15 - Comic Grotesque

Summary

We all grew in those days like the apple-trees in our back lot. Every man had his own quirks and twists, and threw himself out freely in the line of his own individuality; and so a rather jerky, curious original set of us there was.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oldtown Folks (1869)

The perpetual game of humor is to look with considerate good nature at every object in existence, aloof, as a man might look at a mouse, comparing it with the eternal Whole.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Comic” (1843)

In depictions of regional manners, it seems impossible to resist condescension. Whatever his or her degree of sympathy with the culture depicted, the observer writes as a sort of anthropologist on whom a higher knowledge has been conferred than on those described. When Timothy Dwight, from Greenfield Hill, sings how

in rural pride

The village spreads its tidy, snug retreats,

That speak the industry of every hand

he seeks to glorify the enchanting scene spread out before him by contrast to the more storied landscapes of the Old World. But the effect is to miniaturize the objects beneath the superiority (both spatial and intellectual) of the speaker's gaze. More often than not, furthermore, the literary anthropologist of regional manners overtly regards them as either cute or benighted, as touchingly passé or stultifyingly circumscribed.