Reading the American Novel 1865-1914 (Reading the Novel)

Reading the American Novel 1865–1914

READING THE NOVEL General Editor: Daniel R. Schwarz The aim of this series is to provide practical introductions to reading the novel in both the British and Irish, and the American traditions. Published Reading the Reading the Reading the Reading the

Nineteenth-Century Novel Harry E. Shaw and Alison Case Modern British and Irish Novel 1890–1930 Daniel R. Schwarz Novel in English 1950–2000 Brian W. Shaffer American Novel 1865–1914 G. R. Thompson

Forthcoming Reading the Eighteenth-Century Novel Reading the American Novel 1780–1865 Reading the Twentieth-Century American Novel

Paula R. Backscheider Shirley Samuels James Phelan

Reading the American Novel 1865–1914 G. R. Thompson

This edition first published 2012 Ó 2012 G. R. Thompson Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of G. R. Thompson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thompson, Gary Richard, 1937– Reading the American novel 1865–1914 / G. R. Thompson. – 1st ed. p. cm. – (Reading the novel ; 4) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-631-23406-7 (hardback) 1. American fiction–19th century–History and criticism. 2. American fiction– 20th century–History and criticism. I. Title. PS377.T47 2011 813’.409–dc23 2011026037 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9781444344240; Wiley Online Library 9781444344271; ePub 9781444344257; Mobi 9781444344264 Set in 10/12.5pt Minion Font by Thomson Digital, Noida, India 1 2012

For Elizabeth

Contents

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xv

Introduction 1

1

Toward the “Great American Novel”: Romance and Romanticism in the Age of Realism

9

2

Of Realism and Reality: Definitions and Contexts

25

3

Dramas of the Broken Teacup: American “Quiet” Realism

41

4

The Nature of Naturalism: Definitions and Backgrounds

55

5

Implacable Nature, Household Tragedy, and Epic Romance

73

6

Frank Norris: The Beast Within

91

7

The Rocking Horse Winners: Theodore Dreiser and Urban Naturalism

109

8

Subjective Realism: Stephen Crane’s Impressionist Fictions

125

9

Impressions of War: The Interior Battlefield

141

10 Sense and Sensibility: Sentimental Domesticity and “New Woman’s Fiction”

157

11 Domestic Feminism: The Problematic Louisa May Alcott

179

12 “All the Happy Endings”: Marriage, Insanity, and Suicide

195

13 Vulgarians at the Gate: Edith Wharton and the Collapse of Gentility

215

14 Tea-Table as Jungle: Henry James and “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life”

235

15 Economies of Pain: W. D. Howells

261

16 The “Gilded Age”: Genteel Critics and Militant Muckrakers

283

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Contents

17

What Is An American? Regionalism and Race

299

18

The Territory Ahead: Emerging African American Voices

323

19

The “Dream of a Republic”: War, Reconstruction, and Future History

343

At the Modernist Margin: Mark Twain

367

20

Bibliographical Resources

387

Index

421

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Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to. . . students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854) Many American students seem to think that American literature exists in some sort of void, as if American writers knew only American history and read only other American writers. But American writers did not write in a parochial vacuum. They were nurtured by England, the mother country, and by Continental brothers, sisters, and cousins. To understand specific texts of American fiction more than superficially, it is necessary to see them in a broader, primarily European, context of social and literary history. It is also necessary to see them in historical contexts that often blur the boundaries of particular time periods. America was from the first a mix of different cultures; but British literary culture was always the preeminent model and influence, even when Americans were in the process of trying to reject it. Other European influences ebbed and flowed for over two centuries. In the later eighteenth century, the major foreign influence in literature was French neoclassicism; in the earlier nineteenth century, the major influence was German romanticism; in the later nineteenth century, it was the French again, accompanied by the Russians and Scandinavians, who like the French provided models for realism and naturalism. In the early twentieth century, the new modernism was an international mixture of European literatures, owing much to French impressionist painting and literature and emerging German expressionist fiction and theater. Other elements of an “American” literature developed closer to home. Native American songs and creation myths in the oral tradition from the seventeenth century forward are still being recovered. African American literature begins in ix

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the eighteenth century and reaches its first apogee by the middle of the nineteenth. The first important appearances of Asian and Jewish immigrant literature occur in the very late nineteenth century. The twentieth century saw the development of a growing corpus of Hispanic American literature. These were some of the contexts for a course in American literature from 1865 to the early 1900s that I taught at Purdue University, called “The Rise of Realism.” However, the period from the 1860s through the 1890s and beyond was not characterized simply by realism, but also by the persistence of romance and romanticism, by special blends of nonrealistic regionalism and local color, by gothic themes and fantasy, by domestic sentimentalism, by women’s idealistic protest writings, by muckraking melodrama, by intense and conflicted polemics on race, class, and economics, and especially by a problematic “naturalism” partaking of both realism and romanticism. I sometimes used “Realism and the Persistence of Romance” as an alternate title for the course, and that phrase is a sub-thesis underlying the period survey presented here. But I wish to make clear at the outset that in noting continuities with earlier periods and precedents in certain forms of literature, I am not suggesting the superiority of one over the other in social value or literary achievement. Knowledge of traditions before the American Civil War enhances our understanding of postwar concerns. And by cross-referencing prewar and postwar works and matters, I have sought to moderate some historical inaccuracies. Some texts are significant for their sociopolitical or philosophical aspects; and there are a number of works that receive attention in the following pages for their historical or biographical interest. But within the large contexts of cultural and literary history, the emphasis here is on works that have enduring power to engage readers both intellectually and emotionally: on individual works significant for their form (their various integrating structures) and individualizing functions (with particular voices, particular characters, and particular imagery). Once the large context has been laid out, it is the individual text that is most important – at least for what I would call literary studies. To reverse that would be like reading about the history of music and composers without listening to any musical compositions. The present book reflects this approach: major text plus context. It is intended as a general overview of the territory, suitable for introductory classes, though not necessarily always at the most elementary level. It is aimed at the diverse audience levels of the Wiley-Blackwell A Companion to American Fiction 1865–1914 (2005; rev. 2009), which I co-edited with Robert Paul Lamb. As in that book, the major audience for the present volume is conceived to be threefold: advanced undergraduates interested in preparing for graduate education; beginning graduate students; and what the Companion designates x

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as “non-specialists and general intellectuals.” It may also be of some use to teachers preparing their own courses in the field. Wherever it has seemed appropriate, I have referred the reader to the discussions in the Companion volume. For one thing, each of the Companion essays contains an up-to-date bibliography of selected major critical and scholarly works beyond what I have included in the comprehensive “Bibliographical Resources” for the present volume. For another, my colleague and I planned that volume over several years in ongoing consultation with the contributors; and, for me, the present volume is an extension of, and at times a debate with, that one. That is, I have an individual approach, and I argue a more defined overall thesis: I trust that readers will find the two books, although covering the same ground, are not repetitive but complementary. My focus is on Anglophone American novels. By novel I mean to include the short novel form usually called the “novella” or “nouvelle”; and I also make use of selected short stories that are especially significant for understanding such movements as romanticism, realism, naturalism, impressionism, feminism, regionalism, and modernism. The discussions often counterpoint an established canon with an emergent new canon (or canons), noting for example redefinitions of the “sentimental” and “domestic novel,” reconceived ideas of “women’s fiction,” and rediscovered areas like nineteenth-century African American fiction. Others deal more centrally with political issues, the economics of social class, the development of psychological fiction, and so on. As part of the introduction of particular literary texts with which the general reader or beginning student may not be familiar, the importance of narrative structure is emphasized. In emphasizing the importance of story, I follow the lead of critics and teachers of American literature like Darrel Abel in his threevolume literary history, American Literature (1963), and Nina Baym in her Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870 (1978; revised 1993). In these works, analytic plot summary is combined with critical interpretation, revealing meanings embedded in the structure of unfolding narration. In dealing with structure, I have recourse to some very basic ideas: namely, the old Freytag pattern of rising and falling action with a crisis somewhere a little past center. This paradigm was developed by Gustav Freytag in the nineteenth century in reference to the apparent five-act structure of renaissance (specifically Shakespearean) drama: exposition (setting forth the basic situation and introducing the main characters); complication (setting obstacles between characters and their goals, knotting up the plot and complicating relationships); crisis (a turning point toward one outcome or another in the narrative and in the lives of the principal characters); climax or second crisis (usually an emotional highpoint replicating the issues decided in the crisis); and the xi

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denouement (untying the plot knots, bringing the narrative to some sort of resolution, even if an elliptical one). To this pattern, I add two more. Most obvious is the nineteenth-century practice of publishing long novels in two or three volumes, which results in the typical American novel of any substantial length having a significant high point or narrative “turn” at the end of the first of two volumes. When published in one large volume, portions of the narrative may be labeled “books” and may or may not renumber the chapters within each book; sometimes very large novels have five-act structures named and numbered as “books.” This often results in a thematic and narratival “middle-point” at the end of a “book” or volume, taking the form of a major iconic scene or a major turning point, often the “principal” crisis. In earlier nineteenth-century aesthetics, as formulated by German theorists, notably Friedrich Schlegel, this middle-point (Mittelpunkt) was central to the idea of the “geometric” novel. Schlegel further elaborated the middle-point to include secondary or “elliptical” middle-points – an idea that finds an analogue in Frank Norris’s concept of a main narrative “hinge” and related “pivot-points” (see Ch. 6). I also have occasional reference to nineteenth-century narrative aesthetics when calling attention to the “arabesque” quality (intricate interpenetrating and framing patterns) of certain works and “romantic irony” (a proclivity for seriously meaning and simultaneously mocking something). But in general I call attention to middle-points, structural pivots, and geometrical segments without specific reference to arcane theories. Nevertheless, I attempt in this volume to combine traditional analytic tools for close reading of narrative texts with newer concepts in critical theory and narratology – especially those of M. H. Abrams, M. M. Bakhtin, Wayne Booth, Gerard Genette, Wolfgang Iser, Frederic Jameson, Thomas Kent, Morse Peckham, and John Carlos Rowe (see Bibliographical Resources). In addition to standard terms like plot, story, action, and point-of-view, the reader will find concepts like focalization (the consciousness through which the story is presented regardless of technical point-of-view) and narratees (an explicit person or implied consciousness to whom the story is addressed directly or indirectly). In this regard, the student should be familiar with traditional point-of-view and its modes (e.g., first-person central or peripheral; third-person omniscient or restricted; and so forth). A few other significant terms, like dialogical, carnivalesque, and transgeneric, are drawn in particular from the critical framework of Mikhail Mikhailovitch Bakhtin, whose work has informed my own for the last twenty-five years. The meaning of transgeneric is obvious; carnivalesque basically suggests the comicgrotesque as a mode undercutting cultural norms. The dialogical indicates historical and ideological oppositions embedded together in a text for an openended, rather than a closed, thematic dialectic: the art of bringing to light xii

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contradictions and weighing their relative value. (Fuller definitions and applications can be found in my earlier works on Poe, Hawthorne, and “arabesque” narrative; see Bibliographical Resources.) I have employed these terms sparingly, trying always to keep the primary student audience in mind. I have imagined myself in the classroom, sometimes lecturing to a group, sometimes talking to students informally. I have remembered various expressions of puzzlement or sudden enlightenment – or incomprehension at seeming digressions – or excitement about seeing the overall picture of historical contexts and generic patterns – or, best of all, sudden epiphanies regarding specific works. Thus, while presenting an overview of some complex theoretical propositions, I have tried to keep from loading up the discussion with unfamiliar terms and jargon. Those more technical terms and constructs that I do use I have tried to define and explain as we go. In this regard, let me clarify the use of the word “we” in the following discussions. It is not the “royal we” of some anointed expert, but the conversational “we,” the sign of shared experience in reading. Ordinarily, personal opinion will be obvious (for example, Howells’s The Shadow of a Dream deserves greater recognition as a minor classic of American fiction). Occasionally, however, I will try to make more explicit what may be a radical divergence from the standard view. For example, I happen to think that Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, which some critics think a masterpiece, is highly overrated; and I say so as an “opinion.” For works about which there is substantial critical disagreement, I give in addition to my own what seems to me a central or basic interpretation in the context of what I think will be useful to a student-oriented overview of the field. My debt to the historical scholars and literary critics who have preceded me is enormous; but I also owe a general debt to sources beyond the printed page: to my academic colleagues. By that I mean to include former teachers, fellow teachers, fellow readers – and students. In the course of a career that spans nearly fifty years and five universities, I have faced some ten thousand students in the classroom. Many of these students, in their papers, in class discussion, and later on in publications, have given me wonderful insights, broadened my knowledge, and enriched my understanding. To the ten thousand as whole, I owe an incalculable debt, and I thank them for what has been a wonderful career. I can’t think of a better life than having been able to read and talk about books with them. Albuquerque, New Mexico October 2010

xiii

Acknowledgments

I want first to acknowledge colleagues and friends at Purdue University where I taught for over thirty years. I want especially to thank Howard and Nancy Mancing, who provided a room in their home during my last teaching semester; this refuge allowed me to complete parts of this book in seclusion and quiet. My time at Purdue University overlapped with that of Darrel Abel for only a few years. I could have wished for more. Conversations with him, and his writings on Poe and Hawthorne, were important influences on my own work. How much so may be suggested by the Festschrift that I and another Purdue colleague, Virgil L. Lokke, compiled for him: Ruined Eden of the Present: Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe. Critical Essays in Honor of Darrel Abel (1981). For some two decades, my Purdue colleagues Leonard Neufeldt and Robert Paul Lamb generously read and critiqued nearly everything I wrote. The present book is the lesser for Len’s having retired. Bob Lamb’s reading of my work always improved it; and of course we collaborated on the Blackwell Companion to American Fiction 1865–1914. I cite Bob frequently, and his presence will be felt by those who know him, even when he is not specifically cited. Among the greatest pleasures of my Purdue years was working with a number of talented graduate students. One of the first dissertations I directed at Purdue was that of Thomas L. Kent, a revised version of which was later published as Interpretation and Genre: The Role of Generic Perception in the Study of Narrative Texts (1986). In this work, Tom introduced me to some new modes of thinking about genre by applying paradigms of “information theory” to the conventions of dime novels and tracing their transmutations in classic texts by Mark Twain and Stephen Crane. Stephen Frye completed his PhD dissertation at Purdue under my direction in 1995, a revised version of which was published as Historiography and Narrative Design in the American Romance (2001); his interest in Bakhtinian theory and his work on the persistence of the romance

xv

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tradition in America run in the background of several of the discussions here. Eric Carl Link also completed his PhD dissertation under my direction in 1995, a revised version of which was published as The Vast and Terrible Drama: American Literary Naturalism in the Late Nineteenth Century (2004). The extensive notes to that book provide a useful critical-bibliographical guide to issues in both naturalism and realism, and this work is often cited in the present volume. Eric and I also co-authored Neutral Ground: New Traditionalism and the American Romance Controversy (1999), a book covering American theories of fiction from the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, cited in the opening chapters of the present volume. In 2000, Beverly J. Reed, who had acted as my research assistant for a volume on Poe, completed a dissertation on the interaction of “scientific racialism” and the “visual/verbal construction” of the body in relation to the “American Woman.” I was privileged to serve as co-chair for this dissertation with the late Cheryl Z. Oreovicz; from this project I learned new ways of thinking about historical issues of gender and culture. There are others I would mention if there were enough space; but my debt to Darrel, Tom, Eric, Steve, Bev, Bob, and Len is direct and immeasurable. Second, I wish to acknowledge the editors and staff at Wiley-Blackwell. In what seems now a distant time and place, the General Editor of the Blackwell Readings series, Professor Daniel Schwartz of Cornell University, recommended me as the person to write Reading the American Novel 1865–1914; and I want to thank him for his confidence in someone who is primarily a preCivil War scholar. My first experience with the Blackwell publishing group was with Andrew McNeillie (now of Oxford University Press), whose enthusiasm was infectious; it was his conviction of the importance of the Blackwell American series that persuaded me to attempt A Companion to the American Novel 1865–1914 – on condition that I could persuade Bob Lamb to join me as co-editor. Working with Blackwell (subsequently Wiley-Blackwell) has been one of the more gratifying experiences I have had in book publishing (as the acknowledgment in the Companion indicates). For their work on one or both projects I want to thank Karen Wilson, Jenny Hunt, Helen Nash, Gillian Somerscales, and others of the Blackwell and Wiley-Blackwell teams. Ben Thatcher saw the final two condensed versions of the present book through to the production stage. Copy-editing was carried out meticulously by Gail Ferguson, who also took special care with complex bibliographical cross-references; Alison Worthington undertook the task of producing a thorough index beyond just names and titles. I especially want to acknowledge Felicity Marsh, who coordinated the final production of this book from copy-editing to actual publication. Her command of all aspects of editing and production, her understanding of writers’ xvi

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concerns, and her straightforward professional demeanor, combined with friendly low-key humor, made the last stages of this project virtually free of author-anxiety. Most of all, I am grateful to executive editor Emma Bennett, who became the guiding light for the present volume shortly after its initiation. She suggested different options while the manuscript grew and shrank like Alice. When I began more than once to lose perspective, she offered gentle encouragement to stick with the project and made many suggestions for its improvement. She has been central in shaping this book into the more focused work it is now. I have had some wonderful editors in the past; and I was once again exceedingly fortunate. I sought special help from Grace Farrell, Rebecca Clifton Reade Professor of English at Butler University. I asked Grace to read what was then a very long central section (almost a small book in itself) on women authors and woman’s fiction, checking for gross errors as well as editing for length. It was a lot to ask. To my great delight, she set to work cutting and condensing; page after page of unnecessary material dropped out; and, with a few deft transitions, she made them disappear pretty much seamlessly. Bob Lamb also helped me cut the first part of the overly long manuscript, with analyses and summaries shortened, with some paragraphs of garrulous transition omitted, and the notes curtailed. I am grateful for all such advice; but of course any abrupt shifts of subject or overly truncated discussions are my sole responsibility. My deepest debt is to my wife, Elizabeth Boyd Thompson, who is herself the best editor I know. Elizabeth listened to me natter for more than five years about this book, offered sensible advice, and, as she has done so many times before, skillfully edited the final manuscript. She reduced the repetitions, weedwhacked the underbrush, generally cleaned up the style, and pointed out when things didn’t quite cohere. When further reductions were requested, she did all this again. Without her indispensable help, I could not have finished this book. And so, once more, I dedicate my work to my beloved life’s companion.

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Introduction

From 1865 to about 1910, literary circles in America debated the relative value of the novel and the romance with increasing intensity. On the surface, such a matter may not sound terribly significant, but the ongoing debate about realism and romance was central to the quest for cultural unity after the Civil War: it became a major issue in the reemerging concern for a “national” American literature, embodied in the idea of the “Great American Novel.”1 This debate is also central to the interpretation of the texts to be examined in this volume. Genre is a lens, and we need to be aware of the lens and its prismatic properties. Genre conceptions – and their departures and de-formations – are central to the accurate understanding of individual works of literature. Over time we find an ever-changing hierarchy of genres reflecting complicated (and not always consistent) value systems of cultural suppositions and fashions. Taxonomies like novel or romance, realism or romanticism, are tied to some angle of vision, whether generally conceptual or specifically literary. It is important to remember that, however privileged any one literary form may be in any given era, genres are always in contention with one another. It will be well to remember this caveat when trying recover an accurate idea of the post-Civil War era and its literature.

America Singing: The Varied Voices of Realism Just before the Civil War, in 1860, and then again in 1867, the romantic-realist poet Walt Whitman included in the “Inscriptions” section of Leaves of Grass the poem “I Hear America Singing.” In it, he catalogues the “varied carols” he hears: from mechanics, carpenters, boatmen, shoemakers, hatters, woodcutters, Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson. Ó 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

1

Introduction

ploughboys, wives, mothers, girls sewing or washing, young men singing together at night. Historical paradigms are dependent on which “voices” from the past we actually allow ourselves to hear. The following are some classic examples of these varied voices. Realist fiction: 1860s and 1870s Important realist works that focused on the actual and specific problems of particular regions, events, and occupations include: John William De Forest’s Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867); Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age, A Tale of To-Day (1873) and the quasi-fictionalized Life on the Mississippi (1873); Louisa May Alcott’s Work: A Story of Experience (1873); Albion W. Tourg
ee’s A Fool’s Errand: A Narrative of the South during Reconstruction (1879). Realist fiction: 1880s and 1890s The next decade produced works of social and economic realism as different as Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), both of which make use of dialect and vernacular in an attempt to reproduce the actual sounds of regional American and immigrant English. A newer form of domestic realism also reached a zenith in the 1880s and 1890s with such works as: Henry James’s Washington Square (1881), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886), The Spoils of Poynton (1896–97), and What Maisie Knew (1897); William Dean Howells’s A Modern Instance (1881) and The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885); and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). The last decade of the century also produced not only gentler-seeming works of pastoral regional realism, like Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), but also grimmer works focused on regions or specific areas like Hamlin Garland’s Main-Travelled Roads (1891) and Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Realist fiction: early 1900s These realist breakthroughs were followed in the new century by Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and The Colonel’s Dream (1905), James’s The Wings of the Dove (1902) and The Ambassadors (1903), Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) and The Custom of the Country (1913). The term naturalism refers to the pessimistic late-century aesthetic ideology competing with realism. But readers familiar with some of the works just 2

Introduction

mentioned will be aware of how blurred the line between naturalism and realism can be. Naturalist fiction: 1890s and early 1900s Representative titles of naturalist fiction include: Ambrose Bierce’s Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891), Stephen Crane’s Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893, 1896) and George’s Mother (1896, 1898), Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899) and The Octopus (1901), Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods (1902), Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903) and The Sea Wolf (1904), Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911), James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) and The Financier (1912).2 What underlay the appearance of these works, which are supposed to be a reaction to the illusions of romance and romanticism? The usual answer is political and sociological rather than literary: the grim realities of the Civil War and its economic aftermath. But this seemingly simple and direct proposition is actually rather complicated, involving several quite different ideological perspectives and genre conceptions.

Mapping the Territory: Realism, Romance, and the Civil War One of the most repeated generalizations about the 1865 to 1914 period in literature used to be that “realism” overtook and essentially buried “romanticism.” In the conflict between romanticism and realism, the novel supposedly achieved dominance over the earlier romance – so that one of the carcasses left on the battlefield after 1865 was the emaciated body of the latter. Most of the great realist works, however, have various forms of romanticism and romance embedded deep within their realist fabric. Moreover, naturalist writers of the same era, particularly Jack London and Frank Norris, whose works are sometimes said to represent an extreme form of realism, acknowledged the strong influence of the romance tradition. The preconception that post-Civil War realism did away with romance and romanticism for the next half century continues to be popular in part because it is reified by the very names for the period in literary histories, textbooks, and course descriptions. For decades, the most common names for the era in American literary history between the Civil War and World War I were the Age of Realism and the Rise of Realism, or more aggressively the Triumph of Realism. 3

Introduction

This idea that the shocking realities of the Civil War and its aftermath were responsible for the “triumph” of realism was conventional for a century or more, beginning at least by the 1880s. For example, in the Dial for May 1887, Samuel M. Clark commented that “the present generation of readers do not take readily to romance.” The following year, in an essay on “The Romantic and the Realistic Novel,” the critic and novelist H. H. Boyesen remarked that, in his “devotion to realistic art,” he “was inclined to believe some years ago that romanticism was dead.” Earlier in the decade, in 1883, James Herbert Morse, equating the novel with realism, had written in the Century magazine that – after the war – “all the conditions of the times forced the romancer out of the field and pushed the novelist in.”3 It is clear from Morse’s and Boyesen’s pairing of the words romanticism–romance and realism–novel that they equated genre and genre expectations with a worldview, with literary movements, and with historical eras. W. D. Howells in an 1899 lecture on “Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading” called the realistic novel the “supreme form of fiction,” a form greater than the romance (NGd, 143). In an essay remarking the rise of “The New Historical Romances” in the North American Review for December 1900, Howells claimed that the “natural tendency” of American fiction of the 1870s and 1880s was realistic and that the new romances were, happily, more realistic than the older ones before the war.

Theory of the American romance-novel Half a century later, when a new generation of American scholars was reevaluating its national literary history, Richard Chase offered the classic statement of both the demise and persistence of romance. In The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957), Chase wrote: “It used to be thought that the element of romance in American fiction was destined to disappear,” and that “perhaps had to all intents and purposes already disappeared, as a result of the rise of modern realism,” which “set in after the Civil War.” Moreover, it “used to be thought, also, that this was a good thing, romance being regarded as a backward tendency of the comparatively unenlightened youth of our culture.”4 A year or so before, in The Cycle of American Literature (1955, 1956), Robert E. Spiller, the editor of the celebrated Literary History of the United States (1948), had insisted on the idea that romance and romanticism had been supplanted by realism and the novel. The new realistic novelist was represented by W. D. Howells, who, Spiller said, had opened the door to “a more meaningful fiction” through “his advocacy of realism” (116–19; my italics). Not only had the realist novel “superseded” the older forms of literature (including drama and poetry), 4

Introduction

but also a more precise regionalism and realism “took the place” of the “imagination and idealism” of romanticism (113). It was, he said, sometime between 1910 and 1920 that America finally “came of age.” The “actual moment of maturity” might be located in events in 1912 or 1916, as the “symbol for the putting away” of “nineteenth-century forms, ideas, and habits” (162). But Chase pointed out the ways in which realism and romance coexisted. The actual “cycle” of American literature was the interaction of novel–romance, romanticism–realism. The “history of the American novel,” Chase wrote, is “not only the history of the rise of realism but also of the repeated rediscovery of the use of romance . . .” Chase’s interpretation of the native tradition became known as the “Romance Theory” of American fiction. Nearly another half a century later, Michael Davitt Bell in Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation: Selected Essays on American Literature (2001) analyzed his career as a development from an initial interest in romanticism vis-a-vis realism. His earliest concern was “a question about the generic bases of nineteenth-century American fiction.” He had undertaken “the project of interrogating two literary historical assertions that had become commonplace by the 1960s.” These were the interrelated ideas that “the tradition of our fiction before the Civil War had been one of ‘romance’ (as distinguished from the supposedly ‘novelistic’ tradition of nineteenth-century British fiction); and that following the Civil War the characteristic mode of American fiction had shifted from ‘romance’ to ‘realism’.5 Without abandoning his interest in romance and realism as aesthetic phenomena, Bell shifted his focus to what he came to call the “sociology of literary vocation.” His “ultimate aim,” he wrote, “was to use sociology to try to work out the relationship between works of American literature and generalizations about ‘culture.’” Although focused on a literary form, his 1980 study, The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation was already merging formalist with cultural concerns. Thirteen years later, in The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea (1993), he was examining “realism” primarily as a political-cultural event.6 The sociological interpretation of realism was not new in the 1980s and 1990s when Bell moved from aesthetic interests to more broadly cultural ones. It had been quite common for mid-twentieth century surveys and anthologies to toss off casual statements about the overly aesthetic inclination of romanticism and how the “romantic element was vanishing from our national life.”7 A somewhat more temperate statement is found in the introduction to “The Triumph of Realism” section in a standard reference book for students, the College Outline Series volume, American Literature. Here we read that the Civil War brought mass “industrialization of the United States,” which brought about “the twilight of romanticism and the dawn of realism.”8 5

Introduction

Sociology and literary history It is easy to see the appeal of the Civil War as the major pivotal point not only in American political history, but also in American cultural history. For one thing, the bloody realities of war seem to contrast with the romantic optimism of the dominant American philosophy known as Transcendentalism. For another, the war brought into sharp focus, not the overarching idealism of a unified land, but a recognition of its disparate regions and peoples. And yet the romantic idea of the Great American Novel as something mythic – an archetypal representation of the nation as a whole – grew and persisted after the war. In 1960, C. Hugh Holman reemphasized the idea of “industrialism” as a primary cause and a principal trait of American realism – attributing its rise to the Civil War. He asserted that the war had been a struggle between the concepts of agrarian democracy and industrial democracy. The Northern victory brought the “triumphant emergence” of industrialism, which generated mechanical and material advances but also caused labor disputes, economic depression, unionism, violent strikes, and reciprocal repression by the Robber Barons. There was, Holman wrote, a realistic “disillusionment with American life never before widespread in the nation.”9 How “widespread” is uncertain; but among pre-war intellectuals and artists, disillusionment with the dream of an ideal republic was certainly a major theme. Holman also pointed to the rise of science – or at least a rising consciousness of scientific thought among the general public. The impact of Darwin, Marx, Comte, Spencer, and others who were advancing “a scientific view of man,” was sharply at odds with “the older religious view” and was undercutting the old romantic “certainty” about “perfectibility” and the “inevitability of progress.” Jay Martin opens his densely detailed Harvests of Change: American Literature 1865–1914 with the following: “The changes that took place in America between the Civil War and the First World War were remarkable both for their completeness and for their rapidity”; the “whole scene of human endeavor and thought” that had “existed since the Middle Ages” in the short period of a half-century “passed away.” Chief among the “forces” effecting change in “literary production between the wars” was the fact that the “continuity of literary taste” was “shattered by the Civil War.”10 These generalizations are not entirely wrong; it is the sweeping and absolutist quality of them that is problematic. Like many another critical study of the period, Harvests of Change focuses on post-war historical, political, and socioeconomic pivotal points: the Rise of Wealth, the Growth of the City, Immigration, Reform, Education, the Growth of Science and what he calls “a Naturalistic Test of Truth” (specifically Darwinism), Technology, and Mass

6

Introduction

Literature. In literary criticism since then, the shift toward sociological context and cultural critique has continued apace. Sociological concerns are paramount in the fourth edition of the popular Heath Anthology of American Literature (2002). Much of the long introduction, the “Late Nineteenth Century: 1865–1910,” is focused on the social and technological implications of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. About a third of the way into the introductory essay, the editors say that literary realism may be defined on its “simplest level” as a “matter of faithfulness to the surfaces of American life.”11 The introduction goes on to place a number of later American writers in socioeconomic contexts, with the history of literary tradition relegated to the background. In my view, for the study of literature per se, we need first to deal with several large aesthetic idea-complexes barely mentioned in the Heath introduction: the historical-cultural terms, romanticism, realism, naturalism; and the more specifically literary terms romance and novel. For one thing, these concepts are central to the whole debate over literary realism. For another, they are key concepts in the idea of the “Great American Novel.” Notes 1. The “Great American Novel” is discussed in the next chapter. “Literary nationalism” was a major aspect of the preceding romantic period, but it was less generic. Anyone reading the reviews and literary debates of the last quarter of the nineteenth century in America can hardly fail to be struck by the intensity of the concern for genre – especially the novel versus romance as representing value systems and worldviews. Students often think of the romance as merely a love story instead of its broader definition of going beyond (or eschewing) everyday reality; see the historical definitions throughout this chapter and the next. The terms and documents of the national debate are set forth in detail from ante-1810 to post-1910 in Thompson and Link (1999), hereafter cited as NGd (see Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Works, p. 391), including a comprehensive chronological bibliography. 2. For a complementary list, see Cowley, “Naturalism in American Literature” (1950), 329. 3. Quotations from Hjalmar Hjyorth Boyesen and Samuel M. Clark will be found, contextualized, in NGnd, 157 and 141. For James Herbert Morse, see “The Native Element in American Fiction” (Century Magazine), NGd, 141. 4. Chase, xi–xii. This influential book was considered a somewhat controversial work for many years; for fuller discussion, see NGd, 33–43. 5. Adding “end of the century ‘naturalism’” as a form of realism (x–xii).

7

Introduction

6. Bell’s struggles with aesthetics versus sociology are representative of an entire generation of scholars, including myself. 7. This hyperbole is from a classroom guide of the mid-twentieth century, Guy E. Smith’s American Literature: A Complete Survey (1957), 123–4. In the preface to Nation and Region 1860–1900, the third volume of the Viking Portable Library American Literature Survey (1968), Howard Mumford Jones maintains that by the end of the Civil War “Romanticism had run its course” (III, xviii). Also see Howard Jones’s The Theory of American Literature (1965 [1948]) for further historical context outside of the romance/novel controversy, esp. Chs 4 and 5 on literary nationalism. 8. Crawford, Kern, and Needleman (1945[1953]), 158. 9. See Holman, “Realistic Period in American Literature, 1865–1900” (HBL, 1992), 400–2. The Robber Barons were ruthless “moneyed men” who practiced “bossism” and were largely responsible for the growing poverty level in what Lincoln Steffens in 1904 called “the shame of the cities.” See Chs 4 and 16 of the present volume. 10. Jay Martin (1967), 1, 16. 11. Heath Anthology of American Literature, 4th edn, II, 10, col. B.

See also Abrams (GLT); Barrish (1995); Cady (1971); Cowie (RAN); Hoffman (1972); Kent (1986); Link (2004); Parrington (1930); Perosa (1983 [1978]); Pizer (1984 [1966]); Ridgley (REAmL 1963); Rowe (1982); Scheick (ACAF 2009); Walcutt (1956). Also see references at the end of the next chapter.

8

Chapter 1

Toward the “Great American Novel” Romance and Romanticism in the Age of Realism

The idea of the Great American Novel was implicit in the quest for “literary nationalism” well before the Civil War of 1861–5; and it became a call for national unity and national cultural achievement after the war. The idea and the phrase were crystallized in an essay titled “The Great American Novel” by John W. De Forest in The Nation in 1868. De Forest speculated that this mythical entity would be both a great epic poem of the people and the story of their everyday lives. But for the rest of the nineteenth century the most persistent question about this hypothetical construct was whether it would be a romance of idealism and great, out-of-the-ordinary happenings or a novel of ordinary everyday life. Romance and novel are the two literary forms or genres at the center of the debate between realists and romanticists at end of the century. The term romance has a long pedigree, going back more than three centuries in English, but we’ll begin with a nineteenth-century American definition. The first edition (1828) of Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language reads in part: “ROMANCE . . . A fabulous relation or story of adventures and incidents, designed for the entertainment of readers; a tale of extraordinary adventures, fictitious and often extravagant, usually a tale of love or war, subjects interesting to the sensibilities of the heart, or the passions of wonder

Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson. Ó 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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and curiosity.”1 To clarify the definition of romance, Webster compares it with the novel: “Romance differs from the novel, as it treats of great actions and extraordinary adventures” and “soars beyond the limits of fact and real life, and often of probability.” It will be useful to keep this original distinction in mind as we explore their coalescences and diversions in the American “romance tradition.”

A “Library of Romance” in the Age of Realism One of the popular series of fiction prior to the Civil War was called the “Library of Romance,” published by Samuel Coleman of New York. What about romances after the war? In an essay on the “Romance Tradition” in American fiction (ACAF, 2009), William J. Scheick provides an extensive list of romances in the period between the Civil War and World War I – along with an illuminating examination of types and subtypes. He begins with a comment on the ambiguity of terms and the interconnection between romance and novel.2 Beginning with the historical shifts in meaning from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, Scheick comments:

............................................................................................... The definition of romance did not get any clearer with the rise of the novel during the eighteenth century, when romance was generally understood to refer to improbable, imaginative, and symbolic stories distinctly different from the novel. Such a broad distinction, critically impressionist at best, was complicated by early nineteenth-century authors, especially Walter Scott and Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose hybrid fictions combined the factual properties of the novel and the imaginative reach of romance. By the end of the nineteenth century this hybrid form was very popular, despite the fact that some critics – fervid apologists for literary realism such as William Dean Howells – struggled in vain to distinguish between romance and the novel. (35)

...............................................................................................

By the 1890s, as Scheick makes abundantly clear, the body of AngloAmerican romances was characterized by remarkable popularity and bewildering variety, which Scheick has schematized under three large categories: eventuary romance, which emphasizes plot and action; aesthetic romance, which emphasizes a somewhat more passive aspect of “aesthetic appreciation”; and ethical romance, which breaks down boundaries between fact and fiction and generates a variety of forms that balance the “ethos of storytelling” with “life” or “realism.” Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (1914) would be an example of event-centered romance; some of the romance forms that 10

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Henry James experimented with (such as The Turn of the Screw) could exemplify the aesthetic mode; and works by writers like Richard Harding Davis, John Kendrick Bangs, Stephen Crane, Mary Austin, or Jack London represent varieties of ethical romance in Scheick’s schema.3 These categories, labels, and definitions provide useful loci for anyone entering the somewhat chaotic world of both popular and serious romance. Here, however, I would propose a simpler categorical scheme for American romance in the 1865–1914 period: 1 the general historical epic, including varieties we can call ancient, biblical, medieval, and pious; 2 the specifically American historical romance, including the picaresque forms of romances of the Revolution, the Frontier, and the Civil War; 3 fantasy, mystery, and gothic, including utopian or dystopian futurist projections and variations on the fantastic, the grotesque, and the arabesque. How plentiful, after the Civil War, were these romances? Here is a brief overview supplementing Scheick. (1) General historical epics Among the most popular were varieties of historical romance set in bible lands or Rome and chivalric tales of King Arthur and the knights of old. Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880) was a phenomenal best seller. Wallace also wrote a number of other romances, including The Fair God (1873), set in Mexico (inspired by Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico), The Boyhood of Christ (1888), and The Prince of India (1893). The works of F. Marion Crawford (1854–1909), especially his pseudo-historical Italian family chronicles, known as the “Saracinesca” tetralogy – Saracinesca (1887), Sant’ Ilario (1889), Don Orsino (1892), and Corleone (1896) – were also popular. And he produced a number of other romances like Zoroaster (1885), Khaled (1891), In the Palace of the King (1900), and Via Crucis (1898). Charles Major’s love story of Mary Tudor, When Knighthood Was in Flower (1898), set off an avalanche of imitations; but his treatments of British royalty and the knightly tradition were hardly the first on the American scene. Sidney Lanier had published The Boy’s King Arthur in 1881; and Mark Twain not only took advantage of the Arthurian craze with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in 1889 but also wrote several other “historical” romances set in the medievalrenaissance era, including The Prince and the Pauper (1882), Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), and The Mysterious Stranger texts (posth. pub. 1916; 1969). 11

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(2) American historical romances Typical of the sentimental romances of the Old South were Thomas Nelson Page’s In Ole Virginia (1887), a collection of stories, and Red Rock (1898), which nostalgically glorifies life in the antebellum South and defends the motives of the Ku Klux Klan. It was a runaway best seller. So was Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), one of a trilogy of novels that chronicles the overturning of the “Black Plague of Reconstruction” and the “redemption” of the ways of the Old South.4 Other American historical romances produced in this period include S. Weir Mitchell, Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker (1897); Mary Johnston, To Have and To Hold (1900); James Maurice Thompson, Alice of Old Vincennes (1900); Mary Catherwood, The Romance of Dollard (1889); James Lane Allan, The Choir Invisible (1893, 1897); Ellen Glasgow, The Battle-Ground (1902); Winston Churchill, Richard Carvel (1899), The Crisis (1901), The Crossing (1903). Frontier romances of the American West were also the rage – from the dime novels of the 1860s to the 1890s to Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) and Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912). Cowboys, and occasionally “Indians,” replaced the knights and soldiers of old, just as in some of the old romances of James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851). Dime novels were originally short, action-packed narratives of the American Revolution and the Civil War and the Western Frontier, often published in yellow or blue paper covers, selling for ten cents a copy. Meanwhile, more serious romanticized frontier stories featuring the Indian as the “Child of Nature” continued the pre-Civil War tradition of the tragic “Noble Red Man” best known in poems by William Cullen Bryant and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and in prewar fictions by James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick. The subtext of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) moralized on the plight of Native Americans and other minorities. Emerging Native American literature tended to be autobiographical or polemical nonfiction rather than romances; but some novels by authors with actual Native American blood were beginning to appear very late in the nineteenth century, such as Sophia Alice Callahan’s novel Wynema: A Child of the Forest (1891).5 (3) Fantasy, mystery, and gothic romances Under the general heading of fantasy, mention may be made of several utopian/ dystopian romances: Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888), William Dean Howells, A Traveler from Altruria (1894) and its sequel Through the Eye of the Needle (1907), Jack London, The Iron Heel (1907), Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1915), and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee 12

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in King Arthur’s Court (1889). But utopian critiques and gothic tales by Howells, Twain, James, Bierce, and Wharton more often than not tend toward epistemological ambiguity. Works of simpler fantasy like The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) by L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) were more popular. The Wizard of Oz was the first of a series of fifteen connected novels that were continued by others well into the middle of the twentieth century.6 Equally popular was Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950), whose Tarzan of the Apes (1914) was the first of more than thirty volumes involving the romanticized “ape man.” Less well known today but very popular in their time were his stories of lost lands, the inner earth, and his Mars, Venus, and Moon stories. His first published novel, A Princess of Mars (1912), was followed by some sixty other sci-fi and fantasy works. James Branch Cabell wrote a sequence of half-ironic medieval-renaissance fantasy romances, set in the made-up French province of “Poictesme.” Beginning with Chivalry (1907), Cabell produced some eighteen volumes in the series, collecting them in 1927–30. Gothic romances of physical terror, psychological horror, and supernaturalist mystery also continued to be popular. One of the most famous was The King in Yellow (1895) by R. W. Chambers (1865–1933), a collection of ten stories, the first five of which are fantastic tales, and the second five more “realistic” though “strange.” The latter are mainly sentimental narratives about young love among Anglo-American artists in Paris. Other of Chambers’s more or less supernaturalistic works are The Maker of Moons (1896), The Mystery of Choice (1897), and In Search of the Unknown (1904). Chambers’s fantastic stories had an important influence on early twentieth-century science fiction in America; and his detective hero, Mr Keen, in Tracer of Lost Persons (1906), influenced the rise of the American detective story in the early twentieth century. F. Marion Crawford collected seven ghostly sea stories in Wandering Ghosts (1911), one of which, “The Upper Berth,” is still routinely anthologized. Crawford’s previously mentioned Khaled (1891) is an especially effective orientalized supernaturalist romance. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) wrote a classic story of ambiguous psychological gothic, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), a must for readers interested in both the gothic tradition and the rise of feminist literature. Ambrose Bierce (1842–c.1914) collected twenty-six short horror stories and sketches in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891). Re-titled In the Midst of Life (1898), the book contains the famous psychological gothic “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” a stream-of-consciousness, time-dislocation narrative about the last moments of a Civil War prisoner’s execution. Other tales include the haunting story of a little girl’s psyche, “The Eyes of the Panther,” and the grim horror story “Chickamauga,” in which a deaf child moves as 13

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though in a dream through the smoke and fog of a Civil War battlefield strewn with corpses. In Can Such Things Be? (1893), Bierce collected another two dozen stories, sketches, and anecdotes, including the intricately narrated occult classic “The Death of Halpern Frayser” and several other well-known gothics, like “The Middle Toe of the Right Foot,” “The Damned Thing,” “A Psychological Shipwreck,” and “The Man and the Snake.” More than a simple gothic writer of horror stories, Bierce explored the uncertainties of perception and employed impressionist techniques as skillful as Stephen Crane’s. William Dean Howells collected three longish stories of the “occult” in Questionable Shapes (1903); other of his (somewhat) supernaturalist romance stories and novellas are found in Between the Dark and Daylight: Romances (1907). His novel, The Undiscovered Country (1880), explores spiritualism, mesmerism, and psychological bondage, and Shadow of a Dream (1890) is a minor masterpiece of psychological gothic. Edith Wharton wrote at least a dozen “ghost” stories, the best known of which are “The Eyes” (1910), “Kerfol” (1916), and the subtly chilling “Afterward” (1909). Louisa May Alcott wrote a number of “thrillers” early in her career, including The Mysterious Key (1867), The Abbott’s Ghost (1867), and a work now celebrated as proto-feminist, Behind a Mask: or, A Woman’s Power (1866). Leon Edel’s edition of Henry James: Stories of the Supernatural (1949; rpt. 1980) contains seventeen tales. The best known, other than The Turn of the Screw (1898), are “The Jolly Corner” (1908), “Maud-Evelyn” (1900), “The Great Good Place” (1900), “The Friends of the Friends” (1896), “The Altar of the Dead” (1895), and “Sir Edmund Orme” (1891). Edel also includes The Beast in the Jungle (1903); although the tale is hardly a supernatural story or a romance, an argument for realistic psychological gothic might be made. One of the best of James’s stories in the mode of gothic romance is the earliest, “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” (1868). A weirdly suggestive twist on the “vampire” story is found in James’s art-novel, The Sacred Fount (1901), a work of social and psychological realism.

Romanticism and Realism: The Historian’s Paradox If we go a little further back into literary history and contextualize the novel and the romance within the larger concepts of romanticism and realism, we immediately get into a more complicated area. The basic point to remember is that the terms presented here are theoretical and historical labels for large idea clusters, a useful shorthand. The simplest definition of romanticism is as a historical period in Eurocentric cultures from about the 1770s through the 1850s (depending on the country). 14

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Realism may be initially defined as a period from the 1850s to a decade or so past World War I.7 But to go any further in a meaningful way, we are faced with the historian’s paradox: to know one thing you have to know what preceded it, and to know that you have to know what preceded that, and so on. The problem is to be comprehensive but pragmatic, keeping in mind that, although cultural ruptures may occur, time is an ongoing continuum, not a series of discrete periods. A related problem involves terminology: when idea complexes like Darwinism and Freudianism, or impressionism and expressionism, become associated with a time period, some people have trouble seeing the terms as applicable to any other period. But Darwin and Freud were working with data previously explored by others, and each tried to describe what he thought to be actual phenomena independent of a specific time limit. Theories of evolution preceded Darwin, and the idea of the human unconscious and of subconscious motivation preceded Freud. Thus, before Freud or “Freudianism” were watchwords, American writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce, William Dean Howells, and Henry James were exploring repression, obsession, and compulsion, concepts later given systematic names by Freud. Similarly, the features of the artistic movement known as expressionism, associated primarily with the period from 1910 to the early 1930s, may provide useful insights into the movement from which it mainly came: impressionism, associated with a period beginning in the 1870s and overlapping with expressionism (see Chs 8 and 20). In short, to try to understand realism without a grounding in the preceding period, and some knowledge of what came after, is not just narrowly provincial; it may also prompt misunderstandings of the texts involved.

Positive and negative romanticism One way of understanding Romanticism (with a capital R) as ideology, as variant literary practices, and as historical movement is to see it as having two complementary aspects, equally powerful. One has been called “positive” or “optative” romanticism, which is optimistic and forward-looking – symbolized by light, organic growth, and the outward-and-upward spiraling helix. Its inverse twin has been labeled “negative” or “dark” romanticism, which is pessimistic or skeptical – symbolized by darkness, decay, and the downwardand-inward spinning vortex. It would be convenient to divide the American romantics into the light and the dark – with Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman as the “children of the light” – and Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville as the “sons of darkness.” But that is 15

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misleading; aspects of the affirmative and the skeptical crisscross in their writings, creating disturbing mixtures of transcendental optimism and gothic and grotesque apprehensiveness. For the “negative romantic,” the great Quest for Truth involves a journey through idealist despair, nightmarish doubt, and occasionally qualified affirmation. In many of the negative romantics, any affirmation is shadowed by skepticism and dark humor. But it is important to remember that the negative romantics did not totally oppose or disavow the optimism regarding man and nature that the optative romantics believed in, and which they maintained was everywhere evident. The negative romantics were interested in but highly skeptical of such propositions. Romantic writers like Coleridge and Byron in England, and Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe in America, had one foot in the often skeptical neoclassic world of static mechanism and another foot in the positive romantic world of dynamic organicism. Unable to reconcile those two worlds, and skeptical of each worldview individually, the negative romantics have seemed to critics like Morse Peckham to be lost between worlds or worldviews.8 Often their attempt to embrace both the negative and the positive resulted in what was called romantic irony: a mode of taking things both seriously and un-seriously at the same time. It was the optimism and faith in progress of the positive (or “optative”) romantics that the late-century realists and naturalists saw themselves as opposing and correcting. Instead, they would show life as it “really” is – the actual “way things happen.” But they were also indebted to the negative romantics. This brings us again to the vigorous debate in post-Civil War America over the idea of the “Great American Novel.”

The Romance of the “Great American Novel” In the Introduction, we noted that Richard Chase in The American Novel and Its Tradition presented the classic scholarly formulation of the “romance-novel” as the basic American genre in fiction. Chase examined the long-standing notion of an essential distinction in form, style, and worldview between the American and the British novel. Responding to what the English critic F. R. Leavis had labeled “the great tradition” of the socially realistic British novel, Chase designated as its American counterpart the romance tradition. Chase argued that classic American fiction, rather than predominantly realistic and linear, was mythopoeic and symbolic, informed by irony and indirection. In its focus on isolated romantic heroes (positive or negative), American fiction tended to be psychological and metaphysical; although it also dealt with large sociopolitical issues, it was primarily the imaginative shape of radical skepticism, the 16

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“profound poetry of disorder.” A self-conscious, ambivalent American romance tradition, he claimed, extended beyond the Civil War, beyond the turn of the century, and up to the time of the writing his book.

Historical stages 1780–1920 The idea of a form or genre designated as the “Great American Novel” was itself a romantic idea, including a vague notion of the idealistic combined with the realistic, and inexorably evolving over time to a higher form of art and insight in a model society. This concept derives in part from the progressive social archetype of the transcendental philosopher G. F. W. Hegel (1770–1831), who called the desired unity of the existential human condition and the great society: Humanit€at. The historical configurations of romanticism, romance, novel, realism, and idealism (along with naturalism) in specifically American literary history play into this Hegelian idealism. The large contours of the romance/ novel argument are clearer in the context of the romanticism/realism debate. Invocations of a Great American Novel began in the early nineteenth century during the period of “literary nationalism,” garnered support and evoked a somewhat clearer definition in the middle of the century, and reached an apogee at the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. A comprehensive chronicle of criticism on American fiction from the end of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth reveals three successive historical stages. (1) 1780s–1860s The first stage, a period of intensifying nationalism from the Revolution to the Civil War, led directly to energized discussions of whether the novel or the romance was the representative and most characteristic American genre. Although dominated by questions of a uniquely “American” literature, this period also exhibits growing interest in experimentation and the freedom of open forms, whether native or imported. (2) 1860s–1890s In the second stage, the issues of the romance and the novel were of general interest and widely debated as aspects of a unique American literature. New literature from abroad, along with the conduct of the Civil War, led to the rise of the realist novel as distinguished from popular or sentimental romance. At the same time, earlier attempts to stretch fictional form beyond the confining limits of the conventional novel or romance fostered further 17

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attempts in the late nineteenth century to produce transgeneric works of romance and realism, along with the expansion of critical theory. (3) 1880s–1920s In the third stage, from the late 1880s to 1915 and beyond, the realism or naturalism furor of postbellum fictional theory was in essence a reprise in new terms of the novel versus romance debate of the first part of the nineteenth century. The terms of the issue now were the opposition of realism/naturalism to “idealism,” in part a variant term for optative romanticism and transcendentalism. But, as mentioned, American naturalism displays as many affinities with dark or negative romanticism as with the new realism. In the late 1880s and the 1890s, the term idealism became a watchword. In the critical writings of the time, the realism/idealism question is directly reflected in the novel/romance issue. The novel/romance distinction provides insight into the ongoing dialogue on the nature of reality in western culture – one informing not just literary narratives but a broad spectrum of western art, philosophy, psychology, and politics. The ebb and flow of the rival claims of romanticism and realism in American letters from the late 1700s through the early 1900s suggests that the novel/romance issue was a version of the perpetual debate on the “real” and the “ideal” shaping western tradition – including the conflicts of empiricism versus transcendentalism, of mimetic versus symbolic representation, of prose versus poetry, of history versus fiction – and of romanticism versus realism. Moreover, the gradual importation of literary realism from France at midcentury created a renewed interest in genre definition. Along with this European influence, a revitalized nationalist spirit in America prompted American critics and authors to refocus their attention on the creation of a “truly” American literature in terms of the pursuit of the Great American Novel. The nature of this imagined entity became one of the major questions that preoccupied American writers from the Civil War to World War I and beyond.

The Great American Romance-Novel? As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, John William De Forest provided a manifesto for “The Great American Novel” in 1868.9 The idea had been around for decades, but this evocative piece became so celebrated that it gave increased currency to the term for more than another hundred years. De Forest suggests that the time for a real American “epic” has not yet come: to “write a great American poem is at present impossible, for the reason that the nation has not 18

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yet lived a great poem . . .” (31). But the great American work of prose fiction may perhaps be “possible earlier” than a great national epic poem (32). The novel would be something along the lines of everyday life as portrayed in the novels of William Makepeace Thackeray and in the combined realism and romance of Victor Hugo and Honore de Balzac. But we don’t “as yet” appear to have the “literary culture to educate” our own “Thackerays and Balzacs” (36). Not to mention Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, or George Sand, he adds. For De Forest, the task of the Great American Novel was to paint the American national spirit while also being a “picture of the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence” (31). It will be the result of “painting the American soul.” It will aspire to the romance of Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, and others but “within the framework of a novel” (32). De Forest’s concept of a “national” masterwork is in fact a realist-romance concordia discors, and in this context he makes special reference to Nathaniel Hawthorne at the beginning of his essay. He writes that Hawthorne, who had “the greatest of American imaginations,” was too provincial, too much focused on the particulars of a region, especially New England eccentrics. And yet, at the same time, contrariwise, Hawthorne’s characters were not of the present world around us, but were dreams drawn from too far away. His characters are just as apt to be “natives of the furthest mountains of Cathay or of the moon as of the United States of America” (32). His talent was constricted by the romance form. No one else, however, has come close to the Great American Novel – with one exception. The “nearest approach” is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s flawed prewar novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). De Forest argued that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a great novel despite, and in part because of, its insistent romance elements. In that book, he asserts, Stowe presents a “national breadth” to the large picture of the country, along with “truthful outline of character, natural talking, and plenty of strong feeling” (33). De Forest’s praise for these four elements in Stowe’s novel – mythic national scope, true characters, natural speech, and strong emotions – reveals the tension of realism and romance that characterizes his own novels. He writes that we have all actually seen “such Northerners” and “such Southerners” as Mrs Stowe depicts, as well as “such negroes, barring, of course, the impeccable Uncle Tom.” Conditions shape character; the brutal conditions of slavery would not have allowed such a noble character to develop. And yet, while objecting to such romanticizing, De Forest conceives of the Great American Novel as the lived “poem” of a people: something like the great epic romances from the Iliad to Orlando Furioso (31). Apparently Uncle Tom is not (and apparently cannot be) an epic hero. For what De Forest at this point calls the “Great American Poem” will not be written until “democracy” has done its full work. 19

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Frank Norris and the romance of the Great American Novel The critics’ quest for the Great American Novel after the War Between the States often sounds like a quest for the Great American Romance, though they themselves did not always see it that way. Many of the avant-garde fiction writers thought they were writing things totally new. The new naturalists even saw themselves as going beyond the sometimes namby-pamby realists. But at least one major late-century naturalist writer, Frank Norris (1870–1902), saw avant-garde realism in fiction as a partial return to the romance. Around 1900, Norris wrote several essays on the concept of realist romance, including one on the “Great American Novelist,” collected in Essays on Authorship in the 1903 edition of his Complete Works.10 Norris addresses the idea of the Great American Novelist as a mistaken or degraded version of a Great American Novel. Like Poe before him, Norris mocks literary nationalism, attacking the concept of a truly great writer as somehow belonging to one country. Many “people who deplore the decay of American letters are accustomed to refer to the absence of a G.A.N. as though there were a Great English Novelist or a Great French Novelist.” But ask “any dozen” people for a name and you will get “at least a half-dozen different names.” The truly great novelist would not “belong to any particular geographical area” but would be the “heritage of the whole world.” For instance, when one thinks of Tolstoy, it is “as a novelist first and as a Russian afterward.” But if we want to “split hairs,” he writes, let’s say that even if the Great American Novelist is “yet to be born,” it may be that we can still talk about “A Great American Novel.” But what would it be? First of all, it would have to be realistic as well as romantic, which means it would be regional or “sectional.” The United States is “a Union, but not a unit, and the life of one part is very, very different from the life in another.” Look at the works of our very best writers: “Bret Harte made a study of the West as he saw it, and [W. D.] Howells has done the same for the East. [G. W.] Cable has worked the field of the Far South and [Edward] Eggleston has gone deep into the life of the Middle West.” But a great novelist needs to go “deep enough” into the hearts and lives of his regional characters to “strike the universal substratum,” to “find elemental thinking” common to the Creole, the Puritan, the Cowboy, the Hoosier, the Greaser, the Buckeye, the Jay Hawk. This, however, involves a paradox: if an “American novelist should go so deep into the lives of the people of any one community” as to find the commonality with people a thousand miles away, he “would have gone too deep to be exclusively American . . . He would have sounded the world-note; he would be a writer not national, but international . . .” The “thing to be looked for is not the Great American Novelist but the Great Novelist who shall also be an American” (IV, 292). 20

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Other of Norris’s essays confirm that, whatever a Great American Novel would be, it would combine the romantic with the realistic. The best known of the Essays on Authorship is titled “A Plea for Romantic Fiction” (IV, 341–4). In it, Norris (following the lead of others but extending their ideas to naturalism) advocated a semi-intermediary position that is further articulated in “The Responsibilities of the Novelist,” the lead essay of Essays on Authorship (IV, 255–9). Here Norris formulates the theoretical groundwork for the reinscription of the transgeneric romance-novel in naturalist narratives that combined the techniques of literary realism with romantic form. Norris contends that American literary naturalism is not merely a pessimistic or extremist offshoot of realism. Rather, naturalist fiction is the product of the contestatory negotiations of the rise of realism with a continuing romance tradition. The question of whether the Great American Novel would be a realist novel or an idealist romance was bedeviled by the further question of the many hybrid forms or subgenres. Were the new forms of what seemed to be yet another genre, naturalism, to be figured in? These issues were analyzed from a variety of angles by critics in the 1880s and 1890s, resulting in even more bewildering exfoliations of taxonomy. The contrary impulses of fixing upon the genre of a work while demanding freedom from preconceptions are particularly insistent in nineteenth-century debates on the defining limits of various types of fiction. Position statements regarding oppositions and negotiations of novel/romance, for example, appeared before the Civil War and continued through the end of the century, registering increasingly complicated notions of the “transgeneric.” Theoretical concepts of “hybrid” forms emerged. These involved notions of transactions between novel and romance, the production of a new form that suspends or transcends both, as well as negotiation among subtypes like frontier romance, oriental romance, psychological romance, and so forth. The “new novel,” as envisioned by American critics and novelists of the late nineteenth century, featured variants within a continuum of modes, and contesting strategies within an intentionary text, including irony, humor, and parody. The interconnections of genre conventions and reader expectations will help form the basis for discussions in the following chapters of some classic American works not only as individual art objects but also as cultural artifacts. Notes 1. Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language, Vol. II (1828). Note that a “love” story is only one of several characteristics cited. For detailed 21

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2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

discussion, see NGd, Introduction, Chs 1–3, notes, and that book’s “Bibliographical Resources,” 221–35. ACAF tries to provide a guide to the fictions of the post-Civil War era that makes clear the literary history of opposition, contrast, and intergeneric accommodation in the period. Thus Scheick’s “Excitement and Consciousness in the Romance Tradition” follows the first essay by Glazener on realism. This loose pattern connecting the themes and forms of romanticism and realism continues throughout the Companion. For a fuller treatment in a transatlantic context, see Scheick’s The Ethos of Romance at the Turn of the Century (1994). Reconstruction refers to the period beginning more or less at the end of the Civil War and extending to the presidential election of 1876, during which the Union tried to “reconstruct” the economic, political, and social ruin of the Old South by imposing a series of voting laws regarding readmission to the Union. For an overview, from a more or less political point of view, see Gerald Vizenor, ACAF (2009), 222–39. Also see Utley (1984). Attempts have been made by critics to see the Wizard of Oz as a political fiction, especially as an “allegory” of populism and the McKinley Era. In Littlefield’s “The Wizard of Oz: A Parable on Populism” (1964), the Wicked Witch is a symbolic Robber Baron controlling the common man (the little people, the Munchkins), the Scarecrow is a Midwestern landowner farmer, the Tin Man is an industrial worker (even though a woodsman), the Cowardly Lion is William Jennings Bryan, the Wizard is the President, and so on. These “allegorical” meanings are arbitrary, and Littlefield later admitted they had no basis in fact; but his article has generated a series of blanket additions by others. An 1853 article on Honore [de] Balzac in the Westminster Review is often cited as the first use of the literary term realism in English. In 1855, the French artist, Gustave Courbet, set up a “Pavillon du Realisme” in Paris to exhibit his works; and in 1856, a journal titled Le Realisme appeared, the same year as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (see next chapter). Also see Chs 2 and 20 of the present volume. Peckham suggested the term “negative romanticism” as more precise than Mario Praz’s “dark romanticism.” It has been the subject of critical debate; but I prefer it for the very reasons given in Peckham’s originating essay, “Toward a theory of Romanticism” (1951), as well as for its parallelism to “positive” or “optative” romanticism and its partial congruence with “romantic irony.” It is important to understand that as a critical term “negative” romanticism does not mean anti-romanticism, but rather the negative or skeptical side of romanticism. The Nation article is reprinted in Critical Essays on John William De Forest, ed. Gargano (1981), 31–37. For further context, see H. M. Jones (1965 [1948]). IV, 290–2. Essays on Authorship contains 25 essays and articles on literary theory, authorship in general, and the pragmatics of publishing. One of the

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important essays referenced later in the present volume is “The Mechanics of Fiction,” IV, 313–16; also see Lamb (1997).

See also Abrams (1953); Bakhtin (1981); M. D. Bell (1980); Budick (1994); Cady (1971); Chase (1957); Dekker (1987); Fedorko (1995); Haight (1939); Hoffman (1972); Howells (1959); Kennedy (ACAF 2009); Kerr (1972); Light (1965); Link (2004); J. Martin (1967; esp. Ch. 2, “The Great American Novel,” 25–80); Norris (1903, 1964, 1986); Perosa (1983 [1978]); Stromberg (1968); G. R. Thompson (1989, 2001); West (1989). Cf. references at the end of the preceding chapter.

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Chapter 2

Of Realism and Reality Definitions and Contexts

As a literary term, realism normally refers to a theory and practice of fiction in which the artistic goal is to portray “life as it is” – rather than intensified or as it should be – and in simple direct language rather than striving for striking metaphors and indulging in rhetorical flourishes. The elevated subject matter of classic tragedy, or the poetic elements of optative romanticism, or the sentimental aspects of domestic novels and romances, or the hair-raising events of gothic romances were to be downplayed or avoided in favor of the everyday, average, prosaic aspects of life. Realism in this sense was especially prominent in France, England, the United States, and Russia from about the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s and 1940s (and beyond). But there are realistic, mimetic elements in works written centuries before: in the Iliad and the Odyssey (c. eighth century BC), in the plays of Sophocles (496–406 BC), in Boccaccio’s Decameron tales (1351–1353) and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400), in the plays of Shakespeare (1564–1616) and other Renaissance dramatists. Don Quixote (Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615) presents a hybrid form of a romance and novel in which the interplay of worldviews is centrally informed by the mixture of realism with idealized romanticism. Many consider this seventeenth-century work the cornerstone of the modern novel. In the English-speaking world, literary historians generally point to the principal eighteenth-century British novelists as anticipating the nineteenth century in the development of modern realism. In American literature, the primary meaning of realism indicates a period: the historical era from about a decade after the American Civil War to a decade or two after World War I.1 But Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson. Ó 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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literary realism, even when confined to a historical period, is not a single undiversified idea or theoretical program or movement. In both Britain and America, major fictional forms partaking of both realism and romance included the domestic novel, the novel of manners, and the sentimental novel. In America there was an important, predominantly realist, movement toward regionalism, within which broad rubric a form called local color is sometimes distinguished. Both centrally involve a forceful vernacular style (idiomatic spoken language), often in dialect (regional or ethnic idiom). In addition, we can identify, at the minimum, several forms of realist theory and practice in Europe and America: objective realism, compassionate realism, benevolent realism, and sentimental realism. There is also a distinction to be made between intense “social reformist” realism and “quiet” realism. Variations on realism and anti-romance are also in tension with, or in complementary relation to, impressionism and expressionism and most especially naturalism.2

“The Way Things Happen”: Henry James on the Art of Fiction One of the most celebrated theoretical distinctions between realism and romance, or more precisely between the realistic novel and the romance, is found in the preface to the revised edition (1907) of James’s The American (1877), in which he declares that the essence of realist fiction as distinguished from romance is the representation of “our general sense of ‘the way things happen.’” The concept embedded in James’s phrase is more complicated than it sounds. His “definition” involves a perceived difference between the novel and the romance that he had discounted two decades earlier. James remarks that he was surprised, in rereading The American after nearly thirty years, to find that the experience represented in it is more romantic than realistic. He found that it presented the kind of “disconnected and uncontrolled experience . . . which romance alone more or less successfully palms off on us” (1907 preface). James also characterizes the romance, somewhat less negatively than the last phrase suggests, as providing “experience liberated.”3 In a more famous and influential essay two decades earlier, “The Art of Fiction” (1884, 1888), James expresses a somewhat different view of the romance and the novel. It was occasioned primarily by a lecture in April of 1884 on the “rules” for writing fiction by the British novelist, critic, and historian, Walter Besant (1836–1901). In his response, James suggests that Besant’s rules are inadequate, too vague, or wrongheaded. Besant’s first rule is to write from experience. The second is that the characters must be real. Third, he advises the writer to take notes and keep a notebook. Fourth, the novelist’s 26

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figures (characters) should be clear in “outline.” Fifth, the writer should have a “conscious moral purpose.” Sixth, the writer must attend to conscious workmanship with careful attention to style. And finally, as a kind of seventh, Besant admonishes that the “story” is everything. Regarding points one, two, and three, James comments that experience and reality are multiform; the important thing is sensitivity and imagination. The one thing that a good fiction writer needs is “intensity” of experience and perceptions: “the power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it . . .” 4 As for characters clear in outline, James comments that what is most important is detail – details that add up to an organic unity and create the “illusion” of actual life. As for a moral purpose, James insists that we must give artists their initial positioning of their materials – their point of departure, whatever it may be – and that a work is to be judged solely on its execution from that point. James does agree with Besant’s last two “rules”: the writer must give careful attention to style and “story.” Another of James’s major points (diverging a little from answering Besant point for point) is that the old division of the novel into that of “incident” and that of “character” is a distinction without a difference. For, he says, incident is character and character is incident – and the false division reminds him of the “celebrated distinction” between the novel and the romance, which is equally false. True artistry lies in the execution of the work. “We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donnee: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.” Donnee (a “given,” the starting point) is James’s favorite word to indicate the artist’s freedom to pursue a fundamental, even idiosyncratic, intent or theme. Although critics may distinguish between the “novel and the romance,” these are, for a writer, “clumsy separations.”

Mark Twain on Faux Realism and Bogus Romance As a useful historical generalization, it is safe to say that the realist stance was generally opposed to the seemingly pervasive predilection for romance held by the previous generation – though the realists’ works were from the first often intertwined with romantic elements of plot, character, theme, and perception. In “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (1895), Mark Twain tells us what both effective realism and successful romance are not. He takes up the issue of accuracy and keen observation in “romantic” fiction. He declares that there are basically “nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic 27

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fiction – some say twenty-two. In Deerslayer, Cooper violated eighteen of them.” Despite the irony and humor, his recommendations are serious. Here are a few of Twain’s major requirements. .

.

.

.

The “episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it”; the “personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses.” When the “personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader.” The “personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.” The “characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.”

There are also “in addition to these large rules . . . some little ones.” These require that the author shall: “say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it”; “use the right word, not its second cousin”; “not omit necessary details”; “avoid slovenliness of form”; use “good grammar”; employ “a simple and straightforward style.” These rules are representative of the realist attitude toward style, namely, that a writer’s style should be simple and economic and reflect the way people actually talk in life and not in old books. The basic rules for romantic fiction are in Twain’s opinion no different from those for realist fiction – a point, as we have seen, that Henry James also makes. Twain then demonstrates how these “rules” are “coldly and persistently violated” in Cooper’s Deerslayer and other of his popular romances. He begins with what he considers Cooper’s favorite tricks. For example, in the absolute silence of the forest Cooper has his characters step on a “broken twig” and “alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around”; whenever “a Cooper person is in peril,” he is “sure to step on a dry twig.” Twain goes into a detailed description of a central episode of The Deerslayer, demonstrating that Cooper’s faulty knowledge of rivers and streams, and his inattention to realistic detail, make the scene ridiculous. Moreover, the characters do not behave in a way that corresponds to any reality, throwing “a sort of air of fictitiousness and general improbability” over the episode. Twain is not rejecting the romance but advocating a form of it in which improbabilities do not subvert realistic attention to detail. Although he here expresses a preference for realism over romance, it is important to note that he is 28

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basically concerned with literary effect. Like James, Mark Twain would give the artist his donnee; the problem is that Cooper is a bad imitator of Sir Walter Scott, whom Twain also considers a phony romancer.

Sham realism and sham romance: Walter Scott and “Old Times” Twain has a good deal more to say about Sir Walter Scott, reality, romance, and romanticism in Life on the Mississippi (1883). The first segments had appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in seven installments in 1875, known together as Old Times on the Mississippi. Clemens as Mark Twain depicts his apprenticeship as a cub-pilot (1857–60), describing natural scenes along the river, boat racing, gambling on board, and so forth. Then, in 1882, Clemens’s publisher suggested he revisit the Mississippi scenes he had described. He discovered that things had changed drastically since before the Civil War, changes that he in part attributes to preexisting sham romanticism, now viewed with the eye of a realist. Chapters 9 and 46 of Life on the Mississippi contain acerbic and succinct appraisals of romance and romanticism from the realist point of view – but with a noticeable ambivalence that is a key to his whole romantic/realist/ naturalist disposition.5 In Chapter 46, Twain writes: “If one takes up a Northern or Southern literary periodical of forty or fifty years ago, he will find it filled with wordy, windy, flowery ‘eloquence,’ romanticism, sentimentality – all imitated from Sir Walter, and sufficiently badly done too.” They are unintentional “travesties of his style and methods.”6 The real culprit is not the spirit of romanticism but sham romance. In Chapter 9, tellingly titled “Continued Perplexities,” Twain expresses a sense of regret over losing the romance of the river to a more realistic understanding. He speaks of “reading” the “face” of the river, at first, like a “book” of mysteries: “The passenger who could not read it was charmed,” but to the pilot a dimple in the water “was an italicizedpassage,” indicatinga danger toa steamboat. “Intruth, the passenger who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it . . . whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading-matter.” When the pilot had mastered the real “language of this water,” he had made a valuable acquisition, but he had “lost something, too,” for “all the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!” The chapter concludes: “And does n’t [sic] he sometimes wonder whether he gained most or lost by learning his trade?” Was realism in the late nineteenth century so different from the radical skepticism of the prewar romantics? The connection between late-century naturalism and the naturalism of the skeptical romantics will be of importance 29

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in later discussions. For now, we shall look at the rise of realism in the fictions by writers in Great Britain, Russia, Scandinavia, and France who had the most influence on, or whose work parallels, the American writers of the period. American literary realism was heavily indebted to European developments and did not spring immaculately from indigenous American conditions.

Realism and Romance: The European Matrix Realism was especially prominent in Europe from about the mid-nineteenth century to the middle third of twentieth century. Nineteenth-century British writers identified with the rise of the realist novel include: William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863), especially in Vanity Fair (1847–8); Elizabeth Gaskell (1811–1865), notably in North and South (1854–5) and Wives and Daughters (1864–6); Charles Dickens (1812–1870), particularly in Bleak House (1852–3) and Hard Times (1854); Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) with Barchester Towers (1857) and the “Palliser” series (1867–80); and other Victorian writers in the 1830s through the 1870s – especially George Eliot (1819–1880). Eliot’s novels Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Middlemarch (1871–2) are touchstones of realism in British fiction. Other important influences on American realists include several Russian authors: Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852), Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883), Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), and later Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) and Maxim Gorky (1868–1936). Gogol laid the foundation for “Russian critical realism” with his depictions of St Petersburg and Moscow as populated by corrupt politicians, con-artists, thieves, incompetents, and lunatics in the story collections St Petersburg Stories (1835) and Arabesques (1835). In Dead Souls (1841–6), he portrays in detail the harsh realities of provincial Russian society. Turgenev, who holds a special place in the development of the short story and narrative sketch, produced detailed descriptions of everyday life in Russia in such works as A Sportsmen’s Sketches (1852), A Nest of Gentlefolk (1859) and Fathers and Sons (1862). Dostoevsky’s intensely realistic psychological stories, Notes from Underground (1864) and Crime and Punishment (1866), have strong political themes, exposing actual social conditions. Perhaps the greatest example of Dostoevsky’s integration of individual psychological themes with large social issues and speculations about religion and philosophy is The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80). Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865–9) offers a minutely detailed, realistic depiction of the Napoleonic wars played out on a vast canvas with some 2,000 characters. Anna Karenina (1875–7) is a domestic novel about the dangers of love and adultery within an extensive historical and social landscape. 30

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Several of the plays of the Norwegian dramatist, Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), who had a major influence on American writers like William Dean Howells, embody key themes of the age of realism. Two of the most important of these are the idea of self-illusions – the “life-lies” that we live by – and the idea of the “unlived life.” The Wild Duck (1884) exposes the self-deceptions not only of the self-centered and weak middleclass patriarch of an ordinary family, but also of several more or less “well-intentioned” meddlers in other people’s lives. The dialogue mirrors everyday speech appropriate to the various characters. The same is true of three of Ibsen’s most famous plays, A Doll’s House (1879), Ghosts (1881), and Hedda Gabbler (1890), each of which deals with a woman’s options in living, or not living, her life. The Swedish playwright, August Strindberg (1849–1912), also employs realistic dialogue to explore the psychological states of people caught in situations they do not fully understand. Like Charcot, Freud, and others at this time, he felt that people are moved by primitive forces below consciousness. Among these motives is the struggle of one sex to dominate the other, intertwined with the attempt of one social class to overpower the other, as in Miss Julia (1888), somewhat better known in English as Miss Julie.7 The plays and many of the stories of Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) are deliberately static, with incomplete conversations, halting speech, awkward pauses. Often there is no communication at all between characters, who remain self-absorbed in their own, mostly dead, inner worlds. Perhaps the most vivid and disturbing rendering of the unlived life is The Three Sisters (1901). Three aging women want to leave their suffocating country village and go to the city. They talk on and on about their futures but actually do nothing to achieve their desires. Old and alone, they finally realize – too late – that they have wasted their lives. Chekhov’s literary theory (as explained in a letter to his brother, Alexander) may stand as a succinct credo for the central realist aesthetic, reflecting and summing up earlier aesthetic theories of realism. First and foremost for Chekov is getting directly to the basic human point. The writer should strive for complete objectivity, describing persons, things, and situations accurately and truthfully. The truly original and daring writer will avoid stereotypes and conventional rhetoric about sociopolitical or economic issues. Yet, he adds, perhaps a little paradoxically, that the writer should also exhibit overall compassion.

Balzac and French realism As noted in Chapter 1, the first literary use of the word realism in English has been traced to an 1853 article on Balzac in the Westminster Review. The term was 31

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initially used in France in reference to a new style of painting in the 1850s. From  Honore [de] Balzac (1799–1850) to Emile Zola (1840–1902), the French are especially important with regard to the development of naturalism out of, or alongside of, realism. One oddity of literary history is that a benchmark novel of realism was produced by a thoroughgoing romantic, Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880).8 Madame Bovary (1856) contrasts a young wife’s romanticizing of a local petty nobleman with the pitiable reality of her seduction and eventual suicide. Its detailed depiction of the dullness of French village life is regarded as unsurpassed in French realist fiction. Although romanticism and realism coexist in many of Balzac’s works, his multi-volume Human Comedy, begun before 1830 and continued for twenty years, is a touchstone for realist fictional praxis. In the more than one hundred narratives of La Comedie humaine, Balzac tried to present an unflinching picture of contemporary French society at every level. This vast documentary concept had a major influence on the realism of American writers. John William De Forest in his essay on “The Great American Novel” in 1868 lamented that America had not yet produced a Balzac. William Dean Howells, for all his criticisms of European pessimistic or deterministic realism – not to mention meretricious French frankness – was a major force in introducing Balzac, Zola, and other European and French fiction writers to America. Critics writing on French influence sometimes underplay the significance of Balzac,  focusing instead on Emile Zola and naturalism. But Frank Norris saw Zola’s naturalism as directly related to Balzac’s realism. Edith Wharton said she was imitating Balzac in the framing of her naturalist-realist novella, Ethan Frome. In 1905, Henry James published two lectures in a volume called the Lesson of Balzac, in which he said of the later nineteenth-century realists that all the major European and American writers, including himself, were indebted to Balzac. He even referred to those who were most closely associated with the rise of literary naturalism as the “grandsons of Balzac.”9

British moral realism: George Eliot’s subjective mirror In the long debate over artistic realism, Aristotle’s theory of mimesis has been central. For centuries, the idea of mimesis was expressed in the metaphor of a mirror: the artist holds “the mirror” up to “nature” rather than looking through an interpretative “lens” or a possibly imperfect “window.” Romanticism is supposed to have changed the basic mimetic orientation by giving emphasis to the subjective nature and creative power of the artist to interpret (sometimes called the “expressive” theory). This subjective interpretive power

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was often metaphorized as light – a “lamp” illuminating from within. These extremes of the mirror and the lamp may be seen as constituting two of the defining ends of the romantic/realist spectrum.10 But a persistent idealistic strain runs through much of the realist literature of the late nineteenth century, in particular a desire for harmony and greater moral interconnections among human beings. Theoretically, it seems almost an aberration in the realist idea of objective portrayal of the actuality. Does the writer just mirror the reality out there or, peering through a subjective window, illumine the dark with artistic vision? George Eliot insists on fidelity to actual life, but she couches it in moral terms. Her “moral-realist” stance puts into perspective the more labored and extreme theories of William Dean Howells. In Adam Bede (1859), Eliot expresses the notion that pictures of common life and average experience should create bonds of sympathy among her readers. For “human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty – it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it,” so that true beauty lies in “the secret of deep human sympathy.” The artist cannot leave out the “common coarse people, who have no sentimental wretchedness”; the artist cannot merely “frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes.” Art needs “men ready to give the loving pains of a life to the faithful representing of commonplace things – men who see beauty in these commonplace things. . . .” And these artists must represent these things “as they have mirrored themselves” in their minds, without losing sight of the fact that the “mirror is doubtless defective . . .” (Ch. 17). A dozen years later, Eliot uses the mirror image again with important modifications and a greater concession to interpretative subjectivity. In Middlemarch (1871–2), the narrator comments on the complex idea of distortion in science and art and the reordering illumination of individual subjectivity:

............................................................................................... Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which provides the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent. (Book 3, Ch. 27)

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The idea that “actuality” is always subjective, to the extent that reality is presented as an author perceives it, can be particularly well illustrated in the theories of William Dean Howells, whose concept of (American) realism is highly colored by a sense of overall benignity and optimism. The difference between Eliot’s compassionate realism and Howells’s benevolent realism is instructive.

Benevolent Realism: Howells’s Reflections on America For Howells, undoubtedly the most influential man of letters in America during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the ultimate purpose of realism is not only to be “simple, natural, and honest,” but also to be able “to front the everyday world and catch the charm of its work-worn, care-worn, brave, kindly face.” Since the American reality is “brave” and “kindly,” the purpose of American literary realism is “to widen the bounds of sympathy” through faithfulness to actual human existence. For the American writer, actual existence means the benign American experience. Howells’s further divergence from the theoretical stance of nonjudgmental objectivity is most obvious in his famous (and infamous) pronouncement in Chapter 24 of the 1891 Criticism and Fiction: the American realist writer should not write of things that would be offensive to young women of high moral character or innocence. To understand this attitude properly, however, we need to understand the large transatlantic context in which his remarks were made. Earlier in Criticism and Fiction (Ch. 2), Howells criticizes young American novelists who pay too much attention to literary, artistic tradition, and not enough to real life, especially as found in America: “They have been taught to compare what they see and what they read, not with the things that they have observed and known, but with the things that some other artist or writer has done.” And the new writer is falsely “instructed to idealize his personages,” which means “to take the life-likeness out of them, and put the book-likeness into them.”

Real grasshoppers and ideal grasshoppers This mistaken advice he attributes to “the spirit of the wretched pedantry,” which “withdraws itself and stands apart from experience in an attitude of imagined superiority.” To illustrate this point, Howells imagines an obtuse, book-ridden, “learned” spirit, who would say with mistaken confidence to a scientist: “I see that you are looking at a grasshopper there which you have found in the grass, and I suppose you intend to describe it.” But: 34

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............................................................................................... I’ve got a grasshopper here, which has been evolved at considerable pains and expense out of the grasshopper in general; in fact, it’s a type. It’s made up of wire and card-board, very prettily painted in a conventional tint, and it’s perfectly indestructible. It isn’t very much like a real grasshopper, but it’s a great deal nicer. . . . You may say that it’s artificial. Well, it is artificial; but then it’s ideal too; and what you want to do is to cultivate the ideal. You’ll find the books full of my kind of grasshopper, and scarcely a trace of yours in any of them.

...............................................................................................

Howells predicts that “the time is coming when not only the artist, but the common, average man . . . will reject the ideal grasshopper” because “it is not like a real grasshopper.” But we will have to wait until the old-fashioned people die out before “the simple, honest, and natural grasshopper can have a fair field.” The traditionalists are typically “some sweet elderly lady or excellent gentleman whose youth was pastured on the literature of thirty or forty years ago.”

............................................................................................... They have commonly read little or nothing since or, if they have, they have judged it by a standard taken from these authors, and never dreamed of judging it by nature; they are destitute of the documents in the case of the later writers; they suppose that Balzac was the beginning of realism, and that Zola is its wicked end.

...............................................................................................

Howells’s attitude toward Balzac, though hemmed in with reservations, is positive and admiring. His thoughts on the accuracy or inaccuracy of the “wickedness” of Zola are more complex.

When “nothing happens”: the American novel and the English common reader Much of Howells’s argument in the early chapters of Criticism and Fiction is couched in terms of a comparison of English and American novelists and readers. He returns to this issue at the beginning of Chapter 21 with the observation that it is “the difference of the American novelist’s ideals from those of the English novelist that gives him his advantage. . . . There can be little question that many refinements of thought and spirit which every American is sensible of in the fiction of this continent, are necessarily lost upon our good kin beyond seas.”11 The new American novel of benign realism offers something 35

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special: “every now and then I read a book with perfect comfort and much exhilaration, whose scenes the average Englishman would gasp in.” This is the kind of novel in which – to a foreigner – “nothing happens.” That is, “nothing happens” in the sense of high adventure or extreme violence or improbable incident and circumstance.12 Adventure in the American realist novel is different: the important things take place, for Howells, in the stabilizing atmosphere of commonplace moral America.

Howells’s smiling Americans Criticism and Fiction makes it clear that in Howells’s opinion the American novel does not need extraordinary circumstances or extraordinary characters. The American novel of quiet realism is “all alive with the keenest interest for those who enjoy the study of individual traits and general conditions as they make themselves known to American experience.” In the recent past, the American writer of “romance” had complained that there was no native hereditary wrong or ancestral guilt to provide ready-made materials as in European history and literature.

............................................................................................... It used to be one of the disadvantages of the practice of romance in America, which Hawthorne more or less whimsically lamented, that there were so few shadows and inequalities in our broad level of prosperity; and it is one of the reflections suggested by Dosto€ıevsky’s novel, The Crime and the Punishment, that whoever struck a note so profoundly tragic in American fiction would do a false and mistaken thing.

...............................................................................................

Howells the “realist” here writes as if he is wearing blinders. Even though it may be changing for the worse, America is a land where “the sum of hunger and cold is comparatively small, and the wrong from class to class has been almost inappreciable.” In such a land, “our novelists . . . 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.” Although in America we do have death and “painful disease,” this is the “tragedy that comes in the very nature of things, and is not peculiarly American.” In general, Americans enjoy “the large, cheerful average of health and success, and happy life. . . . It will not do to boast, but it is well to be true to the facts.” Thus Howells thinks he is being true to the abstract realist doctrine of the “factual,” but in this instance his factuality is dominated by chauvinist ideology. 36

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American youth and innocence: Howells’s young ladies Such observations lead Howells, in Chapter 24 of Criticism and Fiction, to his recommendation that American literary realism confine itself to the optimistic and the decent so that our novels could be put into the hands of “innocent” young women. Americans could say that “the novel in our civilization now always addresses a mixed company, and that the vast majority of the company are ladies, and that very many, if not most, of these ladies are young girls.” Now, were the novel “written for men and for married women alone, as in continental Europe, it might be altogether different. But the simple fact is that it is not written for them alone among us.” The question for the modern American novelist is whether he wants to write “things for young girls to read which you would be put out-of-doors for saying to them.” Contradictorily, Howells suggests that “those who censure the Anglo-Saxon novel for its prudishness” are mistaken, that the American novel is “really not such a prude after all,” and that “if it is sometimes apparently anxious to avoid those experiences of life not spoken of before young people, this may be an appearance only.” These remarks have been often ridiculed, but they reflect some of the major attitudes in Howells’s America. As Howells admits, things might be changing for the worse, but his basic perspective reflects the dominant sense that things are better in America – that America is “exceptional.” The American realist could write quiet books in which nothing much happens and accurately reflect an American reality. In the next chapter, we will test some examples of this “quiet” and supposedly “benevolent” American realism.

