Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes

Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes is as good a place as any to begin considering the specifics of Southwestern Humor. In fact, Longstreet's narrators provide one of the clearest examples of the dilemma of what I have started calling the "intimate outsider" (doubtless there's a better term, but I don't know it). Though born in the South, both Baldwin and Hall are separated from those they observe by their education in the North, by their manners, language, and knowledge of the world. Baldwin is the more game of the two, attempting to participate in the country life of those around him. He shoots (badly), dances (worse), and rides (humiliatingly), all with a cheerful spirit that earns him the grudging respect of the locals. Hall is another story; effete, withdrawn, sentimental, Hall lacks Baldwin's zest for life and local color, and, as a result, has even more trouble fitting in. However, neither narrator can be said to truly fit in to Georgia life. Longstreet seems to favor Baldwin's approach (perhaps their shared name is a clue?)

The short and essentially unconnected stories that make up Georgia Scenes appeared separately in the Southern Recorder and the States Rights' Sentinel between 1833 and 1835, when they were collected and published in book form. When taken together as a unit it is easy to recognize Longstreet's chief accomplishment, his startling grasp of realism. Longstreet paints southern life in all its gruesome glory, but unlike some authors he also celebrates its beauty and the power of human goodness. The disgust the modern reader almost certainly experiences while reading about the "gander pull" (a fairly horrible competition in which riders on horseback attempt to pull the greased head off a living goose) is tempered by Longstreet's celebration of the genuine feminine virtues of country girls. Dark and light mingle here in tales Edgar Allan Poe praised for their "verisimilitude."