Aichinger 1

S. R. Aichinger

English 8146: American Realism & Naturalism

Dr. Johanningsmeier

21 February 2010

The Sissies of ―Roaring Camp‖

When Bret Harte published ―The Luck of Roaring Camp‖ in 1868 (Nagel 8), social

expectations of the public and private behaviors of men and women dictated responsibilities in

nearly every aspect of one’s life. In 1869, sisters Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe

assembled The American Woman’s Home, an exhaustive text outlining the specific implications

of gender roles. Written in such a way as to ―empower‖ the nineteenth-century woman and her

duties, the text addresses everything from birth to death, sickness and the maintenance of health,

and all the frivolous details in between. According to Beecher and Stowe, women’s

responsibilities lay in ―the care and nursing of the body in the critical periods of infancy and

sickness‖ (14), as well as in the duties of household aesthetics, which held ―a place of great

significance among the influences which [made] home happy and attractive, which [gave] it a

constant and wholesome power over the young, and contribute[d] much to the education of the

entire household in refinement, intellectual development, and moral sensibility‖ (84).

Contrarily, men were not trusted with such tasks; Beecher explained that ―in building his

house, [a man] takes a plan to an architect.‖ It is worth noting that Beecher did not assign the

duty of assembling a home – the comfortable, genial environment with which one lives – but

rather of constructing a house – the physical, dispassionate structure in which one lives. The

responsibility of men lay in ―the out-door labor—to till the earth, dig the mines, toil in the

foundries, traverse the ocean, transport merchandise, labor in manufactories, [and] construct
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houses, […] which, most of the day, exclude[d] him from the comforts of a home‖ (Beecher 19).

The conundrum, then, arises when one assesses the aesthetic and domestic evolution of

the community in Harte’s ―Roaring Camp.‖ In the tale, a ―Christ-like Tommy Luck converts

several picturesque miners to a facsimile of Victorian civilization‖ (Morrow 128). The ―Christ-

like Tommy Luck‖ is the illegitimate child of ―Cherokee Sal,‖ an American Indian prostitute,

and just about anyone else in town. The ―picturesque miners‖ are men who have, for unexplained

reasons, banded together in an ―outsider‖ camp – a community of gamblers who continue poker

games in the midst of gunfire, scamps, and roughs (Harte 9-10). The labor of Cherokee Sal

results in the mother’s death because she ―lacked her sex’s intuitive tenderness and care‖ (9);

that is, because there were no women in the room to provide the necessary care and nursing.

Thus, the newly-born, unnamed child is left vulnerable to a wilderness and band of hapless

outlaws, but instead of suffering the same fate of his mother, ―The Luck‖ thrives.

In ―The Luck of Roaring Camp,‖ Bret Harte uses the birth of a child to challenge the

commonly accepted markers of the feminine/masculine binaries and suggests an alternative

model of male behavior. More specifically, the ―sissification‖ of his characters redefined the

roles of men as described by Beecher and Stowe and realigned the relationships between adult

men and their environments, their homes, and those under their care.

The astounding shift from rough scamp to ―mother‖ occurs immediately upon the birth of

Tommy Luck. In the tradition of gentlemen, while Stumpy, the man with the most familial

experience, tends to the matter of childbirth, the rest of the men wait outside the delivery room,

but rather than cigars, they hold revolvers (Harte 10-11). They reconsider their initial instinct of

exploding ―a barrel of gunpowder‖ for the sake of the child and ―only a few revolvers were

discharged‖ (11). The sudden, tectonic shift in the nature of these men suggests that the arrival of
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the child spurred an unleashing of femininity that allows them to properly care for and encourage

the growth of an infant.

Harte suggests that these capabilities lay dormant in at least some of the men; one

unnamed fellow ―had a Raphael face, with a profusion of blond hair‖ (Harte 10). Aside from a

description of a beautiful, angelic face, this also refers to Raphael, the archangel who was

responsible for all matters of care and healing. Another man, ―Oakhurst … had the melancholy

air and intellectual abstraction of a Hamlet,‖ and the most confident and brave of all the men

spoke with ―a soft voice and an embarrassed, timid manner‖ (10). These descriptions suggest that

Harte recognized the range of forms masculinity can take and points out that these temperaments

potentially are useful, especially in the absence of the biological feminine.

The transformation of behavior of the denizens of ―Roaring Camp‖ from masculine to

feminine is not just in the nurturing of Tommy Luck, but also in the aesthetic of his environment.

