Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Literary Institution, 1850–1910 9780822399933

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Reading for Realism

New Americanists A Series Edited by Donald E. Pease

Reading for Realism The History of a u.s. Literary Institution,

N aney Glazener

Duke University Press Durham and London

1997

© 1997 Duke University Press

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 00 Typeset in Aldus by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

For Paul Foster

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix

1

High Realism and Other Bourgeois Institutions

20

2

"The Grand Reservoir of National Prosperity"

51

3 Addictive Reading and Professional Authorship

93

4

The Romantic Revival

147

5

Regional Accents

189

Conclusion

The End of the Atlantic Group, 1900-1910 Appendix: The Atlantic Group Notes

267

Bibliography Index 363

vii

345

257

229

Acknowledgments

This book was so long in the making and ended up absorbing so many projects that started out being separate that I am sure I will not manage to thank everyone who offered me useful suggestions about it. There are also more people than I can possibly thank here individually whose encouragement has sped my work on this book, or at least made it more pleasant. I appreciate all the collegial and friendly impetus I've gotten, and if I haven't made that appreciation clear in person, I hope this general acknowledgment will begin to make up for my neglect. Since the time that the manuscript was completed in its early and very different form as a dissertation, though, a number of people have contributed their knowledge, energy, and critical acumen to the book-inprogress, and they deserve public thanks here. George Dekker, Jay Fliegelman, and David Halliburton, the members of my dissertation committee, made sure that I left graduate school with a useful assessment of my project's strengths and weaknesses and with good ideas about some directions in which I could develop it. Once I had begun to reshape the project, a supportive writing group gave me detailed responses to chapters 1 and 5; indeed, Margaret Marshall came up with the idea of considering the Arena as a magazine that resisted the Atlantic group's influence, an idea that became the premise of chapter 5. The other members of the group at the time were Susan Andrade, Ay§egul Baykan, Sarah Beckwith, Jean Carr, Paula Kane, Valerie Krips, Janet Montelaro, Marianne Novy, and Iris Young. Angela Farkas responded thoughtfully to an early version of the introduction; chapter 4 has benefited from comments that Deidre Lynch, Marianne Novy, Mariolina Salvatori, Susan Harris Smith, and William Warner made about an essay-length version of it; and Melinda Ponder, Tom Lutz, and an anonymous reader for Arizona Quarterly offered suggestions about shorter versions of chapter 5 that have been incorporated into this book. Kirk Savage, who offered an art historian's perspective on chapter 2, magnanimously shared his insights at short notice and provided some crucial cross-disciplinary translations and resources. Hilda Schneider intrepidly ix

x Acknowledgments

pursued some puzzling leads at the New York Public Library for the appendix. And at Duke University Press, Ken Wissoker offered cheerful and judicious guidance on revisions. I am even more deeply indebted to several readers whose astute suggestions shaped the entire book. Jonathan Arac, whose innovative work in literary history and public debates about literature has taught me a great deal, read most of the manuscript at a crucial juncture and offered wonderful suggestions. He also patiently helped me navigate the process of getting the book into print. Susan Andrade was a generous but demanding interlocutor who in particular helped me to frame the gender analysis in chapter 3. Deidre Lynch and Katie Trumpener, who have illuminated and challenged me since our time together in graduate school, were stalwart supporters of this project from its beginning. Their responses to my work, their adventurous suggestions about things to read, and their own writings' ambitious complexity made me imagine this book more expansively. Jayne Lewis read more of this book than anyone and brought to the task an admirably low tolerance for the favorite catchphrases of cultural studies. More importantly, though, her affectionate support combined with her own intellectual rigor helped me aspire not only to better arguments and finer prose, but also to a more genuine intellectual approach. None of my readers is responsible for any errors, infelicities, or bad ideas that remain, of course, but it is certain that without their efforts the current book would be poorer. The good treatment I received as a graduate student and an assistant professor made it possible for me to undertake and complete this laborintensive project. Stanford University's standard dissertation fellowship plus a grant from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation funded my graduate education, and the friendly environment of the English Department there helped my work in ways that can't be calculated. At the University of Pittsburgh, a Ketchum Summer Research Stipend, a Faculty of Arts and Sciences Summer Research Stipend, and two excellent research assistants, Robert Corbett and Jennifer c. Jones, facilitated my work. My department's willingness to bear with me while I concentrated my energies on this project allowed me to give the manuscript proper care. Finally, I want to thank my husband, Paul foster, the person who convinced me to apply to graduate school and my best source for encouragement and the occasional necessary hard truth ever since. His unflagging belief that my work on this book was important helped me all along.

Introduction

Reception and Periodical Culture in Literary History The same penchant for classification that marked such sinister intellectual enterprises as racial anthropology, sexology, and phrenology flourished in U.S. literary culture during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In particular, the advent of realism set off an explosion of categories for fiction, perhaps because the very name "realism" posed especially grand and impossible problems about the relationship between representation and life that critics hoped to conquer through zealous subdivision. Classification is always an intensely ideological activity, and the classification of fiction in the late nineteenth century was no exception. Not only was fiction widely and enthusiastically read, but also a nation's ability to produce good fiction-especially novels-was commonly taken as an index of its cultural development. It is therefore no surprise to find comparisons between realism and other kinds of u.s. fiction supercharged with assumptions about culture's proper relationship to democracy, nationalism, modernity, social hierarchy, citizenship, and pleasure. A number of critics have discussed ways in which individual works of fiction identified as realist engaged these issues; still others have analyzed ways in which the very form or genre of nineteenth-century realism did so. My purpose instead is to analyze how the public debates about fiction that produced generic categories, making it possible to identify a work as an instance of realism or sentimentalism or romance, constructed certain issues of cultural politics for writers and readers alike. Scholars of nineteenth-century U.S. fiction have mainly neglected these public debates. Whatever their theoretical allegiances, most of them have allowed a very small selection of writings to sum up what fictional forms meant to writers and readers. These writings were produced by nowcanonical authors-Sir Walter Scott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, George Eliot, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Frank Norris, among others-who in prefaces to their works, in separate manifestos, or in reviews of their peers set out important accounts of what fiction ought to 1

2

Reading for Realism

accomplish and what the principal traditions of fiction writing were. This selection of canonized critical writings has been used to produce important studies of the relationships among these authors' works, as well as studies comparing individual authors' theories about fiction with their practices. However, these canonical pronouncements were part of broader public conversations about realism, romance, sentimentalism, and other kinds of fiction, conversations from which individual utterances cannot be extracted without the risk of distortion. The classification of fiction was a complex social enterprise that was not delegated solely to the authors we have come to privilege. Even authors with established reputations wrote in relation to the genre distinctions circulating in their own time, rather than only in relation to the theories of their canonized predecessors. The history of public conversations about genre is therefore an important part of literary history.1 Richard Brodhead emphasizes that the "literary" is a category whose construction has varied historically, and his account of it proposes that a text's literariness derives from the circumstances of its production-its author's social location in relation to the institutions of literary education and literary publishing-as well as from its author's textual performance, her or his ability to mark the text as literary.2 Only certain kinds of writing in certain cultural locations could count as literary, Brodhead emphasizes, and I would add that only certain ways of reading could count as literary. Reconstructing the history of the literary, which is at the same time a history of the extraliterary, therefore requires us to consider texts' reception as well as their production: to consider which ways of reading presumed or ensured the literariness of their objects, as well as to consider how (and whether) those texts made discursive and institutional claims to literariness. The travels of works on and off the canon are other important indices of reception, since such travels manifest and invite certain changes in how texts are read. Realism, the centerpiece of my study, was sometimes denounced for being insufficiently literary, but it was more often praised for being supremely literary. Moreover, the controversies about realism took place within the most belletristic periodicals in the United States, whose attention guaranteed that realism was a literary issue. The changing terms used to distinguish realism from other fictional forms trace the discursive parameters of the literary in one important location during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In addition, the transformations that realism and

Introduction 3 the periodicals promoting it underwent when they were introduced into academic literary history in the twentieth century, transformations outlined in my conclusion, were related to still another regime of literariness. A work's author, its contemporary readers and reviewers, and subsequent generations of academic critics and historians all operate with reference to literariness, and all their operations are potentially part of literary history, even though any particular work of literary history must be selective. Their operations are also closely interrelated. Later receptions often respond to earlier ones, and even more fundamentally, any reception of a text is dialectically related to its production. On the one hand, production anticipates reception: authors produce texts with some understanding of how they will, or might, be construed according to the reading practices that authors see around them and employ themselves. 3 On the other hand, reception responds to production. Once texts are in print, they may be received in ways that their authors did not anticipate, or anticipated and tried to preclude. Still, even if readers aren't trying to be loyal to an author's intentions or historical limitations, or even if they are mistaken about a text's origins, they respond to what they believe about a text's conditions of composition in a variety of ways, such as by feeling addressed or excluded by the text. Therefore, the production and the reception of a text are imaginatively involved with each other-which is to say that they are actually involved with each other, but through the mediation of complex acts of projection and historical reconstruction that cannot be reduced to correct or incorrect surmises. And in this process of productionreception through which texts are made meaningful, the component of reception is at least as important as that of authorial production, narrowly defined, since reception gets the last word. This is why my title insists that realism is something that has to be read for, not something that inheres in how a text is written or where it is published, even though the text and its location can invite realist readings or not. From now on, I will sometimes distinguish production from reception for analytic purposes, but with the understanding that the two are never completely separate in practice. There are two ways to pursue this productive reception of texts, which like many activities in life is a social undertaking practiced individually. One is by trying to understand how a single reader-as a positionality and a reflective consciousness, as a historical possibility fulfilled in a unique way-makes meaning of the texts that come his or her way. This is Carlo

4

Reading for Realism

Ginzburg's project in The Cheese and the Worms (1976), in which the records of a sixteenth-century miller's trial for heresy allow Ginzburg to reconstruct how the miller Menocchio drew on books he had read in forging his own view of the cosmos.4 Ginzburg's study makes a nuanced argument about the intellectual value of popular knowledges and the ingenuity manifested in readings and "mis" -readings practiced by ordinary people. This project was made possible by an archival gold mine, laborious transcripts of the interrogations in which Menocchio was questioned about where he got books, how he used them, and with whom he discussed them. It offers the only reason I know for lamenting the passing of the Inquisition, since it is usually very difficult to find such detailed accounts of a person's reading unless that person is a public figure with a proclivity for diaries and marginalia, or unless, like Janice A. Radway's romance-readers, the person is alive to be interviewed or to fill out a questionnaire. s The reading habits of those rare souls from previous eras who have left us clues about their interpretive activities are certainly of interest. However, in interpreting such clues, we must take into account whatever we can discover about the range of ways of reading that was available. We must also recognize the complexity of even the most casual and unprivileged act of reading. The other way to study the productive reception of texts is to consider the collective activity of readers, and this is the avenue of inquiry I shall pursue here. This inquiry can be articulated with studies in the history of the book, as Cathy N. Davidson's anthology Reading in America: Literature and Social History (1989) demonstrates. Davidson's introduction and many of the essays in this volume analyze reading in relation to the material and ideological conditions of publication, distribution, and consumption that affect "how books work in society."6 These conditions include genre, as Robert Darnton's contribution to the anthology specifies, although none of the essays in Reading in America takes up genre.? An interest in the productive reception of texts can also be articulated with histories of interpretive communities, whose reading practices are shaped by their political commitments, their working epistemologies, and their previous experiences with texts, among other factors. James L. Machor's anthology Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response (1993) reconstructs the reading strategies available to particular groups of nineteenth-century readers, bringing together concerns from reader-response theory, reception theory, and the

Introduction 5 New Historicism. 8 However, none of the contributions to this collection demonstrates a significant interest in genre, either. The fact that neither of these thoughtful anthologies includes work on genre is worth noticing because genres so often affect the packaging, marketing, and public reception of books, phenomena with which both anthologies are closely concerned. Because realism in the nineteenth century was a genre with special connections to the publishing industry as well as a genre that often monopolized public discussions about fiction, it offers a way to conjoin the institutional analysis of book culture with the discursive and figural analysis of accounts of reading, bringing together the history of the book and the history of interpretive communities. A set of late nineteenth-century magazines that regularly classified and discussed various kinds of fiction is my central resource in this study. I call these magazines "the Atlantic group" because the Atlantic Monthly'S literary authority during its first few decades epitomized the influence that these magazines were designed to exert, as they mediated between the publishing industry and readers. Since U.S. literature was not widely taught in the academy until the twentieth century, in the late nineteenth century the Atlantic-group magazines had greater authority over American literature than any other institution did. They had the power to confer legitimacy on certain kinds of texts and certain ways of reading them. Nathaniel Hawthorne's, Henry James's, and many other canonical writers' pronouncements were necessarily in dialogue with these magazines: at least, the magazines certainly responded to these writers, and the writers' reciprocal engagement seems likely, since many of them were reviewed by these magazines and published fiction and essays in them. However, numerous other writers also contributed to this conversation by writing book reviews and articles about literature, and the contributions of the famous and the forgotten alike were shaped by their place in these magazines. The Atlantic Monthly (1857-present) emerged as a cultural project for a group of literary-minded Republicans at the same time that the Republican Party was emerging as the party of abolition. Like most of its kindred magazines, it registered a gradual disenchantment with Reconstruction; participated in the subsequent redemption of the white South; expressed spotty support for women's suffrage and other gender-based reorganizations of society; and fairly consistently published skeptical evaluations of the political usefulness of labor unions, socialism, and Populism. At the end

6 Reading for Realism of the century, the Atlantic-group magazines were suffused with imperialist zeal and sympathy for the goals and problems of "Anglo-Saxons" (a racial construct that excluded a number of "white" immigrant groups whose members were mostly working-class as well as African Americans, Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, and other groups defined as "nonwhite"). It is not surprising that the kinds of fiction valued by these magazines and the standards of valuation they offered were caught up in the construction and justification of social hierarchy along several axes. Nevertheless, it can be surprising to discover that even the magazines' most basic conceptions of authorship and readership invoked and reproduced relations of privilege. It may also come as a surprise that the magazines were explicitly interested in formulating different kinds of reading, not just different kinds of texts-yet another reason why literary histories ought to attend more closely to reception. For instance, mainstream literary history has privileged "naturalism" as a category that accounts for the productions of several turn-of-the-century canonical authors (Crane, London, Norris, and sometimes Dreiser, typically) and that can be represented theoretically by Norris's The Responsibilities of the Novelist, even though naturalism barely surfaced in influential periodicals except with specific reference to Emile Zola, and even though the authors we associate with U. S. naturalism were not grouped together by contemporary reviewers. Conversely, literary history has almost completely overlooked the romantic revival of the :1890S that I will describe in chapter 4, a phenomenon that was definitely recognized (indeed, formulated and named) in contemporary periodicals and that was primarily a new account of the pleasures and social functions of reading, even though it was associated with certain texts. The romantic revival is not more "real" than naturalism just because it was a way in which people formulated their own experience rather than a way in which later scholars grouped certain productions together. However, phenomena such as the romantic revival, which probably affected the reception of works we call naturalist, are part of what literary history ought to account for. To begin instead with a sample of canonical works and to invent literary historical categories that account best-or only-for them is to memorialize the values of the canon makers, rather than to take up the challenges of valuing works and narrating their historical relations that are presented by any era's range of textual productions and construction (s) of literariness.

Introduction 7 To begin with a sample of elite, effectively canonical magazines such as the Atlantic group and to allow them to represent late nineteenth-century literary history would also be to memorialize the values of canon-makers, even if they are periodical editors and publishers rather than academics. One of the most important premises of this study is that despite the substantial insights it offers into a dominant literary institution in the late nineteenth century, it is necessarily a partial account. One can find testimonials galore about the power the Atlantic-group magazines had to confer distinction on both the authors who published in them and the purchasers who read them. However, we can be sure that there were other authors and readers who accepted the Atlantic group's literary preeminence but who did not aim to be literary and therefore neither submitted work to these magazines nor read them. We can also be sure that there were still other readers, and maybe even some published authors, who never encountered these magazines and for whom their cultural authority was irrelevant. Although I will argue in chapter 5 that the Arena, a reform magazine that began publication in 1.889, provided a framework for reading regionalist fiction that challenged the Atlantic group's framework, it is too enormous a task for this book to explore the range of reading formations that structured print culture during this era. 9 However, the kind of literary history I have been describing is necessarily a collaborative project in which the limits of individual studies provide the preconditions for other work. Even within periodical culture, the Atlantic group was not the only site with the power to affect how fiction was read and valued. Consider, for example, how variously fiction could be presented in magazines operating during the 1.890S and early 1.900s. The United States' most influential early little magazine, the Chap-Book (1.894-1.898), was edited by two Harvard graduates and published in Chicago. Like the English Yellow Book, it was sumptuously illustrated by contemporary artists such as Aubrey Beardsley; also like the Yellow Book, it published poetry, fiction, and reviews by distinguished American and European authors. Works by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Alice Brown, and Hamlin Garland, who also published regularly in the Atlantic-group magazines, were interspersed with works by Henrik Ibsen, Stephen Mallarme, George Meredith, and William Butler Yeats in the pages of the Chap-Book, creating some unusual effects for late twentieth-century readers by complicating our sense of which categories of writing belonged together: dialect fiction and reflections on

8 Reading for Realism

decadence shared this space, after all. As I will discuss in the conclusion, little magazines such as the Chap-Book were part of an emerging structure of literary authority formulated in opposition to what by the 1890S was identified as the Atlantic group's gentility. Some of the fiction writers who published in the Atlantic group also published in the Ladies' Home Journal (1883-present) during this era: stories and serialized novels by Mary Wilkins Freeman, Anthony Hope, Rudyard Kipling, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps appeared next to countless advice columns and articles about domestic practices. Unlike the ChapBook, the Ladies' Home Journal did not publish book reviews and therefore provided no explicit running commentary about literary value or fictional classification. lO However, its editor's zeal in securing contributors with established literary reputations and its record-setting circulation figures (one million copies in 1903) made the magazine an important organ of fiction, one which created a relationship between even the most masculine-coded of romance-writers (Anthony Hope and Rudyard Kipling) and domestic counselP As chapter 4'S discussion of the gender-politics of the romantic revival will indicate, the Ladies' Home Journal's juxtapositions troubled the Atlantic group's late-century understandings of adventure fiction and of literature itself in significant ways. Few if any of the contributors to the Colored American Magazine (19°0-1909) also published work in the Atlantic group, yet the magazine manifested a commitment to literature commensurate with the Atlantic's. Not only did the magazine announce its sponsorship of "the higher culture of Religion, Literature, Science, Music and Art of the Negro," but also the decorum of its prose and the consistency of its attention to aesthetic refinement and social respectability echoed the Atlantic group's class-marked vision of culture. 12 In the Colored American Magazine, stories and serialized novels by Pauline E. Hopkins, Angelina Grimke, and many less famous writers were juxtaposed with profiles and portraits of prominent African Americans, political essays, and a variety of pieces involving mainly the social activities and problems of middle-class African Americans in Northern cities. Though short-lived, the Colored American Magazine represented an attempt to adapt the Atlantic construction of literariness to African American interests and problems. And even though its racial agenda was structurally symmetrical to the Atlantic group's turn-ofthe-century Anglo-Saxonism, the asymmetrical social positions marked by

Introduction 9

"Anglo-Saxon" and "Colored" meant that the Colored American Magazine's racial agenda had different political valences. In addition, the magazine's construction of its every contributor-and even its every subscription agent-as a representative of racial progress arguably worked against the internal factionalism that fueled genre wars in the Atlantic group.u Each of the magazines I have described published fiction, had some claim to literary stature, and framed its fiction in ways that had interesting consequences for the construction of genres. Each of these magazines was also in dialogue with the Atlantic group: the Chap-Book most obviously, but the Colored American Magazine (which shared the Atlantic's Boston location as well as its preoccupation with respectable citizenship) quite substantially and the Ladies' Home Journal in certain respects, not only through its overlapping contributors but also through its competing version of a relationship between reading and domestic life. To some extent, of course, any periodical's economic competition with other periodicals creates a relationship between them, but precisely because the Atlantic group had special literary authority, periodicals with literary aspirations had to reckon with it. Periodicals without literary aspirations might not have. The New York Family Story Paper, which began in :1873 and was still thriving at the turn of the century, printed serial novels, fiction, and advice columns, and because it made no claims on the literary, there are no obvious signs of its being in dialogue with the Atlantic group.14 Still, the New York Family Story Paper bears an important relationship to the Atlantic group, precisely because the Atlantic's legitimacy was premised on the illegitimacy of story papers and dime novels, an opposition that structured the Atlantic group's scheme of fictional classification. Moreover, the presence of the Atlantic in the textual field may have had effects on fiction published even in story papers. Autobiographical writings by one author who published in the New York Family Story Paper, Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller, suggest that she always felt uncomfortable and embarrassed about being successful in a subliterary field, and very possibly the magazines in the Atlantic group helped to produce her discomfort, discomfort that in turn shaped her relationships with her publishers and her readers. IS In arguing for the Atlantic group's cultural dominance, then, and in presuming that it provides a useful point of entry into the genre-politics of late nineteenth-century U.S. fiction, I by no means wish to suggest that the Atlantic's construction ofliterary value-indeed, its construction of the value

10

Reading for Realism

of reading fiction specifically as literary-simply trickled down the hierarchy of periodicals, running out before it got as low as the story papers. The periodicals that were in dialogue with the Atlantic group could create distances and resistances that fended off the Atlantic's influence. Nevertheless, since any person or any periodical who aspires to literariness must grapple with the institutions empowered to assign it, the history of the Atlantic group is very likely to be involved in the history of other institutions and formations that influenced how texts got written and read. Once we are in a position to recognize the institutional and discursive characteristics of the Atlantic group's literary dominance, we have a new way to chart the nature and limits of that dominance and the success with which it was resisted. For these reasons, this study of genre debates in the Atlantic group has the potential to contribute to our understanding of many texts that might seem to be remote from it. To a reader familiar with these debates, for instance, Pauline E. Hopkins's preface to Contending Forces takes on special resonances. Not only does she call her book-length work a "romance" in the subtitle and the preface, but she also refers to her "abrupt and daring venture within the wide field of romantic literature": "daring venture" creates a connection between her work and the adventure fiction privileged by the late nineteenth-century romantic revival. In the very next paragraph, however, Hopkins calls her work "a simple, homely tale, unassumingly told, which cements the bond of brotherhood among all classes and all complexions," echoing the rhetoric used in the Atlantic group to praise realism's stylistic spareness and democratic social mission, except for the reference to "complexions." And somewhat later, drawing on a slightly different construction of realism, Hopkins insists that the "incidents portrayed in the early chapters of the book actually occurred."16 The density of Hopkins's generic markers attest to how thoroughly a network of generic possibilities filtered authors' public presentations of their own work, and probably their private -understandings of it as well, but the oscillation that Hopkins makes between late-century versions of realism and romance is more revealing yet. Events such as the whippings, public rapes, and lynchings that occur in Contending Forces were distinctly at odds with the construction of "simple, homely" realism by the Atlantic group and may have demanded, in her estimation, a shift into romance, even though their real place in the experience and history of many black families aligned such

Introduction

11

events with realism. Contending Forces was not reviewed in the Atlantic group, and undoubtedly Hopkins did not expect it to be. However, Hopkins's role as a writer and later editor for the Colored American Magazine, through which her novel was sold by subscription, testifies to her having been in dialogue with the Atlantic group about literariness-even though the Atlantic group didn't answer back. Recovering the interplay between Hopkins's appropriations of romance and realism, on the one hand, and the Atlantic group's social coding of them, on the other, adds to our understanding of the ways in which African American writers were "written out" of culturally approved models of literary production, not only through the presuppositions about authors' subject-positions and subject-matters that underlay dominant genres but also through the ways in which the field of textual production was divided upY Realism in the Atlantic Group One reason why realism is a focal point of this study is because the era during which the Atlantic-group magazines had greatest authority to confer literary value was also the era in which realism emerged as the leading form of literary fiction in the United States. That is, we can use conversations about realism during the late nineteenth century to chart the changing shape of the Atlantic group's authority, which in turn was bound up with the construction of the literary. When realism came to be articulated with muckraking journalism early in the twentieth century, its most influential form was no longer closely linked to the Atlantic group's authority. For my purposes, then, this development in realism indicates the dispersal of the powers previously vested in the Atlantic group to other sites and constitutes the conclusion to my history. But realism is also an object of my analysis, not only a medium for tracking the literary, and it is an especially exciting object because so many recent studies have used it as a privileged site of relationships between culture and other domains. With respect to these studies, my work undertakes three interrelated innovations. First, I argue that American realism was an "establishment" form due to its promotion by Atlantic-group magazines, not due to its inherent bourgeois or repressive characteristics. Whereas a long, rich tradition of Marxist scholarship relates realism to bourgeois class-interests and to capitalist habits of thought, this study will more narrowly emphasize American realism's primary location within a

12

Reading for Realism

particular institution, the Atlantic-group magazines, that initially had specific ties to some of the northeastern urban bourgeoisie but that later became part of a national structure for organizing and legitimating classstratified cultural authority.18 This means that although realism was put to certain bourgeois uses and shaped by its life in capitalism, and although many historical generalizations about the bourgeoisie hold true for the class-fractions I consider, my analysis will not presume that realism emanated from an unlocated bourgeois ideology. Nor, as is a tendency of some scholarship informed by Michel Foucault's work, will it treat realism as a technology that uniformly produced certain effects of power, although I will be analyzing the effects of power produced by some of its appropriations. 19 And rather than presuming that any text or discourse from this era is equidistant from any other and can therefore readily be made part of any discursive ensemble, I want to use the location of genre-debates in the Atlantic group as an instance of institutional mediation that put fictional texts into certain social relationships and not others. 20 The Atlantic group was not the only site where American realism was constructed in the nineteenth century, but I believe that critics who address realism as an entity need to provide some account of its locations, variations, and modes of circulation rather than assuming that it has or had a stable, portable, transhistorical identity and function. I also do not wish to lose sight of the fact that the category of realism was composed and transmitted by the actions of countless human agents, not by an uncanny power of reproduction. 21 In short, this study assigns to nineteenth-century U.S. realism a fairly precise primary location, one that involved it in particular conflicts. However, like the critics whose work on realism's relationship to class and power I have described-reductively, for the sake of conciseness-I emphasize realism's affiliation with powerful groups, continuing to debunk the myths that nineteenth-century realism provided fairer representations of nonelite populations and greater interpretive freedom for readers. These paired ideas have been challenged repeatedly in recent years but still have not been successfully put out of circulation. 22 They drastically oversimplify the ideological significance of gestures toward less privileged populations made by writers attached, however ambivalently, to the cultural machinery of a ruling group; indeed, such accounts of realism usually ignore the fact that it was promoted within magazines that abundantly advertised their elitism. Because these magazines were involved in consolidating privilege on a

Introduction

1}

number of fronts, I have tried to draw on work in cultural studies that organizes multiple axes of power and privilege. In addition, I have sought to emulate Raymond Williams's attention to the variegation of culture and society at any given historical moment: the coexistence of dominant, residual, and emergent cultural practices, and the interrelation of more and less enduring sets of social arrangements. 23 My purpose is not to dismiss realism as an uncomplicated instrument of domination, however, something that a dominant class fraction and a group of belletristic publishers knowingly and unscrupulously manipulated for their own ends. Even insofar as realism was successfully appropriated by a powerful bloc, it served competing purposes. At its best, this appropriation of realism framed the sincere attempts of a population to understand the conditions of its own privilege and its relations to other social groups; at its worst, it fraudulently legitimated that population's control of culture and the "monopoly of humanity" entailed in installing one's own forms of pleasure as the only worthy ones. 24 But the version of realism that served these purposes was neither completely coherent nor the only one circulating in the Atlantic group. This refusal to attribute consistent features or effects to realism marks the second way in which this study departs from most previous studies of realism, many of which generalize about realism without explicitly discussing why certain texts, authorial stances, epistemologies, or social attitudes can be allowed to represent an entity called realism. This study presumes that realism was not a coherent entity, but was rather a term that acquired a repertory of uses as a result of its competing appropriations. Since these appropriations were almost always made relationally, in the course of a reviewer's or an author's distinguishing realism from some other form, it is necessary to examine the construction of realism in relation to the construction of other categories of fiction, as they were developed in Atlantic-group magazines. 25 Thus, the construction of realism at midcentury as a uniquely democratic and modern form was simultaneously the construction of the romance as aristocratic and outmoded; the construction of realist authorship as professional authorship around the 1880s was simultaneously the construction of sentimental and sensational authorship as unprofessional; and the construction of realism as genteel and elitist toward the end of the century was Simultaneously the construction of the revived romance as a refreshingly transgressive form that

14 Reading for Realism

bridged privileged and popular audiences. These constructions can all be found within the Atlantic group, suggesting that even as an establishment form, realism was mutable. However, I will also be proposing that two discourses used to promote realism throughout the late nineteenth century, one organized around connoisseurship and another organized around nationalism, functioned as a particular ensemble that I call "high realism," an ensemble that consolidated the authority of the cultural wing of the bourgeoisie. "High realism," an institution of reception, represents my attempt to specify an entity responsible for many of the effects that critics such as Amy Kaplan and Kenneth W. Warren have attributed to realist texts, especially the effects of producing and enforcing social hierarchies. 26 In other words, realism was defined in various, even contradictory ways, but some of the discourses used to give realism meaning-especially the ones that collaborated to produce "high realism" -were more fully elaborated and more socially consequential than others, and these are the main ones I will be analyzing. 27 The third innovation of this study is precisely this idea that realism was something that had to be read for: that what I call "high realism" might be more accurately identified as a reading formation than a body of texts or textual features. Because realism was promoted by a literary establishment, readers had a powerful incentive to read for it; however, because it was defined variously and relation ally, reading for realism was not a uniform operation that we can reconstruct on the basis of reviewers' prescriptions. Indeed, it was almost always described in general and highly figurative language relying on distinctions that we no longer make readily. Sometimes reading for realism was identified with valuing texts about American contemporary life and construing their representations as "typical" rather than "idealizing"; sometimes it was identified with practicing emotional restraint, rather than giving in to the absorptive, addictive reading that was supposed to be invited by inferior forms of fiction; sometimes it was identified with reading for "character" rather than "plot." These prescriptions may not be unintelligible to us, but they require as much interpretive care as the fictional texts to which we might wish to "apply" them. What we can learn from the genre-debates in the Atlantic group is not how individuals read, but what paradigms for reading were available to them. 28 A good analogy for the relationship between these paradigms and individual reading-practices might be the relationship between the Palmer-

Introduction 15

method models for cursive handwriting and individuals' distinctive scripts. In each case, the standard does not determine individual behaviors so much as make their distinctiveness legible. I will occasionally speculate about realist reading-effects on the basis of the prescriptions in Atlantic-group magazines, relying in part on my perception that there are continuities between reading practices most Americans still use and the reading practices taught in the Atlantic. However, more often I will interpret the ways in which fictional texts from the period pick up and rework the Atlanticgroup discourses about genre and reading. As the rest of this study will explain and demonstrate, many published authors from this era were steeped in the Atlantic group's genre-specificideas about literariness, and they consciously or unconsciously used the discourses provided by these magazines to frame representational issues in their novels and stories. Book reviews, then, not only endorsed certain ways of reading that shaped the reception of texts, but they also affected authors' ways of reading and authors' understandings of the readings their works were likely to receive, understandings that in turn were registered in the authors' productions. (The book reviews I discuss were also accounts of how certain expert readers read, but in chapter 1 I will argue that the reviews were in important ways authored by the magazines in which they appeared.) I have suggested that the book reviews and literary articles of the Atlantic group were constantly concerned with genre, insofar as they seemed to expect that any assessment of a book's social value or readerly pleasure would depend on its genre. A genre, for my purposes, is any "kind" of writing that is given a name and distinguished from other kinds. Given that the terms I am considering were used so variously-so that, for instance, sometimes the romance was distinguished from the novel, but at other times it was a subdivision of the novel-it would not be feasible for me to try to distinguish between more comprehensive and less comprehensive categories by giving them different names (such as "subgenre" or "mode").29 In addition to versions of realism, a number of other fictional forms mentioned in the Atlantic group will be featured in this study: the romance and the sentimental novel, especially, and to a lesser extent sensationalism, local-colorism, naturalism, and a dizzying number of intermittent categories such as the "novel of quiet power" or the "novel with a purpose." Happily, it will not be my task to sort them out once and for all, only to discriminate among their local uses.

16

Reading for Realism

The Atlantic-group reviewers' emphasis on genre is not unusual, of course. It is as common now as it was then for our responses to our entertainments to shape themselves around our assignments of genre. David Lynch's television series Twin Peaks perturbed some viewers when it introduced mysticism into a program they had understood to be a crime drama with elements of self-parody; others could interpret the uncovering of a manichean supernatural infrastructure as an ingenious literalization of the moral universe entailed by plots of detection. Being persuaded to assign the series to one or another understanding of its genre could affect viewers' satisfaction as well as their interpretation of the program's local elements. (In keeping with the hermeneutic circle, of course, the interpretation of local elements in turn affects any viewer's assignment of genre.) The special usefulness of genre as a vantage-point on interpretive practices is that it is one of the most public registers of interpretation, requiring readers to consider their experience of a text in relation to frameworks of interpretation they share with others. As Fredric Jameson has proposed, "Genres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact."3o Any work of fiction's textual engagement with the discourses of genre that are likely to affect its reception is an engagement with the conditions that attend its publication: its functioning for collective social purposes, as well as its commodification and its insertion into an array of other published texts. My first chapter will address some of these conditions of publication and reception, analyzing the relationship between high realism, the Atlantic group's cultural location, and the economic interests of the publishing houses affiliated with the Atlantic and the other magazines I have grouped with it. This institutional account of the politics and economics of literary authority at the onset of American realism frames the middle chapters' attention to the discourses through which the Atlantic group constructed and exerted its authority, and the frame is closed in my conclusion, which describes the dislocation of the Atlantic group's authority around the time when this group of magazines and American realism entered academic literary history. The middle chapters will argue that the metaphors and discourses that structured public debates about genre in this institutional setting thereby caused relationships between works of fiction and particular public issues, issues ranging from the nationalization of artistic traditions (chapter 2) to

Introduction 17

the Temperance movement and professionalism (chapter 3) to imperialism and the fin de siecle construction of childhood (chapter 4) and to the latecentury intersection between Populism and women's rights (chapter 5). Each of these chapters focuses on one or more works of fiction that used these metaphors and discourses especially productively to reflect on their own representational choices and on the cultural politics of generic hierarchy. These choices almost never amount to decisions about whether to "belong" to a particular genre or not: as my emphasis on the impossibility of simply implementing prescriptions about genre ought to indicate, I follow June Howard in presuming that "genre inevitably enters into every work but no work is contained by genre."31 Even works that did not textually foreground their implication in genre politics were involved in these relationships, though. For example, any work that was publicly classified as a romance by reviewers during the 1890S could be thereby enlisted in an ideology of reading that supported both u.s. imperialism and consumerism, regardless of whether the work's author invited these links. Such relationships have important consequences for individual texts as well as for literary history. It is important to analyze the reading practices delineated by Atlanticgroup magazines because for many readers they undoubtedly had the effect of throwing certain aspects of texts into relief at the expense of others. For example, I will suggest in chapter 3 that the ideology of character development espoused by Atlantic magazines-an ideology that informed a reading practice I call "ad hominism"-accounts for many of the differences between the radical fissures and unsettlings that we now discern in many late nineteenth -century novels and the ease with which they seem to have been digested and put to moral use by contemporary readers. Knowing that ad hominism was a dominant reading practice during the era of a text's composition and publication is relevant to our understanding of its historical functioning and the reception its author anticipated or tried to redirect. However, it is not therefore the case that an ad hominist reading of a text defines it, either for nineteenth-century readers or for us today. Penny Boumelha has usefully called for critics of realism to recognize the potential for texts to be appropriated for feminist purposes rather than for critics to assume the "total effectivity" of any repressive "narrative strategies" discovered in a text, and her argument can be extended to point to the possibility of other kinds of dissenting or even just idiosyncratiC ap-

18

Reading for Realism

propriations. 32 Similarly, Michael Denning has intriguingly proposed that working-class readers may have turned the dime novels they read to their own political uses because of their reading strategies, even though there was little in the circumstances of the texts' composition and publication to endow them with progressive political purposes. 33 It is easy to imagine that even readers who were subject to the Atlantic group's influence had alternative resources that allowed them to turn texts to uses unimagined by authors or published reviewers. Moreover, any text that descends to us is ours to use for our own purposes. Some of these purposes address the text's involvement in historical moments previous to our own and different from it; others concern the text's participation in the present, or in a moment capacious enough to unite us with past readers. Reading for Realism takes up the "pastness" of texts in a fairly precise way, but the historically imprecise term "classic realism," as used by Catherine Belsey and others, makes possible a productive analysis of how certain old and new texts in print and on film shape our contemporary subjectivity, even though "classic realism" is often identified by criteria that would have puzzled nineteenth-century readers.34 And of course, studies of the past always embody present concerns, mainly producing knowledge of ourselves as creatures of history. The history that produced us as readers who can still read for realism, in ways that have continuities with those of our nineteenth-century predecessors, is part of the history of how many of the exploitative relations of labor and distorting versions of social identity that afflicted Victorians still afflict us today. This kind of connection between culture and politics is important to acknowledge, especially when we try to assess what opportunities there are for works of fiction today to make progressive political interventions. It is important to consider, not just how widely a work of fiction is read or how much it is valued by those who read it, but what assumptions about life-and meaning and social relations are the preconditions for its legibility. When public school students are taught, as I was, that the fundamental categories for fictional plots are "man vs. man," "man vs. society," "man vs. nature," and "man vs. himself," the perpetuation of individualist reading habits-not to mention gender bias-makes it difficult for any text to introduce readers to collective registers of experience and agency bigger than the individual but smaller and more specific than "society." This particular scheme was not invented by the people who adapted

Introduction 19 realism to the United States in the nineteenth century, but it is highly compatible with the realist reading practices they promoted. Fortunately, there is little chance that this set of plots will mark the limits to anyone's lifetime literacy. However, the example serves to remind us why methods of teaching as well as lists of mandated and censored texts need to be crucial points of political contestation. The practices of reading for realism developed in the nineteenth century have entered into many of our formations as readers. By analyzing the initial and early social underpinnings of these practices, Reading for Realism offers a way to recognize at once their archaism and their contemporaneity: their emergence out of social circumstances that no longer obtain, but also their refunctioning in the service of present or recent formations of cultural dominance. The charge that cultural products aimed at women are "addictive" does not travel today along exactly the same relays that it followed in the nineteenth century, but one can get a sobering sense of the work left for feminism from the very fact that it is still a commonplace. Insofar as writing workshops still assure students that "showing" makes for a better style than "telling," too, it is important to recognize that such realist guidelines for writing fiction have a history of ideological consequences, even if those consequences are somewhat different today than they were in Howells's time. The popularity and literary status of "white trash" writing today is only roughly analogous to that of late nineteenthcentury regionalism, yet the contradictory relationship that both kinds of writing bear to dominant literary and social hierarchies is instructive. Without misrecognizing our own era as a mere continuation of the nineteenth century, we need to grapple with the ways in which we are still caught in some of the political and cultural impasses that arose when corporate capitalism's uneasy collaboration with consumeristic individualism and cultural commodification was new. Reading for Realism describes some of the ways in which late nineteenth-century literary culture was shaped by this collaboration.

I

High Realism and Other Bourgeois Institutions

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, literacy increased, printing technologies became cheaper and more efficient, and transportation networks (especially after the Civil War) facilitated the distribution of books and periodicals. These developments might have worked to level u.s. print culture so that differences in readerships would be increasingly horizontal, based on differences in interest rather than in cultural competence or status. Instead, just the opposite happened. Books, periodicals, and their publishers became more strictly divided between those for the "classes" and those for the "masses," and forums of high culture developed ever more elaborate criteria by which high and low tastes-or high tastes and low appetites, as they were usually characterized-could be discriminated.! This perverse development makes clear that cultural stratification was actively produced, rather than being merely a side effect of the new nation's lag in establishing all the desirable preconditions for democracy. Cultural stratification refracts and supports capitalist class relations as we know them, and insofar as it is not ensured by class-based differences in purchasing power and access to education, it can be fostered ideologically. Moreover, many features of the stricter cultural hierarchy that developed in the late nineteenth-century United States mark its emergence as an episode in the class consolidation of the bourgeoisie throughout the West. Lacking the sumptuary laws and titles that had fixed the social distinction of the aristocracy, and confronted with the volatility of individual fortunes, the bourgeoisie had to distinguish itself as a leading group by developing new practices of distinction, even its own poetics of distinction. Taste and 20

High Realism and Other Institutions

21

refinement were central to this poetics, and both concepts fulfill bourgeois desires to provide for their cultural distinction and to conceal this provision. Because taste metaphorically and in common use references an innate capacity or incapacity, it appears to produce a cultural meritocracy in which individuals scattered throughout society who find themselves possessing this gift properly rise to positions in which they can exercise it, share it, and be honored for it. Yet in practice, what gets legitimated as (good) taste tends to crop up among people with a sense of entitlement based on their family's class privilege or, as often follows from it, their own educational privilege. 2 The idea of refinement is also closely linked to privilege, significantly figuring the ongoing transformation of base materials into something higher. It epitomizes the general (though not uninterrupted) tendency of this era's bourgeois versions of distinction to value abstraction and demonize the physical, whose threatening aspects could be displaced onto those out of power: women, workers, and members of racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. The body as a site of involvement in physical processes, including labor, became ever more insistently disciplined, privatized, and hidden under nineteenth-century bourgeois regimes; representation became ever more elaborately figured as a controlling negation of the material world that was supposed to be its referent. 3 Neither taste nor refinement maps directly onto class position, as cliches about the uncultured nouveau riche and refined but impoverished gentlewomen demonstrate. Moreover, privilege is not a simple hierarchy, but rather functions according to the interaction of various kinds of dominance and social value achieved by people whose identities are constructed through multiple social categories.4 The evidence of a group's achieving cultural hegemony-though not absolute cultural control-is not that everyone else is excluded from legitimate culture, but rather that the terms of cultural legitimacy provide easiest access to members of the group and delimit the conditions and the likelihood of others' access. Any bourgeois group's project of cultural hegemony is necessarily structured by a profound ambivalence, though. On the one hand, the nature of hegemony demands that any group seeking it must induce other groups to endorse its values and thereby its leadership. On the other hand, a group whose leadership is premised on class stratification needs to keep cultural competency

22

Reading for Rea/ism

sufficiently rare that it can monopolize legitimate culture, using its members' comfort in the cultural realm they control as a mark of their distinction and a class-consolidating pleasure. 5 Since capitalism has shaped u.s. culture especially powerfully, it is no wonder that the ambivalence of the bourgeoisie's cultural operatives has been especially pronounced here. 6 During the nineteenth century, it was typical that with one breath they would forecast improvement in the public taste, an improvement that American democracy uniquely fosters; with the next they would warn that only more zealous boundary-patrolling on the part of custodians of culture could prevent the public taste from sinking to the lowest level. This schizophrenia is produced by a classic double bind, the ultimately antagonistic relationship between capitalism and democracy which shapes (or skews) the ways in which people understand what their nation's hierarchy of culture accomplishes. 7 Realism, whose very name seems to promise a demystifying social vision, and whose affiliation with things popular has so often been praised, would be an unlikely place to look for the operations of bourgeois cultural hegemony, were it not that its loose association with democracy was precisely what made it so useful to bourgeois-identified intellectuals. As the most distinguished u.s. periodicals promoting realism represented their own activity, it amounted to staging a little referendum testing public confidence in the authority of the mainly urban bourgeoisie these magazines served. By "representing" Huck Finn, Silas Lapham, Hugh Wolfe, and a host of other nonelite fictional characters, the magazines effectively set up these characters as voters who endorsed the idea that these magazines and their privileged readers were committed to the well-being of their social inferiors. As is the case with real-world referenda, however, even though the party in power may be able to shape the election and the issues it settles in many respects, the fact that the party must suffer the election at all testifies to its ongoing negotiations with populations who actually or potentially resist it. This analogy suggests that the discourses by which realism was appropriated for the purposes of bourgeois groups were thoroughly dialogic: though not addressed outright to readers who did not occupy social positions of privilege, they were nonetheless shaped by the expectation of being overheard by these readers and finding in their continued existence both occasions for speech and constraints on speech. 8 The strategies of realism's promoters can be related to the strategies more

High Realism and Other Institutions 23 diffusely attributed to the bourgeoisie across several centuries and national cultures, but such general accounts of bourgeois class-consolidation through the control of culture can only be persuasive if in its particular instances there are links between forms of cultural privilege and broader conditions of bourgeois hegemony. The promotion of realism affords an especially clear linkage, because it began when cultural authority in the United States was intensely localized, concentrated in the Northeast and especially in urban centers such as New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia. In particular, because the Boston-based Atlantic Monthly was the cultural leader of literary periodicals during the era when realism was imported to the United States, and because Boston had special cultural authority during and after the Civil War, it is possible to chart a coordination between the construction of realism in the Atlantic and the forms of cultural leadership practiced by the Boston elite around the same time, a coordination which connects the promotion of realism-though not necessarily the practice of individual novels-with the legitimizing reformulation of a particular bourgeois group's hegemony. This chapter will trace the relationship between the treatment of realism in distinguished U.S. periodicals and the practices of cultural custodianship and philanthropy that were developed most fully by Boston's bourgeoisie, but that became a technology diffused nationwide for maintaining cultural stratification. A Band in Boston In the wake of numerous literary histories emphasizing that realism opened up literature to populations previously excluded from it, we risk losing sight of the fact that realism could constrain representation as well as liberate it. For instance, late in her life Harriet Prescott Spofford wrote with weary resignation about the effects the promotion of realism had had on her own writing: You wonder why I did not continue in the vein of "The Amber Gods." I suppose because the public taste changed. With the coming of Mr. Howells as editor of the Atlantic, and his influence, the realistic arrived. I doubt if anything I wrote in those days would be accepted by any magazine now. 9 "The Amber Gods," published in the Atlantic in 1860, is lushly narrated by a beautiful and narcissistic woman who steals her cousin's lover; it ends

24

Reading for Realism

with her narrating her soul's departure from her body after her death, which will reunite the original lovers. It is a psychological study whose interest derives largely from the deft ways in which Spofford makes the narrator unwittingly reveal herself, making it a precursor of Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" or Welty's "Why I Live at the P.o." and a fitting counterpart-in prose and a female voice-to some of Browning's dramatic monologues. But, indeed, it is hard to imagine the story's having been published in any American magazine with literary aspirations after the early 1860s or before the 1890s, when the ascendancy of realism was challenged on a number of fronts. Spofford's remarks indicate how forcefully-and narrowly-realism defined the field of literary fiction during the latter half of the nineteenth century. They also remind us that professional writers of the time necessarily imagined their activity in relation to the literary preferences of major magazines. However, her account, like the accounts of many subsequent literary historians, misleadingly condenses a complicated and widespread cultural transformation into the advent of William Dean Howells, the late nineteenth century's most polemical American man of letters. One of my purposes in this chapter is to detach American realism from Howells's person.1° I want to propose instead that the institution of high realism began as a collaboration between two related entities that were working to redefine and control a sphere of high culture: the belletristic branch of the publishing industry, which was defining its market position by defining an American literary high culture aimed at the bourgeoisie and its aspirants; and Boston's bourgeoisie, which used its sponsorship and consumption of high culture to justify its privileged status. The Atlantic remains central to my account of realism, though, because it embodies the convergence between belletristic publishing and Boston's bourgeoisie, and because its high-culture credentials are impeccable. Endless accounts make it clear that the Atlantic had greater power to confer literary status on authors and texts than any other u.s. periodical had, at least until about the 189os, and even then the Atlantic remained influentialY The Atlantic was, in Richard Brodhead's apt phrase, a privileged point of "literary access."12 It was preeminent, but within a group of magazines that mutually authorized each other's status and literary judgment. The editors and contributors of these magazines not only tended to crosspollinate them-as editors who had trained at one magazine took over

High Realism and Other Institutions

25

another or contributed to others, and as contributors were published during the same period by more than one of these magazines-but also, in many cases, knew each other and shared similar backgrounds. These magazines tended to respond to each other, to a few major newspapers and weekly magazines, to the Revue des Deux Mondes, and to the British literary journals that they emulated and tried to rival, especially Blackwood's Monthly Magazine, the Cornhill Magazine, the Edinburgh Review, and the Westminster Review. The members of this group all took up realism itself and the complex of literary terms and issues that surrounded it, and even though not all of the magazines made exactly the same judgment of realism, it seems clear that the magazines were collectively and dialogically working out the discourses in which their judgments could be uttered. These tasks they also shared with the British magazines I have named, plus others, but it is useful to consider the u.s. magazines as a distinct grouping because they shared the work of adapting realism for u.s. texts and readers. This group of magazines consisted of the Atlantic (1857-present), together with the Galaxy (1866-1879), which it incorporated; the Critic (1881-1906) and the Forum (1886-1930), both of which consisted of review articles only; Harper's Monthly, hereafter just Harper's (185°present); Lippincott's (1868-1916); the Nation (1865-present), which published no fiction but was highly respected for its book reviews; the North American Review ("1815-:1939), the most venerable of American periodicals but one whose reputation was not as literary as the Atlantic's; Putnam's (1853-1857, 1868-:1870); Scribner's Monthly (187°-:193°), which absorbed the second version of Putnam's in 1870 and which in :188:1 became the Century; and Scribner's Magazine (1887-1939), which the Scribner publishing company began after the other Scribner's had ceased to have any connection with the publishing company and had changed its name. 13 Like Harper's, Lippincott's, Putnam's, and the two Scribner magazines, the Atlantic was the house organ of a major publishing company for most of its first fifty years: of Ticknor & Fields during its formative years, and of Houghton, Mifflin & Company once the magazine was well established. 14 The success of Harper's had first demonstrated how valuable a flagship magazine could be to a publishing house. Setting the pattern for many other magazines in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Harper's promoted Harper Brothers' books in a number of ways: straightforwardly,

26 Reading for Realism by advertising them; and indirectly, by serializing or excerpting them and by reviewing them. During its life, Ticknor & Fields was the foremost belletristic publisher in the country and a strong supporter of American authors. Its house magazine gained special attention because being published in the Atlantic increased authors' chances of having their work brought out in book form by Ticknor & Fields, and other magazines owned by major publishing houses carried similar clout. IS A magazine like the Atlantic, in turn, was an asset to a publisher not only because of the extra book sales that might be generated by its insider advertising, but more fundamentally because it helped to create a market position for the publisher. A house magazine created a reputation or image for its publishing company, advertising not so much individual titles as the quality of the house's list. 16 Horace Scudder, a leading magazine staffer and house reader for Houghton, Mifflin & Company who later became editor of the Atlantic, wrote in 1873 that a magazine rarely fails to symbolize the house from which it issues. This is, in fact, its great charm with the publisher. He is always wishing to impress his business upon the public mind, and though he may issue book after book, no single one quite expresses what he conceives to be the character of his house, while a magazine with its flexibility, its power of presenting many sides, and its magisterial function also of accepting, rejecting, and criticizing, becomes a very able exponent. It is indeed much more likely to reflect the character and taste of the house than of its editor, and is most likely to succeed when it is a genuine representative of the concern whose name it carries. 17 Since reviewers, like fiction writers, were influenced by this sense of the magazine's house voice (and in some cases explicitly charged with conforming to it), and since book reviews remained mainly anonymous even after other kinds of articles began to be signed, most reviews were "authored" as much by magazines as by individuals, if not more so. Even though a magazine might publish conflicting opinions or precepts, the authority that its reviewers brought to such quarrels was not their own personal authority (or the expertise which may have gotten them hired by the magazine or affiliated with it), but the authority of the space in which their work was printed: the magazine's cultural capital and standing. Certain well-known editors, like William Dean Howells of the Atlantic

High Realism and Other Institutions 27 and Richard Watson Gilder of the Century, may have functioned for many readers as authors of the reviews in their magazines, even when those reviews were written by others, but since the editors in turn were powerfully identified with the magazines, this phenomenon merely confirms the fact that reviews were not primarily the products of individual authorship. As it happens, it was Henry James, writing anonymously in the North American Review, who prescribed that Harriet Prescott Spofford, "if she hopes to accomplish anything worth accomplishing, must renounce newfashioned idealism for a while, and diligently study the canons of the socalled realist schoo!," which he identified with Balzac and Trollope-and this review appeared in 1865, a year before Howells became James T. Fields's assistant editor at the Atlantic and began to influence U.S. literary culture. 18 But even though this review has subsequently been grouped with James's other critical writings, at the time it was primarily an utterance of the North American Review and part of the promotion of realism burgeoning in several magazines. A signed essay such as "The Art of Fiction," authorized by James's standing as a novelist, has a different status in relation to the public conversation about realism, but it is still part of that conversation. And much of that conversation was undertaken by anonymous reviewers whose very anonymity facilitated realism's coordination with the advertising and market-building activities of book and magazine publishers. That is, the review's stance of disinterested cultural appraisal enhanced the reputation of the magazine and its house, contributing to their high-culture appearance of representing absolute cultural standards and being independent of market forces or even personal biases. The cultural authority of the Atlantic and of Ticknor &: Fields was secured by their being Boston institutions. The North's victory in the Civil War meant that the national influence of New England culture was dramatically confirmed: the retrospective scripting of the war as a struggle to free the slaves made the New England-based abolitionist movement into the war's victor. 19 Boston was the metropolitan center of New England and its national voice, as Howells presumed when he confidently proclaimed, in an unsigned review of a novel about the Civil War, "It is the goodness of Boston, and of New England, which, however unbeautiful, has elevated and saved our whole national character ..."20 While the war was still being fought, in 1862, a correspondent of James T. Fields cast the Atlantic and its publishers as special organs of the moral authOrity of the North, insisting

28 Reading for Realism

that California "must be northernized thoroughly, by schools, Atlantic Monthlies, lectures, New England preachers, Library Associations-in short, Ticknor & Fieldsism of all kinds."21 And after the war, the fact that the economically devastated South had to get its books and magazines mainly from the Northeast meant that even the section least likely to grant New England cultural superiority was dependent on it. 22 Several historians of Boston's bourgeoisie have persuasively argued that it developed institutional forms and a rationale for cultural hegemony that became nationally influential after the Civil War, and it seems likely that the stricter delineation of a high-culture book market was coordinated with these efforts. One of the reasons why Boston's bourgeoisie has received so much attention from historians is that its oldest, most influential families formed an unusually close-knit and culturally unified elite. 23 Its members had made their fortunes "in trade, piracy, and speculation during the Revolution, and in pioneering postwar commerce with China, India, and the South Sea Islands"; banking and industrial ventures like the Lowell Mills, whose founder was the uncle of James Russell Lowell, proliferated in the nineteenth century.24 Leading families such as the Adamses, Lowells, and Cabots were mainly of English stock and tended to intermarry.25 Members of Boston's long-established economic elite tended to be Federalists early in the century and Whigs in the 1830s, before the more radical youth of the next generation followed the course of abolitionist politics into the Republican Party.26 Brahmins, as members of this elite were dubbed by Oliver Wendell Holmes, also tended to be Unitarian, with the result that "by 1870 the average [presumably male] Unitarian [in Boston] was thirteen times richer and twenty times more likely to be a lawyer or businessman than was a member of any other denomination."27 The cornerstone of this Boston's elite civic functioning was philanthropy: not just an ethic of charity, but a distinctive set of philanthropic institutions that mediated between the elite and other social groups. The Brahmins saw themselves as heirs to the Puritan heritage of civic organizing, which Peter Dobkin Hall describes as combining corporate traditions and a New World version of noblesse oblige. When the temper of the times made it desirable for some of the civic enterprises that had traditionally been conducted by leading Puritan families to take on a more public character, these leading families tended in the nineteenth century to combine and institutionalize their capital and authority in philanthropic trusts and cor-

High Realism and Other Institutions

29

porations. 28 Significantly, Massachusetts "minimized legal strictures on the charitably inclined and on beneficiary institutions," and the nineteenthcentury invention of the not-for-profit corporation provided the perfect vehicle for discreet elite management of such institutions. 29 By the nineteenth century, the Brahmins had developed a diverse set of philanthropic institutions that appeared to be indispensable to the social fabric, and that were no doubt set up and greeted with goodwill. But along with their other functions, some of these institutions were designed to "strengthen in-group cohesion and train the patriciate in proper modes of leadership," whereas others were "organized by the elite to instill in the masses the virtue of established social arrangements" and therefore "directed primarily to the out-group for the purposes of maintaining patrician predominance."3o It is relatively easy to see how a high-culture library like the Boston Athenaeum, whose use was limited to its members, or an exclusive cemetery like Mount Auburn might inscribe insider status. 31 Ambiguously public institutions such as the Massachusetts General Hospital, the Boston Dispensary, and the Lowell Institute, which Ronald Story groups together as serving a population beyond the elite that operated them, represented a more complex form of the Boston elite's philanthropy, one that provides an important analogy for the activity of belletristic publishers. 32 Founding a hospital or sponsoring a lecture series might well ensure that those who benefit from these services feel both grateful and dependent (though perhaps also aspiring), so that people would get sorted into outsiders and insiders according to whether they were needy or beneficent. In addition, Dalzell's analysis of the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company suggests how cleverly Boston's insiders could use such a "helping" institution to stretch their own capital. For this company, whose philanthropic purpose was served by paying one-third of its profits on insurance to the Massachusetts General Hospital, was capitalized mainly by trust deposits which provided a form of inheritance restricted to interest income: it was a means by which patriarchs tried to keep the family capital from being dispersed and dissipated by partible inheritance and rogue heirs. Many charitable endowments invested their capital in the company, which in turn made loans to private customers-including the trustees of the investing philanthropies. As a result, Dalzell explains, "One gave money to support education or heal the sick, only to borrow it back from the Massachusetts Hospital Life and invest it in the textile industry, the

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very place from which the money had probably come in the first place."33 Massachusetts Hospital Life was merely one instance of the Boston elite's combining chartered, publicly accountable corporations and trusts with informal relations that would have been faulted for being monopolistic had they been formalized. 34 These historians do not propose that profit motives alone account for the remarkable infrastructure of philanthropic institutions that the Boston Brahmins supported. Rather, they demonstrate that the Boston elite's version of civic trusteeship made it hard to know, for these prominent businessmen as well as for their chroniclers, "where self-interest left off and philanthropy began."35 Such confusion is the cornerstone of some understandings of ideology-passing off "sectional interests as universal ones," in Anthony Giddens's words-but it is fruitless to conceive of this displacement as conscious conspiratorial manipulation. 36 Instead, such a tangled social web might well have contributed to late nineteenth-century novelists' zeal in imagining renunciations and martyrdoms, since arrangements like these had their analogues in England and were also forming in other U.S. cities. Anyone whose social world so mingled the pursuit of class advantage with a commitment to public-spirited activity might well strain to imagine characters whose acts of unambiguous altruism could undermine their own self-interest, thereby untying the knot of class-marked philanthropy.37 The ethic of stewardship that governed their activities was a discipline that the Boston Brahmins imposed on themselves, their offspring, and those who aspired to join them as well as on the objects of their charitable impulses. 38 By using the word "discipline" in this context, I am invoking Michel Foucault; and although one does not need Foucault's work in order to recognize that a philanthropic act can manifest the superior power of whoever undertakes it, certify his or her good character, and enforce supplication and obsequiousness on its recipient, Foucault's rigorous historicism compels us to notice that the Bostonians' use of philanthropy was not an outcropping of timeless human nature-hypocrisy and self-deceit, saybut rather a particular technology for creating power relations among people, in this case mediated by specific institutional forms. The Boston elite's Puritan-derived preference for institutions that were public but that bypassed direct state power is a special case of the diffusion of power away from the state that Foucault has charted. 39

High Realism and Other Institutions 31 Power relations help to produce their participants, and they are negotiated as well as enforced. Foucault usefully presents domination as something that is real but that has to be "brought off," contingently and through numerous skirmishes. A dominant class may have "pre-meditated tactics" and" grand strategies," but that class is also produced by its tactics and the conditions of its operation, not securely in control of them. 40 The Boston Brahmins' ethic of stewardship, then, must be understood as something that helped to produce them as a group, a discipline to which they were genuinely subject even though it was a discipline that gave them power relative to other groups. It was experienced and grappled with individually and subjectively, although it seems always to have borne reference to collective identities, since it involved assuming the obligations of a shared social position. Moreover, it was shaped by the Brahmins' interchanges with other groups, including their confrontations with "nonelite challenge[s] for control over valuable resources," though in ways that we cannot easily reconstruct. 41 Of course, the ethic of cultural stewardship most crucially served as a means by which Brahmins could explain to themselves and others the nature and desirability of their social and cultural leadership, which in turn was closely related to their economic and political power.42 Antonio Gramsci's conception of hegemony designates this kind of leadership, which a group is able to exercise by securing the consent of other groups rather than by repressing them through violence or its threat. Chantal Mouffe has usefully glossed hegemony as "the ability of one class to annex the interests of other social groups to its own."43 The exercise of hegemony is by no means in itself illegitimate: any group that attempts to persuade others of its suitability for leadership is seeking hegemony. Hegemony can take many forms and can be secured by a variety of means. However, the Marxist heritage of the term "hegemony" and Gramsci's particular development of it embed it in an analysis of collective social relations and a critique of economic and political domination. For this reason, even though Gramsci was most interested in theorizing how blocs that he favored might achieve hegemony, the term has often been used to call attention to groups that misrepresent the nature of their leadership or that encourage other groups to misunderstand their own situations. In these uses, the term signals a difference from, say, a liberal democratic model of how free, rational individuals are persuaded to back the political party that best ad-

32 Reading for Realism vances their interests, interests that accrue to the individual or the household as discrete units. The ethic or discipline of stewardship, then, was part of a platform by which the Boston bourgeoisie-and in particular the Brahmins-justified, preserved, and understood their concentrated wealth, their institutionalized influence, and their cultural hegemony. And it was within this matrix of philanthropic relations that Boston institutions of high culture, which included Harvard University and the Atlantic Monthly, took on their characteristic forms. These forms, as well as this ethic of stewardship, seem familiar to us today precisely because they were widely emulated. Although the Boston Brahmins did not invent or propagate an entirely unprecedented and unique way of dominating high culture, the intellectual currents and social forms that produced our modern distinction between high and low culture (bridged by an ambiguous middle) came together especially clearly and successfully in Boston. The Boston model I have been describing became a national standard. It is interesting that Annie Fields herself, whose husband, James, was the Fields of Ticknor & Fields, wrote a book entitled How to Help the Poor (1884). This handy volume publicized the model of organized charity that was used in Boston, a combination of philanthropy and social work which Fields advocated over individual almsgiving or public relief based on tax moneys. Like the cultural nonprofit organizations I have described, it involved a board whose members had ties to other relief organizations, professional employees, and volunteers-an organizational template invented in the nineteenth century.44 The San Francisco-based Overland Monthly, which reviewed Fields's book enthusiastically as an account of "the Boston system for organizing charitable work ... ,If targeted its audience as a West Coast urban elite very susceptible to East Coast influences: its imagined reader was characterized in an 1868 article as a "respectable citizen, having good social connections, a seat at the opera, [and] a pew in church."45 Therefore, the Overland's warm reception of Fields's book provides a useful example of the routes by which Boston's cultural institutions spread. As I mentioned earlier, the Civil War was instrumental in extending the influence of Boston's leaders throughout the nation. Having taken steps to consolidate the Boston bourgeoisie's control of its financial corporation before the Civil War, Harvard University made special efforts after the war

High Realism and Other Institutions 33

to attract students nationwide, disseminating its Brahmin-inflected version of elite leadership more broadly.46 Another result of this Northern triumph was that Boston intellectuals were nationally venerated-at least at the time. As I will discuss in my conclusion, later critics have charged that many of the Boston intellectuals prominent at the time were crippled by their privilege and social conformity, a charge usually framed in terms of "gentility" and "geniality."47 It seems likely that these critics have been put off by the close affinity between Boston's accredited intellectuals and its economic elite during the nineteenth century. Figures such as the publisher James T. Fields; James Russell Lowell, one of the Atlantic's founders; and Henry Lee Higginson, the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, were the Brahmins' organic intellectuals, in Gramsci's sense: people who give a group "homogeneity and an awareness of its own function."48 In effect, organic intellectuals develop a group's class consciousness, a task whose glamour is diminished if the group is secure in its dominance, and especially if in retrospect even conservatives are uncomfortable with the kind of dominance it exerted. The Atlantic Monthly originated as a project for the Boston bourgeoisie's organic intellectuals. More precisely-since class analysis must often descend inelegantly to accounting for class fractions, those subsets of an economic class who individually or in coalitions try to work out both their class identity and their independent interests-it originated as a project for certain younger, abolitionist Brahmins and their supporters, mainly other New Englanders. During the Atlantic's first few decades of life, it gradually took on a national cultural role that could no longer be closely linked to the interests of Boston bourgeois groups but that helped to adapt Brahmin technologies of cultural hegemony for the use of bourgeois groups nationwide. Whether aligned with a particular urban elite or with a national system of cultural stratification, though, realism was promoted in these magazines as an establishment form. High Realism have been emphasizing the public, institutional activities of Boston's bourgeoisie because I want to argue that the Atlantic and the other magazines that sponsored realism comprised an institution comparable to the Lowell Institute, or Harvard University, or the Museum of Fine Arts, insofar as they exercised the elite privilege of cultural outreach. Realism was

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caught up in this enterprise, to the extent that it might be considered a more specialized institution of high culture as well as a formation that fiction writers helped to organize. 49 And like other Boston-based cultural institutions inaugurated after midcentury, it sought to compel recognition and admiration for high culture while minimizing the possibilities for audiences to forge unauthorized relationships with its products. Paul DiMaggio and Lawrence Levine have analyzed how the institutional framing of musical performances and visual artworks, especially after the Civil War, helped produce a distinct, sacralized realm of high art, and Richard Brodhead has already connected these phenomena with the practices of distinguished u.s. magazines, work that I want to extend to the specific case of the magazines' nationalistic promotion of realism. 50 Although institutions like the Museum of Fine Arts (founded 1873) and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (founded 1881), on which DiMaggio's work focuses, were set up by elite groups or individuals who envisioned their work as philanthropy, these institutions also controlled the extent and nature of the public's access to cultural products. For example, by shifting their emphasis from reproductions to original artworks, by excluding or compartmentalizing "popular" works (into Pops concerts, for instance), and by using personnel and program notes to discourage listeners and viewers from talking, these institutions isolated their patrons from each other and imposed a reverential distance between audience and artwork. They also relied on imported cultural authority to increase the audience's sense of defamiliarizing distance. The BSO increasingly featured European musicians rather than local ones; similarly, Levine has pointed out that the Metropolitan Opera in New York, whose English-language performances had been fairly popular at midcentury, increasingly chose to present operas in their original languages later in the century.51 The net effect of these institutions' new practices was to foster solitary contemplation and to exaggerate the distance between ordinary patrons, on the one hand, and artists, cultural professionals, and the cultural establishment that supported thein, on the other. The work of cultural professionals who helped to frame works of art through program notes and museum notices also ensured that symphonic works and paintings were established as objects of expert knowledge, further discouraging lay audiences from trying to establish alternative ways of knowing or valuing these works. Boards of trustees of cultural institutions, who were often from elite fam-

High Realism and Other Institutions 35 ilies, relinquished direct control when they hired professional conductors and curators. However, even though this move disrupted the aristocratic model in which the privileged classes in themselves determined what was high culture, it produced an alliance between the bourgeoisie and cultural professionals that continued to affiliate the leading social groups with the most correct tastes. These professionals in effect contributed their credentials to the cultural capital of the class that employed them. The BSO and the MFA were both philanthropic institutions-as was evidenced by their being not-for-profit corporations dependent partly on donations-and institutions that promoted connoisseurship as the proper mode of consuming culture. Both these functions were shaped by the competing bourgeois cultural goals I discussed at the beginning of this chapter: the need to secure a wider audience for high culture who could testify to the worthiness of its controllers' leadership by submitting to their rules of access and standards of valuation, and the need to signal that not just anyone was in a position to understand that culture and enjoy it properly. Reverence, an engine of cultural aspiration, and shame, an engine of cultural exclusivity, were the two main responses that the elaborate framing procedures of the BSO and the MFA were designed to induce. These class-specific commitments to philanthropy and connoisseurship also marked the belletristic sector of the publishing industry, the magazines they operated, and the most influential version of realism they sponsored. High -culture publishers clearly tried to assimilate their own activity to the cultural philanthropy of museum trustees or symphony donors, partly to dramatize their commonality with economic elites (which was a collective fiction, although it may have been true in life for some publis hers) and partly in order to substantiate their professionalism. Like other professionals, as I will describe more fully in chapter 3, they emphasized their fulfillment of civic responsibilities over mere profit motives, evidenced by the fact that high-culture fiction had a smaller audience than inferior forms. 52 In addition to the service they performed by taking on this modest market at all, they credited themselves with mediating between the marketplace and authors, who needed to be insulated from direct contact with grubby economic realities. This myth of the special, fragile nature of authors distanced them from their readers and from the economic relations in which they were inevitably embroiled. James T. Fields embraced this mediating role especially enthusiastically, dealing with authors through

36 Reading for Realism informal financial agreements that put him in the almost patriarchal position of determining how much money his authors needed to go on writing (or how much would suffice for their heirs), versus how much profit the publishing firm needed in order to go on operating in its accustomed way.53 The professional courtesy that high-culture publishers extended to each other included puffing each other's books, a form of complimentary advertising that the Nation, in particular, denounced, but that seemed to be ineradicable. This reciprocal back-patting is one of the signs of the Atlanticgroup magazines' shared market position. 54 One effect of these machinations was to cement the canonicity of a particular group of authors, to such an extent that any work they produced was guaranteed a good reception. 55 Puffs and engineered publicity may have been easily recognized by readers in the know. However, they created an in-group of cultural producers who were not necessarily members of an economic elite, but who were its protected cultural operatives. 56 In short, the philanthropic pretensions of belletristic publishers were thoroughly complicit with their own financial self-interest and the exercise of bourgeOiS class privilege (motives that were also hard to untangle, since the creation of a distinctive, bourgeois-identified market for high culture served economic and ideological purposes equally). Viewed in this light, a publishing firm like Ticknor & Fields does not seem so different in its public presentation and class mission from the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company. Even though most of the magazines in the Atlantic group were founded earlier than the MFA and the BSO, they equally espoused connoisseurship, inflected by the exigencies of regional and national cultural legitimation. The Atlantic, as Ticknor & Fields's house magazine, initially staked out a strong New England cultural pedigree for the firm. In addition to counting James Russell Lowell as its first editor, its first issue in 1857 included works by Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, and Stowe. (They were unsigned, but their authorship was leaked to newspapers. 57) However, it is significant that the profile of colonial governor John Winthrop gracing the Atlantic's title page was replaced by the U.S. flag in 1861 as a sign of loyalty to the Union, and that after the war the national symbol stayed. The main significance of the Atlantic's sectional identity turned out to be that New England, as I have suggested, became specially entitled to stand for the rest of the United States. As a result of the Civil War, New England provided a sectional identity that was automat-

High Realism and Other Institutions 37 ically routed into the national. The resulting collaboration between New England-based (or at least New England-authorized) high culture and the reinvention of a national mission for literature was crucial to the form that the public understanding of realism took in the United States. In committing itself to literary nationalism, and even in taking up realism as a specially American fictional form, the Atlantic followed the example of Putnam's. Harper's, in contrast, had published mainly works by English authors during its early years, and only began to publish more works by Americans after Putnam's came on the scene. Even then, it did not announce a special commitment to American writing, as Putnam's and later the Atlantic did. Despite its ties with the zealously nationalistic Young Americans, Putnam's was not anti-European. It paid thorough and appreciative attention to Dickens, Thackeray, and other British writers in its book reviews, but it set itself the task of articulating a distinctively American point of view. Necessarily, this point of view had a location: it tended to be urban, northeastern (the magazine was published in New York City), and Republican. 58 Like Putnam's, but with a Boston orientation, the Atlantic sponsored American literature fairly aggressively, though not exclusively. Also like Putnam's, its reviews and literary articles worked hard to theorize the Americanness of American literature-and, more prescriptively, to specify the most properly American kinds of literature. This latter work was crucial to the nationalist appropriation that made realism so influential. Of course, realism was by no means an American invention. If one confines the term to the nineteenth-century emergence of realism as a specific literary movement, rather than defining it as an impulse or characteristic of any number of art forms, it seems to have been primarily a British, French, and Russian product. According to George Becker, the earliest use of the term "realism" to designate this literary movement occurred in 1853 in the Westminster Review. 59 However, even if Becker is correct, this kind of word tracking cannot provide a full account of realism's public emergence. Realism's history also includes, for instance, the modulations of the term "novel" that prepared the way for "realist novel" to become a commonplace, almost tautological expression. Locating a precise origin for realism is a highly speculative, tendentious endeavor that makes no difference for my current argument: what is important to recognize is that realism was fully as much an import as the Gothic novel, the romance, and the other literary forms that were rebuked for being un-

)8 Reading for Realism American during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Like the nationstate itself, realism was aggressively im-patriated wherever it traveled. The emergence of the realist literary movement in the u.s. was crucially preceded by the construction of a specifically nationalist, implicitly philanthropic function for fiction, organized initially around a distinction between novel and romance that gradually got rewritten as a distinction between realism and romance. One can trace in American magazines in the 1850s, and especially in Putnam's, an energetic elaboration of certain binary oppositions that the promoters of realism later used to distinguish between realism and the romance, even though during the 1850S the terms "novel," "romance," and "fiction" were not clearly distinguished from each other (as many critics from the period complained).60 I would like to consider two essays that appeared in Putnam's in the 1850S especially carefully, since they contain prototypes of many claims later developed about realism, and since together they mark the outlines of realism's class mission. William Swinton's "Novels: Their Meaning and Their Mission" is an unapologetic piece of boosterism for the novel, ending with a plea for readers with any of more than half a dozen motives to "Write a novel! "61 It begins with a brief discussion of the epic as a form that formerly satisfied certain longings of the soul, setting the stage for "romance literature," as Swinton first styles the general category of product he is writing about, to satisfy current longings. And so it does. What's especially appealing about this essay, despite Swinton's odd tone of salesmanship, is its inclusiveness: true, Swinton categorizes different kinds of works and hierarchizes them according to how "high" they are, but he has very little disparaging to say about any kind of work except potboilers-and even that criticism he softens by ending the essay with a satirical invitation for even those who want to make money, "in Pluto's [sic] and Mammon's name!" to write a novel. Like many a critic to come after him, he insists that both the "real" and the "ideal" have their place in fiction, and he also diplomatically points out to those who consider novels to be corrupting that the novel has improved greatly in the past twenty-five years: We have now no desire for the extravagances of sentiment and action that, with a few brilliant exceptions, characterized English novels of former times. On the other hand, we are disgusted with such productions, and covet, above all, the natural in thought and feeling. 62

High Realism and Other Institutions 39 But the "natural," like the "real," turns out to embody specific compositional principles. As the essay continues, despite Swinton's disingenuous wonder at the variety of romances and novels, it becomes increasingly clear that a certain kind of fictional production is more in keeping with these new times and tastes. During the course of the essay he shifts from using "romance" to "novel" as the generic term, and on the last page he defines the novel's mission as "the filling up and the satisfying of that in the soul which otherwise would be blank and vacant," a wonderful way of summoning up the novel's power of subject-formation. According to Swinton, though, what modern souls hunger for are "veritable and veracious segments of the great life-drama," something very different from "a monstrous assemblage of grotesquely illusive pictures of life and nature." And although Swinton points out that novels and romances cannot be absolutely differentiated, he maps the two terms explicitly onto Coleridge'S distinction between the Imagination and the Fancy, identifying the novel with "inly production of the mind in its highest imagining or poetic moods" and the romance with acts of assembly that resemble industrial production (and maybe Frankenstein's monster): "an accretion of circumstances and particulars from without." Organicism looms as a criterion of novelistic excellence, although Swinton does not explicitly formulate it. 63 Not surprisingly, Swinton goes on to point out that "Even as in the individual, the fancy precedes, in relation of time, the imagination; so in the adolescence of a national literature, we have the grotesque and the arabesque before the lofty idealistic." For Swinton, the novel, as distinct from the romance, is properly idealistic, even though" earnest veracity" is one of its hallmarks. 64 The distinction between the real and the ideal, a staple of British literary criticism by this time, is dearly familiar to Swinton, but it does not undergird his distinction between the novel and the romance, as it will for many later critics. However, his whole framework for differentiating between the novel and the romance aligns the novel with modernity, genuineness, the imagination, and maturity, whereas the romance gets associated with obsolescence, artifice, the fancy, and by implication either youth or immaturity. These oppositions will crop up for decades to come, despite the internal tensions within each set of affiliated values, usually to the end of celebrating (realist) novels and devaluing romances. Swinton also associates the romance with the Orient, in a casual display of orientalism that links it not only to sensualism but also, as Edward Said

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has discussed, to stopped time, blocked from historical becoming. 65 The opposite of romance would necessarily be more Western, rational, modern, and progressive, according to this logic. Not surprisingly, Swinton identifies the modern thirst for truth that fuels the call for novels with the love of "physical science." He links the "national novel" with social integration, pointing out that "America has no national novel, for the very good reason that there is no such thing as American society" -at least not yet-just regions and their fictional interpreters. 66 Whereas Swinton's essay rather refreshingly maps out a version of the fictional field that is both eclectic and idiosyncratic, three years later in Putnam's an anonymous author revealingly hesitated between two possible social missions for the novel, missions that can be approximated as philanthropically nationalist and connoisseurial. "Ideals in Modern Fiction" begins by praising a novelistic tendency that the author identifies with democracy: seeing "the significance of ordinary events of experience common to all" such as "[b]irth, death, love, marriage, the home circle, the struggle for a livelihood, the search after truth ... "67 This account not only makes daily life and its material conditions into worthy objects of representation; the author also invokes the possibility of forging bonds across social distances on the basis of what is "common to all." More specifically, the passage associates the novel with family life. Brodhead has suggested that this reorientation of the novel to domestic life, which was especially important for offering authority to women novelists, occurred in part because novel reading became a valued domestic activity. Indeed, the novel began to be credited with fulfilling an almost parental role, providing loving instruction to the reader who privately and thoughtfully perused it. Like the new model of parenting, which replaced corporal punishment with gentle admonition that a child was imagined to internalize, the novel provided a kind of "disciplinary intimacy."68 The sense that novels, being for domestic use, ought themselves to center on contemporary domestic life fueled later critiques of a certain version of the romance, which as I will discuss in chapter 2 came to be defined by the use of past and exotic locales and therefore was deemed unfit to play this tutelary role. In addition to valorizing the quotidian and the domestic, though, by identifying novelists as "democrats" the author identifies daily life as a ground of virtually political commonality, a means by which privileged readers could come to understand their social inferiors. The idea that

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the mere depiction of a range of characters-more precisely, of poor or working-class characters-could count as an outcropping of democracy is a peculiar and highly suspect truism often associated with realism. This truism epitomizes the coordination between philanthropy, on the one hand, and civic education or national citizenship, on the other, that the promotion of realism often accomplished. Informing privileged populations about the less privileged was treated as a political intervention, making it possible for privileged populations to act through the state or separate institutions to alleviate the others' distress. However, the author's own brief characterization of someone occupying a very different social position demonstrates the potential for the representation of oppressed populations to be condescending and self-aggrandizing: "The little black boy at my feet," writes our author, "if the meaning of his poor obstructed life could be known, is more worthy of attention than all the angels and archangels of song."69 The implication is clear that the poignant existence of the "little black boy" is something that the Putnam's author could appreciate far better than the child in question could. What isn't clear that would be interesting to know is the register of "meaning" that the author attributes to this "poor obstructed life." So far, our anonymous Putnam's author has embraced in the abstract what we might consider to be the philanthropic possibilities of this version of realism, even though his practice is marred by racism. On its last page, however, the piece veers surprisingly. Earlier in the piece, the author raised the importance of "ideality," meaning that which shows "the certain, though arduous, victory of the spirit over all obstructions," presumably including those suffered by the "obstructed" black child he mentioned. Here, near the end, he uses "ideality" to limit the importance of "democracy" in literature. Too many of these democratic works of fiction, the author points out, are "hot arguments upon questions no longer open in any sane mind. We concede to the author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' that slavery, if not a bad, is at least an unfortunate relation. Then that book falls to the ground."70 Ideality as this author uses it cannot be reduced simply to connoisseurship, but it does suggest that a work's power-whatever keeps it from falling to the ground, like the husk of something that has been fully consumed-depends on its participation in abstract and unlocalized reflections on human nature, ones that lend themselves to private contemplation and

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conviction rather than collective action. And increasingly, the piece moves into an even more class-specific vision of culture. In a final stirring call for the kind of literature that will "tell me what to do with my day" -despite the Free Soil sympathies of Putnam's, it seems that working to end slavery is not on the agenda-the author identifies the plottedness of ordinary life with the putative stability of free, white, economically privileged life. This passage is a remarkable demonstration of how a certain kind of literary taste, a certain kind of life experience, and a certain version of the distinction between romances and novels manage to conscript the novel for the cultivation and solace of the comfortable: I have passed the period of romance. Only children wait for adventures. I do not look for sudden wealth or poverty. I do not expect to fall in love with a princess, a beggar, or an opera-dancer. I can earn my bread, and am not exposed to great misery in any turn of the wheel of fortune. Is life, then, for me no longer worth living? ... The right novel, the true poem, ... will show the manhood, not the childhood, of the race. It will not need to elaborate a black background of misfortune to serve as a foil for doubtful happiness, but will exhibit an activity so splendid that it must shine in relief upon the dingy gray of ordinary circumstances, duties, and relations.71 The romance, casually distinguished from the novel, is here identified with childhood and with improbable events, which are associated with the lives of those more vulnerable than our author to the vicissitudes of fortune; it is also identified implicitly with women, who lack "manhood," and with the African Americans who form the "black background" of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The heroism depicted by the "right novel," on the other hand, is predicated on regular living, maturity (that most cherished bourgeois attainment), and moral self-scrutiny ("duties"), virtues that bourgeois white men are especially suited to practice. The passage anticipates Howells's notorious prescription that American novelists ought to "concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American, and seek the universal in the individual rather than the social interests."72 Indeed, the Putnam's author exhorts novelists, "especially women," who "celebrate" their sufferings, instead "to consume in private their private griefs, and publicly to do some justice to the general joy" -a formulation that points unmistakably to the sinister political uses of the dichotomy

High Realism and Other Institutions 43 between public and private and to the fact that bourgeois hegemony in this historical juncture entailed the dominance not only of whites but also of men.?3 "Ideals in Modern Fiction" spells out the logic by which an emerging version of the novel was tailored to the standpoint of the bourgeoisie and its aspirants, a version which would by the :1860s and :1870S be identified as "realist" and which I will specify more narrowly as "high realist." By high realism, I mean to indicate the promotions of realism based in Atlanticgroup magazines that emphasized some combination of philanthropic national citizenship and connoisseurship, values whose class specificity I have shown and whose major u.s. spawning ground was Boston. In Althusser's apt formulation, high realism was ideological in that it represented "the imaginary relationship of individuals" -in this case, individuals who belonged to the bourgeoisie or served as its cultural operatives-lito their real conditions of existence."?4 The precursor of high realism for which the author of "Ideals in Modern Fiction" longs would offer bourgeois readers narrative compensation for the routinization of their lives, and for the diminished human drama that results from isolating secure bourgeois life from the insecure lives of the people whose labor makes it possible. (This includes insulating bourgeois men from the "private griefs" of women and tempering white people's awareness of African Americans' oppression with an emphasis on the pathos of the white people's perceptions of it.) Its subtlety was a by-product of its devotion to bourgeois plots, so that it offered itself as an object of connoisseurship specifically within bourgeois aesthetics. Although the Putnam's author criticized Uncle Tom's Cabin in terms that have often been used to criticize all reform fiction-implying that such books might be morally worthy but not lasting, not literature, not artreform fiction was on other occasions assimilated to the project of high realism. Reform fiction created a bridge between the bourgeoisie and other populations, but it did not necessarily construct an addressivity or class affiliation that was different from high realism's. Rather, versions of realism that were assimilated to the (implicitly philanthropic) project of civic education epitomized by reform fiction and versions of realism predicated on connoisseurship presented alternative-but by no means incompatible-conceptions of what the novel was supposed to do for its privileged audience. One alternative was to instruct them about the conditions affect-

44

Reading for Realism

ing other constituencies, conditions they might be able to change through philanthropy or limited reforms. The other was to enhance their sense of cultural entitlement, and perhaps also to enhance their sense of the dramas and pleasures possible within their own relatively circumspect and insulated lives. 75 (These tasks by no means exhaust the range of what novels read as realist might be considered to have accomplished: they simply caricature two prevalent critical opinions about the broad social function of realist novels.) The transformation by which the novel became the high realist novel was not completed until after Howells began supervising, and often writing, the Atlantic's reviews, although as I have mentioned the transformation took place in other magazines as well. Significantly, this was after the Civil War: if the nationalist polemics in Putnam's were galvanized by the Mexican War, as seems likely, the early nationalist polemics in the Atlantic and its kindred magazines took their force from the North's victory in the Civil War and the urgent task of providing cultural instruction and reconstruction for the South and West. By the end of the 1860s, it was a commonplace to consider the war to have forged a nation and/or brought a callow young nation to dignified maturity (and remember that maturity itself was linked to realism).76 Yet even before Howells's arrival, the Atlantic espoused protorealist sentiments. One of its reviewers, perhaps its first editor, Lowell, chimed in with George Eliot's realist sentiments in a review of Scenes of Clerical Life during the Atlantic's first year, for instance: Thus the novels of the last few years exhibit very clearly the spirit that characterizes the period of regard for men and women as men and women, without reference to rank, beauty, fortune, or privilege. Novelists recognize that Nature is a better romance-maker than fancy, and the public is learning that men and women are better than heroes and heroines, not only to live with.?7 The elaboration of the romance as the alternative or foil to the mainstream course of the novel toward realism also preceded Howells. In an 1861 review of Holmes's Elsie Venner (which had been serialized in the Atlantic, a good example of the symbiosis between the Atlantic and its publisher, Ticknor & Fields), James Russell Lowell identified Holmes's styling his work a "Romance" in its subtitle with his having created two characters who range outside of "the higher and lower grades of average human

High Realism and Other Institutions 45

nature."78 In similar fashion, the following excerpt from an 1862 review suggests that Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, which the reviewer Edwin P. Whipple called "morbid," was tellingly linked with romance insofar as it was "passionate" and criticized social systems: Its tendency is to weaken that abhorrence of crime which is the great shield of most of the virtue which society possesses, and it does this by attempting to prove that society itself is responsible for crimes it cannot prevent, but can only punish. To legislators, to Magdalen societies, to prison-reformers, it may suggest many useful hints; but, considered as a passionate romance, appealing to the sympathies of the ordinary readers of novels, it will do infinitely more harm than good.79 Health and" quiet power" were presented as the antidotes to morbidity and sensationalism throughout reviews during this era; plausibility would ensure a kind word for even the weakest novel, as in the case of a work grudgingly commended in 1868-during the Howells era-for its characters' being in good health, and for its author's seeking to interest readers "in the fortunes of men and women whose individuality is not eked out by entire social disability or desperate pecuniary circumstances. This is a great step, a very great step, in the right direction."so Increasingly in the 1870S and 1880s, these oppositions were used to distinguish the realist novel from the romance. By the 1890S hardly anyone put forward critical judgments based on such complacent social judgments, but even after late nineteenth-century realism became an object of academic study rather than an urgent public controversy, the discourses of philanthropic nationalism and connoisseurship frequently structured its representation. Perhaps the reason why critics have persisted in making Howells's story the story of realism's emergence is that he was publicly scripted as embodying precisely the stretch between "the people" and the highest cultural establishment that realism was supposed to accomplish. For Howells himself was an outsider from the West (Ohio), and his rise to prominence in the literary establishment gave further credibility to the possibility of achieving democratic representation through realism. His ceremonial entry into Boston affords a couple of exemplary anecdotes: that Oliver Wendell Holmes, at a luncheon where Lowell was introducing Howells to Holmes and Fields, compared the event to "'the apostolic succession,'" and that Hawthorne, during How-

46 Reading for Realism ells's same trip east, wrote to Emerson a card that introduced Howells with the solemn claim, " 'I find this young man worthy.' "81 In addition to attesting to the high seriousness with which these literary luminaries took their status, these anecdotes suggest how dramatic a process was required to convert Howells into an insider, even though he arrived in Boston steeped in poetry and reverence. Writing anonymously in the North American Review in 1866, Lowell summed up Howells's symbolic significance. He recalled Howells's initial appearance on the literary scene as a poet and the surprising fact that his delicacy, it appeared, was a product of the rough-and-ready West, this finish the natural gift of a young man with no advantage of collegetraining, who, passing from the compositor's desk to the editorship of a local newspaper, had been his own faculty of the humanities. But there are some men who are born cultivated. 82 The idea of inborn cultivation was important to the idea that taste grounded a cultural meritocracy. Howells might well have been the exception who proved and thereby camouflaged the rule that the highest cultivation more typically belonged to the offspring of prominent urban families. Going on to paint Howells as the genuine version of what Whitman had tried and (according to Lowell) failed to be, Lowell rose to this crescendo: "Unless we are mistaken, there is something in such an example as that of Mr. Howells which is a better argument for the American social and political system than any empirical theories that can be constructed against it."83 This was written in the year when Howells began to work at the Atlantic. Two years later, also writing anonymously in the North American Review, Henry James ended a review of Howells's Italian Journeys with an encomium that eerily captured Howells's peculiar position: Mr. Howells has the qualities which make literature a delightful element in life,-taste and culture and imagination, and the incapacity to be common. We cannot but feel that one for whom literature has done so much is destined to repay his benefactor with interest. 84 It is hard not to imagine that Howells's benefactor, "literature," comprehended not only a set of texts but also a literary establishment which he had pined to be part of ever since he had first sent off poems to the Atlantic, and to which he came to exist in a relationship of extraordinary reciprocity.

