A Lively Reprise:
the Tumultuous Circulation of Cape Cod Folks

   Cape Cod Folks is a complex and engaging text which fully deserves to be studied as a part of the canon of American Local Color writing and for its dialogue with American Women's Regionalism. In light of current critical interest in the ideological uses of print culture, McLeanÕs tale also brings with it some very important extra-textual materials. As I mentioned at the beginning, when the book appeared in July of 1881, it did so bearing the real names of all its Cedarsville ("Wallencamp") characters while all the urban characters were modestly protected by pseudonyms. This lapse in judgment points to a more general group myopia, above and beyond the naieve choices on the youthful Miss McLean's part; everyone in her circle of family and friends, including the Boston publisher, was apparently surprised and annoyed when the Cedarswampers wrote angry letters to the publisher and to the newspapers, and then went so far as to press the matter in court. The reception of the book points to two distinct perceptions of the distance from center to periphery.
   Cosmopolitan elites such as Sarah Pratt McLean and her autobiographical heroine, Miss Hungerford, act out of the belief that provincial communities are a part of a distant world. Regardless of the improved roads and railroads which allow people to come and go from these places with relative speed and ease, cultured urbanites continue to act as if provincials like the Wallencampers are irrevocably part of a primitive past. The citizens of Cape Cod Folks, however, are very much part of the ongoing world of the present. In their minds, they simply live down the road from the metropolis.
   Within the general boundaries of a given region and under conditions of perceived racial homogeneity, one finds a surprising amount of substantiating evidence for conflicts between local color writers and their provincial subjects. Under these limited conditions, one sees the contours of a highly participatory if not radically democratic process in action. Urban-based periodical presses may have even encouraged these exchanges, for they clearly provided good copy and attracted readers. For example, in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Pearl of Orr's Island (1861), a correspondent for Harper's Monthly did exactly what several people did in the wake of Cape Cod Folks: he rushed to the community in question to assess the portrait for himself. In the interest of a good story, he actively solicited local responses to the book, including excerpts in his report. In short, the public images being generated for the nationÕs various communities in and through local color writing were actively if conservatively disputed.
   As the following chronological overview suggests, Cape Cod Folks and its writer found themselves almost immediately at the center of a heated controversy. A month and four days after it was first released, McLean's publisher Òissued a card of apology in the papers" announcing that the names of the villagers would be changed in the very next printing. While most of the Codders were busy writing indignant letters, various city types--reviewers and would-be experts, professional men with literary aspirations, and other assorted vacationers--made a path to Cedarsville to see the town for themselves. The first voice to appear in print turns out to be a person with ties to both sites: minister, writer, historian and Cape Cod native, Nathan Chamberlain, wrote a combination review and travel narrative defending McLean from an "insider's" perspective (BostonÕs Literary World, Sept 10, 1881). Then an anonymous writer, probably a friend of Miss McLean's, published a piece in the Springfield Republican. This speaker swore that McLean had only the "kindest feeling[s] for the Cape Cod people" (Sept 25 1881). In the meantime, the woman McLean used as a model for Becky wrote to her privately voicing her support; "Becky" then made her gesture public by sending her remarks to the local Cape Cod paper which reprinted them. Defending McLean, "Becky" accuses her fellow Cape Codders of gold-digging and testifies to the acceptable tone and truth value of the work: "[I] cannot tell why people should find fault with the names, since [I] do not care for it, and all that was written of [me] was true" (Old Colony Memorial Plymouth Rock, and Old Colony Sentinel, Oct 28, 1881).
   "Becky's" decision to support McLean's story can perhaps be read as a sign, at least on her part, that their relationship in "Wallencamp" was a meaningful one. Without further research, it is worth noting here that the female student supports her former teacher, while the male student, "Lute," challenges her authority and claims some of her profits in court. On a level less directly related to McLean, "Becky's" comments seem directed critically at her fellow villagers, whose deportment she calls into question. Since her privacy has been more intimately and unfavorably compromised than any of the others, she implies that if she has choosen not to protest, they have no legitimate ground for doing so. Perhaps the education which set her apart from most of her peers, here prompts her to continue identifying with an urban view, even in the face of McLean's apparent disregard. Society-types joined in the fray as Cape Cod Folks attracted the enthusiastic praise of Boston literary light, Oliver Wendell Holmes; his review said that McLean's writing was 'the most brilliant' verbiage he had encountered in a long time. He notes that the book had been adapted into a play and would be presented as a "private entertainment."
   This new version of the story apparently highlighted the comic elements of the book. B. R. Curtis, a lawyer and amateur writer joined in the conversation next. Making a trip to the Cape, he gathered material for his own account of life in Cedarswamp, wrote it up and read before the well-to-do Papyrus Club. Apparently this new portrait of the community was much less respectful than Cape Cod Folks, written in a tone that was "patronizing and Bostonian, faintly sneering and contemptuous." Curtis' new version, like McLean's, found an appreciative audience. While there seem to have been rumblings of a lawsuit against McLean sounding in the background all along, it was Curtis' "quoted widely" travelogue which finally goaded the Cedarswamper's most eloquent spokesperson to take up her pen and publicly join the fight. Rhoda Swift was furious with both of them:

