Motherhood Quote by Joseph C. Lincoln

Lincoln is doing two things at once: staking a claim to regional authenticity while quietly arranging his cast along a hierarchy of “types” his readers are meant to recognize on sight. “True to type” is the tell. It’s a novelist’s shortcut that doubles as a cultural argument: Cape women, in his telling, come pre-loaded with moral and emotional virtues - “big hearted, motherly,” tied to the sea like a birthright. The ocean isn’t just scenery; it’s a credential, a way to make character feel inevitable, as if geography manufactures goodness.

Then he draws a hard line: everyone else is “city types one sees in everyday life,” a phrase that sounds democratic but functions like a downgrade. City people are legible because they’re generic; Cape women are legible because they’re idealized. The subtext is pastoral: the Cape as a reservoir of steadiness and care, the city as a churn of familiar social masks.

The exception clause about “the Portuguese” is the most revealing cultural artifact here. Lincoln signals them as both present and peripheral - “occasionally mention,” “Cape dwellers,” but not absorbed into the warm “true to type” portrait. It’s a faint, telling boundary of belonging: ethnicity noted as category, not interiority granted as character.

Context matters: early 20th-century regional fiction thrived on this kind of shorthand, selling readers a consumable local flavor. Lincoln isn’t merely describing who he writes; he’s advertising the comforts his stories promise - virtue with a salt-air alibi, and “everyday life” kept safely at arm’s length.