High Realism and Other Institutions 47 Even though Howells was later so bold as to criticize Trollope and Dickens, among others, for being outdated and insufficiently realist, he never made free with the reputations of the Boston establishment authors. Indeed, in a memoir, he once confessed that he had been wrong to reject a poem of Whittier's, despite the "great inequality in his work," because "with such men it was not my duty to play the censor in the periodical which they had made what it was. They had set it in authority over American literature, and it was not for me to put myself in authority over them."8s They were, after all, the establishment that had accredited him, and like Antaeus he drew strength for combat from their venerable soil. These descriptions of Howells all point to the combination of common roots and uncommon refinement that he represented. What is striking about the promotion of realism in magazines like the Atlantic was exactly this juxtaposition of amorphously populist sentiments with a discourse of stringent connoisseurship. Just as in museums, symphonies, libraries, and other cultural spaces controlled by elite philanthropists, the public was admitted to realism only to be subjected to countless constraints. High Realism and "The People" I have shown that polemics about the novel, which contrasted it most frequently with the "romance," coursed through Putnam's and the Atlantic during the :1850S and :1860s, aligning the novel with modernity, national integration, and the northeastern-based bourgeoisie's quests to find meaning in its life and to access the experiences of other groups. Once the Atlantic-group magazines became truly national in function, they ceased to be so closely implicated in the tactics of any class fraction except the cultural elite who controlled them; this cultural elite gradually lost its close connection to the Brahmins and the cognate economic elites of other cities. By this point, however, the magazines had become an engine for the production of cultural stratification, an engine perpetuating class hierarchy nationwide. During the era when high realism was promoted and made an object of controversy in distinguished general magazines, then, it provided the simulacrum of a relationship connecting locally and nationally privileged groups with that impossible entity, "the people."86 The notion that connoisseurship, a function of taste, was a cultural competence transcending class privilege and market relations naturalized the control of culture by operatives who were ideologically, and in some cases also economically,

48 Reading for Realism affiliated with the bourgeoisie. And like the practice of philanthropy, privileged readers' embrace of realism helped to mitigate the tension between the nation's democratic, even populist, social rhetoric and the persistence of vast economic and social disparities among Americans. Emulating Prince Hal in Eastcheap, privileged readers sought to find out how the other half lived in the course of educating themselves for leadership, but unlike Prince Hal they could do it vicariously. Texts such as Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills and Charles Egbert Craddock's In the Tennessee Mountains may have intervened in privileged readers' understandings powerfully, eliciting their enduring sympathies. However, philanthropically inflected nationalism worked to delimit those readers' interpretations of the relationship between their own lives and the ones they read about, as well as their visions of social change. The most telling evidence of high realism's bourgeois class-identification is that it promoted realism as the literary form that made room for the common man and woman in fiction, but not as readers: it contrasted realism with melodramatic, sentimental, and sensational works of fiction that "are so eagerly read by the million."87 Already by the 1860s and 1870S reviewers commonly mourned the fact that any book they admired was likely not to be popular, and since they admired many books on grounds of realism, one can only imagine that high realism's distinguished fans did not believe that it had widespread appeal. Whether or not they were right is not the point (although, as I will demonstrate in chapter 5, it is unwise to underestimate anyone's reading capacities). The point is that this form invested with so much populist energy was presumed to be too good for "popular" readers, as Atlantic-group magazines often represented it. Insofar as these magazines shaped high literary culture and thereby high realism, they virtually ensured its exclusivity. The test of high realist artistry was an indefinably subtle processing, very often discussed in terms that harked back to Coleridge'S concept of the imagination. Emotional restraint and, as I mentioned, "quiet power" were two of its touchstones, and a special artistic "vision" was supposed to shape the whole so thoroughly that it was hard to know where, as a reader, one might begin to look for its evidences. All genres are defined partly by negation, as Anne Freadman has pointed out, but in the case of realism it is especially significant how often a work was praised for the absence of other, more definite characteristics or impulses. 88 The result was that realism was everywhere invoked, but that

High Realism and Other Institutions

49

even though it was sometimes identified with specific subject matters, in this discourse of high realism it was made to depend so much on subtleties of style that it must have been hard for anyone to learn to identify it reliably. Those who possessed the confidence to know it and enjoy it-or to identify it and object to it in the name of a higher cultural value-marked both their breeding and their cultural expertise. In this spirit, a Lippincott's reviewer, having identified Trollope as a realist, declared, "A taste for Trollope is a test of culture and knowledge of real life, for the basis of his superstructure must be a part of the reader's mind."89 As Paul DiMaggio sums it up, "The experience of Culture-high Culture-became an exercise in the implicit. And Boston's established elite, with its multiplicity of interconnections and its rich symbolic life, was uniquely situated to capture the implicit, to make it its own, to stitch art into the fabric of its communal life, as no other group could," partly because of its command of an extraordinary stable of professionals who educated and accredited the group's tastes. 90 Hence we arrive at a sense of how a taste for realism, that supposedly most inclusive of literary movements, could become a mark of distinction. Indeed, this fact is not surprising, if we recall the influential aesthetic tradition that Pierre Bourdieu traces back to Kant:

If one follows through all the implications of an aesthetic which, in accordance with the logic of Kant's "Essay on Negative Magnitudes," has to measure virtue by the magnitude of the vices overcome and pure taste by the intensity of the impulse denied and the vulgarity refused, then the most accomplished art has to be recognized in those works which carry the antithesis of civilized barbarism, contained impulse, sublimated coarseness, to the highest degree of tension.91 By this logic, the lowness or ordinariness of the materials of realism, considered either as the social status of its characters or the quotidianness of its actions, becomes the precondition for the transforming artistry of the realist writer and attests to the sophisticated perceptiveness of the realist reader by extension. Two examples will suffice. A review of Turgenev by Henry James in the Nation emphasized that the author's "great quality" was "the union of the deepest reality of substance, of fonds, as the French say, with the most imaginative, most poetic touches." Similarly, a Scribner's Monthly review of George Eliot culminated by describing her power-

50 Reading for Realism

ful yoking of antitheses: "And it is not often in the world's history that realism so severe and truthful is united with the most poetic idealism, that the aesthetic conscience of the Greek is wedded to the loftiest moral aspiration, that the power of deep and strong passion is held in abeyance by the strictest self-repression."92 Quotations like these suggest that realism imaged the individual self-restraint that licensed the bourgeoisie's control over the body politic's unruly lower members. Realism when it first emerged in the United States was a marketing label that lent distinction to certain products and provided for their conspicuous consumption; indeed, its self-conscious modernity foreshadowed the marketing cult of the "new and improved." Furthermore, its appropriation on behalf of philanthropic nationalism and connoisseurship in the form of high realism helped to legitimate the political and cultural dominance of the groups who sponsored it. High realism also represented a sincere effort on the part of leading literary intellectuals to seize the cultural implications of their historical moment and national situation, as I will describe in later chapters more sympathetically, but that effort was inevitably shaped by their bourgeois class-identification-even if it was also shaped by a contempt for plutocrats, monopolists, and some of the bad effects capitalism was recognized to have on culture. Like the not-for-profit corporation, high realism embodied the contradictions of a particular renegotiation of a dominant group's hegemony. And when high realism had either exhausted its purposes or ceased to be effective, by about the 1890s, the magazines that had sponsored it moved away from realism, which was later retooled to fit into a new version of literary authority organized around muckraking journalism. The relocation of Howells's protagonists from Boston to New York City, the site of a grittier reality, in The Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) hints at the breakdown of the understanding of realism that had fit so comfortably in Boston, as well as the replacement of Boston by New York City as the nation's literary center. The rest of this book will present not only the transformations in U.S. culture that were refracted and accomplished in the controversies over realism, but also some of the dialogues that works of fiction opened with the institution of high realism, which affected how they would be read.

2

liThe Grand Reservoir of National Prosperity": Connoisseurship, Literary Nationalism, and The Marble Faun

As the realist novel came to be thoroughly Americanized and defined in opposition to the romance, the romance came to be identified with unAmerican materials and techniques. The last chapter began to explore the significant tendency, which emerged during the :1850S and :1860s in Atlantic-group periodicals, to define the romance in ways that diverge significantly from the term's canonical history, as it has been reconstructed by most twentieth-century academic critics.! Rather than admiring the romance for its special epistemology or the critical distance from social convention provided by its imaginative standpoint, much less for its inherent Americanness, reviewers in these periodicals identified the romance instead with various tendencies in fiction and uses of fiction that were incompatible with the specifically American, specifically modern character they attributed to realism. This meant that the romance was subjected to the same outcroppings of nativism that fueled the popularity of the antiimmigrant Know-Nothing Party during the :1850s. The virtual exile of the romance was from one perspective an episode in the petty party politics that blights even the cultural realm, a crude promotional tactic on the part of enthusiasts who wanted to unite American literary culture under the realist standard. From another perspective, though, it raised a fascinating complex of problems related to the historical life of aesthetic forms: Can works of art remain intelligible and vital under changed cultural and historical circumstances of reception, or do some of them really become obsolete? What are the cultural and political arrangements that construct "the nation" as a unified entity finding expression in certain forms and not others? How does an audience's historical and na-

52

Reading for Realism

tionallocation affect its interpretation? And how, in a culture that is not unified by politics or religion, can artists create meaningful public art? For Nathaniel Hawthorne, the promotion of realism posed a more acute question: What was a loyal American arch-romancer to do? Ever adept at spotting the fictional possibilities of petty politics, Hawthorne turned his own predicament into the occasion for entering into some of these questions in The Marble Faun, not as a narrow partisan of the romance but rather as an author genuinely divided in his responses to the cultural transformations around him. The previous chapter suggested that literary nationalism emerged in Atlantic-group periodicals as a means by which a northeastern, urban bourgeoisie legitimated its cultural authority by exercising it in the name of the nation and on behalf of less privileged populations. This philanthropic literary nationalism exemplified not the direct national sponsorship or control of art, but rather a convergence between the nation-state's interpellation of citizens, on the one hand, and the tactics of a class fraction trying to legitimate its cultural leadership, on the other. In turning to Hawthorne, I am confronting traditional understandings of romance and realism in one of their most familiar sites, but I am also moving to complicate my own model.2 Hawthorne's class position-like anyone's, but especially any professional writer's-is not easy to sum up. His Puritan pedigree and his Peabody in-laws, the poverty of his youth and his early writing career, and his two famous patronage posts as Surveyor of the Salem Custom House and as Consul to Liverpool suggest conflicting positions for him on any social map. For my purposes, Hawthorne's close links to Atlantic-group magazines and to Ticknor & Fields, his Boston-area base, and his unambiguous identification with literariness mark him as a cultural professional affiliated with the bourgeoisie during the :1850S and :1860s. However, Hawthorne's case exemplifies the ruptures that perforate any individual's relationship to his or her place in collective identities such as class, race, nationality, and gender. 3 In particular, Hawthorne's troubled consideration of the issues about art and nationalism I outlined above was not an encounter with forces outside him that were hostile to the romance, but rather a manifestation of the contradictions produced in his own life by his individual investment in romance at a time when he was an official agent of the nation and when the nation's bourgeoisie was forging a special relationship with realism. My reading of The Marble Faun will attend to the intricacy of Haw-

Grand Reservoir of Prosperity 53 thorne's relationship to his nation and its stratified culture, focusing especially on the nation as a producer and consumer of high culture. Moreover, because Hawthorne's writings shared discursive commonalities with the Atlantic group's construction of literary nationalism as a generic issue, commonalities that shape his reflections on representation in The Marble Faun, his example supports my claim that public conversations about genre did not merely affect texts after their composition, but also affected authors' addresses to their readers and even their understandings of their own activities. The relationship between The Marble Faun and the framework for literary reception provided by Atlantic-group magazines exemplifies Todorov's proposal, which holds for all the works I will be considering, that "the metatext is actually an intertext; the utterance that describes another utterance enters into a dialogical relation with it."4 In The Marble Faun, Hawthorne's response to the promotion of realism can be traced mainly in two distinct fantasy versions of reception, one relating to connoisseurship and the other to the formation of a unified national audience for art. The first fantasy, about a "Demon of Weariness" who blights viewers' appreciation of art, personifies the apparatus of connoisseurship that elevated Italian religious art over Dutch still-life paintings, and that (reversing the terms of a widespread analogy) was elevating realism over the romance in the u.s. and England. In contrast, the second fantasy, which emerges in the book's meditations on sculpture and other idealizing art forms, imagines perfect communication between artist and audience, mystifying signification as the artist's solitary struggle to control his materials. The murder of the Model figures in this connection as a violent attempt at securing mastery and controlling representation. However, this act of vio~ence is merely an individuated version of the widespread violence required to produce the kind of unified readership Hawthorne longs for, as is demonstrated by the book's gestures toward the military and paramilitary scaffolding of Roman Catholic rule in Rome. The loss of control Hawthorne experienced due to the advancing consolidation of a realist platform for American fiction prompted The Marble Faun's struggles to manipulate its readers. It also led Hawthorne to idealize Catholic Italy, however ambivalently, as a culture in which romance's loyal interpretation would be guaranteed. s Before examining these two fantasies of reception, however, I want to consider the features of Hawthorne's situation that affected his writing's relationship to American nationalism.

54 Reading for Realism Our Nation's Representation

The Marble Faun is overwhelmingly preoccupied with the situation of modern artists. The characters spend much of their time visiting historic sites and museums in and around Rome and comparing their impressions of famous works of art and architecture. We also see some of the three artist-characters' productions, and, not surprisingly, most of their work is deeply indebted to ancient Roman and medieval and Renaissance Italian traditions. 6 Hilda, as a copyist, is most obviously a participant in these past modes, but Kenyon and Miriam also tend toward styles and subject matters authorized by the past, such as Kenyon's statue of Cleopatra (a knockoff of W. W. Story's sculpture of the same subject, Hawthorne admits) and Miriam's sketches for paintings of Jael and Sisera, Judith and Holofernes. That the characters are both viewers of past art and makers of present art stretches the book along two axes: one that explores the value and labor of forging relationships with works of art across historical and cultural distances, and another that rather pessimistically inquires what is left for modern art, overshadowed by these great traditions and predecessors, to create. The sculptor Kenyon, who most often serves as a point-of-view character, sutures this general experience of modern belatedness to the contemporary United States. A snatch of conversation among artists visiting the Fountain of Trevi encapsulates the difficulties of producing a truly national American art, considered here in the context of public sculpture: 7 "What would be done with this water-power," suggested an artist, "if we had it in one of our American cities? Would they employ it to turn the machinery of a cotton-mills, I wonder!" "The good people would pull down those rampant marble deities," said Kenyon; "and possibly they would give me a commission to carve the one-and-thirty (is that the number?) sister-States, each pouring a silver stream from a separate can into one vast basin, which should represent the grand reservoir of national prosperity." "Or, if they wanted a bit of satire," remarked an English artist, "you could set those same one-and-thirty States to cleansing the national flag of any stains it may have incurred. The Roman washerwomen at the lavatory yonder, plying their labour in the open air, would serve admirably as models."B

Grand Reservoir of Prosperity 55 The first speaker's remark compresses a number of unoriginal complaints about u.s. culture-most obviously, the commonplace that Americans had put material progress ahead of spiritual or cultural progress. The reference to cotton mills targets New England, a reminder that that region was the cradle not only of American high culture but also of American industrialism. In addition, the implication that commercial life is at odds with artinsofar as the water can either turn a cotton mill or flow through a fountain but not, apparently, do both-corresponds to the contemporary construction of art as the contrary of industrialism and its offshoot materialism, forces which art is expected to keep in check. Kenyon's comment corrects this superficial opposition, though. Even the choice to put commercial life first involves constructing an ideology, in this case "prosperity," which craves public embodiment, display, and elaboration through art. But on the eve of the Civil War, to make a sculpture celebrating the necessary or at least mutually profitable collaboration of the separate states was expressly polemical. It presumed that the continued union of the states, versus Northern abolitionists' and Southern "FireEaters'" willingness to risk division, was necessary for the nation's economic growth and well-being, and it presumed that economic growth and well-being provided the best index of the nation's health. Kenyon seems to believe that if he were looking for commissions in America, he would probably be bound to this task of working within hegemonic collective symbologies. 9 1t is revealing that "prosperity," capitalism's closest allegorical approximation, is the value he thinks he would be commissioned to promote. Finally, the English speaker slyly raises the possibility that the American flag "may have incurred" stains already, presumably because the nation has committed or countenanced shameful acts. That the water signifying prosperity can be used for laundering the flag, an activity that both acknowledges and erases history, suggests the sinister suppressions involved in reducing the states to sources of the GNP, so that Northern industrialism and Southern slavery contribute indistinguishably from other enterprises. The Englishman's scenario also suggests that such laundering, which Kenyon might have to do if he were in the United States and relied on working by commission, is a feminine activity or an activity that feminizes-the woman's role, in a nation whose menfolk take the flag out into the conflicts where it gets stained.

56 Reading for Realism This conversation lays out the conceptual framework on which many of The Marble Faun's meditations about art rest. Art, considered as a public product and resource, is strained by being made to serve the abstract unity of a nation-state or a religion, specific political agendas for the state or the religion put forth by parties in power, and a public that mayor may not be unified by either the abstract identification or the practical powers that be. Io The resulting shortfall between the social or spiritual function envisioned for art and its practice is figured in feminine terms, in this instance as a humiliating feminization for the (implicitly male) artist and in other instances I will consider as the equally humiliating inability of artists to control female "materials." In light of the fact that the promoters of realism emphasized its public and national role as a reason for its superiority over romance, it might seem surprising for Hawthorne to find an analogy for the romance in a form like sculpture that lent itself to civic celebration. Yet Hawthorne had long been interested in art's public missions, and at the time he wrote The Marble Faun he had a much greater role in American public life than the much-analyzed relationship he had had while writing The Scarlet Letter. Nathaniel Hawthorne famously described himself as having been beheaded when the Whigs came to power in :1849 and removed him from the patronage position of Surveyor in the Salem Custom-House (:154). It was a singularly therapeutic decapitation, since it led to his writing The Scarlet Letter, closely followed by several other books, and for the first time earning acclaim and the prospect of a livable income from his writing. "The Custom-House" essay that prefaces The Scarlet Letter announces Hawthorne's retreat from public life and suspicion of it, a retreat that was not only the product of Hawthorne's personal experience with officeholding. As Jonathan Arac has pointed out, the decapitation dramatized Hawthorne's participation in the formulation of a private, elite, putatively independent and critical devotion to "literature" that was being forged in contrast to the self-consciously public practice of celebratory "national narrative."ll Despite refusing a certain kind of public office, however, The Scarlet Letter is overwhelmingly concerned with public issues, public occasions, and public spaces. The public in question is literally the fictionalized population of Puritan Salem, but Hawthorne's contemporary public is never far from the book's preoccupations, as many critics have emphasized. Donald Pease enthusiastically celebrates Hawthorne's offering up a "re-

Grand Reservoir of Prosperity 57 pressed memory" of "the vital collective life of the pre-Revolutionary past" as a corrective to the "alienating public sphere" in which he served,12 Sacvan Bercovitch, who views Hester as an embodiment of the kind of dissent produced and contained within American liberalism, still suggests that Hawthorne liked to imagine the Puritans as a "vital" interpretive community.13 Attributing rather more guilty fascination than admiration to Hawthorne, Lauren Berlant proposes that the book explores the state's power to produce public spectacles through the bodies of citizens as well as to shape citizens' private responses to them. 14 Despite their distinct arguments, these readings converge in presuming that The Scarlet Letter was shaped by Hawthorne's multiple relations to the state: as an artist seeking independence from it; as a functionary vested with some of its power; as a civil servant whose work and workplace relations were determined by it; and as an ordinary citizen subjected to it. Not every ordinary citizen could claim Franklin Pierce as a friend and patron, though. The two men had become friends as undergraduates at Bowdoin, and after Pierce's election as president, in which Hawthorne's campaign biography of Pierce had some share, Pierce appointed Hawthorne to be American Consul at Liverpool. From 1853 to 1857 Hawthorne held that post, and in 1858 and 1859 he took advantage of being in Europe to travel with his wife and daughters to Italy, where he got the idea for The Marble Faun and began writing it. He finished it in England, where he and his family returned in 1859, and it was published in 1860, not long before the Hawthornes came home to the United States. Another stint of government service, another acclaimed book: another productive period should have followed by this logic, but The Marble Faun was Hawthorne's last completed work of fiction. He became depressed, his health deteriorated, and he died in 1864 in the company of his friend Pierce. This selective account of Hawthorne's later life suggests several ways in which his relationships to patronage and to nationalism had changed since he wrote The Scarlet Letter. For one thing, while writing The Marble Faun he had just enjoyed a political appointment that did not end in his being plucked ignominiously from office. A friend of the victor, he had gotten a share of the spoils. He had not been awarded patronage specifically as a writer-that is, his duties really were diplomatic-but this kind of post was often offered to writers, probably because it provided a stable income, allowed them to travel, and allowed them to make connections with writers

58 Reading for Realism and artists abroad. IS The post was testimony to the writer's public worth as well as his party service in cases like Hawthorne's. Hawthorne kept notebooks throughout his stint abroad which he mined not only for The Marble Faun but also for a book about England, Our Old Home, and he met literary figures such as Tennyson and the Brownings as a result of his posting. In dedicating Our Old Home to Pierce, Hawthorne implicitly commemorated the fact that Pierce's appointment had funded the book, as surely as if Pierce had commissioned it. Hawthorne's travels, his contacts, and The Marble Faun were similarly all made possible by his being part of an administration in power, and in a considerably more visible way than he had been as surveyor in Salem. In return for producing a piece of public art not unlike Kenyon's vision of a ludicrous fountain of American union, a campaign biography that praised Pierce for being more devoted to the "sisterhood of states" than to the divisive issue of abolition, Hawthorne was allowed to represent the nation-state and (not quite the same thing) the regime he had helped bring to power. 16 Another difference in Hawthorne's situation was that he was traveling abroad for the first time. Doubtless the reflections that international travel stimulates about one's own national identity were made more acute for Hawthorne by his official status, yet this self-consciousness of nation intermingled with his first experience of being an expatriate, a cosmopolite: The Marble Faun was produced and set entirely on foreign soil. Most significantly, the main countries in Europe where Hawthorne spent time were England-whose role in defining American identity is specifically highlighted by the title of Our Old Home, and whose cultural influence was a subject of great ambivalence in the United States-and Italy, link to the classical past that was treated as the seedbed of Western culture in general and democratic republicanism in particular. Hawthorne's route to England and then to Italy effectively retraced what many Americans would have recognized as a shorthand genealogy of American political and artistic culture, leading Hawthorne to confront some of his (and the United States') involvements with other nations. It was in Italy, according to the evidence of his notebooks and The Marble Faun, that Hawthorne became interested in the visual arts and succumbed to the anxious nationalism that beset American travelers in this era. Many Americans in Europe speculated about how the famous artworks they saw had been affected by the sponsorship of ruling nobles, aristocratic patrons

Grand Reservoir of Prosperity 59 like the Medicis, or the Catholic Church, and these wonderings were necessarily framed by the travelers' sense of the American alternatives, with which Hawthorne had ample firsthand experience. In addition to benefiting from Franklin Pierce's political patronage, Hawthorne was by this time firmly associated with Ticknor & Fields, whose near-patronage relations with authors I have mentioned in the previous chapter. He was by no means abjectly dependent: the publishers were fortunate to have his muchadmired works on its list, and he was reciprocally fortunate to have their prestigious imprint on his books. Moreover, his relationship to them was always triangulated by the presence of the reading public, which was represented sketchily by sales figures and indirectly and problematically by book reviews. His experience of what it was to produce art in his own historical moment was inevitably shaped by this dual relationship to a high-culture publisher and a projected reading public, as well as by his having received an ambiguous temporary entitlement in the name of the nation but as a result of his relationship with Pierce. Hester Prynne's A was a highly personal work of art (despite its function of public display) that was never institutionalized or marketed as high art, and its Americanness was self-evident in its having been produced on American soil for an audience of Puritans, whom Hawthorne helped turn into ur-AmericansY In light of the changes in Hawthorne's public situation and the experiences that I have recounted, it is not surprising to find art being imagined very differently in The Marble Faun. Here we see professional artists, blessed and burdened with a rich artistic heritage (so that they know they cannot start at A," but must plunge in somewhere down the alphabet), working out their Americanness from afar in relation to other national traditions, and especially in relation to cultures that preceded and helped create the United States: cultures that positioned the United States as a product of history as well as a new beginning. And although we do not hear much about the people who commission or buy the art produced by the characters, we are very much aware of the artists' status as independent agents navigating a market. As artists who visit and discuss established artworks, the characters are also professional viewers, counterparts to the book reviewers whose notices were one of Hawthorne's few indicators about how his works were received. (Filling out the analogy, many book reviewers were also established or aspiring fiction writers.) Thus, the main characters in The Marble Faun can serve both as surrogates II

II

II

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for Hawthorne, practicing more and less public forms of art that loosely correspond to different possible relationships between "literature" and public life, and as surrogates for his present and future readers. Just before writing The Marble Faun, then, Hawthorne's position in Pierce's regime had required him to represent the nation diplomatically, an advancement which may have led him to want to fulfill (and disambiguate) this ambiguously national endorsement of his public stature by addressing a unified public rather than a tier of private consumers. No doubt he was dismayed by the fact that the only influential attempt to constitute American readers (at least, privileged and aspiring readers) as a public was the promotion of realism. As I described in the last chapter, Swinton's "Novels: Their Meaning and Mission" and the anonymous "Ideals in Modern Fiction" demonstrate that a dichotomy between the novel and the romance was developing during the 1850s. The versions of this dichotomy that the two articles sketched were not completely congruent with each other, but both pieces identified the romance with earlier or less mature phases of a culture's development, and both threw their rhetorical weight behind the novel as the bearer of progress and a national! class mission. These essays appeared while Hawthorne was in England, and I have not been able to discover whether he might have been following Putnam's from abroad; he read American newspapers when he could, and his friend William Ticknor sometimes sent him magazines and articles. IS However, a North American Review article that appeared in 1853, before he departed, also traces a mobilization of national and modern consciousness on behalf of the novel, and Hawthorne might very well have read it, since it was in the same issue as a review of two of his romances. It serves productively as an intertext for The Marble Faun. The article is about some of the books by "scribbling women"-Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World and Queechy, and Amy Lothrop's Dollars and Sense-whose amazing popularity in the 1850S Hawthorne resented, and its author has high praise for these writers specifically as exemplars of something new and American.1 9 This was not a judgment that the North American Review or any of its peers sustained about these particular books, especially a couple of decades later when realism was consolidating its masculine professional identity, but in 1853, this reviewer found these novels to be symptomatic of the nationalizing of literary tastes. It is interesting that the review is by Caroline Kirkland, one of the few women to

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write for the North American Review during this era, although since the review was unsigned its author's gender would not have been known to most readers. Kirkland begins the review by imagining the surprise that Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Smith-identified as the authors of The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Orphan of the Castle, respectively-would feel if they came back to life and encountered modern fiction, in which the romance of (presumably plebeian) "John and Sarah" captures people's imaginations more than the "tender trials of Lord Algernon and Lady Helena." "In their day," Kirkland explains, "it had not yet become the fashion to draw conclusions as to national character from popular literature. Novels were not then supposed to express the spirit of the age." Instead, they offered pleasure, a "little instruction," and maybe some "satire."20 There is nostalgia here for the novel's private rather than public functions, its associations with leisure and privilege rather than the self-education of hardworking citizens. Indeed, Kirkland, who states later in the piece that there is "very little romance" about the works he or she praises, seems to mourn the passing of this representational regime: Nowadays, every thing that will not bear this disenchanting light is ranked as meretricious; there is no truth but literal truth; heroines are no longer "mad in white satin"; troubles, to touch our hearts, must be every-day troubles; heroes, who do not interest themselves in political economy and the condition of the masses, are unworthy of good fortune.... The novel has become a quatrieme etat; something considerable in government; a power formidable to evil-doers; but not particularly lovely or cheering to those who resort to it merely to delight or to exalt the imagination,-as suggestive of possibilities of happiness, or as counter-agent to the disenchanting tendencies of our wayward, blundering experience. 21 This passage models the logic by which the romance was becoming a residual category, associated with "every thing that will not bear this disenchanting light": with whatever fictional possibilities the new, improved novel, soon to be appropriated successfully by the realist movement, was jettisoning. And it is especially significant that a reviewer not completely in sympathy with the change described it at the beginning of 1853 as something already accomplished.

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Moreover, Kirkland proposed that the exceptional sales figures of The Wide, Wide World made the book's popularity "an index of the national character" : When a story of real life-American rural life, of the homeliestunheralded at home, unstamped by foreign approval-lacking the tempting bait of national flattery-and wholly deficient in the flash and flippancy that might attract the vulgar mind, springs at once to a currency which few books ever reach-cried to the skies by the "most sweet voices," of old and young, gentle and simple,-we cannot help feeling the verdict to be significant. The "heartiness" of this expression of interest, which Kirkland specifically attributes to the nation, implies that The Wide, Wide World is an outpouring of the American character or soul in a new instantiation. 22 Ironically, she takes up exactly the rhetoric about literature's official status that she previously resisted, perhaps opting to join the cultural movement she can't beat. In formulations like these, the romance, as represented by the works of Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Smith, was pushed relentlessly back into a previous era of artistic activity. Such books were not just several decades old: they were outdated. The romance was under attack, but Hawthorne in most cases was not. A review of Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance in the same issue of the North American Review is wholly laudatory, for instance, crediting Hawthorne with creating "out of nothing," presumably with the aid of the Imagination rather than the Fancy, and with drawing "the hidden soul of whatever he describes to the light of day ... "23 However, the reviewer also points out that the people and things in Hawthorne's books "derive their verisimilitude not from their resemblance to the actual, but from their self-coherency," and he describes them as having been "written to illustrate some idea or sentiment."24 And even though the review declines to position Hawthorne in "any recognized class of writers" or even to compare him with his contemporaries, it endorses Hawthorne's choice to call his works romances. 25 Thus, the reviewer distances Hawthorne from primarily mimetic intentions and finds this compatible with his works' being romances, if not constitutive of this fact; the relationship isn't specified. As Richard Brodhead discusses in The School of Hawthorne, Hawthorne

Grand Reservoir of Prosperity 63 alone of American authors has been valorized under every critical dispensation since the 1850s, precisely because his works and his image have been energetically reconstructed in accordance with each new set of principles of literary valuation. Brodhead's work suggests that Hawthorne was our first novelist to incite and sustain powerful international acclaim, a status that made all his successors eager to annex his authority.26 Hawthorne himself was not usually the target of attacks on the romance, but his investment in the form, which he elaborated in the prefaces to each of his major works, undoubtedly extended beyond his concern for his own reputation. 27 These prefaces chart Hawthorne's increasing defensiveness about the romance, a defensiveness that seems related to the change in dominant literary ethics and aesthetics that Kirkland perceives. "The Custom-House" is the least defensive. There Hawthorne sets out his initial attempts to turn the embroidered scarlet "A" he has discovered into a romance under the influence of moonlight, which creates "a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other." As many readers have insisted, this elaboration of moonlight and romance seeks to bring separate domains into contact, rather than casting Hawthorne's lot with either one. Moonlight, moreover, interacts in Hawthorne's next paragraph with the light from a coal fire, so that the products of moonlight, already somewhat hybrid, undergo a further representational grafting by coming into contact with the light produced in a domestic space. 28 Framing this second opposition with yet another one, Hawthorne goes on to explain that while he worked at the Custom-House, neither moonlight, sunshine, nor firelight kindled the "susceptibilities" that would have enabled him to turn the embroidered letter into a romance (149-50). This entire passage from "The Custom-House" revolves on a distinction between differences that can be melded together and differences that cancel each other out, favorite tropes not only of Hawthorne but of public genre theorists (that is, writers of book reviews and prefaces) during this era. The stultifying effect of the Custom-House work derived from its official nature-"while he [an individual occupying such a position] leans on the mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength departs from him" (152}-but affected only Hawthorne's own inspiration. In the "Preface" to The House of the Seven Gables, though, Hawthorne begins to warn readers about kinds of reading that might cancel out something about his work.

64 Reading for Realism The preface begins by asserting firmly that he is writing a Romance, which is entitled to "a certain latitude" not granted to the Novel, the Novel being "presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience" (351). And it goes on to warn readers in particular against a reading that would assign the scenes of this book an actual location, bringing "his fancy-pictures almost into positive contact with the realities of the moment" (352). The "Preface" to The Blithedale Romance is even more emphatic, as Hawthorne (in prefatory persona) concedes that the real Brook Farm was his inspiration, but that he wanted to use it only as a "theatre" in which his characters could avoid being exposed to "too close a comparison with the actual events of real lives." He then describes the reading contract that he seems to wish his readers would honor, which he presents as a writer's "conventional privilege" to have a "license with regard to every-day Probability, in view of the improved effects which he is bound to produce thereby," a privilege that was understood in "old countries." But by going on to complain that the United States does not "yet" have a "Faery Land" where beings of the imagination "have a propriety of their own" (633), Hawthorne cleverly manages to imply that the reading contract he prefers emerges with a country's maturity or at least age, rather than that it is compatible only with past or foreign social relations. Without this Faery Land, American romancers' creations "are compelled to show themselves in the same category as actually living mortals; a necessity that generally renders the paint and pasteboard of their composition but too painfully discernible" (633). Despite longing for Faery Land, Hawthorne still hopes to set his work in a place that will enable some merger between competing representational modes. The most conducive setting he has found in the United States, he writes, is Brook Farm, the experimental community where he lived for a while in his youth, and his memories of it afford a "foothold between fiction and reality" (634). The problem Hawthorne evokes in these prefaces is that a disruptive referentiality might short-circuit his works' interpretation: that, by being set anywhere in particular, his books might be read either as romans a clef (as they certainly have been) or as inappropriately mimetic or local-coloristic. Yet this problem really relates to the expectations of his readers, which he is trying to set through these prefaces. His disappointment in his readers culminates in the beleaguered, weary "Preface" to The Marble Faun, in

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which he fantasizes that his own Gentle Reader-the "genial personage ... to whom the prim old author was wont to make his preliminary explanations and apologies, with the certainty that they would be favourably received" (853)-has died. He links this demise to the periodicity of "literary fashion," which entails that he must leave his latest work at the mercy of "unkindly eyes" who "skim over what was never meant for them" (854). Disingenuous as the preface may have been, insofar as it challenged his readers to prove their worthiness to take the Gentle Reader's place, it nonetheless expressed the fear that a change in reading practices had made his work, like the inscription on the Gentle Reader's gravestone, "halfobliterated" and thereby unreadable (854). The rest of The Marble Faun's "Preface" goes on even more disingenuously to layout the book's use of Italy. Hawthorne says he did not intend "a portraiture of Italian manners and character," but rather wanted to set his Romance in "a sort of poetic or fairy precinct, where actualities would not be so terribly insisted upon, as they are, and must needs be, in America." Romances are difficult to write in countries like America "where" -he strains credulity-"there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wroag, nor anything but a common-place prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land" (854).29 The anonymous author of "Ideals in Modern Fiction" in Putnam's could have put it no better; it is tempting to see Hawthorne here satirically offering up to U.S. readers precisely the vision of their country that he thought they wanted to have, as if the whole nation were one of the happy families announced in Anna Karenina that elude depiction.30 As is the case with Kenyon's imagined American fountain, "prosperity" becomes the defining characteristic of the United States, a myth whose arrogant reductiveness prompts the English artist's insistence on the flag's stains. Hawthorne's preface goes on to indicate that America, unwritten about, seems also to be unwriteable, whereas overwritten Italy invites even more writing-a scenario that ironizes American reviewers' pieties, often targeting the romance, about how much better it is to write from life than out of dialogue with other books (855). With bland deference, Hawthorne in this passage takes on a set of questions about the relationship between the health of a state or nation and the liveliness of its cultural production that bedeviled many Americans during this era. Americans' anxiety about their own nation's cultural production

66 Reading for Realism stemmed from the fear that a nation that could not nurture its artists was somehow inferior. It is not always possible to tell whether this fear presumes that the missing artists would celebrate the nation or serve as its loyal opposition: Bercovitch's work suggests that critique, in a nation that defines consensus in terms of a diversity of views, doubles as celebration, anyway.31 Certainly the idea that America is inhospitable to romance operates both as a celebration and a critique, as Hawthorne couches it. Notwithstanding his elaborate compliments to his native land, though, his choice to set this romance in Italy was not primarily a tribute to American prosperity. It was a choice to set his Rome-ance in its etymological and representational home, which was also a place where ancient art forms thrived and were esteemed. Hawthorne's setting allowed him to highlight the provincialism and narrowness of the versions of nationalism and connoisseurship being used to promote realism in the United States. In particular, the contrast between the Italian and Dutch old masters on display in Italian galleries allowed Hawthorne to dramatize his own and his culture's ambivalence about mimetic projects of the kind realism signaled. Demon Novelization In her review of works by Susan Warner and others, Caroline Kirkland came up with a curious analogy for the culture shock that Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Smith would experience if they encountered novels of the mid-nineteenth century. Despite the fact that both authors might be more readily identified with the Gothic than with the Christian or mythological high art of Italy, Kirkland compares the imagined disorientation of these revenant authors with the aesthetic dislocation produced by traveling from Italy's art galleries to Holland's: We were returning northward from a survey of the galleries of Italy, where Art has been the handmaid of beauty, elegance, and grandeur, till it seems to the devoted traveller vexing and vulgar to be obliged to devote part of every precious day to eating and sleeping,-into Holland, where the exquisite skill of Teniers and his compeers has been expended upon objects so mean and unpleasing that, if they came in our way in real life, the first thought would be a speedy retreat. To exchange the Transfiguration for Boors drinking-the Madonna della Seggiola for Paul Potter's Bull-the Apollo for the Subject for Dis-

Grand Reservoir of Prosperity 67 section,-what perfection of execution could console us? Nay, the very perfection with which these mean and graceless things are rendered, added to our vexation in contemplating them, for it was just so much deducted from the illustration of the true and ennobling realm of Art.32 The term that makes possible this analogy between Gothic fiction and high Italian art is, of course, "romance," which Kirkland applies to Radcliffe's and Smith's productions, and which came to mediate in this era between (among other things) fictions involving supernatural effects and any art of idealization. This unlikely combination exemplifies what I meant by calling the romance a residual category. Its contents are related only by virtue of their having been commonly opposed to the dominant category of "realism," which mainly monopolized the novel. However, I have had to emphasize the oddness of this analogy because George Eliot's use of it, in particular, has accustomed many readers to it. Eliot maps competing literary tendencies onto this contrast between the works of the Dutch and the Italian Old Masters in Adam Bede (:1859), in a passage I will examine later in this chapter, but this review from several years earlier makes clear that Eliot was retooling rather than inventing this analogy for the differences between realism and its main alternative. Despite the tone of the passage I quoted, which might have been exaggerated to evoke the analogous "astonishment" of the authors brought back to life, Kirkland goes on to praise The Wide, Wide World and its "sisters" highly. The judgment passed on Teniers and the other Dutch painters similarly must be situated as an initial reaction which the course of the review implicitly softens or even reverses. Whether or not Eliot would have recognized Warner as a novelistic fellowtraveler, Kirkland praises Warner in terms that resemble Eliot's praise of the Dutch works whose practice she uses to authorize her own. The Dutch and Italian old masters had been identified with vying representational principles at least since Sir Joshua Reynolds'S Discourses and up through Ruskin's Modern Painters (the early volumes of which Hawthorne had almost certainly read) and popular art handbooks of Hawthorne's time. Mid-nineteenth-century Americans endowed the debate with new stakes, assessing the most productive periods in Dutch and Italian art according to insistently self-referential political criteria so that connoisseurship and nationalism would not be in conflict. 33 For instance, during these decades

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leading up to the Civil War, American writers tended to dwell on the facts that the Dutch Republic formed in 1609 had unified a number of provinces (of which Holland was only one, although I follow casual usage in letting it stand for all of them) and that the struggle for Italian national unity was also trying to combine independent regions and city-states. 34 A reviewer in Putnam's praised Dutch art in terms that laid out other parallels between Holland and the United States. Dutch painters could endow even low subjects with "a motive vastly superior to those superstitious reverences and base fears of authority which often prompted the Madonnas and Martyrdoms of Italy," the reviewer proposed, because Dutch painters undertook their work "in that sturdy burgher spirit which had laboriously won a country from the sea, which had heroically resisted the aggressions of Spanish despotism, and which rejoiced in the free, honest, independent citizenship, achieved by its own valor of spade and sword."35 Conversely, some American admirers of Italian art contended that it, too, had been nurtured in outcroppings of democracy.36 James Jackson Jarves emphasized Italy's intermittent history of republican institutions in his handbook Art-Hints. He deduced that since the greatest Italian art thrived during periods when people enjoyed relative freedom in Italian city-states, the United States was in a singularly favorable position to produce great art as wellY Incongruous as it might seem to compare the United States' internal cultural diversity or division into states with the history of Italy's city-states and regions, independent political and linguistic entities subjected to various forms of centralizing rule, another North American Review writer, G. W. Greene, seemed to have E pluribus unum in mind when he claimed that national identification was immanent in past works of Italian art: What a difference between the glowing school of Venetian art, and the severe grandeur of the Roman,-between the gilded palaces of Genoa, and the stern simplicity of Florence! And yet there was a bond of national feeling uniting them all, even in the midst of their divisions. Titian painted with the feeling that his works would one day hang side by side with those of Raphael ... The burgeoning of a nationalistic and nationalizing literature, better communications among the separate states, a more sensible and defensible territorial division (perhaps by analogy with the doctrine of Manifest Des-

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tiny), and the "existence of a middle class" are the other factors Greene not surprisingly believed would ensure Italy's strong national development. 38 In these heavily ideological assessments of Holland, Italy, and their artworks, national unification, democracy, and capitalist development are brought together as reciprocally fundamental elements of a politicaleconomic complex whose vitality is marked by its capacity to foster great art. The construction of traditions of national art out of works produced prior to the nation's existence tended to naturalize the one-to-one correspondence between nation, culture or religion, and art that made the expatriation of romance possible. If a nation or an era in national life was supposed to have a unified set of beliefs, then dissidents could be dismissed as resident aliens or anachronisms. As John Ruskin warned, "All artists who have attempted to assume, or in their weakness have been affected by, the national peculiarities of other times and countries, have instantly, whatever their original power, fallen to third-rate rank, or fallen altogether ... "39 Moreover, if Titian had somehow always expected to have his works hung next to Raphael's, as Greene suggested, then he was painting not only in anticipation of Italy's national unification, but also in anticipation of museums and galleries that would use national art traditions as organizational principles of display. The excessive attention paid to constructing a set of differences between Dutch and Italian art points to the reductive binarism of the connoisseurship promoted by such museums, connoisseurship which may create elaborate taxonomies of art but which nonetheless is designed to sort greater from lesser art, better from worse tastes. The dominant preference in Western art scholarship in Hawthorne's time was for the Italian tradition, and handbooks like Jarves's were part of the same taste-making technology as the BSG and the MFA, a technology designed to inculcate contemplation, reverence or shame, and submission to a hierarchy of tastes. Significantly, Hawthorne himself first encountered museums full of Italian and Dutch art while under the influence of this taste-making apparatus, and his efforts to forge relationships with these works across cultural and historical distances were made more difficult by his attempt to keep his own tastes orthodox. Museum-going in general did not come easily to Hawthorne, who marveled at his wife, Sophia's, indefatigable "receptivity" and who seemed very self-conscious about his own slow process oflearning to make discriminations among the different kinds of art he viewed. 40 He

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claimed to admire the kind of fiction Anthony Trollope wrote, books so virile (I infer) that they seemed to be "written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale," more than his own, and in similar terms he described finding the Dutch masters much more welcoming than the Italians: 41 I was glad, in the very last of the twelve rooms, to come upon some Dutch and Flemish pictures, very few, but very welcome; Rubens, Rembrandt, Vandyke, Paul Potter, Teniers, and others-men of flesh and blood, with warm fists, and human hearts. As compared with them, these mighty Italian masters seem men of polished steel, not human, nor addressing themselves so much to human sympathies as to formed intellectual taste. 42 A few months later, at the Uffizzi Gallery, Hawthorne once again wrote about the pleasure of running across some pictures by Dutch and Flemish artists, pictures "which were like bread, and beef, and ale, after having been fed too long on made-dishes" (FI 297). A subsequent visit to the uffizzi showed Hawthorne perplexed by his own incapacity or slowness to come around to the accepted valuation of Italian over Dutch painting: "It is the sign, I presume" -a qualification that marks some resistance-"of a taste still very defective, that I take singular pleasure in the elaborate imitations of Van Mieris, Gerard Duow, and other old Dutch wizards who painted such brass-pots that you can see your face in them, and such earthen jugs that they will surely hold water .. ." (FI 3"17). He went on to speculate about a merger between the two styles: For my part, I wish Raphael had painted the Transfiguration in this style, at the same time preserving his breadth and grandeur of design; nor do I believe that there is any real impediment to the combination of the two styles, except that no possible span of human life would suffice to cover a quarter part of the canvas of the Transfiguration with such touches as Gerard Duow's. But one feels the vast scope of this wonderful art, when we think of two excellences as far apart as that of this last painter and Raphael. (FI317) In this passage, Hawthorne is preoccupied with determining which representational differences can be melded together and which ones cancel each other out, as he had been in the preface to The Scarlet Letter. Like

Grand Reservoir of Prosperity 71 Dimmesdale in the forest (and like Hester, too), Hawthorne is momentarily taken by the possibility of a transgressive coupling, but almost immediately he draws back from his heresy and puts the two styles in a developmental hierarchy: "Until we learn to appreciate the cherubs and angels that Raphael scatters through the blessed air, in a picture of the Nativity, it is not amiss to look at a Dutch fly settling on a peach, or a humble-bee burying himself in a flower" (FI )17). These passages show Hawthorne struggling, not only with the accepted valuation of the Italian over the Dutch masters, but also with the organization of aesthetics that deemed the two modes irreconcilable and insisted on a choice between them. In The Marble Faun, this struggle surfaces most explicitly in the chapter entitled "The Emptiness of Picture-Galleries." Left by herself in Rome during the summer, brooding over her guilty sense of complicity with her friends' murder of the Model, Hilda finds herself losing the sympathy with the Italian masters that had made her such a successful copyist of their paintings. In a rich and rhetorically complex passage that draws heavily on his own vexed relationship to Dutch and Italian art, Hawthorne personifies Hilda's changed relation to the old masters as a demon: For the first time in her life, Hilda now grew acquainted with that icy Demon of Weariness, who haunts great picture-galleries. He is a plausible Mephistopheles, and possesses the magic that is the destruction of all other magic. He annihilates colour, warmth, and, more especially, sentiment, and passion, at a touch. If he spare anything, it will be some such matter as an earthen pipkin or a bunch of herrings by Teniers; a brass kettle, in which you can see your face, by Gerard Duow; a furred robe, or the silken texture of a mantle, or a straw hat, by Van Mieris; or a long-stalked wine-glass, transparent and full of shifting reflections, or a bit of bread and cheese, or an over-ripe peach with a fly upon it, truer than reality itself, by the school of Dutch conjurors. These men, and a few Flemings, whispers the wicked Demon, were the only painters. The mighty Italian Masters, as you deem them, were not human, nor addressed their works to human sympathies, but to a false intellectual taste, which they themselves were the first to create. Well might they call their doings, "Art," for they substituted art instead of Nature. Their fashion is past, and ought, indeed, to have died and been buried along with them! (11)1)

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I have quoted at length from this passage because it makes use of so many of Hawthorne's impressions and phrasings: the peach with a fly on it, the wonder at trompe l'oeil mimesis, and the opposition between intellectual taste and human sympathies are obvious parallels. The account of the Demon's effects also closely echoes another passage in which Hawthorne writes about having had "one of the [museum-going] days when my mind misgives me whether the pictorial art be not a humbug, and when the minute accuracy of a fly, in a Dutch picture of fruit and flowers, seems to me something more reliable than the master-touches of Raphael" (FI414). What The Marble Faun passage omits, in presenting the pleasures of Dutch still-life painting as a demon would transmit them, is Hawthorne's liking for the Dutch painters, his admiring identification of them with manly sensual pleasures. (It is interesting that these Dutch artists, who characteristically painted domestic subjects, are so clearly masculinized for Hawthorne, as if their representational control of domestic space confirms their manliness. ) Instead, this passage focuses on the machinations of a Demon whose influence causes viewers to appreciate only the most rudimentary mimesis, who puts art in opposition to nature, and who reduces the Italian masters to a "fashion" that ought to be, like Hawthorne's Gentle Reader, "buried." In a book preoccupied with whether there is any readership left for the romance, the Demon represents a change in reception that is broader than Hilda's personal experience. The whisperings of the Demon "who haunts great picture-galleries" simulate the ways in which taste-making apparatuses interfere in audiences' relationships not only with the works they devalue, but also with the works that the apparatuses are designed to value. The "over-ripe peach with a fly upon it" is something any viewer must feel ashamed of liking, yet knowing one is supposed to like Raphael's cherubs instead produces an estranged response akin to a "false intellectual taste." Notice also the contrast between this passage, in which one representational genre cancels out' another, and the passage from Hawthorne's notebooks in which he imagined a collaboration between Raphael and Duow, representatives of the two genres. Given his own earlier formulations of romance as a merger between opposing or contrasting kinds of representation, often figured as kinds of lighting, and given his liking for Trollope and for Dutch genre paintings, the implication that Hilda's earlier receptivity to the Italian masters (when she was unafflictedby demons) was the higher

Grand Reservoir of Prosperity 73 taste must be understood as a dialogically defensive. Hawthorne has been pushed into identifying his art with the Italian masters, with moonlight, and with whatever escapes mimesis, because antiromance rhetoric has polarized the romance and the realist novel so successfully. However, the greatest threat to his art is not that something called realism or the novel has been promoted over it, but rather that the promotion of realism has been teaching readers to parse all works of fiction into elements of realism and romance. Indeed, most subsequent critics of The Marble Faun have not been able to keep from performing this parsing. George William Curtis, who praised the book highly in the "Editor's Easy Chair," called it a "pure romance" except for Kenyon, who "has strayed out of the broad, common daylight of the novel which is a very different sphere from the romance."43 Curtis praised Hawthorne for balancing Donatello between "brute and human nature," but, significantly, a reviewer in the very same issue of Harper's who was praising Eliot's Mill on the Floss evinced less sympathy with such unnatural balancing acts. The reviewer praised Eliot for not relying on "ghosts or hybrids," constructing instead "a work of fiction which, for force, pathos, and genuineness of representation has few recent parallels."44 Narrative hybridity was also Henry James's quarrel with The Marble Faun: reversing Curtis's critique, he found Donatello to be written in an "unreal" mode that clashed with the rest. 45 The notion that the book founders as a result of a clash between incompatible representational elements has continued to be a commonplace of criticism in this century.46 What happens to the work of the Italian masters, in Hawthorne's passage about the Demon of Weariness, and what happened to parts of The Marble Faun itself seem to be versions of what Mikhail Bakhtin proposes happens to resistant genres when the novel becomes the "dominant [literary] genre." Most other genres themselves become novelized, which for Bakhtin involves being opened up to the decentered interplay of literary and extraliterary languages. But some genres resist this transformation, and those "begin to appear stylized. In general any strict adherence to a genre begins to feel like stylization, a stylization taken to the point of parody, despite the artistic intent of the author."47 From Bakhtin's point of view, this involuntary stylization usefully unsettles the monologism-the specious privileging of a single voice, a single point of view-of unnovelized genres and reveals the boundedness of any particular language or orchestration of

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languages. 48 Like many of the promoters of the realist novel in the United States and England, Bakhtin identified the novel with the accession of new populations and their languages into literature and with the unsettling of genres that served aristocratic purposes. This is the use that George Eliot makes of the analogy she proposes in Adam Bede between her work and Dutch paintings, "which," she unapologetically concedes, "lofty-minded people despise": "1 find a source of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures of a monotonous homely existence, which has been the fate of so many more among my fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or of absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or of stirring actions." (Note that Eliot, like the author of "Ideals in Modern Fiction," wants not only to displace the most privileged from representational centrality, but also to marginalize those whose lives are characterized by "absolute indigence" and "tragic suffering.") In the United States, which liked to pretend it had transcended class entirely by not having a landed, titled aristocracy, it was much less controversial to assert the power of the middling people than it was for Eliot in England. 49 Even so, Eliot's plea for art to make room for commonplace people acquired an urgency by being addressed to the visual arts, where the Italian masters were so esteemed, that was not wholly justified by current literary conditions, since Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell had already made inroads on behalf of nonelite populations: Paint us an angel, if you can, with a floating violet robe, and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward and opening her arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of Art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands ... 50 Juxtaposing this passage with Hawthorne's about the Demon of Weariness, published only a year later, one can see the promotion of realism and the devaluation of the romance from two perspectives, and the differences between them demonstrate the complexities of this juncture in AngloAmerican culture. For whereas Eliot lays groundwork for Bakhtin by proclaiming the liberatory inclusivity of a new kind of novel analogous to Dutch paintings, pleading for the addition of this new representation rather than the exclusion of any other kind, Hawthorne insists upon the ca-

Grand Reservoir of Prosperity 75 pacity of the Dutch aesthetic to de-authorize and exclude another form of representation. The passage about the Demon is not faithfully Bakhtinian, of course. It does not identify the Dutch masters with heteroglossia or polyphony, which for Bakhtin were properties constitutive of the novel. However, Bakhtin's account ignores the fact that heteroglossia and polyphony can be activated or suppressed by reading-perhaps even created or omitted by reading: after all, the American novels that came to be identified with realism were not necessarily more heteroglossic than the works dismissed as romances, especially insofar as the former were read according to the prescriptions of high realism. Hawthorne's passage reminds us that the broader reality on behalf of which a convention gets demystified is always itself delimited, and that whereas the boundedness of any scheme of representation is important to recognize, its ability to be productive within its limits has value as well. Moreover, Hawthorne's representation of the Demon corrects Bakhtin's presumption that the mere appearance of the novel in the representational field produces this effect. The Demon's power is "the magic that is the destruction of all other magic," but it is not a power possessed by the Dutch painters-or, presumably, the realist noveliststhemselves. It is the magic of whoever whispers in the viewer's ear: the magic of the forces affecting reception. "The bride is never naked"51 The fantasy of the Demon, like Hawthorne's prefatory appeals to his readers, presents reception as something that can interfere locally in the proper functioning of a work of art, but not something that creatively activates a work of art and provides a measure of its value. Hawthorne prefers to rely on an idealist theory of art which accords value to a work independently of its reception, judging the work by the artist's ability to incarnate the inspiration-something universal and ideal-that he more or less adequately grasps. 52 (The artist's position has a masculine coding, as I will discuss.) In this scenario, the artist's insight and control over his materials are the only variables that affect the worth of his art. The very idea that a form such as sculpture or the romance might utterly lose its audience raised the question of whether an ideal theory of aesthetic value was sufficient, though. And in trying to imagine how sculpture and other idealizing visual representations could be made to function properly, fulfilling his

76 Reading for Realism desire for public art to serve a unified audience, Hawthorne could only envision audiences who were subjected to patriarchal authority or political repression. As was the case for the promoters of realism, then, Hawthorne's literary nationalism led him in the direction of undemocratic disciplinary arrangements. The plight of contemporary sculpture as it emerges in The Marble Faun parallels the plight of romance in three ways. First of all, both forms were identified with the Old World rather than the New. The romance was associated with exotic locations, not only the Orient, as Swinton's essay in Putnam's mentioned, but also Italy, as invocations of Ann Radcliffe, author of The Italian, suggested. Jenny Franchot has noted that the term "romance" connected fictionality especially with the Roman Catholic Church, which Protestants endowed with" seductive" -and therefore suspicious"mysteries of the imagination." Since anti-Catholicism was fueled by antiimmigrant sentiments, the scripting of the romance as a foreign presence on American soil and its semantic links to Rome and Rome's Church may have overdetermined it as an object of hostility. 53 American sculpture's link to Rome was motivated more by material circumstances, but it was equally consequential. Sculptors gravitated to Rome because they shared the age's fetishistic valuation of the purest white marble possible, which one could not get in the United States, because the most famous sculptures in the Western world were displayed in Italian museums, and because in Italy there were trained workmen available to execute their designs. As it happens, expatriate sculptors could and did execute works of art that were clearly taken up as "American," as in the case of sculptures by Thomas Crawford, Hiram Powers, and others that were commissioned for the expansion of the u.S. Capitol during the 1850s; moreover, some sculptors who chose to stay in the United States achieved considerable success. 54 However, the fact that Kenyon and the other American sculptors we hear about in The Marble Faun have chosen to live abroad contributes to the impression that sculpture was an expatriate art form, just as romancers were being made into imaginative expatriates. Secondly, both the romance and sculpture were characterized by their reliance on previous artworks rather than direct depiction from "nature." This charge demonstrated literary critics' unanimous failure to recognize the dense intertextuality required to produce the kinds of social representations valued under the realist dispensation. 55 Instead, the protorealist novel

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was distinguished by its quasi-photographic capacity to render lifelike people and scenes: one critic marveled at Thackeray's books' ability to serve as "an actual transcript of the life of society" whose characters one felt one might meet on the street, for instance. 56 As works of fiction that did not depict present-day life in the author's own country became relegated to the category of romance (if not to melodrama or sensation fiction, which ranked even lower), romance became identified with an author's necessary dependence on the conventional depictions and emplotments of foreign and/ or past settings. Swinton, you will recall, identified romance with the fancy and thereby with acts of assembly rather than invention. Italy was the most notorious of romance settings, a factor which makes Hawthorne's use of it expressly polemical. Miriam casts similar aspersions on sculpture when she visits Kenyon's studio, proposing that sculptors are" 'of necessity, the greatest plagiarists in the world'" because" '[t]here is never a new group now-a-days; never, even, so much as a new attitude.' " Kenyon bristles, but he concedes that he "'cannot utterly contradict [Miriam], as regards the actual state of the art'" (955-56). Miriam's charge is not without foundation: neoclassical sculpture in white marble was the dominant style for the kind of large public sculpture that Kenyon mainly produces, a style favoring seminude figures in flowing draperies, and even sculptors who used "American" materials rather than historical or mythological subjects tended to recycle familiar arrangements. Miriam's most extended polemic against sculpture concerns its reliance on nudes, a feature that might seem to have no obvious parallel in the romance. However, the problem of the nude as Hawthorne presents it is fundamentally a problem of allegory, a staple of neoclassical sculpture which offers the third commonality between Hawthorne's representation of sculpture and his aspirations for romance. Miriam's critique of the nude in modern sculpture, which echoes opinions that Hawthorne expressed in his notebooks, has usually been treated by critics of The Marble Faun with embarrassment, as if it demonstrates only Hawthorne's prudery or a misogyny cloaking prurience. 57 These claims may be true, but they merely pass judgment on the affect motivating these opinions. What's more interesting is the logic by which the erotic responses that both Hawthorne and Miriam frown on are imagined to undermine or short-circuit representation. Whereas Hilda's loss of contact with the Italian masters was prompted

78 Reading for Realism by a demon's specious whisperings, in the case of the nude Hawthorne imagines a different scenario of obsolescence, one in which a genre of art may have genuinely played out what Bakhtin calls its "great historical destin[y]."58 These two scenarios of genre obsolescence amount to two displaced considerations of the situation of romance, the first defensive and the second resigned. Miriam's critique of the nude begins with the criterion of plausibility, since she claims that" 'Now-a-days, people are as good as born in their clothes, and there is practically not a nude human being in existence'" (955). This criterion is not as superficial or inartistic as it might seem. Marcia Pointon suggests that in the latter half of the nineteenth century, some artists (her examples are mainly painters) adopting a similar point of view began to depict their nudes in circumstances in which they could plausibly be wholly or partly naked-because they were dressing, undressing, or bathing, for example.59 But this concern with plausibility is not Miriam's main point. Caring whether a nude's circumstances are plausible is only a symptom of changes in social relations and artistic viewing that have changed the meaning of the nude: "An artist, therefore,-as you must candidly confess,-cannot sculpture nudity with a pure heart, if only because he is compelled to steal guilty glances at hired models. The marble inevitably loses its chastity under such circumstances. An old Greek sculptor, no doubt, found his models in the open sunshine, and among pure and princely maidens, and thus the nude statues of antiquity are as modest as violets, and sufficiently draped in their own beauty. But as for Mr. Gibson's coloured Venuses, (stained, I believe, with tobacco-juice,) and all other nudities of to-day, I really do not understand what they have to say to this generation, and would be glad to see as many heaps of quick-lime in their stead!" (955) These remarks point to a change in the conditions under which nude sculpture is produced, a change that alters its meaning for viewers. They implicitly concede the impossibility of anyone's ever apprehending human flesh-or representations of it-independently of its social meanings, the gist of Wallace Stevens's assertion that "the bride is never naked." However, Miriam projects the social meanings onto the marble itself, proposing that under modern circumstances nude sculpture loses its "chastity."6o Her

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pastoral fantasy about the circumstances in which the ancient Greeks viewed their models (watching "pure and princely maidens" gambol in "the open sunshine") suggests that the audience's beliefs about a work of art's production have a powerful effect even if the beliefs are mistaken. This attention to the conditions under which works of art and craft are produced grounded Ruskin's arguments about the complicity of Victorian consumers with the oppressive conditions of labor in which their household furnishings were produced, and they also contribute to current feminist arguments about how consumers of pornography participate in the exploitation of the women employed in this industry. It is hard to tell precisely what Miriam believes female nudity meant in ancient times, what kind of "glances" it provoked that weren't the "guilty" ones of modern sculptors, or why the original sculptors' "chastity" of vision secures the propriety of later viewers, but she definitely believes that whatever factors made sculpting nudes possible in the past no longer obtain. 61 Having related an artwork's signification to some of the social conditions affecting its production, in this case the conditions that govern the artists' relations with models and thereby make their visions pure or impure, Miriam elides other conditions of the production of sculpture that might reasonably be imagined to affect viewers' relationship to it. For example, Miriam's reference to "hired models" might be a euphemism for prostitutes, whom sculptors often used as models, yet her formulation emphasizes the risk of artists' losing their "purity" without lingering over the other implications of the cash transaction. 62 Similarly, the problem of artistic control is not related to the sculptors' fair or unfair employment relations with the troops of hired workmen who, as Hawthorne acknowledges in a chapter about Kenyon's studio, actually executed their deSigns. Since these workers were responsible for producing the "buttons and buttonholes" and the other mimetic details that had to be subordinated to the artist's "Idea" (949, 948), including the details of female bodies, at the very least their participation ought to affect the problem of erotic contamination as Miriam frames it. Instead, by reducing the workmen to "machine[s] in human shape" the narrator completely mystifies the site of artistic struggle as the artist's idealizing will, challenged to transcend his erotic impulses, rather than the sculptor's collaboration with his employees or his artwork's commercial status. Hawthorne's insistence instead that the artistic will struggles against

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female presences might reflect on his own practice, since many readers have noticed that Hawthorne's own Dark Ladies were dangerously charismatic. 63 More specifically, Miriam's charge that female nudity was necessarily contaminating in the nineteenth century might point to Hawthorne's share in the mid-nineteenth-century middle-class cultural project that Joel Pfister has called "the feminization of women": their enshrinement and entrapment in a domestic sphere in which they were allocated special emotional labors and the task of building their children's character. 64 Since statues of nude women represented public violations of women's proper domestic containment, with its attendant privacy, modesty, and spirituality, they were newly transgressive. 65 Not only female nudes but also representations of the Madonna risked being contaminated by their mimetic embodiment, though, suggesting that the trouble with nudes is a special case of a more general problem involving signification and female figures. In the "Emptiness of PictureGalleries" chapter, the narrator suggests that artists' real-world relations with their models could interfere with their representations' worthiness to depict the Virgin Mary. The fact that an artist set up "his earthly love ... to be worshipped ... by religious souls in their earnest aspirations towards Divinity" was one danger; moreover, the narrator asks, "[W]ho can trust the religious sentiment of Raphael, or receive any of his Virgins as Heaven-descended likenesses, after seeing, for example, the Fornarina of the Rarberini palace, and feeling how sensual the artist must have been, to paint such a brazen trollop of his own accord, and lovingly!" (11)2). George Hillard was similarly struck by the incongruity of Titian's Venuses being hung near Raphael's Madonnas, as if the former de-authorized the latter just by proximity: as if the fact of women's sexual and erotic embodiment, raised by a representation, precluded their signifying something spiritua1. 66 The danger that a Madonna might be only a material girl is the danger that the model's depiction, tinctured by the artist's unspiritual feelings, might predominate over idealizing reference. Clothed Madonnas could be as dangerous as neoclassical nudes because both forms, as Hawthorne and his contemporaries understood them, were supposed to signify ideal meanings that were undermined by the femininity of their signifiers, considered as representations. The Madonnas preferred by Victorians "excited devotional feeling," as Hawthorne put it, by

Grand Reservoir of Prosperity 81. signifying purity, spirituality, or the miraculous operations of divine grace, so that representations of the Virgin invoked her person and history only as markers of a divine power inviting reverence and faith. Similarly, nude or seminude female forms typically were held to incarnate abstract values such as Liberty or Freedom or Dignity. Even if they represented a fictional or historical character, as in Powers's The Greek Slave or Story's Cleopatra, they were believed to lead viewers to contemplate some virtue or moral which the figure's circumstances threw into relief. Both Madonnas and nudes were in these respects allegorical, part of a system of the allegorical uses of the female figure that has both classical and Christian roots. Marina Warner highlights the doubleness of allegorical signification as it functions with respect to female figures in this system: "Justice is not spoken of as a woman, nor does she speak as a woman in mediaeval moralities or appear in the semblance of one above City Hall in New York or the Old Bailey in London because women were thought to be just, any more than they were considered capable of dispensing justice."67 Classical and Christian culture being equally patriarchal and misogynistic, their idealizing uses of female figures have always instituted a tension between the figure's potential to function as a mimetic representation-an image of a model or an invented woman-and its proper function of signaling a "higher" meaning relating to the cultures' overlapping ethical and spiritual frameworks that depended on the exclusion or subordination of women. This tension fits Bourdieu's formulation, which I introduced in chapter 1., that within Kantian aesthetics, "the most accomplished art has to be recognized in those works which carry the antithesis of civilized barbarism, contained impulse, sublimated coarseness, to the highest degree of tension."68 Arguably, allegory involves such a tension whether or not it involves female figures. As a kind of reading, allegory insists on using representational details to evoke meanings, often abstractions, which "reside in some privileged moral sphere such as politics or religion," as opposed to a reading that emphasizes readers' internalization of represented or implied subjective states (even states of moral responsiveness) or their vicarious involvement in adventures or their curiosity about the view of politics embodied in a represented society, for instance. 69 An allegorical text can be read in these other ways, but they are not the ways that mark the text as allegorical. Likening allegories to ruins, Walter Benjamin called attention to the way in

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which a signifier subjected to an allegorical reading decays, paradoxically having its material particularity negated and memorialized at once?O The signifier must give way to an allegorical interpretation that supplants it, yet its value lies in its capacity to give the abstraction it signifies material embodiment. Allegory in these respects simply suffers from an acute version of the paradoxes involved in all signification, a version more acute because allegory demands to operate for a collective rather than an individualized audience. Regardless of the differences among individuals' responses to an allegorical text, an allegorical work demands that its audience's collective investment in the legacies of classical or Christian culture will function to identify the beautiful blind woman who holds the scales as Justice or the mild-faced woman in blue who holds a baby as the Madonna. To misrecognize such figures is not simply to have a distinct interpretation, but to fail to belong to the community presumed by the representation as allegory. Thus, the vitality of allegory as a form is fundamentally linked to the success with which (in Western culture) classical and Christian frameworks for political and spiritual life predominate, and that success can be misrecognized as an index of the coherence of the nation itself. 71 Since the allegorical art Hawthorne contemplates was constructed as part of the United States' heritage, it could serve both as a standard against which the American nation's cultural fragmentation could be measured and as a metaphor for national unity, whether or not that unity could be achieved by restoring the frameworks that had made allegory viable in previous historical situations. 72 Indeed, The Marble Faun itself used a figure from classical mythology in its title and evoked an allegory of sin and penitence in its plot, inviting an audience for whom these frameworks would be familiar even if the distance between them and the particulars of the text produced interpretive opportunities. Designed to interpellate a readership with these specific literacies, Hawthorne's text could be as vexingly unreadable to others as the Gentle Reader's gravestone. In the correspondence column of The Family Story Paper, which answered miscellaneous inquiries, a reader identified only as Miriam from St. Louis wrote in 1880, "Recently I was looking over a book called the 'Marble Faun,' but could not quite understand it because I did not know the meaning of the word 'Faun,' never having met with it before." The editor responded by explaining the Faun's history in "heathen mythol-

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8}

ogy."73 This glimpse into a reader's perplexity is a reminder of the specific literacies that even Hawthorne's title demanded and of the limits of their dissemination throughout the American public that was in theory his readership. Any misrecognition undermines allegory, but in this work Hawthorne is only worried about one kind of misrecognition, which is why female figures prove so problematic. In The Marble Faun, as in the examples I quoted from Hillard's and Jarves's guidebooks, ideal representations are either recognized as allegories or misrecognized as human examples of trompe l'oeil or roman a clef, according to a narrow conception of mimesis quite similar to the one Hawthorne was trying to fend off in his prefaces but found himself practicing with pleasure in European galleries. Responding to one of Raphael's Virgins as one responds to his Fornarina-with sexual excitement, I presume, since Hawthorne glosses the Fornarina as a "brazen trollop" -is the same as transferring the sensuous response evoked by a Dutch still life to an ideal representation. The special horror posed by this way of misreading a neoclassical nude or a Madonna is that it gets con£lated with an embarrassing or inappropriate sexual response; moreover, such eroticized aesthetic responses might be a disturbing (to Victorians) sideeffect of the rigorous privatization of viewing accomplished in museums such as the MFA. In Hawthorne's depictions of this phenomenon outside of "The Emptiness of Picture-Galleries," however, the response is projectedthough not depicted at all-not as a misreading, nor as a personal expression by the viewer, but rather as an accurate grasp of the original artist's contaminated and contaminating relationship to his materials. In Hawthorne's account, the proper public functioning of allegory risks being compromised primarily by artists' erotic impulses, which are understood to be dangerously private, debased, and anarchic. Artists who triumph over these impulses deserve to be old masters, having kept their private relations with women (and their relations with women as representatives of the private) out of their public artistry. Whereas Hawthorne's fantasies about the Gentle Reader and the Demon of Weariness blamed his audience for any short-circuits in his own art's functioning, his fantasy of viewers who submit themselves to the artistic visions of the old masters takes on the risk of artistic sin as the price of retaining a delusion of heroic artistic control.

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The Governance of Interpretive Communities The exaggerated artistic control that Hawthorne attributes to the greatest artists of the past demands either impossible personal authority or the backing of a force that can regulate the public's functioning as a reading or viewing formation, keeping away demons. The first possibility gets enacted in The Marble Faun as an Oedipal struggle for artistic mastery, and the second takes the form of a longing for something like the Catholic Church's power to unify and discipline a population. The Model's murder is plotted as the product of Donatello's desire to possess Miriam, and it results in Donatello's guilty maturation as well as his punishment; replicating Adam's fall, in which Eve is merely an accessory to a transaction between masculine figures, it is an Oedipal bid for phallic authority which is rewarded by the revelation that no one can really occupy the position of absolute authority, knowledge, and subjective wholeness signified by the phallus. Any enactment of Oedipal aggression provides certain satisfactions, though, even if it does not allow the perpetrator to take the impossible place of the father. Indeed, the Model is so overloaded with thematic significance in this book that his overthrowing offers a substantial though amorphous release: it vents aggression (Miriam's, Donatello's, the narrator's, and the sympathetic reader's) against the power of the past, grown uncanny by persistence in Miriam's transformed present, and against some kind of prohibition or imperative that resonates with Oedipal forbidding,74 Because of the character's designation as "the Model," though, his murder brings these issues of authority and control into relation with the representational questions raised by models and modeling. 75 In particular, the Model might be aligned with the reductive version of mimesis I have compared to trompe l'oeil, which arguably stands in for the insistent present-day referentiality of realism, as opposed to allegory, which seems related to Hawthorne's nostalgia (naive or strategic) for circumstances in which idealizing representations could count on being intelligible to a unified public. The Model's intransigence compounds his association with trompe i' oeil. For one thing, he frustrates Miriam and Donatello mainly by virtue of being always there, whether or not he approaches or addresses Miriam, a physical presence that interferes with whatever they are doing. More significantly, though, when he is serving literally as a model for

Grand Reservoir of Prosperity 85 Miriam's painting, his features refuse to be subordinated to her style and purposes: "The moral atmosphere of these productions was thereby so influenced, that rival painters pronounced it a case of hopeless mannerism, which would destroy all Miriam's prospects of true excellence in art" (877). Not only can Miriam not control how the Model functions as a material of her art, his presence disrupts her guiding visions. Like the female figures whose role in modeling I discussed, the Model is divided between an intrusive physical presence-complete with beard, mustache, and "goat-skin breeches, with the hair outward" (875)-and a spiritual role, his alternate identity as a Capuchin monk. But even though the problems of modeling I have been addressing are in other parts of the book articulated with femininity, the Model's maleness is crucial. In terms of simple logistics, it would be unthinkable for a woman to pose the kind of threat to Miriam that the Model does, or for Donatello to remain a sympathetic character after pushing a woman off a cliff. More importantly, the Model's presence identifies the control of feminine materials as a fundamentally homosocial project which involves the artist in Oedipal rivalry with whatever figures-artistic predecessors, surrogate fathers, or fantasies of masculinity-represent the successful control that the artist wants to emulate. This control is, of course, impossible, predicated on the myth that viewers will magically submit themselves to the vision of an artist who is great enough or pure enough. Donatello's murder of the male Model accomplishes in one fatal stroke both the symbolic removal of unruly artistic materials (signified by modeling)-the triumph over trompe l'oeil mimesis-and the supplanting of a figure of impossible and unbearable rival authority, glossed as historically prior and paternal (signified by the associations made between the Model and an ancient pagan or Beatrice Cenci's father). With specific reference to representation, then, overthrowing the Model might amount to effacing a (reductively) mimetic function of art for a fantasy of securing higher and more perfect representation through allegorical signification, as if the old masters could erase any relationship between the "earthly loves" who posed for them and their finished paintings, or as if the real-world location named in one of Hawthorne's romances could dissolve and leave behind only its "ideal" signification. Brodhead quite justly points out that "Hawthorne's defense of romance is achieved at the expense of an impoverished conception of the novel," and I

86 Reading for Realism would add that The Marble Faun demonstrates that the conception of romance Hawthorne ended up defending was impoverished as well. 76 Trompe ['oeil was not an adequate stand-in for realism, but neither was allegory for romance. I have used the term "allegory" to sum up Hawthorne's interest in public idealizing art, exemplified by sculpture, but Hawthorne's treatment of Donatello and Miriam suggests that the romance had become a residual category for him as well as for antiromance critics. On the one hand, Miriam and Donatello are associated with the conventionality of redundantly intertextualized topoi: in Miriam's case, the Gothic, and in Donatello's case, the imagined past of the Volk and the arc between Schiller's categories of the naive and sentimental. 77 But on the other hand, by being identified with mysteries (Miriam's past, the question of whether Donatello is really descended from fauns) that Hawthorne steadfastly refuses to make clear-that he refuses to submit to mimetic explanationthey take on a kind of anarchic and anti representational figuration that resists public display and abstracting interpretation.78 Divided between these representational agendas, they nonetheless make sense as representatives of romance when restored to dialogue with the polarizing rhetoric of the protorealist novel's promotion. However, their exaggerated distance from the social and representational values that had been appropriated for realism makes them dangerously transgressive and unmoored. The multiple taboos violated by Donatello and Miriam as figures of Catholicism, patricide, conventionality, and elusive figuration account for the thoroughness with which they are punished, sequestered from Kenyon and Hilda, and forbidden to marry and produce offspring at the end of the book. By compressing the complex social circumstances affecting the production and functioning of a work of art into an individual artist's struggle for control, Hawthorne converts a social drama into an Oedipal one. Moreover, he continues to mystify reception, which in both his fantasy of the Demon and his fantasy of individual artistic mastery get depicted as wholly external to production. A painting produced soon after The Marble Faun, Manet's Le Dejeuner sur I'Herbe (1863), calls attention instead to the dialectic of production and reception, specifically in relation to the changing social meaning of the nude. The foreground of Manet's well-known painting implausibly, even outrageously juxtaposes a nude woman with two men wearing conventional nineteenth-century dress in the quotidian setting of a picnic. Most interestingly, a basket spilling fruit and bread is positioned

Grand Reservoir of Prosperity 87 just next to her. It almost seems as if she oscillates between two representational registers: grouped with the other woman in the painting, a more distant figure whose indistinct white gown resembles classical drapery, her classical-allegorical possibilities are activated; but grouped with the men and the edibles in the foreground, she becomes part of a non-allegorizing, sensuously mimetic project descended from Dutch still-life painting but inflected with an awareness of the painting's and the nude's status as objects of consumption. The woman's gaze toward the viewer signals the receiver's implication in the representation, yet the painting's invocation of generic alternatives presents the viewer's bind as a collective and historical one?9 Both Manet's painting and Hawthorne's romance invite audiences-in the direct gaze of Manet's nude and in Hawthorne's narrator's endless appeals-to recognize their genre clashes. This is essential for grasping Manet's painting as a witty transgression and Hawthorne's romance as a troubled meditation. However, the declining reputation of The Marble Faun within Hawthorne's oeuvre suggests that Manet signaled his representational self-consciousness in a way that has remained more effectively intelligible. With somewhat different consequences, then, reception enters into each of these artworks as a real component of production. In relation to reception, too, an artist necessarily confronts the manifold circumstances-political, cultural, economic, and educational-that produce his or her audience considered as both a public and a market. 80 Hawthorne's presentation of Hilda, who is the perfect viewer before her encounter with the Demon, intriguingly transposes virtually all these features of readership into the registers of womanly sympathy and Catholic submissiveness. 81 Her ambivalent identification with Catholicism is crucial for her capacity to produce the kind of idealizing readings elicited by allegory, pointing to the ways in which a Roman Catholic audience serves as fantasy-alternative to Hawthorne's American readership. I mentioned allegory's Christian roots earlier, yet properly these roots were Catholic. "Symbolical Art," according to James Jackson Jarves, "can live only under the devotional forms of pure Romanism." Allegorical art no longer had an audience in a Protestant nation such as the United States, and art needed to be intelligible to everyone, he went on to proclaim. 82 Protestants' permission and need to forge an individual, unmediated relationship with God and Scriptures, together with the legacy of the Puritans' discomfort with frankly aesthetic spectacles, meant that the Protestant-dominated United

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States was producing an atomized audience whose spirituality was not channeled through public iconographic traditions. Yet in the book's recurring fantasies of artistic control, centering on Hilda, allegorical literacy gets personalized and mystified as a matter of an individual viewer's surrender to the artist's power. Hilda's encounter with the old masters is private and contemplative, in keeping with Protestantism, but involves a kind of deification of the artist, in keeping with Protestant slanders that Catholicism allowed saints and priests to usurp divine power. The book endorses Hilda's spiritual enthrallment, a version of the eroticized confessional intimacy between women and priests that fascinated Protestants, which in this case bypasses eyeSight and thereby trompe l'oeil mimesis: "She saw-no, not saw, but feltthrough and through a picture; she bestowed upon it all the warmth and richness of a woman's sympathy; not by any intellectual effort, but by this strength of heart, and this guiding light of sympathy, she went straight to the central point, in which the Master had conceived his work" (898).83 Because Hilda grasps the artist's ideal inspiration, a spiritual reality greater than he is, she narrowly escapes the explicit idolatry of an individual, even an artist, that would verge on Catholicism (as Protestants often misunderstood it) or fascism. However, not only does this account of reception leave open the possibility that a viewer might be misled by an artist who modeled his Madonna on his earthly love, it also makes it impossible for viewers to know whether they are following the artist's inspirations or not. This passage prepares for Hilda's deception by the Demon: A picture, however admirable the painter's art, and wonderful his power, requires of the spectator a surrender of himself, in due proportion with the miracle which has been wrought.... Not that these qualities [sensibility and imagination] shall really add anything to what the master has effected; but they must be put so entirely under his control, and work _along with him to such an extent, that, in a different mood, when you are cold and critical, instead of sympathetic, you will be apt to fancy that the loftier merits of the picture were of your own dreaming, not of his creating. (:1:130) This passage is gloriously unstable, setting out the proper passive cooperation of spectator with painter but then subversively suggesting the impossibility of spectators knOwing whether they are· members of the aesthetic

Grand Reservoir of Prosperity 89 Elect or antinomian heretics, whether they cooperate with divine inspiration or a demon. This was the kind of uncertainty that made a brooding man of young Goodman Brown. Hawthorne's wishful representation of a mind-meld between artist and audience does not work perfectly even for religious art, and it becomes less satisfactory still in the case of more secular art like Hawthorne's own. In The Marble Faun, though, the greater danger is that the Catholic-coded relationship of readerly submission that produces Hilda's ideal, allegorizing readings-readings which testify to a unified collectivity, not a single Gentle Reader but a whole community of them-is not really a private transaction between artist and audience, but rather requires a public regulatory apparatus. Americans were fascinated by the Catholic Church's capacity for precisely this kind of regulation. Hawthorne's friend George Stillman Hillard, whose guidebook Six Months in Italy (1853) he knew, described the Church's ability to unify and discipline its members with disturbing enthusiasm: Viewing the Romish Church as an instrument, or an assemblage of instruments, to accomplish certain ends, without reference to the nature of those ends, or to the effect produced upon the individual instruments themselves, it may be pronounced the most perfect institution the world has ever known. Nothing was ever so admirably devised to cause the energies of its members to work together to accomplish a great common object. 84 There is a peculiarly American and even Bostonian flavor to Hillard's emphasis that institutions succeed by uniting their members in common efforts, suggesting that even though elite New Englanders were deeply suspicious of Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants in America, the Catholic Church exerted a special appeal for them. 85 Because Hawthorne's account of reception is developed primarily in relation to religious art, it is Catholic Rome that most interests him. However, as Robert Levine has pointed out, The Marble Faun cannot escape remarking compulsively on the French military presence that maintained the pope's power after restoring him in 1849.86 After all, only the collaboration between the church and various Italian and other ruling regimes, in combination with the church's own status as a political power, operated to unify Italy into a public for allegorical religious art.

