Popular New Orleans

The Crescent City in Periodicals, Theme Parks, and Opera, 1875–2015

Florian Freitag

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000196955
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

New Orleans is unique – which is precisely why there are many Crescent Cities all over the world: for almost 150 years, writers, artists, cultural brokers, and entrepreneurs have drawn on and simultaneously contributed to New Orleans's fame and popularity by recreating the city in popular media from literature, photographs, and plays to movies, television shows, and theme parks. Addressing students and fans of the city and of popular culture, Popular New Orleans examines three pivotal moments in the history of New Orleans in popular media: the creation of the popular image of the Crescent City during the late nineteenth century in the local-color writings published in Scribner's Monthly/Century Magazine; the translation of this image into three-dimensional immersive spaces during the twentieth century in Disney's theme parks and resorts in California, Florida, and Japan; and the radical transformation of this image following Hurricane Katrina in public performances such as Mardi Gras parades and operas. Covering visions of the Crescent City from George W. Cable's Old Creole Days stories (1873-1876) to Disneyland's "New Orleans Square" (1966) to Rosalyn Story's opera Wading Home (2015), Popular New Orleans traces how popular images of New Orleans have changed from exceptional to exemplary.

1
Scribner’s Illustrated New Orleans

“A Gentleman of Bayou Têche”

Perhaps one of the most fascinating pieces of Kate Chopin’s short fiction is “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche,” written in 1893. In this story, Mr. Sublet, an artist “looking for bits of ‘local color’ along the Têche,” proposes to draw a Cajun fisherman and to publish the picture – in the Cajun’s words – in “‘one fine “Mag’zine”’” (319). The Cajun first agrees to pose for the drawing, then refuses for fear of being ridiculed, but eventually yields, “with shy and child-like pleasure” (324), when Sublet allows him to name the picture. “A Gentleman of Bayou Têche” can be described as a local-color story about local color – about its production (by non-local artists), its reception (by local subjects), its aesthetics, and, most importantly, its ethics. Indeed, several early critics, including David Steiling, Kate McCullough, and Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, viewed Chopin’s story as an ironic comment on the local-color writer and a clever critique of the genre of local-color writing, particularly of the way it actively stages and commodifies the local.¹

Mr. Sublet, however, is a visual artist, not a writer, and the story offers no inherent reason why we should read it as a metaphor. Later critics, including Tom Lutz and myself, have thus regarded “A Gentleman” as a celebration rather than a critique of local-color writers and writing – a celebration, however, that comes at the expense of local-color visual artists and visual art. In Lutz’s view, Chopin stages a paragone, or contest of local-color art forms, from which writing emerges as victorious. Lutz convincingly argues that “A Gentleman” is:

about art more than it is about Cajuns, and about literary art in particular. Anyone can come down to the bayou on a quick hunting vacation like Mr. Sublet and take a picture of a local character. But only the literary artist has the kind of perspective necessary to represent what is lost and gained, by all concerned, in the cross-cultural encounter. Only the literary artist can write from both the inside and the outside.

(30)

Local-color writing (in the shape of Chopin’s story) triumphs over local-color drawing (in the shape of Sublet’s picture), then, because the former allows the artist to represent the local character both from his own and from the outsider’s perspective, whereas the latter has to resort to writing (in the shape of the picture’s title or caption) to achieve such a balanced, multiperspective view. Drawing on Lutz’s analysis, I have argued elsewhere that Chopin uses her story to poke fun at local-color illustrators such as Edward W. Kemble (see Freitag, “Rencontres” 411). Not least thanks to his illustrations for Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Kemble had become famous as, in his own words, a “delineator of the South, the Negro being my specialty” although he had “never been further south than Sandy Hook [New Jersey]” (“Illustrating” 32). Kemble then decided that “it was high time for [him] to go and see what the real article looked like” and, equipped with a camera, visited several plantations, “noting the local color” (32).² According to this reading, then, “A Gentleman” throws a dubious light on certain local-color illustrators and criticizes them for their careless, superficial, and touristic approach to their subjects.

