Rourke, Constance (1885–1941)

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Rourke, Constance (1885–1941)

Author and scholar of American folklore and culture who sought to recover and revalue American traditions. Pronunciation: Roark. Born Constance Mayfield Rourke on November 14, 1885, in Cleveland, Ohio; died on March 23, 1941, after a fall, in Grand Rapids, Michigan; daughter of Henry Rourke (a designer of hardware specialties) and Elizabeth Constance (Davis) Rourke (a schoolteacher and proponent of the kindergarten movement); Vassar College, B.A., 1907; attended Sorbonne, 1908–09; never married; no children.

After death of father, moved with mother to Grand Rapids, Michigan (c. 1887); graduated from high school (1902); graduated from Vassar College (1907); traveled in Europe (1908–10); served as English instructor at Vassar (1910–15); published first article, "The Rationale of Punctuation" (1915); began writing assignments for various journals (1918); was introduced to Van Wyck Brooks (1920); published first book, Trumpets of Jubilee (1927).

Selected writings:

Trumpets of Jubilee (New York, 1927); Troupers of the Gold Coast, or The Rise of Lotta Crabtree (New York, 1928); American Humor: A Study of National Character (New York, 1931); Davy Crockett (New York, 1934); Audubon (New York, 1936); Charles Sheeler: Artist in the American Tradition (New York, 1938); The Roots of American Culture (edited and with a preface by Van Wyck Brooks, New York, 1942). Numerous articles in The Dial, The New Republic, The Freeman, The Saturday Review of Literature, and other journals.

According to Constance Rourke's biographer Samuel Bellman, at the time of her 1902 graduation from high school in Grand Rapids, Michigan, classmates predicted that she would attend the elite women's college, Vassar, captivate young gentlemen, and marry "a well-known man from Harvard." Rourke did, in fact, attend Vassar, following an extra year of study in Grand Rapids with a high-school English teacher, but after college she returned to the home of her mother, where they remained in a close and interdependent relationship until the time of her death. Nevertheless, Rourke maintained an acute independence of intellect that was to lead to a number of outstanding contributions to American culture.

Constance Mayfield Rourke was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on November 14, 1885, the daughter of Henry Rourke, an Irish immigrant who designed lighting and door fixtures, and Elizabeth Davis Rourke , who took the name Constance upon reaching adulthood, and was a teacher interested in the progressive educational theories of the day. The couple had met in the early 1880s in St. Louis and traveled around the East and Midwest after they married.

Within a year of Constance's birth, Henry Rourke contracted tuberculosis and went to a sanitarium in Colorado to recuperate. The mountain air did not correct his condition, and he died in 1887 or 1888. His widow and daughter moved to Grand Rapids, in search of a livelihood.

At first, Mrs. Rourke supported her daughter by giving private art lessons to children. Within a few years, she began to teach in the local public schools and worked to establish kindergartens, which were a relatively new innovation at the time. In 1892, she became a school principal, a post she held at various schools until the mid-1920s. Colleagues generally remembered her as authoritarian and temperamental; some even termed her a tyrant.

Throughout their lives together, Constance and her mother nevertheless enjoyed a very close relationship, although other relationships may have suffered as a result. Rourke grew up a loner, with no intimate friends and little involvement in social activities with her peers. Joan Shelley Rubin writes that "as a high school student Rourke was reportedly an aloof, bookish, unfashionably dressed girl."

During her four years at Vassar in Poughkeepsie, New York, Rourke found the separation from her mother somewhat difficult, but she did well as a student. She studied English and became involved in a few activities: drama, debate, and, briefly, the college's settlement association. According to Rubin, her courses in English reenforced many of the progressive educational beliefs her mother had espoused. Her professors taught that literature should be democratic, accessible to and useful for everyone in a society. Literature and cultural forms, in fact, should be drawn upon to strengthen and improve social life. The idea that culture could be a means of productive change in society was to undergird Rourke's future work.

Just as had happened in high school, she made few close friends during her college years, but her abilities as a student garnered her respect. Upon graduation from Vassar in 1907, she was awarded the William Borden Fund, which provided her with $1,500 for travel and study in Europe. Rourke returned to Grand Rapids, where she taught for a year, before setting out with her mother for Europe.