90 Reading for Realism

A writer in the North American Review in :1854 who made similar claims about ancient Romans' "instinct for organization" -perhaps a sinister relative of New England "faculty" and Brahmin enterprise-emphasized Roman imperialism, and surely the assimilative power he admires was similarly compounded by the Roman Empire's enforcement of a state religion: [T]he Roman people, alone of all the nations of antiquity, and, with few exceptions, of modern times, understood, in any large sense of the words, the art of organizing those self-perpetuating institutions of government, without which history loses its unity, meaning, and value.... The people were united under laws which they had themselves accepted, and which they had the self-denial and the selfcontrol to maintain and obey. Every state which they conquered was brought within the circle of Rome's organic life, and became a part of itself. And this conquest, instead of being a mere aggregation of dissimilar fragments, was like a growing tree, and every added province was a branch permeated by the vital circulation of the trunk. 87 The merger of church and state was supposed to be anathema to Americans, yet the fantasy of unified political and religious life had its appeal as an antidote to the discontinuities of American public life, which included cultural stratification, the proliferation of religious sects, and political factionalization. This projection of an impossible cultural unity onto Italy was a symptom of nineteenth-century Americans' discomfort with the atomizing, secularizing effects of capitalism and Protestantism, whose intersection Max Weber has analyzed. 88 His account of the difference between Catholic and Protestant forms of control makes clear that Hawthorne's nostalgia for Catholicism is double-edged: on the one hand a regressive longing for an earlier discipline whose pains and constraints were not always clearly remembered, and on the other hand a productive use of Catholicism as a standpoint from which the strategies of secularizing Protestant capitalist culture could be more clearly identified and criticized. More specifically, though, Hawthorne's fantasy about Hilda's quasi Catholic reception of art instructively counterpoints his own experiences in museums. Until Hilda's vicarious "fall," after all, she communed intimately with the old masters. Hawthorne, in contrast, confronted the paradox that the most idealizing

Grand Reservoir of Prosperity 91 and spiritual art was mediated and distorted for him by a secular tastemaking apparatus. Although the reverence that the Boston Museum of Fine Arts tried to instill was an adaptation of the relationship Hilda effectively borrows from Catholic believers (a borrowing that is imaged in the book by her misuse of the confessional, for which her imprisonment is a symbolic punishment), its object was at best an incoherent melange of religious and humanist values (including reverence for the Great Men of art) and at worst the act of connoisseurship itself. The idea of Catholicism as a totalizing interpretive framework was a rebuttal to the unsatisfying dislocations produced by art's staging as a secular commodity; allegory was the obverse of the individualized but class-marked kinds of reading promoted by Atlantic-group magazines. What's at stake in the difference between the United States and Italy as it pertains to the public circulation of art is the difference between the functional decentralization of American life-indicated by the independence of church from state, but accomplished more broadly by the diffusion of disciplinary apparatuses that take secular and non-government forms-and what Americans perceived as the centralization of Italian life accomplished by the Catholic Church. 89 Politically, at least in the context of the debates about federalism that led up to the Civil War, Hawthorne saw virtues in decentralization. 9o Robert S. Levine also points out that Hawthorne could not possibly have approved of the tactics of the French military, even though the book records his "desire" for the kind of "ideal unifying authority" they make possible. 91 And despite The Scarlet Letter's depiction of Puritanism as a religious government that produced a unified community, only the fact that the unity allows space for Hester's subjective individuation, marked by her moments of heresy, makes it tolerable. A unified culture was in some respects Hawthorne's dream readership, at least if it was committed to symbolic, idealizing interpretations of art; a nation repressed by priests, aristocrats, and their military forces was his nightmare citizenry. Arac's proposal that literary narrative emerged around midcentury at a distance from national narrative is entirely persuasive, but the impulses toward national consolidation and toward literature, which entailed connoisseurship, were not always separate. The promotion of high realism was structured by both of them. Rather than offering allegories of nationformation, realism was supposed to offer informative metonymic versions

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of national realities. High realism also instituted forms of subjective discipline deSigned to produce readers as properly controlled bourgeois American citizens, as the next chapter will discuss, so that membership in the nation and connoisseurship could not be easily separated. However, the construction of a hegemonic national reality was the feature of high realism that more closely threatened Hawthorne's own practice. The danger of a representational platform privileging the typical, an especially limiting kind of mimesis, was not only that it could be distorted polemically, so that only "prosperity" might count as typically American, but also that it could abstract the present moment from the historical dynamics that transected it: indeed, that it could reduce the past to outmoded superfluity. The subjectivity that high realism was designed to produce could not recognize its own involvement with the past. Hawthorne and the Brahmin intellectuals who formulated realism's Americanness were motivated by similar desires to unify and nationalize American culture, yet Hawthorne's attention to history generated an individual and national dialectic of self-making that interrupted high realist orthodoxy. His attraction to Catholic centralization may have been accentuated by the fact that when he wrote The Marble Faun he was an intellectual affiliated with a specific national regime (Pierce's) more than with a localized class, although I have suggested that New England bourgeois leaders also had much in common with the Catholic Church as a disciplinary institution. Ultimately, however, the choice between political repression and participation in a capitalist culture celebrating prosperity left The Marble Faun stranded. Hilda and Kenyon leave Miriam and Donatello to the sinister Roman authorities, religious and militaristic, yet only as an abstract destination can America serve as an alternative that is clearly better.

3

Addictive Reading and Professional Authorship

There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away Nor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing PoetryThis Traverse may the poorest take Without oppress of TollHow frugal is the Chariot That bears the Human soul.

A Word dropped careless on a Page May stimulate an eye When folded in perpetual seam The Wrinkled Maker lie Infection in the sentence breeds We may inhale Despair At distances of Centuries From the Malaria-

-Emily Dickinson, Poem 1263

-Emily Dickinson, Poem 1261

These poems, both written in 1873, embody two important figurations of reading. 1 Poem 1263 has been more frequently reprinted, including on posters. It celebrates reading as a form of transport: armchair adventuring but not mere escapism, since the "soul" rather than some lesser faculty is the traveler. This poem is so closely identified with a certain reverently enthusiastic view of culture that it can hardly be read except as a pious incantation. Even the meter is regular and conservative, the closing rhyme of "soul" with "Toll" among Dickinson's most conventional. The evocation of a cultural heritage that readers can explore solicits their admiration for frigates and coursers and especially for the paradoxical combination of age and ageless ness that they signify, implying that the "Human soul" which is the subject matter of culture as well as its addressee is both long-lasting in time and untransformed by history-still borne by chariot as late as 1873. The poem celebrates reading as a form of uplifting acculturation that grants rich and poor alike access to a transcendent realm of imagination. In contrast, poem 1261 images the relationship between writer and reader as an unregulated and potentially dangerous act of transmission. The Wrinkled Maker who carelessly dropped a Word seems alien, distant, and a bit sinister, very different from any genial keeper of the realm of Frigates, Coursers, and Chariots, and his being "folded in perpetual seam"

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94 Reading fOT Realism makes a book into a burial place. The poem ends abruptly and dismally, the dash that sometimes lends animation to Dickinson's poems instead marking frustration and bleakness. Poem 1261 is the obverse of poem 1263: if reading can acculturate and uplift, then it can also pollute. Poem 1261'S warier account of reading revealingly figures it as a physical and mechanical process undertaken by a body. In the first stanza, the word's stimulation of an eye reduces reading to a rudimentary physiological response. "Stimulate" suggests not only the word's role as visual sensory input but also its power to agitate a reader. In the second stanza, inhalation presents reading as an act of internalization, also projecting a reader who is vulnerable and somewhat passive: her eye is stimulated, she inhales involuntarily. Thoroughly in keeping with contemporary discourses about reading (although these would shift significantly in the late 1880s and 1890s), poem 1263, which celebrates reading, presents the reader as primarily spiritual or mental-a "soul"-and the book as a vehicle safely subordinated to the soul's purposes. Poem 1261, which considers reading's potential for destructiveness, instead presents reading as a physical process of internalization that endangers readers, and it dissolves the book into words that have not been worked into a vehicle that can safely carry readers, but instead have been "dropped careless on a Page." What Dickinson figures as inhalation was more often figured by writers and reviewers as oral ingestion, and this idea that things read were taken into the body formed the basis for an important set of distinctions between realism and other kinds of fiction. During the 1850S Hawthorne had confronted a set of heavily nationalistic discourses that were used to distinguish realism from the romance. These discourses articulated realism with modernity, democracy, science, and Protestant-inflected secularity, whereas they articulated the romance with the outmoded, the aristocratic, the superstitious, and the Catholic or pagan. They also relied on a polemical understanding of the typical to ground realism's superior right of national representation. These nationalist discourses distinguishing realism from the romance continued to make appearances, but especially in the 1870S and 1880s realism was often defined against sensational and sentimental fiction instead, usually on the grounds that these latter forms were addictive but realism was not. Hawthorne had contrasted the "bread, and beef, and ale" of the Dutch masters (and Trollope) to the "made-dishes" of the Italians, emphasizing the artifice and unhealthy richness of the latter. 2

Addictive Reading and Authorship 95 Reviewers distinguishing realism from sentimentalism and sensationalism similarly identified realism with food or medicine and equated the other forms with alcohol, opiates, coffee and tea, or desserts. By this reasoning, to read realism was to take in something that would nourish or heal, whereas to read sentimental or sensational novels was to indulge an artificial and debased appetite that would never really be satisfied. Then as now, this complex of ideas registered the commercialization of culture: the emergence of a profit-driven culture industry that benefited from the public's dependency on vicarious emotions and excitements. Addiction figures the compulsiveness of some consumer desires and the possibility of their being induced, the possibility that the market can stimulate desires rather than simply fulfill them. Of course, given the cultural construction of all desires, the sorting of natural from unnatural desires is always an ideological project. 3 In the nineteenth century as in the present, women were thought to be more susceptible to addictive consumerism, partly because of their emerging role as the designated consumers for their households and partly because of their having been relegated to private life and private emotion in the first place. Since sentimentalism was mainly identified with women readers and writers, the charge that it was addictive displaced the intertwined effects of commercialism and consumerism onto women's culture, and it also turned the emotional sensitivity demanded of women into a pathology that required male regulation and that justified keeping women out of public life and stigmatizing those who transgressed: a devious cycle of patriarchal disciplining. The construction of realism as a nonaddictive variety of fiction was probably the most important means by which realism was fitted to be an object of connoisseurship. The emotional discipline that differentiated men's cultural consumption from women's also differentiated the cultural consumption of privileged groups from that of people usually lumped together as "lower." Mirroring the imaginative embourgeoisement of realist readers was the professionalization of realist authors, which was supposed to guarantee that they provided healthy, public-spirited, nonaddictive works of fiction. After considering the Temperance movement and Henry James's The Bostonians as important intertexts for high realism's class politics, I will, in this chapter, take up Rebecca Harding Davis's John Andross and a group of novels about women doctors as texts that explore the misogyny involved in the Atlantic group's ideas about readerly connoisseurship and

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authorial professionalism. Discourses about readerly addiction and the version of authorial professionalism designed to "treat" it exemplify the ways in which the construction of high realism symbolically and practically helped to reproduce relations of class, gender, and race dominance. Since high realism was also committed to forging a relationship with "the people" and deploying feminized capacities for observation and empathy, however, its role in reproducing class and gender dominance was complicated by its imaginative and epistemological reliance on the subject-positions of populations it was designed to marginalize. Tastes and Appetites According to reviewers in the Atlantic group, a good book was nourishing, which meant that it was assimilated into the substance of the reader rather than merely being used up for energy or nervous stimulation in the short term.4 Such criteria were used to differentiate books that were like wholesome food from books that were like condiments, spices, sauces, and desserts, as well as from books that were like alcohol and drugs. Middlemarch, wrote one critic approvingly, "can not be devoured at a sitting. It is not dessert after dinner. The reading of it is a luxury, but it is an intellectual luxury, and it requires for its highest enjoyment a mind of some culture, and a mind in a good mood for thought."s Overturning this discrimination, a Nation reviewer more disturbingly compared the "novel-reading mania" with "the morphine or chloral mania," succinctly summing up the potential of all novel reading to be addictive, though writing in the particular context of French fiction and the "sensation novel."6 Henry Giles, as early as :1860, Similarly characterized sentimental works as "mental opiates or stimulants" that produce "intellectual impotence or intellectual inebriety," but he assured readers that the literature of "veracity and reality" was a healthy alternative to them. 7 Indeed, a realist novel or a novel of "quiet power" might be not only nonaddicting, but even an "antidote" to "being carried away by ... sensational novels," as one reviewer wrote approvingly of Dinah Mulock's novels. 8 James McCosh warned in :1880 that all reading was potentially addictive-"Actuallife seems dull and prosaic after mingling in so much more stimulating scenes ... [T]he demand will be for a stronger and yet a stronger draught, with new and more spicy ingredients" -but that "works dealing with realities" were comparatively safe, presumably because they offered little or no stimulation. 9

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Although addiction actually cut across social boundaries in the nineteenth century, just as it does today, many discussions of addictive fiction marked it as a vice of the socially inferior, as the passage advocating the serious but luxurious ingestion of Middlemarch hinted. For example, James Russell Lowell's 1:875 review of a collection of James's stories emphasized the refinement of his effects by declaring that "Those who must have their intellectual gullets tingled with the fiery draught of coarse sensation must go elsewhere for their dram; but whoever is capable of the aroma of the more delicate vintages will find it here."l0 The difference between a "draught" or "dram" and a "vintage" whose "aroma" is savored is obviously class-marked: the antithesis casts lower-class drinking and reading as physical, compulsive ("must") activities, whereas bourgeoisidentified drinking and reading provide the more ethereal pleasure of connoisseurship, imaged as a barely physical "aroma." A North American Review writer similarly implied that drawing-room culture had been brought low by the presence of Zola's books in polite society, showing "that the old infection still asserts itself in the appetite-taste it can not be called-which craves a stimulant for passion, and is tormented with prurient 10ngings."11 Taking in nutritious substances for the sake of health and taking the occasional highly refined stimulant as a tonic and a treat for the palate were the hallmarks of bourgeois ingestion; gorging one's self without discipline on nutritionally empty substances and strong, palate-numbing stimulants was the hallmark of lower-class ingestion. I say "lower-class" because dangerous idleness rather than hard work in exploitative conditions was usually invoked to characterize the social groups who had addictive appetites. It is impossible to tell in these passages whether the addictive relationship is produced mainly by the kind of substance taken, the kind of person taking it, or the way it is taken: an imprecise class hierarchy creates high and low versions of each. These analogies articulated high realism with the Temperance movement insofar as both required subscribers to forego certain powerful but dangerous experiences and embrace self-control and quieter pleasures instead (or more refined pleasures, a point at which the promotion of realism diverged from Temperance). As the metaphoricity of the distinction between a fiery draught and a delicate vintage suggests, though, the patrollers of literary emotionality had a difficult time differentiating safe from dangerous kinds of fiction. Temperance reformers (in spite of the name) urged

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followers to abstain from alcohol, which could at least be easily recognized even if it wasn't always easily resisted, whereas proponents of realism had to teach readers to recognize sentimental and sensational effects as well as to deplore them. Dime novels were marked by their publishers and packaging, but reviewers in the Atlantic and its kindred magazines could take these books' inferiority for granted. More dangerous were the incursions of sentimentalism and sensationalism in novels put out by respectable firms in the same packaging as their more "literary" works, as in the case of Harper Brothers' editions of M. E. Braddon and Wilkie Collins. In charging certain kinds of reading materials with addictiveness, then, the Atlantic group (with weak support from Harper's, which exempted its house authors from these criticisms) was not primarily disciplining the reading practices or preferences of the working class, who was not its target readership anyway. It was, rather, consolidating the link between class and culture, and hinting at the danger and especially the shame involved for its readers in participating in the pleasures of social groups it constructed as inferior (who were related to the working class but not equivalent to it, as I will discuss). To forego addiction was to exert the kind of self-control that was supposed to bring success under capitalism, which meant that one endorsed the system and identified with its dominant culture, differentiating one's self from the people who failed in the system (or whom the system failed). In this respect, the promotion of realism and the Temperance movement had similar ideological functions. Many analysts of the Temperance movement have pointed out that its philosophy centered on self-restraint and prudence, the qualities that Max Weber attributed to the entrepreneurial personality type created by capitalism.12 Even some people who had no history of alcohol abuse joined Temperance societies just because they provided a fellowship devoted to social self-improvement. According to Harry Levine, taking the Temperance pledge became a public sign of social ambition, commitment to hard work, and self-denial, whereas intemperance was often invoked as an explanation for why certain persons or certain sectors of the population, especially immigrants, did not become assimilated and did not live out the American Dream,u Considered as a metonymic declaration of bourgeois values, the Temperance pledge had a powerful social coding, and a taste for realism advertised similar maturity and self-control,14 Daughters of privileged families who cried over senti-

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mental novels, immigrant groups who congregated in taverns, and slowmoving southerners, black and white, were all constructed outside the ethics of work and self-restraint that entitled people to independent economic success or even security.1S The disease conception of addiction was widely recognized in the nineteenth century, although then as now it existed in uneasy tension with the idea that exerting will power could head off addiction or cure it. 16 Most interestingly, constructing addiction as a disease meant that it could also be considered an epidemic, which in turn could be figured as blighting the social organism rather than individuals. Surprisingly enough, the following description relegating alcoholism to a symptom of a more general social disease was written by a man identified only as an inmate in an "inebriate asylum" in New York State: There is a disease of the nervous organism, almost peculiar to this people [Americans], which sprang from seeds of self-indulgence sown in the moral, social, and physical lives of our great-grandparents, and which has acquired fearful aggravations of extension and virulence with each succeeding generation. It assumes a form painfully familiar to the physician and the moralist, in that craving for intellectual and physical "sensation" which expresses itself, without blush or tremor, in the popular performances, displays, and disclosures, of the pulpit and the theatre, literature and art, the press and the criminal courts, the costumes of the women, the prodigality and license of private entertainment, and the graphic eccentricities of popular sports. It does not necessarily take the direction of rum,-it may find relief in the intemperate, passionate pursuit of a vocation or an agitation .... If God, in his mercy, had not suffered me to escape by the stormy Jordan of rum, I might have been a spasmodic editor, a fanatical demagogue, a champion revivalist, a plug-ugly, a lecturer for the Washingtonian Total Abstinence Society, or a-Fenian martyr. 17 Alcohol, by this logic, becomes merely one material, ingestible form of an excitation that can be gotten in a myriad of other ways, all of which involve extreme or uncontrolled behavior-even on behalf of Temperance. Moreover, addictiveness spans the "intellectual" (or emotional, or spiritual) and the "physical"; the term "sensation," like the term "feeling," plays on the ambiguous relationship between physical and mental experiences.

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Understood according to this model, alcohol addiction was not just an analogy for the emotional addictions provided by sensationalism ("sensation" being invoked by the writer in a way that seems distinct from representations of sentimentalism). Rather, alcohol and sensation fiction were equally the instruments by which the American population sustained its addiction to emotional excitation. Of course, once addictiveness had become a shibboleth, it could be used to criticize any zealous pursuit, but the metaphor especially lent itself to such pursuits as were not in harmony with the bourgeois ethic of careful economic husbandry and moderate success through hard work. I8 The idea that not only patently destructive behaviors but also reform activities were diseased excesses makes clear that social activism was as great a lapse from proper capitalist behavior as personal degeneration was. Kenneth W. Warren has pointed out that the charge of sentimentalism was similarly elastic in that it could be used to discredit "any apparently unrealistic political project," including projects promoting racial egalitarianism after the demise of Reconstruction. 19 Apparently reversing this diagnosis, however, E. P. Whipple's article "Mr. Hardhack on the Sensational in Literature and Life" attributes the spread of sensationalism to an excess of capitalist values. Comparing sensation fiction to "whiskey for the mind," Whipple claimed that "it is your ordinary, matter-of-fact, bread-and-butter, practical people, rather than your romantic and poetic ones, who are swindled by sensations. The sensational is a revolt against the humdrum, through the means of vulgar wonder." Whipple considers a variety of phenomena to manifest the public's craving for the sensational, including panoramic paintings, spiritualism, revolutionary scientific theories, and stock speculations. And sensationalism mainly corrupts, in Whipple's view, by emphasizing the consumption of relatively immediate, material pleasures over the long-term pursuit of respectability, good character, tasteful pleasures, and intangible spirituality.20 Ironically, Whipple believes that these antibourgeois behaviors have been bred, or at least exacerbated, by late nineteenth-century capitalism's invitations to profiteering. The very example of speculators who have made money "so rapidly, so easily, and in such a splendid sensational way" corrupts people. 21 The ability to subordinate short-term satisfactions or gains to long-term, more modest, but more secure satisfactions-the kind of rational, prudential relationship to gain that keeps a capitalist system running smoothly-has been corrupted by the prospect of undeserved, imme-

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diate gain through speculation, creating a contradiction between the ideology that had acculturated an earlier phase of capitalism and a new kind of capitalist opportunity. In Whipple's account, sensationalism becomes a perversion of masculinecoded worldly and ambitious motives, but feminine-coded sentimentalism was also characterized by the predominance of short-term gratifications. A Putnam's reviewer noted in 1855 that sentimental novels "work upon the sensibilities, and not upon the conscience or the will; and the good feelings they excite, by their highly-colored pictures, are about as lasting as the fine friendships a fellow forms over his cups, or the religion he puts on during a stress of weather at sea."22 In addition to the fact that addiction creates an escalating desire for its object, reviewers who used the analogy made much of this idea that addictive substances produced short-lived, intense emotional experiences that were not incorporated into the rest of life. Developing a taste constituted a long-lasting improvement of the self's capacities, whereas feeding an appetite was an interruption of the mental and spiritual self's jurisdiction. However, comparing certain books with addicting substances and certain motives for reading with appetites was merely an attempt to contain and exorcise whatever was dangerous about any emotional experience provided by reading.23 The intractability of this problem can be explained in part by the circumstance that the framework which formulated the dangers of emotionally intense reading was the very same framework which required fiction to appeal to readers' feelings as part of its function of social and moral education. This framework was a loose public adaptation of Common Sense Philosophy, a school of thought whose historical emergence and whose construction of moral responsiveness had important consequences for the construction of reading as potentially addictive. Common Sense Philosophy underlay most mid-nineteenth-century understandings of fiction's moral functioning and purpose in the United States. 24 In keeping with capitalism, it envisioned the self as a creature of strictly individual interests and pleasures, and it presumed that socialization and moral behavior could result only if people exerted self-control to curb those interests and pleasures. The idea that people might identify their satisfaction or development with the satisfaction or development of a collectivity was excluded by this framework-perhaps another reason why nineteenth-century novelists were obsessed with depicting ethically moti-

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vated self-sacrifice. Once the self had been posited as somehow antithetical in its interests to any larger community, and once pleasure had been posited as merely an individual and rudimentary, even animalistic, response, pleasure risked seeming fundamentally selfish, antisocial, and debasing, so that it could be made acceptable only by being stringently directed or refined out of its immediacy. According to reviewers who disapproved of them, sentimental and sensation fiction broke down the civilizing process by offering immediate pleasures without requiring any moral routing for them. (As I will discuss below, the moral routings outlined in many works considered to be sentimental were dismissed under the heading of didacticism.) Jean-Christophe Agnew has suggested that Common Sense Philosophy was a defensive response to the emergence of "market culture": the interpenetration of capitalist markets and the domain of moral and aesthetic culture that was supposed to regulate or offset them. 25 His discussion suggests that the reason why Common Sense philosophers were so intent on rooting out any self-seeking from the traditions they inherited from Locke and Hobbes was because of the disturbance created by people's self-seeking in the marketplace, even though as I have suggested the Common Sense philosophers retained the same starkly monadic conception of the individual on which Locke, Hobbes, and capitalism relied. Common Sense Philosophy arose in England when national markets began to merge into a global system, so that practical social life increasingly attested to the fungibility of all goods and services, their place within a network of relative values that was virtually unbounded. As a result of this change, the human participant in the market was increasingly conceptualized as a complex of discrete economic interests and, moreover, as a prudent dissimulater who was apt to conceal these interests, someone who jeopardized the ethical framework of shared civil life.26 In contrast, Common Sense emphasized the unity of feeling and moral action. Thomas Reid proposed that "every man of real honour [and Reid subsequently notes that another name for 'honour' is 'the moral sense'] feels an abhorrence of certain actions, because they are in themselves base, and feels an obligation to certain other actions, because they are in themselves what honour requires, and this independently of any consideration of interest or reputation." This direct, emotionally intense response proceeds from a principle in man [sic], a common moral sense or faculty, "which, when he acts according to it, gives him a consciousness of

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worth, and, when he acts contrary to it, a sense of demerit."2? This representation of moral responsiveness assured Common Sense Philosophy's adherents "of the adequacy of man's senses, the efficacy of his intentions, the rationality of his judgments, the immediacy of his sympathies, and the mutuality of his relations with others." As a result, it was an "authoritative denial of the market's contradictions, indeed of all contradictions other than those concealed within the heart of an unregenerate sinner."28 Whereas the feelings elicited by sentimentalism and sensationalism were demeaned for being too immediate, too raw (in Levi-Strauss's sense: not having been submitted sufficiently to cultural processes), aimed at a presocial or antisocial self, realism's social platform corresponded strikingly with the Common Sense tradition's precepts about how imaginative reading could help discipline and refine the moral sense. 29 For even though everyone possessed a common sense, like other innate faculties this sense needed to be cultivated and disciplined. In particular, fiction's power to create characters could cultivate altruism: readers could exercise the power to feel with and for others, testing their moral judgment and shoring up their impulses to moral action on the basis of vicarious experience. Henry James's unsigned review of Trollope's Can You Forgive Her?, a title that demands readers' moral participation, applied this criterion in 1865, holding that "We trust to novels to maintain us in the practice of great indignations and great generosities."30 Adam Smith's Theory of the Moral Sentiments (1759; revised 1790) more elaborately formulates the moral effects of sympathy and identification, proposing that our moral response to an action-say, a benevolent action-doesn't proceed from an independent faculty, but rather from our capacity to identify with everyone involved in it: First, we sympathize with the motives of the agent; secondly, we enter into the gratitude of those who receive the benefit of his actions; thirdly, we observe that his conduct has been agreeable to the general rules by which those two sympathies commonly act; and, last of all, when we consider such actions, as making a part of a system of behavior which tends to promote the happiness either of the individual or of the society, they appear to derive a beauty from this utility, not unlike that which we ascribe to any well-contrived machine. 31 Visceral responses were most important to Smith, but as his last criterion suggests, he moored these responses in people's access to a standard of

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public judgment represented by an internal spectator who conveys either "what are, or ... what ought to be ... the sentiments of other people." Through this concept of the internal spectator, Smith makes an appeal to an imagined consensus that has been weighted to privilege the judgments of the most cultivated persons and hallowed by the time over which the consensus has developed.32 Only Smith made sympathy into the sole apparatus of moral judgment, but mainstream Common Sense philosophers also believed that sympathy, like the creation of psychological associations among concepts and experiences, could be used to develop the moral sense. Smith's scheme of multiple identifications, one of which is an identification with some kind of social consensus, is wonderfully suited to the omnisciently narrated novel that was to become the main tradition of nineteenth-century fiction. And fiction, Smith implies, might be more effective heuristically than more abstract or theoretical moral works, because particular moral responses are more fundamental than the axioms we derive from them: When we read in history or romance the account of actions either of generosity or of baseness, the admiration which we conceive for the one, and the contempt which we feel for the other, neither of them arise from reflecting that there are certain general rules which declare all actions of the one kind admirable, and all actions of the other contemptible. Those general rules, on the contrary, are all formed from the experience we have had of the effects which actions of all different kinds naturally produce on US. 33 It is a small step from this passage to the principle, often aligned with the promotion of realism, that overt didacticism even blunted a work's moral effect by constraining or preempting readers' responses. Indeed, an American author's reluctance to point out morals for readers was sometimes granted an informally democratic value, as if openly espousing a conviction

or supporting a reform w.ere authoritarian, whereas subtler ways of inducing readers to reaffirm the culture's central truths allowed for diversity or dissent. 34 Of course, the model presumed that no inducements were needed, if realities were represented fairly: the well-regulated sensibility would feel moral truths and act on them without prompting. No clearer example of this process's literary embodiment can be imagined than the scene in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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(1884) in which Huck, his sensibility quickened and purified by his time on the river, decides to brave the "laws" of heaven and earth in order to do what he thinks best: help his friend Jim, a slave, escape. Twain plays on the irony that the person whose moral weathervane is the surest is a social outcast, but his representation of visceral moral responsiveness is in the best tradition of Common Sense Philosophy. And as Jonathan Arac has pointed out, in order to produce this effect Twain omitted any representation of the support Huck's position would have received from widely disseminated American and Christian principles of human equality, reproduced in forums such as Independence Day speeches. 35 To present Huck's choice as inculcated, or as the activation of an option for belief that his culture had already produced, would have undermined the value of Huck's moral response, from a Common Sense point of view. A paragon of moral sensibility, if of nothing else, vagabond Huck had feelings that were moral responses and issued in immediate actions. Uneasily balancing the idea that everyone possessed, constitutionally, a power of discriminating morality from immorality against the idea that the power could be disciplined or deranged, exercised or allowed to lapse, the Common Sense theory of moral behavior both denied and proclaimed the social construction of the self. It put enormous pressure on society and literature to naturalize a moral consensus-or moralized hegemony-that in fact was painstakingly inculcated, and to pass off the internalization of complicated schemes of value and virtue as the organic development of individual tastes and individual moral responses according to a common human pattern. Fiction that would satisfy this philosophy had to fulfill a somewhat contradictory prescription: to produce meanings under the guise of displaying what was already self-evident; to elicit particular emotional responses and sympathetic identifications that would support conventional moral judgments without shepherding readers too obviously; and to convince readers that the world of fiction was a truer, better regulated, heuristically superior, and sometimes more emotionally gratifying version of reality without allowing fiction to become a substitute for reality. Until the emergence in the 1890S of an influential rhetoric about fiction reading that legitimated escapism, the subject of chapter 4, most U.S. high-culture writers and critics struggled with these impossible, conflicting imperatives of the Common Sense-derived paradigm. In particular, the problem of literature's becoming a substitute for reality rather than an accessory to

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it preoccupied Atlantic-group reviewers in the guise of the potential for novel readers to become addicted to fiction, craving sensations and sentiments that would never be properly processed into moral judgments and applied to life. The charge that sentimental, sensational, and also didactic works were not processed by readers as thoroughly as better books also informed critics' concern that authors should leave readers with some "work" to do. Henry James raised this issue squarely in an 1866 essay on George Eliot, whom he (like many other reviewers of the period) faulted for her intrusive narration: "the writer makes the reader very much as he makes his characters. When he makes him ill, that is, makes him indifferent, he does no work; the writer does all. When he makes him well, that is makes him interested, then the reader does quite half the labor."36 On this basis James also found Wilkie Collins to be much more respectable than Mary E. Braddon, since to read his work requires "very much the same intellectual effort as to read Motley or Froude."37 In a similar spirit, the North American Review conflated idleness and ingestion in claiming that most novel readers read very much as children sit and have sugarplums fed to them, whereas " [i]t is in quite another spirit and with another purpose that great works of imagination are approached by those who can appreciate them."38 The notion that a book's difficulty, which requires the reader's work, is a measure of its excellence has not gone away, but the specter of readers gobbling novels as idle children do sugarplums hints at the special cultural significance that the work of readers had in the late nineteenth century. It might be considered the last and most emphatic form taken by resistance to an emergent cultural formation valorizing leisure and consumerism. Nina Baym observed that even in antebellum culture, the prevalence of solitary reading had contradictory implications: if flit strengthens the home against outside forces, it also weakens the social character of the home itself," privatizing the individuals both within the family and in relation to the rest of sociallife. 39 Whereas high culture had traditionally emphasized reading's seriousness, aligning it with production and work, its emerging character as an activity governed by a new understanding of leisure as a domain of privatized, optional activities meant that reading would be nonwork, play, escape. 40 It is possible that the realist emphasis on creating a literature that replicated the daily life of typical readers was partly intended to buttress the seriousness and social relevance of literature. If reading was not

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exactly work for most readers, then at least it could be about work: about the dilemmas of businessmen, about the factory system, about the effort of making moral choices. And if the symbiotic relationship of reading to the rest of life was breaking down (understood in specifically moral terms), then the even tighter harnessing of literature to daily life-so that fiction virtually merged with the conduct books popular throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-was another way to keep it intact. This is not to say that consumerism was a new problem. As Colin Campbell and Terry Lovell have separately emphasized, capitalism has always depended on consumption as well as production and the accumulation of capital. Lowell suggests that people have often reconciled the conflicts between these divergent imperatives by compartmentalizing them: by conceiving of work and saving as activities temporally prior to buying and independent of it, for instance, or by distinguishing producing from consuming classes. However, Lovell's analysis of British culture suggests that in the latter half of the nineteenth century "the virtues fostered in production" were "perhaps paramount," which meant that overtly consumeristic attitudes were still somewhat illicit and that the culture had to make adjustments before it could assimilate them.41 Whipple's resistance to the easy money of speculation was an early (1860) version of many Americans' disapproval of the various forms of profit that could be made, not by work or management or owning capital, but by taking advantage of monopolies, shifts in the money supply and in regulation, and increasingly abstract forms of stock speculation, all of which arguably eroded the public valuation of production that had made capitalism appear to produce social cohesion. Privatized, optional leisure increased the danger that reading experiences might be cut off from the rest of life; the novel's commodity status compounded this danger. As I emphasized in chapter 1, not only were books overtly advertised, but also the book reviews that presented themselves as ongoing arbitrations of cultural worth and that often condemned commercialism were themselves implicated in the advertising strategies of high-culture publishing houses, so that Atlantic-group magazines functioned both as competitors against each other and as collaborators in sustaining a shared market for themselves and their publishers. Even within the accepted parameters of what counted as natural, how could anyone facing these circumstances distinguish a real from an artificial desire, or an

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intellectually independent taste from a manipulable, excessive appetite? The stigmas of being severed from collective life, being consumed at leisure, and being stimulated by advertising tactics, all of which high-culture critics applied to works of sensational and sentimental fiction, threatened to attach themselves to virtually all fiction-reading. Realist Authorship as Professionalism The lines between legitimate and illegitimate kinds of fiction could not be clearly drawn if they were premised on relations to the market, yet of course it was the task of critics in the Atlantic group to make countless discriminations that would preserve literature from commercial contamination. The formation that unified most of these discriminations was professionalism, which pitted professional authors' high-cultural addressivity, special authority, and public responsibility against their works' status as commodities.42 It is easy to imagine why authors would have found the emerging formation of professionalism inviting. For one thing, the ideology of professionalism included some residual antimarket elements, such as a work ethic based on craftsmanship and "pre-industrial ideals of community bonds and community responsibility," which helped satisfy the social imperative for authors to distance themselves from capitalism. 43 The romantic model of authorship, emphasizing meritocratic outcroppings of genius and the power of the imagination, also found some expression in the idea that the expertise claimed by the professional amounted to more than specialized knowledge. Moreover, the ideology of professionalism allowed authors to rewrite their economic situation. Most fiction writers aspiring to high culture depended on sales to magazines and to book publishers. Given these publishers' plentiful signals about the kinds of contributions they sought, the position of authors submitting manuscripts to them might therefore be compared to that of independent contractors, or to that of vendors who sold incompletely processed materials to a limited number of buyers in a finishing industry: publication, with its attendant processes of editing, typesetting, illustrating, printing, advertising, and distributing. The crucial final processing by the publishing industry meant that there was not really much resemblance between authors' relations with readers and a physician's or attorney's personal, private, and very likely enduring relationship with a client. Nevertheless, the intimate relation to the text experienced by

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novel readers allowed authors and sympathetic critics to play down the intermediaries and figure the interchange between author and reader as a professional consultation. Fiction writers' embrace of professionalism was an attempt to resolve ideologically the contradiction between their dependence on an industry and its market structure, on the one hand, and their ideals of intellectual independence and unmediated communion with their readership, on the other. The model of professionalism also conveniently combined the high social status presumed by high realism's being shaped by connoisseurship with a public mission that could be turned to nationalist purposes. Magali Sarfatti Larson's Marxist study of professionalism argues that early professions pursued "collective ... social mobility" by creating a new kind of marketable possession, expertise, that in turn grounded "a new form of structured inequality: it was different from the earlier model of aristocratic patronage, and different also from the model of social inequality based on property and identified with capitalist entrepreneurship."44 During the late nineteenth century, the era in which Labor and Capital emerged as monolithic forces in public imaginings, professionals presented themselves as being members of neither camp, but rather as serving the public alongside this capitalist structure. 45 It was even implied that professionals were not motivated by profit. Instead, their members assigned fees that would enable practitioners to sustain themselves respectably while performing their work in the interest of the public good. 46 Casting itself as a meritocratic system, early professionalism manifested the contradictory political valences that attend all attempts at implementing status distinctions in a democracy politically committed to equal opportunity but economically structured to produce differential access to resources. 47 Some of these contradictory valences derive from the fact that professions depend on ruling groups for their legitimation but pursue somewhat autonomous social and economic interests. In keeping with this analysis, professional authors sought to secure some of the status privileges created by capital, but they found their public mission in the more or less loyal critique of capitalism's excesses, a position that posited culture as a vantage point outside society's economic life. Professionalism could be defined by three factors, only two of which applied to authorship.48 The exception was that a profession generally had control over its own credentialing procedures and set its own fees, whereas

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authors did not. As I have suggested, the work of book reviewers (many of whom were creative writers as well) in teaching readers to sort legitimate from illegitimate kinds of fiction was the closest authors could come to approximating degree programs, apprenticeships, and credentialing examinations. The emergence of authors' leagues and literary agents late in the century was an advance in authors' consolidation as a group, but these innovations were tools in authors' negotiations with publishers, not really comparable to better-established professions' means of self-regulation; neither did they offer direct economic advantages on the model of labor unions' strikes and collective bargaining sessions. The other two factors, the possession of expertise and a commitment to public service, were dimensions of authorship that were stressed by authors and reviewers during this era, usually drawing on analogies between authors and physicians, who exemplified the new and more powerful form professionalism began to take after midcentury.49 Expertise is a kind of knowledge manifested by specialized skills such as prescribing medicines or performing surgery but not reducible to them. As an Atlantic author put it in 1873, the physician's true work is done, not by "drug or knife, but by means of his counsels, and, above all, by force of his manner.... It is the doctor cures us, not the doctor's physic."50 Even though professionals must be trained and tested in order to be credentialed in specific fields of knowledge, it is the very nature of expertise to endow the expert with broad discretionary powers and to inhere somehow in the person, judgment, and insight, of the expert, rather than to be a clearly alienable commodity or service. 51 To this extent, professionalism is a special case of the routinization of charismatic authOrity that Max Weber has described. 52 In assimilating the activity of realists to that of medical professionals, realism's interpreters drew sometimes on the model of the family physician and at other times on the model of the medical researcher, which meant that the realists' expertise was treated sometimes as counsel and sometimes as scientific knowledge. But even accounts of realism that did not emphasize scientific impersonality tended to emphasize detachment as a hallmark of professional behavior, one that distinguished realism from certain garrulously narrated eighteenth-century novels as well as from sentimental novels, whose narrators often asked directly for their readers' sympathies. This detachment marks a shift away from the formation of

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"disciplinary intimacy" that Richard Brodhead has identified in antebellum literary culture, which was modeled on the loving counsel of a parent that a child internalized because of her identification with the parent. 53 Since disciplinary intimacy was especially the function of mothers, in becoming professionals who withheld their personalities rather than quasi parental counselors authors distanced themselves from this feminine coding. Robert Grant's comparison between an author and an attorney exemplifies the way in which authors' narrative restraint was made a sign of their commitment rather than their indifference: Absorption in one's own profession is necessarily essential to success; but in the case of lawyers, for instance, it would scarcely be maintained that most impassioned harangues have not been made by advocates but very little moved at heart by the misfortunes of those whose cause they represented. Ought not the artist as an individual to retain equipoise in order to be judicious ?54 Grant's own emotional restraint is clearly unimpeachable, witnessed by the inordinate harnessing of his sentiments on this subject within a knotty syntax of negations. And certainly the concept of proper detachment was crucial to professionalism, distinguishing a doctor's or lawyer's potentially intimate knowledge of a client's life from a purely personal and friendly relationship. Narrative distance was not promoted only by admirers of realism, but the realists accomplished its virtual apotheosis, to the extent that T. S. Perry could identify Turgenev as "a realist in the sense of hiding himself" as well as in the sense of practicing "painstaking accuracy."55 In contrast to this unobtrusiveness, G. P. Lathrop described narrative familiarity as unprofessionallaxness: "The result of this gossiping about characters between writer and reader is that the former accomplishes too much of the mere study in the presence of the spectator. This material should be employed, out of sight, in the decoction of a rich vitality for the nourishment of the fictitious individuals, and its function should be hidden from the common eye."56 Howells praised Turgenev in comparable terms: "He seems the most self-forgetful of the story-telling tribe, and he is no more enamored of his creations than of himself; he pets none of them; he upbraids none, you like them or hate them for what they are; it does not seem to be his affair."57 Furthermore, the distancing of authors' narration, like the installation of

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reverent distance between audiences and performers or artists at the BSO and the MFA, promoted silent individual contemplation, a prerequisite for connoisseurship. Lathrop, for instance, called the novel "a refined emanation ... which can be appreciated in silence and solitude only, or with but a chosen listener or two at hand to share the influence."s8 The distance of authors in their capacity as narrators from both characters and readers was also linked to authors' success in creating a freestanding, absorbing fictional world, as opposed to what Henry James called Anthony Trollope's "suicidal satisfaction in reminding the reader that the story he was telling was only, after all, a make-believe."s9 Ironically, seamless illusionism encouraged readers to lose themselves in literature and to separate the experience of fictional situations from the mediating act of reading, even though the danger of readers being too fully and pleasurably absorbed in fiction was also ever-present to realist critics. It is possible that the construction of authorial professionalism was as much a safeguard for some of the dangerous pleasures of fiction as a hedge against them. Because fiction writers were not supposed to speak directly to readers or indulge in metacommentary, realist novels were supposed to provide an illusion of facticity and virtually visual mimesis rather than to reveal or present the struggle of ongoing writing: as Howells put it, "the very highest fiction is that which treats itself as fact . . ."60 This means that the outward signs of realists' expertise had to be subtle, so subtle that literary idealists could charge that realist fiction was not sufficiently worked and transformed, echoing some of the realists' own charges against writers of sentimental and sensation fiction. 61 It was important, then, for realists to establish that not only the readers but also the authors of realist novels worked. An Atlantic reviewer even called James, Crawford, and Howells, whom he identified as "the most distinctly professional novelists in America," "knights of labor" who work all the time but kindly relieve readers from hearing their opinions on every topic-an appropriation of the position of "worker" on behalf of the privileged that the next chapter will explore. 62 Both the proponents of realism and its critics presumed that proper authorial labor would turn reading into an enduring experience rather than a temporary pleasure. The mark of that trans formative labor was an attention to form: not outcroppings of narrative moralizing, but a shaping moral consciousness generally figured as insight. Insight was precisely the kind of expertise that inhered in the person of

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the practitioner. An often-repeated anecdote about Thackeray was that the writer had explained modestly and regretfully that he couldn't understand Robert Browning because he "had no head above his eyes." At this, one of Thackeray's admirers pointed to the immediacy of insight-in keeping with Common Sense philosophers' valuation of visceral moral responsesby avowing that "with such eyes as his he needed none."63 Metaphors of proportion and representativeness were crucial to the discursive elaboration of insight. When Henry James characterized a novelist as someone "upon whom nothing is lost," emphasizing more deliberate control of this faculty than the anecdote about Thackeray did, he clearly did not mean that novelists should accord everything equal attention. 64 The work of realist authors was often defined by selection, making "some one expressive particular serve for all introduction and explanation of a fact."65 Versions of realism that aspired to science implied that the particulars of a novel functioned like a scientific model, distilling each phenomenon down to its principles of operation; the ones devoted to poetic individuality suggested instead that the meaning of details lay in their metonymic association with human experience. An Atlantic discussion of early photography exhibited the latter impulse, which was more common: "How it brings the people who sleep under that roof before us to see their sheets drying on that fence! and how real it makes the men in that house to look at their shirts hanging, arms down, from yonder line! "66 As Howells advised, the" essentials" of an artistic "microcosm" might be "the little things and not the large things."67 In this way of reading, the setting of significant objects (rare or common) among which fictional personages moved were converted into expressions or determinants of their character-hence realism's frequent assimilation to the "novel of character," as opposed to the "novel of incident."68 Unlike Dickinson's "Wrinkled Maker" whose dropped word was an isolated fragment triggering an ocular response, realists asserted the organicity of their activity-insight being a comprehensive rather than subdivisible process-and of the works they produced. George Eliot, for example, referred in 1856 to the "genius which absorbs material, and reproduces it as a living whole, in which you do not admire the ingenuity of the workman, but the vital energy of the producer."69 As in the case of other key tropes and discourses used to distinguish realism, what's important is that they formulated values and problems for most or all parties to a conversation, not that they were applied in consensus. George Eliot, who like James and

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Howells was a spokesperson for organicism, was also an object of competing judgments about her own works' organicism. W. C. Wilkinson, in an 1874 study of her novels to date, averred that her writing was "like a living organism, 'vital in every part.' The syntax tingles to its utmost particle with the fine vibration of an omnipresent life. To take away a word would be vivisection. The lacerated sentence would bleed."70 Conversely, while reviewing Felix Holt in the Nation in 1866, Henry James granted Eliot "microscopic observation" but not the capacity to produce "those great synthetic guesses with which a real master attacks the truth." Not surprisingly, her "deficiency" he attributed to "the feminine mind," manifesting a misogyny whose function I will analyze shortly.71 In keeping with the idea that a passionate commitment to specific reforms could be dismissed as sentimental or sensational, realist professionalism held that it was manipulative to enlist the reader's emotions and sympathies on behalf of any special (Le., identifiable) system of social analysis. This idea detached high realism from its initial development as one of a set of quasi philanthropic institutions, some of which offered particular services to less privileged populations. More precisely, it made the representation of life in other classes (within limits) for a bourgeoisidentified readership the only proper contribution of realism to social reform, which could be advanced only in the individual consciences of readers.72 Professional disinterestedness and mastery required the author not to bring any interpretive system to bear on the reality that was supposedly "observed" and "rendered." As Howells regretfully wrote of Zola, each of his books "is bound to a thesis, but reality is bound to no thesis."73 The "novel of purpose" was granted social usefulness but not usually the highest literary status, and critic after critic reaffirmed that reality was compromised by being viewed in terms of any particular political, scientific, economic, or religious interpretive system. Even Josiah Holland, the deeply Christian editor of the early Scribner's Monthly, implied that particular dogmas-Christian or other-had no place in literature: "goodness in the hands of a literary man must not be of the type that is formed by creeds and institutions, if he would make it interesting. Whether there can be any true goodness outside of these we leave the dogmatist and the casuist to decide."74 The Nation put forth a variant on this theme, one which reiterates the politics of the typical, when one of its reviewers declared that "Sufferings or difficulties exceptional in circumstances and in

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nature ought not to evoke the same interest as are aroused by miseries or perplexities which appeal to wide human experience."7s Whereas Winifred Hughes points out that it was" axiomatic in the sensation novel that crime, evil, and violent or illicit passion have already found their way into ordinary middle-class surroundings," these phenomena did not seem to satisfy the Atlantic group's notion of common or wide experience. 76 As Catherine Belsey has pointed out about common sense, though, piecemeal, empiricist, self-evident truths about the world are highly ideo10gical. 77 What this stricture against polemicism or didacticism refuses is any kind of analysis other than conventional (dominant) wisdom. Since the promoters of realism encouraged people to read for characters' development and their individual decision-making, it seems likely that readers and authors who heeded this stricture and attempted no systematic analysis verified some version of laissez-faire liberalism, a national "reality" that realism implicitly affirmed. 78 For instance, a reviewer praised Rebecca Harding Davis's John Andross for presenting characters who "display natural wills and natural weaknesses, neither erring by rule nor right upon system."79 By this reasoning, even characters were precluded from putting forth systems of analysis that might be treated as intellectual propositions-possible interpretive guides to the represented world-rather than only as reflections on the nature of the characters who put them forth. so Howells made an exception for Tolstoy'S Christian socialism, but in general strictures against didacticism made the evaluation of individual characters the foremost interpretive register of any work of fiction, a practice one might call "ad hominism." The justification for this practice was compounded by authors' professionalization, since the ideology of professionalism itself relied on the idea that individual problems had individual solutions that could be found with the help of professional counsel. S1 Ad hominism affected not only how authors conceived of their works, but also what readers learned from them. The importance of reception in this process can be judged by the fact that many twentieth-century readers find it possible to bypass the register of character and, by bringing reading practices other than ad hominism to bear upon these texts, to produce readings that find relatively systematic ideological effects in them, even though there are seldom traces of such readings in nineteenth-century reviews. The construction of legitimate authorship as professional authorship necessarily distanced realists and other writers embracing professionalism

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from working-class people, who were organizing themselves into trade unions and the comprehensive Knights of Labor, practicing boycotts and strikes against exploitative industrial employers during the same era when authors were eliding their subjection to the publishing industry.82 Ad hominism and the specific downgrading of any fiction endorsing specific reforms exacerbated this distance. They tended to support the status quo, since any systematic analysis pointing toward a definite change would be understood as partisan. Despite Howells's strong support of the anarchists executed for the Haymarket bombing in 1886, and notwithstanding the genuine interest that many other authors affiliated with realism took in the labor movement, any author who assumed professionalism acquired a stake in class privilege and cultural hierarchy. To consider the political sympathies of such authors for workers, reformers, and revolutionaries insincere would be inaccurate and would only replicate the limitations of ad hominist reading practices; however, it is important to recognize that such sympathies were riddled with contradictions. The emphasis on realists' subtlety and refinement discursively created their professional expertise and also confirmed realism's suitability as an object of connoisseurship, as a taste that would manifest an identification with bourgeois culture. However, as I have suggested, not only high realism's identification with bourgeois privilege through professionalism but also its special relationship to a national class mission demanded that it announce a relationship with the "people," a relationship which typically glossed a philanthropic interest in oppressed social groups nationwide as a task and manifestation of good citizenship on the part of the bourgeoisie and its aspirants. Connoisseurship demanded delicacy, but realism's legitimation as a democratic artform and its authenticity as a representation of the real depended on its offering, or simulating, some contact with the ungenteel. An essay in the Critic which specifically compared authors and physicians through the semantic swiveling of the German word Arzt declared that "all the more important works of fiction of our time move, with few exceptions, among the lower spheres of the people, where alone there still survives a direct relation between language and sensation."83 According to this logic, "the people" were somehow more real, or provided more direct access to the real, to the possibility for our sign-systems to correspond to experience (a different analysis from the Marxist idea that the proletariat might have a privileged epistemological standpoint because of their direct

Addictive Reading and Authorship 117 involvement in production). Similarly, Eugene Benson in :1867 revealingly described an imperialistic trade relation between the realists at the center and the "people" at the social peripheries, a relationship in which "[t]hey [the have nots] are to stimulate us by their sympathies; we are to rejoice them and elevate them with the beautiful. They give us life, we give them art; they send us the raw material, we give it back changed, refined, qualified, analyzed, beautified."84 Whether realist fiction was given "back" to the populations it depicted was in question, though. Henry James's Olive Chancellor, a protagonist of The Bostonians (:1886), is a caricature of this impulse to imagine that certain agreeable poor people are more authentic than wealthy ones and that sympathy with them and knowledge of them can redeem one's class privilege by forging a connection with "the people." Like Annie Fields, whose drawing room was the model for Olive's, Olive has been a visitor with Associated Charities; she also supports Temperance, and when the book opens she is dying for contact with "the People," as the novel explicitly reifies them, mimicking Olive's attitude. 85 She takes public transportation in order to mingle with them (B22), and she believes they constitute a "mysterious democracy which Miss Chancellor held that the fortunate classes know so little about, and with which (in a future possibly very near) they will have to count" (B 75). Verena Tarrant, the daughter of a mesmeric healer, seems to Olive to represent the People, which makes Olive all the more taken with the idea of turning Verena's natural gift for public speaking and her commitment to the women's movement into a career as a feminist orator. James clearly points to a kind of thrill-seeking in Olive's obsession with Verena's common origins: [Verena's] past she by no means absolutely deplored, for it had the merit of having initiated Verena (and her patroness, through her agency) into the miseries and mysteries of the People.... She liked to think that Verena, in her childhood, had known almost the extreme of poverty, and there was a kind of ferocity in the joy with which she reflected that there had been moments when this delicate creature came near (if the pinch had only lasted a little longer) to literally going without food. (B :104)

If any more evidence is needed, Olive dismisses Verena's parents as vulgar but calls the disadvantaged people she prefers the "real people" (B :167).

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Because Olive is identified with specific reforming intentions, she cannot be a figure for a proper high-realist author; however, since James himself was often criticized for elitism, she might be his mocking response to certain ideas about realism's obligations to "the People." What James lambastes as Olive's individual hypocrisy can be seen, in conjunction with the passages from Benson and the Critic's essayist, as a widespread equation between the low, the popular, and the authentic that functioned in much the same way as the notion of the Noble Savage or other figures of imperialistic discourses, projecting onto subjugated populations a kind of authenticity that denizens of the highest civilization hoped to annex or at least memorialize. This discursive formation utterly precludes these subjugated populations from assuming subjective or political centrality, however. The refinement of high realism was jeopardized by this attention to "low" populations insofar as their characteristic literary (or, some contended, subliterary) topoi were "[p]overty and intemperance" and prostitution: poverty and intemperance that in many cases marked male providers' failure to be proper capitalist subjects, and prostitution that marked women's unseemly entrepreneurial efforts.86 Novelists who violated powerful social taboos were generally excoriated despite the justification they drew for their own activities from phYSicians' public-spirited research and their service on Boards of Health, activities which led them to examine disturbing features of the body and the body politic. 87 A North American Review writer, targeting Zola and Ouida, specifically denied that their works were likely to be curative: "This seamy side of things is no more real than the other, and its delineation no more 'realistic' in the sense given to that term .... If there is any remedial influence in an acquaintance with lives of prostitution, how comes it that those who have cultivated that kind of acquaintance and obtained the knowledge which is so potent for defense are not the purest among men ?"88 Knowledge proceeding by moral identification and knowledge proceeding by distanced sociological fact-collecting collided in these debates about realist representation's class-crossings. Most of these judgments were made about works of European literature, since it was not until the 1890S that Crane, Garland, Norris, and other Americans breached bourgeois decorum, but they were made on behalf of an American sense of propriety that clearly limited the kinds of knowledge fiction ought to produce about nonelite populations (leaving aside com-

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pletely the addictions, steep financial rises and falls, and sexual transgressions of the well-to-do). Some political consequences of this taboo against depicting profound social suffering and degradation are signaled by Pauline E. Hopkins's careful balancing of the claims of realism and romance in her "Preface" to Contending Forces (1899), as I noted in the introduction. Emphasizing her impartiality and her commitment to preserving "manners and customs," she nonetheless classifies her novel as a "romance" by its subtitle and characterizes it in the "Preface" as a "daring venture within ... romantic literature" and a portrayal of "the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history" (emphasis Hopkins's).89 Romance, I have suggested, was a rubric with which she had to contend because her narrative dealt with whipping, rape, and lynching-events relatively typical within the history of any family descended from slaves, but events that challenged the aesthetic and emotional muting required by high realist connoisseurship, even though Hopkins was trying to adapt realism's claims on the national reality for her own purposes. In keeping with the generic pressures Hopkins navigated, Warren's Black and White Strangers (1993) suggests that realists' calls for the need to make discriminations, which I would locate as an imperative motivated especially by high-realist connoisseurship, were caught up in the segregationist logic of the late nineteenth century.90 In similar fashion, the realist construction of which kinds of events counted as typical and realistic had the profoundly political potential to relegate experiences of violence, suffering, and oppression to the domain of "cheap" -commodified, manipulative, addictive-fiction. I have been suggesting that the aesthetic of connoisseurship created a conflict between two conceptions of high realism's national, public, but bourgeois-based mission. The conception that suited the aesthetics of connoisseurship better was that realism's mission was simply to help give shape and meaning to the regular, prudent, uneventful life projected for the white bourgeOisie-fulfilling its mandate of public service only through trickle-down effects. It emphasized subject formation, in the guise of "character building," as a function of fiction. The other conception, which invested realism with the obligation of informing privileged classes about other conditions of life in the United States, concealed high realism's proj-

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ect of class consolidation more effectively, but it risked compromising connoisseurship. Although it was often caught up in a rhetoric about the value of seeing from someone else's point of view, it presumed that the effects of this vicariousness could be routed into knowledge and sympathy, not subject formation or drastic social transformation. Put another way, realism's function of shaping bourgeois subjectivity could come into conflict with its use as a conduit of information and sympathy across social boundaries, a conflict that structured most debates about realism that appeared in the Atlantic group during the 1.870S and 1.880s. The ideology of professionalism granted authors the expertise to build their readers' character and to provide them responsibly with information about other social groups, but this ideology could not completely counteract people's worries about fiction's commodity status. Tears, Idle and Otherwise High realism's role in reproducing, justifying, and obscuring class hierarchy, a role organized around the consolidation of the bourgeoisie and the ideological enlistment of its aspirants, helped to reinforce racial hierarchy as well, since segregation and discrimination strictly limited the chances for African Americans and other groups constructed as nonwhite to become bourgeois or to form social elites that were recognized by white Americans. These special relationships to class and race were crucial to high realism's functioning, and it had an equally important relationship to gender, not only as a principle of social hierarchy but as a component of subject formation in authors and others. Not only women were charged with the kind of "charm" in details that failed of masterful penetration, the charge Henry James made about George Eliot. 91 James himself was accused of it more than once. More importantly, as an essay that identified "Literary Virility" with choosing large rather than small materials and treatments made clear, the proper practice of realism depended on (masculine-coded) authors' ability to deploy this feminine propensity for detail, or for small things, but to subordinate it to an implicitly masculine process of transformation that synthesized, generalized, and apportioned. 92 Such conceptions set realistprofessionals the task of disciplining the feminine capacities required for their work as well as disciplining women writers and readers. Hence, realism required mobilizing a feminine-coded felicity with details but subordinating it to a masculine-codt:d process of judgment and

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generalization, and it also required possessing a feminine-coded susceptibility to emotion but subordinating it to a masculine-coded power of restraint. 93 H. Harland, whose nom de plume was Sidney Luska, offered an account of the author's divided role which suggests that proper authorial professionalism involved the activation and containment of unprofessional emotion and suffering: practically, I have to chop myself into two men, one of whom suffers and enjoys in dead earnest, while the other in cold blood examines him, feels his pulse, and notes his symptoms. If the latter individual for a moment loses his equipoise, my work becomes hysterical and incoherent; while if the former forgets his passion, and becomes indifferent, the work will be cold, hard, and artificiaP4 Despite the fact that Harland presents both entities as male, the inner doctor was in an implicitly masculine position, in light of the fact that the professionalization of medicine consolidated men's near-monopoly of it; reciprocally, the inner patient was in an implicitly feminine position, since hysteria had a feminine coding and since emotionality itself was overwhelmingly a feminine virtue and vice. 9S Realism required a relation to suffering, to emotionality, and therefore to the feminine, just as it required a relation to "the people." Moreover, this relation was no more automatic for the female (or nonelite) writer than for the male. In either case it had to be constructed and was subject to profound slippage and disintegration, due to the ongoing self-deconstruction of categories as ideologically laden as gender. 96 For male writers, however, the masculinization of professional authorship was crucial, not only because it tended to keep women writers in inferior positions but also because it protected their own masculinity in spite of the attention they gave in their writings to domestic life, details, emotions, and women characters. Not only sentimentalism's potential for emotional addiction and disease, but also its semiotic and sexual dangers were set in opposition to the practice of implicitly masculine realist professionalism. "Maudlin" and "mawkish," the two adjectives most often applied to sentimentalism, embody links between tears, an important adjunct of sentimentalism, and addiction, female sexuality, and disease. 97 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the adjective "maudlin" alludes to pictures of Mary Magdalene weeping. But despite the New Testament's representation of Mary Mag-

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dalene as a sincere penitent, a prostitute reformed by the love of Christ, the adjective has long been used to disparage. Its oldest definition is "Weeping, tearful, lachrymose," but a second meaning traceable to the seventeenth century is "Characterized by tearful sentimentality; mawkishly emotional; weakly sentimental." And its third meaning, harking back to the metaphors of addiction we have already seen, designates that "stage of drunkenness which is characterized by the shedding of tears and effusive displays of affection." Whereas "maudlin" links sentimentality to women, especially sexually transgressive women, and to drunkenness, "mawkish" links it to disease and to distortions of appetite. The three most usual meanings of "mawkish" are "Inclined to sickness; without appetite"; "Having a nauseating taste; now, having a faint, Sickly flavour with little definite taste"; and "Feebly sentimental; imbued with sickly or false sentiment; lacking in robustness." In 1860, Henry Giles picked up on tears as a mark of sentimentalism, which he identified explicitly with transgressive manifestations of female sexuality. One of Giles's examples of sentimentalism is the behavior of women who weep over the plight of a fictional character onstage but have no sympathy for real-life sufferers in the same situation. Their "weeping," he diagnoses, "was sentimentalism."98 (Almost one hundred years later J. D. Salinger isolated the same contradiction when Holden Caulfield saw a woman refuse to take her little boy to the bathroom while she was crying over a movie. "You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart," Holden concluded; and surely nine times out of ten they're women, toO. 99) Such scenarios dramatize breakdowns between emotional response and moral action that undermine the capacity for audiences' engagement with fictional characters to shape and improve their "moral sense" (which, along with "common sense," Giles mentions by name). But Giles's greatest charge against sentimentalism is that it disguises and prettifies vices. Prominent among them is adultery, which is promoted by "the mystic falsehood or nonsense of sentimentalism that men impose on women, and that women impose on themselves. The difference generally is, that men are conscious of the imposition, and that women generally are not." Phrases like "passional attraction" and "elective affinity" Giles faults for covering up what ought to be exposed as "lust"; a woman who succumbs, he points out, ought to be called "a carnally-minded adulteress,"

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if not labeled by an even more precise "Saxon monosyllable" he dares not mention, presumably "whore."loo In context, then, this implied term "whore" refers not to a woman who sells sex for money, but to a woman who is an amateur provider of short-term, intense adulterous passion, failing to value properly the long-term but more restrained and familiar affections of marriage. Thus, poverty, intemperance, and prostitution, the topoi of the "lower" classes I mentioned before, all relate to this inability to choose long-term pleasures (and duties) over short-term pleasures. Giles's diagnosis that sentimentalism is a "falsehood ... that men impose on women, and that women impose on themselves" seems rather distant from the use of sentimentalism to designate books about angelic dying children and female self-sacrifice. However, romantic love, by which adulterous women are duped in Giles's account, was only a special case of the hyperdeveloped emotional sensitivity that equipped women to find their entire life's mission in domestic relations. Wifely love and maternal love were the safe, long-term forms of this sensitivity, but romantic love was a very specialized, idealized (or sublimated) form that allowed women to look forward to marriage and the onset of sexual relations with their modesty and propriety intact. Romantic love, which both expressed and cloaked the possibility of female sexual desire, required an immense cultural scaffolding that was mainly continuous with the cultural supports for women's generalized emotional intensity, and novels were among those supports: not just novels about adultery, but novels about romantic love and novels depicting and promoting women's emotional absorption in the lives of people around them. The social mission of romantic love was accomplished by a woman's marriage, but the connection that Giles draws between sentimental culture and adultery points to the threatening potential for this emotional complex to persist beyond its approved usefulness. Addictiveness might also figure this possibility that an intense longing would last beyond the occasion it was designed to motivate and sanctify.lOl Female sexual desire or romantic longing-the two could not easily be distinguished-had a place only as incentives for women to marry, and then in this highly sublimated form; once a woman had married, they ought properly either to subside or be comprehended by her husband's will. Indeed, because sentimentalism was figured as idle emotion, emotion that was not properly hooked up to some kind of production, it might constitute a symptom of the increasing rift between the exquisite development

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of private sensibility and the inexorability of capitalist motives in public life, including political life. The political power of "trusts" was widely recognized; a number of scandals attested to the government's dangerous intimacy with business interests; and sinister formations such as "rings" and "machines" also testified to the obsolescence (if not the utter impossibility) of the idea that women might, through their domestic moral influence on individual men, offset the inhumanity or unethical tendencies of public life. Women who were economically able to live out the Cult of True Womanhood or related domestic ideologies embarked on the energetic cultivation of moral-emotional responses which might be left with no effective conduit back to public life, insofar as the individual men they influenced were also likely to seem insignificant in the face of the unwieldy economic and political entities and structures that shaped the nation's public life. If sentimentalism was emotionality that did not issue in lasting moral responses marked by moral action, then increasingly it might characterize the whole emotional life of the women who were isolated in "private" life. Even their reform activities might be dismissed as ineffectual and sentimental. Adultery, which Giles links to the "falsehood" of sentimentality, connects the sexual dangers of sentimentalism with its semiotic ones, since adultery compromises a woman's "truth" as a signifier. As the history of "mawkish" and Giles's focus on women readers' tears might indicate, the changing history of weeping also relates to the semiotic dangers which attended emotional display, and therefore in which women were specially implicated because they have long been Western culture's designated emoters. By the late nineteenth century, tears had not entirely lost their power to convey sincere and morally operative emotion, but the idea that weeping over a book was a distinct and valuable pleasure had become questionable. Anne Vincent-Buffault has noted that in French literature after the midnineteenth century, tears' sincerity is usually marked by some attempt to restrain them, an analysis that holds true for much u.s. and British literature (at least works with high-culture aspirations or origins) during this period as well. She attributes people's growing suspicion of tears to an impatience with their status as a conventionalized sign of emotion, in light of the century's ongoing struggles to reconcile sincere and uniquely individual expressivity with emotionallegibility.lo2 Whereas in the eighteenth century tears had been a "universal language" bringing people together, Vincent-Buffault points to the emergence of the reading practice I have

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called ad hominism when she suggests that in the nineteenth century tears became manifestations of individual psychology and therefore always suspect because of their conventionality.103 The tears, blushes, dropped eyes, and sudden pallors of a female fictional character could either model proper emotional responses for readers or compromise the sincerity of the character's emotion through the very conspicuousness of the display.104 In short, tears most reliably signified the Doppelganger-like imbrication of sincere expression with performance in any utterance or gesture. As Giles emphasizes through his example of the women weeping in the theater over sorrows for which they would have no sympathy in real life, the semiotic instability of tears lay not only in the possibility of faking them but also in the possibility that, because they were a conventional response, they might express only a passing sensation, not a lasting moral insight. Vincent-BuffauIt quotes the Goncourt brothers' reduction of women's tears to a purely physiological reaction: "Women are an admirable charitable machine. They have their heart in their nerves: pity, the poignancy of a misfortune are a nervous attack for them. Because of this, the fit is brief: a man would linger in his thoughts and sadness for two days, whereas a woman sheds tears and nothing is left."lOs The production and experience of tears was part of what Judith Butler has described as the "stylization of the body" -and also, I suggest, of the subjectivity-that produces and naturalizes gender.106 And women's special relationship to tears during the era when tears became especially volatile signifiers meant that their weeping, as readers or as authors, was a cause of special concern. The production of tears in readers also highlighted the problem of authors' motives, exactly the issue that professionalism was designed to address. It has been an axiom of rhetoric, dating back at least as far as Horace and appearing in Common Sense-derived rhetoric textbooks in the nineteenth century as well, that rhetorical appeals to an audience's emotion would be effective only if the orator felt the same emotions.1°7 Testing this axiom, a symposium that appeared in the Critic in 1888 elicited a wide range of responses from authors about whether they cried and laughed over their creations. lOB Many of these responses registered respondents' attempts to maintain professional decorum-Robert Grant's comparison

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between authors and attorneys was one example-while still using their persons to guarantee their responsible use of their readers' emotions. Significantly, the two versions of the emotionally irresponsible author that respondents outlined can be found throughout Atlantic-group periodicals during this era, and they often inflected the charges of sentimentality made against women authors. The first is the amateur, undisciplined author whose feelings might be genuine enough, or at least strongly enough felt-the two were not necessarily the same-but were not tempered by moral and artistic judgment. Edward Eggleston's assumption that an author who cries over his characters must be "in his cups" and likely to "[degenerate] into an advocate and sentimentalist" fits this version; Robert Grant's reference to an author with an "excess of sensibility" does, tOO.109 The second version is a manufacturer, a quack who somehow produces emotional effects while intentionally short-circuiting the readers' operations of judgment or measurement that ought to accompany them. Frances Courtenay Baylor's description of the quack-manufacturer, whose task is to regulate "the hydraulic emotions," is the most evocative, recalling the Goncourts' formulation: Some authors seem to have a most ingenious arrangement of forcingpumps, shafts, mains, faucets, admirably contrived, and labeled to avoid mistakes, by means of which with a turn of the wrist they can treat us to tragedy or farce without so much as moving an eyelash, in the neatest way imaginable. If there is "anguish," "tears," it is the public that suffers-a vast, impersonal nobody of an everybody, that has the remedy for its woes in its own hands. no To some extent each of these versions corrects the other's failings: the amateur feels the emotion that the manufacturer lacks, but the amateur lacks the consciousness of tailoring effects for an audience that the manufacturer has in excess. Moreover, each of these figures is the demonic version of the qualities that, I have been suggesting, a professional author needed: sincerity (a guarantee of public mission) and expertise. In 1867 Henry James faulted Rebecca Harding Davis for being both an amateur and a quack-manufacturer when he reviewed her novel Waiting for the Verdict in the Nation. This review provides an excellent example of how the construction of realist professionalism in opposition to sentimentalism provided a critical idiom that could disqualify authors and readers

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for having a feminized relationship to emotion. Indeed, James probably attacked Davis so vehemently and elaborately because she might have been taken for a realist even though she did not, in James's view, observe realistprofessional emotional proprieties. Her first short novel, Life in the Iron Mills, had appeared in the Atlantic in 1861 and drawn praise for its verisimilitude and for its mission of extending readers' sympathies to the working class. James's review of Waiting for the Verdict at once signaled and discounted her pretensions to realism, recasting them as "an injudicious straining after realistic effects which leave nature and reality at an infinite distance behind and beside them." Having "made herself the poet of poor people-laborers, farmers, mechanics, and factory hands," Davis failed to see that these populations need to be described "in the same rational English which we exact from writers on other subjects." According to James, Davis was instead inclined to "lachrymose sentimentalism": The author is oppressed with the conviction that there exists In the various departments of human life some logical correlative to that luxurious need for tears and sighs and sad-colored imagery of all kinds which dwells in the minds of all those persons, whether men or women, who pursue literature under the sole guidance of sentimentality ... The narcissism of the amateur contrasts with the calculation of the quackmanufacturer: Spontaneous pity is an excellent emotion, but there is nothing so hardening as to have your pity for ever tickled and stimulated, and nothing so debasing as to become an agent between the supply and demand of the commodity. This is the function which the author of the present work seems to have taken upon her ... 111 The contrast between "spontaneous pity," on the one hand, and an implicitly addictive "need for tears" which is met by a calculating supplier, on the other hand, demarcates a familiar difference between authentic, high-culture, morally productive emotion and superficial, low-culture, idle emotion. Since Davis's novel was a critique of Reconstruction for having failed black Americans, James's criticism also recalls Kenneth W. Warren's point that sentimentalism could be used to dismiss any claims for social justice that would exact drastic changes.

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Such a review no doubt brought home to Davis the problems entailed in regulating emotion within fiction, if she had not already been sensitized to this issue by the Atlantic-group magazines where she often published. The fact that Davis's family often depended on her income from writing, and that she published not only in the Atlantic group but also in Peterson's, a Philadelphia magazine of much lower stature, may have also made her acutely conscious of the commodification of her work and the peculiar artifices involved in the stratification of literary culture. ll2 This consciousness informs her 1874 novel John Andross, a fictional indictment of William Tweed's Whiskey Ring which dwells on forms of emotional manipulation and addiction. In this work, Davis reproduces James's criticisms of her through her unfavorable portrayal of a female character who reads addictively. However, the book also makes a counterattack on James by detailing the emotional impairment of the connoisseur. In a familiar pairing, the manipulative and self-dramatizing Anna Maddox is contrasted with honorable and understated Isabel Latimer. The narrative predictably prefers Isabel to Anna, displacing onto Anna the semiotic burden of convention and contrivance, the ethical burden of addictive reading, and the special feminine sin of narcissism. Whereas Anna's features are a perpetual theater, the narrative stresses that Isabel's more authentic and complex emotions are not reduced to discrete and easily intelligible gestures: " ... Isabel, like other big-natured people, had no petty coquetry of lids and lips; there was no way to guess at the deep delight of the loyal creature except the kindling of her slow fine face."1l3 Her self-expression is a matter of composition, of a subtle and suggestive "kindling," some kind of controlling aesthetic of the whole-very much in the spirit of the organic composition so valued by proponents of high realism. Insofar as Isabel is readable, other than by the narrator's assertions, she is readable by the same sorts of physiognomic clues that govern Anna's representation, except that in keeping with Vincent-Buffault's analysis, Isabel's manifestations of emotion always signify some attempt at selfrestraint as well. She blushes, though in private; at the end of the novel, when she praises John's sacrifices, "water stood in her eyes" (JA 321); mere traces of her grief after Clay misses the wedding are visible to her father's assistant (JA 259). The signs of emotional self-restraint are just as conventional, just as dependent on legible demonstration, as emotional displays are. As Lionel Trilling has observed, the "concerted effort of a culture or of

Addictive Reading and Authorship 129 a segment of a culture to achieve authenticity generates its own conventions, its generalities, its commonplaces, its maxims ... "114 The formula, the convention, and the exaggerated gesture that were supposed to characterize sentimentalism all call attention to the textuality of communication, to the web of implicit allusion and intercitation that makes literature (or acting, or physiognomy) intelligible. The exposure of the semiotic creation of meaning which masquerades as self-evidence is here, and typically, converted through an ad hominist reading modeled by the text into a character flaw. 115 Anna, like Davis as described by James, is both an emotional enthusiast and an emotional manipulator. Her secret husband, Julius Ware, tells her, " 'I used to think you were only a clever little actress, when you led a dozen men to believe you were in love with each one of them. But you mean it; you are like an oyster. You cling to the first solid substance that touches you. And you are just as bloodless and as cold'" (JA 203). Anna's power (or affliction) of entering into whatever scenario accommodates her purposes, and of really believing it for a time, is that of a reader who suspends all ordinary rules and enters willingly and believingly into the fiction of the page at hand. Indeed, Isabel and her fiance, Clay Braddock, take it for granted that Anna has been influenced by " 'magazine and Ledger novels' " (JA 207)-referencing the New York Ledger, a story paper-and "'cheap romances'" (JA 244). Not only is Anna's reading dangerously absorptive, she is narcissistic, as we see early on when the narrative explains that while Clay (who is tempted by Anna throughout the novel) has been visualizing Anna as Spenser's virtuous character Una, "Anna was thinking what a pretty pose hers was on a horse" (JA 43). Such attributions of female narcissism function in part to "make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight," as John Berger has aptly put it,u6 By focusing on the painful asymmetry between a man's absorption in a woman and a woman's absorption in herself, which is treated as an individual failing, they also obscure the cultural logic that constructs female narcissism. Freud emphasized the erotic power of female narcissism, holding that "one person's narcissism has a great attraction for those others who have renounced part of their own narcissism and are seeking after object-love ... "117 Just as women practice leisure and consumption on men's behalf, in Thorstein Veblen's scheme, they practice self-love and self-absorption for men's vicarious pleasure, in Freud's.ns

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This is accomplished symbolically both on a grand collective scale, as the very idea of women's luxurious self-love is gratifying for men to contemplate and credit themselves with protecting, and for individual heterosexual couples, wherein a woman's narcissism can ground the erotics and aesthetics of the relationship for both parties. It is important to remember, however, that narcissism in either men or women is more often the absorbing attempt at self-love than its successful accomplishment. Freud recognized that narcissism can even be a defensive response to an illness or wound, a form of caretaking that indulges the self because of its vulnerability or inadequacy, not its perfect lovability.ll9 In the case of women's physical vanity-or their persistent concern about the effect their appearance has on others-narcissism is a pleasure or interest that compensates for objectification and for the stringency of the criteria for beauty that women encounter. In the case of more diffuse forms of selfabsorption, such as reading and daydreaming about scenes taken from what is read, narcissism might be a plausible response to the restrictions placed on women's lives and ambitions, restrictions that were especially narrow in Victorian America. The fact that Anna's narcissism borrows its scenarios from fiction and that she requires constant "supplies of sympathy" (JA 214) from other people confirms this idea that hers is that peculiar narcissism in which one can love the self only when it is disguised or enhanced. Perhaps the most intriguing feature of Anna's addictive and narcissistic reading is that not only Anna, but also the "good" men in the novel who are taken in by her charms, perceive her in textual terms. Ledger novels and cheap romances may account for Anna's own ability to envision herself as a romantic heroine or "the heroine of a tragic drama" (JA 67), as we hear at one point, but they do not account for men's susceptibility to her, except by virtue of a kind of (sub)literary contagion. Yet both Clay and John read better books than Anna does. One sign of their friendship is a copy of Dryden that John gave to Clay, for instance (JA 24). John compares Anna to Maud Muller, Whittier's sweet rural maiden, and Whittier, a Ticknor & Fields author, was unambiguously canonical at the time. Similarly, when we first see Clay being smitten by Anna, he compares her not only to Spenser's Una, but also to the historic Lady Godiva, thereby hinting at the sexual feeling that underlay these idealizing allusions. Even in a descriptive passage whose point of view is uncertain-although presumably the free indirect discourse most plausibly reflects Anna's own thoughts filtered

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through the narrator's evaluation of them-the narrator calls Anna "the woman Shakspeare [sic] loved to draw," adding wickedly, "her bounty as boundless as Juliet's, looking and longing from a window long ago, her love (while it lasted) quite as deep" (JA 62). Here and elsewhere-most noticeably during a scene in which John Andross is distracted from his conscience by immersion in an elegant party complete with fine art on the walls and classical music in the background (JA 292)-Davis suggests that high-culture products as well as low can dull rather than quicken moral sensibilities, thereby refusing to foist all emotional manipulativeness onto culturally devalued forms such as sentimentalism. In the case of Anna's appeal for men, we must recognize either that Whittier, Spenser, and Shakespeare help produce men's as well as women's investment in female narcissism and self-dramatization (an argument that would require more extensive readings of texts by these authors than Davis provides), or at least that these authors can be mobilized by readers in the service of the cultural complex that fuels sentimentalism as easily as Ledger novels can be. If not only Anna's interest in herself but also the interest that John and Clay have in her depends on her being translated into an almost allegorical figure for feminine vulnerability and innocence, then sentimentalism cannot be blamed on women's psychology or the (subliterary) romances they are supposed to read. The obverse of Anna, who cannot tell fiction from reality, is Houston Laird, who keeps his enjoyment of culture strictly separate from his business practices. Laird is the head of the Whiskey Ring, a corporation that pretends to be involved in transit but is really organized around illicit distilling and the evasion of taxes on whiskey. The Whiskey Ring's activities plus John Andross's alcoholism add to the book's preoccupation with various kinds of addictiveness. Laird, however, is not an addict but a connoisseur whose appreciation of art, nature, and human character is highly developed. He cries over Joseph Jefferson's performance of "Rip Van Winkle," enjoys Theodore Thomas's violin playing, and admires the idealistic schemes of Isabel's father, Colonel Latimer, and a man named Farroll who founded an inebriate asylum. "Laird felt himself a better man for Latimer's and Farroll's whims, just as he did after listening to Joe Jefferson's wonderful rendition of nature, or one of Thomas's noble symphonies; but it did not follow that he had the least intention of imitating those heroic old idiots, any more than he had of going about the country acting or fiddling"

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(JA 83).120 His was emphatically not the cultural superficiality of the socialite-he "jeered at" friends who undertook only fashionable entertainments (JA 83): rather, his enjoyment was so refined, and so thoroughly divorced from any connection with his own choice of life, that he had become a moral monster, from a Common Sense point of view. Houston Laird's experience and behavior defy the idea that the conventional counterpoints to the world of business-such as cultural works, the countryside, and pure women-could attune moral responses and offset the corruptions of urban, commercial life. It would be in keeping with Common Sense Philosophy and contemporary fictional practices for Laird to be blind to the charms of the countryside and of simple young women like Isabel; such a misperception would confirm the moral blindness that typically characterizes a villain like Laird. Or it would be fitting for Laird's genuine admiration for the mountains, for good people, and for moving works of art to issue in some small but crucial virtuous deed. Even if his pastoral interlude could not wreak a complete transformation in him, it could revive whatever shreds of good intentions or honor were left in his character. But Laird, though not a very complex character, refuses to fit any of these familiar patterns. He is an acute judge of the other characters: he values Isabel, holds Anna Maddox in contempt, perceives John Andross's goodness and weakness, and misestimates only Clay Braddock, a romantic rival. He makes a regular practice of philanthropy-even secret, unpublicized kindnesses. Yet he demoralizes people, subverts the legislative process, hires assassins, and is reported at the end of the book to be thriving like the proverbial green bay tree. Laird has Taste, but not Goodness; he makes visceral moral judgments that the narrative supports, but they never impede his immoral courses of action. Houston Laird, disconnected in his moral responses to the world and unshakable in his pursuit of economic self-interest, embodies a link between connoisseurship, philanthropy, economic entrepreneurship, and political corruption that had the potential to expose the cultural and political protection of class advantage during the late nineteenth century. Moreover, Laird's devotion to high culture exemplifies Agnew's concept of market culture, since the culture he admires is thoroughly commodified. Market culture implies the possibility of anything and anyone being commodified and therefore being made comparable to each other in economic terms, as surely as if they were given prices. Laird reveals his funda-

Addictive Reading and Authorship 133 mental relations to the world to be commodified (and homosocial) when he compares being rejected by Isabel Latimer to being outbid for a painting by Gerome: "Neither Bell nor the Gerome would have been in keeping with his drawing-room furniture, perhaps; he was not quite sure that he really wanted either of them; but why should any other man have them?" (JA 133). It isn't that Laird fails to see Isabel's admirable qualities, any more than he fails to have a genuine aesthetic appreciation for a Gerome. Rather, Laird's response to both demonstrates that the connoisseur's aesthetic, which reduces cultural products to a hierarchy of comparative value and which uses them to express class standing, is bound up in the logic of commodification, even though the discourse of connoisseurship (a mainstay of high realism) holds commercialism in contempt. Like Laird, Gilbert Osmond in James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and Verena's suitor Mr. Burrage in The Bostonians are more and less disturbing instances of men's treating women as collectibles, and clearly these eruptions of market culture are especially scandalous because women are supposed to represent the market's opposite, the possibility of transcendent and absolute value. At the heart of market culture is an emphasis on performance, the only remaining ground of social meaning once all meanings have been made relative. Laird is himself a kind of performer who conceals his true motives and the real nature of his business from innocents like the Latimers, and he is wonderfully magnetic. So is Anna Maddox: not only Clay and John, but arguably the novel itself is fascinated with Anna as a performer who believes in her own impersonations. This belief is the source of her eroticism, which Isabel never really can match even though Clay and John both, at various times, acknowledge that Isabel is an extraordinary woman, "real," and better than Anna. Clay attempts at one point to mobilize every marker of stable value and moral emotion-his mother, nature, and religion-for the cause of valuing Isabel, but Anna still wins out: He had been talking to himself all night, recounting his generosity toward Andross, his honourable dealing with Bell, assuring himself that he loved her-loved her purely, tenderly as he did his mother, the mountains where he was born, his religion-that his passion for Anna was a mad, unclean frenzy. But all would not do. He felt dishonoured in every drop of his blood; he had no relish for his mother or the mountains or domestic bliss just

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then; he had not drunk the cup of passion, and he wanted to do it; he was the Prodigal, forced back to the tedious elder brother and insipid fatted calf before he had tasted of the riotous living, or proved how bitter were the husks which the swine did eat. All night, Anna, her cloying amiabilities, looks, and gestures that had brought her beauty close to him, the very tones of her shrill voice, had been present with him, clung about him, stifled him like a delicious nightmare. (JA 186) Anna, the creature and purveyor of literary scenarios of femininity, offers Clay the pleasure of performance, of a fiction that he can inhabit with her which makes relations possible that would not be possible for him in what he considers to be reality, as represented by Isabel. Here, Anna represents for Clay a range of experience he has otherwise marginalized and excluded, perhaps one related to the financial speculation he considers at the beginning of the novel but foregoes because he mistrusts Laird (a sensational thrill, Whipple reminds us). As Judith Butler has emphasized, all gender is performed, yet for gender to be marked as performance is a transgression. The very overinscription of Anna's femininity-its being a performancesexualizes her because, as Oscar Wilde would grasp, performance itself is a transgressive pleasure in an age committed to earnestness, and repressed sexuality is such a preoccupation that it inflects all forms of transgression. John Andross is in search of a zone outside market culture, but at the end all it can produce is a "settlement" of its key characters, in Raymond Williams's terms, not a resolution of the problems raised by cultural stratification and the contagions of female reading and men's addictions to women.1 21 Anna Maddox, whose secret marriage is revealed, gets fat, her excess of flesh interfering with her function of providing men with an emblem of romance and desirable narcissism. Isabel, Clay, and John all end up retiring to the small rural Pennsylvania town where the story began and running the factory Anna's father had previously owned. They have retreated from politics, financial speculation, and explosive conjunctions between fiction and the feminine (since Isabel neither reads, it appears, nor provides a catalyst for the literary-cultural complex that renders femininity addictive).122 But as John says at one point, Isabel is "'different from other women'" (JA 55): her being safe doesn't really resolve the problem. Davis resorts to posing Isabel's steadfastness against Anna's dissimulations in order to recapitulate the scapegoating of sentimentalism but make a

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place for women outside of it. Isabel, however, is shown only in private settings and relationships. For a woman whose public profession entailed regulating other people's emotionality, like Davis herself, the association of femininity with erotically charged narcissism and addictive emotionality presented even more acute difficulties. Physician, Heal Thyself An author dispensing wholesome, professionally authorized works of realist fiction was like a physician dispensing medicine, healing the moral and psychological diseases of the individual or the society, or at least teaching about them-an analogy made both richer and more sinister by the fact that most American physicians were dispensing opiates, cocaine, alcohol, and other addictive substances throughout the nineteenth century, while arguing against the Temperance movement's goals of abstinence and prohibition. 123 The medicalized version of professional authorship posed special difficulties for women because of their ascribed addictions and addictiveness, difficulties which surfaced during the early 1880s in a group of novels about women doctors that clearly bore on women novelists' claims to professional status. 124 The prospect or impossibility of passion for the women physicians was consistently marked by references to addiction in these novels. One of the most vivid examples occurs in the second half of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Doctor Zay (1882), in which Waldo Yorke, who has come to admire the professionalism and skill of his female physician, is nevertheless falling in love with her. Even her painfully clear diagnosis of his own wasted life has the attractions of alcohol: "Yorke made no reply. He sat and watched her, thinking that he would not have borne from any other woman in the world what came like a fine intoxication from her; he drank her noble severity like gleaming wine."125 Here, the intoxicating effects of a woman who is also a doctor might be a tonic. But a little later, when Doctor Zay has lost her "self-possession," and after Waldo has witnessed her "royal overthrow" because she feels compelled to confess her love for him, her alcoholic effects on him are not so plainly salutary: "With closed eyes he repeated the three words, She loves me, as he might have dashed down a dangerous wine, of which he had already more than man could bear. He was intoxicated with her" (DZ 233). Within Phelps's novel, Waldo's intoxication is recuperated as a sign of

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passion, a passion that the novel fully endorses in both Waldo and Doctor Zay without allowing it to compromise Doctor Zay's professional authority. The novel ends with the startling prospect of the two planning to marry and the physician planning to continue her career, Doctor Zay having warned her lover that "'a happy marriage'" with a woman like herself "'demands a new type of man'" and Waldo having readily taken up the challenge (DZ 244). Their final decision to marry, significantly enough, occurs when she is weak and shaken from a heavy professional schedule, culminating in her having taken a revolver away from a man raving in delirium tremens. She has managed not to faint, but she has had to give Waldo the reins to her buggy temporarily. It is significant that alcoholism surfaces at this moment: that the doctor has to battle and exorcise a figure for addiction's extreme effects, something much more dangerous than the early thrill of a love affair, before she is allowed both to marry-presumably, to begin her active sexual life, and to excite Waldo's intoxicating passion without constraints-and to continue her professional life-which depends on her ability to calm patients rather than to excite them, and to administer medicines safely. As a result of her successful but taxing struggle with this figure for addiction, she cedes Waldo some kind of control, the complexities of which emerge in the book's final scene. Once the Doctor is feeling better and has agreed to marry him, Waldo asks her to " 'come to [him] first, of her own accord,' " as proof that after holding out so long she really wants him, and in the last sentence of the book she complies, though by no means under subjection: "With a swift and splendid motion she glided across the little distance that lay between them" (DZ 258). The entire final chapter has been carefully crafted to ensure that Waldo, the coming man of the women's movement, is not subordinate to Doctor Zay (whom the narrator never calls by her first name, though it is revealed once), and also to show that the Doctor's feelings for him include ordinary human neediness and passion, but not necessarily (it is impossible to be sure) any specially gendered dependency. The last scene of the book is especially ingenious. What Waldo requests, for the first time in the book asking his lover to do his bidding, is for her to initiate their first embrace. Her boldness and her independence in this moment redound to him: she usurps a conventionally male prerogative but only in submitting to a man's behest. Her very seductiveness, which

Addictive Reading and Authorship 137 formerly had left Waldo out of control as if intoxicated, is now somehow comprehended by his will. Doctor Zay is much more daring and feminist than the other two novels from the 1880s that featured women doctors as protagonists, William Dean Howells's Dr. Breen's Practice (1881) and Sarah Orne Jewett's A Country Doctor (1884}.126 Only Doctor Zay combines marriage and a full-time practice: Howells's Grace Breen gives up her dream of a practice for marriage, except for treating the children of her husband's factory workers, and Jewett's Nan Prince is emphatically presented as a woman who ought not marry and who therefore deserves some alternative useful role in life. Henry James's Dr. Mary Prance, a minor character in The Bostonians (1886), follows the model of her near-namesake Nan Prince, although as the name change suggests she is a quirkier and less strikingly noble character than Jewett's. Throughout these novels, the question of women's fitness to be physicians (or public speakers, in the case of James's Verena Tarrant, whose situation is counterpointed with Dr. Prance's) bears on the question of women's fitness to be professionals at all, including professional authors. The question of whether women who are professionals are fit to be wives can be traced beyond these books: the fact that Marion Harland had to write an article in the Arena in 1890 debunking the "Domestic Infelicity of Literary Women" confirms what one would expect, namely that not only women doctors' but also women writers' marriages were imagined to be precarious-or perhaps, were hard to imagine. 127 In terms of women even being competent to serve as professionals, though, the problem of women's ascribed emotionality, which affects whether they can maintain professional distance, directly relates to their capacity as authors to use emotional effects responsibly. For instance, when we see Howells's Grace Breen not merely being depressed, but feeling "remanded to the conditions of ... girlhood" by setbacks in her life, and when we hear that she "shed tears scarcely predicable of a doctor of medicine," her discrediting as a professional physician implies the equal unlikelihood that she could be a figure of responsible authorship. Indeed, her propensity to blush and to go pale earlier in the book had already foreshadowed this outcome, betraying an emotionality beyond her control. 128 Dr. Breen's Practice is an unusually narrow and mean-spirited book of Howells's, full of caricatures of women: a hypochondriac friend and erst-

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while patient of Grace's whose husband is the only stable force in her life; Grace's relentlessly domineering mother; and a single woman who is fatuously overexcited by the idea of Grace, first as a heroic woman doctor and then as a romantic heroine a la Jane Eyre. Phelps's book was an explicit corrective to Howells's, and Jewett's book was necessarily in dialogue with both its predecessors. Significantly, in Howells's novel the doctor-heroine, who has previously rejected her true love, Walter Libby, also has to make an overture when she changes her mind and wishes to marry him, but the scene is masochistic and belittling, dramatizing her vulnerability through her childlike behavior and her body's susceptibility to a man's gaze. Having explained to Walter that she won't accept her other suitor, "She suddenly put up her arms across her eyes, with the beautiful, artless action of a shame-smitten child, and left her young figure in bewildering relief. 'Oh, don't you see that I love you?'" Moreover, when Libby teases her afterward about having found the overture difficult, she exclaims "with passionate earnestness," "'Oh, nothing is easy that men have to do!' "129 Passion, once again, coincides with a woman's giving up control to a man, and the surrender is enhanced by her having previously sought the selfcontrol of professionalism. Even though Phelps credits her protagonist with much more selfpossession and maturity than Howells allows Grace Breen, the final form of passion in both books requires some gesture of female submission. We can mark Howells and Phelps in these passages accomplishing similar symbolic tasks, even though Phelps's book moves away from the misogynistic punishment of Howells's and creates a heterosexual relationship much less completely structured by inequality and sadomasochism. I would also like to suggest that it is significant that Howells's doctor, who gives up medicine, and James's, who seems to have no susceptibility to romantic passion, do not suffer trials by addiction, whereas Phelps's and Jewett's doctors, who are both professional and passionate, do. Phelps herself had not long before writing Doctor Zay rather painfully encountered the normative association between sobriety and professional authorship, having been urged by an Atlantic reviewer to emulate the "ease and sobriety" of another author being reviewed, and since the reviewer claimed that not only Phelps's story collection under review, Sealed Orders, but also her "more elaborate works," of which The Story of Avis had just been mentioned, contained "unnatural" and "unsound" treatments of "love and marriage," the idea

Addictive Reading and Authorship 139 that inebriation somehow attended women's attempts at combining marriage and a career could not have emerged in Doctor Zay accidentally, even if it did unconsciously,13° Jewett's Nan Prince has a heritage of alcoholism which her mentor and guardian, also a physician, notes very early in the novel. Late in the book, after Nan has fallen in love with a man but refuses to marry him, she cites" 'the wretched inheritance I might have had from my poor mother's people' " as an indisputable argument against her marrying.Bl This moment undercuts the book's alternate emphasis on Nan having developed, like a plant, according to her nature, that nature being an exceptionally self-reliant one that fastened on medicine as its proper expression when she was only a child. It suggests instead that she is somehow disqualified from marriage, even though we see that unlike James's Dr. Prance she is fully capable of falling in love with a man. In the novels by Phelps and Jewett, the women doctors are successful professionals who also demonstrate that they have not been "unwomaned" by their professionalism, Victorian femininity depending on women's ability to attract men and be attracted in turn. But in each of these books, addiction emerges as a problem precisely at the conjunction of women's professionalism and their sexual passion, requiring in the case of Doctor Zay a ritual containment and in the case of Nan Prince renunciation. What is addictive about women? Their sexuality, is the obvious answernot their own sexual pleasure, since some medical experts considered that to be an aberration dangerous to the women's male partners, but their availability for men's desiring. 132 The inverse situation, in which women's attraction to men is strong enough to be figured as an addiction or compulsion, could be represented only as supernaturally pathological. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) might be the fullest dramatization of this scenario, in which a "good" woman, Mina Harker, asks her husband (and other "good" male friends) to help her struggle against her desire for Dracula (displaced away from a genital register), her desire to help Dracula, and her desire to become like Dracula. Mina's desire is not only a disease: it is a fundamental transgression of the conflated natural and Christian orders. Stoker's novel represents a small advance, insofar as it represents this desire springing up in a woman who, before and afterward, is flawlessly good-perhaps her unfortunate Un-dead friend Lucy Westenra was not quite so good-yet it pulls out all the stops in order to stigmatize her desire thoroughly. How Dracula differs from the novels I have been discussing

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is that Count Dracula solicits and controls the seduction that he exerts. His will is, after all, one of his most salient features, provoking women to invite him across thresholds and exercising a powerful influence even on strong men. Dracula is a seducer, most definitely, but neither Nan Prince nor Doctor Zay is. This is why it is appropriate to consider women to have been produced as (potentially) addicting substances, objects rather than subjects, by late nineteenth-century u.s. (and British) culture. Both these women physicians have willpower, but with regard to their sexuality they exercise it only in order to fight their attractions to men. Both men and women can use their wills to struggle against the power of female sexuality, but only men-and this is why the capitulations of Doctor Zay and Grace Breen to the men they love are so significant-can use their wills to solicit and direct women's seductiveness. In this way, marriage plots function to acknowledge female sexuality only when there is the prospect of its immediate containment. Anna Maddox definitely is aware of her seductiveness, but it seems to be a power whose full significance is beyond her understanding: she uses it, but she does not ultimately control it. As in the moments I described in Doctor Zay and Dr. Breen's Practice, Anna's portrayal shows female narcissism and seductiveness contained by a man's taking charge of them; her proliferating projection of herself into countless gratifying scenarios is stopped by the revelation of her legal identity as Julius Ware's wife. Significantly, Julius holds her in a "bondage" that she finds genuinely uncomfortable at times (JA 204). His sadistic power over her operates vividly in a note he sends her in the midst of her machinations involving Clay and John: " 'My own, you are at liberty to carry out your plans to-day, as you choose; remembering only that a day of reckoning will come, and that before long, and for every misstep, you will be held strictly to account'" (JA 205). Anna's vulnerability before John and Clay is an act that conceals her coquette's power to manipulate them, but that power in turn conceals her own ultimate subjection to her secret and coldly domineering husband. Her pretense of vulnerability covers up real vulnerability. Similarly, her secret marriage to Julius is all that spares her from being married off by her father to one of his creditors, a possibility that at first appears to be a fiction she uses to manipulate Clay, but that turns out really to be her father's intention (though impossible due to her having been secretly married already). The novel's critique of Anna's exaggeration almost obscures the real condi-

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tions of her subjection. Anna, as both victim and source of addiction, can wield power over men without having power over herself, embodying the quintessential paradox of Victorian femininity, a version of the combination of "power and powerlessness" that Shirley Samuels suggests lies at the heart of sentimentalismY3 Men's sexuality might be strong, even uncontrollable at times, but it was not coded as dangerous in the way that women's was, perhaps due to the crucial role female chastity played in establishing legitimate families and routes of inheritance. Accordingly, the ascription of excess and ungovernability to women's sexual attractiveness warded off the idea that men's desire could be equally disruptive and could challenge conscious, willful control. As G. J. Barker Benfield has proposed, "Man's disciplining of women (society's heart) represented sexual and social order, and avoided the curtailment of man's own anarchic tendencies. The discipline of women ('the sex') represented man's subordination of himself."134 And as the gendering of professional self-restraint suggested, the discipline of feminine capacities within a masculine self could subordinate and advance the self at once. The prospect of women's controlling their own sexuality threatened to expose the artifice by which this self-discipline was identified with control of the feminine. Desexualizing women physicians or containing their sexuality in a marriage marked, however subtly, by male sexual dominance was therefore a double strategy, serving equally to prevent women's sexuality from erupting and to conceal the fact that it might not erupt. In The Bostonians, the class and gender politics of authorial professionalism come together especially instructively. As we have seen, Verena Tarrant represents "the People" for Olive Chancellor, an origin which provides Verena with a certain cachet even though her successful professionalization as an orator demands that she be removed from her parents and given the education and refinement to make her a speaker for the women's movement, which was controlled by relatively privileged women. (James's representation does not credit the movement with any cross-class organizing, although in fact suffrage movement leaders such as Anthony and Stanton and numerous women's organizations were concerned with women's labor and working-class women. 135) Thus, Verena, like many a regionalist writer or like Howells himself, could be produced as a professional only by taking on the vantage point and cultural markers of the (northeastern, urbanbased) bourgeoisie's cultural wing.

