Charles Egbert Craddock in the 1870s and 1880s contributed to educated Americans’ growing enthusiasm for the American South with his accounts of daily and sometimes extraordinary happenings in the rural areas he knew well, the Tennessee mountains. Reviewers considered him the equal of Joel Chandler Harris, Mark Twain, George Washington Cable, and others. His novel, The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1885, took its place next to the original collection of stories, the first of which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1884.
Bill Hardwig, the editor, who also wrote the introduction to this re-publication, faced a complex task in putting that introduction together; the somewhat reclusive, publicity-shy author of these bestsellers, sensational ones in their day, was writing not only under a pseudonym—Mark Twain was also a pseudonym; it happened all the time—but also under a pseudo-identity. Charles Egbert Craddock, in literary circles highly praised at the time for his vigorous, masculine writing style and hearty camaraderie with the rural mountain people, was a woman.
Mary Noailles Murfree was the daughter of a prominent middle Tennessee family (Murfreesboro is named after an ancestor), a shy bookworm who spent family summers at Beersheba Springs in the Cumberland Mountains. She was known to say that time passed in a different way there, as if in a dream. She could not bear to hear the scions of wealthy families mock the accents of the local inhabitants. That was how it all began. Hardwig details in his introduction, with evident relish, how Murfree, accompanied by her father and sister Fanny, traveled to Boston in 1885 to reveal her authorship. Many stereotypical notions of masculinity suffered. A hyper-masculine writing style, as Hardwig puts it, was a costume anyone could construct and wear—shocking, such a discovery.
It is difficult to correlate Miss Murfree’s family visits with the tales in this volume, and eventually the novel; Middle Tennessee’s Cumberland Mountains are not the same as the Great Smoky Mountains that are the setting for her stories. Authenticity in any present-day sense aside, her writing soon became a guidebook to the area, as well as a popular read, just at a time when interest in the American South was reawakening in the growing American reading public. Hardwig tells us that missionaries heading for Appalachia used her books as part of what we would now call area studies to prepare to insinuate themselves into the mountain culture and gather converts from the people there.
Hardwig notes that for us today Murfree’s careful attention to the characters’ local expressions and pronunciation may be the biggest barrier to ready comprehension of her writing and appreciation for what it reveals about the culture. Some of Mark Twain’s writing may be considered difficult to read for the same reason. Like Twain, Murfree writes as an educated narrator without talking down to her audience or condescending to her story or its characters. She comes across as rather sympathetic to the mountain people, fully able to see them with all their good and bad qualities.
Murfree may have included characteristics of people she knew, or retold stories she had heard, but in the way of all good fiction, her stories rise above the individual. “The Romance of Sunrise Rock,” for example, finds a medical doctor, unable to thrive in the world of cities, also having adjustment problems in his new mountain retreat. Invited by a friend, a fellow intellectual who decided to toss it all and become a shepherd, the doctor manages to make himself miserable in the midst of magnificent surroundings, while looking down on local people. After all, they imagine that just because they support themselves on their own land, give to others of the little they have, pay their way without stealing or swindling, and keep the local rules of hospitality and fairness, they are at the same social level as the two educated gentlemen in their midst. He chafes at being compared to the local herb-doctor. Murfree has a light hand as a narrator, but she gets her point across.
She shows her sentimental side from time to time. The local people, if young and shy, also reveal their own enchantment, as on page 106:
“Selina stood for a moment upon the cabin porch, her yellow hair gleaming like an aureola upon a background of crimson sumach leaves. A pet fawn came to the door and nibbled at her little sunburned hands. As she turned to go in, Trelawny [the doctor’s friend] spoke to her. ‘Shall I bring you a fawn again? Or will you have some venison from the hunt tomorrow?’ She fixed her luminous eyes upon him and laughed a little. There was no shyness in her face and manner now. Was Trelawny so accustomed a presence in her life, Cleaver [the doctor] wondered?”
In “Drifting Down Lost Creek” Murfree deals with complex questions of guilt, innocence, and the knowable. Mrs. Ware and Cynthia in their local accents discuss the bull-like Jubal’s attack on Vander, and debate whether or not Vander was the one who split Jubal’s skull. Both consider that Jubal deserved what he got, but Cynthia believes Vander’s denials. Mrs. Ware remains skeptical. Murfree covers the incident by providing the conjectures of several community members, without describing it directly for her readers, thus leaving the question of truth and accuracy, along with the question of justice, in the words of her characters as she directly quotes them.
Readers expecting scholarly analysis will be disappointed; Hardwig uses a light editorial approach. Murfree’s stories are worthwhile for their subtlety, however. Their wild popularity in their own day shows the American reading public’s awareness of and appreciation for the mountain culture and its natural setting.
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[Review length: 952 words • Review posted on April 20, 2010]