Mode of Program Participation
Academic Scholarship
Participation Type
Paper
Presentation #1 Title
John Fox, Jr., Theodore Roosevelt, and the Racialized and Anachronized Appalachian Mountaineer at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
In John Fox, Jr’s The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908), the mountains have an inescapable pull. There is no long-term visiting, as evidenced by Jack Hale's eventual transformation into a bona fide mountaineer even as he has tried to turn June into a "civilized" lady. This feature of Fox’s popular novel contributed to the anachronized other-worldliness of Appalachia as popularly conceived in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries—a place out of time, whose inhabitants would be left out entirely from the advances of the larger world in a rhetorical construct similar to supposedly “vanishing Indians” of the nineteenth century. Alongside this element of anachronization, Trail should be viewed in the context of an emerging racial hierarchy of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, which along with denigrating those deemed non-white also privileged and disenfranchised particular kinds of whiteness. While throughout the novel Fox's characters champion the "potential" of the mountaineer, Hale's metamorphosis undercuts this strain of the text and creates a seeming irreconcilable dichotomy between the “ancient” mountaineers and the modern progress of folks in the valleys. Moreover, the narrator explains Hale’s exposure and succumbing to supposed mountain degeneracy nearly in terms of contamination. In the late-nineteenth century, the burgeoning eugenics movement provided an ideological framework for presumed genetic inferiority among certain groups of people. In this vein, with each exposure to mountain life, Hale seems “contaminated” by mountaineer influence. Further, Fox’s correspondence with Theodore Roosevelt regarding Fox’s writing and the status of mountaineers attests to the national embeddedness of “the idea,” as Shapiro terms it, of the Southern Appalachian mountaineer at the turn of the twentieth century. I situate my work within the scholarship of Appalachian Studies scholars such as David Whisnant and Emily Satterwhite, along with that of whiteness studies scholars such as Matt Wray, David Roediger, and Matthew Frye Jacobson, among others. Ultimately, the literary construction of the racialized and anachronized mountaineer—in Fox’s work as well as that of others—served, in part, to justify land and labor exploitation at the turn of the twentieth century, demonstrating the major cultural importance of a supposedly "minor" literature.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Sara Taylor Boissonneau is a doctoral candidate in English at UNC Greensboro, and her dissertation is entitled, Other Americans: The Racialized and Anachronized Mountaineer at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. She will graduate in December 2016, and she currently teaches English at UNC Pembroke.
John Fox, Jr., Theodore Roosevelt, and the Racialized and Anachronized Appalachian Mountaineer at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
In John Fox, Jr’s The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908), the mountains have an inescapable pull. There is no long-term visiting, as evidenced by Jack Hale's eventual transformation into a bona fide mountaineer even as he has tried to turn June into a "civilized" lady. This feature of Fox’s popular novel contributed to the anachronized other-worldliness of Appalachia as popularly conceived in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries—a place out of time, whose inhabitants would be left out entirely from the advances of the larger world in a rhetorical construct similar to supposedly “vanishing Indians” of the nineteenth century. Alongside this element of anachronization, Trail should be viewed in the context of an emerging racial hierarchy of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, which along with denigrating those deemed non-white also privileged and disenfranchised particular kinds of whiteness. While throughout the novel Fox's characters champion the "potential" of the mountaineer, Hale's metamorphosis undercuts this strain of the text and creates a seeming irreconcilable dichotomy between the “ancient” mountaineers and the modern progress of folks in the valleys. Moreover, the narrator explains Hale’s exposure and succumbing to supposed mountain degeneracy nearly in terms of contamination. In the late-nineteenth century, the burgeoning eugenics movement provided an ideological framework for presumed genetic inferiority among certain groups of people. In this vein, with each exposure to mountain life, Hale seems “contaminated” by mountaineer influence. Further, Fox’s correspondence with Theodore Roosevelt regarding Fox’s writing and the status of mountaineers attests to the national embeddedness of “the idea,” as Shapiro terms it, of the Southern Appalachian mountaineer at the turn of the twentieth century. I situate my work within the scholarship of Appalachian Studies scholars such as David Whisnant and Emily Satterwhite, along with that of whiteness studies scholars such as Matt Wray, David Roediger, and Matthew Frye Jacobson, among others. Ultimately, the literary construction of the racialized and anachronized mountaineer—in Fox’s work as well as that of others—served, in part, to justify land and labor exploitation at the turn of the twentieth century, demonstrating the major cultural importance of a supposedly "minor" literature.