Notes 1. American literary realism overlaps with the British Victorian era, which is dated from the 1830s to the Queen’s death in 1901. It also overlaps with modernism, usually identified as extending from the 1880s or 1890s to post-WWI, almost to the onset of WWII (cf. Ch. 20). The early proto-realist novelists include major British writers like Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), Tobias Smollett (1721– 1771), Henry Fielding (1707–1754), and their predecessor Daniel Defoe (1660– 1731), not to mention Jane Austen (1775–1807). For a concise essay on American realism in its “Anglo-European Contexts,” see Fluck, ACAF (2009), 77–95. Also see Kearns (1996) for European romantic and Victorian contexts; Stromberg (1968) for relations to European symbolism; and W. Stowe (1983) for the general influence of Balzac, especially on James. 2. Complicating definitions of realism is the fact that literary realism is different from philosophical realism, which in its long tradition features a central debate 37

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3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

about idealized or spiritual truth as the ultimate reality as distinguished from materialist conceptions. Cady (1971) struggles with the standard literary definitions, complicated by Chase’s formulation (1957) of the romance-novel. Pizer assembles important issues in “The Problem of Definition,” his introduction (1–18) to The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism (1995). James says that “the imaginative flights of romance” liberate novelist and reader from the social relatedness of real-life experience. To explain this “sacrifice of relation,” he uses a metaphor of an air-balloon tied to the earth (real life) by a rope; the “art of the romancer” is “insidiously to cut the cable” but “without our detecting it.” See next note. Henry James, Literary Criticism, ed. Edel (1984), I, 54–5; cf. the idea of the romance in the 1907 Preface to The American. There is even ambivalence in the description of how he adopted the pseudonym “Mark Twain” (supposedly meaning safe water) from riverboat vernacular; it also means at the edge of dangerous water. See Ch. 13 of Life on the Mississippi. Scott’s influence, he says, is vividly symbolized in the sham-romance world of Mardi Gras, a world “in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptiness, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.” Sir Walter “had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.” (The wrecked steamboat of Huckleberry Finn is named the Walter Scott.) Strindberg’s actual title is Fr€oken Julie; to translate it as “Miss Julie” is somewhat misleading; her name is not pronounced “Julie” as in English; that is too informal for her aristocratic status. Flaubert produced a number of works in a romantic, symbolist, or fantastic mode, notably Salammbo (1862) and Three Tales (1877). For further discussion of the “grandsons of Balzac,” see Ch. 4. Among Balzac’s best-known works in the English-speaking world are Eugenie Grandet (1833), Old Goriot (or Father Goriot; Le Pere Goriot, 1835), and Cousin Bette (La Cousine Bette, 1846–7). See M. H. Abrams’s classic work on romanticism, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953). This chapter is an amalgam of pieces published in 1886 and 1890, brought together for this chapter in the 1891 Criticism and Fiction (see the edition of Kirk and Kirk, Howells 1959); the bulk of the book consists of Howells’s “Editor’s study” columns between those years. Making fun of sensationalist and gothic fictions, Howells writes: “Nothing happens; that is, nobody murders or debauches anybody else; there is no arson

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or pillage of any sort; there is not a ghost, or a ravening beast, or a hair-breadth escape, or a shipwreck, or a monster of self-sacrifice, or a lady five thousand years old in the whole course of the story.”

See also Abrams (GLT, 1999); Barrish (1995); M. D. Bell (1993); Bennett (1973); Bertoff (1981 [1965]); Borus (1989); P. Brooks (1995); Cady (1958); Carrington (1966); Carter (1954); Cowie (RAN, 1951); Crowley (1999a); Daugherty (1981); R. Davidson (2005); Edel (1987[1953–72]); Glazener (ACAF 2009); Haight (LHUS, 1960); Holman (HBL); Hough (1959); H. M Jones (1971); V. Jones (1985); A. Kaplan (1988); Kirk and Kirk (1962); Kolb (1969); Kraus (1967); Ludwig (2002); Parrington (1930); Perosa (1983 [1978]); Pizer (1984 [1966]); Rasmussen (1995); Shi (1995); D. Stone (1972); B. Thomas (1997); Thompson and Link (NGd, 1999); Vanderbilt (1968).

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Chapter 3

Dramas of the Broken Teacup American “Quiet” Realism

In “A Plea for Romantic Fiction” (1901; Works, 1903), Frank Norris characterized a certain style of realism the “drama of the broken teacup”; and indeed, two of the major themes of American literary realism are the “quiet life” and the “unlived life.” In this chapter, four narratives centered more or less on marriage relationships will serve to exemplify the scope of American quiet realism: a novel by William Dean Howells (Their Wedding Journey); the title story of a collection by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (A New England Nun); and a novella and a novel by Henry James (The Beast in the Jungle and The Ambassadors).1 The Howells novel is an amiable mixture of nostalgic travel narrative and fiction in which minor lovers’ disagreements constitute the “plot.” Wilkins Freeman’s gentle story of the rural middle class in New England is also an excellent example of American regionalism. The two James narratives (both published in 1903) deal with well-to-do Americans abroad, in big cities in England and in France, and are illustrative of James’s celebrated “international theme.” But the deeper contrast with the Howells and Freeman works lies in their tone of quiet desperation: the silent angst of The Beast in the Jungle is deeply disturbing; and although The Ambassadors is a bit more hopeful, it is unsettlingly ambivalent in its qualified hope that someone else might be able to “live.”

High Suspense on a Suspension Bridge: Their Wedding Journey Their Wedding Journey (1872) is Howells’s first published novel. He had missed the American Civil War, spending the years 1861–5 in Italy as United States Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson. Ó 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Consul at Venice. This experience produced two travel narratives, Venetian Life (1866) and Italian Journeys (1867). In Their Wedding Journey, he fictionalized another travel experience – merging a visit as a boy to upstate New York and a visit as a newlywed to upstate New York and Canada. Basil and Isabel March are fictional characters who reappear in several of Howells’s fictions, notably A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) and The Shadow of a Dream (1890), along with a sequel of sorts to the 1872 volume, Their Silver Wedding Journey (1899), in which we see the central character’s more comprehensive cynicism about government and politics.2 Basil is from the Midwest, and Isabel is from Boston; these regional differences provide a central theme in Howells’s fiction. Their Wedding Journey is a quiet tour de force of small observations of a spectrum of social classes and ages and occupations, informed by a gentle tension between romanticism and realism. The book is composed of ten chapters detailing a trip – by railroad, boat, and carriage – from Boston to Rochester, New York, then to Buffalo, next to Niagara Falls, then to Montreal and the province of Quebec, and home again. The narrator tends to stay in the background, but he comes forward from time to time to comment on the social scene or the general condition of the nation or the relations between the sexes. He informs the reader in the first paragraph of Chapter 1 that he will not be telling a romantic story in the old sense of the word but a realistic one. He will “have nothing to do but to talk of some ordinary traits of American life” as these “appeared” to Basil and Isabel – to “speak a little of well-known and easily accessible places, to present now a bit of landscape and now a sketch of character.” The book has only a slight sense of a plotted novel. The closest to a novelistic turning point (as narrative crisis) is Isabel’s fear of crossing the suspension bridges at Niagara and the minor marital crisis it provokes. One other such crisis occurs later: one that Basil and Isabel recognize, with horror, constitutes their first serious argument as a newly married couple – whether to take a drive in a carriage with one horse or two. These scenes are both sentimental and realistic – recognizable even nearly one hundred and forty years later as the faithful rendering of loving interaction between the sexes. At Niagara, the couple observes various tourists, most of them on their “wedding journeys”; others are older, revisiting their honeymoon scenes. This provides Howells an occasion to observe various representative types and, either through his narrator or through Basil, to make comments on Americans and to describe their reactions to the natural landscape. Key among the reactions to the awesome landscape is a scene wherein Basil and Isabel behold “the tumbling deluge” of a section of Niagara Falls and are unable to tell if the water is dropping from the heights or rising from the abyss. (Howells in later fictions will make fuller use of such potential symbolism than he does here.) 42

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Although Basil expresses a concern for Isabel’s “high-strung” nerves, he suggests they try one of the bridges across the river gorge, one that commands a view of “the whole grandeur of Niagara.” The bridge looks frail as it spans the tumultuous waters below (Ch. 6). After they retreat to the safe mountain “shore,” they look back to the point where they had stood near the falls. From this secure vantage, they feel “relieved that unreality should possess itself of all, and that the bridge should swing in mid-air like a filmy web, scarce more passable than the rainbow that flings its arch above the mists.” They can enjoy the unreal romance and implicit danger because they are safe on solid ground. The first bridge scene is followed by a lightly satiric portrait of a charmingly vapid conversation among the other guests at the surprisingly “empty” hotel to which the couple has retreated. The description is laden with implied social commentary, some of it appreciative, some of it ironic. The hotels at Niagara are “almost abandoned to bridal couples”; the brides are everywhere, dressed almost like little fluttering rainbows, as they walk “back and forth with their new lords on the porch of the hotel.” This scene is followed by a second attempt by Basil and his bride to confront and subdue Isabel’s fear of the suspension bridges. Basil offers to carry her over the bridge, but she retorts that that would only double the weight on it. He tries to “reason” with her by insisting that “the bridges, upon all known principles, were perfectly safe, and that they could not give way.” When she shakes her head, he loses his patience: “Isabel . . . I’m ashamed of you!” Her reply silences him: “Don’t say anything you’ll be sorry for afterwards, Basil.” The scene, the interaction, is simultaneously farcical and real; and the real-life gender-role stereotypes are still easily recognized. Back at the hotel, Basil and Isabel have dinner with some of the people Howells has already described, and we are treated to another semi-vapid conversation. Then the talk turns to “aristocratic Southerners, waited upon by their black servants.” Basil has noticed a Southern “sad-faced patrician,” who “sat with his wife at a table farther down the room,” their child attended by a “little tan-colored nurse-maid.” Basil fancies he sees “a sort of bewilderment in the Southerner.” His judgment of the Southerner’s disorientation underscores Basil’s own growing sense of the mutability of everything, as transient as the rainbow in the falls. Later Basil comments that he “can’t help feeling towards him [the Southerner] as towards a fallen prince, heaven help my craven spirit! I wonder how our colored waiter feels towards him. I dare say he admires him immensely.” The comment quite realistically represents one Northern attitude toward the South after the Civil War and addresses the old problem of romance and romanticizing.3 When Basil and Isabel get ready to leave Niagara, Isabel remarks that she is glad to get away from the natural majesty of the falls. In the face of this sublime landscape, Isabel and Basil begin to “conjecture that the great cataract does not 43

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exist by virtue of our approval, and to feel that it will not cease when we go away.” Isabel doesn’t like this line of speculation and says that she wishes “we’d gone after our first look at the Falls.” In a semi-triumphant twist on the unlived life theme, she says: “I rejoice in everything that I haven’t done” (my italics). Quiet comic realism, illustrating the precarious illusion of shared romance, forms the second dramatic “crisis” of the narrative. After a day’s sightseeing in Montreal, Basil and Isabel argue about whether they need one horse or two for a romantic nighttime carriage ride. When she remarks that they “always intended to have two horses,” Basil makes the mistake of disagreeing. For he is “not yet,” the narrator humorously comments, long enough married to be “used to having his decisions reached without his knowledge.” In a mere “moment it had come, the first serious dispute of their wedded life. It had come as all such calamities come from nothing . . .” Sitting alone in the one-horse carriage, Basil has a change of heart. He replaces the carriage with “a glittering barouche” drawn by “a pair of lusty bays.” As Basil and Isabel drive happily out of the city, they discuss the very serious issue of whether they have experienced a “lover’s quarrel” or a “romantic tragedy.” Isabel says that it was “tragical enough with me, for I didn’t see how it could ever be made up.” Basil, “having made all the concessions,” cannot “enjoy the quarrel as she did.” He suggests that they “behave as if it had never been.” To which Isabel replies: “O no, we can’t. To me, it’s as if we had just won each other.” Thus marriage expectations have been met and a crisis averted. The genial humor underscores the conclusion that all is well that ends well.4

Prayerfully Numbering Her Days: Quiet Triumph of a New England “Nun” Another quiet narrative in which “nothing happens” is the title story of A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891) by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930).5 The story is deceptively simple. Louisa Ellis has been waiting some fourteen years for her betrothed, Joe Dagget, to return from seeking his fortune in Australia. Although Joe comes back and renews his vows to Louisa, he is in love with another woman in the village, Lily Dyer. Louisa accidentally discovers that Joe is going through with the marriage only because he gave his word. Louisa too has been acting on the premise that she must keep the promise made so long ago. But now Louisa renounces her claim on him. At the end she sits happily in her neat little house all alone. But her circumscribed life is in fact fulfilling, for upon Joe’s return she finds her pleasant uneventful life intruded upon, disrupted in numerous small ways; and she comes to realize, at first only half-consciously, that she values peaceful 44

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self-sufficiency. Her epiphany is that she prefers her quiet independent spinsterhood – a life she controls. This theme is skillfully and delicately presented in the minute, realistic descriptions of Louisa’s life-center – her house. Having everything in its place and in the proper sequence is Louisa’s defense against the implied chaos of the world. Louisa begins a round of sewing by carefully taking off her “green gingham apron, disclosing another one of pink and white print” underneath it. When she hears Joe arriving, she takes the pink and white apron off to reveal another one, of “white linen, with a little cambric edging on the bottom, that was her company apron.” She barely has time to fold the pink and white apron “with methodical haste” as Joe enters her house, speaking loudly. Joe, we learn later, always feels as if he is “surrounded by a hedge of lace” when in Louisa’s presence; and he is afraid to move about much in case he “should put a clumsy foot or hand through the fairy web.” When Joe gets up to leave, he stumbles over a rug and knocks Louisa’s work-basket to the floor. Once outside, Joe feels like a “wellintentioned bear . . . after his exit from a china shop.” Louisa, noticing that he has “tracked in a good deal of dust,” gets out a dustpan and brush and “carefully” sweeps Dagget’s tracks away. The gesture suggests a latent desire to sweep him out of her existence. After a retrospective passage detailing their marriage commitment made years before, the narrative comes forward again to describe the growing doubts of each. A week before the planned wedding, Louisa takes a nighttime stroll down the dark road in front of her house and sits on a stone wall in the pleasant dark. Here she overhears Joe and Lily agree that, although they love each other, honor and duty require them to part so that Joe may fulfill his obligation to Louisa. The next day Louisa sits at her window and meditates, wondering how she can “sound him without betraying too soon her own inclinations in the matter.” When Joe arrives, her “diplomacy” works: she gets Joe to admit to some hesitancy about the marriage. “She never mentioned Lily Dyer. She simply said that while she had no cause of complaint against him, she had lived so long in one way that she shrank from making a change.” They hold hands briefly and share a mildly regretful memory: “That night she and Joe parted more tenderly than they had done for a long time.” Later the same night, “Louisa, all alone by herself: . . . wept a little, she hardly knew why; but the next morning, on waking, she felt like a queen, who, after fearing lest her domain be wrested away from her, sees it firmly insured in her possession.” She gazes “ahead through a long reach of future days strung together like pearls in a rosary,” each day much the same, “smooth and flawless and innocent.” Rejecting the cultural mandate that a woman must marry, Louisa will live life on her own terms – as a self-defined nun in a cloister of her own 45

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creation. At the end, she sits “with her needle-work at the window,” filled with a sense of peace, and “prayerfully numbering her days,” as if counting rosary beads in gratitude.

Not Living in Henry James’s World Both The Beast in the Jungle (1903) and The Ambassadors (1903) are excellent illustrations of the theme of the unlived life. Both works are a mix of realist and naturalist ideas. As the central characters awake to their unlived life, one succumbs to total despair and the other considers a radical change but finally opts for a version of the passive life he has been living all along.

Bestiary of The Dead The Beast in the Jungle is a very long short story with the implicature, complexity, and impact of a short novel (the novella, a form James particularly admired). Although a third-person narrative, most of the reader’s information and understanding is filtered through the focalizing self-obsessed perceptions of the main character, John Marcher, who, while intelligent and educated, is exceptionally obtuse regarding human relations – especially love relations. At a party at an English country estate (significantly and ironically called Wetherend), John Marcher encounters May Bartram, who reminds him that they have met before, in sunny Sorrento. The careful reader will note immediately the word play on the seasons. The man is associated with the last cold part of winter – March – and the woman with the warm blush of spring – May. April, in which much of the action of the story (such as it is) takes place, ironically names a symbolic space between the two potential lovers, separating rather than joining them. In Sorrento, Marcher had told May that he was convinced that something extremely unusual was to happen to him. She now asks him if it (whatever it is) has in fact occurred. He replies not yet. They discuss, rather obliquely, what it is, or might be. May promises to wait with him and watch for the vague great event, which they take to calling (because it is what he is calling it) the crouching “beast” in his life.

Heart and hearth: The unspoken Years pass – in which May’s motive for participating in his odd obsession becomes clearer to the reader, though not to Marcher. May has established a comfortable residence in London, where Marcher often visits her. They go out 46

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together frequently, especially to the opera. On one of his visits, she tells him (rather coyly) that she now knows what his beast is – but does not think it wise to tell him. Incredulous and curious, he is bound even closer to her – by self-interest. As more time passes, Marcher notices that May is growing ill. His dominant concern, however, is not for May’s well-being but for his own: he is concerned that she might die without revealing his great life-secret to him. When April again arrives, he once again asks her if she knows the secret of his life. She says she does, but that it must come to him on his own.6 May grows more seriously ill. Deprived of the regular company of his only friend, Marcher finds himself beset with increasing loneliness, made worse by not knowing what she presumably knows about his “beast.” When he finally sees her again, she suggests that he has in fact experienced the beast – it has already sprung upon him – but that it is best that he not know its nature and presence. She does not want him to “suffer.” Her state of mind is seemingly mixed: she does not wish him pain; yet she seems to be experiencing more and more exasperation as time marches on; and thus she prompts him a little. The wonderfully symbolic scene is deftly handled. James dramatically and quietly presents a little moment during which nothing happens – or seems not to. But in fact it is a decisive turning point in the middle of the narrative (the fourth chapter of six). The two of them are in May’s parlor by a cold hearth. Marcher as usual continues his obsessive talk about the great event that is to happen to him. Worried that she will not reveal it to him, he accuses her of abandoning him in his quest. “No, no!” she says. “I’m with you – don’t you see? – still.” As if “to make it more vivid to him she rose from her chair – a movement she seldom risked in these days – and showed herself, all draped and all soft, in her fairness and slimness,” saying “I haven’t forsaken you.” Marcher is so touched by this affirmation that he feels only pleasure, forgetting her illness. At that same moment, with a “gliding step,” she “diminished the distance between them” and “stood nearer to him, close to him, a minute, as if still charged with the unspoken.” But Marcher sees her only as “capable even yet of helping him. It was as if, at the same time, her light might at any instant go out; wherefore he must make the most of it.” The narrator’s last few words (which I have here italicized) are chilling. Marcher does not seem to observe her frailty, much less notice the cold fireplace, the nearly bare mantel, and the lonely ticking clock. To him her death would not mean the loss of the woman herself, only the loss of the guardian of his ego. All he senses is that “Something else took place instead” (Ch. 4; my italics). Marcher does not see her mute offer of herself as a woman to him. The scene and the situation quietly sum up James’s view of the futility and pathos of the relations between the sexes. 47

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Death of love Marcher comes back the next day (Ch. 5), but for the first time “in the long stretch of their acquaintance” she is unable to see him. Instead of feeling pain or worry over the condition of his friend, all Marcher thinks is that “he would lose her; she was dying and his life would end” (my italics). He stops in a park nearby to think: her death would bring his own “consequent solitude”: maybe that was the Beast in the Jungle. He sits down on a bench in the twilight (a recurrent Jamesian image), thinking that he will miss her sharing of his damnable destiny with him. “What could be more overwhelming than that?” As before, it is not her death that he finds painful and overwhelming; it is that he will not have his friend around to indulge his self-centeredness. For each of the next several days “he asked about her only again to have to turn away.” Finally, “she ended his trial by receiving him where she had always received him,” in the parlor by the hearth. Their last meeting is, as usual, characterized by invisible social constraints – signaled by half-completed sentences, vague references, slightly mystifying allusions, and, most of all, the unspoken. With monumental egoistic misinterpretation, Marcher wonders aloud if her certain knowledge of what is to be his great event is what is causing her decline. She replies that she would live for him if she could, but she can’t. As usual, he misses the point. When she dies, he is concerned only with his own loss. The ceremony of burial reveals nothing to him at the time, though later her grave site will reveal a much more significant “nothing.” Despondent over something that is not at all clear to him, he goes on an around-the-world journey, hoping to discover something, anything, that will give meaning to his life. But he finds nothing. In unarticulated despair, he returns to England.

A mourner in the garden When he finally visits her grave, he finds that “this garden of death gave him the few square feet of earth on which he could still most live.” He comes back to it time after time, for “there were the facts of the past, the truth of his life.” Thus he lives by “feeding all on the sense that he once had lived.” One gray autumn afternoon, a chance encounter in the cemetery reveals to him the true nature of his existence. He sees another man mourning at the grave of a beloved. As the man departs, he passes Marcher, who looks into his face and knows him “at once for one of the deeply stricken.” The “image of scarred passion” in the other’s face causes in Marcher a feeling of “envy.” Marcher wonders what the man had had “to make him by the loss of it so bleed and yet live?” Then it 48

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“reached him with a pang” that the stranger had “something . . . that he, John Marcher, hadn’t. . . . No passion had ever touched him, for this was what passion meant; he had survived and maundered and pined, but where had been his deep ravage?” It comes to Marcher that there was “something he had utterly, insanely missed.” In his self-pity there comes the revelation that he “had seen outside of his life, not learned it within.” He had not loved his companion enough to mourn her “the way a woman was mourned when she had been loved for herself.” Marcher realizes that “she was what he had missed.”7 Once again, however, his thoughts immediately turn to himself, and he thinks plaintively that “he had been the man of his time, the man, to whom nothing on earth was to have happened.” James carefully depicts the ebb and flow of the currents of “pale horror” in Marcher’s epiphany. All the time he had waited “the wait was itself his portion.” The “escape would have been to love her.” The Beast “had sprung in that twilight of the cold April when, pale, ill, wasted, but all beautiful, and perhaps even then recoverable, she had risen from her chair . . . and let him . . . guess.” He tries “to fix it and hold” the “horror of waking” to this knowledge so that “he might feel the pain”; for “that at least, belated and bitter, had something of the taste of life.”8 Now Marcher realizes, at least in part, though still pathetically self-pitying, that his so-called “destiny” was never to have anything truly important happen to him – such as loving another and being loved in return.

............................................................................................... He saw the jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast; then, while he looked, perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and hideous, for the leap that was to settle him. His eyes darkened – it was close; and, instinctively turning, in his hallucination, to avoid it, he flung himself, face down, on the tomb.

...............................................................................................

Even in this terrible vision, Marcher’s ego remains immense. Although he thinks he is the one man, to whom “nothing” was to happen, he is representative of many of the dead souls in modern society.

The Ambivalent American: Living and Not Living in the Ambassadors The Ambassadors (1903) exemplifies James’s celebrated “international theme” and is generally seen as a kind of late sequel to The American (1877). That is, as a more mature treatment of the themes of morality, innocence, and corruption in the contrasting but complementary cultures of Europe and America. Initially a depiction of the harmful influence of European immorality on wholesome 49

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Americans abroad, The Ambassadors slowly achieves an ironic turnabout, albeit a partial one. A middle-aged American, Lambert Strether, almost breaks the iron grip of his native, puritanical culture to embrace a fuller, more satisfying life in Europe – but not quite.9 The basic plot is deceptively simple. An American widow, Mrs Abel Newsome, has become worried about her son, Chad, who has been living in what New Englanders consider the wicked city of Paris. The dowager Newsome is a woman of wealth and position, with an image of respectability to keep up. She has asked Strether, her good friend and now fiance, to go (as her “ambassador”) to Paris to find out why Chad won’t come back home and tend to the family business instead of living what may be a dissolute life in Europe. On the way, Strether stops in England, where he makes the acquaintance of Maria Gostrey. Familiar with the Parisian lifestyle, she soon becomes Strether’s social guide. He also meets an old friend, Waymarsh, who is also on his way to France. Waymarsh is estranged from his wife and generally soured on life. After Strether arrives in Paris, he gradually succumbs to the charm of Europe and the Europeans, no longer peremptorily judging them as immoral. Strether’s slowly changing perspective causes him to delay his mission to “rescue” Chad and eventually to cable Mrs Newsome saying that he will be remaining in Paris for a while. Strether is the narrative “center of consciousness”: almost everything is filtered through or told from Strether’s focalizing perspective. Strether is presented not only through interaction with others but also through internal interaction with himself to the point where this psychological process is thematized: the central action of the story is the gradual revelation and alteration of his character. Occasionally we get a view of Strether through the eyes of someone else. For example, Chapter 6 opens with Strether commenting on “scruples,” and it is the nature of his own scruples that is the secondary theme of the chapter. For a moment we see him more or less through Waymarsh’s eyes (and of course what Waymarsh sees in Strether is equally a comment on himself). Strether remarks that it is “indispensable” for Chad to be persuaded to return home as soon as possible. Waymarsh asks: “To whom? You?” When Strether answers yes, Waymarsh asks “Because if you get him you also get Mrs Newsome?” Strether replies that Chad is needed for the family business. Waymarsh knowingly adds that it is the business that is “of real importance” to Mrs Newsome’s future husband. This mild taunt, while further exposing Waymarsh’s cynicism, reinforces our sense of a hidden materialistic strain in Strether (hinted at in the very first chapter). The plot turns on Strether’s impressions of the relationship between Chad Newsome and the charming and beautiful Mme Marie de Vionnet, still married 50

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to the Comte de Vionnet but estranged from him. At first, Strether is unsure whether Chad has a romantic interest in Marie or her daughter, Jeanne. He convinces himself that Chad’s relationship with the married older woman is innocent; then, on a weekend visit to a country resort, Strether sees Chad and the countess alone together in a boat. The ensuing conversation among the three of them is beautifully strained, a fine example of late-century realism. By now, however, Strether has come to think that Chad’s new freer life is something to be appreciated, even desired. In fact, he half-consciously entertains the fancy that he could supplant Chad with his mistress – if he could get the young man to return to America.

Emissaries and plotters In part, his attitude has been altered because Mrs Newsome has sent a second set of “ambassadors,” led by her daughter Sarah Newsome Pocock, who brings along her rather vulgar husband, Jim Pocock, and his more amiable sister, Mamie Pocock. Mrs Newsome has determined that Mamie is to marry her son Chad on his return to America. Sarah insists that her brother return home immediately; moreover, since Strether has proved himself unworthy, his engagement to her mother is to be terminated. Things get a good deal more complicated. For example, Waymarsh, who has developed an interest in the married Sarah Pocock, hypocritically plays the Puritan moralist and tells Strether he should give up his growing friendship with Chad and his circle and convince the boy to return home. Mrs Pocock, reciprocating Waymarsh’s interest (to a degree), also plays the hypocrite, criticizing Marie de Vionnet as a bad influence on her brother. Meanwhile Strether suggests to Chad’s young friend, John Little Bilham, that he marry Mamie. Chad now seems, ambivalently, to want to end it with Marie. One way to achieve this goal more or less gracefully would be to find a suitable substitute; and there are subtle suggestions in the narrative that he is trying to maneuver Strether into the role. As mentioned, the still rather straightlaced Strether does display some interest in her; but, though she likes Strether, Marie is not attracted to him romantically. Meanwhile, Maria Gostrey has developed a more or less romantic (and opportunistic) interest in Strether.

Living and not living Now urging Chad not to desert Marie, Strether advises him to stay in Paris where his life will be freer and, in fact, may be more meaningful than back in 51

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America. Strether would like to stay in Europe also, but he feels that he is too old to make a new life. He turns his back on all these interesting European entanglements and will return to repressive New England with mixed emotions. What seemed unambiguous to Strether before his European experience does not now seem so clear-cut – except for one thing. In a well-known scene, Strether tells Little Bilham to live: “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that, what have you had?” As for himself, he says: “now I’m old; too old at any rate for what I see.” The possibilities for a different, more exciting life were there, he says, like a train waiting for him to climb aboard, but now “I hear its faint receding whistle miles and miles down the line. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that” (Book 5, Ch. 2). This passage suggests some of James’s affinities with the philosophical determinism of the naturalists. Strether sees himself and most others as “a helpless jelly” poured into a “tin mould” of a few predetermined designs.10 “Still, one has the illusion of freedom,” he says. Strether repeats what many critics have seen as the essence of the book: “Do what you like so long as you don’t make my mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!”

Notes 1. James and Howells are treated again in separate chapters; see Chs 14 and 15. For introductory overviews, see Rowe on James (ACAF, 2009), and Anesko on Howells (ACAF, 2009). 2. Klinkowitz (1970) provides a useful overview in which these characters are discussed as both partially autobiographical and also artistically separate from their supposed representation of Howells and his wife. 3. See Ch. 6. Addressing his dinner partners, Basil makes a speech about the changes brought by the conclusion of the Civil War: a notably mild social criticism that will be elaborated in Howells’s later “post-romance” fiction (see Ch. 15 of the present volume). 4. The last scene of Ch. 8 further exemplifies quiet reality. Basil and Isabel, still touring the country, come across a French-Catholic country church tended by “a pale young priest.” When they put some coins into the poor-box, the priest bows, and, “as if he had relapsed into the past,” appears to vanish. Basil and Isabel stand “speechless a moment on the church steps.” Isabel wants to know that “something” weird did not just happen. Basil replies that if they knew the priest, they would find his presence and disappearance less interesting. And he asks Isabel: “What could have been half so good as the nothing that did happen?” (my italics). 52

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5. Another excellent example is Wilkins Freeman’s quasi-feminist regionalist story, “The Revolt of ‘Mother.’” See Howard (ACAF, 2009), 129–130; Kennedy (ACAF, 2009), 154. 6. The dialogue between the two is a superlative example of James’s exploitation of the gaps, hesitations, dead ends, unfinished statements, and the like that are characteristic of much speech in real life. Here failed communication is exacerbated by the super-sensitivity of the characters (however self-centered), producing what James in a moment calls speech “charged by the unspoken.” 7. This was “the meaning of the stranger’s face.” The revelation is rendered in fiery imagery that contrasts markedly with that of the cold fireplace before which May had offered herself to him. This then “was the awful thought, the answer to all the past, the vision at the dread clearness of which he grew as cold as the stone beneath him.” 8. My italics. See the discussion of James’s friendship with Constance Fenimore Woolson as the possible inspiration for The Beast in the Jungle and The Wings of the Dove in Ch. 14. 9. James at one point considered The Ambassadors his best book; see his notebook entries and the later preface to the book. These are conveniently found in the Norton Critical Edition (1964). In its representation of the grip of Puritan repression on many American lives, the book echoes a major theme that Hawthorne (to whom James devoted an appreciative book in 1879) had explored repeatedly. Cargill (1961), reminding us that Strether’s full name is Louis Lambert Strether, after the hero of Balzac’s novel Louis Lambert, calls him “the loneliest of Henry James’s heroes” (328). One may think immediately of John Marcher, but perhaps he is not in James’s or Cargill’s view a “hero.” 10. Images of a beast in the jungle here also occur to Strether. He thinks that “there was something in the great world covertly tigerish, which came to him across the lawn and in the charming air as a waft from the jungle.” This thought makes him “envy” the “glossy male tiger, magnificently marked.” But he thinks that these “absurdities of the stirred sense” are merely the “fruits of suggestion ripening on the instant.” His resignation is “reflected in his next words” to Bilham: “I know . . . whom I should enjoy being like!” Presumably Chad: Strether’s beast pounces; he knows he is no tiger.

See also For Howells, see references in Ch. 15. For James, see references in Ch. 14. For Wilkins Freeman, see Donovan (1983); Glasser (1996); Marchalonis (1991); Reichardt (1992); Romines (1992); Westbrook (1988). Cf. general studies of realism cited in Ch. 2.

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Chapter 4

The Nature of Naturalism Definitions and Backgrounds

In literary studies, the word naturalism most often indicates a historical period closely proximate to literary realism and collateral to it in aesthetic theory. Conventionally conceived, this kind of later literary realist-naturalism began shortly before the 1880s in France and approximately at the beginning of the 1890s in America. It flourishes for a quarter century or so and continues for two decades after World War I in a somewhat less intensely theoretical form. The term naturalism also designates an attempt to merge “objective” scientific method with large philosophical models of existence. The ideology of both philosophical and literary naturalism is usually rooted in a materialist concept of man and the universe – that is, in modification or outright denial of traditional spiritual, moral, and idealist concepts. Philosophical naturalism refers to the postulation that phenomena are to be explained by observable natural processes, not something “supernatural.”1 One of the key concepts in understanding naturalism in its several forms and kinds is determinism. As a philosophical doctrine, determinism is the idea that in human life every event, act, and decision is the inevitable consequence of antecedents, a strict cause-and-effect notion. In this chapter, we will first explore the general problem of determinism and undertake a short survey of some of the major conceptual frames (psychological, social, economic, scientific, and philosophical) for naturalism as a general cultural phenomenon. Then we will profile the general literary scene, emphasizing the influence of French natu
ralism (particularly that of Emile Zola and his circle), with a special comment on atavism and regression. We’ll conclude with the specific theories of Frank Norris on the new romance-novel as the ideal blend of naturalism and realism. Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson. Ó 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Hard and Soft Determinism In general, literary naturalism sees our lives as determined by forces that are both external – the environment (as nature and society), including received history – and internal – fear, hunger, sex, biology, heredity, and subconscious urges. For naturalism, we are in fact the result of these conditions, and the essence (if there is one) of being human lies in our animalistic and instinctive components. In naturalist literature, characters are dominated by animal drives; brutal physical impulses often accompany ruthlessness and extreme greed, revealing a self-absorbed will to dominate others. Thus, unlike romantic naturalism and unlike realism per se, a strongly pessimistic ideology prevails in late-century naturalism. Like realism, this sort of naturalism is in creative tension with idealism and romance. But the predominant view of nature is that it is at best indifferent to human welfare, and at the worst malign, “red in tooth and claw.” The basic natural “elements” are harsh or unfriendly; survival generally means a struggle to the death. Naturalist writers of the period frequently place their characters in extreme situations: wandering in a burning desert, lost in a frozen waste, abandoned on a sinking ship, and so on. Or they imprison their characters in social, economic, political, legal, or ethical-moral situations from which there is no exit. Just how pessimistic later naturalist writers were is partly a matter of the kind of determinism that governed their fictional worldview. Besides paralysis and death, another element independent of human will must be considered in determining the naturalist world: chance. Although American literary naturalism largely embraces philosophical determinism, it includes chance as a major component. Chance also looms large in many works of American realism; indeed, Howells in several of his fictions posits what he calls a “chance-world.” In American literary naturalism, the philosophical conundrums of total determinism and chance, not to mention the possibility (or the illusion) of free will, are unresolved – though we see a partial answer in two slightly different concepts of determinism. In a lecture in 1884, “The Dilemma of Determinism,” William James defined the philosophical concept of determinism as the recognition that all the principal “parts of the universe” are “already laid down.” They are absolute; they decree whatever else will be. There are no real choices: “necessity on the one hand and impossibility on the other are the sole categories of the real.” What people perceive as unrealized “possibilities” are, for determinism, “pure illusions; they were never possibilities at all.” James then distinguished two basic kinds of determinism: “hard” and “soft.” In literature, the first kind represented human beings as almost completely controlled by forces independent of individual will, and the idea of chance or 56

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accident is paradoxical. The second granted a modicum of free will or held out the possibility (sometimes quite remote) of free will and independent action, but subject to the vicissitudes of chance.2

Principal Conceptual Frames Associated with this complex of ideas about often unrecognized “forces” shaping or controlling our lives was the rise of psychology and psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is represented for most people by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), though his ideas on dreams and a realm of unconscious (or subconscious) life had many precedents.3 Freud thought that submerged feelings were the source of neurosis and psychosis and that dream interpretation could uncover “the repressed” and expose it to curative analysis. In his view, people are at the mercy of the subconscious workings of the mind, which in everyday life struggles blindly to balance socially implanted moral instruction with animal impulses inherited from primitive ancestors. Freud divided the functions of the mind into three major realms. The ego, the conscious but unwitting product of unconscious forces, has to negotiate between the socially derived moral injunctions of the super-ego, on the one hand, and the primitive animal impulses of the id on the other. When he suggested that sexual drives were the basis of all human behavior, he meant it as a complex combination of inherited instinct and inherited social conduct – a life drive or survival mechanism – a point largely misunderstood by the general public. In the 1890s, Freud and the Viennese physician Josef Breuer (1842–1925) produced several studies on “hysteria.” The theory was that hysteria as then understood was actually the result of childhood trauma – unconscious stress that the individual could do little or nothing to relieve unless guided to conscious recognition of its sources by the new science of psychoanalysis. By bringing unconscious and repressed elements to a conscious level, the neurosis could be dissipated (the “cathartic” method). Freud’s most controversial ideas were his suggestions about the existence of “infant sexuality” and his formulation of the “Oedipus Complex,” in which a male retains a primitive desire to destroy the father and mate with the mother. Moreover, he speculated that the life-drive of sexuality (eros) was linked to a death-desire (thanatos) of some kind. The eros/thanatos paradox manifests itself in much of the fiction of the times. Related ideas about the pervasiveness of sexuality were in the air prior to and contemporaneous with Freud. The studies of sexuality by Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) and Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) also generated enormous interest. Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia 57

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sexualis was published in 1886; Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex ran to seven volumes from 1897 to 1928.4 In the 1870s and 1880s, Th
eodule-Armand Ribot (1839–1916), a distinguished French psychologist who argued for a physical base of mental activity, published a series of influential volumes on heredity (1875), on memory (1881), on the will (1883), on personality (1885), and on concepts of “attention” (1889). Later works included studies of the sentiments, the evolution of ideas, the creative imagination, the passions, and problems of “affective psychology.” Ribot was interested in the “pathology” of the mental processes as a key to normal functioning of the mind, based on the new science of “neuropsychology.” Howells makes Ribot’s theories the basis for his study of the psychopathology of a curious m
enage-a-trois in The Shadow of a Dream (1890).

Evolution and economic theory: Social Darwinism and Robber Barons The psychological was often intertwined with the social-economic aspects of the “underside” of human life. Naturalist writers were likely to focus, not on ordinary bourgeois life, but on working-class life or on slum life. Typical settings include the factory system, the sweat-shop, the city slum, the playedout farm, the poverty-stricken rural village. In theory, the writer tries to remain objective, refraining from sentiment and moralizing. But the naturalists often do express moral judgments, usually as criticism of the evils of an oppressive society. Often socialistic or radical in politics, the naturalist narrative is often less about character and more about the clash of social forces – especially when these forces can be exposed as oppressive of the common man. The rise of naturalist fiction was greatly influenced by the emergence of compelling evolutionary theory at mid-century. The more scientific theory was articulated in 1859 by Charles Darwin (1809–1882) in On the Origin of Species. But Darwin’s theory was somewhat misunderstood by the general public, partly because of the popularity of a less scientific one, which was a “sociological” adaptation of some of Darwin’s ideas. Beginning in 1860, Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) published ten volumes of social theory (under the collective title System of Synthetic Philosophy) in which he attempted a “positivistic” application of evolutionary speculations to the sociopolitical arena.5 Certain prominent American capitalists seized on the “science” of Spencer’s “Social Darwinism” to justify their exploitation of workers, the poor, the middle class, and even each other. Although to their allies and defenders they were “Captains of Industry,” critics began to think of them as “Robber Barons.” 58

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Those who see them as ruthless exploiters of the middle and lower classes also use the phrase “The Gilded Age” to describe the historical era. Those who see them as creative, public-spirited and philanthropic entrepreneurs – as “innovators” who created a forward-looking, economically and technologically advanced America – tend to call the period the “Progressive Era.”6 As American businesses grew into giant corporate conglomerates, they became all-encompassing (“integrated vertically”): they owned or managed not just manufacturing or sales, but also the basic resource materials and the means of transport. Standard Oil, for example, owned wells, refineries, and railroads. Carnegie Steel was involved in the mining of iron and coal and owned the coke ovens; in addition to producing steel, the company owned overland shipping facilities, including a vast railroad network. Some of the industry barons were guilty of blatantly unethical and illegal schemes to achieve wealth – including political graft, land grabs, and dishonest stock manipulation. One of the most notorious involved the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad (a conglomerate like the one that the small California ranchers fight against in Frank Norris’s 1901 novel The Octopus). Major stockholders in Union Pacific created a dummy construction company – Cr
edit Mobilier of America – and then issued contracts for the completion of the railroad to their own subsidiary, overcharging the United States government by several millions of dollars. In 1867, nearly seven hundred miles of track remained to be laid; before the railroad was finished in 1869, the Cr
edit Mobilier contracts had used up all the congressional funding and had run up a huge debt, and the rail line was still not completed. When the US Congress threatened to investigate these business deals for possible malfeasance, shares of Cr
edit Mobilier were issued to various congressmen either free or at half their worth as a bribe. Congress did investigate after the presidential campaign of 1872 but declined to take legal action against those participating in the swindle. Who were some of these Robber Barons? Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) was the founder of Carnegie Steel. John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) was the president of Standard Oil. Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794–1877) gained control of the New York Central Railroad just after the Civil War. William Vanderbilt (1821–1885) succeeded Cornelius as president of the New York Central and other associated railroads. Jay Gould (1836–1892), another railroad magnate, was an unscrupulous stock speculator; he is especially remembered for his attempt (with James Fisk) to corner the gold market in 1869, causing the “Black Friday Panic.” J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913), whose principal field of endeavor was banking and high finance, was involved in various battles for control of railroads and had major interests in steel manufactures; he was infamous for selling obsolete guns to the Union in the Civil War and for gold speculations that harmed the Union cause; his financial dominance is also said 59

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to have influenced the Panic of 1907. In the court-ordered dissolution of his Northern Security Company in 1904, his major opponent was the antimonopolistic president, Theodore Roosevelt. Almost all of these “captains of industry” who came to be thought of as Robber Barons had some connection to the new wonder of the age – the railroad. In 1868, Henry George (1839–1897), in opposition to corrupt land speculation practices, had suggested that when “the Railroad” (in the abstract) brought increased population to the West, it would bring greater wealth to the privileged few and greater poverty to the majority. In 1879, he published Progress and Poverty, in which he argued that unfair taxation programs and current laws on ownership of land caused progress and poverty to be inextricably linked. Labor was being held back from rightful economic progress because the big landlords were able to raise rents, hold land until the price went up, and exploit farmers and workers by offering the cheapest of wages – the situation in Norris’s The Octopus. Progress and Poverty was enormously popular and influenced many other writers, notably Hamlin Garland, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Theodore Dreiser.7 Although the big monopolistic conglomerates were called public “Trusts,” the owners in general seemed indifferent to public welfare (William Vanderbilt scornfully declared “The public be damned!”) and were quite willing to exploit the insecure economic conditions of workers. They found their moral justification not only in the mantra of “Progress,” but also in the idea that they were, by the process of natural selection, superior to the masses. They were given to conspicuous displays of wealth while forcing their workers to live in shoddy company towns and sometimes paying them not with US currency but with company scrip redeemable only at the company store. Associated with the great Robber Barons was William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951), newspaper and magazine magnate, famous for sensational or “yellow” journalism. For personal economic reasons, Hearst callously manipulated the American public’s patriotic feelings in an effort to promote the Spanish–American War of 1898 (which came in fact to be known as “Mr Hearst’s War”). He published exaggerated and lurid reports of the struggle of Cuba’s oppressed people for independence from Spain, stirred up anti-Spanish sentiment in the United States, and demanded that America go to war. This war is the background in W. D. Howells’s famous story, “Editha” (1905), a sharply critical narrative about conventional views of war and “heroism” that forcefully and ironically presents an anti-romantic perspective on false notions of courage. Like Mark Twain, Howells presents the gullibility of ordinary persons when bombarded by empty chauvinistic phrases. It was the 1873 publication of The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that gave the era one of its two longest-lasting names. They 60

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charged that the American ideal of democratic virtue had become “the ideal of Croesus,” that of materialism, money-getting, and exclusiveness. They saw the years of 1860–8 surrounding the Civil War as a critical period in the moral corruption of America: the war had swept away the old national ideals articulated by the founding fathers. Twain and Warner attacked Carnegie and Rockefeller, along with the laissez-faire sociologist William Graham Sumner (1840–1910), observing that America no longer had a “golden” age, but merely one of “gilt.” In the Gilded Age, a person’s worth was his money; one acquired as much of it as possible in order to glitter in the eyes of his countrymen.8 Most of the super capitalists were enamored of the phrase “survival of the fittest,” which was actually not so much Darwinian language as a Spencerian twisting of Darwin’s ideas of “natural selection,” further twisted by the wealthy to suggest that it was their “right” by natural selection to be richer and more powerful than others. When Andrew Carnegie read Darwin and Spencer, he felt as if he had been given a religious revelation: “Not only had I got rid of theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution,” he said (MAR, 6). William Graham Sumner, in What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883) and other works, defended laissez-faire politics. He opposed any government interference with what he called the “natural” economics of trade. He thought it obvious that very wealthy people (the new millionaires) were superiorly evolved and that their children would inherit all their parents’ wealth if they also inherited their superior abilities. Moreover, the great wealth of a few was a fair trade-off for a generally robust economy that eventually benefited the working class and the poor. John D. Rockefeller told churchgoers that the growth of big business was “merely a survival of the fittest” and that the suppression or elimination of weaker competitors was “merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.”9 The difference between Darwin’s idea of natural selection and the popular notion of survival of the fittest lies in his concept of mutations producing, almost by happenstance, a survival characteristic that is then passed on genetically by the surviving mutated organism.10 This genetic trait (such as a long neck, a curved beak, and the like) more or less accidentally enables the organism to out-compete other organisms. Darwin does not argue a purposeful, teleological evolution toward a higher state. The romantic idea of the evolution of man and society toward a higher state derived principally from the romantics, especially G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854), and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). Darwin, in fact, protested that the theory of evolution did not confer any special status on human beings. But many people clung to the romanticist belief and maintained that it was the “manifest destiny” of America – the providential plan of God 61

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for America – to evolve toward inevitable dominance as a superior social state – the principal theme of the Progressive Era.11

Superman and mass man: Nietzsche and Marx The idea of natural selection as understood in the popular imagination fed into another related conception about evolution, survival, and dominance: the € Ubermensch figure. This term (which may be translated as the “Overman” or “Superman” or “Superior Being”) came from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who posited a higher intellectual or philosophical being in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–4, 1892) and other works. The € Nietzschean Ubermensch, rather than a reference to particular individual beings, is more of a metaphor for the sum total of all civilized striving toward € an ideal social state. The Ubermensch trope represents the “will to power” beyond conventional notions of “good” and “evil” that would distinguish superior beings from the “herd” of mass man. These idea clusters were to be used by American writers like Jack London and Theodore Dreiser to create individual human figures who try to bend others and society as a whole to their individual wills, no matter how perverted. Nietzsche’s writings were somewhat slow to gain general public attention, but after 1888 when the influential Danish critic Georg Brandes (1842–1927), who was highly respected in America, gave a series of lectures on him, Nietzsche’s fame began to spread. Jack London was perhaps the American author of the period most deeply and directly influenced by Nietzsche, though London was inconsistent in his own philosophy. Several of London’s stories of survival repeat versions of the maxim, “Eat or be eaten,” as in The Call of the Wild (1903) € and White Fang (1906). Although his greatest Ubermensch figure, Wolf Larsen of The Sea-Wolf (1904), ultimately goes down to defeat, he imposes his will on everyone and everything through his superior intellect and superhuman physical strength. Theodore Dreiser modeled his business tycoon, Frank Algernon Cowperwood, on a popularization of the idea of the Superman operating outside the normal mores of society. His Cowperwood novels (The Financier, 1912, The Titan, 1914; followed much later by The Stoic, 1947) were also somewhat inconsistent in philosophy, his amoral ruthless power broker supposedly also having a higher spiritual and artistic side. In a different context, Henry Adams (1838–1918) in The Education of Henry Adams (1907) attests to the crucial influence of Nietzsche (along with Schopenhauer) on his concepts of telos and history.12 The vogue of the Superman was also to mutate into a morally debilitating concept of a super race. It merged an old idea of tribal superiority with “scientific 62

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validation” in new anthropological theories. The last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth saw the rapid rise of “scientific racialism” (a euphemism for scientific “racism” as used by the Nazis in concert with the myth of ancient “Teutonic” heroes and the “Aryan” icon). Contrary to the individualistic Superman hypothesis was another, rather different version of evolution – the revolutionary economic theory of Karl Marx (1818–1883). Marx’s view of the dynamics of western society was based on a concept of historical determinism that predicted inevitable class war – which, he thought, was in the process of coming to a final conclusion. That prediction was first announced in the Communist Manifesto (1848), co-authored with Friedrich Engels (1820–1895). The basic philosophy was developed more fully in Das Kapital, the first volume of which was published in 1867 and later completed (1885–94) by Engels from Marx’s notes. In Marx’s idealistic philosophy of economic determinism, the lower classes would eventually gain control of the means of production, reduce the reliance on “capital” as currently understood, and ultimately achieve an egalitarian utopia. This ideology, seemingly in conflict with the idea of natural selection and the later permuta€ tions of the Ubermensch, also came to inform the works of socialist-naturalist American writers like London and Dreiser.

The “Grandsons of Balzac”: Naturalism and the French Connection We have seen that the earlier French realists – Balzac especially – were much admired by American writers. Henry James declared that “everything” was to be found in Balzac.13 But equally important were later nineteenth-century French theories of what the “new” literature should be. These theories can be
represented in the main by the comments of Emile Zola (1840–1902) on the new novel, from his own perspective as a novelist, and by the formulations of the influential critic, Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893). Both men went beyond the relatively “objective” ideal of early realism to espouse a putatively “scientific” attitude; objectivity was to be achieved through “scientific realism”; and the novelist was supposed to avoid the kind of moral judgments that were almost mandatory in earlier literature. Such ideas had been influenced by the positivism of the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Rather than appealing to absolute idealistic principles, Comte thought that the only kind of knowledge that is valid is that attained though careful empirical observation and experimentation; and he argued that “scientific method” should apply to social reform and religious institutions.14 About the same time, Taine began to promulgate a theory of 63

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scientific determinism in literature and history, emphasizing heredity and environment. He posited the facult
e ma^ıtresse, the idea of a predetermined “master faculty” or, as it is usually rendered in English, a “dominant trait,” which could be uncovered by the methodical inquiries of an astute criticscientist. He also formulated the triadic analytic of race, milieu, et moment: roughly, the biological ancestry or ethnicity of a person (race), the contexts and traditions of social circumstances (milieu), and the trends of a particular period of historical time (moment). A literary or historical figure could be understood, completely, by examination of its biological, historical, and social inheritance.

The “experimental novel”
Emile Zola initially responded with enthusiasm to the congeries of ideas represented by Comte, Taine, Darwin, Spencer, and Marx. Especially influential on American writers was Zola’s Le roman experimental (1880), a manifesto that extended the analogy of literature and science and explained his attempts to narrate stories in “scientific detail.” Literally translating as the “experimental novel,” the more precise sense of the title is the “scientific novel,” in which the author adopts the role of a laboratory scientist. The essay became the most important critical manifesto of the naturalist movement. Two metaphors can be used to indicate dominant naturalist conceptions of the nature and function of fiction. Zola’s analogy was the laboratory: if all the factors of context and character were known, the novelist-scientist could describe or predict all behaviors – something like a chemist performing experiments with known quantities. This kind of social determinism can also be likened to a pool table. Calculating velocity, torque, angle, force, and the like, one can precisely predict the direction the pool ball will take. So also “scientific novelists,” in their imaginative experiments, calculate their characters’ behaviors in specific situations. This program was not always observed in actual fictional practice, but in theory the writer was supposed to posit a circumstance and then observe the behavior of the characters with emotionless objectivity. A corollary was a plain style – straightforward, bare, largely non-metaphoric, flat, and unpoetic – in imitation of scientific or technical writing. Romanticism and sentimentality were to be avoided. Thus most naturalist writers thought of the “new” literature as “social documentation.” Both Zola and the de Goncourt brothers, in emulation of Balzac, wrote long, painstakingly detailed novel-cycles amounting to more than twenty interconnected volumes. In presenting the novels as one enormously long work, they professed to depict the whole of contemporary life with characters from all the different social classes. 64

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“Wicked” French fiction In fact, it is principally Zola and the de Goncourt brothers to whom Henry James had reference as the literary grandsons of Balzac. “Les deux Goncourt” (the “two Goncourts”), as they were known, were Edmond Louis Antoine Huot de Goncourt (1822–1896) and Jules Alfred Huot de Goncourt (1830–1870). They produced a series of episodic novels and other works depicting the strata of French life, especially Parisian life, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Their books, minutely detailed, frequently sordid, sometimes sensational, are
considered forerunners of Emile Zola’s naturalist fictions. Their most important works include: Soeur Philomene (Sister Philomena, 1861), for which the authors visited hospitals to ensure accuracy; Ren
ee Mauperin (1864, trans. 1887); and studies of the pathology of degenerates, including Germine Lacerteux (1869). After his brother Jules’s death, Edmond produced La Fille
Elisa (Young Elisa, 1877), a realistic portrayal of prostitution. The other key figure besides Zola in the development of French realism/ naturalism is Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893), noted for his irony, his objective manner, and his simple straightforward prose style. His novels are often characterized as psychological realism, but they tend to feature entrapped, deteriorating characters in the naturalist manner. He was best known to American readers for his short stories, many of them in the naturalist mode, like “Boule de Suif” (Ball of Fat) which appeared in an anthology focused on the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1. This story is frequently cited as a classic of French social naturalism. A reformed prostitute, nicknamed “little ball of fat,” is riding in a coach with several “respectable” people when a Prussian officer detains them and will not let them proceed until she has sex with him. She refuses, but the other passengers put so much pressure on her that she reluctantly agrees; the next day they treat her like the social outcast they have always thought her. Among his psychological “horror” stories, “The Horla” (1887) stands out both for its gothic evocation of an invisible creature – the first of a host of alien invaders sensed only by the narrator – and for its deft insinuation of the possible incipient madness of the narrator (a condition experienced by Maupassant toward the end of his life), who has immured himself like a caged animal in his house.15

The mark of Zola
French naturalism did not spring full-blown from the head of Emile Zola, though he is the most famous of the later French realists and the primary formulator and practitioner of naturalism in French fiction. He began his 65

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novelistic career in 1865, some twenty years or so before the first major American naturalists. In 1871, he published La Fortune des Rougons, the initial volume of the novel-cycle, Les Rougon-Macquart, which was twenty-two years in the making (1871–93), much as Balzac had begun thirty years before with La Com
edie humaine. The Rougon-Macquart series presents in exhaustive detail the social history of a single family in the Second Empire. Dramatizing the need for social change, the novels are noted for brutal realism and sordid detail. Focused on the family’s decay through alcoholism, disease, and degeneracy, the twenty volumes present Zola’s dominant philosophical theme of the transmission of individual traits through heredity exacerbated by environmental conditions. L’Assommoir (1877), first translated into English as The Dram Shop,16 had a major influence on Frank Norris’s McTeague. The novel details the demoralizing effects of alcohol on lower-class workers and is written mainly in the street vernacular of Paris. Nana (1880), which influenced Crane’s Maggie, portrays how a blossoming young girl in a social dung heap becomes a prostitute. But unlike Crane’s Maggie, who is described in similar terms, Nana works her way up to the position of a royal courtesan – only to die in bed, her body a decomposing mass of foul pus. Especially important is Zola’s Germinal (1895), which portrays the poverty and the sufferings of striking French mine workers. It contains scenes of graphic violence, including the sensational description of the castration and dismemberment of the body of a village shopkeeper who has extorted sexual favors from the local women in exchange for food. Translated in 1901, it shocked many English-speaking readers. William Dean Howells, however, despite some ambivalence, defended it and Zola as a great writer. Frank Norris was especially excited by Zola, whose works he read in the original French; the influence of Germinal on Norris’s The Octopus (1901) is evident. Both are novels of social protest that show sympathy for workers in their fight against an abstract industrial conglomerate. Zola’s novel has Marxist/ socialist overtones, but the strike is ultimately futile – as is the California ranchers’ battle against “the Railroad” in Norris’s novel. At the end of Zola’s story, as Etienne, one of the two main strike instigators, heads off alone down the road from the village, flowers are “germinating” new life. But this process does not so much suggest the germinating spirit of universal change as it pathetically and ironically underscores the indifference of nature to the miners’ plight. The similar ending in Norris’s The Octopus, however, evokes something mystical in the inexorable increase of “the WHEAT”: some sort of benign natural force. The contrast between the French work and the American is instructive. Zola’s work, despite its mix of fatalism, social protest, utopian vision, and naturalist romanticism, tends to be informed by a harder-edged determinism than Norris’s in The Octopus (discussed in the next chapter). 66

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Melodramas of the Beast: Naturalist Primitivism and Atavism Atavism stands in opposition to romantic ideas of Edenic primitivism and the Noble Savage. The basic idea is that remnants of an amoral savage state lurk deep in the human psyche. In biology, the term means simply the reappearance of a suppressed characteristic after several generations (as in a recessive gene). In literature, however, atavism generally means an individual “throwback” to a less desirable primitive state: a “reversion” to a hypothetical ancestral prototype, something untamed and bestial in nature, that in modern man manifests itself in criminal behavior. In 1876, Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) published a short work on the theory of criminal attributes, which he expanded over the next twenty years into a multi-volume study called Criminal Man.17 In these works, he argued that various classes of felons possessed distinct psychological profiles and physical features. His “reversion theory” included the suggestion that certain individuals were trapped within an evolutionary chain of genetic types. Morally, the reverted criminal did not possess a civilized sense of right and wrong and showed no remorse for crimes committed – having only survival instincts and a drive to self-gratification.18 Two striking American novels of human atavism are Frank Norris’s Vandover and the Brute (completed 1899; pub. later) and McTeague (1899). A somewhat different concept is embodied in the figure of the captain of the Ghost in Jack London’s The Sea Wolf (1904); related is London’s story of animal reversion to an earlier prototype in The Call of the Wild (1903). In London’s Before Adam (1906), a man has dreams of a savage forebear that are so powerful that he relives the ancestor’s experiences in his mind. In these novels, the theory of atavism corresponds to both writers’ sense that reversion is a general tendency – a deterministic cage within which individuals vainly struggle to find a larger moral meaning. As an extreme form of naturalism, atavistic primitivism is usually combined with melodramatic confrontations and violence. Although intense emotional drama would seem to be antithetical to the naturalist theory of objective reportage, it abounds in the naturalist short stories of Ambrose Bierce and in much naturalist “muckraking” fiction of social protest. We find melodrama in novels like Frank Norris’s The Octopus and McTeague; in Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Sea Wolf, and even in his more realist Martin Eden; in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; and in some of William Dean Howells’s realist works, like A Hazard of New Fortunes and The Shadow of a Dream. We need to remember that, like romanticism and realism, naturalism has many modes. Most often, naturalist writings are associated with a form of realism that focuses 67

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on the grimmer aspects of life, told in a seemingly objective, reportorial manner. But the spectrum of naturalist texts ranges from documentary realism to quiet realism to protest fiction and the hyper-melodramatic.

Naturalism and the Romance-Novel The theory of the naturalist novel in all its contradictoriness is nowhere clearer than in the critical writings of Frank Norris, who professed to regard naturalism as the ideal mixture of realism and romanticism. When Sergio Perosa argues that Norris’s theory of romance is really only an “extension and intensification of realism,” he rather surprisingly misses the point.19 Norris’s theory of the romance is intricately linked with realism, but it is not merely an extension of realist theories. In several critical essays, Norris reveals a compound ambivalence about the realism of William Dean Howells and calls for a better
understanding in America of Emile Zola. In “Zola as a Romantic Writer” (San Francisco Wave, 1896), Norris chides critics who read Zola’s naturalism as a form of realism. “It is curious to notice how persistently M. Zola is misunderstood,” he writes. “How strangely he is misinterpreted even by those who conscientiously admire the novels of the ‘man of the iron pen.’” For most people, “Naturalism has a vague meaning,” which they misconstrue. They see it as “a sort of inner circle of realism – a kind of diametric opposite of romanticism, a theory of fiction wherein things are represented ‘as they really are,’ inexorably, with the truthfulness of a camera. This idea can be shown to be far from right, that Naturalism, as understood by Zola, is but a form of romanticism after all” (Norris 1986: 1106). According to Norris, Zola’s work is not primarily in the “realist” mode, for the domain of realism lies in the “smaller details of everyday life.” These are “things that are likely to happen between lunch and supper, small passions, restricted emotions, dramas of the receptionroom, tragedies of an afternoon call, crises involving cups of tea.” The latter comment seems directed at the kind of fiction habitually practiced by Henry James and frequently by Howells. Norris is sure that “every one will admit there is no romance here,” for this is the domain of the novel, which is the “commonplace tale of commonplace people” (1106). Merging romanticism and naturalism, Norris claims that “terrible things must happen to the characters of the naturalistic tale.” That is, “they must be twisted from the ordinary, wrenched out from the quiet, uneventful round of every-day life, and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama that works itself out in unleashed passions, in blood, and in sudden death.” Unlike the novels of James or Howells, in the naturalist romances of Zola “everything is extraordinary, imaginative, grotesque even, with a vague note of terror quivering throughout.” 68

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Norris associates realism with Howells and Tolstoy, especially in their focus on accuracy of detail and representation of the surface appearance of reality, whereas he associates romanticism with Victor Hugo. Romance, he writes, distorts the surface of reality in order to plumb the dark depths where spiritual truth may be found. The new naturalist romance-novel “closely” resembles “the work of the greatest of all modern romanticists, Hugo.” Zola and Hugo have “the same huge dramas,” and “the same enormous scenic effects,” and “the same love of the extraordinary, the vast, the monstrous, and the tragic.” Thus “naturalism,” Norris concludes (1107–1108), “is a form of romanticism, not an inner circle of realism.”

The romance-novel of the new naturalists In his “Weekly Letter” column in the Chicago American for 3 August 1901, Norris pursues some of the same comparisons and develops in some detail his incipient notion of the hybrid (or transgeneric) naturalistic romance-novel. Arguing that “truth” and “accuracy” are not synonymous, Norris turns to the relation of these values to literary form. The realist wants the novel to be “accurate”; the romanticist aims at the “broad truth of the thing.” Then he offers as a rhetorical question a key statement for the historical examination of realism and naturalism: “what school, then, is midway between the Realists and Romanticists, taking the best from each? Is it not the school of Naturalism, which strives hard for accuracy and truth?”20 Norris’s “A Plea for Romantic Fiction,” written in December 1901, pursues this idea further. Naturalism, he says, combines the best of both realism and romanticism by creating a distinct type of the romance-novel – the new, revitalized form of romance. The naturalistic romance-novel achieves both mimetic accuracy and spiritual truth – it renders breadth of social and physical experience and explores the hidden depths of the psyche. Like Mark Twain, Norris is particularly concerned to make a distinction between real romanticism and fake romanticism (that is, the merely sentimental or sensationalist). Apprehensive that the sentimental historical romances popular in the 1890s may have debased the general reader’s perception of authentic romance, he asserts that “the true Romance is a more serious business . . . an instrument with which we may go straight through clothes and tissues and wrappings of flesh down deep into the red living heart” of life (1165). In asking for acknowledgment that there is romantic fiction other than fantasy and historical romance, Norris elaborates the differences between realism and romanticism: “Romance – I take it – is the kind of fiction that takes cognizance of variations from the type of normal life. Realism is the kind 69

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of fiction that confines itself to the type of normal life” (1166). Norris is careful to observe that the modern romance is not all idealistic and optimistic – indeed, often the reverse. “Romance may even treat of the sordid, the unlovely – as for instance, the novels of M. Zola.” Zola has been “dubbed a Realist,” but he is “on the contrary, the very head of the Romanticists.” The reason that Norris says he “claims so much for Romance” and “quarrels so pointedly with Realism, is that Realism stultifies itself.” It deals with the surface of small things; the world of realism is found in the “drama of a broken teacup, the tragedy of a walk down the block.” The romance, on the other hand, takes “the wide world for range, and the unplumbed depths of the human heart, and the mystery of sex, and the problems of life, and the black, unsearched penetralia of the soul of man” (1168–9). What Norris saw in naturalistic fiction more clearly than almost anyone else at the time was the (re)emergence of the modern American romance-novel – that hybrid genre that encompasses the competing tendencies toward the actual and the imaginary, realism and romanticism – the narrative form that more than any other permitted dialogical negotiation of external mimetic accuracy and internal human “truth.” These matters are thrown into high relief in the works that we’ll look at in the next several chapters – works that illustrate the surprising range of naturalism.

Notes 1. At least since the romantic era, one of the major conceptions of “Nature” has been that it is in some way a manifestation of a benign spiritual realm. This view is the basis of the nature worship of American optative romantics and transcendentalists in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. Despite the profound skepticism of romantic writers like Melville and Poe, we can call this movement romantic naturalism to indicate a historical time frame (in America from before the 1820s through the 1860s). Romantic naturalism can also be distinguished from the ecological naturalism of writers like John Muir (1838–1914) at the end of the century, who saw nature as something to be valued and preserved; see Robisch, ACAF (2009), 177–200. 2. “The Dilemma of Determinism,” rpt. Essays on Faith and Morals (1949), quotations, 150–1. See Link (2004), 108–111; also see 111–114 for “radical indeterminacy.” 3. For a useful history of early psychology, see Whyte (1967). Another name students should know is Jean Martin Charcot (1825–1893), Freud’s teacher. 4. But it was Freud who gained the most public attention at the end of the century; and works like The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), The Psychopathology of

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5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

Everyday Life (1904), and Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex (1910) were quickly made available in several languages. Following WWI, “Freudianism” became almost an obsession. “Positivism” was the name of the scientific-philosophical method of the French philosopher, Auguste Comte (1798–1857), discussed later in this chapter. “Robber Baron” is a partial back formation, made popular by the title of a 1934 book by Matthew Josephson. The so-called Gilded Age is associated with a period beginning immediately after the Civil War (aligned in some ways with Reconstruction) and extending to the 1890s and the early twentieth century. The Progressive Era is associated with a period from the 1880s to World War I, though some historians carry it through the 1920s. George argued that, since land value increases as population grows, an unfair burden is imposed on laborers. His partial solution was increased ownership of land by government to act as a deterrent to land speculation and “unearned increment” to investments. By paying what came to be known as the “single tax,” landlords would be returning to the “community” some of the value of the land that the community rather than speculators had produced. See J. L. Thomas (1983); also see Aaron (1951). This point was given a memorable phrase, “conspicuous consumption,” by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) and exemplified in the lavish spending of William Randolph Hearst and others, especially on their many mansions. See MAR, 6; for more comprehensive discussion, see Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in America (1945; rev. 1959). See next note. See Bert Bender, “Darwin, Science, and Narrative,” (ACAF, 2009), 377–394. Also see Bender’s The Descent of Love (1996) and Evolution and the “Sex Problem” (2004), two books pertinent to the “scientific” background of Frank Norris’s McTeague and Vandover and the Brute. The quasi-religious term “manifest destiny” emerged in the middle 1840s as part of the justification for white Americans taking possession of the North American continent from “sea to shining sea.” But see Aaron (1951). London is discussed in Ch. 5, Norris again in Ch. 6; Adams in Ch. 16. See Ch.2. Also see P. Brooks (1995) and W. Stowe (1983). Isidore Auguste Marie Francois Comte, Cours de philosophie positive (6 vols, 1830–1842). A similar orientation is found in the French physiologist Claude Bernard (1813–1878), who in 1865 had published Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, a deterministic approach to human physiology that also implied a deterministic context to the general human condition. Early in his career, largely under the influence of Zola, J.-K. Huysmans (1848–1907) wrote several naturalistic novels. His best known work is A Rebours (1884, trans. as “Against the Grain,” or as “Against Nature”), a book embraced by the French “D
ecadents,” who extolled morbid eroticism and

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16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

adopted unconventional and sensational social behavior in order to shock the bourgeois. Norris in his naturalistic novel, Vandover and the Brute (c. 1899), deliberately emulated both Zola and “French decadence.” Also translated as The Gin Palace and The Tavern; the title can as well connote a “Trap.” L’uomo del
ınquente. The fifth edition, in three volumes, was published in 1896–7. Lombroso took anthropological “measurements” of faces and skulls and other features. His theory owes something to the long tradition of physiognomy and the later modification of it called phrenology, whereby the contours of the face and skull, the shape of the ears and nose and mouth, etc., supposedly provided clues to psychological make-up. Although mistaken, his physical studies helped give rise to the scientific analysis of crime and the development of modern crime laboratories. Seeing criminals as “victims” of heredity (as well as environment), Lombroso was a proponent of prison reform and the humane treatment of prisoners. See American Theories of the Novel: 1793–1903, 218. Norris’s beliefs about truth in fiction are also developed in “A Problem in Fiction: Truth versus Accuracy” (1901), along with “The True Reward of the Novelist” (1901). Here Norris asks if it is “permissible to say that Accuracy is realism and Truth romanticism?” (1141). Both essays are reprinted in Pizer (Norris 1964); also see Frank Norris: Novels and Essays, ed. Pizer (Norris 1986).

See also 

Ahnebrink (1950); D. Campbell (1997); Conder (1984); Den Tandt (ACAF, 2009); Eby (1988); Howard (1985); A. Jones (1950); Kraus (1964); Lawlor (2000); Link (2004); J. Martin (1967); Mitchell (CLHUS); Mitchell (1989); Papke (2003); Pizer (1984 [1966]), 1993, 1995, 1998); Spiller (LHUS); E. Stone (1959); Walcutt (1956); Ziff (1966). Also see references at the end of the next chapter.

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Chapter 5

Implacable Nature, Household Tragedy, and Epic Romance

This chapter explores a generic triangle, whose points represent three extremes of American literary naturalism. Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911) and Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901) represent two of them. One presents a carefully focused small picture; the other, a large sweeping one. Ethan Frome is set in a village in rural New England, and the action is concentrated in and around a farmhouse in an impoverished section of the Berkshire hill country. The Octopus is set in the Golden West; the state of California is the scene of a violent economic battle between individualistic ranchers and the vast governmental and business forces controlling the growing and shipping of American wheat around the world. Wharton called her book a domestic “tragedy”; Norris called his an epic “romance.” The third point of the naturalist triangle is epitomized by several “survival” narratives by Jack London, notably the novels The Call of the Wild (1903), White Fang (1906), and The Sea-Wolf (1904), and stories like “The Law of Life” (1901–2) and “To Build a Fire” (1908). In the earlier works, elements of romance, redemptive love, and dignified nobility alleviate the bleakness of life, constituting a kind of soft determinism. “To Build a Fire,” however, presents a classic paradigm of hard determinism.1

Jack London and the “Law” of Nature Each of the novels The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea-Wolf repeat versions of the maxim, “Eat or be eaten.” The initially domesticated half-dog, Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson. Ó 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Buck, in Call of the Wild steadily regresses to primitive savagery. Like Buck, the half-wolf, White Fang, has to learn that the “law of nature” is the “law of club and fang”; he has to survive before he can learn anything else. The € unhinged Ubermensch of The Sea Wolf, “Wolf ” Larsen, justifies his brutality as the only way to survive in a hostile universe. He sees life as a mass of unreasoning bubbles of yeast, in which all the individual particles are consuming the others around them:

............................................................................................... It is like yeast, a ferment, a thing that moves and may move for a minute, an hour, a year, or a hundred years, but that in the end will cease to move. The big eat the little that they may continue to move, the strong eat the weak that they may retain their strength. The lucky eat the most and move the longest, that is all. (Ch. 5)

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But other London characters accept their death without anger or gloom. In “The Law of Life” (1901–2), an old Indian chief, abandoned by his tribe, faces his freezing to death as a matter of course. It’s his time: “It was the way of life, and it was just. . . . It was the law of all flesh.” In “To Build a Fire,” a solitary traveler, a man trapped between his limited intellect and weak instincts, turns aside from the main trail that runs hundreds of miles through the Yukon Territory. It has been “days since he had seen the sun,” but “the man” (as he is called throughout) “was used to the lack of sun.” Except for the curved and twisted “dark hair-line” that is the Yukon Trail, everything as far as his eye can see is “unbroken white.” This frozen scene does not, however, “lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature.” In fact, his thinking is inadequate even in practical terms. This point is emphasized by contrast with the big native husky, “the proper wolf-dog,” that trots at his heels. By an instinct stronger than the man’s intellect, the dog knows it is too cold (75 below zero) to keep traveling. The dog seems to expect the man to “seek shelter somewhere and build a fire.” But the man is focused on getting back to camp, looking out for the pitfalls that the frozen river presents. Although the creek is frozen, bubbling springs often hide under snow, forming “traps” waiting for a man to fall through. And in fact, farther along the trail, he falls through the soft snow into icy water. Using a piece of birch bark as tinder, the man is able to start a fire, and he begins to feel safe. All seems well until snow cascades down from some tree

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branches and puts out the fire. He goes about building another fire methodically, but his fingers are so numb he cannot even hold a match. Eventually the man thinks about killing the dog and burying his hands in the dog’s warm body until the numbness goes away. But without functioning hands he has no way to kill the dog. Now “it was no longer a mere matter of freezing his fingers and toes, or of losing his hands and feet . . . it was a matter of life and death with the chances against him.” He begins to run blindly, thinking it “curious that he could run at all on feet so frozen that he could not feel them . . .” Quickly exhausting his energy, he sits in the snow and “entertains the conception of meeting death with dignity. . . . He was bound to freeze anyway, and he might as well take it decently.” He begins to fall asleep: “It was like taking an anaesthetic. Freezing was not so bad as people thought. There were lots worse ways to die.” The dog watches him for awhile as night comes on. When it catches “the scent of death,” the animal turns and trots up the trail toward a “camp it knew, where were the other food-providers and fire-providers,” utterly indifferent to the man’s fate.

Zero Days: Ethan Frome as Naturalist Tragedy Although Edith Wharton is known primarily as an urban novelist, celebrated for such works as The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913), The Age of Innocence (1920), Old New York (1924), and other works of “high society,” Ethan Frome is probably the most widely read of her stories. The narrative is tightly focused on a poor farmer in rural Massachusetts, a man ground down and entrapped in a web of accident, unconscious impulse, moral guilt, and social responsibility. The name of the fictional village in which Ethan Frome lives, Starkfield, suggests something of the quality of life he and his neighbors endure. Toward the end of the novel, casual mention is made of the custom of stopping “in at the Starkfield saloon on a zero day for a drink.” The phrase “zero day” refers to a thermometer reading (0 Fahrenheit, 32 below freezing), but it also symbolizes the cold void of Starkville life.

Framing “reality” The opening frame takes place many years after the central events of the main story. The unnamed narrator, who is not from the village but from the city, mentions having watched a “ruin of a man,” crippled by some horrible accident, laboriously drag himself across the brick pavement. Each awkward step he took seemed “like the jerk of a chain.” Over the course of repeated visits to Starkfield, 75

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the narrator learns a good deal about Ethan Frome’s history and current situation from two principal informants, Harmon Gow and Mrs Ned Hale. The function of the frame has been much celebrated, but I think it overrated. We do not actually learn the story with the narrator. The opening frame of Ethan Frome simply provides a foretaste of his fate: some horrible accident has occurred. The focus of reader interest is the details of Ethan’s story and how his fate came about, not the indirect revelations of the meaning of an elusive something for the narrator.2 In the closing frame, we learn that one of the Frome women has been horribly crippled in a sledding accident, and that a kind of Nietzschean role reversal of master and slave has taken place in the household. The interior story steadily builds to this outcome, and the fact that we learn of this twist of fate in the frame is immaterial. This interior story is quite compelling. Ethan is an unsuccessful farmer trapped in a country cul-de-sac with two more or less “dead” women: each of them is the victim of the unlived life. Paradoxically, part of the novel’s power is that it is radically one-dimensional. Zeena, Ethan’s wife, is never seen from inside, mirroring perhaps his own lack of insight into her; and Mattie, Zeena’s cousin, comes alive only in her response to Ethan’s awkward declarations of love.3 But the relative lack of depth of the women is appropriate to the inevitability of Ethan’s tragic entrapment. Indeed, the narrative’s inexorability has an almost mythic quality.4 The drama is not modern tragedy but more like ancient tragedy – that is, not so much a matter of character, but of “the stars.” Ethan’s total powerlessness to overcome his situation exemplifies the naturalist world view. Chapter 1 begins with a landscape description of a cold winter night permeated by naturalist pessimism. Ethan walks quickly along “the deserted street” of the isolated village, which lies “under two feet of snow” under “a sky of iron.” The night is “transparent,” but not in the usual sense of that romantic cliche. The effect produced on Frome is a “complete absence of atmosphere, as though nothing less tenuous than ether intervened between the white earth under his feet and the metallic dome overhead.” Basically a bookish man rather than a farmer, his quest for knowledge has been thwarted by external circumstances: “His father’s death, and the misfortunes following it, had put a premature end to Ethan’s studies.” But they had fed his imagination and “made him aware of huge cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things.” Frome yearns for the company of a partner who is attuned to some of the same things he is – such as the myths behind the constellations of the sky. Ethan feels that this partner is Mattie Silver – though there is almost nothing in the story to suggest that she is his intellectual equal. As first described, his attraction to her is physical. Waiting outside in the dark to give her a ride back to the farm from a dance, Ethan watches unhappily as Mattie laughingly dances 76

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with the young men. His attention is fastened on her lips and the cherry-colored scarf binding “the cloud” of her dark hair. Wharton deftly sets up the loneliness and shy sweetness of the pair of wouldbe lovers. Ethan has come to feel a sweet, intense “communion” with Mattie. He “could show her things and tell her things, and taste the bliss of the feeling that all he imparted left long reverberations and echoes he could wake at will.” Ethan longs for a feeling of male importance that he does not have in his life with Zeena. Wharton does not overtly criticize this romantic, sentimental desire as male chauvinism; but it is presented as a partial cause of Ethan’s ultimate tragedy. On the way home from the dance, Ethan asks Mattie if she would like to coast down the hill in a sled some moonlit night. She says she would but also mentions that her friends Ned Hale and Ruth Varnum almost slid into the big elm at the bottom of Corbury Road. Through the clumps of leafless trees, they can see farmhouses standing “far back among the fields mute and cold as a grave-stone.” They are in fact headed toward the Frome graveyard.

............................................................................................... They turned in at the gate and passed under the shaded knoll where, enclosed in a low fence, the Frome grave-stones slanted at crazy angles through the snow. “We never got away – how should you?” seemed to be written on every headstone; and whenever he went in or out of his gate he thought with a shiver: “I shall just go on living here till I join them.” (Ch. 2)

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But now, in the company of Mattie, “the sight of the little enclosure gave him a warm sense of continuance and stability.” Wharton skillfully suggests the eros/ thanatos paradox. As they brush by the graves, he thinks irrationally that “even the dead, lovers once,” are conspiring to keep her here with him: “We’ll always go on living here together, and some day she’ll lie there beside me.” When she stumbles and catches at his sleeve, the “wave of warmth that went through him was like the prolongation of his vision.” And now for the first time “he stole his arm about her,” and “she did not resist.” A major, if ambiguous, symbol is presented as they approach the dark farmhouse. There is a pathetic object dangling from the porch: a “dead cucumber-vine.” The phallic shape of the cucumber plant, along with its transformation and diminishment into a pickle, and the unused red pickle jar that Zeena hides away, have suggested a Freudian symbolism to some critics. Although wary of Freudian impositions of sexual meaning, I find that the images do rather suggest a sexless dead marriage. To Ethan, the dead cucumber plant looks like “the crape streamer tied to the door for a death.”

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Zeena comes to the door. The description is in the impressionist mode, focused solely on Ethan’s perception of the moment. It is a grotesque parody of the traditional picture of an idealized woman holding up a lamp in the darkness – symbol of faithfulness, wisdom, and love. Tall and “angular,” Zeena with one hand draws a quilted counterpane “to her flat breast” as the lamp in her other hand throws a light that “deepened fantastically the hollows and prominences of her high-boned face under its ring of crimping-pins” (Ch. 2). It is a vision of the skull of a corpse – a death’s head. In the middle of Chapter 4, another death-laden scene begins with an image of love. Walking toward his farm in “a cold gray dusk that made the snow look whiter,” Ethan sees in “the gloom” an “indistinct outline” of something that melts into “two separate shapes and then conjoined again.” He hears the sound of a kiss and a laugh. He is “pleased” to have “surprised a pair of lovers” (Ned Hale and Ruth Varnum) on the very spot “where he and Mattie had stood with such a thirst for each other in their hearts.” As Ethan moves on, he again passes by “the graves on the knoll.” He glances at “one of the older headstones, which had interested him deeply as a boy because it bore his name.” The inscription, all in capital letters, reads: “SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF/ETHAN FROME AND ENDURANCE HIS WIFE/WHO DWELLED TOGETHER IN PEACE/ FOR FIFTY YEARS.” Ethan wonders “with a sudden dart of irony” if, “when their turn came, the same epitaph would be written over him and Zeena.”

First crisis – the pickle-dish The first crisis also occurs in this chapter – the middle of the narrative. Mattie and Ethan are alone in the Frome house, Zeena having gone to see a doctor in a neighboring village. The supper “was carefully laid . . . with fresh dough-nuts, stewed blueberries, and his favourite pickles in a dish of gay red glass. A bright fire glowed in the stove and the cat lay stretched before it, watching the table with a drowsy eye.” Sitting at the table, they reach for the milk jug “at the same moment and their hands met on the handle of the jug.” Mattie’s “hand was underneath, and Ethan kept his clasped on it a moment longer than was necessary. The cat, profiting by this unusual demonstration, tried to effect an unnoticed retreat, and in doing so backed into the pickle-dish, which fell to the floor with a crash” (Ch. 4). Mattie is terrified because Zeena “never meant it should be used, not even when there was company . . .” She spreads out “the pieces of glass on the kitchen dresser,” and it seems to Ethan “as if the shattered fragments of their evening lay there.” Nevertheless, Ethan assures her that he can put the pieces back together in such a way that Zeena will never detect the damage.

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The two then attempt to enjoy the rest of the evening as if they were a loving married couple. But as Mattie sits in Zeena’s rocker, her face seems to Ethan to be framed by the cushion that “habitually framed his wife’s gaunt countenance.” Moreover, it seems to him that Zeena’s face engulfs Mattie’s. “It was almost as if the other face, the face of the superseded woman, had obliterated that of the intruder.” By some unarticulated sensibility, Mattie feels uncomfortable and moves, and their familial mood returns: “All constraint had vanished between the two.” But, Wharton suggests, it is all merely the “illusion” of domesticity. When Mattie dreamily speculates that Ned and Ruth might get “married some time along in the summer,” she pronounces “the word married as if her voice caressed it. It seemed a rustling covert leading to enchanted glades.” As they almost touch fingers, the illusion is broken. The cat, who has been sleeping in Zeena’s rocking chair, suddenly jumps down, and Zeena’s empty chair begins a “spectral rocking,” causing Ethan to think he has “been in a dream, and this is the only evening we’ll ever have together.” When Zeena returns home, she tells Ethan that she has to have an expensive operation and that she has hired a new girl to replace Mattie. It is “the first scene of open anger between the couple in their sad seven years together,” and Ethan feels that he has somehow “lost an irretrievable advantage.” Zeena snarls that she will not bear the cost of Mattie any longer, adding with unconscious irony “I never bargained to take her for life.” Ethan’s emotions are further strung out when he sees Mattie in the kitchen in a state of anxiety. His instincts, so long held in check, finally impel him to kiss her – their first kiss after all the shy hesitant moments of flirtation and domestic intimacy (Ch. 7). Cynthia Griffin Wolff has maintained that their kiss is not one “of adult passion,” but childlike.5 Their whole relationship, she argues, is described in terms of caretaking and protection; at their most intimate moments they “cling to each other’s hands like children.” These are Wharton’s words, but much later, when they come to the idea of mutual suicide in Chapter 9, Mattie is sobbing as her “lips, groping for his, swept over his face.” To say that they are “never pictured as man and woman together,” or that when Ethan imagines Mattie as his wife there is “no sexual component,” is to omit or misread much of the text. Such a claim ignores, for example, the aching longing in Ethan’s night vigil outside the church in the first two chapters; it ignores the description of the first kiss itself: Ethan “had found her lips at last and was drinking unconsciousness of everything but the joy they gave him” (Ch. 7). Ethan’s unconsciousness of anything but the sensual joy of drinking from Mattie’s lips does not seem particularly infantile.

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Second crisis of . . . the pickle-dish When Zeena discovers the “fragments of the red glass pickle-dish,” she is furious. Laying the fragments “reverently” on the table, she demands “to know who done this.” Ethan says “The cat done it.” The combined absurdity and pathos of the situation is manifest. Zeena rages at Mattie: “You . . . waited till my back was turned, and took the thing I set most store by of anything I’ve got. . . .” Zeena breaks off in “a short spasm of sobs,” which pass and leave her “more than ever like a shape of stone.” The metaphor not only suggests her basic coldness, but also recalls the gravestone imagery that has preceded this scene. Gathering up the bits of broken glass, Zeena goes “out of the room as if she carried a dead body” (Ch. 7). In reaction, Ethan tries to write a letter to Zeena telling her he wants out of the marriage. His self-pitying self-assessment illustrates the naturalist view of the human condition: “Confused notions of rebellion stormed in him. He was too young, too strong, too full of the sap of living, to submit so easily to the destruction of his hopes. Must he wear out all his years at the side of a bitter querulous woman?” (Ch. 8). When he writes that she can sell the farm and keep the money, he stops at the word money. “His pen paused on the word, which brought home to him the relentless conditions of his lot.” In a reverie, he wonders: “If he gave the farm and mill to Zeena what would be left him to start his own life with?” The “inexorable facts closed in on him like prison-warders hand-cuffing a convict. There was no way out – none. He was a prisoner for life, and now his one ray of light was to be extinguished.” In the final chapter, Frome finds Mattie sobbing; she is packed and ready to be driven to the train station. Despite the restraint placed on him by New England rural culture, he confronts Zeena again, “aflame with anger”: the “pulses in his temples throbbed and a fog was in his eyes.” The naturalist doctrine of human lack of rational control is clear: he goes about his task of getting the wagon ready “without knowing what force directed him.” All he can think of is that “in a few hours he would be . . . alone.” The imagery of the final scene of the main narrative replicates that of the opening one. As evening begins to descend in cold and darkness, Mattie and Ethan head out for the train station in the hard snow. As if by unspoken agreement, they go out of the way to pass by Shadow Pond, close by the village’s favorite sledding slope. As they reach the crest of Corbury Road, the launching place for coasting, Ethan feels another “erratic impulse.” “How’d you like me to take you down right now?” A tearful but exuberant Mattie assents. They coast down safely and walk slowly back up the hill. Mattie says that she wants him to take her down one more time: “Right into the big elm. You said you could. So’t we’d never have to leave each other any more.” 80

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............................................................................................... The words were like fragments torn from his heart. With them came the hated vision of the house he was going back to . . . And the sweetness of Mattie’s avowal, the wild wonder of knowing at last that all that had happened to him had happened to her too, made the other vision more abhorrent, the other life more intolerable to return to . . . [ellipsis in text]

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As they speed down the hill toward the elm, “suddenly his wife’s face, with twisted monstrous lineaments, thrust itself between him and his goal,” and he instinctively swerves. Then, exerting the greatest control he ever had over anything in his life, he comes back on course – and plows into the tree. The irony of self-inflicted death as the only human “control” in life is bleak enough. But the last scene in the main narrative adds one more turn of the screw in an appalling, irrevocable twist of fate. He “heard a little animal twittering somewhere near by under the snow,” and “he wondered languidly if it were hurt. Then he understood that it must be in pain: pain so excruciating that he seemed, mysteriously, to feel it shooting through his own body.” He “struggled to raise himself, and could not because a rock, or some huge mass, seemed to be lying on him.” He reaches out with his hand and finds Mattie’s hair and face. The animal “twittering came from her lips . . .”

