Confronting Appalachian stereotypes: back talk from an American region

Abstract

Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes: Back Talk from an American Region. Edited by Dwight B. Billings, Gurney Norman, and Katherine Ledford. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999. Pp. xi, 350. Foreword, acknowledgments, introduction, notes, contributors, and index. $29.95.) Robert Schenkkan's Kentucky Cycle-a very bad play that, amazingly, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1992 (which speaks volumes about how truly meaningful such awards are)-was the impetus for this collection of essays. volume began as a series of responses to Schenkkan's play before it took on a broader focus. One could probably discern this fact, even if editor Dwight Billings did not explicitly state it in his introduction because most of the twenty-two essays refer to Kentucky Cycle. Billings and his colleagues see this drama as merely the latest episode in a tradition of stereotyping and its people that dates back well over a hundred years. Stereotypers consistently find southern Appalachian mountaineers representatives of a homogeneous culture that is in, but not of, America. Geographically isolated, they are inbred, suspicious of outsiders, clannish, inclined toward feuding, somewhat childish, poor, and in general out of touch with modern mainstream society. In other words, the region and its inhabitants are viewed one-dimensionally. Presented in five sections, the essays in Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes challenge historical representations of and its population put forth by Schenkkan and other literary figures, most notably turn of the century novelist John Fox, Jr. They also provide accounts of personal experiences and activism by various groups of mountaineers that contradict negative stereotypes. Only the last four articles are given over entirely to critiques of Kentucky Cycle. book makes its greatest contribution in investigating previously unexamined aspects of Appalachian stereotyping. Katherine Ledford and Kenneth Noe, for example, depart from the usual discussion of Appalachian imagery by concentrating on the antebellum era. Ledford looks at seventeenth- and eighteenth-century southern travel narratives, finding in them roots of the hillbilly fictions that occurred centuries later. Noe s study of Rebecca Handing Davis's fiction reveals that the West Virginia author offered a more realistic view of Appalachian sectionalism during the Civil War than that which became widely accepted in the late nineteenth century (largely due to the fundraising efforts of Berea College representatives) and is often encountered today. John Inscoe's The Racial Innocence of Appalachia demonstrates that major writers also helped propagate and perpetuate Appalachian stereotypes. He criticizes a short story and a novel by William Faulkner as a means of challenging assumptions about population homogeneity in southern Appalachia. Even when covering well-traveled ground the essayists frequently provide new perspectives. No writer has been more closely, or more often, studied by Appalachian scholars than John Fox, Jr. Darlene Wilson takes a new look at the author of Trail of the Lonesome Pine and other works, giving an interesting, but not entirely convincing, argument that his work was motivated not only by a desire for status and money but also by a wish to rescue the degraded reputation of southern white manhood. Kathleen Blee and Dwight Billings examine a Clay County, Kentucky feud-one of the longest and most widely reported in Appalachia-to demonstrate that many of the assumptions that Fox, and others, held concerning mountain feuds were simply wrong. …

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