Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism 9780822398905

Citation preview

Utopia etJ Cosmopolis

New Americanists A series edited by Donald E. Pease

Utopia eiJ Cosmopolis Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism

•

Thomas Peyser

Duke University Press Durham eiJ London I99B

© I998 Duke University Press

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper@ Typeset in Trump Mediaeval by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Contents

Preface vii Introduction: Realism and Utopia, Nation and Globe

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Part One. Dreams of Unity I.

The World a Department Store 29 2.

The Imperial Ghetto 63

Part Two. Forms of Multiplicity 3. The Culture of Conversation 4. The Imperial Museum

Notes 169 Index 191

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Preface

In his 1905 book World Organization, the American social reformer Raymond L. Bridgman noted, "Time and space are not nearly as much against the organic unity of the world now as they were against the organic unity of the United States a hundred years ago," arguing that a world government would be "directly in line with the marked tendency of our age toward the consolidation of small enterprises and organizations into large ones."l The prevalence of such rhetoric at the turn of the century is what first prompted me to examine the literary responses to what many thought was the imminent consolidation of the globe. Such a study seemed worthwhile not simply because it might show that literature of the period was "grounded" in the historical contingencies of its moment, but because in the face of so radical an alteration of the fundamental categories by which human experience is organized ("time and space"), a space itself opens for the kind of reimagining of society and of human nature that must almost of necessity be literary in quality: if there were to be a final organization of the world, there would be a need not only for pragmatic ingenuity in constitutional engineering, but also for a poetic re-vision of the ground of human being and human association, a ground that previously involved the givenness of national identity. Although Bridgman usually warmed to the more mundane

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tasks of global unification, in his chapter on lithe mind of the world" he himself notes the need for another kind of mental labor: "When we talk about the world getting together in order to promote the peace of the nations or for the regulation of transportation or for better sanitation of ports and ships, it all seems businesslike and practical. But joint action by the nations of the world would not be possible unless there were an identity in the world corresponding to the identity of anyone people but greater.... National self-consciousness has been attained but world selfconsciousness has not. will it ever be attained?"2 Before the work of sanitizing ports and regulating railroads on a supernational scale can proceed, there needs to be a motive, a frame of mind, a vision that will make such projects seem worthwhile or even thinkable. Bridgman calls this entity, as yet unthought, "world self-consciousness" or lithe mind of the world." The emergence of this mind is the necessary precondition of world organization. In the following chapters, we will see how Bridgman's question"Will it ever be attained?"-was answered in turn-of-the-century American fiction. When I began to plan this study, at first I thought to restrict myself to the remarkable outpouring of utopian writings of the period, as they seemed the natural place to look for a renovated conception of human solidarity. The further along I got, however, the more I realized that my initial conception was too narrow, because the pressure, so to speak, of global consolidation expressed itself in other kinds of writing as well. In particular, I became convinced that the work of Henry James, the most penetrating explorer of international themes in the fiction of the period, bore importantly on my topic. Rather than attempt a survey of utopian thought, therefore, I have brought together discussions of the careers of the three authors whose utopias are widely known todayBellamy, Gilman, and Howells-with a consideration of James's most ambitious novel of international amalgamation, The Golden Bowl. Although I make no claim to have mounted an exhaustive study of this theme in the literature of the period, I have, I hope, opened up the topic for further consideration.

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Even when considering the utopias, moreover, I have tended not to concentrate on the mechanical contrivances-sanitation and transportation-by which they achieve the perfect ordering of society. In part this is because such authoritative works as Arthur Lipow's Authoritarian Socialism have already covered this ground so thoroughly, at least so far as Bellamy is concerned. My aim, however, is to suggest something of the novelty and even strangeness of the very basis of Bellamy's and others' imaginary institutions, namely, their attempts to grasp the world as a whole .. The need for such a focus may become clearer if we consider for a moment how the story of Bellamy's Julian West, who is miraculously translated from the strife-ridden Boston of 1887 to the utopian world of 2000, is rewritten by a much more recent author of world consciousness: Thomas Pynchon. Like West, Pynchon's Lyle Bland is a wealthy Bostonian whose living room becomes a kind of time machine in which he "imagines that he has been journeying underneath history." As a result of such travel through "Earth's mind," this tremendously successful financier, who has done more than his share of the "grim rationalizing of the World," discovers that at the end of this process an entirely new world comes to light: "Earth is a living critter, after all these years of thinking about a big dumb rock."3 As we shall see, Bellamy is also inclined to the ecstatic (even if his ecstasy is brought on by something like the rationalizing of the world Bland rejects), but the main point here is that the process of global consolidation, carried out by traditional organizations (nations, corporations) for traditional reasons (dynastic aggrandizement, profit), ends up producing an amalgamation with which the old organizational concepts cannot grapple. There is, to put it a bit differently, something of a Peter Principle at work here: Every organization will expand to the point at which the concept behind it no longer makes sense. The success with which the organization expands the scope of its command leads finally to the abortive integration of the unassimilable, which then assumes a problematic place half in and half out of the organization, calling its very foundations into question; the unas-

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similable element, which stubbornly refuses to fit in with the smoothly functioning system, or even defies comprehension by falling outside the classificatory system that the organization fosters, reveals the merely artificial or ad hoc status of rules that, before encountering such an obstacle, appeared fully consonant with the conditions of the world. Although tinkering with the parameters of the organization might solve the problem, it is also possible that the entire structure will collapse like a house of cards-as it does for Lyle Bland-and that the result of the encounter with the limits of the organization will result not in finetuning, but in what Thomas Kuhn refers to as a paradigm shift, a fundamental change in the rules according to which mind organizes the data confronting it in, or rather as, the world. The particular paradigm shift we shall consider here is one that in recent decades has come fully to light: the shift by which the nation is replaced with the globe as the fundamental unit of human association. Although it is certainly true that this shift has percolated through to American popular culture only rather recently, manifesting itself, for example, in bumper stickers adjuring us to "think globally," global thinking permeated the literature of the realist period to an extent that has not been appreciated, and for the most part not even noticed. But if the writers we will consider here did not usually announce such thinking with spectacular assertions about the world's status as a full-fledged "critter," they at least paved the way for such a conception by thinking of it as, in Bridgman's phrase, an "organic unity." In this book, then, I am trying to broaden the context within which the writers I discuss are usually placed, building on, rather than discarding, many of the important recent examinations of the period. Studies as various as Alan Trachtenberg'S The Incorporation of America, Walter Benn Michaels's The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, Amy Kaplan's The Social Construction of American Realism, and Miles Orvell's The Real Thing have all situated turn-of-the-century literature within a national context, namely, the consolidation of a market economy presided over by corporate capitalism. The works on which I concentrate, however, all have an intercontinental character that calls for the

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supplementary perspective I attempt to provide. Whereas much of the criticism of the past decade and a half has with good reason focused on the ways America was beginning to resemble a vast corporation-this is the primary implication of Trachtenberg's alluring title-I hope to bring into the foreground the way turn-ofthe-century authors understood the process by which that metaphorical corporation was itself being incorporated into something even broader in scope, something simultaneously more majestic and more potentially threatening, crisply summed up in what the sociologist Roland Robertson has called lithe crystallization of the globe as a single place."4 J. C. Levenson, my dissertation director, gave me invaluably detailed suggestions as I worked out the core of my argument. Paul Cantor read portions of the manuscript and led me to rethink the matter of cosmopolitanism. Philip Kuberski and Allen Mandelbaum read the entirety of a late draft, offering encouragement and suggestions for the final revision. Others who offered advice after reading portions of this book include Stephen Arata, Jillian Beifuss, Julie Grossman, Harold Kolb, Eric Lott, and Mark Parker. I am indebted to my anonymous readers at Duke University Press, to Reynolds Smith and Miriam Angress, who shepherded the manuscript through its initial stages there, and to Judith Hoover, who copyedited it. I am very grateful for a dissertation fellowship from the University of Virginia, a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, and a Bradley Foundation Fellowship, all of which allowed me the time to develop my thinking and get it on paper. Two chapters of this book were previously published in different forms. Chapter 4 is an expanded version of "James, Race, and the Imperial Museum," which appeared in American Literary History 6 (1994): 48-70, and is here reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press. Chapter 2 is a much altered version of "Reproducing Utopia: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Herland," which appeared in Studies in American Fiction 22 (1994): 1-16. I am grateful to the editors for their interest in my work and for their permission to reprint.

Introduction: Realism and Utopia, Nation and Globe

"Society" is, of course, a kind of fiction.

These words have the ring of the contemporary. They reject natural grounds for human association and imply that social order is radically and willfully arbitrary, based on what can be variously described as a noble lie or mystification. To write these words is to alienate oneself from an unselfconscious participation in an organic community. It is to stand outside the ring of myths that, according to Nietzsche, defines the horizons of a healthy civilization. In short, this sentence could apparently come from the pen of many contemporary intellectuals, among whom the laying bare of the fictiveness of social arrangements and of the mechanisms by which a culture reproduces itself is almost assumed to be part of an enterprise undertaken to liberate that culture from its repressive ideology. It is all the more striking, therefore, that the author of this sentence was the influential sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross, writing in his important work advocating "social control" in 1901.1 Ross's "survey of the foundations of order" (the subtitle of his study) is important because it shows that arguments now firmly associated with the rejection of such control-or "discipline," as it is now, following Foucault, more often called-were once used to advance its implementation. 2 For Ross's emphasis on

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the fictive nature of social arrangements functions as a central justification for his plans to establish a program of control from above. As long as society is not arranged according to precepts laid down by nature, it ought at least to conform to the dictates of reason and of experts-like, Ross thinks, himself-who have gone about the task of studying society scientifically. Announcing the fictive basis of group identity, Ross proposes rules of order that can, in principle, be laid down anywhere. Although different local circumstances might cause the sociologist to apply his or her precepts in different ways, Ross establishes a framework that can be used to penetrate the nature of any society. The social text may vary widely from place to place, but the fact that, for Ross, it is a fiction, a text, allows him to suppose that every society on the globe functions in accordance with a code that may be mastered through a universally applicable procedure of decipherment. Ross's insistence on the fictive foundations of order allows him to take in the different cultures of the earth as one might a group of different literary forms. Just as the grouping designated by the term "literary" authorizes the professional expert on literature to pronounce on a wide variety of texts that may have nothing in common but their supposed "literariness," the uniformly textual nature of social order allows for the creation of a science that can arrange a staggeringly varied array of materials under one heading, "the social," and warrants the emergence of an authority, the sociologist, who takes this category as his or her area of expertise. Even one of the greatest of those earlyauthorities, Georg Simmel, worried about the vast number of "specific problems" that came before the sociologist's eyes: "They might be too different from one another in content, orientation, and method of solution to be treated as if they amounted to a homogeneous field of inquiry."3 In spite of such anxieties, sociologists like Ross who set themselves up in the second half of the nineteenth century had managed to constitute all the civilizations of the globe as a unified object of scientific analysis. Ross may seem a strange starting point for a study of Edward Bellamy, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Dean Howells, and

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Henry James; indeed, this literary quartet may seem implausible to begin with. His example suggests, however, two ideas that are crucial to the authors to whom I devote the bulk of this book. First, and most obviously, the idea that society was in some fundamental way a construction (like a building/ rather than a natural formation (like a leaf/lay behind the progressive impulse plainly visible in Bellamy, Gilman, and Howells. Progressives, that is, typically imagine society as a human fabrication that, like a novel, can be revised and improved. It seems unlikely that people in the City Beautiful movement or on the board of the Interstate Commerce Commission thought they were tampering with nature, or that the vast areas of human activity to which they turned their attention were not in fact amenable to consciously directed, centralized organization. One indication of the pervasiveness of the progressive ethos is its effect on even Henry James, a novelist not usually associated with visions of the destiny of humankind. Responding in 1870 to a letter from his father on "the amelioration of society," James writes of his "great satisfaction" in turning "to any profession of interest in the fate of collective humanity." He claims to be particularly scandalized, like Edward Bellamy and E. A. Ross after him, by the sheer mess and disorder of the modern world, "the absurdly clumsy and transitory organization of the actual social body."4 Here James's social critique is hardly distinguishable from his critique of many nineteenth-century novels, which he famously denigrated as "loose, baggy monsters." Indeed, one reason progressivism was the kind of political movement that could spontaneously generate a literary arm may well have been that it encouraged the belief that revising a society and constructing a novel in some ways resemble one another. Ross points to another fact, one that has not received sufficient attention in the study of turn-of-the-century American fiction and culture: the emergence of a global perspective. There was, of course, nothing particularly new about the fact that the various regions of the world were knit together through a patchwork of cultural and economic interchange, political domination and alliance. Ross's desire to grasp the world whole, however, accords

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with the unprecedentedly global expansion of Western technological, economic, and imperial systems. As America and the European powers became more and more inextricably linked to remote corners of the earth, the very concept of a distinct national identity became problematic. In the United States, of course, the appearance of new kinds and numbers of immigrants provoked sometimes heated debate about national identity and alleged threats to its integrity, long before the nation itself attempted, belatedly and decidedly not in a fit of absentmindedness, to acquire a modest empire of its own. The recurrent, virulent outbreaks of xenophobia that accompanied, and even at times went hand in hand with, America's progressive movement give clear voice to the anxiety brought on by global consolidation and by the idea of the global society-whatever that could mean-that might emerge in its wake. To many, including a bewildered and fascinated Henry James, the globalized future was on display in Manhattan's Lower East Side, presenting a spectacular and perhaps hopeless challenge to many notions of an American or indeed any national identity. If society is a kind of fiction, what kind of fiction could accommodate a society drawn from, or even extending over, all of explored space? This book argues that, in various ways, Bellamy, Gilman, Howells, and James all attempt to grapple with such a question. Of these four, only James is widely thought of as an important explorer of an "international theme," but there are connections between his cosmopolitan concerns and the global context evident in the utopian and realist writings of the others. As is well known, James shuttles his characters from America to Europe with great regularity, but his attempt to map the cosmopolis composed of such globetrotters is related to Bellamy's insistence that his utopian system be spread over all the earth, Gilman's decision to settle her utopia of parthenogenic European women in the heart of South America, and Howells's relocation of discontented Americans to the shores of the antipodal Altruria. All four authors are reaching forward to an understanding of what it might mean to be a citizen of the world, what the consequences might be of taking

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that stock phrase literally. For Ross it means adopting a stance equally alienated from all cultures, establishing an outpost in an Archimedean space carved out by scientific method. Such attempts at complete objectivity and detachment are appropriately labeled utopian, because they seem to posit a nonexistent space outside all prevailing cultures from which to observe those cultures. The attempt to achieve a similarly global perspective prompted many literary figures, too, to embrace utopia explicitly and self-consciously. Although James chose to work almost exclusively in an often experimental form of realism, his anatomy of cosmopolitan culture shows that he, no less than his utopian contemporaries, was trying to trace the emerging outline of the global future. Indeed, the lines of filiation between utopian and realist fictions will recur many times in this book, particularly when the realists turn their attention to the cosmopolitan city. Often the occasion for fiery metaphors-it is a II cauldron, II a II crucible"-the cosmopolis unites the forces of modernity that seemed to point the way to the future. In many works of the period, utopia and cosmopolis both promise the advent of a universality standing at the end of history; both announce the culmination of the modern will to simultaneous expansion and integration, even as they show that the absorption of ever more heterogeneous populations threatens traditional ideas about cultural integrity. Keeping in mind both the aspirations and anxieties that attended globalization at the turn of the century, we shall see that the utopias of Bellamy, Howells, and Gilman-which attempt to transcend the real-are more grounded in existing realities than their authors perhaps thought, and that realism, usually understood as an effort to capture what already exists, is at least potentially as oriented toward the future as is utopia. This is not to say, however, that James's cosmopolitanism is a species of utopianism, or that the utopias are all founded upon a cosmopolitan mingling of the races. Rather, the four authors are united by their responsiveness to the interlocking network of discourses-imperial, literary, sociological, technological-that ac-

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companied the consolidation of the globe and the expansion of Western political and economic systems. Again, this does not mean that James, Bellamy, Howells, and Gilman all made common cause with each other or even with the ever more pervasively universalizing culture in which they found their own lives and writing embedded. There is, in fact, what might be called a division of labor among the four. Whereas James felt inspired to trace the effect of cosmopolitanism on the consciousnesses of exceptional individuals, Bellamy focused on the way relentlessly, globally expansive technological systems might alter the destiny of the collective. (As we shall see, however, James knew full well that cosmopolitanism was accompanied by particular forms of economic and political activity, just as Bellamy knew that vast, centralized organizations called forth a particular kind of consciousness.) Whereas Howells struggled to find the appropriate sphere for intellectual activity in a cosmopolitan world where all values seemed merely local prejudices, Gilman devoted her tremendous energies to a-in this regard, at least-reactionary defense against the encroachments of the global on the local. As we consider all four authors in the context of history and of each other, a discourse of globalization emerges that often startlingly anticipates debates many assume began only recently. At first glance, of course, the writings of this period might seem precisely the wrong place to look for signs of an emerging concept of globality. The reasons for such an assumption are not far to seek. The half century following the Civil War has with justice been seen as the era in which America's national identity seemed to consolidate itself as never before, thanks in part to conscious efforts to reforge a cultural and political union from the sectional shards of the mid-century calamities, and in part to the effects of railroads, telegraphy, and the rise of massive trusts and syndicates operating across great swaths of the continent. Common sense suggests that such consolidations are the necessary precondition of the larger amalgams suggested by the idea of globalization. Globalization seems to build on the earlier development of nationalization, amalgamating nations just as nations had earlier

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gathered to themselves politically, culturally, and even linguistically distinct regions. How then can the idea of globality be of much importance when the work of nation-building is still underway? How can the idea of the nation be overcome before it has been put firmly in place? The force of such questions might lead one to expect that if global and national consolidation were proceeding side by side, assuming that is possible, then they would have been the occasion of noisy conflict, because those desiring, in Whitman's phrase, to "condense a nationality" would have found themselves at odds with those pointing to wider filiations and vaster sympathies. Although such debates between nationalists and internationalists broke out around the turn of the century -as they have intermittently since the colonial period-one task of this introduction will be to show how imbricated the discourses of nationalism and globalization are. In fact, one of the principal findings of recent globalization theory has been the mutually constitutive aspect of nation and globe. The other paired terms whose complex interrelations recur throughout this study are utopia and realism. Like nationalism and cosmopolitanism, realism and utopia seem remarkable for their apparent incompatibility, and literary criticism has, perhaps unintentionally, tended to reinforce this commonsense view. Except when examination of both modes in tandem has been almost forced on critics, as, for example, in some treatments of Howells's career, realism and utopia have tended to be treated as though they belonged to entirely distinct discursive universes. Much more attention has been devoted to the affiliations of realism and naturalism-often pictured as realism's pushy younger brotherthan to the links between the former and the utopian mode that enjoyed such a vogue when the ferment of realism commanded the attention of the literary avant-garde. There are many reasons for our reluctance to yoke realism and utopia to the same literary-historical cart. To read utopias as historical documents (to read them, that is, in the way realist novels often invite themselves to be read) is necessarily to read against the grain, for utopias-at least those not intended ironically-

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explicitly present themselves as emanations from the realm of absolute truth, not as mere products of their age. The authors of utopias in fact frequently intend to alienate their readers from their society, and thereby to hasten its destruction and bring on the establishment of a new order as the final solution to the riddles of history. Utopia asks to be taken not as the statement of a particular human being at a particular historical moment, but as a message from the future or from afar that has somehow penetrated the ideological interference of the here and now with its pristine clarity intact. A timely utterance that masquerades as the voice of eternal nature, utopia appears, so far as its discursive strategies go, not as the opposite but as the mirror image of the ideology it seeks to supplant. 5 The problem with utopia is often not, therefore, that it represents an impossible noplace, but that, all unconsciously, it represents a place we already know very well. Masking from itself, and from its readers, its ground in the dominant culture, utopia seeks to place the widest possible distance between its own procedures and those associated with the realist novel, which prides itself precisely on being deeply suffused by the ethos of the times. The historical biases of many late-nineteenth-century utopians are most evident in their desire to place a grid over reality, to rationalize existence, and this desire points to their enthusiasm for the move toward conscious organization that characterized the United States after the Civil War. Faced with the increasing breadth and intricacy of organizational networks-epitomized by the staggeringly extensive web of railroads that laced the continent-many Americans opted for an outright retreat from modernity, embracing the supposed humanity of the Middle Ages or the purifying asceticism of physical culture. 6 Utopians like Bellamy, however, saw the economic and social disruptions of the Gilded Age as the birth pangs of a better time. The solution lay not in a disavowal of modernity, but in its radicalization; the problem was not that life was increasingly coming under the control of "experts" and "systems/, but that there still remained areas beyond the experts' reach. Many utopians were therefore delighted by the

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growing prestige of the engineer and by the general emphasis on systematization and management that that prestige implied. As Martha Banta has recently asserted, in this period, for many at least, "system and life were revealed to be nearly one and the same."7 Thinkers like Bellamy, although in a sense"oppositional" figures pledged to put existing conditions to the sword, were fully in accord with a, if not the, dominant trend in American capitalism and government. It is worth remembering that in 1887, the year Bellamy wrote Looking Backward, the Interstate Commerce Act became law, creating "the prototype of the modern commissions of experts" that have played such a decisive role in the formulation of subsequent government policy. 8 Although the plan to regulate the profits of railroads proved almost unenforceable, it nevertheless set the stage for a century of legislation. Utopians laid their projects before the public with the earnest conviction that they were the agents of historical necessity, just as did the authors of the Interstate Commerce Commission's first annual report, who depicted the "act to regulate commerce" as "a duty which, though long delayed, had at length ... become imperative."9 Utopia, engineering, regulation, sociological approaches to control-all are united by the belief that "no result of the action of many ... can show order or serve a useful purpose unless it is the result of deliberate design."10 If utopians are united with other prophets of social control in their desire to point out the historical contingencies that have trapped human beings in an irrational system, they are also linked to literary realists, for realism, too, is a version of historicism, a literary mode devised to reveal the sources of behavior in historical circumstance. Its program is to demystify the controlling beliefs of a culture, to show that what seems a natural state of affairs is in fact the product of contingency and convention. An anonymous critic writing in the American Fabian in 1898 praised Howells for just this reason, singling out the novels Annie Kilburn, A Hazard of New Fortunes, and The World of Chance, "wherein the alleged 'laws of business' are considered to be merely accidental.1/ 1i Realist novels thus typically set out to unmask prejudice. It

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is no accident that the novel frequently hailed at the time as the forerunner of realism, Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, was written to combat the passionate, culturally ingrained sectionalism of the Civil War era; the thrust of realism is to dispel the air of naturalness adhering to objectionable conventions and ideals by subjecting them to close and allegedly unbiased scrutiny. Whatever their obvious differences, both realism and utopia are thus joined in their effort to historicize the present. This conjunction in part explains how Howells, the single figure most closely identified with realism as a literary movement, could without any apparent sense of self-contradiction become the author of two important utopian novels. Realism and utopia both therefore might be grouped under the sign of critique, insofar as both aim to displace social arrangements by revealing their self-contradictions and genealogy. Consequently, both modes are also essentially oriented toward the future, as their attacks on the existent are-usually, in any casemotivated by a desire for change rather than by a purposeless, deconstructive glee. Their passion for destruction, we might say, is also a progressive passion. With their insistent demand that society be made or understood anew, realism and utopia are exemplary not only of the American mania for improvement, but also of the broadest characteristics of modernity, which Gianni Vattimo succinctly describes as "the era of overcoming and of the new which rapidly grows old and is immediately replaced by something still newer."12 If we consider Howellsian realism in the light of modernity, however, we uncover a crucial source of the anxiety, uncertainty, and ceaseless self-interrogation that run through it. Modernity in the nineteenth century had been, as it were, underwritten and intensified by a widely and staunchly held conviction that history was a uniform story of improvement. Toward the end of "the century of progress" such attitudes seemed quaint in many quarters. In 1888, the year Bellamy published the happy forecast that would make his reputation, Howells confided to Henry James that "after fifty years of optimistic content with 'civilization' and its ability to come out all right in the end, I now abhor it, and feel

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that it is coming out all wrong in the end, unless it bases itself anew on a real equality."13 It is important to note that, even at his gloomiest, Howells still tended to fall back on a faith in the possibility that the modern could redeem history. Nevertheless, Howells's grave doubts about the inevitability of progress, his uncertainties about the direction of history, were bound to undercut his assurance that by attacking existing social arrangements he was helping to bring about progressive change. In a sense, the most representative words from Howells's novels are those with which he has a character conclude A Modern Instance: "Ah, I don't know! I don't know!" For Howells, a modern instance himself, it is often the paradoxical case that the more one delves into the intricacies of the real, the less one knows for sure. In part, these perplexities suggest why the utopian mode appealed to Howells, as it offered at least the theoretical potential for knowledge. As Paul Ricoeur suggests, the nowhere of utopia seems to lift us above our vexing entanglements and "puts the cultural system at a distance; we see our cultural system from the outside precisely thanks to this nowhere."14 In our own time, dominated by what Ricoeur himself has labeled "the hermeneutics of suspicion," the idea that one can attain such critical distance, and the objective view of things it seems to promise, has been roundly dismissed by many as a dangerous illusion. Foucault, for example, has said, "I think to imagine another system is to extend our participation in the present system."IS Adorno suggests much the same thing in Minima Moralia, in which he explictly disavows the idea that some utopian "beyond" allows us the imaginative freedom to reconstruct society: liThe existing cannot be overstepped except by means of a universal derived from the existing order itself," and thus any utopian vision is bound to be infected by its unacknowledged affiliations with the culture it pretends to overthrow. 16 Even if we dismiss the utopian claim of critical distance, we can see that the promise of such distance would have been particularly enticing to a writer like Howells, whose fundamental assumptions about the very shape of history had evaporated. It would be too simplistic, then, to suppose that realism and

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utopia can be neatly sequestered from each other, that they can be viewed as starkly distinct alternatives between which one has the power freely to choose. For realism to level any critique at society at all, it has to emerge from a perspective that lays some claim to the kind of distance Ricoeur and others encourage us to understand as utopian. On the other hand, utopia is quite "realistic" in its recognition of the "institutionally immanent possibilities" for change ensured by what Anthony Giddens has called the" counterfactual character of modernity," the relentlessness with which the modem constantly goes beyond itself, negating what exists in favor of the new. The insistence of modernity on the new "constantly opens out to the future," and because utopia gives emphatic voice to this very real aspect of the modem, "a rigid division between 'realistic' and utopian thought is uncalled for."l7 The same can be concluded about the overly rigid divisions critics often draw between literary utopias and literary realism. Without utopian distance, the realist critique of society founders on its inextricability from society; without realist attention to fact, utopia floats away into the realm of mere escapist fantasy. As Ernst Bloch, the Marxist philosopher of utopia, has suggested, "To stick to things, to sail over them, both are wrong." By ignoring that we live in "an unfinished world," the writer who obstinately sticks to the facts "never advances from the establishment of what is factual to the exploration of what is essentially happening." An authentic realism must therefore acknowledge that the present is "archrealistically" pervaded by the future always about to emerge from what exists.lS One concrete intersection between utopia and realism, one fact with which they both tried to come to grips, was the consolidation of the globe, whether this manifested itself in the increasingly cosmopolitan character of urban life or in far-flung economic and political organizations. It seems likely that because technology, trade, and imperial politics were working together to make the world dramatically smaller, cosmopolitanism seemed bound up with the future, making it a compelling subject for practitioners of both modes. Such thinking, in any case, is behind such

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utopian visions as William Gilpin's The Cosmopolitan Railway, Compacting and Fusing Together All the World's Continents. Gilpin, who had been the first governor of Colorado, was in a natural position to appreciate the way territories could be grafted onto one another. According to Gilpin, a railroad bridge over the Bering Strait, connecting the Old World to the New, would advance the world toward a benevolent end to history: "In the consummation of the grand scheme of a Cosmopolitan Railway will be forged another link in the great chain of progress which is slowly, but surely, uniting in one race, one language, and one brotherhood all the peoples of the earth."19 Although the formation of one monolithic world culture was not the kind of cosmopolitanism at which all utopians aimed, Gilpin's prophecy illustrates how utopia and cosmopolitanism could be linked together as potential forms of the ultimate world order. Cosmopolitanism like Gilpin's is all the more extraordinary because it tended to go against the robust tradition of American exceptionalism that has flourished since the seventeenth century. To be sure, the writings of figures like John Winthrop, Jonathan Edwards, and Ralph Waldo Emerson are deeply suffused with a sense of America's missionary destiny, of the new nation's emancipatory message to the rest of the world. Such writings remind us that exceptionalism is not the same as isolationism, even if the two have frequently coincided in the American tradition. Nevertheless, in a pattern established by Winthrop aboard the Arabella, those who looked forward to a time when the American vision would spread around the globe typically supposed that before that could happen America had to get its own house in order, whether that meant the successful establishment of a city upon a hill or the perfect enshrinement of self-reliance in the American heart. Gilpin, by contrast, sees a merger with the rest of the world as the precondition of America's own salvation, and by so doing he signals an important shift in terms of the exceptionalist tradition. Although many Americans had previously tended to view themselves as already beyond the vicissitudes of history that characterized what they saw as the decadence of Europe and des-

14

UTOPIA AND COSMOPOLIS

potism of Asia, the convulsions of the Civil War, and the great economic concentrations of power for which the war in part set the stage, had made these views seem naive. In his famous declaration that the war "marks an era in the history of the national consciousness," Henry James pointed out that "fratricidal carnage ... had no place" in the "scheme" adhered to by the "simpler generation" of Hawthorne. The world, he went on to say, was now "a more complicated place than it had hitherto seemed, the future more treacherous, success more difficult."20 The end of the war inaugurated what Dorothy Ross describes as a "crisis of American exceptionalism," a crisis stimulating the organization of social sciences that could explain why history had been impossible to get rid Of.21 If such utopians as Gilpin now turned outward to the rest of the world, in part it was because the radical difference of America was coming to be seen as a lost illusion. It is no coincidence that Gilpin's enthusiasm for technology accompanied his embrace of cosmopolitanism, for both attitudes are responses to the decline of old-style exceptionalism. For a historian like Frederick Jackson Turner, the end of a pastoral America threatened to bring an end to its uniquely democratic institutions. As David W. Noble has shown, Turner saw industrialization and its attendant concentration of power in economic centers in the East as grave and probably fatal threats to democracy.22 Gilpin, though agreeing that technology would ultimately erase the distinction between America and the rest of the world, saw in the machine the potential for a democracy more authentic than that based on the Jeffersonian yeoman. Indeed, he points to the manner in which both utopians and younger historians like Charles Beard would incorporate the disruptions of the postwar era into a "secular theology," continuing the tradition of American historiography epitomized by George Bancroft. 23 Thus Beard, writing in 1909, suggested that industrialism, "unlike the freehold frontier of the American West, could sustain virtuous rational democratic politics in every corner of the world": "It may be that steam and electricity are to achieve that unity of mankind which rests on the expansion of a common consciousness of rights and

INTRODUCTION

15

wrongs through the extension of identical modes of economic activity."24 For Beard and the utopians, technology allowed the older ideal of American exceptionalism to be reconstituted as a dream of universal democratic expansion. The sometimes fanciful technology frequently on display in utopias is therefore not merely, or even principally, a sign of their estrangement from reality, even though the gadgets that alleviate human misery might seem like some of the most escapist, or antirealistic, features of utopias like Bellamy's. Indeed, the way technology often functions in such texts powerfully suggests why the distinctions between realistic and utopian thought are not so absolute as they might at first seem, for technology has in common with utopia a tendency toward universalization and standardization; technology, as Beard argues, tends to produce" common consciousness" and "identical" economies. The expansiveness of Gilpin's and Bellamy's visions, particularly when it comes to the spread of technology, bears witness to what Anthony Giddens calls the "disembedding" of modern social systems, the fact that they can be restructured "across indefinite spans of time-space." Unlike earlier social theorists, such as Turner, who saw an organic relation between the nature of the locale and the nature of its regime, utopians imagine societies that can in principle be at home anywhere. The disembeddedness of modern technology, however, was hardly just a matter of utopian or academic speculation. For example, by the third decade of the twentieth century, engineers trained by General Electric, as if acting on orders from Gilpin and Beard, were "scattered over the four quarters of the globe, doing their share in the fascinating work of electrifying China, harnessing waterfalls in India, installing electrical drives in the sugar mills in the West Indies ... building railways in Australia and refrigerating plants in the Philippine Islands."2s The Philippines, of course, received more from the United States than refrigerating plants; they got a government, too. Suspicion that the disembeddedness of modern Western society could facilitate imperialism of the political and cultural varieties seems justified when we consider that,

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after overseeing the construction of the famous-and utopianWhite City at the Columbian Exposition of 1893, Daniel Burnham went on to develop city plans for San Francisco, Cleveland, and Manila. 26 Utopias were therefore just one expression of the "inherently globalising" tendencies of modernity.27 Recalling the words of Ernst Bloch, we might say that although utopians refused simply to stick to the facts of existing technology, they nevertheless explored "what was essentially happening," and in so doing showed how limiting it can be to draw a hard-and-fast line between utopian and realistic strategies of representation. Nation and globe, like realism and utopia, present themselves at first glance as neatly distinct concepts. We have seen, however, that it is not so easy to spot the precise place where realism ends and utopia begins: a mutually constitutive tension obtains between them. The same may be said of nationalism and globalization. On the one hand, the globalizing imperatives of technology and capitalism dealt a blow to the cultivation of sharply distinct national identities. "In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency," Marx and Engels observed, "we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production .... National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible."2s On the other hand, the universalizing forces of globalization stimulated a reactionary assertion-sometimes anxious, sometimes cynical-of national particularism. Nietzsche fully appreciated the ways that globalization simultaneously undermined and exacerbated national allegiances. In Human, All Too Human he concluded that "the possession in common of all higher culture" and developments in transportation and commerce" are necessarily bringing with them a weakening and finally an abolition of nations, at least the European: so that as a consequence of continual crossing a mixed race, that of European man, must come into being out of them." But Nietzsche also noted that freshly energized discourses of national identity were springing up in order, "consciously or unconsciously," to work against the mixing of races "through the production of national hostilities" and of an

INTRODUCTION

I7

"artificial nationalism."29 Nietzsche's analysis allows us to see that the focus on national units-whether in jingoistic propaganda or the emerging social sciences-may be understood as a reaction to supernational realities, rather than as the expression of some purely domestic cultural dynamic. It is probably naive to portray the emergence of American nativism, for example, as simply the expression of a racist or imperialist essence that always lurked in the culture, but that now vented itself in new ways. Looking back on the late nineteenth century, the sociologist Roland Robertson has argued, "To a significant extent the unitary view of the nationally constituted society is an aspect of global culture," and further, that "a central ingredient of the remarkable compression of the world-as-a-whole was ... the idea that the national society was the major unit both for the allegience of individuals and of the global system per se. "30 Indeed, the very idea of modern-in our context, post-Herderian-nationalism is unthinkable without a highly developed sense of internationalism; only when an acute consciousness of different cultures has arisen will one feel impelled to catalogue or cultivate those traits that allegedly distinguish one's own national culture from all the others. The characteristic mingling of nationalism and internationalism is fully evident, for example, in the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, who adapted the discourse of nationalism to his own essentialist views of race when he described the assorted races of the world as "striving, each in its own way, to develop for civilization its particular message, its particular ideal, which shall help guide the world nearer and nearer that perfection of human life for which we alilong."31 Such assertions remind us that although nationalism does not necessarily entail the idea that one nation's culture can flourish only at the expense of others-and this is the idea that largely accounts for the suspicion of nationalism in the wake of the World Wars-it does rely on an international and often global perspective. One of my objects in writing this book is to suggest that the question of American nationalism, which in one shape or another dominates the current literary criticism of the period we are con-

18

UTOPIA AND COSMOPOLIS

sidering, needs to be asked differently. Instead of asking only What is it in American culture that led to the discursive constitution of the nation in such and such a way? we need also to ask How did the pressures of globalization stimulate the formation of American national culture? The critique of nationalism currently underway in academic journals and even in the popular media tends to view national identity as basically an expression of something going on within the frontiers of the nation. But Robertson suggests that to accept this idea is unconsciously to play one's role in the global cultural system, because in part it is lithe remarkable compression of the world-as-a-whole" that leads one to ask questions like What is the essence of American national culture? In other words, much current criticism of turn-of-the-century literature shares with the nationalist discourse it unpacks the idea that American culture can be thought of as something self-contained. As the following chapters amply demonstrate, I share with others in the field the idea that race and empire are key concepts in the literature of the period, but what I want to insist on is that the literature in which those concepts playa part registers the impact of an emerging consciousness of globality, and not simply the flourishing of attitudes that sprang up autochthonously from the American soil. Drawing once more on Robertson, I propose to keep in focus an insight that needs to be put closer to the center of American Studies: lithe idea of nationalism (or particularism) develops only in tandem with internationalism."32 To be sure, the specific ways nationalism and imperialism are enacted depend in large measure on the cultural contingencies (not to mention the geography) of particular nations and empires, but the imperative to construct a national-imperial discourse-which, after all, is a pan-national phenomenon-must be explained, in the modern era at least, with reference to an emerging globality. Thus even Donald Pease's skepticism about globalization theory (which he refers to as lithe discourse of globallocalism") is tempered by an acknowledgment that it complements the anti-imperialist discourse currently enjoying a wider circulation: liThe discourse of global localism should not be ignored, but neither should it dis-

INTRODUCTION

19

place the critique of imperialism. Taken together the two discourses configure an interpretative crossroads whereby each supplies key figures missing from the other."33 The interrelatedness of nationalism and globalism is captured, if somewhat fortuitously, in the name of the political movement that formed around Bellamy's Looking Backward: Nationalism. As we have seen, the utopian impulse often results in an extreme form of inter- or supernationalism, and insofar as it remains true to its globalizing tendencies, Bellamy's utopia robs nationality of its determinative role in the thinking of culture. Bellamyite Nationalism was not particularly nationalistic, if by that we mean fiercely loyal to "Americanness," to the peculiarities of the national character. Nationalism, rather, was expressly designed to accord with the disembedding of modern social systems, to be at home anywhere in the world. There are, however, at least two reasons Nationalism might not have seemed an inappropriate label for the program of Bellamy and his followers. First, the nation was the biggest unit over which the Bellamyites could even dream of gaining some measure of political control. Second, although Bellamy's vision is explicity global, he formulated no new concept of the political, no revolution in the thinking of the state such as that that accompanied the rise of the great national powers in the first place; Bellamy is no Botero. Indeed, concepts of "world government" frequently feed parasitically on the concept of the modern nation-state, offering a vision of the world as, essentially, one big nation with distinct regional cultures-yet another indication of the inextricability of nationalism and globalization. The notion that national identity was yielding its primacy to a new, unprecedentedly intense form of cosmopolitanism was accompanied by a good deal of anxiety about just what a cosmopolitan identity might be. In both utopias and realist novels, we shall see the emergence of a global culture haunted by nostalgia for secure national identities, which is to say for identities that large numbers of people had talked themselves into believing were the ones guaranteed by their birth in a particular nation. Bellamy himself realized the potential for disorientation brought on by his

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abandonment of the nation as a constitutive aspect of the self. The kind of universalizing cosmopolitanism encouraged by such utopias as his brings about the threatening decentering of experience described by Paul Ricoeur in his important essay "Universal Civilization and National Cultures," which at times reads as if it were an analysis of Henry James: "Suddenly it becomes possible that there are just others, that we ourselves are an 'other' among others.... lIlt becomes possible to wander through civilizations as if through vestiges and ruins. The whole of mankind becomes a kind of imaginary museum .... We can easily imagine a time close at hand when any fairly well-to-do person will be able to leave his country in order to taste his own national death in an interminable, aimless voyage."34 Late-nineteenth-century utopias may be seen as an attempt to contain such a cosmopolitan threat to the integrity of any tradition of thought or action whatever. Culture was no longer a home, but rather a menu or a museum in which any number of possible lives or traditions offered themselves for view or adoption. Nietzsche noted with alarm the prevailing" cosmopolitanism in foods, literatures, newspapers, forms, tastes, even landscapes." The result of "this flood of impressions" is a "Profound weakening of spontaneity."3S The potential threats posed by an emerging global culture may be even more fundamental, endangering the very sense of meaningfulness that many derive from adherence to a larger cultural whole. Global culture, that is, may not feel much like what most people think of as a culture at all. If, as Roland Robertson insists, "a central element of societal ideology, culture or identity ... can only be accounted for in direct reference to the form and content of the interactions between one nationally constituted society and another,"36 then a globally conceived culture must be thought in unprecedented ways for at least one simple reason: there is nothing outside it. As I have argued elsewhere: So long as a system of strongly felt cultural differentiation is in play, members of particular cultures can find it relatively easy to believe in the meaning of their culture and the identity with

INTRODUCTION

21

which it endows them, if only by pointing to something beyond their national borders with an implicit "I am not that." Once the belief in such differentiation wanes, once people start thinking of themselves as inhabitants of a vast, unitary system, the problem of what culture stands for, and what the individual life stands for within it, becomes acute. For some, at least, the minute the concept of globality is taken seriously, culture ceases to mean (in the old sense) at all, since it is now not one among a number of paradigmatically related terms whose differences mutually inform one another, but rather part of a totality that is, literally and paradigmatically, spinning in a void. In other words, globalization may result in the radicalizing of a disabling sense of cultural relativity or arbitrariness, rather than ... in a new sense of self-sufficient wholeness, connectedness, and fullness of being. 3 ? The major themes we have considered here are all brought together in Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (1886), a work in which the self-consciously cosmopolitan novelist explores the relation of national to individual identity, simultaneously bringing all the resources of literary realism to bear on the appeal of utopian thinking, an appeal suggested by the astonishing popularity of Looking Backward throughout the 1890S and beyond. James's cast of characters is a virtual catalogue of a new internationalism, and includes exiled French and Germans, errant Italians, a globe-trotting English aristocrat, and, of course, the two principal figures, an Italian princess of American descent and the French-English Hyacinth Robinson. Even peripheral figures like the princess's companion, Madame Grandoni, exemplify the dangers cosmopolitanism poses to individual identity. At one point she informs Hyacinth, "I am not Italian .... In spite of my name, I am an honest, ugly, unfortunate German .... But she isn't German, poor lady, any more."3S Not Italian, not German, not even any longer straightforwardly "I," Madame Grandoni lurching from the first to the third person exemplifies the fate of the self once the ground of national culture evaporates.

