ladies” (“Uncle Lot” 4, 6). James Benton holds what Stowe describes as “an uncommonly comfortable opinion of himself” (“Uncle Lot” 3); Irving characterizes as Ichabod's “vanity” his belief that in his performance as chorister “he completely carried away the palm from the parson” (276). Both tell stories, and both have, as Stowe writes of James Benton, “just the kindly heart that fell in love with everything in feminine shape” (“Uncle Lot” 6).

There is thus a great deal of evidence to suggest that Stowe begins “Uncle Lot” by invoking “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” However, Stowe imitates in order to revise. For Stowe, there is no threat of castration, nothing to “lose”; what seems revolutionary about “Uncle Lot” is not its explicit content—since unlike Irving's tales, “Uncle Lot” reinforces the values of a theology based on inner feeling and a literature congruent with theology—but rather the demonstration of a woman's authority to be the writer of the tale.⁸ Unlike Irving, Stowe identifies women's values not as debased but as central to the “private change of heart” that must precede cultural conversion, a conversion of domestic ideology that would acknowledge women's moral centrality and women's role in creating American culture, and she asserts the centrality of feeling in American culture by transforming Ichabod Crane into James Benton, a hero willing to acknowledge women's authority at least in the domestic sphere.⁹ “Uncle Lot” thereby links place—Newbury as invocation and reinvention of Irving's “sleepy region”—with values of domestic ideology, conversion, and women's authority that together lay the foundation for her successors in the regionalist tradition. Regional “place” becomes more or less a feature of the fiction and a sign of preindustrial, even prepatriarchal authority for the women of faculty that move throughout Stowe's own work and the later herbalists, healers, and empathic visitors that populate sketches and stories by later women regionalist writers.

Stowe claims that her “main story” involves a romance between her hero, James Benton, and Uncle Lot Griswold's daughter, Grace. However, like Irving in his portrait of Katrina Van Tassel, Stowe gives her readers only an occasional glimpse of Grace; instead she focuses on the process by which male characters in the sketch become converted or transformed in various ways. Stowe places Uncle Lot at the thematic center of her sketch. She describes him as a “chestnut burr, abounding with briers without and with substantial goodness within” but “‘the settest crittur in his way that ever you saw’” (“Uncle Lot” 7, 12). Initially Uncle Lot expresses an aversion to the young hero, James Benton, so in order to “win” Grace's favors, James must first elicit Uncle Lot's recognition of what James believes to be Uncle Lot's inner feelings. Thus the “conversion” of Uncle Lot's opinion of James replaces courtship as Stowe's organizing principle in the narrative; James tries to reach Uncle Lot behind the defenses he has created, the overlays of his “chestnut burr,” and to convert him into a person capable of expressing feeling, that “substantial goodness within.” In addition, James Benton achieves his own spiritual conversion, and conversion to the ministry, by falling in love with Grace's minister brother, George, then, upon young George's untimely death, replacing him within the family as Uncle Lot's “son.” Marriage with Grace at the end of the sketch merely ritualizes this “son” relationship. Thus, despite Stowe's claim that Grace figures as her heroine, she pays very little attention to Grace herself.

However, unlike Irving's portrait of Katrina, what characterization Stowe does provide underscores Grace's intellectual capacity and moral superiority, features congruent generally with the ideology of domesticity and specifically with Stowe's sister Catharine's vision of women. Catharine appears to have believed that conversion was a much less strenuous task for women than for men, that women only needed to be educated in the schools she proposed, where they would “learn proper social, religious, and moral principles and then establish their own schools elsewhere on the same principles” (Sklar 95), and that women would then be in a position to assert their influence on the nation. As Katharine Kish Sklar writes, “Catharine Beecher not only wanted to ‘save’ the nation, she wanted women to save it” and engaged in a campaign to transform teaching from a men's profession to a profession “dominated by—indeed exclusively belonging to—women” (96, 97). Catharine Beecher herself took over much of the care of her younger siblings, including the then-four-year-old Harriet, after their mother, Roxana, died, and it was Catharine who supervised Harriet's education from the time she was about thirteen (Sklar 60).