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Verena's class identity requires laundering and her gender requires containment, at least in Basil Ransom's view. Verena is the main female character in the book who is coded as fully and positively feminine (Olive's sister Mrs. Luna representing a rather degenerate form of femininity, and Olive herself being defeminized because removed from heterosexual possibility), so she bears the symbolic weight of the feminine as well as of the popular. Verena's coding replicates many of the key features we have seen in Anna Maddox and the women doctors. She has an appeal that seems addictive: the public swallows her "in draughts" (B 305), and she is "naturally theatrical" (B 50). We never hear of Verena reading anything that might be called a romance, although her and Olive's insistence "on the historic unhappiness of women" (B 155) is described as a quasi sensational obsession on which they spend too much emotion. From Basil's perspective, though, it is only the public display of Verena's abilities-their extradomestic showcasing-which poses a problem. Whereas Anna Maddox envisioned herself on stages of sorts constantly, Verena appears to Basil to be a basically sincere woman who has erred only in allowing herself to be put physically onstage, even though she continues to behave as if offstage, and to be made subject to a debasing publicity that turns her into a play of representations. The distinction between a lecturer on Women's Rights and, say, an actress is inconsequential from Ransom's point of view, which the book situates but does not explicitly critique. Basil makes the pitch to Verena that she, like Howells's Dr. Breen, can best practice her vocation in private after she marries him: "You won't sing in the Music Hall, but you will sing to me; you will sing to every one who knows you and approaches you. Your gift is indestructible; don't talk as if I either wanted to wipe it out or should be able to make it a particle less divine. I want to give it another direction, certainly; but I don't want to stop your activity. Your gift is the gift of expression, and there is nothing I can do for you that will make you less expressive. It won't gush out at a fixed hour and on a fixed day, but it will irrigate, it will fertilize, it will brilliantly adorn your conversation. Think how delightful it will be when your influence becomes really social. Your facility, as you call it, will simply make you, in conversation, the most charming woman in America." (B 371)

Addictive Reading and Authorship 143 As Bert Bender has pointed out, Ransom hears only Verena's voice whenever she speaks publicly, not her words (hence his reference to her "singing"), and Bender suspects that James knew of Darwin's idea that the tones and rhythms of heightened speech hark back to courtship noises among our primitive ancestors. Bender also points out the potential for this convergence between Darwin and James to warn women that the sense of what they say (or, by extension, write) in public forums can easily be dissolved by male audiences into the (private, senseless) sound of mating calls.136 This suggests that when Ransom is struck by the unseemliness of Verena's appearing publicly, he is responding to his own power to sexualize her, to eroticize what he perceives as the deep transgression of any woman exposing herself to the public eye (and ear). Interestingly, what he proposes to Verena in the passage I just quoted is the substitution of an organicist aesthetic-her gift that will "irrigate" and "fertilize," in much the same way that Isabel Latimer's expressiveness emerges as a "kindling" -over the sentimentalism implied in "gush" (evoking amateurism) and in the mechanism of scheduling (evoking the quack-manufacturer). Marriage will contain everything that is dangerous about Verena, which ranges from her potential political influence, to her potential to be eroticized by male audiences that construe her public performance as transgressive, to her potential to promote emotional contagion. But she doesn't marry just any man, and specifically not nice young Mr. Burrage, who would have allowed her to go on lecturing. Verena marries a former southern planter, identified with slaveholding, who "wrenche[s] her away" at the end of the book, hiding her face with her hood and reducing her to tears (B 426). Basil's association with slavery and his physical mastery of her in this crucial scene underline Verena's status, once married, as chattel, and they atavistically recapitulate the supposed origins of marriage in men's physical capture of women, a fantasy that has sometimes been used to authorize the complex of male sadism and female masochism that often infects heterosexuality. This scene parallels the sadism involved in Julius Ware's proprietary letter to Anna and Walter Libby's taking charge of Grace Breen, and all three scenes highlight the erotic violence implicit in the idea that masculine capacities need to take charge of feminine ones. By setting up the book as a conflict between Ransom and Olive Chancellor for Verena's love and destiny, James denies Verena any will of her own. By awarding Verena to Basil, James compounds this denial. Basil's conquest

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of her is marked by his displacing her commitment to the women's movement, which had preceded even her acquaintance with Olive. "[T]he truth had changed sides" for her, we hear (B 365). When, in the midst of this change in truth's orientation, Verena implores Olive to help her, she is much like Mina Harker in Dracula, marshaling another's will to help her struggle against her own subverted will, except that the sexual character of her struggle is entangled with the more abstract intellectual choice she is making about her own, and women's, nature and destiny. What could have been presented as a choice between passions-with Basil's opposite number being either Verena's passion for Olive or her passion for the women's movement-is instead set up as a decision to choose or to forego passion. However, the choice "for" passion is simultaneously a choice "for" submission to male will, so that Verena's heterosexual passion is presented as fundamentally masochistic. One has to wonder, of course, if nice Mr. Burrage couldn't inspire such passion because he was so nice. Kenneth W. Warren has proposed that the ending of The Bostonians dramatizes the weakening of New England's traditional moral authority as it was seduced by southern racist thought in the last decades of the nineteenth century, a resonance reinforced by the book's dismissive treatment of Miss Birdseye, a relic of the abolitionist movement.!37 This disarticulation of Boston-based high culture from the political advocacy of African Americans, a particular case of high realism's general skepticism about specific reform movements, had profound consequences for the education, aspirations, and safety of many African Americans, not to mention their access to authorial professionalism. The denouement of The Bostonians also enacts realist-professionalism's exploitation of the popular and feminine elements on which it depended. Olive, who has advantages of class and erudition over Verena, ends up by taking Verena's place as orator, just as Basil, his male privilege compounded by his deep implication in white racial privilege, is emerging as a political writer for magazines at the end, taking the place in public politics he denies to Verena. However, the two supplantings of Verena are not symmetrical. Whereas the narrative satirizes Olive for her hypocritical embrace of Verena as one of "the People" in the passages from which I quoted, it does not satirize Basil's ideas about the feminine. The ending can even take on a tragic inevitability, in light of the dominant culture's endorsement of heterosexual passion and women's domestic containment.

Addictive Reading and Authorship 145 Moreover, the fact that Verena, in yielding to Ransom, must give up her opinions, like the fact that Anna must curb her narcissism and Doctor Zay her independence, provides the eroticism of several scenes. In other words, the very fact of Verena's giving up her work in reform creates the impression of passion in her relationship to Basil. What might be benign as a reCiprocal ethic-that people in love ought to be willing to give up things for each other-in these scenarios becomes the possibility that for male-dominated heterosexuality to be enacted, men must take something against women's will, even if it isn't virginity itself or a conventional sexual liberty. Indeed, women's giving up their virginity or offering some other token of capitulation might matter only insofar as these transactions are also signs of men's mastery, being eroticized not in themselves but by their function within this complex. These novels suggest that authorial professionalism, because it was often conceptualized as a masculine control over some feminine capacity, was bound up with a version of heterosexuality that produced men as the controllers of many things feminine, including feminine sexuality. This version produced a stalled form of sadomasochism-one with no play in it, for all that it had to be performed-as the base structure of passion, a structure requiring feminized impulses toward intense experience and masculinized impulses toward controlling and harnessing them. This misogyny was embodied in the discourses that produced certain works of fiction as realist-professional, even though individual works produced and read under its aegis might, like John Andross, provide materials that support a critique of it. It is difficult to say whether the emergence of unprecedented numbers of women readers and writers around midcentury helped produce the gendering of authorial professionalism, or whether the gendering already in place was simply mobilized more often once more women achieved success as authors. In either case, since professional qualities such as distance and decorum were coded as masculine, women's attempts to function as professionals produced resistances; but since realism necessarily entailed certain feminine-coded practices, women could not be simply excluded from legitimacy. Instead, given the existing instabilities in the Common Sense framework for understanding the moral role of emotion in fiction, obsessive fears about the addictive potential of fiction were directed at sentimentalism and articulated with the feminine, an entity that required self-disciplining as

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well as professional patrolling. Addiction, officially the object of loathing, was also an object of longing-or perhaps the dominant form that longing could take-and its contemporary conceptualization was deeply implicated in the form male dominance assumed during the American Victorian era. The discourses that produced sentimentalism as an unprofessional, subliterary category depended fundamentally on these conceptions of women's special relationship to addiction, as addict and addicting substance, and the need for masculine-coded restraint of the feminine. In this way, the institution of high realism that shaped the production and reception of fiction was embroiled in this special version of misogyny and male dominance, as well as in class hierarchy and the consolidation of white bourgeois cultural privilege.

4

The Romantic Revival

Reducing wage-earners' work time to an eight-hour day was a major goal of the u.s. labor movement during the 1880s and 1890s. Through strikes, boycotts, and their threat, the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor, and other labor organizations secured an eight-hour day or something close to it for workers in many industries. One reason why the reduction was sought was to create more jobs, since the hours beyond eight that employers had previously claimed would have to be bought from more workers. The other reason was to give workers free time: time for education, time for organizing, time for family life, and even time for private leisure. "Eight hours for work, eight hours / for rest, eight hours for what we will!" was the culmination of the "Eight-Hour Song" of the late 18805. 1 The symmetry of balancing eight hours' leisure against eight hours' work suggests that each hour of waking freedom counteracts an hour's unfreedom, making it possible to understand leisure as therapeutic compensation for the dehumanizing conditions of work. Some of the new hours freed up might have been spent reading or pursuing other consumeristic pleasures. Whatever the effects of the eighthour day were on actual workers' reading habits, though, the campaign for the eight-hour day very likely contributed to the fantasy of the workerreader that emerged in the Atlantic group during the late 1880s and 1890S as part of a reaction against realism that put in place a revised understanding of romance. The rhetoric promoting the new romance was clearly formulated in direct opposition to the complex of realist professionalism described in chapter 3. Instead of encouraging readers to build their characters, inform themselves about suffering, or embrace refined pleasures, the

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rhetoric of the new romance used not only workers, but also children, primitive peoples, and imperialist conquerors as figures for readers' right to pleasurable adventuring in their leisure time. Instead of valuing fiction for modeling the ethical problems of modern life, the rhetoric of the new romance valued fiction for providing readers with a thrilling escape from the routine and restrictions of their ordinary lives. And instead of constructing the author as a professional whose expertise was one of the boons of advanced civilization, the rhetoric of the new romance figured its authors as genial tribal storytellers whose wisdom was ancient, perhaps even primitive. The romantic revival, as this episode in readership was known to contemporaries, was a complex phenomenon. Its struggle against realism was partly a conflict over the nature of the literary authority that the Atlantic group would wield, a struggle made more desperate (though less consequential) by the fact that the Atlantic group's power to define and categorize literature was being displaced by universities, little magazines, and mainstream magazines of wider circulation, a displacement I will consider in more detail in the conclusion. Since universities and little magazines arguably had greater cultural capital than the Atlantic group, the romantic revival marks the Atlantic group's experimentation with a cultural stance that was middling or middlebrow rather than elite: indeed, partisans of the new romance who wrote in Atlantic-group magazines charged the realists with being elitist, distancing themselves from connoisseurship and the highest cultural status. The new romance also embodied an alternative national mission for legitimate literature: Whereas realism promoted good citizenship through self-discipline and self-denial, the romance was imagined to offer an outlet for antisocial impulses and instincts comparable to the outlet provided by imperialist exploitation and warfare. The fact that the romantic revival in Atlantic-group magazines was organized around the celebration of British authors in itself suggests that the magazines' relationship to nationalism was undergOing some changes in this era. Perhaps most Significantly, though, the romantic revival marked the legitimation of consumerist motives for reading. As the peculiar association between workers and the right to leisure indicates, each of the fantasy images of readers and writers generated by the romantic revival provided a means by which fiction reading could be embraced as a consumer pleasure within the Atlantic group.

The Romantic Revival :149 In this chapter I will analyze the ways in which consumerism was assimilated to the literary agenda of the Atlantic group and explore the related ideological projects in which the romantic revival involved the works of fiction read under its auspices. The assumption that children, especially boys, were model readers of the new romance makes James's The Turn of the Screw (:1898) an especially intriguing commentary on this phase of the genre wars between romance and realism. Like The Marble Faun, the woman doctor books, and John Andross, this text practices a kind of dreamwork on the materials of contemporary generic controversy, a reworking that is neither endorsement nor critique but that both manifests and analyzes some of the desires and fear that were bound up in these acts of classification. We can begin to locate and analyze these late-century cultural fantasies about children and working-class men as readers, fantasies that surface in James's Miles and Peter Quint, in the critical essays of Agnes Repplier that quarreled with Howells and high realism. The Horrors of Reading Realism In light of the general account I have given of the new romance, Agnes Repplier might seem an unlikely accomplice in its promotion. A single woman, she supported herself and two of her siblings by her essay writing and lecturing, and often knew economic hardships; consumer pleasures other than buying books do not seem to have absorbed her. Moreover, although she was familiar with H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Louis Stevenson, the three British writers whom American reviewers enshrined as apostles of the new romance, and although she seems to have taken some pleasure in Kipling's and Stevenson's works, her cultural home base was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where she communed with men (hardly any women) of lofty literary standing. Samuel Johnson was her idol, and Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt special favorites. True, she had a passion for writers considered early romancers or romanticists-Byron and Scott, especially-but she returned again and again in her essays to their intense bookishness and their early reading. Adventurers some of them may have been, but their status as participants in a culture of reading appears to have been more important to Repplier. So the fact that Agnes Repplier was one of the most influential framers and publicists of the ideas about reading that grounded the romantic re-

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vival offers insight into the appeals the movement offered to people who were committed to literature as a cultural institution. Repplier stopped short of promoting the new romance, as I will describe: her essays led the charge against high realism, but her purpose was not exactly to support Stevenson, Haggard, and Kipling instead. Accordingly, another of my purposes in isolating her contributions to the debate is to dispel any impression that critical opinion in Atlantic-group magazines was monolithic. Repplier, as much as any fiction writer, was in dialogue with other reviewers and literary commentators, even though she was also part of a critical establishment. It is a sign of Boston's continued significance as a site of high culture that both major biographies of Repplier identify her as a cultural outsider because she came from Philadelphia. Like William Dean Howells, like Rebecca Harding Davis, like countless other writers who were not originally from Boston, Repplier made an official visit to Boston after she had begun to publish in the Atlantic Monthly, in 1886, and through the offices of its editor, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, she was presented to a sampling of Atlantic luminaries: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and James Russell Lowell. Before publishing in the Atlantic, Repplier's greatest break had been publication in the Catholic World, where she continued to publish works for a specifically Catholic audience. After Repplier's work had begun to be published in the Atlantic, though, it became the main forum for her work for secular audiences. Its publisher, Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., issued her essays in collections beginning with Books and Men in 1888, and very few of the essays collected in collections of the 1890S and 1900S had been published anywhere besides the Atlantic. 2 It is interesting that Repplier found the Atlantic so hospitable, since one of her most frequent foes was the Atlantic's former editor Howells. In spite of Howells's fame and the attention that his opinions continued to receive, during the 1880s and 1890S he was increasingly coming to represent a constricting orthodoxy that invited rebellion. When Repplier first published in the Atlantic Howells was ensconced in the "Editor's Study" at Harper's Monthly, a column that introduced the heated polemics that were later collected in Criticism and Fiction. His column in Harper's was a sign of his currency, but when he quit writing that column in 1892, he was replaced by Charles Dudley Warner, who preferred idealism or romance to

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realism-a sign that Harper's had valued Howells's fame and his penchant for controversy without necessarily adhering to his critical platform. Repplier's earliest essay that explicitly took on Howells was "The Decay of Sentiment" in 1887, a recognizable contribution to late-century narratives of overcivilization. Listing numerous men of letters of the past (including Byron, Shelley, and the influential Edinburgh Review critic Francis Jeffrey) who had cried, laughed, fumed, or been otherwise visibly moved by works of literature, she questions whether the tepid responses of readers in her own time are an improvement: Mr. Howells, who ought to know, tells us that fiction has become a finer art in our day than it was in the days of our fathers, and that the methods and interests we have outgrown can never hope to be revived. So if the masterpieces of the present, the triumphs of learned verse and realistic prose, fail to lift their readers out of themselves, like the masterpieces of the past, the fault must be our own .... We read The Bostonians and The Rise of Silas Lapham with a due appreciation of their minute perfections; but we go to bed quite cheerfully at our usual hour, and are content to wait an interval of leisure to resume them. Could Daisy Miller charm a gouty leg, or Lemuel Barker keep us sleepless until morning 73 Mourning as well the passing of history's clear villains and heroes, who have been diminished by overanalysis, Repplier seems to identify strong emotions about vividly drawn figures in fiction or history as a medium for social bonding: "We are tethered to our kind, and may as well join hands in the struggle."4 Her laments that realism offered neither vivid morallegibility nor strong pleasures were often echoed by reviewers who preferred the revived romance. Two years later, Repplier was bristling even more sharply against the prescriptions of Howells and his followers. In "Fiction in the Pulpit," she treats Howells's claims about the high moral purposes of Emile Zola and Gustave Flaubert with exasperation, and goes on to offer an alternative criterion for a work's success. She proposes that the task of the "storyteller" -a keyword of the romantic revival-"is simply to give us pleasure, and his duty is to give it within the not very Puritanical limits prescribed by our modern notions of decency."s She rails against the realists' presumptuousness in insisting on all fiction's having an explicit social agenda:

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They ["the disciples of modern realism"] are not content with the splendid position which is theirs by right,-not content with the admirable work they have done, and the hold they have secured on the sympathies of our earnest, rationalistic, and unimaginative age; but they assume in some subtle and incomprehensible way that their school is based upon man's love and appreciation for his fellow-creatures. If we would but look upon all men as our brothers, it is plainly hinted, all men would be of equal interest to us, and it is our duty, as nineteenthcentury citizens, to accept and cherish this universal relationship.6 This is precisely the ground of high realism's political function of providing a relationship between elites and "the people." As a counterargument, Repplier offers Voltaire, who was "forever restlessly espousing some popular cause," but who believed despite his humanitarian activities that "the world is full of people who are not worth knowing."7 And against Howells's beatification of Tolstoy the Christian Socialist, an aristocrat who gave up his privileges in order to live like a peasant, she poses Sir Walter Scott, who was "no less the friend and benefactor of his kind" by virtue of writing books that the common people enjoyed. In evidence she puts the "anxious whisper of the London workmen, 'Do you know, sir, if this is the street where he is lying?''' at Scott's death, and "the rapturous cry of the little deformed tailor who, with his last breath, sobbed out [to Scott], 'The Lord bless and reward yoU!'''8 In this anecdote, the "people" take their proper place as consumers of texts, not characters or authors, and their reverence for culture is synchronized with their respect for their social superiors. Whereas realists constructed fiction's democratic function according to its taking "the people" as the subject matter of fiction-working-class people or at least people outside the charmed circle of northeastern urban bourgeois culture-Repplier instead focuses on "the people" as readers of fiction in order to set up readerly satisfaction as a different sort of democratic criterion. Her poleJIlic isn't really about democracy, of course, but about pleasure: the readers she depicts were not ashamed of their reverence for a great writer like Scott (one of the writers Howells had relegated to the prehistory of realism), and presumably they were similarly not ashamed of their emotional involvement in what they read. Scott stands in for a set of pleasures that the realists tried to exclude, pleasures that might be signaled by terms like romance, adventure, and even history.

The Romantic Revival 153

It is significant as well that Repplier romanticizes the worker-readers of a previous generation (and a different nation) rather than working-class readers closer to home. Her foray not long afterward into the reading of nonelite people of her own day, though still English ones, does not seem to persuade her that "English Railway Fiction" provides the third-class passengers who read it with especially enviable pleasures, even though her essay begins by invoking the zeal with which such passengers provide themselves with "Sandwiches, oranges, and penny novelettes ... "9 She finds the books unexciting. Besides, it is never contemporary fiction that she is most interested in having people read, but familiar books of the past that have stood the test of time, and thereby can be counted on to appeal to something fundamental. Worker-readers of the past might represent tastes unadulterated by a hypersophisticated literary establishment, then. Repplier's depiction of worker-readers arises from her need to counter realists' piety about their commitment to the common people. However, her own favorite readerly identification, developed in a number of her essays, is not with workers but rather with children, as "Fiction in the Pulpit" goes on to make clear. Once having established Scott's broad appeal, she rebels explicitly against Howells's belief "that American children need to be warned against Sir Walter's errors" -presumably, his aristocratic milieux and his romantic leanings.1° Her plea here for children to be allowed to read what they like, without undue direction or censorship, was a touchstone of many of her essays, and her passionate encomium to childhood taps a characteristic strain of romance theory. Adult life holds mainly the prospect of subjection, Repplier suggests, whereas childhood offers at least fantasies or appearances of success and certainty: "Consider that it is only in youth that our imagination triumphs vividly over realities,-a triumph short-lived enough, but rich in fruits for the future. The time comes all too soon when we doubt, and question, and make room in our puzzled minds for the opinions of many men." Children are extraordinarily receptive, having unmediated relations to the world: a "clear, intuitive, unbiased enjoyment" and a "sympathy with things that have been." But socialization, figured here as medication, is fast encroaching on childhood: [The child] is not so easily hurt as we suppose; he is strong in his elastic ignorance, and has no need of a pepsin pill with every mouthful

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of literary food he swallows. Mental hygiene, it is said, is apt to lead to mental valetudinarianism; but if we are to turn our very nurseries into hot-beds of prigs, we may say once more what was said when Chapelain published his portentous epic, that "a new horror has been added to the accomplishment of reading."ll With this stringent pronouncement, Repplier exposes the intrusive disciplining figured by the metaphor of professional realist author as physician. In an essay entitled "Literary Shibboleths," Repplier quotes a precept of Samuel Johnson's which she held, throughout her career, as an article of faith: "A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good."12 Repplier's attachment to the child as an exemplary reader was polemical; indeed, her own experience of childhood reading seems to have been composed of equal parts grim obligation and rapturous freedom. Forced by her mother to learn to read from a bland primer entitled Reading Without Tears, she seems to have valued all the more the opportunity she found later on to wallow in works by writers who were worthy of tears, such as Byron. 13 (Acknowledging that Byron might not be considered proper reading for girls today, she points out that "having never been told that there was such a thing as forbidden fruit in literature, I was spared at least that alert curiosity concerning it which is one of the most unpleasant results of our present guarded system"14-trenchant testimony to the power of a disciplinary system to produce characteristic forms of disobedience that justify its patrolling.) The numerous essays that she wrote about contemporary issues involving children's reading show that she realized children's reading was often subject to strict discipline. She invoked not only her own experiences of treasured (and, by the standards of her time, transgressive) childhood reading as well as those of accredited literary figures such as Scott and Shelley in order to argue for revitalizing not only children's reading, but also adults' pleasure in reading. "What we need is, not more cultivation, but a recognized habit of enjoyment," Repplier proclaimed in "Pleasure: A Heresy."ls In a later essay she pointed out that it is strange, if people enjoy books so much, that they should require so many incentives to read, in the form of discussion groups and prescriptions from authorities. 16 The apparatus of taste was precisely what was getting in the way of people's pleasurable access to books: the pressure on people to keep up with the latest trends, to read what experts

The Romantic Revival 155

said they needed to read, to read (or fail to read) dutifully what was most respectable rather than reading enthusiastically what they likedY Glossing Dr. Johnson's advice to read by inclination, Repplier declared that if a man's "taste is for Mr. Rider Haggard's ingenious tales, it is hardly worth his while to pretend that he prefers Tolstol."18 Yet Repplier was equally opposed to leveling all literary judgments, which she referred to as "rank socialism in literature and art"; she clearly held in contempt another writer who had proposed that "it is not worth while to try and like the 'Mahabharata' or the 'Origin of Species,' if we really enjoy 'King Solomon's Mines' or the 'Licensed Victualler's Gazette.' "19 Since Haggard, author of King Solomon's Mines, crops up as the exemplar of unauthorized reading pleasures in both cases, it appears that Repplier is not so much quarreling with the literary judgment that has relegated Haggard to an inferior tier as objecting to the whole apparatus of critical reviewing that prevents readers from discovering on their own why Haggard is inferior, though perhaps genuinely satisfying to inexperienced readers, and working their way to better authors as their tastes and characters develop. In short, Repplier's ideal reader is an autodidact. What she admires most about Lamb is that he recognized by a swift and delicate intuition the literary food that was best fitted to nourish his own intellectual growth. This was Sir Walter Scott's secret, and this was Lamb's. Both knew instinctively what was good for them, and a clear perception of our individual needs is something vastly different from idle preference based on an ignorant conceit. 20 Again she argues by reworking realist metaphors, posing individuals who naturally intuit what they need for health against the standardizing authority of professionals. General prescriptions ignore individual patterns of growth; while there may be some variety in what is good for noble natures, there is not complete disorder, or so much we can glean from Repplier's examples of authors who, as readers, were mainly formed by canonical works. Her ideal young reader has the run of a library full of old books, including plenty of classics and a few strays, and thereby gains the exquisite pleasure of discovering for herself how very good Wordsworth and Scott and Mme. de Sevigne are; she does not decide that she prefers Susan Warner's works instead. The realists are Repplier's target because they have made the disci-

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plinary apparatus of taste too obvious, and because they have left no room for the dimension of taste that is (as her emphasis on Lamb's and Scott's individualities suggests) irreducibly personal and expressive. Arguably, they have interfered with what Althusser has called the "interpellation" of the individual by an institutional apparatus: the call for the subject to take up a space of individuation in the between-spaces of a social order, and genuinely to feel that some longing of her own for identity is answered by her being allowed to occupy that space. 21 The reader who is made to feel that a hierarchy of literary value not only preexists her but completely overrules her own experience suffers acutely from the alienating effects of cultural hierarchy, whereas the reader who has been allowed to find out the hierarchy for herself and internalize her own version of it (the exact contents of the hierarchy being less important than the hierarchical principle) is consoled with other subjective pleasures for any alienation she feels. Repplier wrote as part of a residual formation. 22 Her version of autodidacticism was completely unsuited to an era of mass consumer culture, in which children were more likely to roam free in lending libraries that featured lots of contemporary novels or in newsstands stocking storypapers and dime novels than in private libraries brimming with classics. Her vision of culture was a conservative one, insofar as she presumed a relatively stable hierarchy of value. She criticized the high-realist establishment, not for subscribing to traditional conceptions of taste, but for failing in their own project of admitting wider populations to high culture on elite terms: for failing to conceal the machinery of cultural reproduction, and thereby failing to solicit people's proper subjective investment in culture. However, Repplier's vision also contained a progressive element, insofar as it tried to give all readers equally direct access to culture and equal opportunities to find their own subjective pleasures in reading. It may have been a sign of how claustrophobic high realism's hold on literary culture had become that an admirer of Dr. Johnson, the emblem of neoclassical tastemaking and rational discrimination, became one of late nineteenth-century America's most zealous advocates of reading for undirected personal pleasure. Repplier has mainly been forgotten today. One reason why her essays have not been used to triangulate Howells's Criticism and Fiction and Frank Norris's The Responsibilities of the Novelist-neither of which is significantly more accomplished or more revealingly polemical than the best of Repplier's work, in my view-is that she was not a novelist, but

The Romantic Revival 157 another reason is probably that the romantic revival, the movement in which her critical pronouncements can most clearly be situated, has been omitted from almost all works of American literary history published in this century. It was explicitly recognized in its own time as a literary movement that emerged in the 1880s and 189os: for example, A Study of Prose Fictions (1903), whose author, Bliss Perry, was formerly editor of the Atlantic, discusses a turn-of-the-century "Romantic Revival" at length. 23 Nevertheless, subsequent u.s. literary histories almost always identify naturalism and modernism as the only counterrealist literary movements that emerge in prose at the turn of the century, presumably since these movements account for American canonical writers such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, and Gertrude Stein. Occasionally, the revival of historical romance, embodied in works by writers such as F. Marion Crawford and Lew Wallace, is mentioned, but as a separate popular phenomenon rather than something bearing on the construction of the literary, and without much attention to the reconstitution of romance that it en tailed. 24 Thus, the elision of Repplier and the romantic revival from U.S. literary history is yet another sign of the limitations produced by organizing literary history around the productions of canonical authors rather than around broader fields of textual production and around reception, including rereading. The elision was facilitated by two further circumstances, though: that Repplier's heroes were British writers of the past and that the romantic revival was a transatlantic phenomenon. That is, not only did it happen in (at least) the United States and Great Britain, but also American readers experienced it mainly in relation to British texts. Amelie Rives, Edgar Saltus, and F. Marion Crawford were American authors whom I have seen linked to the revival of romance (or the backlash against realism) by reviewers during the 1880s and 1890s, but none of them was cited with any frequency; Haggard, Kipling, and Stevenson were overwhelmingly the reference points of the revival for U.S. critics, and as I have mentioned, Scott and other earlier British authors were Repplier's touchstones for readerly pleasure. Accordingly, numerous works of British literary history make a place for the romantic revival, perhaps by another name, but as far as I know the only American literary history since Bliss Perry's-which was Anglo-American in scope-to do so is Martin S. Day's A Handbook of American Literature (1975). Day's survey admirably relates the rise of

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romantic fiction to the new demand for escapism and acknowledges the centrality of romantic fiction in late-century reading, but it does not seem to have influenced subsequent studies or histories of the period. 25 Rather than disqualifying the romantic revival from the literary history of the United States, the fact that the reviewers who participated in it were so willing to claim British authors for their own is one of the sources of its interest and importance. The insistent, exclusive nationalism of previous decades seemed to recede toward the end of the century without any public discussion of the change. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of the romantic revival was anchored in U.s. social realities, and the importance of this movement in reading extended well beyond the mere fact of readers' taking up these particular authors. As Repplier's work suggests, the movement recast the social function of reading itself, and it also recast the grounds for legitimate authorship. The Politics and Poetics of the Romantic RevivaP6 It is easy to recognize the homology between works like Treasure Island and King Solomon's Mines and the real-world foreign policies that entailed plundering the resources and undermining the autonomy of less-powerful nations for the sake of u.s. trade and power, a homology by which the idea of adventuring could be used to provide an ideological cover for exploitative international relations. This homology was, however, only one manifestation of the politics of the new romance. The new romance's theoretical basis-the presuppositions about authorship, readership, and fiction's social function that underlay it-involved it in a variety of interrelated cultural and political transformations. Many of these transformations have been productively addressed by T. J. Jackson Lears under the rubric of antimodernism. Antimodernism was an expression of ambivalence toward the increasingly rationalized, industrialized, capitalistic form modern life was taking, ambivalence on the part of those who were helping to entrench this order-including "old-stock Northeastern elites" -as well as those who were more thoroughly subject to it.27 In reaction against the dehumanizing forces of the workplace, antimodernism set up a therapeutic ideal of individual wellness and authentic experience that people pursued in a number of ways: through obsessive concerns with their health, through regenerating holidays spent out of doors, through hobbies that allowed them scope for craftsmanship, and

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through vicarious participation in earlier, more heroic eras, especially the Middle Ages. One of the most famous facets of antimodernism was the kind of manly martial ethic popularized by Theodore Roosevelt as pursuit of the "strenuous life," part of that (at least) transatlantic surge of anxious masculinity that cast itself variously as a reaction against Victorianism, gentility, fin de siecie degeneration, the closing of the American frontier, and overcivilization. Lears associates the popularity of historical heroic romances and adventure fiction during the 1890S with antimodernism, and critics such as Martin Burgess Green and Amy Kaplan have fruitfully analyzed the relationship between romances of adventure and the imperialistic politics of Great Britain and the United States during this era. 28 The therapeutic emphasis of antimodernism and the aggressive ethic embodied in social Darwinism converged with peculiar effectiveness in many discussions of the new romance. Both of them depended on turning evolutionary discourse on its head to suggest that contemporary social life consisted mainly of an artificial, inauthentic set of constraints cloaking and obstructing people's unchanging instincts. "[T]he significant fact is that the public taste has turned, and that this instinct which is as old as the children of Adam and Eve, the instinct for a story, has reasserted itself," proclaimed William R. Thayer in 1894.29 In proposing that readers' love of "story" (as opposed to character development or social analysis, I infer) might be instinctual, Thayer and other supporters of the new romance replaced the realist opposition between "high" and "low" culture with the romancefriendly preference for "natural" over "artificial," and the realists' embrace of the "modern" over the "outmoded" was similarly countered by romancers' claim to represent the "lasting" rather than the "temporary." Even though romances were often set in the medieval past or the colonial present, they were envisioned to give readers access to the instinctual satisfactions more characteristic of a primitive state. In a typical formulation, an Atlantic writer claimed that the romance had its "seeds ... in the primitive passions and emotions" which had been weakened somewhat by "[m]odern education," "the conventional uniformity of modern manners," and "the development of self-consciousness."3o During the 18905, the United States fought the Spanish-American War, which led to the U.S. military occupation of Cuba and the annexation of Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, and through separate military and economic maneuvers the United States also annexed Hawaii and Wake

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Island. These conquests and annexations turned the United States into a conventional imperial power, whereas previously it had practiced forms of economic intervention into the affairs of less powerful nations and wars against other inhabitants of North America that had not been publicly acknowledged as imperialistic. 31 The theory outlining the romance as a recovery of primitive instincts shared common ideological ground with this imperialistic activity, since the need to recover or satisfy primal instincts of conquest and physical competition was also used as a justification for imperialism. The journalist who supported imperialism with the unlikely argument that one of Americans' primitive "instincts" was "commercial" and required an outlet in foreign markets probably would have agreed with this U.S. admirer of Kipling: 32 Civilization must contend with civilization that the more efficient, the more skillful, the more resourceful, may inherit the earth. And even those of us who believe this to be a moment when these deeply intrenched instincts should be restrained,-that the time has come when civilization will be the better advanced by such restraint, by cooperation rather than contest,-even they must grant, nevertheless, that the instincts to which he [Kipling] appeals, which have given our forefathers their preeminence, cannot be repressed without danger, must be guided rather than thwarted, must be made instrumental in the movement toward perfection, rather than crushed out and obliterated. 33 No wonder that Elliot Gorn has commented on the turn-of-the-century penchant for "contained atavism."34 Reading Kipling was presumably a safer way than Kurtz's to go a little bit native, which paradoxically enabled one to excel at the kind of elaborate international economic competition that the "natives" were not very good at. The twin promotions of romance and imperialism pivoted between contradictory narratives about ancient instincts: "1) that they were in danger of being lost, in which case our civilization would become decadent and our tastes artificial; and 2) that they were in danger of leaking out in ways we could not control unless we provided adequate exercise for them. Either narrative effectively produced these instincts as a discursive reality, though. In this way, the review-commentaries formulating the new romance assimilated romance reading to imperialist projects. Let it not be

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imagined that the supporters of realism were unaffected by the discursive reconfiguration of cultural life around social Darwinism, however. Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen warned in 1895 that "romantic fiction," the product of "good Sir Walter and his successors," was contributing to the "recent aristocratic development in the United States, with its truly medireval inequality between the classes" -a casual swipe at one current of antimodernismand also to the "recrudescence of the feudal ideal among US."35 But Boyesen in turn valued realism for preparing readers to take part in the endless struggle for supremacy: As the world is now constituted, the little margin of superiority by which a man secures survival and success is so narrow, that the very smallest advantage, gained or squandered, may be decisive as to his whole career. Therefore, all education should be primarily directed toward securing as intimate an acquaintance as possible with one's environment, so that one may be able to utilize it most effectively.... The most modern novel-which should not be confounded with the romance-has set itself this very task of exploring reality, and gauging the relative strength of the forces that enter into our lives and determine our fates .... It does not act as an opiate dulling our interest in everyday affairs, but it sharpens our observation and enables us to detect the significance of common facts and events. 36 Like the theorists of the new romance, Boyesen presumes that everyday life is a grim struggle, but his endorsement of the "modern novel" (in the next paragraph he calls it the "modern realistic novel") continues to be predicated on its status as a practice ground for reality rather than a therapeutic alternative. It may be significant that the new romance was sometimes imagined to be a taste that bridged high and low readership, just as Agnes Repplier shared the London workingmen's love of Scott. 37 To this extent, its promotion figured the erasure of domestic jockeying for advantage, which Boyesen seems to have been emphasizing, and the immersion of readers instead in the fortunes of national, not personal, competitions"civilization ... [contending] with civilization," as the Kipling reviewer put it. In this sense, Richard Harding Davis's and Stephen Crane's reporting on the Spanish-American War may have also functioned as romances. To this extent, then, both realism and the romance relied on social Darwinism, but the romance was more closely related to imperialism than realism was.

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Insofar as the late-century theories of realism and romance projected competing social functions for reading, they were articulated with different economic practices and correspondingly different conceptions of the American nation. Realism promoted restraint and self-denial, virtues conducing to production, and its emphasis on self-regulation was compatible with the isolationist dread of entangling alliances George Washington had voiced in his "Farewell Address."38 Romance theorists had no such qualms about interventionism. In endorsing the idea that Kiplingesque fiction provided a necessary channel for competitive or aggressive instincts, they prepared readers not only for tales of piracy (foreign trade made scary but exciting) but also for imperialistic adventures among subjugated nations craving American goods and ideals. The diagnosis of "overproduction" was used to justify imperialism as the search for ways to market our excess of u.s. goods abroad, and since domestic consumption was also vital for turning "overproduction" from a crisis into a source of profit, one could speculate that through the circuitous route of exercising an appetite for fiction about foreign cultures imagined in turn to be hungry for American products, Americans were able to internalize a consumerist appetite that served their economy without abandoning their long-standing identification with the productive virtues aligned with realism. 39 In relation to Colin Campbell's and Terry Lovell's proposal that capitalism depends on seemingly contradictory ethics of production and consumption that it manages by attributing them to separate agents or separate occasions, one could view the distinction between realism and the new romance as a version of this symbolic separation between the ethics of production (culminating in the self-sustaining nation) and of consumption (culminating in the tradedependent nation), which are systemically interdependent but have been acculturated in incompatible ways.40 Although romance theorists such as Thayer suggested that the romance appealed to ancient human instincts, the identifications with primitive tribesmen, workers, and children offered to romance readers might be more usefully understood according to Stallybrass and White's account of how bourgeois subject formation allows for the pleasurably transgressive annexation of symbolic versions of social sites, constituencies, and practices that have been officially excluded from bourgeois identity.41 These were not anciently discarded elements of the self, as the promoters of romance held. Rather, the symbolic identities that romance readers tried on were

The Romantic Revival 163 wrested from real populations being subjected to distancing repression and discipline during the very era of the new romance's promotion. Not only did American imperialist rhetoric of the 1890S construct the inhabitants of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and other territories as primitive or childlike peoples unfit either to govern themselves or be made American citizens, but also American anthropology's construction of Native Americans (unacknowledged victims of internal imperialism) as primitive objects of scientific investigation was institutionalized by the establishment of the Bureau of Ethnology in 1879 and publicized widely in the following decades. 42 Similarly, new uses of police and legal powers against labor unions were turning working-class Americans into a sinister "Menace" during this era, and the machinery of legal and pedagogical institutions and philosophies designed to manage children and adolescents was becoming even more intrusive and effective at turning young people into figurative or literal "wards of the State." The romantic revival, then, accomplished a symbolic inversion in which populations being subjected to new measures of discipline and repressive civilizing were used to figure the bourgeoisie's recovery of primitive simplicity and instinctualism. I will examine the romantic revival's symbolic transactions with each of these populations in turn, beginning with "primitives." The figure of the storyteller invoked by Repplier and others derived from a scenario of tribal primitivism. If, as Thayer suggested, the "instinct for a story" -presumably, for taking in a story-is" as old as the children of Adam and Eve," then storytelling must be equally ancient. Thayer'S essay announcing "The New Story-Tellers and the Doom of Realism" made explicit an antagonism that was implicit in the storyteller model itself, its critical departure from the realists' construction of authorship as professionalism. Like the model of professional authorship, however, the model of storytelling guarded writers against charges of manipulation or commercialism. Formulations like Thayer's that characterized writers as intuitive, companionable "storytellers" harked back to the relationship between a bard and a primitive tribe, as if the transaction between writer and reader predated capitalism and the market's structuring. For instance, an Atlantic review essay of 1893 opened by invoking the scenario when "the king, or the chief, or whoever had the ordering of his own entertainment, sent for the skald, the improvisator, the story-teller, or the jester, in the days when men were listeners, and not readers."43 It is perhaps significant that by the

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end of the century, when the storytelling model had become popular, an International Copyright Law (1891) had mainly removed the need for authors whose works were published transatlantically to insist upon their original creation of intellectual property, allowing them to reap the benefits of proprietorship without going to the efforts the realists had to formulate the grounds of their personal ownership of their productions. Literary agents had also come into vogue, sparing authors direct contact with the publishers who bought their works. 44 These changes had by no means altered the fact that authors were governed by the structure and fluctuations of the publishing industry, but they helped insulate authors from the need to insist on their expertise and labor. In chapter 3 I described the collaboration between the construction of realist professionalism and the idea that fiction, because it was potentially addictive, needed to be administered by professionals. Agnes Repplier's claim that Charles Lamb intuited which "literary food ... was best fitted to nourish his own intellectual growth" points toward the romance theorists' rejoinder that the powerful craving for certain kinds of reading matter could be a healthy appetite rather than an addiction. "The public is never more like a healthy child than in its thirst for the exceptional and the exotic," wrote Bliss Perry, in this spirit. 45 In 1893, F. Marion Crawford, who wrote many historical romances, wholly unapologetically identified a public addiction to emotional excitation which was an aftereffect of political engagement and a substitute for it. He proposed that when the world had lived at a very high pressure during the French Revolution, the wars of Napoleon, and what has been called the "awakening of the peoples," it had acquired permanently "the emotional habit," just as a man who takes opium or morphia cannot do without the one or the other. There was a general desire felt to go on experiencing without dangerous consequences those varying conditions of hope, fear, disappointment and triumph in which the whole world's nervous system had thrilled daily during so many years and at such fearful cost. 46 The inmate of an "inebriate asylum" who hypothesized that all addictions were merely manifestations of a fundamental craving for "sensation" was not far from Crawford's idea. However, that author was clearly aghast at this disease of the American social organism, which he traced back to our

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ancestors' unspecified habits of self-indulgence, whereas Crawford (in keeping with Lears's account of the rise of therapeutic ethic) describes the phenomenon and its symptoms without moral evaluation. He establishes the appetite's existence as if that were the only justification he needs for providing works to satisfy it. In 1897, S. M. Crothers, who wrote anonymously in the Atlantic, also helped take the sting out of romance's connection with addictiveness when he confessed to being "addicted to tales of piracy," which the article's title identified with "romance." Writing polemically, Crothers carried out the analogy to alcohol with the teasing suggestion that romances should not be prohibited, but dispensed, with a license, to "proper persons," not minorsY The very fact of these writers' casually admitting the addictive potential of romances indicates a profound loosening of this soci~l taboo. Crawford and Crothers take slightly different tacks in accounting for the satisfactions of romance, though. Whereas Crawford identifies emotional stimulation as the source of the romance's addictiveness, Crothers suggests that the moral legibility of the romance provides its appeal. "We must relieve our minds by occasionally finding something about which there can be no doubt," he proposes, instead of giving "ourselves unremittingly to the discrimination between all the possible variations of blackishness and whitishness."48 Agnes Repplier, who regretted that realist analysis had unraveled clear distinctions between villains and heroes, struck a similar note. But if moral complexity threatened to make action impossible, Manichean oppositions between moral extremes threatened to oversimplify moral judgments. The last passage I quoted suggests that the segregationist logic of "discrimination" analyzed by Kenneth W. Warren was not a feature peculiar to realism. 49 A fantasy of moral and narrative legibility that depends on the absolute demarcation between black and white clearly has racist implications. In the context of romance theory, it might contribute to that theory'S investment in Anglo-Saxonism, yet another route by which the romance intersected with imperialism. One of the rationales by which imperialism was popularized was the notion of a providential design for Anglo-Saxon (or, less often, Teutonic) domination, a plan in which Americans took part not because of their recent dependent relationship with Great Britain but because of their ancient ties of blood and racial superiority. AngloSaxonism allowed Americans to rejoin Britain in imagined imperial collab-

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oration without having to betray the Revolution which had in popular logic granted them Manifest Destiny; the romance model of bardic authorship and the racialist tribalism that it figured underlined the ancient character of this relationship and provided an image for it. As Richard Olney put it, "There is a patriotism of race as well as of country-and the AngloAmerican is as little likely to be indifferent to the one as to the other."50 Thus, romance theory reoriented American literature as part of a new international alliance. It posited, not William Dean Howells's collection of mainly French, Russian, and Scandinavian writers-an enlightened international brotherhood promoting democracy through realism-but a set of racial bonds to Anglo-Saxons (or Teutons) predating national identities and facilitating the subjugation or economic manipulation of other countries. 51 I have been suggesting that romance theory'S use of the scene of storytelling operated in conjunction with the interrelated late-century projects of imperialism (external and internal), Anglo-Saxonism, anthropology, and the construction of the primitive, projects which drew or reinflected the boundaries between the white American bourgeoisie and other populations. According to Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, it is precisely because these groups had been made marginal that fantasy versions of them could become a means of self-production for the bourgeoisie, which got transgressive pleasure from reconstituting itself as a tribe. 52 What's interesting about the storytelling fantasy in particular is that it is a fantasy motivated as well by the explosion of print culture and the cultural dominance of private, silent reading. It is an imaginative reclamation of an oral (and aural) pleasure, coordinated with the pleasure of eating what one likes that romance theorists also aligned with their version of fiction reading. 53 In the case of working-class people as well, one mark of their violently reaffirmed exclusion from the social "we" of the bourgeoisie was that they became objects of imaginative identification for more or less bourgeois readers. In particular, as I have suggested, the struggle for the eight-hour day created a public rhetoric of the right to leisure that a number of writers in the Atlantic group tried to adapt for their own use. The emphasis on a symbiosis between labor and leisure helped to accommodate leisure, and thereby the consumer pleasures that often occupied it, to the Protestant work ethic. "The god of labor does not abide exclusively in the rolling-mill, the law courts, or the cornfield," wrote Agnes Repplier, squeezing a professional workplace between two more proletarian settings. "He has a twin-

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sister whose name is leisure, and in her society he lingers now and then to the lasting gain of both."54 G. R. Carpenter's construction of the worker-reader echoed Repplier's rejection of an establishment of literary professionals who would "prescribe." Like the amorphously grass-roots rhetoric of the Populist movement which gained national attention during the early 1890s, Carpenter's rejection of the literary establishment invited the participation of anyone who felt excluded from the policy-setting machinery of a center. Six months after Brander Matthews, a professor at Columbia University, called historical novels a "drug" for people who believe that "fiction is mere story-telling," Carpenter challenged "Prof. Brander Matthews'" right to judge the tastes of others. 55 Like Repplier, Carpenter insists that fiction in which readers find pleasure is a form of nourishment for them. The intractability of people's appetite for, in this case, historical novels is a sign of how genuine their need is, rather than a sign of their weak willpower or insufficiently developed taste: The attitude of all [experts, artists, literary histories] is, at bottom, dictatorial: they attempt to prescribe what we shalllike,-which is as useless as to prescribe what we shall eat. Let these painters and dramatists and poets-so the simple-minded people has always said in its heart-offer us what they choose that is beautiful and interesting. So much is the privilege of the maker, the seller. But we are free to enjoy what we choose: that is the privilege of the consumer.... Art is your work; but it is our play. We have our work also, which is judged sternly by the laws of supply and demand: in our scant hours of leisure we must playas our nature bids us. It is, then, as one of the first rights of a citizen, that we hard-working people defend our hearty interest in the historical romance. 56 On the one hand, Carpenter's analysis correctly identifies the manipulations and indoctrinations practiced in the name of high culture, which dissimulated its function of creating an economic demand for certain kinds of fiction over others. On the other hand, it mystifies workers' prerogative to pick their own pleasures as a kind of political right, and it misleadingly implies that certain kinas of marketed reading matter satisfy natural or innate appetites. The passage also enacts a founding contradiction of capitalism in that the individual freedom attributed to the producers, who offer

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what they "choose," and to the consumers, who ideally enjoy what they "choose," is juxtaposed with the specter of the "stern," constraining "laws of supply and demand." Carpenter's prose both presumes and denies that there is some realm of culture or of tastes that transcends the market's function of providing profitable goods and stimulating consumer demand for them. This G. R. Carpenter, who took Professor Matthews to task for his elitist condescension and who spoke on behalf of working people's right to choose their own entertainment, was actually a colleague of Matthew's who held a chair of rhetoric at Columbia University, although the article does not mention this factY Like the professionals and business owners who joined organizations such as the Knights of Labor during the last decades of the nineteenth century, Carpenter's political identification with the worker's position risked blurring the specificity of the situation of the proletarians who identified themselves as "workers."s8 It obscured the relations of production which gave certain people who work-capitalists who might put in long hours at the office, for instance-crucial structural advantages over other people who work-factory operatives, for instance. This kind of loose identification with the position of the worker surfaced strikingly in an 1899 series of articles in the Arena, a magazine on the fringe of the Atlantic group. "Workers at Work" profiled, not anyone remotely working-class, but a sculptor, an orator, and three writers, in very much the way that, a generation previously, periodicals had profiled celebrities in their homes. The touch of ordinariness that humanized a celebrity had shifted from home-owning to laboring, but the labor was not positioned in a social system. An 1892 Atlantic review functioned similarly, claiming that fiction sets many persons "free from imprisoning circumstance, and makes them for a while masters of themselves because admitted to the freedom of another world."s9 "Imprisoning circumstance" appears to be an existential inevitability, not the result of specific social and economic arrangements. In these formulations, reading has become a socially acceptable response to world-weariness, as if the civic functions it was previously accorded, its power to reform readers and thereby social institutions, were no longer deemed viable. In general, the idea that romance readers were exercising consumer rights and satisfying natural appetites functioned by denying the extent to

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which both consumer preferences and the unsatisfactory working conditions that leisure activities were supposed to offset were shaped by socioeconomic relations that could have been different. However, just as the Atlantic group's associations between workers and leisure may have been prompted or inflected by the struggle for the eight-hour day, the association between workers and consumer rights may have been precipitated by labor organizations' successful use of consumer boycotts in the 1880s to gain leverage over employers whose labor practices were oppressive. 60 Carpenter's references to workers presume that they are oppressed: writing in 1898, his stance may have been shaped by sympathy for the workers' position. The government and corporate employers had been waging what Philip S. Foner has called a "reign of terror" against labor organizations since 1886, the year of the Haymarket bombing and (perhaps more significantly) the first installment of a set of annual strikes on behalf of an eighthour day. The Homestead Strike of 1893, which was defeated by the Pinkertons and the National Guard of Pennsylvania, and the Pullman Strike of 1894, which was defeated by the use of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act against labor unions, were especially serious setbacks for the labor movement. 61 The fantasy of the worker-reader showed signs of the literary establishment's engagement with these dramas of labor. However, the fantasy appropriated the workers for the subjective dramas of the bourgeoisie. The possibility that at the turn of the century manual work could be a form of therapy undertaken by the overcivilized in their leisure, as in the case of Theodore Dreiser's therapeutic stint as a railroad laborer, demonstrates the conversion of the worker's defining activity into a fantasy or metaphor (even if experienced in person) through which more privileged people expressed and treated their own unfreedom. 62 As was the case in Repplier's evocation of London workmen, moreover, workers could also be turned into simple "folk" detached from the landscape of monopoly capitalism. Whereas for Carpenter, workers were poster children advertising the dehumanizing effects of the capitalist system, for Henry Childs Merwin, who wrote only a year earlier in the Atlantic, the figure of the worker had no political specificity. Merwin brought together all three figures of readerly identification from romance theory in a piece which used the liking "savages and children" have for bright colors as an example of uncorrupted taste, and which implied that the responses of

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working-class people were similarly valuable because they had been insulated from modernity. He struck a note similar to Repplier's when he urged the Atlantic reader in his audience to Leave the close air of the office, the library, or the club, and go out into the streets and the highway. Consult the teamster, the farmer, the woodchopper, the shepherd, or the drover. You will find him as healthy in mind, as free from fads, as strong in natural impulses, as he was in Shakespeare's time and is in Shakespeare's plays.63 These idealized and distinctly nonindustrial workers (lumped together as a singular subject) are presented as carrying the raw materials of good taste, which the more privileged reader can use to renew his own overcivilized responses. The last identification projected for romance readers was the most pervasive: that with children, especially boys. Like Merwin's workers, who were constructed as primitives, children were an important point of identification not only in themselves but also as way stations to primitivism, according to a widespread contemporary adaptation of the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.64 As psychologist William Forbush put it in 1902, The prenatal child passes up through every grade of animal life from the simplest and lowest to the highest and most complex.... After birth this "candidate for humanity" continues this evolution, this "climbing up his ancestral tree," in which he has already repeated the history of the animal world, by repeating the history of his own racelife from savagery into civilization. 65 And even Forbush, whose focus was on parents' and schools' responsibility to monitor and guide this recapitulation, found this primitivism enticing, noting that the child is not only" a savage" but"also a seer" who has visions like those of the Old Testament prophets. 66 As Jacqueline Rose has emphasized, the mediation of the figure of the child made it "safe" for adults to explore states like primitivism that would otherwise threaten civilized life. 67 Of course, the mediation of children-or rather, of a special version of childhood-produced a special version of primitivism, one whose relegation to a specific developmental era in the individual was especially secure.

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The child posited by the new romance theory was not Wordsworth's prodigy of natural wisdom and sympathy, nor Stowe's prodigy of Christian intuitions, but rather a prodigy of appetite and sensation, of visceral responses and vivid wishes that were supposed to be reflected in adventure fiction and satisfied by it. In an essay responding to Henry James's "The Art of Fiction," in which James had claimed that he could not evaluate Treasure Island competently because he had never been on a treasure hunt, Robert Louis Stevenson countered that the subject matter of adventure fiction is the natural (dare I say instinctual?) material of boys' consciousness: Here is, indeed, a wilful paradox; for if he [Henry James] has never been on a quest for buried treasure, it can be demonstrated that he has never been a child. There never was a child (unless Master James) but has hunted gold, and been a pirate, and a military commander, and a bandit of the mountains; but has fought, and suffered shipwreck and prison, and imbrued its little hands in gore, and gallantly retrieved the lost battle, and triumphantly protected innocence and beauty.68 However, one might defend Henry James from Stevenson's charge by pointing out that children-and it seems inevitable that Stevenson mainly meant "boys" -pretend to be pirates and bandits in particular because of the invention, mainly in the nineteenth century, of a boys' literature. Narratives about feudal or monarchical service and outlawry had been appropriated for this purpose, just as bits of political doggerel had been reclassified as nursery rhymes and stories of European peasants were enshrined for children as fairy tales. 69 As Agnes Repplier's fantasies of unrestricted childhood reading suggested, the romantic construction of childhood or boyhood reading was framed in opposition to a dispensation already in place that monitored children's reading. Repplier had resented Howells's sense that Scott's work was not appropriate reading for American children due to its involvement in Old World political systems. Such literature would not produce democratic citizens, according to the very crude model of internalization and imitation that was sometimes generated by realism's supporters. Even more inappropriate, according to realist standards, were works for young people that would promote vice, the most notorious of which, dime novels, were identified with the working-class culture of the unaspiring outside the Atlantic

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group's sphere of influence. In 1875, James T. Fields's prejudice against " 'immoral and exciting cheap books' " was fed by a meeting with a young criminal named Jesse Pomeroy who specifically claimed that Beadle's dime novels had been" 'an injury'" to him and that he hoped other boys would not read them. Significantly, Fields's widow, Annie Adams Fields, revealed how much the prejudice against dime novels authorized the social valuation of high literature when she introduced Fields's account of his meeting with Pomeroy, part of an unpublished essay, with a syllogism: "He had long held the opinion, that if the influence of good literature was beneficent, the opposite was also true,-the effect of bad literature must be deteriorating."70 Balking at the ideas that children ought to read only about model children and that only model children could grow up to be responsible adults, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Mark Twain, and other writers celebrated "bad boys" who turned out not to be so bad after all. Steven Mailloux's analysis of bad-boy books suggests that they provided a preview of G. Stanley Hall's idea, similar to Forbush's, that prankish or even "semicriminal" behavior is a normal phase of youth. 71 However, the bad-boy books still functioned within a framework of ethical development, as my discussion of Huck Finn's exemplary moral intuition about the evils of slavery showed. Some of the adventure novels read as romances did, too, but the rhetoric of romance evoked the need for a therapeutic compensation for socialization, whereas the bad boy books functioned to reassure readers within a realist paradigm of reading that sowing wild oats might be compatible with good citizenship, or even prerequisite for it. Like the populations constructed as "primitive" and like workers, however, children became the emblems of an antidote to socialization even though-which is to say, precisely because-the juridical and educational apparatuses designed to discipline them had become even more extensive and intrusive in recent decades. Concerns with juvenile delinquency, child welfare, and child prostitution became widespread in the United States and Great Britain during the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, but according to Anthony Platt's persuasive account, "it was not until the close of the nineteenth century that an overall attempt was made to rationalize these reforms (juvenile courts, probation, child guidance clinics, reformatories, etc.) into a coherent system of juvenile justice."72 This institutional and ideological apparatus aimed to transform the nation through rehabilitating lapsed children.

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The unlapsed or "normal" children, meanwhile, were being educated according to broader mandates and more intrusive methods. Public schools were expanding their functions to include concerns with students' "health, vocation, and the quality of family and community life."73 This attention to the whole of children's experience represented the substitution of more publicly visible state disciplinary systems for the relatively concealed disciplines of family life. It would be impossible to say whether children were being shaped or disciplined or monitored more, but they were certainly being made more conspicuous objects of shaping, disciplining, and monitoring. Pedagogical philosophies of the era paid increasing attention to children's stubborn individuality, the quality that allowed or compelled them to resist pedagogies relying on physical punishment or rote learning. However, the new pedagogues' common methodology was to specify superior methods-access to self-expression, admiration for teachers, and pleasurable imitation, for instance-by which children's attention could be secured so that they could be more effectively socialized.74 Ellen Key's critique of supposedly more individualistic forms of pedagogy in 1909 seems to be aimed at precisely this benevolent but intrusive stance: I never read a pedagogical discussion without the fine words "selfactivity, individual development, freedom of choice," suggesting to me the music which accompanies the sacrificial feasts of cannibals. The moment these words are used, limitations and reservations are introduced by their advocates. Their proposed application is ludicrously insignificant, in contrast with the great principle in the name of which they urge these changes. 75 As Key's analysis suggests, the general tendency of these new ideas about children and the institutions set up to deal with them was to take into account all of the internal and external obstacles to proper socialization that existed in children's lives, in order to overcome them all the more effectively. No wonder, then, that the child became at once a figure of supposedly inborn human potentiality whose resources were continually being discovered and appreciated anew, and a metonymic reminder of the powerful apparatus of socialization being brought to bear on childhood (and by extension on adulthood). It must have seemed to the romance contingent that they were rediscovering childhood just as it was being hunted to the verge of extinction. Ellen Key gave one of her chapters the

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vehement title "Soul Murder in the Schools,"76 and as early as 1873 Mary Mapes Dodge drew a pathetic portrait of children worn down by their routine, anticipating the late-century argument that leisure reading offers a rare chance for autonomy to people whose daily activities are alienating: Most children of the present civilization attend school. Their little heads are trained and taxed with the day's lessons. They do not want to be bothered nor amused nor taught nor petted. They just want to have their own way over their own magazine. They want to enter the one place where they may come and go as they please, where they are not obliged to mind, or say "yes ma'am" and "yes sir,"-where, in short, they can live a brand-new, free life of their own for a little while, accepting acquaintances as they choose and turning their backs without ceremony upon what does not concern them. 77 For Dodge, as for the later romance theorists, the only respite for the downtrodden is to "'drop in' familiarly at an air castle, or step over to fairy-Iand."7s Whether the appetite fed by romances was constructed as "natural," as in the cases of primitives and sometimes children, or as an appetite produced or enhanced by the restrictions of modern life, as in the cases of workers and sometimes children, it was constructed through fantasy-versions of populations that realist routings of subject-construction had excluded. The civilized, bourgeois or aspiring, mature reader of realism was the composite obverse of primitives, workers, and children. It was not only the highly public emergence of these groups as objects of discipline and repression late in the century that grounded the romantic contingent's fantasy identification with them. Equally, that identification was fueled by the romancers' political and rhetorical opposition to realism, whose less explicit relationship with these groups was forged during earlier, less conspicuous phases of their emergence as populations whose management was a national and bourgeois task. As I have suggested, however, the most important collective effect of these identifications was that they were engineered to make reading's status as a consumer pleasure more palatable. Furthermore, it is important to notice that the romantic revival did not overturn cultural hierarchies completely: proponents of romance did not endorse dime novels, after all. Indeed, by placing themselves in opposition to a literary establishment they identified with realism, even though they worked in concert with the impe-

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rialist designs of corporate nationalism, the theorists of this revival laid groundwork for the twentieth century's often contradictory construction of literature as fundamentally critical or even subversive of the status quo. In the textual field organized by this dichotomy between masculine, transgressive romance and feminized realism, which was even being sequestered in an elite private lodging, I would like to position a work whose genre-based fantasies about childhood and transgression pushed the envelope of the romantic revival: Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. "The high pleasantry of one's very form" Restored to contiguity with the transatlantic debates surrounding the romantic revival, Henry James's late-century representations of young people take on special significance. Several of his major productions of the late 1890s-What Maisie Knew (1897), The Turn of the Screw (1898), and The Awkward Age (1899)-focus on children and adolescents, and Leon Edel has suggested that these later works enacted a kind of "self-therapy" that allowed James to recuperate from his failure as a playwright in 1895 by reliving and reworking parts of his own childhood. 79 However, James was one of a throng of writers who found children's consciousness fascinating to explore in the latter decades of the century. Agnes Repplier commented in the early 1890S on this transformation by which children, "after having been considered for many years as unworthy of the novelist's regard, have now suddenly grown too complex and subtle for him to hope to understand," though not for lack of trying.so James's interest in childhood during this decade refracts and reworks the phase of the realism debates sparked by the advent of romance theory, reminding us of the need to combine any analysis of personal psychology with an attention to the social discourses that organize it. (Indeed, the psychoanalytic framework Edel proposes for James's activity is itself another product of the late-century fascination with childhood.) Of these works, The Turn of the Screw is most closely in dialogue with the romantic revival. The narrative that introduces the ghost story proper in The Turn of the Screw can be seen to take up the terms of the new romance theory quite explicitly:

" 'If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to two children-?'

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"'We say, of course/ somebody exclaimed, 'that they give two turns! Also that we want to hear about them.' "81 Storytelling, the obsession with childhood receptivity (here extended to children's seeing ghosts), and unapologetic thrill seeking on the part of a fiction-consuming audience all come together in this scene. Yet there is a certain irony in their implementation here. Douglas, the unlikely bard or skald who passes on the story, performs in an English country house before a small and elite audience, which most of the women have left by the time of the actual telling. He does not tell the story from memory, but rather reads the governess's manuscript (and the narrator of Turn as a whole claims to be publishing the text of a transcription he made from that), so that only in Douglas's preparation for the story does he demonstrate performative oral inventiveness arising from his relationship with a particular group. (The vagaries of the story's transmission also raise important questions of epistemology and authorship, of course.) The Victorian Christmas custom of telling ghostly tales substitutes here for more ancient rituals. Most significantly, the audience clearly plans to delight in the children's despoilment. The listeners' pleasure in this transgression is evident, and the extraordinary emphasis on the children's innocent appearance within the story is foregrounded as a technique by which the audience will be made to experience an even more vivid surge of horror later on. As early as 1865, Henry James had spoken out against the "degradation of sentiment by making children responsible for it," in the case of a novel that insisted upon the childlike innocence of the passion of two of its characters. 82 We might imagine that he was predisposed to be skeptical of the literary apotheosis of childhood by romancers two and three decades later. Moreover, James himself had been a favorite target of the proponents of the new romance. Although he never unambiguously identified his work as realist, Howells, who did, managed to drag James along with him. One of Howells's most powerful volleys in the cause of realism was a profile of James for the Century magazine in 1.882 that cast James as a realist revolutionary who eclipsed all writers of the previous dispensation. Predictably, Howells's claims met with ridicule and resentment on both sides of the Atlantic. The passage from the essay that Howells's opponents seemed to find most offensive, and to which Agnes Repplier's liThe Decay of Sentiment" responded, is this:

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The art of fiction has, in fact, become a finer art in our day than it was with Dickens and Thackeray. We could not suffer the confidential attitude of the latter now, nor the mannerism of the former, any more than we could endure the prolixity of Richardson or the coarseness of Fielding. These great men are of the past-they and their methods and interest; even Trollope and Reade are not of the present .... This [new] school, which is so largely of the future as well as the present, finds its chief exemplar in Mr. James: it is he who is shaping and directing American fiction, at least. 83 In the wake of this essay, James was everywhere linked with Howells and Howells's pronouncements, and most of the romancers' volleys at realism's elitism and effeminacy targeted these two writers. For example, a reviewer of James's The Princess Casamassima expressed longing for "the methods of those great masters whom Mr. Howells has told us are of the past" and accused James of aristocratic condescension: "he preserves throughout the calm, superior air of one who has outgrown emotions and enthusiasm; he looks upon his fellow-beings only as available literary material."84 AN ation reviewer who praised James nonetheless compared his work to that "of the cunning worker in ivory, or of the lapidary" --companions to Allen's carver of cherry stones-neither of which was likely to capture the public imagination. 8S Taking a familiar romantic stance, a Lippincott's writer didactically propounded, as a corrective to James's and Howells's work, that "In health and vigor we are conscious of vivid feelings, lively passions.... [T]hese attributes claim their right to ministry, as well as the languid desire to know the material of a lady's dress or the precise way in which a man gets up in the morning."86 In short, James and Howells were precisely the writers neglecting the demands of healthy, manly, hungry, hardworking American readers. Since James had suffered so much at the hands of the romance's allies, it is curious to see that he describes The Turn of the Screw in his New York "Preface" (:1908) as a "fairy-tale pure and simple," a "sinister romance," and a "pure romance," and to find him protesting, as he also did in conversations and letters, that the work is the opposite of serious, seriousness having become a byword of realism. 87 Several passages in the "Preface" align James with the romantic revival. Whereas Howells had declared that American literature should concentrate on "the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American,"88 James's "Preface" proclaims,

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The thing had for me the immense merit of allowing the imagination absolute freedom of hand, of inviting it to act on a perfectly clear field, with no "outside" control involved, no pattern of the usual or the true or the terrible "pleasant" (save always of course the high pleasantry of one's very form) to consort with. 89 Howells had claimed in his Century piece about James that in "one manner or other the stories were all told long ago ... " so that issues of character and style preoccupy modern authors 90; James echoes Howells again when he recounts his fear in the face of writing The Turn of the Screw that the "good, the really effective and heart-shaking ghost-stories (roughly so to term them) appeared all to have been told" (P 169), but makes clear that he went on to produce a story that "was an action, desperately, or it was nothing" (P 174). (Agnes Repplier also objected to the "arrogant wave of reason and common sense which ... swept romance," in this case in the form of ghosts, "from the land," insisting that people wanted their ghosts to be, not "friendly shades of departed mediocrity, but phantoms evil in every instinct, and linked with inexpiable crime."91) And James may have been thinking of the Lippincott's reviewer who had claimed that James could not bring himself "to the vulgarity of a regular denouement" when, in the introductory narrative, he has Douglas assure his audience that the story won't tell" 'in any literal, vulgar way,' " to which one listener-not a sympathetic character-responds with disappointment (T 294).92 Within the governess's account, he significantly refers to the towers of the house at Blyas "dating, in their gingerbread antiquity, from a romantic revival that was already a respectable past," just as the first ghost, Peter Quint, appears on one of them (T 310). Interwoven with these allusions to the romantic revival begun a few years before is a discussion of his relations with an imagined audience. The recursiveness of the tale-its being "an anecdote amplified and highly emphasised and returning upon itself" (P 172)-seems connected to its designs upon readers, since in the next sentence we hear that "it is a piece of ingenuity pure and simple, of cold artistic calculation, an amusette to catch those not easily caught (the' fun' of the capture of the merely witless being ever but small), the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious" (P 172), presumably the overcivilized denizens of the late nineteenth century who long for fictional rejuvenation. James goes on to specify two kinds of catching. In

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one case, he makes clear that his fiction has exceeded the appreciation of a reader who "complained that I had n't [sic] sufficiently 'characterised' my young women engaged in her labyrinth" (P 173), an objection that echoes high-realist concerns with deep character and ethics. But James exults even more over about having made readers construct for themselves the evils that menace the children, in a passage worth quoting at length: Only make the reader's general vision of evil intense enough, I said to myself-and that already is a charming job-and his own experience, his own imagination, his own sympathy (with the children) and horror (of their false friends) will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars.... There is not only from beginning to end of the matter not an inch of expatiation, but my values are positively all blanks save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness-on which punctual effects of strong causes no writer can ever fail to plume himself-proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures. (P 176-77; emphasis added) James's great success here is to compel (and expose) readers' complicity in the tale, their role in dredging from their imaginations various unspeakable possibilities for the exploitation of children. 93 The reader here is led by the duplicitous identification with childhood innocence to recognize how inextricable the idea of that innocence is from the idea of its corruption. The realist reader seeking a moral consciousness to emulate or internalize is not the only one taken in by this work: the romance reader expecting to reaffirm the originary innocence of childhood, which serves to guarantee the foundational innocence of the adult imagination, is led instead to encounter or even produce materials more characteristic of the Freudian unconscious. Of course, the touch of Honi soit qui mal y pense in James's exposition here is disingenuous. The danger of "vulgarity" to which he alludes in the "Preface" is by no means so open to interpretation as to be a "blank": the word implies an infringement of propriety, a reference to sex or scatology, especially one that semantically embodies the mores of a subordinate class. Bruce Robbins has proposed that one of James's blanks "overlaps with a general Victorian blank, the 'open secret' that connected servants to the sexual initiation of their masters' children" -but that association, though pertinent, does not necessarily mean that the content of that secret is the full and unambiguous content of the blank. 94 In keeping with Robbins's

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emphasis on the class politics of the novella, however, it is certainly true that the nobility of the children is overinscribed: they are "little grandees" or "princes of the blood, for whom everything, to be right, would have to be enclosed and protected," so that (the governess opines) "the only form that, in my fancy, the afteryears could take for them was that of a romantic, a really royal extension of the garden and the park" (T 309). Their tact, their refined manners ("Whatever he [Miles] had been driven from school for, it was not for ugly feeding" [T 393]), and Miles's gentlemanliness testify to a quality about them in which aristocracy is conflated with innocence. Hence the importance of their corrupters, the ghosts, being servants; the danger of crossing class lines has already been demonstrated by the ambiguous but unhappy fate of Miss Jessel, who was "respectable" (T 296) until she mingled with the "base" (T 335) Peter Quint. Significantly, the strongest proofs that the children have been corrupted are not sexual misbehaviors but lapses from the verbal propriety of their class: that Miles has said things to boys that he liked that were "too bad" to be written about (T 401), and that Flora uses "appalling language" about her current governess to Mrs. Grose (T 388).95 Hence, the contamination of the children can be traced by the class coding of a certain kind of verbal fluency about sex and other transgressive matters; the question is whether the sexual fluency signifies real sexual knowledge or experience. In this connection, the governess's fantasy that the children, especially Miles, have "no history" (T 314) seems significant, calling attention to another blind spot of the romance version of childhood. Less than a decade before G. Stanley Hall's Adolescence (1904) emphasized the sexual capacities and feelings of children, the question of whether the children at Bly have been corrupted by servants, alive or dead, points to the more fundamental problem of whether children need anything but their own experiences to inform them about sex-and presumably about class as well. Hall himself addressed this issue, in a passage suggesting that the "open secret" to whic.h Robbins calls attention was losing explanatory power during the period when James wrote The Turn of the Screw: There are well-authenticated cases where children of both sexes under two years of age have practiced it ["onanism," which in context refers to masturbation], and far more cases are on record for still later childhood years. In some cases it is taught by nurses, older children, or

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perverts, but there is abundant evidence that even with the very young, and still more with the older, the old view that it was not spontaneously learned, but due to example and moral infection, was wrong. 96 It is only by erasing the histories of children's energetic explorations of the world around them, including their own bodies, that they can be posited as so very mild and simple, after all. Yet the possibility that "innocent" children seek out sexual pleasure on their own was perhaps more distasteful to late Victorians than was the possibility that they had been influenced by others to do so. Like the reader described by James's preface, the governess herself is increasingly implicated in the horrors that the children are imagined to suffer-not because, as Edmund Wilson has claimed, she is a "thwarted Anglo-Saxon spinster" with "relentless English 'authority'" whose sexual desires distort her perceptions, nor because, as Martha Banta has more intriguingly but still disturbingly suggested, she is a "Virgin governess who tried to impose her conscious, personal will upon those around her"presumably, the emblem of repressive culture. 97 (The virulence of the misogyny directed at the governess's position of authority by otherwise sensitive critics is a sign of how pervasively our culture blames women for the wounds of socialization.) To ask whether or not the governess is a reliable narrator is as much beside the point as Alice's asking, at the end of Through the Looking Glass, whether she or the Red King dreamed the narrative. 98 The governess's dilemma is not a personal idiosyncrasy. She is caught in the contradictions produced by the children's circumstances: the contradictions, clustered around class and sexuality, of a situation in which privileged children are insulted from the world in order to be educated about it; in which they are submitted to the authOrity of their social inferiors in order to be prepared for the life appropriate to their social rank; and in which they are made the bearers of so stark and absolute a version of innocence that no route into adulthood seems possible for them except an extension of their protected state-"a really royal extension of the garden and the park" (T 397). The analogy between her situation and that of the ghosts is a structural inevitability that enacts the possibility, latent in the works of the Pragmatist pedagogues, that pedagogic procedures might produce the very contents they claim to find in children's consciousnesses, or

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that any kind of "development" contaminates children's fundamental purity.99 This problem surfaces most acutely when the governess realizes that Miles has the upper hand because of the "old tradition of the criminality of those caretakers of the young who minister to superstitions and fears" that prevents her from questioning him more explicitly about the interchanges with ghosts she suspects him of conducting (T 349). Her wording seems significant when she imagines the culpability of her being "the first to introduce into our perfect intercourse an element so dire" (T 349). If she were to try to determine and weed out the contents of children's minds, she would risk importing exactly the contents she most feared. Her potential to contaminate by her very interrogations also surfaces when she regrets on one occasion that she has reduced Miles to a "vulgar" lie (T 397). The problem of whether Miles should be sent back to school-or rather, back to a new school, since he has been expelled from the old one-impinges on another of the dangers of the governess's role, one which has often been noted but to which I would add a new twist. The governess initially assumes that Miles is innocent of whatever he has been charged with and should be preserved from the ignominies of schooling. Like James's fiction, he is simply too "fine and fair" (T 314) for his mates and teachers to appreciate, and she wants to shield him from being further misunderstood. But in her dominion, even aside from the predations of ghosts, he runs the risk of being feminized. The governess herself makes a grim joke about this at one point. When Miles is playing the piano for her after he has been officially exempted from lessons, she attributes to him the desire to practice the courtesy of the" 'true knights we love to read about' " and not push his strategic advantages over her too far. Nevertheless, in light of the tangle of deceptions between them, she notes that "if there are those who think he had better have been kicking a football I can only say that I wholly agree with them" (T 374). It turns out that Flora has disappeared, the governess thinks to meet Miss Jessel, while Miles has so charmingly occupied her; but the comment reflects on the crucial role of sports and male companionship in constructing proper young manhood at this point, and the tenuousness of Miles's masculine socialization. Despite her intent to socialize the children through her instruction, she is, after all, a rogue pedagogue, not properly ensconced within a school setting. And the elaborate courtesy and brightness that she admires in Miles would precisely call his masculinity into question according to the

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converging standards of bad-boy books and sexologists. Following in the tradition of Mark Twain, Mrs. Grose announced early in the novella that a boy who never misbehaves is no boy for her. As the governess restates the idea, both agree that they like boys with "'the spirit to be naughty'" but "'not to the degree to contaminate'" (T 305). Claudia Nelson has shown that in the latter half of the nineteenth century, delicacy and bookishnessusually read as effeminate characteristics-ceased to be signs of moral and spiritual uprightness in British Victorian literature and instead began to signal dangerous "sexual precocity" or perhaps even homosexuality.lOo Miles's account of his vice-saying bad things to other boys-together with the fact that each of the ghosts seeks its same-sex child makes it possible to match him with this profile. Reversing the stereotypical pattern, Miles seems to have picked up a homosexual coding during his education at home and carried it to boarding school with him. Moreover, this understated subplot is revealingly overdetermined: its logic implies that homosexuality is transmitted or produced by the "lower" classes (Peter Quint); by female authority (to whose terrors a host of misogynist interpreters of the governess attest); and/or by the feminizing effects of too much female companionship. James Lane Allen might diagnose Miles as suffering from an excess of the Feminine Principle, which has made him exquisite and decadent at once. Whereas the governess's investment in the children is the mirror image of the ghosts' investment, her relation to them is also analogous to that of the Atlantic-group magazines, whose vying investments in realism and romance commit them both to discipline childhood and to enshrine it. 101 The governess has come to "watch, teach, 'form' little Flora" (T 300) and also" 'to be carried away'" (T 301) by her. The governess's second motive is more easily satisfied than the first: "My attention to them all really went to seeing them amuse themselves immensely without me: this was a spectacle they seemed actively to prepare and that engaged me as an active admirer. I walked in a world of their invention ... " (T 326). She can be "plunged ... into Flora's special society" (T 333); she acknowledges that "the surrender to their extraordinary childish grace" was "a thing I could actively cultivate ... " (T 338). They act plays for her and tell her stories (T 339). No romance reader could have more successfully colonized a realm of childhood, as it was constructed at the end of the century. Completing the parallel, the governess's most positive statement about the nature of

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the ghosts' designs on the children is that Miss Jessel wants Flora to share with her the torments of the damned (T 367), presumably to divert her and to filter her perceptions just as Miss Jessel's successor uses the children's play to distract her from her own sorrowful predicament. One might see in the figure of the governess an emblem of the late-Victorian dilemma about childhood. Trying to forget the disturbing specter of children's sexuality and self-consciousness, the governess becomes absorbed in children's dutiful enactments of the sprightliness in which they have been trained. 102 She is participating in what Jacqueline Rose has called, with reference to Peter Pan, the "sexual act ... in which the child is used (and abused) to represent the whole problem of what sexuality is, or can be, and to hold that problem at bay."l03 It would be overly simple to conclude that the novella is James's coldblooded excursion into romance topoi, intended to catch readers with romantic revival-induced investments in childhood whether or not they ever realize that they've been caught. There seems to be a genuine desire in the "Preface" to invite reading practices associated with romance in order to gain some distance from realism, and the narrative's use of some of the most conspicuous old and new marks of romance (such as ghosts and storytelling) underlines this invitation. Moreover, The Turn of the Screw involved James in a variety of fictional or more broadly intellectual projects. The novella inscribes itself in the Dickensian tradition of Christmastime ghost stories, consolidating James's identification with England (and with country houses, one of which he purchased) a bit more, and, like Heart of Darkness, it genuinely participates in the aesthetic and epistemological project of exploring simulated tale-telling (which may have been fueled by the romantic revival's more naive enthusiasm about storytelling).104 The preface registers his irritation at some of the pressures exerted by realist prescriptions, especially those of his friend Howells, and strikes an aesthete's pose in its claim to defy all such social pressures and be true only to its form, even though the governess continues to invite realist appraisals of her character. In addition, the novella is riddled with imperialistic significance. As Graham McMaster has shown, it can be read as an Indian orphan tale, since the children's parents (and perhaps also grandparents, as the New York edition suggests) were colonials in India. This genre thrived around the turn of the century and seems to have been a fantasy through which the profits of imperialism were laundered by de-

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scending to an orphan, who was necessarily innocent of the lucrative colonial exploitation. lOS I would add to this account that the choice of the child as the launderer connects all the Indian orphan tales to the late-century romantic revival. But my point is that McMaster's reading suggests vectors to the story which James probably deeply, though not necessarily consciously, experienced, and which do not allow the story to be read as merely a calculated manipulation of the psychic contents presupposed by romance theory. In its time and thereafter, The Turn of the Screw was usually classified as a romance (or, when the realism debate was not at stake, a ghost story).l06 To propose, as I do, that The Turn of the Screw participated in debates about what it meant to be a romance or a realist novel, and therefore what it meant to read for romance or for realism, is something different.1° 7 I have located The Turn of the Screw as a fiction taking up some of the discourses, phrases, and images from contemporary arguments about genre, but it is important not to suppose that only works by "masters" are selfreflexive in this way. This recursiveness can be the product of the market's compulsive assigning and patrolling of generic identities, not of unusual authorial self-consciousness. Shoshana Felman has put The Turn of the Screw to wonderful use as an allegory of reading, and the recursive moments that she and some of the best readers in the traditions of Derrida and DeMan find most illuminating are some of the ones I privilege as well.lOB Her version of the reading effect produced by The Turn of the Screw-in which readers seeking mastery are foiled, and the text comments on the impossibility of the literalfunctions beautifully as a heuristic fable for late twentieth-century readers, teaching us, in effect, how to read The Turn of the Screw in a way that is satisfying and instructive. Her project, however, is to analyze the text's continuities across historical moments rather than its engagement with any particular moment, as is demonstrated by the fact that she tracks reading effects that the text produces across generations of critics. In this chapter I have also tried to teach a way of reading The Turn of the Screw, but one in which the fact of recursiveness-the Escher-like narrative design that Felman highlights-is less important than its substance: its engagement with contemporary debates about reading. Whereas Felman highlights scenes of reading that she treats as transhistorical, I have been highlighting topoi and discourses that mediated the readings James might have

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expected his novella to get, and that shaped the climate in which it was first encountered by readers. I have tried to characterize The Turn of the Screw as a narrative that riffs on the romantic revival; I am not convinced that the narrative has a logic that amounts to a precise judgment of either the new romance or high realism. However, one additional way of interpreting its action might serve as a final comment on the debate. Many readers have judged the novella to be organized around the competition between the governess and Peter Quint for Miles, since the governess's initial and final confrontations with ghosts are with Quint and since the last one leaves Miles's heart "dispossessed" and stopped (T 403). As I have hinted, the whole tradition of criticism that faults the governess for trying to cramp or feminize Miles reproduces the sexual politics of the discourses of the romantic revival, sometimes faulting the governess not only for repressing Miles's masculinity but also for unconsciously inventing the threatening masculinity of Quint. However, the allegorical resonances of this struggle are subtler than this. For one thing, as I discussed above, the governess plays out a bifurcation between the more or less realist desire to shape and discipline childhood and the more or less romantic desire to be submerged in it, neither of which can be reduced to a feminine or feminizing intent. For another, presuming that the novella interrogates only the governess's symbolic functions shortchanges the rich figures of Peter Quint and Miles. They are the only characters in The Turn of the Screw who have no counterparts in Jane Eyre, which Millicent Bell has identified as the novella's "intertext," and it is not too far-fetched to assume that they were produced as a result of James's experiences with a particular configuration of the "literary horizon" of his productions, one whose discourses still reverberate in his "Preface."lo9 Miles and Quint are demonic versions of figures idealized within the romantic revival. The innocent appetency of the boy reader and the consumeristic self-assertion of the oddly classless worker reader here spawn their sinister Others: the boy who knew too much and the man whose uncultured pursuit of leisure got out of hand. Of the two, Quint is the more revealing character, a means by which James embodies certain unacknowledged horrors that working-class males represented for elite readers, despite workers' having become fashionable as the icons of an in-group cultural rebellion. In James's novella, Peter Quint is the origin of sexual contamination. He

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has contaminated Miss Jessel, and with her has contaminated the children; the struggle with him might even be contaminating the governess. It is precisely the nature of his contaminating influence that James's "blanks" prompt readers to surmise for themselves. Considered in this light, James's treatment of Quint, which makes a character from the social and narrative margins central to the book, serves at least two purposes.no On the one hand, the class degradation that James lavishes on Quint may demonstrate James's skepticism that fiction would benefit by being renewed from its more "natural" margins, from cultural insiders' coming to identify with people who were less refined and more instinctual. Quint incarnates the elements of masculinity, as it was culturally scripted, that were laundered out of the hypermasculine rhetoric of the romantic revival: vulgarity, since refinement had been feminized, so that the (imagined) uncouth workingman was therefore the most masculine; and sexual aggression, omitted from the idyllic all-male scenarios of adventure fiction. In short, Quint might be a more threatening, scarcely representable incarnation of what James Lane Allen called the "Masculine Principle" advancing on fiction, whose potential for cultural revitalization is dubious. This is a very different matter from assessing whether fiction might be improved from some more genuine engagement with working people, of course: romance theorists and James are involved in a war of symbols. On the other hand, the looming but silent presence of Quint and the absence of any explicit sexual references from the book, so that readers must be preoccupied with filling in these "blanks," amounts to a critique of the hypocrisy of a literary establishment that, through its advocacy of romance theory, published its enthusiasm for revitalizing literature and casting aside overrefinement but that still stringently limited public references to sexuality. Leon Edel's biography of Henry James shows that as recently as the winter of :1895-96, James had been frustrated by the extraordinary restrictiveness of u.s. high culture, when an article he had written for the Century merely making reference to seduction in the works of Alexandre Dumas fils was edited to expurgate the reference. 111 If fiction was renewing itself by reclaiming certain transgressive pleasures of reading and certain materials that had been excluded from high culture during the preceding decades, what was being reclaimed was tame, indeed, compared to the kind of sexual knowledge that was being produced at every turn but disallowed. Quint might be the specter of a set of social and sexual

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practices and meanings that was still effectively suppressed within high culture: suppressed by the mystifying enshrinement of the worker-reader, which papered over genuine class antagonisms and prejudices, and suppressed by the evacuation of open sexual discussion from high culture, which led elite readers to project sexual meanings and wishes they could not acknowledge as their own onto the working class-and maybe even onto children, since they protested so anxiously against it. No wonder James might pride himself on having readers furnish the content of the ghosts' depravities from their own thoroughly acculturated and classbound consciousnesses.