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The most spectacular example of cosmopolitanism in the novel is Hyacinth himself, whose mother was French and whose father was probably the English lord whom she murdered. A cosmopolite malgre lui, he realizes that he "didn't really know whether he were French or English, or which of the two he should prefer to be" (127). Asking himself whether he would rather be English or French, forced consciously to choose aspects of the self traditionally thought to be fundamental, and thus the ground of all criteria for choice, Hyacinth sums up in himself the pitfalls and the opportunities of the cosmopolis: freedom from rigidly conceived national identity yields to nauseating vacillation. The prophetic nature of Hyacinth's predicament may be gauged by the extent to which descriptions of globalization in the present call his problems to mind. Jean-Marie Guehenno, for example, has recently described the quandaries faced by those, like ourselves, who "have no convenient formula for defining the scope of our solidarities .... The abstract freedom of the social contract was rooted in a history that, fortunately, limited our choices. Midway between the determinism of the community and the free will of the citizen, the nation offered a convenient compromise."39 Madame Grandoni may be magnificent when she asserts in the face of her decline, "Yet I am noble" (305), but Hyacinth strikes the keynote of the modern when, responding to a question about his nationality, he says, "Oh, I daresay I ain't anything" (127). This inner vacuum marks one of the key motives for Hyacinth's conversion to a revolutionary politics, a politics that promises to assure him, in spite of his cosmopolitan confusion, of the scope of his solidarities-not to the nation, but to the globally dispersed "workers of the world." Again and again in the novel, individuals having no solid grounding in traditional national cultures resort to self-conscious, often theatrical bids for a new source of authenticity. The princess offers important clues as to the character of such quests, particularly in the course of a scathing assessment of her would-be paramour, Captain Sholto: "Sholto's great idea of himself (after his profession of being her slave), was that he was a cosmopolite-

INTRODUCTION

23

exempt from every prejudice" (352). The result of this desire to be everything, to abstain from the judgments that go along with a wholehearted-or, put negatively, naive-participation in any culture, is that he "was nothing whatever in himself." According to the princess, all that is left to Sholto is an empty posturing: "whatever feeling poor Sholto might have, four-fifths of it were purely theatrical. He was not in the least a natural human being, but had a hundred affectations and attitudes" (353). The logic of this analysis suggests that "natural human beings" depend on national cultures. A supreme cosmopolite herself, the princess rages against Sholto in part because they are so much alike. Late in the novel she complains to Mr. Vetch, "You think me affected, of course, and my behavior a fearful pose; but I am only trying to be natural" (466). Of course, once being natural becomes an effort it loses its meaning. When naturalness is just another option on a behavioral menu, the category itself seems to disappear. The impersonation of naturalness signals the withdrawal, accelerated by cosmopolitan decenteredness, of a shared immediacy of experience. The relentless theatricality on display in The Princess Casamassima points to a world in which individuals typically define themselves, make themselves visible, only by disappearing into some collective script. This tendency explains to a large measure the tremendous popularity of collectivist utopias. As the sense of sharing in an organic community faded, a new importance attached to participation in what James sees as fraudulent or at best merely misguided schemes contrived to offer a sense of belonging to a coherent social whole. What is so tantalizing about the cosmopolis is its suggestion that not just a but the ultimate whole at last beckons humanity at the end of history, even if it presents itself as only incipiently present, awaiting consolidation. Faced with such an ultimate synthesis, not only of nationalities but also of classes, Hyacinth attempts to grasp the whole aesthetically, as perhaps the only way such a conglomeration of multifarious parts can be grasped. His is an aestheticized politics that foreshadows a similar tendency in many of the totalitarian visions of the twentieth century as well

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as the habit of utopians to see the earth as a vast mosaic, the ultimate pattern of which for the first time is about to become apparent. Thus Hyacinth experiences the "joy ... of surrendering one's self to the wave of revolt, of floating in the tremendous tide .... That vision could deepen to a kind of ecstasYi make it indifferent whether one's ultimate fate, in such a heaving sea, were not almost certainly to be submerged in bottomless depths or dashed to pieces on resisting cliffs" (478). A very similar expression of joy in the face of annihilation can be found in The New Cosmopolis (1915), in which the music critic and novelist James Huneker portrays the Lower East Side of Manhattan as both a maker and destroyer of worlds. In spite of prose that seems to register some shock at the variety of racial combinations he finds there, Huneker embraces the unprecedented types he discovers as the pledge of a powerful future. "I assure you," he reports, "that I saw white girls with Chinese slitted eyes, little Irish girls with the Hebraic nose curve, negro boys with straight hair and blue eyes. A vast cauldron-every race bubbles and boils and fuses on the East side."40 Indeed, the uncontrolled fecundity evident to Huneker in "the matrix of New York" (68) goes far beyond the fears of unmanaged reproduction felt by advocates of eugenics. For Huneker, however, these remarkable children are not signs of "race suicide," a catchphrase among eugenicists of the day, but of regeneration, violent and disjunctive as it might be: "[T]he lantern-jawed Yankee type ... is on his last legs, fighting, though he hardly realizes it, against the mastery of the Slav and the Italian. But who cares? We are as yet too young a nation, still in too inchoate a state, to worry about the infusion of more foreign blood. If it is healthy, it is welcome. From the giant amalgam, something powerful must emerge even if a sense of continuity is still lacking" (54). The risks of disorder are precisely what make Huneker rejoice that his own New York is "the New Cosmopolis, the most versatile city on our globe" (148). If the cosmopolis does not quite provide a utopian solution to the chaos of modernity, it nevertheless points the way to a higher, more allinclusive basis for what could become a truly global civilization.

INTRODUCTION

25

The writers to whom I devote the chapters that follow would probably have shied away from the scene Huneker so enthusiastically describes-as Kenneth Warren has recently remarked, "the telos of racial amalgamation was never widely embraced" in the realist period41 -but all the authors I consider have in common with Huneker at least one crucial belief: it was no longer possible to define American civilization, or indeed nationality itself, without reference to the rest of the globe. In addition to complicating our notions about the relation of utopia to realism, the texts I examine in this study should help to highlight the inextricability of nationalism and internationalism, in part because the utopian alternatives and cosmopolitan realities they depict sharply question the viability, in a global world system, of national identity as the source of human solidarity. At times, in fact, the issues raised by these texts seem strikingly contemporary. Writing of our own time and place, the sociologist Arjun Appadurai has suggested that America is a privileged site of globalization, arguing that a meditation on the "postnational" "moves us ... to America, a postnational space marked by its whiteness but marked too by its uneasy engagement with diasporic peoples, mobile technologies, and queer nationalities." 42 As texts like Huneker's and the others we will consider demonstrate, this is a kind of globalized space that has been opening up for at least a century. By looking at some of those who first attempted to map it out, we can perhaps gain a new perspective on the (often surprisingly similar) concerns that occupy us today. In the first part of this study, "Dreams of Unity," I discuss Bellamy's and Gilman's attempts to preserve something resembling a traditionally cohesive social order, Bellamy by extending the consumer culture of the United States over the entire surface of the earth, Gilman by attempting to forestall the incursion of the global upon the local, imagining a kind of ghetto in which northern Europeans stoically endure the ascendancy of darker races. In part 2, "Forms of Multiplicity," I turn to Howells and James, who in their different ways have given up on the idea of a traditionally unified culture, acknowledging that social order can never again

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have the appearance of being grounded in nature. Howells deals with the disruptions of cosmopolitan skepticism by trying to inaugurate a culture of conversation, a culture that contains competing views of an uncertain world by putting them into endless dialogue. Seeking a stronger synthesis, James imagines the world as an imperial museum consisting of curators and exhibits, serving as a necessary stage in the evolution of an order whose ultimate fusions are for the present impossible to predict. Throughout the book, then, I attempt to reveal at least some of the ways American writers at the turn of the century struggled to grasp the world as a whole and to imagine what identity in a world thus understood might be like. Amid current talk of a "new world order," it is perhaps difficult to imagine a time when a struggle was necessary to arrive at such a conception; every grade-schooler today seems to know, almost to the exclusion of everything else, that we are the world. These facts only show how much we are the heirs to the kind of imagining whose history I trace here.

I

The World a Department Store

The entire discourse on consumption aims to transform the consumer into the Universal Being, the general, ideal, and final incarnation of the human species.-lean Baudrillard 1 We are bodies of one another. -Edward Bellamy 2

This chapter shares its title with a utopian novel published in 1900 by Bradford Peck, president of the largest department store in New England and a visionary deeply influenced by Edward Bellamy.3 The work of this disciple usefully underlines an aspect of Bellamy's thought that has previously received little emphasis: its inherently globalizing tendencies. Usually, attempts to place Bellamy in his historical context have focused on his many affinities with other progressives engaged in domestic politics. Peck, however, was clearly inspired by the largely submerged international theme in Looking Backward and its far less widely read sequel, Equality. Unlike many other American progressives, whose efforts often amounted to an attempt to regulate the resident aliens, so to speak, whose presence was the major sign of America's seemingly problematic openness to the rest of the world, Bellamy called for an expansive embrace of the globe, an embrace that, though not exactly imperial, presaged the emergence of a more or less unified world culture. When many others saw labor unrest and the ethnic array as a call to arms in the cause of conservative retrenchment, Bellamy sensed the birth pangs of a new and com-

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prehensive reordering of the world. Indeed, this was the aspect of Bellamy's thought that must have been hardest to swallow for many Nationalists and sometime Nationalists such as, as we shall see in the next chapter, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This is not to say, however, that Bellamy advocated the kind of toleration of "difference" that would satisfy those who typically use that word as a rallying cry today. When in a notebook entry Bellamy enthusiastically looked forward to a time when there will "no longer be either Jew or Greek, Irishman, German, Swede or Frenchman, but Americans only," he was thinking more of a way of dissolving all kinds of irreducible particularities in an abstract medium-" America"-that reduced all difference to a level of comparative irrelevance. 4 Bellamy uses the term "American" in the same way he uses monumental classical architecture in utopia: not as a positive value implying a set of articulated virtues -Bellamy dwells no more on the superiority of traditional, threatened American values than he does on Greek arete-but rather as a capacious (because empty) topos, a solvent that transforms real, potentially disruptive difference into harmless idiosyncrasy. This is how Bellamy differs from someone like Peck, who has talked himself into believing that the department store is valuable because it embodies the social reforms advocated by Christ, even if the latter lacked a vocabulary to articulate this surprising conclusion himself. 5 For Bellamy, however, what is most essential is not that the department store world provides a comfortable life for all-human comfort, as we shall see, does not harmonize with the crucial mystical strains of Bellamy's thought -but that it teaches its citizens the lesson that many people learn today when confronted with a bewildering variety of goods and values: the arrangement of human life is arbitrary and, ultimately, not of much consequence. This may seem an odd conclusion to draw from the work of a man who, after all, probably hastened his own death by exhausting himself while stumping for alterations in social arrangements. Bellamy's relation to other, more practical reformers, however, has been for the most part misconstrued. Jarred by the results of New England's industrialization, and the demographic and class altera-

THE WORLD A DEPARTMENT STORE

31

tions that accompanied it, Bellamy ultimately endorsed a position ironically asserted by Nietzsche, who with his usual astringency noted: "Once we possess that common economic management of the earth that will soon be inevitable, mankind will be able to find its best meaning as a machine in the service of this economy-as a tremendous clockwork, composed of ever smaller, ever more subtly 'adapted' gears."6 Bellamy welcomed the notion of interchangeability this metaphor implies, adjuring people to consider themselves merely "bodies of one another." Well aware of the impermanence of social forms, he arrived at the historicist belief in the ungroundedness of institutions and even of identity itself, and in response attempted to conceive of an order in which the essential emptiness of being could be harmlessly explored. Bellamy's imagined globalization of an American-style consumer society, then, needs to be understood as part of a program aiming to overthrow the groundedness of identity in something resembling a "natural" culture, one rooted in the particularities of a group or place. Faced with the real potential of technology to overcome the barriers that had made both regions and nations sharply distinct, Bellamy supposed that the globalization of culture called for the creation of a form of life in which we can recognize the emerging contours of an aimless consumerism. Keeping in mind recent arguments about how lithe victory of the VCR"7 has paved the way for the universalization of Western-style economic and political arrangements, we may conclude that Bellamy's call for the kind of culture that can be transplanted anywhere in fact has been largely heeded. Emerging at the dawn of a century that was to witness an astounding dissemination of the American cultural style throughout the world, Bellamy's vision of the future amounts to a startlingly prophetic revelation of globalization in its manifestation as consumerism; in his works, as much as in anyone's, the links between the ethos of consumption and the dissolution of traditionally bounded localities become plain. Although discussions of Bellamy tend to focus almost exclusively on Looking Backward, his largely forgotten early fiction sheds crucial light on the origins of his utopian vision and suggests what

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Bellamy himself is likely to have found most compelling about Boston in the year 2000. 8 Bellamy's bizarre novelistic romance Miss Luddington's Sister of r884 is particularly important if we are to understand his trajectory toward utopia, inasmuch as this work brings together two linked themes that become paramount in his subsequent writings: the attenuation of the self and of the unsettling of localized space. The plot revolves around the beautiful heiress Ida Luddington who, on the brink of womanhood, contracts a disfiguring disease, which teaches her that there is really no such thing as a continuous self; she comes to see the alteration of her body as merely the outward sign or objective correlative of the fact that the self is radically disjunctive. She even goes so far as to refer to her previous self in the third person. The romance, however, does not confine itself to the elaboration of this psychological theory; Miss Luddington's metamorphosis has a social correlative as well: the transformation of the small town of her youth (modeled on Bellamy'S own boyhood home of Chicopee Falls) into a small, but nevertheless dirty and noisy, industrial metropolis. As a distraught member of a now marginalized village nobility, she arranges for a duplicate of the preindustrial town to be built on a vacant tract on Long Island. She lives alone in this ghost town, joined only by her nephew Paul, whom she raises. Her obsession with her dead self is communicated to Paul, who in adolescence falls passionately in love with a portrait of his aunt before her illness. (The incestuous drama could be a displacement of Bellamy's own concerns: he married his foster sister, whom he met in his parents' household when he was twenty-two and she eleven.) They go to a medium in New York who manages to raise the "ghost" of Ida's younger self. During one of these seances, the medium dies, stranding the ghost in the land of the living. She moves to the simulated town with Paul and Miss Luddington, marriage to the former is planned, and she is reeducated. Overwhelmed by guilt, the young Ida finally admits that she is an imposter and the medium a fraud and that the latter's" death" was staged in hopes of bilking the Luddingtons of their fortune. Paul forgives her and marries her anyway, unshaken in his belief that

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our past selves continue their existence on another plane. Miss Luddington dies secure and happy in the same faith. At first glance, this odd production may seem to have little to do with Bellamy's utopian writings. In many ways, however, Miss Luddington's Sister is at heart consistent with the vision of Looking Backward. Miss Luddington learns, and teaches, two important lessons imparted to her by her experience of disease and industrialization, both of which serve parallel pedagogical functions. If her disfigurement suggests to her the momentary nature of the self, the lack of any durable core of the ego, the destruction of traditional village life allows her to appreciate the only slightly less momentary nature of social arrangements. Faced with the shifting nature of society and the lack of a stable ego, Miss Luddington builds an artificial world-the first manifestation of Bellamy's interest in utopia. Clearly, her utopia is escapist in nature, but it is an escape with more than just personal resonance. She finds her traditional, deferential community transformed into a contractually organized society, and thus her retreat would seem to have decidedly conservative implications. There would be something misleading, however, in the suggestion that the architectural recreation of the past is above all a fortress for the preservation of her old, secure sense of self; the point, after all, of this ghost town is to give free play to the disintegration of the self, to create a space in which past and present selves can uncannily mingle: it is a town that tries to be haunted. What might seem to be a shrine dedicated, like the pyramids, to the grandeur of an individual is actually something like a factory for the dismantling of the ego. Moreover, Miss Luddington's restoration amounts to an aesthetic manifesto pointing in the direction of Looking Backward. The re-created village, we might say, vacillates between painstaking mimesis and a wholesale rejection of the existent, suggesting Bellamy'S impatience with Howellsian realism. The town on Long Island, after all, is a perfect copy, a masterpiece of realism, but one that, far from creating a sense of contact with some solid reality existing "out there," blurs the distinction between the real and the ideal, between the fact and the model that is derived from

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it; freed from its dependency on the now vanished actual, the model happily lives a life of its own. Indeed, we might say that in Miss Luddington's Sister, Bellamy pushes realism to the point at which it takes on the characteristics of surrealism: reality is precisely reproduced in order to dislodge the commonsense oppositions-self and other, past and present, New England and Long Island-that normally and normatively constitute the real. Exemplifying what Miles Orvell has characterized as a move away from a "culture of imitation, "9 Bellamy defamiliarizes realism itself, and in so doing implies that imitation alone cannot carry one to the end of the quest for the real. The hallucinatory quality of the town is thus best understood not only as a retreat from the hard facts that have made a more beautiful way of life impossible, but also as a challenge to the alleged "hardness" of the facts themselves, a rebuke to the pride of the existent, which everywhere takes itself to be solid and understands any alternative realities as mere fancy and moondust. If, then, Miss Luddington exposes the fictiveness of the self, her encounter with historical change has made clear to her the fictiveness of society, thus voiding any obligation to stay in the "real" world, the reality of which boils down merely to the fact that the majority recognizes it as reaL Her town stands as a monument to the arbitrariness of any form of life, daring the onlooker to explain why or how it can be understood as "wrong." She seems, in short, to be a person with what Nietzsche described, in a fortuitously appropriate way, as the "consuming historical fever" characteristic of the nineteenth century, a fever whose symptom is the credo "things were different in all ages, it does not matter how you are."10 These tendencies of Bellamy'S thought become clearer when we consider "The Religion of Solidarity," an essay he wrote in 1874 that at the end of his life he endorsed as the core of his mature thinking. This essay has often been cited in discussions of Looking Backward because, as its title suggests, it denounces the aggrandizement of the ego and emphasizes the degree to which human beings share a common life and destiny. By relating the essay to Miss Luddington's Sister, however, we can become more aware

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of the mystical elements of Bellamy's writings that, although they became more muted in his later work, persist throughout his career; these are the elements that most strongly bear on the globalizing aspects of his utopia. For Bellamy, the real problems of human beings stem from the fact that they possess a soul that" seeks to enfold and animate the universe, that takes all being for its province, and, with such potential compass and desire, has for its sole task the animating of one human animal in a corner of an insignificant planet."ll From this perspective, the real disease with which Miss Luddington is afflicted is not smallpox but embodiment itself, the tethering of an infinite soul to a particular place and time: "individuality, personality, partiality, is segregation, is partition, is confinement; is fine in a prison, and happy are we if its walls grow not wearisome ere our seventy years' sentence expires" (9). In "The Religion of Solidarity," therefore, he exhorts man to "assume his birthright, and live out, live up, in others, in the past, in the future, in nature, in God" (II): everywhere, in short, but where he is, an insignificant-because finite-place deserving only"a certain calm abandon, a serene and generous recklessness" (n). To carry out this mystifying injunction Bellamy prescribes the adoption of an aesthetic stance toward life and the self. If "as universalists we inherit all time and space" (25), if "we are now living our immortal lives" (25 I, then the body and what happens to it ought to be met with a lofty indifference, or at most a purely aesthetic appreciation. Life for Bellamy is "a delightful game of passions and calculating, superior in interest to chess on account of partial identity with the personalities which serve us as puppets," an identity that nevertheless, "at least to a philosopher's mind, is so incomplete as to prevent the interest from attaining a painful degree of intensity" (r8). Miss Luddington's disjunctive life offers an object lesson in just this perspective. Because the real life is always elsewhere-or rather, everywhere-"Let us then play with our individual lives as with toys, building them into beautiful forms and delighting ourselves in so brave a game" (n). Venturing to sum up in a phrase the implications of Bellamy's

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early work, we might say that it amounts to an assault on the local, if by local we include anything that might be said to have a locus, be it the self, a place, or, metaphorically, a moment. As we have seen, Miss Luddington's village, which seems to be an enshrinement of one place and time, is something more like a hyperbolic assertion of particularity that by its very extremity calls the particular into question, and is even meant to disturb the categories by whose authority people usually distinguish one thing from another. There is, to be sure, something incoherent in her gesture, for she can induce a fluid-or, as Bellamy says in liThe Religion of SolidaritY,ll1universalist"-conception of time and space only by looking backward and, so to say, standing pat with a vanquished past. This incoherence is required by the fact that locality is the precondition of human being, even if this is a precondition that, in light of the religion of solidarity, must always seem galling and even stupid. The stupidity of the merely local, however, is overcome to the degree that one adopts toward it a detached, aesthetic outlook, seeing in it only the form adopted for the moment by universal life in the way a magician binds himself in chains merely to display virtuosity in escape, testifying to the elusiveness of the apparently solid. It is probably a sign of how well Miss Luddington's nephew has profited from her instruction that, upon her death, he demolishes her village rather than let it stand, for if it ever was a monument to anything it was to the frangibility of space and time. All this makes a strange background for a man whose name is so prominent among the crowded field of turn-of-the-century reformers. Social problems would seem at first glance to present little more than distractions to such an idealist. As we shall see, there is a paradoxical otherworldliness in Bellamy'S utopia, a longing to mingle with the universe and for the infinity of death that runs alongside enthusiasm for engineering, race purification, and the assiduous pursuit of leisure. Indeed, in many ways the world described in Looking Backward resembles the earlier, fanciful fictions with which Bellamy had created a modest reputation for himself. Julian West, a young, wealthy, but nervous and

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insomniac Bostonian of 1887 has himself hypnotically sedated and falls asleep, only to wake I 13 years later in a city he barely recognizes. In the days that follow, under the care of Dr. Leete and his daughter Edith, West and the reader are introduced to the simple reforms of the preceding century and the utopian conditions that flowed from them. One of the conditions that underlines Bellamy's drive to globalization is a continuation of Miss Luddington's attack on the local. In Equality, the sequel to Looking Backward, Bellamy foresaw a world linked by video telecommunication, a world in which the local and global could as nearly as possible occupy the same space, so that if "there occurred a spectacle or accident of particular interest, special connections were instantly made" allowing "all mankind" to "see what the situation was for themselves."12 Julian West, seated at the controls of the "electroscope," "had but to name a great city or a famous locality in any country to be at once present there so far as sight and hearing were concerned. I looked down on modem New York, then upon Chicago, upon San Francisco, and upon New Orleans.... I visited London. I heard the Parisians talk French and the Berlinese talk German, and from St. Petersburg went to Cairo by way of DelhL"13 Without leaving the security of Boston, West "travels" to increasingly exotic destinations, crossing in an instant over Europe and into Africa and Asia. The electroscope fosters a "boundless curiosity" for the technological processes that can bring the globe into anyone's house, and to that extent expresses Bellamy's fascination with the capacity of gadgetry to overcome what seemed insurmountable natural barriers, whether of space or economics. Nevertheless, West's quiet shift from "looking" at New York to "visiting" London and "going" to Cairo suggests a confusion that seems to register not so much the ideal of the year 2000 as the cultural displacements of 1887. Bringing out a disorientation becoming increasingly prevalent in literary expressions of modernity, Bellamy has West announce that" all my conceptions of time and space [were] reduced to chaos," exclaiming, "I can stand no more of this just now! I am beginning to doubt seriously whether I

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am in or out of the body."14 Bellamy in fact is quite prescient in his acknowledgment of the potential dangers of a global or cosmopolitan perspective, for during this scene West is no more geographically or culturally grounded than the globally wandering speaker of The Waste Land. Both utopia and later strands of modernism touch on the potentially destructive capacity of technology and cosmopolitanism to undermine the grounding of individuals in their own society. West's distress, however, is clearly an indication that he has not yet successfully learned all the lessons of utopia. Keeping the religion of solidarity in mind, we can see that for Bellamy, West's lack of certainty regarding his body should be welcomed as the onset of wisdom, not treated as a crisis. West's anxiety about his identity, in fact, points to the crucial link between the political and psychological aspects of Bellamy's utopia, between the global economic and cultural system and the liquidation of the ego. That the system is meant to be global is explicity stated in Looking Backward, in which Dr. Leete reports that "the great nations of Europe as well as Australia, Mexico, and parts of South America, are now organized industrially like the United States" (76). As the missionary work of the utopians goes on, "backward races ... are gradually being educated up to civilized institutions" (76), and Leete looks forward to "an eventual unification of the world as one nation" (78). West's first full day in this world civilization is marked, not surprisingly, by a reaction that anticipates his encounter with the electroscope. He wakes up "without being able to regain the clew of my personal identity," barely able even "to distinguish myself from pure being" (40). Presented with evidence of the monumentality of human achievements, he loses a distinct sense of himself. His situation is thus analogous to that produced by Miss Luddington's ghost town, which also dismantles the ego through a display that might seem paradoxically to bolster it. For Bellamy, the productions of humanity are useful only to the extent that they dwarf human beings; he actively sought those aspects of mass culture-in particular, the feeling of nullity it evokes in the individual-that so frequently have been bewailed by cultural critics of his own and subsequent times.

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Globalization is essential for Bellamy because the massive cultural amalgamation it brings about seems to reduce the individual to the cipher he thought it to be. The simultaneous aggrandizement of human institutions and extinction of the ego is the typical goal of Bellamy's dreams. The fact that West confronts the world on television, that all the earth has been made available to him and stands before him at his command, points to the utopian habit of thinking of the world and all things in it-even peopleas material available for manipulation and ordering, as what Heidegger calls "standing-reserve." Indeed, Heidegger's evaluation of the "essence of technology" provides crucial insight into the nature of the utopian enterprise. As we saw in the introduction, technology and utopia share a common tendency toward globalization. They also encourage a similar attitude toward the world. Heidegger's description of the world in the technological epoch could almost serve as advertisement copy for the electroscope: "Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering."ls Heidegger goes on to name this manner of viewing the world "enframing," which he sees as "the essence of technology."16 Significantly, Heidegger associates enframing with tourism. In the course of considering the changes wrought on the Rhine once it is transformed into a source of hydroelectric power, once it has become a managed portion of the standing-reserve, he pauses to wonder whether the Rhine is still a "river in the landscape" and thus somehow still beyond the manipulations of technology: "Perhaps. But how? In no other way than as an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry. "I? Like technology and utopia, tourism views the world as an assembly of resources, as standing-reserve, the definitive quality of which is constant availability. It is appropriate that utopia is often presented as a kind of gallery in which the residents act simultaneously as exhibits and cicerones, for utopia inherently tends toward the treatment of the world as an object whose very reason for being is to be at the disposal of the observer. This observer, however, finds himself equally available for inspection, equally enmeshed in a global system that turns the world

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into an exhibit, and therefore finds his integrity threatened by the very order that seems to present the world to him as an offertory. The apparent randomness of West's visual vacation should not, then, blind us to the thoroughgoing spirit of systematic organization implied by a global network of cameras standing by to obey the whims of the sedentary tourist. In addition to epitomizing the essence of technology, the electroscope also points to what Heidegger calls "the fundamental event of the modem age": "the conquest of the world as picture," one sign of which is "the setting before us of foreign and remote worlds in their everydayness, which is produced at random through radio by a flick of the hand. II The fact that radio heralds "the age of the world picture" shows that visual representation is not Heidegger's prime concern, even if his metaphor seems particularly apt when applied to Equality. Rather, Heidegger argues that once the world is "conceived and grasped as picture," "what is stands before us ... as a system." lS Utopia, which carries to an extreme the tendency toward system, thus appears in the context of Heideggerian critique as a representative expression of modernity. Indeed, Gianni Vattimo has recently pointed out that utopia, a genre given its modem form and name in the sixteenth century by Thomas More, is virtually coeval with modem rationalism, and that "utopia is effectively an aspect of the will to system proper to metaphysics." l9 There is in utopia an extraordinary faith, shared by metaphysics, in the ability of the word, of logos, to order the real. The fact that West has "but to name" a city for it to appear on television parallels the utopian's hope that the act of "naming" the future, of replacing its essential unknownness with definite shape, will set in motion a process that will bring it about. West at the controls of the electroscope epitomizes the relation of the utopian to the world, for he is there only because the world has been subdued by the human will. After all, the ultimate question of utopia is, in the formulation of Darko Suvin, "how is Homo sapiens to survive and humanize its segment of the universe?"20 Although this sounds benign in the context of Suvin's basically approving assessment of utopia, Heidegger implies that

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the humanized universe is not necessarily a gentler place. Although "humanization" is a broad concept that can be defined in as many ways as the concept of the human itself, Suvin seems to mean by it the taming of both the natural and social environment, something more or less compatible with what Heidegger variously describes as enframing or the conquest of the world as a picture. "Where the world becomes picture," human beings intend "in a decisive sense to set [what is] in place" before themselves; they become "the relational center of that which is as such."21 To put this more colloquially, when the world becomes picture, no holds are barred, for the world then exists only to be ranged before humanity in accordance with its own wishesinstead of, for example, to prove the glory of God. This attitude is crisply expressed by Bellamy'S first important biographer, Arthur E. Morgan, who, hardly coincidentally, was the first head of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Describing his mission in the latter capacity he wrote, "There is no traditional line ... at which men must stop in their efforts to bring order out of chaos; no limits need be set on our hopes for a more inclusive and masterly synthesis."22 As we shall see, among the "traditional lines" marked for abolition are the national frontiers that marked each territory of the earth as the alleged site of a unique, and uniquely valuable, cultural evolution. Moreover, Morgan's words reveal that there is no longer a perspective "outside" to which one might appeal to put a brake on the systematic process of "humanization": what is is significant only by virtue of being part of the system of which humanity is the relational center. As a result, this kind of humanization, the will to set what is in place before and for human beings, implies a belief in the radical pliancy of reality, a belief that naturally, and one might even say especially, applies to human institutions. After all, although utopia often presents improved methods for conquering nature, it almost always appears to have existent institutions in its sights. Utopias like Bellamy's encourage the idea that "since all institutions have been made by man, we must have complete power to refashion them in any way we desire."23 Utopian enframing, therefore, does

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not apply only to nature; human institutions, too, can be understood as part of the standing-reserve. Much of the history of the century after Bellamy has been, as it were, a test of this proposition; authorities in nation after nation have supposed, to an unprecedented degree, that inherited institutions, along with the cultural habitudes that sustained them, can be legislated out of existence with impunity. In Bellamy'S work, as we have seen, this process circles back upon those who put it into practice, because the human being, too, is incorporated into the overarching system. In Looking Backward, the negation of the individual and the systematization of all that is are most apparent in the utopian institution for which Bellamy is perhaps most often remembered: the industrial army. This vast, centrally organized state corporation, of which "all citizens, by virtue of their citizenship, became employees" (32), irresistibly suggests the planned economies, both left-wing and right, that have since dominated so much of the world. For Bellamy, the quest for a perfect organization is informed by the rising ethos of engineering, including what was shortly to be dubbed "human engineering." He thus envisions a complex apparatus for the control of information-"individual records" are "strictly kept" (67)and for ensuring that the true measure of individuals will be constantly available thanks to the permanent display of identifying badges revealing occupation, grade, and class (68). The educational system guarantees that "young men are taught habits of obedience, subordination, and devotion to duty" (66), and a man who refuses to work "is sentenced to solitary imprisonment on bread and water till he consents" (69). Indeed, Bellamy's insistence on the global extension of the system, the impossibility of anything remaining "outside," borders on the obsessive. 24 Dr. Leete informs West that "a solution which leaves an unaccounted-for residuum is no solution at all" (73). This attitude accounts not only for the international theme in Bellamy'S work, but also for the fact that even those unsuited for labor belong to "a sort of invalid corps" (71). We are assured that the virtue of 2000 has pierced even the deep interiority of mad-

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ness, which represents, after all, perhaps the least "socialized/' the most spectacularly idiosyncratic, of all modes of human being: "even the insane belong to this invalid corps, and bear its insignia.... In their lucid intervals/' they "are eager to do what they can" (7I). If the system ineluctably spreads outward around the globe, on a microcosmic scale it saturates the individual with its own imperatives. The taming of madness and the advent of the universal homogeneous state: these are the twin aspects of a world transformed under Bellamy's gaze into Heidegger's "world picture," perfectly systematized, permanently available, unresistingly visible. Although the industrial army is thought with some reason to be the representative institution of Bellamy's utopia, of perhaps greater importance is the fact that Bellamy explicity modeled his utopia along lines suggested by what Lewis Mumford has called "one of the most vital institutions of the era I880-I9I4": the department store. 2S Readers of Looking Backward will recall that the department store, by concentrating "the business of a whole quarter ... under one roof, with a hundred former proprietors of shops serving as clerks" (27), offers a rough draft of Bellamy's perfectly integrated economy in which competition is eliminated by the transformation of individual entrepreneurs into employees of the state. Although Bellamy's admiration of establishments like Wanamaker's may now seem eccentric, he was not alone. As we saw, Bradford Peck called attention to the way this revolution in retailing pointed to the potential for universal expansion explicit in Bellamy's work, to the tie between emporium and (at least cultural) imperium. Even decidedly nonutopian observers saw the department store as a central expression of modernity. Two economists writing in I9I4, for example, lauded it as "the most marvelous illustration of the great directing principles of modem economic life. Specialization, concentration and integration are all united there."u Like Morgan's TVA, it amounts to an "inclusive and masterly synthesis." Indeed, it is all too easy to forget that the department store was one of the great representative inventions of the belle epoque.