Given her sister's powerful model, we can view Stowe's portrait of Grace Griswold as suggesting that her sketch does not need to convert Grace, who is the already-converted, and therefore does not need to focus on Grace's development as part of the sketch's “plot.” Stowe describes Grace as follows:

Like most Yankee damsels, she had a longing after the tree of knowledge, and, having exhausted the literary fountains of a district school, she fell to reading whatsoever came in her way. True, she had but little to read; but what she perused she had her own thoughts upon, so that a person of information, in talking with her, would feel a constant wondering pleasure to find that she had so much more to say of this, that, and the other thing than he expected.

(“Uncle Lot” 9)

Grace already represents grace; she possesses the moral character to which the men in Stowe's sketch must aspire in order to demonstrate their own spiritual conversion, which becomes manifested for James in his success at winning over Uncle Lot, then winning a congregation and a wife, and for Uncle Lot in his ability to express his feeling for James Benton. The men in particular must experience that “private change of heart” which characterized conversion for Lyman Beecher (Sklar 27). Within the ideology that asserted women's moral centrality, it does not surprise readers that after speaking very little throughout the sketch, Grace asserts herself in the sketch's final scene, when she tells Uncle Lot, a visitor to her house following her marriage to James, “Come, come, father, I have authority in these days, so no disrespectful speeches” (“Uncle Lot” 31).¹⁰

Thus conversion, rather than the confrontation and defeat that characterize “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” gives Stowe's narrative its direction, and conversion figures as an aspect of plot as well as of theme. Stowe gives James Benton the task of trying to “convert” Uncle Lot; conversion, not seduction, becomes her hero's test. In the scene which depicts this “conversion,” James Benton arrives for an unannounced visit to Uncle Lot's house with the ostensible goal of winning Uncle Lot's affection. Stowe writes:

James also had one natural accomplishment, more courtier-like than all the diplomacy in Europe, and that was the gift of feeling a real interest for anybody in five minutes; so that, if he began to please in jest, he generally ended in earnest. With great simplicity of mind, he had a natural tact for seeing into others, and watched their motions with the same delight with which a child gazes at the wheels and springs of a watch, to “see what it will do.”

(“Uncle Lot” 16)

James wishes to open up the “chestnut burr” that characterizes Uncle Lot's defenses against feeling, and he uses powers of empathy—his “natural tact for seeing into others”—to help Uncle Lot recognize and reveal the “latent kindness” he holds within his “rough exterior” (“Uncle Lot” 16).

Stowe reverses Irving's condemnation of women, suggesting that instead of annihilating what Irving calls “petticoat government” at the end of “Rip Van Winkle,” American society might benefit from genuine government, at least in the domestic sphere, by women; and instead of frightening Ichabod Crane out of town, as Irving does in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” she creates her own hero in Ichabod Crane's image, then “converts” him from his prankish boyishness into a man of deep feeling, into a man, in Catharine Beecher's sense, who becomes more like a woman as the sketch progresses and ends by submitting to Grace's authority.

In Stowe's world, Dame Van Winkle might exert genuine influence, might even speak, as does Stowe herself in assuming authorship; in “Uncle Lot,” Stowe reinforces the nineteenth-century view of women's interest in feeling and moral character, while the masculine behaviors of Brom Bones disappear from the fiction. Thus Dame Van Winkle survives in the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe not as a shrill-voiced termagant but as a woman capable of using her verbal facility in order to assert, in Grace's closing lines, “authority in these days” (“Uncle Lot” 31). Irving has to justify the exclusion of women from the province of storytelling; Stowe wants not to exclude men but to include women in the profession of literature (even though, ironically, she never created a female narrator in her work). Nevertheless, the fact that “Uncle Lot” has remained unremarked for most of this century attests to the apparent victory of Irving's position. At least as literary history has recorded it, Brom Bones inspired an entire “school” of tall tale fiction by the Old Southwest humorists, whereas Ichabod Crane disappeared into the “sleepy region.”