Mr. Editor:
I saw in my paper, the piece written by B. R. Curtis before the Papyrus Club. It reminded me of two cockerels we had. One was old and sick, and the other would go up and peck and torment him and then go strutting and crowing away as if he had done some great thing. There is one thing we do in Cedarville; we respect old age. I was taught to speak the truth. It is not money alone that makes a gentleman or lady. There has been considerable in the papers about the Cedarville people since that book, 'Cape Cod Folks' came out. Stop one moment my friends; how should you feel if your reputation and character had been put before the public without your consent? Where is Mrs. Consider Fisher [Grandma Keeler] today? She lies upon her bed, her body racked with pain; one year ago today, she bid fair to live a great many years. Who is the cause of it? Sarah P. McLean. Parents, how would you feel if it was your daughter?
(Plymouth Rock March 30, 1882)

Mr. Curtis is a bird-brained bully, making fun of people who are his parents' or grandparents' age and who should be treated with respect by anyone with the least training in civility. Ms. Swift argues that the terms are reversed. She and the other Cedarville folks are genteel though they may not have much money, while Curtis and McLean are crude people whose behavior is primitive.
   In a second letter, published roughly a month later, Swift goes into greater detail about her objections to her communitiy's treatment at the hands of city folks. (Judging from her writing, it is fair to assume that the comic adaptations of the novel, as well as the snide travelogues have come to her attention.) The arguments she picks with these scribbling outsiders provide discrete evidence that this provincial citizen clearly resents the rhetorical gestures which treat their lives as relics of the past rather than a viable part of the present. She further objects to the way outsiders, and especially such condescending outsiders as Curtis, unfairly emphasize the differences between themselves and their small town neighbors.
   Her April 20, 1882 letter carefully corrects a number of "inaccuracies" in McLean's story. Without putting the matter into theoretical terms, Swift gestures self-consciously towards the odious ideological baggage McLean's little exaggerations carry with them. First, she says indignantly, our schoolhouse has a handsome bell. If Miss McLean used a horn to summon the children, it certainly was not out of necessity. And second, little Bessie, whom the novel depicts as dying like a redemptive angel in Miss Hungerford's arms, is "alive and well." She does not articulate why she finds these relatively minor details so annoying, but a look at the final paragraphs of the novel brings the underlying issue into focus. Both the children as well as all the young adults functionally disappear from view in McLeanÕs concentration on the oldest generation of Cedarswampers:

