Some of American history’s most prominent pieces of literature revolve around what Dr. Marcia Noe calls the “innocent Midwest.”
Bestselling authors like Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser portray the American Midwest as what Noe, a professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, describes as “full of nice, honest, wholesome people.”
Her newest book, titled “The Innocent Midwest: Culture, Region, and Identity, 1793-1930,” however, dissects a history of the region that is much darker.
Noe, who grew up in Rock Island, Illinois, began the book nearly 30 years ago as a member of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature.
“I was always intrigued with this idea of the innocent Midwest and particularly the paradox of the innocent Midwest,” Noe said. “I became interested in how this idea was translated and how often it appeared in Midwestern literature, plays, stories and poems.”
In the book, Noe traces how that image took hold and why it has been so hard to undo.
Rather than moving chronologically, “The Innocent Midwest” is organized around themes that show how the region’s image was shaped and reshaped over time.
Noe examines early frontier novels, stories about Midwesterners traveling abroad, and works that celebrate ideals such as neighborliness, faith and education. In many of these texts, those values are treated as proof of the Midwest’s morality. In others, they begin to crack.
“In a lot of the literature, those values are presented as universal goods,” Noe said. “But they don’t always work the way people expect them to.”
The book also examines who was left out of the innocent Midwest narrative—those who often appear at the margins of stories that claim to represent the region as a whole.
“The Midwest isn’t innocent, far from it,” Noe said. “Indian removals, lynchings, serial killings, bloody battles, race massacres, gangland mayhem, labor violence and corporate malfeasance could fill the rest of the pages.”
Noe’s intention was not to retell those histories in full, but to tell readers how the myth of innocence survived alongside them.
“I’d like readers to know that we’re influenced quite a bit by the culture surrounding us,” she said. “Movies, TV shows, books, newspaper articles, all kinds of cultural entities have shaped our idea of a region and really changed the way people understand it.
“The power of culture to shape our ideas and our values, I think is an important takeaway.”
Noe said the epilogue, which runs just over a page, was the most difficult part of the entire writing process.
“My bad writer’s block and procrastination strategies that I thought had banished forever had all come back,” she said with a laugh.
Upon realizing she left out an important piece of literature, she knew how it would conclude.
“I started thinking, anyone who reads this book is going to wonder why I didn’t discuss ‘The Great Gatsby,’” she said. “It’s not only the Midwestern book, but the American book.”
The epilogue takes the form of an imagined dialogue between Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby.
“And in that epilogue,” Noe explained, “Nick says, ‘We can’t repeat the past, but maybe we can find a new perspective so that we can see the Midwest the way those Dutch sailors saw America—as a place of promise, growth, new beginnings. Because how we see something shapes the stories we tell about it and then those stories shape our lives.’”
“The Innocent Midwest: Culture, Region, and Identity, 1793-1930” is available for purchase here.
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