In reading “Uncle Lot” to the Semi-Colon Club, Stowe had the good fortune to attract the attention of editor James Hall of the Western Monthly Magazine. One of Stowe's biographers, in describing James Hall's influence, writes that he advocated “cheerfulness, morality, and regionalism” as a literary aesthetic, was “a chivalrous admirer of women writers,” and encouraged payment for contributors to American periodicals (Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe 35-36)¹¹ In awarding his fiction prize to Harriet Beecher's first New England sketch, he was also implicitly urging her to counter the portrait of American life that the frontier appeared to encourage—as he knew very well. In Letters from the West, Hall had recorded the telling of yarns by an old keelboatman named Pappy, whom he had encountered while traveling down the Ohio on a flatboat (W. Blair 70);¹² and as editor of The Western Souvenir, issued in Cincinnati in 1828, “the first of American gift books from beyond the Alleghenies” (Thompson 95-96), Hall achieved the distinction of having been the first editor to publish a lengthy account of the career of the legendary Mike Fink (W. Blair 81-82). Like Washington Irving, Hall appears to have been interested very early in the tall tale; but unlike Irving, he would choose, as editor of the Western Monthly Magazine, to encourage his contributors, especially women, to write about other regional material than the portraits of frontier life that would survive in American literary history as humor of the Old Southwest.¹³

Hall contrasts sharply with his contemporary, William T. Porter, whose sporting magazine, the Spirit of the Times, first published in 1831, provided gentlemen interested in the leisure pursuits of horse racing, hunting, and listening to tall tales with a way of gratifying their fantasies of upper-class superiority (since much of the humor Porter published derived from “the foibles and follies of the lower classes” [Yates 88]) and of ratifying their belief in masculine values and male dominance. Unlike Hall, whose interest in developing western material inspired his work, Porter was a commercialist, interested more in the culture of the sporting world than in literature. He initially catered “to the wealthy slaveholding sportsmen and their friends and allies, who ‘ruled’ racing” (Yates 17). With the decline of horse racing by the end of the 1830s, Porter began to include the early local color fiction literary historians term humor of the Old Southwest. As Norris W. Yates observes, “The bulk of [Porter's] later readers belong to a new and larger economic and social class—a class which may have shared the values and interests but not the economic resources of the old” (21). Thus the values and interests of the slave-holding sportsmen and their allies contrast decidedly with the values and interests of the audience for and contributors to Hall's Western Monthly Magazine. The readers who allowed the Spirit of the Times to flourish for more than thirty years may not have been able to prevent women from speaking out in public meetings, but by excluding morality from the province of humor they attempted to exclude the particular sphere of women's influence in nineteenth-century culture from fiction and effectively defined storytelling as a masculine occupation. The writers who contributed to William T. Porter's sporting magazine continued to develop American literature as a masculine enterprise. To the extent that humor of the Old Southwest establishes Brom Bones as the American hero, this particular literary genre describes a direction for fiction that women writers could not and did not follow.¹⁴

Augustus Baldwin Longstreet and his colleague on the Augusta Sentinel, William Tappan Thompson, both of whom published their sketches in the 1830s, were the only Old Southwest humorist writers who treated female characters in their fiction (W. Blair 74).¹⁵ Of these two, Longstreet in Georgia Scenes (1835) had the greater influence.¹⁶Georgia Scenes is an important text to examine in establishing gender consciousness as a feature of early American fiction, for while it reaffirms Irving's perspective and establishes further precedent for the humorists' exclusion of women, it also suggests a lingering fluidity in the relationship between gender and genre in the 1830s. At the same time, Georgia Scenes suggests that Old Southwest humor evolved in part from suppressing the possibility of female literary authority. In Longstreet's preface to Georgia Scenes he tells us “that when he first wrote and published the sketches which went into the volume, he was ‘extremely desirous’ of concealing his authorship; and that in order to accomplish his purpose, he had used two pseudonyms. For sketches in which men are the principal actors, he says, he uses the name Hall; for those in which women are the most prominent, he writes under the name Baldwin” (Meriwether 358; Longstreet v).