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Symbolizing the triumph of rational capitalism over smaller, traditionally organized trades, the monumental department stores that sprang up across Europe and America in the last two decades of the nineteenth century outdid, for the sheer, astonishing velocity of their appearance, the medieval cathedrals that gradually had knit together the architectural landscape, and even the very concept, of Europe centuries before. Zola went so far as to suggest that the torch had been passed from the older to the newer of these cosmopolitan institutions, noting that "the department store tends to replace the church"; in Au bonheur des dames, his 1883 novel about the new frontier in retailing, he called the department store "the cathedral of modem commerce."2.7 The prominence of the department store as a potent icon of cosmopolitan, rational capitalism received its most dramatic confirmation much later, when the "Third Reich began with a full-scale attack on the department stores," even if the stores' sheer effectiveness as a stimulus to trade forced the Nazis to modify their position later.2.8 Bellamy, then, was not alone in seeing the department store as one of the prime exemplars of things to come. It must be said, however, that in spite of his sensitivity to the drift of cultural symbolism, Bellamy had at best a very slim knowledge of how complex economies actually function; certainly no such knowledge is displayed in his works, in spite of the presence in them of interminable, potted disquisitions on economic development. Characteristically, Bellamy misunderstood the nature of the department store, which depends for its success in large measure on competition between departments, competition that often decides which department will be allocated what is for the most part extraordinarily expensive floor space.2.9 Although the department store did nothing to counteract the competitive bent of capitalist enterprise, Bellamy shared with advertisers themselves the notion that a sense of solidarity could be recovered in the lavish public spaces of the new palaces of consumption. By the early 1 890S, advertisers had already begun to suggest that a culture of consumption held one key to a sense of community that seemed to have vanished from urban life. For example, an 1892 advertise-

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ment made the symbol of Macy's (which ironically was destined to become a symbol favored by the communist masters of the Soviet Union) into the center of a community of knowledge: "1 suppose that in this city there are thousands upon thousands of people who know not one star in the heavens from another, who are yet thoroughly familiar with the red star." "Follow the crowd," an advertisement three years later asserted, "and it will always take you to R. H. Macy &. CO."3D Life lived "UNDER THE RED STAR" already promised some of the solidarity of the year 2000, revealing a link between Bellamy's allegedly adversarial stance and the creation of new, massive, national and international markets. 31 Here, then, we come to the nub of Bellamy's fascination for the trappings of consumer society. It may seem ironic that Macy's, an exemplary product of capitalism, should share its symbol with a communist empire, but Bellamy's appropriation of the department store as a symbol of socialist life shows that collectivist fantasies can underwrite both fatuous commerical advertising and kitschy visions of Marxist solidarity. Bellamy's writings foreshadow the engineering of the sentiments that has gone forward both in the advertisement for antiperspirant, wherein odorless consumers ritualistically, frictionlessly engage in official fun, and in the smilingly propagandistic depiction of peasants unknowingly digging their graves in the Great Leap Forward. Like no other writer of the time, Bellamy unites the (for him merely apparent) individualism of consumer society with the compulsory mass demonstrations and parades that are so plainly designed to blot out the consciousness of the individual as individual. For Bellamy, the idiosyncratic purchase and a fondness for rallies go hand in hand: both contribute to the dismantling of the ego that was his principal aim, even though in the former this proceeds only in a veiled manner. The mass demonstrations that punctuate life in utopia openly encourage identification with the collective, but on a dayto-day basis such identification is much more dependably ensured by the consumer's involvement in the global-commercial system. With the magnificent abundance of the department store, that system monumentally reveals itself in every neighborhood of Bel-

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lamy's utopia, dwarfing the individual even as it seems to cater to his or her needs and even whims. In its cathedral-like open spaces, in its arboreta, and beside its cascades of commodity displays, the individual feels the compression of the global system bearing down on him or her like a force whose origin is coextensive with space itself. Even apparently minor details of the modern retail ways that fascinated Bellamy fundamentally transformed the nature of the purchase: no longer an unambiguously localized, face-to-face encounter between merchant and patron, the purchase functions more as a way of swearing allegiance to vast networks of exchange. Consider, for example, the innovative use of fixed pricing that became a standard of department stores and later spread to most retail exchanges. David Chaney has characterized the effects of this basic feature of shopping: "Rather than negotiate with the retailer the customer was now expected to shop in the sense of abstract contemplation of relative worth."32 Haggling has as its basis the idea that values can be negotiated. 33 When haggling is banished from the marketplace, there is indeed a gain in what passes for bourgeois decorum, particularly as successful haggling depends on an aggressiveness (sometimes veiled, to be sure) at odds with the middle-class ideal of feminine propriety. What is lost, however, is a degree of autonomy for buyer and seller alike. Instead of acting as free individuals engaged in a unique exchange, the precise conditions of which may be wholly idiosyncratic and unrepeatable, those engaged in fixed-price purchases find themselves facing an absolute standard of value that no amount of pleading can alter. In place of a human encounter between buyer and seller, an encounter inflected with quirks of personality and perhaps saturated with the details of past encounters, we have a stark decision by the consumer: to pay the price or not, because the price itself is not negotiable. This is a fortiori the case in Bellamy'S utopia, where prices are officially promulgated throughout the nation, and this also suggests just what makes such shopping seem an attractive activity to Bellamy. Although the vast, lushly appointed spaces of depart-

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ment stores (both in reality and in Looking Backward) offer the flattered ego ample opportunity to puff itself up with illusions that the display is an offertory to itself in all its uniqueness, individuals who engage in fixed-price consumption are as fungible as the mass-produced commodities for which they yearn, as the coins or bills with which they make the objects of their yearning theirs. Although Bellamy presents shopping as the ultimate form of self-expression-"personal taste determines how the individual shall spend" (s8)-the unquestioned imperative that keeps the ball bouncing-"One must spend"-guarantees that individuals shall obligingly submerge themselves in the overarching system whose twin lessons are the monumentality of the system itself and the interchangeability of all individuals taking up their existence within it. This dynamic, in which an apparent cultivation of individual integrity is trumped by the context in which that integrity is manufactured, is similar to one revealed by Stuart Culver in his essay on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. According to Culver, 1. Frank Baum, an expert in store window displays, "seems to articulate a conventional criticism of the commodity fetish," while at the same time his famous novel "naturalizes consumer desire."34 Such paradoxes of consumer culture have long been familiar to readers of Horkheimer and Adorno, but what makes Bellamy perhaps a unique participant in the discourse of consumption dissected by such theorists is that he seems implicitly to share their assumption that the "culture industry" is fatal to individual autonomy, although what they deplore he actively seeks.35 If in Culver's analysis Baum emerges as a self-mystified and internally incoherent champion-cum-critic of consumption, Bellamy, in contrast, enthusiastically embraces the disintegration of the ego. Moreover, critics like Adorno typically express their special horror of two aspects of the culture industry that lay the strongest claims on Bellamy's allegiance: its spatial and spiritual pervasiveness-the way it seeps into even the most intimate of encounters, into the slightest nuances of feeling-and its sheer giganticism. There is a real question whether a sense of individuality can be

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preserved once people become implicated in interminable, circulatory global networks (and keeping this in mind, one might wonder whether theorists proclaiming "the death of the subject" are not simply doing their bit to perfect the ongoing procedures of globalization). But for Bellamy, at least, the pervasive, monumental, and globally extendable aspects of consumer culture are just what make it a dependable solvent of the ego. Not everyone can, like Miss Luddington, build a ghost town in which to experience the disintegration of the self, but in utopia everyone can go to Macy's. Although the department store is perhaps the most representative institution of the world order Bellamy envisions, his utopia is also awash in gadgets that shed light on the new sensations available to citizens whose ties to traditionally bounded culture have been severed. Consider, for example, West's experience with Bellamy's version of the clock radio. In the midst of a dream, West finds himself seated "on the throne ... in the banqueting hall of the Alhambra," surrounded by "lords and generals" massed to fight "the Christian dogs of Spain," and by "round-limbed and luscious-lipped" representatives of "the royal harem." Finally, cries of " 'Allah!' shook the hall and awoke me, to find it broad daylight, and the room tingling with the electric music of the 'Thrkish Reveille'" (76). West encounters a technology that encourages a connoisseurship of the alien and the fulfillment even of those desires for unlimited political, martial, and sexual potency that the regime will not allow to be acted out. The stimulants of these flights of fancy are not, West tells us, left to "mere chance": "The airs played" on one of the channels" during the waking hours of the morning were always of an inspiring type" (76). As a dream factory, the "musical telephone," as it is called, epitomizes a culture that thrives on adventures in alterity, nurturing habits of receptivity that foster the constant re-creation and enjoyment of the self as an almost purely aesthetic phenomenon. It could even be said that it does to the self what the electroscope does to the world, for both are converted into "tours" that the individual is ordered to take by the regime. 36

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Like the journeys made possible by the electroscope, the fantasies evoked by the musical telephone attest to effects of a globalized life-world upon consciousness. Vivid fantasies of immersion in an alien culture are casually indulged, as if they offered the same sort of pleasure as a new hat. In communities governed by traditionally bounded notions of what is and is not acceptable, such imaginings would be viewed as dangerous temptations, morally suspect, the alarming signs of "reversion" or of a creeping bohemianism. One has only to think of the terror elicited by the similarly overheated dreams of Gustav von Aschenbach Iwho wakes up, it is true, only after his dream narrative has proceeded to a more advanced juncturel to see that for those concerned with upholding a particular-which is to say, local-conception of culture, the self's susceptibility to the alien appears as a threat. In Mann's Death in Venice, the events of Aschenbach's dream, like those of Julian West's, "burst in upon him from outside, violently crushing his resistance, his deep, intellectual resistance, passing through easily and leaving his whole being, the culmination of a lifetime of effort, ravaged and annihilated." Indeed, Aschenbach's deadly encounter with cosmopolitan Venice strikingly parallels West's induction into the wonders of the year 2000. Like West before the electroscope, Aschenbach hears "the great languages of Europe melded together in subdued tones," "a broad horizon, tolerant and comprehensive" opens before him, and these experiences contribute to moments of "total disorientation."37 Where Death in Venice and Looking Backward part company, of course, is in their evaluation of these happenings. For Mann, dedicated to a specific ideal of German Bildung, the evaporation of Aschenbach's culturally anchored being, "the culmination of a lifetime of effort," marks the beginning of a calamitous descent, a sometimes languid and sometimes feverish abandonment of discipline, a discipline dedicated to the careful fashioning of the soul. Even though Bellamy in many obvious ways is a much more provincial writer than Mann, he maps out a postlocal position that in some respects is more advanced than Mann'S, whose anxiety in the face of globalization shines out on every page. lIt should

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be remembered that Mann takes great care in tracing the Indian origins of the cholera that eventually kills off Aschenbach: Death in Venice is a tragedy not just of European cosmopolitanism, but of full-fledged globalization.} If Bellamy's dishwatery prose and stiflingly genteel attitudes mark him as heir to an exhausted, thoroughly parochial New England culture, he nevertheless bypasses Mann's civilizational melancholy by simply scrapping his affiliation with anything the German writer would recognize as culture at all. Sending his characters off to playful excursions into an abstract universality, Bellamy experiments in thoroughly globalized sensations of alienation without remorse. It is, indeed, a testament to Bellamy's status as a prophet of globalized consciousness that Looking Backward seems to exemplify many current cultural configurations with which critics of modernity are only now grappling. The remarks of James Clifford, for example, apply no less to life in Bellamy'S utopia than they do to the twentieth-century ethnography and art that are his subject: "Modern practices of art and culture collecting ... have situated themselves at the end of a global history. They have occupied a place ... from which to gather the valued inheritances of Man."3S Meditating on what makes such practices palatable, the late Guy Debord notes, "the arts of all civilizations and all epochs can for the first time be known and admitted together.... It is in this epoch of museums ... that all ancient moments of art can be equally admitted, because none of them suffer more from the loss of their particular conditions of communication than from the present loss of conditions of communication in genera1."39 In their famous dissection of "the homeless mind," Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner assert, "Modern identity is peculiarly open . ... The individual is not only 'sophisticated' about the worlds and identities of others but also about himself."4Q Like Mann, these writers are all in line with Nietzsche's critique of historicism, and all express concern about the floating, homeless consciousness of those untethered from securely defined cultural traditions-even if to some degree they are all suspicious of the way such traditions encourage a chauvinistic disdain for other traditions or, more suc-

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cinctly, for the Other. Unhampered by such concerns, Bellamy and his characters lesson themselves to revel in a culture where all human possibilities are equally available for the enjoyment of the discriminating-or rather, the nondiscriminating-consumer. To a remarkable extent, in fact, the form of selfhood imposed on citizens of Looking Backward coincides with the cultivation of the self encouraged by the advertising that was becoming recognizably modem when Bellamy set pen to paper.41 Although advertising does not explicitly aim at the creation of a postnational or globalized form of selfhood, it tantalizingly sets before the consumer an endless program of metamorphosis, encouraging the view of the self as an infinitely plastic medium that can be transformed at will, and thus undesignedly furthering the emergence of the groundless being Bellamy actively sought to construct. It is not too much to say that Bellamy's utopia is an adsmith's paradise, this in spite of the utopians' announced hostility to preutopian commercialism and all its wiles. 42 Hostility to organized salesmanship in Looking Backward, however, is more apparent than real. Dr. Leete explains that the regime itself incites the desire to consume. When West notices that the system does not encourage saving habits, Leete replies, "It is not intended to .... The nation is rich, and does not wish the people to deprive themselves of any good thing" (47). In a book-length attack on Bellamy and Nationalism, Arthur Lipow even singles out shopping as virtually the only aspect of life about which Bellamy expressed "tender concern for individual rights: the right of the consumers to obtain the goods they desire."43 If, as West insists, there is no need for advertising in the twentieth century, it is largely because the official evangels of self-fulfillment, preaching a rigorous "fun morality,"44 themselves incite the desires and create the needs that late-nineteenth-century advertisers worked to promote. This emphasis on consumption is clearly announced by Dr. Leete, who instructs West that it is "not our labor, but the higher and larger activities ... that are considered the main business of existence" (108). Rejecting labor as a method of self-cultivation, Dr. Leete echoes an early journal entry of Bellamy's in which he

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states, "We are not to work but to live, to live the fullest, freest, most developed life we can."4S Although Dr. Leete does not go so far as to oppose labor to life, he does suggest that the "most developed life" is marked by assiduous leisure, one given over to an exploration of the nooks and crannies of being that lie fallow in the repetitive, workaday routines of productive life. Noting that in the year 2000 all workers are mustered out of the industrial army at age forty-five, he celebrates a regime that allows so much "time for the cultivation of all manner of personal idiosyncrasies and special tastes, and the pursuit of every imaginable form of recreation" (109). It is no wonder, given the necessarily endless character of such "cultivation" and "pursuit," that he paradoxically figures leisure as a kind of labor: "the main business of existence." The retired worker in the future calls to mind Jean Baudrillard's portrait of "man-as-consumer," who "considers the experience of pleasure an obligation, like an enterprise of pleasure and satisfaction." Indeed, although Dr. Leete insists that at age forty-five all citizens are "enfranchised from discipline and control" (109), they seem rather to exchange labor for a regime of fun whose motto is "Everything must be tried."46 Advertising, of course, did not have to wait for Baudrillard to find its theorist; like almost all activities in Bellamy's (and our) professionalizing age, advertising immediately generated a corpus of scholarly and popular writings that promised to endow it with a scientific methodology. In the work of psychologist Walter Dill Scott, for example, what Kellner and the Bergers describe as the "peculiarly open" quality of the modem self becomes the golden key to the adsmith's success. In his Theory of Advertising of 1903, a "simple exposition of the principles of psychology in their relation to successful advertising," Scott offers a theory of human nature fully in accord with West's Thrkish adventure: "Man has been called the reasoning animal ... he could with greater truthfulness be called the creature of suggestion."47 Following up on this insight, Scott writes: "Every thought tends to put itself into action.... We do things simply because we happen to think of them.... If you can get [someone] to think of going to Kansas City

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over the Chicago &. Alton [Railroadl, he will go to Kansas City over the Chicago &. Alton, and nothing but a competing idea or physical impediment can stop him."48 Following William James, Scott depicts thought itself as the thinker;49 there is no ego sitting above the stream of consciousness, adjudicating between different ideas or courses of action. The way such decenterings of the ego-reminiscent of Bellamy's early writings-can be adapted to consumer society are, in fact, revealingly suggested in William James's magnum opus of 1890, The Principles of Psychology. If for Bellamy the self is a precarious possession, for James it is a "fluctuating material," in part because "between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw" (291). "In its widest possible sense . .. a man's Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his," including his "yacht and bank-account" (291). Discarding with Bellamy and Scott the notion of some fixed, durable ego-he at one point calls it II simply nothing" (365 )-James goes so far as to rename the stream of consciousness the "stream of Sciousness, pure and simple, thinking objects of some of which it makes what it calls a 'Me'" (304). Each individual thought, therefore, among other things must choose from the "represented goods" of potential selves what kind of self it wishes to call lime, II including such selves as "statesman, warrior, and African explorer" (309). One decides to II 'carry that line,' as the merchants say, of self" (310). James's insistence on commercial metaphors suggests the extent to which potential selves had come to be seen as a commodity, and the possible pluralism of the self, or rather "stream of selves" (335), makes it, at least potentially, into an occasion for touristic enjoyment. James does not seem to think of his theorizing as an artifact of consumer culture, but taking James, Scott, and Bellamy together we can conclude that for some writers, at least, the tie between an attenuated conception of the ego and the discourse of consumption forcefully suggested itself. The commodification of experience typical of Bellamy's department store world, however, is perhaps most importantly displayed in the utopians' manner of accommodating West himself,

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for the Bostonians of the future do not see him as a threat, which they very well might have; he is, after all, a representative of a dynamic age in which "excessive individualism" (Looking Backward, 21) was cultivated. Compared to the utopians, he could have the will of a Napoleon. Instead of being viewed as a danger, however, he is viewed as a kind of objet d'art. Dr. Leete tells his guest of "the piquancy your nineteenth-century ideas have for us of this day, the rare quaintness of their effect" (108). West is incorporated into the utopian system by becoming something of a professional curio with "an historical lectureship in one of our colleges" (99). On the one hand, the confidence of Dr. Leete and his contemporaries stems from the entrenched power of their social and economic arrangements: they do not fear that a lone refugee from the nineteenth century can plunge them back into history. This confidence is accompanied, perhaps even constituted, by a thoroughgoing aestheticization of experience ensuring that any difference will be viewed as "quaint" or "piquant" rather than as a challenge to their ordering of life. One could say, in other words, that the United States in the year 2000 possesses the culture to end all cultures, because its principle is to absorb and even commodify all otherness. The paradox here is one that continues to be evident down to the present day: the more one learns to appreciate the difference of the different, the less of a threat that difference is to one's cultural security. The arrogance of the chauvinist (who is sure that difference equals inferiority) is succeeded by the complacency of the connoisseur, he who, in James Clifford's words quoted above, occupies a place "from which to gather the valued inheritances of Man" -inheritances that, it must be added, are not valued to the extent of threatening to displace the omnivorously assimilative culture of the culture collectors. Dr. Leete's enlightened tolerance allows him to appreciate anything as a manifestation of this or that global-historical phenomenon: "The incommensurable is made, precisely as such, commensurable, and the individual is now scarcely capable of any impulse that he could not classify as an example of this or that publicly recognized constellation."so These words belong to Adorno's diagnosis of the

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West sixty years after the appearance of Looking Backward, a fact which serves only to underline Bellamy's relevence to times he did not live to see. In spite of West's initial anxiety about the integrity of his ego, then, we can see that what seems like the extraordinary moment of his early identity crisis provides the very model of indeterminate selfhood in Bellamy's utopia, and that this peculiarly floating self is what is called for in the massive, global amalgamation of culture that reduces all individuals to the generic category of human being. Even though West says of his "loss of a mental fulcrum," "I trust I may never know what it is again" (40), in the remainder of the novel there seems to be little concern with the integrity of the ego, as the extraordinary case of Edith Leete makes clear. At the end of the novel, and with no sense of crisis, West admits that his fiancee of 1887, Edith Bartlett, and his fiancee of 2000, her granddaughter Edith Leete, "were blended in my thought, nor have they ever since been clearly distinguished. I was not long in finding that on Edith's part there was a corresponding confusion of identities" (169). Edith confesses, "I have sometimes thought that her spirit lives in me-that Edith Bartlett, not Edith Leete, is my real name. I cannot know it" (169). In a coda to this unusual declaration, and sounding a note that seems to express the melancholy of a rootless bourgeoise rather than utopian confidence, she adds, "of course none of us can know who we really are" (169). The crucial movement within the novel is revealed when we consider West's initial horror at discontinuity and his final, quiet acceptance of Edith Leete's doubled identity, his comfort in a world where, of course," people do not know who they are. Between the two identity crises, identity ceases to be something one can have a crisis about; the notion of a self psychologically centered in something not itself no longer terrifies. Even West, at the close of the novel, is in certain regards not quite himself. Having come into possession of West's century-old love letters to her grandmother, Edith Leete in childhood had told her parents that "she would never marry till she found a lover like Julian West" (168). From Edith's perspective, at least, it may well be that West's being West is principally imporII

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tant as a guarantee that he will be like West. The question of the self in Looking Backward, as in the consumer society from which it emerged, is thus endlessly deferred, its final identity indefinitely postponed in order not to cancel out the potential selves spreading out before one like the "bewildering variety" (54) of goods confronting the shoppers of 2000. If in Bellamy's work individuality is defined as one's place within the system, the system is supple enough to accommodate, and in fact promote, a protean form of selfhood. 51 We can readily appreciate why the postponement of self-definition is called for in a culture that seeks to absorb the entire species within its rules; a less flexible self might shun anything alien as a threat, but a self that is already different from itself is capable of appreciating others-"Thrks," for example-for such things as the beauty of their clothes or the piquancy of their religious beliefs. The extent to which Bellamy was dedicated to the idea of people who were nothing in particular-whose affiliations with anything smaller than the whole of humanity were comparatively unimportant-may be judged by his comments on race. When in 1891 someone wrote a letter to The New Nation, Bellamy's Nationalist newspaper, pointing out that blacks did not appear in Looking Backward, Bellamy responded that Julian West, Dr. Leete, Edith Leete, and the rest are not identified as white: "For anything to the contrary that appears in the book, the people referred to in its pages, so far as we remember, might have been black, brown or yellow as well as white." 52 This statement is extraordinary not only because it flies in the face of dearly held racist doctrines of the time, but also because it seems at variance with Bellamy'S other statements on race. In Equality, which in part constituted Bellamy's bid to extend Nationalism in the South, a region whose white population was predictably uninterested in reform movements emanating from Boston, he had this to say: lithe new system involved no more commingling of the races than the old had done. It was perfectly consistent with any degree of race separation in industry which the most bigoted local prejudices might demand." 53 This accommodation of local prejudices is, paradox-

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ically, yet another aspect of Bellamy's assault on the local, for clearly he sees any insistence on the local-a phrase for which in this case the word "prejudice" may be substituted-as a kind of inessential epiphenomenon. This is why the culture he imagines can display both a cosmopolitan indifference to race (as he says Looking Backward does) and racial bigotry; in the touristic world of 2000, the alchemy of opposites is required because the only way the world in all its variety can be apprehended as whole lies through the aesthetic appreciation of all the contradictions that might otherwise call for choice-choice, that is, conceived as an ultimate, life-defining credo, as opposed to the kind of "lifestyle" choices that abound in consumer culture, which can be revoked at will, because at bottom all the items among which one may choose are understood as equivalent. For Bellamy, choosing between bigotry and tolerance is not very different from choosing between suits of different cuts. What may seem to be Bellamy's waffling on the matter of local prejudice is nothing other than the further articulation of a global cultural style, in accordance with which the individual experiences all cultural affiliations in what, from a traditional viewpoint, seems a highly attenuated way. If we attend to the terms of that attenuation we can appreciate yet another way that Bellamy uncannily anticipates issues dealt with in much more recent theories of globalization, especially those that involve what Roland Robertson calls "a massive, twofold process involving the interpenetration of the universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism." This rather dense formulation boils down to the following: as the compression of the world forces diverse cultures into ever more intimate contact, people learn to appreciate that although other cultures are obviously different, culture is "done" in similar ways throughout the world. No matter how different another culture may be from one's own, it is, no less than one's own (and really no differently than one's own), an attempt to impose order upon the social world. This idea is what allowed Durkheim to see the religion of Australian aborigines as exemplary of all religion, and it is the fundamental axiom (as we saw in the introduction) that al-

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lows for the birth of sociology as a discipline deputized to examine any society. If on the one hand the compression of the world pro-

vides many particular examples of the universality of social structuring (lithe particularization of universalism"), on the other it reinforces awareness of the sheer diversity of cultural forms, providing for lithe extensive diffusion of the idea that there is virtually no limit to particularity, to uniqueness, to difference, and to otherness" (this is lithe universalization of particularism"). The strange mingling of a universality and particularity that emerges from the global scene is also apparent in Bellamy's utopia, in which a dedication to universally extended social structures goes hand in hand with a tolerance for any kind of difference those structures can support. The waning of missionary zeal among both Bellamy's utopians (who would not dream of going down South to fight against bigotry) and many latter-day Western intellectuals (who would not dream of converting the indigenous peoples of the earth to the ideals of the Enlightenment) derives from an essentially globalized conception of the world, again in Robertson's words, II as a series of culturally equal, relativized entities or ways of life."s4 The intertwining of universalism and particularism apparent in our own times is, of course, the result of purposeful human activities (in the political and economic spheres especially), but the purpose those carrying out these activities aimed at was not the inauguration of the unanchored, peculiarly open form of selfhood so many analysts of globalization have decried. Though this kind of selfhood is the unintended result of a host of globalizing forces, Bellamy seems to have envisioned a global cultural order positively to bring about the kind of self with which many of our contemporaries feel (often rather uncomfortably) endowed. We see here once again that the unintended (and often unwanted) side effects of modern globalizing tendencies are, for Bellamy, ends in themselves. As might be expected by the reader of liThe Religion of Solidarity," the ultimate destiny of a world so conceived does not, like the Christian apocalypse, involve the segregation of the righteous

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and the damned in accordance with an absolute standard, but rather a hazy inclusiveness. Thus when Reverend Barton, the greatest preacher in 2000, suggests that the new world marks only the beginning of "real human progress" (162), instead of historical development he has in mind a vague spirituality informed by eugenic fantasies of return to an original purity: "the return of the individual by the way of death, and the return of the race by the fulfillment of the evolution, when the divine secret hidden in the germ shall be perfectly unfolded" (163). The main points of Bellamy's program represent a concerted effort to blur the distinction between the particular and the universal, to bring about an ongoing spectacle of work and recreation, the real goal of which is death, mingling with the universe. In his utopias, which at first glance seem vigorous, optimistic, gregarious-in a word, "pro-life" -the only sanctioned passion is, after all, for the infinity of death. Thus, reappearing in Equality, Mr. Barton explains that people look forward to death with "an impassioned expectancy which would cause the young to envy the old, but for the knowledge that in a little while the same door will be opened for them. "55 An early notebook entry of Bellamy's more succinctly expresses a belief he seems never to have abandoned: "Death ... is our normal state, and it is little wonder we behave so awkwardly while alive."56 The successful establishment of a just society is never an end in itself for Bellamy. Rather, it is a means of dissolving the human in a world already absolutely determined, for it is in such a world that one may most readily, as he youthfully puts it, "play with our individual lives as with toys." With this in mind, we can see that Boston in 2000 embodies the perfect aestheticization of experience Bellamy longs for throughout his work. At the very least it must be said that throughout his utopias, Bellamy puts forth a selfcontradictory program: we must perfect life on this planet, even though that life is wholly insubstantial. Freed from the question of how to live, the individual can look forward to death with a clear conscience. Bellamy, then, was to a large extent only incidentally interested in econOInic questions, using them mostly as a means of resolving

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what he saw as the spiritual crisis of his age. This is not to say that he was not sincerely moved by the spectacle of urban poverty. His utopian project, however, consists of sweeping away all the anomalies of social life so as to render the world a fit object for aesthetic play. The terms of this play were dictated by the possibilities of his time. In "The Religion of Solidarity," Bellamy does not indicate just how one is to carry out the project of treating life as a beautiful form and a delightful game. 57 In Looking Backward, however, he offers the commodification of experience as the means of entry into life systematized on a global scale. Although Bellamy's approach to a concept of world culture was highly, even bizarrely, idiosyncratic, he managed to conceive of a society that, in the words of Ernst Bloch, "lies flawlessly in the line of extension of the modem world. "58 The result was the most confidently aggressive vision of the consolidation of the globe to come out of late-nineteenth-century America. This vision, though pervasive in Looking Backward and its sequel, is often expressed in ways other than remarks about the endless expansion of economic arrangements. It is present, for example, in the description of the suburbs of Boston given by West on the occasion of a ride he takes with Dr. Leete on an "aircar." Still we swept on mile after mile, league after league, toward the interior, and still the surface below presented the same parklike aspect that had marked the immediate environs of the city. Every natural feature appeared to have been idealized and all its latent meaning brought out by the loving skill of some consummate landscape artist, the works of man blending with the face of Nature in perfect harmony. Such arrangements of scenery had not been uncommon in my day, when great cities prepared costly pleasure grounds, but I had never imagined anything on a scale like this. "How far does this park extend?" I demanded at last. "There seems no end to it." "It extends to the Pacific Ocean," said the doctor. 59 With the imposition of "meaning" upon the landscape, the almost literal molding of the continent, Bellamy forecloses the possibil-

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ity that an "unaccounted-for residuum" might lead one to call the comprehensiveness of his system into question: even rocks and trees speak of the religion of solidarity. They are the fitting backdrop for a society whose "fundamental principles," as Dr. Leete remarks, "settle for all time the strifes and misunderstandings which in your day called for legislation" (Looking Backward, 11516). History, like the landscape, has been contained, its latent meaning realized; historical debate has been replaced by posthistorical conversation, exploration by sightseeing. Here it is worth noting that the siInilarity between the world as described by Bellamy and by Heidegger breaks down. If for Bellamy the conquest of the world as picture brings to an end the adventures (as opposed to the diversions) of human being, for Heidegger it signals a new beginning: "Only there where the consummation of the modern age attains the heedlessness that is its peculiar greatness is future history being prepared"; "Only when this is assured through world views will the possibility arise of there being a fertile soil for Being to be in question in an original way."60 Whether or not this ends up being the case, Bellamy's utopian writings give literary expression to the energies that from his time to ours have been unleashed in the ongoing project of unifying the world along lines suggested by the catchword"Americanism." Although other writers were to see different implications in this process, along with different methods of halting or promoting its spread, Bellamy's often prescient work suggests why one English cultural critic in 1901 felt called upon to announce that "the trend of the twentieth century" was to be "the Americanization of the world."61

2

The Imperial Ghetto

A strong and sweet Female Race, a race of perfect Mothers-is what is needed.-Walt Whitman l

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's first publication to win at least modest recognition was a satirical poem that appeared in 1890 in The Nationalist, a journal dedicated to disseminating Bellamy's ideals.2. For this performance she even received a letter of warm praise from William Dean Howells, who at the end of his life was instrumental in promoting the publication of "The Yellow Wallpaper," the short, sensational work on which her present reputation rests. 3 The Gilman revival that has been going on in the academy since the 1970S led to the republication (for the first time in book form) of her utopian novel Herland, and no doubt Gilman's appropriation of the utopian mode is in part responsible for one critic's claim that she was "the truest Bellamyist of them all. "4 To be sure, not all Gilman scholars embrace this iqea. Ann J. Lane, for example, sees Looking Backward as "typical of nineteenth-century utopias" in its reliance on technology, whereas Gilman's utopia heroically "does not fit any category."s We shall see that the absence of elaborate gadgetry in Gilman's utopia does not prevent Gilman from viewing the world as a stockpile of raw materials, just as Bellamy did. My main contention in this chapter, however, is that much of Gilman's work is informed by a keen

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awareness of, and marked hostility to, the forces of globalization that Bellamy embraced. Although Gilman was drawn to the strict regimentaion of life in Bellamy'S utopia-indeed, the hallmark of virtually all her work is the advocacy of strong, centralized regulation of all human activity-as she got older she became increasingly alarmed by the weakening of cultural and racial boundaries, boundaries about which Bellamy, as we have seen, was for the most part indifferent. Bellamy and his sometime follower Gilman both felt that the hubbub of modernity called for a reformulation of the grounds of human solidarity, but the reformulations they proposed differ radically from one another. Bellamy, taking his cue from the economic, technological, and political arrangements that brought about an unprecedented compression of the earth, looked beyond local traditions and forward to a newly abstract conception of humanity. Gilman, by contrast, looked backward to what she saw as a primordial racial past, finding there the uncontarninated essence of the groups with which she identified: Aryans and, more specifically, Anglo-Saxons. Eric Hobsbawm and others have shown how many in the West responded to the increased cosmopolitanism of the fin de siecle by "inventing" national traditions that manifested their difference from their neighbors. 6 Gilman fits into this pattern of tradition building, and, not surprisingly, finds that almost everything valuable about humanity derives somehow or other from the rugged purity of her racial forebears. Gilman and Bellamy thus present exemplary, alternative responses to the consolidation of the globe. Bellamy envisions a framework that can accommodate any kind of difference, which to some extent he accomplishes by dismissing the fundamental significance of those differences in the first place. For Bellamy, that is, the peaceful coexistence of different cultural arrangements on the earth is no more surprising-and really no more interesting-than the coexistence of gyro stands and kimchi joints at the food court in the mall. Bellamy's department store world is unified, but it exhibits what we might call a weak unity, one that cultivates a latitudinarian tolerance for all kinds of differences, provided they do not become too different-become too different,

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that is, by calling into question the basic organization of the world as a consumer paradise; Gilman, however, seeks to enforce what we could call a strong unity. Thus, whereas Bellamy imagines an all-inclusive world order based on the superficiality of cultural difference, Gilman hankers after strictly exclusive social arrangements that, by her lights, offer the best chance for the rebirth of threatened Anglo-Saxon virtues. If Bellamy's works amount to an assault on the local, as I argued above, Gilman's aim throughout her career was to prevent the incursion of the global upon the local. An analysis of Gilman's writings can get nowhere unless one first appreciates her entanglement with the remarkable outpouring of sociological discourse, popular and academic, in the 1890S in America. In the lead article of the first issue of The American TournaI of Sociology in 1895, Albion Small went so far as to dub the age lithe era of sociology." 7 As noted in the introduction, Dorothy Ross has traced the emergence of sociology in the United States to a "crisis of American exceptionalism," a doubt about the direction and cohesiveness of American society that prompted calls for a scientific explanation of social problems. 8 The domestic intellectual convulsions charted by Ross, however, were part of a global reconceptualization of nationality. It is hardly a coincidence that the "science" promising some answers to America's questions sprang up at just this time in Europe, where many similar doubts about national cohesion had appeared without the benefit of American exceptionalism. Focus on the integrity and structure of the nation was due in part to globalization. In an analysis of the institutional blossoming of sociology between 1890 and 1920, Roland Robertson has pointed out that "a central ingredient of the remarkable compression of the world-as-a-whole was, indeed, the idea that the national society was the major unit both for the allegiance of individuals and of the global system per se."9 Albion Small suggested the same thing when he argued that the need to understand largescale social action becomes more urgent lias divisions of labor and

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competition become territorial and international, not less than individual, as occupations are more visibly affected by the actions of distant persons, [and] as communication becomes accurate and rapid between groups of men industrially related though geographically separate."10 Keeping such amalgamations in mind, we can see that the desire for a science that could give an account of "societies and their viability ... derives from a particular period of world history."ll Globalization was "one of the circumstances which produced the particular interests of sociology in its most crucial phase of institutionalization," even if explicit "interest in globalization was rather slender" among the great European sociologists, such as Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel. 12 One sign of globalization that generally received more attention in the United States than in Europe was the commingling of the races. As Arthur Vidich and Stanford Lyman noted in their pathbreaking history of the discipline, "the centrality of race" in American sociological thought has been evident from its beginnings. 13 When sociology took firm shape as a discipline in the 1890S, American descendents of both Northern Europeans and Africans were joined by unprecedented numbers of Southern Europeans, Eastern Europeans, and Asians. Indeed, for many onlookers at the time, America in the 1890S already answered to Arjun Appadurai's description of America in the 1990S: "a postnational space marked by its whiteness but marked too by its uneasy engagement with diasporic peoples, mobile technologies, and queer nationalities."14 Gilman shared with many sociologists a marked preocccupation with diasporic peoples in the United States. For example, Lester Ward, whose early work Gilman much admired and who got to know Gilman in the 1890S, liked to speculate about "the great final blending of all races into one," a "great united world-race."ls E. A. Ross, Ward's nephew by marriage and a favorite correspondent of Gilman (she addressed one of her suicide notes to him), brooded with rather less pleasure on the same possibility, and chided Northern Europeans who married members of what he deemed "inferior" races: "A people that has no more respect for its ancestors and no more pride of race than this

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deserves the extinction that surely awaits it."16 Gilman, as we shall see, preferred Ross's robust racism to Ward's all-inclusive cosmopolitanism, but the fact that such speculations poured off the presses around the turn of the century suggests the extent to which the mixing of the races in America led to contemplation of the ultimate destiny of humanity, and especially of what would follow from the globalization of the gene pool. A word must also be said about Gilman's intellectual and rhetorical style, which derives very noticeably from the sociological work of her contemporaries. In an intentionally provocative suggestion, Ann Lane has recently proposed that we place Gilman "in the company of Henry Adams, Charles Darwin, Max Weber, William [sic) Spencer, Karl Marx, Frederick [sic) Engels, and Sigmund Freud," on account of the "range of her scope and vision and soaring imagination."l? Perhaps Lane overestimates Gilman's originality in part because she does not attend to the fact that "scope," "vision," and "soaring imagination" were the stock-in-trade of sociologically minded intellectuals in Gilman's time: such qualities were among the marks by which sociology was recognized as a distinctive commodity on the intellectual market. One catches the period flavor of such writings in the following passage from Lester Ward's The Psychic Factors of Civilization, a book presenting ideas "than which," Gilman later enthused, "nothing so important to humanity has been advanced since the Theory of Evolution."IB We know that nothing more readily captivates the human female than the display of brilliant mental qualities, and it is easy to conceive that the female Anthropus of the African or Lemurian forest may have been more attracted by male sagacity and success in circumventing rivals than in [sic) any other quality. If this be so it explains many difficulties in the path of the student of man. It explains especially the relatively small brain of woman and places the large brain of man on the list of secondary sexual characters ... and thus may be understood the fact that man has become a being with enormously developed cerebral hemispheres. 19

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For Ward, contemplating the world with his enormous cerebral hemispheres, sociology is the discipline into which can be gathered all the accumulated data of humanity, from the romantic preferences of "the female Anthropus" to the niceties of Cartesian dualism. Nothing is outside its range. It is very revealing of the time that Albion Small introduced The American TournaI of Sociology with hopes that it might become "a factor of restraint upon premature sociological opinion."20 Others, however, clearly reveled in the freewheeling atmosphere, the heady excitement, offered by sociology's enticing interdisciplinarity. Although Max Weber, too, exhibited a stunning breadth in his writings, one could never mistake a page of his for a page of Ward's. Indeed, if one had to provide a famous European alongside whom Gilman might stand, a more likely candidate than those Lane provides might be Oswald Spengler, whose sweeping generalizations, often unencumbered by an evidentiary basis, and vast systematization of world-historical epochs marked the culmination, if that is the right word, of the overheated intellectual style appropriated by Gilman and a good many scholars of her generation who had found their way into American universities. Along with scope and style, Gilman inherited from sociologists the desire to put all their freshly acquired knowledge into action. In this regard, E. A. Ross's Social Control (discussed in the introduction) is paradigmatic in that it displays the vaunted, universal application of sociological analysis, and then goes on to use that analysis as the foundation of an exquisitely detailed regimentation of human activity, a regimentation that was envisioned as the perfection of human society conceived on a planetary scale. The utopian strain of much sociological work prompted Albion Small to single out "two postulates of social philosophy held today in every variety of form and force by unprecedented numbers, first, that the relations of man to man are not what they should be; second, that something must be done directly, systematically, and on a large scale to right the wrongs."2l One is even tempted to see the first word in the title of Lester Ward's Applied Sociology (1906) as redundant, given the many overt links between socio-

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logical reflection of the era and the impulse to reform society along "rational" lines. Just what direction such reform took, however, depended on extrasociological predilections of the sociologists. For Gilman and Ross, sociology provided useful new ways of describing the threat posed by immigration to the alleged purity of olden-time American (that is to say, in their opinion, Anglo-Saxon) culture. Their work is characterized by a tenderly cultivated nostalgia for the days of undisputed Anglo-Saxon ascendancy; as Roland Robertson has pointed out, "[t]he period during which modern wilful nostalgia developed in earnest was also the period when so-called classical sociology was formulated .... Wilful nostalgia among national elites fed into the work of leading sociologists, and vice versa." The newly heightened consciousness of distinctive cultural traditions was in part brought on, as we have seen, by the possibilty of their submergence in an unprecedentedly globalized cultural broth. Robertson, indeed, insists that "the 'discovery' and 'invention' of tradition has to be situated within the complex sets of relations between penetrating and penetrated societies in global context."22 As we shall see, Gilman's work offers a good deal of evidence supporting Robertson's thesis, as she was highly conscious of the interpenetration of societies, and as she tended to see any kind of syncretism produced by such mergers as an undesirable aberration from vanishing racial-cultural norms. Gilman's habit of seeing the world in terms of norm and aberration was already firm when she wrote her first book, Women and Economics. This "Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution," the subtitle, largely consists of a Lamarckian treatise on factors contributing to what she judged to be the ever-increasing differentiation of the human sexes. Basing her thesis squarely on the "natural tendency of any function to increase in power by use," and on the genetic transmission ofthese adaptations, Gilman charts the history of humankind from primal homogeneity to the point when "sex-distinction" became morbid and debilitating.2,~ According to Gilman, the restrictive life forced upon women by the" sexuo-economic relation" (37)

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had made them into what amounted to a degenerate species specializing in "sex-functions" 139). The IImale of our species," on the other hand, "has become human, far more than male" (43). This variation on arguments made at least since Wollstonecraft and Madame de Stael is given a twist by Gilman's desire to ground her polemic in biology, leading her to portray cultural conditioning as genetic determinism. The only reason the female has not withered away completely is that each "girl child inherits from her father a certain increasing percentage of human development, human power, human tendency" (69-70). The constant infusion of men's more human genes alone "has saved us from such a female as the gypsy moth" (70). Gilman defines historical women-as opposed to the essential woman-as deviations from the male, "who is a far more normal animal than the female of his species" (43). At such moments in the text, theory lifts us to a supercultural perch from which we can view the assembled civilizations of the earth, which to the sociological eye exhibit, in spite of their superficial differences, a specieswide conformity. Like the sociologists from whom she learned, Gilman aspires to grasp the various societies of the globe as manifestations of deep, universally valid principles. For Gilman, then, the essential truth of humanity is preserved in the blood and threatened by historical contingencies that carry the potential to debilitate it permanently; there are only so many normal genes, but an infinite amount of time to water them down. This recurrent feature of her thought applies not only to the boy who "inherits from his mother the increasing percentage of sex-development, sex-power, sex-tendency" (43)-all contributing to the lIexcessive sex-indulgence [that] is the distinctive feature of humanityll (30)-but to classes and races as well. For example, arguing that in the country, lIamong peasant classes, there is much less sex-distinction than in cities," she concludes, "It is from the country and the lower classes that the fresh blood pours into the cities, to be weakened in its turn by the influence of this unnatural distinction until there is none left to replenish the nation" (73). Undoubtedly this is not the first time that the city is pictured as a vampire sucking dry the wealth of the country, but

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for Gilman this image is hardly a metaphor. The city works real changes on the genetic profile of the nation, and it seems only a matter of time before environment triumphs over blood. As Sir Francis Galton, the father of modern eugenics, was to pronounce three years later, lithe towns sterilize rural vigour."24 One of the ways Gilman tries to alarm her audience over the differentiation of the sexes is, in fact, to compare their commingling with the intermixing of races, linking-not for the last time in her career-gender and race: "We have made a creature who is not homogeneous, whose life is fed by two currents of inheritance [that is, male and female] as dissimilar and opposed as could be well imagined. We have bred a race of psychic hybrids, and the moral qualities of hybrids are well known" (331). Clearly exercised by the kinds of unions made more likely by the imperial expansion of the West and immigration to America, she warns, "Marry an Anglo-Saxon to an African or Oriental, and their child has a dual nature" (332), a nature analogous to the "moral miscegenation" (339) that is the widespread consequence of dissimilarities between the sexes. Assuming, with good reason, that her audience would consider paramount the preservation of AngloSaxon blood-which earlier in Women and Economics she labels lithe most powerful expression of the latest current of fresh racial life from the north" (I47)-Gilman's rhetorical power rests at these moments on a fear of the disappearance of that difference, of a browning out of white humanity, the gradual sapping of fresh, northern blood. Gilman'S Anglo-Saxons, with their precious genetic cargo, are to the world as the farmers are to the city dweller, and, like the farmers, are threatened by intercourse with their populous surroundings. Still worse, in her eyes, things have come to such a genetic pass that pernicious hybridity is virtually unavoidable: for Gilman, crossing men and women has become as insidious as crossing Anglo-Saxons and Africans, the results of which are, she assures us, "well known." If the problems stemming from sexual differentiation were plain to Gilman, she faced difficulties in her attempt to provide a model for what humanity should aim for. Because, as Gilman

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constantly points out, the oppression of women has adverse effects on both them and men, the question of what an ideal human being would look like is problematicj because history simply is by and large the history of a perverse "sexuo-economic" relationship, no exemplars are ready to hand, despite the superior normality of the male. Just what Gilman takes the content of that normality to be, however, is revealed as the male's paradoxical approximation of maternity. By encroaching on the freedoms of the woman to the point of reducing her to a state of dependency, man assumed the maternal position of provider and nurturer. "He was not only compelled to serve her needs, but to fulfil in his own person the thwarted uses of maternity. He became, and has remained, a sort of man-mother" 1125). "The subjection of woman has involved to an enormous degree the maternalizing of man" 1127). For Gilman this is something other than the mere rearrangement of conventional roles, for motherhood has a meaning that pierces its social determinantsj it expresses, in fact, what is deepest and most essential in human being. Continuing her analysis of ancient social evolution, she borrows Lester Ward's suggestion that "from Nature's standpoint the female is the organism and the male only a sometimes useful, sometimes necessary adjunct or incident."25 Here is Gilman's image of the primordial purity that we can now recognize as a rough draft of HeIland: "She was the deep, steady, main stream of life, and he the active variant, helping to widen and change that life, but rather as an adjunct than as an essential. Races there were and are which reproduce themselves without the masculine organism-by hermaphroditism and parthenogenesis" 1130). This last sentence not only displays Gilman's evident belief that biology points to truths culture has concealed, but suggests the direction of her utopian works to come. The parthenogenesis of the Herlanders is no whimsical narrative device, but an arrangement grounded in nature. Because men are mere variants of essential women, their elimination is simply a precondition of a just picture of what human society is "really" about, just as, for Gilman, the elimination of "nonAryans" would do much to reveal the highest type of which hu-

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manity is capable. As we shall see, much of Gilman's work represents an attempt to find some way back to the purity of this ancient origin, some way of undoing the harm brought about by patriarchal-imperial disruptions. One aspect of that harm for Gilman is what might be called the globalization of femininity, the process by which evolution and patriarchal practices around the world have conspired to reduce women to a nearly uniform type, whereas men have preserved more of their individual and racial distinctiveness. Gilman's evidence of a worldwide conformity in the discourse of gender comes from a "Handbook of Proverbs of All Nations": the proverbs concerning women almost invariably apply to them in general-to the sex. Those concerning men qualify, limit, describe, specialize .... But of woman it is always and only "a woman," meaning simply a female, and recognizing no personal distinction. . . . Occasionally a distinction is made between "a fair woman" and "a black woman" .... But in common thought it is simply a woman always. The boast of the profligate that he knows "the sex" [is one example of such thinking], so recently expressed by a new poet-"The things you will learn from the Yellow and Brown, they'll'elp you an' 'eap with the White." (49-50) Gilman here tries to point to the degeneracy of patriarchal culture by suggesting that distinctions among yellow, brown, and white women are outweighed by their similarities. The "proverbs of all nations," along with the testimony of the profligate, testify to the way the distinctiveness of individual women, and of the races to which they belong, is plowed under by their "sex-distinction"; the fact that they are women is taken to be the most important thing about them, and the condition to which Gilman claims evolution has reduced them to some extent accounts, in her view, for what might otherwise amount to pure prejudice. What Gilman finds revolting in the profligate's remark, which she sees as thoroughly representative of patriarchal discourse, and which suggests that brown, yellow, and white women belong to the same grouping,

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can be summed up as follows: As far as most people are concerned, when it comes to defining a woman, sex trumps race. Deploring this situation, Gilman fuses the questions of race and gender, taking the globalization of female identity as a sign of the women's degradation-white women's degradation, that is. This fusion leads us to the crucial fact of Gilman's feminism: for her, women's struggle for freedom cannot be thought of simply as a contest between men and women in individual societies; it is part of a global drama, reaching back to the prehistorical, evolutionary past, and forward to the likelihood of an increasingly cosmopolitan future in which not just women but also men will be threatened with the loss of their distinctive racial identity. Almost alone among readers of Gilman, Susan S. Lanser has attempted to demonstrate not merely the coexistence of Gilman's feminism and racism, but their interpenetration. All too often, and not just in literary criticism, when we encounter figures from the past whose writings contain ideas we like along with some we hate, our first impulse is to suppose that the things we like belong to the "progressive" part of the writer's thought, and that this part can be detached intact, as it were, from the ideas we find objectionable. 26 Lanser's reading of "The Yellow Wallpaper," however, suggests that we must take both the progressive and the reactionary in Gilman as part of a single package deal, one pointing to the ways Gilman's work fits into an emerging discourse of globalization. Gilman's famous story details the medically sanctioned torture carried out in a rented "colonial mansion" by a doctor imposing a "rest cure" on his depressed wife, who narrates the tale. 27 Instead of restoring her to health, however, the wife's confinement triggers an obsession with the wallpaper of her bedroom, and finally she collapses into psychosis. Although this story has quite appropriately been interpreted as an attack on sexism, and particularly on the restriction of the scope of women's activity in society, it also needs to be understood as the story of the narrator's thwarted attempt to reassert what Gilman understands as the natural, primordial meaning of womanhood, a task ultimately accomplished by the women of Herland.

