(New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1928. Hardbound, abo...)
New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1928. Hardbound, about 8.75 inches tall, 262 pages. Index. The black and white illustrations include a frontis portrait, plus ten double sided plates.
American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York Review Books Classics)
(Stepping out of the darkness, the American emerges upon t...)
Stepping out of the darkness, the American emerges upon the stage of history as a new character, as puzzling to himself as to others. American Humor, Constance Rourke's pioneering "study of the national character," singles out the archetypal figures of the Yankee peddler, the backwoodsman, and the blackface minstrel to illuminate the fundamental role of popular culture in fashioning a distinctive American sensibility. A memorable performance in its own right, American Humor crackles with the jibes and jokes of generations while presenting a striking picture of a vagabond nation in perpetual self-pursuit. Davy Crockett and Henry James, Jim Crow and Emily Dickinson rub shoulders in a work that inspired such later critics as Pauline Kael and Lester Bangs and which still has much to say about the America of Bob Dylan and Thomas Pynchon, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
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Blending myth and reality, Constance Rourke aimed to ge...)
Blending myth and reality, Constance Rourke aimed to get at the heart of Davy Crockett, whose hold on the American imagination was firm even before he died at the Alamo. Davy Crockett, published in 1934, pioneered in showing the backwoodsman’s transformation into a folk hero. It remains a basic in the Crockett literature.
Constance Mayfield Rourke was an American historian and author. She specialized in American popular culture.
Background
Constance Mayfield Rourke was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the only child of Henry Button Rourke and Constance Elizabeth (Davis) Rourke. Their ancestry was mixed Irish, English, Welsh, and French, of Southern pioneer stock. The father, a lawyer, died when his daughter was about seven, and Mrs. Rourke moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she taught at school. Trained as a kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Rourke was also a skilled amateur painter, with talents in handicrafts, the love of which she transmitted to her daughter. Theirs was an unusually affectionate and sympathetic relationship.
Education
Constance attended the public schools. She studied at Sorbonne and Vassar College where she took her B. A.
Career
From 1908 to 1910 Rourke was a research reader at the Bibliotheque Nationale and the British Museum. For the next five years she taught English at Vassar, resigning in 1915 to return to Grand Rapids, where she lived with her mother and devoted herself to research and writing in the field of American culture. How she came to concentrate in this field is not known. At Vassar her interest had been aesthetics and literary criticism. Probably it was in her own background that she discovered the richness of folklore and social history.
Though her parents made little of their ancestry, Constance had grown up with some sense of her heritage among the "plain people" of the South like her maternal grandfather, a Methodist minister. One of her ancestors, George Mayfield, had been stolen by the Creeks and reared as an Indian, had known Davy Crockett and had been Jackson's interpreter in the Creek War; his story exemplified for her the varicolored fabric of the American past.
Beginning with an article on "Vaudeville" in the New Republic (Aug. 27, 1919), she spent the rest of her life exploring and interpreting this past. She had instinctive tact and charm, and her buoyancy and infectious enthusiasm enabled her to move easily among "old timers round about the country, " who opened to her their stores of reminiscence, folk sayings, and songs, which she collected, compared, and knitted together as the basis for her articles and books. Like these people, she had a profound sense of rootedness in her own community, and all her writings are imbued with this feeling for particularity and locality.
The biographical studies of great popular figures in her first book, Trumpets of Jubilee (1927), reflect this interest in regional character. With an uncertain grasp of religious history, she could produce only a superficial analysis of New England theology in the thought of Lyman Beecher, or even in the broader life of his children. The whole book, in fact, is marred by a dwelling on the brash and bizarre. She was more successful in her treatment of Horace Greeley, of whom she drew a sympathetic portrait, and of P. T. Barnum. In dealing with Harriet Beecher Stowe she argued for a just literary evaluation of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and in a later essay on Mrs. Stowe (in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences), she demonstrated that author's fruitful use of a long tradition of Yankee and Negro characterization. Miss Rourke's contention that the novel was "folk drama" became the theme of much of her work, and led to her most suggestive critical concept: that the forms and artifacts of folk culture are not mere deposits within more serious art, but its vitalizing element.
Her American Humor (1931), a study of native American comic types and forms and their influence upon literature, is still fresh and significant. Its definition of the comic tradition in terms of masquerade and minstrelsy underlined her conviction that American consciousness and character were essentially projected through drama, that even Calvinistic religion had the aspect of theatre. She was at her best in delineating the three great comic figures of the Yankee, the backwoodsman, and the Negro, and in demonstrating the borrowings and transmutations that marked the evolution of these types. Her racy, zestful style made American Humor a classic of historical portraiture, and her massive investigations produced an abundance of detail and local incident and a deft, rounded expression of the dominant strain in American humor.
Less successful were the essays on the major figures of American literature in which she attempted to demonstrate their uses of this heritage, though she did point up the importance of humor in their writings, especially the humor of the grotesque, of braggadocio, and of comic inflation.
Her most fully realized critical study was Charles Sheeler (1938), an examination and appraisal of the folk roots of his painting. A book of genuine insight, it was equally an empathic one, for she found in Sheeler's vision of painting the same love of craftsmanship and the same appreciation of the artistic possibilities of plasticity, texture, and architectural form that she herself had discerned. Drawing on Sheeler's observations on the Shaker aesthetic, with its economy of means and unerring sense of proportion, she captured the excitement of his discovery that (in the words of a Shaker saying) "Every force has its form. " In placing Sheeler within an authentically American tradition, she argued that the thoughtful study of "essentially democratic arts" could provide an "anatomy of our creative powers" in the past, and that the "human expressive values" discoverable in them could be appropriated for a broad enrichment of American art.
Miss Rourke died before writing her projected history of American culture, in which she might have developed more completely and convincingly her insights into the relationship between folk tradition and formal art. Six fragments from her manuscripts, edited by Van Wyck Brooks, were published as The Roots of American Culture (1942), an inferior book, but one that demonstrates the breadth of her interests and her commitment to making accessible to "the precarious, strange, and tragic present" a dense, variegated body of native tradition. In spite of the liveliness of her writing and the suggestive hints her studies contain, today's reader notices in her work as a whole her failure to appreciate fully the uses of the comparative approach and her tendency to celebrate folk tradition and popular culture at the expense of analysis and generalization. Equipped with a perceptive yet modest critical apparatus, she left even her best studies in a state of incompleteness, and ultimately they have limited explanatory power. These, however, were the shortcomings of a pioneer who gave great stimulus to the field of American literary history. She died at the age of fifty-five in Grand Rapids, Mich. , from a thrombosis after a fall, and was buried in the Woodlawn Cemetery there.