Ruth Stuart

Ruth McEnery Stuart (1849-1917)

"There is no woman whose work is more widely known and loved, and whose personality has a further reaching influence," declared a reviewer of Ruth Stuart in 1904. Though Ruth McEnery Stuart is less well known today than other contemporary Louisiana writers--George W. Cable, Grace King or Kate Chopin--only Cable commanded a larger following or achieved greater fame as a southern writer at the turn of the century. Like Cable, Stuart was a very popular and adept reader of her own dialect stories, and like him, she lived most of her professional life in the North, away from the sources of her literary success, a fact that may have weakened the complexity of both writers' later work.

The eldest of eight children, Mary Routh McEnery was born in 1849 in Marksville, a cotton-growing center of Avoyelles Parish in central Louisiana. Her parents, Mary Routh Stirling and James McEnery, came from Scotch and Irish immigrant families, who were politically and economically well-connected. When Routh was still small, the McEnerys moved to New Orleans, where her father worked as a cotton commissioner in the Customs House. Routh took daily "health walks" that soon familiarized her with the diverse neighborhoods of this busy port city. She attended both public and private schools, but when the Civil War impoverished the family, she and her sister became teachers. In 1879 after a visit to Arkansas, she decided to marry Alfred Oden Stuart, a wealthy planter some thirty years her senior with eleven children. Their son Stirling was born in 1880, but after her husband died in 1883, Routh Stuart returned to live with her sister Sarah, a school principal, in New Orleans.

Participating in the lively literary and women's club community of the 1880s, where she became acquainted with Mollie Moore Davis, Cable, King, and journalist Dorothy Dix, soon motivated Stuart to try her hand at writing. On a visit to North Carolina in 1887, she met Harper's editor Charles Dudley Warner, who, in 1888, helped her to publish her first two stories, both of which drew on the stereotypes of faithful "darkies" made popular by Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris: "Uncle Mingo's 'Speculatioms'" (The New Princeton Review) and "The Lamentations of Jeremiah Johnson" (Harper's). Their immediate success prompted her to move (eventually with Stirling and Sarah) to New York, where she soon established herself as a fashionable southern hostess and popular author of dialect stories. In 1893 Harper's publication of A Golden Wedding, her first short-story collection, secured her fame. These cheerful creations of plantation life prompted Chopin to praise Stuart's portrayals of the "child-like exuberance" of the "Negro character" as unsurpassed. When Harris similarly asserted that Stuart had "got nearer the heart of the Negro than any of us," he was complimenting the patronizing view of black life that her dialect fiction helped to sustain.

In 1893, Stuart also published her first rural Arkansas fiction, The Woman's Exchange of Simpkinsville. Many of these stories treated sensitively women's efforts to cope with the economic realities of the New South and the changed gender relations that those realities fostered. The outspoken and often unmarried women and intriguing village types even warrant comparison with Jewett or Freeman. At the same time, Stuart's comic intentions and consistently happy endings typically deflect probing analysis. Stuart's major Simpkinsville publishing triumph was Sonny (1896), seven dialect monologues, infused with humor, by an aged, uneducated family man and farmer, Deuteronomy Jones, who recounts his son's (hence, "Sonny") life, in what some critics now view as Stuart's most powerful text. Based on an actual incident and serialized in 1896, The Unlived Life of Little Mary Ellen (1910) recalls Chopin's "La Belle Zoraide" as Mary Ellen, a jilted Simpkinsville bride, becomes inseparably attached to a "toy-baby" whom she believes to be her child. During the community's mock funeral service for the broken doll, Mary Ellen herself dies. Mary Ellen's madness dislocates the community that struggles to understand its own realities. In "Queen O' Sheba's Triumph," published three years later (1899), Stuart again uses the device of a mock funeral and an unexpected death. The story traces the determined departure of a feisty black woman from the plantation to New York City. When friends announce a visit, Sheba arranges her own funeral to avoid the humiliating acknowledgement of her failure to achieve the success she has claimed in her letters home. The collapse of Sheba's admirable initiative and ambition ultimately serves as a warning to both women and blacks of the real threats to the freedom and new options offered by post-reconstruction society. While the story illustrates the culture's patronizing attitude toward blacks and an ambivalence toward female autonomy, it also suggests Stuart's ability to surpass stock expectations. For example, in writing about a remarkably diverse range of ethnic types, including Italians, French, Irish and Germans, Stuart rarely reflects contemporary anti-immigrant sentiment. Though a Mafiosi story like "Carlotta's Intended" does imply violence and misogyny, Stuart more often focuses on the quaint customs and amusing speech of these different urban communities.

By the turn of the century, Stuart was among the best-loved and most-admired American authors. Due to Sarah's managing the New York household, Stuart participated on extended, lucrative reading tours. Known for her charm and southern cooking, she was a sought-after hostess and a prominent member of several prestigious New York cultural clubs. However, she was ever conscious of finances and, in 1904, was suffering from "near nervous prostration" (Taylor 95)). The accidental death of her son in 1905 led to severe depression. Eventually recovering, she returned to writing and to New Orleans for a visit in 1907. Delighted by the adulation showered on her, she met the founder of an exclusive New Orleans literary club (that still exists) named in her honor. Eight years later, she visited again on the occasion of her and Grace King's being awarded honorary degrees from Tulane University, which currently houses her papers. Two years later on May 6, 1917, Stuart died in White Plains, New York. Her body was placed beside her son in a New Orleans cemetery.

Many of her greatly admired twenty-two novellas, collections of poetry, and short stories remained in print long after her death in 1917. Stuart's fiction often represents the most typical version of the mythologies of the South that dominated magazine fiction in the last two decades of the century. Her heavy use of dialect has tended to limit her modern appeal; however, she was, like Mark Twain and Harris, a careful and accurate recorder of regional accents as well as a skillful creator of characters. Drawing on her experiences of plantation life in both rural Louisiana and Arkansas, she offered audiences knowing portraits of black experience, affirming childish amiability, sloth, wisdom, and absolute loyalty to whites. While most modern readers spurn such stereotyping, the pathos and mild humor that characterizes virtually all of Stuart's fiction was admired by her contemporaries, who also sought reassurance that blacks remained willingly and appropriately submissive to the benign authority of southern whites.

Primary Sources
A Golden Wedding and Other Tales, 1893; The Woman's Exchange of Simpkinsville, 1893; Carlotta's Intended and Other Tales, 1894; Sonny: A Christmas Guest, 1896; In Simpkinsville: Character Tales, 1897; Holly and Pizen and Other Stories, 1899; The Second Wooing of Salina Sue and Other Stories, 1905; The Unlived Life of Little Mary Ellen, 1910; Simpkinsville and Vicinity: Arkansas Stories of Ruth McEnery Stuart, 1983, ed. and intro. Ethel C. Simpson.

Secondary Sources
Dorothy H.Brown, "Ruth McEnery Stuart: A Reassessment." Xavier Review 7:2 (1987); Ethel C.Simpson, "Ruth McEnery Stuart: The Innocent Grotesque," Louisiana Literature 4.1 (1987); Helen Taylor, Gender, Race, and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin, 1989; Joan Wylie Hall, "Ruth McEnery Stuart (1849-1917)," Legacy 10:1 (1993); Judy Sneller, "'Old Maids' and Wily 'Widders': The Humor of Ruth McEnery Stuart" in New Directions in American Humor, 1998, ed. David E. Sloane.

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