James Meriwether writes that “the dominant figure of the book is Hall; … Baldwin simply serves as a foil to the ultimately much more masculine and successful Lyman Hall” (359). In Baldwin's sketches, the narrator becomes a moralist who stands back from the action, contrasting “country girls” with their urban counterparts and condemning women who become “charming” creatures and lead their husbands to early graves. By contrast, in Hall's sketches, Hall participates in the action, proves himself to be a crack shot, and establishes himself as a man's man. A third character who appears in the sketches, Ned Brace of “A Sage Conversation,” establishes storytelling as one of many contests, like gander pulling, horse swapping, or horse racing, in which boys or men can prove their masculinity. Both Ned Brace and Lyman Hall achieve a less ambiguous masculinity than does Baldwin.

In suggesting Baldwin's ultimate ineffectuality, Longstreet, like Irving in his portrait of Ichabod Crane, links Baldwin to the world of women that he simultaneously mocks. The “country girls” of “The Dance” are so “wholly ignorant” of urban fashion that “consequently, they looked, for all the world, like human beings” (14); thus Longstreet manages to make fun of both country and urban “girls” in the same jest. In “The Song,” piano player Miss Aurelia Emma Theodosia Augusta Crump has hands that engage in conflict at the keyboard, and “anyone, or rather no one, can imagine what kind of noises the piano gave forth” as a result (Longstreet 70). Longstreet's portraits of women characters, primarily in Baldwin's sketches, led his biographer Kimball King to remark, “It is hard to understand how a man who appears to have had close, satisfying relationships with his wife and daughters, all sensible, intelligent women who led exemplary lives, could portray their sex so unflatteringly, unless his bias were actually a pose, a part of his writer's mask” (80). However, the emerging gender consciousness of the 1830s makes this explicable; Longstreet, like Irving, associates storytelling with masculinity and political power, for Hall ends the volume, in “The Shooting-Match,” by proving his marksmanship and thereby earning the potential votes of the country people. The people promise to support him if he “offers” for anything; “Longstreet makes it clear that the judgment of these people is to be respected and if Hall will accept such responsibilities he will be an able and successful public official” (Meriwether 361), such as Longstreet himself later became in his career as a judge, preacher, and college president. Baldwin, on the other hand, clearly lacks the shooting ability to qualify as either effective storyteller or political man; as he demonstrates in his failure to execute the humorous “double cross-hop” step of his first sketch in Georgia Scenes, he cannot even dance (Longstreet 21).

In Baldwin's most powerful sketch, “A Sage Conversation,” the three aged matrons who relate anecdotes to each other prove Longstreet's point, for they seem unable to understand the meaning of the very anecdotes they are attempting to tell and thus do not succeed in the actively masculine pursuit of contriving and telling stories. Baldwin opens “A Sage Conversation” with the assertion, “I love the aged matrons of our land. As a class, they are the most pious, the most benevolent, the most useful, and the most harmless of the human family” (Longstreet 186). Nevertheless, the women cannot solve the riddle of Ned Brace's story concerning “two most excellent men, who became so attached to each other that they actually got married” (Longstreet 188), and although the women light their pipes and sit around the fire until late in the night, their talking never rises above the level of what one of them calls “an old woman's chat” (Longstreet 196). Although they may look like men, engaging in pipe smoking and late-night conversation, the women are innocents on the subject of cross-dressing, recalling women who “dress'd in men's clothes” and followed their true loves “to the wars,” and one of them concludes that “men don't like to marry gals that take on that way” (Longstreet 191). They miss the humorous potential of their own material; they prove themselves incapable of sustaining the line of a narrative longer than a brief comment or two; they suggest that their only expertise lies in the realm of herbal remedies; and throughout, they demonstrate the general inability of women to be storytellers.