The house of pain Here Wharton returns to the frame at the beginning of the book, where the narrator was just entering the Frome house. He hears a “querulous drone.” There are two women sitting in the kitchen, but he cannot tell which one is making the noise. One has a “tall bony figure” and “pale opaque eyes which revealed nothing and reflected nothing.” The other woman, smaller and slighter, sits huddled in an armchair near the stove. Her hair is “as gray as her companion’s, her face as bloodless and shriveled . . . Under her shapeless dress her body kept its limp immobility, and her dark eyes had the bright witchlike stare that disease of the spine sometimes gives.” The moaning, whining woman is Mattie. An emaciated Zeena acts as her sullen servant. As a last gambit, we go with the frame narrator to see Mrs Hale. She draws a deep breath and says in a lowered voice:

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“There was one day, about a week after the accident, when they all thought Mattie couldn’t live. . . . And I say, if she’d ha’ died, Ethan might ha’ lived; and the way they are now, I don’t see’s there’s much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; ’cept that down there they’re all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues.”

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This comment on the similarity “between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard” is a touchstone for the American naturalist worldview.

The Force Be With You: Norris’s The Octopus as Epic Romance Although now best known for McTeague (1899), Frank Norris’s most famous work was at one time The Octopus: A Story of California (1901). The book illustrates the dialogic nature of American naturalism as a form of romantic realism. The details of wheat farming and railroading seem realistic, but they are combined with a melodramatic plot and rendered in romantic visionary rhetoric; moreover, a sentimental love affair is woven into the story. The central situation of the novel is based on the “Mussel Slough Tragedy” of May 11, 1880, an incident in which US marshals tried to evict settlers from lands in the San Joaquin Valley of California, which had been claimed by the Southern Pacific Railroad. While the ranchers were holding an outdoor festival in a nearby ghost town, a group of armed men working for the government on behalf of the railroad tried to take over their homes. Some of the ranchers rushed back and engaged in a shoot-out; five ranchers and one railroad man died. Norris changes the names. In The Octopus, Tulare County in the San Joaquin Valley becomes “Bonneville,” the Southern Pacific Railroad becomes the “Pacific and Southwestern Railroad,” most often called “P. and S. W.”; sometimes just “the Railroad.” It is also called the “Trust,” but in Norris’s novel that quickly becomes an ironic designation: the R. R. Trust is the octopus entangling and devouring the ranchers. The story is epic and melodramatic, the cast of characters rather large, and a partial list of the dramatis personae precedes the first chapter. One of the most important personages is the shifty Magnus Derrick (called the “Governor”), the wealthy proprietor of the Rancho Los Muertos (“Ranch of the Dead”). Magnus has two sons, one of whom, Lyman, becomes an advocate for the railroad as a lawyer in San Francisco. A former train engineer, Dyke, fired and blacklisted by the Railroad, is driven out of his hop-growing business by the conglomerate. The proprietor of Rancho Quien Sabe (“Rancho Who Knows?”) is the oddly named Annixter, who lusts after an amply endowed milkmaid, Hilma, a romanticized earth-mother, who will come to misery. Norris alternates pictures of the poverty and even starvation of the ranchers’ women with scenes of the excessive wealth of the railroad executives and their wives. The dinner and tea parties of the wives of 82

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the bankers and railroad agents, along with their social clubs and sofa philanthropy, are extensively satirized, much in the manner of Stephen Crane’s The Monster (1899), W. D. Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), and Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922). The quasi-center of consciousness in the story is an idealistic young man in his twenties named Presley, recently graduated from an eastern university. He is a would-be epic poet who is repeatedly shaken by the cruelty and injustice he observes in the West. Especially important to Presley is Vanamee, a mystic outcast sheepherder with a tragic love affair in his past, who gives Presley a number of (romantic) insights to ponder. Equally important to the story, if not more, is S. Behrman, the major villain of the piece – other than the railroad itself, that is. He is a transit agent who secretly works for one Shelgrim, a railroad kingpin in San Francisco. S. Behrman (as he is always called), is motivated by an innate malignity rather like Melville’s Claggart in Billy Budd. The novel was intended to be the first, semi-independent volume in a planned trilogy on the interconnected economic conditions of America and the world. Norris announced the project in a foreword to the first volume of the premature edition of his Complete Works (Norris 1903): “The Trilogy of The Epic of the Wheat will include the following novels: The Octopus, a Story of California. The Pit, a Story of Chicago. The Wolf, a Story of Europe.” The three novels, “while forming a series,” will:

............................................................................................... be in no way connected with each other save only in their relation to (1) the production, (2) the distribution, (3) the consumption of American wheat. When complete, they will form the story of a crop of wheat from the time of its sowing as seed in California to the time of its consumption as bread in a village of Western Europe.

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These volumes are collectively epitomized by Norris’s short story, “A Deal in Wheat” (1902). That story is framed at the beginning and end by the picture of a failed wheat farmer who has been forced to give up his farm and seek menial work in the city because the price of wheat is manipulated by crooked dealers and stockbrokers at the Chicago exchange.6 The third part of the trilogy, The Wolf, was left incomplete at Norris’s death: only a few short chapters exist. Although Norris’s trilogy was to be an epic portrayal of global economic determinism, the philosophical basis of The Octopus seems inconsistent. On one hand, the ranchers go down to defeat both because of the indifferent machinations of the railroad conglomerate and also because of faults in their own inner characters. But at the beginning of the story the ranchers seem to

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possess independent free will; they are portrayed as strong and self-sufficient in their economic and moral battle against the forces of evil. The abstract conglomerate of the Railroad Trust (which controls everything: politics, law, finance, commerce, social status) is portrayed as purely evil one moment, at another as the consequence of public apathy, at another time as the instrument of the “Wheat” itself romanticized as a mysterious life force. The basic story focuses on the ranchers who are farming land deeded to the Trust by the government. The Trust has promised, eventually, to sell the land to them for an agreed price, but the first ranchers have developed the land to the point where the Trust wants more money and/or the land; unable to oppose the Trust individually, the ranchers form an ineffectual growers’ league to combat it.7

The aberrant realist: Primal passion and metallic necessity In the context of naturalist theory, two of the seemingly aberrant features of this and other of Norris’s books are his proclivity to romantic melodrama and “purple prose.” Key imagistic passages describing the cosmic mystery of the growing wheat or the inhuman aspects of the railroad are overdone and repetitious; they also often contain awkwardly mixed metaphors resulting from Norris’s strained attempt to heighten his effects. Two vivid examples of these special effects in the first half of the novel go in opposite directions thematically. The first is the high-romantic description of farming as mythic, as the eternal act of sexual desire and procreation. The farmers bring their sharp plows to the fecund fields: “underfoot the land was alive; roused at last from its sleep, palpitating with the desire of reproduction. Deep down there in the recesses of the soil, the great heart throbbed once more, thrilling with passion, vibrating with desire, offering itself to the caress of the plow, insistent, eager, imperious.” The wheat is celebrated as the newly engendered child of a “vast primal passion”: the “two world-forces, the elemental Male and Female, locked in colossal embrace, at grapples in the throes of an infinite desire, at once terrible and divine, knowing no law, untamed, savage, natural, sublime” (Book I, Ch. 4). The second example is the description of a railroad engine horribly, indifferently, running down a herd of sheep (Book I, Ch. 1). Presley is walking alone at night along the railroad tracks, absorbing what he sees as the inspiring Western landscape, entranced by the beauty and peace of mountains and stars. Suddenly he hears a railroad engine speeding toward him, “vomiting smoke and sparks . . . its enormous eye, cyclopean, red, throwing a glare far in advance . . .”

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The image of a cyclopean monster will recur, but not before the engine bellows like an animal, gallops like a horse, changes to a “leviathan” (traditionally the whale), then becomes the human giant, Colossus, and finally an octopus once more. Running down the track, Presley stops abruptly, “held immovable at the sight of the ground and rails all about him.”

............................................................................................... In some way, the herd of sheep . . . had found a breach in the wire fence by the right of way and had wandered out upon the tracks. . . . The pathos of it was beyond expression. It was a slaughter, a massacre of innocents. The iron monster had charged full into the midst, merciless, inexorable. To the right and left, all the width of the right of way, the little bodies had been flung; backs were snapped against the fence posts; brains knocked out. Caught in the barbs of the wire, wedged in, the bodies hung suspended. Under foot it was terrible. The black blood, winking in the starlight, seeped down into the clinkers between the ties with a prolonged sucking murmur.

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The last detail is hardly “realistic”; it is inflated, romanticized for effect. Presley turns away “horror-struck, sick at heart, overwhelmed with a quick burst of irresistible compassion for this brute agony he could not relieve.” The illusion “of peace, of security, and placid contentment was stricken from the landscape.” Shortly afterward, Presley hears the engine whistle in the distance; and he sees “again, in his imagination, the galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam, with its single eye, cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon . . .” Presley sees the engine “as the symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the echo of its thunder over all the reaches of the valley, leaving blood and destruction in its path; the leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the monster, the Colossus, the Octopus.” Another classic naturalist scene occurs toward the end of the novel. Disillusioned by the ruthless and impersonal wielding of power by the corporate conglomerate and by the weakness and the hypocrisy of the ranchers, Presley decides to leave America. He chooses a ship bound for India, the Swanhilda, which is carrying the ranchers’ wheat to market. S. Behrman, the fat malicious official of the Pacific and Southwestern Railroad, coincidentally visits the same ship. By accident, he falls into the ship’s hold – where he is buried alive by the wheat he has come to inspect. His “inevitable” yet somehow “indifferent” fate is described at length (Book II, end of Chapter 9). Once again, Norris’s straining for effect is quite noticeable.

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The wheat flowing into the hold is repeatedly described via two basic metaphors: liquid and metal. The wheat comes from a “great iron chute,” rushing down “with an incessant, metallic roar, persistent, steady, inevitable.” S. Behrman watches “the gray mass of the wheat, a great expanse, almost liquid in its texture, which, as the cataract from above plunged into it, moved and shifted in long, slow eddies.” When this cataract suddenly increases in volume, he turns to look for the source, catches his foot in a coil of rope, and falls “headforemost into the hold.” With every breath his mouth and nostrils fill with dust: “at times he could not breathe at all, but gagged and gasped, his lips distended . . .” Staggering along in “the black darkness, he bruised his knuckles and forehead against the iron sides of the ship” while the level of the wheat rises with a “steady, metallic roar,” burying him to his thighs. The wheat continues to fall on him “without stop, incessantly, inexorably,” with “a prolonged roar, persistent, steady, inevitable.” Each time he moves, “the relentless tide drove him back.” It is a “terrible dance of death; the man dodging, doubling, squirming, hunted from one corner to another, the wheat slowly, inexorably flowing, rising, spreading to every angle, to every nook and cranny.” As the wheat pours around him, the narrative point of view becomes more distanced. Norris substitutes “the” for “his,” making the man an object rather than a human being: “It filled the pockets of the coat, it crept up the sleeves and trouser legs, it covered the great, protuberant stomach, it ran at last in rivulets into the distended, gasping mouth.” Finally, as from a wide-angle camera view, we see in the hold of the Swanhilda “no movement but the widening ripples that spread flowing from the ever-breaking, ever-reforming cone: no sound but the rushing of the Wheat that continued to plunge incessantly from the iron chute in a prolonged roar . . .” The passage is representative both of the naturalist portrayal of the entrapment of a helpless human being and of Norris’s tendency to romanticize – here an aberrant excursion into some sort of poetic justice. In the concluding chapter, we get an interior summation of what Presley has been through, followed by a romantic hymn to the beautiful and powerful forces of nature symbolized in the growing wheat. Presley looks at “the mountains of the Coast range and beyond them . . . what once had been his home,” and reviews in his mind the “vast and terrible drama” that has taken place. A “galloping Monster” of “steel and steam” had intruded into the “prosperous valley,” into the “quiet community of farmers,” leaving “blood and destruction in its path.” The “Railroad had prevailed. The ranchers had been seized in the tentacles of the octopus.” Presley bewails the epic tragedy he has witnessed: “What then was left? Was there no hope, no outlook for the future, no rift in the black curtain, no glimmer through the night? Was good to be thus overthrown? Was evil thus to be strong and to prevail? Was nothing left?” Romantic and sentimental in its melodra86

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matic pessimism, the passage gives way to an oddly impersonal romantic hope. Remembering what Vanamee, the mystic sheepherder, had told him, Presley comes to a “larger view.” At first he frames it as a question: “What was the larger view, what contributed the greatest good to the greatest numbers?” Presley’s abrupt answer is: “Yes, good issued from this crisis, untouched, unassailable, undefiled.” Men “perished, were shot down in the very noon of life, hearts were broken, little children started in life lamentably handicapped; young girls were brought to a life of shame; old women died in the heart of life for lack of food . . . But the WHEAT remained.” What Presley (and apparently Norris) means by this vatic statement is somewhat confused and contradictory. The novel dramatizes the struggle between the growers and the economic forces of commercialism and shows capitalism grinding down the men of the earth. Yet the procreant and nourishing urge of nature itself, though paradoxically somehow indifferent, provides food for the masses of the world. And this indifferent life force moves on to give the narrator a vision of Truth and Goodness.

............................................................................................... Falseness dies; injustice and oppression in the end of everything fade and vanish away. Greed, cruelty, selfishness, and inhumanity are short-lived; the individual suffers, but the race goes on. . . . The larger view always and through all shams, all wickednesses, discovers the Truth that will, in the end, prevail, and all things, surely, inevitably, resistlessly work together for good.

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This final paragraph is a little jarring. Norris seems to be attempting to achieve the elevating effect of classical tragedy, in which retribution irresistibly overtakes the protagonists and an ultimate moral good emerges. At the same time, Norris tries to present the moral issues of his story as ambiguous rather than simply black and white. The ranchers (strong “frontiersmen”) stoop to fraud and violence rather than exhibit the characteristics of ennobled tragic heroes. The abstract enemy, “the Railroad,” is portrayed as evil but is itself moved by some higher neutral force. Some of the men who work on the railroad’s behalf are moved along by something beyond their individual morality. The forces of “evil” destroy the people of both sides with the relentless power of vague “inevitability”; and the “epic of the wheat” seems finally to make the struggle of the human beings insignificant at the end. Yet “the WHEAT” itself endures. How “naturalist” is the narrative finally? Is the concluding paragraph an inconsistent romanticized paean of praise to some ultimately benign world spirit? Or is it, as some readers have seen the ending of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, acidly ironic? 87

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Notes 1. “To Build a Fire” was first printed as a story for boys, in a much shorter version in The Youth’s Companion (May 29, 1902), in which the man survives. It is one of the four primary examples featured in Mitchell’s Determined Fictions (1989). 2. Wolff (1977; rev. 1995) argues that the story is more the narrator’s than Ethan’s, that in fact Frome is a figment of the narrator’s imagination. See the reprinted excerpt, titled “The Narrator’s Vision,” in the “Norton Critical Edition” of Ethan Frome (1995), ed. Lauer and Wolff, 130. Although I find this claim quite interesting (another link to the techniques of romantic writers), it is not really borne out by the text. 3. Scharnhorst argues in a provocative article (2004) that Mattie is more complex than she appears on the surface, plotting from a fairly early point in the story to usurp Zeena and marry Ethan. I do not myself find this kind of Jamesian subtlety and complexity in Mattie’s character consistently presented in the novel; she seems too ingenuous and simple. On the other hand, the physical transformations are suggestive. While Zeena is associated with witchery in the middle of the book, it is Mattie’s physical appearance at the end that is witchlike: her face is bloodless and shriveled, her nose is elongated, her temples are hollowed out, and her dark eyes have a “bright witch-like stare.” 4. This mythic quality is evident also in its elements of the folk or fairy tale. Ammons (1980), 61–77, has noted that we have in it the major figures the Woodsman (Ethan), the Witch (Zeena), and the Silver Maiden of dreams (Mattie). The allusions seem appropriate. Ethan saws timber, Mattie’s last name is Silver; and Zeena is several times associated with witchcraft and even called a witch, and her cat seems like a traditional familiar. The argument is reprinted in the Norton Critical Edition (1995), 145–157. 5. Wolff, “The Narrator’s Vision” (1995: 142). 6. “A Deal in Wheat” saw magazine publication in 1902; it is reprinted, along with The Pit, in Volume II of the Collier edition of Norris’s Complete Works (307–432), as part of a collection titled A Deal in Wheat and Other Stories of the New and Old West. The story is thematically related to (almost parallel with) Hamlin Garland’s “Under the Lion’s Paw” (collected in his Main-Travelled Roads, 1891), in which a farmer rents a run-down farm, builds it up in expectation of buying it at an agreed on price, but is cheated by the landspeculator owner, who says it’s now worth a lot more money. Both stories are crisply told, almost reportorial. 7. See the discussion of Henry George and the Single Tax in the preceding chapter. The Trust also raises its charges for shipping wheat and drives ranchers out of business with bogus financial offers.

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See also To references to general studies of naturalism at the end of the preceding chapter, add Robisch (ACAF, 2009) and Slotkin 1973, 1985). On London: Auerbach (1996); Geismar (1953); Hedrick (1982); O’Connor (1964); Watson (1983); C. Wilson (1985). On Wharton: Ammons (1980); M. Bell (1995); Benstock (1994); Camfield (2009); Erlich (1992); Fedorko (1995); Fryer (1986); Hoeller (2000); Killoran (1996); Lewis (1975); Nettels (1997); Nevius (1953); Singley 1995, 2003b); Waid (1991); Waid, Goodman and Colquitt (1999); S. Wright (1998[1965]). On Norris: Borus (1989); Chase (1957); Dillingham (1969); French (1962); Geismar (1953); Graham (1978); Hochman (1988); Howard (1985); Mitchell (1989); Pizer (1966).

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Chapter 6

Frank Norris The Beast Within

Among the late nineteenth-century dramatizations of literary atavism are two “San Francisco” novels by Frank Norris: McTeague. A Story of San Francisco (1899) and Vandover and the Brute (written 1899). Each novel begins in the normative world of the American middle class, one at the upper end, the other at the lower. McTeague is generally considered a benchmark for American naturalism. It portrays the growing brutishness of a more or less ordinary, though slow-witted, working-class man with higher aspirations. Vandover and the Brute deals with the degeneration of an effete and indolent aesthete – a would-be artist who sinks into bestiality and decadence not only through heredity and disease, but also flaws of character. Both works are studies in social and biological pressures. The dominant force is the regressive power of entropy, focused on individual regressions that are also archetypal. Both are realistic studies in a naturalist mode of morbid psychology in a specific social-cultural context – heightened by romantic myth and hyperbole. In each, a series of intricately related subthemes revolves around the question of hard and soft determinism: sex, misogyny, social class, economic status, religion, fate, and chance.1

Vandover and the Brute: An American Decadent Novel The conception of one’s inner “beast” in Vandover and the Brute could hardly be more different from that in Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle (1901). Unlike James’s elderly protagonist, young Vandover is extravagant, showy, melodramatic. He visibly regresses mentally, morally, and physically; although horrified Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson. Ó 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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at what he has become, he continually transgresses conventional mores in ways that James’s character would never dream of. The novel begins quietly but moves steadily to a crescendo, the prose style matched by the increasing melodrama of the events, until the last few pages, when it becomes oddly quiescent again. James’s story is quiet throughout, and even the appalling final revelation is silently internal. The descriptions of Vandover’s downward spiral also suggest something preternatural, which James’s do not. Vandover becomes convinced that he is literally being consumed by a wolf – that is, transformed from a man into a wolf as in ancient legends. Yet there is no actual overstepping of the real in the narrative. Norris’s story of the degeneration of an educated and refined aspiring artist presents a psychological variant of two classic gothic novels, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). It is also a descendant of the nineteenthcentury French novelists we profiled in Chapter 4, notably the naturalist
accounts of human deterioration by Emile Zola, along with touches of J.-K. Huysmans. The story takes young Vandover from the chic dandyism of a turnof-the-century Ivy League gentleman-aesthete to the mental, physical, and moral corrosion of an over-the-hill degenerate. Mimetic realism dominates for the first half and more of the narrative, giving it something of the feel of a novel of manners. Entering Harvard in 1890, Vandover encounters by chance three young San Franciscans who become his “friends.” They are all from a similar upper-middle-class background; they form an illusory tight group and share various aspects of college life together. The novel presents lively pictures of typical scenes from the everyday life of young people at college, at parties, in love, in business. The dialogue adroitly catches the vernacular of the 1890s. The possibility of inherited infirmity is raised in the first chapter, in which Vandover’s invalid mother sits drooling in a wheelchair, unable to speak or move. His own physical attributes are somewhat grotesque; and, though symbolic, they suggest defective genes. He is lean to the point of emaciation, but always hungry; his limbs are “out of all proportion, with huge articulations at the elbows and knees”; his neck is long and thin and his head disproportionately large; his ears stick out “stiff from either side of his head.” He vaguely resembles a ravenous wolf in human form. Early in the story, “Van” experiences his first real drunk, is introduced to gambling, and has his first sexual experience. The girl he has sexual intercourse with is of much lower social standing, a circumstance to which he is very sensitive. In Van’s mind, social class also determines a woman’s sexual purity or promiscuity. His sexual encounters are “impulsive,” not “reasoned” acts, an early indication that the rebellious animal part of his being is stirring. Later in a 92

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drunken discussion of male privilege, Van proclaims that “all this talk of women demanding the same moral standard for men as men do for women is fine on paper, but how does it work in real life? The women don’t demand it at all. . . . They like a man to know things, to be experienced” (Ch. 7). In the middle of the novel, when confronted with the possibility that his actions have precipitated the suicide of a girlfriend, Van rejects the idea of his own complicity. He is also able to suppress his deep existential anxieties in hedonistic pleasures. But about three-quarters through the novel (Ch. 14), this strategy begins to fail him, and he falls into a pervasive depression that he does not understand. In a startling manifestation of his deteriorating mental condition, he has an episode in which he barks and snarls and pads about his rooms on all fours. The experience is permanently unsettling, causing him to conceive of a mysterious “enemy” within. He begins to fear that “he was no longer human, that he was sinking, all in a moment, to the level of some dreadful beast.” The one positive thing in his life is his art. Vandover’s temperamental inheritance includes a general aesthetic sensibility and a degree of artistic talent in painting and drawing. But he is indolent and dilettantish. His drawings become chaotic and grotesque. A feeling of numbness in his brain triggers episodes of whirling dizziness. A nameless dread periodically overcomes him. Religious belief offers him nothing; he cannot formulate his terror in philosophical terms, only in images. His hands and feet swell, and he begins to have severe headaches, while the dreaded unknown thing begins to take the shape of a beast “down there in the darkest, lowest places” of his mind: “huge, strong, insatiable, swollen and distorted out of all size, grown to be a monster, glutted yet still ravenous, some fearful bestial satyr, groveling, perverse, horrible beyond words” (Ch. 14). An “eternal struggle between good and evil” has been “going on within him since his very earliest years.”2 He feels that he is journeying toward the center of a great labyrinth, where the monster awaits. When he thinks of the dreadful moment that must be “met alone” without religious or philosophical supports, his “terror increased almost to hysteria.” He knows that he cannot “deliver himself by his own exertions” and repeats to himself the words “nothing, nothing.” To describe Vandover’s sense of helplessness, Norris employs imagery similar to that which he uses to describe the relentless locomotive engine in The Octopus. Vandover feels that a “great, mysterious force” has “spun the wheels of Nature.” This force is like “some enormous engine, resistless, relentless . . . driving before it the infinite herd of humanity . . . crushing out inexorably all those who lagged behind the herd and who fell from exhaustion, grinding them to dust beneath its myriad iron wheels, riding over them . . .” 93

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(Ch. 14). This is hardly the language of realism, but the image of a relentless engine “inexorably” crushing “laggards” certainly sounds like hardcore naturalist determinism. Of course, it is Vandover’s limited and frenetic view at this moment in his life. He is feeling sorry for himself, rationalizing away personal responsibility. The vast “wheels of Nature” are to blame. In his repeated attempts at self-exculpation, the central conflict of the novel is clear: free will and individual responsibility versus necessity and determinism. As Vandover’s despair grows, he begins to gamble away what is left of his money. He sinks to the level of cheating his one true friend, Dolly Haight, out of fifty dollars. Finally, he visits his former college friend, Charlie Geary, and begs for a job. The degradation and humiliation depicted in this penultimate chapter are excruciating; the last chapter is even worse. The final chapter opens with a quasi-satiric description of the “superman” philosophy of the Social Darwinists. Geary articulates a debased “dog-eat-dog” worldview. At barely thirty, Geary is a successful lawyer “devoured” with ambition, and “delighted when he could get the better of any one.” Politics seems a field where one could profitably “sacrifice everything – friendships, fortunes, scruples, principles, life itself, no matter what, anything to be a ‘success,’ to ‘arrive,’ to ‘get there’ . . .” It might be “selfish, but it was human nature: the weakest to the wall; the strongest to the front.” Shifting the metaphor, he (like Vandover) thinks of humanity as driven by an “enormous, relentless engine,” like a locomotive speeding down the rails. The mechanical metaphors of both Geary and Vandover reflect the industrialist-capitalist world they live in. All life is “but a struggle to keep from under those myriad spinning wheels that dashed so close behind.” For Geary, those who are being crushed by the impersonal machine are a buffer against it for men like himself. Geary callously lords it over his former Harvard buddy, eventually offering Vandover a menial job cleaning the houses he has built on the property he has stolen from Vandover. The economic and social degradation of the once wellto-do Vandover is complete. He has broken promises, lied, cheated, swindled his friend, seduced an innocent; he is a hypocrite, a thief, a debtor, a bankrupt, an obsessive gambler, an alcoholic, a sexual libertine. He’s committed just about every sin but murder. The ending is a tour de force of unarticulated implicature. Reduced to mute rage, he watches an exceedingly nasty little boy, who is mocking and taunting the starving Vandover. The boy is wolfing down a sandwich, drooling butter over his chin. Van glares stupidly at him. The story suddenly stops. Because of the novel’s resemblances to Jekyll and Hyde and Dorian Gray, and especially because of a reference late in the narrative to “lycanthropy,” Vandover has sometimes been criticized for its lapse from realism into gothic supernaturalism. Drinking with his friend, Bandy Ellis, Vandover experiences a second 94

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attack by “his old enemy,” the wolf within (Ch. 16). Frightened, Bandy calls the hotel doctor, whose hasty (possibly sarcastic) diagnosis is “LycanthropyPathesis.” The term lycanthropy in modern myth refers to the werewolf, one who has the magical ability to assume the form and characteristics of a wolf, or is compelled to do so by the full moon. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the word lycanthropy was also used to designate a mental disease in which the patient imagines himself to be an animal. An ambiguous phrase, it suggests both a disease and sexual lust, as well as a mental delusion that one is literally turning into a wolf. Critics like Warren French see the lycanthropy “explanation” as evidence of Norris’s artistic immaturity – a “hangover” from his early infatuation with gothic romances. Eric Carl Link’s comment on this criticism is especially pertinent: “It is precisely this type of judgment that arises from viewing the works of Frank Norris (and other American naturalistic authors) as realistic novels rather than romances.” Since “symbolic transformations have a long tradition in romantic literature, they “can hardly be seen as evidence in and of itself of an artist’s immaturity.”3 Link sees lycanthropy as a “forceful symbol” of the influence of Vandover’s “lower, brute nature” and leaves the supernatural question open. Donald Pizer (1966) and June Howard (1985) have argued vigorously for natural rather than supernatural explanations. Howard writes that Vandover is “emphatically” not a werewolf and that the causes of his “transformation” are all natural; Pizer suggests syphilis or insanity.4 Much as I would like to see Vandover as maintaining an uneasy balance between a natural and supernatural explanation in the tradition of indeterminate gothic, I find myself agreeing with Howard and Pizer. There is almost no evidence of any supernaturalism in the book; its gothic elements can be explained as entirely psychological. Although one cannot rule out hereditary insanity, there seems to me little doubt that Pizer is right in suggesting Vandover is suffering mental aberrations due to syphilis. The groundwork for such a natural explanation is subtly laid early in the text. Van’s college friend, Dolly Haight, at the party with the “nice girls” in Chapter 3, cuts his lip on a broken glass, causing it to bleed. Later that night, at the bar, he is kissed full on the mouth by Flossie, a prostitute, reopening the wound and causing his mouth to bleed rather profusely (Ch. 4). The open wound directly exposes him to the prostitute’s diseases. Haight, at the time still a virgin, initially contracts syphilis as a victim of chance; but Vandover has clearly had repeated sexual relations with the same prostitute. Syphilis would explain Vandover’s symptoms and degeneration. The incubation period for syphilis, depending on the strain, is typically from five to fifteen years; and it’s been nearly fifteen years since Van’s early sexual encounters. Symptoms include swelling of the feet and hands, loss of weight, discoloration of the skin, disfigurations of skin and bone, numbness, dizziness, 95

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loss of concentration and motor control, delusions – all symptoms that Vandover has. This biological cause (including hereditary predisposition to mental instability) is a major aspect of the realism of the novel – and of its naturalism. The steady progress of the disease constitutes a hard determinism. But Vandover is the victim both of accident and his own bad choices. As a naturalist novel combining romantic and realist elements, and balancing hard and soft determinism, Vandover and the Brute is an imperfect but fascinating example of exactly what Norris was talking about when he redefined the naturalist novel as realist romance.

The “Sport of Chance”: Sex, Greed, and Entropy in McTeague McTeague employs a somewhat different idea of reversion. McTeague cannot overcome his violent heredity, but he does not succumb, as Vandover does, to a hallucination that he is in fact a beast. His story is more in the manner of Zola’s studies in degenerative alcoholism.5 The final events of McTeague move steadily toward a heightening of romantic melodrama and style. But, like Vandover, McTeague retains the framework of everyday reality, even as the novel builds to its sensational conclusion. For all its many romance elements, McTeague is generally a more realistic work than Vandover in the sense of providing detailed routines of everyday life. Its greater depth of characterization makes it, in my opinion, a more effective mixture of realism and romance. In the naturalist novel, contradictory or ambiguous human relationships are usually part and parcel of the downward entropic spiral of the inscrutable world itself. It’s not that there is no morality, no love, no friendship, no tenderness – but that such ideals are negatively modified by chance, environment, biology, and individual heredity. The paradox of sex, the paradox of friendship, and the paradox of determinism and free will all remain enigmatic. In McTeague, an inescapable heredity is “acted upon” by environmental forces. The protagonist, “Mac” McTeague, is strong of body but not very intelligent. Biological and psychological heredity, along with a disadvantaged childhood, make him an easy prey of social forces. He is victimized by a desire for wealth and class status, by gendered misconceptions about love and marriage, by contradictory moral beliefs, by repressed sexual urges, by machismo, and by alcoholism. As the narrative unfolds, a sense of inevitable fatality becomes stronger and stronger, despite the fact that at several key points things happen by chance. But the luck is consistently bad. Indeed, what would seem to be good luck, winning a large amount of money in the lottery, precipitates the destruction of the three major characters – McTeague, Trina Sieppe, and Marcus Schouler – beginning a 96

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sequence of what Norris in an essay on “The Mechanics of Fiction” (1901) called “pivotal events” in narrative.6 A number of readers have felt that the novel is too sprawling, with unnecessary subplots, lacking fully connected structure. Others see it as both randomly lifelike and artistically unified. One way in which the book is unified lies in its repeated weaving together of a series of motifs and key symbols, perhaps most obviously the animal-like descriptions and the outbreaks of primitive bestiality. Equally obvious is the imagery of gold, revolving around the oppositions of dim aesthetic perceptions and greed.7 The story line itself – focused on the eros/thanatos paradox – is more carefully structured than it may seem on the surface.

Opening strategies Set in the 1890s in San Francisco, the narrative opens on a Sunday afternoon in a dental office on Polk Street, where a blond giant of a man is drinking beer, playing his concertina, and watching the passing human parade. He falls asleep from the beer, a good smoke, a heavy meal, and the heat of the day. As he awakes from his stupor, his pet “canary bird in its gilt cage” begins to sing. The image initiates the interconnection of two major symbolic elements: a cage and what we might metaphorically call fool’s gold (gilt). McTeague’s unrealized ambition is to have a giant gold-painted tooth to hang in front of his business establishment. This “huge gilded tooth,” a “molar with enormous prongs,” would be “something gorgeous and attractive.” The faux gold tooth is an absurdist image of hollow aspiration in a meaningless world, as well as of greedy predation in a determinist world. But for Mac it is a symbol of his achievement and profession. Chance and sham appearances permeate the swift retrospect of Mac’s early life that follows. He became an unlicensed “dentist” by accident. McTeague’s biological father was a rough miner and abusive alcoholic. After his death, the boy came under the influence of a traveling “doctor” of dentistry and became his apprentice, semi-learning the profession by watching the mountebank perform and by looking at medical books that “he was too hopelessly stupid to get much benefit from.” Unable to get ahead financially on his own, he has been able to set up a dental shop in his lodgings on Polk Street with a small amount of money left him by his mother. His best friend is another rough fellow, Marcus Schouler (“Mark”), who lives in the same building. Lively realistic dialogue introduces this relationship, and the detailed picture of their close friendship sets up the contrast with the deadly enmity that is to develop between them. Marcus is smarter than Mac, but not much. He is given to mouthing inconsistent political philosophy, with which Mac, not understanding any of it, always agrees. 97

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Mark has a young cousin, an exceedingly petite woman named Trina Sieppe, with whom he is in love – sort of. One day he brings Trina to McTeague’s office for dental work. Both the passage of time on Polk Street and McTeague’s clumsy efforts to repair Trina’s teeth are meticulously detailed in terms of quotidian realism. One casually mentioned item amid the welter of details has great significance: Trina buys a lottery ticket from McTeague’s cleaning woman. Money, greed for gold, will become a major source of dissension between Mac and Marcus.

The other object of desire While repairing Trina’s teeth, McTeague is quietly, shyly smitten with the young woman who seems to him so pure and pretty. But his romantic regard for her is accompanied by other impulses: his animal nature, lying just below the surface, also emerges. In order to work on her teeth, McTeague has to give her ether. While she sleeps, “unconscious and helpless,” and “absolutely without defense,” he is almost overcome with brutal sexual urges. In a melodramatic scene, he kisses her but fights down the impulse to assault her sexually. His struggle is rendered in the clumsy and repetitious manner that sometimes mars other scenes in the novel, despite their overall power. “Suddenly the animal in the man stirred and woke; the evil instincts that in him were so close to the surface leaped to life, shouting and clamoring . . .” (Ch. 2). But he fights against the beast. Dimly, he realizes that if he were to yield to temptation now he “would never be able to care for Trina again.” He would always see on her pale forehead “the smudge of a foul ordure, the footprint of the monster.” But the “charm of her innocence and helplessness came over him afresh,” and suddenly he kisses her “grossly, full on the mouth.” Why can he not love her purely and cleanly? The answer is both Calvinistic and Zola-esque. “Below the fabric of all that was good in him ran the foul steam of hereditary evil, like a sewer.” Desire and guilt, idealization and abomination, attraction and repulsion, love and fear all contest within him. Introduced almost immediately in the story, the paradox of sexuality will continue to be developed both overtly and covertly throughout the narrative. When Trina wakes, Mac impulsively proposes marriage. “No, no,” she exclaims, “refusing without knowing why, suddenly seized with a fear of him, the intuitive fear of the male.” It becomes clear later that this instinctive fear, bound up with eros, is well founded; for Trina’s destined mate will batter and murder her.

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Parallel subplots Norris next develops other characters, who help to provide an abundance of details creating the illusion of everyday real life. These are mainly the two pairs: Maria Macapa and Zerkow; Old Grannis and Old Miss Baker. Maria cleans the rooms in the building where she, Old Grannis, Miss Baker, and McTeague all live. Zerkow is a junk dealer who lives in an alley near by. Maria tells him stories of trunks filled with golden plates and bowls and serving-ware, supposedly once belonging to her parents and ancestors – stories Zerkow listens to eagerly and visualizes greedily. Old Grannis and Miss Baker live next to each other down the hall. Other boarders in the house are under the impression that the two old folks are in love; actually they have never even spoken to each other – though they listen through the walls. The recurrence of these two pairs throughout the story constitutes a double subplot that parallels the main one both directly and inversely. Late in the novel, the main plot and the subplots come together (Chs. 16 and 17). In an inverse parallel to the violence of the main plot, Old Grannis and Miss Baker finally begin to “keep company,” in a picture of idealized love contrasting with that of Trina and Mac. In direct parallel to the main plot, Maria and Zerkow have a violent relationship, quarreling over nonexistent gold-plate serving-ware. Zerkow marries Maria primarily to hear her describe this golden treasure, supposedly hidden somewhere near. His desire for her gold underscores the thematic convergence of money and sexuality: he dreams of caressing the “virgin metal” (gilded as it is). Their story ends with Maria’s murder in Chapter 16 – shortly before Trina’s murder.

Evolution and the paradox of sexuality Meanwhile the three principals, Mac, Trina, and Mark, become embroiled in an odd, partially unconscious m
enage-a-trois. Several days after the incident in his office, McTeague meets Mark on the street, and they go for a beer. Drinking more and more, Mac tells him about his overwhelming desire for Trina. This scene is the second in an extended series of atavistic regressions on Mac’s part, beginning with a feeble denial of moral responsibility and ending with no sense of responsibility at all. “I tell you, Mark, I can’t help it,” says McTeague (Ch. 4). His “enormous jaws shut together with a sharp click at every pause,” like “some colossal beast trapped.” Mac asks his friend’s opinion about this uncontrollable desire. The heartfelt, semi-articulate question from a dim-witted, ape-like man presents perhaps

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the major philosophical question of the entire novel. Twice Mac asks, “It ain’t my fault, is it?” Marcus is stunned at Mac’s declaration, but says: “I guess you – you want her pretty bad. . . . I’ll give her up to you, old man.” Ironically, this act of apparent altruism serves to heighten the hatred that later develops between the friends. When Mac makes a second, somewhat more considered proposal of marriage, Trina still resists (Ch. 5). Abruptly, he takes her “in his enormous arms, crushing down her struggle with his immense strength.” Trina just as suddenly gives in, “all in an instant, turning her head to his. They kissed each other, grossly, full in the mouth.” But a curious thing happens in McTeague’s mind.

............................................................................................... The instant that Trina gave up, the instant she allowed him to kiss her, he thought less of her. . . . Perhaps he dimly saw that this must be so, that it belonged to the changeless order of things – the man desiring the woman only for what she withholds; the woman worshipping the man for that which she yields up to him. . . . But why should it be so?

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Here Mac and Trina seem to be unknowingly participating in what Norris considers a great mythic archetype beyond their understanding – but their psychological ambivalence is in direct contrast to the idealized celebration of the conjoining of the male and female principles in The Octopus.8 Historically, this description of the sexual dichotomy between male and female is a cultural stereotype, but Norris’s account is also a reflection of naturalist primitivism, based on popularized notions of Darwinian evolution and the “survival of the fittest.”9 By suggesting that McTeague’s reaction is a Darwinian one built into the race, Norris seems to reference the presumed biological-evolutionary fact that the male sex drive is to spread seed as widely as possible – whereas the female instinct is to protect the individual offspring by binding a powerful male to her through sex and devotion. But Norris complicates it all with culturally induced tension and ambivalence. Mac feels the triumphant joy of a primal contest won: “I got her, by God! I got her, by God!” His “self-respect increased enormously”; for the “man that could win Trina Sieppe was a man of extraordinary ability.” The narratival mockery only increases the pathos of the characters. At the beginning of the next chapter, Trina goes through her own version of the paradox. Lying in bed at night she remembers the event “with a veritable agony of shame, and at other times she was ashamed to recall it with a thrill of joy” (Ch. 6). She struggles to understand why she gave in to her sudden, unexpected sexual urge. If Mac had tried to woo her “at a distance” with “little attentions” and “boxes of candy,” she could have

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withstood his advances. “But he had only to take her in his arms, to crush down her struggle with his enormous strength, to subdue her, conquer her by brute force, and she gave up in an instant.” Has she chosen McTeague “of her own free will”? Or is her life “ruled by chance alone,” or by an inexplicable “sorcery”? These ideas are “quite beyond her,” for she has lived her life “with as little selfconsciousness as a tree.” Like her, McTeague is thrown off balance by the suddenness and spontaneity of it all. In his dim way, he is aware that the “very act of submission that bound the woman to him forever” simultaneously “made her seem less desirable in his eyes.” In this reaction, the narrator observes, their “undoing had already begun.” Yet “neither of them was to blame.” Their “destinies,” knitted together by “ungovernable” and “mysterious instincts,” are merely “the sport of chance.”

The downward progress of entropy When news comes that Trina has won $5,000 in the lottery, the dark side of Marcus Schouler begins to emerge. He covets the money that would have been his if he had not let Mac win Trina’s heart. Drinking whisky in the backroom saloon of Joe Frenna’s store one night, Marcus accuses Mac of wanting to marry Trina for the lottery money and demands that Mac give him his rightful share as her previous suitor. He knocks Mac’s pipe out of his hand, shattering it, and throws his knife at him, narrowly missing Mac’s head. McTeague is bewildered: the attempt on his life is for him “beyond solution”; but what enrages him is his broken pipe. (Again, the mockery serves to increase the pathos.) His rage, however, is assuaged by the feminine tenderness of Trina. When Mac returns home, he stumbles over a big package in the hallway. He opens it and finds a birthday present from Trina: “It was the Tooth – the famous gold molar with its huge prongs – his sign, his ambition, the one unrealized dream of his life. . . . Ah, what a dear little woman was this Trina, to keep so quiet, to remember his birthday!” After a semi-comic wedding ceremony, the couple takes up residence near Mac’s dental office. Her gentle demeanor keeps the rough McTeague in line for a time, and she quietly “improves” his crude manners. But soon McTeague wants to move to more upscale accommodations. Trina objects to the higher rent and insists on investing her lottery money. She has the instincts of “a hardy and penurious mountain race . . . saving for the sake of saving, hoarding without knowing why. Even McTeague did not know how closely Trina held to her new-found wealth” (Ch. 8).

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Both Mac and Trina begin to experience doubts. After the excitement of the honeymoon, Trina finds Mac’s grossness off-putting. One afternoon, after only three weeks of marriage, she finds him sprawled on his operating chair, drunk, red-faced, elephantine, disheveled, and snoring open-mouthed, his huge ugly feet dangling over the footrest. She has a vision of her future life. Either it would be “one long continued revulsion, or else – worse than all – she would come to be content with him . . . and all her pretty ways, her clean, trim little habits, would be forgotten, since they would be thrown away upon her stupid, brutish husband” (Ch. 10).

Novelistic hinge – middle pivot point The sequence of chapters from 10 to 13 provides a strikingly symmetrical middle segment – a “hinge” between parts one and two – with nine chapters preceding and nine chapters following. In this sequence, Mac, without Trina’s knowledge, has signed an agreement to rent a nicer house. When she learns of it, she rejects the whole idea, refusing to leave their apartment or to help pay rent for the initial month. Their first quarrel is a major step toward a deepening alienation; for Trina, in reaction, begins to hide every penny. Meanwhile, Marcus also experiences escalating greed. Giving up “the girl who had won a fortune” has been “the great mistake of his life.” Once, while Mac is out, Mark goes to see Trina; when she lies to him about how happy their married life is, he leaves “fairly sick with envy.” Then Mark and Mac meet at a picnic, where several competitions among the men are scheduled. The big event of the afternoon is wrestling; Mac and Marcus have won their matches and are paired against each other. Strong as he is, Marcus is overpowered. He insists on a rematch, but he is thrown to the ground a second time. While pinned, Marcus hears his current girlfriend, Selina, praise Mac’s strength. Enraged, he bites off Mac’s earlobe. Then “the brute that in McTeague lay so close to the surface leaped instantly to life,” and he throws Marcus through the air, breaking his arm. Marcus, “terrified, but too brave to run,” picks up a jagged stone with his good arm, and the two stand facing each other like cavemen. Mac is ready to kill his one-time friend; but the crowd holds McTeague back. Shortly after this fight, McTeague receives a notice from the city of San Francisco that his dentist’s license has been revoked because he does not have the proper professional training, much less an actual degree. Trina and Mac rightly suspect that Marcus has instigated this. It takes an entire chapter (Ch. 13) for Trina to make Mac understand that his livelihood is gone. The loss of economic security is another pivotal point in the narrative (part of the four-chapter “hinge”). McTeague and Trina are forced to move to cheaper 102

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lodgings and to sell off their belongings. Chapter 14 begins with a quarrel over money, in which Trina taunts him about not having a job and Mac tries to assert his masculine authority as male head of the house. The latter part of the chapter is a painful account of selling and auctioning their possessions, with Mac refusing to part with his concertina or with his canary and its gilt cage. Finally, only one thing remains, “a melancholy relic of a vanished happiness . . . a thing that nobody wanted,” Trina’s wedding bouquet.

Substitute sex: Alcohol, violence, and gold fever Mac unsuccessfully tries a series of jobs. Trina becomes more miserly than ever. Entropy, both social and personal, sets in with a vengeance. Mac’s “affection for his wife was dwindling a little every day – had been dwindling for a long time, in fact.” He starts drinking to excess, causing Trina distress, but also causing her to wonder suspiciously where he is getting money for whisky. When she cries, he threatens to hit her. As time moves on, McTeague gives up looking for a job. Trina makes small animal carvings for sale. Sometimes he sits “motionless for hours, watching Trina at her work, feeling a dull glow of shame at the idea that she was supporting him.” His days now consist of watching the digging at a construction site in the afternoon and drinking in the evening. Trina’s obsession with her small stockpile of money becomes pathological. She turns her earnings into gold coins whenever she can and hides them in a locked trunk. She caresses them in secret, a behavior that Norris implicitly parallels with sexual experience:

............................................................................................... she would draw the heap lovingly toward her and bury her face in it, delighted at the smell of it and the feel of the smooth metal on her cheeks. She even put the smaller gold pieces in her mouth, and jingled them there. She loved her money with an intensity that she could hardly express. She would plunge her small fingers into the pile with little murmurs of affection, her long, narrow eyes half closed and shining, her breath coming in long sighs. (Ch. 16; cf. Ch. 19)

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The second half of Chapter 16 brings Maria Macapa back into the story. She and Trina talk to each other about their husbands’ abuses and compare their bruises. A touch of masochism enters their conversation as the women exaggerate their injuries, “as if proud of their beatings,” and lie to each other, “magnifying their own maltreatment.” They even compare the effectiveness of their husbands’ favorite methods of abuse: ropes and whips versus fists and hairbrushes. A few pages later, Trina finds Maria with her throat cut. Zerkow is 103

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found drowned in the river, clutching “a sack full of old and rusty pans, tin dishes . . . tin cans, and iron knives and forks, collected from some dump heap.” Trina exclaims that “all this” has come about “on account of a set of gold dishes that never existed.” The next chapter presents an ironic, even sarcastic, inverse parallel to Chapter 16. Old Miss Baker takes Old Grannis some tea to his room, and they finally talk and reveal their feelings. “The day lapses slowly into twilight, and the two old people sat there in the grey evening, quietly, quietly, their hands in each other’s hands . . . and together they entered upon the long retarded romance of their commonplace and uneventful lives” (Ch. 17). Around them swirls hatred, cruelty, and violent death. The McTeagues begin “to sink rapidly lower and lower.” Trina gives up on domesticity; their room and her person become disheveled. She demands that they move into even poorer quarters. Mac resists and drinks even more heavily. One night, Mac pretends he is going out to sell his beloved yellow canary, which Trina encourages. When he fails to return home, Trina goes looking for him. Mac has been waiting; he steals into the room, breaks open her trunk, and takes all of the small savings she has squirreled away (Ch. 18). Trina now discovers that she can no longer make the little animal carvings that have brought in extra money. The “non-poisonous” paint she has been using has infected her right hand, requiring amputation of her fingers. Deprived of her little trade, she takes a job as a scrubwoman in a kindergarten. Her earnings from this menial job, when combined with the interest from her lottery savings, would be enough to live on. But her obsession gets the best of her. She begins selling various objects and gradually exchanges their savings money for more gold coins to count and caress in the privacy of her dingy room. Meanwhile Mac finally manages to get a job in a music store. Just after Christmas he discovers his concertina in the secondhand section of the shop: “barring the canary, there was not one of all his belongings that McTeague cherished more dearly.” A paragraph describes Mac’s thoughts – invoking retrospectively his “contented” Sunday afternoons with the canary, the concertina, and steam beer. Mac spends the rest of the day railing against Trina as a thief (even though he has been stealing from her). The parallel and contrast with the opening of the first chapter is stark. He drinks at least six glasses of whisky and goes to the kindergarten that night. A “strange sixth sense” warns Trina she’s in danger, and she hides in the cloakroom. He demands money; she refuses. A surprisingly ferocious life-anddeath struggle ensues. She displays the intensity of the life-instinct; but the beast within the male is aroused, and he beats her into unconsciousness. Through the

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night she lies “just as she had fallen under the last of McTeague’s blows.” Finally, toward morning, she dies “with a rapid series of hiccoughs that sounded like a piece of clockwork running down.”10 The conjunction of biological and mechanical images underscores the uncertain question of soft determinism in the novel.

A passion in the desert We come now to the final narrative segment (Chs 20–22), the events of which have seemed to many readers so highly improbable and melodramatic as to compromise the end of the book. Taking Trina’s money, McTeague returns to the mines of Placer County where he grew up. In a moment of tenderness, he takes the caged yellow canary with him so it won’t starve. Several paragraphs describe his job and the mining country, descriptions that critics have praised for their accuracy. In terms of the novel’s narrative trajectory, however, these pages only postpone the final climactic event. As he works the mine, McTeague becomes progressively more irrational and animalistic; he seems to have a “brute instinct” that he is being dogged by an invisible pursuer. McTeague flees over the mountains to Nevada. Some days later, he returns to California, where by chance he runs into a prospector named Cribbens, who tells him about a strike in the Panamint Mountains. Mac feels a rising passion to try gold mining, and they agree to set out to find a place called Gold Gulch. Soon Mac’s “strange sixth sense” acts up again. Although he neither sees nor hears anything untoward, he heads out alone into the “emptiness of primeval desolation.” We next find him eight miles away, with Cribbens’s rifle, a canteen full of water, and the canary in its cage, which is carefully wrapped in moist cloth against the heat. The sentimentalism of the bestial man with a streak of tenderness buried within is a clich
e. I ask students: does the figure of McTeague in the desert carrying a canary in a cage really work? Is there some “modernist” sense of the absurd at work here? Their responses are interestingly mixed. In any event, Mac decides to cross Death Valley in order to put its “arid wastes” between him and the “pursuer” that he senses somewhere behind him. For more than three days, “flagellated with heat” and “tortured with thirst,” he chases “the receding horizon.” Exhausted, he looks to make a camp somewhere in the “horrible desolation.” Suddenly he hears a voice: “Hands up. By damn, I got the drop on you.” It’s Marcus.

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The final chapter (Ch. 22) begins with a retrospect, an awkward three-page flashback. After Trina’s body was found, a posse had been formed, which Marcus joined. The posse gave up, but Marcus continued on doggedly, implacably, and tracked down his man. Now the two men face each other, alone together, in the parched, desolate desert. Entropy and death seem to reign supreme. The first thing Marcus wants to know is what Mac’s done with Trina’s five thousand dollars; the second is if he has any water. Suddenly Mac’s mule breaks away, carrying away Trina’s gold and the only water to be had. The two men follow the animal for several hours; then in frustration Marcus shoots the mule, emptying his gun. When the animal falls, it crushes the water bag, “spilling its entire contents into the sand.” Marcus flings the empty canteen away and says simply, “We’re dead men.” But when they both remember the money bag, their enmity absurdly flares up again. In the ensuing fight, McTeague pummels Marcus to death – but not before Marcus has clipped a handcuff to both their wrists. Chained to a corpse, McTeague looks around “stupidly” – first “at the distant horizon, now at the ground, now at the half-dead canary chittering feebly in its little gilt prison.” However accurate or realistic the mining and prospecting details may be, the improbable ending is straight out of adventure romance. These last chapters – McTeague’s brutal murder of Trina followed by the improbable climax and denouement in Death Valley – have seemed to some readers actually anti-climactic. In an 1899 review, William Dean Howells praised the novel for its realist elements but thought the conclusion an indulgent, melodramatic “anti-climax” worthy of the worst of Dickens. Moreover, unlike the protagonists of several major American realist novels, McTeague does not undergo a crisis of consciousness as the central event of the narrative; thus for readers like Howells the novel leaves several unanswered questions. Is McTeague morally responsible for his actions? Or is he merely the victim of biology and social circumstances? Although we see his degeneration and atavism gradually develop, the end of the narrative tells us only that he murders his wife and flees into the desert wilderness. When Marcus somehow locates Mac in the middle of the desert, their mutual destruction seems both accidental and yet somehow unavoidable. The conclusion seems almost to anticipate the absurdity of existentialist modernism. The minute everyday details of the bulk of the novel mark it as realism. The social entrapment and steadily increasing violence and atavistic regression mark it as naturalism. The exaggerated melodrama of the scenes of violence, and especially the improbable conclusion, mark it as romance. But for Norris, none of these elements is incompatible; for him the naturalist novel is transgeneric: the American romance-novel. 106

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Notes 1. Studies by French (1962) and Pizer (1966) provide a good introduction to Norris. Vandover was completed by 1899 but not published until 1914 (twelve years after Norris’s death) because its subject matter was initially considered too “strong” for public acceptance. 2. Some critics see the book as a kind of equivocal religious allegory, in which the brute represents original sin and divine punishment. The novel’s eighteen chapters describe the gradual fall from a state of apparent grace into an increasingly unregenerate and degenerate condition. As in Jekyll and Hyde, the division between good and evil takes the form of two “selves.” 3. Link (2004), 201 n13 (my italics); 152–3. 4. Link (2004) gives an overview of the critical controversy (see esp. 153). 5. Norris aspired to be the “American Zola”; and he was so regarded by many of his American contemporaries. For specific influences, see Pizer on the “genesis” of McTeague in the Norton Critical Edition (Norris 1977; rev. 1997). He suggests two of Zola’s novels in particular, L’Assommoir and La Bˆete Humaine, along with the sociological writings of Cesare Lombroso on the criminal mind and physiognomy, notably L’Uomo delinquente. Pizer also provides a selection from the 1893 San Francisco Examiner account of the trial of Patrick Collins, who murdered his wife because she refused to give him money for drink, one of the important influences on McTeague. 6. In “The Mechanics of Fiction” (1901), Norris explains what he means by the “pivotal event” in the structure of a well-made novel. Lamb (1997) distinguishes the pivot from a narrative hinge by referencing three additional instances of Norris’s “pivot” term: “A Problem in Fiction: Truth Versus Accuracy” (1901); “Simplicity in Art” (1902); and a review of Winston Churchill’s The Crisis in 1901. The idea of a central “hinge” and secondary “pivots” resembles the “elliptical middle-points” found in influential nineteenth-century German narratology; see Thompson (1989) and the Preface to the present volume. Also see Egbert (1950) on the influence of German theories of “organic expression” on late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American art and architecture, esp. 367–370 ff. 7. For example, golden dreams, gold mines, gold coins, a gold tooth, a goldcolored canary, a gilt cage, golden songs and old golden music, a gilt concertina – even the golden colors of beer and whisky – and of course Mac’s tangled mop of golden hair. 8. Octopus, Book I, Ch. 4; see the discussion in Ch. 5 of the present volume. 9. See Bender 1996, 2004) on Darwinism, sexual impulse, and sexual attraction and selection. 10. Ch. 19. The original description was so unpleasant that it was reduced to a few words for fear of offending the contemporary public. What little is left of

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the original description may be found reprinted in Pizer’s Norton Critical Edition (Norris 1977, rev. 1997).

See also Borus (1989); D. Campbell (1997); Conder (1984); Den Tandt (1998); Dillingham (1969); Fleissner (2004); Geismar (1953); Graham (1978); Hochman (1988); Howard (1985); Link (2004); Michaels (1987); Mitchell (1989); Norris (1903, 1964; 1977 rev. 1997; 1986); Pizer (1984 [1966], 1993, 1995); Ziff (1966).

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Chapter 7

The Rocking Horse Winners Theodore Dreiser and Urban Naturalism

American naturalism, as we have seen, is a composite of coherent but not always fully consistent views of man and nature. On the surface, the characteristic themes of Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) conform to realist and naturalist expectations. Considered more closely, his major urban novels up to 1914 – Sister Carrie (1900), The Financier (1912), and The Titan (1914) – bring into focus the fuzzy edges of literary naturalism.1 Key to Dreiser’s world are the first two installments of what he called the “Trilogy of Desire,” a series featuring the rise and fall of a ruthless financial entrepreneur, Frank Algernon Cowperwood. The “desire” is for winning; the more or less subsidiary rewards are power, money, social status, sex, even love, and finally contentment. The Cowperwood trilogy begins with hard-line determinism in The Financier and softens somewhat, in both of the two succeeding volumes, The Titan and, especially, the long-delayed final volume, The Stoic (1947). In the first two volumes, Cowperwood is a version of the romanticized superman, a figure not always pleasant and certainly not conventionally moral. Cowperwood for the most part treats his competitors ruthlessly, overcomes adverse circumstances, and wills himself to power; when defeated, he threatens an eventual return. The theme of desire is also central to Sister Carrie, a book largely (but not completely) informed by hard determinism – regarded as a landmark of American naturalism as historically important as Norris’s McTeague. Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson. Ó 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Conflict of Convictions Strands of idealism are present throughout Dreiser, but the larger overall impression is one of compassionate pessimism. Some of his characters achieve a sense of purpose and meaning that is to one degree or another idealistic, even though that idealism may lead nowhere. In the purely naturalist worldview, the demand for meaning is itself meaningless, an idea that is also a subtheme in Dreiser’s works. Perhaps it is in part the confusion, contradiction, inconsistency, and paradox in Dreiser’s worldview that make his major novels so forcefully realistic. The quest for meaning is twofold. Some of his characters find meaning in financial accomplishments; others in an aesthetic sense, a commitment to “Art.” At least two of his novels, The “Genius” (1915) and The Bulwark (1946), offer quasi-religious solutions to the human dilemma in Art. Art collecting and art appreciation and artistic endeavor weave in and out of the other novels, sometimes in a crass materialist context, sometimes in the context of mystic beauty. On the issue of determinism and free will, Dreiser was influenced by many of the same thinkers as London and Norris: notably Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, and Herbert Spencer. From his reading and observations, Dreiser developed a mechanistic theory of existence that stands in stark contrast to his romantic and mystical inclinations. His naturalist inclination is to see life as neither moral nor immoral, but simply amoral. In the abstract, he claims to see people as determined by biology and environment. They are mere “atomic entities” or “chemisms” individually. Collectively human society is an assembly of animated atoms or chemicals, the result of the mechanical “addition” of various “forces.”2 Dreiser (inconsistently) argues that ethical questions should be contextualized by scientific theories of evolution – especially the idea of “natural selection” and the “survival of the fittest.” Concepts of morality should be tested against the conditions of social determinism as reflective of natural struggle. The survivors are the supermen, those who achieve their goals through ruthlessness. But even the success of superior beings is partially determined by mere happenstance, by something beyond their full control. A problem with Dreiser’s grand “philosophy” is that he both denies that any metaphysical meaning exists and affirms some sort of gradual “progress” toward the “ideal.” This contradiction leads to another: his inconsistent stance as detached observer: he moralizes – over and over. I find this unfortunate in at least two ways. First, since he never worked out a fully coherent philosophy to replace his partially rejected Catholicism, his moralizing more often than not seems sophomoric. Second, his narrative intrusions sound banal, especially when he strives for a high philosophic style. To put it bluntly, many readers find 110

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his fuzzy philosophy and sentimental bromides all too often couched in hyperbolic language as bad as that of Frank Norris at his worst. At the beginning of Chapter 8 of Sister Carrie is a passage illustrative of both problems. The narrator offers a generalization on the place of human beings in some sort of evolutionary scheme involving the play of the forces of instinct and free will in the development of civilization and individual existence. He says that humankind is a “wisp in the wind” among “the forces which sweep and play throughout the universe” and that human “civilisation is still in a middle stage” of a cosmic evolution. As civilized beings, we are “no longer wholly guided by instinct” and “not yet wholly guided by reason.” Man’s “free-will” is not yet “sufficiently developed” to replace his instincts and afford him “perfect guidance.” In “this intermediate stage he wavers – neither drawn in harmony with nature by his instincts nor yet wisely putting himself into harmony by his own free-will.” A transcendent ideal exists, but we have merely glimpsed it, not achieved it. Humankind in general has the “consolation of knowing that evolution is ever in action,” and that “the ideal” is “a light that cannot fail” (my italics). The narrator’s conclusion is that the “jangle of free-will and instinct” will eventually be “adjusted,” and a “perfect understanding” will give free will the “power to replace” instinct entirely. So, eventually, will the animal aspects of being human be reconciled with intellectual and spiritual elements? Somehow evolutionary theory, romantic idealism, and religion can be reconciled? The chapter leads us to expect some consistent development of these issues as the novel develops, but what little we get is meandering and muddled. And yet, on a dramatic level, his novels are humanly coherent and tend to affirm some degree of existential meaningfulness. His characters exhibit some degree of free choice, though those choices may be partially determined by chance, psychological desires, inherited abilities, biological impulses. They exhibit the internal obsessions, fears, contradictions, and impaired decisions of human beings who are not totally determined by outside forces. Also contributing to Dreiser’s novels’ dramatic effectiveness is his accumulation of careful detail that creates verisimilitude. Some of his attention to detail doubtless comes from his experience as a street reporter for several newspapers; some of it may be the result of his reading French realists like Balzac and naturalists like Zola. Dreiser’s world is formed of palpable and tangible objects, including minute inventories of such things as food and clothing, weather and temperature, changing seasons, and the like. He attempts to reproduce the variations of grammar, vocabulary, and accent of people of different social classes and different ethnic backgrounds. He gives us the precise locations and names of restaurants, theaters, hotels, shops, streetcar lines, and similar tangible things, drawn from actual cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Montreal, and New York in the 1890s and early 1900s. He also makes recurrent reference to 111

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specific events: the financial panic of 1873, the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, the struggle over the introduction of elevated train system in Chicago in the early 1890s, the Brooklyn Street Car Strike of 1895, to mention a few of the most prominent. He gives us the exact amounts of money that his characters have in their pockets, or squirreled away, or are accountable for – and their wages, their debts – and the exact amounts of the cost of clothing, coal, food, shelter, rent – or the precise cost of a flophouse cot and a cup of coffee. In addition to providing verisimilitude, these quotidian details reinforce the theme of money, the physical icon of economic entrapment of various kinds, which is part and parcel of every Dreiser novel.

Sex and the fallen woman Another central realist (and naturalist) feature of his works is sex, especially extramarital sex, presented in a circumspect but insistent way.3 As with other naturalists, sex and the life force are frequently linked to a self-destructive impulse: eros and thanatos. Dreiser’s well-known portrayal of women as objects of sexual desire which yet maintain some kind of angelic allure is exemplified in the recurrent figure of the “fallen woman” in his works. The lure of the virtuous fallen woman is also frequently combined with the issue of class. From Sister Carrie (1900) to Jennie Gerhardt (1911) to The “Genius” (1915) to An American Tragedy (1925), Dreiser portrays sexual license in tension with amoral chance and redemptive dreams of a better life. The “fallen woman” protagonist of the supposedly naturalist-realist novel Jennie Gerhardt (1911) is strongly romanticized. Sexual license is a major aspect of The “Genius” (1915). Its Midwestern protagonist, Eugene Witla, is an artist of minor talent who feels entitled to be somewhat unconventional (the “artist” status is an excuse for many sexual affairs). Actually, this would-be bohemian lives a fairly conventional life, replete with Christian virtues of love and responsibility.4 Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), which many think his finest work, is another landmark of American naturalism. The book illustrates Dreiser’s determinist view of entrapment in illusory and impossible dreams and the inescapable force of biology and socioeconomic pressures. The large conceptual frame of the book is the increasing gap between the rich and the poor in supposedly classless America; and the sexual aspect of the book emphasizes class distinctions and social status. The novel details the entrapment of a lower-class worker in fantasies of wealth and social position as embodied in a desirable, wealthy woman of higher social standing. His illusion drives him to murder a woman of lower social class who is carrying his child. Based on an actual story, the novel lays bare what Dreiser considers the tragic consequences of the 112

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deceptive “American Dream” of unrestricted upward socioeconomic mobility in a capitalist society of prejudice and entrenched wealth.5

Fish-Tank Philosophy: Free Will and Fatality in the “Titan” Trilogy In their way, the first two volumes of Dreiser’s “Trilogy of Desire” are models of the realist style of naturalism.6 Both are highly documented, detailed, panoramic, written (mainly) in a plain simple style. But in casting Cowperwood as a financial Titan, Dreiser taps into the romantic tradition of the Nietzschean € Ubermensch. Like London, Dreiser expresses compassion for the great mass of ground-down people, trapped by heredity and caught in the sociopolitical and economic clutches of an indifferent society; at the same time, he has a high regard for the romantic Superman, who leaps to the head of the pack. In The Financier, we see Cowperwood callously using others as he works his way up in the corporate world of Philadelphia. Even Cowperwood’s patronage of the arts is just another means to an end, a calculated attempt to gain entree into high society in Philadelphia and Chicago and New York, something he has not been able to achieve with mere money. Win or lose, Cowperwood’s amoral will to power is his most striking characteristic.7

The squid and the lobster Chapter 1 of The Financier begins with a quick overview of the background of Cowperwood’s parents and a description of the general social milieu of Philadelphia in the earlier nineteenth century. It concludes with a striking scene in which, as a young boy, Frank goes to a fish-market in Philadelphia and witnesses a battle between two trapped sea creatures. The ten-year-old “was forever pondering, pondering” for he could “not figure out how this thing he had come into – this life – was organized.” His mother tells him the story of Adam and Eve, “but he didn’t believe it.” He finally discovers an explanation of the riddle of life at the fish-market, where he likes “to look at a certain tank in front of one store where were kept odd specimens of sea-life.” One day a squid and a lobster are put in the tank together, creating “a tragedy which stayed with him all his life” and also “cleared things up considerably intellectually.” The lobster is offered no food; after all, the squid is its “rightful” prey. The squid, “pale and waxy in texture,” looking very much like pork fat or jade, moves about “in torpedo fashion.” But “his movements were apparently never out of the eyes of his enemy, for by degrees small portions of his body began to 113

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disappear.” They have been snapped off by the “relentless claws of his pursuer.” Young Cowperwood is “fascinated by the drama” and goes “daily to watch.” Finally, “the bitter struggle” comes to an end. The boy sees the lobster in the corner of the tank; before him “was the squid cut in two and partially devoured.” He “wasn’t quick enough.” Frank thinks that it is “too bad he had missed this.” He feels a slight “touch of sorrow for the squid,” but then he gazes at the victor, thinking: “That’s the way it has to be, I guess.” The incident answers “in a rough way that riddle” that had been “annoying him so much in the past.” His observation that “Things lived on each other” becomes for Cowperwood an emblem of life as it actually is. For “days and weeks Frank thought of this and of the life he was tossed into, for he was already pondering on what he should be in this world, and how he should get along . . .” He determines that he is going to be a lobster, not a squid. Cowperwood pursues his dream of power like a natural predator, winning some battles and losing some, but above all surviving. At the end of Chapter 6, he comes to another realization: some men are agents or tools of other men’s enterprises. Who “was it who made the real money?” he asks himself. The stock brokers? “Some of them were making money,” but behind them are other men “of immense means . . . who schemed out and built the railroads, opened the mines, organized trading enterprises, and built up immense manufactories.” At the age of nineteen, Cowperwood sees himself as “a real man,” and a “real man – a financier – was never a tool.” Thanks to an early talent for making money, he proceeds rapidly in business and is soon able to open a brokerage office in Philadelphia. After the death of a business associate, he marries the man’s widow, in part because he thinks it a good business and social move. Through his new wife, Lillian, he becomes friends with several important politicians. One of these is Edward Butler, who like Cowperwood is a self-made man. Consumed with business deals, and bored with family life after a few years, Frank looks with interest at Butler’s daughter, Aileen. He ultimately persuades her to become his mistress and procures a house as a love nest. Cowperwood now schemes with the City Treasurer to access municipal funds; he buys more and more shares in cable-car and railroad stocks, slowly trying to achieve a monopoly. The illicit deals come to light, and Cowperwood and the City Treasurer are indicted for embezzlement and larceny. After Cowperwood is convicted, his assets are sold off to cover his debts. Through the influence of well-placed friends, Cowperwood’s sentence is cut to thirteen months. In the financial Panic of 1873, Cowperwood buys stocks at cut-rate prices and becomes wealthy again. Divorcing Lillian, he moves to Chicago with Aileen, where he hopes to find new prey.

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Intelligent design and the giant grouper The conclusion reflects the red-in-tooth-and-claw imagery of the beginning retrospective frame. The Mycteroperca, or black grouper, is a large deep-sea fish that lives long and comfortably because of its “very remarkable ability to adapt itself to conditions” (Ch. 59). It can “simulate” the appearance of anything and everything, and its “power to elude or to strike unseen is of the greatest.” Addressing the reader, the narrator asks: “What would you say was the intention of the overruling, intelligent, constructive force which gives to Mycteroperca this ability?” Is what is the “natural” actually “subtlety, chicanery, trickery?” Think of spiders and their beautiful webs. Think of “the rainbowcolored jellyfish that spreads its prismed tentacles like streamers of great beauty, only to sting and torture all that falls within their radiant folds.” Perhaps the main element of the “overruling power” of nature is “illusion.” The end is a little muddled; but the naturalist “message” is reasonably clear. Competition for power in the economic world of human beings is like competition for life in the natural world. “Man himself is busy digging the pit and fashioning the snare, but he will not believe it. His feet are in the trap of circumstance; his eyes are on an illusion.” The illusion is the idea that human beings could attain an almost divine perfection by “conforming” their lives to the “benign” patterns of nature. Religion and romanticism in this sense are false: the reality is that life feeds on life.

New worlds to conquer The Titan is more intricate in its depiction of business machinations. In Chicago, Cowperwood works his entrepreneurial magic once again. He takes on the power brokers who control the city gas utilities, quietly acquiring stock and franchises. He again seeks social respectability and acceptance by making an honest woman of Aileen; but his new wife’s lack of decorum and social grace is a hindrance. Moreover, the “gas lords,” whose wives constitute a major part of high society, are now his enemies; and Cowperwood’s ambitions are once again thwarted. When he meets Stephanie Platow, a connoisseur of the arts, he loses all interest in Aileen and takes Stephanie as his mistress. He soon discovers that he is not Stephanie’s only lover and that even Aileen has been unfaithful. But now another female object of desire appears, seventeen-year-old Berenice Fleming, thirty-five years his junior – a fact that gives him some pause, but not for long.

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The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 had showcased the wonders of electricity, and Cowperwood enters into an expensive battle for control of the new electric conversion of city streetcars. In a complicated maneuver, he manipulates a run on Chicago banks so that he has a shot at controlling the elevated train system in the central business district of Chicago (L-Trains, the Union Loop). When he fails in his bid to obtain fifty-year leases for the system, he hatches a scheme to set up a dummy Transportation Commission in the state legislature. His efforts fail, and his financial empire is in jeopardy. He and his wife, Aileen, move to New York, where he has set up his young mistress on Park Avenue. Aileen finds out about Berenice and threatens him with suicide and scandal or impoverishment. He sells off his entire holdings and takes Berenice to Europe – where he plans to start again.

Going Nowhere Fast: Fortune and Fortuna in Sister Carrie The desire for sex and money also informs the most compelling work of Dreiser’s early period, Sister Carrie (1900). Dreiser’s “fallen woman” story is equally the story of a fallen man. The central theme of money is elaborated through a number of psychological, social, and philosophical issues that can be summed up in the word fortune. In myth, the goddess Fortuna at her whim would spin the wheel of fate around in a great circle, bringing the highborn down and raising the lowborn up. In Dreiser’s novel, the motion of this mythic emblem is combined with that of the half-circle – rocking back and forth – a motion that gives only the illusion of progress. This cyclic motion is repeatedly imaged in large metaphors of the ebb and flow of the sea, the currents of the winds, and more insistently in a small domestic symbol: the rocking-chair. The back and forth motion is also symbolic of the human wavering between instinct and intellect, external force and internal will. The wheel and the rocking chair also characterize the structure of the novel, as the story goes back and forth between Carrie and her lovers, and comes full circle, with the low high, and the high low.

The five-act structure The plot-action of the forty-seven chapters of Sister Carrie at times seems to be rambling, and the time-line is not always clear. But there is an inherent if not always obvious dramatic structure in the work. It may be divided into five acts. 116

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Act I: Encounters: Little Sister Comes to the Big City In the summer of 1889, with very little money in her purse, eighteen-year-old Carrie Meeber sets out on a train from rural Wisconsin to Chicago in search of employment. Not especially intelligent, her head filled with dubious dreams, she plans to live with her sister while she searches for work. On the train she is approached by a smooth-talking, rather dandified traveling salesman, Charles Drouet, who sizes her up as a possible sexual prospect. Carrie is charmed and exchanges addresses with the flamboyant stranger. Thus early do we see the seamy side of the story about to unfold. But Carrie at this point is basically a sympathetic character; she seems neither egregiously scheming nor blatantly immoral, just rather simple about people and situations. At her sister’s home, reality intrudes with a vengeance. The house is unpleasantly dingy and bare, and her sister and her husband are generally unhappy, irritable, dull, and miserly. Carrie finds only a menial job in a downat-the-heels shoe factory. She falls ill, loses her pitiful job, and for days walks the streets of Chicago again looking for work, finding nothing. Since Carrie is no longer contributing any money to the household, her sister urges her to return to Wisconsin. Meanwhile, we see an evening in the life of Drouet. He has dinner out and goes to a bar, where the reader is introduced to George W. Hurstwood. Beginning as an ordinary barkeep, Hurstwood has become a successful manager and is a solid, rather well-off, middle-class citizen. Drouet’s assessment of Hurstwood and the customers constitutes a fairly keen description of types and class distinctions by Dreiser, as do Hurstwood’s own observations of his clientele and his varied manner of conversing with them (Ch. 5). One day, Carrie encounters Drouet by chance and, charmed again, she unburdens herself to him. He offers Carrie money because “femininity affected his feelings” and he loves to have women “succumb to his charms,” though he is not evil (Ch. 7). He, like Carrie, is “a merry, unthinking moth of the lamp.”8 Dreiser here offers one of his frequently intrusive “philosophical” comments. Carrie is strong in the “instinct of self-protection,” which is not surprising, since after all, nature has put “untutored fear” of danger into the “unwise head” of creatures as “small as the chipmunk.” She, “like the sheep in its unwisdom,” is yet “strong in feeling.” The opening of Chapter 7 provides another opportunity to moralize. Dreiser’s narrator delivers a short discourse on the “true meaning of money.” When “each individual realizes” that “this thing primarily stands for” an illusion, then “many of our social, religious, and political troubles will have permanently passed.” Carrie’s attitude is that money is something everyone else has and therefore she must have. A person of her “order of 117

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mind” would be “content to be cast away upon a desert island with a bundle of money”; only starvation would teach her that “in some cases it would have no value.” Carrie’s seemingly naive if not quite innocent character is sketched in the rest of Chapter 7. She takes Drouet’s money and goes to clothing shops. She feels a little ashamed of taking the money, but now she can have a “nice” new jacket and a “nice” pair of “pretty button shoes,” and stockings, and a skirt. In a significant gesture, she caresses the bills, feeling “that she was immensely better off for the having of them. It was something that was power in itself.” She worries about how she is to explain the new clothes to her sister without revealing her indebtedness to a man she hardly knows. A few days later, however, she agrees to move in with Drouet, based on a promise of marriage when he has concluded a big business deal. Is she completely naive about what is developing? She certainly knows she is transgressing traditional codes for women. Act II: Seduction: Beguiling Hurstwood One evening Drouet invites Hurstwood to their “home” and introduces him to Carrie. Hurstwood is approaching a mid-life crisis when he meets Carrie, who is half his age. He is leading an utterly conventional life. He is married to a modestly attractive woman, has relatively nice children, and has a fairly comfortable residence on the north side of Chicago. Between Mr and Mrs G. W. Hurstwood, we are told, “there was no great feeling of dissatisfaction.” It is true that once in a while “he would meet a woman whose youth, sprightliness, and humour would make his wife seem rather deficient by contrast, but the temporary dissatisfaction which such an encounter might arouse would be counterbalanced by his social position and a certain matter of policy.” He is the complete bourgeois. For reasons that are not made entirely clear, Drouet suggests that Hurstwood visit Carrie while he is away on sales trips. The expected occurs, and when Drouet returns and learns that Carrie has been going out with Hurstwood, he and she have a fight during which Carrie learns that Hurstwood is married. Instead of recognizing her own moral culpability, she reproaches Drouet for not having told her that Hurstwood is a married man. Hurstwood gradually becomes more and more indiscreet. Learning that Carrie is to appear in a local theatrical production, he goes to see her performance. Mrs Hurstwood soon learns that her husband has been frequently seen with another woman and tells him that she intends to divorce him and leave him penniless. Hurstwood’s conventional life is suddenly in shambles, not because of inexorable circumstances, but as a result of his own actions. 118

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Act III: The Fall: “Fate” Takes a Hand The main crisis of the story now occurs. In the middle of the narrative, Hurstwood finds the company safe standing open (Ch. 27). Inside is $10,000 in fifty- and one-hundred dollar bills. He touches the bills, thinking “Surely no harm could come from looking at it!” He lifts the bills out: “They were so smooth, so compact, so portable.” He suddenly decides to take them. But once all the money is in the handbag, “a revulsion of feeling seized him.” He puts the bills back in their boxes and back in the safe. He then realizes that he has put some of the bills in the wrong boxes. Reflecting the back-and-forth motion of the entire novel and its imagery, he takes the money-boxes out again, pushes the safe door to, and begins to rearrange the bills in the proper order. “While the money was in his hand the lock clicked. . . . He grabbed at the knob and pulled vigorously. It had closed.” Chance – prompted by his own actions – has decided his fate. Hurstwood now thinks desperately of flight from the police – and from further scandal. He can take a train to Detroit and from there escape to Canada. Thinking of Carrie at last, he goes to her apartment and tells her that Drouet is hurt and in the hospital and needs to see her at once. On the train, Carrie becomes suspicious. Hurstwood confesses to lying about Drouet’s injury, but he immediately lies again. He tells Carrie that his wife has no further claims on him, intimating that he is already divorced. He also conceals the fact that he has $10,000 in stolen money. With misgivings, Carrie agrees to his plan to flee to Canada since Drouet seems to have abandoned her. Act IV: Descent: Hurstwood’s Disintegration In Montreal, Hurstwood and Carrie are “married” in a ceremony he has duped her into believing is legal, even though they use the false name of Wheeler. While in Canada, Hurstwood is sought out by a representative of his employers and given the opportunity to repay the stolen money. Hurstwood restores almost all of it, and he and Carrie go back to the States. In New York, Hurstwood looks in vain for work. Eventually, he is able to buy into a small tavern with what remains of his money; but the partnership does not work out, and he loses almost all the rest of his assets. Again Hurstwood pounds the pavement looking for work, but little by little he loses his incentive and begins to spend his days at home doing nothing. Soon bill collectors are on their heels, and he becomes more and more furtive. In the summer of 1894 (five years since the opening of the story), Carrie finds work as a chorus girl at the Casino Theatre in Manhattan. In the fall, she 119

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is hired for the chorus of the Broadway Theatre; and at the beginning of 1895, she gets a speaking part in the show. Hurstwood’s path, however, is ever downward. One vivid scene involves his working as a scab laborer during the Brooklyn streetcar strike (Ch. 41). Hurstwood finds it surprisingly hard to control the speed of the car; the track has sharp dangerous curves in it; strikers put obstacles on it and jeer at him when he slows down. It is bitterly cold, and he is tired and hungry and scared. On the third run of the day, he is pelted with rocks and other objects, forced from the car, beaten up a little, and fired at, suffering a flesh wound. Not fully understanding what he has been through, Carrie’s disgust with Hurstwood increases. All he seems to do is sit reading the newspaper in the rocking chair. In the spring, she counts up her money and sends him shopping for food. Then she packs up her belongings, leaves him twenty dollars, and goes out to set up an apartment with a friend from the theater. Hurstwood returns to the empty flat and finds the money and a farewell note. Stunned, he sinks down in the rocking chair, feeling “mere sensation, without thought.” At midnight he is “still rocking, staring at the floor” (Ch. 42). Carrie opens in a new show and moves to the posh Wellington Hotel. In the fall, her show goes on the road. She has money, luxuries, and many admirers – everything she had dreamed of as a young farm girl from Wisconsin. Meanwhile, now destitute, Hurstwood begs money from strangers and sleeps in a flophouse in the Bowery. Act V: Ascent: Carrie Rocks On From the fall of 1895 through the winter of 1896, Hurstwood works at menial jobs. Unfit for the work, he is temporarily hospitalized, turned out, and reduced to begging again. At the same time, Carrie’s stage name is emblazoned in lighted signs all over the theater district of New York (Ch. 45). The penultimate chapter is made to carry a lot of weight as Dreiser sums things up, contrasting Carrie’s and Hurstwood’s lives. Carrie’s theatrical success catches the attention of Drouet, who comes backstage to see if he can renew intimacies. When Drouet inadvertently reveals that Hurstwood stole the money back in Chicago, Carrie suddenly feels a “new light . . . shining upon all the years since her enforced flight” (Ch. 46); she imagines that Hurstwood “took it on her account.” A couple of nights later, Hurstwood accosts Carrie at the foyer entrance of the theater. If “there ever had lurked any feeling in her heart against him, it deserted her now.” Her lips tremble as she hands him some small dollar bills, which he receives “almost resenting her excessive pity. It came hard to him to receive it from such a source.”

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The quick snapshots of their different lives continue. Carrie’s manager suggests that with her current celebrity, she could be a hit in London. Drouet is rejected, and Hurstwood is forgotten as Carrie’s dream of fame expands. Hurstwood survives principally by begging and by availing himself of charities in the city. The following winter Carrie returns to New York and appears in a new Broadway play. An old friend named Ames (who appears briefly earlier in the book) visits Carrie in her luxury apartment and offers her advice. He tells her that she should abandon comedy for serious drama, that she has the look, the face, especially the eyes and mouth, to communicate “feeling” to a feeling-hungry world. He adds that if she lives for herself alone, her looks and her gift will quickly fade: “Nature takes care of that.” Carrie doesn’t understand everything that he says, but she is “thrilled to be taken so seriously.” She feels the faint beginnings of a return of her longing for the “ideal.” It is hard to tell if we are to take Ames’s vision seriously. It seems rather trivial as expressed, and Dreiser is ironic regarding Carrie. It seems to Carrie a very “long way” to achieve “this better thing,” and after all, there is so much “comfort” in her present surroundings. So she does “nothing,” indulging in “inactivity” combined with vague “grieving” and “longing.” In her vapidity, Carrie “troubled over” her conflicted feelings “in her rocking-chair for days” (Ch. 46). The last chapter opens with an impressionistic picture of the homeless men in the Bowery. Dreiser describes the men as “of the class which simply floats and drifts, every wave of people washing up one, as breakers do driftwood upon a stormy shore.” The imagery then shifts to animals and gaslight. In the faint light of the gas lamps, a crowd waits for shops to open; they look at the store windows “as dumb brutes look, as dogs paw and whine.” Hurstwood takes a flophouse room, in which a “small gas-jet furnishes a “sufficient light.” He turns the gas off, then turns it on again, “but applied no match.” When he smells the gas, he fumbles for the bed. “‘What’s the use?’ he said weakly, as he stretched himself to rest.” This scene is counterpointed with a description not only of Carrie’s continued triumphs, but also her mental vapidity. Carrie strives to follow Ames’s advice to better herself by reading a book he has recommended, Balzac’s Pere Goriot, a novel about money, poverty, insincerity, and disloyalty. She “nearly” catches the full “sympathetic significance” of the book; but she grows weary of it, yawns, and looks out her window at the expensive carriages “rolling up Fifth Avenue.” In further ironies, Drouet is pictured as unfazed by Carrie’s rejection of him; we see him pursuing a couple of loose girls on Fortieth Street with a

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friend. Meanwhile, Hurstwood’s ex-wife, daughter, and new son-in-law are riding the train into the city in a luxurious Pullman car. Having gotten all of her husband’s previous fortune, Mrs Hurstwood is now a smug well-to-do matron, and her supercilious daughter, used to material comfort, has caught a rich husband. The final gambit of the novel is a description of Carrie Meeber’s confused perceptions of her life and of life in general, mixed with the narrator’s musings. Carrie appears to have “attained that which in the beginning seemed life’s object.” She has gowns and a carriage, furniture, a bank account, friends of the sort who “would bow and smile in acknowledgment of her success.” But, as she sits dreaming in her rocking chair, she is indifferent to all that she once desired. The narrator rather opaquely moralizes on the intellectual and emotional nature of the human mind, invoking the figure of a dreamer ebbing and flowing in the “ideal.” As the pathetic dreamer of the ideal simply watches and follows, “so watched Carrie, so followed, rocking and singing.” She clings “by force of her moods alone” to the idea that the big city of Chicago offers new life and loveliness. But “Chicago, New York; Drouet, Hurstwood; the world of fashion and the world of the stage – these were but incidents. Not them, but that which they represented, she longed for.” But “Time proved the representation false.” This is the narrator’s assertion merely; we are not shown this. There follows more rather opaque moralizing from the narrator on the relative nature of evil and the desire for something better. The last two paragraphs of the novel sum up Carrie’s past and future. “Drouet abandoned his claim and was seen no more. Of Hurstwood’s death she was not even aware,” not even of the harbor boat at that very moment bearing his “nameless body to the Potter’s Field.” She is simply still waiting – waiting for her vague dreams to become somehow more “real.” The attained is for her the unattained – and the result futile, though she does not know why. Such, says the narrator, is the human condition. The novel concludes with an apostrophe to Carrie: “Know, then, that for you is neither surfeit nor content. In your rocking-chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel.” Her longings are unsatisfied; her life is somehow empty. Like many another reader, I find that the novel ends in inconsistent cliches. The conclusion does not clearly arise from the body of the narrative. But perhaps the opaque philosophical “message” at the end is partially clarified by the previously mentioned passage on the forces of free will and instinct in Chapter 8. The narrator declared that in Carrie “instinct and reason, desire and understanding, were at war for the mastery.” The conclusion of the novel seems to reflect these thoughts in an attempt to point a “moral”: material success does not bring inner peace. Is this an extension of the idea that animal existence will 122

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be replaced by enlightened reason and free will? Presumably, the evolution of that transcendent “light that cannot fail” explains Carrie’s character in terms of the general human condition. But what does this have to do with the story we have just read? The last image is of Carrie sitting in her rocker – dreaming about nothing – having learned nothing – and going nowhere.