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Lanser's reading of the story hinges on the color of the wallpaper, and she brings together an impressive amount of evidence suggesting just how symbolically charged the color yellow was in the period that witnessed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Noting that the story turns on the nameless narrator's fantasies about a yellow woman trying to break out of the wallpaper into the room, Lanser asks if the wallpaper might not represent "the political unconscious of a culture in which an Aryan woman's madness, desire, and anger ... are projected onto the 'yellow' woman who is, however, also the feared alien.... [Pjerhaps the narrator is both resisting and embracing the woman of color who is self and not-self, a woman who might need to be rescued from the text of patriarchy but cannot yet be allowed to go free."2s Although Lanser does not rely on Gilman's Women and Economics to bolster her interpretation, we can see that it, along with the sociological writings to which it is allied, can help us advance the argument Lanser puts forward. The attitude Lanser detects in "The Yellow Wallpaper" perfectly matches the sometimes ambivalent positions evident in Women and Economics. If on the one hand Gilman clearly sympathizes with the "yellow" and "brown" women trapped in roles dictated by the patriarchy, on the other she is uncomfortable with the fact that globally disseminated patriarchal practices lump her together with those she considers her racial inferiors. The drama that unfolds in liThe Yellow Wallpaper" may thus involve not merely the narrator's struggle to overcome her husband's stranglehold on her life, but also her increasingly intense identification-and ultimate merger-with a yellow woman. For Lanser, what the narrator wants above all is to construct a "white, female, intellectual class subjectivity."29 The failure to achieve that goal, at least in any straightforward sense, provides important clues about the threats Gilman sees facing female subjectivity in the modern world. A hint about what is essential to the concept of subjectivity in "The Yellow Wallpaper" may be found in a parenthetical comment on the story by Walter Benn Michaels: "it is about a woman driven crazy (if she is crazyl."30

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Clearly, Gilman and many of her interpreters (with the possible exception of Michaels himself) are arguing that the narrator's madness-or whatever they call it-is a real tragedy. It has now become commonplace, however, to see her final condition as in addition a kind of Pyrrhic victory, a flight to another realm where she may control, by means of whatever delusions, her own destiny. Thus Elaine R. Hedges, in her afterword to the story, argues that although the narrator "has been defeated ... in her mad-sane way she has seen the situation of women for what it is .... Madness is her only freedom" (53). One recalls that the narrator's fantasies focus on a figure "trying to climb through" (30) the pattern of the wallpaper. By the end of the story, the narrator says to her husband, "I've got out at last.... And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back" (36). She has become the woman she had previously only observed. Here, indeed, the situation is given a turn of the screw by the fact that the other is only imagined in the first place, a fictional outside invented ultimately only for the purpose of claiming it as an extension of the self who gave birth to it. There is a suggestion, however, that such an act of possession is the precondition of the narrator's sense of self, for only in the words of the possessed woman do we hear the assertiveness that everywhere else the nameless narrator cannot express. In a sense, then, she gains an identity only when she has become a duality, only when she has imaginatively taken possession of another, just as her husband has treated her body as if he himself were its owner. Presented, in the example of her husband, with a culture in which ownership of another seems to be the precondition for mastery of one's self, the narrator engages in a spectacular recapitulation of the terms of her own oppression. Thus not only the husband's solicitous tyranny, but also the whole patriarchal model of selfhood contribute to the disappearance of her self. The husband remains completely blind to the domination that bolsters, or rather constitutes, his sense of self, and in this regard he richly deserves the amused ridicule of his mad wife. Carefully avoiding the grounds for such ridicule, Michaels and others acknowledge

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that this madness may be wisdom, may be admirable, may be an escape from conditions anyone would be crazy to put up with. If the narrator ultimately escapes into a mad version of patriarchal selfhood based on domination, the imagined object of that domination is a figure who appears threatening and sympathetic by turns. The narrator may need to take possession of someone else in order to take control of herself, but once she has merged with the yellow woman she is reduced to crawling about on all fours, entertaining thoughts of suicide, and wonderingly noting the confusion of those around her. She is the very image of the kind of moral collapse that also occupied Frank Norris in Vandover and the Brute and Max Norclau in Degeneration. Keeping in mind the racist ideology of Women and Economics, we might also conclude that the narrator's degeneration hints at the fear of hybridity evident throughout Gilman's work: the merger of white and yellow women results in a degraded hybrid, and, as Gilman notes, the moral qualities of hybrids are well known. The woman trapped behind the wallpaper may be a sympathetic figure-we would like to see her freed-but her "escape" heralds the destruction of her liberator. In his sociological treatise on the dangers posed to white America by immigration, Gilman's friend E. A. Ross presents what may be a revealing parallel to "The Yellow Wallpaper." If the political unconscious of Gilman's story darkly hints at threats to white women's subjectivity-from both men and an alien presence-the political consciousness of Ross's text quite explicitly contains the image of a white American identity imperiled by global compression. Ross begins his consideration of the effect of imInigration on the status of women by painting a harrowing portrait of the way Asian, Italian, and Slavic women are brutally controlled by the men in their home societies. Although his descriptions show signs of sympathy for these women, his chief concern is the effect their immigration will have on white women in the United States: Until recently nowhere else in the world did women enjoy the freedom and encouragement they received in America. It

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is folly, however, to suppose that their lot will not be affected by the presence of six millions from belated [that is, Southern and Eastern] Europe and from Asia.... That the woman's movement in America is to meet with hard sledding cannot be doubted. The [un?]yielding conservatism of our East has been buttressed of late by the incorporation of millions of immigrants bred in the coarse peasant philosophy of sex. It may be long before women win in the East the recognition they have won in the more American parts of the country.31 In a similar vein, the editors of The Independent lamented, liThe wave of recent immigration has brought with it the Oriental conception of women's status."32 When we come to HeIland we will see in more detail the results of subordinating concern for women around the world to anxiety about white women at home, but the main point here is that Gilman was not alone in her thinking about the identity of American women: for her and others, American identity had to be conceived as part of an emergent global cultural system, as the new mobility of populations involved America in an ever more intricate mesh of cross-cultural hybridization and intercontinental entanglements. Although liThe Yellow Wallpaper" seems on the surface the most domestic-in both senses-of narratives, we are now in a position to appreciate that in some ways it anticipates HeIland, Gilman'S utopian depiction of white women cut off from the rest of the world, surrounded by the darker-skinned natives of South America. By putting HeIland in the context of Gilman'S fears about the way global compression threatens white female subjectivity, quite a different text emerges than the one most critics have found. According to the prevailing view, the utopian novel suited the aims of Gilman's feminism by subverting the confinements of a realism dedicated to the mere representation of, and thus ultimate acquiescence to, a patriarchal order. Summing up this position, Susan Gubar argues that "women abused by the probable refuse it by imagining the possible in a revolutionary rejection of patriarchal culture"; "feminism imagines an alterna-

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tive reality that is truly fantastic."33 Along these lines, Herland is seen as a sanctuary for the imagination, a place the reader can visit to gain a vantage point outside the prevailing culture. As Christopher Wilson puts it, "Herland is conceived as a mythological Archime dean standing point."34 HeIland itself may therefore be less of a prescriptive model than a prelude to a critique, a machine for dismantling popular prejudices with an eye to some future reconstruction. Critics who take this position underscore the importance of Gilman's humor, seeing it as a key to her method of pointing out the antinomies and irrationality of everyday patriarchallife. According to Gilman's latest biographer, "Herland is an example of Gilman's playful best."35 The utopian novel complements Women and Economics, Gilman's serious critique of things as they are, with a shattering laughter that disregards and uproots the signposts of patriarchal thought allegedly grounded in the bedrock of nature. What such readings leave out is Gilman's anxiety about the consequences of America's intercourse with the rest of the world. Patriarchy was not the only thing in the modern world she wanted to judge from an Archimedean standing point; in Herland she sought to construct a place immune from the consequences not only of patriarchy, but also of globalization. Her decision to present her vision in a utopian novel seems linked, like so much of her work, to the influence of sociology on her fundamental assumptions. As we have seen, sociological discourse in Gilman's day was firmly rooted in a desire to reorganize the world along rational lines. Sociologists wanted, in Albion Small's words, to ensure that "that which has been unconscious and accidental hitherto will be methodically undertaken hereafter."36 As a result, reform-minded sociologists worked, consciously or unconsciously, with models answering to their notions of the goals toward which their methodical undertakings would tend. In keeping with the (often unacknowledged) utopian stance of sociology, Gilman's project is to present the true, normative picture of her culture, even though it is a norm her culture no longer recognizes. Gilman believes herself, that is, in a situation in

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which a fantastic picture of a perfect civilization carries a greater ontological weight than would a realistic portrait of the civilization to which she belongs. Utopia is one of the possible responses to such a situation. As Gary Saul Morson has described them, utopias suggest that "the real world is an illusion and the imagined world is the higher Reality. In this respect, all utopias are Platonic."37 So far has culture strayed from its ground in nature that "realism" can present at best a coherent picture of an order that needs to be destroyed, not represented. It is not surprising to find Gilman writing, "[Howells] never was a favorite of mine you know. His work is exquisite, but save for that Chinese delicacy of workmanship it seems to me of small artistic value."3s Gubar, therefore, is exactly right when she describes Herland as a place where "culture ... is no longer opposed to nature."39 Gilman hints so much herself when she has Van Jennings, the male narrator of HeIland, say that the children "did not seem 'cultivated' at all-it had become a natural condition" (72). More problematic is what Gubar believes lies behind this naturalization of society: "What Gilman seeks to call into question is the idea that there is or can be or should be a single definition of what constitutes the female."40 If, however, as would follow from Morson's description of all utopias as Platonic, Gilman undertakes a more prescriptive project, then much of what Gubar sees as liberating in HeIland is thrown into doubt. Like most utopias, HeIland has a fairly rudimentary plot. Somewhere in South America, three male explorers-an anthropologist, a doctor, and a rich adventurer-hear of a land inhabited entirely by women, a land from which no man has ever returned. With the help of a native guide, they find the country perched on a plateau accessible only by airplane. Landing in Herland, the explorers encounter a large number of women who, when provoked, anesthetize and imprison them. Once the men have learned the language and what is expected of them as guests, they are released from prison-though they are not allowed to leave the countryand are gradually introduced, along with us, to the history and culture of the Herlanders. Herland had been founded by a Euro-

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pean expedition whose men were wiped out by the combined effect of a conflict with the natives-"maleness means war," Gilman states elsewhere41 -and an appropriately p~c "volcanic outburst" (54); what really destroys the men are the pernicious tendencies of masculinity. When the male slaves of the Europeans took advantage of these circumstances and mounted a revolt, the surviving women "rose in sheer desperation and slew their brutal conquerors" (55). Having successfully isolated themselves from the natives, the Herlanders are saved from extinction by a miraculous instance of parthenogenesis, a power that becomes endemic to the race. The three American explorers duly fall in love with three Herlanders, are married, and subsequently frustrated by their wives' total lack of interest in, and prohibition against, sexual relations. When the most misogynistic of the men unsuccessfully attempts to rape his wife, the men are expelled. Accompanying them is Jennings's wife, who intends to explore the United States-which she does in the sequel, With Her in Our Land-and report back to Herland on the desirability of establishing a connection to the outside, male-dominated world. The challenge to critics who want to preserve Herland as an open-ended instance of negating, literary play lies in a sentence like this one of Jennings's: "We had quite easily come to accept the Herland life as normal, because it was normal" (136). Gubar's strategy is instructive. Comparing Herland to another tale of male exploration, H. Rider Haggard's She, she attempts to demonstrate "the misogyny implicit in the imperialist romance," a romance Haggard blatantly provides, and which the male trio in Herland attempts to enact in the paradise they discover.42 Gubar's analysis of Haggard and of Gilman's male characters is convincing. What she does not take into account are the imperial implications of Herland itself: it is, after all, a settlement of white, European women in the middle of the South American jungle, a remnant of the first great wave of European exploration. As Jennings notes, "there is no doubt in my mind that these people were of Aryan stock, and were once in contact with the best civilization of the old world," presumably because their culture does not resemble the

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implicitly inferior ones surrounding it. Even though they were "somewhat darker than our northern races because of their constant exposure to sun and air," Jennings assures his readers, "They were 'white'" (54). By these quotation marks Gilman indicates that whiteness expresses something other and deeper than pigmentation, something that persists even when it disappears. Gilman's metaphysical racial categorizations also reveal an international theme: the essentializing of races that underwrote the imperialist ventures of Western powers. Unlike Bellamy, who looked forward to a time when there would "no longer be either Jew or Greek, Irishman, German, Swede or Frenchman, but Americans only,"43 a time when racial distinctions would be dissolved in universal humanity, Gilman everywhere attempts to preserve the racial and thus, according to her lights, cultural unity of "Aryans," even when they are surrounded by non-Europeans. It in fact seems more than chance that in Gilman's tale it takes representatives of white imperial power to uncover the secrets of utopia. The "savages" who first tell the explorers of a "strange and terrible Woman Land" can say only that it is "a Big Country, Big Houses, Plenty People" (2- 3). Their inability to master English grammar is a correlative of their inability to know or understand the transplanted European culture near which they have always lived, even though a new arrival like Jennings, a sociologist, has little trouble understanding the natives, making out "quite a few legends and folk myths of these scattered tribes" (2), tribes so scattered that he plainly believes he understands their underlying similarities better than they do themselves. The European will to knowledge is ultimately what makes the discovery of Herland possible in the first place: the three young men had been lured to South America by the "chance to join a big scientific expedition" (2). Herland remains unknown until the imperialist and scientific projects of the nineteenth century and the discourse that validated them designated the Southern Hemisphere as an object of study and destination for tourists, suggesting that for Gilman, as for most of her era, it took whites to know "whites," and vice versa. 44 At the heart of Helland, then, is the story of whites becoming reacquainted

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with their own essential whiteness, a rediscovery of an unsullied culture from the past that has miraculously survived the convulsions of history intact. Even if Gilman had not thought there should be a single definition of what constitutes the female, she does seem to think there is a single definition of what constitutes the best civilization. Herland, however, suggests quite emphatically that there can be no discrepancy between individual and collective needs. When the men escape their prison, they are confronted with a large group of Herlanders, who "evidently relied on numbers, not so much as a drilled force but as a multitude actuated by a common impulse" (42). Just how this unanimity is achieved without acquiescence to some notion of what a person should be is hard to imagine. Moreover, the striking unity the women display when dealing with the outsiders suggests the possible motivation behind Gilman's emphasis on collective unity: only singleminded solidarity can effectively maintain the integrity of the group. An interest in the collectivity, that is, rises as the threat of alien invasion grows; one may even say that a concern for solidarity is a function of threats to solidarity. And for Gilman, collective action that overrides any individual objections-or rather, collective action that arises spontaneously from rigorously like-minded citizens-has an unquestioned worth. Whereas Bellamy's vision of unity depends on a flowing together of all humanity that obviates the need for irrevocable choices among values, Gilman's recalls something more like the Anglo-Saxon posse comitatus. Instead of dissolving into a universally extended cultural continuum, as the citizens of Looking Backward do, the individuals in Herland identify with a tightly exclusive tribe. Even writing in the utopian mode, however, Gilman cannot imagine such community coming about spontaneously. Among the more dangerous imports brought by the men is their knowledge of ecclesiastical history, and when Jennings reports to Ellador, his fiancee, that some people have believed in the daInnation of unbaptized infants, we learn that Herland is presided over by a

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priestly caste: "Every smallest village had its temple, and in those gracious retreats sat wise and noble women ... always ready to give comfort, light, or help, to any applicant" (I1o). Thrown into despair by Jennings's statements, Ellador runs "blinded and almost screaming" to one such counselor, who tells her, "Why, you blessed child ... you've got the wrong idea altogether. You do not have to think that there ever was such a God-for there wasn't ....

Nor even that this hideous false idea was believed by anybody" (I10; emphasis added). "You see," Ellador explains, "we are not accustomed to horrible ideas .... We haven't any.... [A]s soon as our religion grew to any height at all we left them out" (I IO-I1). We see here that the elders of Herland are perfectly willing, apparently with Gilman's consent, to disseminate lies to the population to enforce a calm cheerfulness. At one point Jennings describes the mothers of Herland as "Conscious Makers of People" (68). Even utopia requires an institutional structure to ensure that that consciousness is the right kind. Gilman clearly values conformity for its own sake, assaulting difference wherever she finds it, even in matters of limited concern to society as a whole. In Women and Economics, for example, she provides a rather chilling account of the common kitchens she wanted to establish-and which in fact were attempted in several experimental communes45-to relieve women of the chores of cooking. Cooking, for Gilman, "is a matter of law, not the harmless play of fancy" (231). The new kitchens would therefore be law-abiding: "This will not, of course, prevent some persons' having peculiar tastes; but these will know that they are peculiar, and so will their neighbors" (251). In matters as diverse as diet and theology, Gilman hopes for a self so thoroughly saturated with the beliefs of its community that there is really no longer any point in maintaining the distinction between public and private. She presents us with a self tailor-made for unflinching solidarity, and thus immune to alien influence. The landscaping and architecture of Herland also point to the political unconscious of Gilman's vision of communal purity.46 Herland presents the reader with an ensemble of ready-to-hand

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images of beauty and peace. Houses in Herland are scattered "among the green groves and gardens like a broken rosary of pink coral" (18) and are "grouped among parks and open squares, something as college buildings stand in their quiet greens" (19). When the men actually enter the town they call out, "It's too pretty to be true" and "It's like an exposition" (19). This last comment allies Herland with the "Court of Honor"-more widely known now as the "White City"-at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, which, not coincidentally, was the subject of Howells's AItrurian traveler's one admiring description of America. 47 Like the classical faltades dominating the Court of Honor, the "big white" buildings of Herland point to an allegedly timeless beauty, a standard that transcends the vicissitudes of history. A pretty town that looks like an exposition, however, that seems to be modeled on a simulation of a town, sounds more like a symptom of a growing taste for kitsch than like a utopian novum beckoning society onward. Matei Calinescu has argued that kitsch objects "are intended to look both genuine and skillfully fake .... [Sluch a fakiness calls the viewer's attention to certain agreeable qualities of proficiency, imitative skill, versatility and cuteness."48 Kitsch provides ersatz experience for those whose sense of the real seems to have slipped away, for those who, like Gilman, felt that their culture had become completely unmoored from just grounds in nature. If Herland is an attempt to reestablish that ground, it still cannot help but express one of the pervasive conditions it seeks to correct: the sense of vicariousness with which one experienced one's own culture. Indeed, the Herlanders rather surprisingly exhibit the meticulous self-consciousness about their culture that characterizes sociologists: in spite of their isolation from other cultures, they share with sociologists the appraising eye that turns everything human into an artifact. Thus, when one of the explorers presents jewels to the Herlanders, the recipients "discussed not ownership, but which museum to put them in" (89). The jewels become unintentional signs of the anthropological view of all cultures that alienates people even from their own.49 Instantaneous assumption into

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the museum-a characteristic of our own times-paradoxically makes of the museum not so much a special kind of space as merely an image of what the rest of the culture has become. A glass case in a sense encloses all of Herland, and this museumification of reality simultaneously expresses a longing for a natural culture immune from history, and the idea that such a culture must always exist in an antiseptic place behind plate glass. What is most noticeably preserved in Herland is a nostalgic image of women defined as producers of children, instead of as consumers of goods. In Herland, moreover, the glorification of motherhood is linked to a cultural-and genetic-isolationism. Gilman uses this fixed definition of female nature as a bulwark against the restlessly expansive and intrusive culture built by men, a restlessness that expresses an anxious lack of self-containment and self-contentedness. For the Herlanders, by contrast, motherhood is the clear and unambiguous fulfillment of their being, an honor allowed only the most revered among them, and the culminating instance of all the highest aspirations of civilization. The men in Herland, however, must cast themselves around the globe in search of a vocation. What is perhaps most dangerous about them, Gilman implies, is that their biology is so little a determinant of their lives. Their nature, as it were, is exiguous, has little content. In the very act of throwing themselves into imperial ventures, men reveal a lack of groundedness that renders them unfit for imperial governance. For Gilman, real cultural imperialists, those sustained by a sure sense of the superiority of their civilization and race, stay at home. To return to some of the earlier terms of Gilman's argument, mothers represent "the deep, steady, main stream of life/' and fathers "the active variant"; mothers are essential, fathers are "adjuncts." Gilman presents the mothers of Herland as Conscious Makers of People and the men as makers of nothing, revealing a complex of attitudes according to which men are to women as variant to essential, predation to production, and convention to nature. Indeed, Gilman's theories were in accord with a large body of scientific writings of the period. As G. Stanley Hall, founder of

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The American Journal of Psychology and president of Clark University, told the National Congress of Mothers, women flare themselves by nature in every faculty of their mind and in the very composition of their body more generic; they are nearer the race." Men, on the other hand, possess "the far more highly specialized and narrowed organism."so Lester Ward concurred: flit appears evident that from the standpoint of nature ... the female is the principal sex and constitutes the main trunk of development, she alone continuing the race."Sl (It was this idea that struck Gilman as the most important since the theory of evolution.) We see here that, contrary to many recent estimations, Gilman's recourse to the utopian mode did not allow her to create a purely negating, playful deconstruction of patriarchal thought. At best, she inverted that thought, a striking innovation that might, in fact, awaken readers to the problems of any discourse that attempts to ground essential human being in any biological or racial group whatever. This awakening, however, comes only from reading Gilman against the grain; there is no indication that Herland is meant to be an ironic vision. Even given such reservations about the extent to which Gilman was actually able to transcend the dominant thought of her time, many readers who would judge Bellamy's industrial army harshly would probably tend to view Gilman's performance in Herland as in some measure gentler, more humane, more acceptable. In part this is due to the smaller scale of Gilman's utopia. Although the regimentation of life in Herland is as thorough as in Bellamy's 2000, the precious isolation of the colony suggests Gilman's greater reverence for the local, for that which resists incorporation into the universal. That reverence, however, was informed by her attitudes toward race. Combining the enthusiasm for unity she inherited from Bellamy with a sharp insistence that that unity not be globalized in such a way as to bring different races into contact, Gilman is strangely and precariously poised between imperialism and isolationism, as the secluded colony of Europeans in the heart of the Amazonian jungle implies. The feeling that Gilman is somehow more humane than Bell-

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amy seems also to derive from more specifically aesthetic grounds. Gilman highlights the sheer beauty of her utopian world, while Bellamy portrays beauty as a fringe benefit of solidarity; it is important as a sign of the taming of the world rather than a good in itself. While first circling the plateau in the airplane-rather like Julian West flying away from Boston-Jennings describes "a land in a state of perfect cultivation, where even the forests looked as if they were cared for; a land that looked like an enormous park, only it was even more evidently an enormous garden" (II I. Even the aggressive, misogynistic Terry is impressed. "'I never saw a forest so petted, even in Germany' " (131, he says, linking the Herlanders to the European state most noted for centralized economic and, one gathers, arborial regulation. The idea that Bellamy'S engineered, machine-like society is more unendurably organized than Gilman's garden seems based on the questionable assumption that an interest in preserving greenery is inherently more liberal than an interest in the efficiency movement or urban planning. In fact, Gilman's proto-environmentalism and Bellamy's proto-Taylorism are equally manifestations of the essence of technology described by Heidegger. As one critic has recently pointed out, both "the lumber industry and the Sierra Club" believe "the environment is in man's keeping and control, and it is his responsibility to administer it."s2 The mastery of nature implied by the forest beautiful, the suggestion that the natural world appears to human beings in the form of a standing-reserve, comes closer to the surface when we learn that the well-tended trees are carefully cultivated for food: "Call this a forest?" the male explorers exclaim; "It's a truck farm!" (141. If, then, Gilman stands in relation to Bellamy as a gardener does to an engineer, we must not make the mistake of assuming that her form of utopianism is for this reason in some sense "softer," more playfully open-ended, less rigorous. Indeed, Zygmunt Bauman has recently suggested that the grimmest totalitarian enterprises of the twentieth century reflect "a gardener's vision, projected upon a world-size screen." This is more than just a fanciful analogy, for as Bauman argues, "there is an aesthetic dimension to

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the design" proposed by those who seek to reform the world in accordance with a utopian plan: "the ideal world about to be built conforms to the standards of superior beauty. Once built, it will be richly satisfying, like a perfect work of art." Although at this point in his argument Bauman does not specifically discuss utopia, his observations are clearly relevant to the works and issues we have been considering. He insists, "Modem culture is a garden culture. It defines itself as the design for an ideal life and a perfect arrangement of human conditions," suggesting that the utopian enterprise is a central expression of, rather than a revolt against, modernity.53 Bauman's emphasis on beauty allows us to see that the utopian aestheticization of the world, which is differently reflected in Bellamy, Howells, and Gilman, is closely related to the modem will toward organizational perfection. The combination of aesthetics and organization is succinctly expressed in Jennings's observation that in Herland, "Everything was beauty, order, perfect cleanness" (19). Part of that "cleanness" seems to be ethnic in nature: concepts of beauty, after all, usually rely as heavily on principles of exclusion as on arrangement. As Bauman points out, "Racism comes into its own only in the context of a design of the perfect society and intention to implement the design through planned and consistent effort." Only when people begin to dream of the potential for the technological management of the world do they also seriously consider solving the "problem" of racial difference: tI All visions of society-as-garden define parts of the social habitat as human weeds" to be "segregated, contained, prevented from spreading."54 As we might expect from this analysis, in Herland Gilman pursues what we might call a radically segregationalist aesthetic according to which beauty is ensured by "purity," by a refusal to mix the races and a reluctance even to mix the sexes. This refusal of assimilation points to Gilman's habit of imagining the highest possibility of human development under the sign of racial isolationism. Interpreters of Helland have tended to view Gilman's racism and her eugenic application of "insidious standards to determine who will reproduce" as "disappointing lapses in her dem-

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ocratic vision,"55 as if her attitudes on race were separable from her truly "radical" thought, as if her idealism and her racism were not cut from the same cloth. The work of Bauman and others, however, suggests that her garden civilization is inextricably intertwined with her vision of racial purity. The mixing of the races was not merely a matter of speculative concern for Gilman, for she, like so many of her generation, was deeply alarmed by the example of the modern cosmopolis. Indeed, in the sequal to HeIland, With Her in Our Land, Ellador comments that the United States seems to her "the most ill-assorted and unassimilable mass of human material that was ever held together by artificial means."56 New York, especially, disgusted Gilman. In her posthumously published autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she wrote of the "measureless relief" she experienced when moving out of the city to Norwich Town, Connecticut. 57 Writing with only a little more candor in a letter to her daughter Katherine, she tells of how happy she was to "escape, forever, this hideous city-and its Jews."S8 Even in Norwich Town, which seems "like heaven" after New York, "twothirds of the population are aliens, but they are not so overwhelmingly in evidence as in the great city. The people I meet, and mostly those I see in the neighborhood, are of native stock." The unobtrusiveness of "aliens" in the neighborhood is surely one reason she judges the town "beautiful," but her reflections take on a particular importance when we understand them as part of her prediction of the future in the United States. Just before describing the town, she bemoans "the rapidly descending extinction of our nation," by which she apparently means not the United States but the racial nation: "native stock." Along with many other trackers of demography, like Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby,59 she feels it is inevitable that "our grandchildren will belong to a minority of dwindling Americans, ruled over by a majority of conglomerate races quite dissimilar. "60 Implicitly insisting on the segregation of Anglo-Saxon genes, Gilman finds it axiomatic that the races will not mingle; she does not even contemplate the possibility that the progeny of the old stock themselves might be

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racially quite dissimilar from their ancestors. Writing from what she evidently imagines as a beleaguered enclave in the "Rose of New England," Gilman spends her later years in a town that seems like a blueprint for the future: the territorial integrity of Herland has dwindled to that of a ghetto. In Gilman's work, the belief in racial and cultural superiority that fueled imperialism is curiously enlisted in an act of exclusion. For imperialists, Western might could be used to establish empires over the globe; Gilman suggests it must be strenuously exercised to keep the rest of the globe at arm's length. If in her last years she often dwelled on the (for herl tragic inability of AngloSaxon genes to find a territory in which they could privately flourish, this only underlined the extent to which she had never accepted the cosmopolitan foundations of Bellamy's imaginings. But this does not mean that Gilman's writings are any less a response to globalizing forces than are Bellamy's. Both felt that the compression of the world called for an organized response, the difference between the two being that Bellamy imagined elaborate structures that could contain a globalized society, whereas Gilman sought refuge behind a defense that could keep the world at bay. In spite of this crucial divergence, Bellamy and Gilman alike long for a united culture that could repeal the I>ense of social fragmentation rampant in their America. Even though Bellamy saw salvation in the consolidation of political and economic global systems precisely where Gilman saw only a perilous hybridity, the rule of a "creature who is not homogeneous," they both gave expression to dreams of unity that continue to resonate in the debates of and over the cosmopolitan world.

3

The Culture of Conversation

The true charm of agreeable parlor society is, that there you lose your own sharp individuality and become delightfully merged in that soft social Pantheism, as it were, that rosy melting of all into one, ever prevailing in those drawing-rooms.-Herman Melville I

When a motion was made to form a committee on by-laws at a founding meeting of the First Nationalist Club of Boston, Edward Everett Hale, uncle of fellow Nationalist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, stood before the gathered Bellamy enthusiasts, "and in his peculiar hollow voice said, 'I had hoped that once before I died I might be a member of a body that had no by-laws to squabble over.' William Dean Howells was sitting on an empty wood box in the corner.... He kicked his heels vigorously against the wood box in applause. That made us alllaugh."2 The glaring inconsistency revealed by Hale and Howells is almost poignant. They and other elite Bostonians attended the meeting, apparently, because they wished to promote an unprecedented level of economic regulation and centralization, yet they balked at the difficulty and tedium-real enough-involved in establishing the rules of even a small club. We see that Nationalism was founded in an atmosphere of cognitive dissonancej reformers with an abstract desire to regulate the world instinctively sensed that reality resists all human imposition of order.

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Howells's cornie breach of decorum implicitly supports the position of antiutopians who insist that regulation dampens spontaneity and creativity. A similar dissonance is found in Howells's own utopian writings, in which he was simultaneously at his most playful-conjuring up a perfect place out of thin air-and at his most dogmatic and didactic. By introducing a visitor from his utopian Altruria, Howells encouraged his American readers to reject any sense of ambiguity about values: European and American ways are wrong, Altrurian ways are right. Like other utopias, Howells's Altrurian romances contain many passages in which the utopian citizens lay down the law, casually dismissing all the doubts and confusions bedeviling more than two millennia of Western political thought. Such passages, however, are little in keeping with Howells in his box-kicking mood; when that comes over him, he is all alive to what then seems to him the overt horrors or petty tyrannies or just plain boredom for which any order, however wellintentioned, can set the stage. On the one hand, Howells is sufficiently skeptical about the foundations of his civilization to suppose that only a radical reordering of life can save us, but on the other hand, he is seldom entirely free from the suspicion that order itself is sufficiently the enemy of human happiness and satisfaction. The cosmopolitan stance Howells increasingly cultivated throughout his maturity may thus be understood as a kind of compromise-sometimes a rather desperate one-between his longing for some ever more comprehensive, ever more humane extension of community, and his desire to move beyond anything that could be recognized as a traditional community at all: a body Ito adopt the words of Edward Everett Halel that had no laws to squabble over. Howells can be called cosmopolitan not so much because he focused, as did James, on the consolidation of different races or cultures-although, as we shall see, he sometimes didbut rather because the intellectual universe in which he moved was founded on the notion that no culture can honestly lay claim to having a monopoly on truth, or even that any culture, any set of

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conventional beliefs and responses, inevitably conceals the truth. He is cosmopolitan in the sense meant by most people who use the word in conversation: sophisticated, too aware of the multiplicity of values held by different people around the globe ever to give oneself over wholeheartedly to a narrow or parochial way of looking at things. It is presumably this meaning of the word, and not a desire to bring the races into closer contact, that led publishers to conclude that it would make a suitable title for a popular magazine; indeed, some of Howells's utopian writings first appeared in the pages of The Cosmopolitan. If cosmopolitanism now expressed a fashionably open-minded stance toward experience-one that, for those like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, suggested a flabby racial decadence-the relativity that went with it had its drawbacks, as we see when Howells rather uncomfortably notes, "In the nineteenth century, especially now toward the close of it, one is never quite sure about vice and virtue: they fade wonderfully into and out of each other; they mix, and seem to stay mixed, at least around the edges."3 The fact that the virtue of cosmopolitanism was becoming something of a chic commodity eagerly consumed by a "liberated" readership only compounded the problem of an intellectual like Howells, who hoped that somehow his progressive ideals would get translated into action; we can gather from his novels and essays that he increasingly felt that among the hurried readers of The Cosmopolitan, The Atlantic, and Harper's Monthly, bright chatter itself was the only thing into which any ideas were likely to get translated. Indeed, Howells's stance toward cosmopolitan open-mindedness was decidedly ambiguous. Unlike Bellamy, who thought the consolidation of the earth should be accomplished by the universalization of American conditions, Howells imagines a remote civilization as the source of absolute value, expressing simultaneously his exemption from national prejudices and his discomfort with the relativity of values prevalent in the cosmopolitan world. As we shall see, Howells concluded that mere conversation was becoming the characteristic behavior of his middle-class readership, and by tracing his responses to this situation we can read an early

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chapter of the history of intellectuals attempting to find a place for their activity in a mass market of readers who comfortably assimi1ated critiques of their civilization. What may seem a narrow and insignificant problem-Who sheds tears because intellectuals must shift in the world like everyone else?-points to a problem that may stand at the heart of cosmopolitan civilization conceived on a global scale. Although such a civilization might produce an admirable willingness to consider that perhaps the prejudices of one's land or time are wrong, it might equally give rise to a spiritual aridity that, under cover of loud self-congratulation on the score of broad-mindedness, condemns its members to, at best, perennial triteness and inauthenticity, or, at worst, a sanctimonious hypocrisy condoned by all the canons of moral obligation and good taste. In the course of his career, Howells tried to envision a way to accommodate the multiplicity of values encountered in the cosmopolitan world, without, however, simply giving up entirely on the idea of an integrated community, even though he never entirely freed himself of his suspicions about the latter. Eschewing both the totalizing aspect of Bellamy's vision, in which all meaningful differences are dissolved in the system, and Gilman's imperious moritorium on intercourse with the rest of the world, Howells idealized, often with mixed feelings, a culture of conversation that inhabited a middle ground between imperial expansiveness and defensive retrenchment, a culture emanating from the white middle class that could bring the lower classes and other races into its rules without imposing an absolute unity from above. This attempt to solve the problem of cosmopolitan capitalist culture, to adjust to a culture of cultures, is typical of an author who was disquietingly aware of what it meant to be, in Ricoeur's words,"an 'other' among others."4 More than any other American author of his period, it is Howells, with his confusion, ambivalence, and disquiet about the grounds of his own commentary, who most closely rehearses the intellectual anxieties of our own time. Howells welcomes the gradual erosion of parochial boundaries, but wonders whether a

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world without boundaries will not also be a world without any meaningful purposes. He hopes that the community can expand to include many who have been despised and rejected-he might say, with Richard Rorty, "Expanding the range of our present 'we'" is one of the only projects that can be considered "ends in themselves"S-but suspects that that community itself might be a gift of questionable value. Moreover, in his move from realism to utopia he attempted to make the leap from a national to a global conception of culture, from a mode capturing the intricacies of a city-based national order that seemed to defy any traditional concept of order at all, to a mode that would move his readers to some still point beyond the disruptions of modernization, beyond "development," beyond the contingent loyalties of nationality, from which the global and historical inheritances of humanity could finally be assessed and availed of. "In one manner or other the stories were all told long ago; and now we want merely to know what the novelist thinks about persons and situations."6 With these words, appearing in an 1882 survey of Henry James's career, Howells announced what he took to be the inevitably belated character of the modern novel and of the modern novelist. To ears like ours, already a little deaf to the endlessly repeated assurances about this or that being at an end, Howells's assertion is likely to surprise only because it is more than a hundred years old. Nevertheless, the manner in which he puts his case sounds an astonishingly contemporary note. Describing the way "stories" have been displaced by" situations," in this passage Howells might be mistaken for a would-be theorist of postmodernism, groping about for a way to describe the curiously static dynamism and sterile excitements assailing us from every direction, or perhaps merely trying to account for the dizzying, unplotted, hardbound tedium broadcast upon the new arrivals shelves of every bookstore today. "From Stories to Situations": surely an article with this title is booked to appear on glowing screens charged with the latest number of Postmodern Culture? We will return to Howells's anticipation of our moment, but for now we must consider

