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FIDDLE TUNES, FOXES, AND A PIECE OF LAND: REGION AND CHARACTER IN HARRIETTE ARNOW'S KENTUCKY TRILOGY
Abstract
Harriette Arnow is a writer of place and people: her place, the backhills above the Cumberland in eastern Kentucky, an area isolated from the outside world by its geography, culture, codes, and values; her people, proud but poor hill families, simple, uneducated, whose character and life style have been shaped by the land and the Cumberland, two things that tied all time together for them. This study begins with a discussion of regionalism, its critical bias and conventional definitions, proceeds to Arnow's development as a writer, her roots and felt connection with her region, and moves to a discussion of the trilogy, considering each novel on its own merits, and for the contribution each makes to the overall thematic statement of the trilogy. One purpose throughout the study is to show that Arnow's Kentucky novels, regional in the best sense of the word, derive their merit both from Arnow's knowledge and understanding of her region and its people and from her talent for seeing the universal in the particular. Mountain Path (1936), Hunter's Horn (1949), and The Dollmaker (1954) chronicle the erosion and dissolution of Kentucky hill life and culture from the 1920's to the mid-1940's. Along with the detailed, evocative picture of a dying region, Arnow presents individuals caught up in dramas and moral dilemmas, whose struggles range from their trying desperately to live by and perpetuate the values of their known world to their trying to escape and run away to the unknown outside world. In effect, the novels consistently operate on two levels: the communal and the individual. As the outside world increasingly impinges upon the historically isolated backhills, the tensions and conflicts at both levels grow. Eventually, World War II technology, and the Great Migration, conspire to destroy the hill people and their culture. From the enclosed world of moonshining and feuds in Mountain Path through the coming of roads and change in Hunter's Horn to the dislocation caused by war, Arnow shows her talent for creating regional verisimilitude and characters caught in the stampede of time and the consequences of moral choices.
Subject Area
American literature
Recommended Citation
GRIFFIN, JOAN RAE, "FIDDLE TUNES, FOXES, AND A PIECE OF LAND: REGION AND CHARACTER IN HARRIETTE ARNOW'S KENTUCKY TRILOGY" (1982). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8217529.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8217529