Notes 1. For a succinct and forceful overview of the Dreiser world, see Eby (ACAF, 2009), 572–586. 2. Cf. Zola, Experimental Novel. Cf. Jack London’s metaphor of existence as “ferment” or “yeast” composed of organisms voraciously eating one another in Chapter 5 of The Sea-Wolf. 3. The publication of Sister Carrie was complicated and delayed, supposedly because of moral objections from the wife of F. N. Doubleday, the publisher. The “legend” is that Frank Norris turned the tide in favor of publication. Dreiser became a symbol of attempted authorial “suppression” for the next generation of writers. See the description and documentation of this famous literary legend in Pizer’s Norton Critical Edition of Sister Carrie (Dreiser 1970), 433–70, esp. 433, 455–458. 4. The “Genius” is supposedly based, at least in part, on Dreiser himself, on his own struggles as a self-proclaimed misunderstood genius and “varietist” in sexual relationships. The book was censored by various agencies, but it was published in full in 1923. The quotation marks around “Genius” would seem to be an ironic qualification; when asked about the title, Dreiser remarked that readers would have to decide for themselves what the quotation marks meant. 5. Space permitting, a comparison of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and London’s Martin Eden (1909) would be instructive on this theme. Note also the class/sex theme in Norris’s Vandover and the Beast and the Madonna/whore theme in McTeague (see preceding chapter). 6. Dreiser’s Cowperwood is loosely based on the career of Chicago and Philadelphia transport magnate, Charles Tyson Yerkes (1837–1905). 7. See Eby, ACAF (2009), for a concise discussion of “heroic philosophy in the face of impersonal forces” presented by Cowperwood and other of Dreiser’s characters. 8. The chapter title, “The Lure of the Material: Beauty Speaks for Itself,” identifies major themes of the book; later chapters have parallel titles regarding the flesh and the spirit, e.g., Chs 20 and 21, both titled “The Lure of the Spirit: The Flesh in Pursuit.” Some critics, making use of these chapters in particular, see Carrie as symbolic of the spirit and Drouet and Hurstwood as symbolic of the flesh – a gross oversimplification, in my view, if not a complete misreading. 123

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See also M. D. Bell (1993); Bremer (1992); Eby (1988); Eby and Cassuto (2004); Elias (1949); Fisher (1985); Fleissner (2004); Geismar (1953); Gerber (1964; rev. 1992); Hochman (2001); Howard (1985); Hussman (1983); A. Kaplan (1988); Lehan (1969); Link (2004); J. Martin (1967); R. Martin (1981); Michaels (1987); Mitchell (1989); Pizer (1976, 1984 [1966], 1993); Poirier (1966); Shi (1995); Zanine (1993).

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Chapter 8

Subjective Realism Stephen Crane’s Impressionist Fictions

Impressionism refers to an artistic movement originating in European painting and music about the late 1860s and continuing past the end of the century. The impressionist movement in painting influenced not only American artists, but also several major American writers. A number of works by Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, Henry James, Edith Wharton, W. D. Howells, Frank Norris, and Sarah Orne Jewett reflect in varying degrees impressionist influence.1 Historically, the term impressionism was initially applied to a loose group of later nineteenth-century French painters who shared a number of revisionary attitudes toward representations of reality. The best known in the English
speaking world include Edouard Manet (1832–1883), Edgar Degas (1834–1917), Paul C
ezanne (1839–1906), Claude Monet (1840–1926), Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), along with important predecessors like Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) and Jean Fran¸cois Millet (1814–1875). With the exception of the “Barbizon” painters, the dominant style of painting until the middle of the nineteenth century had been “traditional” and “academic”; the central established principle was that objects should be rendered in precise detail and with a carefully realistic “smooth” (almost photographic) finish.2 The impressionists presented visual detail from a particular angle of vision colored by a subjective mood. They emphasized the idiosyncratic and personal, the subjective and individualistic. In part, this attitude was a reaction against the “scientific” idea of the arts – and thus went counter to certain theories of naturalism and realism in literature. As a literary term, impressionism primarily indicates works that focus on the sensory and psychological impact of things on a character – not only from Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson. Ó 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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the character’s point-of-view, but also from the author’s or narrator’s. In some contrast to realism and mimesis, the impressionist presents things as they would appear to a particular consciousness rather than as what they presumably are in external actuality. Some impressionist works use physical objects to convey the interior meaning, some focus on a purely interior mental-emotional response, some achieve the integration of both. Impressionism emphasizes the interface between the internal and the external. This does not mean impressionism evades realism. Instead, it foregrounds subjective realism. While for the turn-of-the-century literary impressionists fiction is aggressively “pictorial,” the picture is a subjective interpretation, characterized by highly selective details. Thus we have the sense of the ultra-personal often associated with impressionism – theoretically in contrast or opposition to objective realism.3 In this regard, the impressionists were interested in the technique of synesthesia: the description of one sensory experience in terms of another (such as the blue sound of a shark’s fin in Crane’s “Open Boat”). Or the reality of human experience might be rendered as a montage of images.4 Under impressionist influence, Stephen Crane (1871–1900) became the writer who some critics (including myself) believe is the most accomplished artist among the naturalists. Norris and London are given to occasional excesses of melodramatic overwriting; and the inadequacies of Theodore Dreiser’s style are made even more obvious by comparison with Crane.5 Several of Crane’s most celebrated works provide striking instances of the interaction of literary technique, naturalist determinism, and epistemological impressionism.

Pictures at an Exhibition For years, teachers and critics have used Crane’s stories “The Open Boat” and “The Blue Hotel” as models of naturalism. These works are generally taken to be in the mode of hard determinism: dramatizing the submission to the inexorable forces of nature, heredity, or society. But both “The Blue Hotel” and “The Open Boat” are overtly contextualized in larger epistemological frames that cast doubt on the inhuman neutrality of nature – and indeed on the human ability to interpret things correctly at all. They are also vivid examples of impressionist technique exemplifying the mode of subjective realism.

Hotel blues Impressionist influence is evident in several passages of “The Blue Hotel” (1898). One is the famous naturalist description of the human world as a 126

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“space-lost bulb” whirling in an empty cosmos. This narratival perspective, hedged with ironic qualifications, contrasts with the views of several of the characters, whose limited perceptions form the principal basis of the story. Arriving in a small town in Nebraska (at that time the mid-western frontier), a man from the East, called simply “the Swede,” takes a room in Scully’s Palace Hotel. The hotel is painted “a light blue,” a peculiar “shade that is on the legs of a kind of heron, causing the bird to declare its position against any background.” The blue color makes the building seem to be “screaming and howling” against the “gray swampish hush” of the otherwise “dazzling winter landscape.” The blue building is a picturesque marvel to travelers who are used to the “brownreds” and “dark greens” of buildings in the East. Scully has thus shown himself “a master” when “he chose his paints.” The Swede is nervous about taking a room in Scully’s blue hotel because his head is filled with adventure stories from “dime novels” about unscrupulous gamblers and murderous robbers. This reference to these tawdry action-packed predecessors to comic books identifies the main character as romantically naive and uninformed. Thus predisposed to see villainy everywhere, the Swede drinks heavily and accuses his hotelkeeper’s son, Johnnie, of cheating at cards. This accusation is made in front of the other players, significantly including a westerner and an easterner, who are representative rural and urban figures: a cowboy and a city dweller. The Swede has a one-sided fistfight with Johnnie, beats him handily, and leaves the Blue Hotel feeling good about his strength and his animal instincts. As a blinding snowstorm rises, he swaggers down the street, feeling that his fictitious prowess is validated by pain. He enjoys the smarts on his face from Johnnie’s fists and the stings from the windblasts of snow (Ch. 8). As he enters a saloon on the other side of town, a red-burning lamp turns a swirl of snowflakes a “blood-colour.” The swaggering Swede drinks some more and picks another fight, this time with a real killer. The narrator comments that although we “picture the world” as “thick with conquering and elate humanity,” here it is “hard to imagine a peopled earth.” Instead, one “viewed the existence of man then as a marvel, and conceded a glamour of wonder to these lice which were caused to cling to a whirling, fire-smitten, ice-locked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb” (Ch. 8; my italics). This classic naturalist description of the world seems to be an omniscient narratorial comment, but it is qualified by the rhetoric of perception. The story is as much an exploration of the limitations of human knowledge and perception as it is a pronouncement that the world is neutral, indifferent, or blank. Misperception is the subsuming theme, from the Swede’s mistaken conviction that the hotel inhabitants are cheating him, to his misjudgment of 127

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the knife-carrying gambler at the end, to the other characters’ final assessment of their responsibility for what really happened. Months later, two of the participants in the drama are mulling over what happened. The easterner says that they have all participated in the Swede’s murder somehow. “We are all in it! This poor gambler isn’t even a noun. He is a kind of adverb. Every sin is the result of a collaboration. We, five of us, have collaborated in the murder of this Swede. . . . that fool of an unfortunate gambler came merely as a culmination, the apex of a human movement . . .” (Ch. 9). The passage encapsulates one aspect of the determinist view: there are multiple causes to any effect that can be understood – if they can be sorted out. But here the determinist outlook is partially undercut, subjected to naive but incisive skepticism. The westerner exclaims, “Well, I didn’t do anythin’, did I?” Their contrary views illustrate the radical indeterminism of Crane’s determinism. None of the final explanations is “final”: not the ironic notice on the cash register, suggesting that the Swede’s death is the determined “amount” of his “purchase,” not the Cowboy’s denial of responsibility, not the idea of chance, not the easterner’s suggestion of “complicity” in human affairs. It’s all point of view; and maybe it all means – nothing.

The epistemological current of “The Open Boat” Non-meaning may also be the final meaning of another classic naturalist text, “The Open Boat” (1897). Again, the basic story is starkly simple: it recounts the desperate attempt of four men (an oiler, a cook, a newspaper correspondent, and the ship’s captain) to keep from drowning. After being shipwrecked, they have been cast upon the open sea in a small lifeboat.6 As they try at last to gain the shore, the physically strongest of the men is killed swimming against the current and the weakest survives because he is so fat that he simply floats to safety. The descriptions of nature and of the condition of the men are not objective. From the first, they reflect the collective point of view of the four men in the boat. Many clues in the narrative suggest that, just as in “The Blue Hotel,” what we see through the men’s eyes may not be what is really there to be seen. As the narrative progresses, the view narrows to that of the correspondent. He acts as the main center of consciousness for most of the story, though he is not a fully focalizing character: a larger narrative voice ironically comments on the events throughout. A romanticized, sentimentalized, and malignantly personified Nature is both foregrounded and ironically undercut in this story.7 Nature seems outrageously oblivious to their predicament. The most famous passage is the correspondent’s 128

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interpretation of a huge stony wind-tower (which may or may not be an abandoned life-saving station):

............................................................................................... This tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants. It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual – nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent.

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But not even this “final” interpretation is final. The epistemological current of the story is implicit in the first sentence, variations of which stand as the title of more than one critical study of Stephen Crane: “None of them knew the colour of the sky.” It is a wonderful first sentence, combining as it does the weary and desperate situation of four shipwrecked men, their collective psychology, the epistemological theme of limited perception and knowledge, and impressionist emphasis on color and seeing. The collective point of view is from inside the boat.

............................................................................................... None of them knew the colour of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colours of the sea. The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks.

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After setting forth the basic situation and introducing the four survivors, the description continues the impressionist vein, widening the narrative perspective to include the reader, apostrophized as “you,” while the sea continues to be imaged as animate and hostile. “As each slaty wall of water approached, it shut all else from the view of the men in the boat.” There seems to be “a terrible grace” in the movement of the waves as they come “in silence,” save for the “snarling of the crests.” The narrative point of view then shifts to a larger ironic perspective: “Viewed from a balcony, the whole thing would doubtless have been weirdly picturesque.” The “colour of the sea changed from slate to emerald green streaked with amber lights, and the foam was like tumbling snow. The process of the breaking day was unknown to them. They were aware only of this effect upon the colour of the waves that rolled toward them.” 129

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The beginning of Chapter 2 continues to describe the effects of the sea in terms of light, color, and motion – while emphasizing subjective perspectivity: “The crest of each of these waves was a hill, from the top of which the men surveyed for a moment a broad tumultuous expanse, shining and wind-riven. It was probably splendid, it was probably glorious, this play of the free sea, wild with lights of emerald and white and amber.” Later, as the men have begun to give up hope, the sea reflects a mood of helpless isolation. At night, the correspondent feels that he is “the one man afloat on all the oceans.” At this point a shark appears, described in terms of color, light, and sound. A “gleaming trail of phosphorescence, like blue flame, was furrowed on the black waters.” It “might have been made by a monstrous knife.” As the correspondent hears “the whirroo of the dark fin,” he sees “an enormous fin speed like a shadow through the water, hurling the crystalline spray and leaving the long glowing trail” (Ch. 5). After a while the shark (perhaps exemplifying the indifference of nature) apparently simply disappears into the vast ocean. Just before the men make a final attempt to get to shore (Ch. 7), the description focuses on the water and light. As dawn breaks, the gray water begins to reflect “carmine and gold,” and the sky changes to “pure blue”; then sunlight “flamed on the tips of the waves.” That it seems “beautiful” stands in ironic contrast with the life-threatening situation in which the men find themselves. The last paragraph’s subjective impressionism is directly thematic: “When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea’s voice to the men on the shore . . .” There is a sense that the sea-wind is speaking to them – and the men “felt that they could then be interpreters.” This statement is usually taken to be neutral, as though from a detached narrative position. But it emphasizes (perhaps ironically, even sarcastically) not objective reality, but subjectivity: the men felt they could be interpreters.

A village monster The impressionist painters in France and America shared the social dissent of naturalist writers, claiming to be more interested in people of lesser status, the common people, and the underdog. This attitude is particularly clear in another vivid example of impressionist description in Crane’s fiction. The novella, The Monster (1899, 1901) is set in the little village of Whilomville. It is a story of social and racial prejudice in rural America. A typical small town physician, Dr Trescott, a benefactor of the community, lives quietly with his wife and his little son Jimmie. The Trescotts have a black servant named Henry Johnson, who has a fondness for showy lavender trousers. 130

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He is at first a minstrel figure; but like Jim in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, he is dependable, warm, tender, and loyal. He saves the doctor’s son from a fire at their house and suffers horrible burns to his face. Ostensibly, because of his disfiguration in the fire, he is the “monster” of the title; but by the end of the tale it is clear that the town, not the black man, is the monster, snobbish, narrowminded, and bigoted. Some reject the black man because he is a black man, some because he is poor and uneducated, some because he is physically disfigured and horrible to look at. If not as overtly debased as Mark Twain’s villagers in The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899), the townspeople of Whilomville are certainly morally bankrupt and intolerant. The most striking example of impressionist technique in the story is the description of Henry Johnson’s disfigurement during his rescue of the child (Ch. 7). A fire breaks out in the doctor’s chemical laboratory while little Jimmie is asleep in his room upstairs. Although the hallway up to Jimmie’s bedroom is filled with smoke, Johnson finds the boy, wraps him in a blanket, and starts to carry him downstairs. But the “lower hall was all ablaze,” and Johnson momentarily gives up “almost all idea of escaping from the burning house, and with it the desire.” Johnson’s socialization as a black servant has numbed his mind. “He was submitting, submitting because of his fathers, bending his mind in a most perfect slavery to this conflagration.” But the life instinct flickers up when Johnson remembers that there is another “staircase which led from a bedroom to an apartment which the doctor had fitted up as a laboratory and work house.” At this thought, Johnson’s attitude of “submission to the blaze departed instantly,” although he is still afraid of “the battle” he must wage with the beings that dwell in the flames. At the entrance to the laboratory, he comes upon “a strange spectacle.” The “room was like a garden in the region where might be burning flowers. Flames of violet, crimson, green, blue, orange, and purple were blooming everywhere,” like coral and emeralds. “An orange-colored flame leaped like a panther at the lavender trousers. This animal bit deeply into Johnson. There was an explosion at one side, and suddenly before him there reared a delicate, trembling sapphire shape like a fairy lady.” Johnson tries to avoid “the sapphire lady,” but “she was swifter than eagles, and her talons caught in him as he plunged past her . . . twisting this way and that way.” He falls on his back “with his head at the base of an old-fashioned desk.” One of the “silent” jars on the top of the desk “seemed to hold a scintillant and writhing serpent.”

............................................................................................... Suddenly the glass splintered, and a ruby-red snake-like thing poured its thick length out upon the top of the old desk. It coiled and hesitated, and then began to 131

Stephen Crane’s Impressionist Fictions swim a languorous way down the mahogany slant. At the angle it waved its sizzling molten head to and fro over the closed eyes of the man beneath it. Then, in a moment, with a mystic impulse, it moved again, and the red snake flowed directly down into Johnson’s upturned face.

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The exotic horror of the scene is like a gorgeous impressionist painting gone insanely surreal.

The Inexorable Environment: Crane’s Bowery Tales If rural America can be a horror, urban slum life is worse. The grinding, debilitating, numbing effect of life in New York’s Bowery is the subject of several of Crane’s stories and sketches collected in 1900 as Bowery Tales.8 Some of Crane’s “Bowery” stories are in a reportorial mode; others are the work of the impressionist.

Two experiments in misery “George’s Mother” (1896, 1898), an ironically toned picture of New York slum life in the 1890s, is notable for its reproduction of Bowery slang and vernacular. It is an unflinching portrayal of a woman entrapped by the concept of “motherhood” and by her inability to combat the alcoholism of her son. George Kelcey is a budding alcoholic street tough with a menial job and no future, living at home with his mother, whom he both loves and detests. Although the story is basically reportorial, it has many touches of the impressionistic. The denizens of the slum district are like animals in a jungle; their voices are heard howling in the dusk. In the distance, amidst the thick smoke of a profusion of chimneys on tenement roofs, “an enormous brewery, towered over the other buildings,” like “a great bird, flying.” Hanging like a chain of gold from its “neck” is a sign made of great gilt letters advertising a brand of beer – symbolic of the triumph of alcoholism in Bowery life. In the depiction of a drunken orgy, a “row of bottles made quaint shadows upon the table, and upon a sidewall the keg of beer created a portentous black figure that reared toward the ceiling, hovering over the room and its inmates with spectral stature” (Ch. 9). This blend of impressionism with reportage is the hallmark of both Maggie and The Red Badge of Courage – a composite effect that is vividly exemplified in “An Experiment in Misery” (1894). Indeed, the impressions of the “youth” of that sketch are to a degree a correspondent portrait of those of the “youth” in 132

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Red Badge. The “experiment” of the title implies the artist (or perhaps the scientist) at work. The experiment is a sympathetic yet depressing picture of the derelicts in the skid rows of New York – indeed, of derelicts everywhere. A youth in tattered clothes trudges dejectedly through the rain “toward the downtown places where beds can be hired for coppers” (pennies); when he gets to City Hall Park he starts to feel a little better because he sees men in “tatters that matched his tatters.” At Chatham Square, he aligns himself with “aimless men strewn in front of saloons and lodging houses, standing sadly, patiently, reminding one vaguely of the attitudes of chickens in a storm.” The following description of the elevated train station illustrates the impressionist departure from strict mimetic objectivity to suggest a subjective response implicit in the scene. “Two rivers of people swarmed along the sidewalks, spattered with black mud, which made each shoe leave a scar-like impression. Overhead, elevated trains with a shrill grinding of wheels stopped at the station, which upon its leglike pillars seemed to resemble some monstrous kind of crab squatting over the street.” After getting free food at a soup kitchen, the youth asks where he can find a cheap place to sleep. A man with bushy hair and whiskers, looking like an awkward “assassin,” knows a place. They strike a bargain to share the cost of a flophouse. The dark flophouse is like a charnel house or a chamber of hell: “unholy odors rushed out like fiends.” When the youth’s eyes adjust to the gas-lit dimness, he sees cots thickly littering the floor and “the forms of men sprawled out, lying in death-like silence, or heaving and snoring with tremendous effort, like stabbed fish.” The young man imagines the sleeping men’s howls and groans to be “an utterance of the meaning of the room and its occupants . . . giving voice to the wail of a whole section, a class, a people.” The rest of the sketch features a variety of street dialects as the youth and his new friend walk along City Hall Park. It ends with an evocation of class differences imaged in well-dressed people and in the multitude of tall buildings, which, like the people in their “good clothes,” seem to thrust their heads skyward. It seems to the youth “emblematic of a nation forcing its regal head into the clouds, throwing no downward glances; in the sublimity of its aspirations ignoring the wretches who may founder at its feet. The roar of the city in his ear was . . . the clink of coin, the voice of the city’s hopes, which were to him no hopes.” The young man feels like an “outcast,” and he comes to wear a “criminal expression.” The last phrase of the story attributes this expression to “certain convictions,” implying social protest but left unarticulated. Realist objectivity has been left behind – though not necessarily accuracy and truth – the recurrent watchwords of realist theory. 133

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Maggie in the Bowery: Another Experiment in Misery Crane was only twenty-one when in 1893 he published Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, at his own expense, under the pseudonym of Johnston Smith. It is the simple story of the short unhappy life of a young woman who dreams of escaping New York’s Bowery but who ends up a prostitute and apparently drowns in the East River. A later version (1896) clothes her final end in impressionist suggestiveness rather than precise realist description. Crane’s nonjudgmental and more or less sympathetic depiction of a woman’s path toward prostitution did not exactly conform to public taste at the time. Moreover, the story features a good deal of vernacular dialogue, some of it unacceptable in polite society. Critics have suggested that Crane’s book might have had more success if it had contained an indignant message demanding reform, as in the works of the Muckrakers (see Ch. 16). The sensational reformist expos
es by the police reporter and photographer, Jacob Riis, published just prior to Maggie, were great public successes: most notably, How the Other Half Lives (1890) and The Children of the Poor (1892). Maggie, though laced with ironic narrative observations, tends to be a dispassionately objective picture rather than an outraged remonstration against the conditions of the poor. And (once again in Crane), it also presents an impressionistic rendering of slum life.9 Although Maggie is an early attempt at realism that embodies naturalistic determinism, it makes little or no reference to an inherited disposition; the characters seem completely molded by their environment. It is not merely the poverty and squalor of their home that corrupts Maggie and her brother Jimmie, but the sum total of the urban life surrounding them. Imagery of the Bowery as hell permeates the story. The narrative begins with a description of Jimmie as “a very little boy,” standing on a gravel heap in Rum Alley throwing stones at a circle of “howling urchins from Devil’s Row.” Blood dripping from a cut in his head, Jimmie looks like “a tiny insane demon”; reeling in pain, his “roaring curses” change to “blasphemous chatter.” Jimmie’s father, plodding home from work, rescues him, but kicks his son savagely as he leads him home to a “dark region” of streets and gutters and “gruesome doorways” filled with “withered persons.” There are so many of these dead souls that the tenement building “quivered and creaked from the weight of humanity stamping about in its bowels” (Ch. 2).

Blossom in a mud puddle Maggie and Jimmie’s childhood consists mostly of abuse at the hands of their constantly battling parents. After their drunken father’s early death, the two 134

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children go to work while their mother sits at home in a drunken stupor. “The girl . . . blossomed in a mud puddle,” growing up “to be a most rare and wonderful production of a tenement district, a pretty girl.” Her brother suggests that if she can’t get a regular job, she might consider becoming a hooker: “‘Mag, I’ll tell yeh dis! See? Yeh’ve edder got t’ go on d’ toif er go t’ work.’ Whereupon she went to work, having the feminine aversion to the alternative” (Ch. 5). That is the 1896 text. The 1893 version reads “‘Yeh’ve edder got teh go teh hell or go teh work.’ Whereupon she went to work, having the feminine aversion of going to hell.” To “go on the turf” is a variant of “to walk the streets.” The revision is oddly both more explicit and more circumspect. Maggie gets a job sewing collars and cuffs, working in “a room where sat twenty girls of various shades of yellow discontent.” Meanwhile, Jimmie assumes “the vague position of head of the family.” As the “incumbent in that office, he stumbled upstairs at night, as his father had done before him. He reeled about the room, swearing at his relations, or went to sleep on the floor.” By the time Maggie is eighteen, Jimmie has amassed a formidable record with the police. One day he brings home Pete, his older more “worldly” friend. Pete is soon trying to sweep Maggie off her feet. Her romantic dreams for herself are juxtaposed with Pete’s more debased romantic self-concept. As Jimmie and Pete “exchanged tales descriptive of their prowess,” Maggie’s “eyes dwelt wonderingly and rather wistfully upon Pete’s face” (Ch. 5). His “aristocratic person” makes her suddenly aware of the shabbiness of her surroundings. Reminiscing over some of his old fights, Pete exclaims “Hully gee! . . . dose mugs can’t phase me. Dey knows I kin wipe up d’ street wid any tree of dem.”10 Maggie perceives such proclamations in the tradition of old romance: “here was the ideal man. . . . Under the trees of her dream-gardens there had always walked a lover.” To Maggie, Pete is a hero: after all, the “sneer upon his mouth” proclaims to “mankind that there was nothing in space which could appall him” (Ch. 6). Maggie “marvelled at him and surrounded him with greatness. She vaguely tried to calculate the altitude of the pinnacle from which he must have looked down upon her.” When Pete leaves, Maggie watches him from her window, thinking “Here was a formidable man who disdained the strength of a world full of fists. Here was one who had contempt for brassclothed power; one whose knuckles could ring defiantly against the granite of law. He was a knight.” Maggie’s reality is quite different from her romantic visions. Both her brother and mother are abusive and physically violent. One Friday, the mother starts drinking whisky in the morning and keeps at it all day. “With lurid face and tossing hair she cursed and destroyed furniture all Friday afternoon. When Maggie came home at half-past six her mother lay asleep amid the wreck of 135

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chairs and a table. Fragments of various household utensils were scattered about the floor.” With a snort, she suddenly sits up and demands to know where Maggie has been: “Why don’ yeh come home earlier? Been loaftn’ ’round d’ streets. Yer getting’ t’ be a regular devil.” When Pete arrives for their date, Maggie, “in a worn black dress, was waiting for him in the midst of a floor strewn with wreckage.” Pete takes Maggie to a music hall where, on an elevated central stage, an “orchestra of yellow silk women and bald-headed men” are playing a popular waltz, while a “battalion of waiters . . . carrying trays of beer glasses” slide among the throng of customers. Men with callused hands, and attired in garments that showed the wear of an endless drudging for a living, smoked their pipes contentedly and spent five, ten, or perhaps fifteen cents for beer” (Ch. 7). Maggie watches the vaudeville show with glistening eyes and “cheeks blushing with excitement.” She “drew deep breaths of pleasure. No thoughts of the atmosphere of the collar-and-cuff factory came to her.” At the end of the evening, Pete says “Say, Mag . . . give us a kiss for takin’ yeh t’ d’ show, will yer?” Maggie nervously but coyly refuses, leaving Pete astonished. “Gee!” he says, “I wonner if I’ve been played for a duffer.” The remark makes it clear that true romance is not quite what he has in mind.

Melodramas of “real life” Pete also takes Maggie to see “plays in which the dazzling heroine was rescued from the palatial home of her treacherous guardian by the hero with the beautiful sentiments” (Ch. 8). Crane’s ironic depiction of these plays astutely characterizes much of the sentimental-melodramatic fiction and drama that formed the contrary milieu for his own more realistic works. For example, while a theatrical “choir” sings Joy to the World inside a fictitious stage “church” with “happy-hued windows,” poor wanderers are “swooning in snow-storms” outside. The spectacle causes Maggie to lose herself: she experiences “joy” with the church singers and feels “in sympathy” with the poor. Viewing the human panorama, “Maggie and the rest of the audience” regard the play as “transcendental realism.” They “encouraged the struggling hero with cries, and jeered the villain, hooting and calling attention to his whiskers.” And when “anybody died in the pale-green snow-storms, the gallery mourned,” hugging the “painted misery” as akin to theirs. Naturally, the last act would be “a triumph for the hero, poor and of the masses, the representative of the audience, over the villain and the rich man.” Pathetically, Maggie wonders “if the culture and refinement she had seen imitated . . . by the heroine on the stage, could be acquired by a girl who lived in a tenement house and worked in a shirt factory.” 136

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Maggie’s dream of upward socioeconomic mobility is based on false hopes and bogus romanticism. The reality of her situation is the immediate subject of the next episode.

Counter-reality – final descent One night, Jimmie and the mother have an especially bad row. “The usual upheaval of tables and chairs had taken place. Crockery was strewn broadcast in fragments. The stove had been disturbed on its legs, and now leaned chaotically to one side. A pail had been upset and water spread in all directions.” When Pete arrives for their date, the mother is lying drunk on the floor and cursing. While Pete tries to persuade Maggie simply to leave and go out on the town with him, she “gazed long at her mother.” That night Pete is able to seduce her. When Maggie goes to live with him, Jimmie and her mother are, ironically enough, scandalized. Moreover, matters soon deteriorate with Pete, who cheats on Maggie with several women, getting one girl pregnant. When Pete is through with her, Maggie tries to return home, but her family turns her away. She is told again that she has gone to the “devil” and is on her way to “hell.” Being told repeatedly that she is fit only for the streets seems to have an effect. Maggie becomes a prostitute briefly and then drowns herself in the river rather than go on. Or so it seems. The last chapters of the narrative suggest, rather than precisely detail, Maggie’s descent into the hellhole of prostitution and apparent suicide at the river of death. In Chapter 17, an unnamed woman walks the streets on a wet night in the “blurred radiance” of the new electric lights. Her journey takes her from the theater district, where she sees the well-off patrons, to the begging spaces of the poor. She passes a “girl of the painted cohorts of the city” and continues past the “places of forgetfulness,” the taverns. From there, she goes to a concert hall where she sees a panorama of social types, then to the darkened blocks of factories leading to the river. As she goes, she changes her demeanor and expression. She looks several men boldly in the face, but, seeing one who is apparently a minister, she thinks of asking for help. He saves “his respectability by a vigorous side-step.” He will not risk his reputation just “to save a soul.” A paragraph omitted in 1896 describes the last person this unnamed “girl” meets on the waterfront. He is like a huge dirt-encrusted river rat, dressed “in torn and greasy garments.” His “small bleared eyes” are “sparkling amidst great rolls of red fat,” and his whole body “quivered and shook like that of a dead jelly fish.” Chuckling and leering, he follows “the girl of the crimson legions” into darkness. 137

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In both the early and revised texts, Chapter 17 ends with the image of the river as having “a deathly black hue,” with a yellow glare from a factory lighting the “waters lapping oilily against timbers.” The “varied sounds of life” have faded and “died away to a silence.” Maggie has repeatedly been told by her family to “go to hell.” It is as if she is now at the river Styx. Critics have also suggested that the final “downward” sequence is suggestive of Dante’s Inferno. The woman makes her way down from the illusory theater district to less and less fashionable areas and finally down to the waterfront – as though encountering various classes of the damned in the circles of hell. Of course, she has been living in hell all her life. It is clear why this novel is seen as a principal exemplar of American literary naturalism. It is also a prime example of American literary impressionism. Notes 1. Literary impressionism in America arose approximately two decades later, in the late 1880s and 1890s. Impressionism is sometimes neglected in American literary history. CLHUS mentions impressionism only once in passing, in the first paragraphs of the chapter on Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein (see 873–874). Why is not clear, especially since we have at least two important studies of Stephen Crane and literary impressionism by Nagel (1980) and Halliburton (1989). 2. The Barbizon school was a group of landscape painters preceding the impressionists; they withdrew from urban life and established an artists’ center around the forests of Barbizon, France (notably, Fontainebleau). 3. Reporting “impressions” of things – rather than the things themselves – would seem to take us a long way from the theory of either realism or naturalism; but it doesn’t necessarily. Sensory emphasis resonated with the ancient dictum of the Roman critic, Horace (65 BC–8 BC): Ut pictura poesis. “As in pictures [painting], so in poetry”): an idea adopted in Anglo-American imagist poetry (see next note). 4. Imagism denotes a school of American modernist poetry from about 1910 to 1918; the best known poets of the Imagistes group are Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Hilda Doolittle (“H. D.”), and Amy Lowell. For discussion of expressionism, the major aesthetic mode directly related to impressionism and often confused with it, see the final chapter of the present volume. 5. One of the best analyses of Crane’s style in connection with his worldview is that of Halliburton, mentioned above. Also see Cain, ACAF (2009), 556–571. 6. As a newspaper correspondent, Crane himself went through such an experience on January 2, 1897 when the Commodore, carrying illegal arms to Cuban insurgents against Spain (a year prior to the outbreak of the Spanish–American 138

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7.

8.

9.

10.

War), was shipwrecked fifteen miles off the Florida coast. See “Stephen Crane’s Own Story” and accompanying documents from Florida Times-Union and the New York Press (January 1897), often reprinted in editions of Crane. The structure of the story emphasizes the subjectivity of the entire experience. The seven chapters of the tale divide into a symmetrical pattern: the first three chapters or sections detail their growing hope; the next three detail their growing despair and anger. The last chapter describes their attempt to make shore, their incomplete rescue, their subjective impressions of their rescuers – and their possibly mistaken conviction that they have perceived some deep meaning in the experience. The name “Bowery” derives from the old road to the New Amsterdam farm of Governor Stuyvesant (who is buried in St Mark’s Episcopal Church “in-theBouwerie”). The name later came to designate a section of lower Manhattan Island, between Chatham Square and Astor Place, east of Broadway. During and after the Civil War, it became a theatrical district; beginning in the 1870s, it slowly degenerated into an area of cheap taverns and dance halls, populated by prostitutes, petty criminals, con-artists, alcoholics, and out-of-work and homeless persons. The book was brought out again by the firm of Appleton in 1896 with the language somewhat sanitized and the last chapters altered. One of their staff editors was Frank Norris, who liked Crane’s work and supported its publication. Although achieving greater critical acceptance than before, the book was still not very successful commercially. The 1893 text is readily available in the Norton Critical Edition of Maggie, ed. Gullason (1979). This volume also contains an essay (234–245) by Parker and Higgins (q.v.) on the revisions demanded by the publisher. The passage is a classic of New York vernacular dialect. See the long paragraph beginning: “‘I met a chump deh odder day way up in deh city,’ he said. ‘I was goin’ teh see a frien’ of mine’” (Ch. 6).

See also M. D. Bell (1993); Benfrey (1992); Berryman (1950, rev. 1962); B. Brown (1996); Colvert (1984); Conder (1984); Crane (1979, 1994); L. H. Davis (1998); Dowling (2007); Fleissner (2004); Fried (1987); Gandal (1997); D. B. Gibson (1968); Howard (1985); G. Jones (1999); Kent (1986); LaFrance (1971); Link (2004); J. Martin (1967); Marz (2001); Mitchell (1989); Solomon (1966); Stallman (1968); C. Wilson (2009); Wolford (1989).

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Chapter 9

Impressions of War The Interior Battlefield

The impressionistic representations of the Civil War examined in this chapter are written from the perspective of three “participants”: a little boy, a Confederate officer, and a Union enlisted man. In each of these narratives – Ambrose Bierce’s “Chickamauga” and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” and Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War – the real battlefield is within the mind of the observer.

Bierce’s Surrealist Impressionism An actual veteran of the Civil War himself (whereas Crane was not), Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?) said that he could not think of anything much worse than Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, a book regarded by others as an American classic. Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1890, 1892) is also a classic of American literature. “Chickamauga” (1889) is less well known, though it should be on every student’s reading list.1 “Chickamauga” reads like a dream narrative set in a nightmare landscape. Its gothic and surreal qualities acquire another level of meaning when one realizes the significance of the title. The battle of Chickamauga, in Tennessee, lasted for three days, September 18–20, 1863. It was part of the larger battle for nearby Chattanooga. The Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg had hemmed in the Confederate forces, and the taking of Chattanooga would split the Confederacy in half. Bierce’s tale, however, does not describe the actual battle. It is a third-person story told mostly from the point of Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson. Ó 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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view of a deaf-mute child (though we don’t learn of his impairment until the end). A little boy of six, playing soldier and wielding a wooden sword, wanders into a tangled forest, where he is frightened by a rabbit with long ears. He runs deeper into the forest and eventually falls asleep. Unawares, he has come up to the edge of the battlefield of Chickamauga. Awakening in the “gathering gloom of twilight,” the boy makes his way to an open space by a creek, where he is surrounded by a “thin, ghostly mist.” Here he sees “a strange moving object,” approaching with a “shambling, awkward gait” and “followed by another and another.” He doesn’t know that they are the retreating Union troops; they are simply bizarre creeping human figures, men crawling “upon their hands and knees,” using “their hands only, dragging their legs,” or crawling on “their knees only, their arms hanging idle at their sides.” They “came by dozens and by hundreds; as far on either hand as one could see in the deepening gloom they extended . . . The very ground seemed in motion toward the creek. Occasionally one who had paused did not again go on, but lay motionless.” The child sees only “that these were men, yet crept like babes.” Since they have human forms, he is not afraid and moves “among them freely, going from one to another and peering into their faces with childish curiosity.” Their “singularly white” faces, many streaked with red clots, remind him of a “painted clown whom he had seen last summer in the circus, and he laughed as he watched them.” The “maimed and bleeding men” creep on, as “heedless” as the boy of the “dramatic contrast between his laughter and their own ghastly gravity.” Since the boy “had seen his father’s negroes creep upon their hands and knees for his amusement” and “had ridden them so, ‘making believe’ they were his horses,” he approaches one of the “crawling figures from behind and with an agile movement mounted it astride.” The man sinks to his chest, recovers, and then flings “the small boy fiercely to the ground.” He looks at the boy with a face that “lacked a lower jaw.” To the boy, the “unnatural prominence of nose, the absence of chin, the fierce eyes, gave this man the appearance of a great bird of prey crimsoned in throat and breast by the blood of its quarry.” Rising to his knees, the man shakes his fist at the child, who runs “terrified at last” to the protection of the farther side of a tree, where he takes “a more serious view of the situation.” Emphasizing the play of shadow and light, Bierce paints the “haunted landscape” in reds and whites. As the wounded men crawl “like a swarm of great black beetles” in a “hideous pantomime,” the horizon begins to brighten with “a strange red light”; the “trunks and branches of the trees” make “a black lacework” against the red glow. This eerie light, we learn later, is from a “fire beyond the belt of woods on the farther side of the creek, reflected to earth from the canopy of its own smoke.” 142

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Now the boy begins another game. He proceeds, as though leading an army into battle, down a slope at “the foremost of the throng” of “his horrible companions.” His “wooden sword still in hand,” he “solemnly directed the march, conforming his pace to theirs and occasionally turning as if to see that his forces did not straggle. Surely such a leader never before had such a following.” At this point, however, the narrative point of view broadens. Beginning with a camera-eye’s view of the hoof and foot prints in the mud beside the creek, we are informed of the actual context – a horrible defeat and retreat of thousands in the midst of war. As the weird twilight transforms “the sinuous line of mist to the vapor of gold,” the water of the creek gleams red around blood-stained stones. With their faces in the water, some of the exhausted men appear to have no heads. As the story draws to a close, the boy approaches “the blazing ruin of a dwelling,” which, like his first impressions of the army retreat, is initially pleasing to him. In fact, he runs about “collecting fuel” to increase the fire. Then, “shifting his position, his eyes fell upon some outbuildings which had an oddly familiar appearance, as if he had dreamed of them.” He suddenly recognizes “the blazing building as his own home.” His “little world swung half around; the points of the compass were reversed.” For a moment, he stands “stupefied by the power of the revelation.”

............................................................................................... There, conspicuous in the light of the conflagration, lay the dead body of a woman – the white face turned upward, the hands thrown out and clutched full of grass, the clothing deranged, the long dark hair in tangles and full of clotted blood. The greater part of the forehead was torn away, and from the jagged hole the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a frothy mass of gray, crowned with clusters of crimson bubbles – the work of a shell.

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The corpse is his mother. “The child moved his little hands, making wild, uncertain gestures. He uttered a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries – something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey – a startling, soulless, unholy sound, the language of a devil.” Much better known is Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” which employs impressionist technique in interior monologue to the point of streamof-consciousness. This narrative mode is most often associated with early twentieth-century modernists, though a long scene in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1) is a celebrated nineteenth-century example of one mode of it (which we shall look at in Ch. 14). Both terms indicate narration that tries to reproduce (or give the illusion of) the continuous flow of a character’s 143

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mental processes, including images, stray thoughts mimicking the free movement and association of actual thought, random memories, half-conscious thoughts and feelings, and pure sense impressions.2 Bierce’s narrative begins with a description of a man looking down into the swift water below a railroad bridge. His hands are tied behind his back, and he has a rope around his neck. Peyton Farquhar, a well-to-do Alabama planter, is about to be hanged as a secessionist saboteur by Union soldiers. A longish description of the countryside – at least what the man can see from the bridge – precedes an objective description of Farquhar. This summary is followed by a description of what the man sees in the swirling water and what he hears as an unidentifiable sound. This sound is regular and has a “sharp, distinct metallic percussion like the stroke of a blacksmith’s hammer upon the anvil.” The sounds seem to become louder, hurting “his ear like the thrust of a knife.” The intervals between seem to get longer and longer as he impatiently awaits the next sound; what he hears is the ticking of his watch. As he looks down into the water, he has several instantaneous thoughts, “which here have to be set down in words” but are “flashed” into his brain just as the signal to hang him is given: if only he could free his hands, he might throw off the noose, spring into the stream, evade the bullets, swim vigorously, reach the bank, take to the woods, and “get away home,” where his “wife and little ones” would still be safe “beyond the invader’s farthest advance.” The second section of the story, though told summarily from the third person, fills in the background of Farquhar’s life as if he is remembering what led up to his present situation. The third section begins with Farquhar’s falling “straight downward through the bridge” and losing consciousness as if “already dead.” Then, as he regains consciousness, we participate in his mental impressions. He wakes as a result of “a sharp pressure upon his throat, followed by a sense of suffocation.” Pain “seemed to shoot from his neck downward through every fibre of his body and limbs” and seems to be “pulsating” in time. “These sensations were unaccompanied by thought. The intellectual part of his nature was already effaced; he had power only to feel, and feeling was torment. He was conscious of motion. Encompassed in a luminous cloud, of which he was now merely the fiery heart, without material substance, he swung through unthinkable arcs of oscillation, like a vast pendulum.” With “terrible suddenness” his swinging ceases. The “light about him shot upward with the noise of a loud plash; a frightful roaring was in his ears, and all was cold and dark.” It is now clear to him that “the rope had broken and he had fallen into the stream.” Opening “his eyes in the darkness,” he sees “above him a gleam of light, but how distant, how inaccessible!” He knows that he “was still sinking, for the light became fainter and fainter until it was a mere glimmer.” But then “it began to grow and brighten, and he knew that he 144

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was rising toward the surface – knew it with reluctance, for he was now very comfortable . . .” As he removes the hangman’s noose around his neck, mind and body feel separate. He watches the noose float away, thinking of its “undulations” as “resembling those of a water-snake.” When he reaches the surface of the water, he seems to have regained “full possession of his physical senses.” In fact, he senses “things never before perceived.” Note the vivid impressionist cataloguing of immediate sights and sounds.

............................................................................................... He felt the ripples upon his face and heard their separate sounds as they struck. He looked at the forest on the bank of the stream, saw the individual trees, the leaves and the veining of each leaf – saw the very insects upon them: the locusts, the brilliant-bodied flies, the gray spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig. He noted the prismatic colors in all the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass.

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As Farquhar reorients himself in the river current, “the visible world seemed to wheel slowly round, himself the pivotal point . . .” A “counter-swirl” turns him half around, and he sees the soldiers on the bridge preparing to fire at him. He dives “as deeply as he could” yet hears “the dulled thunder” of the rifle volley. Rising to the surface again, he meets “shining bits of metal, singularly flattened, oscillating slowly downward.” One of these misshapen bullets “lodged between his collar and neck; it was uncomfortably warm and he snatched it out.” Swimming “vigorously with the current,” he feels the nearby impact of a cannon shell. Suddenly he feels himself “whirled round and round – spinning like a top.” Objects are “represented by their colors only; circular horizontal streaks of color – that was all he saw.” In a few moments he is “flung upon the gravel at the foot of the left bank of the stream. . . . He dug his fingers into the sand, threw it over himself in handfuls and audibly blessed it.” The subjectivity of this impression is emphasized in a word-painting of vivid misperception of color and light and sound – almost surreal in effect. The sand looks:

............................................................................................... like diamonds, rubies, emeralds; he could think of nothing beautiful which it did not resemble. The trees upon the bank were giant garden plants; he noted a definite order in their arrangement, inhaled the fragrance of their blooms. A strange, roseate light shone through the spaces among their trunks and the wind made in their branches the music of aeolian harps.

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He quickly plunges into the forest and follows “the rounding sun.” By nightfall he finds a road he is sure leads in the “right direction.” His neck is “horribly swollen,” his eyes are “congested,” and his tongue is “swollen with thirst.” The sense of “reality” seems to slip into dream; and Bierce shifts to the present tense. Farquhar thinks that he must have been sleepwalking and is now standing “at the gate of his own home.”

............................................................................................... As he pushes open the gate and passes up the wide white walk, he sees a flutter of female garments; his wife, looking fresh and cool and sweet, steps down from the veranda to meet him. . . . As he is about to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon – then all is darkness and silence!

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Peyton Farquhar is dead: “his body, with a broken neck,” swings “gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.” The whole escape sequence has taken place in the man’s mind, seemingly instantaneously. The story is a tour de force in literary impressionist painting.

“The Unexplained Glory”: Flying the Colors in The Red Badge of Courage Stephen Crane’s famous war novel is glossed perfectly, I believe, by the first poem in his collection titled War Is Kind (1899).

............................................................................................... Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment, Little souls who thirst for fight, These men were born to drill and die. The unexplained glory flies above them, Great is the Battle God, great, and his Kingdom– A field where a thousand corpses lie.

............................................................................................... Often reputed to be the first American novel that did not portray the Civil War romantically (an untruth), The Red Badge of Courage (1895) recounts a bloody battle from the general point of view of one untried soldier, Henry Fleming, frequently called simply “the youth.” Focused on this limited subjective experience, the novel counterpoises an environment of bewilderment 146

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and coercion at the front with the would-be hero’s ultimate sense of confidence in himself. When he is slightly wounded by a blow to the head from one of his own men, Henry wants it to be taken as a “red badge,” signifying his courage. Maddened, he throws himself in harm’s way. He becomes a regimental flag bearer, flying the Union colors high in the forefront of battle. But is he a hero – or a mere cog in the war machine?

The illusion of history Jumbled ambiguity is deliberately built into the novel. The book describes a battle of the American Civil War, but we do not know which, or where, or when. We know that the contest is between the Union forces and the Confederate, but we don’t know who is in command on either side, or tactically why the battle is being fought at all. Critics and Crane himself (in the 1896 “The Veteran”) have suggested that the novel is based on the bloody Battle of Chancellorsville, May 2–4, 1863. General Robert E. Lee defeated Hooker’s Army of the Potomac with heavy losses on both sides: over 10,000 were killed. On May 22, 1863, Ulysses S. Grant attacked at Vicksburg, Mississippi, and less than two weeks later, on July 1–3, waged the Battle of Gettysburg, with both sides again sustaining heavy casualties: the North 23,000, the South 28,000. The unconditional surrender of Vicksburg came on the 4th of July; but some six weeks later (September 19–20) the Union forces were defeated in Georgia, at the Battle of Chickamauga. Confederate General Bragg forced the Union army to retreat to Chattanooga, Tennessee, once more with heavy casualties: the North 16,000, the South 18,000. On November 19, 1863, Lincoln gave his famous “Gettysburg Address,” seeing Gettysburg and these other battles as a turning point in the war. None of this historical coherence is apparent in The Red Badge of Courage – only the confusion of the campaign and of the individual soldiers, who conquer their fear with numbed indifference and mechanical routine. Some readers adopt the youth’s concluding point of view and see the story as affirmative: he has earned his badge of courage. A close reading, however, suggests both a naturalist theme of entrapment by forces beyond individual control and an epistemological theme of the total incomprehensibility of war.

Incidents of Battle and the Schematics of War: The Five-Act Structure There are two basic ways to gain a coherent overview of the details of The Red Badge of Courage. First, it is helpful to group the events of the twenty-four 147

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chapters according to the series of days that pass. This chronological sorting can help the reader keep track of what the soldiers in the narrative cannot: the sequence of events at the front. Such a chronology reveals the encounters, respites, and engagements that are loosely (and ironically) narrated in the episodic manner of ancient epic and medieval quest romance. Second, despite all the smoke and confusion, we can group events as falling into the kind of five-act dramatic structure we have seen before.3 The five-act structure of the twenty-four chapters can be loosely graphed as follows: Act Act Act Act Act

I II III IV V

The The The The The

Fear Visions Lie Test Transformation

(Chs 1–6) (Chs 7–11) (Chs 12–15) (Chs 16–18) (Chs 19–24)

Act I (Chs 1–6) Fear and Anxiety: The Hero Runs The opening chapter is a capsule foreshadowing of the basic situation. A young man leaves home to serve in the war, and the novel begins with impressions of the general scene, observations of the battlefield, and rumors that the army is at last going to move – somewhere. The story immediately narrows to the retrospective thoughts of a young private, Henry Fleming. He has been dreaming of glory in battle like that of the Greek warriors; but he is worried that he might not measure up. As in Maggie, characters are often referred to by general descriptors. A “tall” soldier and a “loud” soldier argue about battle and the possibility of running from the enemy in fear. One of the soldiers is given a name right way – Jim Conklin (his initials, J. C., will become suggestive of quasi-allegory at work in the narrative). Henry asks if any of the boys will run. Some probably will, Jim says, adding that if he were in the midst of “a whole lot of boys” who started to run, he himself would too, and like the devil. In the second chapter, the soldiers in Henry’s company learn that the rumor they will be moving out is apparently false. As another regiment marches by, they hear that the Confederates have been winning. In the next chapter, Henry goes to sleep and awakes to discover that the army is to move out after all. He is fixated on the sense of being “caught in a box” while marching. In Chapter 4, gunfire in a skirmish frightens the loud braggart soldier; and he gives Henry some letters to deliver in case of his death. Sniper fire wounds the company lieutenant in the hand. Suddenly Henry’s whole unit seems to be fleeing – while the regiments to the right and the left jeer at them. The enemy is still a vague abstraction – a composite monster. 148

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The opening of Chapter 5 depicts the waiting. An ironic comparison to the war scene is implied as Henry remembers a circus parade as a boy. Then the enemy comes. Henry suddenly has no time for fear, and he finds himself “working at his weapon like an automatic affair,” rather than covering himself with the glory of an ancient warrior in hand-to-hand combat. Henry’s first experiences of actual battle show him becoming a machine – an image pattern that will recur with heavy implication in the conclusion. He feels selfless, a part of a larger whole, a member of a community, a subtle brotherhood – but whatever Henry Fleming thinks at any given moment is likely to be mistaken, even self-delusional. He is portrayed not as a romantic warrior, but as a cog or gear in the sociopolitical machinery. Is he already losing his independent will? When the enemy charge is eventually repulsed, we see (dully, barely comprehending, as though we are Henry) the ghastly forms of the fallen. The Union boys think that the “supreme trial had been passed” (Ch. 6). Then the enemy comes again – and the men run. Henry Fleming runs too. Now Henry sees those who do not run as “idiots” and “machine-like fools.” Act I of the novel, as schematized here, ends with Henry’s unit holding against the enemy. Act II (Chs 7–11) The Visions: Guilt, Fear, and Illusion The apparent victory of Henry’s unit is couched in images of a mad war god, imps, devils, and machines. Henry rationalizes his guilt by feeling that he has somehow been “wronged.” The ambiguity of everything is compounded, intensified by the famous “chapel” scene (Ch. 7). In the forest, Henry sees a dead man leaning against a tree in a “natural” chapel, a “bower” that contrasts with the machine images. Has the man been crucified? The religious images become grotesque as Henry watches an army of ants swarm over the body. In a panic, Henry flees the scene, replicating his run from the enemy. In Chapter 8, Henry finds himself running toward the sounds of battle, as though he has finally found his courage. Suddenly he sees a “spectral” soldier looking into the unknown. It is a sergeant – a “tattered man.” When the tattered man asks if he has been hit by enemy fire, Henry slips away in embarrassment. In Chapter 9, Henry walks among the wounded, wishing he had a “red badge,” a mark, a symbol of courage. The dreamlike aspect of the scene continues as Henry sees another tall spectral soldier, wounded in the side. The man begins running, collapses, and dies – his bloody hands fingering the wound. The tattered soldier, like a pursuing spirit, again finds Henry Fleming. The red sun is pasted in the sky like a wafer. The allegorical implications of crucifixion and Eucharist are heavy but never quite fulfilled: a negative allegory offers, then withdraws, rational meaning; its ironic religious images are evoked again at the end of the narrative. These paragraphs are among the 149

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most vivid and arresting of the entire novel; and we will return to them later in another context.4 In Chapter 10, the tattered soldier keeps asking Henry where he is hurt, suggesting that it might be worse than he thinks: it might be “inside mostly,” an observation that wounds Henry all the more. Henry writhes and moves off, envying the dead. In Chapter 11, the Union army seems to be retreating; so maybe, Henry thinks, he is not so bad after all. But another column is going forward. Henry wants to believe in himself, but his desire is totally superficial: he wants to convince the others of his courage. Act III (Chs 12–15) The Lie: The Symbolism of the Red Badge At this juncture, the middle-point (Ch. 12), Henry receives his wound. Scenes of retreating Union troops suggest that the battle is lost. When Henry grabs a bloody man and demands information, the man hits him on the head with his rifle. The “red badge” is his at last – received from one of his own men – in retreat. When he is taken back to his regiment, Henry lies, telling the others he has been shot (Ch. 13). He falls into another weary sleep and awakens to notice that the loud soldier is no longer boastful. Seizing the opportunity, Henry again lies about the “action” he experienced. When he remembers the letters that the loud soldier had given him earlier, he thinks that he may be able to “use” them against the other if the truth of Henry’s war “action” is revealed (Ch. 15). These are hardly the sentiments of a romantic hero, but his self-delusion restores his pride, and he tells two self-glorifying romanticized tales to his fellow victims of the confusion and misinformation of war. Act IV (Chs 16–18) The Test: The Hero Fights The regiment marches, and Henry curses the generals – he himself has become a loud soldier. The distorting subjectivity of the entire experience is foregrounded as Henry watches himself telling war stories (Ch. 17). Later, engaging a nearly invisible foe, he fires his rifle mechanically but wildly and keeps on firing after the enemy has gone and there is nothing to hit. The lieutenant calls him a “wildcat”; others see him as a “war devil.” The youth now sees himself as a “knight.” In contrast to Henry’s restricted vision of things, the reader gets a more comprehensive view of the fighting. Young Rogers is shot clean through the body and lies writhing and yelling (Ch. 18). Henry and his friend Wilson overhear the division commander and an officer talking about sending the men into a hopeless attack, calling the boys a bunch of “mule drivers” too stupidly stubborn to survive the next encounter. Henry and Wilson tell their comrades that they are going to charge the enemy but keep the officers’ remarks to themselves. 150

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Act V (Chs 19–24) The Transformation: The Strange Alchemy of Courage Epistemological uncertainty pervades the last act of the drama. As the charge begins (Ch. 19), Henry mistakenly thinks he sees everything unified and whole and clear. He feels enthusiasm for the fighting; once again he thinks he feels a sublime sense of unselfishness and brotherhood. When the regiment slows its forward progress, a lieutenant yells at them, and they move forward rapidly in a kind of herd movement. Henry, Wilson, and the lieutenant lead the charge. When the color sergeant is killed, Wilson grabs the flag after a grotesque struggle with the dead. The irony also applies cruelly to the next incident, as Henry “heroically” takes the flag from Wilson (Ch. 20). When the regiment falls back to the trees, Henry is mortified by their cowardice and rages inwardly at the officer who called them mule drivers. Smoke gathers in a great cloud so thick that they can’t see what is happening. As Henry hears screams in the gray miasma, he (again “heroically”) bears the flag high. In the symbolic haze, he sees the enemy’s faces for the first time and absurdly notices that they have colorful uniforms. Grotesque humor colors Henry’s realization that the enemy troops are “men.” As Henry’s regiment marches back to their own lines, another unit jeers at them for having failed to gain even a small advance (Ch. 21). Henry is disdainful of his comrades but pleased with himself. Feeding his ego on false perceptions, he exempts himself from the criticism that his unit has made a mess of it, stopping a hundred feet from success. The officer that called Henry’s regiment a bunch of dumb mule drivers now calls them “mud diggers,” but the colonel asks who had borne the flag so high. Henry and Wilson, happy to receive conventional cliched praise, are no longer resentful of the meaningless campaign. Their individual egos are more important than the unit as a whole, subverting Henry’s earlier sense of “brotherhood.” Henry is made the flag bearer for his unit (Ch. 22). As he watches the battle with serene self-confidence, the men seem like fiends in hell, even as they act like automatons. In the midst of Henry’s complacent survey of the carnage, a sergeant is shot through the cheek, and his mouth gapes grotesquely. The twisted bodies have no effect on the new hero, however, who leads a bayonet charge with the flag held recklessly high (Ch. 23). Henry is like a “religiousmad” savage, grabbing the enemy flag and taking four prisoners. He and Wilson stand with the flag and congratulate each other, full of vanity. In the last chapter, the regiment is ordered to retrace its steps and regroup with the brigade – though again no one knows why. Henry is full of the realization that he has escaped death. Better yet – his showy, brave performances have been witnessed. He no longer cares whether they have won the battle or not. “He was a man.” Or is he a “machine,” a mindless instrument of 151

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some political game beyond his comprehension? Or is he still an “animal, blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war”? Henry thinks of himself as a noble soldier in some great cause – even if “unexplained.”5 Some readers have taken this apparent transformation as straightforward and positive. After all, Henry seems to find his courage, and the imagery of the “golden” rays of the sun in the last paragraph seems affirmative. But the religious and alchemical images are ironically undercut: for the sky is filled with “leaden” rain clouds, and the men march like metal automatons.6 Is this hard or soft determinism? Perhaps the answer, if there is one, is in fact to be found in impressionist imagery.

The chapel and the sun: Impressionist painting in green and red In The Red Badge of Courage, the presentation of the misinterpretation of nature and the general epistemological limitations of human perception is consummately impressionistic. Crane images the war in fog, and smoke, and the muffled rumblings of guns. Traditional quasi-allegorical associations of color are inverted. Gold becomes leaden. The vivid colors of reds, yellows, and greens in nature are dimmed in gray haze and smoke. Green and yellow become the colors of putrefaction; and red first and last is the color of blood. An impressionistic scene early in the book is central to the book’s ultimately unresolved concerns. In Chapter 6, Henry runs from the enemy, temporarily destroying his dreams of glory. In Chapter 7, he tries to rationalize his cowardice. He tells himself that his comrades and their leaders had exhibited “blindness and stupidity,” and he pities himself as a victim of “an iron injustice.” He has run into the forest, away from the “rumble of death.” Here he tries to justify his cowardice by invoking the patterns of “Nature.” Nature is life, not death; self-preservation is the first law of nature. The “landscape gave him assurance” as a “fair field holding life” and embodying a “religion of peace.” He now “conceived Nature to be a woman with a deep aversion to tragedy.” Behind him, the fields are strewn with the dead. On impulse he throws a pinecone at a squirrel, and the squirrel runs. The creature “did not stand stolidly baring his furry belly to the missile, and die with an upward glance at the sympathetic heavens. On the contrary, he had fled as fast as his legs could carry him; and he was but an ordinary squirrel, too – doubtless no philosopher of his race.” The youth feels “that Nature was of his mind.” This conviction, however, is followed by a recollection of finding himself at the edge of a swamp, where he had to walk carefully “upon bog tufts” to avoid “the oily mire.” Although narrated as if happening in the present, it is a memory that contrasts with Henry’s current attempt to see Nature as 152

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feminine and benign – for he also saw a small animal suddenly “pounce” on the swamp water and “emerge directly with a gleaming fish.”

The green chapel and the red wafer Now penetrating farther into the “deep thickets” of the forest, Henry goes from obscurity to “greater obscurity,” at length reaching “a place where the high, arching boughs made a chapel.” He softly pushes these “green doors aside” and enters. He finds the interior of the natural chapel bathed in “a religious half light” – in the midst of which is death. This “chapel” scene is one of the best known in the novel, not only for its thematic relevance and symbolism, but also for its vivid impressionism. “Near the threshold” of the bower, Henry stops, horror-stricken:

............................................................................................... He was being looked at by a dead man who was seated with his back against a columnlike tree. The corpse was dressed in a uniform that once had been blue, but was now faded to a melancholy shade of green. The eyes, staring at the youth, had changed to the dull hue to be seen on the side of a dead fish. The mouth was open. Its red had changed to an appalling yellow. Over the gray skin of the face ran little ants. One was trundling some sort of a bundle along the upper lip.

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The horror of what Henry sees, especially in the context of his fear of death and temporarily regained faith in life, is communicated without narrative comment. The pure impressionism of the scene (it is he who is being “looked at” by a dead man) is given an even more overtly subjective turn in the next few paragraphs. He shrieks “as he confronted the thing.”

............................................................................................... He remained staring into the liquid-looking eyes. The dead man and the living man exchanged a long look. Then the youth cautiously put one hand behind him and brought it against a tree. Leaning upon this he retreated, step by step, with his face still toward the thing. He feared that if he turned his back the body might spring up and stealthily pursue him.

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Now he runs for a second time. As he flees, he carries a vivid picture in his mind, “pursued by a sight” of “the black ants swarming greedily upon the gray face and venturing horribly near to the eyes.” When he finally pauses, he listens anxiously, imagining that “some strange voice would come from the dead 153

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throat and squawk after him in horrible menaces.” But all he hears is a soft wind soughing in the trees about the “portal of the chapel.” Other scenes in Red Badge are similarly impressionistic – vivid and symbolically charged with ironic religious images. The famous one-line description of the sun at the end of Chapter 9 is connected to the chapel scene by its heavy religious implications, undercut by the gruesomeness of violated corpses. At this latter juncture, Henry Fleming confronts his brother-in-arms, J. C., who has been mortally wounded in the side. When the tall man falls to the ground like a lofty tree and seems to bounce, the “tattered soldier” exclaims “God!” Henry sees the wound in J. C.’s side; but it is hardly Christ-like in the usual sense. No merciful spear thrust, the wound “looked as if it had been chewed by wolves.” Henry shakes his fist at the battlefield and exclaims “Hell –.” The chapter then ends: “The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer.” Not only is the succinct conclusion of the chapter startlingly pictorial, it also drives home – without comment – the idea of sacrament without meaning: the wafer is merely “pasted” in the heavens.

Religious controversy This one scene – indeed, this one line – has generated a storm of controversy. Ever since R. W. Stallman suggested over half a century ago that the wafer is a communion image (however ironic), his interpretation has been repeatedly attacked and dismissed.7 The wafer has been seen as an image of the red patch worn by General Kearny’s troops, as an artillery primer used in the Civil War, and as an Aztec sacrificial symbol, as well as a number of other things both relevant and irrelevant. One usual suggestion is that the red wafer is a wax seal on an envelope (possibly a military message) and not a communion wafer.8 There is nothing about letters and seals in the passage; but if one wanted to accept the “seal” image, perhaps the idea of the seventh seal of the apocalypse would be an appropriate association. In any case, the preponderance of religious and specifically Christian images in Crane’s text makes the blood and the wafer highly suggestive. To dismiss the religious, spiritual, and alchemical images (and the attendant irony) is to ignore too many details of the text. Taken together, these word paintings and others throughout Crane’s novel form one large canvas of blended colors: the scenes of the green chapel, and the blood-red wafer, and the leaden clouds, blue skies, and golden sunlight are pictorially and thematically suggestive in the best sense of artistic and literary impressionism. Early in the novel, in the second act, the dead man’s blue uniform has faded to pale green; his rotting pale flesh, eaten by insects, is bathed 154

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in green light. In the third act, the sun itself is as red as the blood of the dying soldiers who assault and mangle each other like fiends in Hell. In the last act, leaden clouds gather to dim the golden sunlight. The apparent “crucifixion” of soldiers like J. C. seems without promise of transfiguration or redemption. The “glory” remains “unexplained.” Is then all this human turmoil, as in other of Crane’s works, as blank or inscrutable as nature itself?

Notes 1. Reprinted in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891); also published with revisions as In the Midst of Life (1892); further revised in 1898 and published again in 1909; the editions add some tales and omit others. Among Bierce’s well-known war stories are “A Horseman in the Sky,” “One of the Missing,” “The Coup de Gr^ace,” “One Officer, One Man,” and others, including a four-sequence section of Can Such Things Be? entitled “Soldier-Folk.” Among Crane’s war stories are “A Mystery of Heroism,” “An Episode of War,” “The Upturned Face,” as well as a number of poems, including War Is Kind (1899). 2. William James is often given credit for the formulation of “the stream of consciousness” in a chapter on the “stream of thought” in The Principles of Psychology (1890). See Ch. 14 of the present volume for further definition and discussion. 3. See the Preface to the present volume for comment on of three- and five-act structures; see discussion of medieval quest-structure in Ch. 19. Homer’s epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, are each divided into 24 chapters, as is Red Badge. 4. Mainly the technique of impressionism. For a sophisticated stylistic analysis of the passage, see Halliburton (1989), 130–3, who also links the scene to expressionist techniques. 5. The irony is patent even before the machine and iron imagery temporarily transforms into hot plow shares, echoing the biblical injunctions (Isaiah 2:4; Joel 3:10; Mica 4:3). 6. The alchemical images suggest transformation. But is the process from lead to gold – or the reverse? Is it sacred alchemy (divine revelation) or profane (the dark arts)? See the last two paragraphs of the novel. 7. Link (2004), 198–200, notes the “many attempts to interpret the religious imagery” of the novel and the question of “whether Fleming’s ‘redemption’ at the end is ironic or not”; he provides a comprehensive bibliography of such studies (199 n7). Also see essays on textual variations, omissions, and critical approaches collected in Link (2010). 8. In a response (1955), Stallman pointed out that such seals typically did not use red wax and were not “pasted.” The military seal idea is rather illogically extrapolated from a passage in Chapter 4 of Rudyard Kipling’s The Light that 155

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Failed (1890–1): “The fog was driven apart for a moment, and the sun shone, a blood-red wafer, on the water.” Kipling’s novel tells of a soldier back from the horrors of war, who wants to paint a great picture before he goes blind. But Chapter 4 is about color and painting – not war. It is a veritable catalogue of impressionist images and ideas related to painting; and Kipling’s description of changing colors along with alternating fog and sunlight may have influenced the first paragraph of Red Badge. In the final book-length publication of The Light That Failed, the soldier-artist goes blind and dies. Perhaps there is a general parallel to Henry Fleming’s situation here (the light that fails is not literally his eyesight, but symbolically the light of religion, as well as his perception).

See also M. D. Bell (1993); Benfrey (1992); Berryman (1950, rev. 1962); Bertoff (1965, rpt. 1981); B. Brown (1996); D. Campbell (1997); Colvert (1984); Conder (1984); Crane (1979, 1994); C. N. Davidson (1984, 1982); L. H. Davis (1998); Diffley (ACAF 2009); Fried (1987); D. Gibson (1968); Howard (1985); LaFrance (1971); J. Martin (1967); Marz (2001); Mitchell (1984, 1982); O’Connor (1967); Solomon (1966); Spiller (LHUS, 1960); Stallman (1968); C. Wilson (ACAF, 2009); E. Wilson (1962); Wolford (1989).

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Chapter 10

Sense and Sensibility Sentimental Domesticity and “New Woman’s Fiction”

Both the sentimental romance and the domestic novel are forms traditionally associated with “women’s fiction” but hardly confined to books written by women. It is important to be aware that sentimentalism has also been a pejorative term associated with melodrama.1 The term sensibility, however, in general had a more positive connotation than sentimentalism; and it was not normally associated with melodrama. In literature, the word sensibility often signified an intense emotional responsiveness to beauty, sublimity, and pathos, whether stimulated by nature or art. Sentimentalism and sensibility inform a number of nineteenth-century domestic novels, both early and late. An understanding of the ways in which the conventions of the domestic novel (or more accurately the domestic novel of manners) are intertwined with those of the sentimental romance is essential to an understanding of romantic realism in late nineteenth-century American fiction.

The Domestic Novel: Sentiment, Manners, and Marriage Alexander Cowie offers a handy rule of thumb illustrating the difference between novels generally characterized as sentimental rather than domestic: in sentimental romance, the proper conclusion is the death of the heroine; in the domestic novel, the proper conclusion is the appropriate marriage of the heroine (RAN, 9–21). The initially virtuous sentimental heroine is seduced Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson. Ó 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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by a cad (who may or may not become remorseful and is sometimes assisted by a wicked female friend). Becoming sensible of the error of her ways (especially if she finds herself pregnant), the heroine expresses remorse for her sinfulness. She then does the “morally correct” thing and commits suicide – or otherwise dies, often in childbirth. A particularly useful concise treatment of the domestic novel is that by Elizabeth Boyd Thompson in the Women’s Studies Encyclopedia (1990). She begins by addressing “the confusion between the use of domestic novel as a literary term and its use as a popular one.” She suggests that, for British fiction at least, the phrase domestic novel of manners is preferable. The central character is usually an “imaginative heroine,” who is “both an avid reader and a teller of tales.” The major convention of the genre is “the idealization of domesticity” through “the sanctification of middle-class, Christian, and family-centered values” – values that “dominate characterization, plots, and themes” of the domestic novel of manners. These conventions are also central to the American sentimental romance and domestic novel. At the heart of all this domesticity is love: “the plot always revolves around the vicissitudes of the heroine’s preparations to love and be loved,” but “happiness rewards only those characters who love in the right place at the right time . . .” The conventional “happy ending” is the wedding. Thompson observes that it sometimes seems as if the marriage might be “actually the end of happiness,” a point we’ll address later in this chapter. She observes that between 1830 and 1870, three pervasive themes “dominated Victorian fiction in general and the domestic novel of manners in particular”: the status of women, social reform, and religion. These themes are also prominent in American fiction, intertwined with others. Works focused on women in American fiction (including several by male authors) tend to depict heroines striving for independence through four basic pathways: (1) the “traditional” occupations (domestic worker or servant, seamstress, governess, companion, and so forth), as in Louisa May Alcott’s Work and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth; (2) an unconventional means of support (becoming a prostitute, a mistress, or an “actress”), as in Stephen Crane’s Maggie or Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie; (3) independence through authorship, as in Augusta Jane Evans’s St. Elmo and Alcott’s Little Women; (4) a struggle against the perceived limitations of conventional marriage, as in Chopin’s The Awakening and James’s The Portrait of a Lady. A special and powerful version of the situation of the American woman is the plight of black or mixed-race women victimized by economics, society, and predatory men, as in William Wells Brown’s Clotel, Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars. With these considerations in mind as background, let us address the 158

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idea of a genre of “Woman’s Fiction” in American literature as distinguished from fiction by women – and as further distinguished from what I will be calling “New Woman’s Fiction.”

Theory of “Woman’s” Fiction In 1978, Nina Baym published an important work on American women’s fiction from 1820 to 1870 entitled Woman’s Fiction.2 Baym’s purpose was to reclaim previously denigrated fiction by women. Although condescendingly referred to as mere “women’s fiction” for nearly a century, such “fiction was by far the most popular literature of its time, and on the strength of that popularity, authorship in America was established as a woman’s profession, and reading as a woman’s avocation” (11). One of the limitations of Baym’s book is that it is confined to middle-class white women as authors (and readers for the most part). It omits the concomitant growth of fiction by minorities like black women. But, by and large, her book reconfigures the relationship between popular culture and serious literature and provides a stimulating counter to earlier studies like Fred Lewis Pattee’s The Feminine Fifties (1940), Herbert Ross Brown’s The Sentimental Novel in America (1940), and Helen Waite Papashvily’s All the Happy Endings: A Study of the Domestic Novel in America (1956), which either condescended to “women’s fiction” or ridiculed it. Baym explains that she is going to focus on “plot” as “overplot.” The works of “the genre that I am calling woman’s fiction meet three conditions. They are written by women, are addressed to women, and tell one particular story about women”: that of a “girl who is deprived of the supports she had rightly or wrongly depended on to sustain her throughout life and is faced with the necessity of winning her own way in the world.” Such novels, she argues, subvert the established conventions of patriarchy. The girl is properly called a “heroine” because “her role is precisely analogous to the unrecognized or undervalued youths of fairy tales who perform dazzling exploits and win a place for themselves in the land of happy endings” (1st edn, 11). Thus woman’s fiction is a modern modification of the fairy tale archetype, in which the “happy marriages” with which “most – though not all – of this fiction concludes” are the culturally appropriate resolution of “the basic problems raised in the story.”3 Baym’s last chapter is on Augusta Jane Evans [Wilson] (1835–1909) and the “Waning of Woman’s Fiction.” Baym sees Evans’s St. Elmo (1866) as “a kind of culmination” of woman’s fiction before the 1870s “because it was both the most popular novel in the form and one of the last to be written completely within its terms.” The protagonist is supposedly representative of the heroine of woman’s 159

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fiction, who is “generally immune to the appeal of a dissolute suitor. When she feels such an attraction, she resists it.” And the “most famous confrontation of this sort occurs in St. Elmo . . .” The novel opens with a twelve-year old girl witnessing a duel. Edna Earl’s independence and morally aggressive character is shown immediately as she rushes up to the body of her dead grandfather and accuses the surviving duelist of being a murderer. After the death of her grandfather, Edna is forced to leave the family plantation to seek a factory job. The orphan stirs the sympathy of Mrs Murray, who offers her a home, protection, and an education. On the new plantation, Edna meets Mrs Murray’s son, St Elmo, a disquieting Byronic figure, with a mysterious background and disreputable reputation. He leaves on a long journey; when he returns, he proposes to Edna, asking her to “save” him from his erring ways. Edna declares that she cannot try to “save” anyone and, with some reluctance, rejects his proposal. Baym claims that: “Edna does not save St Elmo but in fact refuses to do so, resisting the greatest temptation that can be put in the path of a romantic, enthusiastic, and pious girl, especially if she is in love with the scoundrel. . . . Her one act rejects two powerful feminine temptations: to marry and to save the man she loves” (290–1). Contrary to the implication that this is the main theme, Edna succumbs to both temptations by the end of the book. Edna supports herself as a governess while writing steadily and achieving some success with a number of articles and two novels. But her health declines under the stress of constant labor. When St Elmo reappears, he has been “saved” by Edna’s earlier rejection of him. Rather improbably, he has become a minister. He proposes to her again and is eventually accepted. Edna acquiesces at the end partly because she is ill, exhausted by her foray into the outside world. She wants the domestic security of a reliable male protector, and in fact, has enshrined her need into a gospel of domesticity. The full title of Evans’s book is St. Elmo. Or, Saved at Last. The “salvation” is double. St Elmo has been saved by the strong character of the heroine. Edna’s salvation is suggested not only by her ultimate marriage, but also by the epigraph on the title page, under “Saved at Last.” Placed in this position, it glosses the major theme: submission to the domestic principle of the primacy of the male and the assisting role of female inspiration and purity. Edna has strayed from this principle by having a career outside the home but is saved by returning to it. The epigraph is from Ruskin:

............................................................................................... Ah! The rule is – a true wife in her husband’s house is his servant; it is in his heart that she is queen. Whatever of the best he can conceive, it is her part to be; whatever of the highest he can hope, it is hers to promise; all that is dark in him she 160

Sense and Sensibility: New Woman’s Fiction must purge into purity; all that is failing in him she must strengthen into a truth; from her, through all the world’s clamour, he must win his praise; in her, through all the world’s warfare, he must find his peace.

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Supposedly concerned with her frail physical health, St Elmo delivers a pompous little speech in the last chapter on her future as a properly married woman. The attitudes revealed in the first part of the novel have hardly undergone radical change; he is still a patriarchal chauvinist. Having proven herself too femininely frail to live independently in the working world, she is to give up all nondomestic aspirations. As the pastor “pronounced her St. Elmo Murray’s wife,” she faints away – a conventional swoon, but also a suggestive trope for her loss of self. As she recovers consciousness, St Elmo cradles her in his arms with the following words:

............................................................................................... “To-day I snap the fetters of your literary bondage. There shall be no more books written! No more study, no more toil, no more anxiety, no more heart-aches! And that dear public you love so well, must even help itself, and whistle for a new pet. You belong solely to me now, and I shall take care of the life you have nearly destroyed in your inordinate ambition.” (Ch. 37)

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Edna acquiesces in what constitutes female bondage in a “benevolent” patriarchal social system, literally and symbolically. A modern reader is likely to find the book inconsistent in characterization and point of view and to be chilled by the female enslavement that St Elmo’s speech suggests. As we shall see in the coming chapters, his words could be those of the imprisoning husband in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” or the well-meaning but somewhat obtuse husband in Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel, The Awakening. And Edna Earl’s attitudes toward womanhood and marriage stand in stark contrast to Christy Devon’s idea of a “sisterhood” of enlightened women in Louisa May Alcott’s 1873 novel, Work, published within a few years of St. Elmo. Unlike Edna Earl, the women of these works, or Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, are three-dimensional. Despite Edna’s early ambition, the novel’s themes coalesce in her acceptance of the proper woman’s role as the protected and immured darling of a strongwilled man. This example of “Woman’s Fiction” ends in paradox and compromise if not co-option. Thus when Baym asserts that Augusta Evans Wilson’s St. Elmo is the acme before the “waning” of woman’s fiction in the 1860s, it seems to me that she is discounting the powerful development in the last third of the century of the genre Baym herself has identified and largely mapped out. 161

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In fact, she regards the later permutations of what she identifies as woman’s fiction to be no longer “woman’s” fiction at all. A way out of this conundrum is to posit a “New Woman’s Fiction” – which is in fact based on a cultural shift premising the rise of the “Modern Woman,” more often called the “New Woman.”

New Woman and Modern Woman The term “New Woman” appears to have first become popular as a catchphrase in the 1890s. The Feminist Companion to English Literature pinpoints it rather too specifically in 1894, when feminists and anti-feminists, especially as represented by the British novelists Sarah Grand and Ouida, engaged in a debate over the changing role of woman worldwide.4 Feminists were articulating a sense of autonomy, founded on equality of the sexes: their “New Woman” advocated a degree of sexual freedom more or less equal to that of men. Unlike traditional women, the New Woman did not see marriage as the social and moral goal of womanhood, nor motherhood as a necessity of a fulfilled life. The idea that it was the duty of women to uphold moral values and thereby redeem erring men was seen as a major instrument of inequality between the sexes. Contemporary critics of the New Woman began to use the term “feminist” in an increasingly negative way, associating her with “unwomanly” mannishness and various forms of dissolution, including promiscuity (even the use of birth control), smoking, drinking, gambling, and working outside the home in other than traditional female occupations. Some women were ambivalent; some women were inspired; others were outraged. With this background in mind, we’ll now focus on two contemporaries who in the 1870s and 1880s helped redefine the role of women – in the process writing what I want to call New Woman’s Fiction: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911) and Lillie Devereux Blake (1833–1913). Each wrote novels about independent women and a woman’s right to a professional career, most notably Phelps’s Doctor Zay (1882) and Blake’s Fettered for Life (1874).5

The Contraries of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps One of the major discrepancies in subject matter and themes in Phelps’s career is the apparent opposition between her early satires of romance and her seemingly earnest novels of a visionary cast.6 Like Mark Twain, who also invoked medieval romance while mocking it, Phelps had a strong interest in 162

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traditional Arthurian tales. In her earliest writings, she retells knightly stories as nineteenth-century realism, deconstructing their romance. Her Lady of Shalott is a teenager living in the slums. Her Galahad is married to an insane drug addict. The true story of faithless Guenever (Guinevere) is told from the unrepentant woman’s perspective, set in a modern hovel. Other poetic retellings, however, have elliptical parabolic religious themes (later collected in Songs of the Silent World, 1884 and 1891). Some of Phelps’s visionary novels are romances – both sentimental and pious – especially the “Gates” series of sermonizing fictions depicting Heaven: The Gates Ajar (written 1866, pub.1868); Beyond the Gates (1883); The Gates Between (1887); and Within the Gates (1901). In these tales, Heaven provides family reunions in an idealized earthly setting for the well-off (with grand houses and lovely furnishings). The enormously popular Gates Ajar is actually a problematic example of the genre of “consolation literature.”7 It tells the story of a young woman’s attempt to recapture her faith after her beloved brother dies in the Civil War. The first part protests the social constriction of women via obligatory mourning ritual. The partially satiric descriptions of superficial customs and rites make the point that they don’t really touch the emotions of grieving. The materialist vision of heaven is explicitly the “comfort of . . . fancy,” a fantasy indulged. Considered in this light, the work would seem to adumbrate, at least in part, the social criticism of Phelps’s other novels. Another aspect of Phelps’s visionary concerns is her interest in ghostly stories. Although generally oriented toward “spiritualism,” these fictions nevertheless tended toward the genre of popular gothic. In 1869, she published a collection titled Men, Women, and Ghosts, intermixing supernaturalism, realism, and social criticism in ten stories. She also wrote a number of children’s and juvenile books, some of which feature an important character type for mainstream of American literature: the mischievous “Gypsy” Breynton, who has been called the prototype of the American tomboy heroine.8 Memorable “tomboys” are found in the novels and stories of Louisa May Alcott, the most important of which is Jo March in Little Women. Charming or winsome as these bad boys and unruly girls seem, they are also rebels against convention and the status quo.9

Phelps as feminist This variety of literary interests and experiments is especially interesting in view of a sequence of novels by Phelps that deal with women’s independence – economic, professional, and psychological. In particular, she portrays some of 163

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the problems with conventional or traditional concepts of marriage – engaging the issues of “true womanhood” and the idea of the modern woman. Hedged In (1870) investigates the double standard of conventional morality for men and women. The heroine of The Silent Partner (1871) is a female social worker, who represents the women mill-workers in New England. She is not only fighting for their betterment, but also combating the silencing of women – in the professions as well as wives in the home. The Story of Avis (1877) features a woman artist. The novel portrays the dilemma of a middle-class woman caught in an unhappy marriage and goes so far as to suggest that perhaps even the best marriage may be bad for women because it traps their creative spirit. At the end, we are told ambivalently that it will take generations to make the new woman. “We have been told that it takes three generations to make a gentleman: we may believe that it will take as much, or more, to make A WOMAN” (Ch. 25). The new woman will have a radiant physique, maternal health, and “the energy of the muscle and the repose of the nerve” that lead to “intellectual command.” The new woman will be one in whom “emotion intensifies reflection” and “self-poise is substituted for self-extravagance.” Thereby she will be able to adjust the “sacred individuality of her life to the supreme capacity of love and the supreme burden and perils which it imposes on her.” Only a man whose “sources of feeling are as deep as they are delicate,” who will be willing to practice abnegation of male prerogative, can be a suitable mate for the “free” woman.10 Five years later, Phelps’s novel Doctor Zay (1882) portrayed just such a new woman. Filtered primarily through the evolving enlightened consciousness of a male chauvinist, the story focuses on the struggles of a woman physician with love, marriage, and professionalism. It is probably Phelps’s best-known woman’s issue novel – in part because of W. D. Howells’s negative portrayal of a professional female physician in Dr. Breen’s Practice (1881). Howells presents the professional woman who is its “heroine” as a love-starved misfit – a woman who goes into a profession only because she is a domestic misfit. Grace Farrell contrasts Howells’s negative picture of the “woman physician” to the positive portrayal of Dr Cornelia D’Arcy in Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life (1874). Farrell and others conclude that Howells seems to think that women only enter a profession because marriage is impossible for them. At the end of Howells’s novel, writes Farrell, Dr Breen is “a helpless woman who is rescued, through marriage, from what is viewed as the ridiculous predicament of having a profession.”11 In Phelps’s book, on the other hand, the female physician is “a fully mature, self-possessed professional.” Dr Zay is a “new type of woman” who negates the conflict between marriage and working on her own terms. As in Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor (1884), which tells the

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story of a woman who declines marriage to become a physician, in Doctor Zay the profession of medicine and the competence of a professional woman are idealized. But resistance to the idea of a professional woman of any kind – and a physician in particular – is also lucidly presented. Dr Zay faces gender bias on several levels, including her private life. The plot of Doctor Zay is simple. Arrogant, wealthy Waldo Yorke, an attorney from Boston, is badly injured while traveling in a carriage along the “wild” coast of rural Maine. The story is told primarily from Yorke’s point of view; and at first he is shocked to discover that his physician is a beautiful and intelligent woman. Then he is astonished by her skill and competence. Much of the story happens during his recuperation. As he sees Dr Zay confronting with tenderness and skill the realities of brutal accidents, a life-threatening pregnancy, and infant deaths, he gradually falls in love with her. He experiences a transformation of attitude, even of character, for he wants to be “worthy” of such a woman. He asks her more than once to marry him, but she refuses, at first. When she finally relents, she insists on a marriage “contract.” She is to continue her practice of medicine. She tells him that he is “unfortunate” in his choice of mate, for he has come upon a “new kind of woman.” A “happy marriage” with “such a woman demands a new type of man.”12 This sentiment is echoed at the end of Lillie Blake’s Fettered for Life, but only after unimaginable travail for the heroine and almost every other woman in the novel.

