Race, Class, Time, and Mary N. Murfree’s Mountain Essentialism

This article examines Mary N. Murfree’s most famous work, In the Tennessee Mountains (1884), in terms of its construction of Appalachian identity. The stories contained in that collection were originally published in the Atlantic Monthly and were therefore among the first widely read depictions of the Appalachian mountaineer. Reading some of Murfree’s stories in the context of articles they were published alongside in the Atlantic Monthly and the larger cultural milieu of the period, this article argues that racializing discourse was not coincidental to early Appalachian texts, but integral to an evolving national discourse on whiteness. The author then traces that discourse throughout some of Murfree’s other stories in the 1884 collection, illuminating a rhetorical phenomenon of racializing and anachronizing the Southern Appalachian mountaineer into developing social hierarchies.