What Are the Ozarks?

by Steve Wiegenstein, Finalist for the M.M. Bennetts Award for Historical Fiction
Winner to be announced at the Historical Novel Society Luncheon on June 27, 2015 and HERE.

My novel series is set in the Ozark Mountains, an area of the United States that is not well known, even to most Americans. Those who have heard of the Ozarks probably only know it from a couple of sources: the simple, comically rustic family on the television show “The Beverly Hillbillies” or the clannish methamphetamine dealers of the novel and movie “Winter’s Bone.” Both narratives, oddly enough, have (fictional) roots in the same location, Taney County, Missouri.

The Ozarks are a rugged region of hills (the “mountains” descriptor is essentially honorific) in the central part of the United States, mainly in the states of Missouri and Arkansas. Because the hills obstructed travel, the region was lightly settled during the westward expansion period and developed a reputation for backwardness and poverty. The literary Ozarks begin with The Shepherd of the Hills (1907), the first American novel to sell a million copies. The Shepherd of the Hills took the hillbilly stereotype and added a layer of Christian uplift over the top of it, along with enough melodrama to fuel a contemporary TV mini-series for two or three seasons.

Although the people of the Ozarks are poor, the region itself has long been attractive to outsiders. The earliest European settlers, French, came for lead and iron. In the late Nineteenth Century, the nation’s craving for building materials led to indiscriminate timber cutting that changed the landscape permanently. In the mid-Twentieth Century, the region’s steep and narrow valleys drew power companies and government dam builders, who envisioned a network of hydroelectric power dams feeding the electrical needs of the rest of the Midwest (only a few of which have actually proven efficient). The 1960s saw a renewal of the lead and iron boom. And for the last several decades, the commodity in demand has been natural beauty, as retirees and tourists flock to the rivers and lakes of the Ozarks in search of a rustic ideal.

Ozark Lumber Company

Rural hill people everywhere are experienced in dealing with exploitative outsiders, and Ozarkers are no different. The classic legend/fiddle tune “The Arkansas Traveler,” in which a country bumpkin baffles a traveling city slicker with his incomprehensible logic, exemplifies this interaction as well as anything I know. The old fiddler is either a fool or a genius, and the city slicker can’t tell which. The great Ozark folklorist Vance Randolph, quoting one of his informants, titled one of his books We Always Lie to Strangers, an approach that lives on today. That phrase, fittingly enough, was reused by the creators of the 2013 documentary film about Branson, Missouri, the current high temple of all things Ozarks, both faux and authentic.

The history of the Ozarks is rich in contradictions: the idyllic landscape that has existed in grinding poverty since its first colonial settlements, the beautiful isolation that draws political extremists and criminals looking for a place to hide, the residents who resent the stereotypes placed on them but who are willing to employ them when useful. I set my novels in the Ozarks partly because I’m a native of the region and I feel a kinship to it unlike any other; but I also write about the Ozarks because as a novelist who is interested in issues of the environment, social class, the land, and the romantic ideal of Nature, it’s a near-perfect setting to engage with those issues.

An Ozarks Trail

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Steve Wiegenstein is the author of Slant of Light and This Old World, the first two novels in an anticipated multi-book series. Slant of Light, published in 2012, was the runner-up for the David H. Langum Prize in American Historical Fiction, and This Old World, published in September 2014, is currently a finalist for the M.M. Bennetts Award for Historical Fiction. Both books were published by Blank Slate Press, a literary small press in St. Louis, Missouri.

See more about Steve and his work on the M.M. Bennetts Award for Historical Fiction website.

Utopian Communities of the Nineteenth Century

I have invited the three finalists of the M.M. Bennetts Award for Historical Fiction to write posts about the research behind their novels. These posts will not always be British but will be interesting history. Tonight's post is the first.

by Steve Wiegenstein

Life is pretty much a mess, most of the time. People don't behave as they should; they follow their own interests and desires, bringing them into disagreement with others and creating unnecessary heartache and conflict. Wouldn't it be nice if everyone could agree in advance that they would act for the common good, setting aside their own wishes in favor of what's best for everyone?