It is what the past has to say to the precarious, strange, and tragic present that is significant.
—Constance Rourke

Following her plan to survey European educational methods and literary criticism, Rourke studied at the British Museum and the Sorbonne, and traveled to Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. By the end of the journey in 1910, she had made up her mind that she wanted to write instead of teach. Nevertheless, she was in need of an income, and she returned to Poughkeepsie that year as a private tutor. Soon she was offered a position at Vassar as an instructor of English, which she accepted, and again, the separation from her mother proved emotionally painful. She planned to return to Grand Rapids, but actually stayed at Vassar until January 1916.

Rourke stopped teaching in 1915, possibly because of her health. Her biographers note variously that she feared the tuberculosis which had killed her father, and that she either suffered from a mild nervous breakdown or heart problems during that year. Her health continued to be a bother until the mid-1920s, when the root of her discomfort was discovered to be a prolapsis of the stomach, and the problem was remedied. In 1916, Rourke was back in Michigan with her mother, but facing financial difficulties. In 1917, she was forced once again to go back to the profession she had hoped to leave.

Now, however, she began to balance her teaching schedule with the writing she had long hoped to do. Her first published article, "The Rationale of Punctuation," had appeared in the Educational Review in 1915. Three years later, in 1918, she wrote her first book review for the New Republic, then published her first full article (on vaudeville theater) in the same magazine the following year.

In Grand Rapids, Rourke had a number of suitors and rejected several marriage proposals. She became engaged at one point but broke it off, perhaps because she feared a loss of freedom to pursue her own concerns. Her article on vaudeville had marked a transition in her interests, from education to literature and culture, and in 1920 Rourke began to travel to New York City, where she cultivated connections with editors, writers, and critics in search of writing assignments she could fulfill back in Grand Rapids. As Rubin points out, it was this periodic travel away from her mother which allowed her to stay in Grand Rapids with adequate employment and income.

In 1920, Rourke had the good fortune to be introduced to one of the leading figures in New York's circle of critics—Van Wyck Brooks, editor of the Freeman. Brooks employed her to write reviews for his journal, but, more important, he ultimately provided her with a new focus and purpose. In his own work, Brooks had offered a series of observations about American culture with which Rourke found that she vehemently disagreed, and it was in opposing his conclusions that she found new subject matter.

Writing in the early years of the 20th century, Brooks and others proposed that America lacked a worthy cultural tradition, particularly compared to that of European countries. According to Brooks, American culture was shallow because Americans were too concerned with their material existences in a capitalist society. Such concerns and such a society bred a lack of imagination and a lack of community and shared beliefs. Like other culture critics of the time, Brooks denied that there was a tradition of cultural and artistic achievement to which contemporary Americans could feel connected. Many critics also doubted the presence in America of any folk traditions out of which grander forms might develop. The picture they painted was of a nation utterly barren of culture. Beginning in the 1920s, the rediscovery of the lost and undervalued cultural life of America became Rourke's mission.

Rourke and Brooks remained on good terms, stimulated by each other's conclusions, and Brooks actually suggested the topic that became Rourke's first book, a group study of five prominent 19th-century individuals: Lyman Beecher and his son Henry Ward Beecher (both Protestant ministers); Lyman's daughter Harriet Beecher Stowe , author of Uncle Tom's Cabin; newspaper editor and politician Horace Greeley; and circus founder and entrepreneur P.T. Barnum. During the mid-1920s, while turning out numerous well-received reviews, Rourke wrote her group biography, which was published in 1927 under the title Trumpets of Jubilee. The book was a study of individuals which sought to uncover more than mere biographical data; Rourke herself claimed that biographies were of interest to her only insofar as they served to illustrate widespread cultural trends. In the words of Kenneth Lynn, a student of Rourke's work, "her aim was to define the American character by evoking and interpreting the popular or folk taste of a bygone era, in this case by studying the lives of five Americans of the mid-19th century who had an enormous popular appeal." For the serialization of the work in Woman's Home Companion, a popular magazine, Rourke received $10,000.

In her second book, Troupers of the Gold Coast, or The Rise of Lotta Crabtree, published in 1928, Rourke followed a similar approach, focusing this time on the life of a now-forgotten entertainer, Lotta Crabtree (1847–1924), and theater in San Francisco during the late-19th century.