James M. Cox suggests, with irony, that in the final “showdown” between Stowe and the frontier humorists, Stowe “wins”; that in Uncle Tom's Cabin, she turns the bear hunt characteristic of much of southern and frontier humor into a man hunt; and that she “killed” the humorists by raising the question of serious moral culture. He claims that he does not wish to “put down Mrs. Stowe” but argues that it was ultimately Samuel Clemens who found the form of genius for the materials of native American humor (“Humor” 591-92). It is difficult to imagine how Stowe or any other woman writer of the 1830s and 1840s could have written the kind of American humor Cox refers to here, since in order to do so she would have had to achieve that humor at women's expense and ironically agree to take only masculine culture, with its sport, jests, frolics, and put-downs, seriously.¹⁷ Cox views Clemens as the product of the implicit conflict between Stowe and the Old Southwest humorists, implying that the local color school of American fiction, including Bret Harte and Hamlin Garland, emerged from the same origins as Old Southwest humor.¹⁸ For Cox, Stowe and Longstreet appear to sketch alternative directions in American fiction, and Hall's sketches in Georgia Scenes (if not Baldwin's) support this point. Hall's narratives create further variations on the theme of masculine dominance, serve to reify the distinctions between men and women characteristic of “separate spheres,” and contribute to dividing early-nineteenth-century American fiction along the lines of humor at others' expense, exemplified by Old Southwest and local color “schools,” and empathy for others, in the tradition of literary regionalism, primarily exemplified by women writers.¹⁹

With the publication of “A New England Sketch” or “Uncle Lot,” Stowe joined an emerging group of women who had begun to publish in magazines—Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Sedgwick, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, among others—and who, by their very success as publishing authors, underscored the issue of gender in nineteenth-century literary culture. In her delineation of woman's fiction, however, Nina Baym suggests that Stowe's interests in slavery and religion were “issues transcending gender” and that they “set her apart from the other American women writing fiction in her day” (15). Stowe certainly knew Sedgwick's A New England Tale (1822), the novel Baym credits with inaugurating the genre of woman's fiction; Sklar notes that it had created controversy within the Beecher family and that Catharine in particular had attacked Sedgwick, a convert to Unitarianism, as having betrayed her social position and the Calvinist tradition (44-45). It was perhaps in recognition of Sedgwick as well as an attempt to distance herself from the controversy that led Stowe to change the title of “A New England Sketch” to “Uncle Lot.” Yet if Stowe chooses not to model herself on Sedgwick, more is at stake than a defense of her family's social standing and theological allegiance; she also chooses not to write in the formal tradition of Sedgwick. Instead, she raises questions of region that Sedgwick, despite the regional flavor of her title, does not address.²⁰ Stowe's interests in “Uncle Lot” suggest that as early as 1834 there existed the possibility that women would create not a single major tradition but two—women's fiction and regionalism—that would develop independently of each other, yet share some common themes, concerns, and influences. Thus, while Stowe responds to Irving in “Uncle Lot,” she also drew her inspiration from her female contemporaries. Critics have identified several works by women with the roots of the regional tradition in American fiction, in particular Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Sketch of Connecticut: Forty Years Since (1824), Sarah Josepha Hale, Northwood: A Tale of New England (1827), Eliza Buckminster Lee, Sketches of a New-England Village in the Last Century (1838), and Caroline Kirkland, A New Home—Who'll Follow?; or, Glimpses of Western Life (1839), in addition to Sedgwick's A New England Tale.²¹

