Paul Laurence Dunbar's performances and the epistolary dialect poem.

When the Western Association of Writers convened in Paul Laurence Dunbars hometown of Dayton, Ohio, in 1892, he read a welcome address in verse, which included the following lines:

 
   So, proud are you who claim the West 
   As home land; doubly are you blest 
   To live where liberty and health 
   Go hand and hand with brains and wealth. (11.9-12) 

Throughout the poem, Dunbar uses the second person in greeting the Midwesterners in the audience, leaving room to question whether he would include himself among them as a "Western" writer, but the poem ends with his offering his own "welcome warm as Western wine, / And free as Western hearts" (11.23-24). In fact, Dunbar saw his dialect work as belonging, at least in part, to a Midwestern American literary tradition. Moreover, a conspicuously Midwestern tradition of African American art and literature was beginning to develop in the last years of the nineteenth century. (1) Many of the African American poets writing around the turn of the century, including James Edwin Campbell, James David Corrothers, and sibling poets Aaron Belford Thompson, Priscilla Jane Thompson, and Clara Ann Thompson, lived in the Midwest for most or all of their lives. Several of them looked to James Whitcomb Riley, one of the most famous Midwesterners of the era, as a profound influence upon their work. (2)

After receiving an encouraging letter from Riley following the Western Association of Writers reading, Dunbar and his reputation would come to be associated with the then-established Riley for decades to come. In 1898, enthusiastic rumors were circulating that the two were collaborating on a comic opera. The fantasy pairing made sense: Dunbar and Riley were among the best-selling poets of the 1890s, and their dialect verse shares a nostalgic sentimentality as well as a distinctly Midwestern sensibility. (3) Dunbar's false southernness now seems to us one of the most glaringly inauthentic elements of his poetry, part of a general inauthenticity that readers now find jarring.

Dunbar's inauthenticity can be understood as the consequence of two strategies. The first is his attempt early on to model himself after Riley not only in style, dialect, and theme, but also in performances--performances that, in Dunbar's case, were produced and reinterpreted in the imagined tension between regionalist and African American literature. The second is his attempt to view dialect's perceived orality through the lens of literacy in a way that Riley did not. The centrality of Dunbar's "We Wear the Mask" to his oeuvre has prompted many readers of Dunbar to call upon the mask metaphor in describing his poetics, but the mask may not be the most fitting way to describe Dunbar's experiments with written language. Dunbar's often subtle orthographic experimentation, the means by which he manipulates readers into enacting contradictions and impossibilities, works to refute the possibility of authentic expression in any poetic mode.

In his attempts to view orality through literacy, Dunbar introduces literate modes of communication such as letter writing into what is ordinarily treated as a doubly oral genre--doubly because both dialect and poetry. The epistolary dialect poem written…