"Twenty Miles West of Civilisation:" Edna Fern's Multilingual Regionalism

Feminist critical regionalism provides a necessary reaction to notions of "the west" in literature and literary study that have historically relied on problematic notions of gender, race, and nation. Within the study of US... [ view full abstract ]

Feminist critical regionalism provides a necessary reaction to notions of "the west" in literature and literary study that have historically relied on problematic notions of gender, race, and nation. Within the study of US literatures, a language problem persists that limits the scope of examples of literature studied within this context. For this seminar, I will consider a short story titled "Ein Farm-Idyll in Süd-Missouri" (A Farm-Idyll in Southern Missouri) written in the 1880s by the German-American author Ferdinande Richter under the pen name Edna Fern. The story centers on a German-American family living on the edge of the prairie, whose property is protected by the Missouri woodlands, for a time, from harsh weather and outside threats. Little by little the family is dispossessed of the property they claimed after the US Civil War, first when their cows are stolen by a mock-mythical "swamp Angel," and later, when a wealthy northeastern widow reclaims the farm itself as her legal property. The narrative presents a world of language mixture, competing claims to power and property, attentiveness to space and climate, and contested constructions of whiteness and American belonging.  I will read the short story as an indirect and multi-layered critique of western expansion. Edna Fern's story, which features a nuanced female narrative voice and an outsider's perspective on the American frontier, offers a rich example of the affordances of studying non-English literature in the United States.