Stowe herself, in The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862), would bring female characters and values into the center of a regional novel. In this book in particular, Stowe demonstrates the influence of Sigourney, who published the memoir Sketch of Connecticut in Hartford the same year thirteen-year-old Harriet Beecher moved there to become a student at her sister Catharine's Hartford Female Seminary.²² In Sketch of Connecticut, Madam L. tells Farmer Larkin, a regional character who makes a brief appearance, that she doesn't recollect the names of his children. He replies, “It's no wonder that ye don't Ma'am, there's such a neest on 'em. They're as thick as hops round the fire this winter. There's Roxey and Reuey, they're next to Tim, and look like twins. They pick the wool, and card tow, and wind quills, and knit stockins and mittins for the fokes in the house; and I've brought some down with me to day, to see if they'll buy 'em to the marchants' shops, and let 'em have a couple o' leetle small shawls” (Sigourney 118). This passage provides evidence that Stowe had read Sketch of Connecticut before she began The Pearl of Orr's Island, for she names her own characters Roxy and Ruey in that novel after the daughters of Farmer Larkin. The model Sigourney created in her New England farmer with his Connecticut speech rhythms also served to influence Stowe's own portrait of Uncle Lot, the one character in her first sketch who speaks in dialect. In her analysis of Sketch of Connecticut, Sandra A. Zagarell argues that Sigourney's writing “was quite directly concerned with the foundations and organization of public life,” and that both she and Sedgwick (in Hope Leslie [1827]) “addressed a major political topic of the day, the nature of the American nation” (“Expanding” 225). Thus Sigourney becomes a model for Stowe in two ways: she offers regional characters for Stowe's later meditation and expansion in “Uncle Lot” and The Pearl of Orr's Island, and she also confirms for Stowe that women have an inalienable claim to an evolving American political and cultural vision. Sigourney explores, as Stowe would later do, the possibilities of literary authority for women.

“Uncle Lot,” unlike A New England Tale, does not inaugurate a genre. Regionalism, in contrast to woman's fiction, begins inchoately, reflecting uncertainty on the part of both male and female writers in the 1830s concerning the ways in which the gender of the author might inscribe the formal concerns of the work. For by the 1830s the direction of critical judgment concerning women writers, though clearly forming, was not yet set. Stowe's vision of Uncle Lot as the “settest crittur you ever saw” and the challenge she sets her hero to convert Uncle Lot to the expression of feeling establishes her perspicacity in implicitly predicting that gender itself would remain a “chestnut burr” within American culture, that is, a briery issue difficult to open but yet containing its own reward. Genre is also a “chestnut burr” in the emerging world of “separate spheres.”²³ What Stowe begins to explore in the regionalism of “Uncle Lot” is the possibility that the limits of genre can indeed be transformed or, to use a word more in keeping with the ideology of “woman's sphere,” “converted” to the cultural work of developing a form for women's narrative voice.

Notes

1. Numerous scholars and critics are working to define the tradition of regionalism and to explicate its features and significance. Most scholars link regionalism with the development of the fictional sketch in nineteenth-century American literature. See Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky for a discussion of Irving's development of the sketch form. See also Sandra Zagarell, “Narrative of Community: The Identification of a Genre,” in which she identifies a “department of literature” she terms “narrative of community” and includes numerous American writers often described as regional in this “department.” See also Josephine Donovan, New England Local Color Literature: A Women's Tradition; Perry D. Westbrook, Acres of Flint: Writers of Rural New England, 1870-1900 and The New England Town in Fact and Fiction; and introductory essays on regional writers in Elizabeth Ammons, ed., “Introduction”; Judith Fetterley, ed., “Introduction”; and Marjorie Pryse, ed., “Introduction,” Stories from the Country of Lost Borders; see also critical essays on Cary, Cooke, and Stowe in Fetterley, ed., Provisions: A Reader from 19th-Century American Women; see also Pryse, “Introduction,” The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories; and Pryse, ed., Selected Stories of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. Lawrence Buell notes some disagreement with the tendency of what he calls the “feminist revisionary scholarship” to identify the regionalist tradition as female. In his own work, he examines regional representation in American literature, arguably a broader survey but one which does not locate itself within the boundaries of prose fiction, although he does acknowledge that “the staple of regional prose, however, continued to be the short sketch or tale” (296). In Buell's survey of the field of regional representation, he finds that it “looks considerably more androgynous once we survey the whole panoply … So although I agree that the conception of social reality that underlay New England regional poetry and prose lent itself to feminist appropriation and became, in the postwar era, increasingly a woman's construct, … provincial literary iconography [is] a project in which writers of the two sexes participated together” (302-03). See Louis Renza for a discussion of the ways “minor literature” (such as regionalism) in Jewett demonstrates pressures to become “major literature,” and see Richard Brodhead for “a different account of the regionalist genre from what feminist studies have proposed” (Cultures 144).