Chopin (or her editors) had enough taste and good sense to not publish “A Gentleman” in “‘one fine “Mag’zine,”’” let alone with illustrations: the story was first printed in Chopin’s first collection Bayou Folk (1894), which Houghton, Mifflin and Company released without any illustrations whatsoever (except for the Riverside Press’s colophon). “Azélie,” by contrast, another of Chopin’s stories featuring Cajuns and also written in 1893, appeared in the December 1894 issue of the Century – certainly “‘one fine “Mag’zine”’” – and with three illustrations by artist Eric Pape³ before it was reprinted in Chopin’s second collection A Night in Acadie (1897). Chopin may not have thought highly of local-color visual art in general and of illustrators like Mr. Sublet in particular, but she could not – and may not have wanted to – entirely escape the exigencies and established procedures of the late-nineteenth–century literary marketplace. In Gilded Age America, local-color stories such as “Azélie” – as well as other short stories, novels, and poems – frequently appeared with illustrations in literary magazines before they were collected or reprinted in book form. Prior magazine publication, publishers believed, helped promote the sales of hardcover editions – which is why the major publishing companies had established or acquired literary monthlies in the first place.⁴ And with the exception of some of the older, more conservative titles, such as the Atlantic Monthly, illustrations constituted, in Gib Prettyman’s words, one of the magazines’ “primary sources of competitive distinction” (26). Only a “lunatic,” the enterprising literary businessman Fulkerson in William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) acknowledges, “would start a [magazine] in the twilight of the nineteenth century without illustrations” (7).

To editors and illustrators, a literary genre such as local color, with its detailed descriptions of local and regional landscapes and the customs, speech, and dress of their inhabitants, and with its general emphasis on the “picturesque,” must have seemed especially suited for illustration.⁵ In late nineteenth-century literary magazines, local-color stories were not only frequently accompanied by illustrations, however; they were also surrounded by a distinctive mix of what long-time Century editor L. Frank Tooker has called the typical ingredients of “the traditionally perfect magazine of the day” (320): serialized novels; poems; essays on such issues as art, science, technology, and travel; a variety of recurring editorial departments; and advertisements, all of them often illustrated themselves. Like local-color illustrations, some of these features were especially close to local-color fiction – not only regarding their placement in the magazine, but also methodologically and with respect to their contents. Bill Hardwig, for instance, argues that local color particularly resonated with contemporary travel writing:

local-color fiction of the era closely mirrors travel writing … in form, content, and purpose. In some ways, the methodological overlap between the genres makes sense. These two modes of writing shared the central objective of translating [a region] to a readership unfamiliar with [it].

(3)⁶

However close they were to the local-color stories alongside which they appeared in the magazine, all of these various features had, at least potentially, an impact on how contemporary magazine readers perceived local color.

It is all the more surprising, then, that until very recently, studies of local-color fiction have completely ignored the original periodical context of local color. Basing their readings on reprints of the stories in collections (mostly arranged according to individual authors; see, for instance, Chopin’s aforementioned volumes Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie), most critics have placed local color, as Hardwig notes in Upon Provincialism (2013), “in larger literary and historical contexts, such as Gilded Age expansion, US imperialism, Howellsian realism, and the beginnings of American naturalism” (152).⁷ Hardwig maintains, however, that local color can be more profitably understood in the context of Gilded Age periodical culture and should therefore be critically re-situated and re-evaluated within this context (see 152). This is exactly what I will attempt to do in the following. More precisely, I will take a periodical studies approach to New Orleans local color published in Scribner’s Monthly, an Illustrated Magazine for the People (later renamed The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine), in order to analyze the various ways in which these local-color stories “call and respond” (Noonan, Reading xvi) to other literary, journalistic, and pictorial texts about New Orleans (as well as to other features) published in the same or in other issues of the magazine.

