Neo-Regionalism in Lee Smith’s Fair and Tender Ladies and Silas House’s A Parchment of Leaves

Exploring the literary connection between works I identify as neo-regionalist and Appalachian regionalist texts from the turn of the last century, I argue that Lee Smith’s Fair and Tender Ladies (1988) and Silas House’s A Parchment of Leaves (2001) revise and complicate the denigrated image of the anachronized and racialized mountaineer established in earlier regionalist texts. Set in rural southeastern Virginia and extending from around World War I through the mid-1970s, Smith’s Fair and Tender Ladies expands the scholarly possibilities for examining fictional representations of how American backwaters negotiate their relationships with the encroaching outside world, as rural communities become more national and nations becomes more global. Smith’s neo-regionalism suggests a paradigm available to the nation as a whole for reconciling the perceived sanctity and coherence of national identity with an increasingly supranational and, certainly, supra-regional world. Like Smith’s novel, Silas House's A Parchment of Leaves revisits the "problem" of the mountaineer at the turn of the last century. House’s novel tells the story of a Cherokee woman, Vine, her white husband, Saul Sullivan, and the dramatic consequences of Saul's brother's infatuation with Vine. The intertwining stories of a Cherokee family and a white mountaineer family point to the parallels (though certainly not one-to-one equations) between the treatment of Native Americans (and the accompanying rhetoric of the "vanishing Indian") and the mountaineer’s disenfranchisement as mountain land and labor became profitable in a rapidly industrializing nation. Moreover, the novel gives voice to the racial complexity of a region long portrayed and popularly imagined as racially and culturally homogenous. In these ways, House's novel also amends the problematically anachronized and racialized mountaineer of the turn of the century.