LOOKING UP Certainly Sherwood Bonner was not the first or the only white southern woman to travel to the northern part of the United States and write about what she saw. In the summer of 1860, South Carolinian Grace B. Elmore visited New York City and recounted the trip tiffany jewelry for sale her diary once she returned home. Details of the landscape or city life, descriptions of what she did or saw while away from home, are noticeably absent from her account; however, they are replaced by the fiery language of impending secession.
Never have we had our rights, and never will the North be content until the South submits to be governed Prom Dresses 2012 its puritanical, self-righteous, meddlesome self. My God! It seems to me they could better employ their time in cleansing themselves from the social sins that fill their cities and factories, than in casting their envious eyes upon our fair and happy South.
Elmore threatens Tiffany Blue box bracelet that the South is on the brink of rising up “as one man and seced[ing] from the already detested Union.” She concludes her entry for October 18, 1860, with this balance of disdain and foreboding: “Well, goodbye to what we saw in Yankeeland, for how long I wonder?”
Writing some fourteen years later and on the other side of a civil war that had turned Elmore’s hot rhetoric to little more than bombast, Sherwood Bonner took a different tone. She did not, however, deliver an essentially different message. She finds the Northeast to exhibit essentially Heart lock charm pendant same characteristics Elmore observed — it is “puritanical, self-righteous, meddlesome” — but Bonner outfits her critique in the clothes of humor and indirection, tactics that allow her, in fact, to reach more sweeping conclusions extending to an examination of American identity itself.
Yet in her first letter from Boston, dated March 15, 1874, Bonner emphasizes nothing so much as the fact that she is a Southerner and thus insistent upon a regional distinctiveness Two Hearts pendant her perception that should be unmistakable for her Memphis readers; she may have left the South, but she continues to see with its eyes.