Harte injects his men with a dose of femininity that convinces them that the utility of one’s

surroundings is not sufficient for the rearing of children. Rather, as Beecher and Stowe suggest,

it is the culmination of ―aesthetic elements‖ that ―contributes … to the … refinement, intellectual

development, and moral sensibility‖ of Tommy Luck’s upbringing (84). The preliminary

attempts at beautification are crude and amateur, and ―there [is] a rude attempt to decorate [his

play area] with flowers and sweet-smelling shrubs,‖ and progresses to a time when the men

―bring him a cluster of wild honeysuckles, azaleas, or the painted blossoms of Las Mariposas‖

(Harte 15). One is not required to look hard for evidence that this change in the men’s behavior

was both unusual and abrupt. Harte explicitly writes, ―The men had suddenly awakened to the

fact that there were beauty and significance in these trifles, which they had so long trodden

carelessly beneath their feet‖; the trifles to which Harte refers are ―flake[s] of glittering mica, a
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fragment of variegated quartz, [and] a bright pebble from the bed of the creek‖ (15). The image

Harte presents is of a group of men rooting through muck and slop to recover valuable treasures

of amusement for their beloved ―Injin baby‖ (16).

In Beecher’s and Stowe’s opinions, trinkets of aesthetic décor are not part of the man’s

duty of building a house, but instead, men are more apt to include any number of features ―which

make the house neither prettier nor more comfortable‖ (85). It is Harte’s aim to blur the line

between ―pretty‖ and ―functional,‖ therefore redefining what is useful, valuable, and ultimately

who is responsible for it.

In the time following Tommy Luck’s arrival to Roaring Camp, the effects of his presence

take an outward motion, rippling first from the things immediately around him, and then away

from him until they transform the entire camp. Late in the story, Harte addresses the reaction of

the camp’s expressman, who would share with the outside world that ―They’ve got vines and

flowers round their houses, and they wash themselves twice a day‖ (16). The care of yards and

gardens, however, is contrary to the roles to which Beecher and Stowe agreed. The preparation

of hot-beds and the planting of flowers and potted house-plants fell squarely within the duties of

the female community members (379-381). As for the cleanliness and decency of the campers,

Kentuck began ―to regard all garments as a second cuticle, which, like a snake’s, only sloughed

off through decay‖ and was therefore not permitted to be in the presence of Tommy Luck (Harte

14). In order to undo this unfortunate sentence, Kentuck ―appeared regularly … in a clean shirt,

and face still shining from ablutions‖ (14).

These depictions of the changes occur within and around the men of Roaring Camp

suggest inner conflicts occurring regularly in them: on the one hand, the men are extreme

examples of what Beecher and Stowe call masculine – rough, dirty, and more likely to be
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comfortable outdoors then indoors. They are men who are wild and lawless. They wade through

muddy water to find gold. On the other hand, the arrival of Tommy Luck has awaked a much

less ―masculine‖ desire – that of nurturing the child, creating an atmosphere that is comfortable

and aesthetically agreeable, and, as seen in Kentuck, bettering oneself in order to ―be worthy‖ of

the child’s presence.

In his article, Patrick D. Morrow refers to the men’s behavior as ―fatherly‖ (130), but if

one considers seriously the attitudes toward the gender roles of the time, this idea is far off the

mark. Addressing the duties as assigned by Beecher and Stowe, the actions of the men of

Roaring Camp are nothing less that motherly. This realignment of gender roles suggests Harte’s

intentions with his characters. That is, rather than viewing gender norms as inherent to a person’s

sex, they are learned and reinforced. Further, breaking these gender laws is a punishable offense.

One most clearly sees this in the climactic scene of ―The Luck of Roaring Camp,‖ in which a

flood wipes out the hyper-feminized progress occurring in the camp. Read as an act of social

gender authority, the force not only wipes out the markers of female work, but also that, which

caused the unacceptable change: Tommy Luck.

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Works Cited

Beecher, Catherine E. and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The American Woman’s Home: or, Principles

of Domestic Science; Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical,

Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes. New York: Arno Press, 1971. Print.

Harte, Bret. ―The Luck of Roaring Camp.‖ James Nagel and Tom Quirk, eds. The Portable

American Realism Reader. New York: Penguin Books, 1997: 8-17. Print.

Morrow, Patrick D. ―Bret Harte, Popular Fiction, and the Local Color Movement.‖ Western

American Literature 8.2 (1973): 123-131. Print.

Nagel, James and Tom Quirk, eds. The Portable American Realism Reader. New York: Penguin

Books. 1997. Print.

Nissen, Axel. "The Feminization of Roaring Camp: Bret Harte and The American Woman's

Home." Studies in Short Fiction. 34.3 (1997): 379-388. MLA International Bibliography.

EBSCO. Web. 12 Feb. 2010.