2. See Nancy Cott. She locates the origins of nineteenth-century American feminism within the decade of the 1830s and asserts that the development of feminism actually depended on the ideology of “woman's sphere.”

3. Stowe herself collected “Uncle Lot,” originally titled “A New England Sketch,” in The Mayflower, or Sketches of the Descendents of the Pilgrim (1843), a work with a limited circulation and out of print by 1855. Following the success of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the collection was reissued, with additional sketches, and this collection then became part of the Riverside Edition of Stowe's works. However, the sketch has not appeared in anthologies of American literature and remains unknown except by Stowe scholars. John Adams included the sketch in his edition of Stowe's work (see Adams, ed., Regional Sketches: New England and Florida), and the sketch appears in Fetterley and Pryse, eds., American Women Regionalists 1850-1910.

4. For further explication of the significance of the silencing of Dame Van Winkle, see Fetterley, The Resisting Reader 1-11.

5. For a general discussion of gender unease in early-nineteenth-century American culture and the relationship between the minister and culture, see Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture, although Douglas's work has been superseded by others. See in particular Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860. For an argument that manhood produces its own anxiety for nineteenth-century writers, see David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance.

6. Railton discusses the “psychic underside” of early-nineteenth-century American men's public selves and suggests that “it reveals their instinctual doubts about the sacrifices that the role of gentleman in a democracy exacted of them” (102).

7. See also John Seelye, “Root and Branch: Washington Irving and American Humor.” Buell notes that “probably the single most important American prose work in teaching native writers to exploit regional material for literary purposes was Washington Irving's The Sketch-Book” (294).

8. Biographical evidence suggests that Harriet Beecher was writing with her father as well as with Washington Irving in mind. Although she initially called her most interesting character in “A New England Sketch” Uncle Timothy Griswold, changing his name when the story reappeared as “Uncle Lot” in The Mayflower, there would have been no confusion in the Beecher family that “Uncle Tim” was based on Harriet's father Lyman's Uncle Lot Benton. Lyman Beecher's mother had died two days after his birth, he had been raised by a childless aunt and uncle instead of in his father's household, and he had apparently entertained his own children with numerous tales about his childhood with Uncle Lot (Rugoff 4, 219). Thus James Benton, who becomes the “adopted” son of Lot Griswold in the sketch, serves as Harriet's portrait of her father as a young man. By choosing to write a sketch based on her father's own tales from childhood, to become like Lyman Beecher a storyteller, Harriet implicitly expressed her desire to model herself on her father, but she carefully disclaimed the ambitiousness of this desire, describing her work, in a letter to her brother George, as “a little bit of a love sketch …, a contemptible little affair” (Boydston, Kelley, and Margolis 62). Thus we can see her hiding behind the “love sketch” as a story more suitable than others a woman might tell, even though her interest in conversion in the sketch clearly identifies her as the daughter of Lyman Beecher, the Congregational minister known in the early 1800s for his power as a revivalist and the man who produced seven sons, all of whom became ministers.

9. Although the senior Beecher had definite views about gender differences, often lamenting that Harriet, with her intelligence, had not been born a boy and therefore a potential minister, he appears to have made no distinctions between young men's and young women's potential for experiencing conversion, and Lyman Beecher taught both daughters and sons that conversion involved a “private change of heart” rather than merely a social and public acknowledgment of belief (Sklar 27).