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just what the abandonment of story, the demotion of plot, meant to Howells's development as a writer. It would not be too much to say that Howells's dictum concerning plot sums up his notion of the role of art in his age. His words fit an age of assessment (like our ownl, an epoch in which the thrust of intellectual activity is not so much discovery as appraisal, a time when the critical faculty predominates over the exploratory. For Howells, the literary response called for by this II situation" was realism. Although Howells's narrative technique today seems tame, unexceptional, and almost unthinkingly "traditional," that was hardly the view of his contemporaries. For Horace Scudder, writing a review in The Atlantic, The Rise of Silas Lapham alienates the reader because of Howells's "super-refinement of art."7 Howells himself was highly and rather defensively aware of his innovative tendencies. In Indian Summer, the middle-aged Colville attempts to account for his engagement to his very young fiancee by saying, "Oh, call us a passage from a modern novel ... if you're in the romantic mood. One of Mr. James's." His interlocutor responds, "I hardly feel up to Mr. James. I should have said Howells. Only nothing happens in his case."8 A few years later, Howells would write that in choice American fiction "nothing happens," 9 confirming his rejection of highly detailed plotting in favor of character study. Many other readers noted, with mixed response, this aspect of his work. In 1893 Celia Parker Woolley felt it necessary to defend Howells from the attack of "romanticists" who claimed, II 'Nothing ever happens in his stories .... ' But what 'happens,' it may be asked, in the lives of the majority of the men and women we see around us? We no longer live in the days of tournaments and knightly enterprise; but life was never of such intense human interest as to-day. The novelist of the present age has a tenfold harder as well as more inspiring task to execute in the study of human character and motive, than the romance ever had. II 10 Woolley was herself building, consciously or unconsciously, on Howells's own account of the belated novelist's vocation. Although Howells's observation on stories and situations seems to address a technical question about the construction of novels,

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both his and Woolley's comments invoke a form of attention especially suited to an age past the period of great historical struggle: from here on out, the "human interest" of modern life is to be found in the depiction of men and women adjusting to and coping with the basically eventless character of the times. A case is to be made for seeing the preference of character to plot as a sign of political conservatism. Amy Kaplan, for example, has argued, "To base a novel on plotting means to acknowledge that conflicting and incompatible stories can constitute the social reality which the novelist represents. The force of Howells's belief in character thus must be understood as a bulwark against the disruptive potential of the story."ll Kaplan is surely right to note that Howellsian realism rests on authorial choices determining just what will end up being considered "real" enough to make it into the novels. Howells's turn away from plot, however, does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that he banishes a really existing social dynamism from representation in his novels. Let us accept Kaplan's idea that plotting acknowledges the power of "conflicting and incompatible stories" to "constitute social reality." Everything depends, however, on what we mean by "incompatible." The plots of the kind Kaplan refers to rely on differing sets of values playing themselves out in the social, political, or personal spheres. The result of the ensuing struggle is the "social reality" with which the plot's conclusion leaves us, and the plot ends up having been "about" how such realities get constituted: reality emerges from the way incompatible stories play themselves out in action. If incompatible means tending toward disruptive, transformative action, then Howells may be said to banish incompatible stories from his novels. If, however, incompatible simply means what it usually means, then his realist novels abound in incompatible stories, descriptions, interpretations, and judgments: they simply do not issue in large-scale transformations of social reality. /Even his utopian novels focus on the already transformed society, providing only a sketchy outline of how those transformations were effected.) As we shall see, endlessly ruminated conversa-

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tional conflicts are characteristic of Howells's works. Howells, then, seemed reluctant to make the move from representing mere incompatibility to representing full-fledged social transformation, and Kaplan seizes on this reluctance as evidence of Howells's general tendency to contain whatever might potentially disrupt the existing order. Even if we accept much of Kaplan's argumentwhich I think we should-we do not do Howells full justice unless we also note that the inability of conflicting stories to get themselves translated into action might well point to a shrewd diagnosis of the order with which he found himself confronted. When Howells presents us with novels full of talk about social transformation that nevertheless issue in nothing but a kind of enlightened deadlock, one cannot always be sure if he is doing his bit to keep the social pot from boiling over or if, in quite a different spirit, he is somewhat despairingly knocking against a historicopolitical gridlock, one guaranteed in part by the fact that differences, even apparently radical ones, have taken up their place as reliable or even amusing fixtures on the modem scene. If we trace Howells's development from April Hopes to the Altrurian romances, we can detect a growing sense of frustration and disenchantment with just those aspects of Howells's society and art to which Kaplan draws our attention. Moreover, in a sense it is natural that for an American the accommodation of difference should become simultaneously a virtue and a potential danger. After all, the United States is and was, in Franco Moretti's recent formulation, a "geopolitical reality broader than the European type of nation-state," giving rise to a literature marked by "cosmopolitan tendencies."12 The conversational disagreements that in a sense were Howells's metier serve as almost an objective correlative of the equally unresolvable conflicts of value inevitable in an increasingly cosmopolitan world, and the insoluble character of these debates seems in part to have led him to complement his realist novels with his utopias, and with their promise of a global perspective that would resolve seemingly intractable dissonances into a higher harmony. Howells's ambivalence toward plot may well be one of the rea-

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sons he felt that April Hopes was his first deliberately "realist" novel, in spite of the fact that it was written after The Rise of Silas Lapham, which readers then and now took to be one of the novels that most represented Howellsian realism. Looking back on his career in 1896, however, Howells told a friend that April Hopes was the first novel he wrote "with the distinct consciousness that he was writing as a realist." 13 According to most critical accounts of realism, this statement is hard to understand. April Hopes deals only with a small circle of upper-crust New Englanders in consistently genteel settings. There is very little attempt to portray the disruptions of the modern city, or to include the lower-class figures who appear frequently in other of his novels of the 1880s. This novel, in fact, depicts one of the most tightly circumscribed worlds in Howells's mature fiction, and seems to jar with the expansive representational scope we associate with realism in literature. On two counts, however, one may readily understand why Howells saw April Hopes as explicitly realist. The most obvious reason is the presence of one Mrs. Brinkley, who observes the misguided courtship of the protagonists, Dan Mavering and Alice Pasmer, and in a sense dominates the novel with her ongoing, deflationary commentary. She is capable of scandalizing her sentimental, female friends with comments like "I consider every broken engagement nowadays a blessing in disguise," the scandal residing in her refusal to acknowledge the sanctity of the "whole little rose-colored ideal world" inhabited by those who "liked to have people talk as they do in genteel novels."14 Acting something like a Greek chorus, Mrs. Brinkley takes up Howells's continuing attack on the conventions of women's fiction, underlining the fact that for Howells one of the key, defining aspects of realism was that it was not sentimentalism. The prominence of this attack throughout his mature career-Edwin H. Cady, we should remember, implies that Howells's arrival at realism coincided with a declaration of "war"IS-suggests it was genteel fiction that in a sense called realism into being. April Hopes, a novel that includes the opinions Howells regularly furnished in his essays

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and reviews, thus marks an explicit extension of the critical revolt he launched from the pages of Harper's beginning in I885. In another sense, however, this novel depicting the lIaesthetic leisure and society" (369) of the rich allows Howells to examine what many of his realist manifestos seem to deny: the difficulty of determining what a bedrock human reality might be, a difficulty that in part derives from Americans' highly self-conscious attempts to wrest a coherent sense of their national identity from the cosmopolitan realities surrounding them. In Criticism and Fiction, Howells supplies a disarmingly simple basis for minimum literary worth: III confess that I do not care to judge any work of the imagination without first of all applying this test to it. We must ask ourselves before we ask anything else, Is it true? "16 According to this model of critical evaluation, truth is something the reader possesses a sure sense of beforehand. Whatever truth is, it is not something for the novel to reveal. For it to be worth anything at all, literature must tell us what we already know, must answer to a concept of reality already firmly in the mind of the reader. Good fiction, then, seems to depend on close imitation of easily verifiable facts. What happens, however, when imitation itself is one of the salient facts of the social world, when life offers no foundation, no solid IIreal," but only the spectacle of attempts to give life reality by making it conform to patterns abstracted from some putatively "real" elsewhere? In liThe American Scholar," Emerson had called for independence from the courtly muses of Europe, but half a century on, Howells shows us a society still dominated by a rage for mimesis. Announcing a theme that will be extensively developed in Through the Eye of the Needle, the aged patrician Bromfield Corey asserts in April Hopes, liThe women of America represent the aristocracy which exists everywhere else in both sexes" (pI). Playing on the word "represent," Corey brings to mind not only the notorious disjunction in America whereby women are the guardians of the culture to which busy men remain strangers, but also the suggestion that women finding themselves in a vulgar and provincial setting consciously work to imitate and import the

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manners and interests of Old Europe (what Corey means by "everywhere else"). Lacking an ancient cultural tradition of their own, the pure products of America have to make do with ersatz creations based on imported traditions. Moreover, middle-class imitation in Howells goes beyond mere provincial admiration of the Old World. At the New Brunswick resort, Dan Mavering treats an audience of vacationers to an imitation of the "genuine darky minstrels" (390) who had entertained him on the boat out. The "frank joy" (391) even of the hyper-self-conscious Mrs. Brinkley-"How sincere! How native!" (390)-points to a hunger for the genuine that differs significantly from American imitativeness as described by Veblen. Veblen's emulative leisure class enacts the ancient struggle of power for deference. The resort crowd in Howells pursues a more muted, melancholy quest after authenticity, seeming to assume that both high-toned, aristocratic Europeans and working-class blacks are in touch with a reality that genteel Americans can glimpse only from afar. Indeed, if anything, it is the ways of blacks that Howells's characters rather shallowly speak of as the standard of absolute value, a habit that culminates in the glib remarks of Isabel March in A Hazard of New Fortunes: "I am in love with the whole race. I never saw one of them that didn't have perfectly angelic manners. I think we shall all be black in heaven-that is, blacksouled."17 Appropriately delivered in the midst of the Marches' famous attempt to find an apartment in New York, these comments reflect the spiritual homelessness of the middle class. Like Julian West, who dreams of himself as a Moor setting off to fight "the Christian dogs of Spain," Isabel has a habit of imagining the possession of otherness as the endpoint of her own restless wandering. Displaying a condescending admiration for those who seem at ease in their customs, she brings to the surface the contradictions implicit in a cosmopolitan sophistication with which Howells and many of his readers were familiar. To a Mrs. Brinkley or a Mrs. March, the artistry of a black performer may seem "native"-may seem, that is, like the spontaneous expression of a character untouched by art-but this does more than expose preju-

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dices about the "natural" propensities of other races; it testifies to the extent of such characters' self-consciousness about the artificiality and contingency of their own ways. In Howells's mature works, such cosmopolitan detachment from any fixed set of conventions is most on display in what is perhaps the key attribute of many of his central characters: the power of glib speech itself, especially the ability to generate witty commentary exposing the antinomies and absurdities of high society. Such commentary is of particular importance because it shares with realism a tendency to unmask the contingency of social arrangements and to enliven a sense of their frequent selfcontradictions. In this respect, Howellsian realism seems to be a continuation of the "political romanticism" dissected by Carl Schmitt. For Schmitt, romantic irony reveals its political impotence by its tendency to "[play] one reality off against another in order to paralyze the reality that is actually present": liThe romantics transform every thought into a sociable conversation. II Tracing this behavior to the constitution of modern regimes, Schmitt observes, /lIn the liberal bourgeois world, the detached, isolated, and emancipated individual becomes ... the court of last resort, the absolute. illS The generous sampling of Mrs. Brinkley's observations in April Hopes suggests that Howells, like Schmitt's romantics, places a high value on liberated commentary, a commentary that at least threatens-or even manages-to overwhelm the actual events of the novel as a whole. Although April Hopes indicts a culture whose genteel overlay manages to hide the painful ground of all the characters' motivations from others and even from themselves, particularly if those motivations are erotic, the one part of that culture that stands above criticism is the incessant talk that preinterprets the unfolding action for the reader. The supremacy of conversation over action would seem, in fact, to be one of the constituents of Howells's realism, and is at the bottom of his rejection of plot. To offer a comparison to James's final phase, a typical Howells novel of the I 880s can be imagined as a version of The Golden Bowl in which Fanny Assingham's endless talk successfully swamps the developing story. It is

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Fanny, after all, who attempts to fend off fears that an adulterous plot is underway by repeating a mantra recalling Howells's dictum on the best fiction: "Nothing-in spite of everything-will happen. Nothing has happened. Nothing is happening."19 Long ago, Alfred Kazin pointed to Howells's consuming interest in conversation when he noted that the novelist brought characters together "mechanically, staging dinner parties and symposia for no better purpose than to have people talk."2Q The running commentaries ensure that we view the disruptions of the plot, such as it is, as occurring outside the smoothly flowing chatter of society, and (at least in the novels from the 1880s) prevent us from viewing that chatter as itself a doubtful contrivance for getting by in a culture experienced even by its adherents in only a highly mediatedway. In Howells's last "big" realist novel, A Hazard of New Fortunes, the shortcomings of the culture of conversation emerge, even as the highly questionable status of such a thing as "American identity" becomes the topic of an urgent investigation. The two issues go hand in hand. Howells's futile but now celebrated attempt to intervene in the cultural conversations of his time came in his defense of those condemned to die in the judicially sanctioned hysteria following the Haymarket riot of 1886. The most important artistic echo of that wrenching experience appears in Hazard, written in 1888 and 1889. His decision to render a sympathetic portrait of a socialist, Lindau, who happens to be German-born was particularly pointed, even daring, since many of those executed had also been German Americans, and the public's revulsion at their politics had been reinforced by racism. Siding, at least emotionally, with an imInigrant holding to ideals that to many seemed threateningly alien, and setting the action of the novel against a notably cosmopolitan New York, Howells reveals the extent to which America no longer stood in simple opposition to the rest of the world. If the self-conscious construction of an American identity is at issue in Howells's earlier novels, in Hazard the existence of any such identity is cast into doubt. The central pronouncement of the book, summing up How-

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ells's skepticism about the survival of American ideals, is put in Lindau's mouth when he offers this terse jeremiad: "Dere iss no Ameriga any more! "21 Some have seen Howells's decision to saddle Lindau with what may seem a comic German dialect, replete with odd-looking spellings and ethnically inflected emphases, as his attempt to neutralize the threat that Lindau poses to genteel society. By highlighting Lindau's inability to master the pronunciation of received English, Howells gives the reader an easy way to dismiss the socialist's righteous anger as just an eccentricity, like his fractured speech.22 To see things this way, however, is at least to hint that when it comes to questions of ethnicity, Howells stands cheek by jowl with those for whom the Germanness of the Haymarket anarchists was yet another sign of their fitness for the gallows. Rather than interpret Lindau's striking indictment as an occasion for racist fun, we may see it as Howells's way of announcing the disappearance of old-style national identity. Like his counterparts making up the "huddled masses" steaming to America as the century closed, Lindau, a stranger in the land, casts more than just pronunciation into doubt. As Zygmunt Bauman has argued, strangers "question oppositions [like those between friend and enemy, native and foreigner) as such, the very principle of opposition .... They unmask the brittle artificiality of the division-they destroy the world." 23 In A Hazard of New Fortunes, the ideals vivifying the notion of the American difference come authentically alive only in the mouth of the resident alien, and even so their incandescence marks only the momentary flare of extinction. The fact that" Ameriga" now finds its champions in immigrants who cannot perfectly master its language makes the serious point that an America with a clearly defined identity no longer exists. For Howells, as for many after him, the reason for the disappearance of America's distinctiveness is not far to seek: Dryfoos, the man for whose millions and daughters many in the novel find themselves contending, is one of the first tycoons in our literature whose fortune is based on a modern form of energy (in his case, natural gas), and the fossil-fuel-based economy his

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emergence heralds is what Lindau has crossed the Atlantic to serve: with a prescience by no means unique in his work, Howells put his finger on one of the prime forces shattering traditional communal ties and rendering only relative ancient cultural and economic boundaries that once had seemed absolute. By putting Lindau at the ethical center of his major attempt to portray the new America with all the tools realism put at his disposal, Howells seems powerless to do anything but announce the disappearance of his great subject. This novel seems to reach forward, in fact, to the most insistent questions of our own time, especially those dealing with the coming of a "postnational" condition, with its "diasporic peoples, mobile technologies, and queer nationalities. 1124 Lindau's queer nationalism shows how long a postnational space has been opening up in America. We cannot say with certainty why Howells never again even attempted a novel like Hazard, but it is hard not to read something into so marked a Kehre. Kaplan, again, provides one of the best such readings:

Hazard both fulfills and exhausts the project of realism to embrace social diversity within the outlines of a broader community, and to assimilate a plethora of facts and details into a unified narrative form. By the end of the novel, the paint threatens to fly off the surface of Howells's largest novelistic canvas. After the publication of Hazard in 1890, Howells stops exploring the dangerously shifting boundary lines of his urban representation, and turns to domestic and utopian fictions that remain within the untested perimeter of the foreground. 25 Here Howells's move away from big canvasses comes across as something of a failure of the will; by suggesting that Howells moves from a place of danger and exploration to the domestic and the utopian, where his representational strategies remain comparatively untested, Kaplan seems to register a certain disappointment with her subject, as if his abandonment of large realist forms signaled a surrender to the existent; as if, like Whitman beset by

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the villain touch, Howells were crying out to a plethoric America, "You are too much for me." Some evidence for this kind of reading might be found in Howells's next New York novel after Hazard, The World of Chance. Henry James had written admiringly to Howells of "the breadth and depth and thickness of the Hazard," but such a compliment could hardly be paid with any credibility to the author of The World of Chance, even in the context of a tactful prevarication between friends-at least between friends aware of each other's faculty of discrimination.26 In spite, or perhaps because, of a sometimes frenzied plot (including madness and suicide), the production suffers from a remarkably thin rendering of the New York setting that in Hazard had yielded so much. The publishing scene, which figures prominently in Hazard, takes center stage in the later novel, attesting to a notable reduction in scope. In fact, these two successive novels set in New York are models, respectively, of ambitious scope and of tentative circumscription. One finds Lindau's place occupied by a much milder David Hughes, an aged veteran of Brook Farm engaged in a futile attempt to disseminate his utopian social theories. Naturally, he finds no publisher willing to take him on, but one Percy Bysshe Shelley Ray is more successful: he manages to place a romantic novel modeled on Romeo and Juliet. But if The World of Chance is not a very good novel, if it is not a novel that works very hard to form a mass of intractably heterogeneous materials into a higher unity, it at least helps explain why an author who could write such a thing might be frustrated by the conditions of American publishing. The fact that Ray's romance finds the publisher Hughes's writings do not registers Howells's awareness that the commodity status of literature often undercut the possibility of serious social commentary appearing before the public at all. Howells himself, in spite of his reputation as an "important" American author, had never been able to find a large audience for his socially engaged novels, at least when they were published in book form.27 This failure, coupled with his inability to convince even a significant minority of the injustice of the

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Haymarket executions, in part accounts for the inward turn of The World of Chance, a novel that amounts to an extended meditation on the vagaries of a literary industry as market-driven as any other. By 1893 Howells seems to have abandoned the hope that realism could serve as a site of disinterested social analysis. Howells's discouragement with the economic pressures on publishing, however, is not the only possible explanation for his discouragement with the big realist novel. In addition to the embeddedness of literature in a system of commodity capitalism, a factor we might call extrinsic, Howells was concerned about the intrinsic status of literary discourse. His high degree of selfconsciousness in his art was one symptom of a prolonged, queasy meditation on the possibility or impossibility of realism as a transparent method of representation. In Howells's works we find a fully articulated fear that language itself threatened to create a world of its own, one that would displace rather than represent reality. In mid-career Howells anxiously wrote that words could "only breed more words," suggesting that writing in no matter what mode was subject to an inevitable and pernicious selfreferentiality.28 Later, when considering the explosive output of the adsmith, who he prophetically suggested "may be the supreme artist of the twentieth century," he worried that if the growth of advertising continued at its current rate, "there will presently be no room in the world for things; it will be filled up with advertisements of things." 29 By simply imposing on the population completely self-serving pictures of life, advertising runs counter to the realist aspiration to produce an accurate picture of the world, and, even more threateningly, points to the possibility that language is simply a self-confirming system that hinders rather than enhances knowledge of what is. Beneath Howells's analysis lies the anxious question, to adapt Melville: "Who ain't an adsmith?" One might go further and adapt a Derridean dictum that aptly captures Howells's meaning: There is nothing outside the ad. Although the dense language of Heidegger's philosophy could hardly be further from the jaunty gloom of Howells's critique of

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advertising, Heidegger presents essentially the same idea in his description of the ways representation has, so to say, trumped reality in our time. When Howells worries about the things of the world disappearing under the accumulation of advertisements for things, he could almost be seen as providing an accessible translation of the following: "What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth .... The Being of whatever is, is sought and found in the representedness of the latter."30 Here we return to Howells's anticipation of contemporary preoccupations. Hedged in on one side by the disappearance of any easily agreed upon reality ("Dere iss no Ameriga anymore") and on the other by a faltering faith in the ability of language to render an accurate picture of what is, Howells, at the height of his powers, faced an impasse that almost a century of modernist experimentation has not overcome. Indeed, hardly anyone is interested in overcoming it any longer; the impossibility of "realism"-a word now interchangeable in many circles with the phrase "naive realism"is the donnee of writing that wants to be taken seriously. Is it any wonder that Howells could not, or chose not to, repeat his performance in Hazard? In the years immediately following Hazard's 1890 publication in book form, one finds Howells casting about for some way of coming to terms with the problem of reality in America, and the solutions he hits upon often hinge on a central preoccupation of his classic realist phase: the culture of conversation. Perhaps Howells's most daring attempt to prescribe conversation as an antidote to the uncertainties-above all, the cosmopolitan uncertainties-of the American scene appears in An Imperative Duty, published as a book in 1891. The novel opens with the return to Boston of the young Dr. Edward Olney, a "specialist in nervous diseases" who believes he "could be most prosperous where nervous diseases most abounded."31 Offering corroborating evidence for Tom Lutz's recent claim that neurasthenia was "a nearly universal trope for the individual's relation to cultural modernization,"32 one cause of widespread nervousness, as the reader of

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Hazard could guess, is the disorienting mingling of races in the cosmopolitan city. This becomes the central topic of the novel when the doctor falls in love with Rhoda Aldgate, a young woman who has just learned that some of her ancestors are black, although she has always lived as a "pure" white. In a fit of misguided self-sacrifice typical of many characters in Howells's novels, Rhoda at first refuses Edward's proposal of marriage, enforcing the social, and in some states legal, prohibition against racial intermarriage. Edward, however, overcomes this internalized prejudice, and after marrying they settle in Rome, where Rhoda is thought to look "very Italian" (101). An Imperative Duty has with justice been cited as an example of Howells's willingness to set even the most ingrained social conventions at defiance, most notably by W. E. B. Du Bois in his 19I2 tribute on the occasion of the novelist's seventy-fifth biIthday.33 Nevertheless, Howells's daringness is to some degree neutralized by the conclusion of the novel, for if Howells is willing to disrupt received attitudes, his characters are not. Far from facing the public consequences of their marriage, Rhoda and Edward seal theiI love with a vow of secrecy: "Never!" [says Rhoda. I "It shall never be known! For your sake! I can bear it; but you shall not. Promise me that you'll never tell a living soul!" She caught him nervously by the arm, and clung to him. It was her sign of surrender. He accepted it, and said: "Very well, I promise it. But only on one condition: that you believe I'm not afraid to tell it. Otherwise my self-respect will oblige me to go round shouting it to everybody. Do you promise?" "Yes, I promise;" and now she yielded to the gayety of his mood, and a succession of flashing smiles lit up her face, in which her doom was transmuted to the happiest fortune. (98-99)

The strong sense of mutuality in this passage might augur well for the marriage, but that marriage will be based on a bargain that seems powerfully to advocate a split between private and public

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selves and values. The complex interweaving of this arrangement perhaps suggests that Howells himself was uncomfortable with the compromises with public opinion it represents: the couple's "solution" to their problem seems strained, almost too perfect. Rhoda wants her identity kept hidden for Edward's sake, and he consents only with the guarantee of her belief that he could bear the revelation she cannot bear him to bear. This nice circularity in effect hermetically insulates the couple from their culture; for the Olneys, a happy marriage is sufficient compensation for living in a world that would despise them if it only knew who they were. One could say of race issues what Lutz has recently argued about issues of class in Howells's work, that they "are regularly drummed into the background by the importunities of marriage."34 Moreover, Rhoda's "nervous" "submission" to a male authority, who, after all, is a specialist in nervous disorders, manages firmly to reestablish sexual norms even as it transgresses racial ones. To be sure, An Imperative Duty undertakes as a novel the disruption its characters avoid, but this only underscores Howells's reluctance to represent directly the violent conflicts that inevitably arise when a society is asked to see its most precious beliefs as disgusting lies. Instead, Dr. and Mrs. Olney disappear into the sunny closet of Italy, and "their talk flowed fantastically away from all her awful questions" (99). This fantastic conversational evasion is an instance of the remarkable blend of daring and reticence that several critics have pinpointed as typical of Howells's work. 35 In addition, it is perhaps the central example of the way his novels can propose their own kind of talking cure for the injustices of American life. Their solution stands as an emblem of Howells's whole enterprise in the 1890S: in a culture that, far from being unified, represents a conglomeration of different cultures, irremedial obstructions to a true community are patched over with charming talk. If that talk seems to drift away from hard facts, seems to create an alterative reality, rather than boring down to bedrock, we need to remember that for Howells, the prophet of the adsmith, the 01neys' talk typifies the power of language to create the world human

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beings inhabit. In his rather brief classic realist phase, Howells pins his hopes on the power of the novel to reveal what is; for him at that time, everything depends on the novelist's ability to render the world accurately. In An Imperative Duty, by contrast, the "happy ending" depends not on a communal re-cognition of what is real, but on the central characters' ability to manipulate the irrealities of the signifying system to their own advantage, capitalizing, for example, on the slipperiness of apparently straightforward distinctions, like that between "Italian" and "African." Here the rupture between language and reality, which would spell doom for the realist manifestos of an earlier Howells, opens up a new and happier way of being. In the realist novels of the 1880s, Howells asks his readers, Shall our society be founded on true or on false representations? By the 1890S, having lost faith in the efficacy or perhaps even the possibility of a true representation, he seems to have modified his question to What representations of ourselves will lead to happiness? The change in orientation suggested by these two questions provides the crucial and heretofore neglected context for understanding Howells's engagement with utopia in his later years. In the past, critics have generally accepted Howells's utopian writings as relatively straightforward adjuncts to his realistic novels. Robert L. Hough, for example, discounts the generic distinction of the utopias by grouping them together with such works as Annie Kilburn under the rubric of "social novels."36 Other critics, like Edwin Cady, see the Altrurian romances as a kind of holiday-or, for Kaplan, retreat-from the allegedly more demanding rigors of realism. "Howells enjoyed his release from stern realities and even played at ornamenting his fantasy with curlicues of romantic irony," writes Cady. Nevertheless, Cady also acknowledges that Howells was still engaged in "critical analysis" of the United States, however many curlicues he added around the fringes. 37 According to these views, Howells's "interesting" "evolution of the Utopian from the realist," as one of his contemporaries put it, resulted in a "confession of his faith" and the revelation of "a new altruistic gospel."38 Although this reviewer was struck by the fact

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that America's foremost realist had written a utopian novel, he saw this departure as part of an "evolution," part of a continuum in Howells's career. Comparisons of the utopias to sacred texts suggest that for the critic, A Traveller from Altruria revealed the Archimedean point outside the confusions of society from which Howells applied his social criticism, and by virtue of which he was able to expose hypocrisy, penetrate shams, and reveal the underlying reality that corrupt conventions tended to cover up. The obvious disjunctions between utopian and realist writings, therefore, become the grounds for a perfect complementarity. Without rejecting the notion of a continuity between these poles of Howells's literary corpus, we need to reexamine its basis. When we consider the trajectory of Howells's career, his remarkable and prolonged rise in stature, and his apparent disenchantment with the realist mode, the Altrurian romances can be seen as a way of dealing with the crisis of representation Howells experiences after Hazard. We might begin by noting one basic point that unites Howells's utopias with the works of Bellamy, Gilman, and James: they all rely on a supernational orientation. As we have seen, by the time Howells started writing utopias he had begun to doubt the meaningfulness of a straightforwardly American identity. Keeping in mind his awareness of the way corporate capitalism breaks up old communities, and his subsequent intercontinental focus, we might say that Howells's development follows the path of literary evolution predicted by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto: "The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.... National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature."39 Trying to provide a more precise typology of this "world literature," Franco Moretti has recently developed the idea of "modern epic," a term he uses to describe such massive texts as Faust, Moby-Dick, Ulysses, and One Hundred Years of Solitude, which he designates as

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world texts, whose geographical frame of reference is no longer the nation-state, but a broader entity-a continent, or the world-system as a whole. The construction of national identity-henceforth required of the novel-is thus replaced, for the epic, by a far larger geographical ambition: a global ambition .... The take-off of the world-system has occurred-and a symbolic form has also been found for this new reality.40 Although one would not wish to put Howells's utopias on the same shelf as the masterpieces absorbing Moretti's attention here, the former do, however, warrant consideration as "world texts," as texts that have left behind the pinning down of a national identity, and that reach forward to still broader forms of human solidarity. Unlike Bellamy, however, Howells is not eager to base his vision of a global order on an eternally fixed set of beliefs about just what a human being is and just how such a creature should spend his or her life. If Bellamy sees the globalizing tendencies of the modern period as an opportunity to bring the final incarnation of humanity into being, Howells tries to preserve some sense of a future that has not yet been defined. The motto of his utopian vision might be summed up as follows: Comprehensiveness without totalization. But how is one to achieve something like an order-which, after all, depends on a core set of beliefs to which its adherents assent-while still preserving a multiplicity of perspectives, while still allowing for an open space in which something like an individual might take shape? In the Altrurian romances, Howells attempts to answer this question by presenting us with a purified version of the culture of conversation he had portrayed in his earlier novels, a culture free of the spurious open-mindedness he saw as characteristic of his America, one authentically open to the free development of the postnational individual. Strikingly, Howells chooses to land his Altrurian visitor, Mr. Homos, at a site of conversational relief and rest from American nervousness. A Traveller from Altruria, unlike its sequels, is not

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set in Altruria at all, but rather at a New England resort for overworked city dwellers, where utopia furnishes merely an occasion for lively conversation. The novel is narrated by a fixture in the culture industry, Mr. Twelvemough, an author of sentimental romances. He and the other domestic inmates of the resort come off badly throughout the text, and by inhabiting the place with a number of Twelvemough's upper-crust readers, Howells is able to provide a stinging anatomy of the bad faith and willful blindness he saw as the engine of the literary marketplace. The chief representative of the novel-reading public is Mrs. Makely, a guest at the resort whose admiration for Twelvemough's flowery productions parallels her reliance on sulfonal for sleep.41 She is also, however, eager to listen to Homos's gently delivered but nevertheless damning appraisal of competitive capitalism, suggesting that for a consciousness like hers, everything from sentimental trash to lofty political debate gets thrown into one homogenized conversational soup. Twelvemough, unlike Howells, purposefully panders to the Mrs. Makelys of the world, but his significance in the novel hinges on the question of why Howells scorns him. Does Howells despise the narrator of A Traveller from Altruria because Twelvemough is his nemesis, his double, or a paradoxical combination of both? Twelvemough does indeed produce sentimental fictions ending in improbably happy marriages, and if we limit our analysis of him to that observation he is the unambiguous enemy of Howellsian realism. The original readers of the novel, who may have had a keener perception of Howells's overall cultural significance, would not have been so sure. Edward Bellamy's delight at Howells's Nationalist-tinged utopian fiction stemmed in part from his surprise that "the leading novelist of the time should have turned aside from the conventional types of polite fiction to give his country-men this drastic arraignment of the way we live now."42 Bellamy's casualness in labeling Howells's earlier fiction "conventional" and "polite" shows he was not a very careful reader; the novels from which Bellamy thinks Howells turned aside are full of "arraignments." If, however, we take into account the function of much social criticism of the time, Bellamy's con-

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fusion itself becomes revealing. Nationalism offered many members of the middle class, including Howells, a therapeutic release from the worry and guilt their vivid sense of economic inequality brought about. The fact that Howells could become a powerful member of the literary establishment by repeatedly serving up explicit attacks on the injustices of American social life-attacks, moreover, addressed to those his novels portray as the villains and not the victims-suggests that Howellsian realism gained what limited foothold it had at least in part because of the bourgeois taste for penetrating critique, a taste still evident in the pages of Harper's and The Nation today. Bellamy oversimplifies the question of Howells's conventionality by ignoring how conventional "drastic arraignments" could be, and in so doing overestimates the extent to which he himself departed from the precincts of "polite literature." A link between Twelvemough and Howells at one point even becomes explicit. When the men at the resort try to explain American business practices to Mr. Homos, Twelvemough recalls a work of "a friend of mine, a brother novelist."43 This friend had written a novel about a failing businessman, who "could have retrieved himself if he had let some people believe that what was so was not so, but his conscience stepped in and obliged him to own the truth." The novel, of course, closely resembles The Rise of Silas Lapham. By making himself into a topic of polite conversation, and by suggesting that Twelvemough is a friend and brother novelist, Howells seems to be owning the truth of his significance to a "liberated" readership, or at least to be contemplating a grim possible truth. If the energy Howells put into making Twelvemough look ridiculous throughout the novel contained an element of self-castigation, he would at least have remained consistent to his own belief that "a bad conscience is the best thing a man can have."44 What here sounds like the Augustinian pronouncement of an eternal truth may be a reflection of the contradictions inherent in Howells's brand of professional authorship, which required that he play to the bad conscience of the audience on which he depended for his success. Howells was in the curious position of having evolved into both

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the unofficial" dean of American letters" and a vociferous critic of the civilization he felt was "coming out all wrong in the end."45 This melancholy duality is emblematic of a new and distinctive taste for sanctioned opposition, a taste that art historian o. K. Werckmeister has recendy proposed as the hallmark of a "citadel culture" in which an untrammeled freedom of expression is condoned in part because it poses almost no serious threat to the existing order. Howells's commercial success and status as a literary icon, even though in his mature years he frequendy affronted the vast complacency of the American public, suggest that his was a society that, to adopt Werckmeister's characterization of the r980s, had "come to insist on being questioned by a general social critique."46 Far from leading to fundamental reform, such critiques offer litde more than intellectual thrills or, perhaps, a balm for the conscience of those who feel their good fortune is built on the pain of others. No one could miss the disjunction between Howells's denunciations of the alleged excesses of competitive capitalism and his simultaneous negotiation of unprecedentedly lucrative contracts with Harper's in 188s-least of all Howells himself, who in a letter to Henry James concluded a gloomy survey of American greed with a now famous, or rather notorious, self-chastisement: "Meantime, I wear a fur-lined overcoat and live in all the luxury my money can buy."47 Howells finds the cultural conversation in America to be fatally compromised by self-interest or fatuous posing, and this is one of the ways America most starkly differs from Altruria, which Homos depicts as a land of conversation: "we meet constandy to argue and dispute on the questions of aesthetics and metaphysics" (r661. For Dante, this was to be the punishment meted out to wise pagans in Hell, but for Howells it is clearly a kind of paradise. Altruria provides the perfect setting for conversation, a kind of Habermasian dream world where free communication is the order of the day. There, if anywhere, one would be free to spin out the representation of oneself most according with human happiness; it would seem the ideal playground of self-creation, the place one would be most able to escape the constraining identities sanc-

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tioned by a corrupt society. Nevertheless, the endless symposia of Altruria point to a strange sterility in Howells's vision. The topics Howells has Homos mention-aesthetics and metaphysics-seem to have been singled out precisely because talk about them is not likely to produce any immediate consequences; they provide an opportunity to experience conversation as such, or what we might call absolute conversation. In Altruria, the questions of aesthetics, at least, seem to be basically settled: "Our own dress ... is studied in one ideal of use and beauty, from the antique .... The community builds the dwellings of the community, and these, too, are of a classic simplicity" (I63). As for metaphysics, lithe presence of risen Christ in our daily lives" (17I) seems to set very definite bounds for any speculation in that direction. Homos's evocation of Altrurian talk boils down to this: they meet to discuss matters that in practical terms are permanently settled, but whose vagueness renders them fit topics for endless improvisation and for the display of rhetorical virtuosity. Altrurian discussion represents, mutatis mutandis, an extension of the witty, detached commentary that abounds in Howells's earlier novels. Although Howells evidently intends to provide a forum in which the infinite possibilities of human being may be endlessly explored, his vision does not carry much conviction. I have argued that when Howells moves away from realism to utopia he moves away from the ideal of representation as an accurate depiction of what is and toward an ideal of representation as a source of selfimages conducive to human happiness. Howells seems haunted, however, by the idea that there is something flimsy, insubstantial, or perhaps even trivial about discourse unmoored from a verifiable ground in the existent. The Altrurian writings, especially those following A Traveller from Altruria, depict Howells's sometimes tormented consciousness of wandering between two conceptions of representation, each of which point to quite distinct and incompatible ideas of the artist's responsibility to his society. It is significant that Howells continued to write "Letters of an Altrurian Traveller" for Cosmopolitan even after he had completed the series that went up to make A Traveller from Altruria;

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Aristides Homos was clearly not so much an agent in a plot as an invented voice through which Howells could launch an ongoing commentary on America. Howells himself had cited belatedness, a sense that all the stories had been told, to explain the sovereignty of character over action, but in the second series of "Letters" Homos offers some observations that suggest another etiology. For Homos, from his utopian perspective, American life seems utterly void of coherence, and resembles "a fantastic dream" (183). In the famous opening of The Eighteenth BrumaiIe of Louis Napoleon, Marx states, "Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce."48 Homos could be echoing this sentiment when he comments on the painful disparity between rich and poor in the American cities: "In Europe, this sort of tragicomedy is at least well played; but in America, you always have the feeling that the performance is that of second-rate amateurs" (231). Substituting a geographic for Marx's temporal displacement, Homos shows a keen awareness of the creeping sense of unreality that infected many Americans' perceptions of their surroundings at century's end. Into Homos's observations one can read the shipwreck of Howells's realist program; behind Homos's insistence on the dreamlike character of modern life one can sense Howells's fear that society can never be anything but a fiction: the distinction between just societies grounded in the nature of things and unjust societies besotted with illusions takes a back seat to the distinction between societies whose members know their parts (as in Europe) and those composed of players perpetually fumbling their lines. In "Letters of an Altrurian Traveller," recording Homos's alternately bemused and horrified reflections on the American scene, Howells gives us an image of the tourist as representative human being, in Ricoeur's phrase, an other among others. Under Homos's errant gaze we see revealed a world-and one does mean a worldawash in groundless representations, a world in which not the least of such representations are carefully cultivated images of national distinctiveness. As we saw in the introduction in our

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analysis of The Princess Casamassima, the cosmopolitan condition tends to make all differences seem inessential, bringing in its wake a heightened awareness of the merely contingent nature of national characteristics that previously seemed essentially linked to the soil of the nation. Homos, who turns the detached eye of anthropological analysis on everything he encounters, is an example of dislodged subjectivity; floating free, wandering in and out of plots, Homos both attests to and is himself evidence of what happens when the individual is set adrift in chaos with no sure guide to the real. Ambiguously placed characters like Lindau and Homos-or, for that matter, a great many of Henry James's displaced creationssuggest that the pressure of cosmopolitanism might have played a greater role in literary development than is usually supposed. For example, Miles Orvell's recent, revelatory analysis of the shift from a "culture of imitation" to a "culture of authenticity" tells a largely domestic story, in which the realist aesthetic collapses for reasons having little to do with any international theme. Examining the material and literary culture of late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century America, Orvell argues that the realist aesthetic is grounded in what was a widespread faith in "the power of the machine to manufacture a credible simulacrum." Just as the machine could act as "an agent for democratizing luxury and diffusing high culture through imitations of elite forms,"49 the realist novel could provide a reliable map of the social to a wide audience. According to Orvell, however, the success of the machine leads to a dialectical reversal: in a culture flooded with reproductions, the distinction between original and copy breaks down, leaving only the simulacrum, the copy without an original. Howells's portrayal of the adsmith's ascendency could easily be incorporated in such an argument, because it, like Heidegger's meditations on the conquest of the world as picture, is evidence of anxiety about the tendency of technologically powered capitalism to re-form the world in its own image. Consequently, the culture of imitation generates the demand for a culture of authenticity marked by an insistence on the really real. In literature, this is