5

Regional Accents: The Atlantic Group, the Arena, and New England Women's Regionalism I

Different periodicals invite different ways of being read. Through page layouts, announcements and advertisements, illustrations and typography, addresses to readers, and a variety of other signals, a periodical provokes certain kinds of attention and creates certain interpellating identifications for its readers. It is perfectly possible, therefore, to make inferences about the reading formation created by any given periodical, with the understanding that because readers can be familiar consumers of various periodicals as well as of other kinds of texts, reading formations can overlap or can even interpellate the same reader in conflicting ways. However, not all periodicals provide substantial discussions of how to read other kinds of texts and how to assign cultural value to texts, including their own contents. Because the Arena did, it marked the possibility of a reading formation for fiction that not only differed from the formation constructed by the Atlantic group but also challenged its adequacy. Founded in 1889, the Boston-based Arena published articles in support of a wide range of reform movements and fringe intellectual topics. Like the Atlantic, the Arena published book reviews as well and earnestly sought to assess the value of the books it reviewed, value which was sometimes cast in terms of literariness and sometimes not. As was the case for the Atlantic, also, the Arena's book reviews functioned in coordination with the magazine's choice of fiction to publish and with the political agenda of its journalistic commentaries. And because the Arena was committed to the Farmers' Alliance and the People's Party during an era in which farmers managed to occupy the nation's political center stage, the difference between the Atlantic way of reading and the Arena way is most

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clearly marked in the case of regionalist fiction, which was overwhelmingly devoted to representing rural spaces and communities. In this chapter I will consider some differences between an Atlantic and an Arena reading of some familiar works of New England women's regionalism. I have been emphasizing the power of the Atlantic-group magazines to bring works of fiction into dialogue with their discourses about literature because of their preeminent literary authority. It seems unlikely that the regionalist works I'm examining were written with equal attention to the Arena. I doubt whether their authors kept up with the Arena; moreover, some of these authors began their careers and set their work's direction long before the Arena was founded. However, just as the Atlantic group was part of a larger organization of cultural authority coordinated with class interests, the Arena was an organ of various social-protest movements whose scope and social effects were greater than its own. Writing regionalist fiction involved authors in a complex and contradictory set of relations to rural life. In conjunction with the Atlantic group, one set of these relations is brought into relief, but in conjunction with the Arena, another set becomes more prominent. The Arena is important, not because it successfully competed with the Atlantic group's cultural authority, but because its reviewing and political reporting brought together and gave a public hearing to a set of interests that had numerous adherents in the 1890s, interests that were not well represented in the Atlantic group. Because the Arena's interests informed its reflective book reviews, we can derive from the Arena the outlines of a reading practice quite distinct from that encouraged by the Atlantic group. Writing the Rural Since the Arena did not begin publication until 1889, the Atlantic group had already developed ways of framing regionalism before the Arena ever came on the scene. The most explicit and general framework for regionalist writing constructed it as a means of imaginative national unification, especially after the Civil War when regionalist fiction became a staple of these magazines. Subtitles of local-color works often announced them to be novels, stories, studies, or portraits of "Creole life," "the recent West," "Southern life," "the Hoosier State," "New England," "the upper Ohio," and so on, and reviewers often testified hopefully to the process by which these fragments could be glued together to form a vessel for national consciousness

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and a truly national culture. Regionalist writing certainly began well before the Civil War: a work such as Caroline Kirkland's A New Home,

Who'll Follow? (1839) had already taken up the task of informing easterners about the West, after all, and Washington Irving's Knickerbocker writings and Hawthorne's New England writings were similarly selfconscious works of regional historiography. But after the Civil War, regionalist writing became a virtual industry, so much that book review columns sometimes grouped the books under review by region. Despite the abundance of regionalist novels, the short story was often praised for being the ideal regionalist form, as well as a form in which American prose writers were held to excel. It was a commonplace in Atlantic-group magazines that the familiar, established social structures of European countries such as England lent themselves to easy novelization, but that the volatile and diverse population of the United States could be captured only in pieces: With us the magazine story has been constrained to fill, in a measure, the part of the novel in holding the mirror up to nature. The mirror is a small one, but ... our society is too scattered and heterogeneous ever to be reflected as a whole; in which case we have cause to be grateful for the many partial but clear images which are given us; for the bright little sketches of local life and character jotted down by writers who at least draw from nature, and who sometimes seem to lack only the strength or the technical knowledge for more sustained work. Few of us realize how largely we are indebted to novels for our knowledge of facts, and still less, perhaps, do we recognize how far our ideas in regard to unfamiliar portions of our own country are gleaned from mere occasional sketches and stories, or how complete a picture these would make if pieced together. 2 The nationalizing function of regionalism was so crucial that this Atlantic reviewer was willing to overlook even a lack of literariness, and the importance of this task accounts in part for the overwhelming popularity of regionalist fiction in the Atlantic group during the entire period I have surveyed. But imaginary consolidation of the nation was not the only important ideological function of regionalism. Since the majority of regionalist writing focused on more or less rural life-not only life on farms, but also life in villages and small towns-regionalism can be productively considered as

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part of a larger enterprise of writing the rural. Writing the rural involves distinguishing the rural from the urban, assessing the practical and symbolic value of the rural to the nation as a whole, and representing rural life-representing it specifically as rural, that is. In various forms it has been energetically pursued from colonial times to the present in the United States, and as Raymond Williams's important study The Country and the City demonstrates, it has been a powerful literary project not only within other national cultures but also for rendering relations between the metropolitan "first world" and the rural-coded "third world."3 During the era of u.s. history I have been considering, the nation's expressed public interest in its rural life had a distinct plot that was often summed up as rural "discontent"-a term that revealingly points to some aberration in what ought to be peaceful, even drowsy rural contentment. The Atlantic author who wrote an article about "The Political Menace of the Discontented" in 1896 clearly disapproved of this bad attitude, whereas writers in the Arena usually took the stand that farmers and other protesters had legitimate causes for dissatisfaction. 4 This discontent started to emerge during the 1870S with the recruitment of farmers to the Grange, a voluntary organization dedicated to the improvement of farmers' lot through cooperative endeavors. It grew stronger during the 1880s, due in part to farmers' resentment of the railroads that controlled shipping costs for farm products and in part to western farmers' mistrust of the eastern financiers who invested heavily in western mortgages; the Farmers' Alliance, which became a significant organization during these years, was much more politically oppositional than the Grange. The Arena was founded just before discontent reached its height in the 189os, when the People's Party emerged as the party of agricultural unrest. And during the first decade of the twentieth century, after the conspicuous defeat of the People's (or Populist) Party in the 1896 elections and some improvement in the economic situation of farmers, rural discontent became a target of Progressive cures in the form of agricultural extension services, the new academic discipline of rural sociology, and the Country Life Movement, which was devoted to the appreciation of rural living (and, revealingly, rural vacationing). Indeed, President Theodore Roosevelt even formed a Commission on Country Life in 1908, so important did he deem the rural population's contentment. The plot of rural" discontent" I have broadly sketched is a familiar one in which a protesting population is not only defeated politically but is also

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disciplined out of political resistance. The academic-governmental approach to problems of rural life in the early twentieth century effectively depoliticized rural-identified protests of the late nineteenth century by constructing rural life as pathological and then encouraging ruralites to submit gratefully to therapies prescribed by urban-identified experts. This is not to say that agricultural extension services, for instance, were not helpful to farmers. The problem with such approaches was that they displaced political and economic grievances completely into the domains of scientific management and social engineering. 5 Because of regionalism's implication in this larger project of writing the rural, it was susceptible to widely varying articulations. Insofar as regionalist fiction could be read as attesting to the inferiority of rural life, or insofar as it led urban readers to believe that they had a cognitive purchase on rural society that ruralites (who were often characterized by their ignorance or misunderstanding or urban culture) did not reciprocally enjoy, regionalism was part of this ideological apparatus of the nation's urbanand northeastern-identified center. But insofar as regionalist fiction could be read as testifying to the exploitative consequences that certain national policies had for rural Americans, and to the injustice of a system that gave meager or unpredictable rewards to agricultural producers and the rural infrastructure that supported them, regionalism had the potential to swivel in its orientation and serve the periphery. Regionalism's functioning on behalf of urban northeasterners has been the more thoroughly explored by critics so far, who have analyzed regionalist fiction in parallel with ethnography, travel writing, and the imperialist rhetoric of national "expansion." These forms of writing the rural undertook the depiction of more "primitive" or "simple" subcultures at the periphery of national life for the benefit (and from the vantage point) of the supposedly more modern and sophisticated metropolitan center. Because the Atlantic group was part of the culture of this center, recent scholars of regionalism who have pursued this reading of regionalism have effectively focused on its framing by Atlantic-group magazines, whether or not they have identified this focus. Richard Brodhead's Cultures of Letters explicitly considers the functioning of regionalist texts that were published in the Atlantic, the Century, and Harper's in conjunction with the travel literature published in these magazines. 6 Magazines are only incidental to Amy Kaplan's analysis of regionalism in The Columbia History of the American

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Novel, but she puts regionalism in the context of the Century's latecentury historical review of the Civil War, a sign of regionalism's role in national consolidation as well as its problematic racial politics. 7 Both Brodhead's and Kaplan's analyses hold that regionalist fiction managed the anxieties and imperialist ambitions of well-to-do, native-born, East Coast urbanites: the readership of the Atlantic group, in other words. The specificity of their analyses is by no means a failing, but if it is not recognizedif regionalism gets articulated only with ethnography and travel writing, the forms of writing the rural that most clearly served privileged populations-then we risk losing sight of regionalism's share in other political projects. The book reviews of the Atlantic group not only confirm but also extend the reading of regionalist fiction that Brodhead and Kaplan have proposed, especially in relation to regionalism's mediation of white racial privilege. For example, both critics suggest that regionalist works comforted privileged urban readers troubled by onslaughts of immigrants. 8 In a soothing displacement of these worries, regionalist fiction tended to depict remote and isolated ethnic communities whose inhabitants were remnants of a past social order that was inevitably passing away as a result of the advances of modern, urban-industrial-based life. A Harper's reviewer praised Mary Noailles Murfree for her representation of Tennessee mountain people, "a primitive folk who retain the dialect and the simple and uncouth ways of their forefathers, together with their dress, occupations, and forms of intercourse, their inartificial and rough-and-ready vices and virtues, their quick responsiveness to passion and emotion, and their full share of that human nature which makes all men kin."9 The mountaineers were our "kin," certainly, but the reviewer implies that they were stalled in an earlier evolutionary phase, and their interest lay as much in their constituting a kind of living preserve for linguistic and social curiosities as in their experiencing interpersonal dramas. Even more sinister was a Lippincott's reviewer's praise for how Gertrude Atherton depicted Californian life under Spanish rule: Atherton ably conveyed "the life and spirit of a people, far more Spanish than American in type, yet inherently tending toward absorption by the dominant Anglo-Saxon race."l0 In keeping with the imperialistic functions of Anglo-Saxonism that I examined in chapter 4, the localcolorist proclivity for making the mores of depicted populations seem static and unchanging conduced to the idea that subordinate ethnic and social

Regional Accents 195 groups lacked the flexibility and ambition of the self-styled Anglo-Saxons who read about them. Justifying not only the United States' new island possessions but also white (Anglo-Saxon) supremacy at home demanded that "racial" traits be essentialized as much as possibleY Taking Brodhead's and Kaplan's analyses even further, the Atlantic group helped to publicize a peculiar genre of writing the rural-and thereby a peculiar way of reading regionalism-that gave regionalist works about New England a special relationship to Anglo-Saxonism. A group of academic historians held that English settlers in New England brought with them an Anglo-Saxon, Aryan, and/or Teutonic racial inheritance that was naturally manifested in the political institutions of the New England village. As Herbert Baxter Adams, the foremost proponent of this school of historiography and one of the founders of the American Historical Association, put it, "The town and village life of New England is as truly the reproduction of Old English types as those again are reproductions of the village community system of the ancient Germans."12 In turn, New England villages were envisioned to be microcosms of American democracy, which could therefore be understood as specifically Anglo-Saxon in origin. The idea was sufficiently widespread for an Atlantic reviewer to presume his readers' familiarity when he quarreled with it in :1897, and Henry Cabot Lodge and numerous other prominent Bostonians embraced some version of it.1 3 In terms of regionalist fiction, this Aryan village school of U.S. historiography implied that whereas depictions of immigrant groups who were destined to be assimilated into the United States' dominant AngloSaxonism (or to be shut out of it) were governed by the paradigms of primitivism, depictions of New England rural life instead were governed by a kind of ancestor worship that could be directed toward characters from contemporary life because they preserved the social-racial principles of "our" Anglo-Saxon forebears. Murfree's writings about Tennessee mountaineers may have functioned as travel literature, but New England regionalist writings took on more of the character of pilgrimages, in this connection. 14 In keeping with this idea that the Anglo-Saxon subjects of regionalist writings were emblems of civilization rather than primitivism, one reviewer proclaimed that the "most indigenous civilizations of the New World," which she implausibly identified as Freeman's and Hawthorne's New Englanders and James Lane Allen's Kentuckians, provide its most "enduring art."lS Sarah Orne Jewett's story "The Queen's Twin," which is

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especially preoccupied with such Anglo-Saxon origins, brings together two characteristic moments in local-color fiction whose race politics become unusually legible in this connection. The first is the perception that remote settlements in the United States have preserved the English culture of previous centuries-especially high English culture, which might embody the Anglo-Saxon, Aryan, or Teutonic racial heritage-in their language and practices. The prospect of meeting Abby Martin, who feels she has a special relationship to Queen Victoria because key events in her life have paralleled those in the Queen's life, prompts Jewett's narrator to remember "the quick interest and familiar allusion to certain members of the royal house which one found in distant neighborhoods of New England; whether some old instincts of personal loyalty have survived all changes of time and national vicissitudes, or whether it is only that the Queen's own character and disposition have won friends for her so far away, it is impossible to te11."16 Similarly, when Mrs. Todd, in "The Foreigner," uses the phrase "a made countenance," and the narrator recalls Sir Philip Sidney'S use of the same phrase, we find the English Renaissance alive and well in nineteenthcentury Maine, and the same kind of link is made. 17 The second moment is the narration's participation in the meritocratic notion that certain Americans, by virtue of their robustness, high moral character, or charisma, might be "natural aristocrats" destined to exert special influence whether or not they achieve extraordinary success. Mrs. Martin's features "had kept, or rather gained, a great refinement" over the years, and Jewett's narrator acknowledges her quiet superiority.18 Likewise, Clary, in Rose Terry Cooke's story "Clary's Trial," "was only a bound girl, but nature had made her an aristocrat outwardly and inwardly ..."19 This characteristic trope reinforces the ideas that some people are born nobler than others, perhaps through an atavistic outcropping of traits dating back to the noble race from which they sprang, whereas remote U.S. subcultures' preservation of English ways lends support to the idea that there might be fundamental, .intuitive connections among all Anglo-Saxons, or even that they might share a special worldwide mission. In the decade in which the United States claimed its first publicly recognized colonial possessions, it is suggestive to find an American woman in remotest Maine identifying with Victoria, the head of the British Empire. 20 I have been suggesting that the Atlantic group provided through its book

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reviews and its hospitable treatment of Aryan village historiography even more explicit ways of putting New England regionalist fiction in the service of late nineteenth-century racism and nativism than Kaplan and Brodhead have uncovered. Contemporary constructions of genre also affected regionalism's relationship to Anglo-Saxonism. Regionalism could be connected either with realism (because of its nationalizing mission and its attention to the contemporary and American) or with romance (because its populations were symbolically related to the past and the foreign, and because a sojourn among them could be figured as an adventure or escape), and Mary Wilkins Freeman's two stories about young Johnny Trumbull are clearly immersed in the race politics of the romantic revival.21 In "Cock of the Walk," Johnny, a scion of "the best and oldest family in the village," is true to the family's heritage, in which "survived, as fossils survive in ancient nooks and crannies of the earth, old traits of race, unchanged by time and environment," by being the first Trumbull in memory to turn out a fighter. In the next story in the same collection, Johnny reads a book of Border Ballads and takes up the chivalric, though quixotic, cause of trying to find homes for the neglected hordes of cats kept by the presumably inferior Simmons family, who also have "a quota of children popularly supposed to be none too well nourished, let alone properly clothed."22 (Another malady of the Anglo-Saxons was supposed to be a lack of reproductive vigor, as the evaded marriages and long-deferred marriages in New England regionalist fiction attest.) Johnny seems to be from an old, overcivilized family (his father a physician, his mother a college graduate) that needs to be reinvigorated by his romance reading. It makes perfect sense in this connection that by the end of the story Johnny has a little colony, two kittens of his own, and feels his heart" glad and tender with the love of the strong for the weak."23 Johnny, who already has attracted the attention of a bold neighbor girl from a comparable family, seems likely to grow up and fulfill the Anglo-Saxon imperatives to propagate and to keep the race pure. The relationship between regionalist fiction and imperialist race politics, then, can be charted not just by analogy with travel fiction, but in terms of the Atlantic group's providing a rich reading apparatus for regionalism in which the primitivizing treatment of more "foreign" populations and the construction of New Englanders as Anglo-Saxon collaborated. Brodhead's

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account of the politics of literary authority that underlay regionalism's construction also provides a persuasive way of understanding how the choice to participate in writing the rural affected fiction writers. On the one hand, regionalism was "the principal place of literary access in America in the postbellum decades," a means by which many new writers broke into literary culture. 24 The stubbornness with which literary historians have clung to the idea that realism represented a democratization of literature may well derive mainly from the association between regionalism and realism, since the Atlantic outgrew its dependency on writers from the Boston and New York areas precisely by making use of regionalist writers: George Washington Cable of New Orleans; Alice Brown, Rose Terry Cooke, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Sarah Orne Jewett of rural New England; Hamlin Garland of the Midwest; "Charles Egbert Craddock" (really, Mary Noailles Murfree) of Tennessee; Bret Harte of California; and numerous other cultural outsiders were published by the Atlantic early in their careers and helped to make its contributor list more national. On the other hand, regionalist writers' "literary access" was firmly delimited, as Brodhead explains. Atlantic-group magazines were opened to a wider range of participants only on elite terms, which usually diminished the literary authority of regional writers. Brodhead points out that narrowness is a distinguishing characteristic of regionalism and equally a guarantee against any regionalist writer's being considered a master. "Great" works were long novels that concerned issues of acute and widespread importance and had "scope," in sharp contrast to the sketches and short stories most typical of regional writing and the peculiar problems confronting the communities whose remoteness and idiosyncrasy were stressed in regionalist fiction.2 s In short, the choice to write regionalism meant taking up a distance from high realism, the most literary version of realism, no matter how exquisite a stylist the regionalist was. The very idea that a work of regionalism functioned as part of an ensemble, rather than representing a self-sufficient literary effort, also undermined the regionalist writer's status, even when it was accepted as a realist undertaking. I quoted an Atlantic reviewer from the 1880s about regionalism's construction as a set of "partial but clear images," "bright little sketches of local life and character." Meredith Nicholson reiterated this understanding of regionalist writing as fragmentary and cumulative in 1902 :

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[I] t is fair to assume that in the nature of things we shall rely more and more on realistic fiction for a federation of the scattered states of this decentralized and diverse land of ours in a literature which shall be our most vivid social history. We cannot be condensed into one or a dozen finished panoramas; he who would know us hereafter must read us in the flashes of the kinetoscope. 26 It is hard to attribute artistic mastery to the equivalents in fiction of

"flashes of the kinetoscope," after all. In keeping with regionalism's susceptibility to both realist and romance affiliations, regionalist writers might be imagined as being suspended between inferior versions of the "storyteller" and the "professional" models of authorship. Writers like Murfree who had actually lived in the regions they wrote about ran the risk of being cast as mere native informants whose authorial talents only fitted them to depict their own kind. For instance, the Atlantic chided Hamlin Garland for straying away from his midwesterners and writing about the Washington politicians who affected their fate in A Spoil of Office. 27 According to this variant of the storyteller model, the magazines themselves might be seen to be exerting the guiding anthropological intelligence, insofar as they disseminated the models according to which these native informants could narrate the subcultures in question. Conversely, writers who were not natives or long inhabitants of the region they wrote about risked seeming like formula writers: if not quacks, as sentimentalists were accused of being, then professional researchers rather than professional artists. Charles Dudley Warner, who exulted prematurely over the death of local-color writing in Harper's "Editor's Study" in 1896, satirized the plodding, inartistic devotion to realism that he found in it: Given a theme or a motive for a story or a sketch, the problem was how to work it out so that it would appear native and Real. The author had only to go to the "locality" that he intended to attack and immortalize, or write to a friend there residing, in order to pick up the style of profanity there current, the dialect, if any existed; if not, to work up one from slovenly and ungrammatical speech, procure some "views" of scenery and of costume, strike the kind of landscape necessary to the atmosphere of the story-endless prairie, iridescent desert, weird passes, smiling valleys, though smiling valleys were not much in request-and the thing was done. As soon as the reader saw the "local

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color" thus laid on he knew that the story was a real story of real life. He was deceived by the striking appearance, and it was some time before he began to suspect that the artist had begun to put on color before he knew how to draw. 28 What Warner presents as the lazy or uninspired willingness of regionalist writers to write according to formula, though, might equally be understood as the standardizing pressure exerted by Atlantic-group magazines, whose reviewers frequently praised dialect, landscape, and presumptive accuracy of details. Warner was right about how many representational commonalities regionalist works shared, in spite of their proclaimed mission of capturing diversity, and many of these commonalities demonstrate how readily the regionalist works published and reviewed in the Atlantic group lent themselves to the constructions I have been recounting. The exceptions were mainly works about New Orleans and its environs, whose residents were the only population of a major urban area deemed colorful and peripheral enough to count as the subjects of regionalism. 29 Whereas Creoles (and other populations, including southern African Americans, who were identified with the "plantation South" rather than the South of mountaineers) were scripted as being passionately talkative, most late nineteenth-century works of local color about other populations emphasize the taciturnity of the people depicted, a verbal disability compounded by the use of dialect to represent their speech. This taciturnity does not always connote repression-sometimes characters who have powerful desires and who long for self-expression are condemned to taciturnity by the absence of any sympathetic listeners-but as a communal norm rather than an individual difficulty, it suggests provincial limitations. Comparisons between rural dwellers and the flora and fauna around them are also extremely common in regionalist writings, and they imply that all these beings are subjects of natural rather than social, political, or cultural history; the shaping power of physical environments is heavily emphasized. Communities in regionalist novels are also often characterized as harboring certain survivals"-a term from anthropology that is often explicitly used by some local colorists and their reviewers-of earlier phases of culture: locutions or customs that have been preserved from a much earlier social formation, maybe even the country where an immigrant community originated. As I suggested above, II

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these holdovers from supposedly "earlier" modes of social organization convert the communities depicted into museums or preserves. Finally, numerous translations made from features of rural life to comparable features of contemporary urban life, or to historical precedents that would be familiar to a cosmopolite, signal that works of regionalist fiction are intended for urban audiences and also make clear that the fiction is an ethnographic exercise that works by projection and diminishment: "To this obscure woman, kept relentlessly by circumstances in a narrow track, singing in the village choir had been as much as Italy was to Napoleon," we hear about one of Mary Wilkins Freeman's protagonists. 3o Such analogies serve to position the rural phenomena in question as "low mimetic," in Northrop Frye's terms, or even as poor copies of better elaborated, more important originals located in the historical mainstream. 31 All of these features can be read to confirm the historical centrality, subjective sophistication, and full modernity of elite and aspiring urban readers, especially northeasterners. And therein lies the great irony of regionalist writing: that the impressions of isolation, idiosyncrasy, and narrowness that characterized regionalist works-impressions that excluded regionalist works from the highest literariness-were precisely what guaranteed that regionalism accomplished the central cultural functions that gave it pride of place in Atlantic-group magazines. The main ideological burden of regionalist writing, as it was constructed within the Atlantic group, and as Brodhead's and Kaplan's analyses eloquently testify, was to dramatize and elaborate the marginality of rural populations. Yet precisely during the era when regionalism was most prolific, rural Americans, conceived as a distinct bloc of the population, were politically prominent in national life, perhaps more than they had been since Jefferson penned his praise of yeoman farmers. The entire reading apparatus for regionalism provided by Atlantic-group magazines worked to deny the fact that the nation's rural areas were sites of historically central and emphatically modern political challenges. Building on circumstances such as the Atlantic group's hospitality to regional writers and regional fiction's internal marks of condescension toward the populations it depicted, Brodhead has asserted that "In nineteenth-century America regional writing was not produced for the cultures it was written about, which were often nonliterate and always orally based."32 The production of this writing in the Atlantic group cer-

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tainly showed no signs of trying to invite or respect readers from the regions depicted. However, Brodhead's belief that the cultures that inspired regionalist writing were "non literate and always orally based" is certainly hard to substantiate; it might even be a symptom of the mystifying construction of rural life's distance from urban, print-steeped modernity that regionalism encouraged. 33 An Atlantic author who partly concurred with Brodhead nonetheless pointed to the complexities of assessing rural Americans' literacy: "I have yet to find the ordinary farmer who can misspell out the delightful poems of James Whitcomb Riley, though I have met many who are familiar with Shakespeare and Milton, and widely read in wellwritten history."34 One of the ways high culture exerts its hegemony is, of course, by representing something in relation to which populations chart their advantages or disadvantages, something that is valued by the dis empowered as well as by the powerful. The progressive dimension of humanist ideologies of culture, exemplified by Agnes Repplier's polemics, is that less privileged populations may well believe in their right to get hold of high culture and make their own meanings from it. The Atlantic writer's description of farmers reading Shakespeare and Milton is an isolated anecdote, but it takes on greater significance when one considers that the National Economist, a publication of the Farmers' Alliance, in 1892 advertised discounts on works by George Eliot, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Cullen Bryant, and a series called the "World's Best Literature" as incentives for new subscribers. (An alternative discount was on a music box that played Mozart.) Moreover, the American Agriculturalist commended the Atlantic to its readers when the Atlantic was young, and as late as the 1880s Harper's, Scribner's, and Cosmopolitan advertised in this farmers' journa1. 35 Rural Americans were not the Atlantic's target audience, but they may have been part of its readership, like others who wanted to sample authorized high culture. Not all rural dwellers were farmers, but farmers were practically and symbolically identified with the rural areas which were regionalists' favorite source of material. 36 And farm families who were reading Eliot, Longfellow, and Harper's may have been reading Hamlin Garland and Sarah Orne Jewett as well, even if they read over the shoulders of the urban elites that the Atlantic and many regionalist writers targeted. Whether these

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rural readers read differently from their urban counterparts is another question. It is possible that many rural readers were as susceptible to hierarchizing narratives of "development," of the sort that turned Murfree's mountaineers into a "primitive folk," as urban readers were, either because they had internalized a sense of their own cultural backwardness or because they read with a double consciousness. Or perhaps readers of any particular rural area romanticized the fictionalized residents of other areas but viewed depictions of their own region with skeptical amusement. The American Agriculturalist and the National Economist provide few clues about these matters, since they did not generally review books or signal how they understood the appeal of the books they offered as bonuses. There is not, of course, a single "rural reading" of regionalism, any more than the urban-based reading that Brodhead and Kaplan have outlined obtains monolithically. But since the analysis of reading formations seeks only to specify some of the overdeterminations of any text in relation to the material conditions and discursive practices of its historical moment, rather than to account empirically for how groups of people read (an impossible task), then it becomes possible to outline the potential for regionalist texts to have functioned differently for rural readers than for the urban readers to whom the Atlantic group catered. Ethnography, travel literature, and the historiography of the Aryan village school were certainly part of the enterprise of writing the rural, as were chairman Liberty Hyde Bailey's report of the Commission on Country Life and textbooks about rural sociology or even scientific farming. But so were political writings about agricultural conditions, the impact of the currency system on farmers, the social conditions of men and women on farms, and tariff reforms. Within this field, regionalist works could be aligned in a number of ways, and a particular work could even generate diverging ideological resonances. Given the currency of the idea that farmers nationwide represented a relatively unified political-interest group (a matter of controversy, but certainly a possibility publicized by both the Farmers' Alliance and the People's Party), it is even possible to imagine that the representational commonalities of regionalist works had a double function. They testified to the power of Atlantic-group magazines to standardize accounts of rural life, but they also suggested commonalities in the situations of rural populations. In particular, the depictions point to the idea that various rural groups suffered in common the nation's

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efforts to decenter them culturally, politically, and economically. And since Atlantic-group magazines were nationally distributed, they necessarily relayed this evidence far and near, making it possible to envision rural populations communicating with each other-in distorted and constrained ways-through this medium. The title of Rose Terry Cooke's 1891 shortstory collection, Huckleberries Gathered from New England Hills, might be read as a sly or ambivalent acknowledgment of the transformation any regionalist work underwent in being submitted to readers in the metropolis. It harks back to Thoreau's discussion in Walden of how huckleberries lose or at least change their flavor in being marketed, just as by analogy regionalist works could be transformed by the ethnographic and nationalizing rubrics of their marketing. "A huckleberry never reaches Boston," wrote Thoreau, and if Cooke was also skeptical about whether her work reached Boston readers or her Boston publishers, she may have envisioned an alternate readership who got its full flavor. 37 In searching for a periodical that might put regional writing in conjunction with these other, more overtly politicized and oppositional ways of writing the rural, it would make sense to look outside of northeastern cities. Periodicals that were themselves "regional" -i.e., not based in northeastern cities-might have provided a better forum for the elaboration of a counterethic and counteraesthetic of regionalist writing: a regionalist reading of regioqalist writing. It would be impossible to survey the range of periodicals on the periphery where such a reading might have been fostered, but doubtless many periodicals without national reputations did so to some extent; local newspapers would be fascinating to examine in this connection. However, two of the regional magazines with the most "literary" national reputations, so much so that even the Atlantic group noticed and sometimes applauded them, were remarkably similar to the Atlantic group in their constructions of literariness and therefore of regionalism. In order to demonstrate why the Boston-based Arena provided a more important alternative to the .c1tlantic group than the Chicago-based Dial or the San Francisco-based Overland Monthly, I will examine how these latter magazines' deference to the Atlantic model prevented them from constructing a genuinely regional reading of regionalism. I am not arguing that the Arena provided the only alternative to the Atlantic as a framework for reading regionalism or anything else, and of course I have not been able to examine every magazine outside of the Atlantic group. However, the

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ways in which the Dial and the Overland were disappointingly similar to the Atlantic, moreso than the Arena, offer concrete examples of the process I described in chapter 1 by which the Atlantic group's structure of cultural authority was taken up nationally. The Dial, the Overland, and the Arena Both the Chicago-based Dial and the San Francisco-based Overland Monthly had considerable cultural capital in the estimate of the Atlantic group, marked by the fact that the Nation made favorable mention of both magazines intermittently in its reviews of recent issues of noteworthy periodicals. The Overland, founded in 1868, first attracted significant attention from the Atlantic through the fiction of its first editor, Bret Harte, whose story "The Luck of Roaring Camp" was reprinted by the Atlantic. However, the fact that Harte, once he broke into the Atlantic, left the Overland and spent most of the rest of his life on the East Coast and in England suggests that the Overland's cultural currency was valuable mainly because it could be traded for Atlantic currency, not so much because of its independent merits. Harte once told a journalist that "The Luck of Roaring Camp," which appeared in an early issue of the Overland, had been written in order to signal to contributing writers that the magazine wanted fresh western fiction, not" 'the kind of thing that would have been offered to an editor in the Atlantic states ... ' "38 Ironically, the story was criticized in California for putting the West in a bad light, since it concerned gamblers, miners, and other rough characters, and was only redeemed for the home audience by the subsequent imprimatur of the Atlantic's publisher.39 The Overland competed obsessively with the Atlantic, having chosen its cover emblem of the grizzly bear as a counterpart to the Atlantic's Governor Winthrop-even though its founders had rejected one proposed name, the Pacific Monthly, as too closely paralleling the name of its rival. 40 The Overland was as devoted to its region's writers and subject matter as the early Atlantic had been to its New England base. The Overland prided itself on the fact that most of its contributors were from the West in general and from California in particular. 41 Indeed, an 1894 column answered wellmeaning friends who wondered why the editor didn't" 'get Howells, Stevenson, Kipling, Crawford, and so on, to write for [him]' " by pointing out that these writers can be found "morning, noon, and night" in "Eastern and

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European magazines," whereas the "writer for the OVERLAND lives in the OVERLAND's field, with exceptions that prove the rule, and writes because he has something to say, and not for pay alone."42 The Overland also railed against East Coast pretensions on occasion: one reviewer referred sarcastically to Stowe's claim in Oldtown Folks that New England was "that extraordinary 'seed-bed' of most of the cardinal virtues," for instance, and another must have been gesturing toward the East Coast when he held up cultural outsider Robert W. Chambers as the leading American writer, in spite of expecting to hear "indignation among some half dozen authors who have gotten into the habit of patting each other on the back and assuming it as axiomatic that the best name lies somewhere in their little circle." As the reviewer pointed out, literary "pharisees" would find it impossible even to review a book bearing the imprint of Chambers's humble publisher. 43 However, in other ways the Overland emulated the cultural stance of the Atlantic group. By and large it reviewed the same books that the Atlantic group did, together with a few offerings of West Coast publishers (including, naturally, the publishers of the Overland). And in the same early column in which he confessed to feeling "provincial pride" over a favorable notice the Overland had received in Putnam '5, editor Harte invoked the magazine's audience as an urban elite, in an interpellation that I mentioned in the introduction: "You are a respectable citizen, having good social connections, a seat at the opera, a pew in church; and like most Californians, life is altogether very pleasant to yoU."44 An 1886 supplement identified those "most deeply interested" in reestablishing the Overland in 1883 after its suspension in 1875 as members of Berkeley, Harvard, and Yale alumni groups and the "famous San Francisco" Chit-Chat, Union, and Bohemian Clubs. 45 In short, the Overland clearly sought a readership and a structure of cultural authority much like that of the Atlantic, even though it used that structure to organize Californian and western contributors and subject matters. The Overland therefore provides an example of the success with which the Boston elite's model and rhetoric of cultural authority as trusteeship was disseminated nationally, ceasing to serve only urban northeasterners and instead providing the basis for the cultural dominance of the bourgeoisie nationwide. The Chicago Dial, founded in 1880, was even more eager for assimilation into the Atlantic group than the Overland and more fully attained it. Its

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very first issue contained an article, "The Original 'Dial,'" which did not discuss the choice to name the Chicago magazine after the Boston -based one, but which made clear the deliberateness of the obeisance. Bypassing the Atlantic for an earlier but indisputably high literary magazine was not a bad strategy for coping with the anxiety of influence. (A later retrospective identified the Chicago Dial's models as the English periodicals the Athenaeum and the Academy-which might very well be true, but which also enabled the writer to sidestep the Dial's location in a field dominated in the United States by the Atlantic, the Century, and the Nation. 46 ) Like the Overland, the Dial mainly reviewed books issued by the same stable of East Coast publishers whose books were reviewed by the Atlantic group, with the addition of a few top-notch publishers from the hinterlands such as Chicago's own Stone and Kimball. Even more Significantly, the Dial, like the Nation, reviewed other periodicals. In October :1884, when the "Topics in Leading Periodicals" column began, the periodicals covered were the Atlantic, the Century, Harper's, the North American Review, and the Dial itself. Over the years it expanded that list considerably, even including periodicals in special scholarly fields on occasion, but it continued to track those magazines, and to a lesser extent the others in my Atlantic group, most consistently. The Dial did not publish fiction, but its contributors included a number of essayists who also contributed to the Atlantic group. And like the Overland and the Atlantic, the Dial prided itself on its university connections. 47 Like the magazines in the Atlantic group, both the Overland and the Dial moved from a strong promotion of realism to a reaction against it and an embrace of the romantic revival. But both were also sympathetic to the rise of little magazines that sought to provide an alternative to the norms of the Atlantic group. Indeed, the Dial bought the subscription list of the Chap- Book after it folded and increasingly sought an avant-garde aesthetic identity for itself, which culminated during the late :19:lOS and :19205 in its crucial elaboration and promotion of modernism in the United States.48 Their sympathy for little magazines may have been a small show of resistance to the literary establishment whose authority the Dial and the Overland otherwise mainly emulated. This is not to say that their peripheral locations and identities did not inflect their participation in Atlantic-group discourses in interesting and important ways. Perhaps the most intriguing inflection was the Overland's

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relationship to the romantic revival, especially after the accession of the flamboyantly named Rounsevelle Wildman to its editorship in 1894- Wildman, who had served as Special Commissioner of the United States for the Straits Settlement and Siam and who left the editorship in 1897 to serve as Consul General of the United States at Hong Kong, was the author of The Panglima Muda, a romance set in Malaya. 49 What he called the "new West," the Overland's domain, combined the U.S. West with part of what we now call the Pacific rim: it included California, New Mexico, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Idaho, and Texas, "as well as the Sandwich Islands and the Asiatic Coast."50 The magazine never developed this formulation of its purview into the critique of the distinction between romance and realism, the exotic-distant and the local-familiar, that it could have, much less into a critique of the nation-state as an organizing principle for literary production. Nevertheless, Wildman's conception meant that western readers could construe a romance like The Pang lima Muda as granting them access to a part of the world outside of the United States with which they had a special link, their common orientation to the Pacific Ocean and its trade routes, that was not quite the same as the rest of the nation's vicarious investment in U.S. imperialism in the Pacific. What bound both the Dial and the Overland to the Atlantic group most closely was their shared commitment to a similar construction of the "literary," the one manifested in high realism. The Chicago and San Francisco magazines constructed literature's national mission in relation to bourgeois-identified established institutions of culture and education; they upheld connoisseurship as a privileged relationship to literature; and, most surprisingly, they acquiesced to the idea that the nation's regions were obliged to explain and represent "themselves" to the center. The Overland was fully as ready as the Atlantic or the Nation to Jewett's and Cooke's New Englanders and Murfree's Tennessee mountaineers into holdovers from past or passing social-economic orders, for instance. 51 The Dial was similarly ready to consign Craddock's mountaineers to natural history and even to "tragedy": For people so residing and so circumstanced, the essential dramatic movement is the tragic. ... These simple mountain folk have their depths of feeling, their heights of devotion to duty, and their sublime submission to fate; in their plainness and bluntness of character, they

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reflect the simple grandeur of the balds, ravines and precipices around them; their lives are modelled after their Appalachian homes. The significance of these people's lives, the reviewer goes on to suggest, is not self-evident, but requires Craddock's "tender sympathy[,] ... clear intellect and ... bright imagination" to bring it out. 52 Moreover, anticipating the "English Only" movements of the twentieth century, one Dial writer credited "the vital English elements in our language and literature" as well as in our "political and social instincts, in our entire civilization indeed," with providing the United States' only chance of assimilating "that chaotic mass of humanity which year by year has poured into the great gateway of Manhattan."53 The distance between the stylistic purity of the local-color writer and the dialect of the population she or he rendered could provide a concrete index of the work of assimilation that had yet to be accomplished, by this logic. Similarly, both magazines tempered their endorsement of fiction's national-or even regional-functions with a powerful commitment to issues of style that were formulated in close relationship to traditional understandings of cultural hierarchy and class status. An Overland reviewer who praised William Henry Bishop by putting him in the company of Hawthorne, Howells, and James took a clear stand with the literary aristocracy on the issue of style, which he or she felt had been to a great extent the standard of selection for the "Atlantic Monthly"; and while that magazine may perhaps have carried too far its rigor on this point, and rejected substance for form, there is still much to be said in favor of making a pure style the sine qua non. We remember a critical gentleman, not greatly given to the reading of stories, who read with pleasure one of the thinnest serials the "Atlantic" ever published, avowing that its good English was so grateful to his ear, lacerated by other more weighty serials then current, that he read it in preference to them. And observe that the same good taste that shapes sentences, selects words, and arranges paragraphs gratefully to the correct ear, will guide the larger matters of style ... 54 Subtlety, refinement, and discrimination-those qualities of literature whose appreciation was never constructed as something that could be taught, but which seemed instead to come naturally to certain privileged

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beings born with this "correct ear" -are clearly the touchstones of literariness set forth in this review. For a different construction of regionalist fiction, one has to look to a magazine with a different relationship to the "literary." And despite its having been published in the Northeast (successively in Boston, New York, and New Jersey), the Arena offers this different relationship. The Arena was overwhelmingly the brainchild and product of Benjamin Orange Flower, a former minister from Illinois, and it seems possible that Flower saw the Arena as a space in which reforms and theories that were discredited or ignored in mainstream journals could get a hearing. In keeping with Flower's background, the Arena published articles on Judeo-Christian theology long after the Atlantic group had digested the Higher Criticism and moved on to secular matters. It tracked psychic research and theories about neonatal influences. It respectfully investigated Christian Science, perhaps as a corrective to Mark Twain's invectives against it in the Century. More importantly, it participated in writing the rural by sponsoring regionalist writers (mainly Hamlin Garland and the Tennessee author Will Allen Dromgoole, a woman) and by following closely and sympathetically the intertwined political fortunes of the Farmer's Alliance, the People's Party, and the campaign for a bimetallic currency. Indeed, despite its northeastern urban location, it sought and apparently secured a special relationship with farmers. The National Economist urged its readers in 1892 to support the Arena, which it called "the most fearless and progressive magazine published in this country today."55 And the Arena in turn offered compelling evidence of its commitment to its farm audience by dropping its subscription price in July 1.897, motivated by its understanding of the "trials" and "wrongs" suffered by "the honest producers (who are the very blood and sinew and soul of this Republic)," producers identified as farmers. 56 Yet perhaps the most striking feature of the Arena for the purposes of its serving as an alternative reading apparatus for regionalism is that it published reviews and literary articles about fiction-which is to say, it insisted on the reflective reading and evaluation of fiction-even though it sometimes rejected the Atlantic group's intense devotion to the "literary."57 An early editorial by Flower laid out a critique of dominant literary values that indicated the Arena's counterstance, although Flower was not completely fair to the "literary magazines" he indicts:

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What is the highest function of the novel? To amuse, to entertain, to enable one to pleasantly while away otherwise tedious hours. Such is the popular conception of the real value of fiction-a conception entertained by most critics, as is illustrated by the fact that few literary magazines deviate from the rule of rejecting any novel which emphasizes a needed lesson or carries with it a moral truth. All fiction which makes people think and think earnestly; which touches the conscience and feeds the well-springs of the soul-principle in man, is tabooed. To me this standard seems unworthy of our age and generation-wholly inadequate to meet the requirements of a time which calls so loudly for the best endeavor of heart, brain, and hand, to bring manhood and womanhood abreast with the high and glorious ideals so plainly visible to the earnest and loving student of social and ethical problems, and to relieve the strained and unhealthy conditions of society as we find them on every side at the present time. 58 Flower's target is not so much a single position as a complex of dominant literary stances: most certainly the revived romance, which made escapism a respectable social function of fiction; aestheticism, which he evokes with a passing dismissal of "art for art's sake" later in the editorial;59 and very likely also the realist establishment, which was apt to fault a work of fiction for didacticism or for being too clearly attached to a specific social reform. David Dickson, tracing the Arena's favorable treatment of Garland, Norris, London, Crane, Sinclair, and realist dramatist James A. Herne, styled Flower the "Patron of the Realists."60 He was certainly a patron of those realists, if we agree to lump all of those writers into that category, but he had no particular or exclusive devotion to realism: Bellamy'S Looking Backward, Howells's A Traveller from Altruria, Ignatius Donnelly's Ragnarok, the Age of Fire and Gravel, and other utopian or speculative fictions were favorites of the Arena as well, and without being framed by any explanation of how they represented honorary exceptions to an otherwiserealist canon. Indeed, Flower criticized the realists for being too dogmatic and exclusive. 61 The Arena often used the label "social romance" to emphasize the social relevance of works of fiction that were not especially realist. 62 The Arena did not offer an alternate version of the literary but rather an extraliterary-but not antiliterary-standard of value for fiction (and poetry, which it also published and reviewed). For example, in the following

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excerpt an Arena reviewer clearly distinguishes between this work's merits as fiction and its suggestiveness to the thoughtful reader, but he or she does not presume that a more literary presentation should have been the author's goal: Like almost all stories in which the writer has some definite message and merely employs fiction as a rack upon which to hang his theory, this novel [The Monarch Billionaire, by Morrison I. Swift], considered as a story, is of small value. The work, however, coming as it does from the pen of one of the noblest and most sincere reformers of our time, is rich in helpful suggestions for friends of economic progress. The reviewer goes on to detail the concerns about which this book is especially helpful and to sum up that it is "full of food for reflection." 63 A reviewer similarly wrote of another socially responsible novel that the "composition might now and then have been more effectful; however, the earnestness of the author is so desperate, her expressions so boldly to the point, her convictions so deep, that to dissect form and language in 'The Juggernaut of the Moderns' would leave one's self with a feeling of being small and petty."64 Conversely, a review of a novel by Anthony Hope suggests that for all his literariness, only a socially situated, reformist reading of his work Double Harness can make it worthwhile. Like the previous reviews, this one is worth quoting at length because the differences between its rhetoric and that of the Atlantic group are cumulative: It goes without saying that a novel written by Anthony Hope would be well written and readable. It does not, however, necessarily follow that all his novels are worth reading. Indeed, in a life so fraught with great problems so earnestly calling for high, noble and worthy thinking, it must seem to many persons little more than a prostitution of talent to write stories that are mere sectional views of that modern frivolous Vanity Fair, society life in London, especially when the view given concerns those who are living almost wholly superficial lives. And yet to the contemplative reader such volumes as Double Harness are deeply suggestive. They afford a vivid and startling view of a phase of present-day society-life found in every great city-life given over to convention and to materialistic egotism. 65

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Aside from this review's dialogism-its gesture toward the possibility that for certain other readers, the quality of Hope's writing would virtually settle the question of this novel's value-it might seem to be predictable. Flower and the Arena appreciated a wider range of fiction than promoters of twentieth-century socialist realism, but in both cases the polarization between a (frivolous, bourgeois, elitist) concern with style and a (serious, insurgent-identified, populist) concern with social analysis is evident. 66 What is more surprising about the review is the reviewer's assumptions that any reader reads from a certain position with certain interests, certain social questions uppermost in his or her mind, and that some ways of reading texts create more value than others. In this review, as throughout its politically demanding reviews of imaginative texts, the Arena modeled a reading practice that was selfconsciously productive and that often went against the grain: counter to dominant reading practices, in some cases counter to authors' perceived intentions about their books. This understanding of reading presumably authorized rural readers and their sympathizers to search regionalist works for their relevance to contemporary rural-urban political tensions. The reciprocal of this reading practice is the assumption that novels are ideologically specific and partial-an assumption which was, admittedly, easier to make about works of reform fiction than about some other kinds of fiction. Flower's review of Albion Tourgee's A Fool's Errand could not have been more enthusiastic about the book, yet it positioned the book as a particular rendering of Reconstruction, not a masterful neutral overview: In our judgment "A Fool's Errand" is the most valuable historical contribution to the Reconstruction period that romance literature has yet given us. Yet we would not have the reader acquaint himself with but one side of the story. No author is wholly impartial, and he who reads "A Fool's Errand" should also read "Red Rock" or "The Leopard's Spots." Aside from its historical value, "A Fool's Errand" is a beautiful romance and an important contribution to American fiction that merits a permanent place in literature. 67 Without suggesting that literary value either precludes social value or is negligible, this review refuses to let literary value be the sole criterion for its evaluation, or to presume that literary excellence is incompatible with ideological specificity. In keeping with this stance, not only was Uncle

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Tom's Cabin-the u.s. novel that, arguably, had had the greatest impact on public political life-the Arena's touchstone for greatness in a work of fiction, but the Arena also established the importance of Frank Norris's The Octopus by comparing Norris to political orators, predicting that his novel would exert "much the same influence over the mind as that exerted by Patrick Henry in the House of Burgesses of Virginia, and by those noble utterances of James Otis, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock just prior to our great Revolutionary struggle."68 The Arena challenged the adequacy of the "literary," as constructed by the Atlantic group, in another way. It reviewed a very different set of authors whose works were issued by a different set of publishers. There were overlaps: the Arena continued to review Garland even after Howells welcomed him to the literary mainstream, for example, and it occasionally reviewed a book issued by Harper Brothers, Houghton-Mifflin, or some other unambiguously high-culture publisher. But the Arena reviewed hundreds of books that the Atlantic group completely ignored: not only the products of its own Arena Publishing Company and, later, Alliance Publishing Co., but also books put out by publishers such as George H. Ellis and Lee &: Shepard of Boston; G. W. Dillingham and Howard &: Hulbert of New York City; Charles Moulton of Buffalo; Charles H. Kerr &: Co., Laird & Lee, and Purdy Publishing Co. of Chicago; and David McKay of Philadelphiacompanies whose products were rarely if ever mentioned in the Atlantic group even though they marketed mainstream fiction and nonfiction rather than dime novels. It reviewed self-published books on occasion, and it reviewed The Queen of the Woods, published in Hartford, Michigan, whose author had been chief of the Pottawattamie Indians. 69 It also paid special attention to products of the Bobbs-Merrill Company, which Flower believed was to Indiana "what Houghton, Mifflin and Company and their predecessors were to New England."70 In all these ways, the Arena made it possible to read regionalism as a minor literature in a different sense: as a literature bearing special importance for a distinct minority of the population, as a literature posed against a major literature, and as a body of fiction minor as literature but not as social representation. 71 Hamlin Garland's strongly politicized advocacy of regionalism, which shows up in many of his early Arena essays, suggests that it was even possible to write regionalism as this kind of minor litera-

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ture, to some extent. 72 The fact that regionalist writers' activities were often compared by reviewers in the Atlantic group with both agriculture and mining, the occupations most closely associated with Populism, may have contributed to creating an articulation between regionalist writing and Populism. 73 And even writers who did not consciously or publicly identify their regionalist work as politicized expressions of rural or agrarian consciousness (or who, like "Octave Thanet" [Alice French], publicly denied rural "discontent") were nonetheless likely to enact in their work their contradictory relations to the periphery and the center, in ways that would have allowed contemporary readers who were familiar with the political significance of rural life to find the materials of social protest. 74 Producerism and New England Women's Regionalism The Arena publicized an important conjunction between women's rights and Populism that appears also in the works of several New England women regionalists, making it possible for them to be read as writers of minor literature in the special sense I just described. The Arena's attention to women's interests and rights was thorough and progressive?5 Dress reform was one of Flower's favorite topics, but the double standard in sexual behavior, women's wage labor, and other more fundamental feminist issues were amply discussed. The Arena also occasionally sponsored symposia in which prominent women such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Frances Willard were asked to address the relevance of a current controversy, such as Henry George's single tax or bimetallism, to women in particular. These symposia, necessarily juxtaposing women as a constituency with the other constituencies who had taken stands on these issues, exemplify the Arena's predisposition to coalition building. This was the flip side of the Arena's general suspicion of the powers that be, which led Flower and many of his contributors to presume that disempowered groups ought to be leagued together against a common enemy. But the Arena's support for women's rights was too consistent and vehement to have been merely tactical. B. 0. Flower even wrote an article supporting women's right to control their sexual activity within marriage, an issue which Elizabeth Cady Stanton also supported and spoke about, but which to my knowledge got utterly no press in the Atlantic group.76 His support for this issue was based partly on the specious argument that children produced

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from uncontrolled lust would weaken the species, but he also explicitly endorsed a woman's right to be "true to herself."77 The uncompromising title of the essay was "Prostitution Within the Marriage Bond." This close interweaving of women's issues with other political issues in the Arena is especially important because it helps to mediate between Brodhead's and Kaplan's emphasis on the national, imperial agendas of regionalist writings and traditional feminist readings of regionalists such as Freeman and Jewett. Feminist readings shaped by the politics of the 1970S tended to overemphasize and universalize the utopian possibilities of the female-dominated spaces, benevolent matriarchs, and domestic expertise that they found in regionalist works, isolating these features from the historical circumstances in which they functioned.7 8 Yet given the preponderance of women writing regionalism in the late nineteenth century and the elaborateness with which household details and women's circumstances were detailed throughout the genre, it is noteworthy that Brodhead's and Kaplan's readings do not linger over the politics of domesticity and gender.79 The Arena provides a link between domestic politics and national politics through the concept of producerism. Producerism is the belief that a socioeconomic system ought to be arranged to ensure adequate compensation for those who produce usable goods with their own labor.8o Unlike Marxism, it does not entail a critique of private property. The form of producerism that predominated in the Arena and in Populist politics emphasized agricultural production rather than manufacturing, even though Populism and its predecessor movements forged links with industrial labor unions, and it was formulated mainly on behalf of landowning farmers rather than agricultural laborers. (Hired farm laborers were mainly left out of Populist rhetoric, although one Arena article that I have found takes into account their double economic vulnerability.81) It was a peculiar political hybrid of materialist attention to relations of production and Jeffersonian idealization of yeoman farmers. Accordingly, the targets of producerism were land speculators, financiers, monopolists, and middlemen: anyone whose share in production was deemed secondary, even-or more often, especially-if he or she had lent money to buy land or equipment or financed the railroad that transported crops.82 Producerism was the impetus behind at least three major reform movements designed to change the nation's distribution and representation of

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wealth and value. One was Henry George's single-tax proposal, set forth in his widely read and reviewed Progress and Poverty (1879), which aimed to penalize monopolists and land speculators who tied up land for profit without producing real wealth (the product of labor and matter) for humanity. Whereas George's reform focused on revising the tax system for the benefit of farmer-landowners, the two major currency reform movements at the end of the century focused on changing the basis of the money supply to benefit the farmer-landowner, either by reversing the 1873 demonetarization of silver or by instituting a "Sub-Treasury Plan" that would issue currency" directly to producers and exchangers of wealth" -those involved in agriculture-without the mediation of banks and on the basis of the transaction needs of those people: farmers' negotiations with various providers of services on the credit of their upcoming crops, for instance. S3 George's tax reform and the two currency reforms aimed to redress the injustice that some of the people whose labor most directly created the nation's wealth were inconvenienced or wronged by the nation's financial system. As Flower put it, "If any people in the republic deserve to be prosperous, it is our farmers," yet mortgages, transport costs, and other infrastructural arrangements kept many farmers in debt and poverty.84 Populist producerism, being advanced mainly on behalf of farmers, emphasized the farmers' activity of "feeding them all" in its appeals, a strikingly domestic way of thinking about agriculture. All farmers, not just those who worked in the "breadbasket" of the Great Plains, were figured as domestic insofar as they provided nourishment for the rest of the nation. This identification of farming with domestic labor-by metonymy, a construction of rural life in general as a protected preserve in the service of public, urban industrial life-was the basis for crosspollination between Populism and a number of ideas in the Arena and in New England women's regionalist fiction about women's work and women's status. In writings by the New England regionalists Alice Brown, Rose Terry Cooke, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Sarah Orne Jewett, the attention paid to women's domestic activity invites producerist readings. 8s For example, a familiar figure of New England women's regionalism, the domineering patriarch who stints his family on food, is an especially producerist kind of villain. Cephas Barnard in Freeman's Pembroke (1894) is a good example of this figure, a man of self-proclaimed philosophical bent who decides at some point for himself and his family that eating the flesh of

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animals is wrong because it nourishes the animal nature at the expense of the spiritual. "'It's better for us to eat some other kind of food,'" he explains to his dismayed wife and daughter, "'[even] if we get real weak and pindlin' on it, rather than eat animal food, an' make the animal in us stronger than the spiritual, so that we won't be any better than wild tigers an' bears, an' lose our rule over the other animals.' "86 Vegetarianism for the sake of preserving human domination over animals is an unusual philosophy, and in Cephas's case it is sadomasochistic in more ways than one. As he speaks, he is making a sorrel pie-his wife has pled in vain for pumpkin-with a crust that, having no shortening, only amounts to glue, and he has taken over the cooking in anger because his wife dared to question the likely success of the pie. He is bound to suffer from the experiment and make his family suffer with him. The pie fiasco comes on the heels of a fight he had the night before with his daughter's suitor, who, being an equally hardheaded character, vowed never to return to the house. The fact that Cephas's rationale for the sorrel pie involves self-control and domination implicitly alludes to the consequences of this quarrel, since it is his daughter whose life he is dominating and who, with her marriage called off, will be left to practice self-control, without even the solace of animal proteins. Like Adoniram Penn in Freeman's "The Revolt of Mother," who builds a new barn rather than the new house his family so desperately needs, Cephas is defaulting on the fundamental requirement of the domestic contract that patriarchs keep their families decently fed and housed so long as they are able. Silas Berry in Pembroke, a miser who is not shown stinting his family but who refuses to allow them to offer hospitality to anyone else, is a comparable figure. Two of Rose Terry Cooke's stories, "Mrs. Flint's Married Experience" (1880) and "How Celia Changed Her Mind" (1892), quite explicitly focus on husbands so stingy that their wives almost starve, in each case making the point that the overworked and stinted wives would have been better off unmarried. 87 Calvinist strictures against pleasures of the body, capitalist neuroses about hoarding and scrimping, and abuses of patriarchal authority collide in these men's stinginess about food, and all might equally be imagined as objects of the authors' satire and disapproval. In addition to the outrageousness of anyone's being unnecessarily starved or stinted, these incidents take their meaning from the fact that the wives and families, who work in households or on farms, are being short-

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changed on the only material reward they get for their labor: their board. And a producerist calculus clearly reveals this inequity. Richard T. Ely, a progressive economist whose work was excerpted in the Farmers' Alliance magazine National Economist,88 laid this out quite clearly in an economic textbook he prepared for the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle in 1889. Under the heading "Productive Elements Often Overlooked," he pointed out that women's domestic labor was even more invisible than farmers' in national calculations of wealth: Every well-regulated household is an establishment where valuable things or quantities of utility are produced. Food is prepared for use, and prepared food is worth far more than unprepared, as we discover when we purchase it at a boarding-house, restaurant, or hotel. ... Now it is a fact that more than half of the human race in civilized nations is composed of women, and if it is admitted that women labor as long and as severely as men it follows that a fourth of the labor of men and women combined is destined for the household and not for the market. But this is only a part of the annual income of the country of which no account is taken in ordinary money-estimates of annual income. 89 According to Ely, women's domestic labor creates value that is unrepresented or misrepresented by currency transactions. Without citing Ely, two Arena writers came to similar conclusions. One writer, calling attention to women's enormous uncompensated labor in most households, declared in 1901 that "men as a class never did support women as a class."9o Another, protesting against the fact that women's household work was classified by the census as "not gainful," focused on the more local issue of men's control of the money supply within individual families, pointing out that since the "whole sphere of housewifery and the wife's personal necessities" is economically "submerged," men have no way of knowing what amount of household money women require and are usually unjustified in stinting them. 91 This critique significantly echoes Populist protests against the gold standard and the government's control of the money supply, which worked to the disadvantage of farmers who depended on borrowing money for the expenses of planting each year and repaying it after the harvest. Not only food but also language is in short supply within much New England regionalist fiction, which offers many acute examples of the tac-

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iturnity that I have mentioned was common in regionalist fiction. Many characters are suspicious of unnecessary or elaborate words, and often we hear that they have no vocabulary for the complicated affective experiences that narrators describe. For instance, when Amelia Titcomb marries a passing tramp in one of Alice Brown's Tiverton Tales, "The treasures of local speech were all too poor to clothe so wild a venture." (Both the Arena and the National Economist, a publication of the Farmers' Alliance, emphasized that "tramps" were merely honest men out of work, as Amelia Titcomb's husband proves to be. 92 ) Amelia, we hear later, "was a New England woman, accustomed neither to analyze nor talk. She could only suffer in the elemental way of dumb things who sometimes need a language of the heart."93 Adoniram Penn, who builds his family a new barn instead of a new house in Freeman's "The Revolt of 'Mother,'" has speech "almost as inarticulate as a growl," but it was his wife's "most native tongue."94 Free-flowing speech often seems to be an urban prerogative, part of an implied urban economy of excess, luxury, and deceit that might be exemplified by the language of advertisements and con men, even by easy money. This might seem to be a contradictory attitude, given that ruralidentified reformers were working to expand the money supply. An 1893 article entitled "A Money Famine in a Nation Rich in Money's Worth" compared scarcity of money with scarcity of foodstuffs, clearly suggesting that both resources needed to be more abundant. 95 Yet the Arena's articles' emphasis on the representational nature of currency necessarily implied some suspicion of it, and sometimes the articles were weighted with nostalgia for barter economies in which one could be certain not to be cheated by currency's mediation. Most of the Arena articles about currency questions converged on the idea that the money supply was an arbitrary representation of wealth controlled by the government, bankers, and the corporations involved with them, and that the money supply's corruption was the result of its not being a measure of true wealth. 96 "If we had all the coal and England all the gold in the world, which would have the best basis for money?" asked H. A. Higgins in July 1892, invoking an argument many currency reformers made about the foolishness of making relatively useless substances such as gold and silver the measure of a nation's wealth. 97 Farmers might have an interest in currency reform yet retain a sense that currency was slippery and corrupting, a necessary evil. Similarly, the restriction of rural speech, like the restriction of currency available for farm-

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ers to borrow or land for them to rent, frees local-color characters from certain corrupting influences, but it also impoverishes them. In keeping with this suspicion of currency and the consumer culture it makes possible, countless characters in New England women's regionalist fiction hold the belief that old, familiar possessions are better than conventionally valuable things or new consumer goods, except maybe when it's time to buy the children Christmas presents (as in Freeman's "A Stolen Christmas"98). Not only are there endless domestic objects that have grown dear to their owners because of the memories tied up with them, but even plants-like Elmira Todd's herbs, in Country of the Pointed Firs, gathered from the woods nearby-can be invested with such affective Significance that they become produce mementos. Clarissa May won't replace the jar of dried rose leaves in her blue ginger jar because she packed them years ago with the man she loved, in Freeman's "The Scent of the Roses"; Luella Norcross won't replace her mourning bonnet years after her father's death, in Freeman's "Life-Everlastin'''; and Susan Peavey, in Alice Brown's "Honey and Myrrh," has no desire to see new and strange things in the world because, as she puts it, "'I never see a di'mond, but I guess I know pretty well how 't would look.' "99 The culminating example of this apotheosis of the familiar and the memorializing is the titular object of Alice Brown's "The Mortuary Chest" containing belongings of the dead, even including the piece of slippery elm somebody's father was taking on the day that he died. 1OO This resistance to consumerism-interrupted occasionally by the counternarrative that a new dress or ribbon is an innocent pleasure, like good food-is symptomatic of the ways in which exchange relations are bypassed or stalled in these stories. This evasion of exchange relations has the potential to symbolize what interactions with the world of objects might be like outside of capitalism. By investing domestic objects and domestic tasks with sentimental or devotional significance, regionalist writing removes objects and work from market relations, as if enacting a protest against the depersonalizing wider world of commodification and wage labor. On the other hand, objects in local-color fiction take their value not as much from "use" -the category that Marx would oppose to "exchange" -as from their function of connecting their owners with traditional ways or lost loved ones, or of establishing their owners' control over a home that, as Ann Douglas Wood has pointed out, is eerily particularized and weighty with

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belongings,101 Arguably, this accentuation of sentimental value is only incidentally a critique of capitalism, proceeding more fundamentally from twin suspicions of the unknown world beyond the local and of the most easily identified forms of representation. This phenomenon is especially interesting to consider in light of the fact that New England was commonly understood to be suffering from depopulation and economic decline from a more lively and prosperous condition. 102 The communities depicted were not enclaves that had escaped the incursions of capitalism, but rather areas that had long been part of exchange economies and had only recently declined. The most obvious example of this is Dunnet's Landing, where The Country of the Pointed Firs is set, and where shipbuilding and sailing used to thrive. The anticapitalist values ascribed to traditional ways in the communities depicted seem to be a kind of back-formation, recovered or invented from within capitalist relations. For example, the reliance of many characters on family gardens as opposed to cash crops and purchased food maintains a preserve of precapitalist practices, but it is a depoliticized vestige of them, like folk dances and traditional foods that come to stand in for what had been socially and politically rich ethnic identities. The desire to imagine an alternative to exchange values is real and important in these stories, but the desire is insistently privatized, ascribed only to the household or individual who wants to grow vegetables and use the ancestral teacups. Like the home, the farm functioned ideologically in producerist formulations as an alternative and redeemer to the capitalist marketplace. 103 Pastoral idealism was powerful: the salt-of-the-earth farm family who eked out a living somehow no matter how hard times got rivaled Virginia Woolf's "Angel in the House" as an image used to prettify exploitation. Both women and farmers were torn between trying to make use of their symbolic status and trying to escape it. Farmers used not only their identification with nature (as opposed to urban artifice) but also their connection to Jefferson's yeoman farmer to explain why the justice of current market arrangements should be measured by their consequences for farmers. To this extent they tried to combat the public perception that the" 'sturdy yeoman' " had degenerated into the" 'hayseed,' " as one Atlantic writer put it in 1896.104 In other ways, though, especially within the progressive Farmers' Alliance organization, they wanted to present themselves as

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modern, scientific businessmen whose savvy would sustain them if only a few unjust legal and economic practices were corrected. Depictions of women's domestic labor in New England regionalist fiction similarly wavered between emphasizing its exploitation under current social and economic arrangements and idealizing the satisfactions of a wellordered domestic space, presided over by a woman with "faculty." In relation to the producerist platform of the Arena, accounts of women's domestic competency and even their extraordinary pleasure in domestic tasks might be understood as representations of the utopian potential within domestic work. After all, women who worked at home, like subsistence farmers, had the rare privilege of producing and laboring for the immediate use of their household, which meant that their labor could function symbolically (though not actually) as labor outside of capitalist relations, labor organized around use value, including aesthetic pleasure for its own sake, rather than exchange value. Mary Wilkin Freeman's Louisa Ellis, the main character of "A New England Nun," provides one of the most vivid examples of this recovery of the pleasure of domestic labor. Louisa releases a man from his engagement to her, partly because she has discovered he is really in love with someone else, but also because she cannot stand to give up her household and move in with the man and his mother. In the last paragraph, one of the richest passages in regionalist fiction, we hear that "If Louisa Ellis had sold her birthright she did not know it, the taste of the pottage was so delicious, and had been her sole satisfaction for so 10ng."105 The "birthright" posited may have been marriage, or some form of happiness that wouldn't be solitary, or maybe even motherhood, but the "If" brackets any of these possibilities. Indeed, the story details some of Louisa's newly safeguarded pleasures so eloquently that the forsaken alternative seems misty indeed. Virtually a New England Huysmans, Louisa takes an almost entirely aesthetic pleasure in her life, albeit her aesthetic puts a premium on order. She distills aromatic essences of flowers and occasionally rips out a linen seam "for the mere delight of sewing it together again."l06 At the end of the story, she "gazed ahead through a long reach of future days strung together like pearls in a rosary, every one like the others, and all smooth and flawless and innocent, and her heart went up in thankfulness."lo7 Insofar as stories like "A New England Nun" evoke how precious-and, unfortunately, how luxurious-it was for a woman of

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unexceptional means to have this much control over her life and surroundings, the control that was usually a prerequisite for artistic endeavors, they anticipate the argument of Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Whereas women's domesticity had functioned morally and symbolically at midcentury, guaranteeing women's insulation from the corruptions of public life and authorizing them (in suffragists' arguments) to vote to preserve domestic life and values, toward the century's end women's domesticity was rescripted as a form of labor requiring expertise. 108 It seems plausible that there was a structural symbiosis between, on the one hand, regionalist fiction's development of the utopian possibilities of this private domestic labor, envisioned as an ensemble of crafts and lores removed from capitalist exchange and scientific scrutiny, and on the other hand, protoProgressive efforts to rationalize and collectivize cooking and housework during the same era. These were competing solutions-antimodernist and aggressively modernizing, respectively-to the problem of valuing domestic labor and acknowledging its organizational complexity. Characters who feed their families from kitchen gardens and gather their own herbs for healing are fantasy figures not just of quasi spiritual female nurturance, but also of a domestic expertise independent of the standardization and rationalization of science, typified by late-century medicine. Their alter egos were champions of cooperative housekeeping, such as Edward Bellamy and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who presumed that domestic work was an important human undertaking that ought not to be relegated, arbitrarily and inefficiently, to isolated women, but rather ought to be organized scientifically.l09 These reformers took housework seriously, but not necessarily women: as Glenna Matthews has pointed out, most attempts to profeSSionalize or collectivize housework denigrated the competence of women who were keeping house privately.110 From a feminist point of view, what is most interesting about stories like "A New England Nun" is the fact that the right to self-determination, selfsupport, and dignity in one's own home is being asserted on behalf of unmarried women, as if this were the most valuable birthright. (Writing in the Arena, Hamlin Garland called "marrying for a home," the grim alternative to this self-sufficiency, "that first cousin of prostitution."111) In one of Alice Brown's stories, "The Way of Peace," this point is raised directly: of the protagonist, it is asked, "Was her home not a home merely because there were no men and children in it 7" 112 Perhaps a hallmark of regionalist

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fiction by women during this era is that it rewrites the domestic sphere so that it does not need to be justified by its relationship to public life, but rather is unapologetically dedicated to women's pleasure in homemaking and friendship. In liThe Way of Peace," the protagonist Lucy Ann Cummings has to assert her right to stay by herself in the house she had previously occupied with her mother, rather than to go visiting brothers and cousins all the time. She identifies occupying the house with taking her mother's place: indeed, she even enhances her natural resemblances to her mother by styling her hair like her mother's and wearing her mother's clothes, and she takes comfort in her own resemblance to the one she misses. Domestic tasks have taken on a sacramental quality for her, serving to connect Lucy Ann with this lost mother: at one point she exults in the prospect of making the attic cleaning take a week, even though it could be done in one day, because the activity will be so pleasurable she wants to make it last as long as possible. Read as a counterpoint to stories by Freeman, Brown, and others about how women's domestic labor in family groupings goes unvalued and unseen (such as Freeman's "The Selfishness of Amelia Lamkin"), stories about women contentedly keeping house alone or together (such as Freeman's "A Mistaken Charity," Brown's "The Way of Peace," and Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs) imply that this labor has the potential to become estranging and exploitative whenever husbands, children, or male relatives enter the picture. 1l3 This counterpointing marks an important opening for feminist and/ or Marxist readings of these works. However, not only the Atlantic group's pathologizing framework for rural distress but also the regionalist works' own narrative structures and emphases often worked to contain their potential for criticizing patriarchy and capitalism. Instead of inviting an inquiry into what was gained or lost, produced or precluded, by the division of labor and sensibility that made women into domestic beings, these regionalist works tended to limit their scope to detailing the surprising richness of lives confined to domestic spaces. Furthermore, the complexity of any comparison between an Arena and an Atlantic reading of New England women's regionalism is demonstrated especially dramatically in such stories about women who cherish their singleness and proprietorship. The Arena's advocacy of producerism and women's rights created an ideological matrix within which the usual conditions of women's domestic labor-its being accorded no real productive

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value, directed or interfered with by men, and increasingly subjected to the standardizing assistance of consumer products (a real help to many women, but a further entanglement of housework in capitalist relations)-could have been readily developed. Conversely, if one looks at these stories in conjunction with the Atlantic group's Anglo-Saxonism, some disturbing racial codings emerge. In two of Alice Brown's Tiverton Tales, for example, the decisions of women not to marry out of loyalty to their ancient families seem to dramatize the era's obsession with racial and genealogical purity. Dilly Joyce, in "A Last Assembling," is immersed in her family's heritage: she "held herself remote from personal intimacies; but all the fine, invisible bonds of race and family [the terms seem to be identical, in this context] took hold of her like irresistible factors, and welded her to the universe anew."U4 Her fiance is of a different "race" -meaning a different established family-and she realizes after a flood of memories and imaginings from her family history that "she had loved not him, but his inheritance," which is his lineage, not any money.l15 So she doesn't marry him, remaining instead in the house so full of her family's past. Similarly, in "The FlatIron Lot," the aptly named Mary Oldfield promises her grandfather, a local historian, that she won't marry so that the field he owns, the site of the first settlement, will stay in the family name one generation more.1 16 As these stories indicate, the refusal of marriage could manifest the dread of exogamy and the fetishization of pure lineage, thereby participating in the turn-of-the-century valorization of racial purity.ll7 But since Populism itself included nativist strains, it is possible that a Populistinflected Arena framing of such stories could produce several politically divergent readings: an Anglo-Saxon reading valorizing racial purity and "indigenous" proprietorship, a producerist reading valorizing women's domestic activity, and a feminist reading marking the importance of women's lives, activities, and privacy independently of their functioning in families. It is therefore important to recognize that the Arena reading formation was not simply progressive, just as the Atlantic, which had published enthusiastic articles about cooperative housekeeping, was not simply conservative or reactionary. us I have proposed that stories about stingy patriarchs protest patriarchal privilege in: households according to the same logic by which farmers protested their exploitation by those who controlled the money supply. Similarly, in Freeman's and Cooke's frequent depictions of women's vulnerabil-

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ity in the marriage market, their inability to market themselves freely not only as lovers but as domestic managers, it is tempting to see an analogy with farmers' complaints about their inability to control national and international markets for their crops: not a critique of the need to market one's self or one's goods, but only of the injustices of particular market conditions. The farm wife's grievance against her husband (or the marriage market) paralleled her husband's grievance against the nation's economic arrangements. It might seem paradoxical that I am suggesting that these works of regionalist fiction brought together an analysis of farmers' exploitation in the national economy with an analysis of women's exploitation in the marriage economy. My point is not that either of these grievances subsumes the other, nor that regionalist fiction was somehow "balanced" because it registered both. Instead, just as an earlier phase of feminism drew on the model of individual rights emphasized within the Abolitionist movement, in which so many women were active, the kind of feminism that the Arena sponsored, oriented to the claims of women as laborers, and that regionalist fiction often embodied, seems to have developed by analogy with Populism and in tandem with it. Late nineteenth-century producerism does not easily fit our current understandings of either socialism or feminism, which is why Populism and the domestic protests embedded in regionalist works can seem so politically contradictory to contemporary analysts. ll9 Populism ideologically mobilized a range of rural groups and interests, but at its core were the efforts of agricultural landowners (in company with western silver-mining capitalists) to struggle against industrial capitalists for control over national economic policies. The late-century feminism that made use of producerism also mainly embodied the concerns of women from the bourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie, with the complication that in farm households observing a traditional division of labor, both the male farmer and the wife might not only manage laborers but also work alongside them. Depending on the wealth of the household and its internal power relations, though, as some of the stories show, wives and children could be effectively reduced to proletarians who had little power to bargain over the price of their labor. Neither Populism nor producerist feminism was a fundamental critique of existing social arrangements; however, both could be appropriated for more radical purposes.

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Using the example of the Arena in conjunction with a few characteristic scenes from late nineteenth-century New England women's regionalism, I have tried to demonstrate that for rural readers, readers who were familiar with the politics of producerism, or women who were sensitive to the politics of domestic labor, regionalism could signify something different from the ethnographic containment of rural experience that Brodhead and Kaplan outline. My point has not been to replace Brodhead's and Kaplan's readings but to situate them as the products of a particular reading formation, organized around the readership of high-culture magazines such as the Atlantic and Harper's. It is important to note, too, that the contrasting reading of regionalism I have presented does not make regionalism serve as a simple advocate for rural people or for political movements that grounded their legitimacy in rural interests. What I have sketched instead are some of regionalism's points of intersection with the Arena's range of reference, organized primarily around the analogy between the women's domestic labor and farming as they were both constructed through producerist discourse. Arguably, what many women regionalist writers did best was to plot domestic life according to the dramas of its labor: managing scarce resources and finding alternative ones, negotiating with uncomprehending patriarchal bosses, and conducting diplomatic and trade relations with other households. These dramas brought together the patriarchal politics of the household and the capitalist politics of the national economy. The domestic focus of much regionalist writing may have served to invite even eastern urban readers' identifications, in a counterpoint to the distancing accomplished by the dialect, nostalgia, and projected primitivism that Brodhead and Kaplan analyze. For Tolstoy had it backwards: happy families under patriarchal capitalism are often singularities that defy or mock our emotional investments in them, whereas the social arrangements that make fictional families unhappy, and the fantasies about escaping from family life that fuel these depictions, are often compellingly familiar.