Such a retracing of the textual and pictorial networks established by one Gilded Age periodical around the city of New Orleans will inevitably reveal the variety of and the occasional tensions between the individual texts’ literary and pictorial perspectives on the urban space, its history, its future, its culture, and its inhabitants. Like any other magazine, Scribner’s/Century was held together by an editorial formula. In fact, in the case of Scribner’s/Century, it was one particular aspect of this formula – namely, the periodical’s explicit openness to and welcoming attitude toward submissions from and about the South in the name of post-Civil War sectional reconciliation and national integration – that, among other factors, contributed to the surprisingly large number of representations of New Orleans in its pages. But of course, this editorial formula could not prevent the fact that the various textual and visual representations were not uniform in the ways they approached the city, neither within themselves – as, for instance, in the case of illustrated features, where the writer’s point of view did not necessarily correspond to that of the visual artist – nor among each other. Indeed, such a complete uniformity was never even intended by the magazine, as is evidenced by at least one instance in which a writer was actively encouraged to submit her retort to another writer’s supposedly “false” representation of New Orleans and its people.⁸ It is precisely this at times harmonious, at times disharmonious polyvocality of the various literary, journalistic, and pictorial texts that together make up what I call here “Scribner’s Illustrated New Orleans,” then, that I seek to examine in the following.

“Scribner’s Illustrated New Orleans” does not only stand for a large variety of intertextual and intermedial relationships, however. Equally important are the numerous interpersonal relationships that crystallized around the magazine. This network of persons included, first and foremost, the authors and artists who created the texts and illustrations about New Orleans published in Scribner’s/Century, but also a multitude of other people who were involved in the production of the magazine in less visible ways: editors, art editors, editorial assistants, wood engravers, managers, and printers. Some of these people were entirely new to the world of magazine publishing; others were well experienced at their respective professions. Some of them were New Orleanians; others were not. Some of them had met in person (and in New Orleans!) to exchange their views on their work or even to collaborate on a New Orleans-related magazine feature; others had merely read or seen each other’s work or had never even corresponded. Some of them were deeply invested in how the city should be represented textually and pictorially; for others, New Orleans was but a stopover between other projects. What brought them all together were the magazine and their individual contributions to “Scribner’s Illustrated New Orleans.”

While I will concentrate on the intertextual or intermedial and interpersonal networks that formed around the various New Orleans-related features printed in Scribner’s/Century in the following, I will, occasionally, also look beyond the pages of the magazine. As I have already intimated, magazine publication was often but a stepping stone toward book publication; indeed, almost all of Scribner’s/Century’s New Orleans-related features were later reprinted in book form, mostly by the magazine’s current and former parent companies (Century Company and Charles Scribner’s Sons, respectively). On their way from the magazine to the book, however, some of these features were significantly altered: texts were edited or rewritten, illustrations were repositioned or added, and existing texts – as well as existing texts and illustrations – were newly recombined. New, different images of New Orleans emerged in the process, and new people joined the network, adding their own perspectives and views of the city to the existing ones. While I will not even attempt to include and discuss the entire history of the post-periodical publication of Scribner’s/Century’s material on New Orleans, I will nevertheless draw, at various points, on some of these post-periodical texts to substantiate and enlarge my arguments.⁹

Thus conceptualized, “Scribner’s Illustrated New Orleans” comprises such well-known and trailblazing late-nineteenth–century literary and pictorial representations of New Orleans as the Louisiana chapters of the famous “Great South” series of travel sketches, the local-color stories later collected as Old Creole Days and Balcony Stories, the novella “Madame Delphine,” the novel The Grandissimes, and the pictures of Creole slaves dancing the Bamboula in Congo Square. It includes work by such well-known writers and illustrators as George Washington Cable, Grace E. King, Lafcadio Hearn, Edward W. Kemble, and Joseph Pennell. All of these people and their texts and pictures had something to say about New Orleans, and they all had their own distinct views on the city. What they all have in common, however, is that they depicted the city as French and that they represented the city’s Frenchness as past. Indeed, these textual and pictorial portrayals of French New Orleans substantially differ from the late-nineteenth–century representation of other U.S. regional cultures (particularly in local color) by completely “pastifying” (...