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expressed by the rise of naturalism, which replaces the older, "illusionistic fiction" of Howells and Henry James with an attempt "to bring literature and life closer together. "SO Drvell's analysis certainly clarifies in new ways the representational strategies adopted by such writers as Crane and Norris, who themselves would probably have agreed that they had exchanged "an artful illusion of reality" for "a more intense encounter with the real thing itself."sl The longing for intensity, however, the longing to feel an immediate connection to "the real thing," may well be a symptom of an encroaching cosmopolitan sense of the contingency of things, rather than simply a reaction to the problematic relation of original and copy produced domestically by the emergence of a machine-made environment. Indeed, if one examines Frank Norris's charges against realism, against "its meticulous presentation of teacups, rag carpets, wall paper and haircloth sofas,"s2 we find evidence of what might be called a nostalgic affection for certainty, for a world in which things do not admit of more than one interpretation, a world cured of the confusions and ambiguities one encounters in Howells's presentation of cosmopolitan space. Norris's "plea for romantic fiction"-by which he means what subsequent critics have labeled naturalism-in fact offers us a way of understanding not only how his own work departed from realism, but also that something like Bellamy's impulse toward rigorous globalized organization is often more emphatically present in naturalism than in an ostensibly utopian work like A Traveller from Altruria. "Realism," Norris complains, "is minute .... It is the visit to my neighbor's house, a formal visit, from which I may draw no conclusions" (emphasis addedJ.s3 Norris's impatience with the fact that does not point to a conclusion, the singularity that yields no theoretical gold, highlights the way that he is in some respects more unambiguously aligned with Bellamy than is a sometime Nationalist like Howells. It is Bellamy, after all, who has his mouthpiece in Looking Backward proclaim that all facts must find their place within a coherent system: "A solution which leaves an unaccounted-for residuum is no solution at all. "54

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Norris's argument with Howells, whom he singles out for derision, hinges on what he sees as the residue of life left uncatalogued by the realists, in which he rather hyperbolically includes "the unplumbed depths of the human heart, and the mystery of sex, and the problems of life, and the black, unsearched penetralia of the soul of man." Concluding his plea with another purple passage, Norris writes, "Romance, too, is a teacher, and if-throwing aside the purple-she wears the camel's-hair and feeds upon the locusts, it is to cry aloud unto the people, 'Prepare ye the way of the Lord; make straight his path.' "55 These words from Norris are certainly unexpected-as, one supposes, they were intended to be-but they show that the end of Norris's plumbing and probing is a "straightening" of reality. If in certain respects Bellamy is far removed from Norris-the author of Looking Backward did not want to be called a socialist because "to the average American" socialism is associated with "all manner of sexual novelties"56Norris's exultant, muscular claim that "to Romance belongs the wide world for rangel/ 57 comports well with the globally expansive tendencies of Bellamy's vision. And as is the case with Bellamy'S utopia, Norris's internationalism suggests little concern for the sometimes irresolvable cultural ambiguities that actually arise under cosmopolitan conditions. Indeed, as we shall see in connection with James's imperial museum, Norris's aesthetic manifesto is accompanied by a grandiose notion of inevitable universal government. Even the epic plot of his uncompleted Trilogy of the Wheat, which was to track an immense American harvest from midwestern farms to the Chicago commodities market and ultimately to Europe, where it would relieve widespread famine, reads like a fictive foreshadowing of the Marshall Plan, another epic plot pointing to a new world order. By contrast, Howells's flight from plot, which reaches its highwater mark in A Traveller from AltrUIia, underlines his skepticism about the ability of human beings to dictate a unitary ordering of the world, even as he holds out hopes for a less totalizing notion of human solidarity. His first utopian novel is instead an odd but characteristic performance in which a sense of compre-

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hensiveness is achieved through small effects. This is a book of inconclusive visits, unresolved conversations, awkward lapses, small rapprochements, building to no grand, synthesizing climax, fitfully and even queasily self-referential. Irresolution is in fact the subject of the final sentence, which describes the "cultivated people" who "continued of two minds" (179) on the question of Mr. Homos's veracity. Although Howells's refusal of finality probably reflects a political hopelessness-no resolution is possible-in part, the novel also implies a deliberate loosening of form, an untying of the knot of plot, suggesting that reality is better served by a desultory, open, even playful exploration. The Traveller from Altruria is thus something like a fruition of Howells's earlier experiments in form, or rather lack of form. In other words, Howells's late utopian writings, which in a sense set the conventions of realism at play, allowing them to range over the patently unreal, amount to a turning away from the "culture of imitation" that nevertheless provides an alternative, possibly a more forwardlooking alternative, to the" authenticity" promised by the naturalists58 and to the rage for elaborate control manifested by utopians like Bellamy. There is good reason to believe that Howells felt ambivalent about his narrative experiments; what aspect of Howells's life or work is not marked by ambivalence? Even though the small effects, clever ironies, and even wispiness of A Traveller from Altruria are analogous to the musical playfulness, the achieved inconsequentiality, of a Satie, Howells does not seem altogether comfortable in the playful mode. Indeed, the painfully heavyhanded irony that emerges whenever the idle rich describe the universally beneficent effects of laissez-faire capitalism signals his need never to be just gaming. One could not easily imagine the godfather of realism renouncing what we might call his sensed responsibility to the real-to be real, a real man,59 solid, serious, upright-to the point at which he could say, along with Satie, "Although our facts are incorrect, we do not vouch for them." The instability of Howells's achievement is reflected on both formal and thematic levels in his later work. When in 1907 How-

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ells returned to the matter of utopia with the publication of Through the Eye of the Needle, he once again involved Homos in a plot, albeit a thin and conventional one. Howells registers his own discomfort with this expedient in a remarkable, ironic introduction (to which we shall return) in which he explains that this is lithe story of the Altrurian's love for an American woman, and will be primarily interesting for that reason."60 To the extent that this is true, of course, the romance fails as a work of political commentary. Howells's bitterness, however, is not directed entirely toward his readers' insatiable desire for love storiesj in part, it is directed at his own inability to make utopia interesting. Few critics have found the direct presentation of Altruria engaging, and this is partly due to the nature of utopia itself. Like Bellamy and Gilman, Howells discovered that a utopian world is necessarily posthistorical. As Eveleth Strange, Homos's American bride, reports, "For weeks after we came to Altruria I was so unhistorically blest that if I had been disposed to give you a full account of myself I should have had no events to hang the narrative on" (362). This allows Howells once again to experiment with a kind of plotlessness, this time resorting to an epistolary technique that borders on stream-of-consciousness: "I must mention things as they come into my head, and not in any regular order" (383), Eveleth apologizes. To maintain any type of narrative at all, Howells introduces shipwrecked Americans whose refusal to adopt Altrurian ways constitutes the only possible conflict in a society where the terms of life are permanently established by universal consent. What results is an Altruria that is part spa-"I have lost at least twenty-five pounds" (403), a delighted Eveleth reports-and part prison, for, as in Looking Backward and Herland, the individual's membership in the community must be compelled by violence. When the crew of the shipwrecked vessel is put to work, "each of them was fitted with a kind of shirt of mail, worn over his coat, which could easily be electrized by a metallic filament connecting with the communal dynamo, and under these conditions they each did a full day's work" (414). The tension inherent in this utopian romance derives from the fact

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that whenever narrative and history threaten to break out, they must be suppressed by any means. It is not surprising to read Howells's admission to Charles Eliot Norton, "All other dreamers of such dreams have had nothing but pleasure in them; I have had touches of nightmare."61 Howells cannot separate his dreams from his nightmares because he realizes that any community, even one designed to maximize a multiplicity of perspectives, is bound to depend on the at least occasional coercion of the individual, even if the individuals so coerced do not find their identities liquidated in the manner preferred by Bellamy. In Through the Eye of the Needle, rugged individualists are introduced into society by being connected to the "communal dynamo," and like the author of another book printed in 1907, Howells cannot help wondering whether, in the modern world, social connections are bound to be in some manner sinister: "As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamo as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross .... Before the end, one began to pray to it." This, of course, is not Homos surveying the immaculate industry of Altruria, but Henry Adams "haunting" the Great Exposition of 1900 in Paris. For Adams, too, the dynamo creates communities by impressing individuals with its awesome power. Indeed, Adams found that what was to be another great unifying focus of modernity, the automobile, had by 1900 "become a nightmare at a hundred kilometres an hour."62 What is most significant, however, is Adams's connection of the dynamo and the Virgin, for it concisely expresses what may be the most profound motivation behind Howells's utopianism: the search for something to replace the vacuum created by the disappearance of God, insofar as God represents, as does the Virgin for Adams, the "symbol or energy" that "had acted as the greatest force the Western world had ever felt, and had drawn man to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or supernatural, had ever done."63 The dream of such a unifying force clearly possesses Howells's imagination, largely because the global amal-

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gamations he witnessed seemed to cancel the possibility of an organically unified culture. The unity that does seem possible in the technological world threatens to become the unity of a model prison, as the "electrized ... metallic filament" makes clear. The flat prose in which Howells presents this brutal method of social control in fact links his utopia to the scientistic, managerial outlook advocated at the time by writers like Taylor and E. A. Ross. Indeed, Ross's own discussion of art as a means to social unity stresses the links between the desire for community and the death of God. In a passage that might serve as an epigraph to the entire canon of turn-of-thecentury utopias, he comments: "Art shows us Society, and bids us be content. The collective life is magnified till it fascinates with its spaciousness, glorified till it dazzles with its splendour.... In a century of Gotterdammerung like ours this apotheosis of society is especially marked."64 Howells, to be sure, gave many reasons not to be content with his particular society, but in his utopian novels he verges on endorsing the total socialization of the individual. Howells's reservations about his own ideals seem to be founded in part on his fear that he might have been contributing to the vast forces, governmental and economic, that tended to blend individuals into an undifferentiated mass-the very forces and the very result, in other words, that Bellamy so enthusiastically embraced. As Robert Hough has correctly recognized, "Every aspect of life in Altruria is organized,"65 and to the extent that this is so, Howells participates in, rather than dissents from, the growing pressure toward the organization of life that had in his lifetime accomplished something as fundamental as, for example, the division of the United States into four uniform time zones to facilitate railroad scheduling. Howells was uncomfortably aware of what we might now call the "complicity" of his utopia with the dominant culture, and his nightmares suggest his awareness of the pitfalls that, according to utopian theorists like Bloch, attend any attempt to paint a positive portrait of the utopian state: the fact that we have been socialized in a corrupt sys-

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tem precludes our ability to imagine a truly just one. The more disturbing aspects of Altrurian organization would even seem to justify Michel Foucault's gloomy warning against utopian or even possibly "progressive" thinking: "I think to imagine another system is to extend our participation in the present system."66 Of course, many readers have been struck with Altruria's lack of any monolithic state apparatus, which with some justice they see as Howells's rejection of the move toward centralization. Nevertheless, the fact that everyone apparently agrees about who should be hooked up to the dynamo suggests that the state has so completely suffused the individual as to make some conversations superfluous. The form of Through the Eye of the Needle on the one hand expresses Howells's gloomy doubts about the possibility of consciously fashioning a truly unified society and on the other seems calculated to suggest that no such unification should be brought about. The first half, set in New York, is composed of letters by Homos to a friend in Altruria. The second half, set in Altruria, is a series of letters by Eveleth Strange to Mrs. Makely. The stark gap in the middle is reminiscent of the similar break in the middle of The Golden Bowl, a novel divided between the perspectives of Prince Amerigo and that of his American wife, Maggie Verver. In James's work, the threat that a change in perspective will involve a radical relativizing of all experience is overcome by Maggie's effort consciously to "re-write" the events of Book I. We are left not simply with two points of view, but with one point of view that has triumphed over the other by a process of assimilation. The higher organizational unity into which James welds his materials is, however, lacking in Howells's final utopian romance. The two realities, America and Altruria, are simply left facing each other across an unbridgeable gap, the values of both completely intact, engaged in a dialogue that is unlikely to result in any dialectical transformation of either; like the adherents of Werckmeister's citadel culture, the reader is left in possession of two perspectives "absolute and relative at once."67 If Howells traveled to Altruria to preserve the detachment from his culture that un-

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derwrote his early enthusiasm for ironic conversation, once he got there he seemed to discover that critical distance and practical impotence go hand in hand. This gap is most evident in the final letter by Eveleth, who still finds that Altruria simply does not feel real. Her anxiety that she is merely dreaming is put to rest only on the final page of the romance, when the appearance of a ship from America assures her, for some reason, that Altruria must be a concrete destination. "I shall never again doubt that Altruria is real!" (441), she exclaims. Her final words, however, are odd. Wondering about the destiny of the approaching passengers, she concludes, "I dare not ask anything, I dare not think anything!" (442). Howells's last words on utopia announce a moratorium on speech and thought, as if, at the end of his utopian enterprise, he encountered a mere oppugnancy between world orders that brought an end to progressive dialogue. The end of the dialogue may even be a kind of "payment" for the success of Eveleth's conversion to Altrurian ways. The second half of the novel is in large measure an account of her assimilation to utopia. At times, she cannot keep her affiliations straight, as she reveals when she writes to Mrs. Makely that "the shopping here is not so enslaving as it is with us-I mean, with you" (4°3). Toward the close of the novel, she has "become more and more thoroughly naturalized," even if she is not yet "a perfect Altrurian" (429). With the end of her fears that Altruria is a dream she seems to cross a definitive threshold, and at just that moment lapses into her ultimate silence. It is as if having at last become completely naturalized, a perfect Altrurian, she simply vanishes into the continent, incapable of, or uninterested in, further articulation. Indeed, Eveleth's final letter, which puts a premium on uncommunicative self-containment, recalls Howells's most vehement denunciation of the Haymarket executions-in which he expressed his hope that "Mr. States' Attorney General ... has not suffered too keenly from the failure to realize his poetical ideal in the number of Anarchists hanged"68-not so much because of its content as because, after making three revisions and addressing it

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to Whitelaw Reid, he never sent it. Just days after the four executions of November I I, Howells seemed bitterly to resign himself to the futility of trying to discuss controversial issues, sensibly and in a cool hour, in the pages of the mass media. The conclusion of the Altrurian romances registers, rather than reconsiders, the frustration Howells's most dangerous political activity had engendered. This frustration is even more apparent in the preface to Through the Eye of the Needle, which is perhaps Howells's finest achievement in the short essay form. For this introduction Howells adopted the persona of a staunch supporter of the American way, and he dismisses the criticism leveled by the Altrurian at his country by noting that Homos visited the United States on the verge of the depression of 1893-98. Following the Spanish War, however, "Providence marked the divine approval of our victory . . . by renewing in unexampled measure the prosperity of the Republic" (270-711. The editor then undertakes a survey of current conditions in which Howells's prose rises to an almost Swiftian level of disgust with his civilization. "The trolleys now pass unheard ... the subway is a retreat fit for meditation and prayer" (271 I. "[T]he condition of every form of labor has been immeasurably improved, and it is now united with capital in bonds of the closest affection" (27 I I. Businessmen "have become more and more cultured, so that now you frequently hear them asking what this or that book is all about" (2721. "Every room has abundant light and perfect ventilation, and as nearly a southern exposure as possible" (2691. "Each child has his or her little plot of ground in the roof-garden, where they are taught the once wellnigh forgotten art of agriculture" (2701. If we believe this report, the butt end of the Gilded Age witnessed a rebirth of the tempered spirit of the Georgics. Part of the grim exuberance of these pages derives from Howells's finally giving rein to his contempt for many of those in his audience. In part, however, he seems to have been driven to this expedient because he understood that his impenetrable aura of respectability had made it almost impossible for him to be heard; the adherence to vaguely socialist doctrines by the Dean of American Letters had

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become but one more fixture in the cultural marketplace. The introduction, in which Howells suggests that he can tell the truth only by lying, amounts to a rejection of many of his fondest hopes for the transforming power of realism. Indeed, part of his bitterness may be directed against the essay form of which he himself was a master. Although Howells staked his hopes about the transformative power of literature on the novel, he must have been aware that he was known mostly through his essays, read by the harried subscribers of magazines who did not have the time or inclination to inspect the fruits of his literary theory. In an 1894 essay on "The Doom of Realism," one critic wrote that "there were many of us who, while we read very little of his novels, never missed one of his monthly essays in Harper's."69 The essay may have established Howells as a celebrity, but it was a curiously mediated celebrity based on the widespread knowledge that he was a novelist, rather than on a knowledge of his novels themselves. In the 1 907 preface, Howells may be venting his frustration with the fact that he had always been more important because of what he and others said about novels like his than because of his novels themselves. Like the possible future in which advertisements overwhelm things, Howells's world seemed to be dominated by reviews that successfully pushed art off the stage. If his critique of American civilization was bound to be itself transformed into a commodity and misinterpreted by genteel readers, for once at least he had the pleasure of misinterpreting it for himself. In the first decade of the century, Howells seemed to come to bitter awareness of the way cultural critique, utopian or not, was blithely incorporated into the cosmopolitan culture itself. Indeed, at various times in his later life he must have wondered just what sort of position he held in the political and social spectrum. In 1901, Theodore Roosevelt declared that Howells deserved some of the blame for the assassination of President McKinley: "Tolstoy and the feeble apostles of Tolstoy, like ... William Dean Howells, who unite in petitions for the pardon of anarchists, have a heavy share in the burden of responsibility for crimes of this kind."70 Apparently overlooking the same affront to Illinois justice, George

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Harris and Sons of Chicago asked for and received permission from Howells to put his portrait "on a handsome Cigar Box Label." Summing up these apparent contradictions, years before Whitelaw Reid had jokingly, though pointedly, called Howells "a parlor anarchist."7! Caught in the toils of a celebrity depending on the consolidation of a mass market, and on a "liberated," cosmopolitan readership capable of turning everything into the subject of a sociable conversation, Howells was one of the pioneers in a terrain that has by now become densely populated.

4 The Imperial Museum

The American poets are to enclose old and new for America is the race of races. Of them a bard is to be commensurate with a people. To him the other continents arrive as contributions.-Walt Whitman 1 The course of history is nothing but the story of men's struggles from generation to generation to find the more and more inclusive order. Invent some manner of realizing your own ideals which will also satisfy alien demands-that and that only is the path of peace! - William Tames 2

Late in the summer of 1911, the last of the Yahi, a tribe thought to have been exterminated, suddenly appeared in the corral of a slaughterhouse in Butte County, California. Naked, starving, and unable to communicate, this "last wild Indian in North America" presented a human as well as an administrative enigma. At first the county sheriff put him in his prison cell for the insane. Within a few days, newspaper reports of the incident reached professors in the state, who promptly asked for and received permission from the Indian Bureau in Washington to take charge of the captive. On Labor Day Ishi, the Yahi word for man and the name given him by his new hosts, was taken by train to San Francisco and quickly installed in the anthropology museum of the University of California at Berkeley, where he resided until his death in 1916. He sang his tribal songs for the phonograph, he reenacted his daily routine for the camera, and on many Sunday afternoons Ishi was available to meet with members of the public at the museum. 3

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This transformation from "wild Indian" to living exhibit, this unexpected punctuation of the Census Bureau's declaration, twenty years before, that the frontier was closed, epitomizes one of the strategies for assimilating difference, particularly racial difference, available in turn-of-the-century America. Although Ishi's story and situation were spectacular, his life never became a Barnum-style spectacle. Throughout his stay in the civilization of his people's conquerors he was treated with a high measure of respect, respect due in part to his very difference itself. The fact, of course, that he was an exhibit and not a curator has, to say the least, a brute historical significance, but that the relationship established by his appearance was an apparently mutually satisfying one between exhibit and curator and not, say, an antagonistic one between prisoner and jailor is a fact whose significance, though no less historical, is considerably harder to gauge. It is striking, however, that an institution and an academic discipline were in place as natural candidates for his maintenance, the "naturalness" being a sign of the success with which they had established themselves as managers of knowledge relating to this member of a vanished culture. The alacrity with which the Indian Bureau gave permission for what thirty years earlier might have seemed an audacious move indicates that the government of public attitudes toward Native Americans was passing from the government itself to centers of enlightened, scientific investigation. That the matter of Ishi could be regarded as principally a question of knowledge as opposed to a question of public policy was of course due to the successful annihilation of native tribes as a political or military force. In the wake of a stunning internal imperialism it was, paradoxically, Ishi's incalculable difference, the alienation he might have seemed inevitably booked for, that provided him with so emphatic a place in one of the white cultural enclaves. 4 The change from spectacle to specimen is also evident in Henry James's 1905 encounter, on the steps of the Capitol, with "a trio of Indian braves ... arrayed in neat pot-hats, shoddy suits and light overcoats," which to his mind "quickened their resemblance ... to specimens, on show, of what the Government can do with

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people with whom it is supposed able to do nothing." For James, recounting the experience in The American Scene, whatever it was that the government had done with the braves marked the terminus of a tradition of cultural iconography stretching from Cooper down to the present: "for a mind fed betimes on the Leatherstocking Tales," the scene reduced "to a single smooth stride the bloody footsteps of time. One rubbed one's eyes, but there, at its highest polish, shining in the beautiful day, was the brazen face of history, and there, all about one, immaculate, the printless pavements of the State."S If Cooper had presided over an era whose project was to kill Native Americans, James now witnessed a process that got them off the prairies and into shoddy suits without staining the immaculate pavements of the State with their blood. The turn-of-the-century buzzword that names this process is "assimilation." James went so far as to dub the society to which he had returned "the great assimilative organism" (127). James both exposes and contributes to the functioning of that organism by turning the Native Americans into museum pieces showing what the government can do with people. Readers of The Golden Bowl will recognize at once that for James and his American characters the habit of turning people into exhibits is inveterate. To cite for the moment only the most extravagantly elaborated example, Maggie Verver tells Prince Amerigo at the start of the novel that he is to form "part of [the] collection" at her father Adam Verver's vast, projected "museum of museums" at American City.6 She explains to Amerigo, apparently a descendent not only of Vespucci but of a pope, "You're not perhaps absolutely unique, but you're so curious and eminent that there are very few others like you .... You're what they call a marceau de musee" (1:12). The egregious Fanny Assingham, whose prolix commentaries on the doings of the four main characters take up considerable space in the novel, makes the prince sound curiously like Ishi, noting, "He is profoundly a Prince.... He's perhaps one of the very last-the last of the real ones" (1:400). Prince Amerigo thus joins the gallery of extraordinarily displaced persons common to the utopian novels we have been considering:

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Bellamy's Julian West, Howells's Mr. Homos and Eveleth Strange, Gilman's trio of American explorers. In an important sense, The Golden Bowl echoes the utopians' concerns about the assimilation of the foreigner, the stranger, the survivor from a previous age, suggesting the pervasiveness of concern about how the individual could be accommodated in a complex social machinery that could no longer rely on cultural homogeneity to ensure its smooth operation. If Dr. Leete in Looking Backward could confidently assert that the arrangements of 2000 leave no "unaccounted-for residuum,"7 James in The American Scene contemplates the immigrants in Manhattan with a good deal more anxiety, wondering what would become of lithe obstinate, the unconverted residuum" (124) of foreignness evident on the Lower East Side. Maggie Verver's intention to put the prince in a museum, to manage his exceptional character by appreciating him as a living objet d'art, bears striking resemblance to the way James himself has been thought to handle characters in his novels. Especially in his major phase, he tended to insert the subjects of his art in a glass case of impeccable form. His obsession with the formal mastery of his materials is, in fact, precisely what has led James M. Cox recently to call James "a true imperialist in the world of art," suggesting, if only half-seriously, a link between aesthetic and political concerns. 8 Many others, however, find in James's aestheticism an indifference to the new, imperial world order. Raymond Williams sums up the position of these critics when he declares that what James "has really excluded is history."9 James has even become something of a test case for those interested in the possibilities of a political discourse about literature. When Frank Lentricchia suggests in Criticism and Social Change that lithe Henry James scholar" can accomplish "genuine political work," he is trying to be provocative: even Henry James criticism, of all things, can be political. 10 In one of the more recent attacks on James's purported aloofness from history and politics, Peter Conn demonstrates the irrelevance of James's concerns by pointing out that in June of 1905, "while Big Bill Haywood was addressing the delegates gathered at

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[the] founding convention of the IWW in Chicago, James was delivering the commencement address at Bryn Mawr, speaking on 'The Question of Our Speech.'''l1 But how unpolitical was James's alarmed announcement to the undergraduates that "we have simply handed over our property"-the English language-to, among others, "the American Dutchman and Dago"? James goes on: "All the while we sleep the vast contingent of aliens whom we make welcome, and whose main contention, as I say, is that, from the moment of their arrival, they have just as much property in our speech as we have ... are sitting up (they don't sleep!) to work their will on their new inheritance."12 It would be hard to come up with a more shrilly political passage in all of James-its untroubled, unquestioned, and evidently natural distinction between us and them smoothing over the ideological work that lies behind the definition of the alien. With the publication in 1907 of The American Scene, James was to make a much more probing investigation into the distinction that at Bryn Mawr seemed so obvious. Brought up short by the spectacle of immigrants in New York City, James wondered: "Who and what is an alien, when it comes to that? ... Which is the American ... which is not the alien ... and where does one put a finger on the dividing line, or, for that matter, 'spot' and identify any particular phase of the conversion?" (124). Of course, opinion about the answer to these questions varied widely. James's contemporary Richard Guenther, a German-born member of Congress, for one would have backed up the new immigrants' claims on the language, for according to him, "We are Americans from the moment we touch the American shore."13 James himself was never so straightforward in his answer, in part because, as Conn points out, he is himself "the most patently ubiquitous of the aliens in The American Scene."14 Giving the question another turn of the screw, however, James manages to weld engagement with the alien onto a definition of the American, or at least of the American writer. For the "man of letters, in the United States," whose "honour ... sits astride of the consecrated English tradition ... the dragon most rousing, over the land, the proper spirit of

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St. George, is just this immensity of the alien presence climbing higher and higher" (138). Aligning himself with St. George against the dragon of immigration, James nevertheless ties these opposites together in a definitional knot: the American is one entangled with the alien. By treating his subjects as if they were exhibits in a museum, apparently shorn of their historical determinants, James manages the problem of the alien in a time that witnessed both the peak of immigration to the United States and the success of American imperialist ventures in the Pacific. Many critics of the late phase, even historically minded ones like Conn, have seen this aestheticization of experience as a way of eluding engagement with the larger world. But even so rarefied a contrivance as James's late manner may be seen as part of an attempt to bring order to a world threatened by fragmentation and by the disappearance of consensus. Gabriel Pearson has argued as much in his extraordinarily suggestive interpretation of the late Jamesian style: "Hypertactic prose of the late James kind manifests as fully as possible the artist's conscious operations, witnesses his presence and stresses the chaos against and out of which continuous meaning has to be established.... [C]onventions, and the generalized social consciousness which gives rise to them, have lost their viability ... and it is the prose itself which has to re-establish the illusion of community."ls Until fairly recently, the chaos against which James strives has generally been taken to be a moral chaos brought on by the eternal failings and falterings of the soul. We are now in a position to explore the possibility that that chaos in fact emerged from cultural embroilments and decenterings rooted in the evaporation of traditional national-cultural boundaries. Recent efforts to restore James to his historical context have often focused on The Golden Bowl-by common consent one of James's most hermetic productions-in order to break the hold of such assumptions on James criticism. Attempts have thus been made to see this novel as an allegory of capital, as a tool in the operations of "power," and as a symptom of the new emphasis on consumption. l6 These readings, however, are not specific enough

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about just who gets to wield capital, "power," and "consuming vision." If we examine The Golden Bowl with an eye to its treatment of race, we find that James's-and the Ververs'-vigorous aestheticism is linked to an imperial dream of infinite expansion and endless assimilation. Far from being an escape from history, James's manner of treating the world as a museum, and its inhabitants as curators and exhibits, joins his art to the assimilative labor that lay ahead for his native country. Set in cosmopolitan London-which he elsewhere calls "an epitome of the round world," "the capital of the human race"17-James's last great novel, like the utopias we have considered, responds to the emergence of universal culture. For Bellamy, such a culture requires the radical homogenization of human beings, even if the process goes on under the cloak of a consumerism apparently indulgent of individual idiosyncrasy. James, however, as if heeding his brother's injunctions, tries to invent a way of realizing his own cultural ideals that will also satisfy alien demands, a way of imagining the world as an integrated totality that will not be totalitarian. Describing the profile of James's characters, Dorothea Krook mentions, among other attributes, that they are "rich, often very rich; they are handsome; they are well-bred." Such characters have "exactly the same dramatic function as the kings, queens and princes in Shakespeare's plays. They are 'representative' of all humanity."ls Many critics today, of course, would object to the representativeness of Shakespeare's royalty, but James's presentation of Prince Amerigo itself should caution us against taking him as a stand-in for all humanity: he is emphatically, almost hyperbolically, an Italian prince. In his opening dialogue with Fanny Assingham, he lives up to widely held stereotypes by confessing his lack of "the moral sense," prompting Fanny to burst out, "Oh you deep old Italians!" (r:30) and to call him, more succinctly, "Machiavelli!" (r:3r)-which reminds us that the first half of the novel is, after all, titled "The Prince." James's own essays collected in Italian Hours could have been used to predict the plot of The Golden Bowl. Writing of the Venetian "race," he notes, "It

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hasn't a genius for stiff morality.... It scruples but scantly to represent the false as the true .... It has been accused further of loving if not too well at least too often."19 Just these characteristics are embodied in the prince's eminent ancestors, including "the infamous Pope" (1:10), and it is in light of his desire to escape this burden of the past that his marriage to Maggie takes on a special significance: "What was this so important step he had just taken but the desire for some new history that should, so far as possible, contradict, and even if need be flatly dishonour, the old?" (1:16). In spite, however, of his utopian desire for a "new history" and his "remarkable displays of assimilative power" (2:38) in matters of language-a power that recalls James's anxieties about the alien in America-the adulterous plot in which the prince finds himself demonstrates quite explicitly "how little one of his race could escape after all from history" (1:10). Amerigo's race countervails his desire, recently described by Margery Sabin, "to embark on the adventure of a new identity in the role invented for him by the Ververs."20 In this way his story opens onto one of the most inflammatory political questions of the time: To what extent could immigrants be assimilated to American life? In 1896 Henry Cabot Lodge, sounding very much like the narrator of The Golden Bowl, declared on the floor of the Senate, "The men of each race possess an indestructible stock of ideas, traditions, sentiments, modes of thought, an unconscious inheritance from their ancestors, upon which argument has no effect." His topic was immigrants and written language, and his goal was to impose a literacy test on the newly arrived, a test that he felt would most exclude "Italians, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, and Asiatics . . . races with which the English-speaking people have never hitherto assimilated."21 Although President Cleveland vetoed the bill the following spring, Lodge was hardly alone in his alarm at the newer aspects of immigration to the United States. The year 1896 marks the first in which immigration from southern and eastern Europe outstripped that from the north and west. This trend, along with the acquisition of the Philippines,

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helped establish new and more intimately felt sensitivity to questions of race. As W. E. B. Du Bois pointed out in The Souls of Black Folk, "this is an age when the more advanced races are coming in closer contact with the less developed races, and the race-feeling is therefore intensified."22 The use of marriage as a figure for the mingling of national bloods was one register of the growing concern for the genetic profile of the nation. At the beginning of what he was sure would be The Anglo-Saxon Century, John R. Dos Passos, father of the novelist, felt that a union between Britain and the United States "has become necessary in order to fulfil the destiny of the race-it is as natural as marriage between man and woman."23 Analogies to marriage were just as irresistible to those opposing the global expansion of the United States. Speaking against the annexation of the Philippines, Senator John Daniel of Virginia referred to the racially mixed population of the islands as a "mess of Asiatic pottage," warning that the "interjection of a race nonassimilable has been the fly in the ointment of American institutions," and counseling that the treaty would mark "a marriage of two nations. The twain becomes one flesh."24 Daniel's attempt to discredit imperialism by making it sound like miscegenation only underlines the fact that the international theme in American politics had taken on the character of a marriage plot, and that racial and national identity were for many, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, one and the same. If the conjoining of territories struck onlookers as a kind of wedding, the imperial ambience of The Golden Bowl suggests that the comparison could also work the other way around, that concerns about Western expansion could be displaced upon the events surrounding the marriage of Maggie and the prince. The novel starts, after all, with the prince's fantasies of a recaptured, imperial past: "If it was a question of an Imperium, he said to himself, and if one wished, as a Roman, to recover a little the sense of that, the place to do so was on London Bridge," for cosmopolitan London presents a "convincing image of the truth of the ancient state" (1:31. The fact that this image is not merely an image is confirmed by the presence of Fanny Assingham's hus-

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band, Bob, a retired colonial officer whose habits suggest "tropic islands, a continual cane-bottomed chair, a governorship exercised on wide verandahs .... [HJis cheekbones and the bristle of his moustache were worthy of Attila the Hun" (1:66). Perhaps most significant of all, capitalist turned collector Adam Verver is said to resemble Keats's stout Cortez, and his "peak in Darien" is the realization that "a world was left him to conquer and that he might conquer it if he tried": "To rifle the Golden Isles had become on the spot the business of his future" (1:141). References to the rifling of islands, along with the other traces of an imperial milieu that float in and out of focus in the novel, register the interest in the question of empire that James, like virtually every American intellectual, felt following the SpanishAmerican War, which seemed to mark the entry of the United States onto the stage of imperial politics. Although in comparison to the far-flung empires of the European powers the American acquisitions seem relatively small, the prospect of an American empire challenged politicians and others to reconsider the nature of the United States. James "hated ... almost loathed" the war itself, partly because of his ingrained pacificism and partly because it represented an eruption of chaos and disorder. Just as he had complained to his father in 1870 of "the absurdly clumsy and transitory organization of the actual social body," shortly after the outbreak of the war he wrote to his brother William of "the madness, the passions, the hideous clumsiness of rage" revealed in the hostilities. Concerning the ultimate outcome of the war he was considerably more ambivalent. Writing to his nephew in 1899, he explained that as a resident of England, he "inevitably" felt "the 'Imperial' question, in a different way" than he would if he lived in America. "Expansion," he goes on to say, "has so made the English what they are-for good or for ill, but on the whole for good-that one doesn't quite feel one's way to say for one's country 'No-I'll have none of it!' It has educated the English. Will it only demoralise US?"25 Even if this hardly constitutes a drum-beating endorsement of American imperialism, James does suggest that an encounter with the alien might yield spiritual gold to the colo-

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nizers, as if the occupation of the Philippines were a grand tour on a national scale. Indeed, he seems to cast the United States as an Isabel Archer embarking on a career that threatens demoralization even as it offers a deepened engagement with life and the world. Like the protagonists of his works exploring the "international theme," James's America is faced with a dangerous opportunity. The Golden Bowl, in fact, is imbued with a sense of danger related to the expansiveness of Europe and the United States. To be sure, James keeps the violence that usually attends imperial exploits well in the background; it is only in the comfort of the drawing room that Fanny says to her husband, "You've taken part in the sack of cities, and I'm sure you've done dreadful things" (1:83). But the fact that violence is in the background at all links The Golden Bowl with the catalogue of "dreadful things" James's sometime neighbor Joseph Conrad had published just two years earlier in Heart of Darkness. In fact, James's novel of betrayal in the rarefied air of London society appears in many respects to be a prolonged meditation on Conrad's nightmarish vision of Europeans adrift in Africa. 26 Adam Verver, for example, seems like an inversion of Conrad's "bearers of a spark from the sacred fire," who disseminate civilization among conquered lands. American City, by contrast, is a gathering in, "civilization condensed" (1:145), a collection culled not only from the West but from subject regions as well. Verver proposes to Charlotte Stant, after all, during the course of a visit to Brighton to buy up "an extraordinary set of oriental tiles of which he had lately got wind" (1:197). The museum is in effect the modern department store raised to sublimity, an intense revision of the Bond Street shop windows that attest to the link between emporium and imperium, windows "in which objects massive and lumpish ... were as tumbled together as if, in the insolence of Empire, they had been the loot of far-off victories" (1:3).27 Displaying an exemplary multiculturalism, Verver represents the new connoisseurship to which one can be educated in a world of empire, the ability to adopt exotic standards that is one of the aesthetic spinoffs of colonial governance. As

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Columbia professor Franklin Henry Giddings wrote in Democracy and Empire in I900, sounding the same note as James in his letter to his nephew: "Outlying possessions will compel us, as nothing hitherto has done, to respect the opinions, the manners, and the interests of other nations. They will continually involve us in complications from which we can hope to emerge unscathed only by the utmost exercise of tact and knowledge .... Nations, like individuals, improve both their morals and their manners when they have no alternative."28 Verver seems to have profited from such a course of improvement, a process similar to the "education" James felt the English received from the expansion of their empire. In a world made safe for collectors by Bob Assingham, Verver's museum founding does the cultural work of empire. Housed in vast buildings beyond the Mississippi, the collection at American City expresses the inclusiveness, the aesthetic flexibility and extension, of an imperial consciousness confident enough to enshrine alien accomplishments in its heart. It is not surprising, therefore, that the anti-imperialist Senator Daniel should phrase his objections to the annexation of the philippines in terms of Gilman's nativist aesthetic, one hewing to the older conception of national organicism. Using the notion of balance to accommodate earlier U.S. gains in the Sandwich Islands, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, Daniel expressed his belief that the nation "is a perfect, symmetrical body, becoming homogeneous in all its parts." Add distant possessions in the Pacific, he warned, and you create "something that is cumbrous and unnatural, something that is heterogeneous and surprising."29 He invokes, in other words, what Henry James in The American Scene presents as an overly defensive "idea of the country": "Is not our instinct in this matter, in general, essentially the safe one-that of keeping the idea simple and strong and continuous, that it shall be perfectly sound?" (86). It is James's special accomplishment in The Golden Bowl, however, to forgo safety and to embrace heterogeneity and surprise, if only to bring them under the control of a higher organizational power, of an "existence more intelligently arranged" (2:22). The

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challenge posed by the alien is perhaps most strongly suggested in one of James's most symbolically charged passages, the opening of the second volume, in which Maggie ponders the growing sense of her predicament, a predicament largely caused by her own attempts to bring order to her and her father's lives. When Maggie feels that her marriage has left her father alone, she encourages a union between him and her former schoolmate Charlotte Stant. Not realizing that Charlotte and Amerigo had previously been lovers, Maggie resumes her close relationship with her father after the two couples settle in London, a development that throws the old lovers together. Sensing the adulterous plot she has in part, through her good intentions, facilitated, she contemplates her" situation": "This situation had been occupying for months and months the very centre of the garden of her life, but it had reared itself there like some strange tall tower of ivory, or perhaps rather some wonderful beautiful but outlandish pagoda .... The thing might have been, by the distance at which it kept her, a Mahometan mosque" (2:3-4). Finding a tower of ivory in the heart of her arranged life, Maggie experiences a Comadian sense of displacement from and doubt in the integrity of her civil, her civilized, ways. The victim of an adulterous pair, she experiences "the horror of finding evil seated all at its ease where she had only dreamed of good; the horror of the thing hideously behind, behind so much trusted, so much pretended, nobleness" (2:237)-"the horror," in short, revealed in the dying words of Mr. Kurtz a few years before. Having embarked on an omnivorously assimilative project, the Ververs come face-to-face with the "reversion" -to the pagoda, the mosque, the "wild eastern caravan" (2:237) that figures Maggie's temptation by the "rages of jealousy" (2:236)-that threatened all such undertakings. The symbol of this particular threat, the surprising, heterogeneous ivory pagoda, would have made perfect sense to Senator Daniel, who worried that along with the habit of governing an empire "we are already beginning to get the Asiatic flavor in our American utterances."30 Even Amerigo's hereditary past gives the image a resonance it might not otherwise have. John Fiske, pointing out the finally decadent despotism of the ancient

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Romans, spoke of "this tendency, if you will pardon the phrase, towards the Asiaticization of European life," a tendency "continued by inheritance in the Roman Church"31-an inheritance in which, of course, the Catholic Ververs themselves share. Recalling the alien presence in The American Scene, we can see that the threatened asiaticization of Maggie's life is paradoxically what makes her an American, what shows her fantastically exceptional situation to be nevertheless the representative story of the United States. The historical occasion for this encounter with the alien was the westward course of empire, a course that had proceeded further than the displacement from Rome to London imagined by the prince. Tracing the history of the world as the inevitable outcome of shifting trade routes, in 1902 Brooks Adams declared in The New Empire, "During the last decade the world has traversed one of those periodic crises which attend an alteration in the social equilibrium. The seat of energy has migrated from Europe to America."32 He could be even more specific: "The vortex of the cyclone is near New York" !208). In an attempt to prepare Americans for their coming power, Adams proposed institutional changes promoting a "scientific education" that would "tend to diminish the agony of adaptation" !xxv). Among the institutions he surveys is the museum, which he castigates for adopting a narrowly aesthetic outlook. Instead of teaching "that certain objects are in themselves beautiful," he insists museums should promote the study of art "as a product of an environment" !xxvii). Abandoning the old formalism for a new historicism, Adams suggests that the museum should school the people in the habit of seeing art in terms of the cultural work it performs. Art of the past must, in his view, be experienced at second hand. Indeed, the whole notion of a timeless standard is ruled out by Adams's Darwinian assumptions: "If men are to be observed scientifically, the standard by which customs and institutions must be gauged cannot be abstract moral principles, but success" !xxiv). Offering a theoretical foundation for the link between art and politics, Adams argues that the scientific museum leads to suc-

