The Emergence of Appalachian Stereotypes in 19th Century Literature and Illustration

Appalachia is often portrayed as an arrested frontier, a geographically isolated subculture, and reservoir of culturally homogenous. Appalachians are pictured as proud, fiercely independent, and god-fearing southerners. But in all reality they are portrayed as fighting and feuding, barefooted and backward, ignorant degenerates, downtrodden by centuries of isolation, inbreeding, and poverty. So how was Appalachia discovered? Well Appalachia was prompted in the mid 1870s by local color writers such as Mary Murfee and John Fox Jr. who explored in fiction and travel sketches such mountain themes as conflicting Civil War loyalties, moon shining, and feuding. (Billings)

Where there are various regions there are bound to be a variety of people with alternate cultures, beliefs, and ways of life. The cultures found with the Appalachia are unique in their own ways and represent a body of individuals who found their way to such an area. Land that is included within the Southern Appalachia can be best described by Horace Kephart as he does so in his book The Southern Highlander and His Homeland to include: “the four western counties of Maryland; the Blue Ridge Valley, and Allegheny Ridge counties of Virginia; all of West Virginia; eastern Tennessee; eastern Kentucky; western North Carolina; the four northwestern counties of South Carolina; northern Georgia; and northeastern Alabama.” (22-24) With so much

Dial, Wylene P. The Dialect of the Appalachian People. January 1969. http://www.wvculture.org/history/journal_wvh/wvh30-2.html. 21 November 2014.

Imagine going to high school. You get your bag and sack lunch together, and begin the trek down the road to your school. Except, when you reach your high school’s campus, the military has to escort you. Up the steps, through the halls, even within every classroom that you go to. All until you have left school’s campus at the end of the day. This isn’t something that just happens every day, but it did happen. The event described is about nine African-American high school students that integrated into a formerly all-white high school. These students were later known as the Little Rock Nine. There are many instances, both in the past and today, where people are discriminated against and made fun of simply because of who they are. Not only because of the color of their skin or their sex, but also because of how much education they have, or what type of job that one has. Over time, of course, this discrimination of all these types have become less and less common. However, several decades ago, they were quite common. In some Romanticist writings, one can find that there are those that attempted to combat this discrimination through their words, and two pieces that assisted this were Walt Whitman’s A Song for Occupations and Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century both explore this once controversial topic of equal rights.

This chapter tells and explains the literature of Appalachia and includes important literature that’s came out of the region. It talks about many fiction tales Appalachia has to share and offer to the rest of the country. Many could say there myths or tall tales. They also explained how the lack of education decreased some literature and was a setback. Even with that being said they are many published writers from the region and plenty of great books to read. Other than just published books there a lot of poems that are famous and are very well written. Drama and theater are also two parts of Appalachian literature. I can relate to that because both of my roommates are in those programs. When I told them I was taking this class

Appalachia. Not a word that means something to a lot of people, but it’s home to me. When you come from one of the most poverty stricken places in the country, you aren't expected to be much in life. Here you’re told to find a job that pays well and stick with it, and it doesn’t matter if you like it; but, I have different aspirations in life. I want to do what I love and try to benefit my community from it. I plan to use my art to help portray the southwest of Virginia as more than just a statistic. We are more than the poverty that confines us.

The Kentucky landscape is neither totally a pastoral ideal nor an antipastoral reality; it is marked by both, pastoral element and racial violence. Crab-apple trees are parallel to Afro-Americans; they populate and racialize the landscape: “most of the country beyond Vagermound Common was bunched with crab-apple trees, posing crookedly, like tired old Negroes against the sky” (BOF 7-8). They look as if to follow Big Mat like ancestral guardians: “against the dark sky the darker crab-apple trees kept pace with him as he walked” (16). The nighttime landscape looks like a color-blind society, an insight suggested by Melody: “at night the hills ain’t red no more. There ain’t no crab-apple trees squat in the hills, no more land to hoe in the red-hot

Many people have never heard of Appalachia, or the place I call home. Some people of never even heard of West by god Virginia. Some people call it Western Virginia because they think it don’t exist. This is the life story of Tree Man Thompson.

Rick Simon asserted that “Appalachia represented a spatialized manifestation of class exploitation” (270). A more popular approach was the theory of internal colonialism. This was the assertion that Appalachia was constituted as a region or place through colonization by “outside” interests that came in and took all of the natural wealth of timber, natural gas, and coal, with the justification of a list of vicious stereotypes of Appalachian people. This idea of insiders being good and outsiders being bad is often seen in deeper social analysis and political critique of the region. Inequality is spatial to social relations within Appalachia. It is clear from Smith and Fisher’s

Growing up on the outskirts of Mena, Arkansas within the shadows of the Ouachita mountain range was an experience for the ages. And though the sleepy little town of Mena offered very little in the way of excitement, the mountains, on the other hand, provided ample opportunity for an adventurous young boy with a wild, unfettered imagination. I remember lying awake at night listening to the song of the whippoorwill as the summer breeze gently rustled my bedroom windows. it was without a doubt pure heaven! But there were times when the whippoorwill fell silent, and a strange and eerie howl penetrated the darkness. Hell, even to this day my hair stands on end just thinking about it. But you know, there are things in this world that’s better left unspoken. And though I didn’t know it at the time, I would soon find out just exactly why that is.

In the beginning of Bryson and Katz’s journey up the Appalachian Trail, the two men quickly find out the physical toll that the hike would take on them. While Bryson was “bug-eyed, and breathing hard”

It began in a white clapboard cottage on the shores of Lake Huron with the heavy pinging of rain on the tin roof. It began with the remnants of a life long dead. It began when his father said, we'll go home to the Virginias.

The slightly built woman dreaded the advancing darkness of the night as she stood solemnly by the window, staring, but not actually seeing the rolling green hills of the Appalachian Mountains. Their peaks dominated the landscape, rising high above the treetops. How she would love to escape over their crests never to return.

Throughout time the West has become intrinsically linked with the concepts of “wilderness” and the “frontier.” Concepts of wilderness and the frontier have greatly shaped the perception of the West. Perceptions of the frontier and wilderness have changed over time; first, Turner’s frontier thesis described the frontier and wilderness an uninhabited land of opportunity; second, new historians challenged Turner and claimed wilderness and the frontier were merely constructs of society; lastly, concepts of the frontier and wilderness expanded past the American West—into space and the future. Each of these perspectives shaped the general narrative of the West.

A Belle, a literal translation of beautiful in French After the Civil war between the North and South of the United States, many changes befell the Southern United States, such as a more industrialized economy, rejection of slavery, and more liberal ideas to be spread into the South. Including these changes, the role of Southern women became more flexible with education, employment, and political rights. Despite all these changes the North considered beneficiary for women in the American South, many stereotypes have remained for Southern women. These stereotypes, including women being kind, family-oriented, and to maintain a certain reputation within their community, just to name a few. Moreover, these stereotypes continue to be present in the contemporary Southern culture, which raises the question; “where have these stereotypes come from?”. The source of these stereotypes is most likely to be based on the South’s most recognized and glorified period, the Antebellum South. Therefore, the antebellum South has played a major role in shaping the standards for South by setting standards of reputation, appearance, and portrayal of womanly activities. In continuation, this research essay analyzes the connection between the Antebellum South’s customs for women and how it has led on to the stereotypes for modern Southern women today.