That is the essence of the utopian ideal, and that's why it has fascinated me for many years. I first got interested in utopian movements when I read about the Icarians, a little-known group that lived in the United States for about fifty years in the Nineteenth Century. That interest led to a wider appreciation for the entire utopian movement, which was a transatlantic movement inspired both by Romanticism and by the newly created idea of “social science,” both of which contributed important elements to the movement in varying degrees.

When I think of the foundations of this movement, three names come to mind: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, coiner of the memorable phrase “Property is theft”; Charles Fourier, the utopian socialist whose concept of the “phalanx” inspired communities on both sides of the Atlantic; and Robert Owen, the Welsh reformer who put his ideas into action in Britain and the United States. The intellectual roots don’t attract me as much as the human drama, though.

- the New Harmony community in Indiana,
as envisioned by Robert Owen

The Icarians, like a lot of utopian groups, originated with a charismatic leader who attracted a group of followers. But the Icarian movement was different from most others as well. For one thing, its founder, Etienne Cabet, hadn't actually intended to form a settlement. He wrote a novel, Voyage to Icaria, largely to comment on the political situation in France and to keep his name in front of the French public while he served a period of exile. But the novel, in which he set forth his communistic ideas in the form of an imaginary community in the South Seas, caught the public imagination, and in 1848 Cabet found himself leading a group of immigrants to the United States to establish a real-life Icaria. The experiment was marked by equal amounts of strife and heroism, nobility and pettiness, but the last colony of Icarians didn’t disband until 1898, and their dogged persistence in trying to live out their ideal deserves our admiration, if not imitation.

New Harmony as it actually looked

Those of you who have read my first novel, Slant of Light, will recognize that situation as the starting premise of the book – a charismatic social reformer who founds a community, almost by accident. I depart from history at that point, but certainly one of the central themes of my book is the utopian impulse that lives in us all, and whether that impulse can ever be realized. This Old World picks up that story after the devastation of the American Civil War, when the first wave of utopianism died down as dreams of a radical refashioning of human nature felt to most Americans more like a cruel hoax than an achievable ideal.

Somewhere below the surface, the utopian impulse has a dictatorial side—it's the "I know best" impulse, the belief that life's messes and strife could be avoided if only you would agree to what I know is best for us all. You can see hints of this impulse in the obsessive fascination with order that characterizes many of the utopian theorists’ visions of the ideal community. Fourier’s ideal phalanx was to have 1,620 people, equally divided among male and female, and encompassing what he imagined to be all combinations of the common passions of humanity. To the social reformer, our human imperfections are a problem to be solved. But to the novelist, they're what makes us so interesting.

- An artist’s imagining of an ideal Fourierist phalanstery

The fictional inhabitants of Daybreak, the name of my fictional community in Slant of Light and This Old World, try earnestly to arrange their lives for the common good. They hold weekly meetings to vote on everything from whether to install windows in their cabins to whether to buy cloth for mourning dresses. They eat together, work together, travel together. But their communal urges keep getting thwarted by their human desires. They envy, they betray, they fall in love with the wrong people. It's the struggle between these two sides of human nature—the desire to improve and perfect ourselves, and the desire to have what we want when we want it, regardless of others—that drew me to the utopian experience of the Nineteenth Century as a microcosm of human nature.

- the Icarian settlement in Nauvoo, Illinois

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Steve Wiegenstein is the author of Slant of Light and This Old World, the first two novels in an anticipated multi-book series. Slant of Light, published in 2012, was the runner-up for the David H. Langum Prize in American Historical Fiction, and This Old World, published in September 2014, is currently a finalist for the M.M. Bennetts Award for Historical Fiction. Both books were published by Blank Slate Press, a literary small press in St. Louis, Missouri.

See more about Steve and his work on the M.M. Bennetts Award for Historical Fiction website.