Conclusion

The End of the Atlantic Group, 1900-1910

The generic controversies that organized literary debates, and thereby the construction of the literary, in the Atlantic and its peer magazines seemed to dissipate during the first decade of the new century. Anyone familiar with standard periodizations of U.S. literature expects to find by :1900 if not before some kind of sparks £lying in public literary discussions due to the onset of naturalism, which is usually associated with the fiction of Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, and sometimes Hamlin Garland or Theodore Dreiser. These authors were all reviewed in the Atlantic group, often favorably and always seriously, and some of them published in its member magazines; Norris was even a columnist for the Critic in the last years of his life. Yet the application of Zola's term "naturalism" to these turn-ofthe-century writers in particular is the construction of subsequent literary historians, distinct from the term's intermittent use in the last decades of the nineteenth century as a synonym for realism or a minor variant of it. The earliest identification of it with the Crane-Norris-London constellation I have found is in one of Carl Van Doren's contributions to the Cambridge History of American Literature (:19:17-:192:1), in which he characterizes the "later naturalistic writers" (he grants them some American forbears such as E. 'jV. Howe, author of the bleak The Story of a Country Town [:1883]) as "polemic haters of the national optimism."l Contemporary reviewers construed these authors according to some of the same criteria that later became associated with "naturalism," but neither the term, the criteria, nor these authors were treated as a movement or a marker of a new kind of fiction in the Atlantic group before :19:10. What one finds in the Atlantic group instead, at the opening of the 229

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twentieth century, is a proliferation of classifications for the fiction currently being produced, some of which discursively echo the debates about realism and other forms that engrossed reviewers in previous decades, but none of which is pursued with much polemical enthusiasm or analytic consistency. Passing classifications such as the "political novel," the "epic novel," the "philosophical romance," the "book of everyday life," the "religious nove!," the "problem nove!," the "animal story," the "purpose novel," the "romance of the power of money," and the "society romance" are coined without much deliberation, although these uninspired taxonomies are occasionally enlivened by whimsical inventions such as the "Vegetable School of fiction" (in which characters seem so closely related to their home landscape-in this case, an English one limned by Eden philpotts-that "you almost expect to see the characters in the book putting down roots").2 Of these, the epic novel bears the closest resemblance to subsequent representations of naturalism; both Cornelia Atwood Pratt and William Dean Howells apply the term to Norris's writings, and Pratt suggestively describes epic novels as ones "in which the human beings who take the time-worn parts of hero and heroine are wholly subordinated not to incident or plot, but to the clash of elemental forces, the vast trend of events."3 But the novels that would be naturalist seem not to have sorted themselves out very distinctly for contemporary Atlantic-group reviewers, who mainly expressed disappointment with the literary output of the decade, not least of all because of what they saw as its miscellaneousness or derivativeness. Writing near the end of the decade, an Atlantic reviewer complained that it was hard to discern any "decided tendencies" in recent fiction, which instead drew freely upon styles and themes ranging from fiction's earliest purviews to its most recent forays.4 Norris himself, writing in 1902, called this time "the era of the Fourth-Raters," "imitators of the Romantic school" who would at some point be replaced by an era of geniuses producing something genuinely new. 5 In retrospect, though, it is possible to diagnose the literary malaise marked by the thinness of generic controversy as an affliction of the Atlantic group rather than of the era's fiction writers. The Atlantic Monthly was still a respected magazine at the end of the nineteenth century, but by 1900 its cultural formation's dominance-its power to construct and legislate the literary-was waning. Ironically enough, the first public acknowledgment of its decline may well have been Barrett Wendell's celebration of the

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Atlantic in his Literary History of America (1900). He yoked together the Atlantic Monthly, James T. Fields's activities as a book publisher, the Saturday Club, and Harvard University as the forces that fostered the later literature of what he called "The Renaissance of New England," about which I will have more to say below. Wendell claimed at the outset, not quite accurately, that he was excluding living individuals from his account, but apparently his tact did not extend so far as to consider the effects of a living magazine's being consigned to history and perhaps more damagingly to local or regional history, the history of our literature before it became properly nationa1. 6 Although Wendell clearly finds nothing objectionable in the idea that the greatest American writers at midcentury were a coterie based in Boston and luxuriously equipped with their own publishing house and magazine, it is hard to overlook or approve the insularity signaled by his deSCription that "the standard writers of New England were more concerned as to what the Saturday Club might think of their productions than they ever deigned to be about the public." 7 Howells himself objected to Wendell's nearexclusive concentration on New England, sniping that the history might have better been entitled "A Study of New England Authorship in its Rise and Decline, with Some Glances at American Literature."B And Wendell's connecting the Atlantic to Harvard via James T. Fields caused Howells even greater awkwardness, since Wendell suggested that the connection was lost when Fields ceased to be editor. Howells, who was Fields's successor, hedges his bets in his response, trying not to detach the Atlantic from Harvard's authority yet emphasizing the Atlantic's national and public character: It is ludicrously mistaken to suppose that after Fields left the magazine, it ceased to be in sympathy with Harvard. Fields had no special affinity with Harvard, and the young Harvard men ... began writing for his successor in greater number than before, in proportion to their fitness or their willingness; if there was any change it was because Harvard was becoming less literary, and the country at large more literary. The good things began to come from the West and the South and the Middle States, and the editors took the good things wherever they came from. 9

Wendell's history unwittingly provided groundwork for countless subsequent literary historians to castigate Boston for fostering what has often

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been called, in a phrase George Santayana framed for a slightly different purpose, a "genteel tradition" in literature, the product of a complacent, repressed, and self-congratulatory elite.1° Whereas Wendell's discussion of the Boston cultural elite emerged from his discussion of a pre-Civil War literary renaissance, though, most subsequent critics of the genteel tradition identified it mainly with the culture of the "schoolroom" or "fireside" poets (Holmes, Longfellow, Lowell, and Whittier) and with Howells's Boston: the Boston contemporary with the promotion of realism in the United States. The Atlantic Monthly and its kindred magazines became a topic in American literary history during the first era when American literary histories were being produced in significant numbers. This was also the era when these magazines were ceasing to be the primary organ of literary evaluation and classification in the United States, and the literary establishment they represented was being rejected or even vilified by the up-andcoming generation of fiction writers and critics. The end of my story of the Atlantic group concerns two interrelated historical undertakings: 1) the cultural reorganization that invested other sites with authority over the literary; and 2) the representation of the Atlantic group and realism, the literary movement most closely and lastingly associated with it, in U.S. literary history. The Literary After the Atlantic Era So great has the power of the magazines been that they have convinced half the world they stand for the true aristocracy of letters, that he who ignores their canons must withdraw, and forever dwell, beyond the pale. The newspapers have taken their cue from them; it saves thinking; and there is, beyond all question, a certain public which will not recognize the existence of an author who has not been bred in one of the magazines or launched by one of the associate publishing-houses .... All this begets timidity; and timidity is a leech at the throat of originality. -Gertrude Atherton, "Why Is American Literature Bourgeois ?"ll (1904) Like the critics a decade earlier who had faulted realism with providing too little excitement for readers, Atherton published her protest in an Atlanticgroup magazine, the North American Review. And in retrospect, the romantic revival can be recognized as a harbinger of the kind of criticisms that Atherton and numerous commentators after her would make of the

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Atlantic-centered literary establishment. The fact that the romantic revival was cast as primarily a genre war indicates its insider status; a Scribner's Magazine writer who noted the "decline of the preface" in 1904 may have unknowingly hit upon a symptom of the literary community's impatience with internal skirmishes conducted within the parameters sanctioned by the Atlantic group, since a common function of a preface is to classify the work presented. 12 The romantic revival had effectively been a proposal, internally circulated, for the existing establishment to authorize as "literary" a new way of reading a different kind of text. This proposal stayed within most of the important parameters of literariness, even though it was a departure from certain recently installed values associated with realism. The rhetoric of the new romance appealed to timeless pleasures and ancient traditions, after all, and its leading practitioners were valued for their individual craftsmanship. However, the defensiveness of the maneuver drastically compromised the construction of high culture that had previously operated in the Atlantic-group magazines. The idea that these magazines ought to endorse certain kinds of fiction because they were widely read (and issued by publishers more respectable than the firms responsible for dime novels), implying that the middling public had spotted an important kind of value in these texts before the experts had, called into question the magazines' cultural custodianshipP It was as if the literary establishment were precariously crammed behind the wheel of an early automobile and found itself skidding, so that the romantic revivalists tried to steer the car into the skid to keep it from running completely out of control. The insider critique represented by the romantic revival was followed in the next decade by the more hostile external critique that faulted the Atlantic group for being what Atherton called "bourgeois" and what was more often called "genteel." This critique replicated the misogyny of the romantic revival. Santayana figured the difference between America's practical ingenuity and its inherited traditions that had grown stale and genteel as a difference between a phallic "sky-scraper," inhabited by the "American Will," and a "colonial mansion" inhabited by the "American Intellect": "The one is the sphere of the American man; the other, at least predominantly, of the American woman. The one is all aggressive enterprise; the other is all genteel tradition."14 Vernon Louis Parrington compounded this scapegoating of women for the literary establishment's gentility when he described the Boston that shaped Howells as a soci-

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ety "where women held sway and a maidenly reticence was reckoned the crown of womanhood," with the result that "Howells became a specialist in women's nerves." IS But whereas the romantic revivalists had faulted the realist wing of the establishment for laundering masculine-coded adventure out of fiction, what early twentieth-century critics faulted the literary establishment for suppressing might be indexed by sex, though not reduced to it. Atherton accused the establishment of making a "fetish of the body," holding that it "never has done and can do no wrong" and must be treated as if it belonged to "a little child" (yet another use of the symbolic overdetermination of childhood).1 6 John Macy quipped that if "there were no more passion in the world than Mr. Howells recognizes and portrays, about eighty million of us Americans would never have been born and, once born, half of us would have died of ennui."17 And the reason why women were held responsible for this prudishness was that it was understood to be practiced on behalf of the American girl. For instance, the Literary History of the United States (1948) cited Howells's belief that a magazine should not publish anything a father ought not let his daughter read, although the author of this section blamed the Ohio frontier rather than Boston for Howells's "squeamishness about sexual relations." 18 Atherton admits that she had kept a photograph of Howells's study on her desk when she was starting out as a writer in California. In rejecting Howells and the literary establishment he represented, she also rejected this paternalistic cultural caretaking. Yet Atherton, a woman, blamed the literary establishment's limitations not on women but on domesticity, as it affected both men and women: To be great, it is above all things necessary to develop your ego, your power, and there is only one way to do it: by divorcing yourself from all that is smug, that is easy, that is comfortable, that is orthodox and conventional, by seeing life from its peaks to its chasms. No writer with a real gift and with a real ambition has any business with a home, children, the unintermittent comforts of life which stultify and stifle. 19 Christopher Lasch has characterized the genteel tradition against which early twentieth-century intellectuals were rebelling by the "combination of patriarchal authority and the sentimental veneration of women," the engines of the bourgeois family'S reproduction of itself and its values. 20 The Atlantic group's self-presentation as an extension of this domestic machin-

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ery prompted critiques of its gentility and femininity, the restricted attention to the "little" and "minute" for which both Atherton and Frank Norris criticized it. 21 The recourse to feminization as a way of discrediting an ideological opponent, a tactic always available in a social order riddled with misogyny, accounts for the slippage from women's being constructed by a male-dominated literary establishment as needing protection, on the one hand, to women's being blamed for the establishment's taboos, on the other. Norris's protest against the previous literary establishment was made in the name of "romance"; some other early twentieth-century writers and critics protested against Howellsian realism in the name of a deeper realism, which subsequent literary historians often called "naturalism"; and still others, like Atherton, bypassed generic taxonomies altogether in calling for some kind of literature that would exceed established bounds. Despite these differences in strategy, what most of these twentieth-century rebels shared was an animus against not only or even primarily a kind of writing, but against the infrastructure of publishing and class hierarchy that had enculturated and promoted it. Perhaps the most interesting moment in Atherton's essay occurs when she points out that Bret Harte and Mark Twain, in her view the first truly American writers, were helped by having been "independent of editors and reviewers," Twain because he published his first books by subscription and made an independent reputation as a humorous lecturer, and Harte because he published in the magazine he edited, the Overland Monthly.22 These authors were not really as independent as Atherton suggests. Each was recognized and promoted by the Atlantic group, and there is no telling what their reputations would have been had the major magazines snubbed them. In coming up with these examples, though, Atherton is clearly trying to imagine how an author could function as an author, getting published and reaching an audience, from some institutional site other than the Atlantic group. By the time of Atherton's writing, there were at least three such sites emerging, which perhaps were obscured for her by their very newness-or by her unwitting entanglement in the older model of the literary. One was a new group of mass-circulation magazines whose most famous member was McClure's, which had succeeded in reaching a national audience much greater than any previously attained by high-culture magazines (as opposed to story-papers, for instance), combining writings by elite authors

2)6

Reading for Realism

with somewhat sensational reporting. Other new wide-selling magazines of similar audience address included Edward Bok's Ladies' Home Journal, William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan, and Munsey's.23 These magazines sold for a lower price, 10¢ to 15¢ per copy versus the 25¢ or 35¢ price of the Atlantic-group magazines. 24 McClure's, when announcing its lower price, nonetheless referred to itself as "a first-class magazine" and claimed to publish lithe best literature and art," listing Stevenson, Kipling, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Bret Harte, Sarah Orne Jewett, Anthony Hope, Joel Chandler Harris, and Howells, among others, as contributors the magazine would be featuring. 25 The new, cheaper monthly magazines appealed to a wider audience without giving up a relatively high-culture market position, and their success probably helped stimulate the romantic revival within the Atlantic group.26 These magazines bore a somewhat parasitical relationship to the Atlantic group, insofar as they established their high-culture status mainly by publishing authors already canonized in the older magazines. Their vantage point on the literary was significantly different from that of the Atlantic group, though. The profile of the author treated as a personality, rather than the book review or polemical literary essay, was their most characteristic approach to literary culture, subordinating the literary to humaninterest journalism. And as Christopher P. Wilson has emphasized in his study of early twentieth-century authorial professionalism, these magazines also represented a different mode of literary production. They usually commissioned articles and stories rather than sifting through submissions; Frank Norris claimed, perhaps from his experience as a house reader for Doubleday, that this tactic was increasingly common among book publishers as well. 27 Interestingly, it was the sensational journalism they sponsored rather than the new magazines' choice of fiction to publish that most challenged the Atlantic group's paradigm of the literary. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) might exemplify the new kind of journalistically inspired reform fiction which was designed to change laws and institutional structures rather than individual hearts. Within the Atlantic group between 1900 and 1910, there are numerous essays assessing the impact of journalism on literature, or the relationship between journalism and literature, all of which might be considered anxious responses, conciliatory or hostile, to the McClure's group and the editorially driven journalistic model of literary production on which it relied. 28

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The second new site of the literary was the "little magazines," which were much more openly antagonistic to the established magazines that were in comparison "big." First becoming a recognized phenomenon during the 1890S, most of the little magazines were inspired by the British Yellow Book and were influenced more or less by French symbolists and British aesthetes; they took pride in correcting the stodginess of established periodicals. 29 They tended to be short-lived, though, probably because most of them lacked the backing of publishing houses, so there is no reason to believe they impinged much on the circulation figures or public status of the Atlantic group, even though they created the possibility for an alternative kind of cultural capitaPO Perhaps the most significant fact about the little magazines was that many of them were associated with the culture of the universities: the literary aspirations and tastes of students or recent graduates or young faculty members. The most prominent of these magazines and the one on which many others seem to have been modeled was the Chap-Book, founded by two recent Harvard alumni and supported by many of their Cambridge, Massachusetts, connections,31 The Lark, in San Francisco, was co-edited by Gelett Burgess, who taught at the University of California; the Philistine was founded by a man who had attended Harvard briefly before finishing his education with a European tour; the Mahogany Tree, which was begun three years before the Chap-Book and ended quickly, was also founded by Harvard men. An imitator of these magazines, the Chicago Four O'Clock, was published by A. L. Swift and Co., a manufacturer of college yearbooks. And the Bibelot, which was not a product of college culture but rather self-consciously devoted itself to self-culture in the tradition of the Chautauquan, was still a product of educational programs that were independent of the Atlantic group.32 The link between little magazines and universities was sufficiently widely recognized that the Critic could complain in 1897 that any youth just out of college, or any freshman just in college" could have his own magazine if only he had enough money.33 Hence, what might appear to be a guerrilla enterprise on the part of outsider intellectuals may really have been an outgrowth of the U.S. academy's early ventures in teaching English and American literature, as well as to the presence of many sons of wealthy families in American universities. Probably the most important of the three new sites of literary authority was, accordingly, the university. Even though only a few universities inII

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cluded classes in American literature or contemporary literature before the end of the century, the prospect that American literature would soon be safely settled in the academy was widely anticipated in the Atlantic group as early as the 1890s. The academy's potential for shaping creative writers was especially controversial. Frank Norris thought that having universities prepare writers was a great improvement over having publishers commission "novels ... to order," but he offered this opinion in the context of McClure's-style literary production rather than of the romantic ideal of original authorship to which many persons of letters were still devoted. 34 (Exemplifying this devotion, Sir Gilbert Parker proclaimed in the North American Review that the art of fiction differs from all other arts in that "it cannot be taught."35) And the Nation in 1908 published a number of letters arguing about whether a Ph.D. in the humanities was useful preparation for either a creative writer or a teacher, especially a teacher who would transmit the love of literature.36 But of far more immediate concern to the Atlantic group was the university's role in turning out accredited literary critics. Paul Shorey waxed enthusiastic in 1896 about the advent of the new "university man" (women students were invariably overlooked) to American letters, the product of standards of disciplinary rigor developed in Germany. The Johns Hopkins University had most famously imported this version of graduate education to the United States, emphasizing research and a new understanding of disciplinarity modeled on the empirical methods of the sciences. The university-accredited intellectual would provide a "norm for others, no local provincial or partial standard, but the absolutely best attainable in the civilized world today," according to Shorey. He predicted that such university men would predominate on college faculties within a generation, and that already they were writing book reviews in the Nation and the Chicago Dial (as it happens, two magazines that surged to prominence in the wake of most of the Atlantic group's submergence) that carried the "most weight with the intelligent public" -presumably not the same as the general publiC. 37 His article raises the specter that the Atlantic group, which had for decades been a literary authority unto itself, or its successors would be reduced to popularizing judgments about contemporary literary works and trends that were either made in universities or authorized by reviewers' university credentials. In the first decade of the twentieth century, then, the Atlantic group

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registered concerns not only with the relationship between literature and journalism, especially the muckraking variety, but even more insistently with the relationship between its own cultural influence and the academy's.38 The little magazines troubled the established magazines hardly at all, although their retrospective significance lies in their having been progenitors of later magazines (or of new incarnations of established magazines, as in the case of the Nation) that replaced the Atlantic group as extraacademic purveyors of the literary. The Chicago Dial's taking over the Chap-Book's subscription list and goodwill epitomizes this relationship.39 The Atlantic group's greater preoccupation with the academy was well justified, however. Even though universities have not become the exclusive training grounds for authors, readers, and critics that some turn-of-thecentury observers seemed to expect, the interrelated emergence of English and American literature as academic disciplines has meant that universities have mainly taken over the power to confer canonicity on works and authors and to approve and inculcate certain ways of reading them. The nonacademic magazines that emerged as important sites of literary evaluation and debate in the decades after World War I (magazines such as the Dial, the New Republic, the Nation, and the Partisan Review) were necessarily in dialogue with critics based in the academy; their current equivalents, such as the New York Review of Books, similarly take it as part of their mandate to publicize and criticize trends in the academic teaching, criticism, and theoretical analysis of literature. Moreover, even though the NYRB, the Village Voice, and the New York Times Book Review constitute a literary establishment whose reviews have significant influence over the prospects of contemporary authors, especially beginners, the academy arguably has primary control over literary history, and therefore over posterity. The academy had not, by 1910 (a year that might conveniently mark the end of the Atlantic group's special influence), attained this secure control over the literary; the study of u.s. literature in particular did not become securely established as a discipline until much later, perhaps even after World War 11.40 However, the preconditions for its authority were already in place and ready for the Atlantic group to mull over by that time. Interestingly enough, both journalism and the academy provided new versions of the authorial professionalism that the Atlantic group had endorsed in tandem with its promotion of realism. Christopher P. Wilson has identified the advent of authorial professionalism with the rationalized,

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solicitation-dominated literary marketplace of magazines like McClure's and book publishers like Doubleday & Co. of the early twentieth century, although he points out that the writers themselves and a public weary of muckraking began to move away from this model by about 1910.41 Yet the very fact of these writers' subordination to editors, along with their being relegated to write on commissioned topics, prevented them from being fully professional according to the nineteenth century's criteria, at least in their journalistic work: from having control of their own expertise, from being loosely monitored by some kind of professional credentialing organization rather than by an employer, and from appearing to be indifferent to market motives, as described in chapter 3. Indeed, the ambivalent attitudes of the writers Wilson considers (London, Sinclair, Phillips, and Steffens) toward their professionalism testify eloquently to the difficulty these writers had in grafting the conditions of their labor onto their inherited, even if adapted, ideas of properly literary authorship.42 University professors represented a more plausible fulfillment of the promise of authorial professionalism. The Critic published several articles in 1903 about limen of letters" at major universities, starting with Harvard, and even though the articles acknowledged the demands made on professors and instructors for purely academic publications, they featured instead the academics who had found time to publish novels, stories, and essays, quite often in the Atlantic and its kindred magazines. These men of letters were valued for transcending their disciplinarity: the philosopher Santayana was profiled as a poet, for example, Woodrow Wilson as a historian read by nonspecialists, and William James as a philosopher with a novelistic sensibility.43 The articles praised a number of author-professors for their share in creating an intellectual community for students after hours: for making students feel welcome to visit them at home, being willing to read students' extra-academic literary efforts, and in general serving the community rather than sticking strictly to the minimum requirements of their employment. This kind of behavior, while offering more familiarity than Henry James's strictures against authors' informal chatting with readers would have condoned, nonetheless fit nicely into the late nineteenth-century vision of the professional author as a counselorexpert who earned high status in the community by virtue of generously dispensing his disinterested wisdom. As the happy symbiosis between these men of letters and the Atlantic

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group indicates, the university-based man of letters did not significantly challenge the paradigm of the literary on which the Atlantic group's cultural authority was based. David Shumway's landmark study of the formation of American literary studies as a discipline persuasively identifies the man of letters as a practitioner of literature before it became a proper academic discipline, and it is revealing that the article about Harvard men of letters opens with the author's encountering a "very old gentleman in the college yard" who declared that there were no longer any men of letters at Harvard, the breed having died out with Lowell, Longfellow, and Holmes. 44 The faculty members that the author goes on to hold up in refutation represented a residual formation. Far from being a threat to the Atlantic group, university-based men of letters who published works other than literary criticism in general magazines consolidated rather than challenged the magazines' cultural authority. It even became increasingly common after about 1900 for Atlantic-group magazines to list the degrees and institutional affiliations of their academic contributors. The grounds of the Atlantic group's cultural authority were undermined instead by the ascendancy of university-based critics whose professionalism was constructed in relation to the new model of disciplinarity that Shorey had celebrated. Anything they might publish in general magazines was extradisciplinary and, arguably, extraprofessional, since their authorized work was addressed to other professionals and to students, so that their access to a general audience occurred only in the form of popularization. Gerald Graff, Michael Warner, and David Shumway have cogently traced the struggle within English departments, on the one hand, and between academic and nonacademic critics, on the other, precisely over this issue of disciplinarity. Within the academy in the early part of the century, there was a split between professors who embraced the new disciplinarity, mainly by devoting themselves to empirical literary studies grouped together as "philology," and professors who stayed closer to the "man of letters" model, who can be characterized as belletristic critics or "generalists."45 The philologists based their conception of the discipline on the sciences and were concerned primarily with issues of historical linguistics, whereas the belletrists or generalists were more interested in inspiring students with an aesthetic, emotional, and moral appreciation for literature. Within American literature, Shumway proposes that the form of the discipline that eventually gained dominance drew elements from both of

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these traditions, relying on philologically inspired influence studies to establish a canon of interrelated authors while privileging the aesthetic criteria and the attention to cultural nationalism inherited from the belletrists or generalists. 46 Outside of the academy, many critics in the "man of letters" tradition resisted the new disciplinarity, either in its early form of philology or in its later form that centered on a narrow canon of authors and very specific criteria for aesthetic excellence and cultural significance. The debates about disciplinarity conducted by these camps arguably centered on the question of the intellectual's role in society, intellectuals having begun to consider themselves (and often, to be considered) an independent social grouping. 47 The man of letters had addressed a wide public directly, taking his authority from the model of professionalism that underlaya physician's or lawyer's stake in the community; a university-based disciplinary intellectual earned respect for the stricter, scientific standards of his (the model still being male) credentials but was not so clearly authorized to function as a leading citizen. The scandals involving academic freedom that were discussed in the Atlantic group around the turn of the century affected mainly faculty members in economics and political science, but they impinged on what it would mean for universities to take over the literary insofar as they asked whether university professors were public intellectuals-professionals installed for practical reasons in university positions, but serving a public much broader than their students and granted an authority beyond the strict limits of their discipline-or whether they were hired experts-specialists whose intellectual authority extended only as far as their field's academic principles and the forum provided by their university employment. 48 Bliss Perry, an Atlantic editor who wanted to fuse the" generous spirit of the amateur with the method of the professional" and thereby offset the specialization of knowledge, wrote a stirring endorsement of professors' public activities, especially their involvement in politics, glorying in the "manifold modes of contact with his fellow citizens" (including writing textbooks) that the new breed of college professor had forged. 49 Yet even Perry suggested that academics' grasp of public affairs was likely to be limited, comparing some of them to "Irish members of parliament" who "are boyishly pleased if they can merely obstruct the business of the House," and characterizing them as "men not habitually sobered by practical contact with affairs."5o Clearly, Perry was subscribing here to the idea that academics' authority was mainly bounded

Conclusion 243 by their discipline, and that however laudable their attempts to apply their expertise to public life might be, they were often not competent in the translation, nor even mature in their citizenship. In contrast with physicians or lawyers, more exemplary professionals, university professors' expertise had the potential to unfit them for the richest civic participation, precisely because they pursued knowledge (so the stereotype went) in conditions artificially insulated from the rest of social and political life. At stake was not only professors' behavior in nonacademic public life, but also the nature of their authority in university settings. Arthur Twining Hadley, the president of Yale, wrote a defense of universities' right to patrol what professors taught because of teachers' capacity to influence students who were not their intellectual equals. Existing laws rightly protected "individual thought" or "casual discussion," Hadley proposed, but not ideas "made the subject of systematic communication to the young." S1 In other words, it was precisely the power of the new disciplinarity-its approach to scientific status-that made it subject to stricter social controls, in Hadley's view. Hadley evoked the dangers of professors being too independent, harnessing their scientific authority to personal hobbyhorses. On the margins of the Atlantic group, though, a writer in the Arena argued that the net result of university control over professors' speech was the systematic reproduction of the knowledge that suited the plutocrats who controlled or influenced university boards of trustees. Thomas Elmer Will claimed that "American wealth-owners" exerted an unhealthy influence over American education in three ways: by controlling their own institutions, by making donations to existing institutions that compelled the institutions to defer to them out of gratitude, and by controlling (or more often, Will suggests, inhibiting) public colleges and universities, presumably through the plutocrats' political influence. 52 Will marshals an impressive array of evidence about major universities' curtailments of academic freedom, instances in which professors were fired or forced to resign as a result of speaking their minds; most of the instances involved economists who supported bimetallism or criticized the monopolies in which the institutions' founders had made their money. His basic charge is that in most universities, far from being the unworldly specialists Perry had described, professors were "hirelings doing the bidding of their employers" and therefore unfit to be public intellectuals, a role that Will implies they ought to be left free to play, just as universities ought to be freed from plutocratic influences. 53

244 Reading for Realism

This critique never made it into the Atlantic group, but concerns about the effects that "rich men's sons" had on universities' intellectual life at least hinted at some academics' worrisome proximity to the upper reaches of the bourgeoisie, and thereby bore upon whether professors' institutional situation hampered or biased their intellectual output. 54 Since the publishing industry had outgrown any direct connection with hegemonic social groups, except via their shared stakes in capitalism and (for certain publishers) high culture, the universities may have taken over the Atlantic group's role in the reproduction of social stratification through cultural stratification during the decades before the G.!. bill, provisions for needbased financial aid, and civil-rights legislation helped to diversify student bodies. Mirroring the controversy over academic freedom was the Critic's investigation into conditions of periodical book reviewing. This was not a new topic: as I recounted in chapter 1, throughout the late nineteenth century magazines accused each other or the industry at large of "puffing" books by their house publishers or by publishers who advertised in their pages. The Critic's interest in the topic may have been motivated by the charge, which its editors hotly denied in 1900, that it was a "publisher'S organ" because it depended on advertising from the publishers whose books it reviewed. 55 Nevertheless, the ensuing articles focused very little on this material dependency, canvassing authors, publishers, and book reviewers instead about their estimate of the conscientiousness, fairness, and usefulness of American book reviews compared with English book reviews. The series was by no means muckraking: the fact that many reviewers relied on publishers' prepared notices was treated as a venial lapse in conscientiousness and a misunderstanding of what publisher!l claimed was the main purpose of those notices, which was to inform reviewers rather than to preempt evaluation. In conjunction with the Atlantic group's concerns with academic freedom and with the quality and nature of literary instruction in universities, though, the Critic's foray into reviewing amounted to a parallel but halfhearted sounding of whether periodical critics were intellectually independent and formed by some kind of recognizably consistent professional discipline. 56 This preoccupation with intellectual independence was rapidly converging with critiques of the "genteel" literary establishment, which easily devolved into the preconception that any literary establishment would be

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genteel, stultifying, perhaps even corrupting. The result was the creation of a social role for an intellectual grouping that was not only distinct but oppositional, a grouping that Shumway believes became important around 1910.57 The literary intellectuals outside of the academy who opposed the "professors," be they philologists or their disciplinary successors, were as eager to distance themselves from the Atlantic-group literary establishment as the academics were. As Shumway presents the situation, The new intellectuals saw themselves as the antithesis of Howells and the older men of letters, but they shared with them the assumption that the literary was a cultural force and that literature was a matter not merely of taste but of truth. It was because of the power of the literary under the men of letters that the new generation would regard it as worthy of their attempt to capture it.58 These oppositional intellectuals published articles in magazines such as the Dial and the New Republic that came to prominence during the 1910S and 1920S, and they published books of literary criticism and history that competed with the products of academic researchers: Van Wyck Brooks, H. L. Mencken, Malcolm Cowley, and Edmund Wilson were some of the most prominent academic outsiders who succeeded the Atlantic-era men of letters. In effect, the two criteria for intellectual authority that surfaced in debates over academic freedom and periodical book reviewing during the early years of the twentieth century-intellectual independence and disciplinary authorization-diverged, with one camp prizing the broad cultural view made possible by its location outside of the academic literary establishment and the other side prizing the rigor and consistency made possible by its unifying, albeit constraining, disciplinary status within the academy. These two groups succeeded the Atlantic group as the main competitors for control of literature: control of the public representation of what counted as literature, what ways of reading were literary, and what relationship if any literature bore to culture, society, and politics. As Shumway points out, though, after the Atlantic group lost control of the literary, the literary ceased to be as powerful a cultural site. Whereas men of letters in Howells's generation had affected what got published as well as how it was reviewed, their successors' relative independence of the book publishing industry meant that they had less clout. Moreover, even though the Atlantic group had appealed to a readership that, if not itself bourgeois, at least

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aspired to prosperity and cultural authOrity, its member magazines had constructed the literary as a general interest that could be advantageously pursued even among the very lowliest of the aspiring. Whether installed in universities or housed in little magazines and highbrow reviews, conversely, the literary after 1910 appealed mainly to a privileged public that was self-conscious about its separateness from any broader public. On the one hand, this diminution of the literary's social reach meant that literary culture had jeopardized its politically inspiring potential to project a future in which all Americans would have acquired tastes for cultural products that were somehow both refined and democratic. But on the other hand, it meant that cultural trusteeship had lost some of its effectiveness (though not all currency) as a rationale for the social and political dominance of bourgeois groups. Representing Realism Indeed, it may appear that many of the literary tendencies that developed during the nineteenth century were concentrated and delivered

to

the twen-

tieth century through ... periodical literature.

-The Cambridge History of American Literature (:19:17-21)59

Literary historians who wrote during and just after the era of the Atlantic's decline faced a knotty problem. Given that the Atlantic group was the literary establishment with which the best-known writers between the 1850S and the end of the century had been affiliated, but given that it was now being rejected by both academics and independent critics for being genteel, bourgeois, and/or predisciplinary, how could this period of unprecedented fictional productivity be salvaged for some kind of affirmative version of American literary history? Perhaps because of Howells's longevity (he was alive until 1920 for the next generation to kick around); because of the fortuitous inscription of his institutional authority in his middle name ("He became the Dean of American Letters, and there was no one else on the Faculty. Huckleberry Finn ran away from school," wrote John Macy, in an antic literary history of 19126°); and because of his close association with James and Twain, two authors whom literary critics and historians increasingly admired and used in their theories of u.s. literature's Americanness, the realist movement with which Howells had been so closely associated presented especially acute

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historiographical difficulties for the generation that followed him. 61 The "Renaissance of New England," as Barrett Wendell dubbed it forty years before F. O. Matthiessen would claim it for the nation as a whole, was initially laden with similar difficulties, since in connecting the Renaissance with Harvard and with the Atlantic, Wendell related the moment when American literature was supposed to have been most original and subversive (according to later reconstructions) to both the old and the new literary establishments, the Atlantic group and the university. Understandably, this provocative conjunction did not recur in most later literary histories. Since Matthiessen's reconstructed American Renaissance included only one author with firm Harvard connections, Emerson (and he had effectively renounced them in renouncing the ministry); since Lowell, a founder and the first editor of the Atlantic, was dropped from this later, influential version of the Renaissance; and since all Matthiessen's authors' contributions to the Atlantic had occurred relatively late in their careers, the American Renaissance could be severed from any contaminating literary establishment and configured instead only with the conveniently short-lived original Dial. 62 Realism, however, got caught up in a struggle over the shape that the postphilological discipline of American literature would take. Shumway identifies the two needs of the emerging discipline as "an aesthetic appropriate to American literature" and "a unifying conception or theory of that literature's meaning," one that would embed it in an account of the national culture's distinctiveness. 63 Realism, as it was construed by influentialliterary historians, had disadvantages on both counts: they associated it with social depiction accomplished at the expense of form, and with European and especially British traditions. I have emphasized the scripting of realism by literary historians because realism was not inherently uncongenial to either of these projects, especially when one considers, as I have been emphasizing in previous chapters, how variously realism was interpreted by its contemporaries. The promotion of high realism had emphasized stylistic refinement and craftsmanship, and critics have generally credited at least Howells and James with aesthetic finesse. Unfortunately, the detachment of realism from the genteel tradition and the early twentieth-century articulation of realism with muckraking journalism resulted in its being characterized by its engagement with public historical realities at a time when the most powerful sector of the discipline had set

248 Reading for Realism

individual artistry and direct social involvement in opposition. In truth, works associated with realism were no more "directly" involved with social realities than any other kind of fiction: they were intertextual, they were discursive, and they were constructionist rather than reflective. In taking "critical realism" as the pivotal category for a history of American literature in which aesthetic criteria did not prevail, however, Vernon Louis Parrington inaugurated a tradition in the historiography of realism that adapted it for the ends of critics who, working in various intellectual paradigms, concurred in valuing literature for producing social knowledge more than for embodying highly individualized creative acts. It was to Parrington's appropriation of realism that Lionel Trilling was responding when he complained, "In the American metaphysic, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant. And that mind is alone felt to be trustworthy which most resembles this reality by most nearly reproducing the sensations it affords."64 Trilling was objecting in particular to representations of Dreiser that made his formal inadequacies into a testament to the authenticity of his vision, thereby implying conversely that aesthetic finish was a mark of insincerity. Shumway has questioned why Trilling would bother to target Parrington, who had been marginal to the construction of American literature as a discipline and whose influence was certainly not significant by the time of Trilling's writing.65 Why Parrington would trouble Trilling so acutely in 1951 is hard to say, but Parrington's generai importance is greater than Shumway suggests. 66 Parrington's version of realism has helped shape the loyal opposition to the mainstream of the discipline up until the present moment-when, arguably, the party valuing social knowledge has regained the field. His Main Currents in American Thought valorized "critical realism" in the form of literature (broadly construed) that grappled with what Parrington considered to be fundamental social realities, those being economic and political ones. But what Parrington held up as the culmination of critical realism was "naturalism," the first American literature to escape "Puritanism and optimism," the two characteristics that had governed American thought and, presumably, impeded critical realism before. 67 Drawing on the Cambridge History of American Literature, Parrington's solution to realism's implication in the genteel tradition was one widely followed, with variations in terminology: he divided realism into a good realism, committed to radical social investigation and culminating in natu-

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ralism, and a bad or at least inferior realism compromised by being subjected to the" genteel tradition," which he describes as a pressure toward refinement and the representation of manners that originated in "Back Bay drawing-rooms."68 Literary historians and critics who followed Parrington's lead privileged the realism or naturalism of authors who were personally rebelling against Howells and the genteel tradition, even though some of these historians acknowledged that Howells or the earlier realism paved the way for these writers, and that the differences between their practices were not as great as the newcomers claimed. Viewed strictly in terms of the historiography of literary establishments, the naturalist movement celebrated in literary histories might even be defined as a subset of the literature canonized by the Atlantic group during the era of its decline, produced by authors whose alternate site of literary authority was the McClure's group. Although the major authors associated with naturalism published in the Atlantic group as well, they had ambivalent or hostile feelings toward the Atlantic-group literary establishment. And because the heyday of the muckraking McClure's group was relatively brief-so that it did not become a lasting site of the literary-literary historians have found it possible to emphasize its gritty willingness to take on trusts and social taboos over the kind of production-line composition that Wilson usefully details in The Labor of Words, so that the McClure's group was not faulted as the Atlantic group was for constraining authors' productions. The problem of realism's European roots had required agile sleightsof-pen even for the Atlantic group, of course. In the early part of the twentieth century, literary historians took a page from the Atlantic's selfrepresentation by identifying the early version (or forerunner) of American realism with local colorism and scripting it as the natural literary engine of the nation's consolidation. This consolidation could be dated in a number of ways by literary historians who wanted to mark the onset of a realist era. The Civil War (dated either as 1861, its beginning; 1865, its ending; or 1870, the end of the decade in which it occurred) provided the most popular dates, but there were also advocates for the end of the Mexican War in 1848, which marked the last great territorial acquisition of the contiguous United States, and the completion of the first transcontinental railroad route in 1868. 69 Dating the realist era by a national historical event positioned realism as a distinctive product of American conditions even

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Reading for Realism

though it was also an international cultural phenomenon. William P. Trent's performance of this delicate balancing act was both straightforward and deft: This movement toward realism was, of course, part of a world-wide literary change of taste, but something like it would probably have occurred even if America had been completely isolated. Commonplace, emotional fiction would almost necessarily have evolved to meet the needs of the American masses. American humour, as we shall see later, was contemporaneously evolving and was assuming a form not far remote from the realistic fiction that portrays types of provincial character. 7o Other historians' accounts of how realism sprang spontaneously from the late nineteenth century's embrace of science, democracy, and individualism similarly took up the rhetoric of the Atlantic group but elided that establishment's crucial role of theorizing, promoting, and publishing realism. Because Trent ends his history in 1865, the section on humor he provides does not showcase Mark Twain, as one might expect, but the link he traces between American humor-which literary historians overwhelmingly represent as an antiestablishment, decentralized force renovating the literary establishment from a more popular "outside"-and realism hints at Twain's potential to help subsequent literary historians detach realism from the literary establishment.71 What the party of social engagement and the party of individual artistry shared was a desire to locate the authorship of works they valued outside of a literary establishment. Not only critics but also authors needed to be constructed as oppositional intellectuals after about 1910. For the historians who followed Parrington, acknowledging the Atlantic group's central relationship to realism would have meant compromising their claims for realism's documentary status, for its identity as a spontaneous expression of the national character, or for its capacity to offer up social criticisms from a space outside of the dominant culture. The more aesthetically minded school of literary historians, with no less nationalist an agenda, conceived of literary history'S mission as being to account more selectively for interrelations among canonical authors, whose canonicity depended on their aesthetic excellence and individual grasp of life's complexities. These were the critics whom Shumway identifies with the mainstream of the disci-

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plines of English and American literature, their ascendancy marked by the eventual monopoly New Criticism held in the academy for several decades. They were governed by what Shumway calls "authorism," a belief in the romantic conception of original authorship. As a principle of literary history, authorism entailed that major authors and their works, especially the major works, were the most important phenomena for which literary history had to account.72 This was the disciplinary stance responsible for the works of criticism and literary history that identified nineteenth-century realism almost exclusively with the productions of Howells, James (in one phase), and Twain, and that relied upon the critical or prefatory writings of Hawthorne, Howells, James, and Norris to account for the transformation from the romance of the :1850S to the realist novel of the 1880s and :1890S to the naturalist novel of the turn of the century.73 Critics in this tradition have tended to identify the realist era with the :1880s and 1890S because those are the years in which writings by the three great realist authors make tendentious reference to realism (Howells's profile of James for the Century typically serves as a kickoff piece) and in which these authors' greatest works of realism were written, as these critics construct the movement and the novels. To analyze or even describe responsibly the complex process by which Howells, James, and Twain surfaced as the canonical representatives of realism would be impossible here. I can offer only a crude and preliminary sketch of how literary-institutional pressures-as distinct from other kinds of intellectual and cultural motives, which interacted in turn with the intricacies of individual critics' and historians' readings of individual works of fiction-operated to help produce the version of nineteenth-century realism that still provides the standard background for academic writings on this topic. However, until very recently, these authors were maintained as canonical only insofar as they could be distanced from the literary establishment of the Atlantic group: Twain, as I hinted above, because of his association with western humor, an extra literary tradition, and James because of his expatriation. The difficulty literary historians have had in extricating Howells-as-author from his lifelong involvement in the Atlantic group cannot be the sole explanation for his inferior position in the canon, but it is doubtless a contributing factor. Despite his relative indifference to aesthetically constituted canonicity, Parrington offered one strategy for salvaging Howells by emphasizing Howells's midwestern origins and depicting him as having been victimized by

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the genteel tradition rather than having embodied it. 74 In his contribution to Norman foerster's The Reinterpretation of American Literature (1928), Parrington effectively divided Howells's life and work into an earlier, Boston-based, genteel period and a later, New York City-based, more critical period. In this way, he reinforced the premise of A Hazard of New Fortunes that in leaving Boston for New York one necessarily moves closer to reality, even if one remains a man of letters, and he succeeded in associating the later Howells with naturalism.7 5 However, Howells's place in the canon has become more secure in recent years mainly because of the discipline's swerve away from narrow canonicity into valuing (among other things) the work of authors whose social and cultural position shed light on dominant cultural formations. Realism's un-American origins emerged as a more urgent problem for critics working within the paradigm of high canonicity after the publication of F R. Leavis's The Great Tradition, published in 1948 and made available in an American paperback edition in 1954.76 By identifying realism as the main tradition of British fiction and including certain American novelists within a branch of it, Leavis's book spurred scholars in American literature to locate the distinctiveness of their own novelistic tradition somewhere else. The most influential location was the romance, as formulated by Richard Chase in The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957). Chase's study was a bold advance for canonically based critics, since it granted the traditionally canonical works of American fiction over a period of 150 years both artistry and a distinctively American stance, one which was defined precisely in terms of the impossibility of their being socially engaged. Chase was very aware of his own historical revisionism: "It used to be thought that the element of romance in American fiction was destined to disappear, perhaps to all intents and purposes had disappeared, as a result of the rise of modern realism which set in after the Civil War." Instead, the "history of the American novel" (a term Chase detached from "realism" at the outset) is "not only the history of the rise of realism but also of the repeated rediscovery of the use of romance. . . ."77 Realism, for which the American public had developed a definite liking, was not excised from the tradition, but it was relegated to the background of fictional production, as a kind of unlocated establishment against which the more original and distinctive ventures into romance appeared in relief. Shumway cites Robert Spiller's observation that one reason for the in-

Conclusion 253 fluence of Chase's theory was that it comprehended the whole range of canonized American novelists. 78 There are a number of other reasons for Chase's appeal. By identifying the romance tradition as a hybrid one, so that even individual works could include romance and novelistic elements, he avoided narrow formalism and hair splitting. He was also able to draw on prefaces by Hawthorne and James in defining his version of romance, thereby authorizing it by means of two of the authors whose canonical status was strongest at the time. Most interestingly, by identifying the romance with the representation of people in "ideal relation," so that they have "universal human significance" rather than more specific and delimited social significance, he effectively made it a characteristic of the United States' national literature to eschew particular, situated concerns. It was American to try to grasp things in their absolute, presumably transnational significance, in other words: a satisfying stance for scholars balanCing allegiances to nationalism and to humanism?9 Amy Kaplan has charged that the dominance of the romance theory marginalized the study of American realism, and to some extent this is certainly true. so Matthiessen's and Chase's work both implied that the most "literary" of American texts were produced either before or at odds with the realist movement, thereby no doubt discouraging many midtwentieth-century critics interested in narrative form, stylistic complexity, and rich authorial visions from looking to the large number of writings consigned to realism proper. But it is impossible to overlook an influential body of studies about late nineteenth-century American realism that either defied or made shrewd compromises with the pressure toward hypercanonization, and that collectively represent an alternative to the exclusive emphasis on formal or aesthetic issues (construed claustrophobically, rather than being situated as themselves cultural and political) that Shumway identifies with the mainstream of the discipline of American literature. 81 Granville Hicks's The Great Tradition (:1933), for instance, continued Parrington's left-wing appropriation of the realist novel as the literary tradition of social engagement, positing Howells's espousal of realism (despite his constrained practice of it) as the foundation for the most important and also the most "literary" prose of the early twentieth century.82 He viewed the class struggle as the central fact of American culture, but few of his successors were as specific in their politics. Fortified by a few respectable but little-remembered studies in the interim, such as Grant C.

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Knight's 1951 account of the 1890S as the "critical period" that shaped the course of American fiction by installing realism-cum-naturalism as its dominant tradition, scholars in the sixties turned to the now firmly established "realist era" to work out accounts of how literary texts might constitute responses to social conditions. 83 One of the richest of these studies, Jay Martin's Harvests of Change, even anticipates Jane Tompkins's emphasis on texts' "cultural work." For example, he writes that late nineteenth-century fiction was helping Americans to "absorb the city into their consciousness-to accommodate, and perhaps compromise, their predilections toward the image of the frontier, with all that this implied, to the actualities of city living."84 Epitomizing the tendency of work on realism to value the texts associated with it expressly for their connection to certain social ideals, but to construe those ideals so broadly that hardly anyone could take exception to them or even locate them precisely on a political spectrum, Warner Berthoff dedicated The Ferment of Realism (1965) "To Liberalism and Democracy, the good old causes, in whose ambiguous service the work surveyed in this volume was mostly written."BS Such appropriations of realism were disciplinarily marginal, maybe even insurgent, because they challenged the supremacy of the major-works-of-major-authors dogma and the primarily formalist scholarship it authorized, but they were by no means necessarily left-sympathizing. Geraldine Murphy has aptly identified Richard Chase's distinction between the romance and the novel as a conservative product of the Cold War era, insofar as it reductively contrasted a very laissez-faire version of individual freedom (the romance's new hallmark) with totalitarianism (represented by the implicitly realist novel's reproduction of bounded social space).86 But Donald Pizer reversed this valuation by interpreting several realist novels-Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham, Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and James's What Maisie Knew-as celebrating the individual's nonconformity within an evil, corrupting society.S? In Pizer's account, this celebration of the individual who evades a reified Society becomes a characteristic feature of realism rather than romance, but it is no less implicated than Chase's schema in cherished American myths about the nation's capacity to produce individuals even out of its most corrupt social formations: a cause for patriotic selfcongratulation and, paradoxically, faith in the American social order. In recent years, the study of realism has profited from another set of

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changes in the discipline of American literature, marked not only by Jane Tompkins's attention to texts from the cultural mainstream, but also by a renewed interest in European Marxist or materialist critics who offered new historical and representational readings of realism, such as Georg Lukacs; by Roland Barthes's and Michel Foucault's attention to the discursive construction of any "reality effect"; by New Historicists' interest in literary representation and the literary construction of value as market phenomena; and by canon revisionists' attention to authors whose skill in representing the complexities of their diverse social locations contributes to their works' interest for contemporary readers. Once again, then, we find ourselves in an era when realism as an entity has considerable legitimacy within the literary establishment, or at least the part of it housed in universities and charged with transmitting literary traditions. To keep a balance between acknowledging the effects realism has had, both as a textual institution and as a symbolic counter in literary history, and recognizing the trans formative labor required to produce it as a unified entity, in varying shapes suited to varying purposes, is the task produced by our era's dialectical imperatives of elaborate disciplinarity and rigorous disciplinary self-criticism.

Appendix: The Atlantic Group

The magazines in this group shared contributors with the Atlantic and with each other, endorsed each other's cultural authority, and based that authority in similar understandings of class-inflected cultural trusteeship. Histories of nineteenth-century magazines in general as well as histories of these particular magazines tend to agree that the Atlantic was the most literarily distinguished monthly magazine in the United States from its founding until some time in the 1880s, when the lavishly illustrated Century succeeded in securing more of the best-known writers and providing a more compelling aesthetic presentation for them. However, the Atlantic's close ties (of publication, personal relationship, and proximity) with many of the authors whose midcentury reputations defined canonicity in U.S. letters, the explanatory power of its Boston location and its best-known publishers' market position, and the consistency with which it staked out a domain of secular high culture as its own make its influence within this group of magazines more significant than the Century's for my purposes. The magazines' reliance on many of the same contributors is important in part because it seems plausible to me, after reading some of the contributions of the same authors across magazines, that these magazines presented virtually interchangeable outlets for the authors' work: in other words, that these magazines constituted a market. The overlap in personnel also suggests not just that the magazines valued similar kinds of work, but perhaps even that they were likely to be influenced by each others' judgments, choosing manuscripts by people who had published in their "peer" magazines over manuscripts by unknowns. The exception to this rule was Lippincott'S, which shared relatively few contributors with the other magazines (in spite of the fact that at some time or another it published work by Henry James, S. Weir Mitchell, Frank R. Stockton, Brander Matthews, and other Atlantic-group regulars). Indeed, the fact that Lippincott's was able to operate and inspire reviewers' admiration without relying on the same stable of contributors as the other magazines might serve to indict the rest of the Atlantic-group for recycling each other's imprimaturs. 257

258 Appendix

The density of connections among editors and columnists for these magazines also created an important commonality. James Russell Lowell edited the North American Review after he left the Atlantic, and he was a staunch Nation supporter and contributor; Howells became a columnist for Harper's after he left the Atlantic, having previously been assistant editor for the Nation; Richard Watson Gilder, the editor of the Century from 1881 to 1909, was the brother of Jeannette and Joseph Gilder, publishers and editors of the Critic; George William Curtis, a columnist for Harper's, turned down the editorship of the Nation but had previously been an associate editor for Putnam's even while writing for Harper's; and Walter Hines Page edited the Forum in the early 1890S before moving to the Atlantic at the end of the decade. These are merely a few of the most obvious connections: without seeking them out, I happened on countless details pointing to friendships, correspondences, envious rivalries, and other relationships among people employed by these magazines (again, with Lippincott's the most remote from the others). Not only do these connections create numerous informal conduits by which these magazines could influence each other, but such relationships also suggest that employees of different magazines considered each other as colleagues because of the magazines' comparable status and authority. Of these magazines, only the Nation regularly reviewed other periodicals. The Nation did not review only the Atlantic-group magazines, but it covered most of these magazines regularly and either reviewed them favorably or chided them for lapsing from their usual standards. In magazines other than the Nation, passing mentions of their distinguished competitors establish the group's common location in a realm of culture that authors in each magazine might expect their readers to know. And occasionally one of these magazines would publish a response to a piece in another magazine from the group, as was the case when the Critic printed a rebuttal to Agnes Repplier's "Fiction in the Pulpit," which had been published in the Atlantic (Edward J. Harding, " 'Fiction in the Pulpit,' " Critic, 12 October 1889, 176-78). Through a web of cross-references as well as through explicit dialogues, the magazines mutually established their cultural centrality. The signs that the Atlantic-group magazines sought similar structures of cultural authority are the most difficult to specify, although of course it is a task of this book's main chapters to demonstrate the ongoing class

Appendix 259

inflections of reviews and articles about literature in these magazines. Editorials and columns are some of the sites where these inflections are densest. The opinion pieces in the Atlantic's "Contributors' Club," whose original and arguably genre-setting entries were written by Howells and other Atlantic staffers, inclined to lament the decline of the public taste in rhetoric whose echoes one can pick up in George William Curtis's "Editor's Easy Chair" column in Harper's and in Josiah Holland's "Topics of the Times" column in Scribner's Monthly. The range of these laments might vary from angry jeremiad to urbane satire to condescending homily, yet the appeals to a readership that would set itself apart from this decline, appeals that often invoked readers' cultural privilege and superior sense of civic obligation, were very much alike. Few if any of the histories of magazines I have consulted would have characterized this cultural stance as "bourgeois": "genteel" or "upper-middle-class" are preferred epithets. However, the presumption that this cultural elite emerged independently of class-based advantages and affiliations is one of the limits of previous analyses that I have tried to challenge. The constitution of the Atlantic group is not intended to be rigid nor necessarily suitable for projects other than the one that Reading for Realism undertakes. The practical urgency of delimiting the group means that I have summarily ruled out some contenders whose contributions to generic debates might have been consonant with the contributions in the Atlantic group, or interestingly different from them. No intellectual principle accounts for my decision to stick mainly to monthly general magazines, for example, but to make exceptions for the Critic (which was not a general magazine) and the Nation (which was never issued monthly). Harper's Weekly might fit into the Atlantic group as well as Harper's Monthly, but one Harper publication seemed to be enough. I decided that the character of the Review of Reviews and its later date of founding set its history apart from that of the Atlantic group, even though the Critic was also devoted mainly to reviews and even though the Review of Reviews was founded only three years after the youngest magazine I consider. In order to make an argument about the relationship between class and culture, I have had to exclude many periodicals whose claims to literary authority and public service differed significantly from the claims enacted in the Atlantic group, as in the case of the Colored American Magazine, discussed in my introduction. Similarly, no southern magazines figure in

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my account to test my hypothesis that the Atlantic model, which migrated to the West and the Midwest, also migrated to the South. Because the sectional character of the cultural authority claimed by the Southern Literary Messenger and the Southern Review was so different from the nationalizing sectional identity of the Atlantic group, and because the Sewanee Review's official affiliation with the University of the South put it in a different cultural position from the magazines in the Atlantic group, I have made no attempt to include these important southern magazines in my analysis. What follows are a few salient facts about each of the magazines in the Atlantic group, along with citations of histories that I found especially useful and, where available, indexes that assign authorship to anonymous articles. For each of these magazines, Frank Luther Mott's History of American Magazines provides an excellent profile and guide to further research, and the publishing houses that figure in relation to these magazines are discussed at greater length in John Tebbel's A History of Book Publishing in the United States. All of these magazines were indexed in Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, by William Frederick Poole. Most of these magazines published prospectuses in early issues and retrospectives on significant anniversaries that are important self-representations I have not been able to list here. Numerous biographies of editors and publishers and numerous histories of publishing houses also helped to educate me about the magazine and book publishing industries of the late nineteenth century, but I describe here only the books that provided especially useful analyses. The Atlantic Monthly (1857-present)

The magazine's early editors, James T. Fields and William Dean Howells, and its most famous publishers, Ticknor & Fields and Houghton Mifflin, are often put forth as benchmarks of its literary authority, which was specifically constructed as Bostonian. The Nation's magazine reviewers almost always indicated that the Atlantic was the finest of American magazines, but not without wryly pointing to its special Bostonian character. As one reviewer put it, "All Americans-Illinoisans, Californians, dwellers in the isles of the sea-have great faith in Boston's critical ability; perhaps even a larger faith than in her productive powers" ("Notes. Literary," Nation, 2 April 1870, 255).

Appendix 261

Hagiographic studies of the Atlantic, its early editors, and its bestknown publishers are legion. However, Ellen B. Ballou's The Building of the House: Houghton Mifflin's Formative Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970) offers a refreshingly candid and informative account of the interrelations of magazines and their publishing houses during the late nineteenth century. Warren S. Tryon's Parnassus Corner: A Life of James T. Fields, Publisher to the Victorians (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963) is an excellent study of the contradictions between Fields's cultural ideals and his commercial strategies. The Atlantic Index (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889) and The Atlantic Index Supplement (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903) list authors for some unsigned pieces, covering 1857 to 1901. The Critic (1881-19°6)

The Critic was begun as an independent magazine but became affiliated in 1899 with G. P. Putnam &: Co., whose revived Putnam's had long since folded. It published mainly articles about culture, with an occasional foray into politics or science, and it reprinted many of its pieces from British reviews and a few American magazines. Like the Forum and the Nation, it published no fiction, but it included short poems in its columns occasionally. "The Lounger;" written by Jeannette L. Gilder; was its main editorial department, a column of literary notes that expanded after the Critic's purchase by G. P. Putnam &: Co. into a running account of literary events and personalities brimming with photographs of the principals. Without quite fulfilling its title's promise of social commentary in the mode of f/aneurs, "The Lounger" and other writings in the Critic adopted a mode of leisurely cultural commentary more suitable to connoisseurship than to exhortations in the name of the nation or ethical imperatives. Frank Norris also wrote a literary column, "Salt and Sincerity," around the turn of the century. The Critic was based in New York City. The Forum (1886-1930)

The Forum's first editor was hired away from the North American Review, and the Forum was more similar to that periodical than to any of the others in my group. Its articles were somewhat shorter than those of the North American Review, but they were similarly weighty in tone and serious in print presentation. The Forum published neither fiction nor poetry, andagain, like the North American Review-its attention to cultural matters

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was subordinate to its attention to politics. Mott emphasizes the Forum's policy of favoring expert contributors, which is in keeping with the fact that the skirmish over historical romances which took place in the Forum, recounted in chapter 4, was conducted by university professors. The Forum was based in New York City during the period I consider. The Galaxy (:1866-:1879)

Mott reports that contemporary commentators believed the Galaxy's founding was motivated, and made successful, by the desire to create a New York City-based alternativ~ to the Atlantic. If this is so, then the Galaxy's eventual absorption into the Atlantic, which bought its subscription list on its demise, is an irony. The Galaxy was highly admired by the Nation, which called it "the second-best literary magazine in the country," since the Atlantic was always first for the Nation ("The Magazines for June," 30 May :1867, 433). Anticipating the Critic's flirtation with aestheticism and the irreverence that cultural insiders can afford, the Galaxy was severe in its judgments against gentility, Puritanism, and didacticism. Its subtitle announced it as a "Magazine of Entertaining Reading," in contrast to most of the Atlantic-group magazines' elaborate subtitles proclaiming their devotion to arts, letters, science, music, knowledge, and other indisputably valuable domains of culture, yet the high-culture credentials of most of its contributors were impeccable. The Galaxy published primarily fiction, poetry, and articles about culture. Harper's Monthly (:1850-present)

In a review exemplifying the finely tuned hierarchical judgments that characterized a commitment to connoisseurship, a Nation reviewer assessed the status of Lippincott'S and the revived Putnam's by laying out the parameters of magazine culture within which they fell: "Neither is so popular in character ~s Harper's, and neither addresses an audience so cultivated as the subscribers to the Atlantic" ("The Magazines for March," Nation, 27 February :1868, :173). Harper's was the magazine in the Atlantic group whose commitments to literary nationalism and to high culture were the shakiest, even though it was the magazine whose success set a precedent for the Atlantic and the first Putnam's. Until Putnam's made loyalty to American authors an asset for magazines, Harper's had published only British serials, an origin which maae it awkward for Harper's to

Appendix 263 indulge in rhetorical excesses about its vision of national culture. And because Harper Brothers published works by Mary E. Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and E. D. E. N. Southworth as well as by authors of undisputed literariness, its cultural standing was ambiguous. One predictable result of Harper Brothers' eclectic tastes was that the reviews in Harper's were far less likely to condemn sensationalism, sentimentalism, and other forms oflow status. Its book reviews were often short and superficial. However, its "Editor's Easy Chair" column, whose most famous and long-lasting occupant was George William Curtis, took a distinctly more patrician and critical cultural stance, leading a Nation reviewer to speculate that "It must be this 'Easy Chair' which keeps for Harper's the best class of its readers" ("The Magazines for September," 30 August 1866, 169). Despite the magazine's long tradition of blandness, however, toward the end of the century, under the editorship of Henry Mills Alden, the magazine rivaled the Century in its ability to solicit wellknown contributors, add subscribers, and provide pleasurable illustrations. Howells's "Editor's Study" from 1885 to 1894 also marked a significant foray into polemicism. Eugene Exman's The House of Harper: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Publishing (New York: Harper and Row, 1967) is as straightforward as its title, but the Harpers' publishing ventures were so numerous that Exman's account of their nature and interrelationship is helpful.

Lippincott's (1868-1916) The other Atlantic group magazines insistently identified Lippincott's with its Philadelphia base, demonstrating the extent to which a Boston-New York City axis otherwise defined literary culture. Revealing as much about the Nation as about Lippincott's, for example, a Nation reviewer congratulated Lippincott's on its "absence of pretension": "A set comparison between the Philadelphia product and that of Boston and New York would probably show in the pages of the former a solid mass of the regulation article. But still there would also be found in Lippincott's a comparative freedom from staleness and familiar routine, which would command the good-will of the expert examiner" ("The Magazines for September," Nation, 3 September 1874,157). The Galaxy once called Lippincott's "one of our best magazines" (E. E. E, "Periodical Belles-Lettres and Criticism," Galaxy, July 1873, 79), but none of the Atlantic-group commentators

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Appendix

seems to have identified Lippincott's with any particular platform of culture or politics. During the period covered by this study, Lippincott's was the house magazine of J. B. Lippincott & Company. The Nation (1865-present)

Published in New York City, the Nation was founded primarily as a political publication, devoted especially in its early years to Reconstruction and race relations. However, its book reviews were considered rigorous by all, though not necessarily fair: Sharon M. Harris refers to contemporary women writers' complaints about the Nation's masculine bias in Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 323 n. 48. The Nation, conversely, often assessed the fairness of other magazines' reviewing, though mainly in order to criticize book reviewers' cowardly "geniality" or biases in favor of affiliated publishers. Like the Atlantic especially, it reviewed European novels even before they were translated, necessarily putting U.S. literature in an international context. E. L. Godkin was the Nation's influential first editor. Richard Clark Sterne's Political, Social, and Literary Criticism in the New York Nation, 1865-1881: A Study in Change of Mood (New York: Garland, :1987) is impressionistic but usefully interrelates the Nation's book reviews with its other cultural projects. Some of the Nation's unsigned articles are assigned authors in The Nation: Volumes 1-105, New York, 1865-1917, Indexes of Titles and Contributors, compiled by Daniel C. Haskell (New York: New York Public Library, 1951). The North American Review (1815-late :1930s)

The North American Review is the oldest periodical in my group, but because it was quickly eclipsed in literary authority by the Atlantic, it is a subordinate member. The advent of James Russell Lowell as editor in 1863 marked a resurgence in the North American Review's literary standing, one which arguably was signaled by its engagement in the literary conversations ongoing in Harper's and the Atlantic; Henry Adams's association with the Review during the 1870S also repaired its cultural authority. Like the Atlantic, this journal was always able to secure well-known contributors, even though its lack of illustrations and the forbidding length of its articles limited its circulation. The Review was published in Boston until :1877, owned by a number of different publishing companies (among them

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Ticknor & Fields and its spin-offs). In 1877 it moved to New York City under the ownership of D. Appleton & Company and remained there despite later transfers to other publishers. Some of its anonymous articles can be assigned authorship on the basis of William Cushing's The North American Review Index (Cambridge, Mass.: J. Wilson, 1878), which covers 1815 to 1877. Putnam's Monthly (1853-1857, 1868-1870)

The early Putnam's is the more important; its revived version drew mainly favorable commentary from the Nation but was too short-lived to leave much of a mark. John Paul Pritchard's Literary Wise Men of Gotham: Criticism in New York, 1815-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1963) sets the first incarnation of Putnam's in the context of other New York magazines' intense nationalism; John Stafford's The Literary Criticism of "Young America": A Study in the Relationship of Politics and Literature, 1837-1850 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1952) provides a related analysis. Both versions of Putnam's were based in New York City. The later version was owned by the G. P. Putnam Publishing Company, under a couple of different names; the earlier version was begun by G. P. Putnam & Co. but later purchased by two other New York City publishers. Scribner's Magazine (1887-1939)

Mott reports that Scribner & Co. agreed not to use their name on a magazine for five years after they sold Scribner's Monthly; Scribner's Magazine was begun as soon as the time was up. Scribner's Magazine from the start secured the good opinion of the rest of the Atlantic group and a share of the group's well-known contributors. Based in New York City, it was a general magazine, featuring articles about a variety of political and social topics as well as fiction, poetry, and literary criticism. Despite its rich illustrations, it seems to have been a less desirable venue for publication than the Century for the most powerful U.S. authors. Scribner's Monthly (1870-1881); The Century (1881-1930)

The transformation of Scribner's Monthly, which a Galaxy writer called "the most religious popular magazine in this country, and we presume in the world" (rev. of Everyday Topics. A Book of Briefs, by J. G. Holland,

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Galaxy, December 1876, 715), into the Century, which epitomized secular high culture, is one of the most fascinating episodes in the history of u.s. periodicals. Arthur John's The Best Years of The Century: Richard Watson Gilder, Scribner's Monthly, and Century Magazine, 1870-19°9 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1981) is an excellent guide to this transformation, which understandably affected the magazine's book reviews and literary articles as well. Whereas its early editor Josiah G. Holland, a profoundly Christian novelist, had inclined more to public exhortation than to connoisseurship, Holland's successor Richard Watson Gilder made the magazine a showcase for fiction and poetry by the nation's leading authors and for polemical literary essays. Howells, James, and Twain all serialized novels in the Century during the 1880s and participated in its series of literary profiles in which authors wrote about each other, making the Century indispensable to many twentieth-century accounts of realism. Scribner's Monthly was affiliated with Charles Scribner's Sons; an 1881 reorganization severed the Century's connection with the publishing company, although the Century Company published a few books, too. The magazine, which absorbed the revived Putnam's in 1870, was always based in New York City.

Notes

Introduction 1. And of genre theory: Tony Bennett's Outside Literature, which has helped me to formulate this project, proposes that "the proper concern of genre theory is not to define genres-for this can only result in sets of institutionalized prescriptions for the regulation of contemporary reading practices-but to examine the composition and functioning of generic systems" (Bennett, Outside Literature [London and New York: Routledge, 1990], 112). In this way Bennett presumes that generic identities are not formal, inherent properties of texts, but rather derive from relations constructed among texts. In emphasizing public conversations about fictional classification, this study also finds an important predecessor in Steven Mailloux's work. Mailloux's definition of a "rhetorical hermeneutics" somewhat humorously calls attention to the messiness of this kind of elaborate historical situating: "Rhetorical hermeneutics argues that any explanatory attempt must embed the act of interpretation first in its most relevant critical debates (and there may be several); then the act and its participation in ongoing arguments must be situated in the rhetorical traditions within relevant institutional discourses; and then the interpretive act, its arguments, and its framing institutions must be placed within the cultural conversations, relevant social practices, and constraining material circumstances of its historical moment. And of course this moment has its specific temporal history and geographical location within a culture's evolving social, political, and economic formations" (Steven Mailloux, Rhetorical Power [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989], 134). Both Interpretive Conventions and Rhetorical Power are devoted more to explicating viable hermeneutic constructions of reception and to refuting the possibilities of foundationalist theory than to offering a framework that might organize this complex situating of late nineteenth-century literary production and reception, however. See also Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American

Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982), 159-207. 2. Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), 106-16.

3. Authors who did not envision their works' publication have a special relationship to reception, according to whether they imagined their works would have no readership at all (a very rare circumstance) or a readership consisting of one person, a circle of friends and family, or a vague posterity. Any author, as a reader, engages

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the reading practices around him or her, but an author writing for intimates might of course envision a different kind of reading than he or she would get in the marketplace. 4. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a SixteenthCentury Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980). 5. Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984). Radway's interest lies in romance readers as a group rather than as individuals, but her information gathering proceeded by questionnaires and interviews addressed to individual readers. 6. Cathy N. Davidson, "Introduction," Reading in America: Literature and Social History, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989), 3. Davidson's Revolution and the Word (1986) is an exemplary study in this tradition, conceptualizing collective reading practices on the basis of the material formatting and circulation of Revolutionary-era books as well as on the basis of readers' marginalia and other signs of use (Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986]). 7. Robert Damton, "What Is the History of Books 7" Reading in America, 30. 8. James L. Machor, ed., Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,

1993)· 9. "Reading formation" is Tony Bennett's term for "a set of intersecting discourses which productively activate a given body of texts and the relations between them in a specific way." It is comparable to Stanley Fish's concept of an "interpretive community," except that Fish's term does not signal so clearly the fact that ways of reading are taught, although Fish acknowledges it. It also is hard to be sure that a set of people subjected to the same discipline of reading form a "community" in any other meaningful sense. See Tony Bennett, "Texts, Readers, Reading Formations," Literature and History 9, no. 2 (1983): 216. On Fish's use of interpretive communities, see the last six essays in his collection Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press,

1980). 10. A column called "Literary Queries" ran intermittently around the turn of the century (which is the only moment in the lives of these magazines I am comparing), but it consisted only of short squibs giving facts about authors and works, such as pseudonyms and anniversaries of first publication. 11. Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 5 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1930-68),4:545. Matt distinguishes between magazines and

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269

"cheap mail-order journals," though, some of which he implies reached circulations of one million before the Ladies' Home Journal did. 12. "Announcement," Colored American Magazine, August 1900, 1. This an-

nouncement was repeated in other early issues of the magazine. I). The magazine's editorial staff, its subscription agents, and some of the clubs of its regular readers were profiled in R. S. Elliott, "The Story of Our Magazine," Colored American Magazine, May 1901, 4)-77. For more information about the magazine and Hopkins's connection with it, see John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America, 1741-1990 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), 1))-)4· 14. Or perhaps it did make claims on the literary, if one links literariness with a certain "class" of text. An advertisement for an upcoming serial in the New York Family Story Paper assured readers that the serial would "command and deserve the attention of all admirers of high-class fiction." The significance of "high-class" would be complex to assess, but it is a salutary reminder that class was constructed discursively-and translated into cultural preferences-in competing ways. See the advertisement for Marguerite's Promise, or, For Love's Sweet Sake, by Mrs. Emma Garrison Jones, New York Family Story Paper, 1 August 1881, 4. I am grateful to Angela Farkas for making this advertisement and other materials from this periodical available to me. 15. Angela Farkas analyzes Miller's relationship to her work as a dime novelist in a Ph.D. dissertation currently in progress at the University of Pittsburgh, Only a "Working" Girl: Class, Gender, and Women's Dime Novels, to be completed in

1997· 16. Pauline E. Hopkins, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro

Life North and South (1900; reprint, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), I)-IS. 17. I am building here on Kenneth W. Warren's work, with which I will be in dialogue in later chapters: Kenneth W. Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 199)). By attending carefully to the preoccupations with race that surface throughout the writings of authors in the realist canon-with blackness and whiteness, with "discrimina-

tions," with central scenes of race relations such as Pullman cars-Warren specifies ways in which texts associated with realism contributed both to the hope of social changes that would benefit black Americans, and to the backlash against racial equality that ratified social segregation and other forms of racial oppression at the century's end. I argue, as my use of Contending Forces predicts, that race relations marked the discourses governing the entire genre hierarchy, not just the construction of realism, although more of the demographic markers I will be examining bear on class and gender.

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18. Georg Lukacs might stand at the head of this tradition, insofar as he understands the implicitly realist novel as "the predominant art form of modern bourgeois culture." In Studies in European Realism, he analyzes realist novels that embody the distortions of capitalist culture, such as the "dissolving" of "social institutions" into "personal relationships," and that also detail the" contradictorily progressive character of capitalist development." See Georg Lukacs, Studies in European Realism [1948] (New York: Grossett & Dunlap, 1964), 2, 41, 1}. Roland Barthes's S/Z is also an inquiry into a realist text's relationship to capitalism and the bourgeoisie. In identifying irony as a kind of textual ownership, for example, Barthes treats a narrative feature often associated with realism as the manifestation of capitalist habits of mind. See Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay [1970], trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 44-45. And Fredric Jameson has also contributed to this tradition: in The Political Unconscious, he identifies the realist novel as a tool of bourgeois culture by which "populations whose life habits were formed by other, now archaic modes of production are effectively reprogrammed for life and work in the new world of market capitalism." See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981), 152. Myra Jehlen's "The Novel and the Middle Class in America" is an interesting revisionist contribution to this tradition, some of whose assumptions crop up in a wide variety of studies of realism. Jehlen's essay is in Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen, eds., Ideology and Classic American Literature (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), 125-44. Marking a bridge between this tradition and the New Historicist fascination with market culture is Eric J. Sundquist's introduction to the influential anthology American Realism: New Essays (1982), which brought together New Historicist, feminist, and cultural materialist approaches and made room for realism's contradictory relationship to its historical moment. Sundquist identifies the "age of realism" as "the age of the romance of money-money not in any simple sense but in the complex alterations of human value that it brings into being by its own capacities for reproduction." See Eric J. Sundquist, "Introduction: The Country of the Blue," American Realism: New Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982),19. 19. The most impressive example of this scholarship is Mark Seltzer's study of Henry James's fiction, which provides an analysis of realism along the way. Defining realism's project as "the policing of the real," Seltzer presumes that realism functions as a virtual technology, one that positions individuals as objects of certain kinds of knowledge and discipline. Despite my sense that realism cannot be so readily specified, I have learned from Seltzer's account of how power functions in narrative. See Mark Seltzer, Henry James and the Art of Power (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984), 51.

Notes to Introduction 20.

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The New Historicism notoriously elides issues of cultural location and in-

stitutional mediation. Seltzer, Mailloux, and Walter Benn Michaels, who might all for my purposes be identified with this slippery movement, pay careful attention to the complexities of representational and historical phenomena, but their tendency to totalize both a cultural era and its system or form of domination belies the historical contingency of social reproduction. Moreover, none of them provides an adequate way of mapping relations among cultural phenomena: of distinguishing between those that were more closely interrelated and those that functioned relatively independently. I have cited relevant works by Mailloux and Seltzer above. Michaels's The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (which, as he presents it, seems contiguous with realism) is a brilliant investigation of economic and literary issues of representation, even though as its title suggests it attributes a single logic of operation to naturalism. See Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1987). 21. In this dimension of my analysis I have drawn on Anthony Giddens's account of the human agency at work in all social reproduction. See his essays "Agency, Structure" and "Institutions, Reproduction, Socialisation" in Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1986). 22. An example of the persistence of this view of realism is the following passage from Alfred Habegger's widely cited Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature: "The positive side of American realism was its vision of democratic action. Howells was able to achieve what he did partly because he emerged from a people living in a roughly democratic system under conditions of relative ease-a people with some power to direct their own lives. It was because of this power that realism turned to the causal and material world and insisted on the primacy of what ordinary people, living under recognizable pressures, try to do. Realism never tells us what is to be done, but it assumes, fundamentally, that choice, regardless of the difficulties, exists" (Habegger, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1982], 110-11, emphasis in original). 23. The two works of Williams's that most clearly reflect the intricacies of his cultural analysis are Marxism and Literature (1977) and The Sociology of Culture (1981), although they are not his most satisfying works. My use of the term "institution" to characterize high realism is very much in keeping with Williams's development of this category, but I have not adopted strict use of the terms he uses to refer to other kinds of cultural arrangements because they did not seem to me to be sufficiently vivid for readers to keep straight. See Raymond Williams, The Sociology of Culture (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 35. 24. The phrase is Pierre Bourdieu's in Distinction: A Social Critique of the

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Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984),

491. 25. As Clifford Siskin has pointed out, "a genre rises not through a hierarchy of absolute aesthetic values, authorized by and authorizing literary critics, but according to its increasing visibility in the changing hierarchies of all other forms of writing with which it is always interrelated." See Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), 10-11.

26. Amy Kaplan's The Social Construction of American Realism, which focuses on the models of authorship that Howells, Wharton, and Dreiser adapted from what was available to them, follows Jameson's lead (as she acknowledges) in proposing that realist texts both contain "threats of social change" -change that would upset class hierarchy-and "register those desires which undermine the closure of that containment." Her book also can be viewed as a wonderful updating of Lukacs's Studies in European Realism, insofar as her attention to her subject authors' class positions-and genders-emulates and complicates Lukacs's interest in how authors' own relationship to social struggles shaped their representations. See Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), 10. 27. I depart here from the approach of Nina Baym, although her work has been helpful to me, insofar as she appears to presume that categories of fictional judgment were either coherent and stable or, if incoherent, random and beyond analysis. Instead, I consider both coherent and incoherent categories to have been discursively constructed in ways that are in theory significant, even if sometimes one fails to make sense of them. See Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984). 28. Put another way, any historical reader we imagine "exists not as a category of personhood but as a function: a repertory of strategies enabling a text to become intelligible in a historically specific way." Machor's essay in the Readers in History anthology, from which I quote, derives an analysis about the gendering of antebellum reading practices from book reviews and articles about literature, theorizing the status of the book review in much the same terms that I do. My work on the institutional location of book reviews pursues a direction that his essay does not, though. See Machor, "Historical Hermeneutics and Antebellum Fiction: Gender, Response Theory, and Interpretive Contexts," in Readers in History, 78. 29. Other writers emphasizing reception have also used "genre" in this way, most notably Tony Bennett in Outside Literature, Anne Freadman in "Untitled: (On Genre)," Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (1988): 67-99, and Hans-Robert Jauss in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Howell Bahti (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982).

Notes to Chapter One 273 30. Jameson, 106. Unfortunately, The Political Unconscious does not take up the possibility that the contract governing a text's reading might be inscribed somewhere other than within the text itself. 31. June Howard, Form and History in Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1985), 192. 32. Penny Boumelha, "Realism and the Ends of Feminism," Grafts, ed. Susan Sheridan (New York: Verso, 1988), 79. 33. Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1987), 72-74. Denning puts forward the hardto-substantiate hypotheses that, in general, powerless groups are more likely to read allegorically and that, in particular, working-class Americans' acquaintance with works such as Pilgrim's Progress and fairy tales accustomed them to reading allegorically. Nevertheless, his study is important because of the subtlety with which it projects a possible reading formation and its operations. 34. Belsey's discussion of classic realism, though compressed and introductory, aptly captures the kind of analytic ends the term frequently serves; see her Critical Practice (London and New York: Methuen, 1980), 67-84. The term also has an important history in film studies. 1. High Realism and Other Bourgeois Institutions 1. Past literacy rates are notoriously complex to define and hard to establish, since literacy can involve a number of different practices and since historical surveys often used simply the report of individuals themselves or of the heads of their households. Lee Soltow and Edward Stevens estimate that there was a 17 percent decline in illiteracy in the United States between 1820 and 1870, but they stress that illiteracy was also being demographically redistributed during this era. Any substantive discussion of literacy needs to attend to the different understandings and distributions of literacy that they detail. See Lee Soltow and Edward Stevens, The

Rise of Literacy and the Common School in the United States: A Socioeconomic Analysis to 1870 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), 198. William Charvat estimates that the framework of national markets for book distribution and sales was in place by the 1850s. According to John Tebbel, though, "The more the markets increased before the turn of the century, and the more printing technology made it easier to supply them, the more the gap between quality writing and mass writing continued to widen." There is ample evidence that publishers during this era were conscious of needing to establish a distinct market identity, and that the packaging of high-culture books-through exquisite bindings, tasteful series titles, advertising rhetorics of refinement, etc.-was an important mark of their status. See William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in Amer-

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ica, 1800-1870, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1992), John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, 4 vols. (New

}12;

York and London: R. R. Bowker, 1972-81), 2:7. As Bourdieu points out, education produces people with a sense of cultural competence not (only) because of what one learns in school but because of higher education's tendency to inculcate in students a "general, transposable disposition 2.

towards legitimate culture." See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984),2}. }. My account of the bourgeoisie's construction of cultural hierarchies has drawn on Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction; Norbert Elias's The History of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott, The Civilizing Process, vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon, 1978); and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White's The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986). 4. Bourdieu's Distinction provides one way of mapping the multiplicity of conditions that produce privilege; however, it does not attend closely to race and gender, two of the most salient categories of privilege. In this chapter, I will emphasize class analysis with the understanding that the main bourgeois groups I consider were also white and male-dominated. Intersections between class and gender are especially complex to assess in families in which women labor only within their homes and families. Obviously in some respects the women in bourgeois families functioned as bourgeois, especially in their relations with working-class people. However, since women seldom controlled their family's property, and since there are ample signs of misogyny and presumptive masculinity in the cultural discourses I will be tracking, it seems clear that the bourgeois groups under consideration were organized around gender privilege as well. 5. Bourdieu, 229. 6. As Sacvan Bercovitch puts the case, capitalism has especially deeply and homogeneously permeated u.s. culture because here, in contrast to European nations, there were no entrenched economic and cultural predecessors to provide alternate models of "sources of social cohesion." See Bercovitch, "How the Puritans Won the American Revolution," Massachusetts Review 17 (Winter 1976), 610. 7. It also skews people's conception of democracy. Janice Radway clarifies the contradictions involved in many appeals to democracy made by bourgeois cultural operatives in her discussion of the emergence of middlebrow culture in the twentieth century, appeals in which "the term 'democracy' was repeatedly disarticulated from its association with groups or the common people and articulated anew to the notion of a smaller, rational, elite body of unique individuals who were themselves conceptually opposed to coercive, tyrannical authorities." See Radway, "The Scan-

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275

dal of the Middlebrow: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Class Fracture, and Cultural Authority," South Atlantic Quarterly 89, no. 4 (199 0 ): 725. 8. The concept of dialogism is elaborated throughout Bakhtin's work, but "Discourse in the Novel" is especially thorough in working out some of the idea's implications. See M. M. Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Nove!," The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), 259-422. 9. Fred Lewis Pattee, The Development of the American Short Story: An Historical Survey (New York: Harper, 1923), quoted without citation on 163. 10. Howells's relationship to realism has been exhaustively analyzed, most recently and interestingly by Amy Kaplan and Michael Davitt Bell; see Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), and Michael Davitt Bell, The Problem of American Realism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993). 11. For instance, in 1868, when the Atlantic was not quite eleven years old, the Nation declared in its house voice to have "always more or less respected [the Atlantic] as a chief pillar of American literature," and the year before it had pointed out that even if another magazine could lure away the Atlantic's contributors with greater pay, "it would in all probability neither purchase their best productions nor the favor of the public" [sic]. See "Magazines for January," Nation, 2 January 1868, 13; "Notes: Literary," Nation, 29 August 1867,167. Actually, Scribner's Monthly (which became the Century) lured even Howells with better pay and the excellent reputation of editor Richard Watson Gilder, but doubtless many contributors felt, as Helen Hunt Jackson did, that they "would rather appear in the Atlantic than elsewhere," even though they couldn't turn down better pay from a respectable competitor sometimes. See Arthur John, The Best Years of the Century: Richard Watson Gilder, Scribner's Monthly, and Century Magazine (Urbana, Chicago, and London: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1981), 57. John is paraphrasing Jackson. 12. Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago and London: Chicago Univ. Press, 1993), 109. 13. For more information on these magazines and the grounds of their commonality, see the appendix. Also, all of these magazines' publishing histories can be found in Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1930-69), vols. 2-4; Mott's work has been indispensable for this project. Most of the magazines had somewhat long titles and even subtitles, but for convenience's sake I identify each by a brief version of its name.