A little more than a year after I left Wallencamp, I heard of Grandma and Grandpa KeelerÕs death [sic]. . . . Since then, I have not heard from Wallencamp. It is doubtful whether I ever get another letter from that source. . . . From the storms that shake their earthly habitations, they pass to their sweet, wild rest beside the sea; and by and by when I meet them, I shall hear them sing. (336-7)

The reader is left with an image of the Cape Cold residents as a spiritually noble but rapidly disappearing community. The only future that the resolutely secular Miss H. envisions for them is in another world. She ends by invoking an ethereal realm where her geographically-inflected class distinctions will be eternally re-enacted: she will listen while they continue to sing sing their old, moving but unfashionable, hymns.
   In short, Swift resents this pre-mature entombment: sainthood need not be earned at the cost of secular respect amongst fellow Christians and citizens. She further uses this letter as an opportunity to turn the tables on city folks like "that enterprising young lawyer [Curtis]." From where we stand, she implies, city folks are the comic types. They talk funny, misusing big words to describe ordinary bits of Cedarville life. "'Who ever heard of a Ôcongolmerate harness?'" she asks the reader. She also apparently overhears Curtis trying to make himself look like an expert in front of his friends: he tells them the water trough is where "'the horses arrange their toilet.'" The spokesperson for Cape Cod vents her anger, not so much at McLean, whom she does not parody, but at the opportunistic Mr. Curtis. Afterall, beyond her her rude faux paux with names, McLeanÕs narrative provides a complex portrait of the town and includes sharp criticism of urban behaviors and attitudes in the ways she repeatedly condemns Miss Hungerford and Dave. And Miss Hungerford has her comic moments right alongside the rural characters.
   Unfortunately, nothing prevents the subject, in this case the lives and reputations of the Cedarville residents, from being taken up by others who have absolutely no respect for the dignity of others. In Curtis' monologues, for example, Cape Codders are flattened into two-dimensional comic grotesques, while the critique McLean levels against male adventuring as well as her implicit criticism of the nation's educational systems fall by the wayside.
    For better or worse, McLeanÕs version ultimately proved to be the most enduring. At least in part, it continued to attract readers in those early years because the wheels of the justice system were slow to turn. A number of Cedarswampers initiated a cluster of lawsuits roughly a year after the book first appeared, but these claims were not immediately brought to trial. In February of 1884, four years later, Lorenzo Nightingale (Lute) finally sued McLean's publisher, Alexander Williams & Co.. Given the storyline of Cape Cod Folks, this historical event constituted an ironic return of the repressed for the creator of Miss H.. "Lute" proved that he was not dead, and that furthermore, he was not a martyr ready to give his life for city folks, no matter how delicate and winning they might be. The character whom McLean depicted as most capable of interacting successfully with the larger world of commerce, in real life did exactly that--he was awarded $1095.
   While the occasional reporter complained that Nightingale was greedy and shameless, surviving discussions of the matter are generally in sympathy with the Cedarville residents. Reporters at the time commented that readers generally condemned McLean, to a greater or lesser degree, for disregarding the privacy of others. Through residents like Rhoda Swift and Lorenzo Nightingale, the periphery talked back to Sarah McLean in a booming voice. Unfortunately, at this time we do not have any diaries or letters to tell us what McLeanÕs reactions were. We do know that she went right to work on a second local color tale, but this time she located her subject further afield in New England. As a writer, she continued to produce in the regionalist vein, commanding a sizable audience right up through the first World War, but like a nervous twitch, she kept changing the names of the characters in Cape Cod Folks (one scholar has counted three different sets). In McLean's novel, the existence of increasingly more comfortable and faster modes of transportation does very little to bring Miss HungerfordÕs world closer to New England's backwater towns. The urbanite, a rich city girl, and the writer herself, clearly believe that they live in a world that is radically separated from the "Wallencampers." But the Cape Cod residents perceive the same distance as a largely instrumental matter of inconvenience and travel money. They know that they live merely a day's journey away from the metropolis.

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