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cess in the new empire by encouraging the habit of mediated vision. Confronted with an artifact, the viewer is not to marvel at its beauty, but to consider how such beauty strengthened the society from which it proceeded. Such circumspection is of particular value to the twentieth-century American, for "as the United States becomes an imperial market, she stretches out along the trade-routes which lead from foreign countries to her heart" /2081. Mastery in these circumstances requires a quality of mind Adams calls "generalization," of which "administration is only the practical side" /2101. Evoking something like Adam Verver's breadth of appreciation, Adams writes that "generalization necessitates the maintenance of an open mind. It is inconsistent with subserviency to a priori dogmas" /21 1 Ii through generalization "the individual is trained to hold the judgment in suspense" /2101. Adams's argument shows that an acute sensitivity to difference is not incompatible with, but is in fact crucial to, imperial aspirations. The new nonjudgmental attitude was in fact coming into place just at this time in the anthropological wing of the American administration of the Philippines. Although James himself was anxious about the possibility of "remote colonies run by bosses," some aspects of the American occupation, though by no means all, suggested a less brutal form of governance. 33 Indeed, a brief examination of the American handling of the natives will reveal a marked convergence of James's aestheticism and imperial administration. Making an exemplary move, in 1903 the Bureau of NonChristian Tribes changed its name to the Ethnological Survey for the Philippine Islands, which was deemed a "more fitting designation,"34 more fitting because it converted the indigenous population from an object of moral condescension and concern into an object of scientistic inquiry. The shift in terminology was accompanied by an assiduous attempt to turn the Filipinos into objects of ethnographic as well as aesthetic contemplation for Americans in the United States. The "preparation for publication of the scientific results achieved" by the staff was to a large extent hindered by the more pressing project of "making necessary preparations for an adequate representation of the non-Christian tribes at the

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coming Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St. Louis." Generous funding of this effort had been assured by President Roosevelt himself, who, along with Secretary of War Root and William Howard Taft, then governor of the Philippines, was anxious to see "a thoroughly creditable exhibit." Among the more than two thousand anthropological exhibits were to be "several colonies of the various tribes, both civilized and uncivilized, for the purpose of giving opportunity for ethnographic study of the people of the Philippines."3s In practice, as might be expected, the staid expectations of the Survey gave way to a more sensational response, as one reporter on the scene at St. Louis noted: "More women than men visit this concession, and the writer saw a number of them take part in the wild dance and hound song of the dog-eating savages."36 If this commentator failed to get into the objective spirit with which the reservation was prepared, she nevertheless fully participated in the accommodation of difference the government officials hoped to promote. Refusing the Christian point of view by which the natives would have looked like souls ripe for conversion, she accepts them as pure manifestations of cultural difference who, if to her unattractive, have nevertheless an integrity it is her business to view but not to disrupt. When observed with the colder eye of anthropological assessment or aesthetic appreciation-as if, that is, they were rnorceaux de rnusee-the tribes present a living justification for imperial policy. Not only does their difference seem to mark them as incapable of the allegedly unique Anglo-Saxon genius for administration, it also makes a claim upon that genius by its very existence as an irreducible otherness threatened with extinction-a threat that comes in part, paradoxically, from the notion of Anglo-Saxon supremacy that was one of the ideological motors behind American expansion. The mere fact that these peoples could be made into exhibits was precisely what required that they be made into exhibits for their own protection. This odd vacillation between rigorous involvement and scrupulously maintained distance is what brings the American confrontation with the Filipinos into the realm of the aesthetic, what

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marks their relations with the simultaneous engagement and detachment characteristic of the experience of art. That, at least, is presumably what the anti-imperialist William James meant when he said, "We have treated [the Filipinos] as if they were a painted picture.... They are too remote from us ever to be realized as they exist in their inwardness. "37 It is remarkable that this way of figuring the United States' relations to the subject peoples could be employed by either side of the debate on the question of annexation. If William James could object that empire implied "the presumption to force our ideals on people to whom they are not native,"3S apologists for expansion could justify the American presence in the name of preserving the tribal ways it seemed to endanger; the elusive inwardness of the non-Westernized Filipinos was just what required the curatorial care of the Westerners. Thus, Secretary of the Interior of the Philippines Dean C. Worcester wanted "to protect the wild tribes of the islands from imposition at the hands of civilized Filipino, American, and other residents."39 The foes of imperialism might acknowledge the merely pictorial quality of the native populations in the minds of Americans-though sometimes with considerably less acknowledgment of their humanity, as in Senator Daniel's blunt, loaded reference to them as "the brown people of the Philippine Archipelago"4°-but they did not seem aware that this reifying process could be frankly conceded by expansionists who, with the best will in the world, felt that was precisely why Americans had to be there. This was particularly the case since McKinley had set the tone of public debate on the Philippines with talk of "duty," "obligation," and "responsibility."41 Even after the bloody "insurrection" of Aguinaldo and its equally bloody suppression, Roosevelt could dismiss the thought of pulling out as mere selfishness: "Such desertion of duty on our part would be a crime against humanity. "42 We have found, then, that to a surprising degree imperial discourse treats the world as a museum, a habit often associated with Henry James's and the Ververs' aestheticism, which for so many readers has been a sign of the novelist's irrelevance to the world-

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historical events of his time. Indeed, James's tendency to see the mastery of his material as virtually a moral obligation suggests both Roosevelt's justification of imperial policy and Maggie Verver's spectacularly successful manipulation of people and events in the second volume of The Golden Bowl, which she undertakes "in the grasp of her conceived responsibility" (2:56). Far from being merely fortuitous, these connections along with many others locate the Ververs' vision of themselves and their enterprise within the ambit of an imperial discourse. One of the most striking aspects of Adam Verver's characterization, in fact, remarkably parallels the familiar appeal to the white man's burden: the rifler of the golden isles is consistently described as the embodiment of selflessness. What has usually been seen as a glaring example of James's famous ignorance of business can, however, be understood as performing a particular kind of ideological work. Early in the novel we learn that "this amiable man bethought himself of his personal advantage, in general, only when it might appear to him that other advantages, those of other persons, had successfully put in their claim" (1:125-26). He thus figures himself as "surrounded" by a "numerous array," attending to "the many-coloured human appeal, represented by gradations of tint, diminishing concentric zones of intensity, of importunity," unable to make out where the appeal "really faded to the impersonal whiteness for which his vision sometimes ached" (I :126). Reserving for the moment our consideration of the impersonality of whiteness, we can note that it is the darker tints of "the many-coloured human appeal," tints suggesting alien interests, that lay claim to Verver's attention. James himself felt susceptible to a related appeal, and the imperial suggestion of Verver's rather impressionistic metaphor comes still closer to the surface in the author's preface to the New York edition of "Lady Barbarina." Considering the story of an Anglo-American marriage, James explains: Nothing appeals to me more ... than the finer-if indeed thereby the less easily formulated-group of conquests of civiliza-

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tion, the multiplied symptoms among educated people, from wherever drawn, of a common intelligence and a social fusion tending to abridge old rigours of separation. This too, I must admit, in spite of the many-coloured sanctity of such rigours in general, which have hitherto made countries smaller but kept the globe larger. ... There, if one will-in the dauntless fusions to come-is the personal drama of the future.43 We may wonder whether such sanctified rigors of separation are of a piece with Daniel's revulsion from the "mess of Asiatic pottage" for which he feared his imperialist colleagues were willing to sell their birthright to a racially homogeneous nation. In any case, James here anticipates a time when countries shall be larger and the globe smaller, which also of course implies a time when some countries will no longer be countries. If Verver hears the human appeal directly, James, as if on a still higher mountaintop, hears the appeal of conquest and civilization themselves, and implicitly looks forward to a culture that can accommodate people "from wherever drawn," so long as they have been "educated" in the ways of "civilization." Behind James's views is a reminder that imperialism, when it is not mere rapine on a national scale, reveals itself in part as a pedagogical project. These hints of imperial vision become more explicit in The American Scene, where James points to the unique power of "the consecrated English tradition" to create a culture that can become anyone's, "from wherever drawn." Indeed, James's fascination with international dramas, and with the marriages of Americans to Europeans that furnish a type of the fusions to come, suggests a tie to widely held ideas about the peculiar destiny of Englishspeaking peoples. Thus Senator Albert Beveridge, one of the bestremembered popularizers of this theory, believed, "The inherent tendencies of a race are its highest laws .... The sovereign tendencies of our race are organization and government."44 God, he was sure, had made the "English speaking and Teutonic peoples" "the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns."45 Maggie Verver, in her determined effort to reestablish

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order and to realign the inhabitants of what Fanny calls "her wonderfullittle world" (1:380), may thus be seen as fulfilling not only a personal but also a racial dream. She, at least, like Beveridge, describes the labor of organization as somehow holy: "I live/, she says, "in the midst of miracles of arrangement, half of which I admit are my own" (2:rro). In The Golden Bowl, however, it is not Maggie who claims organizational powers as her racial endowment; Charlotte Stant, who works the other half of the miracles, does that. When the prince speculates whether a sight-seeing tour of Gloucester can serve as a plausible cover for a liaison with his mother-in-law, he discovers that she has already planned the entire expedition down to the minute. Providing an example of the miraculous arrangements of which she herself is capable, Charlotte suggests that by taking the 6:50 train into Paddington "we can dine, at the usual hour, at home" (I: 362). Of her tactical superiority she explains, "It takes Anglo-Saxon blood." The joke that blood manifests itself in the details of domestic, or antidomestic, arrangement is not quite a joke to the prince, or at least not a joke he is willing to let stand unchallenged: "'''Blood''?' he echoed. 'You've that of every race!'" As one of the last of the real princes, Amerigo is naturally sensitive to questions of pedigree, but Charlotte's blood is not a problem only here, even if this is the moment it rises closest to the surface. Charlotte's racial ambiguity is of a piece with the various disruptions she inaugurates throughout the novel; an unknown quantity, Charlotte can, at least temporarily, "pass" as a true friend, a faithful wife, and an inheritor of the consecrated English tradition. If the motivation behind her behavior does not seem exactly racial, the narrative queasiness surrounding the question of her blood suggests that it is not exactly not racial, either. After all, insofar as we are to take seriously the narrator's instruction about the limitations on those of Amerigo's race, genealogy is a central concern of the plot. As we shall see, Charlotte's desire to claim an identity firmly determined by race, and to reject a freefloating, cosmopolitan model of selfhood, is what distinguishes her from her victorious adversary, Maggie. In spite of Charlotte's

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boast, she and the prince in fact function together in the novel as embodiments of the anxiety surrounding the theories of AngloSaxon destiny. In the opening dialogue of the novel Amerigo tells Maggie, "I'm eating your father alive" (1:8). Even in the course of their playful banter this quip has a vaguely ominous ring to it, but the context of contemporary debates about the fate of Northern European stock in America gives it specifically racial undertones. In his 1904 article "The Value Rank of the American People," sociologist E. A. Ross gloomily surveyed the net genetic loss of the United States in the wake of the Civil War. The war, or the "Great Killing," as he called it, selectively destroyed the best genes in the North, for "the impulsive were decimated, while the calculating stayed at home and multiplied." The rising tide of immigration, or the "Great Dilution," only compounded the problem. For Ross, "the cheap stucco manikins from Southeastern Europe do not really take the place of the unbegotten sons of the granite men who fell at Gettysburg and Cold Harbor."46 Like his good friend Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ross clearly saw the immigrants as a threat to something new on the planet, something he admired, "a distinct American type." Thus, the Ververs' engagement with the alien, their experiment in assimilation, is typically American both in its ambitious goals and its risks. Concern about the odds against which the higher races must struggle, about the coincidence of genetic superiority and infertility, is in fact played out in the plot of The Golden Bowl. In an essay of 1904, Francis Galton declared, "It seems to be the tendency of high civilization to check fertility in the upper classes."47 Speaking even more to the point of James's novel, British colonial minister and historian Charles Pearson had earlier hypothesized that "heiresses are the outcome of families that tend to be sterile."48 Whatever genetic strength initially allowed such great families to rise ultimately hinders their continuity. It is worth noting that all three great novels of James's major phase revolve around threatened family lines, most spectacularly, of course, in The Wings of the Dove. Even the four remarkable physical specimens

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at the center of The Golden Bowl manage to produce among them only one child, and it is hard to avoid noticing that Amerigo, not Adam Verver, is the one whose male line of inheritance is assured, suggesting not only, as Maggie vaguely feels, "his connexion with occult sources of renewal" (1:2.481, but also the purportedly superior fertility of Southern Europeans. If the Italian prince is somehow the center of somatic vitality in the novel, the ambiguous Charlotte seems by contrast subtly to threaten Verver's potency, and even his health. When the curtain rises on the married life of the Ververs only Charlotte is on stage, II extremely apparent" (1 :2.4SI, while her older husband languishes ill at home. His constitutional decline-earlier he seems to Maggie "an irresistible youth" (1:1681-is confirmed by Charlotte. Wondering what would have happened had she and her husband had a child, she declares, "And now I'm sure. It will never be... . Never." Stating somewhat obscurely that "It's not, at any rate .. . my fault" (1 :3071, she leaves in doubt whether Verver suffers from impotence or sterility, but in either case the situation dramatizes the failure of the "highest" genes to get themselves reproduced. If allegedly higher races cannot be perpetuated in the usual way, events in the novel suggest that members of other races can be, as it were, enlisted through the mysterious influence of the masters. The obscure strategy allowing Maggie to control others-"how I," as she herself says, "make them do what I like!" (2.:IIsl-in fact does get deployed at times along explicitly racial lines. The very crisis of the plot, in fact, is precipitated by the practically unmotivated repentance of the Jewish dealer in questionable antiques. By coming to Maggie's home to confess that the objet he sold her is flawed, cracked, "the vendor of the golden bowl had acted on a scruple rare enough in vendors of any class and almost unprecedented in the thrifty children of Israel" (2.:2.2.2.-2.31. Under Maggie's tutelage, this Jew becomes less of a Jew, a conversion all the more remarkable given James's conviction, reported in The American Scene, that "the individual Jew [is] more of a concentrated person, savingly possessed of everything that is in him, than any other human" (1321. Maggie is able to do what even the vast assimilative

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organism of her native land cannot: impose an external norm upon "the unsurpassed strength of the race" (132) whose members James found "swarming" on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The ambiguous figure of the Jew, in fact, provides James with a paradigm of racial life. For many and perhaps even most critics, the passages on the ghetto in The American Scene are simply the places where James's latent anti-Semitism finally comes out of the closet.49 There is, of course, an element of pure fear and disgust in James's impressions, especially regarding his notion of the Jews' superior fecundity: "The children swarmed above all-here was multiplication with a vengeance" (131). The barely submerged terror of a threatened reproductive revenge pursues James "like a skeleton at a feast," and to the extent that this is representative of his outlook it is hardly to be distinguished from cheap, apocalyptic fantasies of racial strife. A more nuanced reading, however, has been offered by Ross Posnock, who discerns in the grotesque handling of the Jews a measure of "self-contempt, for James's image of the Jew contains an element of self-projection."so The most obvious link between James and the Jews is their status as aliens, along with their shared refusal to be assimilated by the vast homogenizing technology of "publicity" that is one of James's main targets. James's admiration of the inviolability of the individual Jew, however, is not a celebration of individuality as such; it is more like a meditation on race and on the specifically racial strength required to avoid disappearing in the anonymous mass of the American public. For James, each of the "denizens of the New York Ghetto" has "his or her individual share of the whole hard glitter of Israel." Israel, in fact, is the explanation, as it were, for the presence of Jews in America: "they were there for race, and not, as it were, for reason: that excess of lurid meaning, in some of the old men's and old women's faces in particular ... could only be the gathered past of Israel mechanically pushing through" (132). If it is impossible for James to imagine individual strength outside the horizon of a specifically racial identity, we see here his anxiety about the mechanical, determined nature of the individuality thus established. James's Jews are able to escape bland cul-

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tural conditioning only by succumbing to the blind destiny of race. The heightened pitch of James's descriptions seems to register disturbances in his view of himself-not only, as Posnock argues, of himself as an individual beset by the emergence of the administered world, but also of himself as a manifestation of race. After all, denigration of other races always entails at least a silent gesture of sensed affiliation with one's own. What James finds most "lurid" about the Jews, however, is just the fact that their race is so unmistakably a race. James's racism is thus paradoxically founded on a fear of race itself, a fear that makes any racial affiliation, even with the consecrated English tradition, a threat to freedom. James's queasy vacillation between faith in self-creation and fear of genetic determinism can be traced through his whole career, and reaches a climax in his earlier work in the vertiginous hereditary ambiguities that play such a prominent role in The Princess Casamassima. In that novel, Hyacinth attempts to evade the issue by claiming, "Oh, I daresay I ain't anything," but it is only in The Golden Bowl that James presents an "impersonal whiteness" that heralds the birth of the race that overcomes race. If the Ververs enact contemporary dreams of Anglo-Saxon organizational conquest, they nevertheless display a racial hermaphroditism suggesting that one of the miracles of arrangement of which they are capable is the rearrangement of their own racial alignment. By the end of the novel, Maggie is envisioned as occupying an "improvised 'post'-a post of the kind spoken of as advanced," with which she is connected "in the fashion of a settler or a trader in a new country; in the likeness even of some Indian squaw with a papoose on her back" (2:323). Referring to this passage, Mark Seltzer points to the way such racial ambiguity suggests the "empathetic improvisations" cultivated by Western imperialists in their attempts to understand and govern others around the world. 51 In fact, Maggie's London post seems to participate in what Frank Norris and others at the time called "the American conquest of England," which for the Californian promoter of Anglo-Saxon destiny was "but an incident of the Greater

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Invasion, an affair of outposts preparatory to the real manoeuvre that shall embrace Europe, Asia, the whole of the Old World."52 In addition, as a representative of a uniquely assimilative race, as an advanced, improvisational, racial chameleon, Maggie can be figured as both settler and squaw because what she seems in fact to be is nothing-or almost nothing. Although the prince says that Charlotte and Maggie are "of the same race" (1:310), Maggie's Anglo-Saxon blood seems to endow her not merely with the much touted powers of organization, but also with the potential for endless imitation, endless emulation. Maggie can be described only in terms of something else because for her race is itself a blank space, exemplified by her father's "neat colourless face," a face so colorless, in fact, "that it was clear, and in this manner somewhat resembled a small decent room, clean-swept and unencumbered with furniture" (1:170). The race of the Ververs is an emptiness, pure potentiality, nothing as yet. It is, then, Charlotte's eagerness to identify herself with a centered notion of an unchanging Anglo-Saxon character that disqualifies her from participating in the higher destiny of the Ververs, who extend their power not by imposing their way on the world, but by creating a space in which native and alien can achieve a compromise that, in some respects at least, respects the integrity of both. Unlike Maggie, who is able to transform herself into lithe slim rigour of her attitude, a rigour beyond that of her natural being" (2.:60), Charlotte insists on the natural determinants of her actions, and thus fails to achieve the unanchored form of being for which, paradoxically, her blood had fit her. Insisting on her identity, she becomes the object, and not possessor, of the imperial vision it seems James's business in the novel to invoke, a vision that is a necessary step in the evolution of an allinclusive culture. It turns out in the end that she, not Amerigo, is destined to become an exhibit in the museum of American City, and like other living exhibits of the time, like Ishi and the Filipinos in St. Louis, the threat she represents is contained by her conversion into an occasion for aesthetic contemplation. In the often cited final scene, just before the departure of Adam and

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Charlotte Verver for the United States, Maggie and her father survey their possessions, including their spouses, who fall into "the splendid effect and the general harmony: Mrs Verver and the Prince fairly 'placed' themselves, however unwittingly, as high expressions of the kind of human furniture required aesthetically by such a scene" (2:360). If one needed an example of how aesthetic vision in James goes hand in hand with power, this would surely do. The former lovers, after all, are turned into furniture by the composing eyes of Verver and his daughter, who are but a single step away from appraising Charlotte and the prince as they might "a pair of effigies of the contemporary great on one of the platforms of Madame Thssaud" (2:360). This moment has understandably served in James criticism as a focus for discussions of general ethical principles involving human relations. 53 Although such discussions are often fruitful, they do not take account of the racial motifs in the novel, which allow us to see the connection, for example, between the transformation of Mrs. Verver and the prince into wax museum pieces and William James's observation that "We have treated [the Filipinos] as if they were a painted picture." Indeed, at times in The Golden Bowl Charlotte is envisioned as a virtual stand-in for a conquered race, "thrown for a grim future beyond the great sea and the great continent" (2:312). When Maggie considers her father's plans for taking his wife with him back to American City-which ultimately seems to be the only way the integrity of the two couples can be preserved-she is struck by "his idea, the clearness of which for an instant almost dazzled her. It was a blur of light in the midst of which she saw Charlotte like some object marked by contrast in blackness, saw her waver in the field of vision, saw her removed, transported, doomed" (2:271). Distance and darkness, perhaps the two principal attributes in the American mind of "the brown people of the Philippine AIchipelago," are here displaced upon Charlotte, as if she were a testing ground for a vast project of assimilation and containment. 54 The aesthetic vision of Maggie and her father thus serves a specific ideological function appropriate to an imperial vision that takes others, that takes otherness

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itself, into its curatorial care. Moreover, the notorious aestheticism of the novel as a whole, instead of serving, as it does for most critics, as a measure of James's detachment from the life of his times, is actually a sign of his vital engagement. The elusiveness of James's attachment to contemporary notions of a specifically Anglo-Saxon destiny derives from his finding himself on the cusp between hard-and-fast definitions of the English-speaking races and a more fluid idea of a whiteness purified to the state of colorlessness, equipped successively to absorb all "aliens" from wherever drawn-even if drawn from the Anglo-Saxons themselves. For James, the real mark of mastery is no longer exactly governance and organization but, to use one of his favorite words for describing the modem novel, "elasticity."55 In his preface to "Lady Barbarina" he even suggests that the form of the novel is particularly suited both to chronicle and to bring about the "achieved social fusion" he foresaw. For the belated novelist, "the late-coming observer and painter," this fusion represents "a portent and an opportunity. In proportion as he intelligently meets it, and more especially in proportion as he may happen to have 'assisted' from far back at so many of the odd and fresh phenomena involved, must he see a vast new province, infinitely peopled and infinitely elastic-by which I mean with incalculable power to grow-annexed to the kingdom of the dramatist. "56 Here James's rhetoric, along with his "assistance," both his attendance and aid, suggest that he may not only have been, as James Cox says,"a true imperialist in the world of art," but also a true imperialist tout court, truer, indeed, than those who spoke so loudly about the future of, to take Frank Norris's elite grouping, "the Frieslanders, the Anglo-Saxons, the Americans." Norris, in fact, provides a revealing parallel to James's late work in an essay of 1902, the full title of which runs "The Frontier Gone at Last: How Our Race Pushed It Westward around the World and Now Moves Eastward Again-The Broader Conception of Patriotism as the Age of Conquest Ends." Looking into the future, Norris perceives "a new patriotism, whose meaning is now the secret of the coming centuries," but which does not correspond to "our selfish

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present-day conception of the word."S? For Norris, the one thing that can overcome the selfish pride of the Anglo-Saxon race, the pride to which Charlotte gives voice, is the concept that had been behind their global victory, the concept of the nation that allows ever larger groups to consider themselves, if only abstractly, united. Norris concludes: "Will it not go on, this epic of civilization, this destiny of the races, until at last and at the ultimate end of all, we who now arrogantly boast ourselves as Americans, supreme in conquest, whether of battle-ship or of bridge-building, may realize that the true patriotism is the brotherhood of man and know that the whole world is our nation and simple humanity our countrymen?"S8 Of course, Norris's "brotherhood of man" may very well mask an abstract male subject shorn of any inconvenient, irreducible difference. In addition, by making the whole world "our" nation, Norris seems to hint that some brothers have a better claim to the possessive case than others. Nevertheless, Norris looks forward to a time when the imperialists will themselves be imperialized by the universal worldview their conquest of the world brought into being. He believed with Henry Demarest Lloyd that "imperialism will build the roads on which will travel the new gospel that will destroy imperialism."s9 This new submission of power to cosmopolitan universalism constitutes much of the drama of The Golden Bowl. For whereas Maggie's vision and the chameleonism beyond mere race that underwrites it put her in a uniquely privileged position to control the destiny of others, she herself accepts this privilege as a burden, one resembling the white man's burden Kipling suggested his readers take up. Throughout her half of the novel Maggie feels herself "in the grasp of her conceived responsibility" (2:56), a responsibility, as Kipling's poem says, "To veil the threat of terror," to prevent the catastrophe that would result from an exposure of the adulterous lovers. The price exacted in this novel for the maintenance of order is the transformation of the world into a museum. The peculiarly self-conscious, floating form of selfhood required for that task is at once a source of power and of sorrow for

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father and daughter; they themselves, after all, have to pay what is portrayed as the horrible price of separation from each other, the kind of separation brought on by many another imperial ventures overseas. The more remarkable burden, however, is borne by Charlotte and the prince, who, after all, consent to become not curators but collectibles. In a final moment that seems an approach to mere fantasy, the captured, adulterous spouses behave in a way "that was like an ampler submission to the general duty of magnificence" (2:360). The submission to a magnificence not their own is perhaps rendered less fantastic, however, when we consider the Yahi who contributed to the luster of Berkeley or the Filipinos who traveled to a strange land for the sake of a "creditable exhibit./I They remind us that although The Golden Bowl might contribute to an elasticity of vision and selfhood consonant with an imperial museurnification of the globe, other projects were then going forward to secure those who would be, as it were, on the receiving end of the process. Like the trio of braves on the steps of the Capitol, Charlotte and the prince have been put in their place without, so to speak, staining the Ververs' carpets with blood. Although this conclusion seems to echo the perfect stasis achieved by utopians facing similar dangers from aliens, it would be wrong to suggest that James displays the utopian affinity for absolute closure. If James shares with the utopians an intense concern for the assimilation that seems required in the cosmopolitan world, he plainly dissents from the idea that modernity can have a final solution. By the close of the novel the Ververs have, it seems, achieved a stability that shows some promise of enduring. That promise, however, is suggested by the reemergence of carnality after a period of celibacy enforced by Maggie during her reeducation of the prince and realignment of the two couples. The powerful sexuality that closes the novel jars with the sanctioned diminishment of affect characterizing all the utopian writings we have considered. Whereas the utopians found community on the gradual cooling down of human passions, the dynamism inherent

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in James's version of order points to an openness of vision that would have forced him to reject any permanence but the permanence of change. Above all else it is, in fact, the closedness of utopia that seems to render it antagonistic to James. As we saw first in Looking Backward, utopia presupposes a condition in which the fundamentals of existence have been established for all time. The preoccupations of James's later career, however, attest to the fact that it was not finality but revision that absorbed his attention. Even Maggie's triumphant revisions in The Golden Bowl do not quite overcome the formal split running down the middle of the novel, which, like the crack in the bowl itself, points to the perpetually damaged quality of human life. Reflecting the strategies of his characters who understand the need for endless revision, in the prefaces to the New York edition James returns again and again to thenonutopian provisionality of his artistic solutions. Given a "critical apprehension" that "insists on becoming as active as it can," James asks, "Who shall say ... where it shall not begin and where it shall consent to end? "60 Bellamy, of course, was overwhelmingly hostile to the rethinking of fundamental problems, even if this seems a paradoxical thing to say about America's most famous utopian author. Part of what is idealfor Bellamy about 2000, after all, is that the critical spirit has been put to rest, that social questions have been "settleldl for all time."61 This is part of the reason Ernst Bloch, the most prominent advocate of utopian thinking in our century, observed that Bellamy's writings were thoroughly in keeping with the trajectory of the modern world. 62 For Bloch, the elimination of "inflammatory elements" from an allegedly utopian society is "proof that reality had remained a petit-bourgeois society" characterized by "palliative ideology instead of a clarion call."63 In a sense, then, James's restless revisionism suggests a stronger link to what Bloch understands as authentic utopian expression than to anything in Bellamy's perfectly engineered world. At rare moments, in fact, James sounds a note that seems almost explicitly utopian. There is, in particular, what we might call a positive moment in the critique of modern America James

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offers in The American Scene, a book that is often misunderstood as the unalleviated grousing of a frightened old man. The most remarkable expression of James's hope for the future comes just where one would least expect it, in the midst of his on the whole alarmed assessment of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Here, in a warmly lit cafe, the "brooding critic" contemplates the "unprecedented accents" that tum such establishments into "torturerooms of the living idiom"-a phrase that many would accept as an accurate characterization of James's later manner itself. It is this outlandish speech that James calls the "Accent of the Future," a language that makes his personification of the living idiom"gasp ... at the portent of lacerations to come." All this fits the characterization of James as reactionary. What he writes next, however, makes such an interpretation difficult to allow: "The accent of the very ultimate future, in the States, may be destined to become the most beautiful on the globe and the very music of humanity (here the 'ethnic' synthesis shrouds itself thicker than ever); but whatever we shall know it for, certainly, we shall not know it for English-in any sense for which there is an existing literary measure" (1391. To be sure, this passage does not bubble over with enthusiasm for the linguistic fusions to come. For one thing, by anticipating the extinction of literary English James is to some extent predicting the obsolescence of his own work. In a broader sense, however, James is acknowledging that a truly beautiful future depends on the destruction of what exists. In The Golden Bowl Maggie imagines the prince and Charlotte as a pair of "high Wagnerian lovers" (2:2801, but at times in The American Scene James himself strikes an almost apocalyptic, Wagnerian pose, sounding something like Erde rising out of the earth to exclaim, "Alles, was ist, endet"-everything that is is ending-a moment when the music as much as the libretto creates an atmosphere in which catastrophe, melancholy, mystery, and hope are bafflingly intertwined. This baffling mixture is what most characterizes the imperial ethos of The Golden Bow1. We must be careful, however, not to confuse that ethos with the jingoistic endorsements of imperial-

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ism that flooded the European marketplace of ideas at the time. After all, the pervasive sadness of The Golden Bowl, its refusal to ignore the sense of loss that accompanies Maggie's "triumph," does not square with the fatuously excited rhetoric of glory that greeted the march of empire. Although James's vision of the world cannot be extricated from the imperial milieu, his work does not for that reason express a cryptic endorsement of imperialism as it was actually practiced, of the "bosses" let loose on subject populations. If it did, we might expect the novel to end with Maggie lording it over her repentent husband. What happens, however, is quite different. The "horror" Maggie now fears, in fact, is that the prince will confess to his sins, that, in other words, he will confirm her position of mastery over him. Her last manipulation of her husband, her conversational evasion that allows her to "dispose" of his potential for confession "on the spot forever" (2:368), decisively ends her accustomed power over him. The final paragraph of the novel elaborates this transition. Although the prince tries, "too clearly, to please her" (2:368)-a clarity pointing to his past submissiveness-he presently "enclos[ed] her," and she responsively "buried her own [eyes] in his breast" (2:369). Maggie's last act seems more like self-extinction than the self-aggrandizement we might expect from a character who in most respects seems like a model colonizer of other people's minds. Maggie's negation of her self and renunciation of her power, however, are crucially in tune with the higher aspirations of empire that engaged James when he imagined the "dauntless fusions to come" and the" Accent of the Future." Empire, at least in theory, can be something other than the foisting of slavery upon a conquered people it has so often been in practice. In Alexandre Kojeve's formulation, "a truly universal State or ... Empire, in the strict sense of the term," is one "in which conqueror and conquered are merged."64 Empire is usually thought of as the imposition of individual or collective will upon foreign territory, like that implied in Bellamy's radically homogeneous utopian world, but Kojeve reminds us that, in what he sees as its truest, most universal manifestation, empire amounts to the dissolving of the

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self in the other, the disbanding of the notions of center, either geographic or ethnic, and periphery. In the end, then, we are impelled to link James and the "imperial" not because he said AngloSaxons were gloriously destined to rule the world-which he did not-or even because near death he deliIiously identified himself with Bonaparte-which he did-but rather because in some of his most important work he expressed the longing for the cosmopolitan universality that is perhaps the most profound tendency of modernity, a longing that received stultifyingly different expressions in turn-of-the-century literary utopias. We can now see that although both James and Bellamy yearned for a culture that might be universal, for the author of Looking Backward its universality depended on the imposition of a clearly defined, culturally centered norm upon the world, whereas James reached forward to a synthesis, cloaked for the present in mystery, that might very well entail putting his own culture to the sword. James is dedicated to the preservation of the "unaccounted-for residuum" from which someday a new order might emerge. His is a unity that nevertheless protects and encourages a multiplicity of views, a multiplicity that, unlike the deadlocked dialogue gloomily imagined by Howells, might ultimately prove productive. I would like to conclude by simply mentioning a man whose position and even name suggest he embodied the entwined forces of empire, universality, and cosmopolitanism I have tried to describe: Dr. Gustavo Niederlein, the special Philippine commissioner for the St. Louis Exposition. Having reestablished the French Colonial Museum in Paris, Niederlein arrived at his post already familiar with the ties between curatorship and governance. In the field, however, the activities that in Paris were merely in close relation became almost identical. By his own report, in his efforts to find exhibits, "Nothing was left undone. All kinds of tactics were employed to secure the sympathy and support of as many collaborators as could possibly be obtained."65 Clearly, for Niederlein the promise of a commendable showing in St. Louis was a way of winning the hearts and minds of the natives. If James, seeking a fit audience though few, could attempt

168

UTOPIA AND COSMOPOLIS

through the novel to assist at the formation of an achieved social fusion, Niederlein pursued a related goal employing forms directed at a wider audience, forms that had a high destiny of their own in the years ahead: "There are still other ways of obtaining exhibits, namely, in the way of public propaganda, which often brings success."66 Not coincidentally, the particular success both Niederlein and the Ververs aimed at was an imperial display in the very heart of America. At the moment when the United States obtained its own overseas empire, public propaganda and high art could join forces to stretch the limits of a vast, assimilative power that seemed poised at the dawn of its century.

Notes

Preface Raymond L. Bridgman, World Organization (Boston: Ginn, 1905), 112,

I

110. 2 Ibid., 109. 3 Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 589,5 88,590.

4 Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992),64.

Introduction: Realism and Utopia. Nation and Globe Edward Alsworth Ross, Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of OrderlNew York: Macmillan, 1901),293. 2 Cf. Susan Mizruchi, "Cataloging the Creatures of the Deep: 'Billy Budd, Sailor' and the Rise of Sociology," boundary 217(1990):272-304. In this essay, Mizruchi explores the continuities between New Historicist "characterizations of realist subjectivity" and the "late nineteenthcentury American sociological tradition" (273). 3 Georg Simmel, "The Field of Sociology," in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: The Free Press, 1950), 3. 4 Leon Edel, ed., Hemy Tames Letters 1843-1875 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), vol. I, 187. For a commentary on this letter, see Martha Banta, "Beyond Post-Modernism: The Sense of History in The Princess Casamassima," The Henry Tames Review 3(1982): I

104-5·

170

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

5 The common opposition of ideology to utopia derives from Karl Mannheim's work in Germany in the 1920S_ See his Ideology and Utopia, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils /New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 19851. For a more recent treatment, including a lengthy consideration of Mannheim himself, see Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, ed. George H. Taylor /New York: Columbia University Press, 19861. 6 See Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the 'JIansformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 /New York: Pantheon, 19811· 7 Martha Banta, Tay10red Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford /Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19931, x. For an excellent account of the rise of the engineer, see David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism /New York: Knopf, 19771, esp. 33-83. 8 John A. Garraty, The New Commonwealth /New York: Harper &. Row, 19681,120. 9 First Annual Report of the Interstate Commerce Commission /Washington, D.C.: GPO, 18871,2. IO F. A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science /New York: The Free Press, 19521, 142. I I Qtd. in Edwin H. Cady and Norma W. Cady, eds., Critical Essays on W D. Howells, 1866-1920/Boston: G. K. Hall, 19831, 19I. 12 Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 19881, 166. 13 Mildred Howells, ed., Life in Letters of William Dean Howells /Garden City: Doubleday, 19281, vol. 1,417. 14 Ricoeur, Lectures, 17. 15 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard /Ithaca: Cornell Univesity Press, 19771,230. 16 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott /London: Verso, 19781, 150. 17 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity /Stanford: Stanford University Press, 19901, ISS, 156, 155· 18 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Nevelle Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight /Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 19861, vol. 1,22223. Other general studies of utopia from which I have benefited include Bloch's The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg /Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 19881; Louis Marin, Utopiques: Jeux d'espaces /Paris: Editions de minuit, 19731, and "Frontiers of Utopia: Past and Present," Critical Inquiry 19/19931:397-420; Fredric Jameson, "OfIslands and Trenches: Natural-

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

19

20 21 22

23 24

25 26 27 28

29 30 31

32

171

ization and the Production of Utopian Discourse," Diacritics 7 (June 1977):2-21, and "Progress versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?" Science-Fiction Studies 9 11982):147-58; Tom Moylan, "The Locus of Hope: Utopia versus Ideology," Science-Fiction Studies 9 11982):159-66; Frank E. Manuel, ed., Utopias and Utopian Thought (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966); Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); and Gary Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's "Diary of a Writer" and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), esp. 107-85. William Gilpin, The Cosmopolitan Railway, Compacting and Fusing Together All the World's Continents (San Francisco: History Company, 1890), iv. Henry James, Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers INew York: Library of America, 1984), 427-28. See Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 53-140. See David W. Noble, Historians against History IMinneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 19651, 37-55, and The End of American History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 16-40. David W. Noble, Historians, 3. Qtd. in David W. Noble, End, 31. If we substitute consumer electronics for "steam and electricity," we can see that Beard quite precisely anticipates Francis Fukuyama's recent argument about the "victory of the VCR" and its instrumentality in bringing about "the end of history." See Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man INew York: The Free Press, 1992), 98-ro8. Qtd. in David F. Noble, America, 172. See Harold U. Faulkner, Politics, Reform, and Expansion, 1890-1900 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959), 33. Giddens, Consequences, 63. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2d ed., ed. Robert C. Thcker (New York: Norton, 19781,476-77. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 174. Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992), II2, 193. W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Conservation of Races," in W E. B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses 1890-19I9, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Pathfinders Press, 1970),78. Robertson, Globalization, ro3.

172

33

34 35 36 37

38

39 40 41 42

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

Donald E. Pease, "New Perspectives on U.S. Culture and Imperialism/, in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease /Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 19931,26. Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley /Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 19651,278. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale /New York: Vintage, 19671,47. Robertson, Globalization, 100. Thomas Peyser, "Globalization in America: The Case of Don DeLillo's White Noise/, Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 25/19961:265. Henry James, The Princess Casamassima /Harmondsworth: Penguin, 19861, 193. Further references to this edition are in parentheses. Because the editors of the Library of America have chosen to reproduce James's revision of the novel, this edition remains the most widely available of James's 1886 version. Jean-Marie Guehenno, The End of the Nation-State, trans. Victoria Elliott /Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 19951, 48. James Huneker, The New Cosmopolis /New York: Charles Scribner'S Sons, 19151, 16. Further references to this edition are in parentheses. Kenneth W. Warren, Black and White Strangers /Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19931,23. ArjunAppadurai,"Patriotism and Its Futures/, Public Culture 5/19931: 4 12•

I I

2

3 4 5 6 7

'The World a Department Store

Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster /Stanford: Stanford University Press, 19881, 53. Qtd. in John L. Thomas, Alternative America /Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 19831, 168. This sentence, it should be noted, is spoken by a fictional character who acts as Bellamy'S mouthpiece in an uncompleted manuscript. See Bradford Peck, The World a Department Store: A Story of Life under a Cooperative System /Boston: Author, 19001. Qtd. in Arthur E. Morgan, Edward Bellamy /New York: Columbia University Press, 19441,259. See Peck, World, 310. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale /New York: Vintage, 19681,463. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man /New York: The Free Press, 19921,98-108.