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14· Mott,3:493· 15. The symbiosis between book publishers and their house magazines during the earlier part of the century was also made possible by certain "gentlemen's agreements" that precluded publishers from trying to woo away each other's authors. See Tebbel, 2:14; Eugene Exman, The House of Harper: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Publishing (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper & Row, 1967),7. 16. William Charvat usefully points out that the founding of the Atlantic and its acquisition by Ticknor & Fields had a genuine share in constructing New England's literary "renaissance," though, because up until the founding of the Atlantic, most of the authors identified with it used Philadelphia and New York publishers (Charvat, 170). This fact also signals how important the Atlantic was in consolidating Ticknor & Fields's reputation. Van Wyck Brooks credits publisher Fields with capitalizing on his monopoly of New England authors by publishing them in Blue and Gold editions that marked them as a unified literary establishment; he also distributed souvenir volumes of "Boston [area] Authors." See Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England (New York: Dutton, 1955), 495· 17. Horace Scudder, Riverside Bulletin, 1 September 1873, 29-30, quoted in Ellen Ballou, The Building of the House: Houghton Mifflin's Formative Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 126. 18. [Henry James], rev. of Azarian: An Episode, by Harriet Elizabeth Prescott, North American Review, January 1865,272. 19. On the Civil War's role in consolidating the moral authority and national prominence of Boston elites, see Peter Dobkin Hall, The Organization of American Culture, 1700-1900: Private Institutions, Elites, and the Origins of American Nationality (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1982), 221-25. 20. [William Dean Howells], rev. of 1. W. DeForest, Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, Atlantic, July 1867, 122. Curtis, writing in his "Editor's Easy Chair" column in New York-based Harper's, concurred in 1883: "New England, indeed, has been the formative influence [on 'American thought' and 'the national life'], not only in literature, but in politics and morals." He went on to suggest that with the passing of the current group of Boston luminaries, very likely no single place would ever exert such an influence again. See [George William Curtis], "Editor's Easy Chair," Harper's, December 1883,149. 21. Quoted in Warren S. Tryon, Parnassus Corner: A Life of James T Fields, Publisher to the Victorians (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), 260. 22. Gerald R. Wolfe, The House of Appleton (Metuchen, N.J. and London: Scarecrow Press, 1981), 128. 23. Several historians of urban elites confirm that the Boston elite was significantly more cohesive than the elites of Philadelphia or New York City: see E. Digby

Notes to Chapter One 277 Baltzell, Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia: Two Protestant Ethics and the

Spirit of Class Authority and Leadership (New York: Free Press, 1979); Ronald Story, The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class, 18001870 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1980), 180; Thomas Bender,

New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 75; and Hall,18. Most of the historians I have been citing trace something like the following transformation: that Boston developed an unusually well-integrated elite that developed into an especially effective upper class, one that helped to catalyze and provide a model for a more or less national network of urban elites and upper classes. Whereas from a Marxist point of view this elite was always a bourgeois class fraction, many of these historians distinguish an upper class from an elite insofar as an upper class exerts more comprehensive social leadership; see Frederic Cople Jaher, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1982), 2-3; and Story, xii. By these criteria, the Boston elite gradually became an upper class as membership in it came to imply (though not necessarily always to produce) an all-embracing set of affiliations and attitudes, and as it succeeded in converting its economic domination into political, social, and cultural leadership. However, a terminological morass looms here, since "elite" has for some writers signaled an alternative to Marxist class analysis, one which privileges the analysis of status or political power over that of collective economic relations. I have tried to render these various historians' claims in their own terminology but assimilate them to mine in my analysis. Anthony Giddens's use of" 'elite group'" "to designate those individuals who occupy positions of formal authority at the head of a social organisation or institution" provides a model for my use of the term "elite" to designate the cultural operatives of the bourgeoisie who controlled the belletristic publishing industry as well as the close-knit Boston families who headed philanthropic and financial institutions. The term" elite" does not replace class analysis for Giddens, but rather accounts for the institutional mediation between economic hegemony and political-or, I would add, cultural-hegemony. The elites I discuss are bourgeois or bourgeois-identified class fractions that I also call "bourgeois groups," in order to keep their class specificity in view. See Anthony Giddens, The Class Structure of Advanced Societies (London: Hutchinson Univ. Library, 1973), 120. 24- Jaher, 21. 25· Baltzell, 32, 47· 26. Jaher, 47, 56,84; Story, 6. 27. Story, 7. Actually, in his novel Elsie Venner Holmes defined the "Brahmin caste of New England," which he differentiated sharply from the merely wealthy, as

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being a "race of scholars" whose members were likely to be descended from Edwardses or Chauncys or Ellerys. However, as Peter Dobkin Hall has observed, Holmes goes on to depict the process by which "new money became civilized and old culture monied," so that by the time of the 1861 book publication of Elsie Venner (it was serialized in the Atlantic in 1859-60, appropriately enough)-the story is set in the recent past-a confluence of wealth with cultural capital probably made it possible to identify Brahmins with economic as well as cultural privilege, excluding mainly the nouveau riche. I retain the term because of its convenience and mean by it the subset of the Boston bourgeoisie whose wealth was longestablished by midcentury and who cared about achieving cultural hegemony. See Oliver Wendell Holmes, Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny, The Complete Writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, vol. 5 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1892), 4. Also see Hall, 205. 28. Hall, 20-22, 97-101. 29. Hall, 122. Paul DiMaggio's work, which I discuss below, emphasizes the Significance of the not-for-profit corporation. 30. Jaher, 59. 31. Indeed, membership in the Athenaeum could be used to mark the selective assimilation of the nouveaux riches into the Boston elite. As Robert F. Dalzell Jr. has pointed out, offering shares in the Athenaeum may have provided "a means of rewarding those men willing to invest their money at Lowell, or Lawrence and Holyoke," since the shares were mainly inherited from original investors and hardly ever for sale. See Dalzell, Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), 153, 158, 125. 32. Story, 89. 33· Dalzell, 103-4. 34. Hall, 100. 35. Dalzell,136. 36. Anthony Giddens, "Ideology and Consciousness," in Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1986), 193. 37. On late nineteenth-century novels' obsession with renunciation, see Anthony Hilfer, The Ethics.of Intensity in American Fiction (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981) and Georg Lukacs, Studies in European Realism (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), 25-26. 38. Dalzell has vividly summed up the balance that powerful Bostonians struck between consolidating the ruling class and assimilating parvenus: "An impressive degree of 'openness' remained fully compatible with the protection of class interests. There was no need to resort to cruder forms of exclusion; admission to Harvard did not have to be restricted to children of the rich alone. Poor boys like Francis

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Bowen, who made it over the requisite hurdles, could be left to absorb-through diligent performance of the tasks set before them, no less than through association with their professors and better-favored classmates-the proper attitudes. Thus setting standards high enough made it possible to defend one's privileges in the very act of extending them to others-a democratic remedy for a democratic problem" (Dalzell, :16:1). See also Hall, 75, 90-92. 39. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, :1979),306. 40. Michel Foucault, "The Confession of the Flesh," a conversation with Alan Grosrichard et a1. in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon, :1980), 203. 4:1. Story, :135· 42. Ronald Story points out that the top one percent of the Boston population

owned about two-fifths of the city's taxable wealth by :1860 (3). 43. Chantal Mouffe, "Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci," in Mouffe, ed., Gramsci and Marxist Theory (London, Boston, and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, :1979), :183. Mouffe's essay is on 168-20444. Mrs. James T. Fields [Annie Adams Fields], How to Help the Poor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1884). 45. Rev. of How to Help the Poor, by Mrs. James T. Fields, Overland, December :1883, 660. "ETC," Overland Monthly, October :1868, 387. The context is an exhortation for readers to support vaccination efforts. Chapter 5 discusses the Overland's relationship to the Atlantic-cohort magazines more fully. 46. Story, 75, :179· 47. Martin Green faults James T. Fields in particular for promoting a literary

arena in which "geniality" mattered most, and George Santayana had something similar in mind when he mourned the dominance of the "genteel tradition" in American philosophy and poetry. See Green, The Problem of Boston: Some Readings in Cultural History (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., :1966), 1:16; Santayana, "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy" [:191:1] and "Genteel American Poetry" [:19:15], in George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition, ed. Douglas L. Wilson (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, :1967). 48. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geofrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, :197:1),5. Paul DiMaggio discusses Higginson's social centrality in the articles cited below. Ellery Sedgwick's recent history of the Atlantic vehemently argues that the "New England cultural elite" from whose ranks the Atlantic's founders came were "distinct from the dominant social and economic elites." However, he characterizes

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the social and economic elites by their interest in "manners, fashion, and money" rather than "intellectual and moral development," apparently relying on a dubious stereotype of high society. Moreover, he presumes that the very fact that the cultural elite was occupied with the "transmission of culture" differentiates it from other elites, denying in principle the possibility of true intellectuals being affiliated with a dominant social! economic class. Sedgwick's history of the Atlantic usefully charts the changes in the magazine according to the transfers of its editorship, but it takes Atlantic writers' and New England elites' democratic sympathies at face value. See Ellery Sedgwick, A History of the Atlantic Monthly 1857-1909: Yankee Humanism at High Tide and Ebb (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1994),5. 49. I draw here on Raymond Williams's discussion of the distinction between institutions and formations, which I find useful because the fact that realism can be understood in both ways helps to explain the disparate analyses that literary historians have made of it. See Raymond Williams, The Sociology of Culture (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 35. 50. Brodhead, Cultures 122-25. Carl F. Kaestle usefully cautions that the stratification of print culture is a slippery phenomenon, since" [a]n expansion of literacy can draw more people into reading the same thing (for example, McGuffey's Readers or syndicated newspaper columns) but at the same time encourage the development of distinctive reading materials that serve different groups." However, the point I and my sources are making about stratification is that the framing of cultural products positioned their audiences differently: the same person, being interpellated in competing ways by different cultural products, is being subjected to a stratified culture, even if that person's cultural experiences overlap with the experiences of a wide range of people. Kaestle's essay is "The History of Reading," which appears in Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading Since 1880, ed. Kaestle, Helen Damon-Moore, Lawrence C. Stedman, Katherine Tinsley, and William Vance Trollinger Jr. (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1971), 33-72; the quotation is on 55. My use of "interpellation" here derives from Louis Althusser's well-known essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation)" in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127-86. 51. The analysis of the MFA and BSO comes from a pair of influential articles by Paul DiMaggio: "Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America" and "Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston, Part II: The Classification and Framing of American Art," Media, Culture and Society 4 (1982): 33-50, 303-22. Part I has been reprinted in Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, eds., Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1991), .374-97. Lawrence Levine also dis-

Notes to Chapter One 281 cusses the acculturation of audiences in these institutions, as well as the appropriation of originally more widely enjoyed (in the United States) cultural products such as Shakespeare plays and Italian opera for exclusive high culture, in Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988). However, DiMaggio's analysis proceeds from a closer dialogue with Marxist cultural studies and has influenced my treatment of these issues more powerfully. 52. According to John Tebbel, publishers in this era were "constantly calling attention to their calling, particularly its unprofitability as compared with other enterprises," and treated it as a "public service" (Tebbel, 2:10-'11). 53. Fields's informal dealings got him into some legal trouble with a couple of his firm's authors. For an account of his preferred arrangements and the lawsuit that made him change them, see Tryon, 104 and 335-48; Tebbel, 1:403; Carl J. Weber, The Rise and Fall of James Ripley Osgood (Waterville, Maine: Colby College Press, 1959), 137; and James C. Austin, Fields of The Atlantic Monthly: Letters to an Editor, 1861-187° (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1953), 210, 270. 54. The examples of the behind-the-scenes relationships-friendly or economic-that shaped book reviews are legion. See for example a Putnam's editorial about corrupt reviewing practices, "Editorial Notes. Cursive and Discursive," Putnam's, April 1855, 439-43. A Nation article in 1867 confirmed the close link between reviews and advertising, citing the dishonest practice of the so-called "Genial Critic" in offering "favorable notices in return for paying advertisements" ("The Genial Critic," Nation, 2 May 1867, 36). And sometimes the culprits admitted it: Thomas Bailey Aldrich referred in a letter to writing sixteen "impartial" anonymous notices each week about Every Saturday, the magazine he edited (Weber, 66). On prepared notices, as well as the fact that review copies of books in themselves may have functioned as bribes, see Charvat, 173-74. Ticknor &: Fields's authors often wrote positive reviews of each other's books, and Fields's fierce protectiveness of his authors extended so far that he once created a public scandal by withdrawing his firm's advertising from a newspaper that had given Longfellow a negative review (Tebbel, 1:400; Tryon, 201-3). Fields also pressured North American Review editor Charles Eliot Norton into substituting a positive review of Longfellow'S Enoch Arden for a negative one (Tryon, 288). 55. An "Editor's Easy Chair" column of 1856, not quite reviewing Longfellow'S Hiawatha, made it clear how much an author's reputation, construed as a virtually personal relationship with readers, could outweigh consideration of his or her individual works. The author, either Donald G. Mitchell or George William Curtis, pointed out that one should not criticize a friend's new dress for not being prettier: "It is the friend, not the dress. It is, also, the poet, the man, the individuality, quite as much as the poem. What charms us in great works is quite as much the sense of

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power in the worker, as the beauty and success of the work" ("Editor's Easy Chair," Harper's, January 1856, 262). 56. For extended discussions of Fields's sophisticated use of publicity and networks of insiders at other publications, see Tryon, and Charvat's chapter, "James T. Fields and the Beginnings of Book Promotion, 1840-1855," 168-89. 57· Sedgwick, 36. 58. Bender, 151-67. 59. George J. Becker, Documents of Modern Literary Realism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), 7. George Eliot was the editor of the Westminster Review from 1851 to 1854 but, according to Thomas Pinney, did not write articles for it while she was editor. See Thomas Pinney, "Introduction," Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (London: Routledge & Kegan Pau!' 1963), 160. Nina Baym's study of reviewing during this period confirms the difficulty of finding consistent uses for these terms, although she also points out that the "novel" had emerged as a privileged form by the 1850s; see her Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984), 228-29,44. 61. [William Swinton], "Novels: Their Meaning and Mission," Putnam '5, October 1854, 396. John Paul Pritchard identifies the author as Swinton, but without explanation, in Literary Wise Men of Gotham: Criticism in New York, 1815-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1963), 53. Pritchard finds protorealist impulses and a prevalent distinction between the novel and the romance in U.s. literary criticism during the 1850S and even earlier in magazines like the Whig Review and the Knickerbocker, as he discusses beginning on 31. 62. [Swinton], 390, 396, 391, 390-9163· [Swinton], 396, 39164· [Swinton], 391, 393, 395· 65. These are fundamental ideas that Edward W. Said develops throughout Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979)' 66. [Swinton], 390, 394. 67. "Ideals in Modern Fiction," Putnam's, July 1857,91. 68. Brodhead, 45-46, 2169. "Ideals in Modern Fiction," 91-92. 70. "Ideals in Modern Fiction," 92, 96. 71- "Ideals in Modern Fiction," 96. 72. William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction, published in one volume with Frank Norris, The Responsibilities of the Novelist (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967),128. A Harper's review also echoes the sentiments of the author of "Ideals in Modern Fiction": "It is not difficult to perceive the monstrous injustice involved in the threatenings and violence of the trades unions, nor to weave a story in which

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that violence shall come into play in making up the pattern of the romance. It is more difficult to perceive the romance of actual life, and so to paint it as to make every reader recognize in the nineteenth century an age of chivalry, and in his own humble life an opportunity to don the armor and be a true knight" (rev. of Miss Mulock's Works, Harper's, August 1872, 463). 73. "Ideals in Modern Fiction," 95. 74. Althusser, 162. 75. Richard Brodhead movingly describes the preconditions for this latter function of fiction in relation to "Coverdalean privacy," the privatized spectators hip of other people's lives typified by the narrator of Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance: "having sealed itself in from the public, the overtly erotic, the productive, and the active, it has made those modes of life into an 'other life' apart from itself and has replaced them, within itself, with a positive sense of their lack" (65). This analysis echoes Stallybrass and White's account of the bourgeoisie's ongoing process of distancing itself from certain SOcial-symbolic materials-especially ones associated with the classes below and above from which the bourgeoisie struggles to maintain its difference-and then reclaiming them via acts of transgression which, far from subverting bourgeois identity or hegemony, energize the bourgeoisie. 76. "We are accustomed to say that the war and its results have made us a nation, subordinated local distinctions, cleared us of our chief shame, and given us the pride of a common career," wrote Thomas Wentworth Higginson in "Americanism in Literature," Atlantic, January 1870, 57. "We had been somewhat boyish as a nation, a little loud, a little pushing, a little braggart" before the war, wrote Lowell, but after looking "death in the eye for four years," "[o]ur thought and our politics, our bearing as a people, are assuming a manlier tone." (Needless to say, Lowell was also masculinizing high culture in this passage.) See James Russell Lowell, "On A Certain Condescension in Foreigners," Atlantic, January 1869, 93. 77. Rev. of George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, Atlantic, May 1858,891. 78. [James Russell Lowell], rev. of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Elsie Venner, Atlantic, April 1861, 511. 79. [Edwin P. Whipple], rev. of Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, Atlantic, July 1862, 125. 80. For characteristic uses of "quiet power," see [T. W. Higginson], "Literature as an Art," Atlantic, December 1867, 753, and rev. of Janet's Love and Service, by Margaret M. Robertson, Harper's, February 1870, 461. The quotation is from rev. of Annie L. McGregor, John Ward's Governess, Atlantic, November 1868,637' 81. William Dean Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaintances (New York: Harper, 1910), 37, 55· 82. [James Russell Lowell], rev. of Venetian Life, by William Dean Howells, North American Review, October 1866,611. Edwin H. Cady and David L. Frazier

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identify Lowell's authorship of this review in The War of the Critics Over William Dean Howells (Evanston, Ill., and Elmsford, N.Y.: Row, Peterson & Co., 1962), although The North American Review Index does not make any attribution for this review. The acquaintance with Howells claimed by the reviewer makes Lowell's authorship plausible, however. 83. [Lowell], 612. 84. [Henry James], rev. of Italian Journeys, by William Dean Howells, North American Review, January 1868,339. 85. Howells, Literary Friends, 136. 86. Stuart Hall's analysis of the instabilities of the term "popular" is mainly transferable to the idea of "the people" that surfaces in these reviews: it hovers between referring to the working classes, all people, and excluded people, for example. Hall stresses that no class or grouping has a "pure" identity; rather, all are affected or perhaps even produced by the relations of dominance that structure a society. See Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing 'The Popular,'" in Raphael Samuel, ed., People's History and Socialist Theory (London, Boston, Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 227-40. 87. A Galaxy reviewer praised Marian Harland's works for focusing on "the characters ... of ordinary life" and omitting "any of those melodramatic incidents which are so eagerly read by the million" (rev. of Ruby's Husband, by Marian Harland, Galaxy, December 1868, 856). 88. Anne Freadman, "Untitled: (On Genre)," Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (1988): 79· 89. Rev. of Mr. Scarborough's Family, by Anthony Trollope, Lippincott's, September 1883, 336. 90. DiMaggio, "Cultural Entrepreneurship ... Part II," 317. 91. Bourdieu, 490. 92. [Henry James], "Ivan Turgenef's New Nove!," Nation, 26 April 1877, 25253; "George Eliot's 'Daniel Deronda,'" Scribner's Monthly, November 1876,135. 2. "The Grand Reservoir of National Prosperity" 1. The history of the distinction between the novel and romance in AngloAmerican culture, as traced in canonized treatises and works of fiction, is compactly and intelligently surveyed by George Dekker in The American Historical Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), 14-28. The only work not cited by Dekker here that is often cited by other romance theorists as having influenced nineteenth-century understandings of romance is Clara Reeve's The Progress of Romance (1785;reprint, New York: Facsimile Text Soc., 1930). Nina Baym presents evidence that the term "romance," despite its long history, by no means had a settled meaning in Hawthorne's time but was rather used

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"broadly" and "inconsistently." I suggest instead that Hawthorne's use of the term, rather than being simply "idiosyncratic" as Baym claims, was in dialogue with certain other specifiable appropriations of the term, even though these appropriations do not add up to a coherent definition of "romance." See Baym, "Concepts of the Romance in Hawthorne's America," Nineteenth Century Fiction}9 (1984): 4}0. 2. John McWilliams has pointed out that every recent notable work on American romance includes a chapter on Hawthorne, though in shifting company. See John McWilliams, "The Rationale for 'The American Romance,'" boundary 2 17, nO.1 (Spring 1990): 78. }. For a provocative argument about the importance of using these ruptures to interrupt the analysis of class and other collectivities, see Wai-Chee Dimock, "Class, Gender, and a History of Metonymy," in Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations, ed. Wai-Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994),57-106. 4. Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), 2}. 5. My account of Americans' relationship to Catholicism in this era is based mainly on the work of Jenny Franchot in Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1994)' 6. Evan Carton discusses this issue and connects it to a romance aesthetic of "the model" that figures the impossibility of grasping the world directly. See Carton, The Rhetoric of American Romance: Dialectic and Identity in Emerson, Dickinson, Poe, and Hawthorne (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985), 264. 7. Robert H. Byer calls attention to this scene's significance in an essay that examines The Marble Faun as a critique of conventions for beholding monuments, linked in the case of this conversation to Hawthorne's privately revealed "skepticism about the Union as outward type or inward conviction." The essay provides an interesting alternative account of what the romance was using sculpture to explore, employing monumental art to discuss the idea of a unified public that I relate to allegory. See Byer, "Words, Monuments, Beholders: The Visual Arts in Hawthorne's The Marble Faun," in American Iconology: New Approaches to NineteenthCentury Art and Literature (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 199}), 16}85; the quotation is on 169. 8. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun: or, The Romance of Monte Beni, in Nathaniel Hawthorne, Novels, ed. Millicent Bell (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 198}), 974. All references to this work, as well as to The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance, will refer to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text. 9. Kenyon's dismay at the constraints of work by public commission may have

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been fueled by what Hawthorne knew about the constraints faced by some of his sculptor friends who were working on commissions for the u.s. government. For example, artworks commissioned for the u.s. Capitol during the 1850S were scrutinized hysterically for elements that could be nationally divisive, especially anything pertaining to slavery and abolition. For an account of this pressure, see Vivien Green Fryd, Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815-1860 (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1992); a discussion of "America," a statue by Hawthorne's friend Hiram Powers that was rejected for inclusion in the Capitol because its allegorical female figure stood on a broken shackle, can be found on 204-5. 10. Lauren Berlant usefully describes this disjuncture between the nation and the "elements of civil life" in The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), 21-22. 11. Jonathan Arac, "What Is the History of Literature?" Modern Language Quarterly 54, no. 1 (March 1993): 109. This essay sketches the plot of Arac's contribution to the Cambridge History of American Literature, which presents literary narrative and national narrative as two competing genres not neatly periodized in succession, despite the brief public prominence of literary narrative during the 1850S. See Arac, "Narrative Forms," in The Cambridge History of American Literature: Vol. 2, 1820-1865, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch et al. (New York and Cam-

bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 607-777. 12. Donald E. Pease, Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writing in Cultural Context (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 46. 13. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Office of The Scarlet Letter (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991),48,60. 14· Berlant, 59, 197-98. 15. Edwin Haviland Miller explains that the post of consul at Liverpool was one of the most remunerative that Pierce's government offered. Miller also points out that Hawthorne was lionized after Pierce's election because of his intimacy with the president, and that Hawthorne helped procure government jobs for some of his friends-another sign of his being fully aware of his proximity to state power. See Miller, Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1991), 389-401. Pease proposes more controversially that men of letters were often selected. for diplomatic posts because politicians recognized that they and artists were both in the business of " [shaping] the public will" (Pease, 45). 16. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Life of Franklin Pierce (1852; reprint, New York: Garrett Press, 1970), 110. Jonathan Arac offers an illuminating account of Hawthorne's involvement in patronage relations, which Arac reads as a manifestation of the degraded state of American politics in the early 185os, in "The Politics of The

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Scarlet Letter," Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 247-66. 17. The cultural mythmaking that turned the Puritans, one group of early American settlers, into "our" ancestors has been a subject of widespread analysis, but one compact discussion occurs in Sacvan Bercovitch, "How the Puritans Won the American Revolution," Massachusetts Review 17 (1976): 597-6}0. 18. [William Swinton], "Novels: Their Meaning and Mission," Putnam's, October 1854, }89-96; "Ideals in Modern Fiction," Putnam's, July 1857,90-96. About Hawthorne's access to u.s. periodicals while he was abroad, see his letter to Ticknor of 9 March 1860, in Letters of Hawthorne to William D. Ticknor, 1851-1864 (Washington, D.C.: NCR Microcard Editions, 1972), 97. 19. Hawthorne's infamous complaint that "America is now wholly given over to a d---d mob of scribbling women" occurs in a letter to Ticknor, dated 19 January 1855 (Letters of Hawthorne . .. , 75).

20. [Mrs. Caroline Matilda Kirkland], rev. of The Wide, Wide World, by Elizabeth Wetherell [Susan Warner]; Queechy, by Elizabeth Wetherell [Susan Warner]; and Dollars and Cents, by Amy Lothrop, North American Review, January 185}, 104. Radcliffe and Smith were both British novelists writing in the late eighteenth century, and Smith's novel was actually entitled Emmeline: The Orphan of the Castle. 21. [Kirkland], 121, 105-6. 22. [Kirkland], 12}. 2}. [Andrew Preston Peabody], rev. of The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, North American Review, January 185}, 228, 229. 24· [Peabody], 227, 2}0. 25· [Peabody], 228, 2}1, 2}}. 26. Brodhead argues that Hawthorne was very much aware of his own canonicity by the time he wrote The Marble Faun; indeed, he persuasively suggests that this fact inspired Hawthorne to explore in that book the dangers of cultural products being made into objects of deadening reverence rather than live engagement. See Richard H. Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne (New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), esp. 72-73. However, genre politics do not figure prominently in his discussion of the" contemporary reorganization of the literary sphere" (72) or of The Marble Faun. 27. Hawthorne's prefaces have received numerous careful readings, noteworthy among which are Edgar A. Dryden's discussion of the hostile play of exposure and concealment in them; Dan McCall's suggestion that the prefaces record Hawthorne's frustration over his increasing inability to "organize" the "materials" pro-

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vided by American life into works of art; and Evan Carton's proposal that the prefaces "chart the increasing pressure" of Hawthorne's "dialectical enterprise," shared by other romance writers, of aiming for both "a revelatory, world-interpreting art, a full presence that they cannot approach ... , and an art of freeplay that they cannot affirm." See Dryden, Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Poetics of Enchantment (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977), 120-42; McCall, "Hawthorne's 'Familiar Kind of Preface:" ELH 35 (1968): 422-39, reprinted in Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Collection of Criticism, ed. J. Donald Crowley (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), 130; and Carton, 168,12. 28. Despite the fact that Hawthorne's figuration of his activity here brings moonlight into relation with other kinds of light, nineteenth- and twentiethcentury critics have often identified the romance with moonlight. Even Hawthorne himself referred to The Marble Faun as his "moonshiny romance" in a letter. But as I will suggest in this chapter, by the time Hawthorne wrote The Marble Faun he had been pushed into assuming, defensively, a reductive and oppositional version of romance in which a combination of representational "lightings" may have no longer seemed possible. See Nathaniel Hawthorne, letter to James T. Fields, 11 February 1860, in The Letters 1857-1864, ed. Thomas Woodson et aI., vol. 18 in The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et aI., 20 vols. (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1987), 230. 29. Here as elsewhere, The Marble Faun seems to be in close dialogue with a guidebook written by Hawthorne's friend George Stillman Hillard. Hillard explicitly discusses the literary suitability of "decaying" nations, among which he counts Italy: "The twilight shadows of Rome are more touching and pensive than the morning beams of our land of promise." He also suggests that "As we [Americans] have no past, so Italy seems to have no future." See Hillard, Six Months in Italy, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1853), 2:355-56. 30. Milton R. Stern has pointed out that the ostracism Cooper suffered for questioning American progress might have offered a special incentive for Hawthorne to muffle his own criticisms through tactics like this one. See Stern, Contexts for Hawthorne: The Marble Faun and the Politics of Openness and Closure in American Literature (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1991), 37,99. 31. See Bercovitch's chapter "The Ritual of Consensus" in The American Jeremiad (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 132-75; and his chapter "The A-Politics of Ambiguity" in The Office of The Scarlet Letter, 1-31. 32. [Kirkland], 104-5' 33. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (1797; reprint, New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), 63, 69; John Ruskin, Modern Painters, 3 vols., in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vols. 1, 3, and 4 (New York: Thomas P. Crowell & Co., n.d.), 1:10, 92, 379. The records of the Salem

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Athenaeum show that Hawthorne checked out Modern Painters, presumably one or both of the two volumes that had been completed then, in 1848. See Marion L. Kesselring, Hawthorne's Reading, 1828-1850: A Transcription and Identification of Titles Recorded in the Charge-Books of the Salem Athenaeum (New York: New

York Public Library, 1949),41. Svetlana Alpers cites evidence that this perception of an opposition between Dutch and Italian art goes back even as far as a critique of Flemish art attributed to Michelangelo. See Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983), xxiii. 34. Hawthorne's friend John Lothrop Motley cast the rise of the Dutch republic as a triumph of democracy and capitalism, setting the parameters for many American responses to Dutch art, in The Rise of the Dutch Republic, A History, 2 vols. (1856; reprint, New York: A. L. Burt, 1898). On the influence and reductiveness of Motley's account, see Adam Hopkins, Holland: Its History, Paintings, and People (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988), 43. As for Italy, one reviewer cited the "commercial character" of the Italian city-states and its history's function of showing the" fatal effects of the disunion of small states, suited by their physical position to have formed a powerful confederacy," as reasons for Americans' special interest in Italy. See rev. of The Florentine Histories, by Niccolo Machiavelli, and The Citizen of a Republic, by Ansaldo Ceba, North American Review, April 1846, 508. On mid-nineteenth-century Americans' relationship to Italy, see also William Vance, America's Rome, 2 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1989) and Margaretta M. Lovell, A Visitable Past: Views of Venice by American Artists 1860-1915 (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989). 35. Rev. of Modern Painters, vol. 3, by John Ruskin, Putnam's, May 1856, 493. 36. Others disagreed, of course; one North American Review writer proposed that "art has flourished in Catholic countries" -making a characteristic American equation between Catholicism and despotism-because of their "despotic governments, under which freedom of thought and action in regard to the most important concerns of life have been very much restricted and hindered," so that men of genius found their only outlets in the arts. See rev. of The Personal Adventures of "Our Own Correspondent" in Italy, by Michael Burke Honan; Men and Things as I Saw Them in Europe, by Kirwan; The Fine Arts, Their Nature and Relations, by M. Guizot; and Lectures on Ancient Ethnography and Geography, by B. G. Niebuhr, North American Review, April 1854, 487-88. 37. James Jackson Jarves, Art-Hints: Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting (New York: Harper & Bros., 1855), 22, 27. The fact that Jarves's ideas were perceived by a Harper's reviewer to be hardly original, but rather a digest of views picked up from Ruskin, Anna Jameson, and other well-known art writers (whom Jarves credits in the preface), makes his book all the more valuable for my purposes, since it suggests

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that his understanding of the differences between Italian and Dutch art and culture may have been widely disseminated. See rev. of Art-Hints, by James Jackson Jarves, Harper's, September 1855,323-24. 38. [G. W. Greene], rev. of Della Speranze d'Italia, by Cesare Balbo, North American Review, January 1848,4,16,17,32. For another periodical's account of Italy's success in uniting individual states without "destroy[ing] their individuality," see rev. of The Personal Adventures of "Our Own Correspondent" in Italy, etc., 460. 39. Ruskin, 1:123-24. 40. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The French and Italian Notebooks, vol. 14 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Thomas Woodson et al. (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1980), 102. Subsequent references to this work will appear parenthetically in the text, marked "Fl." 41. Hawthorne, letter to James T. Fields, 11 February 1860, 229. 42. Hawthorne, The French and Italian Notebooks, 112. 43. [George William Curtis], "Editor's Easy Chair," Harper's, June 1860,128. 44. Rev. of The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot, Harper's, June 1860, 117. 45. Henry James, Hawthorne (London: Macmillan and Co., 1879), 169-70. 46. In addition to a myriad of critics who follow Curtis and James in finding the book suspended between romance and realism, Myra Jehlen finds a tension between novel and allegory in the book, and Richard H. Millington, in an especially nuanced discussion of this issue, reads the book as an ongoing conflict between "romancethe fiction of transgression-and the genteel novel-the culturally ascendant fiction of suppression." See Jehlen, American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), 162; Millington, Practicing Romance: Narrative Form and Cultural Engagement in Hawthorne's Fiction (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992), 178. 47. M. M. Bakhtin, "Epic and Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981),5-7. 48. "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse" and "Discourse in the Novel" in The Dialogic Imagination both develop Bakhtin's theory of the polyphonic novel's intervention into linguistic and political orthodoxies. Richard Brodhead suggests that Hawthorne and Melville use competing literary modes in the productively parodic fashion Bakhtin describes a suggestion that I would mainly endorse. However, my emphasis on reception makes it essential to take into account the extent to which reading practices make parodic effects legible. Even Dostoyevsky, an author whose polyphony Bakhtin analyzes as exemplary, can be read in ways that contain or obscure these effects. See Brodhead, Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976), 13-42.

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49. Myra Jehlen suggests that in the United States, the "middle class" attained an "absolute hegemony" and "a more complete ideological development than ... in Europe," which suggests that the appropriation of realism for the middle class was more subversive in England than in the United States. See Jehlen, "The Novel and the American Middle Class," in Bercovitch and Jehlen, 133. 50. George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 223-24. 51. From Wallace Stevens, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," in The Palm at the End of the Mind (ed. Holly Stevens [New York: Vintage Books, 1972], 222): Then Ozymandias said the spouse, the bride Is never naked. A fictive covering Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind. This section of the poem considers the impossibility of the eye's or the mind's ever confronting the reality it figuratively marries independently of human conceptual categories. 52. On Hawthorne's romantic platonism, see also Millicent Bell, Hawthorne's

View of the Artist (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1962),45-47. 53. Franchot invokes "romance" as a general term for fiction, not a specific category, but I believe her point pertains to the generic controversy I am tracing (Franchot, 201). Franchot's book explores the connection between anti-Catholicism and reactions to Catholic immigrants at length. 54. For information about the sculptural requirements of the Capitol expansion, see Fryd, whose book provides ample testimony to the fact that more or less neoclassical public sculpture was by no means growing obsolete in the United States at midcentury, in spite of the symbolic use Hawthorne makes of its inappropriateness to modernity. 55. Roland Barthes is the shrewdest analyst and the most compelling poet of this intertextuality; see especially his S / Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974). 56. "Thackeray's Newcomes," Putnam's, September 1855, 28457. Anticipating the sentiments he would attribute to Miriam, Hawthorne complained that "[man's] [sic] clothes are as natural to him as his skin, and sculptors have no more right to undress him than to flay him," for instance (FI 177), and he told Anna Jameson that sculpture ought to perish if it could not successfully depict people in modern costumes (FI 209). 58. Donald Pease provides a valuable discussion of the mystifications wrought by the version of modernity which, I am suggesting, informed the promotion of the realist novel, in Visionary Compacts, 42-43. See Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," The Dialogic Imagination, 259.

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59. Marcia Pointon, Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting, 18301908 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), 113-20.

60. This rhetoric of chastity was an important part of Hiram Powers's campaign to make his nude statue, The Greek Slave (1844), acceptable in the United States, a campaign whose gender politics have been analyzed interestingly by Joy S. Kasson in Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1990), 55-63. An excellent essay by T. Walter Herbert Jr. draws together The Marble Faun, The Greek Slave, and an episode in the sexual life of the Hawthornes' governess into a fascinating discussion of how the Victorian cult of female "purity" produced erotic pleasures for both sexes. See Herbert, "The Erotics of Purity: The Marble Faun and the Victorian Construction of Sexuality," Representations 36 (Fall 1991): 114-32. 61. Hillard and Jarves share Miriam's views, which go back to Joshua Reynolds's emphasis on the limitations and belatedness of modern sculpture. Hillard asks, "Why persist in a path of art in which the ancients can never be approached [ 7]" also suggesting that historical changes have changed the meaning of the body (Hillard, 1:193). Jarves raises the question of the "propriety of rendering the nude figure" and warns that in painting, where the use of pigment makes representation more sensual, avoiding "all appearance of sensuality" "requires not only consummate art but equal purity of mind" (Jarves, 155, 160). Presumably Gibson's pigmented nude sculptures were especially suspect. 62. Kirk Savage suggested this gloss on "hired models" to me. Being acquainted with several sculptors in Rome, Hawthorne would have been in a good position to know about sculptors' use of prostitutes as models, and to know that even models who weren't prostitutes risked their reputations by posing nude. See Margaret Farrand Thorp, The Literary Sculptors (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1965), 26-27. 63. See Joel Pfister, The Production of Personal Life: Class, Gender, and the Psychological in Hawthorne's Fiction (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1991), 162. Pfister's chapter on The Marble Faun intriguingly suggests that Miriam was a character who had escaped "feminization" and whose paintings and sketches, despite the narrator's suggestions that they are flawed, emphasize successful female resistance to patriarchal power. 64. Pfister, 6; emphasis Pfister's. 65. In keeping with this idea, in his notebooks Hawthorne seemed to object to some nudes for being too ample, excessively large and developed. Bartholomew's Eve revealed to him "an awful volume of thighs and calves" (FI 177), and on an earlier occasion, he complained about nudes" 'with enormously developed bosoms and buttocks.'" Hawthorne's discomfort might be an example of the anxiety female bodies can prompt because of their potential to exceed, and perhaps shatter, phallo-

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centric possibilities for understanding and representation-a conceptual excess for which the simulated fleshiness of these nude statues might serve as metaphor. See Nathaniel Hawthorne, The English Notebooks, ed. Randall Stewart (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962),556, cited in Rita K. Collin and John L. Idol Jr., Prophetic Pictures: Nathaniel Hawthorne's Knowledge and Use of the Visual Arts (New York, Westport, and London: Greenwood Press, 1991), 80. 66. Hillard, 1:90. Similarly, Jarves admired depictions of the Madonna and child that invoked domestic human affections, but he criticized artists who were "incapable of rising above the lovely, material woman" (Jarves, 356). 67. Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985), xix. 68. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984), 490. 69. Paul Smith, "The Will to Allegory in Postmodernism," Dalhousie Review 62, no. I (1982): 108. I am grateful to Mark Kemp for letting me know about this essay. Smith's essay usefully distinguishes postmodern varieties of allegory but also describes the kind of allegory for which, I am arguing, Hawthorne projects nostalgia, allegory relying on "a shared referential metasemantic system such as was available to mediaeval allegorists and their audience" (107). 70. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1985), 178-79, 182. 71. E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987) represents a later historical version of this misrecognition, in which once-dominant and once-coherent belief systems have been fragmented and jumbled among a hodgepodge of historical and scientific markers under the catch-all rubric "literacy": "salvation" and "Plato," treated as discrete and equivalent references, compete with "San Antonio, Texas" and "rheumatoid arthritis" on the list. Like Hawthorne and other Victorian American intellectuals, Hirsch demonstrates his devotion to a complex of national unification, democracy, and capitalist development when he promotes cultural literacy as both a route to individual advancement, "the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children" (xiii), and a means of ensuring Americans' coherence as a "human group" (xvii). 72. Cindy Weinstein provides a very different account of Hawthorne's relationship to allegory, identifying allegory with the display of authorial labor. Because of the construction of the aesthetic realm as one of leisure, authors such as Hawthorne and Melville were criticized for producing work that revealed their labor; allegorical characters, Weinstein argues, were identified with such a display. Although I am less certain than Weinstein that allegory was a privileged site for anxieties about authoriallabor, some of which I address in chapter 3, my argument concerns Hawthorne's

294 Notes to Chapter Two polemical use of allegory in The Marble Faun as a representation of a certain relationship between literature and public life, not the actual functioning of allegory as Hawthorne and other writers of his time may have used it. See especially Weinstein's chapter 2, "Hawthorne and the Economics of Allegory," in The Litera-

ture of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995). 73. "Answers to Correspondents," The New York Family Story Paper, 10 May 1880, 8. I am grateful to Angela Farkas for this reference. 74. Frederick Crews and Nina Baym present two convincing accounts of the Oedipal energies that incite the murder of the model. See Crews, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), 225-26; and Baym, "The Marble Faun: Hawthorne's Elegy for Art," New England Quarterly 44 (1971): 355-76, reprinted in Modern Critical Views: Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), 99-114, esp. 102, 111-14. 75. A rich essay by Jonathan Auerbach proposes that the entire book might be read as a meditation on the metaphor "to execute a model"; see "Executing the Model: Painting, Sculpture, and Romance-Writing in Hawthorne's The Marble Faun," ELH 47 (1980): 103, 110. Auerbach's essay treats many of the same issues of representation I do, and very interestingly, but stays strictly inside the text. 76. Brodhead, Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel, 4177. Friedrich Schiller, On the Naive and Sentimental in Literature (1795). Numerous critics have read Miriam, Donatello, and/ or the Model as figures of romance, defined in various ways, but the reading which comes closest to mine and offers the most interesting challenges to it is Richard Millington's. Millington's study takes up the relationship between transgression and authoritative suppression in the book, identifying Miriam, Donatello, and the Model with the romance but finding the Model to embody both "romance" and "the punitive," representing "Hawthorne's developing sense that the authoritarianism against which romance struggles is not simply the reverse of the impulses it sets out to free but also an aspect of them" (Millington, 202). 78. Stacey Vallas notes that the mystery of whether Donatello's ears are furry like fauns' ears "concerns l~nguage's self-referentiality, its capacity to refer to its own fictions and to recreate us through them," in a wonderful reading of The Marble Faun. See Stacey Vallas, "The Embodiment of the Daughter'S Secret in The Marble Faun," Arizona Quarterly 46, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 77. 79. Marcia Pointon's analysis of this painting as one that interrogates "the symbolic function of women in ... pictorial representation" brought the work to my attention and shaped my own reading of it (Pointon, 113). 80. On the transformation of nineteenth-century readers from public to market,

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see Gaye Tuchman, "Culture as Resource: Actions Defining the Victorian Novel,"

Media, Culture and Society 4 (1982): 7· 81. Jenny Franchot has noted that Hilda occupies a "liminal position between New England Protestantism and Italian Catholicism" (Franchot, 357). 82. Jarves, 294,331-32. 83. Franchot, 125. 84. Hillard,1:279· 85. New England's special ambivalence toward Roman Catholicism is one of the major emphases of Franchot's Roads to Rome, laid out in the first chapter. 86. In 1849 the French army had restored control over Rome to the pope, quashing a short-lived republic. Moreover, the possibility that Italy might be united as a confederation ruled by the pope had strong adherents during the 1840S and 1850S. See Lucy Riall, The Italian Risorgimento: State, Society, and National Unification (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 68. 87. Rev. of The Personal Adventures of "Our Own Correspondent" in Italy, etc., 453· 88. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), 89. Lauren Berlant has proposed that "Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote at a time in America when literary culture was doing much of the work of generating ... a constellation of national signs, both to provide for the people a National Symbolic, the common language of a common space, and to shore up the shaky state apparatus, which as yet had no cultural referent whose expression it could authentically say it was" (Berlant, 21). Despite its unifying name, though, the United States' National Symbolic has never been and could never be coherent in a way that could ground allegory; indeed, being able to follow a television comedian's monologue that references public figures, public events, cultural stereotypes, and pro forma taboos without ensuring any specific interpretation of them might be the surest index of membership in an interpretive community with claims to national status. 90. In his campaign biography of Pierce, as Levine notes, Hawthorne backed up Pierce's refusal to support abolitionism by suggesting, in a competing appropriation of Rome, that the Roman Empire demonstrated the danger of dependency produced by states' being too fully subjected to a centralizing power. See Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Life of Franklin Pierce (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1900), 102-3, cited in Robert S. Levine, "'Antebellum Rome' in The Marble Faun," American Literary History 2, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 32. 91. Levine, 31. Jonathan Arac also relates The Marble Faun to the fact that "The establishment of literary narrative made possible the dream of an autonomous world of art and pleasure, which proved however to depend on economic and political conditions that produced misery at the personal, local, and national levels" (Arac, "Narrative Forms," 724).

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3. Addictive Reading and Professional Authorship 1. Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, 1960), 553. Poem 1261 was first published in 1947, poem 1263 in 1894. 2. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The French and Italian Notebooks, vol. 14 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Thomas Woodson et al. (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1980), 297. 3. "From this point of view, the critique of the culture of consumption in terms of its gratuitousness and unnaturalness amounts to a critique of culture in genera!," Mark Seltzer suggests, in a thought-provoking analysis of this issue. See Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), 122. 4. Steven Mailloux intriguingly analyzes metaphors of ingestion in relation to the disciplining of boy and girl readers in "The Rhetorical Use and Abuse of Fiction: Eating Books in Late Nineteenth-Century America," New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions into the Canon, ed. Donald E. Pease, boundary 2 17, no. 1 (1990): 133-57. Mailloux notes the masculine gendering of sensationalism and the feminine gendering of sentimentalism, which is significant for my argument (157). Janice A. Radway has also traced some of the history of the metaphorical equation of reading with eating in an essay which criticizes disparaging generalizations about consumer culture: "Reading Is Not Eating: Mass-Produced Literature and the Theoretical, Methodological, and Political Consequences of a Metaphor," Book Research Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1986): 7-29. And Mark Seltzer explores the relationship between consumerism and embodiment marked by this metaphor in Bodies and Machines, which considers a number of the phenomena that I address in this chapter and the next-the relationship between consumption and production, the fascination with boys' culture, and the individuating disciplines of mass culture-within a Foucauldian framework that charts the relationship between "possessive individualism and market culture, on the one side, and what might be called disciplinary individualism and machine culture, on the other," in consumer culture (Seltzer 58). An especially fruitful discussion about the metaphor of consumption begins on 121. 5. Rev. of Middlemarch, by George Eliot, Harper's, April 187J, 775. 6. [Auguste Laugel], "Two Novels by Paul Bourget," Nation, 8 April 1886, 295. 7. Henry Giles, "Sentimentalism," Harper's, July 1860, 209, 211. 8. "Miss Mulock's Works," Harper's, August 1872, 463. 9. James McCosh, The Emotions (1880; reprint, New York: Scribner's, 1890),

57-58. 10. [James Russell Lowell], "James's Tales and Sketches," Nation, 24 June 1875, 426. 11. A. K. Fiske, "Profligacy in Fiction," North American Review, July 1880,87.

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12. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (1904; reprint, New York: Scribner's, 1958). 1). Harry Levine, Demon of the Middle Class: Self-Control, Liquor, and the Ideology of Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Califor-

nia at Berkeley, 1978), 124, 24). Joseph Gusfield's history of the Temperance movement also argues that Temperance rhetoric provided a way for certain groups to establish their superior social status over others through the symbolism of the relationship to alcohol, according to Gusfield, with the Temperance movement favoring the interests of Protestants over Catholics, rural over urban dwellers, the middle classes over both the upper and lower classes, and longtime American residents over immigrants. See Joseph R. Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1963), 40, 44, 7, and 56. See also Philip S. Foner, The History of the Labor Movement in

the United States, 4 vols.; vol. 2: From the Founding of the A. F. of L. to the Emergence of American Imperialism (1955; reprint, New York: International Publishers, 1975),29· The protection of women from men's alcoholic abuse and neglect was an important function of the Temperance movement that does not impinge significantly on the rhetoric of high realism. On connections between Temperance and women's interests and rights, see Mari Io Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1920 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1983), 60-69.

1870-

14. The bourgeois coding of Temperance meant that it was possible that the organization of working-class culture around the consumption of alcohol had a selfconsciously political construction as well. Eric Lott hints at this possibility in "White Kids and No Kids At All: Languages of Race in Antebellum U.s. WorkingClass Culture," in Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations, ed. Wai-Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994),186, 189-91. 15. James L. Machor discusses the antebellum construction of women as lazy readers in periodical reviews, in an essay that addresses many connections between gender and reading with continuities in the postbellum period I am considering. See Machor, "Historical Hermeneutics and Antebellum Fiction: Gender, Response Theory, and Interpretive Contexts," Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century Ameri-

can Literature and the Contexts of Response, ed. James L. Machor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983), 67. 16. Outside of the Temperance movement, which held alcohol to be dangerous for anyone, most mainstream conceptions of alcoholism held that the disease could be either constitutional or induced by habituation. See [J. W. Palmer], "Our Inebriates, Classified and Clarified. By an Inmate of the New York State Asylum," Atlantic, April 1869, 477.

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The question of the moral responsibility that alcoholics bore for their behavior while drunk continually threw the disease concept into confusion (and, arguably, still does). A writer in Putnam's emphasized that inebriation results from "a diseased condition of mind or body, or both, or from inherited waywardness," encapsulating the tensions between physiological, psychological, and moral understandings of addiction ("The Use and Abuse of Stimulants," Putnam's, Novembert855, 542). 17. [J. W. Palmer], "Our Inebriates, Harbored and Helped. By an Inmate of the New York State Asylum," Atlantic, July 1869, 118-19. Palmer's other article was "Our Inebriates, Classified and Clarified," cited above. 18. Levine, 45. 19. Kenneth W. Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), 90. 20. Edwin P. Whipple, "Mr. Hardhack on the Sensational in Literature and Life," Outlooks on Society, Literature, and Politics (Boston: Ticknor, 1888), 66, 69. Originally published Atlantic, May 1860, 195-99. 21. Whipple, 63, 73-74. 22. "A Crop of Novels," in "Editorial Notes. American Literature and Reprints," Putnam's, November 1855, 544. 23. The emotions themselves had often been compared historically to inebriation and to diseases and especially to diseases of the will. See H. M. Gardiner, Ruth Clark Metcalf, and John G. Beebe-Center, Feeling and Emotion: A History of Theories (New York: American Book Co., 1937), chapter 9. 24. William Charvat and Jean-Christophe Agnew have both shown that Common Sense philosophy remained important in U.S. academic culture, especially for the understanding of literature, well into the nineteenth century, and Donald Meyer's study of nineteenth-century American college textbooks on moral philosophy used between 1835 and 1892 confirms that the Common Sense tradition was central to most American university curricula during the era he studies. Not all the reviewers who relied on the intellectual structure of Common Sense would have been to universities; however, the reviews show signs of a public familiarity with this framework, a lively adaptation of it for contemporary concerns that should not be dismissed as a "popularization." See William Charvat, The Origins of American Critical Thought 1810-1835 (New York: Barnes, 1961); Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 15501750 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986); Donald Meyer, The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the American National Ethic (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1972). On the importance of the Common Sense tradition in American literature and American colleges, see also Terence Martin, The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction

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(Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1961) and Douglas Sloan, The Scottish Enlight-

enment and the American College Ideal (New York: Teachers College Press, 1971). 25. Agnew, 188. 26. Agnew, 50-53, 83. Similarly, Albert O. Hirschman has argued that in the distant past of early capitalism, people believed that the rational pursuit of selfinterest under capitalism would provide a salutary curb to the disruptive and disturbing pursuit of passions. Once capitalism was in place, though, the purely selfinterested and calculating capitalist agent became equally disturbing. See Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), 41,132. 27. Thomas Reid, "Essays on the Active Powers of Man," Thomas Reid's Inquiry and Essays, ed. Ronald E. Beanblossom and Keith Lehrer (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 316. James McCosh identifies Reid as a "fit representative of the Scottish philosophy" in his overview of all the thinkers identified with the Common Sense tradition (192). 28. Agnew, 174. 29. The other way in which Common Sense Philosophy implied that literature could help strengthen the moral sense was by creating associations to strengthen readers' moral discernment. For example, Wordsworth's "Advertisement" to Lyrical Ballads (1798) relied implicitly on strengthening the associations that grounded moral judgment, suggesting that the literary representation of rural life could have the same purifying effect on the emotions that a visit to the countryside could, nature being granted the power to align moral responses that artificial urban life disrupts. 30. [Henry James], rev. of Can You Forgive Her?, by Anthony Trollope, Nation, 28 September 1865, 409. 31. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. E. G. West (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1969), 515-16. 32. Smith, 510-11 and 42}. 33. Smith, 265· 34. However, criticisms of didacticism also suggested that readers requiring didactic moralizing were less skilled and subtle than readers of realism. Howells referred contemptuously to "a large class of readers who cannot understand the difference between the artistic reluctance to enforce a lesson that ought to teach itself, and callousness to the sins described." See [W. D. Howells], rev. of A Terrible Temptation, by Charles Reade, Atlantic, September 1871,38435. Jonathan Arac, Huckleberry Finn and the Functions of Criticism (forthcoming from Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1997). 36. Henry James Jr., "The Novels of George Eliot," Atlantic, October 1866, 485.

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37· [Henry James], "Miss Braddon," Nation, 9 November 1865,593. 38. Richard Grant White, "Recent Fiction," North American Review, January 18 79,97. 39. Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984), 50. The privatization of reading is a historical generalization that should not be overestimated, though: Barbara Sicherman's account of one family's reading practices suggest that they enjoyed reading aloud well into the late nineteenth century. See Sicherman, "Sense and Sensibility: A Case Study of Women's Reading in Late-Victorian America," Reading in America: Literature and Social History, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989), 206. 40. The emergence of leisure as a form of private experience not just distinct from work but antithetical to it is a distinctive feature of industrial society, according to Victor Turner in "Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology," Rice University Studies special issue, "The Anthropological Study of Human Play," 60, no. 3 (1974): 64-90. See also Thorstein Veblen's discussion of leisure's capacity to serve as a form of conspicuous consumption, insofar as it signified the "non-productive consumption of time," in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1983), 45. 41. Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Terry Lovell, Consuming Fiction (New York and London: Verso, 1987), 31-35. 42. The discursive construction of authorship as a profession is distinct from the conditions affecting authors' ability to make a living by their writing. This latter criterion is what underlies many arguments about "professional authorship" that relate it to authors' ownership of their property and to market conditions; see for example William Charvat's The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (1968; reprint, New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1992), which is about the economic viability of authorship rather than its status as a profession. 43. Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Univ. of California Press, 1977), 220. 44. Larson, xvii. Samuel Haber, who emphasizes honor and authority as the

goals of professionalism rather than status and market advantages, presents an alternative view of profeSSions as accomplishing in residual form some of the functions of the "eighteenth-century English gentleman" in The Quest for Authority and Honor in the American Professions, 1750-1900 (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), ix. However, Larson also acknowledges the importance of the gentleman and of crafts guilds as historical precedents for professionalism on 62-63.

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45. Haber sums up this position fully and succinctly: "He [the professional] was not a capitalist because his authority and honor were not derived from wealth and the dollar was not the best indication of his achievement. He was not a worker, though he was employed, because he worked from a position of command, guided in part by his science, and was therefore never wholly at the bidding of those who employed him. Furthermore, in that his work seemed to be largely intellectual, it brought with it a proper respect and afforded special gratifications" (Haber, 204). There is a lively argument among Marxist sociologists and historians about the class affiliation of professionals. Larson addresses the issue most directly on 209-16 but without taking a simple or universal position on the question; her analysis emphasizes the extent to which the complex of professionalism is permeated by capitalist relations but also hosts certain residual forms of resistance to them, and I infer from her careful historical tracing of particular professions that she views their close interrelation with ruling groups as being more accurate and revealing than any attempt to assimilate them wholly to the interests of a particular class. The debate over professionals' class affiliation has been shaped by the work of Barbara and John Ehrenreich, who propose that the "professional-managerial class" is a new entity spawned by monopoly capitalism. For a brief account by the Ehrenreichs of their position, and for a number of responses to it, see Pat Walker, ed., Between Labor and Capital (Boston: South End Press, 1979).

46. Larson, 49. 47. Larson, 136. 48. My definition of professionalism is adapted primarily from the accounts of Larson and of Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: Norton, 1976). Because Christopher P. Wilson understands professionalism differently, linking it to the rationalized and bureaucratized work of turn-of-the-century journalism, he locates the emergence of authorial professionalism later than I do. His focus is not on the use of "professionalism" to exclude certain writers from legitimacy, but rather on authors' savvy relationship to a market that might require them to take up a variety of cultural positions. See Wilson, The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1985),1-16,204 n.). Wilson also draws on Bledstein, but with different emphasis. 49. William G. Rothstein, American Physicians in the Nineteenth Century: From Sects to Science (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1972), 115; Lawrence Rothfield, Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992), 9. 50. [E. Spencer], "A Good Word for Quacks," Atlantic, March 1873, )28. For a discussion of classical versions of the analogy between writers and physicians, see Rothfield, 12-1). Rothfield's illuminating study of medical discourses in several

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key works of European realism also addresses how both medicine and authorship produced themselves as professions, specifically in relation to Balzac's work (Rothfield, 68-80). It provides a persuasive and theoretically rigorous account of how realism and medicine worked as systems for producing certain kinds and relations of knowledge, although Rothfield relies only on canonical accounts of realism. 51. Larson, 14. 52. Max Weber, Economy and Society, 2 vols. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978) 2:1121-23. 53. Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), 46. 54. "On the Writing of Novels," Critic, 24 March 1888, 136. 55. T. S. Perry, "Ivan Turgenieff," Atlantic, May 1874, 569. 56. [George P. Lathrop], rev. of Old Kensington, by Miss [Anne] Thackeray, Atlantic, September 1873, 371. 57. [W. D. Howells], rev. of Liza, by Ivan Turgenev, Atlantic, February 1873, 239· 58. G. P. Lathrop, "The Novel and Its Future," Atlantic, September 1874, 313. 59. Henry James, "Anthony Trollope," Century, July 1883, 390. A Harper's reviewer took a stance similar to James's, saying that even when George Eliot's analytical interruptions were individually "good," from "an artistic point-ofview ... they are objectionable, as interrupting the movement of the story" (rev. of Earl's Desire, by R. E. Francillon, Harper's, May 1871,931). 60. Howells, Prefaces to Contemporaries (1882-1920) (Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1957), 76. 61:. Idealism, which was occasionally articulated with the romance, was the main platform for fiction that competed with realism for legitimacy, but the proponents of idealism generally joined the realists in trying to exclude writers of sentimental and sensation fiction from their professional formation. See Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), 48-49. 62. [Horace E. Scudder], "James, Crawford, Howells," Atlantic, June 1886,850. 63. William Crary Brownell, "William Makepeace Thackeray," Scribner's Magazine, February 1899, 246. 64. Henry James, "The Art of Fiction" [1884, 1888], Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American-Writers, English Writers, ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 52. 65. [W. D. Howells], rev. of Arne, by Bjornsterne Bjornson, Atlantic, April 1870, 5°5· 66. [Oliver Wendell Holmes], "The Stereoscope and the Stereograph," Atlantic, June 1859, 746.

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67. Howells, Prefaces, 184. 68. See for example George P. Lathrop, "The Growth of the Novel," Atlantic, June 1874, 684. 69. George Eliot, "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," in Eliot, Essays, 329. Eliot's essay "Notes on Form in Art" (1868) in the same volume also emphasizes organicism. 70. W. C. Wilkinson, "The Literary and Ethical Quality of George Eliot's Novels," Scribner's, October 1874, 693. Praise for Mary Noailles Murfree's "sinewy compactness of language" and for Irving's and Hawthorne's style being "an elastic garment that fits all the uses of the body" similarly suggest that works of professionalliterature have the spare functionalism and unity amid variegation of a body. See [Horace E. Scudder], rev. of The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains, by Charles Egbert Craddock [Mary Murfree], Atlantic, October 1885, 558; also Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "Literature as an Art," Atlantic, December 1867, 751. 71. [Henry James], rev. of Felix Holt, by George Eliot, Nation, 12 August 1866, 128. James wrote elsewhere that Eliot was stronger in her "touches" than in her "composition," and that her observation was "decidedly of the feminine kind: it deals, in preference, with small things." See Henry James Jr., "The Novels of George Eliot," Atlantic, October 1866, 488. As the leading woman novelist in the English language, Eliot was of course a lightning rod for gendered anxieties about authorship. 72. Ironically, this emphasis on the individual as the locus of change is a linchpin of many works read, in the nineteenth century and today, as sentimental, as Jane Tompkins has eloquently described. Nothing so identifiably Christian as the heart or soul is the locus of the individual response presumed by high realism, though. Moreover, the extreme attenuation of response presumed by connoisseurship suggests the onset of the split between knowing and doing-being a privileged but powerless spectator versus being an individual actor caught up in great historical forces-that June Howard attributes to naturalism and relates, interestingly enough, to Progressive-era professionalism. See Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), 132-33; June Howard, Form and History in Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1985), 104-41. 73· Howells, Prefaces, 91. 74. Josiah Holland, "Goodness as Literary MateriaV' Scribner's, September 18 78,743-4475. [A. V. Dicey], rev. of Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot, Nation, 12 October 1876,231.

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76. Hughes, 43-44. 77. Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London and New York: Methuen, :1980),3. 78. In a study of realism and its alternatives in Germany, an analysis that has influenced my own, Russell A. Berman suggests that realism was "the corollary to a viable ideology of laissez-faire liberalism" and that its "internal aesthetic malaise mirrors the demise of liberalism and of its faith in meaning, language, and discursive exchange." See Berman, The Rise of the Modern German Novel: Crisis and Charisma (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, :1986), :134. 79. Rev. of John Andross, by Rebecca Harding Davis, Scribner's, October :1874, 753· 80. As this formulation suggests, the kind of individualist ad hominist reading I am describing was quite distinct from M. M. Bakhtin's idea, reiterated throughout his work but especially in The Dialogic Imagination and Problems of Dostoevsky's

Poetics, that the characters as well as the narration in a novel could bring together various social languages whose interaction produced social knowledge. The most important sign of this difference is that the realists' embrace of character was often contrasted with the production of mere "types," which presumably allowed characters to represent moral values, social forces, or intellectual propensities symbolically, as Bakhtin discusses, rather than dissolving them into a particular character's personality. See for example William Dean Howells, Editor's Study, ed. James W. Simpson (Troy, N.Y.: Whits ton, :1983), 2:1. 8:1. Larson, 225. 82. Philip S. Foner traces the renewal of trade union activity on a national scale after the Civil War, a reaction in part to the increased concentration of capital during the war, in the first two volumes of his History of the Labor Movement in the United States. Volume 2 describes the 1880s as a decade of unprecedented consolidation among workers, mainly through the Knights of Labor. See History of the Labor Movement in the United States. Vol. 2.: From the Founding of the A. F. of L. to the Emergence of American Imperialism (:1955; reprint, New York: International Publishers, 1975), 47-74· 83. "About Old and New Novels," Critic, 22 March :1884, 154. 84. Eugene Benson, "Literature and the People," Galaxy, 15 April 1867, 874. 85. George Dekker analyzes the literary historical significance of Annie Adams Fields's drawing room in "Henry James, Willa Cather, and the House of Fields" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Literature Association, Baltimore, Maryland, May :1993). Henry James, The Bostonians, ed. Alfred Habegger (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., :1976), 15, 164. Subsequent references to this work will appear parenthetically, marked "B." 86. [Charles Dudley Warner], "Editor's Study," Harper's, January 1893, 3:15. See

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also Henry James's "The Novels of George Eliot," Atlantic, October 1866, 482, in which he says of "Janet's Repentance" that "[ilt would be difficult for what is called realism to go further than in the adoption of a heroine stained with the vice of

intemperance." 87. Larson, 23; Rothstein, 311. The analogy between realist fiction and medicine was used to justify transgressive fictional explorations of the social body: "where others would hack unmercifully, her scalpel cuts with a clean and trenchant stroke and wounds but to heal with the permanence of true health" (rev. of Waiting for the Verdict, by Rebecca Harding Davis, Lippincott's, January 1868, 419)' "'Madame Bovary' is no more immoral than a dissecting-room or a hospital is immoral," another reviewer claimed (rev. of The Bane of a Life, Galaxy, September 1870, 419)' However, insofar as anatomy rather than surgery dominated the representation of realists as wielders of scalpels, the realists were subject to attack. Michael Fried's study of realism (focusing on Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane, somewhat arbitrary representatives of this phenomenon) is an interesting exploration of links between realism and the representation of surgery, specifically through these representations' common preoccupation with practices of writing. See Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987). See also Mark Seltzer's argument about the relationship between surveillance, embodiment, and these metaphors of dissection in Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), 95-96. 88. Fiske, 80, 82. Emile Zola's use of medical analogies for his version of realism, laid out in his treatise "The Experimental Novel" (1880), stimulated interest in this analogy. The collection in which this essay appeared was reviewed relatively promptly in the United States, and Zola's works were constant objects of fascination and loathing in Atlantic-cohort periodicals, often being used to discredit realism or to represent versions of realism that were unacceptable in the United States. "The Experimental Novel" was part of a collection by Zola reviewed anonymously by T. S. Perry, under the title "Zola's Essays," in the Atlantic, January 1881, 116-19; and by Marie S. Stillman, also anonymously, under the title "Zola as a Critic" by the Nation, 16 March 1882,233-34. 89. Pauline E. Hopkins, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1899; reprint, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), 13-14. As I suggested in the introduction, Hopkins's claims on "romance" are consonant with the romantic revival that emerged in the 1880s and 189os, which offered her a more literary kind of authority than sentimental or sensation fiction would have. 90. Warren, 40-41. 91. Despite expressing admiration for Howells's ability, for example, the Nation faulted him with missing the highest function of art by attending to "minute felicities" rather than the "whole": "To write in this way is to appeal to the reader by

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moments, to please the greatest number, because it is easiest to please by moments; but it is to lose form, for when one thinks of the story a multiplicity of details come back to his memory, which has lost in them the great lines that alone make a whole of any artistic work" ([G. E. Woodberry], rev. of The Lady of the Aroostook, by William Dean Howells, Nation, 20 March 1879, 205)' 92. "Literary Virility," Scribner's, March 1876, 737. As I quoted above, Howells also suggested that the "essentials" of an artistic "microcosm" might be "the little things and not the large things" (Howells, Prefaces, 184). 9). Nancy Armstrong has suggested that insofar as subjectivity was a femalecoded domain, the feminine has since the eighteenth century been a crucial mediation for all novelistic representation. However, it would be consistent with her careful historicism to presume that different literary formations forge their relation to the feminine in different ways, one of which is the realist-professional version I am describing that articulates the feminine with medicine and addiction. See Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987),4. 94. "On the Writing of Novels," 1) 7. 95. The exclusion of homeopathic practitioners from membership in the American Medical Association meant that a branch of medicine that had traditionally been hospitable to women was disqualified from professionalism, for example. See Rothstein, 171. 96. Precisely because gender is a cultural rather than a biological category, there could be slippages in the genderings of authors, even though an author's gender (as in the case of James's criticisms of Eliot) could also be used as a limiting principle. A vivid example of this slippage occurs in Lathrop'S criticism of Mary Noailles Murfree, whose first novel was published under the pseudonym "Charles Craddock," that "the fact that she was [subsequently] known to be a woman seems to have reacted on the authoress and to have affected her writing. For she then gave free play to an exaggerated sentimentality of description which previously she had curbed." Sentimentalism, the product of femininity, is not necessarily inherent in women's writing, but is something to which they are vulnerable because of their gender. Uncomfortably, Lathrop also credited Elizabeth Stoddard with that "vigor which, for want of a more searching and pliable term, we call masculine." See George Parsons Lathrop, "Audacity in Women Novelists," North American Review, May 1890, 611. 97. A few samples of the terms' use confirm their pejorative emphasis and nearredundant use to modify sentimentalism. Giles refers to "sentimentalism of the weakest and the most mawkish kind" as well as "maudlin sentimentalism" (205, 210) in his piece on "Sentimentalism." W. C. Wilkinson praised George Eliot for being "no maudlin sentimentalist," and William Crary Brownell praised Thomas

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Hardy's work for exhibiting "no stilted language, no mawkish sentimentality, no melodramatic hysteria." See W. C. Wilkinson, "The Literary and the Ethical Quality of George Eliot's Novels," Scribner's Monthly, October 1874, 697; Brownell, "Recent English Fiction," Galaxy, November 1876,633. 98. Henry Giles, "Sentimentalism," Harper's, July 1860, 204. 99. J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951; reprint, Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1991), 140. 100. Giles, 205. 101. My account of romantic love has been shaped by Shulamith Firestone's discussion of romantic love as an ideological ruse by which women are compensated with somehow specious emotion for their real forfeiting of self-determination in marriage. A man's idealization of a woman in romantic love "voids the woman's class inferiority," though only temporarily, writes Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1970), 148. 102. Anne Vincent-Buffault, The History of Tears: Sensibility and Sentimentality in France, trans. Teresa Bridgeman (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), 167, 245. On the contradiction between the "simultaneous demands for unselfconscious sincerity and deliberate communication," see Dorothy Mermin, The Au-

dience in the Poem: Five Victorian Poets (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1983), 6. Other works that address the emergence in the nineteenth century of a discomfort with the conventional nature of expressivity are Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982), 43; Agnew, 86; Jay Fliegelman,

Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority 1750-1800 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), esp. 9-35 and 93-106; and Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism (New York: Vintage, 1974), esp. 8-24. Not only women were caught in this changing valuation of the signs of emotion. An article promoting "realism" in drama suggested that modern Americans are more "exacting and fastidious" than their ancestors and identify emotiveness with a "lack of self-command." The revealing exceptions to this generalization, according to the author, are immigrants and "the less sophisticated of our own lower classes...." See "About Acting," in "Culture and Progress," Scribner's Monthly,

September 1872, 631-32. 103. Vincent-Buffault, 243, 167. 104- Nancy Armstrong persuasively contends that the prejudice against women's "self-display" originated, at least in England, in the bourgeoisie's producing a new, normative version of femininity-domestic femininity-precisely in opposition to the previously reigning aristocratic version of selfhood, which was marked by sumptuary display. If so, this would not be the first instance of a bourgeois

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value's originating in the class's contest with the aristocracy but being turned to the domination of the working class. The stereotype of social upstarts whose gaudy accessories betray their inferior origins testifies to this idea's having swiveled and persisted. See Armstrong, 76-77. 105. Vincent-Buffault, 177. Quoted from Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Jour-

nail (13 June 1858). 106. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 33. 107. Agnew cites this truism of classical rhetoric, exemplified by Cicero's De Officiis, on 93. See also one of the best-known rhetoric textbooks in the United States during the early and middle nineteenth century: Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 14th ed. (London: Spottiswoode, 1825), 9. 108. The Critic published this symposium in 1888, in response to an article about novel writing in The Pall Mall Gazette which was in turn reviewing an essay by British novelist Walter Besant. The Pall Mall article had introduced, as a touchstone for novelists, the following passage from Horace's "Art of Poetry," as the Critic translates it: "If you wish me to weep, you must yourself grieve first; then your misfortunes will trouble me, 0 Telephus or Peleus. If you speak what is improperly assigned you [what is not suited to your character], I shall either sleep or laugh." As the anonymous Critic commentator (probably one of its editors, Jeannette and Joseph Gilder) points out, the range of responses to the question about whether authors agreed with Horace might be summed up by the distance between Mark Twain's "Yes," an endorsement of Horace, and Edward Eggleston's strong rejection of the passage, demonstrating that the issue was a matter for internal controversy even among writers identified with realism. See "On the Writing of Novels," 134- The interpolation is in the original. 109. "On the Writing of Novels," 136. 110. "On the Writing of Novels," 135-36. 111. [Henry James], rev. of Waiting for the Verdict, by Rebecca Harding Davis, Nation, 21 November 1867, 410-11. 112. On Davis's financial exigencies and her relations with Peterson's and the Atlantic, see Tillie Olsen, "A Biographical Interpretation," in Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories (New York: Feminist Press, 1985), 101, 128; and Sharon M. Harris, Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 72-73. As Harris points out on 137, Waiting for the Verdict got more favorable reviews as well. 113. Rebecca Harding Davis, John Andross (New York: Orange, 1874), 191. Subsequent references to this work will appear parenthetically in the text, marked

"JA."

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114. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), 105. 115. As this example suggests, ad hominism is perhaps the primary means by which nineteenth-century texts (though not only ones read as realist, I suggest) denied contradictions, a phenomenon Colin MacCabe has usefully identified. See Colin MacCabe, Theoretical Essays: Film, Linguistics, Literature (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1985),39,44. 116. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (New York: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1983), 51. 117. Sigmund Freud, "On Narcissism: An Introduction," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 20 vols. (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1968), 14:89. 118. Veblen, 83. This is one reason why Ann Douglas's critique of sentimentalism, which she charges with manifesting and inducing narcissistic as well as consumeristic pleasures, is somewhat mistaken in its object. Her study The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Avon Books, 1977) brilliantly brings together an extraordinary range of cultural practices that she holds to celebrate the self in its averageness or even its lowliness and that she dubs sentimental. Moreover, she persuasively links this leveling but apolitical valuation of the common individual to the emergence of consumerism, and especially to women's transformation from being producers to being (more often, and above all symbolically) consumers (6)). However, her analysis underestimates the extent to which the whole culture, not just women or sentimental practices, was permeated by capitalist relations, including consumerism. See also Agnew's discussion about the roots of many of the phenomena Douglas identifies with sentimentalism in Common Sense Philosophy (Agnew, 187). 119. Freud, 82. 120. Edwin Booth, the father of Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was an actor, as was Joseph Jefferson, who was famous for his portrayal of Rip Van Winkle and who was a friend of Davis and her husband. Theodore Thomas was a solo violinist who organized his own orchestra in New York City in the 1860s. 121. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), 175· 122. At one point another character does enlist Isabel's help in foiling a plot against her father on the theory that if Caesar had sought Calpurnia's aid, his assassination might have been averted. The analogy, however, uses literature to think through an entire complex of events, rather than simply providing a romantic coding for Isabel. And although the character finds the analogy helpful, Isabel resolutely resists it: "'This is not Rome:" she points out dryly (JA 256).

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12). As a writer in the Critic put it, "most of us, in our moments of novelreading, are to be classed in the category of invalids." Elaborating on the analogy between authors and physicians, the writer declared that "The physician helps me most who mixes his medicine with a smile, and an assurance that my disease is only a temporary disarrangement" ("The Plot of the New Novel," Critic, 4 April 1885, 157,158). Clifford Siskin also notes the significance of imaginative literature being deemed addictive and therefore in need of medical supervision, emphasizing the construction of the self as having a deep psychology into which an expert can intervene as a necessary underpinning of both phenomena. See Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), 181-94. 124. Women were widely charged with addictive reading, but there was relatively scanty press given to women's alcoholism and drug addiction (especially among the bourgeoisie). The typical opium addict of the nineteenth century was, according to Oakley Ray, a "thirty- to fifty-year-old white woman" who bought opium or morphine legally, perhaps in the form of a "family remedy" from Sears, Roebuck. See Oakley Ray, Drugs, Society, and Human Behavior, 2d ed. (St. Louis: Mosby, 1978), )08. My argument diverges here from Wai-Chee Dimock's sense that "professionalism" and "feminism" were historically unconnected as they were produced in Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." Her essay provides an interesting account of the possibility for a literary work to construct a professional reader, however. See Dimock, "Feminism, New Historicism, and the Reader," in Readers in History, 95. 125. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Doctor Zay (1882; reprint, New York: Feminist Press, 1987), 168-69. Subsequent references to this work will appear parenthetically in the text marked "DZ." 126. Another interesting novel about a woman physician is Annie Nathan Meyer's Helen Brent, M.D.: A Social Study (New York: Cassell Publishing Co., 1892). Meyer's protagonist (Brent re-writing Breen 7) seems to be less clearly articulated with authorial professionalism, though, since she represents medicine in its much more academic, scientific, research-oriented late-century phase. She helps to found a medical school modeled on European universities, and she takes pride in its being cutting-edge, scientifically. However, the novel is still preoccupied with how to combine her professional status with marriage, and there is an interesting analogy to Zola's conception of realism-emerging as naturalism in the United States during the 1890s-in her defense of her own unfeminine and ungenteel campaign against venereal disease, which might even function in the novel as the sign of a profounder disease in relations between the sexes, one carried by men who cannot adjust to a new, superior kind of woman like Helen Brent. 127. Marion Harland, "Domestic Infelicity of Literary Women," Arena, July 1890, )1)-20.

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3:11

128. William Dean Howells, Dr. Breen's Practice (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1881), 187. Earlier instances of Grace Breen changing color appear on 81, 91-92, :112, 131, and 172. 129. Howells, Dr. Breen's Practice, 248, 249. 130. [Harriet Waters Preston], "Old Creole Days and Other Novels," Atlantic, January 1880, 50. 131. Sarah Orne Jewett, A Country Doctor (1884; reprint, New York: New American Library, 1986), 235. 132. G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes Toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, Evanston, San Francisco, and London: Harper and Row, 1976), 275. 133. Shirley Samuels, "Introduction," to Shirley Samuels, ed., The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), 3-4. Samuels's collection blurs the distinction between, on the one hand, sentimentalism, a particular construction of emotionality often criticized, and on the other hand, emotional response and sympathy, widespread cultural values-but this blurring means that its contents provide a number of wide-ranging analyses of the politics of emotionality during this century. 134. Barker-Benfield,200. 135. Buhle, 56-60; Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement: From the First Trade Unions to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1982), 58, 62. 136. Bert Bender, "Darwin and 'The Natural History of Doctresses': The Sex War Between Howells, Phelps, Jewett, and James," Prospects 18 (1993): 114-15. I am grateful to Bender's essay for pointing out to me that The Bostonians might usefully be considered part of this constellation of books about women doctors. His emphasis on male sexual domination in Dr. Breen's Practice and The Bostonians has also informed my analysis, although he sticks closely to the texts' navigation of Darwin's ideas of natural selection. 137· Warren, 93-94, 96. 4. The Romantic Revival 1. "Eight-Hour Song," John Swinton's Paper, 16 May 1886, reprinted in Philip S. Foner, The History of the Labor Movement in the United States: Vol. 2: From the Founding of the A. F. of L. to the Emergence of American Imperialism (1955; reprint, New York: International Publishers, 1975), 103. Foner's history is my main source about the struggle for the eight-hour day. 2. The fullest biography of Repplier is George Stewart Stokes's Agnes Repplier: Lady of Letters (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1949), but her niece Emma Repplier has also published a useful biography entitled Agnes Repplier: A

)12

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Memoir (Philadelphia: Dorrance & Co., 1957). See also the very full entry about her by Paul R. Messbarger, "Repplier, Agnes," in Dictionary of American Biography, Suppl. 4, 1946-1950, ed. John A. Garraty and Edward T. James (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974), 688-90. Repplier published an autobiographical essay that highlights her visit to Boston: "Eight Decades," Eight Decades: Essays and Episodes (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1970), 1-49. 3. Agnes Repplier, "The Decay of Sentiment," Books and Men [1888] (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., 1892),119-20. The essay was originally published in the Atlantic, July 1887,67-76. 4. Repplier, "Decay," 124. 5. Agnes Repplier, "Fiction in the Pulpit," Points of View [18911 (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., 1892), 112. The essay was originally published in the Atlantic, October 1889,527-36. 6. Repplier, "Fiction," 129-30. 7. Repplier, "Fiction," 1)1. 8. Repplier, "Fiction," 134. 9. Repplier, "English Railway Fiction," Points of View, 209. This essay was originally published in the Atlantic, July 1891,78-87. 10. Repplier, "Fiction," 134. 11. Repplier, "Fiction," 135. 12. Repplier, "Literary Shibboleths," Points of View, 81-82. This essay was originally published in the Atlantic, May 1890,631-38. 13. Repplier was a late reader, in her mother's view, and was persuaded to learn only when her mother refused to allow anything to be read to her. The two essays in which Repplier discusses her early experiences in reading are "Eight Decades" and "Books That Have Hindered Me," the latter being found in Points of View, 64-77. 14- Agnes Repplier, "The Children's Poets," Essays in Idleness [18931 (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, & Co, 1891), 50. 15. Agnes Repplier, "Pleasure: A Heresy," Points of View, 151. 16. Agnes Repplier, "Our Belief in Books," Compromises (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., 1904), 85-86. 17. Agnes Repplier, "Our Friends, The Books," Essays in Miniature (1892; reprint New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), 13-14. 18. Repplier, "Literary Shibboleths," 82. 19. Repplier, "Literary Shibboleths," 91, 92. 20. Repplier, "Literary Shibboleths," 87. 21. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation)," Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127-86. Repplier's complaint against the realists here anticipates objections to the Book-of-the-Month Club that Janice Rad-

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way has analyzed quite wonderfully. In this passage her assessment suggests that the ideological sleight-of-hand demanded by Common Sense Philosophy was still enough of a cultural imperative to merit staunch defending in the mid-twentieth century: "[T]he Book-of-the-Month Club displayed-even celebrated-the function of critical authority and it thereby externalized a process that was otherwise conceived as internal to the individual who, in arriving at independent judgment, was thought to be exercising only universal reason." See Radway, "Mail-Order Culture and Its Critics: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Commodification and Consumption, and the Problem of Cultural Authority," Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paul Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992),522. 22. I rely on Raymond Williams's useful terminology here; see "Dominant, Residual, and Emergent" in his Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 121-27. 23. Bliss Perry, A Study of Prose Fiction (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903), 255. 24. For example, Spiller's Literary History of the United States bypasses the debate by casting realism and romance as fictional impulses that are likely to commingle in a given work; it omits any mention of a romantic revival. See Robert E. Spiller et al., eds., Literary History of the United States, 3rd ed. (London: Macmillan Co., 1963), 878. The Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott et al., likewise bypasses the debate (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988). Carl Van Doren discusses the rage for historical romances before the Spanish-American War as "an American version of the movement led in England by Robert Louis Stevenson, Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, and Anthony Hope," but he refers to historical romances about America, not the imperialistic adventure fictions Americans were reading. His historical account appears as the section "The Later Novel: Howells" in William Peterfield Trent et al., The Cambridge History of American Literature, 4 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1921), y89. Amy Kaplan's excellent chapter on "Nation, Region, and Empire" puts late-century historical romances in the context of imperialism but does not address the struggle over the romance form itself, in The Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliott et al. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1991), 256-66. Peter Keating comes closer to engaging the public discourses about romance, identifying "one strand of late Victorian fiction [that includes James, Hardy, Butler, and Corelli] in which children are portrayed as the victims of modern intellectual and moral restlessness" and another in which "adults were the enemy." However, he does not relate this phenomenon to the debate over realism and romance. See Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875-1914 (London: Sicher and Warburg, 1989), 219. Keating also links these works to U.S. boy books such as those by Twain. Mark Seltzer's Bodies and Machines tantalizingly refers to a "turn

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of the century reinvention of the American romance," but his sole source for it seems to be James's The American (1879) and the 1907 New York preface to it. See Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), 66. 25. Martin S. Day, A Handbook of American Literature: A Comprehensive Study From Colonial Times to the Present Day (New York: Crane, Russak, 1975), 146-47. For a random sampling of British literary histories that address the romantic revival, see George Saintsbury, The English Novel (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1927); Wilbur 1. Cross, The Development of the English Novel (New York: Macmillan, 1928); Lionel Stevenson, The History of the English Novel, 11 vols. (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967); and Peter Conrad, The History of English Literature: One Indivisible, Unending Book (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1987). 26. My section title adapts Peter Stallybrass and Allon White's The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986), a work that shapes my analysis here. 27. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 7880-7920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), xvi. 28. Lears, 103. For productive analyses of late nineteenth-century adventure fiction in relation to imperialism, see Martin Burgess Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (New York: Basic Books, 1979); Amy Kaplan, "Romancing the Empire: The Embodiment of American Masculinity in the Popular Historical Novel of the 1890S," American Literary History 2 (1990): 659-90; Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, or, The Impossibility of Children's Fiction (London: Macmillan Press, 1984); and Edward Said, "Kim, The Pleasures of Imperialism," Raritan 7 (1987) 2:27-64. 29. William R. Thayer, "The New Story-Tellers and the Doom of Realism," Forum, December 1894, 478. 30. "The Romance of Modern Life," Atlantic, November 1881, 641. 31. My main source for facts and analysis about u.s. imperialism in the late nineteenth century is Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 7860-7898 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1963). 32. Frederick Emory, writing in the Baltimore Sun, 26 May 1895, cited in LaFeber, 282. 33. Henry Rutgers Marshall, "Rudyard Kipling and Racial Instinct," Century, July 1899, 376. 34. Elliot Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986), 224, cited in Kaplan, "Romancing the Empire," 666. 35. Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, "The Great Realists and the Empty Story-Tellers," Forum, February 1895, 730. Foner notes that "The New Feudalism" was a common description of monopolistic capitalism in the 1880s (13).

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36. Boyesen, 725-26. 37. As Wilbur L. Cross put it, "Stevenson with a middle flight has reached both

the scholar and the general reader. Women only has he failed to please ... " (Cross, 282). 38. George Washington, "Farewell Address," 19 September 1796, reprinted in Basic Writings of George Washington, ed. Saxe Commins (New York: Random House, 1948), 627-44. "The Great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign Nations is in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible," Washington warned, in the midst of a long explanation for why the United States should avoid either lasting alliances or conflicts with other

nations (Washington, 640). 39. "Overproduction" represents the idea that the nation's economic ills (culminating in the Depression of 1893) would be cured if only it could find or create new consumer markets. Foreign-policy decisions during the latter part of the nineteenth century tended to favor manufacturing over agricultural interests on the grounds that the former were more regular and predictable, and they threw a greater proportion of the nation's energy and resources into industrial production. But overproduction obviously presumed that production was an uncontrollable good in itself (LaFeber, 21). As many people involved in the labor movement recognized, the idea that overproduction demanded imperial conquest also provided a way to move public attention and sympathy away from the demands of American workers, who would have happily consumed more of the goods they produced if employment opportunities and wages were better (Foner, 419)' 40. Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Terry Lovell, Consuming Fiction (New York and London: Verso, 1987), 31-35. Campbell's and Lovell's work was discussed in chapter 3. Mark Seltzer offers an alternative analysis of how production and consumption are managed in Bodies and Machines; see especially 59-66. 41. See Stallybrass and White, 197-202. 42. On the national and imperial goals of field work among Native Americans in the Southwest during these decades, and on Frank Cushing's success in publicizing ethnographic activities in periodicals such as the Century, see Curtis Hinsley, "Ethnographic Charisma and Scientific Routine: Cushing and Fewkes in the American Southwest, 1879-1893," in George W. Stocking Jr., Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1983),53-69. 43. [Horace E. Scudder], "A Few Story-Tellers, Old and New," Atlantic, November 1893,693, 44. On the rise of literary agents, see John Tebbe!, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, 4 vols. (New York: Bowker, 1972-1981), 2:130-40. 45. Perry, 276.