During the '20s and '30s, Rourke was frequently away from Grand Rapids. While she continued to dislike the separation from her mother, she was welcomed into Eastern literary circles, where she met such well-known authors as Thornton Wilder, William Carlos Williams, and Malcolm Cowley. She also traveled to small towns around the country, spending a great deal of time on research and conducting interviews for her books, which she enjoyed enormously. In Twentieth Century Authors, she wrote about her research techniques:

[M]y work has also included to a large extent what may be called "living research," that is, talking with old timers roundabout the country, particularly in small towns, listening to their autobiographies—plenty of them have the gift!—looking at provincial art, which has its special fascinations, listening to old music. If my work had meant only research in libraries, I don't believe I could have stayed with it, for as far as I can discover I am not a bookish person.

In 1931, Constance Rourke published American Humor: A Study of the National Character, considered her finest work and the one for which she is most remembered. Describing the comic images of Yankees, loggers, strolling players,

miners, explorers, religious leaders, and boaters which surfaced and resurfaced in American humor and literature, she uncovered the mythic figures which had populated the literary and comic imagination of the nation, and frequently related their stories to the literature of more recognized American authors such as Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe. Underneath comedy, Rourke also found deep feeling, and proposed that American humor has had as its unconscious object the goal of uniting a disparate people. In her closing chapter, she claimed: "If the American character is split and many-sided at least a large and shadowy outline has been drawn by the many ventures in comedy. A consistent native tradition has been formed, spreading over the country."

By attempting to provide evidence of the creative tradition in America which Van Wyck Brooks denied, Rourke hoped to give to creative writers a sense of continuity upon which they could build. The critic, she argued, by tracing and illuminating historical and cultural patterns, was tendering a necessary and important service to the nation's artists by offering them a tradition and a past.

During the 1930s, Rourke published three more books. The first was a biography written for children about Davy Crockett, a logical subject for Rourke because of the significant role Crockett played in the folk traditions and myths of the 19th century. Movie rights to the book were sold, although the film was never produced. In 1936, she produced a biography of naturalist and artist John James Audubon, and in 1938 she finished her sixth and final book, on artist Charles Sheeler, entitled Charles Sheeler: Artist in the American Tradition, pursuing her favorite themes.

During the 1930s, while she continued to write articles and reviews for a variety of journals, Rourke broadened the scope of her work as one of the organizers of the National Folk Festival in St. Louis, and in 1934, she became one of the editors of the Index of American Design, which was part of the Federal Art Project set up by the U.S. government under the New Deal.

Always concerned about the relationship of cultural forms to the broader society, Rourke became increasingly worried about the threat posed to democratic life by the flowering of fascism in Europe during the 1930s. She became publicly active in antifascist campaigns, making speeches on the need to oppose Germany, first recommending economic sanctions and later supporting military ones. In her piece written for Twentieth Century Authors around 1940, she stated her view of the importance of studying American history, which she saw as buried and in need of uncovering, "because we are now pressed to understand and fully use all the forces of democracy."

In 1941, arriving home after attending a meeting of the Grand Rapids chapter of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, Rourke slipped on her front porch and injured her back. Her mother was asleep, and Constance did not disturb her, finally managing to get in the house and up to bed. She was hospitalized the next day with a cracked vertebrae and seemed to be recovering well when she collapsed and died from an embolism resulting from her fall. Her mother survived her by only a few years. One last work of Rourke's was published posthumously, salvaged from the manuscript and notes already produced for her next project. The book, entitled The Roots of American Culture, was edited and introduced by Van Wyck Brooks who by then had come to agree with Rourke's assessment of American culture. In his preface, Brooks wrote: "Constance Rourke had assembled proofs of a rich creative life in our past, and she had found indications in it of distinctive native American elements."

sources:

Bellman, Samuel I. Constance M. Rourke. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1981.

Kunitz, Stanley J., and Howard Haycraft, eds. Twentieth Century Authors. NY: H.W. Wilson, 1942.

Lynn, Kenneth. "Rourke, Constance Mayfield," in Notable American Women, 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary. Vol. 3. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.

Rourke, Constance. American Humor: A Study of the National Character. NY: Harcourt, Brace, 1931.

——. The Roots of American Culture. Edited by Van Wyck Brooks. NY: Harcourt, Brace, 1942.

Rubin, Joan Shelley. Constance Rourke and American Culture. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.