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

173

8 Recent attempts to trace continuities in Bellamy's writings include John L. Thomas, Alternative America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 152-72; Franklin Rosemont, "Bellamy's Radicalism Reclaimed," in Looking Backward, 1988-1888, ed. Daphne Patai (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 148; Lee Cullen Khanna, "The Text as Tactic: Looking Backward and the Power of the Word," in Looking Backward, 1988-1888, 40-43; and W. Warren Wagar, "Dreams of Reason: Bellamy, Wells, and the Positive Utopia," in Looking Backward, 1988-1888, 111-12. 9 See Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). For further consideration of Orvell's thesis, see chapter 2 below. 10 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980),8,41. I I Edward Bellamy, "The Religion of Solidarity," in Selected Writings on Religion and Society, ed. Joseph Schiffman (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1955), 5. Further references to this edition are in parentheses. 12 Edward Bellamy, Equality (New York: D. Appleton, 1897), 205. 13 Ibid., 204. 14 Ibid., 204-5. 15 Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper &. Row, 1977),298. 16 Ibid., 301, 307. 17 Ibid., 297. 18 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper &. Row, 1977), 134, 135,129· 19 20 21 22

23

Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. David Webb (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 86, 80. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 38. Heidegger, Question, 129, 128. Qtd. in Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Roosevelt: The Coming of the New Deal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 327. The thoroughly utopian character, or at least intentions, of the TVA under Morgan is further shown by his statement that the "TVA is not primarily a dambuilding job, a fertilizer job or power-transmission job"; "the improvement in that total well being, in physical, social, and economic condition, is the total aim." F. A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution in Science (New York: The Free Press, 1952), 148.

174

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

24 Cf. Thomas, Alternative, 153, for a discussion of Bellamy's "obsession with abstract design." 2S Qtd. in H. Pasdermadjian, The Department Store: Its Origins, Evolution and Economics lNew York: Arno Press, 19761,24. 26 B. Nogaro and W. Oualid, qtd. in ibid., 4I. 27 Qtd. in Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marche: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, I869-I920 lPrinceton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 19811, 177. 28 See David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany I933-I9391Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 19671, 132 ff. 29 For a discussion of intramural competition in the department store, see Susan Porter Benson, "Palace of Consumption and Machine for Selling: The American Department Store, 1880-1940," Radical History Review 21119791:2I1-13. 30 Qtd. in Ralph M. Hower, History of Macy's of New York, r858-I9I9 ICambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 19431, 273. 3 I This link is more concretely expressed by Bellamy's insistence to his publishers that the second edition of Looking Backward be promoted with a stepped-up advertising campaign. See Thomas, Alternative, 26 S. 32 David Chaney, "The Department Store as a Cultural Form," Theory, Culture, and Society I, no. 3119831:23. 33 This must not be confused with the idea that values are entirely arbitrary or without any ground whatever: the fact that a buyer and seller might haggle over the price of water does not therefore imply that the value of water to human beings appears only as a function of discourse; it means only that that value cannot be settled absolutely, by reference, for example, to a natural or God-given price la chimera for which some medieval thinkers sought to establish a basisl to which buyer and seller alike must conform. 34 Stuart Culver, "What Manikins Want: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows," Representations 21 119881:98. 3S See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Englightenment as Mass Deception," in Dialectic of Englightenment, trans. John Cumming lNew York: Continuum, 19901, 120-67. 36 A useful contrast to Bellamy's utopian conception of the self is offered in Equality, when West comes upon a statuary group representing strikers of the late nineteenth century, individuals revered by the utopians for their resistence to intolerable conditions, even if they failed to understand the trajectory along which history was to travel: "The faces were coarse and hard in outline and bristled with unkempt beards.

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

37 38

39 40

I75

Their expression was one of dogged defiance, and their gaze was fixed with ... scowling intensity upon the void space before them" (206). Hard, dogged, fixed, and intense, the strikers, still caught in the toils of history, have been molded by dialectical opposition; one might say that they make appropriate subjects for statuary in utopia because, in a sense, they always were statues, forced into a rigid posture by Necessity. Not only, as Dr. Leete explains, are they deluded about the reforms needed to truly liberate them, they are also apparently misinformed about the nature of human being, in the true light of which any such insistence on fixity of purpose needs to be understood as a failure to delight in the empty ground of play. Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, trans. Clayton Koelb (New York: Norton, 1994), 56,21,32. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: 7Wentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988),244. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), section 189. Peter 1. Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner, The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (New York: Random House,

1973),77· The first trademarks, for example, were registered with the Patent Office in 1870; five years later there were more than one thousand. See John A. Garraty, The New Commonwealth, I877-I890 (New York: Harper &. Row, 1968), 105. 42 When, toward the close of the book, West dreams he has returned to Boston of 1887, he is struck and disgusted by "the prevalence of advertising," which assumes the "extraordinary effect of strangeness that marks familiar things seen in a new light." He goes on to point out, "There had been no personal advertising in the Boston of the twentieth century, because there was no need of any" (175). Furthermore, when West explains to his utopian bride-to-be that clerks in nineteenth-century shops helped their customers make decisions, she is shocked that there should have been a system in place to "tell people what they wanted" (55), as succinct a definition of the function of advertising as one could wish. 43 Arthur Lipow, Authoritarian Socialism in America: Edward Bellamy and the Nationalist Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 29. Throughout this chapter, I am generally idebted to Lipow's critique of Nationalism, particularly to his chapter "Obliteratingthe Self: Nationalism and the New Community" (160-83). 44 See Baudrillard, Writings, 49. 41

176

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

Qtd. in Daniel Aaron, Men of Good Hope: A Story of American Progressives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951),97. 46 Baudrillard, Writings, 48. 47 Walter Dill Scott, The Theory of Advertising (New York: Garland, 45

1985),59· 48 49

50

5I

52 53 54 55 56

Ibid., 49, 50, 5 I. See William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Holt, 1890), vol. 1,401. Further references to the first volume of this edition are in parentheses. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978),65-66. See Walter Benn Michaels, "An American Tragedy, or the Promise of American Life," Representations 25 (1989):73,81-82; and Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 19921, esp. 47-90. The New Nation, 3 October 1891; qtd. in Rosemont, "Bellamy's Radicalism," 173. Bellamy, Equality, 365. Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 19921, 100, 102. Bellamy, Equality, 267. Qtd. in R. Jackson Wilson, "Experience and Utopia: The Making of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward," Journal of American Studies I I (1977):53.

Cf. Thomas, Alternative, 9I. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), vol. 2, 613. 59 Bellamy, Equality, 296. 60 Heidegger, Question, 153. 61 W. T. Stead, The Americanization of the World. or The Trend of the Twentieth Century (New York: Horace Markley, 1901). 57 58

2 I

2

The Imperial Ghetto

Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. James E. Miller Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 19591, 463. For accounts of Gilman's involvement in the Nationalist movement, see Robert E. Riegel, American Feminists (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1963), 166-68; Mary A. Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist I860-I896 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 169-75, 177-79; Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism. I870-I920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981),79; Ann J. Lane, To "Herland" and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 161-62; Dol-

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

3 4

5

6

7 8 9

10 I1 12

13 14 15

177

ores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 184-85. On the reception of Gilman's poem for The Nationalist, see Lane, Th "Herland, " 143-45. See Howells's introduction to The Great Modern American Stories: An Anthology (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), vii. Franklin Rosemont, "Bellamy's Radicalism Reclaimed/' in Looking Backward, r988-1888, ed. Daphne Patai (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 177. Ann J. Lane, introduction to Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York: Pantheon, 1979), xxi. Further references to this edition are in parentheses. Eric Hobsbawm, "MasS-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870-1914/' in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983),263-307. In spite of the title, Hobsbawm fits the United States into the pattern of tradition building he uncovers. See Albion Small, "The Era of Sociology/, The American Journal of Sociology 1(1895):1-15. See Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 53-140. Roland Robertson, "Japan and the USA: The Interpenetration of National Identities and the Debate about Orientalism/' in Dominant Ideologies, ed. Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill, and Byan S. Thrner (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 194. Small, "Sociology/' I. Robertson, "Japan and the USA," 193. Roland Robertson, Globalization (London: Sage, 1993), 143. Arthur J. Vidich and Stanford M. Lyman, American Sociology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 17. Arjun Appadurai, "Patriotism and Its Futures/' in Public Culture 5 (1993):412. Lester F. Ward, Applied Sociology: A Treatise on the Conscious Improvement of Society by Society (Boston: Ginn, 1906), 108.

16 Edward Alsworth Ross, The Old World and the New: The Significance

17 18 19 20

of Past and Present Immigration to the American People (New York: Century, 1914), 304. Lane, To "Herland, " 230. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Man-Made World or, Our Androcentric Culture (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1971), 3. Lester F. Ward, The Psychic Factors of Civilization, 2.d ed. (Boston: Ginn, 1906),83. Small,"Sociology/, 15.

178

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

Ibid., s. Robertson, Globalization, 148. 23 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (Boston: 1898), 58, 33. Further references to this edition are in parentheses. 24 Francis Galton, Essays in Eugenics (London: Eugenics Education Society, 1909),27. 25 Ward, Psychic Factors, 87. 26 See Susan S. Lanser, "Feminist Criticism, 'The Yellow Wallpaper,' and the Politics of Color in America," Feminist Studies 15 (1989):415-41. At times Lanser herself falls prey to a similarly anachronistic compartmentalization of Gilman's thought, when she writes, for example, "Despite her socialist values . .. Gilman upheld white Protestant supremacy; belonged for a time to eugenics and nationalist organizations; opposed open immigration; and inscribed racism, nationalism, and classism into her proposals for social change" (429; emphasis added). In addition to ignoring the way socialism has actually tended to function in this century, Lanser's "despite" points to the habit of projecting our own ideological constellations into the past. To be an academic, socialist-leaning intellectual in the United States today involves, in general, opposition to racism, suspicion of nationalism, and many other things besides (promotion of recycling, alarm about global warming, support of abortion rights, and so forth). There is no intrinsic connection, however, between such views and socialism per se, which in practice has to do with the centralized organization of social life. As Gilman's socialist leanings make clear, socialism is in a sense mute on the question of just what such centralized organization will attempt to achieve. The image of . Gilman as someone who, but for a few lapses, could fit in with contemporary American feminism derives primarily, I would argue, from very questionable assumptions about the inherently "progressive" nature of feminism and socialism. 27 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper (Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, 1973), 9. Further references to this edition are in parentheses. 28 Lanser, "Feminist," 428-29. 29 Ibid., 435. 30 Walter Benn Michaels, "Introduction: The Writer's Mark," in The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 5. 31 Edward Alsworth Ross, The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People (New York: Century, 1914), 235,237. 32 Qtd. in ibid., 237. 21 22

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

179

33 Susan Gubar, "She in Herland: Feminism as Fantasy," in Coordinates: Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. George E. Slusser, Eric S. Rabkin, and Robert Scholes /Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 19831, 139. 34 Christopher P. Wilson, "Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Steady Burghers: The Terrain of Herland," in Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her Work, ed. Sheryl 1. Meyering /Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 19891, 182. For a discussion of feminist criticism as a potentially privileged site of critical distance, see Myra JeWen, "Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism," in The Signs Reader, ed. Elizabeth Abel and Emily K. Abel /Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19831,69-95. 35 Lane, introduction, v. 36 Small, "Sociology," 7-8. 37 Gary Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Geme: Dostoevsky's "Diary of a Writer" and the Traditions of Literary Utopia /Austin: University of Texas Press, 19811,82. 38 Qtd. in Hill, Gilman, 176. 39 Gubar,"SheinHerland," 144· 40 Ibid., 142. 41 Gilman, Man-Made World, 92. 42 Gubar, "She in Herland," 140. See also Joseph Allen Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition /Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19871,276: Gilman offers "an opposing form of narration, which absorbs all forward motion and reformulates it in the nonlinear patterns that constitute the Herlanders' non-patriarchal way of life," in order to "debunk the aggressive ethos" of the quest. See also Gilman's own analysis of "masculine literature" in Man-Made World, 87-106. 43 Qtd. in Arthur E. Morgan, Edward Bellamy /New York: Columbia University Press, 19441,259. 44 For an influential account of how this proceeded with regard to the Near East, see Edward W. Said, Drientalism /New York: Pantheon, 19781. 45 See Hayden, Grand Domestic Revolution. 46 For a useful documentation of Gilman's lifelong interest in the effect of architecture on social arrangements, see Polly Wynn Allen, Building Domestic Liberty: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Architectural Feminism /Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 19881. 47 See William Dean Howells, "Letters of an Altrurian Traveller;" in The Aluurian Romances /Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 19681, 198-21 9. 48

Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity /Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 19871, 252. See also Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent So-

180

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

ciety, trans. David Webb (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992),72: "Kitsch is simply that which ... still lays claim to the stability, definitive character, and perfection of 'classic' art." 49 Something similar happens to clothes belonging to Howells'S American traveler to Altruria in Through the Eye of the Needle. See Howells, Altrurian Romances, 370, 381. 50 G. Stanley Hall, "New Ideals of Motherhood Suggested by Child Study," in The Child in Home, School, and State: Report of the National Conference of Mothers (N.p.: National Conference of Mothers, ca. 1905), 20,27· 51 52

53 54 55

56 57 58

59

Ward, Psychic, 87. Michael Valdez Moses, "Lust Removed from Nature," in New Essays on "White Noise", ed. Frank Lentricchia (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991),66. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989),91,92. Ibid., 66, 92. Hill, Gilman, 17I, 172. The special pleading that sometimes accompanies analyses of Gilman's racist views is, to say the least, surprising. Ann Lane, for example, notes, "Gilman's views of immigrants, blacks, and Jews, however typical of her time and place, are sometimes unsettling and sometimes offensive, though characteristically clever" (emphasis added). A string of anti-SeInitic slogans-common coin in writings of that kind-is then adduced as evidence of this cleverness. See Lane, introduction, xvii. Forerunner 7 (June 1916): 153; qtd. in Lanser, "FeIninist," 433. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (New York: Arno Press, 1972), 324. Lane, Th "Herland," 379. The train ride, however, was not the escape she had hoped for: she was put in a berth with two blacks. "To have sat in the sun opposite those coons and their baggage-&. their lunch ... would have used me up pretty badly." Fortunately, she found herself another traveling companion: "She is Prussian." See Walter Benn Michaels, "The Souls of White Folk," in Literature and the Body, ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988),201.

60

Gilman, Living, 324.

3 The Culture of Conversation I

Herman Melville, Pierre, or The Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1971),250.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

181

2 Qtd. in Arthur E. Morgan, Edward Bellamy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944),249. 3 William Dean Howells, "Editor's Study," Harper's Monthly 83 (1891): 640. 4 Paul Ricoeur, History and 'Ihlth, trans. Charles A. Ke1bley {Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965),278. 5 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 64n. 6 William Dean Howells, "Henry James, Jr.," in William Dean Howells: Representative Selections, ed. Clara Marburg Kirk and Rudolf Kirk (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), 354; reprinted from The Century 25 (1882):25-29. 7 Qtd. in Edwin H. Cady and David 1. Frazier, eds., The War of the Critics over William Dean Howells {Elmsford, NY: Row, Peterson and Co., 1962),34. 8 William Dean Howells, Indian Summer, in Novels 1875-1886 (New York: Library of America, 1982),754. 9 William Dean Howells, "Editor's Study," Harper's Monthly 81 (1890): 804; qtd. in Harold H. Kolb, The Illusion of Life (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969), 43. 10 Qtd. in Cady and Frazier, War of the Clitics, 61. I I Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 24-25. 12 Franco Moretti, Modern Epic (London: Verso, 1996), 50n. 13 Qtd. in Edwin H. Cady, The Realist at War: The Mature Years, 18851920, of William Dean Howells {Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 195 8),5 8. 14 William Dean Howells, April Hopes, in Novels 1886-1888 {New York: Library of America, 1989),431. 15 See the titles of his two-volume biography, The Road to Realism: The Early Years, 1837-1885, of William Dean Howells (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1956), and The Realist at War. 16 William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction {New York: Harper and Brothers, 1891),99. 17 William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes {Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976),48. 18 Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes {Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986),72,74,99. 19 Henry James, The Golden Bowl (New York: Scribner's, 1909), vol. 2, 400. 20 Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds {New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942),40. Kazin sees the culmination of this habit in the set-piece conversations of A Traveller from Altruria.

182

21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31

32

33 34 35

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes, 318. Cf. Kaplan, Social, 57-58, and Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Caxolina Press, 1989), III. Zygmunt Bauman, "Modernity and Ambivalence," Theory, Culture, and Society 7 (1990):148-49. Arjun Appadurai, "Patriotism and Its Futures," Public Culture 5 (1993): 4 12. Kaplan, SOCial, 63. Henry James, Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: Harvaxd University Press, 1980), vol. 3, 281. See James D. HaIt, The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 173. Qtd. in Kenneth S. Lynn, William Dean Howells: An American Life (New York: Haxcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971),9. William Dean Howells, "The AIt of the Adsmith," in Literature and Life: Studies (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1902), 271, 270. Maxtin Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture," in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977), 129-30. William Dean Howells, The Shadow of a Dream and An Imperative Duty (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 10. Further references to this edition are in paxentheses. Tom Lutz, American Nervousness in 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991),20; see 166-99 for a consideration of the importance of nervousness as a motif in Howells's fiction and life. Edwin H. Cady and Norma W. Cady, eds., Critical Essays on W. D. Howells, 1866-1920 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983),217-18. Lutz, Nervousness, 195. Richaxd Brodhead and Anthony Hiller both axrive at similar conclusions despite their focus on quite different aspects of Howells's work. Hilfer sees in A Modern Instance a remarkably forwaxd-Iooking treatment of consciousness, but believes that in the end Howells seeks to negate his psychological insights through the stern application of traditional moral categories: "Consciousness has been so carefully, so beautifully tracked only in order to show it up, confound it, degxade it, disavow it." See Hilfer, The Ethics of Intensity in American Fiction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 198 I), 68. Brodhead finds that in The Undiscovered Country Howells undermines any application of the truths of the novel to a wider social reality by making the plot seem like an "unmeaning idiosyncrasy" "having nothing to do with anything but

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

36 37 38 39

40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

183

itself"j the effect "is to puncture the significance of his chosen dramatic situation." See Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986),93. In An Imperative Duty, in addition to, as it were, paying for his progressive attitudes toward blacks with traditional attitudes about female submissiveness, Howells displays his characteristic antipathy toward the Irish, underlining the fact that this is not an antiracist novel, but a novel seeking to isolate those races worthy of contempt. Robert L. Hough, The Quiet Rebel: William Dean Howells as Social Commentator (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1959),42. Cady, Realist at War, 197,200. S. Kirk, qtd. in Cady and Frazier, War of the Critics, 64, 63, 64. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, The Marx-Engels Reader, 2d ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978),476-77. Moretti, Epic, 50-51. According to an 1889 citation in the OED, "Sulfonal is a 'hypnotic' which is free from the incalculable dangers of the 'narcotic' remedies such as opiates and chloral." If the OED entry (under "sulphonal") is any guide, Howells's reference to this designer drug was quite timelYj 1889 is the first instance listed of the word's use in English. Qtd. in Clara Kirk and Rudolf Kirk, introduction to The AltruIian Romances (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), xxii. William Dean Howells, A Traveller from AltruIia, in The Altrurian Romances, n6. Edwin H. Cady, ed., W. D. Howells as Critic (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973),468. Mildred Howells, ed., Life in Letters of William Dean Howells (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, and Co., 1928), vol. 1,417. O. K. Werckmeister, Citadel Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 16. M. Howells, Life in Letters, 1:417· Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Feuer (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1959), 320. Orvell, The Real Thing, xv, xvi. Ibid., 103. Ibid., 137. Frank Norris, The Responsibilities of the Novelist, Complete Works of Frank Norris (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1967), vol. 7,167. Ibid., 164-65. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (New York: Bantam, 19831, 73. Norris, Responsibilities, 167-68.

184 56

57 58

59

60 61 62 63 64

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

Qtd. in Milton Cantor, "The Backward Look of Bellamy's Socialism," in Looking Backward, I9~8-I 888, ed. Daphne Patai (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988),32. Norris, Responsibilities, 167. Howells's utopian writings are certainly not the only works of the period to reflect similarly "modem" formal tendencies. For example, much of what I have said of A Traveller from Altruria could also be said of Sarah Orne Jewett's remarkable-in fact, far superior-The Country of the Pointed Firs. On masculinity as a constitutive aspect of Howells's realism, see Alfred Habegger, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 199-248, and Michael Davitt Bell, The Problem of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993),31-35. William Dean Howells, Through the Eye of the Needle, in The Altrurian Romances, 273. M. Howells, Life in Letters, 2:242. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 380. Ibid., 388-89· Edward Alsworth Ross, Social Control (New York: Macmillan, 1901),

263-64. 65 Hough, Rebel, 65. 66 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977),230. 67 Werckmeister, Citadel, 17. 68 See Cady, Realist, 77. 69 Qtd. in Cady, War of the Critics, 68. 70 Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and H. C. Lodge I884-I9I8 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925), vol. I, 501. 71

Cady, Realist, 79,191,152.

4

The Imperial Museum

Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. James E. Miller Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959),412. 2 William James, "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green, 1897),205. 3 For a full account, see Theodora Kroeber, Ism in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 1

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

I8S

4 The assimilation of Ishi takes on still more significance when we consider that, as Walter Benn Michaels has recently reminded us, Indians were often seen as exemplars of rugged independence resisting all attempts at socialization. Emblematizing the self-sustaining individual, they thus stood in stark opposition to the world portrayed in Looking Backward, in which "individuals [arel individualized by their place within the system." See Michaels's" An American Tragedy, or the Promiseof Amercian Life," in Representations 25(19891:73. 5 Henry James, The American Scene (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 19681, 363-64. Further references to this edition are in parentheses. 6 Henry James, The Golden Bowl (New York: Scribner's, 19091, vol. I, 12., 145. Further references to this edition are in parentheses. 7 Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (New York: Bantam, 19831,73. 8 James M. Cox, "Pudd'nhead Wilson Revisited," in Mark Twain's "Pudd'nhead Wilson": Race, Confiict, and Culture, ed. Susan Gillman and Forrest G. Robinson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 19901,21. 9 Raymond Williams, The English Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 19701, 133. 10 Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19831,9. I I Peter Conn, The Divided Mind (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 19831, 37-38. 12. Henry James, The Question of Our Speech, The Lesson of Balzac: Two Lectures (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 19051, 41, 44-45. 13 Qtd. in Theodore Roosevelt, American Ideals and Other Essays (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 18971, 31. 14 Conn, Divided Mind, 44. 15 Gabriel Pearson, "The Novel to End All Novels: The Golden Bowl," in The Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry Tames, ed. John Goode (London: Methuen, 19721, 311. 16 See Carolyn Porter, Seeing and Being (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981); Mark Seltzer, Henry Tames and the Art of Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); and Jean-Christoph Agnew, "The Consuming Vision of Henry James," in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, r880-r980, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon, 19831,65100. I am particularly indebted to Seltzer's suggestion that "a form of economic and cultural imperialism is discreetly reinvented ... in the form of Maggie's domestic colonialism" {721. Seltzer offers imperial governance as one among many analogues to a more general policing of subjectivity in which he feels James is implicated. My contention is that the analogy between Western-style imperialism and Maggie's

186

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

domestic arrangements is grounded in an ideology of race common to both. 17 Henry James, "London," in English Hours (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), 10, 12.. 18 Dorothea Krook, The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry Tames (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1962), IS, 13. 19 Henry James, Italian Hours (London: William Heinemann, 1909), 17. 20 Margery Sabin, The Dialect of the Tribe (New York: Oxford University 21 22

Press, 1987),73. Congressional Record, 16 Mar. 1896, 2819, 2817. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam Books, 1989),36.

23 24

2S

26

27

28

29

30 31

John R. Dos Passos, The Anglo-Saxon Century (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1903), IO!. Cong;essional Record, 3 Feb. 1899, 1430, 1423, 1422. The significance of such comments about the fate of northern European races is discussed by Walter Benn Michaels in "The Souls of White Folk," in Literature and the Body, ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 18S-209. Qtd. in Leon Edel, Henry Tames: The 'Ireacherous Years: 1895-1901 (New York: Lippincott, 1969),238; Leon Edel, ed., Henry Tames Lette1s 1843-1875 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), vol. I, 187; qtd. in Edel, 'Ireacherous, 23 1,239. Cf. Seltzer, Henry Tames, 72. I have benefited from, without exactly following, Seltzer's suggestion that the museum in American City resembles the outposts of civilization Conrad describes. Cf. David Cheney's description of the department store's "imperialistic ability to subjugate an enormous range of modes of production to the common display form of the store and its overarchingidentity," in "The Department Store as a Cultural Form," in Theory, Culture, and Society I, no. 3 (1983):24. This straightforwardly imperial power of the department store seems to be just what suited it to Bellamy's purposes. Franklin Henry Giddings, Democracy and Empire, with. Studies of Their Psychological, Economic, and Moral Foundations (New York: Macmillan, 1900),286. Congressional Record, 3 Feb. 1899, 1423. Ibid.,14 2 S· John Fiske, American Political Ideas (New York: Harper and Brothers,

188S),1I7. 32 Brooks Adams, The New Empire (New York: Macmillan, 1902), xi. Fur-

ther references to this edition are in parentheses. 33 Qtd. in Edel, 'Ireacherous 238. 34 U.S. War Department, Bureau of Insular Affairs, Fourth Annual Report

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53

187

of the Philippine Commission, r903 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1904), part 2,58. Ibid., part 2,59; part I, 406, 61. L. H. Harris, "The People at the Fair," The Independent 57 (1904): 306. Qtd. in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William Tames (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), vol. 2, 311. Qtd. in ibid., 2:309. U.S. War Department, part 2, 59. Congressional Record, 3 Feb. 1899, 1423· Qtd. in Richard C. Hildebrand, Power and the People (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 198 I), 39-40. Addresses and Presidential Messages, intro. Henry Cabot Lodge (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904), 317. Henry James, Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the New York Edition (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1211-12. Qtd. in Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963), 318. Qtd. in Conn, Divided Mind, 9. Edward Alsworth Ross, "The Value Rank of the American People," The Independent 57 (1904):1063. Francis Galton, Essays in Eugenics (London: The Eugenics Education Society, 1909), 39. Charles H. Pearson, National Life and Character (London: Macmillan, 1894),76. William Boelhower, however, has argued that in The American Scene James's encounter with the alien allowed him to identify "the fundamental structure of cultural differences" (39), in the United States; he thus credits James with a radical critique of received a priori categories. See Boelhower, Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). For a contrasting view, according to which James's preoccupation with manners in the American Scene needs to be understood as a way of excluding racial minorities from white society, see Kenneth W. Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), III-16,passim. Ross Posnock, "Henry James, Veblen, and Adorno: The Crisis of the Modem Self," Tournal of American Studies 21 (1987):49. Seltzer, Henry Tames, 70-72. Frank Norris, Novels and Essays (New York: Library of America, 1986), 1187. For the culminating instance of this tradition, see Martha C. Nuss-

188

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

bawn, Love's Knowledge: Essays in Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 19901, esp. 131-32, 136-37, 146-47. S4 This reading raiSes the possibility that discourses of race and gender reinforce one another in the novel; it is perhaps no accident that an image so suggestive of colonization is applied to a woman. For this to be so, however, one must count even Charlotte's female adversary, Maggie, among the "losers" in the novel, or at least see her victory as merely the result of her superior adaptation to the patriarchal-imperial world. This interpretation would coincide with such recent feminist readings of the novel as that by Lynda Zwinger, who argues that Verver is the one really in control, calmly relying on the cultural conditioning that makes Maggie into his agent, "the daughter who has been taught that she wants what he wants-her to want." Thus Maggie reminds Zwinger of a young woman who says, "I'm interested in the kind of man who lets me think I'm running the show, but is really in control." See Zwinger, Daughters, Fathers, and the Novel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 199 I I, 93, 9 S· In a similar vein, Joseph Allen Boone suggests that Maggie "may rebel against the prescription of 'feminine' passivity, but only by accepting the terms of aggression and conquest valued by a power-obsessed society." "In truth ... Maggie inhabits one feminine stereotype after another," and "she remains trapped in limiting social definitions of her role." See Boone, Tiadition Counter Tiadition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19871, 192, 19I. A feminist reading of the novel could therefore suggest that although Maggie may seem to be running the show, the imperial patriarchy is really in control. S5 See Henry James, Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers (New York: Library of America, 19841, 105: "Its plasticity, its elasticity are infinite." James's enthusiasm for the potentially infinite expansiveness of the novel is another point of contact between aesthetic practice and assimilative culture. Many critics, however, see James's literary innovations as inherently subversive of order. Boone, for example, argues that James's "progressively open-ended plots" incite critical thinking by bringing the reader "face-to-face with the issues implicit in their concluding uncertainty" (Tiadition, 1881. Boone assumes, however, that open-endedness amounts to an attack on received social order, thus ignoring the possibility that openness and dynamism were in fact the mainstays of an omnivorously expansive, imperial culture. He thereby seems to read James's celebration of "plasticity" and "elasticity" through the lens of recent political debates in which these qualities are firmly and rather inelastically associated with the left. Attention to the imperial context of The Golden Bowl allows us to understand open-endedness, whether of the novel or of the de-

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63

64

6S 66

189

constructed self, as a strategy appropriate to the structures of power Boone suggests James wanted to subvert. Ross Posnock, too, has recently offered an analysis of James's embrace of "non-identity," concluding that his endorsement of an open, permeable self, a self that must '''surrender' to the alien ... must go 'more than half-way,' "points to his rejection of "an ideology of assimilation." See Posnock, The Trial of Curiosity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991),281. The noblesse oblige, however, that drives James to surrender his consciousness to the alien seems very much like the "secret responsive ecstasy" into which Maggie falls when she wonders "if there weren't some supreme abjection with which she might be inspired" (2:313). When, a few pages later, she gives out her tactically submissive lie to Charlotte-"I've failed!" (2:318)-we see that for a sufficiently imperial consciousness, surrender and assimilation can go hand in hand. H. James, Literary Criticism: French Writers, 2:12.09. Norris, Novels and Essays, 1188. Ibid., 1189-90. Henry Demarest Lloyd, "New Applications of Democracy," The Congregationalist 5 Jan. 1901, 14; qtd. in Martha Banta, Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993),68. H. James, Literary Criticism: French Writers, 1046. Bellamy, Looking Backward, lIS. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), vol. 2, 613. Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), xxvi. Alexandre Kojeve, "Tyranny and Wisdom," in Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (New York: The Free Press, 1991),170. U.S. War Department, part 1,409. Ibid., 419.

Index

Adams, Brooks, 148-49 Adams, Henry, 67, 128 Adorno, Theodor, 11,47,54 Advertising, 51-53, III, 175 n·42 Aestheticization of experience, 2324,35-36,48,54,57,59-60,8788, 140-41j as concomitant of globalization, 23, 57j and imperialism, 141, 150-P, 159-61j and racism,89 Aguinaldo, Emilio, 151 Anachronism, interpretation and, 74,178 n.26 Appadurai, Arjun, 25, 66 Asiaticization. See Globalization, United States and Assimilation, 137-38, 142-43, 14647,167-68,185 n.4. See also Difference, management of Bancroft, George, 14 Baudrillard, Jean, 29,52 Baum,L.Frank,47 Bauman, Zygmunt, 88-90, 108 Beard, Charles, 14-15, 171 n.24 Bellamy, Edward, viii-ix, 3-6, 9, 19,

25,29-61,63-65,83,87-89,9 1, 95,97-98,116-19, 124-29,138, 141,1 64,167 Berger, Brigitte, 50, 52 Berger, Peter, 50, 52 Beveridge, Albert, 153 Bloch,Ernst, 12, 16,60, 164 Boelhower, William, 187 n.49 Boone, Joseph Allen, 188 n.54, 18889 n.55 Botero, Giovanni, 19 Bridgeman, Raymond L., vii-viii Brodhead, Richard, 182-83 n.35 Burnham, Daniel, 16 Cady, Edwin H., 103, I I 5 Calinescu, Matei, 85 Chaney, David, 46, 186 n.27 Cleveland, Grover, 142 Clifford, James, 50, 54 Columbian Exposition of 1893, 16, 85 Conn, Peter, 138-40 Conrad, Joseph, 145, 147 Consumerism, 29-31, 44-48, 141j as self-expression, 47j and self-

192

INDEX

Consumerism (cont.) hood, 45, 47-48,56; and solidarity, 44-45. See also Advertising; Department stores; Haggling Conversation, 61, 97-99,106-7, 112-15,120-21; and postnationality, 117 Cooper, James Fenimore, 137 Cosmopolitanism, 96-99, 166-67; and anxiety, 19-23, 38,49-50,64, 123; and cities,S, 90-91,113; and the future,s, 12; and selfconsciousness, 105-6 Cox, James M., 138, 161 Culver, Stuart,47 Daniel, John, 143, 146-47, 151 Debord, Guy, so Department stores, 29-30, 43-48; competition within, 44; and empire, 145, 186 n.27; asful6llment of Christianity, 30; Nazis and, 44; as successor of Christianity, 44 Difference, management of, 30, 5355,84,136-37 Disembedding, IS Dos Passos, John R., 143 Du Bois, W. E. B., 17, 113, 143 Durkheim, Emile, F' 66 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 13, 104 Engels, Friedrich, 16, 67, 116 Exceptionalism, American, 13 - 14, 65 Fiske, John, 147-48 Fossil fuels, 108 Foucault, Michel, I,

II,

130

Galton, Francis, 71, ISS Gender: and class, 70; and evolu-

tion, 69-74; and race, 71, 75,188 n·S4 Giddens, Anthony, 12, IS Giddings, Henry Franklin, 146 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, viii, 36,25,30,63-91,95,97-98,116, 127,13 8,146, ISS Gilpin, William, 13-15 Globalization, vii-xi, 91; and consciousness, 49- So; and consumerism, 31,45-48; and "death of the subject," 48; and end of history, 117; offemininity, 73-74; and nationhood,6-7,16-19,2S,64-6S, 77,78, 124-2S; paradigm shifts and, x; and race, 66-67; and selfhood,38-39,46-48,ss,s8;and traditional culture, 20-21,57,99; United States and, xi, 61, 78, 1079, 147-48; and universalization, 57-58

Gubar, Susan, 78-81 Guehenno, Jean-Marie, 22 Guenther, Richard, 139 Haggard, H. Rider, 81 Haggling, 46,174 n·H Hale, Edward Everett, 9S-96 Hall, G. Stanley, 87 Haymarket Riot, 107-8, 111,13134 Hedges, Elaine R., 76 Heidegger, Martin, 39-41, 43, 61, 88,111-12,123 History, end of,S, 23-24, 61, 127 Hobsbawm, Eric, 64 Horkheimer, Max, 47 Hough, Robert 1., liS, 129 Howells, William Dean, viii, 3-6, 9-11,25-26,33,63,80,85,89, 9S-134,138 Huneker, James, 24-25

INDEX

Identity, national, 4,16,19-20, 107-9, 117, 143, 146; and personalidentitY,21-23 Identity, personal, 32-33, 37-38; and advertising, 5 I; and patriarchy, 76-77,188 n.54; and race, 154-60. See also Consumerism, and selfhood; Globalization, and selfhood Imitation, United States and, 1045,122 Immigration, 75, 77-78,138-39, 140, 142-43; and national identity, 4, 108-9; and race, 66; and status of women, 77-78 Imperialism, 81-82, 87, 91,142-53, 166-68; and aestheticism, 15051,159-61; and appreciation of otherness, 136, 145-46,148-51 Indian BUIeau, 135-36 Interstate Commerce Commission, 9 Ishi, 135-37, 163, 185 n·4 Isolationism, 86-87, 89, 91 James, Henry, viii, 3-6, 14-21,26, 96,99-100, 110, 116, 120, 123, 130,135-68 James, William, 53, 135, 144, 151, 160 Jesus Christ, 30, 121 Kaplan, Amy, X, 101-2, 109 ~in,}lUTed, 107 Kellner, Hansfried, 50, 52 Kipling, Rudyard, 162 Kojeve, Alexandre, 166 Krook, Dorothea, 141 Kuberski, Philip, 27 Kuhn, Thomas, x Lane, AnnJ., 63, 67-68, 180n.55 Lanser, Susan S., 74-75,178 n.26

I93

Lentricchia,Frank,I38 Lipow, ix, 5 I Lloyd, Henry Demarest, 162 Local, the: hostility to, 36-37, 57; defense of, 65 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 142 Louisiana PUIchase Exposition of 1903,149-50, 167-68 Lutz, Tom, 112, 114 Lyman, Stanford, 66 Macy's,45 Madness, 42-43, 7S-77 Mann, Thomas, 49-51 Marshall Plan, 125 Marx, Karl, 16, 67, 116, 122 Marxism, 45 McKinley, William, 133, 151 Melville, Herman, 95 Michaels, Walter Benn, x, 75-76 More, Thomas, 40 Moretti, Franco, 102, 116-17 Morgan, ArthUIE., 41, 43, 173 n.22 Morson, Gary Saul, 80 Mumford, Lewis, 43 Museumification, 20,141,151-52, 162-63. See also Aestheticization of experience; Sociology, museum and Napoleon, 167 Nationalist Party, 19,30,51,56, 95-96, II9 Naturalism, 7, 124 Niederlein, Gustavo, 167-68 Nietzsche, Friedrich, I, 16-17, 20, 31,34,50 Noble, David W., 14 Nordau, Max, 77 Norris, Frank, 77,124-25,158-59, 161-62 NSDAP,44

I94

INDEX

Orvell, Miles, x, 34, 123-24 Outside, disappearance of, 20-21, 41-43,60-61 Pearson, Charles, 155 Pearson, Gabriel, 140 Pease, Donald, 18-19 Peck,Bradford,29-30,43 Philippines, 15-16, 142-51, 160, 1 67-68 Plot, demotionof,99-I02, 125-26 Posnock, Ross, 157, 189 n.55 Pricing, fixed, 46-47 Progressivism, 4, 29 Pynchon, Thomas, ix Race,66-67,113-14,142-43,15262,185 n.35; Bellamy and, 56-67; in the cosmopolis, 24, 90; essentialist views of, 17, 82-83; and gender, 71, 75, 188 n.54; Gilman and,64,66-67,89-9I,74-77, 180 n.58; overcoming of, 158-59 Realism, 33-34, 78, 80, I03-7, 11112,121-24; and historicism, 910; links to utopia of, 5-15 Reid, Whitelaw, 132, 134 ReligionofSolidarity,34-38,58-59 Ricoeu~Paul, 11-12,20, 122 Robertson, Roland, xi, 17-20, 5758,65-66,69 Roosevelt, Theodore, 133, 150-52 Rotty, Richard, 99 Ross, Dorothy, 14, 65 Ross, Edward Alsworth, 1-5, 6669,77-78, 129,155 Satie, Erik, 126 Schmitt, Carl, 106 Scott, Walter Dill, 52-53 Scudder, Horace, 100 Seltzer, Mark, 158, 185 n.16

Simmel, Georg, 2, 66 Small, Albion, 65-66, 68, 79 Society, fictive nature of, I; as stimulus to reform, 2-3 Sociology, 65-69, 85; characteristic style of, 67-68; and museums, 85-86,148-49; and race, 66-67; and systematization, 79; universal scope of, 2, 58, 68; utopian aspects of, 68, 79 Spanish-American War, 144 Spengler, Oswald, 68 Stael, Madame de, 70 Suvin, Darko, 40-41 Technology, 14-15, 31, 37-40 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 41,43, 173 n.22 Theatricality, 22-23 Tourism, 39-40; experience of self likened to, 48, 53 Trachtenberg, Alan, x-xi Turner, Frederick Jackson, 14-15 USSR, 45 Utopia, 33, 39, 89, II5-16, 127, 164; and feminism, 78-79; and institutions, 41-42; Platonism of, 80; relation to realism of, 5-15; superhistorical pretensions of, 8, II, 129-30; and systematization, 8-9,15,40,42,95-96 Vattimo, Gianni, 10, 40 Veblen, Thorstein, 105 Vidich,Arthur,66 Wagner,Richard, I6 5 Ward, Lester, 66-68, 72, 87 Warren, Kenneth, 25 Webe~Max,66-68

Werckmeister, O. K., 120, 130

INDEX

Whitman, Walt, 63,135 Williams, Raymond, 138 Wilson, Christopher, 79 Winthrop, John, 13 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 70

195

Woman, as principal sex, 72, 86-87 Wooley, Celia Parker, 100 Worcester, Dean c., 151 Zota, Emile, 44

Thomas Peyser is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Randolph-Macon College. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Peyser, Thomas. Utopia and cosmopolis: globalization in the era of American literary realism / Thomas Peyser p. cm. - (New Americanists) Includes index. ISBN 0-8223-2.230-7 (alk. paper). ISBN 0-8223-2247-1 (pbk.: alk. paper) I. American fiction-History and criticism. 2. Realism in literature. 3. Bellamy, Edward, 18501898-Criticism and interpretation. 4. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 1860-19 35-Criticism and interpretation. 5. Howells, William Dean, 1837-1920Criticism and interpretation. 6. James, Henry, 1843191 6-Criticism and interpretation. 7. Internationalism in literature. 8. Nationalism in literature. 9. Utopias in literature. I. Title. ll. Series. PS374.R37P491998 813'.409-dC21 98-5nO C IP