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46. F. Marion Crawford, The Novel: What It Is (1893; reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), 102. It is instructive to compare Crawford's version of the link between the French Revolution and addiction with William Wordsworth's: Wordsworth attributes the "degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation" in part to "the great national events which are daily taking place," prominent among which was the French Revolution. His goal, unlike Crawford's, was to provide an alternative to this appetite for "stimulants." See William Wordsworth, "Preface" to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads [1800], in Selected Poems and Prefaces by William Wordsworth, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965),449. 47. [S M. Crothers], "The Confession of a Lover of Romance," Atlantic, August 1897, 281, 288. 48. [Crothers], 282. 49. Kenneth W. Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), 90. This part of Warren's work was discussed in the previous chapter. 50. Richard Olney, "International Isolation of the United States," Atlantic, May 1898,588. 51. Theorists of racial reversion were legion in this era. For a survey of some of the most prominent texts, see LaFeber and also Ralph Deward Bald Jr., "The Development of Expansionist Sentiment in the United States, 1885-1895, As Reflected in the Periodical Literature" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Pittsburgh, 1953). 52. "[T]he exclusion necessary to the formation of social identity at [one level] is simultaneously a production at the level of the Imaginary, and a production, what is more, of a complex hybrid fantasy emerging out of the very attempt to demarcate boundaries, to unite and purify the social collectivity" (Stallybrass and White, 193). 53. The romantic revival marked the reclamation of reading as a physical experience in several registers; see for example Alice Wellington Robbins, "Reality and Realism," Critic, 10 September 1887, 123-24; Edgar Saltus, "Morality in Fiction," Lippincott's, December 1888,713; and Robert Louis Stevenson, "A Gossip on Romance," in The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays, ed. Jeremy Treglown (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988), 172-82. Given the previous efforts of the bourgeoisie to make reading private, silent, and intangible, and to play down the role that the market played in making books available to readers-to pretend that the reader was effectively tapping into an author's subjectivity, and that the mediation of the book or magazine was trivial or external to that process-this move to valorize reading's physical thrills provides exactly the kind of transgressive pleasure in an abandoned set of practices and values that Stallybrass and White describe. In relation to this emergence of the reader as vitally embodied, see also Seltzer, 60. 54. Agnes Repplier, "Leisure," Essays in Idleness (Boston and New York:

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Houghton, Mifflin, & Co., 1901), 97. Originally published in Scribner's Magazine, July 1893, 63-67. 55. Brander Matthews, "The Historical Nove!," Forum, September 1897,90. 56. G. R. Carpenter, "The Neo-Romantic Novel," Forum, March 1898, 121. 57. "George Rice Carpenter," Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, 20 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929), 3:511- 12. 58. On nonworkers in the Knights of Labor, see Foner, 55. 59. [Horace E. Scudder], "Recent American and English Fiction," Atlantic, May 1892,694. 60. Foner, 48-49. 61. The quote is from Foner, 116; for Foner's account and analysis of these events, see 206-18 and 261-78. 62. On Dreiser's use of his experience as a manual laborer, see Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988),132-33; and Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), 44-46. Lutz points out that Dreiser also undertook an exercise cure at a spa, which suggests that the therapeutic value of physical labor was not merely Dreiser's idea. 63. Henry Childs Merwin, "On Being Civilized Too Much," Atlantic, June 1897, 845,846. 64. Lears points out that, as early as the 1880s, the psychologist G. Stanley Hall was one of the foremost promulgators of the idea that children, in the course of growing to adulthood, necessarily repeat the experiences of primitive ancestors (Lears, 147). For an interesting discussion of the relationship between childhood and primitivism as it was formulated in late nineteenth-century European culture, though without the suspicion of the category of "primitivism" that would be prudent, see George Boas, The Cult of Childhood (London: Warburg Institute, Univ. of London, 1966). 65. William Forbush, The Boy Problem, 2d ed. (Boston and Chicago: Pilgrim Press, 1902), 9. 66. Forbush, 34. 67· Rose, 9. 68. Robert Louis Stevenson, "A Humble Remonstrance," The Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Coward, 1950), 371. Originally published in Longman's Magazine, September 1884, in England and reprinted in the United States in the Critic, 13 December 1884,284-86. 69· Green, 58-59. 70. Annie Adams Fields, James T. Fields: Biographical Notes and Personal

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Sketches (1881; reprint, Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1971), 223-25. The quotation is on 223. On the prejudice against dime novels, see also Madeleine B. Stern, ed., Publishers for Mass Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), xv-xvi; Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1987); and Steven Mailloux, Rhetorical Power (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989). 71. Steven Mailloux, "The Rhetorical Use and Abuse of Fiction: Eating Books in Late Nineteenth-Century America," boundary 2 17, no. 1 (1990): 147. Mailloux quotes G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, vol. 1 (New York: D. Appleton, 1904), 335, 404, and 339. Mailloux also documents the Concord Public Library's exclusion of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a symptom of the fear that inappropriate reading for boys would breed delinquency (100-29). 72. Anthony M. Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency, 2d ed., enl. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977), xviii. On the importance of childsaving as a Progressive project, see David John Hogan, Class and Reform: School and Society in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1985),52. The term "juvenile delinquency" dates from the eighteenth century, but the concept became important in the United States around 1825, when the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents was founded. See Robert M. Mennel, Thorns and Thistles: Juvenile Delinquents in the United States, 1825-1840 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1973), xvii, 3-4. Numerous charities aimed at the welfare or rehabilitation of impoverished or delinquent youths were founded around the middle of the century. 73. Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876-1980 (New York: Harper, 1988), 206, 229, 273-80. A formulation by the president of the 1898 Illinois Conference of Charities made clear that the change in philosophy constituted an extension in the state's authority: "'Who are the children of the state? All children are children of the state or else none are. The state is but the coordinated parentage of childhood .. .' " (Jenkin Lloyd Jenkins, Proceedings of the Illinois Conference of Charities (1898), in Board of State Commissioners of Public Charities, Fifteenth Biennial Report (1898), 282; quoted in Mennel, 130). The legal term for this state parental function is parens patriae, which Mennel discusses in a passage beginning on 14. 74. These three methods are quick (and therefore insufficient, though heuristic) versions of the pedagogical philosophies of John Dewey, William James, and Josiah Royce: indeed, it is a measure of the social importance of the socialization of children that three of the nation's most eminent philosopher-psychologists did substantial work in pedagogy. For the portions of their work that discuss these new methods most directly, see John Dewey, "Interest in Relation to the Training of the

Notes to Chapter Four 319 Will," John Dewey on Education, ed. Reginald D. Archambault (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1964), 281, 276; William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology:

and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (New York: Norton, 1958), 46; and Josiah Royce, "The Imitative Functions, and Their place in Human Nature," Century, May 1894,139, 142. These arguments about education lend themselves to Mark Seltzer's analysis that in "disciplinary individualism," "the achievement of the standard" becomes "the measure of individuality" (Seltzer, 155; emphasis Seltzer's). 75. Ellen Key, The Century of the Child (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1909), 255· 76. Key, 203-32. 77. Mary Mapes Dodge, "Children's Magazines," Scribner's Monthly, July 1873, 352-54; reprinted in Virginia Haviland, ed., Children and Literature: Views and Reviews (New York: Lothrop, 1973), 26-32. The quotation is on 27. 78. Dodge, in Haviland, 27. 79· Leon Edel, The Treacherous Years: 1895-1901, vol. 4 of The Life of Henry James (New York: Avon Books, 1969), 15 and 264. See esp. 208-12 and 260-64 for the heart of Edel's argument about James's identification with his child characters. 80. Agnes Repplier, "Children in Fiction," Essays in Miniature (1892; reprint, New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), 144. 81. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, in The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels (New York: A Signet Classic, New American Library, 1980), 292. Subsequent references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text, marked 82. Henry James, rev. of The Gayworthys, by Adeline Dutton Whitney, Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers, ed. Leon Edel

and Mark Wilson (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1984), 637; originally published in North American Review, October 1865,619-22. 83. William Dean Howells, "Henry James, Jr.," Century, November 1882, 28. 84. Rev. of The Princess Casamassima, by Henry James, Lippincott's, February 188 7,359. 85. [Mrs. C. B. Martin], rev. of Tales of Three Cities, by Henry James, Nation, 20 November 1884, 442. 86. "Our Monthly Gossip," Lippincott's, January 1887, 184. 87. On James's comments about The Turn of the Screw outside of the "Preface," see Edel, 213-14. 88. William Dean Howells, Editor's Study, ed. James W. Simpson (Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1983),41. 89. Henry James, "Preface" to The Aspern Papers, in The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces by Henry James (Boston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1984), 170. Subsequent references to this work will appear parenthetically in the text, marked liP'''

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90. Howells, "Henry James, Jr.," Century, November 1882,29. 91. Agnes Repplier, "Ghosts," Atlantic, December 1894,741,747. 92. Rev. of The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James, Lippincott's, February 1882, 214· 93. James's "Preface," written a decade after The Turn of the Screw, must also be

seen as a response to the work's reception. Several of the contemporary reviews reprinted in the Norton Critical Edition attest to critics' "disgust" and "outrage" at the novel, so James's denial of responsibility has at least a few specific targets. See Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 169-80. 94. Bruce Robbins, "Shooting Off James's Blanks: Theory, Politics, and The Turn of the Screw," The Henry James Review 5, no. 3 (1984): 195-96. Millicent Bell, drawing on Robbins's approach, also presents a reading sensitive to the sexualized class relations of the novella in Meaning in Henry James (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991),223-42. 95. Edel also points out that Miles's "misdemeanor" is "in the realm of speech, not sex," although he proposes that the reader can choose "between blasphemy and obscenity" (Ede!, 208). 96. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, 2 vols. (1904; reprint, New York: Appleton, 1914), 1:435. 97. Edmund Wilson, "The Ambiguity of Henry James," Hound and Horn 7 (1934): 385-406; revised rept. in A Case Book on Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw," ed. Gerald Willen (New York: Crowell, 1960), 115-53. The quotation is on 1.11.. Martha Banta, Henry James and the Occult: The Great Extension (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1972), 132. Even Leon Ede!, drawing on James's biography, claims, "The essential point the story makes is to show Miles's wish to be a boy among boys-and the fact that his expression of such a wish is deemed evil by the governess" (Ede!, 208). 98. Lewis Carroll [Charles Dodgson], Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and

Through the Looking Glass (1865, 1871; reprint, New York: New American Library, 1960), 236-37. Martha Banta's insistence that James's ghosts "connote states of being in the narrative iconography," "whether they stand as actual presences or as manipulated metaphors for consciousness," represents a similar position, although Banta locates the logic of The Turn of the Screw in the governess's personal consciousness (Banta, 132, 122). 99. The benevolent coerciveness of Progressive (and proto-Progressive) pedagogy is part of the "medico-tutelary complex" whose effects on Henry James's work Mark Seltzer describes in his Foucauldian study of James. Although Seltzer does not address pedagogic theories explicitly, he gestures toward a reading of The Turn of

Notes to Chapter Four

}21

the Screw that is very close to the one I am proposing here, comparing the gov-

erness's power to this "medico-tutelary complex" and arguing that the famous ambiguities of this story are less important than an examination of how "desire, knowledge, and power" function in the world. He does not actually undertake a reading of The Turn of the Screw, however, nor does he relate these issues to generic controversies. See Mark Seltzer, Henry James and the Art of Power (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1984), 157-58. 100. Claudia Nelson, "Sex and the Single Boy: Ideals of Manliness and Sexuality in Victorian Literature for Boys," Victorian Studies (Summer 1989), 547. 101. The governess's strategy of trying to elicit the children's obedience through earning their affection is very much in keeping with the pedagogical methods of the 1890s. For example, William James, whose ideas were probably familiar to his brother, was sensitive to the transferential dynamics of teaching, noting in 1892 that the "teacher who succeeds in getting herself loved by the pupils will obtain results which one of a more forbidding temperament finds it impossible to secure" (William James, 46). 102. "Perhaps the trouble lies in the curious but highly esteemed fallacy that the child of fiction is expected to be always precocious and sprightly, to emit sparks like a cat, and electrify the sluggish atmosphere about him," wrote Agnes Repplier (Repplier, "Children," 148-49). 10}. Rose, 4. A contemporary review provides a sample of how very uncomfortable this aspect of The Turn of the Screw made some readers: "Every inch of the picture seems an outrage in our first heat. Even in colder moments, if we admit the fact of infant depravity, if we own that children are supreme actors, and can bar doors on their elders most effectually, we must deny the continuity and the extent of the corruption as suggested here" (from the Bookman, November 1898, 54; reprinted in The Turn of the Screw, A Norton Critical Edition, 172). Stanley Renner also suggests that the children disturb the governess because of their "normal sexual development," but he reduces the possession to a delusion of the governess, whom he also credits with trapping Miles "in the psychosexual undertow of the mother-son relationship.... " His reading of The Turn of the Screw interprets the governess's sighting of Peter Quint in terms of nineteenth-century beliefs about physiognomy. See Stanley Renner, "Sexual Hysteria, Physiognomical Bogeymen, and the 'Ghosts' in The Turn of the Screw," Nineteenth-Century Literature 43, no. 2 (September 1988): 175-94. The quotations are on 193 and 194. On the complexity of the links between various forms of love for children, sexuality, and power relations, see James R. Kincaid's subtle analysis in ChildLoving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). 104. For James's purchase of Lamb House and some parallels between it and Bly,

}22

Notes to Chapter Four

see Edel, 200-2. Edel mentions parallels between The Turn of the Screw and Conrad's Heart of Darkness on 204, and Peter Conrad discusses the relationship between James's late-century storytelling and Conrad's (56}-66). 105. Graham McMaster, "Henry James and India: A Historical Reading of The Turn of the Screw," Clio 18, no. 1 (Fall 1988): 2}-40. 106. Peter G. Beidler has renewed the claim that The Turn of the Screw is a "ghost story," focusing on its continuities with the reports of psychic phenomena being enthusiastically collected and disseminated in the late nineteenth century. See Beidler, Ghosts, Demons, and Henry james: The Turn of the Screw at the Turn of the Century (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1989). 107. Fred G. See also relates The Turn of the Screw to the struggle between romance and realism, suggesting that James's works depicting "possession" resist the realist effort to expel the "noumenal," the Romantic appeal to a stable realm of higher meaning, from the functioning of the sign. "Possession is the voice of metaphysics excluded by a logic that chooses to emphasize the unvarnished fact as the basis of a literary movement," See claims. However, See's article does not account for the fact that James had left "fact-based" realism far behind by the time he wrote The Turn of the Screw, and it essentializes realism and romance as opposing epistemologies in a way that dehistoricizes them. See Fred G. See, "Henry James and the Art of Possession," in Eric J. Sundquist, ed., American Realism: New Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982), 119-}7. The quotation is on 1}4. 108. Shoshana Felman, "Turning the Screw of Interpretation," in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982), 94-207. 109. Bell, 224. See also Alice Hall Petry, "Jamesian Parody, jane Eyre, and 'The Turn of the Screw,'" Modern Language Studies 1}, no. 4 (198}): 61-78. The quoted phrase is from M. M. Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1982), }14. 110. Also the literary margins. Leon Edel and Adeline R. Tintner believe that Peter Quint, under the name Quin, is drawn from a story in Frank Leslie's New York journal of Romance, General Literature, Science and Art, which also contains references to a character named Miles and to Harley Street. The story, Temptation, was serialized in 1855. Edel and Tintner speculate that James may have read the story as a child and/ or may have come across it in a library as an adult. If they are correct, the fact that Quint's origins are subliterary is significant. See Edel and Tintner, "The Private Life of Peter Quin[t]: Origins of 'The Turn of the Screw,'" Henry james Review 7, no. 1 (Fall 1985): 1-4. 111. Edel,156.

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5. Regional Accents 1.

My title signals a debt to Michael Denning's Mechanic Accents, whose at-

tempt to imagine how class issues structured dime novels despite the complexities of the texts' class affiliations provides a model for my approach here. 2. [So Kirk], "Recent Volumes of Short Stories," Atlantic, February 1881,281. 3. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), 284. 4- "Menace" and "discontent" might seem ludicrously mismatched to readers unused to glossing "discontent" as a euphemism for protests such as the march of Coxey's Army on Washington, D.C., in 1894. See "The Political Menace of the Discontented," Atlantic, October 1896, 447-51. Two articles in the Forum, both denying fundamental discontent, also highlighted the term, leading an Arena writer to rebut using the same term. See Octave Thanet [Alice French], "The Contented Masses," Forum, October 1894,204-15; J. H. Canfield, "Is the West Discontented? A Local Study of Facts," Forum, December 1894, 449-61; John E. Bennett, "Is the West Discontented? Is a Revolution at Hand?" Arena, August 1896, 393-405. An article by Arena editor B. 0. Flower also investigated "The General Discontent of America's Wealth Creators as Illustrated in Current Cartoons," in Arena, July 1896, 298-304. 5. Similarly, the Atlantic cohort's proto-Progressive articles recommending that farm families live closer together, form societies for their intellectual and social improvement, and in other ways enrich their lives, by and large minimized or ignored the effects that poverty and indebtedness had on rural women's morale, health, and community-mindedness. See for example George E. Waring Jr., "Life and Work of the Eastern Farmer," Atlantic, May 1877, 584-95; and E. V. Smalley, "The Isolation of Life on Prairie Farms," Atlantic, September 1893, 378-82. 6. Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), 124. 7. Amy Kaplan, "Nation, Region, and Empire," The Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliott et al. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1991), 243. In keeping with the analysis I have been outlining, Kaplan proposes that "regionalists invent places as allegories of desire generated by urban centers" (252). 8. Brodhead, 137; Kaplan, 251. 9. Rev. of In the Tennessee Mountains, by Charles Egbert Craddock, Harper's, September 1884, 640. 10. Anne H. Wharton, "Recent American Fiction," Lippincott's, January 1893, 128. 11. Kaplan suggests that George Washington Cable's less sanguine and stable presentation of racial differences was stabilized and diminished by being labeled as

}24

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regionalist and lumped with other southern regionalist efforts to glamorize the Old South (Kaplan, 244). 12. Herbert Baxter Adams, "The German Origin of New England Towns," Johns Hopkins Studies in History and Political Science 1, no. 1 (188}): 8. I}. The review began, "It was taught pretty generally until quite recently that all peoples, or at any rate all Aryan peoples, had gone through a stage in which the 'ownership' of the soil was vested in the village community. This idea was probably of German origin and originally applied to Germany only. Then the generalization was extended to England and, about the same time, to the vast area of Hindustan. A decade or so of popularization followed." The review cites Henry Maine's Village Communities in the East and West (1871) as a source everyone interested in the subject in the past twenty years would have consulted. See rev. of The Indian Village Community, by B. H. Baden-Powell, Nation 7 October 1897, 28}. On the Boston adherents of Aryan village theories, see Barbara Miller Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing New England Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956), 84-112. On the currency of these ideas, see also Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 6474; Barbara Miller Solomon, 61-65; David D. Van Tassel, Recording America's Past: An Interpretation of the Development of Historical Studies in America, 1607-1884 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1960), 122; Percy D. Westbrook, The New England Town in Fact and Fiction (Rutherford, Madison, and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1982), 147-60. Barbara Miller Solomon has also noted that in Boston, the term "Anglo-Saxon" was used with invidious specificity to distinguish the established families from the Irish immigrants, or "Celts" (Solomon, 9). In relation to the similarities I will be discussing between the Atlantic cohort, on the one hand, and the San Francisco Overland and Chicago Dial, on the other, it is significant that both of these magazines also gave the Aryan Village school of historiography a hearing. See for example James O. Pierce, "The Study of Early Institutions. II," Dial, April 1884, }09-12; Charles H. Cooper, "Anglo-Saxon Freedom," Dial, May 1891, 20-21; John S. Hittell, "Modem Civilization a Teutonic Product," Overland, March 1875,251-55; and a review of Studies in Historical and Political Science, Overland, March 188}, }21. 14. Murfree's mountaineers could also be made the objects of ancestor worship. William Goodell Frost suggested in an Atlantic piece that inhabitants of "Appalachian America" preserved the language and customs of colonial America because of the region's inaccessibility. In keeping with Anglo-Saxonism, however, he also suggested that the "Saxon speech" of "Chaucer's" time could still be heard among the mountaineers. His essay works by the same logic that promoted the veneration of New Englanders, identifying Appalachian mountaineers with the

Notes to Chapter Five

)25

people who settled North America and fought the American Revolution. See Frost, "Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains," Atlantic, March 1899, )11-19. The quoted passages are on )11 and )1). 15. Edith Baker Brown, "Mr. James Lane Allen," Atlantic, January 1897,110. 16. Sarah Orne Jewett, "The Queen's Twin," in Mary Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett, Short Fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman, ed. Barbara H. Solomon (New York: New American Library, 1979), 206. 17. Sarah Orne Jewett, "The Foreigner," Freeman and Jewett, 187. Similarly, an untitled squib in the Critic cited an article in the Chautauquan which held that southern "cracker" idioms are "obsolete English idioms" (Critic,)o May 1896,)97)' David Hackett Fischer comments on the persistence of features of Chaucer's and Shakespeare's English in Appalachia, but reminds us that these continuities, more striking to us than how Appalachian English has changed to resemble ours, do not mean that time has stood still there. See David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), 832. 18. Jewett, "The Queen's Twin," Freeman and Jewett, 212. 19. Rose Terry Cooke, "Clary's Trial," Huckleberries Gathered from New England Hills (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin &: Co., 1891), 183. 20. Amy Kaplan points out that the inhabitants of Dunnet's Landing have a "history based on international trade" with which the narrator's interpretation of the place as a backwater is in tension, and that Mrs. Martin's identification with Queen Victoria is a reminder of Dunnet's Landing's past interconnections with the rest of the world as well as the United States' present ones (Kaplan, 253). 21. Brodhead has suggested that regionalism provided urbanites with imaginative escapes from rapid historical change, offering" cultural elegies" for social orders fast fading away in order to serve as "a cultural version of D. W. Winnicott's transitional object: a symbol of union with the premodern chosen at the moment of separation from it" (Brodhead, 120). Herb gatherers and country seamstresses were antidotes to consumerism and mass production; rural gossips and storytellers provided a consoling contrast to the explosion of print culture. 22. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, "Cock of the Walk," The Copy-Cat and Other Stories (New York and London: Harper &: Bros., 1891), )5. Freeman, "Johnny-inthe-Woods," The Copy-Cat, 60. 23. Freeman, "Johnny-in-the-Woods," 82. 24. Brodhead, 116. 25. Brodhead,166. 26. Meredith Nicholson, "Edward Eggleston," Atlantic, December 1902, 804. 27. [c. M. Thompson], "New Figures in Literature and Art. III. Hamlin Garland," Atlantic, December 1895,843. 28. [Charles Dudley Warner], "Editor's Study," Harper's, May 1896,961.

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29. Even New Orleans was represented as an "exotic" city distant from the Northeast. Its Creole culture was understood as a survival of a past and passing social order, as Helen Taylor discussed in Gender, Race, and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1989), 17. A review of George Washington Cable's Dr. Sevier makes this clear: "The creoles of New Orleans, or descendants of the original French colonists and settlers who founded and impressed their characteristics upon that most exotic of American cities, form a peculiar people, whose identity has been preserved intact for many generations by the insensible operation of the law of inertia, assisted by their traditions and associations, and their indelible social and personal idiosyncrasies. Though gradually diminishing in numbers, and probably destined to extinction at no very remote day, they have successfully resisted amalgamation with the energetic and progressive Anglo-American element that has surged around and about them .... " See "Editor's New Literary Record," Harper's, February 1885,493. 30. Freeman, "A Village Singer," Freeman and Jewett, 369. }:1. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957; reprint, Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 197.3), }4. Caroline Gebhard, rebutting Alfred Habegger, similarly points to the ideological privileging of certain populations as more "real" than others: "To argue that women writers who wrote about rural areas have little to tell us about gender, fantasy, or realism because they are not writing about 'real'-that is modern, urban, middle-class-life is surely circular reasoning." See Caroline Gebhard, "The Spinster in the House of American Criticism," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 10, no. 1 (1991): 87. }2. Brodhead, 122; emphasis in the original. }}. The plausibility of the claim varies with different populations, of course. For instance, it might well be true for Tennessee mountaineers, whom Mary Noailles Murfree made the basis for her fiction, but it is less likely for the Creoles who inspired George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, and others, for Garland's midwestern farm families, or for the rural New Englanders who were represented by the authors I discuss below. Brodhead makes this claim specifically in relation to immigrants' being the objects of regionalist representation; in shifting the focus to regionalism's representation of rural populations, I include more people who are likely to have had access to education. }4. "The Contributors' Club," Atlantic, December 1902, 866. }5. "The Atlantic Monthly," American Agriculturalist, May 1859,154. See advertisements for Scribner's and Cosmopolitan in the February 1887 issue, and for Harper's in the January 1885 issue. }6. The slippage between "regional" and "rural" that I am following was a

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327

common feature of late nineteenth-century treatments of regionalism. With the exception of New Orleans, whose Creole population was an enclave of ethnically identified urbanites who conform to Brodhead and Kaplan's criteria of being much less threatening than more recent immigrant populations of northeastern cities, regionalism focused almost exclusively on rural neighborhoods and the market towns that served them. 37. Henry David Thoreau, Thoreau: Walden and Other Writings, ed. Joseph Wood Krutch (New York: Bantam, 1977), 233. 38. Henry J. W. Dam, "A Morning with Bret Harte," McClure's, December 1894, 44· 39. Dam,46. 40. Noah Brooks, "Early Days of 'The Overland,''' Overland, July 1898, 5; "ETC" Overland, 1 July 1868, 99. 41. William C. Bartlett, "Literature and Art in California. A Quarter-Centennial

Review," Overland, December 1875, 542; "ETC" Overland, February 1894, 221. 42. [Rounseville Wildman], "ETC" Overland, November 1894,555. 43. Rev. of Oldtown Folks, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Overland, October 1869, 390; Duffield Osborne, rev. of Lorraine and The Mystery of Choice, by Robert W. Chambers, Overland, January 1898, 86. 44· [Bret Harte], "ETC," Overland, October 1868, 385,387. 45. "The Overland Monthly: History of a Great Magazine Publishing Enterprise," a supplement to Overland, December 1886, 3. 46. "The New Dial," Dial, 1 September 1892, 127. A historian of the Dial's place among American periodicals conceded, twenty years later, the preeminence of the Nation's reviews at the time of the Dial's founding and the importance of the Nation's example, however: see Henry Loomis Nelson, "American Periodicals," Dial, 1 May 1900, 351. 47· Nelson, 351. 48. On these magazines' sympathy for little magazines, see "A Periodical of Protest" (about The Philistine of East Aurora, New York), Overland, June 1895, 222, and the "Announcement" about the demise of the Chap-Book and the Dial's purchase of its subscription list, name and goodwill, Dial, 16 June 1898, 37. 49. Wildman's diplomatic credentials are described in his "Preface" to Tales of the Malayan Coast: From Penang to the Philippines (1899; reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969),5. 50. [Rounseville Wildman], "ETC," Overland, November 1894, 555. 51. Rev. of A White Heron and Other Stories, by Sarah Orne Jewett, Overland, October 1886, 439; rev. of Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains, by Charles Egbert Craddock [Mary Noailles Murfree], Overland, November 1885, 552.

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52. James O. Pierce, "charles Egbert Craddock," Dial, March 1887,271. 53. William Cranston Lawton, "Local Color and Eternal Truth," Dial, 16 July 1898,}. 54. Rev. of The House of a Merchant Prince, by William Henry Bishop, Overland, April 188}, 4}455. Untitled squib, National Economist, 15 October 1892,}. 56. The notice of the subscription price reprinted a long letter from a Kansas farmer who praised the Arena and explained the economic hardships which had made him tardy in renewing his subscription. See John D. McIntyre, "A Stroke for the People," Arena, July 1897, 1}4-}6. The quoted passages are on 1}6. 57. The Arena's reviews varied, and in proposing that the Arena marked an alternative to the Atlantic group's valuation of the literary, I privilege signed reviews by Flower and some unsigned reviews that might well have been by him. The Arena published other literary articles that were similar to the Atlantic group's. For example, a piece by Annie Steger Winston not only recycled numerous truisms about the difficulties of writing about so heterogeneous a society, but also quite explicitly defined American literature as being written by and for long-established white Americans. See Winston, "America as a Field for Fiction," Arena, May 1900, 654-60. 58. [B. O. Flower], "The Highest Function of the Nove!," Arena, April 1890, 628-29. 59. Flower,6}0. 60. David H. Dickson, "Benjamin Orange Flower, Patron of the Realists," American Literature 14 (May 1942): 148-56. 61. B. O. Flower, rev. of A Romance of New Virginia, by Martha Frye Boggs, Arena, August 1896, 519-20. 62. See for example rev. of The Monarch Billionaire, by Morrison I. Swift, Arena, May 190 4, 547. 6}. Rev. of The Monarch Billionaire, 547. 64. Edah Corvin us, rev. of The Juggernaut of the Moderns, by Rosa Hudspeth, Arena, September 1896, 692. 65. Rev. of Double Harness, by Anthony Hope, Arena, December 1904,681. 66. Alternatively, the teview might be read as a precursor of Georg Lukacs's idea that certain realists-the great ones, he implies-"always take the most important, burning problems of the community for their starting point," whereas inferior realists after 1848 resort to depicting "isolated characters of purely private interest" who lead shallow lives that the authors discuss in detail, rather than focusing on the sweep of significant historical transformations. See Georg Lukacs, Studies in European Realism (New York: Grosset &: Dunlap, 1964), 12, 14}.

Notes to Chapter Five 329 67. B. o. Flower, rev. of A Fool's Errand, by One of the Fools [Albion Tourgee], Arena, September 1902, 334. 68. B. O. Flower, rev. of The Octopus, by Frank Norris, Arena, May 1902, 548. 69. B. o. Flower, rev. of The Queen of the Woods, by Simon Pokagon, Arena, August 1901,206-8. 70. B. o. Flower, rev. of The Main Chance, Arena, October 1903, 441. 71. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari understand minor literature in this way. Their essay "What Is a Minor Literature?" argues that a minor literature can be understood as politically resistant rather than somehow inferior or less serious. They define minor literature by the "deterritorialization" of its language, "the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation," features which bear consideration in relation to U.S. regionalist fiction. These are criteria which influence my discussion of regionalism's potential for political resistance in the section that follows. However, grappling with the precise relationship between criteria that they develop in relation to Kafka and the u.s. regionalists under discussion is a task that takes me too far afield from my argument, so I have relied on Deleuze and Guattari more loosely as conceptual inspiration. See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, "What Is a Minor Literature?" trans. Dana Polan, in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990), 60. I am grateful to Elayne Tobin for introducing me to this essay and calling attention to its salience for U.S. regionalist writing. The essay is adapted from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986). 72. Brodhead analyzes Hamlin Garland's self-consciousness about his relationship to the people he writes about on 140-41. 73. For example, a Harper's reviewer hoped that Edward Eggleston would "strike a new vein" in his next work, and a Century writer warned readers against taking versions of local color that were merely "literary float rock ... for the vein." Another Century writer called James Fenimore Cooper "the prospector of that little army of industrious miners now engaged in working every vein of local color and character, and in sifting out the golden dust from the sands of local history." See rev. of The End of the World, by Edward Eggleston, Harper's, December 1872, 140; E. Hough, "The West, and Certain Literary Discoveries," Century, February 1900, 510; Brander Matthews, "The Centenary of Fenimore Cooper," Century, September 1889,796. In relation to agriculture, a Lippincott's writer called dialect fiction a "field" in

which the example of a "few master hands" "bore unripe and unwholesome fruit"

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in the form of poor imitators. References to "fields for fiction" of some kind or another were legion. A Harper's reviewer called the South "that ample store-house of indigenous fiction," presumably where the reapings of the field were siloed. See T. C. De Leon, "The Day of Dialect," Lippincott's, November :1897, 680; also rev. of Like unto Like, by Sherwood Bonner, Harper's, December :1878, :146. 74. Thanet's article "The Contented Masses" was cited above. 75. Frank Luther Mott emphasizes women's importance as "subject matter, as contributors, and even as editors," noting that "[a]lmost a fourth of the contents of the first twenty volumes were written by women." See Mott, A History of American Magazines, 5 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, :1930-68),4:405. 76. Ellen Carol DuBois, ed., The Elizabeth Cady Stanton-Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches, rev. ed. (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, :1992), 95-96. 77. B. 0. Flower: "Prostitution Within the Marriage Bond," Arena, June :1895, 66. 78. The book that most epitomizes the tradition of feminist scholarship that celebrates regionalism for valuing women's domestic experience is Josephine Donovan's New England Local Color Literature: A Women's Tradition, published in :1983, but this critical direction began to be developed in articles and prefaces even earlier. Other examples of this work include the essays by Susan Allen Toth and Barbara A. Johns in Emily Toth, ed., Regionalism and the Female Imagination: A Collection of Essays (New York: Human Sciences Press, Inc., :1985); Julia Bader's essay in Leonore Hoffman and Deborah Rosenfelt, eds., Teaching Women's Literature from a Regional Perspective (New York: Modern Language Association of America, :1982); Barbara H. Solomon's "Introduction" to Short Fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman, ed. Barbara H. Solomon (New York: New American Library, :1979); and the essays by Marjorie Pryse, Josephine Donovan, and Martha Satz in Shirley Marchalonis, ed., Critical Essays on Mary Wilkins Freeman (Boston: G. K. Hall, :199:1). 79. Kaplan briefly addresses women's domestic protests in a discussion of Mary Wilkins Freeman (255); Brodhead pays attention to regionalism's gendering in a chapter about Sarah Orne Jewett's relationship to authorship, but despite his punning chapter title's reference to "Women's Work," the chapter analyzes Jewett's choice to construct her authorship in a minor genre rather than the gendered subject matter of her work. 80. Robert C. McMath Jr., American Populism: A Social History, :1877-:1898 (New York: Hill and Wang, :1993), 7. McMath's foregrounding of this term influenced my use of it. 8:1. Herbert M. Ramp, "The Laborer's View of the Labor Question," Arena, November :1897, 644-72.

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82. McMath, 63, 108-42. 83. C. C. Post, "The Sub-Treasury Plan," Arena, February 1892, 348. 84. B.o. Flower, "Are We a Prosperous People 7" Arena, January 1893, 202. 85. Connecting New England fiction to Populism may seem dangerously speculative in light of the fact that New England was one of the regions where the Farmers' Alliance and the People's Party were weakest, probably because New England farmers did not suffer as much as others from the volatile economic effects of land speculation and railroad transportation. In addition, Populism often represented itself and was represented as the political vehicle of the West, constructed in opposition to the financial and industrial centers and magnates of the Northeast. Some New Englanders even strongly disapproved of their westering neighbors' choice to gamble for success in the West rather than pursue a more respectable, modest living in the Northeast. See Hal S. Barron, Those Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century New England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), 32 and "Political Menace," 450. However, Populism got national publicity, and Barron's study of a Vermont township found that the local young people's debating club addressed Populist issues, a telltale sign of interest and familiarity, although he does not mention how the opposing positions were defined or which one won (126). The fact that the New England-based Arena publicized Populism is obviously crucial for my argument. 86. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Pembroke [1894] (New York and London: Harper &: Bros., 1899), 54. 87. Both stories can be found in Cooke, How Celia Changed Her Mind, and Selected Stories, ed. Elizabeth Ammons (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1986). Sympathy for farm wives' lives, which were usually described as full of "drudgery," was double-edged, in relation to the Atlantic cohort's writing of the rural. In 1892 Rose Terry Cooke cited in one of her stories the already prevalent stereotype of "moody and melancholy farmers' wives who, year by year, swell the lists of insanity," probably by reason of "monotony of work," a stereotype that helped represent rural circumstances as simply pathogenic rather than warped by specific forms of political and economic exploitation. See Rose Terry Cooke, "Love," Huckleberries Gathered from New England Hills (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin &: Co., 1891), 60. B. 0. Flower cited the same truism that mental institutions were filled with farmers' wives but proposed that their husbands' sexual abuse of them, including the abuse of forcing them to have more children than was healthy, was more likely the cause. His diagnosis at least took into account one important set of power relations that shaped rural women's lives (Flower, "Prostitution," 65). 88. See for example an article excerpted and reprinted from another source, "Richard T. Ely on the Labor Movement," National Economist, 13 February 1892, 3 63.

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89. Richard T. Ely, An Introduction to Political Economy (New York: Chautauqua Press, 1889), 22-23. 90. (Mrs.) Wilbert Lowth Bonney, "Women and the Wage System," Arena, August 1901,175. 91. Flora McDonald Thompson, "The Work of Wives," Arena, January 1902,73. 92. Elbert Hubbard, "The Rights of Tramps," Arena, April 1894, 593-600; Melinda Sissins, "Tramps vs. Indians," National Economist, 7 February 1891,337. 93. Alice Brown, "A March Wind," Tiverton Tales (1899; reprint, Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg Press, 1967), 20, 47. 94. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, "The Revolt of 'Mother,' " Freeman and Jewett, 418. In emphasizing their taciturnity, I do not mean to suggest that the dialogue of these characters is not made to resound eloquently in the stories. As a reviewer of Mary Wilkins Freeman wrote, "the brevity of speech which is in itself a characteristic of New England people ... conveys a great deal to the reader, because, like the entire story, it is a condensation, an epitome." See "New England in the Short Story," Atlantic, June 1891, 847-48. 95. Geo. C. Douglass, "A Money Famine in a Nation Rich in Money's Worth," Arena, September 1993, 401-17. 96. Articles in the Arena proclaiming the arbitrariness of gold or any other currency standard were common. "Money, simply as money, never has or can have

any intrinsic value in and of itself," wrote John Franklin Clark in "The Money Question" (a popular title), Arena, March 1893, 471; "Money ... is a function created by law," wrote the Hon. John Davis, in "The Money Question," Arena, April 1892, 542; "[T]here is not and never has been an honest dollar," wrote William Jennings Bryan, in "Honest Money; Or, A True Standard of Value. A Symposium," Arena, July 1897, 57. Money, as legal tender, ought to be based "not on gold, not on silver, nor on any single commodity, but on all commodities," wrote John Davis in April 1892, and John Franklin Clark concurred in March 1893 that "the greatest number of articles of utility and prime necessity should be utilized to fix and determine the value of the monetary unit, and thus special legislation in favor of one or two commodities would be avoided." See Hon. John Davis, M. c., "The Money Question," Arena, April 1892, 545; John Franklin Clark, "The Money Question," Arena, March 1893, 472-73. 97. H. A. Higgins, "The Basis of Money," Arena, July 1892, 241. 98. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, A New England Nun and Other Stories (New York: Harper and Bros., 1891), 321-37. 99. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, "The Scent of the Roses," A New England Nun, 204; "Life-Everlastin'," A New England Nun, 338-62; Alice Brown, "Honey and Myrrh," Tiverton Tales, 223. 100. Alice Brown, "The Mortuary Chest," Tiverton Tales, 69.

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101. Wood points out that for an earlier generation of writers she characterizes as sentimentalists, home was mobile, created by a woman's presence and influence, but that for the local colorists, home "looms solid as rock, sharply particularized like anything one knows through daily contact .... Home is no longer unlocalized, no longer simply one of the magical little lady's portable tricks, but a fact." Wood's discussion of the forbidding, decaying nature of both characters and scenarios in women's local-color fiction seems exaggerated, or at least un tempe red by the recognition that there are stories by the same authors she treats that are sympathetic to female sexuality, for instance, and that show bustling families. However, her general approach to treating the local-colorists' transformation of the materials of sentimentalism is thought-provoking and often persuasive. See Ann Douglas Wood, "The Literature of Impoverishment: The Women Local Colorists in America, 1865-1914," Women's Studies 1 (1972): 20-21102. New England's decline in rural population was not necessarily a decline in prosperity, resulting in some cases from fewer people's controlling more agricultural land. Barron suggests that outsiders were more concerned about New England's decline than its own inhabitants (Barron, 29-36). 10). Ironically, the lack of separation between the farm as workplace and the farm as home meant that farmers themselves were imagined to lack the domestic redemption that homes offered to other men who worked. As one analyst described in 1877, "The American farmer has no such relief [of coming home for 'rest,' 'pleasure,' and 'change' after a day's work]. His house is a part of his farm; his fireside is shared by an uncongenial hired man, his family circle includes too often a vulgar and uninteresting servant, and from one year to another, his living room being the kitchen and work room of the busy farmhouse, he rarely knows what it is to divest himself of the surroundings of his labor and business, and to give himself over to the needed domestic enjoyment and recreation. If it is objectionable for him, it is infinitely more so for his wife and daughters, who, lacking the frequent visit to the town or occasional chat with strangers, and the invigorating effect of open-air work, yield all the more completely to depressing cares. They become more and more deficient in the lightness and cheerfulness and mental gayety to which in any other occupation the chief toiler of the family would look for recreation at his own fire-side." See George E. Waring Jr., "Life and Work of the Eastern Farmer," Atlantic, May 1877, 586-87.

This may be another reason why regional fiction's elaboration of farm women's domestic abilities was especially important, since farm homesteads were positioned disadvantageously in terms of domestic ideology. Donald Marti explains how farm wives' anxieties about their domestic capabilities surfaced in their participation in the Grange, where women activists put forth a somewhat contradictory agenda for their sex: on the one hand, to "aspire beyond domesticity" and take an active role

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in the Grange and other organizations; on the other hand, to be domestic, especially since farm women's capacity to "create beautiful, gracious, morally edifying homes" was often doubted. See Donald B. Marti, Women of the Grange: Mutuality and Sisterhood in Rural America, 1866-1920 (New York, Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, 1991), 11. 104. "The Political Menace of the Discontented," 449. 105. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, "A New England Nun," in A New England Nun and Other Stories, 360. 106. Freeman, "A New England Nun," 360, 354. 107. Freeman, "A New England Nun," 360. 108. With the passage of the Morrill Act to fund land-grant colleges in 1862, not only agriculture but also domestic skills began to feature in college curricula, and the Grange aggressively endorsed the academic study of "domestic science." Domestic handbooks had long treated household management as a discipline requiring thought and expertise-Catharine Beecher's A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) was one of the best-known-but its elevation to a college-level course of study enhanced its status. The discipline of "home economics" was created in 1899. See Marti, 81-83; Glenna Matthews, "Just a Housewife": The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 145. Matthews also attests to the widespread existence of domestic science courses in U.S. universities by 1900 (148). 109. Edward Bellamy'S influential utopian novel Looking Backward (1888) posited a future in which housework and cooking were done collectively. Charlotte Perkins Gilman argued for this through fiction and journalistic writings. Cooperative housekeeping was even practiced on a modest scale by several New York City apartment buildings during this era and by a group of Cambridge, Massachusetts, families as early as the 1860s. Polly Wynn Allen gives information about Gilman's views on collective housework as well as about the Cambridge Cooperative Housekeeping Society and comparable experiments in Building Domestic Liberty: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Architectural Feminism (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 22-23. 110. Matthews, 109, 142. 111. Hamlin Garland, "A New Declaration," 183. 112. Alice Brown, "The Way of Peace," Tiverton Tales, 190-91. 113. "A Mistaken Charity" and "The Selfishness of Amelia Lamkin" can be found in Freeman and Jewett, 301-11, 462-84. 114. Alice Brown, "A Last Assembling," Tiverton Tales, 153. 115. Brown, "A Last Assembling," Tiverton Tales, 171-72. 116. Alice Brown, "The Flat-Iron Lot," Tiverton Tales, 281. 117. The founding of the DAR and other manifestations of genealogical elitism

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in the late nineteenth century also tended to identify Americanness only with the descendants of the earliest white settlers. It seems significant that Rose Terry Cooke's Huckleberries Gathered from New England Hills, a work contemporary with these social trends, features Thanksgiving or Independence Day in six of its eleven stories, insisting on the American pedigree of characters whose poverty and remoteness might otherwise render them negligible or invisible. Melinda Ponder has usefully pointed out to me that in light of Theodore Roosevelt's prescription that people-in context, he implied "Anglo-Saxons"-who refused to marry were" criminal[s] against the race," these women characters' refusal to marry could be considered a salutary unwillingness to devote themselves to perpetuating the "race." See Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Ideal of Race (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1980), 152. Although, as I have mentioned, I view the many evaded or delayed marriages in these stories as partly symptomatic of the widespread belief that Anglo-Saxons were losing vigor (and therefore, Roosevelt and his ilk would argue, needed imperialist conquest to pep them up), the fact that the examples I've found of explicitly racial thinking express loyalty to the race makes me emphasize dread of exogamy over resistance to Roosevelt's prescriptions. u8. On the cooperative housekeeping experiments publicized in the Atlantic, see Allen, 22-23. 119. McMath, 9-16. In learning about the complexities and versions of Populism, I have relied not only on Barron's and McMath's studies, cited above, along with Marti's work on the Grange, but also on Peter H. Argersinger, Populism and Politics: William Alfred Peffer and the People's Party (Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1974); Karel D. Bicha, Western Populism: Studies in an Ambivalent Conservatism (Lawrence, Kans.: Coronado Press, 1976); John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmer's Alliance and the People's Party (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1961); and Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage, 1955). Philip S. Foner's account of real and potential collaborations between the Populist Party and the labor movement was also helpful; see Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 4 vols., vol. 2, From the Founding of the A. F. of L. to the Emergence of American Imperialism (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 300-44. Conclusion: The End of the Atlantic Group, 1900-1910 1. Carl Van Doren, "The Later Novel: Howells," Cambridge History of American Literature, ed. William Peterfield Trent et al., 4 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1917-21),3:92. 2. William Everett, "The Political Novel," Atlantic, June 1908, 850-57; Cornelia Atwood Pratt, "Mr. Winston Churchill and the Epic Novel," Critic, July 1901,75-

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76; Aline Gorren, "Mrs. Wharton's Philosophical Romance," Critic, June 1902, 541-43; Harriet Monroe, "Books that have Passed the Hundred Thousand Mark," Critic, February 1904, 118; Herbert W. Horwill, "Present-Day Tendencies in Fiction," Forum, April-June 1907, 552; Frederic Taber Cooper, "The Fallacy of Tendencies in Fiction," Forum, July 1907,113,114; Cornelia Atwood Pratt, "Croesus and Other People in Current Fiction," Putnam's, January 1908, 488; H. W. Boynton, "Some Recent Novels," Putnam's and The Reader, July 1909, 492; "Sorting the Seeds: A Survey of Recent Fiction," Atlantic, May 1909,704. 3· Pratt, 75. Pratt's application of the term "epic novel" to Winston Churchill's The Crisis, a historical novel of the Civil War, suggests that it had more elasticity than subsequent literary histories would grant to naturalism, though. Howells identifies Norris's writings with Zola's due to their "epical" quality, thereby connecting Norris with naturalism even though the obituary essay never mentions the word. See W. D. Howells, "Frank Norris," North American Review, November 1902, 771. Herbert W. Horwill's observation that the modern "problem novel" of the time mainly concerns "heredity and environment," London's White Fang being his example, also lays groundwork for the literary historical creation of naturalism. My point is not that naturalism is not a proper category for understanding some texts, but that because it was a category used by subsequent literary historians it did not have the effect on contemporary theories of literature and practices of reading that discourses surrounding realism did. See Horwill, 552. 4. "Sorting the Seeds," 702. 5. Frank Norris, "Salt and Sincerity," Critic, July 1902,78. 6. Barrett Wendell, Literary History of America [1900] (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901),370-77,10. 7· Wendell,377· 8. W. D. Howells, "Professor Barrett Wendell's Notions of American Literature," North American Review, May 1901, 628. 9· Howells, 634· 10. Santayana originally published the phrase in the title and body of "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy," a lecture delivered at Berkeley which was reprinted in his collection The Winds of Doctrine (1913). Because one of his targets was Transceftdentalism, which was a keystone of American literary historiographyas well as philosophy, and perhaps also because he soon afterward wrote an essay entitled "Genteel American Poetry" (1915), his phrase has been applied to the literary as well as the philosophical establishment of the nineteenth century. For an account of some of the writers and critics who drew on Santayana's phrase, see Douglas L. Wilson's "Introductory" to George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition: Nine Essays by George Santayana (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), 1-25. Both essays by Santayana are reprinted in this collection.

Notes to Conclusion 337 Passing references to "gentility" in relation to Howells, late nineteenth-century Boston, and pre-1890s realism are legion. Some of the most prolonged and hostile accounts of this gentility are the "Foreword" to After the Genteel Tradition: American Writers Since 1900 [1936], ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1937), 9-25, which draws heavily on Sinclair Lewis's Nobel Prize speech excoriating gentility and identifying it with Howells; Martin Green's vilification of James Fields for promoting gentility in The Problem of Boston: Some Reading in Cultural History (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1966); and Alfred Habegger's account-which doesn't name gentility as its target, but which clearly identifies repressive culture with the feminine-of the emergence of realism out of an ongoing and uncompleted struggle by the "sissies" Howells and James to free themselves from women's culture, in Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1982). 11. Gertude Atherton, "Why Is American Literature Bourgeois 7" North American Review, May 1904, 776. 12. "The Point of View," Scribner's Magazine, August 1904, 251. 13. This crisis might be an earlier version of the controversy over the cultural authority of the Book-of-the-Month Club that Janice Radway has analyzed: "The Scandal of the Middlebrow: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Class Fracture, and Cultural Authority," South Atlantic Quarterly 89, no. 4 (1990): 703-36. 14· Santayana, 40. 15. Vernon Louis Parrington, "The Development of Realism," The Reinterpre-

tation of American Literature: Some Contributions Toward the Understanding of Its Historical Development, ed. Norman Foerster (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1928),147. 16. Atherton, 778-79. 17. John Macy, The Spirit of American Literature (New York: Modern Library, 1912), 284. 18. Robert E. Spiller et al., eds., The Literary History of the United States (New York: Macmillan Co., 1948), 893. 19· Atherton, 780. 20. Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), xiii. 21. Frank Norris, The Responsibilities of the Novelist, published in the same volume with William Dean Howells, Criticism and Fiction (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 280; Atherton, 775. 22. Atherton, 772. 23. The rise of a new, cheaper generation of general magazines during the 1890S is discussed in Frank Luther Mott's A History of American Magazines, 5 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1930-68), 3:8. Arthur John reports that the Cen-

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tury, which achieved the highest circulation of the magazines in the Atlantic cohort, reached a peak circulation of 250,000 in the 1880s, dropping back to 200,000 by 1890, whereas McClure's in 1893 and Cosmopolitan in 1894 reached circulations of over 300,000. See Arthur John, The Best Years of the Century: Richard Watson Gilder, Scribner's Monthly, and Century Magazine, 1870-19°9 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1981), 125, 132, 233-36. Mott reports that Ladies' Home Journal was the first periodical to reach a circulation of half a million, which it did in 1891 (Mott, 4:16).

24· Mott,4:2-5· 25. "McClure's Magazine at Ten Cents," McClure's, July 1895,192. 26. As far as I can tell, though, these wider-selling magazines by no means supplanted the cultural authority of the Atlantic cohort. See for instance H. L. Mencken's disparaging remarks about them: although he found the Atlantic to be overburdened with "Boston Brahmins" and only the Century really gained his esteem, he castigated "the yellow magazine of the McClure's type-a variety of magazine which surpassed it [the Century model of magazine] in the race for circulation by exaggerating and vulgarizing all its merits," in Mencken, "The American Magazine," Prejudices, 1st series [1919] (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), 174-75· 27. Christopher P. Wilson, The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1985), 49-53; Frank Norris, "Salt and Sincerity," Critic, May 1902, 449. 28. See for example H. W. Boynton, "The Writing Public," Critic, August 1904, 121-24; the symposium "Will the Novel Disappear?" North American Review, September 1902, 289-98; and Henry Mills Alden, "Magazine Writing and literature," North American Review, September 1904, 341-56. 29. For descriptions of these magazines, see Edward E. Chielens, The Literary Journal in America to 1900: A Guide to Information Sources (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1975). 30. The Chap-Book, which is often considered the model for other little magazines, in fact came to be affiliated with the publishing firm of Stone & Kimball (and later Herbert S. Stone & Co.) in Chicago, but since the firm was itself new it was unable to keep the magazine alive longer than from 1894 to 1898. See Wendy Clauson Schlereth, The Chap-Book: A Journal of American Intellectual Life in the 1890S (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), 1, 9, 12. 31. Schlereth, 9. 32. Mott, 4:388, 639, 389, 424-26. 33. Critic, 2 January 1897, 12; cited in Mott, 4:387. 34. Frank Norris, "Salt and Sincerity," Critic, May 1902, 449. Walter H. Page similarly projects an important role for the university in training, if not "men and women of' genius,' " the "journeymen writers" who produce a large volume of what

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most people read. See Walter H. Page, "The Writer and the University," Atlantic, November 1907,685, 35. Sir Gilbert Parker, "Fiction-Its Place in the National Life," North American

Review, December 1907, 497. 36. See Stuart P. Sherman, "Correspondence: Graduate Schools and Literature,"

Nation, 14 May 1908, 442; George B. Adams, "Correspondence: Proper Work of a Graduate School," Nation, 28 May 1908, 485; Brander Matthews, "Correspondence: Graduate Instruction in English," Nation, 28 May 1908: 485-86; Albert S. Cook, "Correspondence: Graduate Students as Writers," Nation, 4 June 1908, 532; and "The Ph.D. Again," Nation, February 1909,132-33. 37. James Shorey, "Present Conditions of Literary Production," Atlantic, August 1896, 166. 38. A number of articles about academic literary criticism, most of which were ambivalent if not hostile, appeared in the first decade of the twentieth century; see for example Gamaliel Bradford Jr., "Books New and Old: The Mission of the Literary Critic," Atlantic, October 1904, 537-44; John Corbin, "Harking Back to the Humanities," Atlantic, April 1908, 482-90; H. W. Boynton, "The Reading Public,"

Critic, May 1904, 455-59; Brian Hooker, "The Popular Element in Literature," Forum, November 1909, 400-12; and Herbert Crombie Howe, "The Contradictions of Literary Criticism," North American Review, September 1902, 399-408; as well as the series of articles in the Nation cited in note 35 above. 39. Nicholas Joost, Years of Transition: The Dial, 1912-1920 (Barre, Mass.: Barre Publishers, 1967), 13-18. 40. Gerald Graff correctly points out that nationalist zeal during World War I advanced the standing of American literature as a discipline considerably, but Shumway dates the university's clear control over American literature from after World War II. See Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987), 130; David R. Shumway, Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1994), 31, 49. Shumway's dating seems persuasive, since before the 1950S an extraordinary number of influential critics functioned effectively outside of the academy (and had to be acknowledged by the academy as equal combatants or helpmates), whereas very few have occupied that role since. I am grateful to Jonathan Arac for calling my attention to the significance of nonacademic critics such as Edmund Wilson in the post-Atlantic era. Graff's and Shumway's studies have helped me immeasurably in writing this conclusion, both conceptually and because of their bibliographic richness. 41. Wilson, 195. 42. Amy Kaplan calls attention to the prevalence with which critics of Dreiser map the development of his artistry onto his emergence from the culture of maga-

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zines like McClure's, so that he moves from "conventional hack to iconoclastic realist," presumably because journalistic professionalism-which might more accurately be called competence or success, because of its divergence from the strictest standards of professionalism-was not compatible with the academy's construction of authorship. She also intricately analyzes the process by which Dreiser set up Howells as a figure against which he would define his own version of authorship. See Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), 105, 106-10. 43. Frank W. Noxon, "College Professors Who Are Men of Letters: Harvard," Critic, February 1903,129, 128. The other articles in the series were Burton J. Hendrick, "Some Literary Instructors of Yale," Critic, March 1903,221-28; Edwin M. Norris, "Some Writers of the Princeton Faculty," Critic, June 1903, 509-16; and George S. Hellman, "Men of Letters at Columbia," Critic, October 1903, 316-27. 44. Shumway, 49-50; Noxon, 124. 45. Gerald Graff and Michael Warner, eds., The Origins of Literary Studies in America: A Documentary Anthology (New York: Routledge, 1989), 4-8; Graff, 55-97· 46. Shumway, 124-28. 47. This is the thesis of Lasch's The New Radicalism in America 1889-1963, cited above. 48. A Nation reviewer even claimed in 1905 that "[t]here is on the whole no class of men in American society about whom so much uneasiness is felt as about the college professor." See rev. of The Amateur Spirit, by Bliss Perry, Nation, 16 February 1905,138. 49. Bliss Perry, "The Amateur Spirit," Atlantic, August 1901, 277. This essay became the keynote of Perry's collection, The Amateur Spirit (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1904). See also Bliss Perry, "College Professors and the Public," Atlantic, February 1902,285. 50. Perry, "College Professors," 286. 51. Arthur Twining Hadley, "Academic Freedom in Theory and in Practice," Atlantic, February 1903,159. 52. Thomas Elmer Will, "A Menace to Freedom: The College Trust," Arena, September 1901, 247-48. This artiele expands on elaims he first introduced in an earlier article about Ruskin College as an alternative to institutions controlled by plutocrats and intellectually supporting them: "A College for the People," Arena, July 1901,15-20. 53. Will, "A Menace," 249· 54. Arthur Twining Hadley, "Wealth and Democracy in American Colleges," Harper's, August 1906, 450; "Making Scholarship Attractive," Nation, 25 February 1909, 187.

Notes to Conclusion

)41

55. J. B. and J. L. Gilder, "On the Reviewing of Books. An Open Letter to Mr. John Cotton Dana," Critic, October 1900, )07-10. 56. The four articles about book reviewing were Agnes H. Morton, "The Reviewer Reviewed," Critic, December 1901,535-42; George Sands Goodwin, "Certain Authors' Views on Book-Reviewing," Critic, June 1902, 537-40; George Sands Goodwin, "Publishers' Views on Book Reviewing," Critic, August 1902, 117-25; and George Sands Goodwin, "Views of Reviewers on Reviewing," Critic, November 1902,446-55. 57· Shumway, 5). 58. Shumway, 5). 59. William B. Cairns, "Later Magazines," The Cambridge History of American Literature, ed. William Peterfield Trent et aI., 4 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1917-21), 3:317-18. 60. Macy, 281. 61. Even though poetry was more important than prose in the initial construction of American literature as a discipline (Shumway 109), promoters and practitioners of late nineteenth-century poetry such as Richard Watson Gilder failed to draw the animosity, or the attention, that Howells did. The fact that the poets from the late nineteenth century that were becoming most important to posterity (for reasons too complex to explore here) were unambiguously independent of the literary establishment must have helped: namely, Whitman, Dickinson, and the sometimes-canonized Sidney Lanier. 62. F. 0. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941; reprint, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968). 6). Shumway, 127. 64. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking Press, 1950),1). 65. Shumway, 282. 66. For example, Sharon O'Brien recounts the influence that Parrington's and other left-wing critics' assessments of Cather had on her reputation during the 19)OS. See Sharon O'Brien, "Becoming Noncanonical: The Case Against Willa Cather," Reading in America: Literature and Social History, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989), 246-47. 67. Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920, ) vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 19)0), ):)26. What I have quoted comes from a section of "Addenda" published as part of volume ); Parrington died before he could complete it. 68. Parrington, ):251. 69. The idea that the Civil War was a cultural as well as a political watershed pre-

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cedes the disciplinary installation of American literature; for instance, as early as 1891 both Henry A. Beers and Greenough White point to the close of the war as ending sectional feeling in literature, White in the context of local color and Beers in the context of realism; Walter C. Bronson followed their lead in dating realism's onset as 1870. See Henry A. Beers, Initial Studies in American Literature (New York: Chautauqua Press, 1891), 197; Greenough White, Sketch of the Philosophy of American Literature (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1891), 64-66; Walter C. Bronson, A Short History of American Literature (Boston: D. C. Heath & Co., 1906), 103, 281. William Peterfield Trent established the era between the Mexican and Civil Wars as the years in which a transition between romance and realistic fiction occurred; see Trent, A History of American Literature (London: William Heineman, 1903),497. Shumway suggests that Parrington and Norman Foerster hit independently upon the periodization of the prewar romance and the postwar realist novel that was to shape the discipline, Parrington in Main Currents and Foerster in his anthology American Poetry and Prose (1925), which dates the "Advance of Realism" from 1870. See Shumway, 168; Parrington, Main Currents, 3:xxvi; Norman Foerster, ed., American Poetry and Prose (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1925), xiii. Shumway usefully comments on the influence of this periodization on 136-40. One sign of the institutionalization of this dating is the fact that the journal American Literary Realism, established in 1967, defined its period of inquiry as 1870-1910. Since the scholars who wrote sections of The Cambridge History of American Literature functioned relatively independently, they provide a number of alternative mappings of the onset of realism or its corollary, literary nationalism. C. Alphonso Smith identifies the end of the Civil War with the rise of dialect fiction (which gets constructed as the onset of national rather than regional literature) due to the end of sectionalism and an increased interest in other areas of the country, in Smith, "Dialect Writers," Cambridge History of American Literature, 2:360. Carl Van Doren identifies the achievement of the "outline of the national picture, at least of contiguous territory" with the turn away from the romance that dominated the U.S. during Cooper's lifetime, a turn "away from conquest of new borders to the closer cultivation, east of the Mississippi, of ground already marked." Van Doren, "Contemporaries of Cooper," Cambridge History of American Literature, 1:308. Fred Lewis Pattee wavers among datings, but thereby marks his sense of the available watersheds. He calls the 1850S and 1860s the "dawning of definiteness, of localized reality, or a feeling felt by the reader of actuality and truth to human life" in the short story, whose great era begins in 1865; he marks the completion of the transcontinental railroad as an influence on the new literary spirit; and he also declares (in keeping with the canonical dating of realism discussed below) that realism proper did not arise until the 1880s. See Pattee, "The Short Story," Cambridge History of American Literature, 2:372, 367, 378, 383.

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Barrett Wendell was an interesting exception to these periodizations and the canonical periodization I discuss below, using 1857-the year when the Atlantic Monthly was founded in Boston and Harper's Weekly in New York City-as the hinge year of his periodization; see Wendell, 449. 70. William P. Trent, A History of American Literature (London: William Heineman, 19°3),499. 71. Nina Baym's study of American literary histories between 1882 and 1912 emphasizes the textbooks' Anglo-Saxonism, centered on the primacy of New England, and proposes that Harte, Twain, and Lincoln were appealing figures to fill the post-New England era because they came from the "nebulous rural West populated mainly by Saxons along with some German who, as Teutons, shared the requisite racial heritage." Only Twain survived the emergence of stricter canonicity, however. See Baym, "Early Histories of American Literature: A Chapter in the Institution of New England," American Literary History I, no. 3 (1989): 477. 72. Shumway, 125, 112-13. 73. In the same section of The Cambridge History of American Literature in which he constructed the naturalist period in American literature, Van Doren identified the 1880s as a "little renaissance of fiction" mainly (though not exclusively) due to the work of Twain, Howells, and James; see Van Doren, "The Later Novel: Howells," 85. An earlier version of this canonical dating, but relying on an expanded sense of the canon, is in a section of a 1901 textbook produced by Cornell University faculty. The author dates "the growth of realism to vigorous maturity" as occurring between 1880 and 1890, exemplified by the "best work of Howells, James, Craddock, Fawcett, Bunner, Cable, and many others who wrote of the life they had seen and were content to employ present-day settings." See Clark Sutherland Northrop, "The Novelists," A Manual of American Literature, ed. Theodore Stanton (New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1901), 211, 212. 74. Parrington, 3:251. 75. Parrington, "The Development of Realism," 147-48. 76. Both Amy Kaplan and John McWilliams point to Leavis's role in catalyzing the consolidation of an alternative tradition of romance, and McWilliams takes the American paperback edition of The Great Tradition as a sign of Leavis's wide impact. See Kaplan, 2; John McWilliams, "The Rationale for 'The American Romance,'" boundary 2 17, no. 1 (1990): 71. Kaplan suggests that the romance theory of the American novel made realism "un-American" on 4. 77. Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1957), xii. 78. Shumway, 329-30. 79· Chase, 13, 19· 80. Kaplan, 3.

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8:1. Jonathan Arac proposes the term "hypercanonization" to account for the fact that in American literary studies, "a very few single works monopolize curricular and critical attention." See Arac, "Nationalism, Hypercanonization, and Huckleberry Finn," boundary 219, no. 1 (1992): 14. 82. Granville Hicks, The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature Since the Civil War (New York: Macmillan, 1933)' 83. Grant C. Knight, The Critical Period in American Literature (Chapel Hill:

Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1951). 84. Jay Martin, Harvests of Change: American Literature 1865-1914 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967), 4. 85. Warner Berthoff, The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884-1919 (1965; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981). 86. Geraldine Murphy, "Romancing the Center: Cold War Politics and Classic American Literature," Poetics 9, no. 4 (1988): 737-47· 87. Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1966), 4-9.

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Index

Academy. See Universities Addiction: capitalism and, 95, 98; as disease, 99-100; professionals, treatment by, 96, 1.38-.39, 164-65, .310 n.12.3; reading and, 19, 95-IOI, 106I08,119,12I,I28,I.35-46,I6I, 164-65, I67; Temperance movement and,I7,95,97-99,117,I.35,297 n.I.3; Whiskey Ring, I.31. See also Sensationalism; Sentimentalism; Women Ad hominism. See Character Adventure fiction. See Romance Aestheticism, 2II African Americans, 99; as authors, 8-9, u9, I44; the bourgeoisie and, I20; as characters, 41, u9, 127; high realism and, 42-4.3; as readership, 8-9 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 7 Allegory, 77-8.3, 293-94 n.72; Catholicism and, 87-90; female figures in, 80-83, 86-87; realism, relation to, 84, 9I; romance, relation to, 86 Althusser, Louis, 43, I56 Anglo-Saxonism: in Atlantic group, 6, 8-9,226, .324 n.I.3; Populism and, 226; regionalism and, 194-97, 203, 226; romance theory and, I65-66; Theodore Roosevelt and, 334-35 n.u7 Antimodernism, I58-59, 224 Arena: Atlantic group, relation to, 7, I89-90, 204, 226; book reviews in,

189, 210-14; history, 2IO; literature, relation to, 210-14; Populism and, 189-90,192,210,225; as reading formation, I89-90; rural readership of, 210; women's issues in, 2I5-I6, 223,225-28 Artists/ artistry. See Authorship; Visual arts Atlantic, 257-66; Atlantic group, role in, 5,24-28,257; Boston elite, relation to, 32-.3.3, 36-37, I50, 230-32, 257; first issue, 36-37; high realism and, 44-45; history of, 5-6, 260-6I; influence of, 27-28, 230, 257, 275 n.u; literary nationalism and, 37; Ticknor & Fields, service for, 25-26, 44, 276 n.I6. See also Galaxy Atlantic group: Anglo-Saxonism in, I96-97; authorial professionalism in, 95-96; book reviews in, 36; as bourgeois institution, 33-34, I90, 206, 234-.35,246-47,259; consumerism in, I49; criticisms of, 2.32-35; defined, 5,257-66; European periodicals, relation to, 25; genre in, I5; influence of, 7-u, I5-I6, 24-27, I90, 229-46, 249,257; journalism versus, 236; in literary history, 232, 246-47,250-52; little magazines and, I48, 207, 2.37; McClure's group versus, 236, 249; as middlebrow, I48, 2.33; national role, 47, 52-5.3,205; Populism and, 5, 192; readership of,

Atlantic group (cant.) 48, 194, 202, 245-46; realism in, 11, 25,183, 207; regionalism in, 190201,203-204,215,225-28; role in shaping reception, 15, 95-96, 107108; romantic revival in, 148, 183, 207; universities, relation to, 148, 231,237-46; relation to women's rights, 5, 215 Authorship, 158; "authorism," 250-51; of book reviews, 26-27; book reviews, represented in, 6, 48-50, 11027; class and, 141-42; economic markets, relation to, 35-36, 163-64; fiction, represented in, 118; gender and, 83,120-28,135-46,306 n.96; professionalism of, 95-96, 108-1U>, 125-28,131,135-48,154,163-64, 199,236,239-40,249,300 n.42; race and, 144; reception, anticipating, 3, 15,267-68 n.3; of regionalist fiction, 198-200; representation, control of, 53,84-92; romantic conception of, 108; sincerity and, 125-26; storyteller model, 148, 151, 159, 163-64, 166,176,199 Bakhtin, M. M., 22, 73-75, 78 Balzac, Honore de, 27 Bennett, Tony. See Reading formations Book publishing industry, 214, 245; belletristic sector of, 35; as philanthropic, 35-37; professionalism and, 35-36,23 6 Book reviews, 214, 244; authors, influence on, 59; authorship of, 26-27; authorship and readership, representation of, 6, 110; by canonical writers, 1-2; genre, considered in, 15; marketing and publicity, use in, 36, 107-

108; reception, influence on, 14-15, 189; regionalism and, 191 Boston: cultural authority of, 23, 2728, 204; location of periodicals and publishers, 9, 23, 27-28, 189, 232; New York versus, 50 Boston bourgeoisie. See Boston elite Boston elite, 158, 276-77 n.23, 279-80 n.48; Atlantic group and, 47, 190; cultural custodianship and, 23,3435,206, 246; defined, 28; "gentility" and, 231-32, 251-52,336-37 n.l0; high realism and, 43; Imperial Rome, compared to, 90; philanthropy and, 23,28-33,35-37,41,44,114,117, 132; professionals, employment of, 49; Roman Catholic Church, compared to, 89 Bourdieu, Pierre, 49, 81 Bourgeoisie, the, 213, 232-33, 274 n·4; hegemony, forms of, 21-22, 33-35, 190; high realism and, 42-44, 48-50, 52,92,120,282-83 n.72; history of, 23; practices of distinction, 20-21, 118,206,259; professionalism and, 52, 116, 141; race relations, 120; reform fiction and, 43-44; subject formation of, 162-63, 166-69, 174, 187-88,234; universities and, 244 Brahmins. See Boston elite; Holmes, Oliver Wendell Brodhead, Richard, 2, 24, 40, 62-63, 85-86,110-11, 193-202, 216, 228 Brown, Alice, 7, 217, 220-21, 224-26 Canonicity. See Literary history; Literature Capitalism: addiction and, 95, 98; commodification, 19, 132-33; Common Sense Philosophy and, 101-102;

Index

consumerism, 17, 19, 95, 106-108,

modification and, 1}}; high realism

147-49,156,162, 167-69,174-75, 218,221-22; cultural stratification, relation to, 20-2}; culture industry, emergence of, 95; currency reform, 215-21,227-28; exchange value versus use value, 221-22; U.S. history, role in, 19, 50, 55, 100-101, 107,109,158-59; as instinctual, 160; productive ethic and, 90, 98, 162; professionalism and, 109 Century, 25, 257-58, 26}; history of, 265-66; relation to realism, 266. See also Scribner's Monthly Chap-Book,7-9 Character: important feature of realism, 14; reading for (adhominism), 1718,115, 129, }04 n.80. See also Plot Childhood, 17, 148-49,162,169,17576,179-86; history of, 16}, 172-74; primitivism and, 170-71; reading,

and,45,47-50, 95-97,112,116-20, 128, 1}1-}}; ideality and, 41; race and, 119; visual arts and, 67-69, 91. See also Taste Consumerism. See Capitalism Cooke, Rose Terry, 196, 204, 208, 21718 Craddock, Charles Egbert [Mary Noailles Murfree], 48,194,199,208209, }06 n.96 Crane, Stephen, 6, 118, 157, 161, 211,

15}-56, 171-76, 186-88; sexuality, 170,179-82, }21 n.10} Civil War, 55; literary nationalism and, 44; New England and, 27-28, }2-}}; print culture, impact on, 20; the South, consequences for, 28 Classic realism, 18 Clemens, Samuel L. See Mark Twain Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: on Fancy vs. Imagination, }9, 48 Colored American Magazine: Atlantic group, relation to, 8-9, 259 Commodification. See Capitalism Common Sense Philosophy, 96, 101106, 1}2, 145, 298 n.1}; realism, relation to, 10}-106, 11}; on sincerity, 12 5- 26 Connoisseurship, 5}, 91, }O} n.72; Atlantic group, rejected by, 148; com-

229 Crawford, F. Marion, 112, 157, 164-65, 205 Critic, 25, 258-59, 262; history of, 261 Cultural stratification, 174-75, 27} n.1, 280 n.50; the bourgeoisie and, 21-22; the Civil War and, 20; class stratification, related to, 12, 2}5, 244; in periodical culture, 9-11; subjective pleasures of, 156 Davis, Rebecca Harding: biography, 128,150; Henry James and, 126-28; John Andross, 95, 115, 128-}5, 14045, 149; Life in the Iron Mills, 22, 48, 127; realism, relation to, 127; sentimentalism and, 126-28; Waiting for the Verdict, 126-27 Decadence, 7-8 Democracy: capitalism and, 22; in foreign art traditions, 68-69; literature and, 246, 274 n.7; the novel and, 4041,61, 152-5}; realism and, 12-1}, 22,41,47,96,116-20,254,271 n.22; romance and, 161 Denning, Michael, 18, }2} n.1 Dial (Chicago): Atlantic group, relation to,204-210,2}9,245

366 Index authors, 35-36; Howells, introducDialect, fictional use of, 7, 199-200, 228 tion of, 45; as organic intellectual, 33, Dickens, Charles, 37, 47 Dickinson, Emily, 93-94, 113 23 1 . Forum, 25, 258; history of, 260-61 Didacticism, 19; ad hominism, counteracted by, 115-16; realism, distinFoucault, Michel, 12, 30-31 guished from, 104-106, 211, 271 Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins, 8, 150, 195, 201,216-18,220-25 n.22, 299 n.34; reform fiction, linked Freud, Sigmund: on narcissism, 129-30 to, 144, 211-14; temporariness of effects, 106 Dime novels and story papers, 18, 98, Galaxy, 25, 263, 265; history of, 262. 129-31,156,171-72,174,269 n.14 Domesticity: Atlantic group, constructed in, 8, 226; farming and, 217, 333-34 n.103; labor and, 217-20, 223-28; Ladies' Home Journal, constructed in, 8; masculinity and, 72; the novel and, 40; patriarchal role in, 218-19,234-35; regionalism and, 216. See also Women Dreiser, Theodore, 6, 169, 229, 248 Eliot, George [Mary Ann Evans], 1; Adam Bede, 67, 74; Felix Holt, 114; intrusive narration of, 106; Middlemarch, 96-97; The Mill on the Floss, 73; organicism, relation to, 113-14,120; realism, relation to, 49-50,67, 74; Scenes of Clerical Life, 44 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 36, 45-46 Escapism, 105, 148, 158, 211 Evans, Mary Ann. See George Eliot Farmers. See Rural life Fiction. See Novel; Realism; Regionalism; Romance; Sensationalism; Sentimentalism Fields, Annie Adams, 32, 117, 172 Fields, James T., 27,32, 260; on dime novels, 172; financial dealings with

See also Atlantic Garland, Hamlin, 7, 118, 199, 202, 21011, 214 Genre: as classification, 1-2, 229-30, 233,267 n.1; conflicts in, 73, 87, 149, 184-86; defined, 15,48; as institution, 16; interpretation and, 16; literary history and, 2; marketing and, 5, 50; race and, 10-11; reception and, 4-5 Giddens, Anthony, 30 Gilder, Richard Watson, 26-27 Gramsci, Antonio, 31, 33 Haggard, H. Rider, 149, 155, 157-58 Harper's, 25, 258-59, 264; British authors, early reliance on, 37; Harper Brothers publishers, service for, 2526; history of, 262-63; sentimental and sensational works, publication of, 98, 263 Harvard University, 32-33, 231, 247 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 195, 209, 253; allegory and, 77-83; Atlantic group, relation to, 5, 52; biography, 52, 5658; The Blithedale Romance, 64; the bourgeoisie, relation to, 52; fiction, platform for, 1, 251; The House of the Seven Gables, 63-64; Howells, introduction of, 45-46; The Life of

Franklin Pierce, 58; The Marble Faun,52-60,64-66,71-92,149;nationalism, relation to, 52-53, 57-60, 91-92; Our Old Home, 58; realism,

relation to, 53, 73-75, 81, 83-87, 9192; romance, relation to, 52, 62-66, 72-87; The Scarlet Letter, 56-60, 63, 70-71,91; Ticknor & Fields and, 52, 59; visual arts and, 58-59, 69-89; "Young Goodman Brown," 89 Hegemony: defined, 21-22, 31-32; instances of, 28, 33, 43, 55, 92, 98, 105. See also Cultural stratification High realism, 91-92, 159, 247; the bourgeoisie, relation to, 13, 24, 4243,48-50; defined, 14, 43; history, relation to, 92; publishing industry, relation to, 24; reform fiction and, 114-15,118; regionalism and, 198; social hierarchy and, 96, 146, 246; Temperance movement and, 97-99. See also Realism Historical romance. See Romance History of the book, studies in, 4-5 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 150, 232, 241; Atlantic, publication in, 36; Brahmins, invention of, 28, 277-78 n.27; Elsie Venner, 44; Howells, introduction of, 45 Hopkins, Pauline E., 8, 10-11, 119 Howells, William Dean, I, 19, 112-15, 150,153,205,209,214,230,236, 266; Atlantic, connected with, 26-27, 44-47,231,260; Boston, influence of, 232-34, 251-52; Criticism and Fiction, 157; Dr. Breen's Practice, 137-40,143; Haymarket defendants, support for, 116; A Hazard of New Fortunes, 50, 252; literary establishment, associated with, 23-24, 245-

49; organicism, relation to, 113-14; as professional novelist, 112; realism, relation to, 23-24, 27,45,149-54, 176-78,235, 246-49,251-52; The Rise of Silas Lapham, 22, 151, 254; A Traveller from Altruria, 211 Hugo, Victor, 45 Idealism/ ideality: novels and, 41; theory of art, 75-76 Immigrants, 6, 194-98, 200 Imperialism, 17, 117, 118; regionalism and, 194-97, 216; romance and, 148, 158-63,165-66; United States, history of, 159-60, 163 James, Henry, 209, 246, 253, 257, 266; liThe Art ofFiction," 27, 113, 171; Atlantic group, relation to, 5; The Awkward Age, 175; The Bostonians, 95,117-18,133,137,139,141-45, 151; connoisseurship, linked to, 97, 127-28,133; fiction, platform for, 1, 103,112,113; on intrusive narration, 106,240; on John Andross, 126-27; on The Marble Faun, 73; organicism, relation to, 113-14, 120; The Portrait of a Lady, 133; The Princess Cas amassima, 177; as professional novelist, 112; realism, relation to, 27, 495°,126-27,176-78, 247,251;on sentimentalism, 126-27; The Turn of the Screw, 149, 175-88; What Maisie Knew, 175, 254 Jameson, Fredric, 16, 270 n.18 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 150, 216, 236; Anglo-Saxonism in the writings of, 195-96; A Country Doctor, 137-39; Country of the Pointed Firs, 221-25; as regionalist, 202, 208, 217

368

Journalism: realism and, 11; literature and, 236, 239-40. See also McClure's group Kaplan, Amy, 14, 159, 193-202, 216, 228,253,272 n.26 Kipling, Rudyard, 8, 149, 157-58, 16062, 205,236

Index

Local color. See Dialect; Regionalism London, Jack 6, 157, 211, 229 Lowell, James Russell, 150, 232, 241; Boston elite, ties to, 28,33, 247; connoisseurship of, 97; editorship of Atlantic, 36, 44,247,258; editorship of North American Review, 258, 264; Howells, introduction of, 45-46; realism and, 44

Labor unions, 168; Atlantic group on, 5, 163; history, late nineteenth-century United States, 147, 163, 169; Populism and, 216. See also Working class Ladies' Home Journal: Atlantic group, relation to, 8-9; McClure's group, membership in, 236 Lears, T. J. Jackson. See Antimodernism Lippincott's, 25, 257-58, 262; history of, 263-64 Literacy: in the late nineteenth-century United States, 20, 273 n.1; political contests over, 19 Literary history: Atlantic group in, 246-53; canonicity and, 6, 156-57, 251; genre and, 2; naturalism and, 6, 229-30,249; realism in, 3, 246-55; reception and, 3,157-58; the romance in, 51; romantic revival, omitted from 6,157-58 Literature, 245; Arena, in relation to, 210-14; Atlantic group and, 9-10, 46-47,208-210, 245-46; canonicity and, 6; connoisseurship and, 91, 209; the extraliterary and, 2, 211-12; journalism and, 236, 239-40; regionalism as, 198-200; universities, relation to, 241, 245 Little magazines, 7, 148, 207, 239, 246; Atlantic group, relation to, 237; universities, relation to, 237

Magazines. See Periodicals McClure's group: Atlantic group, relation to, 236, 249; authorship in, 240; defined, 235-36. See also Journalism Melodrama. See Sensationalism; Sentimentalism Melville, Herman, 1 Mexican War, 44 Middle class. See Bourgeoisie Mimesis. See Realism Murfree, Mary Noailles. See Craddock Charles Egbert Nation, 25,258-60,262; history of,

26 4 Nationalism, literary, 16, 52, 59, 65-69, 148,208; allegory and, 82-83; Anglo-American, 157-58, 166; Civil War and, 44, 91; democracy and, 76, 84-92; novel and, 40, 60-61; philanthropy and, 43-48, 52; realism and, 37,51-53,94; regionalism, relation to, 36-37; romance and, 148. See also Visual arts: nationalism and Naturalism: Atlantic group, relation to, 249; the "epic novel" versus, 230,336 n.3; as a genre, 15; in literary history, 6, 229-30, 249; McClure's group, relation to, 249; realism versus, 229, 235,248-49

New England: Anglo-Saxonism and, 195-97; cultural authority of, 27-28; economic history of, 222; regionalism, 190, 217-28. See also Boston New York Family Story Paper: relation to Atlantic group, 9 Norris, Frank, 211, 230; on book publishing, 236; columnist in The Critic, 261; the "epic novel" and, 230; fiction, platform for, 1, 251; as an innovator, 118; as a naturalist, 6, 157, 229; The Octopus, 214; realism, criticisms of, 235; Responsibilities of the Novelist, 6, 156 North American Review, 25, 261; history of, 264-65; realism, early promotion of, 60-62 Novel: addictiveness of, 96; connoisseurship and, 112; democracy and, 61; ethical function of, 211-14; Imagination and, 39; realism, relation to, 37; romance, relation to, 3845,60-66,73-75,254,284-86 n.l; the short story, relation to, 191 Organicism, 39, 113-14, 120 Overland Monthly, 32,204-10,235

People's Party, the. See Populism Periodicals: authorship and readership, role in constructing, 6, 189; book publishers, use for, 25-26; canonical status of, 7; literary authority of, 2, 232; in literary history, 246 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 236; Doctor Zay, 135-40, 145; in Ladies' Home Journal, 8; Sealed Orders, 138; The Story of Avis, 138 Philanthropy. See Boston elite; Nationalism, literary

Physicians. See Professionalism Plot: analysis of, 18; subsidiary element in realism, 14. See also Character Populism, 17, 167; Arena, treatment in, 189-90,192,210,225; Atlantic group, treatment in, 5, 192; labor unions and, 216; in New England, 331 n.85; producerism and, 216, 226; regionalist fiction, relation to, 201204,215. See also Producerism Print culture, history of, 20 Producerism, 216-28. See also Populism Production, textual. See Authorship Professionalism: academic disciplinarity and, 241-45; amateurism versus, 126, 242; authorship and, 13, 17,95-96,108-120,125-28,131, 135-48,236,239-40,300 n-42; of book publishers, 35-36; Boston elite, use by, 49; of cultural operatives, 3435,52; defined, 108-110; gender and, 121,126,128,135-46; individual solutions, commitment to, 115; labor movement, relation to, 110, 112, 115-16; medical model of, 110-11, 116,118,126,135-39, 154, 243; race and, 120; university professors and, 240-41 Publishers, publishing industry. See Book publishing industry Puritans: legacy of civic organizing, 28 Putnam's, 25,258,261-62; abolitionism and, 42; history of, 265; literary nationalism and, 37; realism, early promotion of, 38-44, 47 Race, 99, 195, 226; connoisseurship and, 119; genre and, 10-11, 119; professionalism and, 120, 127, 144; real-

370

Race (cont.) ism and, 96, 119; representation and, 41-43,119; romance and, 165-66, 197. See also African Americans; Anglo-Saxonism Readership/reading. See Reading formations; Reception Reading formations, 7, 14, 189-90, 203, 226-28, 268 n.9. See also Reception Realism: allegory, relation to, 84, 91; bourgeois groups and, 11-12, 42-43, 98-100; character and, 14, 250; childhood and, 183; connoisseurship and, 95-97,116-20,128,131-33,177; democracy and, 12-13, 22, 41, 9496,116-20,152-53,247,250,254, 271 n.22; didacticism, distinguished from, 104-105, 211, 271 n.22, 299 n.34; early usage of the term, 37-38; elitism of, 13, 148, 177; emotion in, 121; as establishment form, 11-12, 33,211, 246-52; ethical function of, 103-106,118-20,148,151,165,172, 174,211; femininity, relation to, 120-21,142-46,177,186; as a genre, 15; historical emergence of, 1, 11; as an import, 37-38, 247, 249-50; institutionallocation of, 12; journalism, relation to, 247-48; legacy of, 18-19; literariness, 2; in literary history, 232, 246-55; Marxist studies of, 11-12,170 n.18; mimesis and, 7273,83-89,92,112-13,247-48; modernityand, 13, 94, 159; narrative detachment in, 110-13; nationalism and, 51, 94; naturalism versus, 229, 235,248-49; New Historicist studies of, 12, 255, 270 n.18, 271 n.20; nonaddictiveness of, 95-101, 161; the novel and, 37-43; organicism and,

Index 143; philanthropy and, 48; pleasure in, 151-56; professional authorship and, 95, 147-48, 154; promotion of, 11,53,60-62; race and, 10-11, 119; regionalism, relation to, 249; romance, relation to, 45, 51, 73, 86, 94, 147-49,159,161-62,171,174-75, 208,235,252; science and, 94, 113, 118-19,250; sentimentalism and sensationalism, relation to, 95, 98, 112; sexuality suppressed in, 187-88, 234; social Darwinism and, 160-61; social hierarchy and, 13, 120; sympathy in, 103-105, 152; typicality in, 14,42,94,113-15; verisimilitude of, 64-65,76-79,96. See also Classic realism; High realism; Novel Reception: authors' anticipation of, 3, 109; evidence about, 59, 62, 82-83, 201-203,210; exclusivity of, 48; fiction and poetry, represented in, 53, 63-65,72-75,86-89,93-95,17879, 185; genre and, 4-5; historicity of, 51-52, 54, 115, 185; influences on, 18-19, 69, 87-91; literary history and, 3,157-58; paradigms for, 6, 14-15; physicality of, 94, 296 n·4, 316 n·53; pleasurable, 154-56, 16769; previous studies of, 3-5; productive, 3; social function of, 158. See also Reading formations Reconstruction, 5, 127 Refinement. See Taste Reform fiction: promoted in the Arena, 211-14; the bourgeoisie and, 4344; didacticism and, 114-15; in McClure's group, 236; realism, relation to, 104, 118-20, 144 Regionalism: Anglo-Saxonism in, 19497, 203, 226; authorial professional-

Index

371

ism, relation to, 141; authorship of, 198-200; book reviews and, 191; feminist readings of, 216, 221-22, 224-25; high realism and, 198; imperialism, relation to, 197-98, 216; as

254,284-85 n.l; obsolescence of, 13, 51-52,61-62,94; pleasure and, 15156,166-68,174; primitivism and, 159-60,174; race and, 10, 1:65-66; reading of, 4; realism, relation to, 51,

literature, 198, 329 n11; nationalism, relation to, 190-93, 228, 249; New England in, 190, 217-28; Populism and, 201-204, 215; primitivism and, 193-201; producerism and,

72-77,84-87,94,147-49,159,16162,171,174-75,208,235,252; sculpture, compared to, 56, 75-80; social, 211; social Darwinism and,

217-28; realism, relation to, 249; rural life and, 190-210, 213, 219-22, 226-28; rural readership of, 201203, 228; the short story and, 191; urban bourgeois readership of, 193201:, 228; white trash writing and,

19. See also Dialect; Rural life Repplier, Agnes, 158, 161, 166-67, 1:69, 1:71,202,258; Atlantic group, relation to, 150; Boston, relation to, 150; on children in fiction, 175; on ghosts in fiction, 178; realism, criticisms of, 149-56, 165,176 Republican Party, 5 Romance, 177-78,211, 233; addiction and, 165, 167; adventure fiction as, 152,162,165,171-72; allegory, relation to, 86; aristocracy, promoted by, 13, 94; artifice and, 44; childhood reading and, 171, 174, 183; consumerism and, 148-49, 174-75; democracy and, 161; disease and, 45; escapism and, 148, 172; ethical function of, 151:, 165; Fancy and, 39; as foreign, 51, 64-65, 76, 94; as a genre, 1,15; historical, 152,159,164,167; immaturity, alleged to promote, 42; imperialism and, 148, 158-63, 16566; in literary history, 51; the novel, relation to, 38-45, 60-66, 73-75,

160-61; the supernatural and, 94, 178. See also Romantic revival Romantic revival, the, 147-88, 211; adventure fiction and, 8, 10; Atlantic group, relation to, 148, 232-33; the bourgeoisie and, 163; escapism and, 158,211; literary history, omitted from, 6, 157-58, 313-1:4 n.24; literature and, 150; masculinity and, 18788,233-34; Overland Monthly and, 208; race and, 197; social hierarchy and, 13-14. See also Romance Roosevelt, Theodore: Anglo-Saxonism of, 334-35 n.177; Commission on Country Life, 192, 203; the strenuous life, 159 Rural life: Country Life Movement, 192,203; farmers and, 202-204, 210, 216-23,227-28; regionalist fiction and,190-210, 213,219-22,226-28; writing about, 191-95 Said, Edward, 39-40 Scott, Sir Walter, 1, 152-53, 155, 161 Scribner's Magazine, 25; history of, 265 Scribner's Monthly, 25,259; history of, 265-66. See also Century Sculpture. See Visual arts Sensationalism: as addictive, 95-96, 98-101, 164; disease and, 45; as a

372 Sensationalism (cont.) genre, 15, 77; reforms, linked to, 114; social vision of, 115; temporariness of effects, 106, 112 Sensation fiction. See Sensationalism Sentimentalism: as addictive, 95-96, 98,101,121,145-46; artifice, associated with, 38; authorial professionalism versus, 121-25, 199; as a genre, 1,15; intertextuality and, 128-29; reforms, linked to, 114; sexuality and, 121-23, 134, 141; tears and, 122-29,154; temporariness of effects, 101, 106, 112, 123-25; women, associated with, 95, 128-31, 134-35, 145-46 Sexuality: addictive aspects of, 135-46; censorship related to, 187-88, 234; childhood, 170, 179-82,321 n.lo3; sado-masochistic, 140-41, 143-46; sentimentalism and, 121-23; working-class men and, 186-88 Socialism: treatment in Atlantic group, 5 Spofford, Harriet Prescott, 23-24, 27 Stein, Gertrude, 157 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 149-50, 15758,171,205,236 Story papers. See Dime novels and story papers Stowe, Harriet Beecher: published in Atlantic, 36; Old Town Folks, 206; Uncle Tom's Cabin, 41-43, 213-14

Index

guished from, 154-56. See also Connoisseurship Temperance movement. See Addiction Thackeray, William Makepeace, 37, 113 Ticknor & Fields, 130; the Atlantic, publishers of, 25-26, 44; as a Boston institution, 36-37; influence of, 2728 Tolstoy, Leo, 115, 152, 155, 228 Trollope, Anthony: Hawthorne, admired by, 70, 94; Howells on, 47, 177; intrusive narration of, 112; realism, relation to, 27,49, 103 Turgenev, Ivan, 49, 111 Twain, Mark [Samuel L. Clemens], 210, 246, 266; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 22, 104-105, 254; author of "bad boy" books, 172, 183; as literary outsider, 235, 250; realism, relation

to, 250-51 Universities: Atlantic group, relation to, 148, 231, 237-46; creative writers, preparation of, 238; cultural authority of, 148, 237-47; economic influences on, 243-44; institutionalization of American literature in, 237,239,241-42,339 n.40; institutionalization of English literature in, 237,239,241-42; intellectuals in, 238,240-46; literary critics, preparation of, 238; literary history, control of, 23W little magazines, relation to, 237

Taste, 69, 72; addiction or appetite, distinguished from, 97, 101, 162, 16469, 171, 174; as bourgeois value, 2021,96-97,101; goodness, distinguished from, 132; meritocracy and, 46-50,168,209-10; pleasure, distin-

Veblen, Thorstein, 129 Visual arts: classical and medieval, 54; Dutch vs.ltalian traditions in painting, 53, 66-75, 87, 94; Madonnas in, 80-82; Manet's Oejeuner sur

Index 373 I'Herbe, 86-87; nationalism and, 5456, 76; the nude, 77-80, 86-87; sculpture, 53-56,75-80 Warren, Kenneth W., 14, 100, 119, 127, 144,165,269 n.17 Weber, Max, 90, 98, 110 Whipple, Edwin P., 45, 100-101, 107 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 36, 47,130, 232 Williams, Raymond, 13, 134, 156, 192, 241 Women, 181, 186; addiction, associated with, 95, 135-41, 145-46; the Arena an~215-16,223,225-5~asau­ tho~,42-43,60-62,95,114,120-

23,126-45,217-28; as doctors, 9596,135-46,149,310 n.126; domestic labor of, 217-20, 223-26, 228; gender, performed by, 133-34; high realism an~ 42, 96 (see also individual women autho~); marriage and, 12225,137-45; as models and subjects of art, 78-81, 85-87; narcissism of, 128-31,134-35,140-41,145,309

n.118; physicality, identified with, 21,78-82; Populism and, 17, 215, 226-28; as professionals, 121, 126, 128,135-46; publicity and, 142-43; as readers, 95, 121-25, 129-31, 13435, 145-46, 228; sentimentalism an~ 95, 98-99, 101, 121-29, 13435; suffrage movement, 5, 141 Working class, the: addiction and Temperance, relation to, 97-99; characters from, 117-19, 141-42; high realism and, 42, 48, 96, 120; physicality, identified with, 21, 179-83,186-88; professionals and, 116, 168; as readership, 18, 48, 14748,152-53,161,162,166-72,18688; "white" racial identity, relation to, 6; women's suffrage movement, relation to, 141. See also Labor unions Writers/writing. See Authorship Zola, Emile: didacticism, accused of, 114; disease, linked to, 97, 118; invention of naturalism, 6, 229

About the Author Nancy Glazener is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Glazener, Nancy. Reading for realism: the history of a U.S. literary institution, 1850-1910/ Nancy Glazener. p. cm. - (New Americanists) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8223-1880-6 (cloth : alk. paper). ISBN 0-8223-1870-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. American periodicals-HistorY-19th century. 2. Literature and society-United States-HistorY-19th century. 3. Realism in the press. I. Title. II. Series.

PN4877·G49 1997