The fate of humor in the career of Thomas Bangs Thorpe

Abstract

Thomas Bangs Thorpe won a lasting place in Southwestern humor with "The Big Bear of Arkansas," a tall tale epitomizing the "rip-roaring" frontiersman's yarn. Thorpe's other sketches have faded into obscurity. This study analyzes the whole of Thorpe's achievement with Southwestern material, accounting as far as possible for the discrepancy between his strongest and his weakest works. Certain of Thorpe's early strengths became also his weaknesses: his longing for gentlemanly respectability; his ambition for success as a writer; his ear for the vernacular, upon which he relied too little. Thorpe's early promise is shown in "Tom Owen the Bee-Hunter," a sketch combining an Irvingesque gentility with a charming freshness of style and hint of frontier flavor. Further promise is shown by Thorpe's use of dialect, wit, and lively narrative in sketches between 1839 and 1841. "The Big Bear," however, far surpassed earlier sketches by virtue of its consistent use of dialect, its pace, its metaphysical theme, and its fully delineated frontiersman, Jim Doggett. After "The Big Bear," Thorpe never again gave his frontiersman center stage. Thorpe's "Letters from the Far West" contributed a new hybrid--a combination satiric epistle/tall tale/sporting adventure which, while uneven, is the most humorously sustained work Thorpe completed after "The Big Bear." In his 1854 novel The Master's House, which suffers from thematic obscurity and a weak protagonist, Thorpe includes passages of humor reminiscent of his best, but he fails to realize the potential of using humor surrounding his villains to best advantage. Thorpe's 1876 autobiographical sketch reinforces certain qualities evident earlier: his narrative power, his fine ear for the vernacular, his pride in being associated with Tom Owen, and his lack of discrimination about his own work. Thorpe's strength of capturing the vernacular with fidelity of surface detail became also his limitation. When he had exhausted his limited store of direct vernacular rendering, he had little imaginative or analytical power upon which to rely. Nevertheless, by means of his genius for the vernacular in "The Big Bear," Thorpe helped build a distinctively "American" vein of humor.