10. In collecting “Uncle Lot” for The Mayflower, Stowe changed the original wording of Grace's closing lines. In “A New England Sketch,” Grace tells her father, “I'm used to authority in these days” (191). The change, with its echo of biblical usage, serves to reinforce Grace's moral authority to speak.

11. Hall appears early in the history of the Beecher family's move to Cincinnati. Prior to the publication of “Uncle Lot,” Hall's Western Monthly Magazine had published an essay titled “Modern Uses of Language,” signed “B,” and attributed to Catharine although written by Harriet (Boydston, Kelley, and Margolis 50-51). Sklar notes that Catharine viewed the Western Monthly Magazine as a potential outlet for her educational ideas, and that she included its editor James Hall among the trustees for the Western Female Institute, the school she opened in Cincinnati (110). Hall continued as a friend of the Beechers until he engaged in a defense of Roman Catholics in open conflict with Lyman Beecher's position on Catholicism, with the result that the Western Monthly Magazine lost its influential supporters and suffered financial failure, and Hall retired into banking (Flanagan 66-67).

12. Hall describes “Pappy” as a “humourist” who “would sit for hours scraping upon his violin, singing catches, or relating merry and marvellous tales” (182).

13. Ironically, in Flanagan's biography of James Hall, he writes that “Hall sketched women infrequently and on the whole rather badly” (143).

14. Caroline Kirkland may have been viewed as an exception; she was one of the few women, if not the only one, whom Porter published in The Spirit of the Times; Porter reprinted Kirkland, but she did not contribute original material (Yates 60).

15. William Tappan Thompson collected his Major Jones letters in 1843 as Major Jones's Courtship, the same year Stowe collected her own sketches in The Mayflower.

16. Alone among the major Southwest humorists, Longstreet did not publish his work in the Spirit of the Times (Blair 85).

17. See Blair's discussion of early American humor, especially 18-19.

18. Guttman terms “Sleepy Hollow” “a prefiguration of the tradition of Mark Twain and the frontier humorists” (171).

19. After Augustus Baldwin Longstreet graduated from Yale in 1813, he entered law school in Litchfield, Connecticut, where he attended sermons by the Reverend Lyman Beecher and visited in the Beecher home. “He also found time to visit Miss Pierce's School for Young Ladies, where he frequently regaled the young women with his droll accounts of rural Georgia in his ‘country boy’ pose. His first practice as a raconteur began during the Connecticut years” (King, Augustus 12), with women, and likely the Beecher family, as his audience. The young Harriet would not have directly benefited from hearing Longstreet's stories (she would have been hardly three years old), and yet it is one of the delightful coincidences of literary history that the two writers who would each begin to develop alternative possibilities for the treatment of American materials that Irving sets out in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”—Longstreet with his southern humor and male world of sporting stories, Stowe with the “sleepy” regionalism of “Uncle Lot”—would both have “met” in Litchfield, Connecticut.

20. Buell terms A New-England Tale “really more an expose than an exposition of provincial village culture, too heavily committed to a Cinderella plot … and anti-Calvinist satire … to accomplish much by way of regional mimesis” (295).

21. See discussions of Hale and Sedgwick in Nina Baym, Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America 1820-1870; see discussions of Sigourney and Sedgwick in Sandra A. Zagarell, “Expanding ‘America’: Lydia Sigourney's Sketch of Connecticut, Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie.”

22. John Adams in Harriet Beecher Stowe terms Sketch “a true forerunner of Mrs. Stowe's work” (31). As an adolescent, Harriet met, knew, and very likely read Sigourney, her sister's dear friend in Hartford.

23. Tompkins suggests that even Hawthorne, in some of his earliest sketches collected in Twice-Told Tales (1837) (“Little Annie's Ramble,” “A Rill from the Town Pump,” “Sunday at Home,” and “Sights from a Steeple”), began as a “sentimental author” long before he would become the genius of the American romance and damn the “scribbling women” (10-18). Buell focuses on the iconographic representation of region rather than the relationship between regional representation and genre; he does observe that “the staple of regional prose, however, continued to be the short sketch or tale” (296).