Escaping the Chains of Gender? Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life Lillie Devereux Blake (1833–1913) was an important figure in the American Feminist Movement, though, until Grace Farrell’s biography appeared in 2002, few of us knew it – largely because, in her battle with Susan B. Anthony for control of the movement, she lost. Lillie Devereux Blake: Retracing a Life Erased is the story of one of the most remarkable women of her time.13 Blake’s first novel, Southwold, was published in February 1859 – shortly thereafter her husband, Frank Umsted, shot himself, having squandered her inheritance. It would be nearly a decade before she married New York businessman, Grinfill Blake. In the interim, she poured out scores of articles. Of particular importance is her 1863 essay, “The Social Condition of Woman” (published anonymously), in which she maintains that if a woman has a “nature too lofty to submit tamely to control,” she will “chafe fiercely” against all restraints. She will “revolt desperately against perpetual subservience

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to man,” especially if she is economically dependent on him. Blake insists that people have a common nature, but are “trained” in gender roles – in other words, that gender is socially constructed. Farrell observes that Blake was aligned with a small minority of suffragists “who saw the dangers for women’s progress in emphasizing gender differences.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a leading member of this minority, which traces a radical line from Mary Wollstonecraft and Frances Wright – women who advocated the principle that men and women share a common nature and thus share rights in common.14 Blake wrote five novels in all: Southwold (1859); Rockford; or, Sunshine and Storm (1863); Ireton Standish (1866–7); Forced Vows; or, A Revengeful Woman’s Fate (1870); and Fettered for Life; or, Lord and Master (1874), which was her last novel. The heroine of Southwold, Medora Fielding, is not the prototypical heroine of woman’s fiction narrowly defined. Although she has too much intellect to be satisfied with the frivolities of society, and though she debates with men on the rights of women, she is also the product of a culture that causes her to compete in courtship games and develop cunning over integrity. Four years later, Blake published Rockford; or, Sunshine and Storm, in which, amidst implied adulterous and incestuous relations, a stalwart mother resists the machinations of a blackguard to force a marriage between a half-brother and half-sister. In 1870, Blake published Forced Vows; or, A Revengeful Woman’s Fate, a story involving abduction, imprisonment, a mad stepmother, and murder. Even more sensational is Fettered for Life, an expose of political graft, alcohol abuse, seduction, prostitution rings, abduction, and rape.15

Breaking the mind-forged manacles Fettered for Life; or, Lord and Master. A Story of To-Day (1874) contains discussions of industrialization, abolitionism, temperance, immigration, an increasing urban population, the condition of working women, and women’s issues like suffrage, legal powerlessness, incommensurate employment, domestic violence, personal freedom, and gender identity (it also implies lesbian attraction by innuendo and features a female cross-dresser). It is also filled with stock characters and descriptions from the literature of sensibility and the domestic tradition; and, were it not for the trenchant social and political criticism, a modern reader would likely find its sentimental elements cloying. The style, however, is generally straightforward, simple in the best sense. The dialogue is sometimes stilted and preachy, but in general it is lively and true to life. Since its overall social criticism is repetitive, we’ll take a detailed look at the 166

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first half of the novel, especially the first twelve chapters, and a more selective look at the second half. The central plot of Fettered for Life is essentially that of the fairy-tale archetype identified in Nina Baym’s Woman’s Fiction: a young woman leaves home to escape domestic tyrannies, goes to the city, endures indignities and abuses, but through talent and determination wins through to success, the culmination of which is marriage. But Blake’s novel tells this story with a considerable difference in tone and characterization. In fact, early in the novel the heroine remarks with irony bordering on sarcasm that she finds herself in the city (New York) “like a little girl in a fairy tale, to seek my fortune” (Ch. 4). The book opens with a judge attempting to force an “arrangement” on a beautiful young woman, who has been brought to court by a policeman who found her alone on the street after dark. The unspoken assumption by the men in the court, who “gaze” at her and exchange knowing “glances,” is that a female found alone on the street at night must be a prostitute – or at least of questionable morality. The discovery that she is not such a woman does not deter the vile Judge Swinton, and he arranges for nearby lodging, planning to call on her as soon as practicable. Witnessing the scene is a news reporter who calls himself Frank Heywood. Although frequently on the perimeters of the narrative, he is a central character. The detained woman is Laura Stanley, the central female figure of the story. Feminine and lady-like, but independent of spirit, Laura has come to New York in search of employment, to escape the tyranny of her cold and unloving father. Gifted in drawing and painting (as well as mathematics), she hopes to find herself as an artist and a woman. Laura had found herself alone on the streets at night because her train was delayed and the clerk at her hotel refused her a room unless she came to his first. Now, almost arraigned as a vagrant or worse in Swinton’s court, she is taken, somewhat forcibly, to the home of John Bludgett, an ugly, burly man who, we soon discover, beats his wife. From the moment we meet Mrs Molly Bludgett, a pale, “small, thin creature, about thirty years old,” we sense something is wrong. Her eyes have “a look of perpetual fear” (Ch. 2). Told by her husband that he has brought her a boarder, she says, “What, another woman?” We learn later that Bludgett is in the employ of Swinton for the express purpose of supplying impoverished and unprotected women for the judge’s pleasure. Exhausted, Laura sleeps until late the next day. When she comes down from her room, she finds Molly reading “a showilyillustrated paper,” the New York Weekly Typhoon. Reading stories like the “Headless Lover, or Beauty’s Last Temptation, a Tale of Love and Despair” is Molly’s “only pleasure.” But she has to do it surreptitiously. These small details are more important than they might seem at first. Mr Bludgett doesn’t like 167

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his wife to read. Reading, and especially writing, is akin to having a voice of one’s own. The discovery that Molly is virtually imprisoned in her husband’s house infuriates Laura, who asks why Bludgett doesn’t want Molly to leave the house. Molly says she has never asked because “he do’nt [sic] like for me to ask questions.” When Laura asks if Bludgett has used force on Molly, the loyal wife draws back almost angry, saying, “He’s my husband.” Molly soon warms to the more liberated Laura, however, and asks her several times if she has any friends in the city. When there is a knock at the door, she repeats the question with “a wild stare of terror in her eyes.” To Molly’s relief, the visitor is the young reporter. He apologizes for intruding but urgently insists that Laura “leave this house at once.” Molly suddenly says she must speak even if “Bludgett should kill me for it.” Laura is not safe there and must go at once. As Frank and Laura are about to leave, John Bludgett appears and blocks their way. Frank moves quickly and plants a “blow directly under the big man’s right ear.” As they hurry from the house, Frank and Laura hear “a woman’s scream, prolonged and anguish-stricken.” This first instance of Frank Heywood’s courage, prowess, and kindness will be repeated more than once. Frank takes Laura to the house of his friend, Cornelia D’Arcy, MD. When she is introduced to Dr D’Arcy, Laura, a recent graduate of Essex College, is pleased that the eminent Dr D’Arcy remembers her. D’Arcy recalls that Laura “stood at the head of her class in mathematics and worked out some very difficult problems admirably” (Ch. 3). Here at Dr D’Arcy’s, she feels “safe, at last.” The next morning, a visitor, Bridget (“Biddy”) Malone, comes seeking advice from the doctor about her unmanageable son, Pat. She is an Irish washerwoman, representing yet another social and ethnic class. Here we get a longish passage in Irish dialect about the evils of alcoholism. We also learn that Dr D’Arcy, a widow, prefers to be called Mrs D’Arcy because “her marriage had been a profoundly happy one” (Ch. 4). She is a woman’s rights activist and suffragist, who knows the evils men commit, but also knows that “men are not all brutes” (my italics). In the next chapter, we find that Laura does have one acquaintance in New York, Flora Livingston, a college friend. Flora represents the idle rich. When Laura tells Flora that she has come to New York “to earn my living,” Flora is slightly startled: “What put such a thought in your head?” Laura replies, “Necessity and inclination both.” Laura remembers how bright Flora seemed at college, especially in composition. But Flora’s social set does not “associate with literary people,” and “they think any woman who earns her own living is out of caste.” Laura suggests that, since Flora’s father is a lawyer and has no son, she could study law and join his firm. Flora warms to Laura’s energy, saying “Oh, how I could labor at anything useful! I get so tired of worsted-work.” 168

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But when Laura suggests she ask her father to let her advance, the light fades from Flora’s face. In the next chapter, “Laura Applies for a Situation,” she appears at the offices of the prestigious firm of Clamp & Bolton. Although she is a highly qualified bookkeeper, having stood first in mathematics in her graduating class, she is summarily rejected because of her sex. Outside Frank Heywood is waiting for her, having anticipated what would happen. Feeling a kinship of empathy with Frank, Laura asks him to accompany her back to Bludgett’s to retrieve a volume of Shakespeare she has left behind. When Laura sees Molly Bludgett again, the woman has a plaster bandage on her temple; and “blood had settled in black circles under her eyes” (Ch. 7). With Molly is Rhoda Dayton (“Rhody”), a young woman who works nights at a “concert-saloon.” She knows Frank and tells a story of how he helped the girls when the police abused them in a raid. After Rhoda has gone off on “her night’s work,” Molly settles down to read her sentimental romance. When she hears John Bludgett coming in, she hides her book and greets her “lord and master.” He is quite drunk, and, unfortunately, he has seen Laura and Frank departing. He demands to know where Laura now lives. When Molly resists telling him, he beats her savagely, kicking her repeatedly even after she has fallen unconscious. This scene is followed by an address to the reader:

............................................................................................... Reader, is this scene too horrible? are your dainty sensibilities shocked at such a recital? Think then if you shrink from the mere description, what the reality must be, and say not that it is unnatural or overdrawn, when day after day, our police records are full of the accounts of the wounds, the hurts, the death-blows, that women receive from brutal husbands. (Ch. 7)

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Panorama: Marriage, love, and class Blake continues to counterpoint the lives of the different classes. Laura in high dudgeon tells D’Arcy that she was refused the position at Clamp & Bolton because of her gender. Dr D’Arcy responds with a little speech, telling her not to “give up your hope because of one disappointment,” but to try to become a “really great woman-painter” – not only for herself, but also for the larger benefit of her sex. To this end, the doctor will use her influence to get Laura enrolled in the Academy of Design, as well as try to find some private students for her.

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There follows some talk of Frank Heywood, whose mysterious tragic history Dr D’Arcy knows very well. She tells Laura that he is “as true and faithful a friend as you could have,” placing a curious emphasis on the word “friend.” Three visitors, Mr and Mrs George Bradford, and their son, Guy, are announced. Now, D’Arcy says to Laura, “you will have an opportunity to see my model couple.” Although married before “woman’s rights were ever talked of, they have been equal partners in all things, and are lovers yet.” During the course of the evening, as he discourses on the ideal of “equal marriage,” Laura feels Guy Bradford’s “earnest gaze” on her; it “affected her strangely,” and her color rises more than once. In Chapter 9, Laura’s economic situation improves, but the relatively low wages she earns elicit another discourse on gender inequity by the doctor. Although such set speeches begin to be a little tiresome, they are important to an understanding of the economic condition of woman in the 1870s – especially in view of the fact that they are still pertinent today. In the meantime, the good doctor has arranged with Mr and Mrs Alexander Moulder to take Laura as a boarder. Mr Moulder is a much milder middle-class version of the working-class husband represented by John Bludgett. When the overweening Judge Swinton pays him a visit to solicit money for a political cause, Moulder falls all over himself at the “honor.” Political solicitation is only the ostensible reason for Swinton’s visit; actually he has discovered Laura’s new residence. In Moulder’s parlor, he does all he can to make himself socially “agreeable” to her, all the while plotting to get her alone. The next chapter returns to the upper class. Under the influence of Laura, Flora Livingston decides to ask her father to educate her in the law and take her into his firm, as he would a son. Shocked, he adamantly refuses. When she asks what her “prospects in the future” are, he replies: “The prospect of being a good wife to some suitable man. Your ambition should be for his success; I have no patience with this talk about a career for a woman! A true woman is willing to lose her own identity in her husband’s.” That night he discusses the situation with his wife. Although Mrs Livingston “had at one period of her life protested against her destiny as bitterly as did ever any revolted slave,” she has for years been “contented with her chains.” She finds her daughter’s desire for a career “a shocking idea!” For Mrs Livingston, the narrator observes, the fetters of custom will last a lifetime. The comparison to the chains of a Negro slave is no accident. Neither blacks nor women are seen in this society as fully human. The alternations from one class level to another in the first twelve chapters continue loosely throughout the next dozen. These chapters alternate and integrate women’s personal concerns with large socioeconomic ones. In particular, the quest for respectable and equitable employment for a 170

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woman is contrasted with the idleness of the leisure class and the poverty of the working class. In Chapters 13 through 16, Laura talks with Mrs Moulder about her illadvised marriage to a middle-class male chauvinist; in contrast, Laura’s visit to Guy Bradford’s wealthy parents reveals an ideal loving marriage of equals; Laura becomes thoroughly disgusted with the misogynist head of the girl’s finishing school; Rhoda takes care of her dying friend, Maggie, in a tenement and receives an unwelcome visitor at work in a saloon; and Flora receives a proposal (or commandment) of marriage at a society ball. In Chapters 17–21, Laura is more or less “pursued” by four radically different men; Dr D’Arcy shows Laura reports of the light punishments meted out to men who beat and murder women; Flora confesses to being devastated by her loss of freedom in an engagement to a very rich man of her own class; Bridget Malone enlists Laura’s assistance in getting Dr D’Arcy to treat Rhoda’s dying friend, Maggie; Rhoda receives a “warning” of impending danger to Laura; and Frank Heywood swings into action. Chapters 23–4 create a dramatic pause before the assault on Laura by Judge Swinton’s henchmen in Chapter 25 – an interlude in which we see Laura rebuffed, abused, and assaulted in less melodramatic ways as she looks for an honest job.

Middle-point of the melodrama Although the reality of abused women is never fully subsumed in the glow of romance, the story now moves into the mode of swashbuckling melodrama. Frank’s dramatic rescue of Laura from the evil clutches of Judge Swinton (Ch. 25 of 51) is reprised with variations in Chapter 37 when he rescues Rhoda Dayton from a sinking ship. Even more melodramatic is Rhoda’s final sacrifice. After their “desperate leap” over the side, Frank and Rhoda grab on to a small plank, but the plank is not “large enough for two.” Rhoda decides that since her “life is a wreck and a ruin,” she “may as well end thus as any way.” But before she lets go, she says, “Frank . . . I know your secret. Will you give me a kiss?” Unable to speak, Frank bends toward her: their lips meet in a “strange” and “despairing embrace.” Rhoda says with “plaintive” cry, “Frank, your life is better worth saving than mine, good-bye – good-bye!” and sinks beneath the waters. The conventions deployed here are those of a love story: Rhoda seems to be romantically in love with Frank. There has always been something different about Frank, his delicacy of face, his feminine lips, his shining eyes, his tenderness, his understanding of women. By this point, the reader may have already guessed that the heroic Frank is a woman in man’s clothing. Despite the melodrama, under the surface of the scene Blake has managed rather delicately 171

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to suggest lesbian attraction and desire; and Rhoda has not been the only woman attracted to Frank. As the story winds down, several loose ends begin to get tied up. Guy Bradford continues to weave in and out of Laura’s life. Flora at last makes it into a literary magazine, but when her husband discovers that she has published, he is outraged. Devastated, Flora eventually decides that death is preferable to life as “his obedient slave,” with every aspiration crushed. In a passage that parallels others in woman’s fiction – Stoddard’s The Morgesons, Chopin’s The Awakening – Blake describes Flora answering the call of the sea (Ch. 47). Laura hears of Flora’s death through Dr D’Arcy. While Judge Swinton is being elected to Congress through fake rallies, intimidation, and voter fraud (Ch. 50), Frank finally reveals his secret to Laura: “I am so much attached to you – I trust you so entirely that I think I can confide in you. . . . Have you never guessed my secret?” (Ch. 49). Frank tells her that when she so often said he seemed like a brother to her, she would have been “nearer the truth” if she had said “sister.” After a moment of astonishment, Laura cries out “You are a woman!” and claps her hands in delight: “It’s grand!” cries Laura and gives him/her a “hearty kiss.” “To think of you being one of the editors of ‘the Trumpeter!’ And going all over town as you please! And knocking Bludgett down! And rescuing me from Judge Swinton! And voting, I dare say!” Frank briefly tells her his life story, from leaving an unhappy and repressive home to becoming a cross-dressing female because “my actions were free; I could go about unquestioned. No man insulted me, and when I asked for work, I was not offered outrage” (Ch. 49). To say that the novel presents untraditional views of marriage and sexuality is an understatement. The highly modernist idea that gender identity is socially constructed antedates Virginia Woolf’s famous genderbending Orlando (1928) by over half a century. Moreover, there is “something about Frank” that makes him attractive to women. Whatever the sexual implications, one of the ironies of Frank’s womanhood is that throughout the narrative Guy Bradford displays increasing jealousy of her/ him as a rival for Laura’s affections. The end of the narrative suggests a new beginning. The penultimate chapter recounts the overwhelming election of Judge Swinton to Congress and the death of Mrs John Bludgett. In the final chapter, Guy Bradford goes to the home of Dr D’Arcy, with whom Laura is staying, and asks if she will see him. Asking her to forgive his unfounded jealousy of Frank, he proposes. Laura answers yes, with a quasi-hesitation and a proviso “that you will not ask me to surrender my liberty entirely, and will permit me to follow out my own career in life . . . ” He

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responds lovingly that their obligations to each other are equal: “We will make life’s journey hand in hand, equals in all things.” The “fetters” have been transformed into “bonds” of love.

Freedom and Domesticity? Alcott and the New Woman The difference from the self-centered, patronizing, patriarchal speech of St Elmo in Evans’s novel just a few years before is notable. Another novel from the same period, antedating Blake’s novel by only one year, also presents a more liberated view: Louisa May Alcott’s Work: A Story of Experience (1873). But Farrell makes a point of the radical difference between Blake’s novel and Alcott’s Work. Alcott’s “insistent interpretation of women’s work in the public world as a continuation of their duties in the home” reaffirms the notion that “woman’s essential nature is connected to a separate domestic sphere.” This ploy is “typical of advocates for women’s rights throughout the century.” The “strategy” employed by Alcott and others “called for the expansion of women’s options without questioning the underlying presumptions and attitudes about woman’s essential nature which had limited those options to begin with.”16 The newer woman is for Farrell more fully realized in Blake’s Fettered for Life. Critics have occasionally pointed to nuances of social commentary in Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870).17 There are more than nuances. A central scene in the novel is a rather clear icon of the emerging prototype of the New Woman. The heroine, Polly Milton, and her friend, Fanny Shaw, visit a pair of artists – Lizzie Small and Rebecca Jeffrey – both of whom who have radical views on womanhood. Polly tells Fanny that these women “live together, and take care of one another. . . . They are all alone in the world, but as happy and independent as birds; real friends, whom nothing will part.” The conventional Fanny suggests sarcastically, “Let a lover come between them, and their friendship won’t last long.” Polly replies, significantly, “Take a look at them, and you’ll change your mind.” The focus of the chapter is on a large sculpture of “the coming woman,” a “beautiful woman, bigger, lovelier, and more imposing than any woman I ever saw,” says Fanny. The woman of the statue has broad shoulders, clear-visioned eyes, and a mouth that can “say strong, wise things, as well as teach children and kiss babies.” She has lips that “do something besides simper and gossip.” The four women discuss what she should hold in her hand – a scepter perhaps? “No, we have had enough of that,” says Rebecca. Women have been called queens, she continues, but “the kingdom given them isn’t worth

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ruling.” When Polly suggests that the artist put “a man’s hand in hers to help her along,” Rebecca replies: “No, my woman is to stand alone, and help herself.” A fifth woman then speaks up: “Give her a ballot-box.” Rebecca agrees to add a ballot-box to the pedestal of the statue to complement symbols not only of domesticity but also of artistic and literary talent. There are other feminist touches, but the bulk of the novel is given over to sentimental idealism regarding love, marriage, and family. The newer woman is coming, but she has not yet quite arrived.

Notes 1. The term melodrama suggests works or scenes that feature sensational action, heavy-handed suspense, and sentimental platitudes. The sentiment is characterized by phony pathos and specious romanticism, sham menace and alarm, false piety and bogus religiosity; melodramas typically feature a stereotyped, conventionally happy ending, whether or not it grows out of situation, plot, and character. Sentimentalism is often defined as an attempt to manufacture an emotional response disproportionate to the situation, to indulge in unthinking feeling. Another literary meaning of the terms sentimental and sentimentalism, however, is intentional indulgence (or even deliberate over-indulgence) in emotion in order to enjoy it. See GLT, HBL, Camfield (ACAF, 2009), 53–76; P. Brooks (1995). 2. A slightly revised second edition of Woman’s Fiction (1978) was published in 1993. Although in the nineteenth century the phrase “woman’s fiction” was used in the same manner as “woman’s world” or “woman’s sphere,” I find that students habitually substitute the word “women’s.” The nomenclature makes a difference, I think. 3. A provocative theory about foregrounding domesticity and happy endings is that, in order to get into print, women authors embedded their subversive ideas within beginnings and endings that conformed to the tenets of domesticity and male authority. This theory of the “subversive middle” is attractive, but not always convincing. See Susan K. Harris (1990). 4. See The Feminist Companion to English Literature; entries are alphabetical. Americans are included, but the work is decidedly British and Commonwealth in orientation. “Ouida” is the pseudonym of British-born Louise de la Ramee (1839–1908). “Sarah Grand” is the pseudonym of the less well-known but more interesting suffragist writer, Francis Elizabeth Clarke McFall (1854–1943). 5. Works by Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894), the grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper, would also be appropriate for discussion in this

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

chapter. She wrote five novels and scores of stories. It is in the short story that Woolson is generally acknowledged to be at her best. Two of her stories in particular, “Felipa” (1876) and “Miss Grief” (1880), both problematic of interpretation, have been the recurrent subjects of ideological analysis by lesbian critics; see, e.g., Koppelman (1994). “Elizabeth Stuart Phelps” (1844–1911) was born Mary Gray Phelps. When her mother died in childbirth, Mary assumed her name. When she married Herbert Dickinson Ward in 1888 (she was forty-four, and he twenty-seven), she became Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward. Sometimes known to her public as Mrs Ward, she is often indexed under both Phelps and Ward. She also used the pseudonyms Lily Phelps and Mary Adams. The older Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1815–1852) wrote popular books with a strong religious theme. It was The Gates Ajar that Mark Twain was satirizing in Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven (written 1868; pub. 1909), in which he makes many of the basic presumptions of white Protestant Christianity in nineteenth-century America look ridiculous. Jemina Breynton (nicknamed “Gypsy”) is the female parallel to the “bad boy” figure in American literature: the engaging young rascal whose exploits often embody social criticism. The “bad boy” was already a well-established figure. Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907) had written The Story of a Bad Boy (1870), in which he explains that his term “bad boy” doesn’t mean bad in the core sense of the word, but “a real human boy” who gets into “mischief.” The type was made even more famous by George Wilbur Peck (1840–1916) in his “Peck’s Bad Boy” series, beginning in 1883 with Peck’s Bad Boy and His Pa, and running for several volumes through the first decade of the twentieth century. The most enduring of these popular “bad boys,” however, were Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. For a succinct introduction to children’s literature in America, with a useful selected bibliography, see Tarbox (ACAF, 2009), 428–48. See the next chapter for discussion of Jo’s “problematic” independence. Kessler, in the notes and introduction (xiii–xxxiii) to her edition of The Story of Avis (Phelps 1985, 2001), explains how Phelps ironically inverts the male figures of the medieval quest romance: “Phelps feminizes and updates the Grail Legend: Lancelot parallels Avis; Galahad, Wait, her daughter; the Grail, woman’s spiritual achievement and self-development . . .” (251). See Kessler’s critical biography (1983); also see S. K. Harris (1990) on Avis. Farrell writes that it was standard “in the novelistic treatment of women physicians” to portray them “as stunted emotionally because of their inability to find husbands”; see Lillie Devereux Blake: Retracing a Life Erased (2002), 141. This work and Farrell’s essay in ACAF (2009), 260–78, which places women’s fiction in the context of social problems, will be major referents for the rest of this chapter.

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12. See the exchange toward the end of Ch. 12. Her entire speech (comprising a long paragraph) is worth a careful look, incorporating as it does a strong statement advocating a woman’s freedom, combined with her own domestic desire for a lasting relationship with a man, and the insight that an unreconstructed traditional man would come to resent the “new kind of woman.” Also see the last page for Dr Zay’s skepticism regarding traditional religion combined with her willingness to take a chance on a man who demands only that she come to him “of your own accord.” 13. As is made clear in Retracing a Life Erased; Farrell deals critically with all of her writings. 14. See Retracing, 64–5 ff.; 101–2. Farrell also mentions Angelina Grimke, Margaret Fuller, and Judith Sargent Murray as going counter to the idea of biology over culture so prevalent in nineteenth-century ideology. She notes the prevalence of the idea that Darwinian theory stressed “the inevitability of sexual differentiation in the evolutionary process.” Women were deemed to have “immense reproductive systems” and “smaller brains,” and thus were “less rational and educable than men and more subject to their biological functions” (102). Illogically, this idea coexisted with the idea of women’s moral superiority, their aptitude for reform movements, Church work, and the like; the influence of woman was supposed to radiate out beyond the domestic sphere and control the moral destiny of the community (see Retracing, 103). Cf. Bert Bender, ACAF (2009), 377–94, esp. 382–4. Darwin never argued lesser brain development in women, but instead the equal development in both sexes. 15. Farrell provides critical analyses of each of Blake’s five novels; a condensed discussion of Fettered for Life appears in the “Afterword” of Farrell’s edition of the novel for Feminist Press (1996). 16. “Afterword,” Fettered for Life, 394–5, my italics. 17. For a brief insightful overview of “the underrated Old-Fashioned Girl,” see Matteson’s essay on Alcott in ACAF (2009), 462; also see the next chapter. For other treatments of the New Woman, see the following: for Stoddard, Gilman, and Chopin, see Ch. 12; for Wharton, see Ch. 13; for Stowe, Jewett, Cather, and the idea of regionalist feminism, see Ch. 17. For Freeman, see Ch. 3.

See also Alcott (1988); Ammons (1991); Baym (1981,1992); Bender (1996, 2004); Boyd (2004, 2006); H. R. Brown (1940); Budick (1994); Cogan (1989); Coultrap-McQuin (1990); Crozier (1969); C. J. Davis and D. D. Knight (2004);. Alcott (1991, ed. Elbert); Fetterley and Pryse (2003); Fleissner (2004); Fryer (1976); Hoeller (2000); 176

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Kasson (1994); Kessler (1983); Moore (1963); Nettels (1997); Papashvily (1956); Pattee (1940); Patterson (2005); Roman (1992); Smith-Rosenberg (1985); A. F. Stein (1985); B. Thomas (1997); Torsney (1989); Wagner-Martin (ACAF, 2009); J. W. Warren (1984); Welter (1996, 1976).

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Chapter 11

Domestic Feminism The Problematic Louisa May Alcott

Recent critics have been fascinated by the “double life” of Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), who is almost exclusively known to general readers today as the author of popular stories about children and young people – stories full of good humor and sentiment and conventional piety.1 But she also published a large number of sensational gothic romances. In addition, she wrote at least two versions of a “Mephistopheles” story: A Long Fatal Love Chase (written c. 1866) and A Modern Mephistopheles (1877). What Alcott called her “blood-andthunder” tales are full of abuse and revenge, violence and murder, with doses of drugs, mesmerism, abduction, and soft-core sex – hardly what most readers expect from the author of Little Women (1868).2 Alcott also wrote on behalf of abolition, legal and social justice for African Americans, equal rights for women, and women’s suffrage. Among her early book-length publications is Hospital Sketches (1863), a redaction of a series of letters she had written to her family regarding her experiences as a nurse during the Civil War.3 Amidst a certain levity provided by the folksy narrator, Nurse Periwinkle, the pathos of war is vividly presented and an earnest moral drawn from each narrative. She commends Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and extends the idea of “liberation” to women: she proclaims herself a “woman’s rights woman” and claims she can do anything a man can and probably do it better. The book in fact begins with the manifesto of “work,” a declaration of the need to be useful: “I want something to do,” says Periwinkle. This manifesto is central to a once-forgotten novel, Work: A Story of Experience (1873), rediscovered a century later by academic critics as an important study of a woman’s independent place in society. Another largely unknown work is Moods (1864, Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson. Ó 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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rev. 1882), a serious adult novel about what it means to be a woman in the later nineteenth century.

“Cosy Domesticity”: The Children’s Writer Alcott’s fictions about and for children run to several volumes published regularly over many years. The Little Women trilogy spans almost twenty years from the publication of the first volume (1868) to the last (1886).4 Feminist and other critics have divided opinions about the Little Women volumes, especially the first one. Some see Little Women as anti-feminist; others see the trilogy, along with Work, as constructing an idealized gynocentric society. Work does move in that direction; but the world of Little Women is a far cry from, say, that of the all-female utopia envisioned decades later by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Herland (1915). Angeles M. Estes and Kathleen Margaret Lant are so appalled by the final acquiescence of Little Women’s central character to domesticity that they refer to the “horror” of the gentle story of the March family girls. Although somewhat hyperbolic, the criticism makes an important point about the conflict between domesticity and career embedded in the novel – and the heroine’s marriage to a male chauvinist.5 Little Women is immediately recognizable as sentimental juvenile fiction. The consciously charming story begins in rural New England in the early 1860s, during the American Civil War. The family consists of a largely absent father and five women – Marmee (dialect for mother, i.e., “Mommy”) and four daughters. Meg, the oldest and most overtly motherly of the four sisters, acts as a kind of babysitter for children in the neighborhood. Beth, frail, gentle, and domestic, habitually knits by the hearth-fire. Amy, ambitious to be a famous sculptor and painter, is also a motherly woman. Jo, tall, strong, tomboyish, and independent of temperament, wants to be a writer. The Reverend Mr March is serving as a chaplain for the Union Army in the Civil War. Their genteel poverty contrasts with the wealth of the family next door, the Lawrences. Young Theodore Lawrence (“Laurie”), privileged and indulged, is the lonely “boy next door.” For much of the novel, he moons after Jo. A conservative pietistic element is emphasized from the start by allusions to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678; 1684). Alcott’s story is preceded by an “adapted” epigraph from Bunyan’s book about little “tripping maids” becoming “pilgrims” journeying toward the “world which is to come.” The first chapter of Little Women is titled “Playing Pilgrims,” and several of the chapter titles of Part I invoke the Christian story and draw analogies to Bunyan. In the fifth chapter (“Being Neighborly”), Beth anticipates their move to a new home in terms of getting out of the Slough of Despond, going through the Wicket 180

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Gate, and finding the beautiful Palace, while Jo reminds her that they “have to get by the lions first.” Chapter 6 is titled “Beth Finds the Palace Beautiful,” the first of four chapters that indicate a central character trait for each of the four girls – especially faults to be amended. Beth is too passive and submissive; Amy is too materialistic; Jo is too arrogant and intemperate; Meg is too vain. Chapter 7 is titled “Amy’s Valley of Humiliation”; Chapter 8 is “Jo meets Apollyon” (Bunyan’s scaly giant of “Pride”); Chapter 9 is “Meg Goes to Vanity Fair.” In spite of these allusions, the novel does not act out a complete allegory but remains a lively and amiable story of recognizably real people coping with real problems. When word comes that Mr March is seriously ill, Jo sells her long, beautiful hair to get money to enable her mother to visit her sick husband at the front.6 Jo’s conflicted femininity is charmingly demonstrated when Marmee finds her daughter privately crying, not for her sick father, but for her hair. Another disruption occurs when an aunt takes Amy to Europe with her as a traveling companion, and Jo decides to take a position as a governess in New York. There Jo meets Friedrich Bhaer, formerly a distinguished professor in Berlin, who is eking out a living by tutoring in German. She is impressed by his intelligence and by his goodness. With the introduction of Professor Bhaer, the implicit piety of the narrative gradually becomes more overt; and a seemingly major contradiction in theme and character develops. Upon her return home, Jo refuses Laurie’s proposal of marriage because she intends to be a writer and earn her own way. But the feminist theme of independence is about to undergo a radical reversal. Beth, who had contracted scarlet fever while caring for a neighbor’s sick baby, begins to deteriorate rapidly, and Jo dedicates herself to caring for her. The requisite prolonged death scene of sentimental fiction takes several chapters, replete with heavy-handed piety and religious imagery. Beth finally dies “in the dark hour before the dawn” with “no farewell but one loving look and a little sigh.” Mother and sisters make her “ready for the long sleep that pain would never mar again,” feeling that to “their darling” death “was a benignant angel – not a phantom full of dread.” Lonely and distraught, Jo seeks solace in writing and in her family, eventually becoming a successful writer of popular fiction. Very late in the narrative, Professor Bhaer comes to see Jo on his way to take up a faculty post in the Midwest. Awkward and hesitant, he proposes. This time Jo decides in favor of marriage (Part II, Ch. 23, “Under the Umbrella”).

The end of independence? To conventional minds of the time, Professor Bhaer may have represented solid traditional values of piety and domesticity, but he is not really a very appealing 181

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character. He condescendingly lectures Jo on the rightness of traditional religion and the immorality of trashy story-papers, remarking that he does not think “good young girls” should see such stories as appear in them (Part II, Ch. 11). Jo counters: “Many respectable people make an honest living out of what are called sensation stories.” His response: “If respectable people knew what harm they did, they would not feel that the living was honest.” Later, in her room, Jo decides Bhaer is right: “They are trash, and will soon be worse than trash if I go on; for each is more sensational than the last.” She then stuffs “the whole bundle” of her manuscripts into her stove. When “nothing remained of all her three months’ work, except a heap of ashes, and the money in her lap, Jo looked sober, as she sat on the floor, wondering what she ought to do about her wages.” She decides she can keep the money but will not write any more “sensational stories.” Going “to the other extreme,” she writes heavily moralizing stories, but her “lively fancy and girlish romance” is “ill at ease in the new style.” She then tries “a child’s story” and “juvenile literature.” But the only publisher she finds “felt it his mission to convert all the world to his particular belief.” Jo finds she cannot consign all the naughty boys to a brutal end just “because they did not go to a particular Sabbath-school” or reward all the “good infants” with “every kind of bliss”; so she simply “corked up her inkstand.” Noticing she has ceased to write, Professor Bhaer is pleased that she is “occupying her mind with something useful.” Many readers do not find Jo’s attraction to Bhaer convincing, especially after her rejection of her intimate friend, Laurie. No Bront€ean Rochester or Heathcliff, Bhaer seems quite unsuitable for a high-spirited, ambitious, independent-minded heroine. Alcott said that she had to marry Jo off because, after the publication of Part I, she received scores of letters from young ladies begging her to marry Jo to someone. Alcott gave in to the commercial imperative, but refused to marry Jo to Laurie, the proverbial boy next door. That would have been too utterly conventional. Jo should have remained a spinster, she said; but unwilling to go against the public clamor of “so many enthusiastic young ladies,” Alcott made a “funny match” for her heroine out of the spirit of “perversity.”7

The requisite domestic ending The final chapter (Part II, Ch. 47, “Harvest Time”) completes the conventional domestic denouement with an overview of the prospering extended family. Old Aunt March has willed Jo her big house, “Plumfield,” and Jo and her professor have decided to use it as a school for boys. The novel ends with a pious, 182

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sentimental passage that many nineteenth-century readers seemed to find satisfyingly affirmative but that many modern readers find cloying. The family is gathered around an outside table, surrounding the central figure of Marmee. It is her sixtieth birthday. One chair is empty, representing the place of little Beth; and Amy is worried about the health of her baby, who like Beth is a “frail little creature”; the “dread of losing her” is the “shadow” over Amy’s habitual “sunshine.” This “cross” binds them more “closely together.” Jo, “glancing from her husband to her chubby children, tumbling on the grass beside her,” declares: “I’m far happier than I deserve.” When she expresses her deep gratitude for life’s bountiful harvest under her mother’s “patient sowing and reaping,” the family matriarch, “touched to the heart,” stretches out her arms, “as if to gather children and grandchildren to herself.” The novel concludes with these words: “O my girls, however long you may live, I never can wish you a greater happiness than this!”

Beyond Little Women Despite the final sacrifice of Jo’s creativity to conventionality and domesticity, most of the descriptions of her literary efforts suggest, if not an anti-domestic bent, at least a counter-current. Unlike Jo, Alcott did not give up writing thriller fiction. A half-dozen sensation stories appeared the same year as the first volume of Little Women; in 1869 and 1870, another eight appeared; and she continued intermittently to work on A Modern Mephistopheles, which was published in 1877. Almost all of Alcott’s thrillers were published either anonymously or under the pseudonym of “A. M. Barnard.” The plots tended to follow an exaggerated pattern of danger-and-doom and last-minute rescue. Alcott’s experiments in the romance genre of the sensational thriller are usually mingled with parody and irony on the one hand, and on the other (more overtly) with romantic or pietistic uplift, involving both moral “punishment” and woman as “redeemer.” Several of these stories involve the “masks” that women adopt and the “roles” they play – in either their victimization or in their “will to power.” In fact, power could be seen as perhaps the basic theme of all these stories. Alcott repeatedly presents the covert power of a woman over men, usually accompanied by a revenge theme. These stories thus raise the question for modern readers of whether they are merely conventional romance thrillers or undercover feminist narratives, semi-covert examples of a newly emerging “woman’s fiction.” The main such work is not quite a gothic thriller; it is a realistic romance of domestic intrigue: Behind a Mask; or, A Woman’s Power (1866). 183

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The drama queen Alcott’s now celebrated “governess novel” has been called one of her most “radical” texts and her most important sensation story. Judith Fetterley has praised Behind a Mask for its “incisive analysis of the economic situation of the white middle-class woman” in the late nineteenth century. Since women were grossly undervalued and underpaid, they had to resort to indirection and deception; and Behind a Mask, she suggests, dramatizes more or less realistically (within the sentimental romance tradition) their predicament without necessarily casting aspersions on the stratagems they employ. Following up on the implications of Fetterley’s reading, Elaine Showalter suggests that the book is “a narrative meditation on the possibilities for feminist subversion of patriarchal culture” through “role playing.”8 The central figure of Behind a Mask, Jean Muir, is an aging stage actress, who, with the help of makeup, wigs, dentures, and costume, disguises herself as a younger woman and plays the role of a governess in order to insinuate herself into the household of the wealthy Coventry family. She presents herself as a young person just blossoming into womanhood – innocent, selfless, altruistic, and well disposed. But beneath this mask, she is an angry, scheming, vengeful woman. Shown to her room after her arrival at the family mansion, she removes false hair and teeth, revealing herself as “a haggard, worn and moody woman.” Decanting a drink, she sighs that at least here, safely ensconced in her room, she can be herself, “if actresses are ever themselves.” Jean’s plan is to win over all the men and choose the richest. But her carefully plotted schemes are discovered because she has imprudently detailed them in letters to a female friend who is also looking to infiltrate a wealthy family. Nevertheless, she manages to convince the Coventry patriarch, the elderly Sir John, of her innocence, and, sensing her advantage, she forthwith seduces and secretly marries him. Gerald Coventry, who has suspected her motives all along, but who has also fallen for her, is stunned. As she departs on the wedding journey with old Sir John, she says to Gerald in a penetrating voice, “Is not the last scene better than the first?” Jean Muir has been called one of Alcott’s most nuanced characters. She is deceitful and manipulative, but her judgment of other people is incisive, sometimes even sympathetic. She struggles with a less than coherent concept of morality and self-identity; and her purpose, if not truly evil, seems immoral; yet the plot conveys an odd feeling of amoral just deserts. Alcott’s conception of a Machiavellian female character, neither moral nor immoral, certainly struck a new chord in “woman’s fiction” in America.

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So too did Moods (1864; rev. 1882). Alcott struggled with this novel, starting and stopping, publishing what she considered an unsatisfactory version in 1864, and reworking it over a period of eighteen years before reissuing it in a revised version in 1882.9 The autobiographical elements are noticeable, though the story line is in the tradition of sentimental romance. Alcott initially inscribed the book to her mother as a “romance,” based on “my own life experience”; later she felt uncomfortable about the personal nature of the book and wrote that it was from observation. She also changed the ending: instead of dying, the heroine adopts a life of dedicated service to others. In doing so, she transcends her moody self-absorption and finds a degree of happiness in self-sacrifice. The first reviews were mainly, though not completely, negative. Some critics found the book immoral, accusing Alcott of advocating free love because the plot revolves around a heroine who wants to cleave to her husband but is obsessed with his best friend. While presenting the heroine’s quandary, the book discusses the possibility of divorce in a more or less morally neutral manner – and in terms of a woman’s independence and her right to choose. A correlative theme is the defects of marriage as a social convention, especially the mandate of total and exclusive “rights” to another person. Depressed by the reception of Moods, Alcott temporarily gave up writing what she intended as her next novel, Work. It took her nearly a decade to return to it and complete it.

Achieving “Woman’s Fiction”: The Sentimental Realism of Work Work, A Story of Experience (1873) moves more convincingly than Moods toward its problematic yet inspirational conclusion. In one context, the denouement is quite conventional. In another, it is almost revolutionary. The book opens with a manifesto, spoken by the orphaned Christie Devon to her Aunt Betsy: “. . . there’s going to be a new Declaration of Independence.” Christie explains that she is “old enough to take care of myself; and if I’d been a boy, I should have been told to do it long ago.” So, “like the people in fairy tales,” it is her intent to “travel away into the world and seek my fortune.” While speaking, she vigorously kneads “the dough as if it was her destiny,” an ambiguous, even ironic image since she thinks she wishes to escape conventional domesticity. In another variation on the archetype of “woman’s fiction,” Christie’s journey will be both an individual bildungsroman and a larger Everywoman’s mission – or as the recurrent allusions in the novel suggest, a Pilgrim’s Progress.10 After much travail, including a visit to her personal Slough of

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Despond, she will find self-fulfillment in a larger moral-religious sense of community. Within this large context, Christie’s story exemplifies the philosophy of work extolled by Victorians (notably Thomas Carlyle) as the “cure” for despair. Christie is twenty-one when she leaves home; the narrative ends two decades later when she is forty. Overall, Christie’s passage toward independence brings her to a realization of the interdependence of all human beings and, especially, the need to work for the mutual benefit of other women. This emphasis on the status of women and the idea of a women’s community has made the novel an object of special interest to feminist critics and historians; but the book retains a strong conservative bias toward the traditional view of domesticity as the proper sphere of woman.11 It is heavily and conventionally religious (specifically Christian and Protestant); and for some, an over-indulgence in pious bromides undercuts Christie’s feminist social revelation.

Structural and thematic issues Readers have also been critical of the overly episodic quality of the novel, finding it loose-jointed in structure and even contradictory in theme. Some critics have suggested that the novel is a picaresque, an episodic journey. In a general way the first part of the novel is in the tradition of “on the road” narratives; but the concomitant view of Christie as a “rogue” (picaro, outlaw) seems rather strained, even though she is somewhat outside the conventional dictates of society. Actually, the twenty chapters of the book divide rather obviously into two coherent halves; and Chapter 10 is titled “Beginning Again.” In addition to this basic two-part division are other overlapping, interlocking, or interpenetrating clusters of chapters that demonstrate progress toward an overarching theme.12 As in other works we have examined, the middle-point of the book is not one chapter or passage but a sequence of transitional chapters. These chapters form a hinge between the two consistent divisions of the larger bipartite structure. The initial six chapters describe Christie striking out on her own to attempt to find “useful” work. The occupations that Christie attempts in Chapters 2–6 (titled “Servant,” “Actress,” “Governess,” “Companion,” “Seamstress”) represent some of the major kinds of employment available to women in the nineteenth century. They also represent a spectrum of social classes associated with working women. But these jobs grant neither economic independence nor dignity – in fact they reinforce poverty and mortification – although there is an implied progression to these chapters. In “Servant” (Ch. 2) and “Actress” (Ch. 3), Christie experiences for the first time supercilious condescension, as if 186

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she were a person of a lower class. In “Governess” (Ch. 4) and “Companion” (Ch. 5), each a step up in class, she experiences deception and dishonesty. In “Seamstress” (Ch. 6), Christie goes down in class to a mind-numbing job where she is regarded as nothing more than a machine. There is also an alternation between domestic, “inside” jobs and other, “outside” jobs. In “Servant,” she is in a domestic position inside a family circle; in the next position, “Actress,” in an outside, public job. “Governess” and “Companion,” which follow, are both inside domestic positions. Then in “Through the Mist” (Ch. 7), Christie is in an outside position as a “needle-woman” for independent hire. Each of these occupations is portrayed with a certain satiric and often comic verve, within the context of deadly seriousness. By Chapter 7, Christie has not only become disenchanted with the very idea of opportunity outside the domestic sphere, but also has come to despair of ever achieving womanly independence. Each of her employments has entailed some sort of degradation; and, as a result, she feels increasing (if reluctant) identification with the lower classes. She leaves her position in a factory-like sewing establishment as an act of solidarity with a lower-class woman called Rachel. Discovered to be a “fallen woman,” Rachel has been rejected by her fellow workers. Christie embraces her as a sister, foreshadowing the sisterhood theme that culminates the novel. But as for herself, Christie feels an overwhelming sense of repeated failure. Out of a job, she now faces poverty. She has arrived at the point of suicide.

Rescue and rehabilitation Christie is saved from throwing herself into the river by her friend Rachel, who takes her to a wiser woman. Chapter 8, titled “A Cure for Despair,” reveals that the cure for Christie’s despondency is a return to the values of domesticity – an enlightened domesticity. Christie’s spiritual rehabilitation takes place in the domestic sphere of an older laundress, Mrs Cynthia Wilkins, who (in Ch. 9) introduces Christie to the potent sermonizing of the Reverend Mr Power. This chapter continues the moral turn of the narrative toward the positive, with true Christianity as a guide. The primacy of the religious theme is fully established and followed out with increasing insistence in the remainder of the novel. Christie is moved by two of Power’s sermons: one an Old Testament explication of the stern justice of Jehovah; the other a milder New Testament meditation on forgiveness, mercy, and love. Alcott does not give us either of the sermons. Instead, we get summary descriptions of the responses of the congregation and Christie, who “felt as if he preached to her alone.” 187

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Through Mr Power, she meets David Sterling, a “florist” (really a gardener and botanist) and quasi-transcendentalist. He has tried to work out his own redemption from a mysterious sorrow through discovering the spirit in nature, especially in the cultivation of flowers and exotic plants.13 Chapter 10 (“Beginning Again”) concludes the first half of the narrative and begins the second. The penultimate step in Christie’s rehabilitation through love, marriage, and motherhood is now set in motion. This set of values hardly sounds like a feminist revolution, but, as we shall see, certain aspects of the “cure for despair” are radical. Christie comes back to hearth and home with an enlightened sensibility and elevation of the spirit, and the novel concludes as a kind of exemplum of broad humanitarianism and spiritual uplift. But within this narrative contour, the story turns at the midway point to the mode of domestic romance, with a sentimental interlude of pastoral idyll, geared to the popular tastes of the time. Christie and David slowly and gently fall in love and marry. Since their romance takes place against the backdrop of the American Civil War, the story is also laced with patriotism, another feature popular with Alcott’s primary audience. The concession to conventions of popular taste is relative, however. The Civil War also reveals Christie’s continuing development as an independent woman. As Christie and David grow ever closer, she notices that little by little he is neglecting his garden and seems distracted. He feels a duty to join the Northern troops. Christie tells him that the very day he enlists, she too will stand “ready” to serve in a Union hospital. Two years pass, during which Christie engages in “all sorts of service” to her country. Then she gets word that David is dead.

Culture and social class: A new emancipation and the ideal republic In the second half of the narrative, Christie faces her greatest single trial in the death of her husband. But she wins through to happiness and self-fulfillment in other ways – including motherhood and the formation of a proto-feminist sisterhood of oppressed and exploited women. The chapters of the second part are more tightly linked together than those of the first part, involving a unifying utopian theme of gender equality that is almost messianic. The last chapter (Ch. 20) presents an overarching vision of the “coming woman” and the new society of equal workers to which many modern readers respond very positively. The “religious” revelation governing the whole is also sociopolitical, leading toward the establishment of a new community of women as a “loving league of sisters.” Thus, as a whole, the novel is not as disconnected as some critics have suggested. 188

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The last two chapters round off the narrative fairly quickly. The title of Chapter 19, “Little Heart’s-Ease,” refers to the nickname (after the flower) of Christie’s baby, a little girl whose Christian name is Ruth. Despite the compensation of her little girl, Christie feels for a while that she “cannot forgive God” for taking David from her; but she is learning “submission through the stern discipline of grief.” Christie now advocates for “working-women,” feeling a special “sympathy for this class of workers.” Attending what purports to be a support group meeting, she discovers that the society ladies who presume to run the meeting do not understand working women, nor the workers them – “in spite of the utmost need on one side and the sincerest good will on the other.” It’s up to Christie to “bring the helpers and the helped into truer relations with each other.” That will be the first step toward the “Ideal Republic.” Because Christie (like Alcott) comes from “genteel” poverty, she seems “fitted to act as interpreter between the two classes.” Christie has finally found the “calling” she has been seeking. The only portion of her speech actually rendered is short. Whereas the War achieved the emancipation of black people from slavery, she speaks now of the emancipation of women. This second emancipation – the freeing of women from social and economic constraints – will be the foundation of the Ideal Republic. Christie asks Bella Carrol, a well-to-do society lady, to try an “experiment.” Bella is to make her home “beautiful and attractive,” keeping “all the elegance and refinement of former times.” To this high-toned milieu, she is to add “common sense” and invite old friends and new to come to her home to engage in “conversation instead of gossip” and in “nobler” pursuits instead of “present dissipation.” The “sort of society we need,” says Christie, is in the hands of “those who possess the means of culture.” Christie herself cannot be the leader of this enterprise because she’s too radical a reformer: as a woman, she is too “strong-minded.” Perhaps more importantly, she doesn’t have the necessary social and economic position. Is this snobbery – or social realism? At this point, as if to redeem Christie’s expressed social elitism, two of her old acquaintances from the first part of the novel reappear: a fugitive slave, and Mrs Wilkins, the laundress. She calls them her “dear friends.” One, she says, “has saved scores of her own people, and is my pet heroine”; the other “has the bravest, cheeriest soul I know, and is my private oracle.”

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hands around a kitchen table. On the wall is a painting of a scene from the second part of Pilgrim’s Progress that suggests a unifying parable for the novel.

............................................................................................... It was a quaint and lovely picture of Mr. Greatheart, leading the fugitives from the City of Destruction. A dark wood lay behind; a wide river rolled before; Mercy and Christiana pressed close to their faithful guide, who went down the rough and narrow path bearing a cross-hilted sword in his right hand, and holding a sleeping baby with the left. The sun was just rising.

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The symbolic import of the imagery for American women as presented in Christie’s story is clear. Asked what she will do now, Christie says she just plans to “work” quietly, for “in labor, and the efforts and experiences that grew out of it, I have found independence, education, happiness, and religion.” The new woman will have learned that “the greatest of God’s gifts to us is the privilege of sharing His great work.” Conventionally pious as this statement sounds, it is actually in the service of the more radical idea of complete equality for women. As several critics have observed, the joining of hands suggests that the relative powerlessness of women – dramatized in the first several chapters as the typical fragmentation of their life experiences – can be overcome through unity. The women gathered at Christie’s table are a “loving league of sisters, old and young, black and white, rich and poor, each ready to do her part to hasten the coming of the happy end.” As she sits with her disciples at the table, the woman named “Christie” seems to function as a Female Christ – bringing enlightenment and prophesying the social and moral salvation of both men and women.14 Some readers see an unresolved contradiction in this conception of Christie as the herald of the New Woman. From the beginning, the narrative divides women into two groups: the weak who make a mistake in striking out on their own and should never have left the domestic nest; and the strong who find that self-discipline and self-discovery lead them back to domestic values. The “strongest” women struggle and suffer danger and even (temporary) defeat. They attempt to achieve success out in the world and thereby achieve certain values of “self,” as opposed to self-abnegation. Christie has learned to be selfless, but she has also learned not to sacrifice herself always.15 In this, Christie is reminiscent of Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne at the end of The Scarlet Letter; and Christie’s little daughter functions symbolically like Hester’s daughter, Pearl: “a hopeful omen, seeming to promise that the coming generation of women will not only receive but deserve their liberty . . .” Like

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Hester, Christie is both her liberated self and a representative of a class of oppressed women – a point announced back in the first chapter.

............................................................................................... Christie was one of that large class of women who, moderately endowed with talents, earnest and true-hearted, are driven by necessity, temperament, or principle out into the world to find support, happiness, and homes for themselves. Many turn back discouraged; more accept shadow for substance, and discover their mistake too late; the weakest lose their purpose and themselves; but the strongest struggle on, and, after danger and defeat, earn at last the best success this world can give us, the possession of a brave and cheerful spirit, rich in selfknowledge, self-control, self-help.

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Although, as in Little Women, the pilgrim’s “progress” is circular, from home outward and back to home and domesticity, the passage affirms individual quest and affirmation of “self.” It is clear that we are supposed to admire Christie as one of the strong. For all its sentimental and melodramatic flaws, Christie’s triumphant story may be said to exemplify the theory of “woman’s fiction” far better than works like Evans’s St. Elmo. The “Ideal Republic” requires a woman of independence, which means the ability to help herself. Men’s help can be appreciated, but the new woman will not require or depend on male assistance. The strong woman’s true “home” lies in affirmations of the self in the community of women.

Notes 1. Matteson’s ACAF essay (2009), 451–467, is a concise and well-balanced introduction to Alcott’s complexities. His prize-winning biography (2007) of Louisa May and her father, Bronson, places her in the intellectual and social environment of New England. Stern’s biography (1950), long standard, has been frequently revised. In 1975, Stern published a collection of previously unknown gothic tales by Alcott (see next note). Partially in response, Saxton (1977) reevaluated the darker side of the famous “children’s writer,” though she was not the first to employ a psychoanalytic approach. Both Stern and Saxton have had a major impact on subsequent critics with strong feminist interests. One of the most influential books of reinterpretation is the anthology, Alternative Alcott, ed. Showalter (1988). 2. In 1975, Stern brought out a collection of the “Unknown Thrillers” of Alcott (rpt. 1978). Over the years, Stern has incrementally added to the list of Alcott’s

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3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

anonymous and pseudonymous thrillers in several edited collections, the most inclusive of which is the “Collected Thrillers” (1995). Stern is also the author of Louisa May Alcott: From Blood and Thunder to Hearth and Home (1998). Keyser’s study of the fiction, Whispers in the Dark (1993), takes its name from one of Alcott’s gothic thrillers. Contracting a fever during her war service, Alcott was treated with a mercury compound that made her seriously ill for the rest of her life. Little Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy appeared in two parts in 1868 and 1869. Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys came out two years later in 1871; but not until 1886 did she finally end the March family story with Jo’s Boys, and How they Turned Out. The recent Norton Critical Edition of Little Women (2004) contains useful general assessments and background materials, including the important Estes and Lant essay on the feminist failings of the novel (referenced below). Although Alcott expressed a certain cynical contempt for “juvenile” writing, she produced, in the fifteen years between the two “Jo’s Boys” volumes, several works trading on the name and/or character of the heroine of Little Women: principally six volumes of Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag (1872–82), Eight Cousins; or the Aunt-Hill (1875), and Rose in Bloom: A Sequel to Eight Cousins (1876). Other of her once well-known young people’s works include An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Jack and Jill: A Village Story (1880), and A Garland for Girls (1888). Estes and Lant’s 1989 essay is reprinted in the 2004 Norton Critical Edition of Little Women, 564–583. A woman selling her tresses is a motif of folk tales and sentimental fiction. See, for example, the famous story by O. Henry (William Sydney Porter 1862–1910), “The Gift of the Magi” (1906). See the discussion of Bhaer and the “funny match” in Eden’s Outcasts, 346–348. See Showalter, Introduction (xxx), Alternative Alcott; and Fetterley (1983), 2. Matteson (2007) provides a good discussion of these struggles; see esp. 298–304, 400–403. To an extent, Alcott toned down some of her more radical critiques of social convention and gender inequality. Elbert’s edition of Moods (1991) prints variant passages. The opposite endings of the two Mephisto stories parallel the different endings of Moods. A Long Fatal Love Chase presents a Faustian attitude of defiance and declaration of undying love (or possessiveness); A Modern Mephistopheles sees unsanctioned love as moral error and extols self-sacrifice. A bildungsroman is a novel of the “education” or “development” of the hero; when the protagonist in such a novel is female, some critics use the term female bildungsroman, sometimes attributing special characteristics to it as genre. See Grace Farrell’s comparison of Work with Fettered for Life toward the end of the preceding chapter. Yellin (1980) has argued that aesthetically the novel ultimately fails because the episodes are not tightly connected thematically. Originally titling it Success, Alcott re-titled it twice.

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13. These two male figures are supposedly based on real people: Power on Theodore Parker (1810–1860), and Sterling on Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862). 14. In another of their noteworthy articles on Alcott, Lant and Estes argue that Christie is a Christ figure and that the episodic structure of Work results from its being in the tradition of parables; see Lant and Estes (1991). 15. Although “self-abnegation” is a “noble thing,” Alcott once wrote, “there is a limit to it” (Saxton 1977, 273).

See also Alcott (1975, 1988, 1991, 1994, 1995, 2004); Bedell (1980); Boyd (2004); Camfield (ACAF, 2009); Clark and Alberghene (1998); Kasson (1994); Keyser (1983, 1999); MacDonald (1983); Stern (1984, 1999 [1950], 1998); Strickland (1985); Tarbox (ACAF, 2009).

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“All the Happy Endings” Marriage, Insanity, and Suicide

In the expanded sense of serious woman’s fiction – “New Woman’s Fiction” – not every heroine triumphs, not every story ends happily, and marriage may lead to misery. Three examples of negative domesticity and the New Woman have become key texts in the recovered history of literary feminism: one originally from the 1860s and two from the 1890s. Each offers a powerful example of marriage as a disaster, leading to imprisonment, insanity, or death: Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons (1862, rev., 1889), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899).

Radical Compromise and the Female Bildungsroman: Stoddard’s The Morgesons The three novels of Elizabeth Drew Barstow Stoddard (1823–1902) enjoyed two revivals after their first publication. Two Men (1865) was revised and reprinted in 1888; Temple House (1867) in 1888; and The Morgesons (1862) in 1889. The second Stoddard revival came almost a century later with the 1984 reissue of The Morgesons in an annotated scholarly edition with selected other writings.1 Since this landmark edition of The Morgesons, interest in Stoddard has continued to be strong. Largely because it is an early presentation of a woman’s sexual awakening, Susan K. Harris sees the book as “the most radical women’s novel to appear in the midnineteenth century.”2 Part of this radicalism, she suggests, is that the narrator, Cassandra, speaks for herself alone and is not offered as a model for womanhood. Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson. Ó 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Certainly the book seems less preachy than many another; moralizing is dramatically presented in terms of particular characters, and often couched as questions. The book works within the tradition of the “domestic novel” and “woman’s fiction,” but it is more aptly called a female or feminist bildungsroman.3 Even more accurately, it can be called a negative bildungsroman: for it’s not clear what the protagonist has achieved or finally learns. Space permits only a brief word. The story is structured primarily by three journeys away from the domestic sphere and back again. Each time, the intellectually gifted heroine learns more about the world, but also about herself. Each of the three journeys takes her farther from home, toward larger and more urban realms. The first journey sends her to a neighboring Massachusetts coastal village and to her grandfather’s cold house. She finds that the new school and her new home and the village are intellectually and emotionally repressive; she is an outsider at school; her grandfather is a stern fundamentalist Calvinist who seems not to like her, and an offputting puritanical revival sweeps through the village while she is there. She flees back to her home town. The second journey occurs just before she turns twenty. Enamored of a handsome visiting cousin, Charles Morgeson, she is persuaded to try living on his distant farm with his wife and children. There she realizes the couple’s half-conscious alienation from each other and finds herself slipping into an intense romantic attachment to Charles. She is on the verge of actual adultery when Charles suddenly dies. Her third journey takes her into fashionable society, where she is thrown into the company of the dashing Somers brothers, both of whom suffer from the family curse of alcoholism. Despite misgivings, she is swept off her feet by Desmond Somers. But again no sexual consummation takes place; his alcoholism grows worse and he departs for unknown exotic places. Meanwhile, her sister, Veronica, marries the younger Somers brother, Ben, and Cassandra inherits a house, where she exists unhappily alone, growing older and repressing her sexuality. The last chapter begins with Cassandra sitting by the window of her house, looking over the water of the coastline. When she goes inside, she is aware of a “yearning empty void within me, which I did not like.” She seeks surcease of sorrow in books. Suddenly her lost lover, Desmond, appears, haggard and faint of voice. He looks weak and old. He tells her it has taken him two full years to break his “cursed habits.” She murmurs “loving words to him” and feeds his undernourished body. That evening Ben and Veronica arrive, and there is a loving family reunion. The literary conventions for a happy ending seem on track again. A year and a half later, however, Ben is dead from acute alcoholism, and everyone else is wearing out their existence in a kind of dumb misery. In an epilogue, we learn that Cassandra has married Desmond, but that people consider the marriage “a misalliance.” They presume that Desmond has not really changed. Although Desmond likes the ambiance of the seacoast, Cassandra feels that the sea’s “eternal monotone expresses no pity, no compassion.” Her widowed sister lies on the floor playing with her year-old baby, which smiles idiotically and never

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cries or moves. Veronica, her “face, thin and melancholy, is still and calm and lovely”; but now “her eyes go no more in quest of something beyond. A wall of darkness lies before her . . .” Thinking of their late mother, Cassandra wonders “whether death is not a welcome idea to those who have died.” What kind of a happy ending is this? One husband is dead from alcohol abuse, his vacant-eyed wife left to deal with a retarded child alone. Another woman is burdened with an unstable husband teetering on the edge of renewed alcoholism. Her mother is dead, her father estranged and married to her deceased first love’s wife. To our recently married heroine, the domestic scene entails a monotonous, pitiless, and compassionless existence, and only death seems to offer a release. Early in the Civil War, still a time of domestic fiction with happy endings, the novel is a harbinger of, shall we say, a change in the wind.

Escaping the Domestic Prison? Charlotte Perkins Gilman Unlike Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Anna Perkins Stetson Gilman (1860–1935) was almost forgotten for over half a century. But in the 1970s she was resurrected by American feminists as one of the most important women writers and women’s rights activists of her time. Gilman has been more important for social history than for literature, and in her own day her nonfiction books gained her more celebrity than her fiction. But today two works of fiction have been singled out as especially important. One is a didactic, partially satiric, utopian novel, Herland (1915), featuring a harmonious community constituted solely of women (discussed in Ch. 19). The other is an elegant short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), which dramatically depicts the nervous breakdown of a wife essentially imprisoned in her room by male doctors, one of whom is her husband.4 “The Yellow Wallpaper” is one of the most remarkable stories of the end of the century, both for American social history and for American literature. Gilman encountered early opposition to its publication, despite backing from William Dean Howells.5 After the story was eventually published in the New England Magazine in 1892, it was reprinted in different venues over the years: most frequently in collections of tales of the supernatural, then in the later twentieth century as an important feminist text. “The Yellow Wallpaper” does in fact operate successfully on three levels at once: as a gothic ghost story, as a psychological story, and as a feminist parable.

Gothic realism and “The Yellow Wallpaper” The narrative is told in the first-person by a woman (a writer) whose husband has confined her to an upper room in a “colonial mansion” rented for the season.

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She has been told that it is an old “hereditary estate,” though that may be a deception. At first, the narrator seems nervous but rational. She is writing in a notebook, secretly, because the doctors have recommended she not be allowed to read or write, since that might overstimulate her already agitated mind. The narrative is divided into twelve unnumbered segments that get progressively shorter until the end; the breaks usually indicate interruptions by others and the passage of time, but primarily they add to the psychologically fragmented effect. The structure and style work together to suggest a steady disintegration of mental coherence. Some readers note that the narrator has recently given birth and thus she may be suffering postpartum depression. But the general opinion of her doctors is that she has a “hysterical tendency.” The word hysteria (like the words melancholia and neurasthenia) was an all encompassing term for mental and nervous disorders, especially for those suffered by women. The larger cause of her condition, of course, is woman’s place in nineteenth-century American society; and while the story may be one of internal psychological breakdown, it is also a critique of societal suppression and authoritarianism. As in an old-fashioned ghost story, however, the unnamed narrator begins by drawing attention to the ancient house, which has been “long untenanted.” She would call it “a haunted house,” but to do that, she comments ironically, would be to reach for a “romantic felicity.” Her “practical” husband “scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.” Thus the story begins with all sorts of signals that a gothic horror story is to follow. A dilapidated house in a traditional gothic tale suggests the supernatural and/or psychological breakdown, especially hallucinations. But this house symbol also suggests the domestic ideal gone horribly wrong. The narrator’s husband, John, has extra authority because he is an eminent physician; and she suspects his “authority” is part of the reason she isn’t getting better. The male dominated medical profession comes under immediate, if slightly tentative, criticism. She disagrees with their opinions, especially their ban on “work.” Her husband tells her that “the very worst thing” she can do is “think about my condition.” So she thinks about the house and garden, which are charming and orderly, though the greenhouses are “all broken now.” When she grows angry with her husband’s condescending manner, he urges her to exert more self-control, which she tries to do, but keeping up the charade makes her “very tired.” Her husband is very “loving,” so much so that she can hardly “stir” without his “special direction.” She had wanted the room downstairs, which opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window. But her husband insists that she needs “air,” and the “nursery at the top of the house” becomes her bedroom. The room’s being, or apparently being, a nursery implies the husband’s half-conscious infantilization of his wife. Even though it is “a big, airy room,” taking up the “whole floor nearly,” she doesn’t like it even “a bit,” despite the many windows that let in lots of sun. For one

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thing, the windows are barred. She speculates that although the room must have been a nursery first, it must later have become a playroom for little children; the bars must have been to keep them from falling out. Then she thinks the room must have been the children’s gymnasium as they grew older; for “there are rings and things in the walls.” What she doesn’t realize (and what the reader doesn’t realize until nearer the end of the story) is that she may be in an abandoned sanitarium. The other odd thing about the room is the wallpaper. The wallpaper becomes the visual and emotional focus of her mental life, and the rest of the narrative, a psychological tour de force in literary impressionism. The wallpaper has been stripped off “in great patches all around the head of my bed” and also rather low down toward the floor in a line running all around the room. The design of the wallpaper is one of “those sprawling flamboyant patterns” that commit “every artistic sin.” The eye is confused in following “the lame uncertain curves,” for “they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions.” The color is “repellant, almost revolting; a smoldering unclean yellow” with tints of “lurid orange” and “sickly sulphur.” Her husband doesn’t understand about the wallpaper; and when she asks him to have the room repapered, he laughs at her; he objects that next it will be the “heavy bedstead” that she doesn’t like, and then it will be the “barred windows,” and then the “gate at the head of the stairs.” This last point seems a casual detail on a first reading, but it would not seem to be so much a safety device outside the children’s nursery as something else. A “gate” at the end of the upper-storey hallway in connection with the “barred windows” and what are apparently ring-restraints in the walls contributes to the growing idea that she is locked away in a deserted maison de sant
e – of the sort that became the subject of expos
es by the Muckrakers.6 She remembers that, when she was a child, she used to lie awake and get “entertainment and terror out of blank walls.” She remembers a comfortable old chair from her childhood, which she could “hop into . . . and be safe.” But the childhood furniture of this “nursery” has been removed. Looking about, she thinks that the “children” must have hated the room: “I never saw such ravages as the children have made here.” The “floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster itself is dug out here and there,” and the bed “looks as if it had been through the wars.” She doesn’t know what to make of it all. But, as the narrator’s sense of ordinary reality becomes increasingly distorted, she thinks she can see “a kind of sub-pattern” behind the front design of the wallpaper: “a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure that seems to skulk about” (Ch. 2). In her third journal entry, we learn that they have just completed an Independence Day celebration. The few guests have gone; and despite help from the new servant, Jennie, she feels overtired. John tells her that if she doesn’t make better progress he’ll “send me to Weir Mitchell. . . . But I don’t want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like John . . . only more so!”

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(Ch. 3). We now discover, with her, that her bed is “nailed down” and “immovable.” She has begun, when alone, to “cry most of the time.” She spends a good deal of time following the pattern in the wallpaper, but she cannot find a rational design. The pattern seems to be a kind of “‘debased Romanesque’ with delirium tremens.” The “bloated curves and flourishes” waddle in “isolated columns of fatuity.” If anything it is an “interminable grotesque” (Ch. 3).

Escape of the creeping woman She finds it more and more difficult to “think straight” (Ch. 4), but she is happy that her baby (in the care of her husband’s sister) does not have to endure the figure in the wallpaper, which has become somewhat more distinct. She is “too wise” to mention this figure to anyone, but she keeps “watch” for it. Behind the “outside pattern” of the wall paper “the dim shapes get clearer every day.” The “shape” is always the same, “like a woman stooping down and creeping about.” While as a gothic work the narrative now begins to manifest ghosts or demons, psychologically the narrative suggests that the protagonist is projecting an image of herself trapped behind the papered walls. As a feminist parable, the narrative turns toward a symbolic representation of the condition of women in general: “the same shape, only very numerous” (Ch. 4). One moonlit night she sees “the faint figure” on the “undulating wallpaper” looking as if “she wanted to get out” (Ch. 5). When she tries to wake her husband to talk about her growing apprehensions, he says, “What is it, little girl?” She tells him she fears she is getting worse and that she wants to leave the house right away. His response is to hug her, speaking to her in the third-person as if talking to a child: “Bless her little heart. . . . She shall be as sick as she pleases!” (Ch. 5). The sixth installment of her journal describes her obsession with the changing patterns in the wallpaper and her observation that her husband and the servant are beginning to look at her oddly. The “pattern” in the paper is a “constant irritant to a normal mind.” Her description is a small but stunning example of psychological impressionism: “The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions . . .” Moreover, the pattern “changes as the light changes”:

............................................................................................... At night, in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be. . . . By daylight, she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still.

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Now the narrator no longer wishes to leave before she finds out the secret meaning of the figure in the wallpaper (Ch. 7). At night she can see the “developments” in the patterns better: “There are always new shoots on the fungus, and new shades of yellow all over it. I cannot keep count of them . . .” (Ch. 8). Moreover, after a week of fog and rain, the “smell” of the wallpaper “creeps all over the house,” hovering and “skulking, hiding,” as if “lying in wait for me on the stairs.” She thinks seriously of burning the house, to “reach” the smell. But she gets “used to it.” She now mentions a “funny mark” that “runs round the room” on the wall, “low down, near the mopboard.” It is “a long, straight, even smooch, as if it had been rubbed over and over.” At this point (Ch. 9), she is convinced that the woman behind the bars of the wallpaper is shaking the lines of the outer pattern. Sometimes she thinks “there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one . . .” In the shady spots, the woman “takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard” but can’t break through. Nobody can “climb through that pattern,” for “it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads.” The narrator thinks that if she couldn’t see the women’s heads, or if they were “taken off,” then “it would not be half so bad.” The implication is clear: the pain of being imprisoned as a wife and mother would be lessened if women didn’t have heads. Eventually, the women begin to “get through” the pattern, and the narrator paints a surreal impressionist picture of their pathetic attempt to escape. The “pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!” (Ch. 9). Now, however, the narrator claims she has seen the woman “out of every one of my windows!” (Ch. 10). It has to be the “same woman” because “she is always creeping . . . and when a carriage comes she hides under the blackberry vines.” The narrator doesn’t “blame her a bit” for hiding: “It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight!” (Ch. 10). “I always lock the door when I creep by daylight.” Perhaps, she thinks, if the “top pattern” of entangled vines and bars “could be gotten off the under one,” the creeping woman could escape (Ch. 11). The narrator decides to free her by scratching off the top layer of wallpaper in secret. On the last day of their stay, her husband is away. In the moonlight, the “poor thing” in the wallpaper begins to “crawl and shake the pattern.” The narrator runs to help her and “before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper” (Ch. 12). In the morning, the servant expresses “amazement” at her work and says she wouldn’t mind pulling off the horrid paper herself. The narrator’s internal response is that “no person touches this paper but Me – not alive!” Alone once more, she focuses on the “great bedstead nailed down,” the scene of both the submissive sex act and child birth. She wants to finish peeling away the wallpaper, but she needs something to stand on, and the “bed will not move!” She pushes at it until she gets so angry that she bites off a piece at one corner of the bed. She peels off all the rest of the wallpaper she can reach by standing on the floor. She considers jumping out the window, but the “bars” are too strong,” and her act

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might be somehow “misconstrued.” Besides, it’s difficult to look out the windows because of the large number of creeping women. She wonders if they all came “out of that wallpaper as I did?” Her thoughts and images become increasingly incoherent. The woman in the wallpaper (or herself) is “securely fastened now by my well-hidden rope.” She (the woman, herself) doesn’t want to creep around outside anymore, where “everything is green instead of yellow.” Perhaps she (the woman is now fully at one with the narrator) will “have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night.” In her locked room, she “can creep around as I please,” and since her shoulder “just fits” into the long groove around the wall, she won’t “lose my way.” When her husband comes home, he asks her to unlock the door, but she tells him he has to unlock her door; and she tells him where to find the key. Again, the symbolism is allowed to work by indefinite implication. When he finally finds the key and unlocks the door, it is too late. Creeping around the room, she looks at him over her shoulder and says, “I’ve got out at last.” And she’s peeled off most of the paper, “so you can’t put me back!” The last image is of her husband lying unconscious (or is he dead?) across her path on the floor. “I had to creep over him every time!” Thus by 1892 woman’s fiction has taken another memorable new turn. In 1899, new woman’s fiction takes another turn of the screw with Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, in which a woman triumphs over her entrapments – not through a retreat into insanity – but apparently through rational suicide.

“To Love and Be Wise”: Kate Chopin and the New Woman Until the 1950s, Kate Chopin (1850–1904) was remembered as a regional short story writer. She has since become something of a cause c
elebre because of her feminist (or proto-feminist) breakthrough novel, The Awakening (1899). Chopin is now one of the most frequently taught of American authors in the 1865–1915 period. Many, if not most, of Chopin’s works deal with the question of whether individual happiness can be found in marriage or in romantic love. The “Latin Proverb” (“To love and be wise is scarcely granted even to a God”) that she uses as an epigraph for her story “Wiser than a God” (1889) could stand as the overall motto for a number of her stories as well as her novels. In this story, a talented woman chooses a career as a pianist rather than marriage to the person she loves. Yet at the end, possibly out of practical necessity, she is considering marriage to an older, untalented man whom she does not seem to love. The story ends a bit elliptically with the protagonist’s independent spirit both affirmed and compromised. A similar pattern informs her privately printed first novel, At Fault (1890), in which a young Creole widow comes to see herself as “at fault” for sacrificing love for the empty mores of society. 202

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Her short stories and sketches, collected in Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), were well received as “local color,” even though the subject of several of these stories is unadorned sexual desire.7 In “A Respectable Woman,” a wife is so physically attracted to a visiting friend of her husband’s that she has to leave her own house to avoid losing her self-control, though at the end she asks her husband to invite the man again. A sequence of three related stories: “The Kiss,” “The Storm,” and “At the ’Cadian Ball” are strikingly sensual. “The Storm” describes a passionate, adulterous, and guilt-free encounter so sexually explicit that Chopin never published it in her lifetime. Among Chopin’s most celebrated narratives is “The Story of an Hour” (first titled “The Dream of an Hour,” 1894), a short story particularly pertinent to issues in The Awakening. A woman who is “afflicted with heart trouble” receives news that her husband has been killed in a train wreck. She goes to her room in apparent grief, but there she reveals her true state of mind: “Free, free, free!” she chants to herself. She knows that she had loved her husband, “sometimes.” She knows she will weep when she sees his body – but “beyond that bitter moment” she sees the “long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely.” There will be “no one to live for her . . . she would live for herself.” But someone is at the door downstairs: it’s her husband. His death has been falsely reported. Seeing him, she experiences a sudden heart attack – which her doctors attribute to a “joy that kills.” The woman’s brief sense of freedom is an illusion, and she dies a victim of a chance-world on the one hand and biological and social entrapment on the other.

Escaping the Self? The Awakening as Self-Consuming Feminism Despite her success as a writer of short stories, when The Awakening appeared in April 1899, its frank depiction of female sexuality generated mainly negative reviews, first in St Louis and then across the country. The novel was banned in several cities, and Chopin’s subsequent questionable reputation influenced the publisher’s rejection in 1900 of another collection of stories, titled A Vocation and a Voice. After an unsuccessful republication in 1906, The Awakening went out of print. When the novel was rediscovered half a century later, it gradually came to be acknowledged as a neglected tour de force and (though it has its detractors) a classic feminist work.8 The story line is straightforward. Edna Pontellier is a mildly unhappily married woman of twenty-eight, who, in the process of self-discovery, becomes more and more dissatisfied with her conventional life. Edna’s conflicted feelings revolve around three large issues she faces: freedom, romance, and sexuality. Her forty-yearold husband is a rather dull businessman whom she has married for reasons other than love. She falls in love with a younger man who can’t commit to her, has an affair 203

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with another man, and moves out of her husband’s house into a smaller one of her own. Some time after her twenty-ninth birthday, when it becomes clear that the life and love she desires are not to be hers, she walks into the sea. Despite its current reputation, the book is a problematic text for feminism. Some readers find the ambiguity surrounding Edna’s final struggle to find her true self troubling. The heroine seems to capitulate to social pressures, and, perhaps even more distressing, she seems to die from unrequited love. Even more disturbing for some readers is the heroine herself. Although the ideological thrust of the text seems to be that a woman’s quest for independence and freedom is necessary, that quest is dramatized as only ambiguously honorable. Edna feels that her marriage has closed “the portals forever behind her upon the realm of romance and dreams.” As she approaches thirty, she is still very much an adolescent: petulant, irresponsible, selfcentered, even shallow. The Awakening is not a “quest romance” but a quest for romance told in realist terms. And yet, as in the Baym theory of Woman’s Fiction, the “fairy tale” is a primary archetype of Edna’s story. Symbolically and psychologically, she is Snow White waiting for the prince to awaken her. When she thinks he has arrived, she throws away everything for the dream. Her romanticism is thoroughly understandable in realistic terms, and her negative qualities seem to me to be part of the artful complexity of the book as a successful work of naturalist realism. Edna Pontellier is a successfully drawn character because of her dualities and contradictions – and the novel, in my opinion, is a successful creation precisely because of its careful presentation of the contradictory claims of realism and romance. The novel is also a work of complex symbolism and impressionist techniques. The primal shapes of Edna’s conflicted desires form an interconnected series of images. These include, in addition to the pervasive motif of dreaming and waking: fairy tales and tales of exotic adventure; birds and flight; cages and houses; ecstasies of art and music; naked figures standing lonely against the horizon; girlhood “meadow” memories; and the encompassing and isolating sea. Interpenetrating all are images of white and black in a chiaroscuro effect. The “shadow” of her discontent takes on various “shapes,” several of which are related to romantic dreams and nightmares, many of them adolescent in nature: lover-hero-prince figures, pirates, specters, demons, swamp beings; and a recurrent sinister figure of fate, a “lady in black.” These motifs are contained within the large frame of reality in contrast to romance – but interpenetrated by romance – thus shaping her reality. Various symmetries structure the narrative. The first half takes place in the pastoral seaside of a resort “island”; the second half is set in a cosmopolitan city on the mainland – with the final chapter again on the island. A symbolic narrative pivot (Chs 17, 18, and 19) constitutes a narratival middle-point.9 Chapter 17 is the first of three anti-domestic chapters. It begins with a reference to the Pontellier’s “very charming house” in the exclusive French Quarter of New Orleans: a symbol of Edna’s entrapment. After Mr Pontellier upbraids her for neglecting her duties, Edna

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tries to smash her wedding ring, but she is unable to make even “a mark upon the little glittering circlet.” When the maid comes in, she hands the ring back to her mistress. Edna slips the ring on her finger again – a gesture symbolic of her continued entrapment. Chapter 18 describes both Edna’s “obsession” with a potential lover and her rejection of the boring domestic bliss of one of her female friends; and Chapter 19 portrays Edna’s more complete rebellion. Without actually verbalizing it, she decides that she will simply begin quietly “to do as she liked and to feel as she liked” and “never to take another step backward.” But this moment of decisive “freedom” is accompanied by the starkest of naturalist sentiments:

............................................................................................... There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why, – when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward an inevitable annihilation. (Ch. 19)

...............................................................................................

The sentiment and the imagery could be straight out of London, Norris, Dreiser, or Crane.

Opening strategies As the novel begins, Edna is on a summer retreat with her family on Grand Isle, not far off the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico. The owner of the resort, Madame Lebrun, caters only to wealthy Creoles.10 With Edna are her husband, L
eonce Pontellier, and their two boys. The central vacation compound is composed of several cottagebungalows connected to a main building (containing a common dining hall). Thus on vacation Edna is forced into even closer contact with a microcosm of Creole society. The resulting tension she feels, though ambivalent, is central to the novel. A caged parrot hangs outside the door of the central resort house. The bird repeats over and over the words: “Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi!” (Go away! Go away! For Christ’s sake!). Somewhere around the house, out of sight, is another caged bird, a song bird. Whereas the parrot echoes Edna’s frustrated desire to be left alone, the mocking bird’s song echoes her illusory hope for something more beautiful and romantic; and the “maddening persistence” of “his fluting notes” mock her caged desires. The “cage” that Chopin is building around her central character is thematically and imagistically complicated. Edna is initially presented on an isolated island miles from the mainland, surrounded by water, and unable to swim. The caged birds of the first chapter are contrasted in the second with Edna’s wistful reverie of her father’s Mississippi plantation and her childhood in Kentucky. She remembers a 205

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great inland meadow, as large as an ocean, and a young man in uniform. Her romanticized memory of a cavalry officer and the fragrant meadow is actually another cage, that of romance and dream. The pleasurable romantic image actually exacerbates her sense of current entrapment.

Edna among the Creoles: Creating “Dense Social Milieu” Part of the concept of “character” in The Awakening is what Henry James called for in “The Art of Fiction”: a “dense social milieu.” In this case, the controlling social context is that of the wealthy Creole society of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the early 1890s. (The date is not specifically given, but topical references in the text suggest that it is some time shortly before 1893, historically the year of a devastating hurricane.) The people who surround Edna are stereotypical but quite realistically conceived – their conventionality is part of their realism. Only Edna changes in any significant way; and that change paradoxically leads nowhere – in a classic naturalist paradigm. Chopin’s original title was “A Solitary Soul,” and Edna, though surrounded by people, certainly seems alone.11 The dense social milieu that initially defines her includes nine major characters, along with a number of others. Only two of them seem to have even a partial understanding of her: an older nonconformist female musician; and a kindly old male doctor, who knows “his fellow-creatures better than most men” yet does “not want the secrets of other lives thrust upon him” (Ch. 23). Several minor figures weave in and out of the narrative, but the major characters fall into four groups.

(1) Women friends Two women Edna meets on Grand Isle come to have a great deal of importance for her, representing as they do two radically differing aspects of her life. The younger one, Adele Ratignolle, is married and almost always referred to as “Madame” Ratignolle. The older one is unmarried, and always referred to as “Mademoiselle” Reisz. Whereas Mme Ratignolle’s life is all happiness and domesticity, Mlle Reisz’s life is individualistic and exciting. Edna is fond of the woman who represents domestic entrapment but doesn’t really like the woman who represents freedom from domesticity – another example of her conflicted personality and the realism of the book.

The “mother-woman” The epitome of the conventional wife and mother, Mme Ratignolle subordinates her own selfhood for her children and for her marriage. Adele Ratignolle is also described as the “embodiment of every womanly grace and charm,” a woman who 206

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was like “the bygone heroine of romance and the fair lady of our dreams” (Ch. 4). Adele’s personification of the two “ideals” of romance and motherhood emphasizes her contrast with Edna. Edna’s thoughts are not on self-effacing motherhood, but summer romance. Although a mother, Edna is “not a mother-woman”; and her lack of motherly love is a major key to her personality.

The rebel artist The other major female figure, Mlle Reisz, is the opposite of Mme Ratignolle. Mlle Reisz is a gifted pianist, a woman self-possessed and self-determined. She lives her life in her own way and is unruffled by criticism. Her unmarried state and her bohemian status as an artist seem to have made her “free.” Although Edna does not formulate very clearly to herself the reasons for her attraction to Mlle Reisz, it is her extraordinary ability at the piano as much as her independence that arouses Edna’s yearning for freedom. The music Mlle Reisz plays revives in Edna a sensuous artistic sense of her own, which is closely associated with a sense of self-discovery, awakening more intense feelings than she has been used to. Later, Mlle Reisz will speak to Edna of the loneliness and difficulty of the artistic life in terms of “broken” wings – one of many instances of the imagery of wings, both positive and negative. Music has “a way of making pictures” in Edna’s mind. She doesn’t know what work that Mlle Reisz is playing the night we first meet her, but in her own mind Edna has given it the title “Solitude.” Whatever its actual title, it is a piece that always makes Edna see, in her imagination, “the figure of a man standing beside a desolate rock on the seashore.” He is naked, and his attitude is “one of hopeless resignation as he looked toward a distant bird winging its flight away from him.” Edna feels “the very passions themselves,” aroused in her soul like waves beating “daily against her splendid body.” The image of a member of the opposite sex naked against the sea and sky is sensual and sexual; but the man is alone and desolate; he seems imprisoned on his rock, yearning to fly.

(2) Marginal lovers The objects of Edna’s growing desire are two men near her own age. Although they do not exactly parallel the opposing worlds of Mme Ratignolle and Mlle Reisz, they too seem to be opposites. Margaret Culley (“Solitary Soul,” 224) sees Edna’s two love objects as emblematic, one standing for “imagination” and the other for the “flesh.” Either of these ideational constructs might be “deliverers” for Edna, she argues, but both fail her. Although physical entities, they are really fictional constructs in her mind. Young Robert Lebrun is confused and hesitant, possibly insincere. Alc
ee Arobin, a notorious womanizer, is positively insincere and predatory. 207

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The callow youth The son of the resort owner, Mme Lebrun, Robert Lebrun is a seemingly harmless young gallivant who flirts with a different married woman each summer on Grand Isle. “Robert talked a great deal about himself. He was very young and did not know any better.” He plans to seek his fortune in Mexico in the fall, but then he “was always intending to go to Mexico, but some way never got there.” His flirtations are normally regarded as jeux d’esprits; but this summer his playful attentions to Edna seem – at least to her – to deepen into something more serious. While Robert is playing at love and intrigue, Edna is falling in love; and falling in love awakens her sexual urges. Robert’s early stimulation of Edna’s awakening sexuality is enhanced, ironically enough, by her prudery.

The libertine Well-known as a seducer of married women, Alc
ee Arobin has no depth of feeling and no sense of responsibility. Although mentioned early, he doesn’t really figure in the narrative until Chapter 23. A superficially cheerful fellow, he affects extravagant admiration of Edna, but “Alc
ee Arobin’s manner was so genuine that it often deceived even himself.” Edna “felt somewhat like a woman who in a moment of passion is betrayed into an act of infidelity, and realizes the significance of the act without being wholly awakened from its glamour.” Although “Alc
ee Arobin was absolutely nothing to her,” the “touch of his lips upon her hand” has an effect “like a narcotic upon her.” He begins to speak to her in a way that at first brings “crimson to her cheek” yet appeals to “the animalism that stirred impatiently in her” (Ch. 26), and she eventually succumbs to their mutual desires (Ch. 27). The actual seduction scene is discreetly suggestive.

(3) Degrees of patriarchy The other principal male figures – the husband, the doctor, and the father – are conventional older men. To some degree, each is a male stereotype. Both Edna’s husband and his friendly advisor, Dr Mandelet, appear to be genuinely caring, though both are tragically limited in their perceptivity by patriarchal tradition. But the arch-patriarch is Edna’s father, the Colonel, a relic of the Civil War.

The husband Some feminist interpretations of the novel see L
eonce Pontellier as an iconic representation of insensitive, imprisoning patriarchy. But there are many instances of his love, devotion, and concern in addition to, and even in opposition to, his portrayal as a preoccupied businessman and aristocratic paterfamilias. Chapter 3 provides a good example of the ambiguity of Pontellier’s role. After winning some 208

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money at Klein’s Hotel, he finds Edna sleepy and inattentive; he thinks “it very discouraging that his wife, who was the sole object of his existence, evinced so little interest in things which concerned him and valued so little his conversation.” This comment is laden with potentially heavy irony: given his interest in business and money, Edna would not seem to be the “sole object of his existence” and the comment suggests a self-centered, self-pitying point of view. The next morning, however, the picture of L
eonce as husband alters somewhat. Preparing to go to the mainland on business, he gives Edna half the money he won. A few days later, a box of bonbons and other treats (fr
ıandises) arrives. There are other indications of his regard for her; his “absolute devotion” to Edna is mentioned more than once; and Edna herself remarks on his “many acts of consideration and his repeated expressions of ardent attachment” (Chs. 7, 24). All the ladies declare that “Mr. Pontellier was the best husband in the world. Mrs. Pontellier was forced to admit that she knew of none better.” (The irony is double, implying that there are no “better” husbands.)

The doctor Increasingly concerned about Edna’s behavior, L
eonce seeks advice from Dr Mandelet (Ch. 22). This visit shifts the novelistic point of view from Edna to L
eonce (the only chapter to do so). L
eonce here makes a crucial decision, in itself neither good nor bad, that helps to set in motion Edna’s subsequent actions. Admitting his quick temper and occasional quarrelsomeness, L
eonce “nervously” tells the doctor that Edna is not her usual self: “Her whole attitude – toward me and everybody and everything – has changed.” Edna has “some sort of notion in her head concerning the eternal rights of women; and – you understand – we meet in the morning at the breakfast table.” The meaning is clear: they are not now having sexual relations. L
eonce feels that he is married to an irresponsible and selfcentered woman, who, in return for his conventional goodness to her, is mistreating him. The doctor reveals his own residuum of male chauvinism, asking with a smile if Edna is consorting with “a circle of pseudo-intellectual women,” that group of “super-spiritual superior beings” that his own wife has been telling him about. The trouble, says L
eonce, is that she’s not associating with anyone. She “goes tramping about by herself, moping in the street-cars, getting in after dark. . . . I feel a little worried over it.” Nevertheless, Dr Mandelet insists, Edna needs some time alone. His reasons are condescendingly male: most women are delicate, sensitive, moody, and whimsical. We get a more complex picture of the doctor in Chapters 37 and 38, during Mme Ratignolle’s difficult childbirth. After the birth struggle is over, Dr Mandelet joins Edna, and, worried about her, offers to walk her home. He casually asks when she and L
eonce will be going on a trip abroad he has proposed. Edna declares that she will not be forced into anything. The doctor then offers encouragement in the form 209

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of a brief philosophical discourse on the nature and necessity of illusions, unconsciously touching on what Edna is coming to realize is the major theme of her life – the unreality of everything.

The father Neither Mr Pontellier nor Dr Mandelet is the supreme old-style male chauvinist of the novel. That distinction is given to Edna Pontellier’s father, known simply as the Colonel. He is a religious fundamentalist and Southern patriot who has never gotten over his exalted position in the Confederate Army (Ch. 23). Edna is “not very warmly or deeply attached” to him, but neither is she visibly antagonized by his overbearing ways; and while he is in New Orleans she ministers to all his wants like a dutiful daughter. In honor of the old gentleman, the Pontelliers give a dinner party. In an argument over the morality of gambling, Edna sides with her father, and L
eonce notices what seems to be a “deep filial attachment which he had never suspected.” At dinner the men tell stories: L
eonce of old plantation days, the Colonel of his part in the War, and the doctor of “the waning of a woman’s love, seeking strange new channels, only to return to its legitimate source after days of fierce unrest.” The exemplum “did not seem especially to impress Edna,” who instead tells a story of a woman who paddled away in a pirogue (carved-out canoe) with a lover and never came back (Ch. 23). The doctor walks home unhappy. “‘I hope it isn’t Arobin,’ he muttered to himself as he walked. ‘I hope to heaven it isn’t Alc
ee Arobin.’” The Colonel remains quite unaware of his daughter’s unhappiness. Some days later, he has an almost violent dispute with her about her refusal to attend her sister’s wedding. L
eonce refuses to get involved because he is “following Dr. Mandelet’s advice, and letting her do as she liked” (Ch. 24). But on his way to New York, L
eonce stops to see the Colonel. Edna’s father tells him he is “too lenient, too lenient by far. . . . Authority, coercion are what is needed. Put your foot down good and hard; the only way to manage a wife.” This prompts a sarcastic comment from the narrator: “The Colonel was perhaps unaware that he had coerced his own wife into her grave.”

(4) Confinement – The children Edna’s two male children, Raoul and Etienne, are stereotypes, but their mother’s attitudes toward them are not. Edna is “fond” of her children, but in “an uneven, impulsive way,” sometimes gathering them “passionately to her heart,” sometimes forgetting them. When they are in the care of their grandmother, Edna does not miss them much. Their absence “seemed to free” her of “a responsibility which she had blindly assumed and for which Fate had not fitted her” (Ch. 7). 210

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By Chapter 13, now thoroughly infatuated with Robert, Edna leaves her children in the care of Adele Ratignolle to go alone with him to the islet of Ch^eniere Caminada. Back home at nine o’clock in the evening, she briefly tends to the boys and then, dreaming of a future with Robert, gives no further thought to her children except to scold them for being noisy. In Chapter 16, Edna remembers a disagreement with Adele Ratignolle: she had told Adele that she would give up “the unessential,” like money or even her life, for her children, but not what she has come to think of as “myself.” In a feminist context, this declaration makes perfect sense, even though Mme Ratignolle doesn’t understand it, and Edna herself feels “it’s only something which I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.” When Edna leaves the main Pontellier house and moves into a little one of her own around the corner, she sends the children off to stay with their grandmother in the country. After a good deal of time, she decides she should at least visit them. Temporarily, she is glad to see them. “But by the time she had regained the city,” she has forgotten them. Her “love” for her children is superficial, an illusion, a fiction.

Freedom, Independence, or Illusion? In Chapter 24, when her husband is gone, “a radiant peace” settles upon Edna, who “at last” is alone. It is now that she decides to move out of her house on Esplanade Street and get her own place – just around the corner from the Pontellier mansion. She thinks that her new house and her sexual liberation mean independence; and her anticipated adultery would also seem to be a strike for freedom. Does Edna see adultery as a trope for freedom – a palpable symbol of female freedom in a restrictive, patriarchal society? Perhaps not in these abstract terms, but she feels it. Yet Edna continues to take money from the husband she’s in the process of leaving. She even plans to have a gala birthday party at his expense in the old house (Ch. 29). As though in a fairy tale, Edna presents herself as a princess presiding over her subjects. Some critics have seen this scene as symbolic of her triumphant, queenly independence. “There was something in her attitude . . . which suggested the regal woman, the one who rules, who looks on, who stands alone” (Ch. 30). That is, she sees herself as independent, ruling her life. But her revolt is manifestly incomplete. She is exploiting the very trappings of money and high society provided by her confining marriage. Her queenly crown is “a magnificent cluster of diamonds that sparkled, that almost sputtered, in Edna’s hair, just over the center of her forehead.” The sputtering crown is a present from her husband that had arrived that very morning. As the novel approaches its conclusion, Edna feels that she is awakening from a “life-long stupid dream” (Ch. 36), even while she indulges in another – a romantic union with Robert. She seems to realize that her “awakening” from “illusion” may 211

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itself be an illusion. The “years that are gone seem like dreams – if one might go on sleeping and dreaming – but to wake up and find – oh! well! perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one’s life” (Ch. 38). Back on Grand Isle, walking to the shore prior to her fatal swim, she says over and over to herself that it makes no difference who is her lover and that it doesn’t matter about her husband. “Today it is Arobin; tomorrow it will be someone else. It makes no difference to me . . .” (Ch. 39), a declaration that may, or may not, be true. While thinking that there is “no one thing in the world that she desired . . . except Robert,” she “realized that the day would come” when he, too, and even the very “thought of him,” would “melt out of her existence, leaving her alone.” In her imagination, the “children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her; who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul’s slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew a way to elude them.” Swimming out to her death, with her arms and legs growing tired, she thinks of her husband and children: “They were part of her life. But they need not have thought that they could possess her, body and soul.” During Edna’s final walk down to the beach before she enters the sea, lines from Chapter 6 are closely repeated: “The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude.” Shedding her restrictive and pricking bathing-garment, she stands naked to the elements for the first time. There is no living thing in sight on the beach – only a bird with “a broken wing,” which is “beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down to the water” (Ch. 39). Yet at this moment of “defeat,” Edna feels exhilarated: “How strange and awful it seemed to stand naked under the sky! how delicious! She felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known.” Then, as Edna swims farther and farther out, words from Chapter 6 are again repeated: “The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.” The recollected image from her youth of the grass-meadow as the infinite sea recurs: “She did not look back now, but went on and on, thinking of the bluegrass meadow that she had traversed when a little child, believing that it had no beginning and no end.” She smells the odors of flowers. She hears her father’s voice, then her sister Margaret’s, and the barking of the old dog, and the humming of bees. Perhaps most telling, she hears the clanging of the spurs of the young cavalry officer she had fantasized about as an adolescent. Neither triumph nor total acquiescence, death, as she half-consciously chooses it, would seem another illusion contained within another as in a series of infinite regress. As a work of psychological realism, the book presents neither traditional tragedy nor a pat resolution of the larger issues of the condition of woman that Edna’s story graphically exemplifies. The novel is a realistic dramatization of strength and weakness, revolt and failure. Is the book less a feminist text because it is a complex

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naturalist novel in which there is no escape from the cage of convention and romantic illusion? It seems to me a natural outgrowth of woman’s fiction. Real “woman’s fiction,” or rather New Woman’s Fiction, portrays not the heroine’s fairy-tale “triumph,” but her struggle.

Notes 1. The Morgesons and Other Writings (1984), ed. Lawrence Buell and Sandra A. Zagarell; see “Biographical and Critical Introduction” (xi–xxv). 2. S. K. Harris (1990), 152; also see her 1985 essay. Harris, and Buell and Zagarell, both provide bibliographies of shorter critical studies of Stoddard. 3. See Weir, “A Neglected Feminist Bildungsroman” (1976). 4. The story has autobiographical elements. Suffering from nervous exhaustion, Gilman was persuaded to take the “rest cure” developed by the celebrated Dr S. Weir Mitchell. In the spring of 1887, she resided for a month in Mitchell’s sanitarium in Philadelphia, returning home with instructions to live as “domestic” a life as possible, to keep her child by her “all the time,” to “have but two hours’ intellectual life a day,” and never “touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live.” Following these instructions for several months, she “came perilously close to losing my mind.” See Gilman, Living (1935, rpt. 1990), 91, 92, 96. 5. Gilman published an account of “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” in the Forerunner in October 1913 and another in her autobiography (Living, 1935; 1990). She states that the story derives from her 1887 encounter with Dr Weir’s “rest cure,” though parts of the story, like the woman’s hallucinations, were not part of her own experience. (In fact, there is evidence she had begun the story before her encounter with Weir.) The inconsistent hyphenation of wall-paper is normalized as wallpaper in the source text used here. 6. In 1887, the same year as Gilman’s incarceration in Weir’s sanitarium, Elizabeth J. Cochran (writing as Nellie Bly) published an expos
e of the Blackwell Island Asylum for Women as Ten Days in a Mad-House. See Ch. 16 for discussion of the social criticism of the “Muckrakers.” 7. A bayou is a marshy area of slow-moving water draining into a lake or river. The word Acadian indicates the culture and speech of southern Louisianans descended from the French exiles from Acadia (a French colony in eastern Canada, including Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and part of Maine). Many remained poor and uneducated, maintaining a rural folk culture and speech; others became prosperous. The word ’Cadian (as found in the title of one of Chopin’s stories) is an elided form of Acadian, the slang form of which is Cajun (Caijan). See note 10 on Creole below. 213

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8. REAmL suggests that The Awakening caused a scandal at the time of its publication because it not only treated extramarital relations neutrally, but also involved “miscegenation.” There is no evidence in the text, however, that the heroine’s husband, L
eonce Pontellier, is of mixed European and African blood or that part of Edna’s dissatisfaction stems from racism. The Awakening began to be “rediscovered” in the 1950s, well after the critical biography of Chopin by Rankin (1932). But the real revival began with two works by Per Seyersted at the end of the 1960s: Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (1969) and The Complete Works of Kate Chopin (1969). Emily Toth published a critical biography in 1990; Seyersted and Toth edited Kate Chopin’s Private Papers in 1992. The unpublished collection, A Vocation and a Voice, was brought out with additions and editorial apparatus by Emily Toth (Chopin 1991); see xxxiii–xxxiv for an explanation of the speculative editorial recovery of the intended volume. 9. The numerical middle of 39 chapters. There is also what nineteenth-century narrative theory conceived as a second or “elliptical” pivot point some twothirds to three-quarters through the narrative (Ch. 27). 10. Creole is a word with a half-dozen overlapping, partially inconsistent meanings. Most broadly, it signifies someone of European descent who has been born in the West Indies or elsewhere in Latin America; somewhat more specifically, it indicates someone descended from original French settlers of the Southern United States, especially Louisiana, many of whom are wealthy and comport themselves as aristocrats. The word Creole can also mean people who are “descended from or culturally related to Spanish and Portuguese settlers of the Gulf States” (Amer. Hert. Dict.). More narrowly, it can mean a person of mixed Negro and European ancestry, particularly someone speaking a Creole dialect (i. e., patois, mixed languages, especially English, French, or Portuguese, including variant Indian and African words). 11. Margaret Culley points out that in 1895 Chopin translated a Maupassant story, “Solitude,” in which one character observes that, whatever we do, we ultimately live in horrible solitude. See “Edna Pontellier: ‘A Solitary Soul,’” in the Norton Critical Edition of The Awakening, 224–228; this is the last critical essay in the 1976 volume; the second edition of 1994 adds another ten essays post-1976.

See also Beer (1997); Bender (1996); Benfey (1998); Boren and de Saussure (1992); Boyd (2004); C. J. Davis and D. Knight (2004); Ewell (1986); Fryer (1976); M. Hill (1980); W. Martin (1987); Papashvily (1956); Papke (1990); Skaggs (1985); A. Stein (1985); B. Thomas (1997); Toth (1999); Walker (2001); Welter (1966, 1976). 214

Chapter 13

Vulgarians at the Gate Edith Wharton and the Collapse of Gentility

Edith Wharton used to be called a “society novelist,” but her work is more accurately categorized as “New Woman’s Fiction” or the “New Domestic Novel of Manners.” Appreciating her version of the domestic novel tradition requires a few new terminological distinctions and definitions. First of all, the “society novel” needs to be distinguished from the “social novel.”1 The latter term normally indicates works centrally concerned with large socioeconomic issues in a political context. Unless otherwise indicated, the term society as used in this chapter means class consciousness from the point of view of the American “upper classes” or the “social climbers” seeking to achieve that status. What passes for the upper classes in America is at least two-tiered: “old” money, representing a “genteel” culture; and “new” money (nouveaux riches), representing a “vulgar” way of life that mistakes mere wealth for culture, breeding, and social standing.2 The phrase genteel tradition was first applied to the culturally refined upper and upper-middle classes of America by George Santayana in 1911.3 The phrase involves a paradox illustrated in Wharton’s novels: genteel persons were supposed to be above mere money concerns, but they were products of the money culture and highly aware (if not fully appreciative) of the privileges money bestowed. The term vulgarian, although it may be used to describe lower-class values, in this chapter refers principally to the debased values and manners of nouveau-riche social climbers.4 Editha Wharton’s fiction displays the intersection, confrontation, or conflict of these value-systems within a complex of classes and subclasses – all revolving around the subjects of love and money. Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson. Ó 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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After suffering a decline in reputation in the first part of the twentieth century, Edith Wharton has been rediscovered by newer generations of readers. For a time after her death, readers found her fiction old-fashioned, its world no longer representative of American life. But she was, in fact, one of the major figures of an important group of women writers at the turn of the century who modified the nineteenth-century sentimental-romantic tradition of women’s fiction and turned it toward modern realism. Such proto-modernist and modernist writers included women as different from Wharton as Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Willa Cather, and Gertrude Stein – a rather remarkable group. In addition to seeming old-fashioned, Wharton (like Henry James, who became her close friend) was criticized as an elitist uninterested in the lives of ordinary men and women. Her disdain for the low breeding and social blunders of newly rich vulgarians has suggested to some readers that she saw even the faults of the upper classes as intrinsically more important than the life-struggles of those of lower social standing. This is a distorted view of her work. Upperclass foolishness and weakness are major targets of her trenchant satire, and several of her works deal with the economic and psychological entrapment of the working classes – as, for example, Ethan Frome (1911), a masterpiece of American domestic naturalism. Her other portraits of social and psychological entrapment across the class spectrum should be reread in the context of domestic naturalism. As Edmund Wilson observed, Wharton’s heroines and heroes are locked into such tightly closed psychological, social, and economic systems that they either destroy themselves by beating their heads against the walls of their prison or suffer a living death by resigning themselves to it.

A Life “Apart”– A Love “Too Late” The writer we know as Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was born Edith Newbold Jones, the daughter of one of New York’s respected old families, who dated their American ancestry to pre-Revolutionary times. In 1885, at the age of twentythree, she married Edward Wharton, a gentleman from a wealthy family as socially prominent as her own. The first few years seem to have been relatively happy, but the marriage soon deteriorated. After a decade of troubled married life, Edith Wharton took to writing in earnest – most notably short fiction for magazines – and in 1899 she published her first collection of stories, The Greater Inclination. Actually, her first book was a collaboration on a nonfiction work, The Decoration of Houses (1897), written with the architect, Ogden Codman, a book that presents interior decoration as a reflection of individual personality. Indeed, the motif of the “house” becomes a major theme and symbol in Wharton’s fiction – as significant as the many houses in the fiction of Henry 216

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James or the imprisoning house in the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne, or the decaying houses, and tombs and other enclosures in the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. After 1899, she began to publish works of fiction in quick succession. In many, she dramatizes cultural differences between Europeans and Americans. One such, a novella, The Touchstone, came out in 1900; The Valley of Decision (1902) was a two-volume historical novel set in eighteenth-century Italy; the novellas Sanctuary (1903) and Madame de Treymes (1907) have European settings and characters. The House of Mirth (1905) is an unflattering portrayal of upper-class society and the vulgarians who surround it in both America and Europe. Critics immediately saw resemblances to the characters of Henry James – a writer to whom she was often (though not always favorably) compared. Wharton returned to the Berkshire setting for another rural story in Summer (1917), and the novella can be read with Ethan Frome as unified complementary works. The main action of Ethan Frome takes place in winter, and Wharton called Summer her “hot Ethan”; as a tale of seduction, it is hot in more than one sense.5 By common critical agreement, Edith Wharton’s “major phase” is the period from the publication of The House of Mirth in 1905 to 1920 or so; during this period she turned out one remarkable work of fiction after another, including Ethan Frome. By 1912, the date of the publication of The Reef, Wharton had produced seventeen books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Works like The Reef – which explores the complex sexual and social relationships among Americans coming together in a French chateau – were again compared to the works of Henry James, mainly because of the psychological analyses of members of the upper and upper-middle classes in an international context.

The reef of custom The Reef portrays an attempt to rekindle an old love, never consummated, a situation fraught with ambiguity and uncertainty. One of the estranged lovers, Anna Leath, had married an American businessman living in France. Now widowed, she has a grown stepson, Owen, and a child of her own, nine-year-old Effie. Anna is living on her deceased husband’s estate with her stepson and her widowed mother-in-law. As the novel opens, George Darrow, an American diplomat living in London, is on his way to France to see if their long-lost love can be recaptured. George has remained a bachelor and kept the flame of his old love alive in his heart, despite having had numerous sexual liaisons. Arriving in Paris, he receives a brusque telegram from Anna putting him off. Resentful, he spends an intimate week in Paris with a young and vivacious American girl, Sophie Viner. Months later, 217

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when George finally meets Anna at her chateau at Givre, he discovers that Sophie is now Effie’s governess – and engaged to Anna’s stepson! Anna discovers the affair with Sophie just as she is beginning to feel her old attraction to George. The basic story (though not its development) revolves around a simple question: should Anna, after all this time and knowing what she does, marry George or not? She has to sort out her feelings about the accepted mores of female and male sexual behavior, as well as the differences between American and European customs. Once considered one of Wharton’s minor works, The Reef is regarded by some critics as equal in psychological characterization to The House of Mirth. Others find it flawed. The point-of-view of much of the novel is dual, as the third-person narrator alternates between the perspectives of the two major characters. Although this alternation enhances the tale’s psychological complexity, the story line becomes rather static. Dissatisfied readers find the characterization contradictory and the overall narrative tone inconsistent. One of the chief objections is that the author/narrator’s attitude toward George Darrow is as ambivalent and unresolved as Anna’s. Although in a Henry James novel this ambiguity might be not only thematic but also dramatically effective, many readers find Wharton’s apparent indecisiveness exasperating. As R. W. B. Lewis writes, after George arrives at Anna’s chateau, attitudes and relations “shift almost from page to page” until Anna “turns against Sophie, and sends Darrow away.” Sophie then “disappears, and Owen, stricken and mute, goes off for a trip around the world.” Anna, “in an effort to fortify herself against marrying her besmirched fianc
e, seeks out Sophie in Paris, with the intention of declaring she has renounced Darrow. Sophie, however, has left for India . . .” (325). Even Wharton’s friends had mixed feelings about the novel, including the recurrent judgment that the ending was not up to the promise of the beginning. Biographical critics have made piquant observations that throw some light on the novel. George Darrow seems to be based partially on Morton Fullerton, Edith’s on-again-off-again lover from 1908 to 1910.6 Wharton herself had mixed feelings about the book because of its personal aspects. She told Bernard Berenson: “It’s not me, though I thought it was when I was writing it” (Lewis 1975, 326). A few years later, however, she commented that praise for the book went to her “innermost heart, because I put most of myself into that opus.”

An age of innocence and doubt: World War I and after In 1913, just before the publication of The Custom of the Country, Edith finally obtained a divorce from Edward Wharton. After her divorce, she settled 218

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in Paris, where she felt more comfortable than in America. When World War I broke out in 1914, she remained in Paris and volunteered to work for the Allied cause. Not only did she write books, pamphlets, essays, and stories about the war in France, but she also provided places of refuge for displaced persons and the wounded. (She was awarded the Cross of the French Legion of Honor.) Among her wartime writings are two novels of interest to the student: The Marne (1918) and A Son at the Front (1923). She began work on The Age of Innocence at the end of World War I; and in 1921 she received a Pulitzer Prize for it, the first woman to earn the award. (In 1923, she became the first woman to be honored by Yale University with the degree of Doctor of Letters.) Although beyond the time period of the present volume, this novel is central to an understanding of Wharton’s work and worth a comment. Set in upper-class New York in the 1870s, the novel’s main theme is the conflict between conventional society’s insistence on conformity and the individual’s need for personal realization. She portrays the illusive social assumptions and constructions that constrict the inner and outer lives of both men and women and explores the dilemmas that face them in a society rigid, even Puritanical, in its attitudes toward marriage and sexual freedom. Newland Archer, an affluent lawyer, unwisely enters into a marriage of convenience with an utterly conventional woman. He soon finds himself attracted to his wife’s fascinating cousin, the nonconformist Ellen Olenska, who is separated from her husband. Unwilling to destroy his marriage and compromise his social position, Archer inwardly renounces his passion and decides to live a “life apart” from Ellen. Years later, at the conclusion of the novel, Archer takes his son to Paris to see her, but he does not go up to her rooms with the boy, preferring instead to sit on a bench below her balcony. He fears that she has (“doubtless”) over the years had other “more tangible companionship” and that, perhaps, “she, too,” had kept “her memory” of him as “something apart.” But, he thinks, “if she had, it must have been like a relic in a small dim chapel, where there was not time to pray every day. . .” As he sits in the gathering twilight, he imagines his son being introduced to “a dark lady, pale and dark,” who “would be sitting in a sofa corner near the fire, with azaleas banked behind her on a table.” He suddenly realizes that the imagined scene is “more real to me here than if I went up” (Ch. 34). Fearful “lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge,” he finds himself “rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other.” When a light shines through the windows and the shutters are closed, Archer gets up from the bench and walks slowly back to his hotel alone. It is no accident that the scene is set near the Place des Invalides. Although the literal reference is to the plaza containing the Wounded War Veterans’ Hospital (H^ otel des Invalides), 219

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the scene is figuratively the place of the emotionally crippled. As in so many of James’s fictions of the unlived life, so also in hers: it is “too late.” Important nonfiction works of her last years include The Writing of Fiction (1925) and her autobiographical A Backward Glance (1934). Her fiction includes several volumes of short stories (most notably perhaps Xingu and Other Stories, collected in 1916). Many of these stories are still frequently anthologized, works like “Souls Belated” (1899), “The Other Two” (1904), “The Eyes” (1910), and “Afterward” (1909). Especially popular are the story “Roman Fever” (pub. 1936) and the novella-length Bunner Sisters (composed 1891–2, pub. 1916). Bunner Sisters is a grim story of genteel poverty in which neither the sister who chooses renunciation nor the sister who indulges herself ends up happy. Old New York (1924) is a collection of four novellas – False Dawn, The Old Maid, The Spark, New Year’s Day. The four stories depict the conflict of social conventions and morals decade by decade in the 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s; all four portray frustrated, primarily unfulfilled lives.

Infinite Vulgarity: The New American in The Custom of the Country The Custom of the Country (1913) presents a remarkable twist on the theme of the unlived life. The novel chronicles the social career of a scheming, amoral vulgarian, Undine Spragg, the coarse daughter of a moderately successful (and slightly crooked) Midwestern businessman. She is the central figure of a satiric international novel of manners – one that Henry James admired, but thought was in fact rather too satirical. The “heroine” of the novel is not, as some critics suggest, the opposite of the heroine of The House of Mirth. She is her vulgar twin, who, instead of declining, rises in the world. The words of the title have particular meanings. Custom refers to perceptions of traditions, manners, mores. It also means a medium of exchange – money, price, property – or feudal tribute. The countries involved are America and France, but the word country also implies a mental territory, a habituation. The self-congratulatory cultural mythology of America asserts that its democratic republic is different from class-conscious European countries. Wharton’s novel suggests that the differences are only superficial; both regard people, especially women, in terms of socioeconomic valuation. Wharton’s protagonist, while consciously participating in this system, turns the gender tables upside down. Beautiful and ruthless, Undine marries three men four times (remarrying one) and takes another as an adulterous lover. Two of the men are rich, powerful, aggressive, self-promoting, and loud – representatives of the American nouveau riche. Two are refined and cultured, one a representative 220

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of American gentility, the other of European aristocracy. Her first husband is Elmer Moffatt, a country bumpkin from Kansas. As a young girl, she elopes with him and then quickly divorces him, partly because her father (who wants upward social mobility for his daughter) objects to the farm boy. Moffat will, however, eventually become a self-made multimillionaire (cheating and swindling whenever necessary). He represents the newest of the nouveau riche, the energetic growing middle class, regarded by both the old guard and the first tier of the nouveau riche as barbarians at the gates. Her second husband is Ralph Marvell, a weak, emotionally infirm member of an “Old New York” family. Ralph is soft-spoken, sensitive, and artistic – an aspiring writer who does not write but merely indulges in romantic literary fantasies. The older (or outmoded) genteel social set of New York from which he comes is the very group that is being exploited by the nouveaux riches. He falls madly in love with Undine, but her indifference (especially after she finds out he has no real money of his own) and his own failures eventually drive him to suicide. In between the second and third of her marriages, Peter Van Degen, an incredibly vulgar American businessman, takes Undine as his mistress for a short time. Van Degen represents an earlier generation of nouveau-riche entrepreneurs in America. While Elmer Moffatt is clawing his way up, Van Degen is enjoying the expensive fruits of his nefarious capitalist ventures. He is given to ostentatious public display of various sorts, while maintaining, through marriage into a genteel family, a superficial respectability. He makes little effort to conceal his promiscuous lifestyle and is generally regarded as an interloper in polite society. Undine sees in him an opportunity for financial gain; she accompanies him to Europe, where she intends to supplant his wife. Recognizing her motives (and seeing her interest in a European aristocrat), Van Degen moves on to another conquest. Undine now targets Count Raymond de Chelles (later Marquis de Chelles), whose distinguished family still has extensive lands in France. He is a somewhat haughty, rather inflexible member of the legitimate French nobility, representing antiquated traditions. For one thing, he demands an heir, despite Undine’s worry that having a child will spoil her figure. All in all, Undine finds the social customs of his country as incomprehensible and retrograde to her desires as those of the genteel class in America. Moreover, the family fortune is not as great as she had thought. Before she returns to America, she makes incursions into the estates of the de Chelles, selling off or stealing treasured ancestral heirlooms, furnishings, and antique tapestries. Back in America, Undine again takes up with Elmer Moffat, now richer even than Van Degen – and just as unscrupulous. Although he is as aggressive, loud, and vulgar as Van Degen, he is a more sympathetic character. For one thing, he adopts a very fatherly attitude toward Undine’s lonely little son, Paul. But at the 221

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end of the novel, Undine seems to be looking about for a better catch – someone higher on the social scale. Undine Spragg is one of the most memorable characters in American fiction: an ironic portrait of the new American “lady,” a tour de force in unpleasantness. Her superficial materialism and selfishness destroy the happiness of all about her. Unlike Chopin’s Edna Pontellier, Undine is not passionate or romantic; like Alcott’s Jean Muir, she is calculating, manipulative, and almost totally devoid of any tender sympathies. Louis Auchincloss (1961) memorably describes her as the central character in the “conflict of social groups” who is not a “victim” but an “invader,” as “sentimental in her judgments of herself as she is ruthless in her judgments of others.” For her, a “father is only a checkbook, a husband a means of social advancement, a baby a threat to the figure. No amount of association with cultivated persons or of exposure to the art of Europe can ripple the surface of her infinite vulgarity” (24).

House of Pain: The Downward Path to Wisdom in The House of Mirth The ironic title of The House of Mirth comes from the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes: “The heart of fools is in the house of mirth” (7:4). The first seven verses of the seventh book serve to gloss the themes of Wharton’s novel. The Preacher tells us that the value of a good name or reputation is more important than material things; that death is better than being born in the first place. Death (the house of mourning) is the final end for everyone – and it is better to hear the wise criticize illusion than to believe the fools whose trivial folly and superficial mirth consume and destroy them. One should not blame the oppression of others for one’s own failures: you are responsible for your own miseries. This pervasive pessimism underlies the purposelessness, the boredom, the empty class consciousness of Wharton’s House of Mirth.

Book I: From domestic archetype to social naturalism The basic story reflects the “Woman’s Fiction” archetype of the domestic novel but seriously deforms it. An orphaned young woman from a once wellto-do family leaves her rural home and goes to the big city to live as the “poor relation” with her moderately wealthy aunt. But the object of her quest is a rich husband of high social standing. She is calculating, but at the same time repelled by the vulgarity and dishonesty of her mission. She mistakes or mistimes her marriage opportunities, alienates the man she really loves, loses 222

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what marginal social status she gains, sinks into poverty, and half-intentionally commits suicide. The ambiguous heroine of this story of social naturalism is Lily Bart, who has “a fatalistic sense of being drawn from one wrong turning to another, without ever perceiving the right road till it was too late to take it.”7 Unlike Cassandra of Stoddard’s The Morgesons, or even Edna in Chopin’s The Awakening, she does not really oppose the social conventions she has absorbed. She frequently questions and berates herself, but more often she feels sorry for herself.

Caste of characters Wharton is as usual at pains to create a Jamesian sense of a dense social milieu. Earlier we noted two tiers of upper-class American society. Wharton’s conception of society is more complex. There are at least three tiers, with additional insider/outsider divisions. In the first division, the old guard holds itself aloof as genteel and cultured, as the inheritors not just of money but of good taste and breeding. Historically speaking, “Old New York” was being invaded by increasing numbers of the newly rich in the 1880s and the 1890s, the era of the Robber Barons. In Wharton’s novel, even those nouveaux riches of the highest social standing are garishly materialistic and deficient in breeding and culture. This group tends toward ostentatious display, but it is the nouveau nouveaux, the newer newly rich, who are the real vulgarians. And on their fringes are the quasiwealthy outsiders and desperate social climbers. As a whole, the various levels of the new rich are sometimes collectively called the “business class.” A major irony of The House of Mirth is that the society in which Lily Bart tries so hard to reestablish herself is not the one to which she aspires. She has been brought up in tangential contact with the genteel rich and identifies with them. But the circle she is working in the novel is the next rung down the social ladder. She has been schooled to be an old-guard “lady” of refinement, but she has closer ties to the first and second levels of new money. Having suffered what she considers near impoverishment because of her father’s business failures, Lily at the beginning of the novel is planning to attract an appropriately wealthy man. After all, she has the social skills and beauty. But even with the nouveau-riche social climbers, she is a special kind of outsider. Early in Book I, at a dinner party, Lily looks “down the long table, studying its occupants one by one . . . what a long stretch of vacuity! How dreary and trivial these people were!” This scene embodies the basic paradox of the novel: a calculating woman, who is generally cleverer than those whom she would manipulate, is undone by her superior moral scruples – even though she is vacillating and her values conflicted. 223

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Lily’s dying mother has sent her to live in New York with her well-to-do, socially prominent but out-of-touch aunt, the widowed Mrs Peniston. Although “by no means the richest of the family group,” Aunt Peniston is quite able to provide for Lily and can provide entr
ee to fashionable New York society (I, 3). Mrs Peniston herself has become an effete representation of the old upper class and is now a mere observer of life from the safe distance that her money allows. “She belonged to the class of old New Yorkers who have always lived well, dressed expensively, and done little else.” The first several chapters set forth Lily’s prospects quite clearly as she charms the vulgarly rich Trenors during an extended stay at “Bellomont,” their ostentatious mansion. We also discover that she smokes, drinks, plays cards for money (like a New Woman), and loses track of her funds (unlike the New Woman). Lily Bart’s prospects for a profitable marriage revolve around three principal suitors. These men are interested in her for different reasons and in varying degrees; and she finds a way to mismanage each relationship. The two richest of them, Simon Rosedale and Percy Gryce, are wrong for her by any standard except money. Her close friend, Lawrence Selden, is the man she is really attracted to, though she hardly admits it since he is too poor for her. By the time she is ready to follow her heartstrings rather than her purse-strings, it is “too late.” Selden’s character is problematic in its own way. He is a young lawyer who has not yet been able to establish a lucrative practice. He has a genuine historical interest in collecting “Americana,” but he doesn’t have enough money to acquire a really good collection. He is reserved, bookish, and reticent. He tends to hang about the edges of the action and “watch” what happens. Even though he discourses on the superficiality of society, he sometimes seems to approve of the “game” Lily is playing. In the first chapter, after some banter about Lily’s not marrying a poor man like himself, he asks: “Isn’t marriage your vocation? Isn’t it what you’re all brought up for?” (I, 1). Lily’s response is to shrug and say, “What else is there?” After all, “I must have a great deal of money.” As she measures out the tea, Selden watches her “sapphire bracelet slipping over her wrist” and thinks that she is “so evidently” the “victim of the civilization which had produced her” that even “the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate” (I, 1). Simon Rosedale is a wealthy Jewish merchant and investor who sees Lily as an entr
ee into New York’s newly established social elite. Jews are not socially acceptable; so despite his money, he lacks the appropriate connections and background. Lily understands “his motives, for her own course was guided by as nice calculations” (I, 2), but she feels an “intuitive repugnance.” Later, out of options, she reconsiders; but by that time Rosedale has ingratiated himself with the elite by lavish gifts and her reputation has been damaged. Ironically enough, in his absolute forthrightness Rosedale is probably the most honest, the most 224

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genuine character in the novel. He knows she doesn’t love him; in asking her to be his wife, he says he is just giving her “a plain business statement” of what he can provide. They part amicably. Percy Gryce seems initially to be the best prospect. He is extremely wealthy, shy, and not too bright. His wealth has allowed him to amass a fine collection of “Americana” far grander than Selden’s. He is under the watchful eye of his widowed mother, a veteran of the marriage market, who intends to protect her son from calculating women. Although a match with Gryce would bring Lily the money and social standing she wants, she finds him incredibly boring. Nevertheless, she fantasizes about being married to a man with an annual income of $800,000. “She would be able to arrange her life as she pleased, to soar into that empyrean of security where creditors cannot penetrate” (I, 4). She “determined to be to him what his Americana [collection] had hitherto been: the one possession in which he took sufficient pride to spend money on it.” Later, after having “been bored all afternoon” by Gryce, Lily rethinks her position. She concludes that she “could not ignore him” as a prospect, but to win him, she “must submit to boredom” and “all on the pure chance that he might ultimately decide to do her that honour of boring her for life” (I, 3). When the critical moment of a proposal is at hand, instead of going out walking with Gryce, she goes off with Selden. The mandatory afternoon walk after Sunday Church “stood for a fraction of that great bulk of boredom which loomed across her path.” But the larger part of Lily’s impulsive decision is her attraction to Selden. Wharton employs two of her favorite metaphors to describe Lily’s thinking – a cage and trapped flies.

............................................................................................... It was rather that he had preserved a certain social detachment, a happy air of viewing the show objectively, of having points of contact outside the great gilt cage in which they were all huddled for the mob to gape at. How alluring the world outside the cage appeared to Lily, as she heard its door clang on her! In reality, as she knew, the door never clanged: it stood always open; but most of the captives were like flies in a bottle, and having once flown in, could never regain their freedom. It was Selden’s distinction that he had never forgotten the way out. (I, 5)

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Selden tells her that his idea of success is “personal freedom,” especially freedom “from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from all the material accidents. To keep a kind of republic of the spirit – that’s what I call success.” After some more banter about his “country” of the truly free, Lily says, “ . . . as I understand it, one of the conditions of citizenship is not to think too much about money, and the only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it” (I, 6). The basic inner conflict for Lily seems simple: the freedom 225

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and independence of the “republic of the spirit” versus the restrictions and imprisonment of the “house of mirth.” Sitting on a high ledge of rock with Selden, it seems as if “there were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears” (I, 6). Selden appears to be her intimate friend, but Lily’s one true friend is Gertrude (“Gerty”) Farish, her cousin. Even though she herself is attracted to Selden and feels some jealousy, Gerty is the one person who remains loyal to Lily throughout the narrative. She has decided to go her own way no matter what society says and has taken her own apartment as a single woman. Lily envies Gerty’s freedom but finds her “mean and shabby surroundings” unacceptable for herself (I, 3). To Lily, as to her mother, “acquiescence in dinginess was evidence of stupidity” (I, 8). Among the other figures in the drama are two married couples that exemplify the increasingly unpleasant elements of vulgarian high society: George and Bertha Dorset; and Gus and Judy Trenor. The Dorsets are somewhat higher up the social scale, and wealthier. They represent the most desirable level of society that is readily available to Lily. George Dorset is genuinely in love with Lily. Bertha, aware of her husband’s attraction to Lily, hates her. She maliciously manipulates her and tries to destroy her socially. She spreads rumors about Lily’s supposed promiscuity, but Bertha’s own promiscuity goes unrebuked. The “code of Lily’s world decreed that a woman’s husband should be the only judge of her conduct: she was technically above suspicion while she had the shelter of his approval, or even of his indifference” (I, 9). Gus and Judy Trenor represent the more vulgar of the nouveaux riches. At first, Judy is happy to make use of Lily’s social graces as hostess to enhance their social gatherings at Bellomont. Judy soon grows jealous of Lily, for it becomes increasingly clear that her husband is lusting after her. In fact, Gus precipitates a major pivotal event in the narrative. Aware that she is living beyond her means, he plans to embroil Lily financially and thus entrap her in an adulterous relationship. He offers to invest some of Lily’s income in “sure things” for her. Using the womanly “training” received from her mother, Lily acts very “grateful,” not only by words, but also by calculated facial expressions and feminine body language (I, 7). As Gus becomes more aggressive, Lily fears that she may become the subject of gossip which will endanger her vulnerable social status. When the tension gets particularly strong, she asks Selden for his opinion. He tells her that she should give up fortune-hunting (hinting vaguely at his own interest in Lily). Over a period of some weeks, Gus gives Lily about $9,000 as the “return” on her “investments.” Lily uses the money not only to pay her bills and reestablish her credit, but also to buy expensive things she can’t really afford. 226

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Gus springs his trap in the middle chapter of the novel, just before Book II begins. Lily finds a note purportedly from Judy asking her to dinner that night, only Judy is not there. Offering her cognac, Gus says it’s an opportune time for Lily to repay his “loan.” Lily is astonished, especially when Gus claims that she knew that the money was not from investments, but from him. Lily has to force her way past him out of the mansion. Unknown to her, and rather improbably, Selden and a friend see her leaving. Selden immediately decides the rumor about Lily and Gus is true and that he no longer has feelings for her. Disgraced, Lily is rejected even by her Aunt Peniston, who has been horrified to hear that her niece has become “Conspicuous!” However unfounded the charges, it is “horrible of a young girl to let herself be talked about.” When Lily reads in the newspaper that Selden is sailing for Havana and the West Indies, she decides that she must accept the marriage proposal of Simon Rosedale – but she is saved from that decision when an invitation arrives from Bertha Dorset to join them on their yacht for a cruise in the Mediterranean.

Book II: Society destroys whom it will The first several chapters of Book II detail the efforts of Bertha Dorset to complete the ruin of Lily’s reputation. The description of how Bertha Dorset manipulates Lily into a compromising situation and forces her to leave the Dorsets’ yacht in apparent disgrace I find rather thin and improbable. Later, when we return to Lily’s confused psychological reactions to external events, the story picks up again. The plot thickens when Lawrence Selden’s housecleaner, Mrs Haffen, offers to sell Lily some love letters between Selden and Bertha Dorset. The extramarital love letters undercut Selden’s moral superiority (as if he too were a captive of social determinism). Lily buys the letters ostensibly to protect Selden’s reputation, but also reserves the option of “using” them somehow. Lily also receives word that Aunt Peniston has died and left her a “mere” $10,000. Lily has been disinherited; the break with the Dorsets was the final straw for old lady Peniston (II, 4). Lily plans to repay Gus with the money her aunt has left her, but she has to wait for the probate court to transmit her inheritance to her. She is still penniless. Thanks to Bertha Dorset and others, Lily finds herself ostracized. She now becomes involved with a more or less contemptible social set on the perimeters of fashionable society: “The Gormer milieu represented a social out-skirt which Lily had always fastidiously avoided; but it struck her, now that she was in it, as only a flamboyant copy of her own world, a caricature approximating the real thing as a ‘society play’ approaches the manners of the drawing-room” (II, 5). 227

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She soon becomes disgusted with their vulgarity and amoral deviousness and removes herself from their circle. As the rumors about Lily increase, her market value decreases. At this point, Simon Rosedale reappears and makes Lily a forthright offer, similar to Gus Trenor’s, though less offensively presented. When she refuses to become his mistress, he tells Lily that if she can mend fences with Bertha Dorset and be reinstated in New York society, he would consider marriage. Even cleverer at scheming than Lily, he suggests that Lily could use the Selden love letters either to blackmail Bertha into reinstating her or to expose Bertha’s infidelity and acquire George for herself. Lily rejects Rosedale’s new proposals – but reconsiders them later.

The domestic novel as social naturalism As in many another domestic novel, the impoverished heroine finds herself seeking low-paying jobs, each more menial than the last. The novel now begins to take a clear turn toward naturalist determinism. Lily thinks herself the victim of “the selfish despotism of society.” The following passage presents an overview of her amorphous thoughts in philosophical determinist terms:

............................................................................................... Inherited tendencies had combined with early training to make her the highly specialized product she was: an organism as helpless out of its narrow range as the sea-anemone torn from the rock. She had been fashioned to adorn and delight; to what other end does nature round the rose-leaf and paint the hummingbird’s breast? And was it her fault that the purely decorative mission is less easily and harmoniously fulfilled among social beings than in the world of nature? That it is apt to be hampered by material necessities or complicated by moral scruples? (II, 11)

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The aim of Lily’s muddled attempt to account for her existence and the vicissitudes of her life in the “natural” terms of biological determinism is to avoid personal responsibility. The next sentence exacerbates the ambiguity of her thinking. Are the two opposite forces that Lily half-formulates (via the narrator) nature and human society – or necessity and scruple – or materialism and morality?

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two antagonistic forces . . . fought out their battle in her breast during the long watches of the night; and when she rose the next morning she hardly knew where the victory lay . . . in the distorting light of fatigue the future stretched out before her grey, interminable, and desolate. (II, 11)

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Blackmailing Bertha Dorset would be a last desperate attempt to preserve the only life Lily can imagine: a life of financial ease in New York “society.” She starts for the Dorsets with the bundle of letters, but unconscious impulses take her to Selden’s first. Selden, still under the impression that Lily has been promiscuous, says he sees no future for himself with a little fortunehunter. Seeing that he, like the others, has judged her without evidence, she realizes that it is “too late” for anything but to know “what I had missed.” The scene is almost a mirror of James’s Beast in the Jungle. “Something” lies palpably “dead between them” and can no longer be called to life. She discreetly deposits the letters into the fire, an act Selden misses, while silently “groping for the word to break the spell.” In the excruciating silence, Lily touches his forehead with her lips and leaves. The word Selden can’t speak is “love,” but the word that will echo throughout the rest of the narrative is “silence.”

The triumph of genre convention The conclusion is almost a lapse in artistic sensibility – or so it seems to me. The governing theme seems clear: social convention triumphs over individual will; but the powerful literary conventions of the sentimental/domestic novel also seem inexorable. After leaving Selden’s apartment, Lily sits on an empty park bench in the dark. There is nothing for her to go home to: nothing but the “silence of her cheerless room – that silence of the night . . . and the bottle of choral by her bed.” She is approached by a “thin shabby” young woman, a girl named Nettie, whom Gerty and Lily had once helped save from the “social refuseheap.” She persuades Lily to come to her dingy flat, where it’s warm. Here Lily is introduced to her newborn baby. Nettie explains that she had expected to marry “a gentleman where I was employed.” But “he was too stylish for me. . . . Work girls aren’t looked after the way you are, and they don’t always know how to look after themselves.” Then she met George, who “knew about me” but wanted to marry her because he “cared for me enough to have me as I was” (my italics). The contrast with Selden is unstated but implicit. At this point, moved by some impulse deep beneath the layers of social artificiality, Lily stretches her arms out to the baby. She feels the baby’s “soft weight sink trustingly against her breast.” Lily thrills with “a sense of returning life” as the physical pressure of the child “became part of herself.” She returns to

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her own room renewed, at least temporarily. The sentimental scene is out of balance with the rest of the novel. Back in her room, a different order of sentimentality takes over. A knock at the door brings her the long-awaited $10,000 check from her aunt’s executors. She can now repay all her debts, even though it will leave her penniless again. “It was no longer, however, from the vision of material poverty that she turned with the greatest shrinking” (II, 13). Her deeper misery is presented in a confused series of nature images, beginning with plants, roots, currents of time as whirling wind and water, and a tiny tentacled creature clinging to nothing solid – the sea-anemone of her previous reverie: “it was the clutch of solitude . . . the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years . . . without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could cling before the awful flood submerged them.” As she thinks back, it seems “that there had never been a time when she had had any real relation to life.” Now her thoughts shift to a sense of physical place as the foundation of family ties. It is not a house of false mirth – a house of fools – but a house of “blood” kinship, passions, “tradition,” and “inherited” loyalties that counts. More broadly, what matters are the “mysterious links of kinship to all the mighty sum of human striving” (II, 13). She suddenly remembers the “matinginstinct” she had once felt before coming under the “disintegrating influences” of the artificial society life around her. Her vague idea of natural romanticism, a basic existence informed by love, but trumped by socialization, is less than fully clear. But the centrality of love is confirmed in Lily’s befuddled mind by Nettie’s life. The “poor little working-girl” seems to Lily “to have reached the central truth of existence.” Life has “the frail audacious permanence of a bird’s nest built on the edge of a cliff – a mere wisp of leaves and straw, yet so put together that the lives entrusted to it may hang safely over the abyss” (II, 13). Although an affirmative clich
e, the statement also evokes the double nature of nature. The natural image of enduring life exists in the midst of chaos and threat, a precarious permanence at best, and one that requires mating: “it had taken two to build the nest.” The uniting of two beings, she thinks, requires two aspects of “love”: the “man’s faith as well as the woman’s courage.” Lily remembers that Nettie’s “husband’s faith in her had made her renewal possible. . . . Selden had twice been ready to stake his faith on Lily Bart; but the third trial had been too severe for his endurance.” The learned social coercions, not just of thought but also of feeling, made Selden’s love as “impossible to restore to growth as a deep-rooted plant torn from its bed.” Nothing now remains to Lily but the emptiness of renunciation. “In the mysterious nocturnal separation from all outward signs of life, she felt herself 230

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more strangely confronted with her fate.” The “terrible silence and emptiness seemed to symbolize her future – she felt as though the house, the street, the world were all empty, and she alone left sentient in a lifeless universe” (II, 13). The naturalist worldview reigns supreme. She “remembered that she had not closed her eyes for two nights. The little bottle was at her bedside, waiting to lay its spell upon her.” She puts out her hand and measures “the soothing drops into a glass”; but as she does, she knows that “they would be powerless against the supernatural lucidity of her brain.” Her “suicide,” somewhat like that of Edna Pontellier, is not clearly deliberate. Lily does not “consider the question very closely . . . darkness, darkness was what she must have at any cost.” She raises herself in bed and swallows “the contents of the glass; then she blew out her candle and lay down” (II, 13). As she thinks about the “word,” the word that had not been said between her and Selden, she slips into the sleep of death. Sleeping Beauty lies upon a narrow bed in a “dingy” boarding-house. When a suddenly remorseful Prince Charming arrives, “irresistible sunshine” is pouring into her room in “a tempered golden flood” (II, 14). In its light, Selden sees the “semblance” of Lily Bart. He looks round the room and sees the two envelopes and Lily’s open check-book. He finally surmises the truth about the money from Gus Trenor. He realizes that he has not had the faith in a beloved that a real lover would. It seems to be an epiphany. The melodramatic conclusion has him kneeling at her bedside, finally uttering the word of love – which she cannot hear. As Selden tries to explain things satisfactorily to himself, he rationalizes “that all the conditions of life had conspired to keep them apart . . .” (II, 14). In his view, his admirable distance from the vapid socialites, and her unworthy inability to distance herself from them, are to blame for their failed love. He absolves himself. Now he can “read into that farewell” of her kiss “all that his heart craved to find there”; he can “even draw from it the courage not to accuse himself for having failed” her (my italics). In James’s Beast in the Jungle, John Marcher realizes that he is to blame for having missed the love offered him; but Selden exculpates himself in self-forgiving obfuscation. Even in death, Lily is marginalized.

............................................................................................... Two are better than one. . . . For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. (Ecclesiastes, 4.9–10)

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Notes 1. Society novels emphasized social status, breeding, refinement, and etiquette. For a different overview of Wharton’s art, see Waid and Colquitt (ACAF, 2009), who discuss her work from her first adolescent novel to Hudson River Bracketed (1929) and The Gods Arrive (1932). 2. The French term for the “new[ly] rich” is used in English both as an adjective (usually hyphenated, as in “the nouveau-riche class”) and as a noun (“the nouveau riche”); when the plural form (nouveaux riches) is used, it refers to persons of a class rather than the idea of a class. The term has strong negative connotations. 3. See D. Wilson (1967); for further discussion of the “genteel” see Ch. 16 of the present volume. For an overview of the issue of class in American fiction, see C. Wilson, ACAF (2009). The suggestions for further reading at the end of this chapter are condensed and should be augmented with the various studies of genteel and social fiction, women’s writing, feminist writings, and so forth cited in the main bibliography. For example, Budick’s Engendering Romance (1994), though not treating Wharton extensively, contains a section on Stowe, Chopin, and Wharton within an illuminating theoretical re-conception of what the forms of “women’s writing” include. See NGd, 183–186, for further discussion. Also see Chs. 10–12 of the present volume. 4. A vulgarian is a “vulgar person; especially one who makes a conspicuous display of his money” (Amer. Hert. Dict.). The English word vulgar is from Latin vulgus/ vulgaris, meaning the “common people,” as “distinguished from the educated or cultivated classes.” Other specific meanings in English are: deficient in taste, delicacy, or refinement; ill-bred, boorish, crude, tasteless; obscene, indecent, coarse. 5. There is a touch of incest in Summer. Sensuous sexuality is implied in some of Wharton’s published fictions, though it is hardly explicit or “sensational.” Among her unpublished posthumous papers, however, is a detailed depiction of sexual acts suggestive of the physical passion she was capable of, and apparently missing in her marriage. A fragment called “Beatrice Palmato” describes a woman’s “passionate excitement, bred of privation, and of the dull misery of her marriage” (R. W. B. Lewis, 1975). It is rather misleadingly reprinted as an incest scene without her accompanying story outline in Ethan Frome and Summer, ed. Knight (2004), 239–241. The full version (outline plus fragment) is given in Lewis 1975, 544–548. 6. She recorded aspects of the affair in her fragmented secret diary of 1908 titled “The Life Apart”; for a detailed account see Lewis 1975, 159–264. 7. Bk. I, Ch. 12. The novel is formally divided into two “Books,” relatively equal in length, with chapters renumbered in each one: fifteen in the first Book and fourteen in the second. The time of the narrative is the first years of the new

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twentieth century, beginning in 1903; the central place is New York City (with a background retrospect of the heroine’s Midwest origins).

See also Ammons (1980, 1991, 1995); Bauer (1994); Beer (1997); Benstock (1994); Bentley (1995); Boyd (2004); Camfield (ACAF, 2009); Farrell (ACAF, 2009); Fedorko (1995); Fryer (1986); Goodman (1994); Hoeller (2000); Killoran (1996); Kress (2003); Lindberg (1975); Montgomery (1998); Nettels (1988, 1997); Nevius (1953); Papke (1990); Price (1996); Scharnhorst (2004); Singley (1995, 2003a, 2003b); Tuttleton (1974); Waid (1991); Waid et al. (1999); Wharton (1990, 1995, 1998, 2004); Wolff (1995); S. Wright (1998).

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Chapter 14

Tea-Table as Jungle Henry James and “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life”

Many regard Henry James (1843–1916) as the premier American fiction writer to emerge from the nineteenth century. By 1965, James had already accumulated a whole library of criticism. Now, nearly half a century later, that library has become something like a national archive – by last estimate, more than any other American author.1 James wrote between five and six million words of fiction alone, the equivalent of fifty ordinary-sized novels. Among his major achievements were his expansion of what came to be called the psychological novel and his enhancements of narrative technique (especially the exploitation of a “center of consciousness”). The term psychological novel indicates a work that emphasizes internal characterization as the motivating force or springboard of external action. This effect is more or less the reverse of that of the traditional novel. The difference may be suggested by the works of Jane Austen. She takes a keen interest in her characters’ inner motivations; but, rather than rendering private mental states, Austen tends to couch her characters’ motivations in social situations.2 The title of Freud’s 1904 work, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, catches the essence of much of James’s fiction. The idea of an everyday psychopathology suggests the anxieties, frustrations, half-articulated desires, repressions, and compulsions – the incipient madness – of commonplace lives. When Frank Norris, writing from the perspective of literary naturalism, spoke of some works of realism as the drama of the “broken tea-cup,” he may not have had in mind

Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson. Ó 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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James’s conception of the society drawing-room as a naturalist jungle. But at James’s dinner table, the “worker in one connection was the worked in another”; such are the “wheels of the system.”3 This social “system” (especially in Europe) sometimes entraps the “innocent” and na€ıve American woman. But more often, blameless as she may appear, James’s characteristic female is the deadlier of the species. Two figures in particular – the “Lady” and the “American Girl” – seemed to fascinate James. But in trying to comprehend the complex, ambiguous, or questionable female figures in James’s fiction, one must be alert to what in the preface to The Turn of the Screw he called “a trap for the unwary” reader. Many of his innocents wreak subtle and efficient revenge.

James’s House of Fiction: The Three-Stage Paradigm Let me begin this discussion of James by trying to help the student sort out the nearly six million words of complex fiction. James’s career is conventionally divided into three chronological stages. His fictions also appear to be of three main types: (1) accounts of the cultural, social, and individual interactions between Europe and America; (2) stories of artists and writers; and (3) complex narratives of intricate social machinations by women and men trapped in biological, psychological, social, and cultural prisons. Weaving in and out of this pattern is the menage-a-trois as a recurrent situation and theme. The term ordinarily means a sexual relationship among three people, but in James it is often a metaphor for a psychosocial relationship in which a sexual undercurrent may or may not exist. The three-stage chronological paradigm has long been standard, but the divisions are a little arbitrary and overlap.4 The qualities of the fiction of the last period are present in his work from the first; and the line between the second and third periods is rather indistinct. It must be acknowledged, however, that some works from the third period are noticeably different in style. The prose style tends to be rather difficult and the plot hard to follow – especially, I would say, in The Sacred Fount (1901) and The Golden Bowl (1904).

Period of early mimetic realism During the decade from 1871 to about 1880–1, James’s style and plots remain relatively straightforward, possibly because of his emphasis on the short story. Before the book publication of A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales in 1875, 236

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James had published some twenty short stories in magazines. Notable works of the period include: . . . . . . . . .

Watch and Ward (serialized 1871, rev. 1878) A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales (1875) Roderick Hudson (1875) Madame de Mauves (1874–5) The American (1877) The Europeans (1878) Daisy Miller (1878, 1879) An International Episode (1879) The Madonna of the Future and Other Tales (1879; title story first pub. 1873)

Watch and Ward features a vaguely unwholesome psychological theme. A man in his thirties learns that a stranger to whom he had once refused help has committed suicide, leaving a daughter. He decides to adopt the twelve-year-old child, bring her up to be a lady, and marry her when she turns eighteen. When the girl discovers his intent, she is bewildered, but eventually succumbs to the wishes of the father-lover. The young sculptor of Roderick Hudson has more conventional psychological issues. One is the conflict between true artistic talent and superficiality; the second involves desire for an unattainable object. His story is told within a social framework that, given his inherited temperament, more or less determines the outcome. Roderick garners the support of a more established artist, Rowland Mallet; but, in Mallet’s Rome studio, Roderick begins to show signs of mental instability. After a hopeless entanglement with two women, the distraught artist heads into a mountain storm in the Swiss Alps. When his body is found, it is unclear if he has fallen or jumped. The main novel of this period is The American (1877; rev. 1907). It is a celebrated early example of James’s “international theme,” in which an innocent New World American meets Old World corruption and decadence. Although the plot is improbably romantic, the novel is an attempt at a realistic psychological study of double conflicts. In Paris, Christopher Newman, an American businessman, meets the widowed Claire de Cintre of the aristocratic de Bellegarde family. The family agrees to allow the wealthy Newman to court Claire, but later they withdraw their support for reasons that are unclear to him. Valentin, a younger member of the family, remains friendly to Newman, but he is fatally wounded in a duel over a woman. Before he dies, he tells Newman a family secret: Madame de Bellegarde was accused by her dying husband of his murder. Newman offers to keep the secret if he is allowed to marry Claire. But the Bellegardes believe that Newman (as a simple and naive American) will 237

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never expose them. When Claire retreats to a nunnery, Newman, confused and disgusted, destroys the evidence against the family. As in James’s other works, the American side is not all innocent and good; and the Europeans are not all corrupt and scheming. Black and white moral lines that seem starkly drawn are not. Two novellas portraying the innocent American Woman or naive American Girl make an inverse pair. Each represents an independent development of the theme of wronged innocence. In terms of the psychopathology of life, each of the women, beneath a surface sweetness, seems to embrace suffering and martyrdom as a means of recrimination. In Madame de Mauves (1874–5), the center of consciousness is a moonstruck young man named Longmore, described as a “disappointed observer.” He watches the beautiful Euphemia de Mauves from a distance but falls in love with her. Remote and vengeful, the “innocent” wife exacts from Longmore a chilling renunciation of all passion while she coldly drives her philandering husband to suicide. Daisy Miller (1878), James’s famous portrait of the young American woman abroad, is a touchstone for many aspects of his fiction: the conflict between American and European customs and morals; a detached yet involved observer who provides a restricted point-of-view for events; the “American Girl” type who represents the innocence (and vulgarity) of American culture; the subtle examination of psychological twists and turns within a dense social milieu. Although uncultured and unsophisticated by European standards, Daisy has an aura of freshness and cheerfulness about her. Ignorant of European customs, she goes out with young men without a chaperone and comes under censure from both Europeans and other Americans, which makes her all the more reckless. At night, she exposes herself to the deadly malaria of the Roman Coliseum – whether deliberately or not is left uncertain. The events are mostly filtered through the frosty consciousness of a young man named Winterbourne (cf. Longmore above). After her death, he discovers her innocence and decides that he has lived “too long in foreign parts.” He has misunderstood the American openness of character combined with puritan morality. It is a little hard today to comprehend the public indignation that the story created in America; it was seen by some as “an outrage on American girl-hood.”5

Period of psychological realism The second stage, from 1880 to about the mid-1890s, is characterized by continuing interest in developing the psychological “center of consciousness,” most spectacularly represented by The Portrait of a Lady (discussed at length later). 238

Tea-Table as Jungle: Henry James . . . . . . . . .

The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1) Washington Square (1880–1) The Bostonians (1885–6) The Princess Cassimassima (1885–6) The Aspern Papers and Other Stories (1888) The Reverberator (1888) The Tragic Muse (1889–90) The Lesson of the Master (1892) The Real Thing and Other Tales (1893)

Washington Square presents a psychological menage-a-trois, involving an unattractive woman, her father, and a disingenuous suitor. Catherine Sloper struggles to break free from both of the men. She quarrels with her father, telling him that she intends to marry the fortune-hunting Morris Townsend. Dr Sloper buys him off. Seventeen years later, her father dies, leaving her very little money. Townsend reappears, thinking that she still pines for him and has inherited a small fortune. But she will have none of him. This “portrait of a lady” is of a strong-willed woman who renounces love and chooses, while wreaking revenge, a lonely dignity. The Bostonians presents another intriguing menage-a-trois. Basil Ransom, a Southern officer and typical male chauvinist, contends with Olive Chancellor, a women’s rights activist, for control of another woman, Verena Tarrant, a charismatic speaker and public performer. Ransom is captivated by Verena but reveals himself to be only slightly amenable to a change in attitude toward womanhood. Olive, lacking Verena’s eloquence, desperately needs her for the ongoing work of women’s rights and social reform. For this reason, and others, she becomes increasingly hostile to Ransom. By the middle of the novel (Ch. 20 of 42), Olive seems to have complete control of Verena. In fact, the attachment between the two seems (by innuendo and plot implication) both lesbian and a master–slave relation. The second half of the novel details Verena’s gradual (ambivalent and incomplete) escape from Olive’s grasp. At the end, Ransom browbeats the confused girl into becoming his wife, who quietly sheds some tears at leaving Olive. The last sentence of the novel suggests that “with the union” to Ransom “these tears were not the last she was destined to shed.” James intended The Princess Cassimassima to be a “big novel,” an attempt at a political fiction set in Europe to complement The Bostonians as his “political” novel set in America. Cassimassima involves an anarchist plot, in which and around which prowl several upper-class and aristocratic figures. The work has its admirers, but many readers find its plot improbable and his portrayal of the lower-class characters and revolutionaries unconvincing. 239

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The Aspern Papers is a novella-length masterpiece. It features yet another curious psychological menage-a-trois, this time involving an old woman, her “niece,” and a deceitful male interloper. The latter is a biographer who tries to obtain possession of the letters and other papers of a famous deceased poet, Geoffrey Aspern, in order to write a definitive life of the great man which will insure his own small literary reputation. The story is told in the first person with the biographer as the center of consciousness. Most of the “action” is his attempt to ingratiate himself with and outwit old Juliana Bordereau, Aspern’s mistress. She is the “aunt” of the unlovely spinster, Tina (or Tita, depending on the version). He pretends an interest in Tina, but Juliana is on to him. Calling him a “publishing scoundrel,” she threatens to destroy the papers; but she dies before doing so. Tina then tells the narrator she could let him have the precious papers if he were part of the family. Appalled at what is a marriage proposal, he retreats, only to convince himself that marriage to her wouldn’t be totally without appeal (the papers). But she rejects him. He is unaware that Tina is likely the daughter of Aspern and Juliana; as biographer, he has lost more than he knows. When he says in the final sentence that he regrets his “loss,” he means, he says, the papers; but his final comment implies his halfconsciousness of his loss of moral character. It is really Tina who has the last word. Wounded by his sham romancing, she tells him, with enmity and pleasure, how she burned Aspern’s private papers one by one: “It took a long time – there were so many.”

Period of radical technique The third stage (mid-1890s to 1904–1907 and after) is the problematical period of major experimentation with point of view, complicated syntax, and the “unsaid” in conversations. Major works include: . . . . . . . . . .

The Spoils of Poynton (1896, 1897; English title The Old Things) The Other House (1896) What Maisie Knew (1897) The Turn of the Screw (1898; part of In the Cage) The Awkward Age (1899) The Sacred Fount (1901) The Wings of the Dove (1902) The Beast in the Jungle (1903) The Ambassadors (1903) The Golden Bowl (1904)

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The central external “action” of The Spoils of Poynton is the quest to achieve control of the valuable furnishings (paintings, sculptures, furniture) of an English mansion majestically named “Poynton.” Mrs Gereth is moving to a smaller manor, leaving Poynton for her son, Owen, and his fiancee, Mona Brigstock, and taking the best pieces with her. Mona refuses to go through with the marriage until the missing items are restored. Mrs Gereth engages Fleda Vetch – the center of consciousness for the narrative – to help her preserve the Poynton treasures. Despite his engagement to Mona, Owen Gereth becomes quite fond of Fleda and impulsively proposes. Fleda insists that he first “free” himself, honorably, from his pledge to Mona. When Mona’s mother tells Mrs Gereth that she thinks her daughter is losing Owen, the old woman restores the Poynton treasures. It’s not fully clear who is using, playing, or conning whom. Mona sees the restoration of the treasures (the “spoils” of the little war) as acquiescence to her demands. A few days later, Mona and Owen are married – to Fleda’s somewhat numbed incomprehension. Fleda receives a letter from Owen telling her to choose a priceless treasure from Poynton for her own. But Poynton has burned down. The novel ends a little elliptically; but the real action has been the social and psychological warfare among the three women. The dramatic action of the highly regarded What Maisie Knew is more complicated, involving shifting and crisscrossing menages-a-trois. The center of consciousness is little Maisie Farange. The story begins in her early childhood when she is being bounced back and forth between her divorced parents. Mr and Mrs Farange have joint custody, but neither seems really to want her. Her father, Beale, marries the attractive Miss Overmore, Maisie’s former nursegoverness. Maisie’s mother, Ida, marries the affable Sir Claude. So Maisie has two sets of parents – this is what Maisie “knows” as a very young child. But her new stepfather is in love with her father’s new wife (whom James calls “Mrs Beale” from this point on). Her mother further muddies the situation by leaving Claude and taking a series of lovers (at least four), whom Maisie has to sort out. Her father and stepmother drift apart; and Sir Claude begins to spend time with Mrs Beale. Maisie now “knows” that she likes her stepparents better than she likes her parents and hopes Sir Claude and Mrs Beale will become a couple. Maisie’s new governess is the rather dense and fussy Mrs Wix, who is scandalized that the two stepparents are seeing each other. Maisie’s father meanwhile has introduced Maisie to his current mistress, whom he calls the “Countess.” Maisie listens to several adult conversations about moving to different countries and living with different sets of “parents.” Worried about the child’s confusion and emotional upset, Sir Claude takes Maisie to Boulogne,

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accompanied by Mrs Wix. Here Mrs Wix confuses Maisie further by talking about men “paying” women for various things that are “bad.” Maisie observes that Sir Claude also pays Mrs Wix; but she accepts the old lady’s idea that her stepparents are somehow sinners. When Sir Claude brings Mrs Beale to France, however, the woman is so ingratiating that even Mrs Wix warms up a bit. But Sir Claude, to Mrs Wix’s indignation, wants to take Maisie with them to the south of France before their divorces are final. When Maisie says she needs time to sort everything out, Mrs Wix asks if Maisie has lost her moral sense, which Mrs Wix believes that she has been instrumental in developing (Ch. 26). Maisie only “dimly” remembers something about the so-called moral sense. What she really knows is that she feels within her “something still deeper than a moral sense” (Ch. 31). She wants Sir Claude all to herself. When she asks Mrs Beale if she will give him up, the woman calls Maisie an “abominable little horror.” Claude, moreover, says he will never give up Mrs Beale. Seeing that (as usual) she is second best, Maisie decides to stay with Mrs Wix. Maisie now knows that she must carefully calculate her own well-being in the adult world that awaits her. The novella, The Turn of the Screw (1898), combines psychological realism and gothic supernaturalism in an indeterminate narrative. Its depiction of the possibly sexually perverted mental and emotional state of a young woman is another example of James’s skeptical view of feminine “innocence.” In a preface, James specifically called the narrative a “trap for the unwary” and suggested that it was not tightly fastened down in the manner of most conventional plots, but required another “turn of the screw.” Consideration of the implied narratee(s) is part of the indefinite quality of many of the best “ghost” stories. This story is told in two first-person sequences: an opening frame in which people are telling ghost stories around a fire; and an autobiographical manuscript, written years ago by an anonymous young woman. Whether the narrative that follows is an “actual” ghost story or a psychoanalytic study of madness is at issue. The unnamed woman begins by describing her interview for a position as governess for a British gentleman’s two wards, Miles and Flora, a boy of ten and a girl slightly younger. She finds the children delightful, but she soon becomes aware of “presences.” Mrs Grose, the housekeeper, convinces her that they are the ghosts of the children’s former attendants, Miss Jessel and Peter Quint, who have died mysteriously. The governess soon suspects that the pair had illicit relations with one another and perhaps with the children as well – though her thoughts on the latter are only implied, making the idea even more unsettling. She feels the evil pair’s “presence” more and more, especially after Mrs Grose corroborates her description of a vague figure on the staircase 242

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as indeed Peter Quint. Late one night she finds Miles standing alone outside the house. Then Flora disappears; the narrator and Mrs Grose find her by the lake, where the governess also sees a mysterious black-draped figure. Fearing that it is a ghost, she hysterically shouts out the name “Miss Jessel,” terribly frightening the little girl. Flora is soon sent away – for her “safety.” Later, the governess takes Miles to an inn – for his “safety” – but Peter Quint’s face appears at a window. She clasps the boy to her bosom and tries to force him to say the ghost’s name, as though hoping to exorcize a demon. The boy utters it and dies (or so she says). The strictly ghostly interpretation has several problems, all of which suggest the narrator’s mental instability. There are a number of minor inconsistencies in her narrative. From the beginning, she exhibits a predisposition to immediate emotional involvement, which suggests her capacity for fantasizing and delusion. A psychoanalytic interpretation suggests that the governess leads Mrs Grose and the children step by step to an overwhelming conviction of the reality of the ghosts and ends by frightening Miles to death. She cannot see her own insanity, only its reflection in the reactions of others, which she then takes as confirmation of the truth of her suspicions of some supernatural agency. But there are problems with a psychological reading of the story. In a famous essay on the tale, titled “The Ambiguity of Henry James” (The Triple Thinkers, 1938; see Wilson 2007), Edmund Wilson suggests that the major weakness of the psychoanalytic reading is Mrs Grose’s confirmation of the governess’s description of the deceased Quint, whom the governess has never seen. But even this matter has another turn of the screw; for the accuracy of her description could be explained by her trip to the village, where she “heard things” that others said about Peter Quint. The paradox of the situation is characteristically Jamesian. If the governess is insane, the children may be presumed the “innocent” victims of her delusion. If the ghosts are real, the children are corrupt and the governess is sane. One more turn of the screw: has she projected her own psychological fixation on to the children? Given her suspicions about the sexual relations between the ghosts, and their supposed obsession with the children, it is not difficult to surmise that the young woman may have her own psychosexual obsession. In an effort to rescue the boy, she removes him from the house and takes him to an inn, where, alone in their room, she feels almost as if they are a honeymoon couple. When she sees the face of Peter Quint at the window, she “knows” that this specter has come to take Miles from her. She holds the boy close, enfolding him “to my breast, where I could feel in the sudden fever of his little body the tremendous pulse of his little heart . . .” When the frightened boy wants to know if it is “he” at the window, the governess demands the name of the one he means. “Peter Quint – you devil!” is Miles’s terrified exclamation. Miles collapses and 243

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she catches him, saying “I caught him, yes, I held him – it may be imagined with what a passion.” She holds him for a minute before she realizes that “his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.” The Freudian implications of the final scene are fairly overt, and yet her actions mimic a classic exorcism. That she may be the demon herself is not conclusive, nor is its inverse. The views are not mutually exclusive, but instead add dimension to the ambiguity. Whether one sees it as realistic or naturalistic, The Turn of the Screw represents not only a continuing romance tradition in the age of realism, but also the psychopathology underneath “everyday” life. The theme of the opaquely written The Sacred Fount is that in any human relationship there is a stronger–weaker, or master–slave, component. More specifically, the narrator has a theory that a weaker (or older) partner vampiristically imbibes the energy or power of the stronger one’s “sacred fount.” At a weekend in an English manor house, the narrator seeks to sort out the hosts and the other guests according to this theory. At the end, the theory is questioned and no particular conclusion is drawn. Regarded by some as James’s stylistically most difficult work, it has been called an unconscious self-parody; others regard it as key to Jamesian psychosexual drawing-room sociology. A number of James specialists think the complicated last novels are James’s best – and that The Golden Bowl is the best of the best. I myself find the unfolding of the story tortuous and the prose style pointlessly complicated. Given the social-moral situation and the evident psychopathology of the characters, it should have been an intriguing story: it is an odd menage-a-quatre that is also a double menage-a-trois. Maggie Verver, daughter of an American multimillionaire, Adam Verver, has married into an impoverished branch of the Italian aristocracy. Maggie and her husband, Prince Amerigo, are staying with her father in his sumptuous English residence. At Maggie’s invitation, they are joined by her close friend Charlotte Stant. When Charlotte and Adam, despite age differences, decide to marry, the familial dynamics begin to change. As distance between Maggie and her husband, Amerigo, gradually develops, she turns to her father for company. In turn, he shows rather overmuch “affection” for his daughter, preferring her company to that of his young wife. Maggie becomes aware that the relationship between her husband and her friend (symbolized by the image of a flawed golden bowl) is not what it seems. They have recommenced an affair begun years before. Adam Verver is aware of it, but to protect his daughter he keeps quiet and takes Charlotte back to America. Of particular interest is psychological sparring between Charlotte and Maggie for possession of one or both men. Other than Maggie, however, the characters tend to be two-dimensional. The prose style is convolute, exasperatingly opaque, and self-indulgent, constantly interrupting dramatic illusion 244

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and disrupting the narrative pace of the book. If, however, one is interested in the steadily developing psychological complexity of James’s prose style, the time required to work through the novel may be rewarding.

Two Portraits of a “Lady” I want now to turn to a pair of portraits of nearly opposite, yet parallel women in two of James’s most celebrated works: The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1) and The Wings of the Dove (1902). The women in these portraits are among the most fully developed and intriguing personalities in James’s fiction. Each of these narratives is told by an external storyteller, who, even if not a character, uses the first-person pronouns “I” and “our.”6 The storyteller relates the narratives principally from the third-person restricted point-of-view: that is, the narrator tells the story by focusing on the perceptions of an observing character or two who are more or less involved in the action.7 The Portrait of a Lady focuses on a young woman, Isabel Archer, who is also the central observing character trying to fathom the motives of those around her and at the same time analyze herself. The storyteller/narrator takes us into her interior monologue, just short of stream-of-consciousness, to dramatize an extraordinary mental process of self and social analysis. The Wings of the Dove, another third-person narrative told by an “I” storyteller, modifies the pattern; the storyteller persona is more removed, and the center of consciousness resides more in the characters of the entire social milieu, what James called the “many windows” of the house of fiction. Isabel Archer is the more thoughtful and self-analytical; but she seems to have something of the martyr’s complex, accepting suffering and renouncing joy. Milly Theale is a martyr to the greed and scheming of others, and for most of her novel is portrayed as almost angelic. But she perhaps wreaks a crafty and vindictive revenge for her suffering on those who would coldly manipulate her.

Lady in Waiting: Isabel Archer The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1) has been called the last of the great Victorian novels and the first of the modern. Its dense social milieu and its plot seem quintessentially Victorian, its portrayal of the main character modern. The novel is focused primarily on the perceptions of a single character, and it contains an extended interior monologue allied to stream of consciousness – all this in the midst of a realist novel of domestic manners.8 Historically, the novel 245

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is the culmination in America of the first phase of the development of the modern psychological novel out of the matrix of artistic impressionism. The word portrait suggests interpretative artistry. But does the word lady, rather than woman, identify a certain level of society, or does it suggest an ideal embodiment of nineteenth-century “true womanhood”? Isabel Archer is herself conflicted on this very point. One of the keys to her character is her sense of herself as a genteel lady in the Victorian sense. She wants to be a “good wife.” On the other hand, she is a woman with her own ideas and seems to be driven by the impulse to control. One of the recurrent interpretations of the novel stresses her dual quest for freedom: first as an idealistic young woman, second as a caged wife.

“Impressions” of a lady In his preface, James cites Isabel’s reverie in Chapter 42 as “the best thing in the book” and as “a supreme illustration of the general plan” of making an individual consciousness the reflecting and refracting mirror of society. To understand Chapter 42, it is necessary to know only the bare bones of the plot. One of the striking things about this celebrated chapter is that it contains – however allusively and suggestively – all the issues of the larger book. The overall narrative is basically in the mode of a domestic novel of manners. The opening scene is the “ceremony” of afternoon “tea” at a carefully laid teatable on the lawn of an old English country house. But there are several deformations of the domestic genre. Two large and compatible structures are discernible, the largest of which is itself a two-part division. In the first half of the novel, the heroine resists marriage proposals and instead seeks a vague “freedom”; in the second half, she faces the consequences of a bad marriage. A dramatic three-act structure underlies this large thematic division. Chapter 42 (of fifty-five) marks the beginning of the final act in terms of Isabel’s full recognition (however subjective) of her unpleasant, almost intolerable domestic situation. Isabel is a young American woman possessed of a lively personality and intellect, who both resists and succumbs to social and psychological pressures. Traveling in Europe, she is befriended by Henrietta Stackpole, an expatriate American newspaper columnist, who often acts as a counterfoil to Isabel’s blurred but fundamental romanticism. After Isabel unexpectedly comes into a fortune, she is pursued by three men: an aggressive American, Caspar Goodwood, who seems genuinely to love her; a young English aristocrat, Lord Warburton, who is charmed by her youth and vitality; and an expatriate American aesthete and dilettante, Gilbert Osmond, who 246

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marries her for her money. Throughout, she is psychologically entangled with her cousin, Ralph Touchett. Isabel latterly discovers she is being manipulated by an older, more sophisticated European woman, Madame Serena Merle, Osmond’s former lover and the unacknowledged mother of Isabel’s stepdaughter, Pansy. Madame Merle has colluded in the pretense that Pansy is the child of Osmond’s late wife. Several plot issues come to a head over the question of Pansy’s marriage prospects. Her father has thwarted her marriage to Edward Rosier, the young man whom Pansy actually loves. Osmond is instead trying to negotiate her marriage with the wealthy Lord Warburton who – though attracted to the stepdaughter of the woman to whom he is really attracted (Isabel) – is being manipulated by the girl’s father at the instigation of her biological mother, who is an antagonist on some level of the stepmother, who is worried about the real nature of Lord Warburton’s attraction. Meanwhile our heroine’s marriage seems to be falling apart – which she does and does not understand – which she does and does not desire. It’s quintessential James. In Chapter 42, Isabel tries to puzzle out the behavior of the various people just named, especially that of her husband, by subjectively putting herself into their minds. James’s impressionist technique fuses external objects with the interior musings of a character involved in some kind of self-analysis. But to partake more fully in Isabel’s mental turmoil, we begin two chapters before the lonely meditations of Chapter 42, both of which are composed principally of conversations. At the end of Chapter 40, Madame Merle suggests to Isabel that she can make Lord Warburton do what she wants – even if it is to marry her stepdaughter. “It’s quite in your power. You’ve great influence over him.” This pronouncement leads directly in Chapter 41 to a tense conversation between Isabel and Gilbert.

The good wife Osmond “for the first time” explicitly brings up the matter of Warburton and his daughter’s possible marriage. Isabel has allowed herself “little by little” to think that Pansy’s marrying Warburton is a good thing. It is unclear to Isabel at this time if Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond have secretly mounted a campaign in Warburton’s favor, but Gilbert now tells her that it “would please him greatly to see Pansy married to an English nobleman.” The tension between husband and wife grows as the dialogue proceeds. Some of it is implicit in the scene; some of it is on the surface. It seems to Isabel “that if she could make it her duty to bring about such an event she should play the part of a good wife.” This sense of domestic fidelity is 247

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part of what it means to be a Victorian “lady.” But the narrator comments that, in her responses during this conversation, it “may seem to the reader that Mrs Osmond had grown of a sudden strangely cynical” about the whole marriage affair. Isabel has been staring into the fireplace; when Osmond first enters the room, she “transferred her eyes from the flickering flame in the chimney to Osmond’s face, and she watched him while he kept his silence.” A certain “covert observation had become a habit with her,” for she “wished as much as possible to know his thoughts, to know what he would say, beforehand, so that she might prepare her answer.” Gilbert wants to know if Warburton has been “attentive” to Pansy: “Isn’t that what you call it?” “I don’t call it anything,” said Isabel; “I’ve waited for you to give it a name.” “That’s a consideration you don’t always show,” Osmond answered after a moment. The retort, despite the pause, is snappish and implies the deteriorated relationship between husband and wife. Gilbert suggests that Isabel beguile Warburton into proposing to Pansy, saying “The moment you really wish it you can bring him to the point.” Isabel replies: “What have I ever done to put him under an obligation to me?” Osmond says “You refused to marry him.” When Isabel protests that she “must not presume too much on that” as an indication of Warburton’s feelings, Osmond throws down the book he has been holding and comments again that “with a little good will,” she could “manage” the proposal. He waits for a response which does not come, then silently leaves the room.

Isabel alone in the house of darkness As Chapter 42 opens, Isabel is sitting alone as the shadows of evening lengthen. She leans back in her chair and closes her eyes. For “a long time, far into the night and still further, she sat in the drawing-room, given up to her meditation.” She wants to reflect on Pansy’s marriage prospects, but her mind wanders off in several related directions as she tries to sort everything out. We enter her thoughts as she goes over her doubts that she can influence Lord Warburton. Did Warburton wish to profit by the few moments of “intimacy through which they had once passed?” Is she supposed “to cultivate the advantage she possessed in order to make him commit himself to Pansy, knowing he would do so for her sake and not for the small creature’s own . . . ?” Is this “the service her husband had asked of her?” 248

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She frames the question in terms of “service” and “duty” to her husband – a conundrum since it involves playing on the adulterous “predilection” of Warburton for another man’s wife. She finally decides that all the parties are as “disinterested” as “need be.” Her thoughts now begin to link Madame Merle with her husband. But in a tour de force of narratival strategy, Isabel’s apprehension that her beloved stepdaughter might be the child of his affair with Madame Merle is only vaguely intimated. Isabel thinks now with irritation how “her short interview with Osmond half an hour ago was a striking example of his faculty for making everything wither that he touched, spoiling everything for her that he looked at.” She wonders about her own complicity in unhappiness: “Was the fault in himself, or only in the deep mistrust she had conceived for him?” She realizes that “her deep distrust of her husband” has “darkened the world” for her. The narrator steps in softly at this moment to remark that her “sentiment” is “easily indicated, but not so easily explained, and so composite in its character that much time and still more suffering had been needed to bring it to its actual perfection.” The elliptical point is that “Suffering, with Isabel, was an active condition.” However hedged about with ambiguity, this observation is a key to Isabel’s character. Her suffering “was not a chill, a stupor, a despair; it was a passion of thought, of speculation, of response to every pressure.” As the evening closes around her, she thinks that it was at the end of the first year of marriage that “the shadows had begun to gather.” It seems to her “as if Osmond deliberately, almost malignantly, had put the lights out one by one. The dusk at first was vague and thin, and she could still see her way in it. But it steadily deepened, and if now and again it had occasionally lifted there were certain corners of her prospect that were impenetrably black.” The imagery of the scene, extending through several paragraphs, is like a deftly brushed impressionist painting. As she thinks of “these shadows” upon their lives, she turns to self-justification. The “shadows were not an emanation from her own mind”; they “were a kind of creation and consequence, of her husband’s very presence.” She “knew of no wrong he had done . . . she simply believed he hated her” because he “had discovered that she . . . was not what he had believed she would prove to be.” She attempts to analyze her thoughts in terms of what she then thought his thoughts were – and in doing so she tries to put herself into the mind of a woman that no longer exists. This thought leads her to her inheritance and old Mr Touchett, her benefactor, but also the “beneficent author of woe,” since it was her money that first interested Gilbert. Her money has proved a burden. She returns to the idea of a mutual “deception.” Osmond had “said to her one day that she had too many ideas and that she must get rid of them.” She realizes that he “had told her that already, before their marriage; but then she had not noticed it . . .” So, yes, 249

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she thinks, “she had been hypocritical” in hiding her intellect and insight, but “she had liked him so much.” Isn’t having ideas to share “just what one married for, to share them with someone else?” she asks herself. She regretfully observes that “One couldn’t pluck them up by the roots, though of course one might suppress them.” In this reflection, Isabel embodies the social mores of a lady and a dutiful wife. But James adds another layer of subtlety to Isabel’s frustration and resentment. “It had not been . . . his objecting to her opinions,” she thinks, but his feeling that her very “character, the way she felt, the way she judged,” should all be subservient to him. The portrait of the subtleties of Isabel’s mind continues for several more pages. Isabel’s thoughts again begin to repeat themselves in altered language. She is not afraid of physical abuse, and she is at liberty to come and go as she chooses; but she is expected “to think of him as he thought of himself – as the first gentleman in Europe.” She finds his materialism is just as vulgar as that of the rest of the world; and his complete self-centeredness is “appalling.” Her own “notion of the aristocratic life was simply the union of great knowledge with great liberty; the knowledge would give one a sense of duty and the liberty a sense of enjoyment.” His “was altogether a thing of forms.” She feels almost buried alive in Osmond’s house; and yet, the narrator suggests, “she nevertheless assented,” even though she sees society as a “rigid system close about her” and feels herself “shut up with an odour of mould and decay.” She thinks vaguely of breaking out into the open air, but so far her attempts to bring her apprehensions out into the open have only made their relationship worse. She imagines Osmond sneering, thinking that “her sentiments were worthy of a radical newspaper or a provincial Unitarian preacher.” The “real offence . . . was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his – attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park.” Returning to the complementary antagonism in their relationship, she reaffirms her paradoxical sense that Osmond “didn’t wish her to be stupid.” “But he expected her intelligence to operate altogether in his favour. . . . He had expected his wife to feel with him and for him, to enter into his opinions, his ambitions, his preferences.” But “certain things” in his preferences Isabel finds “hideously unclean.” She is “not a daughter of the Puritans, but for all that she believed in such a thing as chastity and even as decency. Did all women have lovers? Did they all lie and even the best have their price?” Isabel feels scorn for such women, “a greater scorn for them than for the gossip of a village parlour.” As she examines and reexamines her sense of Osmond’s sense of things, her thoughts begin to veer off to her dying cousin, Ralph Touchett. Gilbert thinks 250

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she sees too much of him. But Ralph’s invalid state prevents Osmond from denouncing him; and it seems to Isabel that having to restrain himself only deepens her husband’s resentment. But she can’t “pretend to be indifferent to Ralph.” She believes Ralph is dying and that she may never see him again, and “this gave her a tenderness for him that she had never known before.” At this point, she exclaims silently to herself: “Nothing was a pleasure to her now; how could anything be a pleasure to a woman who knew that she had thrown away her life?” Isabel’s despair is like “an everlasting weight on her heart.” As she sits meditating in the drawing room, her existence seems to her to be illumined by a pallid light. Her cousin Ralph is “a lamp in the darkness.” Something “in Ralph’s talk, in his smile . . . made the blasted circle round which she walked more spacious.” She remembers vividly “that morning in the garden at Florence when he had warned her against Osmond.” She wonders how Ralph could have known that Osmond was not right for her. As Isabel lingers in the “soundless” drawing-room, “long after the fire had gone out,” James begins to paint a somewhat more exterior picture. She does not feel cold; indeed, “she was in a fever.” She hears “the small hours strike, and then the great ones,” but she takes no heed of the time. “As I have said,” the narrator comments, as though a camera were drawing back slowly from a close-up scene, “she believed she was not defiant, and what could be a better proof of it than that she should linger there half the night, trying to persuade herself that there was no reason why Pansy shouldn’t be married . . .?” The clock strikes four in the morning, and she rises from the chair. Suddenly she stops in the middle of the room; her inner eye is focused on “a remembered vision – that of her husband and Madame Merle unconsciously and familiarly associated.” The chapter concludes with this halfformulated thought. As the novel proceeds toward an end, Casper Goodwood continues to pursue Isabel. The question at the end is: why does she resist Goodwood and decide to return to her husband? Like other of James’s “heroines,” she is the moral descendant of American Puritans; she is also observing Victorian conventions: the angel of the house is going to set her house in order. But it is all nuanced. There are hints that she senses loss of control over Caspar, combined with some sense that she can gain dominance over Gilbert. Then again, she seems, in part, to have just given up. After all, suffering, with Isabel, “was an active condition . . .” For now, we leave her standing in the dark room, with the firelight dying and the candles spent, the shadows first encroaching upon and then enveloping the musing figure. Chapter 42 exemplifies the new subjective realism. It is an impressionist portrait – of a woman – and a lady. 251

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The Dove and the Serpent: Milly Theale Three extra-textual matters have special significance for our discussion of The Wings of the Dove (1902). First is the critical assumption that the dying heroine of the novel, Milly Theale, is based on James’s beloved, cheerful, outgoing cousin, Minny Temple. James himself mentions that the “situation” of Milly Theale was suggested by the protracted death of his cousin: the basic situation, not the person.9 The second matter is the obscure and long-lasting “nervous disorder” that afflicted Henry’s sister, Alice, who died in 1892. Some biographers have speculated that Alice inherited their father’s brilliant instability, but her debilitating “neurasthenia” may have also been due in part to cancer. The third is James’s close friendship with Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894). She suffered extended periods of depression all her life, and some critics believe that she was at least a partial model for Milly. The exact relationship between James and his dear “Fenimore” (she was Fenimore Cooper’s great grand-niece) is unclear; it is clear that the two cared about each other very much. Their intimate friendship lasted for fourteen years. From 1885 to 1889, they were often living in near proximity in Italy, Switzerland, and England. When apart, they wrote each other almost daily; but James destroyed the correspondence after her death. In 1893, she rented a villa in Venice; in January 1894, she suffered a fall from her balcony, dying from her injuries at the age of fifty-three. Suspicion that she committed suicide is based on the newspaper reports of the incident – and an extant letter of James’s. James was unreservedly despondent. These two deaths from incurable disease and the possibility of suicide should be kept in mind as relevant context.

Money, money, money The Wings of the Dove is essentially a moral-psychological drama of social naturalism involving money, class, and the quest for either love or sex. An unmarried English couple, Kate Croy and Merton Densher, are in love but poor. They plot to make a dying American heiress, Milly Theale, fall in love with Merton; Milly will marry Merton and leave him her fortune; Kate and Merton can then marry. But by the end of the story their sensibilities have been so deeply touched by the gentle American “princess” (the “dove” of the narrative) that they cannot marry after all. Money is especially important to Kate’s father, an irresponsible schemer; and lack of money is one of the main reasons that Kate’s bourgeois family is 252

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unhappy. Kate does not initially share the family obsession with obtaining wealth. But pressured by family and circumstances, she eventually comes round to the arguments of her father and sister, thus setting in motion a series of “schemes” or “scams.” First, Kate becomes the protege of her well-to-do aunt, Mrs Maud Manningham Lowder. Kate agrees to go to live with Aunt Maud, who has acquiesced in the plan to marry Kate off to a man of wealth and standing. Kate and her father devise a further scheme to make people think that she has no use for him, for her improvident father would be regarded as a social hindrance. These disreputable collusions are compounded by Kate’s relationship with Merton Densher. Despite her plans, Kate and Merton, a second-rate journalist in London, become secretly engaged. Kate’s sister encourages her to pursue Lord Mark, who has a title to offer as well as money. Aunt Maud insists that Kate break off any connection with Densher, but Kate continues to see him unbeknownst to her aunt. Most readers find this scheming distasteful, and yet James makes the plight of the impoverished lovers pathetic, if not sympathetic.

Enter the heroine – in air This prologue to the entrance of the “American princess” occupies the first four chapters.10 In Chapter 5, the scene shifts to the dying heiress. Milly is first described in company with the somewhat older Mrs Susan Stringham who acts as friend, confidante, and social secretary. When we first encounter Milly, she is sightseeing in the Alps. She has gone off on her own, and Susan has started after her. She finds Milly in a “vertiginous” position at a point that appears “to fall precipitously” into the deep canyon below (III, 5). Mrs Stringham “stifled a cry on taking in what she believed to be the danger of such a perch,” namely Milly’s “liability to slip, to slide, to leap, to be precipitated by a single false movement . . .” The sequence of possibilities is not accidental thematically; it describes Milly’s subsequent actions over the course of the narrative. Mrs Stringham is distraught at seeing Milly suspended, as it were, at the edge of the void. Milly seems lost in thought, and Susan decides that she is probably “not meditating a jump.” Thus the possibility that the morbidly ill Milly may be in fact contemplating suicide is suggested early on in a characteristically Jamesian inverse way. The image of the delicate “dying heiress” seems to be carefully cultivated on Milly’s part. When Miss Theale arrives in England, she seems to many of the London social circle like an “angelic” being. The fact that she is an American and 253

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that almost all the other characters are Europeans continues James’s “international theme,” with the usual surface implications of innocence (young America) and corruption (old Europe). But these implications undergo James’s usual twists and reversals. For one thing, Milly has already made the acquaintance of Merton Densher in New York, and, finding him quite attractive, she herself maneuvers to bring him into her society. The interconnections among the characters become steadily more intricate. Kate’s Aunt Maud is an old school acquaintance of Susan Stringham; Susan introduces Milly to Maud, who introduces her to Kate. Milly and Kate hit it off immediately – in a slightly wary way. Kate, who is described as not a “brutally brutal” person, only “defensively” or “indifferently” so, speculates that the heiress is “the least bit brutal too” (IV, 8). Kate then introduces Milly to her sister, from whom Milly learns that Merton and Kate are still in love. Milly is now aware of Kate’s awkward situation as a woman in search of a wealthy husband – a point relevant to the subtleties of the unfolding plot. Meeting Milly at Maud’s, Lord Mark finds himself attracted to the wealthy American heiress. He attempts to get closer to Milly without exactly courting her – to which Milly only seems to be oblivious. At one point, Milly is said to resemble a painting – a red-haired woman by Bronzino – another deliberate Jamesian ambiguity, to which we should be attentive. As Robert C. McLean points out, there are two Bronzino portraits of red-haired women in Florence.11 One is beautiful; the other is not. Bronzino’s portrait of the attractive Lucrezia Panciatichi is in the Uffizi Gallery; his portrait of Laura Battiferri is in the Palazzo Vecchio. The latter more closely resembles Milly, who has “too much forehead, too much nose and too much mouth.” If Milly is not attractive after all, would she not be especially vulnerable to the disingenuous protestations of an attractive young foreigner, even if she knows they are disingenuous? And if she does know, is she still an innocent dove? Milly consults an eminent London doctor who seems (it is left unclear) to be a neurological specialist. The only details we get are secondhand from a conversation between Susan Stringham and Aunt Maud. Milly’s mysterious fatal ailment is never specified. McLean suggests that, whether or not she has consumption (the usual guess of other critics), her disease is “primarily mental” rather than “organic” (128). In fact, it may be repressed sexuality. Susan says that the doctor stressed that “the great thing is for her to be happy” and that she “must be made so.” When Maud asks what he meant, Susan replies, “Oh, you know!” Maud asks if he means “the specific.” McLean thinks that this possibly sexual suggestion casts the action of the novel into a new light – one that is more complexly interesting than the usual readings of the book.

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A middle pivot Toward the mid-point of the novel (V, 16), Merton Densher comes back to London from abroad and arranges to meet Kate in the National Gallery. As it happens, Milly Theale has gone to the same exhibition and sees the pair together. When Merton pays court to Milly shortly thereafter, she is perplexed. She seems at this point to be unaware that Kate is urging Merton (who is having doubts) to marry Milly in anticipation of her death. On the advice of her physician, Milly goes to spend the winter in Venice, accompanied by Susan Stringham. Aunt Maud and Kate soon pay her a visit, followed by a tentative and diffident Merton Densher. As her illness visibly progresses, she seems to some like an ethereal, winged being, a dove. Before pursuing the courtship of Milly in Venice, Merton insists that Kate spend one night in his room with him. Afterwards, when the others return to London, Merton stays behind and proceeds to charm Milly with his attentions, causing the dying woman to fall in “love.” Lord Mark, who has supposed Milly free, has proposed to her but been rejected. He is so resentful of Merton that he tells Milly that her lover has been secretly engaged to Kate all along. Merton unexpectedly finds himself barred from the palace, and Milly turns her “face to the wall,” a traditional and biblical metaphor for accepting imminent death (see 2 Kings 20:2). But Milly has known about the secret relationship ever since the lavish dinner party at Maud’s (IV, 7). Why does she now bar Merton from the palace? What is she up to? Merton Densher seems to undergo a reversal of feelings, though it is not fully clear how this change comes about. When he learns that Lord Mark has revealed his relationship with Kate, Densher appears remorseful. The usual reading of the novel is that the “wings of the dove” have touched him and effected a moral change, but it is left vague. Returning to London, Densher cannot face Kate. At Christmas, he hears from Maud that Milly has died in Venice. A letter addressed in Milly’s handwriting is then delivered to Densher, who cannot bring himself to open it. Instead he goes, finally, to see Kate and shows her the sealed letter. The possibility that it contains an offering from the dead woman seems to disturb their new sensibility. If the letter contains an offer of money, did the “dove” then know what they were up to all along – and now has forgiven them? They burn the letter without reading it. Some time later Merton Densher receives a letter from a New York lawyer. Convinced it contains another offer of money, perhaps even control of Milly’s fortune, he refuses to open it and instead sends it to Kate, who brings it with her for a final confrontation. Merton tells Kate that he can marry her only if they refuse an offer of money from the dove. Kate responds that she cannot marry

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him without the money. She thinks that Densher has fallen in love with Milly and is obsessed with the dead woman. The novel concludes with Kate’s words: “We shall never be again as we were!” The wings of the dove have touched them – or is it possible that instead of transforming them into better persons, the dove has brushed them with the wings of death, revealing their corruption in a particularly effective way? Is it possible that Milly Theale has taken a subtle and typically Jamesian kind of revenge, forever dividing them from each other? This question is related to the issue of free will and determinism in the novel. Although in the realist tradition of the domestic novel of manners, the book also presents a strong determinist theme in the social, economic, psychological, and ethical entrapment of the major characters. The tension between the possibly illusory sense of free will and the powerful determining circumstances may be seen as leading to events that hasten Milly’s death and alienate Kate and Merton. This illusion of free will colliding with a pervasive determinism is a major dynamic of Wings. The “determining circumstances” are quite abundant. At the very beginning of the story, the corrosive and entrapping influence of family feeling at first restrains Kate from marrying Merton Densher, then gives her the impetus to persuade Merton to deceive Milly. It is the kind of social trap posited by the naturalist writers. Merton Densher is also caught up by circumstances, exacerbated by a less than firm will. Forced into a position that he finds unsavory, he proceeds anyway. Although Milly Theale is ostensibly the one most firmly ensnared by circumstances, she is also finally the strongest and most willful of the principal characters. The “princess” is entrapped first and foremost by a fatal disease. She is also trapped by her wealth, which makes her a target for schemers. Her condition, her self-absorption, her romantic desires allow the lonely selfpitying heiress to be duped by Merton Densher’s seductive courting. She then becomes a collateral victim of Lord Mark’s revenge. Milly is also a victim of her own confused understanding of life, which includes the temporary illusion that the will to live can triumph over illness. But Milly comes to realize that those suffering from disease are helpless victims of nature; she cannot live by “volition, by option” (V, 14), however rich she is.12

Wolves and sheep – doves and serpents One of the most suggestive elements of the title of the novel is the apparent allusion to several “dove” verses in the Bible. Perhaps the most obvious is in Psalm 68:13: “yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove covered with silver, and 256

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her feathers with yellow gold.” Milly is certainly rich in gold and silver. But note Psalm 55:6, 8. Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest

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The allusion is congruent with Milly’s state of mind and suggests release in selfdestruction. This sentiment is followed, however, by lines excoriating one’s enemies: Destroy, O Lord, and divide their tongues:

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mischief and sorrow are in the midst of it. Wickedness is in the midst thereof; guile and deceit depart not . . . (Psalm 55:9–11)

The Psalmist then envisions all enemies consigned to hell. In the New Testament, the dove is coupled with the serpent. In Matthew 10:16, we read: Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

The innocent sheep wanders into the midst of wolves, but which are the sheep and which the wolves? Milly looks as harmless as a dove but may have the cunning of the serpent. Are Milly’s dovelike qualities and her self-identification with the martyrdom of Christ merely deceptive coloring? Is she as much the dissembling serpent as the others? Recall that Milly’s first physical appearance in the novel is at the edge of a precipice (III, 5), causing Susan to fear that not only has she “a latent intention,” but also a “horrible hidden obsession,” perhaps of “meditating a jump” – an idea Susan immediately rejects, as if not wanting to face it. Just before her death, Milly appears in white, wearing beautiful jewels. Kate comments that “one somehow doesn’t think of doves as bejeweled. Yet they suit her down to the ground.” Merton replies “Yes – down to the ground is the word” (VIII, 28; my italics). The recurrent images of height and depth, precipices, high walls and balconies support Robert McLean’s contention that Milly leaps to her death from her balcony. In his view, Milly knows that her suicide will drive Kate and 257

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Merton apart forever – the ultimate revenge: “The dove has indeed practiced the wisdom of the serpent.”13 Perhaps this statement can serve as a gloss on all the “tea-tables” in the world of Henry James. Notes 1. For a concise update of James and James criticism to the twenty-first century, see Rowe, ACAF (2009). For a clearly written pragmatic introduction for the general reader, without any “theory of special interpretation,” see McElderry (1965). Also see Abel, MAR, 215–363; Cowie, RAN, 702–742. Edel’s five-volume biography (1953–72) is regarded as definitive, but his one-volume abridgement (1985) may be more accessible for most readers. 2. Concern with a character’s psychological state is not an invention of the nineteenth century. One naturally thinks of Shakespeare, and, in the earlier British novel, of Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne. But the major historical usage of the term psychological novel indicates a group of novelists of the mid- to late-nineteenth century. James’s observing narrator (or a focalizing character) attempts to comprehend the inner psychology of the other characters, especially one other. See note 7 below. The “center of consciousness” is someone whose sensibility, acumen, and limitations are as important as those of the characters he or she is trying to understand. 3. The Wings of the Dove (1902), IV, 8. 4. I attempt to provide the student with a general chronological guide to James’s major fiction; but not every work mentioned is described or analyzed. I have selected out those I think the most important – concluding with a pairing of two works, two decades apart, which are of special significance for understanding his women characters. Also see discussion of The Beast in the Jungle and The Ambassadors in Ch. 3. 5. See Gargano (1961); see also the editorial in the New York Times for June 4, 1879; reprinted in James’s Daisy Miller, ed. Stafford (1963), 123–124; cf. the New York Times (November 10, 1878), 103–104. 6. For example, the narrator of Portrait of a Lady introduces his tale with: “I have in mind in unfolding this simple history . . .” 7. Technically speaking, James tends in his various fictions to move back and forth between the third-person omniscient and the third-person restricted point of view. Relatively few of his narratives are in the actual first person, though they often give that effect. (The Turn of the Screw is in the first person, but it is framed within another first-person narrative that focuses on another person who possesses a diary by yet another person.) Although the third-person restricted (or limited) point of view was not new in James’s time, his intense double

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8.

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deployment of it was distinctive and contributed to his reputation as the father of the American psychological novel. There are excellent Norton Critical Editions for both these novels. Interior monologue and stream of consciousness both indicate narration that tries to reproduce (or give the illusion of) the continuous psychological flow of a character’s mental processes. A useful distinction divides interior monologue into two techniques: the direct and the indirect. The direct mode represents the orderly-disorderly sequences and random associations of a character’s thought, as if no author or narrator outside the character exists. The indirect mode features a third-person narrator/commentator or author who guides the reader’s understanding of the psychological discourse. See GLT, HBL, Booth (1961), Cohn (1978), Genette (1980), Iser (1974). James’s description of Isabel Archer’s all-night musing is indirect interior monologue. See the last chapter of Notes of a Native Son and Brother (1914), plus references in his letters and notebooks. Henry’s love for his cousin, the “beautiful girl,” was quite deep and apparently intense. The novel is divided into two “Volumes” and ten “Books,” but the chapters are numbered consecutively (1–38); the second volume begins with Book VI, Ch. 17, dividing the novel into two approximately equal parts. Chapters will be cited parenthetically by book and chapter for structural clarity: e.g. (III, 5). McLean (1972). Tintner (1993) provides insightful commentary on James’s use of art in his fiction and includes 98 plates (she does not include the second painting). There is a similar ambiguity regarding other paintings, in particular a scene that suggests Milly as a Christ-figure at the Last Supper or a pagan queen surrounded by sycophants. It seems that she has consulted her doctor to confirm whether or not her disease is fatal, based on the hope that one could live if one would. But her situation seems to be that “one would live if one could” (V, 14; my italics). McLean, 148; my italics. I find this analysis compelling, but not everyone does. Stafford (1974), reviewing the year’s work on Henry James for 1972, considers McLean’s reading extreme. He sums up as follows: McLean sees Milly’s death “literally as a suicide, ‘most probably by leaping . . . from the balcony of the Palazzo Leporelli.’” Milly’s illness “is said to be a kind of hysteria growing out of sexual repression; she is said to be diabolic and crafty throughout, jealous, lustful, self-pitying, and pathological. . . . At the time ‘of her Christmas death, her wings spread across a continent to hang heavy upon the man she loved and the rival she hated.’ Each reader will have to decide the merits of this view for himself.” His own is that McLean’s radical reinterpretation of a sweet and pathetic Milly is a “distinguished” piece of criticism, but in error. McLean’s may be a “minority” view, but I think an unbiased reading of the text bears him out.

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See also Anesko (1986, 1997); M. Bell (1991); Bentley (1995); Borus (1989); Bridgman (1966); P. Brooks (1995); Budick (1994); Buitenhuis (1970); Cargill (1961); Chase (1957); Chatman (1972); Cogan (1989); Daugherty (1981); R. Davidson (2005); Dawidoff (1992); Dupee (1974); Fluck (ACAF 2009); Griffin (1991); Habegger (1989); Holland (1982 [1964]); Jolly (1993); V. Jones (1985); F. Kaplan (1992); Kress (2003); Krook (1962); Lewis (1991); J. Martin (1967); Matthiessen (1944); McWhirter (1989); Miller (1976); Nettels (1997); Perosa(1978, 1983); Poirier (1960); Posnock (1991); Quinn (1936); Rimmon (1977); Rowe (1976, 1982, 1984, 1998); Sears (1968); D. Stone (1972); W. Stowe (1983); G. Taylor (1969); B. Thomas (1997); Tuttleton (1974); Veeder (1975); Wagenknecht (1952); Winner (1970); J. Woolf (1991); Yeazell (1976).

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Chapter 15

Economies of Pain W. D. Howells

For over two decades during his lifetime, William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was regarded as the most influential, powerful, and important writer-editor in America. His playful unofficial title was the “Dean of American Letters.” As editor of the Atlantic Monthly from 1871 to 1881, one of the most prestigious magazines of the era, Howells discovered and encouraged new writers: notably, Brett Harte, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Stephen Crane, Hamlin Garland, Frank Norris, John W. De Forest, Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Abraham Cahan, Charles W. Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar. He also promoted the careers of Mark Twain and Henry James, both of whom became Howells’s good friends. While defining American realism as less prurient and turbulent than the European variety, Howells still defended European realism and naturalism. He introduced or helped to introduce European writers like Balzac, Flaubert, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Ibsen, and Zola to American readers. In Criticism and Fiction (1891), he compared European fiction with American and put forward a theory of different kinds of realist writings. Less important for a theory of literature, but of special interest for cultural criticism, is his Heroines of Fiction (1901), published in two volumes. In Literary Friends and Acquaintance (1900), he presented sketches of American writers he had met. In My Mark Twain (1910), he not only offered personal biographical reminiscences of Samuel Clemens, but also tendered critical opinions on several of Twain’s works. His numerous volumes of fiction present a panorama of human concerns: A Modern Instance (1881), a divorce novel; Indian Summer (1886), a story of the quest for romantic love in middle age; The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), a satiric Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson. Ó 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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novel of manners and business; A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), an economic novel of class conflict; A Traveller from Altruria (1894), a utopian novel of socioeconomic criticism; “Editha” (1907), a celebrated antiwar story. These are merely his best-known works. In addition, he wrote novels examining the moral-economic implications and conditions of modern life like The Minister’s Charge (1887) and Annie Kilburn (1888). He investigated women’s social problems (not astutely, some would say) in Dr. Breen’s Practice (1881) and A Woman’s Reason (1883). He wrote naturalistic novels on the influence of heredity and works of psychological fiction that pushed the limits of the gothic mode, as in The Shadow of a Dream (1890). He explored the psychological aspects of pseudo-occult movements like spiritism and spiritualism, hypnosis and mind-control in the novel The Undiscovered Country (1880) and in three volumes of supernaturalistic tales collected as Questionable Shapes (1903), Shapes That Haunt the Dusk (1907), and Between the Dark and the Daylight (1907). But in the early twentieth century Howells’s brand of realism began to seem old-fashioned – and by the late twentieth century, he had all but dropped out of several textbook anthologies of American literature.1Now, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, though he still has detractors, Howells is making a slow critical comeback.

Four key events There are four salient events in Howells’s life that broadly illuminate the major themes of his work: (1) his time in Italy from 1861 to 1865; (2) his marriage to a genteel New Englander in 1862; (3) the extended illness and early death in 1889 of his daughter Winifred; (4) his reading of socialist economic and political philosophy in the late 1880s and the aftermath of the 1886 Haymarket Riot in Chicago.2 Howells spent the Civil War as American Consul in Venice, a post awarded him for a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. A number of his books, both fiction and nonfiction, make use of Italian scenes and characters, including several stories of Americans in Italy.3 In Europe, he met and married Elinor Mead of Vermont. This marriage, combined with his early European experience, contributed to the multiple cultural perspectives we see in his fiction. The couple’s first child, Winifred, was born in December 1863. Her neurological disabilities and early death in 1889 caused Howells several bouts of severe depression, a problem he had also suffered from as an adolescent. Told that Winnie’s illness was psychosomatic, Howells’s interest in abnormal psychology intensified, leading him to consult Dr S. Weir 262

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Mitchell – the same neurologist and psychologist who prescribed the deadly “rest cure” for Charlotte Perkins Gilman. For a while, Howells thought that if Winnie had been “allowed to read,” the total rest cure procedure might have succeeded.4 In 1881, Howells had suffered another mental and physical breakdown while writing A Modern Instance. Recovering through hard work, he published A Modern Instance in 1882 and worked on other lengthy projects. In November 1884, The Rise of Silas Lapham began serialization in the Century magazine, coming out in book form in 1885. In 1886, Howells began a regular and influential column for Harper’s. By that year, he had published another campaign biography, this one of Rutherford B. Hayes, along with a number of short stories and essays, several plays, and five more novels. Under the influence of Leo Tolstoy, political philosopher Henry George, and socialist Laurence Gronlund, Howells had become increasingly liberal in his social and political attitudes. He was particularly interested in the relevance of Tolstoy’s ethical Christianity to the alleviation of the economic condition of the working poor. Howells was also impressed by Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1870), which we have previously noted in relation to the Robber Barons. He would shortly read with approval Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian socialist novel, Looking Backward. Concurrently with this political reading came a series of violent political, social, and economic events that disturbed Howells deeply.

Haymarket On May 4, 1886, during a rally that brought labor union demonstrators into conflict with the Chicago police, someone threw a bomb into the midst of the crowd. Nearly seventy people were wounded and several policemen were killed. “Anarchists” were blamed; eight leaders were arrested and convicted, not on evidence, but on public outrage. Four were peremptorily hanged; one committed suicide rather than face public execution. Howells was infuriated at the perversion of justice and the miscarriage of democratic institutions of due process. He wrote a passionate letter to the New York Tribune and later wrote that five men had died simply for their ideas. Howells was the only prominent American writer to stand up for the Haymarket demonstrators, and he incurred considerable public vituperation for doing so. The appalling injustice of this event hastened his conversion to more radical political and economic views – in particular to a modified socialism. In 1890, Howells published his most fully realized “economic” work, A Hazard of New Fortunes. He followed it four years later with a utopian socialist 263

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dialogue-novel, A Traveler from Altruria. This political change also signaled his increasing conviction that the naturalist worldview was more accurate than idealist philosophy.

The Shape of a Novelist’s Career Howells’s career conforms in a general way to a common three-phase pattern: early quietly satiric romantic comedies (from 1872 to about 1880–1); socioeconomic “problem novels” (from 1881 to 1894); and darker psychological novels (from the mid-1890s to 1920). These stages overlap, especially the middle and the late, and he continued to write comedies of manners throughout. The works of the middle period are traditionally considered his most important. Several of them are designated as “economic” works – Howellsian economy being defined not only in terms of business and money, but also in social and moral terms. The Minister’s Charge (1887) is supposed to represent a shift from comedic romances to serious ethical works, but A Modern Instance (1882), five years earlier, is a serious “problem novel” about marriage and divorce. Howells’s two most famous works from the 1880s, The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes, operate partially within the tradition of the domestic novel, enlarging it to include domestic economy, social psychology, and moral philosophy. Michael Anesko comments that Howells “never wrote another novel comparable to A Hazard of New Fortunes” (ACAF, 515). This judgment reflects the general critical assessment but goes counter to the contentions of Howells’s admirers that late works like The Landlord at Lion’s Head (1897) and The Son of Royal Langbrith (1904) are works of substance and skill greater than those of most other writers of the time. The central character of The Landlord at Lion’s Head is unable to overcome his inherited character of selfishness and cruelty. The Son of Royal Langbrith tells the story of a son who has idolized his celebrated father as a virtuous public benefactor, only to learn that he was a ruthless Robber Baron and abuser of women. The son has not inherited a brutish disposition, however; there is some hope of escape from the biological trap.

Comedies of manners With Anesko’s assessment in mind, the following discussion will focus on the middle phase of Howells’s career (basically the decade from 1880 to 1890). It is useful, however, to see its development out of the situations and implicit themes of the early works – especially Howells’s own version of what came to be 264

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celebrated in Henry James as the “international theme.” In this context, Howells gave memorable expression to the figure of the “American Girl,” innocent, pure, and gullible – also a subject in James. Moreover, Howells’s earlier pastorals, social romances, and comedies of manners are implicitly concerned with social issues – and informed by a naturalist theme, the unpredictable exigency of accident and chance.

Romance and satire in a “chance-world” The reader will recall that Their Wedding Journey (1872) is an almost plotless travel narrative featuring his recurrent characters, Basil and Isabel March. It is an example of Howells’s early genteel and quiet realism, but in the course of their travels, the Marches encounter class and race prejudices and provincial political chauvinism. The following year, Howells published a somewhat less genial romantic comedy, significantly titled A Chance Acquaintance (1873). It continues the steamboat trip up the St Lawrence River that the Marches begin in Their Wedding Journey. The center of attention is now an eighteen-year-old girl from a rural village, Kittie Ellison, who is the embodiment of the innocent American Girl. One of the boat passengers is a pretentious, condescending gentleman from Boston. Kittie is at first offended by him; but when he rescues her from an attack by a dog, she sees him as a “romantic” hero and, adolescent fashion, falls in love. Fortunately, she breaks off the engagement in time, realizing that she can never be at ease or happy with such narrow, snobbish, and (in their own way) vulgar people. A similar theme of virtuous inexperience versus stultified tradition structures Howells’s “international” novel, A Foregone Conclusion (1875). The American Girl is now in Italy, traveling with her widowed aunt. Seventeen-year-old Florida Vervain is ignorant of the ways of the world, impulsive, and rather socially unrestrained. In this, she is like the American innocent of Henry James’s more famous Daisy Miller (1879). And, as in Daisy Miller, there is a young American male compatriot, who is both attracted to and put off by her. At the end, he apologizes for having thoroughly misunderstood her behavior; at last unfettered from the chains of social custom, he is emotionally able to marry her. This kind of sentimental romance mode is punctured by small realisms in The Lady of the Aroostock (1879), yet another story of an American innocent in Europe. Lydia Blood, a young and naive Massachusetts schoolteacher, sails to Europe on the Aroostock; her small-town American upbringing contrasts markedly with the cosmopolitan ambience of Old World urbanity. After a series of misinterpretations, she marries an erring suitor and goes to California, 265

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where the couple can live in relative freedom from the prejudices of Boston and Europe. This novel too has been compared to Daisy Miller; and it provides a complementary context for James’s story. Many readers feel that Howells’s best comedic romance is the later novel, Indian Summer (1886). Filled with humor and banter, it features the Italian locale and mood of his early romances. The story revolves around a limited number of characters representing four generations: an eleven-year-old girl; a twenty-year-old woman; a middle-aged woman and man; and an eighty-yearold minister. The central romantic triangle is resolved when the protagonist realizes that his infatuation with the twenty-year-old is foolish and that he is actually more attracted to the woman of his own age. Six years later, in The World of Chance (1893), Howells seems to have a final word about romance novels and romance writing. An unsuccessful romance writer, Shelley Ray, finally gets his oft-rejected novel published, and more or less by chance, it becomes a best seller. Meanwhile, his almost accidental contact with a poverty-stricken family has changed him. The family head is a socialist, whose doctrines persuade Ray that the books he has been writing are banal and false. Ray commits himself to writing fiction of social and economic criticism in the service of the larger community of man.

“Problem” Novels The date of 1887 has been taken as a definitive turning point in Howells’s social thinking. This was the year that The Minister’s Charge was published – the year after the Haymarket Square demonstration and trial. The Minister’s Charge contains a statement of Howells idea of moral “complicity”; given the major character who mouths it, however, the bromide (along with the “economy of pain”) seems fraught with potential ambiguity. The Reverend Mr Sewell (who also appears in The Rise of Silas Lapham) is a problematic moral guide. Subtitled The Apprenticeship of Lemuel Barker in imitation of the German bildungsroman, the novel tells the story of a farm boy who aspires to be a great writer. Mr Sewell has insincerely lavished praise on Barker’s unskilled poetry, inspiring him to move to Boston in the vain hope of pursuing a literary career. The charge of the title is upon and/or against the minister. Since Sewell and others have interfered with Lem’s life, they are “complicit” in what happens to him and therefore responsible. Sewell advises the young man to return to his rural roots, but Lem refuses. Eventually, Lem overcomes his mistakes and limitations and rises in self-respect and in class – the ostensible themes of Silas Lapham. 266

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There is a dramatic relativity to the pronouncements of The Minister’s Charge. Howells’s criticisms of society are placed in the mouths of various characters; the problem of social amelioration is explored from different angles: conservative, moderate, liberal, and progressive (see RAN, 675). Overarching all these differing views, however, is the ideal of “equality” in a democracy and its basis in economics. Howells envisions some “future state” that provides suitable employment for all – a utopian idea more fully developed in A Traveler from Altruria (1894), discussed in Chapter 19. The novel seems to point the moral that in some large sense we are in fact our brothers’ keepers; the evils of the world are exacerbated when the “virtuous” imagine themselves to be indifferent spectators. It is a little disconcerting to realize that the minister in this novel is the same character who formulates an expedient theory of the “economy of pain” in The Rise of Silas Lapham. Annie Kilburn (1888) continues some of the same themes. The title character returns from Rome to find that major socioeconomic changes are taking place in her little village. Struck by the evils of the economic situation, she decides to use her money to help the poor, supporting a charity called the “Social Union.” In doing so, she comes into partial conflict with the Reverend Mr Peck, another of Howells’s semi-confused moral philosophers. The book is structured around a series of conversational debates on false charity and other social issues. Annie’s quest for justice remains unresolved at the end.

Whited sepulchres: Realism and naturalism in the divorce novel Howells’s divorce story, A Modern Instance (1882), is generally regarded as one of his major novels. The central female figure is Marcia Gaylord, a spoiled, self-indulgent, but not malicious young woman. Her lack of balance and restraint is part of Howells’s theme of the need for socially “implanted goodness.” The novel suggests that the idea of the “natural goodness” of “natural man,” still so cherished from the romantic era, is an illusion. Late in the novel, Howells’s apparent spokesman, Eustace Atherton, states that “natural goodness is the amiability of a beast basking in the sun when his stomach is full” (Ch. 38). Bartley Hubbard, Marcia’s eventual husband, is her darker twin. His lack of self-control (“implanted goodness”) is a more grotesque version of her undisciplined “natural” tendencies. The two are predisposed both to be attracted to and to clash with each other. They eventually elope to Boston, where Hubbard earns a mediocre living as a freelance writer. Clever and glib, he moves up rapidly in the world of Boston sleaze journalism, becoming an editor of Events, a daily paper known for its low standards. Two or three years after the 267

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birth of a daughter, the Hubbards’ marriage begins to show signs of stress. Drinking heavily, Hubbard steadily degenerates, while Marcia becomes more and more possessive and demanding. Meanwhile, Marcia and Bartley have renewed an old friendship with Ben Halleck, who has been quietly in love with Marcia for years. Halleck is the inverse of Bartley Hubbard: hardworking, disciplined, selfless, ethical. Halleck tenderly tries to make her life less stressful without ever revealing his feelings. As Hubbard deteriorates morally, he undergoes physical changes, becoming so fat as to seem buoyant with the afflatus of moral decay. Yet Howells does not quite make him an out-and-out villain of melodrama. He remains a flawed human being, entrapped in a biological and social prison with no implanted inner character to redeem him. One day, he impulsively forsakes his wife and child and disappears. To this point, the novel is in the mode of moral realism, focused on the themes of irresponsibility and desertion. When Hubbard reappears two years later, the novel begins to depart from ordinary realism as Howells defined it. Apparently wanting to marry another woman, Hubbard tries to get a divorce in a different state in an effort to obtain terms favorable to himself, ironically charging Marcia with deserting him. Marcia’s father succeeds in getting a judgment in his daughter’s favor – but he suffers a paralyzing apoplectic stroke in the courtroom. Hubbard himself is later shot to death in Whited Sepulchre, Arizona, for slandering a man’s wife (the allusion is to hypocrites; see Matthew 22:27). The novel gets darker as it concludes. Marcia takes her child and her halfparalyzed father back to her childhood village in Maine. She avoids people and is regarded as “dry, cold, and uncommunicative” (Ch. 41). Not too far away, deeper in the Maine woods, lurks a morbid Ben Halleck – now a notably unpopular preacher who has retreated into his Calvinistic childhood religion for psychological rather than spiritual comfort. Still harboring his love for Marcia in secret, he writes to Eustace Atherton for guidance. He doesn’t think he has the right to propose to Marcia because he wanted Hubbard’s death: “if I have been willing he should die, am I not a potential murderer?” Atherton is in a quandary. He sees that Ben’s “being in love with her when she was another man’s wife” is just the “indelible stain” he feels it to be. But is it? Halleck, in self-abnegation and guilt, may be the victim of merely arbitrary precepts – the “implanted goodness.” The novel leaves us with the question: are moral restraints good and necessary as a counter to animal rapaciousness, or do they block “natural” healthy impulses? When Clara Atherton asks her husband what he is going to write to Ben Halleck, he says “Ah, I don’t know, I don’t know” – the last words of the book.

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Obscure depths of the mind A similar question haunts a pair of psychological romances that span the 1880–90 decade: The Undiscovered Country (1880) and The Shadow of a Dream (1890). These novels illuminate what is for most readers a relatively unknown aspect of Howells: his psychological, psychic, supernaturalist, and gothic interests. The Undiscovered Country sounds a somber psychological and quasi-occult note, exploiting the mental confusion of spiritualists and religious cult members. It presages the grim exploration of abnormal psychology in The Shadow of a Dream, a novel that is a deeper and more realistic probing of the subconscious mind in the context of social pathology. It explores the moral question that troubles Ben Halleck – uncommitted but desired adultery – in a more disturbing, twisted way. A bizarre m
enage-a-trois exists primarily in the mind of the mentally disturbed husband – a suspicion confirmed in his mind by a recurrent dream. Does his psychopathology stimulate adulterous desire in actuality – or only in the minds of the other two? Or are his suspicions in fact justified? Overall, The Shadow of a Dream is informed by a naturalist worldview, suggesting that the mind is a function of the nervous system, a mere tabula rasa upon which conflicting emotions and contradictory moral configurations are engraved. The narrative ends in death and an averted glance of bafflement. There is no exit – and Basil March, the center of consciousness for the story, concludes that perhaps it’s best simply to avoid thought.

The Problematic Rise of Silas Lapham; or, the Economy of Pain The Rise of Silas Lapham (1884–5) is both an economic novel and a domestic novel of manners. The business dilemmas seem realistic enough; and the portraits of the individual members of the two main families are nuanced: simultaneously stereotyped, pathetic, comic, and all too familiar in real life. Howells’s satiric portrait of the self-satisfied American businessman with utterly conventional values, superficial morality, and shallow understanding reappears almost four decades later in Babbitt (1922) by Sinclair Lewis; but while George Babbitt comes to feel trapped by conventional values, Lapham is able to negotiate convention and remain comfortably middle class throughout. Howells’s story contains deliberately unresolved contradictions often overlooked by the general reader and even critics. The implicit and explicit contradictions contribute, in my view, to the book’s status as a classic of American realism.

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As a member of a large family, Silas had to leave the farmstead in rural Vermont to seek his fortune. His enterprise and his marriage to a small-town schoolteacher are part and parcel of the American middle-class dream; but he was destined for bigger things. Silas’s inherited lands contained a mineral deposit, which he was able to convert into a key ingredient in a superior paint. He kept his business alive during the Civil War by force of will; postwar economic exigencies, however, required him to take in a questionable partner, named Rogers. This is the situation revealed at the very beginning of the book as Lapham pontificates to a cynical newspaper reporter, Bartley Hubbard (of A Modern Instance), who is interviewing Lapham for a series called the “Solid Men of Boston.” Largely unaware of how he appears to the reporter, Lapham produces a picture of his wife and two daughters as a symbol of his solid bourgeois values for the smirking reporter to admire. This opening scene is still generally regarded as a locus classicus of American realism. Semi-comic realism is the hallmark of another of the initial symbolic scenes of the book – finding a new home. Silas decides to build an appropriately ostentatious house in the most socially prestigious section of Boston. Silas and his wife, Persis, pretend that they are moving only because it is a more convenient location for their daughters, Penelope and Irene. The daughters are already on the way to being snobs, both despite and because of their nouveau-riche status. They feel socially ill at ease with people of established family and inherited wealth; and they are somewhat embarrassed by the gaucherie of their parents, especially their father. On one of their visits to the new house, the elder Laphams are surprised by the sudden reappearance of Silas’s old partner, Rogers. We now learn that, after Rogers had put up money to keep the paint firm going, Lapham had maneuvered him out of the company – an action that Lapham maintains was “just business.” Persis, however, has always had reservations about his action; and Rogers’s sudden reappearance has taken some of the joy out of the new home and new life. This scene underscores a certain ethical blankness in Silas’s character but also marks the beginning of a small and ambivalent degree of change in Lapham.5 A subsequent visit to the building site brings a new complication in the person of Tom Corey, a young man of well-to-do family, who is interested in the construction and paint industry. He is also attracted to one of Lapham’s daughters. While Tom looks over the half-completed house, Silas begins bragging about his success and wealth. Tom asks his father, Bromfield Corey, if he should apply for a job in Lapham’s company. The elder Corey has no objection to a well-paying position for his son, but he does have reservations about his son’s acceptance of the Laphams socially. 270

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Silas is flattered by Tom Corey’s interest in joining his firm, for in his mind it means another step up the social ladder. Without telling Persis, he precipitously invites the young man for a weekend at their vacation home in the country. In the evening, Silas and Persis talk about Corey’s intentions. She asserts that Corey is not interested in Lapham’s paint business, but in their daughter, Irene. Silas replies that he is going to give him a chance at both. Tom Corey’s mother vigorously objects to the Laphams as social inferiors – though, like her husband, she does not object to their son’s making money through Lapham. Meanwhile, Mrs Lapham is becoming increasingly concerned about her husband’s ostentatious spending and the rising costs of the new house. These worries are exacerbated when she learns that Silas has made a very large loan to his old business partner, Rogers. Tom Corey proves to be a valuable employee, and Lapham invites him frequently to their old house. During this time, Mr and Mrs Bromfield Corey feel pressure to make some acknowledgment of their son’s relationship with the Laphams. When Mrs Corey finally decides to entertain the Laphams, she makes sure to do so before the members of her own social set return to the city from their summer resorts.

The dinner party The three central scenes of the dinner party are an excruciating comic tour de force much admired by critics. Chapter 13, describing the various social anxieties of the Laphams as they prepare themselves for the party, is more realistically rendered than the description of the dinner itself. Irene suggests that the invitation is to make up for bad manners, though no one can identify exactly what Anna Corey’s objectionable behavior was. Penelope’s resentful refusal to go to the dinner throws the family into a tizzy. Persis wonders if they can somehow “all send some excuse at the last moment” and not go. Silas, who has been swelling with pride at the invitation to the socially prominent Coreys, comments, “I guess we shan’t want to send any excuse. . . . If we’re ever going to be anybody at all, we’ve got to go and see how it’s done.” So they decide not to mention Penelope in the acceptance note – a faux pas. A few days later, while Persis and Irene are busy with their “dress-making” for the party, Silas begins to feel a “vague apprehension” in regard to his own dress. They buy a book of etiquette, which tells them not to eat with their knives or pick their teeth with their forks – but says nothing about the important matter of a black cravat or about gloves. The chapter ends with mother and father worrying once more about the propriety of Penelope’s stubborn refusal to go to 271

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the dinner party. They don’t know that Pen knows how socially inept they are – or that she has a secret interest in Tom Corey. Chapter 14 begins with the Laphams’ awkwardness as they enter the Coreys’ home. Silas doesn’t know why Persis and the other women have suddenly disappeared; and when they reappear, he doesn’t know what to do. He has never escorted a woman into dinner before. At first, he listens quietly to the conversation of the Coreys and their guests without understanding what they’re talking about – especially when it turns literary. To calm his nervousness, Lapham gulps his wine, a bad idea since he doesn’t normally drink wine at all. He relaxes; he becomes voluble; he becomes witty; he tells stories; he sees he is making an impression. He brags that he has money enough to hire people like Corey’s son – that he has so much money he is moving to a huge house nearby in the swankiest section of Boston. As the party breaks up, he is unsure why people are leaving. His wife doesn’t seem to know the proper time to depart either, and they stay until after eleven, waiting to be dismissed. The next morning, Silas detains Tom Corey at the office and apologizes clumsily. Tom somewhat archly tells Lapham that his wine-induced prattle was a minor matter and that his overall behavior had been quite all right. But later that evening, Tom feels guilty about his condescension and decides to go the Laphams and apologize in what turns out to be a charmingly comic scene. Finding not Silas, but his daughter Penelope, Tom engages in another awkward conversation, finally blurting out that he loves her. She is nonplussed: everyone has thought that he has been interested in her older sister, Irene. Penelope experiences a flood of confused feelings and insists that he go; he leaves the house thoroughly disoriented.

The economy of pain The twist in the love plot leads to one of the more ironic aspects of the novel: the formulation of an “economy of pain.” The phrase is that of the Reverend Mr Sewell, who advises Mr and Mrs Lapham on the ethical-religious principles of what is an awkward social dilemma. Pen is in love with Tom but does not want to hurt her sister. Sewell tells the Laphams that Penelope’s offer to sacrifice her own happiness is a “false ideal.” Clearly it is Irene who must suffer: “One sufferer instead of three, if none is to blame,” he suggests (Ch. 18). As he tries to clarify his argument, Sewell contradicts himself repeatedly. The “economy of pain,” he says, is a commonsense idea “which naturally suggests itself, and which would insist upon itself, if we were not all perverted by traditions which

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are the figment of the shallowest sentimentality.” People like the Laphams have been taken in by the sentimentality of “novels that befool and debauch almost every intelligence in some degree.” Perhaps, given the puritanical tradition of America, the idea of the pernicious falsity of novels is not surprising. But what are we to make of Sewell’s assertion that the concept of self-sacrifice “certainly doesn’t come from Christianity”? Growing “quite heated and red in the face,” and continuing to contradict himself, he tells the Laphams that they will be “guilty” if they don’t help Irene to give up her love for Tom Corey. The poor confused parents buy into the whole configuration of the minister’s “logic.” And Sewell’s later reappearance in the last paragraphs of the novel is not, as some have felt, an unnecessary moral tag-end. Sewell’s morally dubious advice in Chapter 18 casts a shadow of ambiguity across the economic “self-sacrifice” that Silas ultimately makes in the last quarter of the novel, bringing the narrative to a less conventional end. The economic theme dominates most of the rest of the narrative, symmetrically enfolding the intermittent love plot at the beginning and end. Silas’s debts are piling up as a national economic crisis threatens. He decides to inspect some mining properties that were securities for his loans to Rogers, but his ex-partner has tricked him: the land is controlled by a railroad syndicate. Chance (with assistance from human carelessness) then takes another severe turn for the Laphams – in what seems one of the less realistic aspects of the novel. Visiting his house site one night before the sale, he decides to test the chimneys. He leaves without making certain the fire was out, and the house burns to the ground. Moreover, he has let his property and fire insurance lapse the week before. Lapham then tries to effect a merger with a competing paint manufacturer, a deal contingent on his ability to raise enough capital to finish building their new plant. A British consortium is interested in properties Lapham had earlier put up as security, but Lapham resists selling these “valueless” properties (until the railroad squeezes him out). He is consoled by what he considers his honesty in the matter; but, unable to raise the necessary money, he goes bankrupt. Nevertheless, Tom Corey continues to pursue Penelope, and they are eventually married. The older Coreys try to accept what they still consider an inappropriate match; but they are uncomfortable with it. Irene recovers her composure and becomes a stronger person. Mrs Lapham is more or less content. Lapham is able to salvage a modicum of his wealth; he is content because he feels he has been an honest man at the end – thus rising through falling.

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An inconclusive ending? Silas Lapham’s story would seem to be a secular version of the felix culpa. But does he really rise through error to a higher moral state? I would suggest that Silas Lapham is a deliberately ambiguous characterization by a writer who had become increasingly skeptical of American promise and optimism. Although the last words of the novel seem to emphasize Lapham’s basically decent nature, they are heavy with hesitation. Lapham tells Sewell that he has more or less concluded that his real mistake was in not handling the Rogers affair the right way “in the first place” (Ch. 27). He seems at this point to palliate everything as a deterministic sequence – not that Lapham thinks in such abstractions. He says is that it all now seems like starting “a row of bricks” tumbling; and they just kept tumbling, “one after another.” Sewell suggests the felix culpa theme in sidewise fashion: “We can trace the operation of evil in the physical world . . . but I’m more and more puzzled about it in the moral world. . . . and in your own case, as I understand, you don’t admit – you don’t feel sure – that you ever actually did wrong the man.” Lapham’s hesitant reply: “Well, no; I don’t. That is to say––.” All he knows is that he couldn’t cheat the British investors. When Sewell asks if he has any regrets, Silas replies that if “the thing was to do over again, right in the same way, I guess I should have to do it.” He guesses that he would “have to” do the “right” thing. In the Land of Promise, things have taken an odd downward turn after all; and a feeling of overall disillusion, only half perceived, seems to me the dominant sensibility at the end of Lapham’s “rise.”

Genteel Muckraking in A Hazard of New Fortunes W. D. Howells’s longest novel, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889–90), explores business, politics, and ethics against a background of class in America. Sometimes it is referred to as Howells’s “strike novel” (the plot moves toward a clash between workers and police), but it is less a protest novel than a portrait of the cultural disparities among skilled working-class individuals, highly educated middle-class intellectuals, and coarsely educated nouveau-riche capitalists and their minions. Howells called the novel “the largest canvas I had yet allowed myself.”6 The wordplay of the allusive title pairs the words hazard and fortune in two ways. The word hazard means not only a potential danger, but also chance and the chanciness of life in general. The phrase new fortunes not only suggests the rise of the nouveaux riches, but also implies fate and change – personal, social, and especially economic. The configuration of conditions signaled by the title 274

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suggests a story about people caught in the wheel of fortune – and thus perhaps a naturalist novel. If so, it is a modified naturalism, informed by an indeterminate determinism, with glimpses of free will and glimmers of hope. Basil March is the center of consciousness for the novel, and his limited realization of his personal relation to large social and economic injustices is the principal theme. His major revelation is what he calls his own “complicity” in the overall human condition. To the extent that he becomes more socially and ethically aware, the novel may be said to have a strain of optimism. Overall, however, the tone is one of chastened naivet
e and looming disillusion. Basil is one of Howells’s principal recurring characters; in Hazard, we find him approaching the age of fifty. As a young man, he had imagined a literary career for himself; but economic exigency compelled him to go into the insurance business. After nearly two decades in that business, he experiences an almost accidental change of fortunes that puts him temporarily at hazard. Basil is presented with a new business opportunity by an old acquaintance called simply by his last name, Fulkerson. He is trying to develop a new literary magazine, to be called by the Dickensian name of Every Other Week. Basil’s wife, Isabel, is excited by the prospect of her husband becoming editor or co-editor of a new magazine – until she realizes it means leaving Boston (I. 3). The March’s indecisiveness about the venture occupies several chapters, in which they fret about all manner of small domestic economies. When Basil is told that the insurance company is transferring him to New York at a lower salary, he feels as if a “destiny” has taken a hand, one that is somehow both comic and tragic (I. 5; cf. I. 12). He resigns and accepts Fulkerson’s offer. The rest of Part I provides a panoramic view of certain areas of New York City, as it also deftly sketches in the characters of Basil and Isabel. They are not indifferent to others less fortunate, but they have cultivated tastes that “enabled them to look down upon those who were without such tastes.” This mildly satiric observation is a key to Basil’s character. His inner world is that of art and literature rather than the realities he has presumably insured others against. When actually faced with unpleasant facts, he tries to take a distanced, “purely aesthetic view.” Their encounter with the underside of urban life begins with the search for an acceptable flat in New York. Howells’s portrayal of different neighborhoods, ethnic groups, and dialects provides graphic depictions of the urban landscape and the lower strata of American society. Dual or multiple perspectives are characteristic of Howells, and much of the dynamic of the novel lies in March’s seeing with new eyes realities he hasn’t really seen before. Although primarily in the mode of realism, the images of the New York urban neighborhoods are suggestive of the naturalist descriptions of Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser. 275

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Part I ends with the introduction of one of the major players in the rest of the drama, Berthold Lindau, Basil’s old teacher from Indianapolis. Lindau is a German immigrant, who, after campaigning for social and political reform in Berlin in the 1848 uprisings, fought in the American Civil War against the slaveholders. As a naturalized citizen, Lindau is the ideal vehicle for immigrant socialist ideas. As March settles into his new environment, he finds that he likes riding the elevated train (L-Train). He finds “the variety of people in the car . . . unfailingly entertaining” (II. 11). Listening to “the jargon of their unintelligible dialect,” he wonders “what notion these poor animals formed of a free republic from their experience of life under its conditions.” He sometimes indulges in “publicspirited reveries” about “the future economy of our heterogeneous commonwealth.” One of his musings verges toward a more thoroughgoing naturalistic determinism: “Accident and then exigency seemed the forces at work”; they seem “energies as free and planless” as the “fierce struggle for survival, with the stronger life persisting . . .” The whole of existence sometimes seems characterized by “the absence of intelligent, comprehensive purpose in the huge disorder and the violent struggle.” This urban panorama “with its dumb appeal” vaguely penetrates “the consciousness of a man who had always been too self-enwrapt to perceive the chaos to which the individual selfishness must always lead.”

“Business is business” Fulkerson takes care of much of the business of organizing the magazine, not always successfully. One of his mistakes is hiring an “art director” who turns out to be not only a political troglodyte, but also a vain and self-centered troublemaker. Another troublesome figure is the owner of the magazine, Mr Jacob Dryfoos, a self-centered, self-made, newly rich millionaire. Dryfoos has made his fortune through an accidental discovery of natural gas on his Indiana farmlands and subsequently increased his fortune through (possibly shady) deals in the stock market. Dyfoos is bankrolling the magazine in order to provide his otherworldly son, Conrad, a position in a real-world enterprise. He gives Fulkerson the charge of training up young Conrad to be a capitalist boss. Much of Part III of the book is devoted to describing Dryfoos’s background, his changed fortunes, and the Dryfoos family ambiance. He and his two daughters are representative of a certain type of American nouveau riche. The girls are simpleminded folk whose heads have been turned by their father’s money. Originally an honest man with simple tastes, Dryfoos’s subsequent 276

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development is more or less the reverse of Silas Lapham’s. “His moral decay began with his perception of the opportunity of making money quickly and abundantly.” His favorite maxim is “Business is business,” and his overriding concept of “competition” justifies any and all actions he takes. Conrad is different from his sisters. His face is a “singularly gentle” one, in which a “look of goodness qualified and transfigured a certain simplicity” of character. Unable to convince his father to let him become a clergyman, Conrad takes up charity work in the East Side slums in his spare time. In quite different ways, Conrad and old Lindau become Dryfoos’s major antagonists. Lindau, hired by March to oversee the production of the magazine, is diametrically opposed to the money-grubbing, social-climbing Dryfooses of the world. He is a proponent of the unionist movement – to which Dryfoos is completely and unalterably opposed. The coming confrontation between Lindau and Dryfoos is signaled in an especially memorable way in Part IV in a contretemps between Lindau and Fulkerson.

Confrontations Fulkerson asks Lindau if his attitude would be different if he were not a “slave” but a “master” of capitalism. Lindau takes the bait; but his answer takes a surprising twist. He argues that people don’t have much control over what they inherit from their fathers, but self-made men are subject to moral questioning. “Ain’t that rather un-American doctrine?” asks Fulkerson (IV. 4). Lindau roars at Fulkerson, his heavy accent growing “more and more uncertain.” The longish speech begins: “On-Amerigan! . . . What iss Amerigan? Dere iss no Ameriga anymore!” It ends with Lindau saying find a rich man and see “whether you meet an honest man.” Fulkerson then twits Lindau about his war veteran’s pension being turned down. Lindau flames up again – his pension was not “vetoed” – he renounced it. He would rather starve than take a pension from a republic bought up by monopolies and run by trusts and combines. Although formerly somewhat conservative, March’s sympathies are now with Lindau. These attitudes are intensified by March’s growing awareness of escalating class violence, in which Big Capital employs force to put down Labor. Fulkerson is also in the middle, but his middle position is not the ethical one of March. Fulkerson is an opportunist; commercial interests dictate his professional, aesthetic, and ethical decisions.7 To enhance the success of the first issue of the new magazine, Fulkerson proposes a large public relations party for the staff and members of the press. For Dryfoos, the “real object of the dinner” is “to bring a number of men 277

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together under Dryfoos’ roof and make them witnesses of his splendor, make them feel the power of his wealth” (IV. 6). Fulkerson, shamelessly pandering to his employer, turns the dinner conversation to the way in which Dryfoos masterfully got rid of some troublesome union sympathizers, at just the right moment bringing in “fresh men” under the protection of Pinkerton detectives with “rifles at half cock.” While Lindau fumes, another guest remarks that it is a pity the Pinkertons didn’t get off a few shots. Ever more exercised, Lindau begins to lose control. He snarls in German to Basil that he cannot stay to hear any more of this “vile treason,” but he is restrained by March. Dryfoos opines that if he had his way there would no labor unions at all anywhere. Lindau shouts out that Big Business associations are actually capitalist unions. Would Dryfoos deny the right to unionize to workers, while granting owners the right to have their own kind of “unions”? The answer, of course, is yes. Another guest, a Southern plantation owner, reminds Dryfoos that under current laws against monopolies and protecting workers he couldn’t do that. But when “commercialized society” has collapsed, “we can begin to build anew.” His idea of renewal, however, is very different from Lindau’s. The central authority and the ruling “leisure class” will be responsible for “the national expense and the national defense,” and, of course, the general welfare of the working classes. The working classes will be responsible to the leisure class for “the support of dignity in peace and shall be subject to its command in war.” This vision sends Lindau over the edge. “No, no, no!” he shouts. It is the state, the whole people together, that shall make the new ideal society. The next morning Dryfoos comes round to the office of Every Other Week and confronts March about Lindau. He wants him fired (IV. 7). March resists. He defends Lindau’s character and tells Dryfoos that as editor of the magazine he does not take orders. This is the pivotal moment for March, who has at last stood up for his principles and confronted an antagonist head on. The most spectacular confrontation in the book is the New York street-car strike, described in vivid detail from multiple perspectives (V. 5). March, despite his wife’s protestations, is unable to keep away from the rioting. As he nears the corner where all the violence has taken place, he sees “Lindau drop under the club of the policeman.” Drawn to the spot where Lindau lies, he sees “Conrad dead beside the old man.” Conrad has been killed by an accidental hazard – a random pistol shot. Touched by the fact that Conrad died trying to protect Lindau, the grief-stricken Dryfoos (somewhat improbably) decides to provide for the old man for the rest of this life. But Lindau dies from his clubbing. 278

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The “economic chance world” The last three chapters are dominated by more or less philosophical discussions between Basil and Isabel about the meaning of everything that has happened. Isabel asks if Basil thinks Conrad’s death has changed Dryfoos. After all, he is selling the magazine to Fulkerson and Basil and moving away (V. 16). Basil doubts that great “cataclysmal” events really change people: “There’s the making of several characters in each of us; we are each several characters, and sometimes this character has the lead in us, and sometimes that.” He suggests that Conrad’s death was forecast from the beginning of time and was an effect of his coming into the world in the first place. To which Isabel cries out “This is fatalism!” In contradictory fashion, Basil says what he really finds dismaying is that “this economic chance world in which we live” seems to have been created by men. “It ought to be law as inflexible in human affairs” as in “the physical world,” that “if a man will work he shall both rest and eat . . .” (my italics). Unfortunately, “No one is sure of finding work; no one is sure of not losing it.” He repeats his sense that the dream of an ideal republic has been compromised, possibly ruined, by the greed of competitive capitalism. Isabel puts the blame on character rather than social conditions. Basil replies that “conditions make character”: the social conditions of pure capitalism promote greed. He adds that Isabel and himself are as guilty of excess and illusion as anyone. Isabel reverts to continuing worries about his job and the new partnership. Basil replies that if Fulkerson does something devious, it “would be merely looking out for himself. . . . It’s what anyone would do.” As with The Rise of Silas Lapham, Howells ends A Hazard of New Fortunes not with a clear-cut gain in moral integrity and philosophical vision, but with moral-psychological ambiguity. Isabel sounds the muted note of idealism that lingers in the book: “You wouldn’t do it, Basil!” He wouldn’t – but others would.

Notes 1. Howells does not even appear in the Norton Anthology of American Literature, 6th edn (2003), though he is still in the Heath anthology with a new introduction. It is an interesting lesson in the politics of academic publication to read “Howells in The Heath” (1999b) by John Crowley, who was the original consulting editor for the Howells section. 2. For overviews of the man and his work, three are especially useful, two older and one recent: Cowie (Ch. 15 of RAN); Abel, MAR (121–215); and Anesko, ACAF (2009). These shorter treatments may be profitably followed by three volumes 279

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3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

by Crowley (1985, 1989, 1999a). Carter (1954) and Bennett (1959) have long been standard studies, along with Cady (1956–8); still one of the best critical studies is Vanderbilt (1968). For a discussion of the Italian experience, see Woodress (1952) and Wright (1998 [1965]). Howells thought that the “privation” threw “her thoughts back” upon herself and made her “morbid and hypochondriacal.” An autopsy, however, revealed a physical cause. See Crowley, introduction (xi–xiii) to The Rise of Silas Lapham (1996). Most readers and critics view the novel in more black and white terms; i.e., Lapham undergoes a complete moral renovation or transformation. For discussion, see Pizer, “The Ethical Unity of The Rise of Silas Lapham” (1960) and Tanselle, “The Architecture of Silas Lapham” (1966). Tanselle offers an analysis of a four-part pattern in the novel as materialistic rise, social rise, social fall, materialist fall. I would offer (not instead but in addition) the following mirror-pattern of five segments: business, love {dinner party} love, business. The novel is not as sprawling as it might appear. It is formally divided into five parts, suggesting but not exactly conforming to the pattern of a five-act drama. Although varying in the number of chapters in each major part, the first two parts and the last two are all roughly equal in length. They book-end a middle section that is little more than half the length of the others, thus emphasizing Part III as a “pivotal” sequence, though not its most memorable section. In each of the five parts, the chapters renumber; parenthetical references in the main text above will be to each part by Roman numeral, followed by the chapter number in Arabic in the following manner: (V. 5). On urban fiction, see Bremer, ACAF (2009), an essay that deals in addition to Howells with James, Wharton, Fuller, and the “Chicago school of fiction” led by Edith Wyatt. On economics, see Sherman, ACAF (2009), which deals with Wharton, Dreiser, and Alger, and others in addition to Howells. Howells is said to have modeled Fulkerson on S. S. McClure. See the discussion of McClure’s Magazine and the revolt of its editorial board in Ch. 16.

See also Anesko (1997); Bennett (1973); Bertoff (1981 [1965]); Borus (1989); Cady (1971); Carrington (1966); Cogan (1989); Davidson (2005); Eble (1982); Fryckstedt (1958); Glazener (1997); Goodman and Dawson (2005); Haight (LHUS, 1960); Hough (1959); Howells (1891, 1900, 1910, 1959, 1970, 1973, 1982); A. Kaplan (1988); Kearns (1996); Kerr (1972); Kirk and Kirk (1962); Klinkowitz (1970); Kolb (1969); Lynn (1971); J. Martin (1967); McKay (1982); McMurray (1967); Michaels (1987);

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Nettels (1988, 1997); Petrie (2005); Peyser (1998, ACAF 2009); Pizer (1984 [1966], 1993, 1995); Prioleau (1983); Quinn (1936); Quirk and Scharnhorst (1994); Scharnhorst and Quirk (2006); Sundquist (1982); W. Taylor (1942); B. Thomas (1997); Thompson and Link (NGd, 1999); Van Doren (1947); Wagenknecht (1952, 1969); C. Wilson (1985, ACAF 2009).

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Chapter 16

The “Gilded Age” Genteel Critics and Militant Muckrakers

The Gilded Age (1873) by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner gave the Age of Big Business one of its most memorable labels. In American cultural history, the term “Gilded Age” invokes the period from the end of the Civil War through the 1890s, and slightly beyond. Associated with the rapid rise of Big Business are the Labor Movement, the Factory System, and the attempt of Corporate Capital (personified as the Robber Barons) to control it all – by violence if necessary. Within this time frame, political historians have identified other periods, most notably Reconstruction and the Progressive Era, terms embodying the contradictory tendencies of the times. But for most literary scholars and cultural critics, the “Gilded Age” is the label that has stuck.1 The term emphasizes the problems and evils of laissez-faire capitalism. Gilded means covered with a thin layer of (usually) fake gold. In their comic Dickensian way, Twain and Warner strip away the pretty surface and expose the ugliness beneath the top layer of society, politics, and business. The word gilded also suggests American Victorian respectability and artifice, from the giltedges and decorations of fake books in simulated libraries, to elaborate gilded picture frames in over-decorated parlors, to insincere piety regarding personal behavior and business ethics. Novels of social criticism in the era generally took one of two forms: “genteel criticism” and “muckraking.” Among the Genteel Critics and historical romancers who sometimes cast a jaundiced eye on American manners, morals, and institutions are Henry Adams, Booth Tarkington, Winston Churchill, Robert Herrick, and W. D. Howells. The Muckrakers wrote both fiction and nonfiction in which they more militantly exposed the ugly underside of Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson. Ó 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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American capitalism and putative democracy. Important muckraking works include novels by Rebecca Harding Davis, John William De Forest, and David Graham Phillips; and journalistic expos
es by Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Jacob Riis, Thorstein Veblen, and Helen Hunt Jackson. The most famous of the American muckraking novels is Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906).

Picaresque Adventures in The Gilded Age Twain and Warner’s The Gilded Age. A Tale of To-day (1873) is in the tradition of comic-realist picaresque. At the center is a “rogue” hero (picaro), who may be positive or negative. Typically, a picaresque narrative has no definite plotline, adding one “adventure” or encounter after another, exposing the vices and absurdities of different segments of society. In America, the best known of the early picaresques are probably H. H. Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry (1792–1805; 1815) and Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884–5). In The Gilded Age, Twain and Warner focus on the twin elements of misguided idealism (as romantic delusion) and out-and-out corruption. The two main characters are burlesques of medieval romance figures, transplanted to the secular American scene, with gentlemanly titles: Colonel Beriah Sellers and his pal Squire Silas (“Si”) Hawkins.2 Sellers is an impractical would-be capitalist, suffering from grandiose dreams of wealth and success; Hawkins, a conventional middle-class family man, is easily influenced but essentially honest. The other main plot involves Silas Hawkins’s various children. Their behavior exemplifies a falling away from past ideals: from a more or less Jeffersonian idealism, to the false dreams and ineptitude of their father’s generation, to even greater decline in their own generation. This pattern provides the clue to the overall coherence of a story line that is somewhat involved and clumsy. Second plots and subplots are not always well integrated. Robert Paul Lamb notes that there are “two main plots: the story of a Missouri family destroyed by its pursuit of riches and faith in the American dream; and a blistering satire on corrupt Washington politics, society, and the court system.”3 There is also a major subplot involving two young lovers that appears more or less intermittently in different chapters written by Warner.4 These lovers are Philip Sterling and Ruth Bolton, whose genuineness contrasts with quasi-parallel comically incompetent and sincerely sleazy characters in the main story. The overall pattern may be seen as unfolding in four stages (MAR, 42–54). The first part revolves principally around the simple postmaster and storekeeper, Hawkins, who falls under the influence of his flamboyant friend, Sellers. Their exaggerated expectations of wealth lead to recurrent misunderstandings 284

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and boom-to-bust financial transactions. Hawkins is not looking so much to improve his own wealth and status as to provide for his children. His motivation partakes of an important aspect of the American Dream: the desire to see your children have a better life than your own. The second stage of the novel, shifting from Tennessee to Missouri, depicts the increasingly harmful outcomes of speculative financial projects. In this section, the major figure is Colonel Sellers. The two friends finally make big money – only to lose it. Hawkins dies in despair, enjoining his children to remember the “land,” meaning the “real property” in Tennessee. Meanwhile, most of his eight children have grown up imbibing the false “idealism” of the age of materialism. Their bogus version of the American Dream is the dream of the nouveaux riches. It will ruin their lives. After the scene shifts from Missouri to Washington, DC, the stages of the narrative blur together somewhat. Villainy is now centered in Senator Abner Dilworthy. He quickly sizes up two of the Hawkins children as possible pawns in his counterfeit enterprises for public benefit. Hare-brained economic projects become fraudulent promotion schemes, with private enterprise superseding the public interest. Trading on phony religious avowals, wholesale political corruption becomes an across-the-board economic exploitation of democratic institutions. As in Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry, several types of government con men are profiled, all posing as God-fearing Christians and public benefactors. Dilworthy’s main scheme, selling the Hawkins’s Tennessee lands to the government for a great university for black people, is eventually exposed as the great “Negro University Swindle.” The last stage of the narrative lays bare the deception and fraud of the American scene and the degradation of the American Dream by the next generation – some of it exorbitantly melodramatic. After Dilworthy is exposed, the novel is rounded off with a conventional happy ending – written mainly by Warner. This sub-story shows that love and honesty and hard work pay off: Philip and Ruth will presumably live happily ever after (Ch. 63). Although modern readers tend to think Warner’s ending is not a fitting conclusion, it comports with the sentimental streak in Mark Twain5 without diminishing the political satire that constitutes the primary distinction of the novel.

The Genteel Critics The American “Genteel Tradition” refers primarily to the philosophical and aesthetic environment associated with the intellectual elite of New England and New York. The genteel standard was that of “high culture” rather than the “crass materialism” of vulgar capitalism (at least superficially). These elite were 285

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inclined to eschew the less pleasant realities of the American scene in favor of conventional morality and social behavior – and traditional “correctness” in art as distinguished from experimentation. The phrase “Genteel Tradition” gained currency from a speech given by George Santayana at Berkeley in 1911. Santayana both elucidated and problematized the felt difference between the old aristocratic tradition of intellect (represented in America primarily by Puritanism, Enlightenment philosophy, and Transcendentalism) and the newer realism. For the older genteel class, literary “realism” was not so much of the grime and grit of the lower classes, but of the rising middle class. So-called realist writers, Santayana argued, mistakenly denied their roots in the Genteel Tradition; and uncritical genteel writers served the false gods of privilege.6 That’s the negative connotation of the Genteel Tradition. The positive is the astute analytical critique of American society and institutions undertaken by some of the most brilliant minds in America. The prime example is the philosopher-historian, Henry Adams (1838–1918), the well-to-do descendant of prominent old-guard families that included two American presidents. Adams’s Democracy – An American Novel (1879–80) presents a series of disillusioned satiric pictures of the social and political culture of Washington. As in The Gilded Age, many of the characters are modeled on actual persons (Old Granite as the nineteenth US President, Rutherford B. Hayes), most of whom are characterized by reckless ambition. The philosophical aspects of Adams’s political views are found in the famous Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904; rev. 1912; 1913; see Adams 1983) and The Education of Henry Adams (1907; 1918; see Adams 1983).7 In these irony-laced works, Adams formulated and refined the contrast between the Virgin and the Dynamo as icons of change. The medieval Virgin of Chartres represents a genteel religious idealism; in the year 1200, he argued, the forces of faith and science were in perfect balance. The dynamo is the impersonal “force” to which human beings now bow down, a motorized source of power that has displaced man from the center of things. It was, he claimed, the ideal image for the age of industrial mechanization in which science and engineering led to greater and greater material wealth. Indeed, money was the new gospel: so Andrew Carnegie argued in The Gospel of Wealth (1899), a book in which questionable schemes to achieve material success were justified by charity to the masses. Two other novels of the 1880s that were frequently paired and contrasted with Adams’s Democracy were John Milton Hay’s anti-union novel, The Bread-Winners (1883–4) and an attack on Big Business by H. F. Keenan, The Money-Makers (1885). A clearer example of the congruent conflict of gentility and muckraking is found in Booth Tarkington’s The Gentleman from Indiana (1899). When the owner-editor of a small newspaper exposes local corruption, he is attacked by a 286

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gang called the “White Caps” and presumed murdered. But he is not dead; he returns, eventually becomes a US Congressman, conquers his old enemies, and promotes a new era of ethics and honesty. As an expos
e, the book is regarded as rather too genteel and banal – the very qualities that brought Tarkington popular success.8 The American historical romancer, Winston Churchill (1871–1947), is not usually associated directly with either the genteel or the muckraking writers. His carefully researched romances, Richard Carvel (1899), The Crisis (1901), and The Crossing (1904) are better known. They were all best sellers. He began his career, however, with a satire, The Celebrity (1898), putatively aimed at Richard Harding Davis. With Coniston (1906), set in the thirty years before the end of the Civil War, he began to turn more directly to political issues. Mr. Crewe’s Career (1908) portrays the conflict of principles and personal desires in its story of the railroad’s control of New Hampshire politics. A Modern Chronicle (1910) takes up the question of divorce. The Inside of the Cup (1912) focuses on the inability of religion to deal with modern social issues. A Far Country (1915), through the allegorical story of a Midwestern “prodigal son” in the 1880s, argues the need for reforms in business and politics in the Robber Baron era. Robert Herrick (1868–1938) wrote several novels focused on modern industrialization and the corruption of the aspiring middle class by what Howells in A Hazard of New Fortunes calls rampant “commercialism.” The Common Lot (1904) tells the story of the greed of an architect, who, to enhance profits, cuts corners on his designs, creating unsafe structures. The Memoirs of an American Citizen (1905) is an ambivalent first-person account of “success” as the achievement of wealth and power and little else. In Together (1908), the study of several marriages reveals the tribulations of contemporary economic pressures and the political forces behind them. A Life for a Life (1910) weaves together themes of money, ambition, and sexual desire. One Woman’s Life (1913) analyzes a social climber. Clark’s Field (1914) analyzes the effects of money on an orphan girl who inherits a tract of farmland made more valuable by urban expansion; her thoughtless indulgence after becoming rich reveals the emptiness of such a life. Herrick’s collection of short stories, The Master of the Inn (1908), presents the integration of physical work, contemplation, and physical and mental tranquility as antidotes to modern malaise. Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885) is still celebrated for her expos
es of the treatment of Native Americans by the US government. Her interest in the oppression of Native Americans intensified after hearing a lecture in 1879 by Chief Standing Bear on the enforced removal of the Ponca tribe from the DakotaNebraska territories. In 1881, she published A Century of Dishonor, in which she provided instances of treaty violations with different tribes, describing in personal terms the harsh treatment of Native Americans. Ramona (1884) 287

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presents an interesting problem in genre: as an “Indian” love story, it is both a protest novel and a romance. The Indian Appropriations Act of 1871 had put Native Americans in the “custodianship” of the federal government. While in Southern California, Jackson learned of government appropriation of California Indian lands guaranteed them in the Mexican–American War. It was at this time that she heard the story of Ramona, which she turned into a phenomenally successful novel, popular with both adults and young people – though it had only minimal effect on Indian rights. Students who read the book expecting a muckraking expos
e are surprised to find a largely genteel romance.

“Muckraking” in Journalism and Fiction The Gilded Age may have given the era of Big Business its most pungent label, but the novel did not deal specifically with mass industrialization and the concomitant increase in indifference to individual and public welfare embodied in the American factory system. In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt applied the label muckraker to the socially conscious investigative reporters and fiction writers of the preceding fifteen years or so – a time of increasing public exposure of governmental and commercial corruption and amorality. He adapted the word from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), in which, as he pointed out, the “Man with a Muck-rake” is so busy raking up filth that he does not see the heavenly golden crown above him. Roosevelt thought “muckraking” could be beneficial so long as the reporting was truthful and the writer kept an eye on what was good in a democratic republic. Although the writers involved did not at first like the label, they came to accept it as a badge of honor. The term ultimately acquired a generally favorable connotation as a concise description of the honest effort to expose the politically corrupt and the morally wrong.9 Applying the term somewhat retrospectively, some literary historians see Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910) as the first Muckraker novelist in America, pointing to her 1861 novella, Life in the Iron Mills, which is an odd mixture of aesthetic romanticism and grim reality. Her reform novel, Margaret Howarth: A Story of Today (1862), is overtly political and feminist; it tells the story of a young woman who, abandoned by her lover, is forced to work in a wool mill in Indiana. Waiting for the Verdict (1868) deals with the question of how freed slaves can be reintegrated into American society. John Andross (1874) deals with the corruption of the Grant administration, in particular the liquor licensing laws. Taking many of its details from newspaper accounts, the story involves “Boss” William Tweed’s corrupt New York Whiskey Ring during the Grant administration. 288

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More in the satiric mode of The Gilded Age are the two political fictions by J. W. De Forest, Honest John Vane and Playing the Mischief. These two novels were both published in 1875 shortly after The Gilded Age, a work they emulate. De Forest is not usually associated with the Muckrakers, but both of these novels are satiric expos
es of the corruption of Washington, DC. The ironically titled Honest John Vane is a satire on political corruption revolving around the Cr
edit Mobilier railroad scandal. In Playing the Mischief, De Forest’s overall target is the uncontrolled payment of bogus reparation claims during the Grant administration. In 1892, Hamlin Garland published in rapid succession three novels on political corruption and the problems of the American farmer: A Spoil of Office (1892) supports the platform of the Populist Party and dramatizes the development of the Grange and the Farmer’s Alliance; Jason Edwards: Average Man (1892) advocates Henry George’s so-called “Single Tax” theories; and A Member of the Third House (1892) explores the political indebtedness of Washington, DC to the railroads. Like Theodore Dreiser, many if not most of the Muckrakers were newspaper reporters or got their start in journalism. Frequently, the hallmark of their writing is a reportorial style in the tradition of Balzac and Zola (with requisite melodramatic purple passages). One of the most prominent of these Muckraker novelists is David Graham Phillips (pseud., “John Graham,” 1867–1911), who in his time was known as the “American Balzac.” As a journalist, he wrote a series of muckraking articles, some of which were published as The Reign of Guilt (1905) and “The Treason of the Senate: Aldrich, the Head of it All” (1906). In Treason of the Senate, he charged Senator Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island with conflict of interest as a corporate executive. It was primarily this book, according to historians, that caused Theodore Roosevelt to make his Muckraker speech. Phillips was a prolific writer; before his premature death, he ground out nearly two dozen novels, most of which address major social problems. The first was The Great God Success (1901), which deals with business and sex. Others of Phillips’s “problem novels” include: The Golden Fleece (1903), a picture of a European fortune hunter; The Master-Rogue (1903), self-revelation of a financial tycoon; The Cost (1904), deception in marriage, business, and politics; The Plum Tree (1905), the life of a political boss; The Deluge (1905), sex and business on Wall Street; The Light-Fingered Gentry (1907), an account of insurance frauds; The Second Generation (1907), a story of conflict between virtuous labor and ill-gotten wealth; and The Price She Paid (1912), the story of woman’s quest for self-sufficiency.10 In addition to the themes of money, business, romance, and sex, many of his novels deal with the changing role of women in a retrograde society. His most famous novel, Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise, is the story of a young woman from the country who falls into prostitution after her aunt and 289

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uncle, having been told she is illegitimate, ban her from their home. It was first published in 1908–9, but suppressed as immoral; it was reissued in 1917 after receiving praise from Edith Wharton, who recognized the book as legitimate social criticism.

The era of great magazines and newspapers Mention should also be made of the major magazines and newspapers and some of the most significant of the many nonfiction reformist works. The Nation was one of the earliest of the liberal magazines, founded at the end of the Civil War by Edward Lawrence Godkin, a champion of Civil Service reform. The most influential of the later magazines included Cosmopolitan, Collier’s, Everybody’s, McClure’s, and the American; for a while, the most influential reformist newspaper was the New York World. Several of these magazines and newspapers were later bought by syndicates like the Hearst organization and trivialized (Cosmopolitan, for example, founded in 1886, was bought in 1905 and made into a fashionable ladies’ magazine). McClure’s Magazine was arguably the most important and is generally credited with having initiated the muckraking movement. McClure’s was founded in 1893 by John S. Phillips with Samuel Sidney McClure as its editor-in-chief. Although his reputation was to fade, S. S. McClure’s place in the history of American journalism is secure. McClure’s published article after article exposing the pervasive corruption in American society: urban blight, crooked insurance companies, railroad frauds, and the unfair practices of Big Oil. These articles were written by the best investigative journalists of the day. Ida Tarbell wrote the blockbuster expos
e, History of the Standard Oil Company (1904). Lincoln Steffens produced not only The Shame of the Cities (1904), but also Struggle for Self-Government (1906) and The Upbuilders (1909). Ray Stannard Baker (the biographer of President Woodrow Wilson) was more moderate. But his early articles, like those written for the Chicago Record in the 1890s on the Pullman workers’ strike, and the march of unemployed workers on Washington, DC were hard-hitting and sympathetic – as were his articles on the coal miners’ strike collected as The Right to Work (McClure’s, 1903). His book, Following the Color Line (1908), explored the deep racial split in the new American Dream of a truly democratic republic. But McClure became problematic for these writers. In 1906, Phillips, Tarbell, Baker (now writing under the pseudonym “David Grayson”), and Steffens decided to leave the magazine and found a new and more aggressive one: the American Magazine, which became as influential as McClure’s. 290

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A handful of other key nonfiction works of the period should be mentioned. Henry George in Progress and Poverty (1879), already referenced several times in the present volume, argued for redistribution of wealth. Henry Demarest Lloyd, in The Story of a Great Monopoly (Atlantic Monthly, 1881) and Wealth Against Common-Wealth (1894), laid the ground for a history of Standard Oil’s economic manipulations prior to Ida Tarbell’s expos
e. Nellie Bly (Elizabeth J. Cochran) in Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887) exposed insane asylums by pretending to be mad and spending a week in the Blackwell’s Island Asylum for Women.11 The titles of Jacob Riis’s works, How the Other Half Lives (1890) and The Children of the Poor (1892), are self-explanatory. Thorstein Veblen, in Theory of Business Enterprise (1899) and Theory of the Leisure Class (1904), attacked the value systems of the rich and developed the idea of the “conspicuous display” of wealth. Samuel Hopkins Adams’s The Great American Fraud (1906) exposed the scams rife in the patent medicine industry. These are some of the muckraking critics of American society that form the milieu of The Jungle (1906) by Upton Sinclair, one of the most militant of all the Muckrakers.

Muckraking in the American Jungle: The Persistence of Naturalism Upton Sinclair is remembered today almost exclusively for The Jungle, but he produced over ninety popular and influential volumes. Other of his earlier works attacking the corruption of monopolies and various corporations include King Midas (1901) and The Metropolis (1908). In several works subsequent to The Jungle, he took on the mining and oil industries. During his long career, Sinclair was involved in many political activities. In 1934, he unsuccessfully stood for election as Governor of California under the banner EPIC (“End Poverty In California”), an organization he founded. Although a socialist, he criticized any organization or practice that was corrupt or unfair or suspect – including aspects of socialism. His works of social protest made him one of the best-known American writers in Europe. Historians have estimated that The Jungle at one time was the most widely read American book in the world. It is sometimes called a work of ameliorative naturalism. If it is, it is ameliorative in the sense that it holds out a degree of hope for social reform and presents a character who, although trapped by socioeconomic circumstance, is not totally ground down at the end. The Jungle is an expos
e of several kinds of corporate and public malpractice, focusing primarily on the meat-packing industry. According to Sinclair, his 291

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intent was to create sympathy for the downtrodden factory worker and support for the American Socialist Movement; but it was the vivid descriptions of the grisly abuses in animal food production (such as grinding poisoned rats into hamburger and sausage) that outraged and frightened the public.12 The book became an immediate best seller and its celebrity influenced the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Sinclair later declared that he had aimed at the nation’s heart, but had hit it in its belly.

“Hog-squeal of the universe” One of the most powerful moments in the book occurs in Chapter 3 when the emigrant protagonist, Jurgis Rudkus, first reports to a huge meat-packing factory for work. He sees more than a square mile of pens, filled with cattle. Jurgis is initially proud to be a part of this vast enterprise, “a cog in this marvellous machine.” The men go into the hog-killing building, which is almost completely mechanized, though tended by burly unthinking men indifferent to the shrieks of the animals. Despite the hellishness of it all, it is “all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated.” Indeed, even dim-witted men like Jurgis “could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe.” The ensuing passage is a classic of American naturalism.

............................................................................................... Each one of these hogs was a separate creature. Some were white hogs, some were black; some were brown, some were spotted; some were old, some were young; some were long and lean, some were monstrous. And each of them had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart’s desire; each was full of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. And trusting and strong in faith he had gone about his business, the while a black shadow hung over him and a horrid Fate waited in his pathway. Now suddenly it had swooped upon him, and had seized him by the leg. Relentless, remorseless, it was; all his protests, his screams, were nothing to it – it did its cruel will with him, as if his wishes, his feelings, had simply no existence at all; it cut his throat and watched him gasp out his life. And now was one to believe that there was nowhere a god of hogs, to whom this hog-personality was precious, to whom these hog-squeals and agonies had a meaning? Who would take this hog into his arms and comfort him, reward him for his work well done, and show him the meaning of his sacrifice? (Ch. 3)

...............................................................................................

The passage concludes ironically; as Jurgis turns to go, he mutters, “I’m glad I’m not a hog!”

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Welcome to the American Dream As members of a Lithuanian emigrant family try one job after another, the working conditions of not only the meat-packing industry, but also fertilizer plants, machine shops, steel mills, and street and sewer construction, are revealed one by one. The emigrants are not romanticized or idealized; poor, uneducated, and not very intelligent, they tend toward gullibility, alcoholism, freakishness, violence, and criminality – characters much in the manner of Zola and the de Goncourt brothers, or of Frank Norris in McTeague. Jurgis Rudkus has emigrated to America with his father, Antanas, and the family of his betrothed, Ona, whose father has just died. Besides Ona are her orphaned cousin, Marija; her stepmother, Elzbieta, and her six children; and her stepmother’s brother, Jonas. When they arrive in Chicago, a city noted for the icy winter winds that blow off the cold waters of gigantic Lake Michigan, they are almost penniless – and unprepared for winter. Antanas tries to find work, but the old man is too weak for most of the laborintensive jobs available. The younger people, however, are able to find work in the stockyards. Inspired by the American Dream, the immigrant family makes its first mistake. They decide to pool resources and buy a small house rather than rent rooms. They are immediately taken advantage of by an unscrupulous real estate agent, who commits them to an exorbitant mortgage on a decaying house. Meanwhile, old Antanas finds work in the stockyards by paying a kickback to one of the foremen. Ona also finds work at the plant and begins to save money for her wedding. Elzbieta lies about the age of her oldest son, Stanislovas, so that he too can work at the packing plant. Then, succumbing to damp working conditions, Antanas develops tuberculosis and dies. During the winter, the health of the entire family deteriorates, partly because their flimsy house offers little protection from the cold winds of the Great Lakes. Summer brings wet, muggy, blanketing heat that spawns swarms of flies and mosquitoes. After losing one job, Marija obtains another as a trimmer of beef parts, which exposes her to severe knife-cuts and consequent blood poisoning, a common occurrence at the plant. Before the ensuing winter, Ona has a baby, and Jurgis severely injures his ankle and cannot work in the plant. Two of Elzbieta’s children quit school to sell newspapers. Toward the middle of the narrative, Jurgis can find only low-paying unskilled work at a fertilizer plant, where noxious fumes disable workers after only a few years. Ona is already beginning to show symptoms of early tuberculosis. A dispirited Jurgis now finds that drink is a “spectre following him” everywhere, and he sinks into alcoholism.

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Ona’s tubercular cough grows worse – and she is pregnant again. She is also behaving strangely, and Jurgis, suspicious, confronts her. This confrontation occurs exactly at the middle of the book (Ch. 15 of 31), a major pivot point. Ona haltingly explains that her boss, an Irishman named Connor, has been making sexual advances to her for some time – finally persuading her that she could make some desperately needed extra money if she would give in to him. Recently, however, he has tired of her; he finds her “ugly” now that she is pregnant. Jurgis tracks down Connor and beats him severely. Sitting in jail, Jurgis at first feels like “a wild beast that has glutted itself.” As he mulls over his situation, he concludes that society is unjust, even in America. It’s Christmas and Jurgis is warm and dry in jail, while outside his “wife might be dying, his baby might be starving, his whole family might be perishing in the cold” (Ch. 16). Jurgis “could not say that it was the thing that men have called ‘the system’ that was crushing him to the earth. . . . He only knew that he was wronged, and that the world had wronged him; that the law, that society, with all its powers, had declared itself his foe.” The dream of America can break your heart. These new attitudes are confirmed when he is released from jail. Unable to meet the mortgage payments, what’s left of his family has had to move. He finds Ona in a cheap boarding house, in the pangs of childbirth. Returning from a desperate search for a midwife, Jurgis finds Ona and the baby dead. He dedicates himself to providing for his son, Antanas, named for his grandfather (metaphorically implying a cycle of entrapment). He finally finds work at a steel mill some distance away. To save money, he rents a room near the mill and sees his boy only on weekends. While Jurgis is at work, little Antanas drowns in front of their house. The American Dream is becoming a nightmare. Jurgis flees Chicago for the freedom of the West, where he becomes a migratory farm worker. Because he is working outside in the clean air and sun, instead of in close quarters infested with disease and blood and offal, he regains his health. He also realizes that he is not alone; there are thousands of people in similar situations. After a time, he returns to Chicago where he finds work digging sewer tunnels under the streets. A severe shoulder injury releases him from the feces-infested urban underworld; but after his hospital treatment, he is turned out onto the city streets as a crippled beggar. After a bungled theft and fight, Jurgis is arrested. In prison, he is befriended by a safe-cracker, Jack Duane, who introduces Jurgis to the Chicago demimonde. As a petty thief, Jurgis finally achieves a modicum of the American Dream of economic success. When Jurgis hears that the workers at the meat-packing plant are beginning to unionize, he sees an opportunity. The factory owners reject the workers’ demands; the workers call a strike; and Jurgis goes to work as a scab. Encountering his wife’s seducer, Connor, Jurgis pummels him; and once again 294

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he has to flee to avoid prison. Penniless, unemployed, and starving, he discovers Marija working in a house of prostitution as “Lithuanian Mary” (Ch. 28). He asks her for money to help him find work. Marija gives him only a quarter.

Second coming: Transitory triumph of socialism After a day of “wandering here and there among factories and warehouses without success,” Jurgis follows a crowd into a public hall, where a free lecture is to be given – and falls asleep. But he awakes to find an intense young woman in the seat beside him. At first, he is confused and apprehensive: “There was a faint quivering of her nostrils; and now and then she would moisten her lips with feverish haste. Her bosom rose and fell as she breathed . . .” (Ch. 28). She is responding to an inspiring speech by a fiery Socialist reformer advocating a new political program. The speech is both a summons to a spiritual awakening and a political call to arms. It is a secular sermon, couched in pulpit oratory. Jurgis himself is carried away in a flood of emotion. It is “not merely the man’s words, the torrent of his eloquence” that wash over him. He feels in the “presence” of a Messiah. All that Jurgis “had ever felt in his whole life seemed to come back to him at once, and with one new emotion, hardly to be described.” Thus Jurgis joins his fellow discontents in the Socialist Movement. Through them he finds a socialist employer, and through him finds respectable work in honest menial tasks. Identifying himself fully with the Socialists, seeing himself now not merely as an outsider but as a legitimate social rebel, Jurgis dedicates himself to political activism. He will help to make America the Land of Promise after all. For some readers, the final message does not provide an adequately integrated conclusion. The last scene suggests political wish-fulfillment. It begins with tabulations of Socialist victories in the Chicago area elections of 1903. The city of Chicago is leading the whole country in a new direction: “it had set a new standard for the party, it had shown the workingmen the way!” (Ch. 31). This ringing claim is spoken by an “orator upon the platform,” a young man, “hungrylooking, full of fire.” To Jurgis, he seems “the very spirit of the revolution.” The old politicos, the young man avers, will try to reassert themselves, but they will be revealed as “sham reformers.” The Socialist party will strip them naked, and “outraged workingmen” will flock to the Socialist banner. It was not the professed hopefulness of the conclusion that was the most resonant for socially conscious readers in 1906, but rather the vivid indictments earlier in the book of the insensitive cruelty of the machine-like meat-packing industry and its indifference to the public good. Moreover, Sinclair underscores an unnoticed multi-corporate collusion against the common welfare.

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Throughout the early description of the meat factory (Ch. 3), its revolting physical foulness is contrasted and integrated with the smooth efficient assembly-line machinery of its operation. The entire plant is self-contained and self-sufficient. Although inhumane and filled with hidden disease, it is an economic wonder – is it not? After all, the plant employs thirty thousand men and supports another “two hundred and fifty thousand people in the neighborhood” and “indirectly a half million.” It sends “its products to every country in the civilized world” and furnishes “the food for no less than thirty million people!” The chapter ends with a sarcastic comment on the naivet
e of working dupes like Jurgis. In working for the Company, he had begun to feel a part of something larger and more valuable than himself alone. It’s almost a religious experience. “So guileless was he, and ignorant of the nature of business,” that he does not realize that a “rival” company is really working in concert with the one he works for. They are actually required “to be deadly rivals” by the protocols of capitalism and by the recent anti-monopoly laws. It’s an Orwellian sham. The smooth covert economic machinery of Corporate America is designed to maintain the status quo of the impoverished worker and the wealthy master – forever. Meanwhile, the general public feeds on their offal.

Notes 1. For a useful discussion of the literary backgrounds of the age, aimed at the student and general reader, see Abel, “The Gilded Age,” MAR, 1963, 1–9; also see Dawidoff (1992). 2. They are vaguely modeled on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, without their specific symbolism of romanticism and realism. Sellers also resembles Dickens’s Mr Micawber in David Copperfield (1849–50). The Gilded Age provides an elaborate example of a favorite device of Mark Twain’s fiction: “twinning.” Several of the characters are symbolic “twins,” and many of the plot episodes are mirrors of one another. See Gillman (1989). Also note the pun in the name Mark Twain (two). Sellers’s first name underwent several changes. Beriah Sellers is called Mulberry Sellers in a stage version of the novel produced in 1874; he is also called Mulberry Sellers in Twain’s sequel to the novel, The American Claimant (1892). See Rasmussen (1995), 166–176, for an extended synopsis. 3. Lamb (ACAF, 2009a), 473. Sometimes the novel is seen as almost a roman a clef, with the characters representing actual persons: both prominent (or notorious) political figures and personal friends and relations of Samuel Clemens.

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4. Clemens wrote the first twelve chapters and Warner the next eleven; the next forty chapters alternate the two story lines in clusters of one to three or four by each author filling out his individual plot. Some chapters were written together, and almost all were revised by each other. 5. On sentimentalism, see Camfield (1994) and ACAF (2009), 53–76; cf. references in Ch. 10 of the present volume. 6. D. Wilson (1967); see Dawidoff (cited note 1); cf. Ch. 13 on Edith Wharton. For a wide-ranging essay on “class” in American fiction, see C. Wilson (ACAF, 2009). 7. Along with The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1919); also see Esther – A Novel (1884), a story of intellectual doubt. 8. Tarkington (1869–1946) was a prolific writer; some of his works reflect his two years in the Indiana House of Representatives; his novels featuring young people were especially popular, notably Penrod (1914) and Seventeen (1916). He won a Pulitzer Prize for his portrait of several generations of a pseudo-genteel family, The Magnificent Ambersons (1918). 9. See Filler (1976 [1939]). In Britain, the word implied mere sensationalism and scandalmongering (and still does). For a different aspect of Roosevelt, muckraking, and regionalism (including Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and even W. D. Howells), see Robisch (ACAF, 2009), esp. 183–186. 10. Other of Phillips’s novels that are occasionally mentioned in literary history include: Old Wives for New (1908); The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig (1909), The Hungry Heart (1909), The Husband’s Story (1910), The Conflict (1911), George Helm (posth., 1912). 11. See reference to Gillman’s “Yellow Wallpaper” in Ch. 12. 12. Sinclair also includes the story of cooking-room workers falling into vats and being processed as lard. The genesis of the book was the violent put-down of a workers’ strike in 1904.

See also Aaron (1951); Bremer (1992); Budd (1962, 1983); Camfield (2003); Cardwell (1991); Carter (1954); Conder (1970); Cowie (RAN, 1951); De Forest (1981); Decker (1990); DeVoto (1932); Dowling (2007); Filler (1976 [1939]); Fisher (1985); Gandal (1997); Geismar (1953); Goodman (2003); Habegger (1989); S. M. Harris (1991); Hofstadter (1959); Holloway (1971); Horton and Edwards (1952; chs. 9–10); Hough (1959); G. Jones (1999); H. Kaplan (1981); Light (1965); Lindberg (1975); Lyon (1970); Michaels (1987); Montgomery (1998); Nettels (1998, 1997); Petrie (2005); Pfaelzer (1996); Pizer (1984 [1966], 1993, 1995); Quinn (1936); Rowe (1976); Salomon (1961); W. Taylor (1942); B. Thomas (1997); J. L. Thomas (1983); Trachtenberg (1982); Turner (1966); C. Wilson (1985); Ziff (1966). 297

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Additional muckraking works Edward Eggleston, The Mystery of Metropolisville (1873); David Ross Locke, A Paper City (1878); Thomas S. Dension, An Iron Crown (1885); John T. Trowbridge, Farnell’s Folly (1885); George T. Dowling, The Wreckers (1886); Martin A. Foran, The Other Side (1886); H. H. Boyesen, The Mammon of Uprighteousness (1891), The Golden Calf (1892), and The Social Strugglers (1893); Hamlin Garland, A Member of the Third House (1892); F. Hopkinson Smith, Tom Grogan (1896); Harold Frederic, The Market Place (1899); Margaret Sherwood, Henry Worthington, Idealist (1899); Robert Herrick, Memoirs of an American Citizen (1905). Henry Blake Fuller’s satiric stories of cultural pretensions in Chicago social life include The Cliff-Dwellers (1893), With the Procession (1895), and Under the Skylights (1901).

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Chapter 17

What Is An American? Regionalism and Race

The Civil War brought a sharpened awareness that the nation was a collective of disparate regions and peoples rather than the ideal vision of one America. Moreover, the frontier was ever moving, and what once was the West for the Eastern seaboard dweller became the Midwest, beyond which stretched the Far West. With exploration and settlement, more regional divisions became recognizable; and the values and worldviews of radically different cultures commingled and conflicted. In nineteenth-century America, assimilation was taking place, but the process remained incomplete and fragmented. A favorite critical generalization about this aspect of American culture and literature is that all realism is “regional.” Although that may be nominally true of realism, the reverse is not; a good deal of American regionalism entails romance, fantasy, superstition, and the supernatural. In order to get a sense of this large field, we need first to lay out the historical background for questions of American “identity” in terms of the conventional definitions and implications of “regionalism” and to address the putative distinction between “regionalism” and “local color.”1

Becoming “American”: The Myth of the Frontier The “Frontier Thesis” was famously articulated by Frederick Jackson Turner in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893, 1894). But the idea of the freedom of the frontier and the American “frontier spirit” goes back to the late enlightenment and pre-romantic periods. The classic statement on Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson. Ó 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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the process of becoming an American is found in Letters from an American Farmer (1782) by Michel Guillaume Jean de Cr
evecoeur (or J. Hector St John de Cr
evecoeur). His romantic notion of the transformation of a European into an American is connected to the land – specifically the idea of the frontier. The intellectual and social aspects of the mythic drama of the frontier are explored in the third installment of Letters from an American Farmer under the title “What Is an American?” By the mid-nineteenth century, American romantic nationalism had turned the Puritan providential mindset into the political expansionist slogan of “Manifest Destiny.” In this context, the word manifest is a religious term suggesting the actualization of the divine in the physical world as part of a preordained plan. Writing in the expansionist newspaper, the United States Magazine and Democratic Review (July 1845), John L. O’Sullivan, asserted that it is “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our multiplying millions.” For Cr
evecoeur, sixty years before, the traditional American “providential” mythos is less visible, and his focus is primarily political and socioeconomic. Cr
evecoeur divides the varyingly “civilized” territories created by the everwestering frontier into three areas – bordered in the west by what he calls a “desperate” edge. The first area contains the Eastern Seaboard cities, which are more like Europe. The second is the “intermediate space” of the “middle settlements”: rural Farm America. The third encompasses the newest settlements at the edge of “the great woods.” Beyond is the “extended line of frontiers where the last settlers dwell.” There, remote from “the power of example and the check of shame,” are to be found the “off-casts” of society. Some will prosper; others will “recede even farther”; they are “a kind of forlorn hope.”2 What about nonwhite, non-Europeans? The reality of the American Dream for them is very different. In Letter 9, Cr
evecoeur gives a brief but disturbing picture of a savagely beaten black slave in a cage hanging from a tree. His eyes have been pecked out by birds, and he is covered by insects sucking his bloody wounds and eating at his ripped and mangled flesh. Accused of murdering the overseer of a plantation, he has been caged without food or water for two days when Cr
evecoeur encounters him. The horrible picture is an icon of the dark side of the white American ideal of dominion. The undeniable entanglement of the “peculiar institution” of slavery with a religiously imbued sense of American providential destiny lurks beneath the ringing slogans of liberty, democracy, and manifest destiny. Huckleberry Finn’s flight from “sivilization” to the “Territory ahead of the rest” symbolically captures the apprehension that the “westward course of empire” in America is not necessarily progress toward Jefferson’s “empire for liberty.” The mythos of the Great American Novel should be read against this background. 300

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Regionalism versus Local Color John W. De Forest saw the Great American Novel as somehow conveying an overall national sensibility through particularities of region, state, city, village, families, and individuals. This theme runs through the local color and regionalist movements that proliferated after the Civil War and reached a zenith in the 1880s and 1890s. Regionalism sounds straightforward enough but turns out to be a surprisingly erratic term. Typically, regionalism implies not an urban but a rural location; and the word strongly connotes a writer who focuses on his or her native region. But a writer may live in more than one place and become attuned to the spirit of more than one place. Among such writers are Henry James, Edith Wharton, Frank Norris, W. D. Howells, Hamlin Garland, and Kate Chopin. New Hampshire-born Constance Fenimore Woolson’s works of the 1880s included several story collections and novels about the South, where she lived for a time. The best known are East Angels (1886), in which a Northerner comes to the rescue of the belle of a failing Florida plantation, and Jupiter Lights (1889) in which sisters-in-law represent conflicting Northern and Southern cultures. The popular writer of stories with a “surprise ending,” O. Henry (William Sydney Porter), born in North Carolina, wrote stories set in Honduras (Cabbages and Kings, 1904), Texas and Tennessee, and New York (The Four Million, 1906, the collection for which he is most famous). Massachusettsborn Horatio Alger (1834–1899) starts his “Pluck and Luck” rags-to-riches novels with a bootblack in New York City in Ragged Dick (1867). New Yorkborn Bret Harte moved to San Francisco about the age of seventeen and is best remembered today as the author of Western, mainly California, stories, including the novella M’Liss (rev. 1873) and the stories in The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1870), which included the celebrated “The Outcasts of Poker Flat.” Perhaps the preeminent example of regional syncretism is Mark Twain. Sam Clemens grew up in Missouri, along the banks of the Mississippi River, the setting of his most famous works, Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1884–5), of his antiracist novella Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), and of his semidisenchanted autobiographical reminiscence Life on the Mississippi (1885). But he went west as a young man, to Nevada and California, and even to Hawaii; his first literary success was with the Sierra Nevada stories of The Celebrated Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867). Leaving the West, he headed for the Eastern seaboard, married, and settled in Hartford, Connecticut. While in Connecticut, he returned to the subject of the Western territories with great success in Roughing It (1872). As a world traveler, he described Europe and the Holy Lands from a Midwestern-Western point of view in works like Innocents 301

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Abroad (1869). In addition to repeatedly giving lectures around the globe, he lived in Europe for extended periods. Yet he is perhaps our greatest “regional” writer, paradoxically both incorporating and transcending region.

Distinguishing regionalism and local color Attempts to differentiate between the idea of the “local” and the “regional” have been made by a variety of critics. One suggestive but not always accurate distinction suggests a difference between an “outside” view of a region and its people and an “inside” one. In their popular anthology of American Women Regionalists (1992), Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse put the distinction simply:

............................................................................................... The phrase “local colorist” (which implies a literary analogy to painters of so-called “genre” scenes) refers to numerous post-Civil War writers, including, for example, Sherwood Bonner, Alice Brown, George Washington Cable, Hamlin Garland, Bret Harte, Ruth McEnery Stuart, Mark Twain, and Constance Fenimore Woolson. These writers depicted “local” scenes . . . from the perspective of a narrator defined as superior to and outside of the region of the fiction . . . often to entertain and satisfy the curiosity of late-nineteenth-century urban readers in Boston and New York.3

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Local color thus supposedly entails an outsider, usually urban, who describes the life and surroundings of a presumed simpler rural people. Frequently, the main narrative is contained within a frame that sets up the contrast between the frame narrator and the local inhabitants.4 If a characterized narrator is truly local, the term regionalism tends to be preferred. This distinction is a little fuzzy around the edges, and not everyone observes it. The word regionalism is often used as the more general term that includes the sub-distinction of local color, just as regionalism itself is sometimes seen as a subcategory of realism.5 An older concept of local color views it as less legitimate than “regionalism proper,” and sees literary regionalism developing in four stages: “sectionalism, the local-color mania, regionalism proper, and the folk revival” (REAmL, 946). This older notion of local color as a lesser term receives an additional twist from Fetterley and Pryse and critics like Eric J. Sundquist. Sundquist has suggested that regional realism is used as the honorific term for the writings of regionalists possessing economic or political power (white males) and that local color is often a dismissive term used for writers farther from the power base (women, 302

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immigrants, African Americans). Noting the explosion of women regionalist writers after the Civil War, Fetterley and Pryse try to connect the distinction between local color and regionalism to issues of gender; but other critics have found the distinctions inconsistently applicable, and their genre distinction remains a little obscure.6 In fact, one of the celebrated nineteenth-century proponents of American regionalism, Hamlin Garland (1860–1940), called it all “local color.”

Hamlin Garland: Local Color, Regionalism, and Veritism “Local Color in Art” is the title of Chapter 5 of Garland’s Crumbling Idols: Twelve Essays on Art . . . (1894). Here, in italics, he writes: “Local color in a novel means that it has such quality of texture and back-ground that it could not have been written in any other place or by any one else than a native.” Garland’s discourse is somewhat fragmented and repetitive, but coherent overall. He asserts that subservience to traditional, old-fashioned ideas about the greatness of art and literature dries up originality and creativity; and the kind of criticism practiced by old men, who love old things, hampers the development of art. From this pronouncement, he jumps to the idea that newer literary criticism sees that “local color means national character.” Insisting that local color is “natural and unstrained art,” Garland assaults the notion of the picturesque (in the sense of “genre” painting, whether typical and representative of a region or atypically quaint and odd). Local color means “more than a forced study” of scenery. The writer of local color “naturally carries it with him.” Local color is the “vital charm of individual peculiarity.” Chapter 6, “The Local Novel,” deals with the sections of America and emphasizes the emergence of a new African American literature out of the New South. In the North as a whole, the novel will continue to “delineate the intimate life and speech of every section of our enormous and widely scattered republic.” It will portray “the changing, assimilating races,” the “drama of their swift adjustment to new conditions.” In the West, “California, New Mexico, Idaho, Utah, Oregon, each wonderful location in our Nation of Nations will yet find its native utterance.” Moreover, “each age” is “its own best interpreter.” To the artist “who sees that difference, not similarity, is the vitalizing quality, there is no sorrow at change . . .” The “fiction of the future will express these changes.” Thus to “the modern writer” the present is “the vital theme,” not the past. The truth of our present is the gateway to the future: the “point of view of the modern writer is that of the veritist, or truth stater” (my italics). 303

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Vernacular fiction The veritist novel will constitute “a literature from the plain people.” This new local fiction will be colloquial – not “exclusively in the dialects,” but certainly in “the actual speech of the people of each locality.” In asserting that the new regional realism – veritism – will be vernacular, Garland identifies an important feature of much regionalist fiction: the imitation or reproduction of local speech patterns. Dialect indicates regional-social variations on a given language, usually not so extensive as to make a regional variant incomprehensible to other speakers of the language. Admiration for the actual language that people use every day lies behind the often quoted remark of Hemingway (in The Green Hills of Africa) that all “American” literature begins with a single book – Huckleberry Finn. As Walter Blair makes clear in Native American Humor, the vernacular speech and humor associated with Mark Twain derives from pre-Civil War Old Southwest humorists like Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Henry Clay Lewis, Johnson J. Hooper, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, George Washington Harris, and others.7 Blair also includes pre-Civil War New England regionalists and writers of vernacular fiction like Seba Smith, Thomas Chandler Haliburton, and James Russell Lowell. Later nineteenth-century regional and local color humorists include Charles Farrar Browne (as “Artemus Ward”), David Ross Locke (as “Petroleum V. Nasby”), Charles Henry Smith (as “Bill Arp”), Henry W. Shaw (as “Josh Billings”), Edgar Wilson Nye (as “Bill Nye”), Finley Peter Dunn (creator of “Mr Dooley”), and Bret Harte. Harte is also included in Blair’s section of Local Colorists, along with Edward Eggleston, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Joel Chandler Harris, and Mark Twain.8

Garland and Midwestern realism Garland attempted to portray in indigenous language the hard truth about the American myth of the agrarian ideal, but his iconoclasm was tempered by his belief in the possibilities of democracy, in ameliorative social justice, and in the equality of women. Garland’s brand of realism emphasized not only mimetic detail, but also the philosophical implications of the reality exemplified by the often bitter life of the American farmer in the Midwest. Garland himself was born on a small Wisconsin farm. In 1884, at the age of twenty-four, he went to Boston, where he read natural and social philosophers like Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Henry George, while also absorbing the idealism of Walt Whitman. In 1887 and again in 1889, he revisited Iowa, Wisconsin, and the Dakota territories – where he was shocked by how much he 304

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had forgotten of the poverty and bleakness of Midwestern farm life. Garland’s empathy with the hard life of farming women is often attributed to his recognition of the self-sacrifice, suffering, and endurance of his mother. “Up the Coulee” (a narrow ravine, spelled different ways) recounts the return of Howard McLane to his native Wisconsin after a decade of urban success back East. As he rides the train across Wisconsin, Howard indulges in idealized boyhood memories, feeling pride in “being a Western man.” But he finds the little train station in the La Crosse valley “grimy,” and the town seems “dull and sleepy and squalid.” Howard’s memory of “the beautiful, peaceful valley” is forgotten as a “sickening chill” strikes his soul. He stands for a moment absorbing the “farm scene, with all its sordidness, dullness, triviality, and endless drudgeries”; all “the joy of the homecoming was gone.” Howard has come to pay a debt to his mother and brother. As the story painfully details the contrast between Howard’s wealth and their poverty, the tension between the brothers rises. After a detailed picture of a typical evening of fiddle-playing and gossiping with poverty-stricken friends who have come around to see the prodigal returned, we find Howard pondering “the infinite tragedy of these lives” in terms of one thing “eating” another. In a final meeting with his brother, Grant, Howard apologizes for neglecting the family and offers to help with money. Grant replies: “I’m too old to take a new start. I’m a dead failure. I’ve come to the conclusion that life’s a failure for ninety-nine per cent of us.” Thus ends the story of the life that “the world loves to call ‘peaceful and pastoral.’” A similar situation is portrayed in Garland’s novel, Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly (1895), but with a gender reversal and a different outcome. Critics have been struck by the idea that Garland in this obviously autobiographical fiction seems to have cast a version of himself as the heroine. Growing up on a Midwestern farm, Rose Dutcher discovers that she is clever enough for college. With encouragement from a teacher, she attends the University of Wisconsin. After graduation, Rose leaves for the big city of Chicago in the hope of becoming a published author. Although initially opposed to the idea of marriage because it would impede her career, Rose eventually finds an appropriate partner who pledges a marriage of mutual equality – as Garland did to his wife, the artist, Zulime Taft. The 1891 Main-Travelled Roads (expanded in 1899 and 1922) is Garland’s most famous work. The first edition of Main-Travelled Roads was subtitled Six Mississippi Valley Stories.9 In addition to “Up the Coulee,” the 1891 MainTravelled Roads contained two of Garland’s most highly regarded stories, ““Under the Lion’s Paw” and “The Return of a Private.”10 We noted “Under the Lion’s Paw” earlier (Ch. 5). In “The Return of a Private,” a “sick and emaciated” Civil War veteran returns unheralded to his little hometown in the 305

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upper Midwest to find that his “farm was mortgaged,” a “rascally renter had run away with his machinery,” and “his children needed clothing.” His “war with the South was over, and his fight, his daily running fight, with nature and against the injustice of his fellow men was begun again.” Each of the stories of Main-Travelled Roads contains a short epigraph in italics suggesting the historical theme of the great East–West “road” across America. The epigraph to “Under the Lion’s Paw” catches the spirit of the whole, evoking the curiosity of children as they watched the covered wagons roll past: “Along this main-travelled road trailed an endless line of prairie schooners, coming into sight at the east, and passing out of sight over the swell to the west. We children used to wonder where they were going and why they went.”

Other Midwesterners Hamlin Garland is one kind of quintessential Midwestern writer, but the Midwest was a fluid designation. At one time, states like Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma were the Western frontier. A major Midwestern-Western transplant is Willa Cather (1873–1947), who spent her first nine years in Virginia and her adolescence in Nebraska. She wrote of the Midwest, the West, and the Southeast. Most of her major works appeared after our period; and only one of her three most famous early novels was published before World War I. O Pioneers! (1913) depicts the loneliness of a childhood in Nebraska. The Song of the Lark (1915) describes the attempts of a young woman from a small town in  Colorado to become an opera star; My Antonia (1918) connects a Nebraska woman’s enduring pioneer spirit to the natural regeneration of the land.11 A group of Indiana writers sometimes called the “Hoosier school” include (besides Dreiser) Edward Eggleston (1837–1902), Booth Tarkington (1869– 1946), and Edward Watson Howe (1853–1937). Tarkington was briefly discussed in the last chapter. Howe was a misanthropic newspaperman, remembered for one cynical and pessimistic book, The Story of a Country Town (1882–3). Published a couple of years before Huckleberry Finn, the novel was praised by Mark Twain for reflecting the way people actually talk. The book is credited with being an early realistic deconstruction of the myth of idyllic small-town America and its respectability. Edward Eggleston is best remembered for The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871). A teacher in a one-room country school has to prove himself with the locals, who suspect him (erroneously) of being a “night rider” terrorist. The book features Indiana dialects and typical scenes. The Hoosier Schoolboy (1883) was less popular, being a criticism of the backward conditions of Indiana country schools. Better known is Eggleston’s 306

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The Circuit Rider (1874), in which a young Methodist preacher rides what was then still frontier.

Sarah Orne Jewett and New England The three most celebrated women writers of New England in our time period are Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852– 1930), and Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909). Best known to the general public is of course the Connecticut writer, Stowe, whose pre-Civil War writings include Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Dred (1856), and The Minister’s Wooing (1859). The Pearl of Orr’s Island: A Story of the Coast of Maine was published in 1862. After the war, she published interconnected vernacular sketches and tales in which the central storyteller is the garrulous Sam Lawson: Oldtown Folks (1869), Sam Lawson’s Oldtown Fireside Stories (1872; expanded 1881), and Poganuc People (1878). Stowe’s Pink and White Tyranny (1871) and My Wife and I (1871) are part of a series of “society” novels dealing with the condition of women; the first is social satire; the latter argues for a woman’s right to have a career outside the home. Massachusetts-born Mary E. Wilkins Freeman wrote a number of tales based in the region, including A Humble Romance and Other Stories (1887), A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891), Pembroke (1894), and By the Light of the Soul (1906). We have already looked at “A New England Nun” as an example of “quiet realism” (Ch. 3). As mentioned, another example of the type, celebrated as a character study, a vernacular fiction, and a low-key feminist manifesto, is “The Revolt of Mother.” Sarah Orne Jewett, born in South Berwick, Maine, focused most of her works on women.12 Her first book, Deephaven (1877), contains thirteen localcolor sketches of a decaying New England coastal town, a precursor to The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). It depicts the relationship between two women who wish to emulate the “Ladies of Llangollen.” The once-famous incident involved two ladies of respected Irish families who fled their homes in 1778 in order to avoid being coerced into a nunnery and a marriage, respectively. They led a cultured, intellectual artistic life as a couple for thirty years; their writings idealize rural life and women’s companionship.13 Jewett’s Old Friends and New (1879), also centered around women, contrasts the urban and the rural, with touches of supernaturalism in the nature descriptions. A Country Doctor (1884) features the conflicts facing a woman who wishes to become a physician. The most famous of Jewett’s story collections is A White Heron and Other Stories (1886), the title-story of which is one of the most admired shorter works 307

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of regionalism in nineteenth-century America. A nine-year-old city girl named Sylvia visits her grandmother’s farm next to a forest, where she identifies with the natural environment, especially with a particular tall tree and a beautiful, reclusive white heron. When a handsome young ornithologist and hunter is taken in as a guest in her grandmother’s house, Sylvia feels the stirring of an unaccountable natural attraction to him. But she finds his intention to hunt and stuff the heron repulsive. In the end, she refuses to disclose the location of the bird. The story is much more subtly nuanced and touching than this bare summary suggests.14

Pastoral secrets: The Country of the Pointed Firs The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) is set in the fishing village of “Dunnet” in Maine. The book is often described as “pastoral,” but its pastoralism is actually quite melancholy, even despairing. As Grace Farrell observes, in “Jewett’s world both men and women go crazy – usually from loss and loneliness . . .”15 Not quite a novel, the book is composed of twenty-four interrelated sketches. Although most of them can stand alone, they are also part of a story-sequence recounting an unnamed narrator’s encounters with a series of villagers and her incremental sense of their life stories. The most obvious overarching structure is the circular journey-return motif. The “return” is to something pastoral; but it is in an elegiac mode, an evocation and lament for something dying or disappearing. Alternations of past and present take the form of bereavements and reaffirmations (however muted), and the temporal and the eternal are firmly connected to the physical sense of place. The twenty-four titled (or labeled) chapters may seem almost randomly arranged: in the authorized edition, some have numbered sub-sections, with some in Arabic numbers, some in Roman numerals. But they can be grouped into five parts to highlight these themes – the whole enclosed in an opening and concluding frame. (I have differentiated these segments for clarity of reference; they are not explicitly indicated as segments in her text.) Introductory Frame The book opens in the third-person. This abstract third-person narrator comments that when “one really knows a village like this and its surroundings, it is like becoming acquainted with a single person.” She is looking for a secluded place in which to write. She rents a room from Mrs Almira Todd,

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meeting her for the first time in her quasi-mysterious garden, where the narrative surreptitiously shifts into the first-person. The narrator feels that there something almost occult in the pastoral setting and the village folkways – and she vaguely senses that Mrs Todd has something of the (good) witch about her. Neither young nor old, Mrs Todd is the most formidable presence in the village. She runs the village store, in which she sells exotic medicinal herbs. She is the village’s primary physician, and she treats the obscure male doctor like an incompetent schoolboy. She also acts as the true minister to the community, revealing the minister for the physical and mental weakling that he is. When Mrs Todd is away searching for herbs, the narrator watches her shop. Part I (Littlepage’s Story) Lonely old Captain Littlepage drops by to discuss poetry and soon begins telling a story about making his way to a small island after a shipwreck, where he met another wrecked sailor, who told him of a village of ghosts at the North Pole. Littlepage believes this is a way-station for souls waiting to go to the hereafter. The old man’s story introduces the themes of death, forgetfulness, dream, and lost time, bringing a gothic undercurrent into the nostalgic story of a Maine village. Part II (A Visit to Green Island) On a trip to Green Island, the narrator meets Mrs Todd’s mother, old Mrs Blackett, who keeps house for her lonely middle-aged son, William. After gathering some herbs, Mrs Todd points out the precise place off the headland where her husband drowned. Time past and human loss in death and loneliness are again emphasized, and the pastoral present time is muted – made ambiguous and even ambivalent. As Grace Farrell points out, the pennyroyal that Mrs Todd is gathering is a special herb. A remedy to ease menstrual cramps and childbirth, it was also used by midwives (before male doctors intruded) to bring about early miscarriage. An abortion could only be whispered about, which is probably why certain “suffering neighbors” come to Mrs Todd “at night as if by stealth” for “whispered directions.” Standing with the narrator at the headland (Ch. 10), Mrs Todd speaks of her dead husband for the first time. Seeing the pennyroyal here always reminds her that he died before he “ever knew what he’d had to know if we’d lived long together.” The pennyroyal also reminds her of “– the other one.” Farrell suggests (267) that she “is reminded, by a field of pennyroyal, of her own abortion.”

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Part III (Shell-Heap Island) One of Mrs Todd’s stories involves a cousin, Joanna, who lived and died on Shell-Heap Island, the name of which seems to describe her life. Disappointed in love, Joanna lives by herself in lost time for ever. If she were to live on the mainland, she’d be sent “up to Massachusetts,” meaning to an insane asylum. Part IV (the Bowden family reunion) June turns into August, and the writer is invited to attend the mammoth family reunion of the Bowdens. Life is temporarily regained and affirmed in temporal time – though not every member of the Bowden family is fully sane. Moreover, Mrs Todd’s mother has a premonition it will be her last such event. Part V (Mr Tilley and his wife) Elijah Tilley, a standoffish old fisherman who has taken a liking to the narrator, invites her to his house one afternoon and tells her the story of his wife’s death eight years earlier. He has not been able to accept it and keeps the house exactly as she had had it when she was alive. Trapped in perpetual mourning, Mr Tilley cannot escape time past. Concluding Frame With the coming of autumn, it is time to leave Dunnet. Mrs Todd seems irritable – as if, having had her loneliness temporarily relieved by a growing friendship with the narrator, she now faces an intensified isolation. On the boat, watching Dunnet Landing recede in the distance, the narrator remembers a day when William, Mrs Todd’s brother, had overcome his shyness enough to invite her to accompany him on one of his rare visits to the mainland. They had gone to the farm of the aged and crippled Mrs Hight, who was cared for by her daughter Esther. The narrator latterly realizes that William and Esther are frustrated lovers, condemned to separate lonely lives. Returning the next spring, the writer learns that Mrs Hight has died and the aging lovers are to be married. The marriage of William and Esther concludes the narrative with a reaffirmation, though not without a degree of implied anxiety. After the ceremony, the narrator goes to the pier with Mrs Todd to see them off to Green Island. Mrs Todd is thinking of the always uncertain sea journey and of her mother “watching all day, and waiting.” She says “nothing 310

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more,” but holds hands with the narrator all the way back. When the narrator leaves again, she watches the coastline fade in the distance until Dunnet Landing and all the coasts “were lost to sight.”

Toward Mark Twain: Southern Writers New Englanders might object, but I think most readers would agree that the richest tradition of regional writing in the second half of the nineteenth century is that of the South. The majority of Southern authors and authors who write of the South are mentioned or discussed in other chapters of this volume: Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, Thomas Nelson Page, Thomas Dickson, Charles W. Chesnutt, Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson, Joel Chandler Harris, and Kate Chopin, for example. To these we may add a handful of Southern regionalists.16 James Lane Allen (1849–1925) wrote several volumes of Kentucky stories, including Flute and Violin (1891), The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky (1892), and a pair of melancholy romances, A Kentucky Cardinal (1894) and Aftermath (1896); his best-known novel is the historical romance, The Choir Invisible (1897). Mary Noailles Murfee (1850–1922), who wrote under the pseudonym of “Charles Egbert Craddock,” is known primarily for two works, In the Tennessee Mountains (1884) and The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains (1885). Grace Elizabeth King (1852–1932) wrote several New Orleans-based volumes: Tales of a Time and a Place (1892), Monsieur Motte (1888), and Balcony Stories (1893). The major works of Virginia-born Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945) were published well after our time period: Barren Ground (1925), The Romantic Comedians (1926), and Vein of Iron (1935). Nearer in time is Life and Gabriella (1916), a portrait of a Southern woman abandoned by her husband who makes her own way in the world. Her early novel The Descendant (1897) features a free-thinking heroine who opts for love and passion rather than conventional marriage. The Battleground (1902) evokes doubts about the traditions of the Old South; and The Miller of Old Church (1911) unromantically portrays decayed Southern gentry. Among the most important of the Southern regionalists is George Washington Cable (1844–1925).17 In the story collection Old Creole Days (1879), in the novella Madame Delphine (1881, later included in Old Creole Days), and in the historical romance novel The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880), Cable addressed the issue of mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds: black, white, and Indian – and French, Spanish, and English. His evocations of the physical sense of a lost era of New Orleans Creole 311

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society and his eccentric characters are perhaps more memorable than his treatment of social issues in these works. The best-known of Cable’s stories in Old Creole Days are “Jean-Ah Poquelin,” a story of a pale leper hidden away by the family, and “Belle Demoiselles Plantation.” In the latter, the Mississippi river is a major “character.” A Creole called “Colonel” de Charleu builds a plantation for his seven beautiful daughters on the edge of the river. The daughters die when the old mansion slides into the river – symbolic of the fate of the Old South. A final word on Kate Chopin is in order here. Before the publication of the controversial Awakening (1899), Bayou Folk (1894), a collection of twenty-three short stories, and A Night in Acadie (1897), a collection of over twenty stories, were published to good notices. Chopin was extolled as a talented “local color” writer who caught the mannerisms, lifestyle, and actual speech of European Creoles in Louisiana. The public liked the ironic twists of many of her stories, which were often in the manner of de Maupassant and O. Henry. A striking example of such a twist occurs at the end of “Desiree’s Baby” (1892–3). Plantation owner Armand Aubigny marries a beautiful girl of obscure parentage. Shortly after the birth of their son, Armand realizes that the newborn is part Negro. He assumes that, even though her skin is fairer than his own, his wife must be of mixed race. She asks if she should take the baby and leave. Despite loving her, he answers yes. She disappears into the bayou, apparently intending to kill herself and the child. Some weeks later, Armand discovers an old letter from his mother to his father – thanking God that Armand will never know that his mother “belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery.” As a story of the social construction of race, the work foreshadows Puddn’head Wilson (1894).

Mark Twain: “De-Southernized” Southerner The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson is a good place to begin a discussion of Mark Twain, the South, and the issue of racism. It captures in little the whole idea that race is only partially biological – that it is in fact primarily a social-cultural idea. It also represents Twain’s lifelong concern with the philosophical problem of human “identity,” a theme that obsessed him to the last. The novella revolves around an identity exchange between two boys born at the same time in a Mississippi village, both of whom, though having different names, are called Tom. One is part-black, the other all-white. They are switched in the cradle by the mother of one, a slave-woman named Roxy, who is afraid that her own child will be sold down river. Roxy’s son as a white man eventually sells his mother, murders his uncle, and accuses others of the crime. 312

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David Wilson, an amateur scientist-detective and lawyer, is called “Puddn’head” by the village people because of his odd ways of thinking. Employing the new technology of fingerprinting, Wilson discovers the real murderer and in the process exposes the artificiality of the cultural definitions of black and white. Roxy’s son, being one-thirty-second Negro, would by Southern legal definitions be “black”; but because his heritage is not known, he is socially accepted as white. He has been raised with the Southern aristocratic slaver’s mentality and never questions his despicable actions. The switched white child, raised as a slave, is also trapped by his social, political, historical condition; he is comfortable only in the slave’s world. Pudd’nhead Wilson holds the South’s customs and legal absurdities up to ridicule at the same time that it demonstrates the coercive force of custom, social structure, and political institutions. W. D. Howells said of Clemens that “he was the most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew.”18 Part of this desouthernization is reflected in his passionate opposition to slavery. Again quoting Howells: “No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery, and no one has ever poured such scorn upon the secondhand, Walter-Scotticized, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal” (Ch. 9; 35–6).

End against the middle: Reading Huckleberry Finn The year before Samuel Clemens turned fifty saw the initial publication of the book that many consider not only his masterpiece, but also perhaps the pivotal work of American fiction of the later nineteenth century. This of course is Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884–5), a book he had struggled with for a decade. This famous novel has often been misread as structurally and thematically flawed. The misreading turns on the fact that when Tom Sawyer re-enters the narrative toward the end, he subjects the slave, Jim, to all sorts of comic hijinks – and Huck goes along with it. Thus the book’s supposed “real” theme of Huck’s discovery of brotherhood with a black man – and beyond that an allencompassing vision of universal brotherhood between white and black – is peremptorily dropped.19 I contend, on the contrary, that the end of the book is a naturalist work consistent with Twain’s dark vision of the human condition and that it is fully and consistently structured. The forty-three chapters can be divided into groups or patterns of ten, ten, eleven, and eleven, plus opening and concluding frames. Precisely in the middle are two chapters (21–22) that act as an iconic hinge dividing the novel into two equal parts. The subsequent crisis of both theme and plot 313

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occurs exactly three-quarters of the way through the novel (Ch. 31). Moreover, the first segment of ten chapters takes place on land and moves toward the river. The second segment of ten takes place on the river with excursions (nearly all of them disastrous or unpleasant) to the land, plus the invasion of the freedom of the river-raft by the land-based con-artists, the “Duke” and the “King.” The middle of the book focuses on a murder and lynching – on land. The next segment of eleven continues the alternation of river and land – concluding the river journey with Huck’s decision to let Jim go and his return to the land. The last segment takes place on land. Thus the novel divides into four symmetrical interpenetrating and thematically consistent sections in the sequence: Land\River-Land\Land-River\Land. The river is escape and temporary freedom. The land – with its arbitrary and unjust laws, its hypocrisy, and its violence – is imprisonment. The river narratives are penetrated by land narratives and finally enclosed by the imprisoning land at the beginning and the end.

Sometimes “people” get hurt I think that the best place to start any detailed discussion of Huckleberry Finn is not at the beginning but with Chapter 32 (“I Have a New Name”). This is the important moment when the last quarter of the story begins – as Huck leaves the river after a steamboat explosion and returns to the land for the last time – just before Tom Sawyer rejoins the narrative. Huck arrives at the farm of Tom’s Aunt Sally, who asks him if the steamboat has gone aground. Huck lies: “It warn’t the grounding – that didn’t keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.” Aunt Sally responds: “Good gracious! Anybody hurt?” Huck, knowing how to play the prejudices of Southern white society, says: “No’m. Killed a nigger.” To which Aunt Sally responds: “Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”20 This bit of conversation is one of the most significant in the book. Huck has decided that a runaway slave, his friend, is in fact a man – a human being. Yet he plays the race card without hesitation in his conversation with the white lady. The explosive word nigger is used here to expose the rotten core of the whole society.21 That Huck can so skillfully read and play on this racial bias after all he has experienced with Jim goes directly to the central themes of the novel. Huck has not recognized all black people as human beings. He has made an exception for one person, Jim. To accept this fact is to see the skepticism underlying Huckleberry Finn and the deep pessimism of Mark Twain regarding the “damned human race.”

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Apologizing Huck’s hesitating acceptance of Jim’s full humanity is poignantly rendered in Chapter 15. After Huck has tricked Jim into thinking he had drowned in the fog-covered river, Jim tells him how worried he was all night, calling to him across the water and looking for him. Jim says, like an angry father worried about a son, that “all you wuz thinkin’ ’bout wuz how you could make a fool uv old Jim wid a lie . . . en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren’s en makes’em ashamed.”

............................................................................................... Then he got up slow and walked to the wigwam [on the deck of the raft], and went in there without saying anything but that. But that was enough. It made me feel so mean. . . . It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go an humble myself to a nigger; but I done it, and I warn’t ever sorry for it afterward, neither. I didn’t do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn’t done that one if I’d ’a’ knowed it would make him feel that way.

...............................................................................................

The pathos and irony of the scene are intensified by Huck’s belief that in apologizing to a black man he had done something he should feel ashamed of.

The circus of life Chapters 21 and 22 (the middle-point) are filled with heavily symbolic theatrical and circus images and motifs and depict several sham performances. In Chapter 22, Huck is on hand to watch the people of a little one-horse town in “Arkansaw” attempt to lynch Colonel Sherburn for shooting down a blustering, harmless old drunk named Boggs. A mob that comes to Sherburn’s mansion at night is cowed by the Colonel’s calm courage and all too obvious contempt for them. Holding a shotgun, Sherburn tells them that there is not a man among them, and that the average man, North and South, is a coward. Both episodes are set up like a stage show. The scene where Boggs is shot down reads like a Western melodrama. When Sherburn faces down the crowd, he is standing on his veranda as though on a stage. A third theatrical performance is the traveling circus; a fourth is a burlesque stage show. In one of those abrupt transitions and juxtapositions so characteristic of Twain, Huck tells us that, although he “could ’a’ stayed” at Sherburn’s instead of fleeing with the mob, he preferred to go to the circus. (The circus and the lunatic asylum are frequent conjunctions in Twain.) At the circus, Huck is

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especially excited by a “drunk man” (a parallel to Boggs) who wants to ride the horses – and turns out to be one of the performers. Huck feels sheepish for having been taken in, but he remarks that he “wouldn’t ’a’ been in that ringmaster’s place” for a thousand dollars because “it was one of his own men” that fooled him. That night, the Duke and the King stage Romeo and Juliet, but there is only a small audience. So the Duke changes the theater bill and adds “LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED” to lure in customers. The Shakespearean lines are thoroughly garbled. These are not really disconnected scenes. The major theme of these chapters is the dupe. Sherburn in a way dupes the crowd just as they, from his point of view, are trying to dupe him – and themselves – by thinking they were men. The Duke and the King try to dupe the men of the village by suggesting that their play is racy. The circus makes a specialty of illusion and duping. But the most important dupe is Huck, who (for all his shrewdness and ability to dupe others) is duped over and over again by the mythos of the society in which he lives. The difference between Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer amounts to an analysis of the American character into conventional romanticists and traditionalists on the one hand and realists and individualists on the other. As Sherburn may be seen as an extreme version of Huck Finn’s individualism, so is the blustering old Boggs an extreme and pathetic version of Tom Sawyer, the “player.” The chapters implicitly question the extent to which it is morally possible to defy social convention or mores, a question that comes up later in the freeing of Jim.

Just like white folks? In the very next chapter, Huck at least partially realizes he has been duped by social conditioning. After another sham performance by the Duke and the King, Huck falls asleep on the raft, and Jim stands his watch for him. Huck wakes up to find Jim “moaning and mourning to himself ” (Ch. 23). He knows Jim is thinking about his wife and children. “I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for their’n. It don’t seem natural, but I reckon it’s so.” In an exceptionally moving passage of dialect, Jim tells Huck about the time he slapped his daughter for not shutting the door as he had repeatedly told her to do, not realizing she had gone deaf: “ – en I’d ben a-treat’n her so!” Acknowledgment of Jim’s humanity is the turning point of the plot and the culmination of the personal brotherhood theme. The Duke and the King are planning to sell Jim into slavery again. Huck knows that Jim has “got to be a slave,” but he doesn’t like it. On the other hand, he doesn’t want it to “get all around that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom” (Ch. 31); the shame 316

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would be terrible. He writes a note telling where Jim can be found; but the more he thinks about it, the more confused he feels. He knows he should turn Jim in; but he thinks about how Jim looked after him on the river and all the good times and “somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against, but only the other kind.” He knows he has “got to decide, forever, betwixt two things.” He decides that he is a sinner by nature: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” He tears up the note. He has done the morally right thing, but he does not recognize it as right. And there is little in the last part of the novel to suggest that he is ever persuaded to see it that way in larger social terms. Huck does not come to some sort of progressive abolitionist epiphany. Twain does not cast him in the symbolic role of ameliorative hope. In Huckleberry Finn, a number of quintessential Mark Twain techniques and themes come together, including: the dramatic irony of casting a racially prejudiced, poor-white, uneducated fifteen-year-old boy as the center of consciousness, the symbolic doppelg€anger motif, the colloquial style of narration, the use of regional vernacular, the hypocrisy of religion, sham romanticism, the materialism of the Gilded Age society, antislavery and race issues, and the great multifaceted theme of the vexed escape to freedom. Twain is at pains to make clear that Huck’s overall or dominant view is the result of tradition – the romantic tradition of the Old South, represented by the chivalric distortions of Tom Sawyer, of the tramp con-artists the “Duke” and the “King,” and of the Southern aristocrat, “Colonel” Sherburn. The romance of old times on the Mississippi is once again both evoked and debunked. What Huck learns from the return of Tom Sawyer is that he cannot play-act like Tom for very long. Before they completely “sivilize” him, he is going “to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest.” But he won’t be free. The phrase “ahead of the rest” suggests the relentless pursuit of the others – the continuing encroachments of the bogus ideals of civilization. Huck is one of Cr
evecoeur’s “off-casts,” at best “a kind of forlorn hope.”

Notes 1. The Western frontier changes by the decade in the nineteenth century. The same is true for the Southwest, which needs to be distinguished from the Old Southwest (prior to the Civil War), in which a Deep South state like Alabama may be referred to as Southwestern. Following the practice of other literary historians, “ethnicity” is here treated as a collateral set or cultural subset of racial matters. (Of course, in America, race almost always implies the hereditarybiological difference between black and white, sociologically determined by black peoples’ previous condition of servitude.) Dowling, ACAF (2009), not 317

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

only offers a general overview of various immigrant groups, but also deals concisely with Finley Peter Dunn, Sui Sin Far, Onato Watanna, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, Abraham Cahan, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles W. Chesnutt, and others representing different ethnic groups. Vizenor, ACAF (2009), surveys indigenous American prose literature and reportage leading to the first Native American novel. Turner argued in 1894 for a kind of “steam-valve” social-economic mechanism to American expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Bold, ACAF (2009), puts the matter as follows: “Turner argued that the frontier line, as it advanced westward across America, provided the nation with its distinctive character, separating its identity off decisively from Old World models,” which “until Turner, had been argued as the seeds of American culture” (204). But Turner was preceded in this formulation by Cr
evecoeur. On the West and the frontier, see especially H. N. Smith (1950) and Slotkin (1973, 1985). See Fetterley and Pryse (1992), xi–xii, my italics. Integrating the idea of ethnicity and race and region, they include selections from Sui Sin Far (Chinese immigrant), Zitkala-Sa (Native American), and Mary Austin, a Midwest transplant to the desert Southwest who became (mystically in her mind), the spiritual daughter of the Native American heritage of The Land of Little Rain (1903). Austin distinguished between local color as backdrop and “region” as a “character” in fiction. Others in the anthology include Alice Cary, Rose Terry Cooke, and Celia Thaxter, along with several writers discussed later in this chapter. Writers like Twain, of course, could write from inside region and often reversed the cultural hierarchy, as with Huck Finn. See Blair (1937; rev. 1960a) for discussion of frame techniques (including cultural differences) of folk-tales and tall-tales of the Old Southwest. The nearly 200-page “introduction” to this anthology remains one of the best historical discussions of the subject available. See Cox (1988)CLHUS, 761–84, who writes that “Regionalism became, in the long battle being waged by realism against romanticism and the sentimental romance, a subordinate order of realism.” See Fetterley and Pryse (1992), xi, for the basic formulation. Cf. Blair in note 4 above. For a concise and informative compendium of a large number of regional and local color writers (of all kinds and genders), see Sundquist, “Realism and Regionalism” (1988, CLHUS, 501–24). Blair (1960a). For various views of vernacular fiction, see several essays in ACAF, especially those by Howard (119–39), Diffley (240–59), Bruce (279–95), Kennedy (149–74), Anesko (499–517), and Lamb (468–98). Additional mention may be made of a few other works and writers. W. D. Howells attempts a German dialect in A Hazard of New Fortunes; Upton Sinclair a Polish dialect in The Jungle; Lillie Devereux Blake an Irish dialect in Fettered for Life; Bret Harte a westernized hillbilly dialect in “Tennessee’s Partner” and other

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9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

California stories; Joel Chandler Harris a Georgian black dialect in the “Uncle Remus” stories; Stephen Crane reproduces Bowery accents in Maggie and George’s Mother; G. W. Cable reproduces Louisianan black speech in Old Creole Days; Kate Chopin reproduces upper-class Creole in The Awakening and Cajun and Louisianan backwater dialect in stories like “A Visit to Avoyelles,” “Azelie,” “At the ’Cadian Ball,” “The Storm,” and others. Main-Travelled Roads was expanded twice; the 1899 edition added three stories for a total of nine; the 1922 edition added two more stories from the 1890s, for a total of eleven stories. The “valley” of the title of the first edition refers to the great Missouri–Mississippi river confluence dividing the Midwest east and west. Garland collected more stories and sketches in such volumes as Other Main-Travelled Roads (1910) and Roadside Meetings (1930); but his later fame was based on autobiographical memoirs and analyses of his Midwestern roots: A Son of the Middle Border (1917) and his Pulitzer Prize winning A Daughter of the Middle Border (1921). See Pizer (1960a), Holloway (1971 [1960]) for critical biographies. Other stories from the collection that are often singled out are two dealing with the condition of women, “Mrs Ripley’s Trip” and “A Branch Road.” In a curious disclaimer, Fetterley and Pryse suggest that Cather is not a true regionalist. They suggest that “transplanting, not rootedness, lies at the heart of Cather’s relation to region, and that, unlike the regionalists who preceded her, Cather experienced region within the context of loss” (593). See Woodress’s  biography (1970). Aside from My Antonia, her most admired works are from the 1920s and 1930s. Among writers who were born elsewhere and who lived in or wrote about the Midwest is the New York-born Joseph Kirkland (1830–1894), remembered for one book, Zury, the Meanest Man in Spring County (1887). Another often-cited transplanted writer is Alice French (1850–1934), born in Massachusetts, who lived in Iowa and Arkansas and wrote stories of rural Arkansas, notably Knitters in the Sun (1887) and Stories of a Western Town (1893). Critics always remark that Jewett formed “intense” relationships with women during her life and that she gravitated to artistic communities of women. She was close friends with Celia Thaxter, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Willa Cather. After the death of James T. Fields, she engaged in a thirty-year relationship with his widow, Annie Fields, one which most suppose was a “Boston Marriage” (a monogamous life-commitment between two women). Naturally, much contemporary speculation about the sexual nature of their life together ensued; more about them can be found in almost any encyclopedia under “Llangollen.” Jewett’s other works include: Country By-Ways (1881), The Mate of the Daylight (1884), Friends Ashore (1884), Marsh Island (1885), The King of Folly Island and

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15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

Other People (1889), Tales of New England (1890), The Queen’s Twin and Other Stories (1899). See Farrell (ACAF, 2009), 265; for a select list of critical works pertinent to Jewett, women’s fiction and regionalism, see 276–8. See Sherman (1989) for a full-length study. For a useful collection on The Country of the Pointed Firs, see Howard (ed.) (1994). The modern use of the term pastoral generally suggests a small village and a gardenlike environment as an icon of a peaceful rural life, something simple and uncomplicated in contrast to the meanness and grasping hurriedness of city life or of the bogus values of modern civilization generally. The pastoral elegy is a highly conventionalized or ritualistic poem of mourning. The standard compendium is Hubbell (1954). See Turner (1966 [1956]); Hubbell (1954). Howells, Ch. 9 of My Mark Twain (1910), rpt. edn 1963; references are to the 1st edn; here 35. Here, unlike most of the discussions in this volume, I have to assume that my reader has read Huckleberry Finn at least once; thus I hope that some of my abbreviated allusions to the events in the novel will be clear. See Fishkin (1993) for discussion of how Huck has learned the masks and voices of black folk traditions for puttin’ on the white masters. Nearly all euphemisms eventually do the opposite of what they are intended to do, often with ludicrous results. It would undercut this scene to flinch primly away from the offending word and try to palliate with the phrase “N-word.” That would be to participate in the racial game from a “safe” distance – ironically underscoring Mark Twain’s point about hypocrisy. See the entry for the word in Rasmussen (1995), 338. See esp. the following discussions: Arac (1997) on Huckleberry Finn as “idol” and “target”; Chadwick-Joshua (1998) on “reading race” and the “Jim Dilemma”; Leonard et al., on Black perspectives on Huckleberry Finn (1992); and the vigorous explications of the book’s antiracism by Fishkin (1996, 1997). See Robert Paul Lamb (ACAF, 2009a, 489), for a photograph in later life of Clemens with his good friend, John T. Lewis (1835–1906), the principal model for Jim. The criticism on Twain and especially Huckleberry Finn is extensive; see suggestions for further reading below.

See also J. Adams (1963); Ayers, et al. (1996); Benfey (1998); Bickley (1987); Boeckmann (2000); Bold (1987); Bremer (1992; ACAF, 2009); Bridgman (1966); Cain (1995); CAL (2004); D. Campbell (1997); Chamerzky (1977); Cowie (RAN, 1951); Crow (2003); Crozier (1969); Donovan (1983); Dowling (2007); Fetterley and Pryse (2003); Foote (2001); Gandal (1997); Hedrick (1994); G. Jones (1999); Lawlor (2000); Lichtenstein (1992); Lowry (1996); Marchalonis (1991); J. Martin (1967); 320

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Matteson (2007); Matthiessen (1929); McCullough (1978); Moore (1963); O’Connor (1966); Olsen (1965); Perry (1988); Rankin (1932); Ridgely (1980); Roman (1992); Rowe (1982); Rubin (1969); Samuels (1992); Scharnhorst (1980, 1992); Skaggs (1985); Slotkin (1992); Sollors (1997); Sundquist (1993); B. Thomas (1997); Toth (1985, 1990, 1999); Utley (1984); Vizenor (1998); Wagner-Martin (1982, 1995); Walker (2001); K. Warren (1993); Westbrook (1988); Woodward (1966 [1955]).

On Twain and Huckleberry Finn Baldanza (1961); Blair (1960b); Budd (1962); Cardwell (1953, 1991); Coulombe (2003); Covici (1962); Cowie (RAN, 1951); Cox (1966); DeVoto (1932, 1942); Emerson (1984, rev. 2000); Fishkin (2002); Fulton (1997); W. Gibson (1976); S. K. Harris (1982); H. Hill (1973); Howe (1998); Howells (1963 [1910]); F. Kaplan (2003); J. Kaplan (1966); Kent (1986); Lynn (1960); Michelson (1995); Paine (1912); Pettit (1974); Powers (2005); Railton (2004); Robinson (1986); Salomon (1961); Sewell (1987); Skandera-Trombley (1994); H. N. Smith (1962, 1964); Steinbrink (1991); A. Stone (1970); Turner (1960); Wector (1952); Wonham (1993).

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Chapter 18

The Territory Ahead Emerging African American Voices

In the twentieth century, African American fiction finally achieved long withheld critical recognition. Writers like Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright produced such classics as Cane (1923), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Native Son (1940). At mid-century, Ralph Ellison produced another classic, Invisible Man (1952), and James Baldwin began a series of influential novels and stories with Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). In the latter part of the century, a number of distinguished black women writers emerged, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and Jamaica Kincaid, for example; and Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature. But most nonblack readers in the middle years of the twentieth century remained unaware of the tradition behind the apparently sudden emergence of this “new” black literature. Nineteenth-century African American narratives, largely ignored by white critics for over one hundred years, have now become subjects of intense interest in American literary studies, and many forgotten works by black writers have been resurrected from the grave of prejudice and neglect. Generally speaking, four historical periods of African American prose narrative from the late eighteenth century to World War I can be distinguished: 1 “slave narratives” from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century; 2 “abolitionist” novels of the 1850s and early 1860s – closely related to the earlier “slave narratives”; 3 “genteel,” “sentimental-domestic” novels of the 1890s and early 1900s; 4 “naturalist” and “premodernist” fiction of the 1900–1914 period. Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson. Ó 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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The gap between the mid-1860s and the 1890s is quite apparent, but as Dickson D. Bruce, Jr, observes, the Reconstruction period “represents something of a lost era” primarily because archival work on Black American literature is just beginning.1 The major works of the first group – slave narratives – are the Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). The major works of the second group – abolitionist narratives at midcentury – include William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in America (1853); Frederick Douglass’s novella The Heroic Slave (1853); Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857); Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859); Martin R. Delany’s Blake; or the Huts of America (1859); and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861–2). Major works in the third group – the fin de si
ecle genteel novel – continue the theme of the pursuit of freedom as well as another major theme treated by Brown, Wilson, and Jacobs, that of the “tragic mulatto woman.” These novels include Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892–3), Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’s Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life, North and South (1900), and Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900). The major novels of the fourth group – naturalist and early modernist works – include Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899) and The Hindered Hand (1905); Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods (1902); Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and The Colonel’s Dream (1905); and James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912). How accurate this broad categorization is will be determined by further scholarly study and, doubtless, rediscovery of other forgotten works.2

Toward “Double-Consciousness”: Historical Backgrounds 1789–1912 As a literary term, the American slave narrative refers almost exclusively to the story of black enslavement; it overlaps with but should be distinguished from the American captivity narrative, in which a white person, usually a woman, is taken by Indians and more often than not treated as a member of the tribe. Of the several slave narratives from the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, two are especially important in the development of the early African American novel: the autobiographical accounts of the rise from slavery to freedom by Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass. 324

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The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789) is a paradigm for many of the key features of the genre. From the first, the book had a surprising impact on the AngloAmerican world – more than any other ex-slave autobiography before the publication of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845). Equiano not only vividly depicts the horrors of slavery, but also details his economic rise through the free enterprise system, which eventually enabled him to purchase his freedom. He exhibits both forthright courage and deceptive cleverness. The overall freedom theme is contained within an argument for the universality of human morality and the economic right of all people to better themselves. American pro-slavery advocates attacked Equiano’s Narrative as mere fiction, thereby unintentionally increasing its circulation: it went through nine editions in five years and was reprinted in the next century. Throughout the gracefully written narrative, Equiano exhibits a Deistic view of morality informed by the values of mainstream Christianity, as well as the Enlightenment values of universal humanity and analytical reason. Especially important psychologically is the question of one’s name. A British ship’s master tries to rename him more than once, finally settling on Gustavus Vassa, which Equiano resists for a long time. The importance of one’s name, involving as it does one’s heritage and identity, is a major theme in other African American narratives. When Equiano earns enough money to buy his freedom, he records his manumitting papers in toto, repeating his names several times. Between the time of Equiano and the American Civil War, a large number of slave narratives appeared, some more fictionalized than others. From these, historians have extracted a number of paradigmatic situations, narrative sequences, themes, and character types that are also pertinent to the later African American novel.3 The single major literary feature of the slave narrative is the quest motif – the quest for freedom. This freedom is both physical and mental and includes the previously denied access to the education necessary to achieve social and economic mobility. The centrality of the quest theme links the American slave narrative to the romance; and a characteristic feature of the quest romance is a “hero.” Most American slave narratives focus on the courage of an extraordinary individual resisting oppression or attempting to escape bondage. The single most important social theme is the inescapable importance of the visible “color line.” The idea of pure blackness (noble even though imprisoning) is in tension with the pervasive problems caused by miscegenation. The color line is further blurred when persons of mixed race face the option of “passing” for white or trying to maintain a black heritage. Interspersed throughout these narratives are imprecations against the inhumanity of slavery, coupled with often melodramatic and sentimentalized 325

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scenes of cruelty, separation, loss, and betrayal of loyalties and love. These didactic passages are informed by the self-reflexive recognition of the power of writing and speaking as weapons against oppression – the power of the book that is being written. The audience for the slave narrative is not just black people; it is also addressed to white people in the hope of effecting change. Other major themes include the centrality of the maternal side of the family; the importance of spirituality; and the significance of geographical location, both for the quality of everyday life and for the possibility of escape (the Deep South versus states at the Northern border, for example). A recurrent character type is the trickster figure, associated with folklore, of course, but also with the necessity of deceiving the white masters by “masking,” “signing,” and “puttin’ on,” as well as “passing.”

Frederick Douglass: Father of black abolitionist narrative Among the increasingly large number of slave narratives in the decade or so before the Civil War are three autobiographies regarded as the main progenitors of the earliest full-fledged African American novels: Narrative of the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845); Narrative of William Wells Brown, A Fugitive Slave (1847; frequently revised); and Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave (1849, 1851). These works are, ironically enough, contemporaneous with the passing of the muddled Fugitive Slave Acts of 1850, which required Northerners to assist in the return of escaped slaves to the South and imposed heavy penalties for noncompliance. Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) is the central figure to whom others in the cause were responding. His influence on the later African American social and political philosophers, Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), was immeasurable. Douglass and his successors also influenced, directly and indirectly, the novelists of the 1890s and 1900s. The 1845 Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave went through three revisions and expansions. The first version is less personal than the others, being more focused on the abolitionist cause than on people and incidents. My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) fills in more personal details about Douglass and his family, particularly his mother and grandmother. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, further expanded 1892–3) takes his life story farther, but most readers find that the expanded parts lack some of the electricity of the earlier versions. The several versions together present an impressive testimony to the rise of a slave to freedom and status in both the white world and the black. The first two texts offer an aggressive account of the slave’s fight for freedom. Escaping from a Maryland plantation after a fistfight with an overseer, Douglass 326

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fled to Baltimore and then New York, where he discovered the Liberator, the abolitionist newspaper edited by William Lloyd Garrison. Douglass now began a political career as an abolitionist writer and speaker. An address at an antislavery congress on Nantucket Island brought him a great deal of attention; and in July 1845, in Rochester, New York, Douglass gave an address on “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” hailed at times as the greatest antislavery speech ever given. In December 1847, he founded the North Star, a newspaper devoted to abolitionism and other principles of freedom. The significance of the title is that the North Star was the guiding light for fugitive slaves who had neither map nor compass on their flight north to freedom. When the Civil War broke out, he became an effective recruiter of black men for the Union Army, and he continued to be an effective political activist after the war. He was a constant public critic of the failures of Reconstruction, especially the failure to grant black men the vote. Douglass fought vigorously for passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits denial of voting rights “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

Warring sons: Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, two of the most important black writers and political activists of the post-Civil War era, also represent two different attitudes toward political action. These contrasting positions are presented quite clearly in Washington’s Up from Slavery (1901) and Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Although he wanted to be Douglass’s successor in the arena of black political action, Washington argued not for confrontation but for reconciliation and accommodation with white people. In a well-known passage from the “Atlanta Compromise” speech of 1895, Washington’s message is that black people should stay the course, keep the faith in the homeland South, even accept lack of equality for a while, rather than suffer turmoil, daily violence, and lynching. The compromise spirit resonated not only with white people, but also with many blacks weary of confrontation and vitriol. From the time of his 1895 speech to the beginning of World War I, Washington was the foremost black leader not only in America but arguably in the world. At first, the Massachusetts-born W. E. B. Du Bois praised Washington’s Atlanta speech. But his attitude changed when, about to present a legal appeal for a man accused of murder and rape, he discovered that the man had been burned at the stake and hacked up – and that his knuckles were on “display” at a local store. Under such circumstances, racial reconciliation did not seem possible. But Du Bois’s pessimism about racial harmony was not based on 327

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one shocking incident. He was a college-educated intellectual, having studied at Fisk University, Harvard University, and the University of Berlin, and his pessimism was informed by a wide and deep understanding of history. Du Bois struggled for human rights worldwide and for the political and civil rights of African Americans all his life. In 1903, he gained wide national recognition with The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of fourteen essays, several of which had been published separately before. In these works and others, he maintained that black people needed to pursue aggressive political action. In the preface, he boldly announced that the central problem of the twentieth century would be “the problem of the color-line.” He thought it critical to go beyond bewailing the treatment of black people by whites to a more positive personal sense of being black. The famous last chapter of Souls extols “the Negro folk-song” as a genuine contribution by blacks as blacks to the “spiritual heritage of the nation.” In the equally famous first chapter, Du Bois introduces the idea of African American “twoness”: the state of being both American and African, of experiencing “two unreconciled strivings,” of possessing “two warring ideals in one dark body.” Only a “dogged strength” keeps the soul of a black person from “being torn asunder.” In a later chapter, he criticizes Booker T. Washington for being too soft on the race issue. The critique created a sensation, and this famous “debate” between Washington and Du Bois glosses some of the issues of later nineteenth-century African American novels. In Pauline E. Hopkins’s turn-of-the-century novel, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900), for example, a chronicle tracing several generations of a black family, different characters represent the divergent Washington and Du Bois approaches to political and social action for blacks in America.

The New Black Novel and the Crisis of Identity The “crisis” in the title of Dickson D. Bruce’s ACAF essay, “Confronting the Crisis: African American Narratives,” is that of identity: a specifically American identity in a divided and racist society. He suggests that six interrelated themes weave in and out of the fiction of the 1865–1914 era: the “tragic mulatto”; protest and “uplift”; genteel “plantation fiction” (and its subversion); black “folk life”; revisiting the “color line” in terms of assimilation and rejection; the “turn inward” and growing despair.4 In the hands of white writers like Thomas Nelson Page, Irwin Russell, and Joel Chandler Harris, the “plantation tradition” of dialect fiction helped create images of African Americans as “a simple-minded, dependent, childlike people, 328

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and of an Old South in which black people, loyal and devoted to their masters, had been happy and content as slaves” (281). Many black writers working within this tradition subverted such notions. Bruce points to James H. W. Howard’s putting a beautiful mulatto woman in a brutal plantation setting in Bond and Free (1886). One of the most important themes in the context of racial equality and assimilation is that of the “tragic mulatto”: most especially those young men and women who have passed for white and are then revealed to have African ancestry and thus become exposed to discrimination.5 This theme is not confined to a single type of fiction but winds through the majority of African American novels of the era. Some writers modified the theme into a “dual project of protest and uplift.” The light-skinned heroine of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s best-known novel, Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1891–2), stands up against prejudice, accepts her ancestry, forgives her previous condition of servitude, and, through an abiding religious faith, espouses general love toward all humanity.6 More subversive are Appointed (1894) by Walter H. Stowers and W. H. Anderson (one of the first novels to focus on lynching) and the “folk tradition” of plantation fiction in which an aged black storyteller tells stories of slave owners fooled and tricked by ex-slaves or revealed as morally inferior, such as Victoria Earle Matthews’s pamphlet-story, Aunt Lindy (1891; 1893). The two most prominent writers of subversive folk and plantation fiction are Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles W. Chesnutt. Beginning as writers of deceptively folksy short stories, both later moved away from the genre to realist and naturalist forms of fiction. Dunbar, who is better known as a poet, published four volumes of “folk” stories, but what Bruce calls “deeper and subtler forms of protest” are found in his four novels: The Uncalled (1898), The Love of Landry (1900), The Fanatics (1901), and The Sport of the Gods (1902). The first never reveals the characters’ racial identity while calling into question racial ideas. The last is not, in my opinion, exactly “subtle” in dealing with race, but forthright, powerful, and horrendously pessimistic. Chesnutt’s plantation and folk stories began to appear in major magazines like the Atlantic in the late 1880s (before he was even known as African American). His first collection of these tales, The Conjure Woman (1899), features an old ex-slave storyteller, Uncle Julius McAdoo, whose “conjuration” tales of superstition and magic subvert the genre. Although deception and trickery characterize the plantation stories of The Wife of His Youth (1899), the title story features a man passing as white who acknowledges an old black woman he had married while in slavery, thus challenging the “color line.”7 Chesnutt’s first novel, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), is the story of a tragic mulatto woman, who, discovering her African ancestry, is driven into madness and death by both the white and the black communities. In this and 329

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later works, Chesnutt focuses on the artificiality of the color line. He tries to show that persons of mixed race are not inferior or “unnatural,” but victims of cultural prejudice and arbitrary legal distinctions. The other two novels published in Chesnutt’s lifetime are The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and The Colonel’s Dream (1905), the latter of which portrays the failed efforts of a white ex-Civil War officer to build a racially equal community in the New South. Sutton E. Griggs wrote five aggressively political novels about the color line: Imperium in Imperio (1899), Overshadowed (1901), Unfettered (1902), The Hindered Hand (1905), and Pointing the Way (1908). Dickson Bruce finds The Hindered Hand the most striking. Two light-skinned women take opposite paths: one tries to pass for white, is found by a court to be legally black, is harassed and abused, and goes mad; the other embraces her black identity but gives up on America, planning to emigrate to Africa. Griggs’s better known Imperium in Imperio is an account of the rise and collapse of the “Imperium,” a black revolutionary movement attempting to create “a separatist state.” It fails because of its leaders’ personal ambitions and because Griggs’s world is one “in which alienation appears the most likely outcome of any attempt to overcome a racist America.”8

Toward the Twentieth Century: Traditionalism and Modernism Three novels from the beginning of the twentieth century might be said to sum up the tumultuous story of African Americans and point the way to a future efflorescence of African American literature: The Marrow of Tradition (1901), The Sport of the Gods (1902), and The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912). They range in technique from the traditional to the modern (even in the same book) and in theme from muted optimism to naturalist pessimism.

Epic struggle: The Marrow of Tradition In the past, Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858–1932) was often referred to as the first significant African American fiction writer; yet until the late 1970s he received minimal attention in standard reference books. Usually only his folk stories in the plantation tradition were cited, with glancing references to The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and The Colonel’s Dream (1905). Sometimes The Marrow of Tradition (1901) was not even mentioned.9 Chesnutt was born a couple of years before the Civil War in Cleveland, Ohio, of freed African American parents from North Carolina. After the war, his 330

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parents returned to North Carolina, and four-year-old Charles grew up “Southern.” Light-skinned enough to “pass” as white, he refused to deny his black heritage. As a mulatto in the South, he faced harassment from both whites and blacks, and in the 1880s the young man returned to the North, settling permanently in Cleveland. During his lifetime, he was variously a teacher, a school principal, a newspaperman, a businessman, and a lawyer. He passed the Ohio bar in 1887, but he devoted his main energies to a stenography business (mainly court recording), taking time away from it in 1899 to pursue his writing. After the lukewarm reception of The Marrow of Tradition, he reopened the business in 1901. Never a particularly popular author, he was nevertheless awarded the NAACP Spingarn Gold Medal in 1928 for his “pioneer work” in depicting “the life and struggle of Americans of Negro descent.” The Marrow of Tradition is in part an attempt to emulate the scale and epic feel of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Depicting a variety of characters at different social levels in a representative community, the novel offers a panorama of race relations in the South. It is an attempt to create sympathy for the African American struggle in terms that are both ennobling and tragic. In so doing, Chesnutt tries to amalgamate several different literary genres: love story, folk tale, dialect story, family feud, political history, reportage, realism, and melodrama, among others. The exaggerated melodrama and the proliferation of subplots and paired characters spoil the novel for many readers, but it also has an energy that draws the reader in. The easiest way to untangle the complicated narrative is to see it as the story of two half-sisters, one white (Olivia) and one half-black (Janet), and their two families. This blurred familial color line (only partially acknowledged) contrasts with the firm color line in the community, a small town in North Carolina that Chesnutt calls “Wellington.”10 The white family is of the Old South. Its tradition-bound nouveau-riche patriarch, Major Philip Carteret, is a white supremacist and the owner of the local newspaper. His wife Olivia is a Merkell, an old Southern white family (from whom Carteret’s fortune comes). Her great burden is that she has a “black” half-sister, whom she refuses to acknowledge. In fact, much of her story involves her attempts to keep the relationship secret. The “black” family is that of Dr William Miller, a mixed-race physician, who has returned to the South to help his people by setting up a black hospital and training center. His wife Janet is also a Merkell, the product of old Merkell’s union with a black servant, Julia Brown. Unbeknownst to Olivia Merkell Carteret until the end, their father had actually married Julia after the death of his first wife, thereby legitimizing Janet’s patrimony and her right to inherit moneys and properties. To have a son to pass on the family tradition is Major Carteret’s greatest desire. But Olivia is frail and has been told by her doctor that she has only one 331

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chance to have a child; any others might kill her. Weeks before the child is due, the sight of Janet so distresses Olivia that she gives birth prematurely. We learn the reason for Olivia’s distress from an old black nurse who meanders on in dialect about various family histories and events for several pages. In the course of this chatter, we discover that the Merkell pater familias has had an affair with Janet’s mother. We also learn that although Carteret’s newborn son needed a doctor because of a rattle stuck in his throat, the Major did not consider Janet’s husband, Dr Miller, worthy of setting foot in his house, despite the fact that Miller has been educated in the best schools in the North as well as in Europe. This racial tension is also played out along large political lines in the community. As the editor of the Morning Chronicle, Major Carteret uses the paper to forward his white supremacist views. His associates, General Belmont and Captain George McBane (representing different strata of society), are even more rabid than Carteret. Together they seek to put down “Negro domination” and reestablish white rule in the Post-Reconstruction South. Carteret deliberately reprints what he knows will be an inflammatory article to the white community: an editorial from the local Afro-American Banner advocating social reform on the basis of racial equality. Chesnutt creates a vivid dramatization of the power of the press in shaping human belief and behavior – and in rewriting history. An unintended effect of Carteret’s manipulation of public information is that white violence suddenly erupts, much to McBane’s satisfaction. Under the banner of “No nigger domination,” the whites burn both newspaper offices and Miller’s hospital. The mob kills anyone who gets in their way, including Dr Miller’s son, his only child. A small resistance force is organized by Josh Green, a black man who as a boy saw his family burned out by Klan violence. In a highly melodramatic scene, Green kills McBane. One of the issues in the interpretation of the novel is whether Green’s aggressive views or Miller’s accommodative views on race represent Chesnutt’s own. The conclusion of the novel seems not only to include both perspectives, but also to sound the note of uncertainty that we find in the two novels by Dunbar and Johnson examined below. The Marrow of Tradition concludes with Carteret going to Miller and asking the doctor to treat his son, who lies dying. Bitter over the death of his own son, Dr Miller at first refuses: “There, Major Carteret . . . lies a specimen of your handiwork! There lies my only child, laid low by a stray bullet in this riot which you and your paper have fomented; struck down as much by your hand as though you had held the weapon with which his life was taken!” (Ch. 36). The despondent Carteret goes home to tell his wife the doctor won’t come. In a panic, she rushes out into the night to the Millers’ house. Opening the door, the doctor is struck by the physical resemblance between Olivia and his wife, one darker, one fairer, but “the same form, the same 332

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features, marked by the same wild grief” (Ch. 37). After a stereotyped speech of pleading and reproach on Olivia’s part, the doctor relents: if his wife agrees, he will attend the Carteret boy. The “two women stood confronting each other across the body of the dead child [the Millers’ son], mute witness of this first meeting between two children of the same father.” Death, “the great leveler,” writes the narrator, works a “marvelous transformation in the bearing of the two women.” The initial dialogue of the scene, however, is full of recriminations and desperate beseeching in the high sentimental tradition. Olivia pleads: “You will not let my baby die? You are my sister; – the child is your own near kin!” Janet in bitter wonderment replies: “I have been your sister for twenty-five years, and you have only now, for the first time, called me so!” Olivia then tries one more ploy: “My father was married to your mother. You are entitled to his name, and to half his estate.” To which Janet replies that her “sister” has robbed her all these years – hardly a reason to “forgive the murder of my child.” Despite the sentimentality, the scene is rife with ironies – the major one being that the woman who was physically and morally repelled by her connection to a black heritage now finds her revulsion resolved by a piece of paper, a marriage certificate according to white law.11 The idea of “race” as socially, politically constructed could hardly be clearer. In one final speech of recrimination, Janet reminds Olivia that, although they used to be mistaken for each other on the street, Olivia denied her and “left me nameless all my life.” She then rejects white legitimacy.

............................................................................................... “I throw you back your father’s name, your father’s wealth, your sisterly recognition. I want none of them, – they are bought too dear. . . . But that you may know that a woman may be foully wronged, and yet may have a heart to feel, even for one who has injured her, you may have your child’s life, if my husband can save it!”

...............................................................................................

When Dr Miller is admitted to the Carteret house, he asks if the child is still alive. “Yes . . . but nearly gone,” says Carteret. A call with a haunting implication comes down from the head of the stairs: “Come on up, Dr. Miller. . . . There’s time enough, but none to spare.”

In the American penal colony: The Sport of the Gods Although Ohio-born Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) was the child of former slaves from Kentucky, he did not really know the Deep South. But he 333

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listened attentively to his mother’s stories and eventually published several volumes of stories in the genre: Folks from Dixie (1898), The Strength of Gideon (1900), In Old Plantation Days (1903), and The Heart of Happy Hollow (1904). In The Sport of the Gods, he combines realism and melodrama, with touches of sentimentality. The prose style is crisply modern; the dialogue is mostly realistic and rendered in ordinary English, though several passages are in dialect. Dickson Bruce suggests that the title indicates that people, specifically black people, are “toys” to the gods. But the allusion is darker. One of Plutarch’s axioms in Political Precepts is a comment on indifferent cruelty as “sport”: “It was a saying of Bion, that though the boys throw stones at frogs in sport, yet the frogs do not die in sport, but in earnest.” Even better known are the lines from Shakespeare’s King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;/They kill us for their sport” (IV.1.36). The Hamiltons are a Southern black family, victims of their social environment, and possibly the sport of a malevolent God. The novel begins with the word fiction – the fiction of the good old plantation South before the War – a myth from which the present tale is to diverge. “Fiction has said so much in regret of the old days when there were plantations and overseers and masters and slaves, that it was good to come upon such a household as Berry Hamilton’s, if for no other reason than that it afforded a relief from the monotony of tiresome iteration.” From the first, the narrative has the feel of an archetypal parable about to go wrong. As the story opens, Berry and Fannie Hamilton are living in a cottage on the property of their white employers, a Southern plantation owner named Maurice Oakley and his wife, Leslie. An ex-slave, Berry Hamilton has been the Oakleys’ well-paid butler for twenty years; his wife Fannie is their housekeeper. The Hamiltons have two children, a son, Joe, and a daughter, Kit. They are “good-living,” honest, middle-class people, who despite the chaos of Reconstruction have succeeded in rising with the “rehabilitated fortunes” of the South. Berry has stuck with Maurice “through thick and thin,” and, as his employer’s fortunes have increased, so have Berry’s. The relationship is based on trust and loyalty, freely given. Then Oakley (in an effort to protect his brother, the real thief) accuses Berry of taking $986, in spite of the fact that the two men have been close for twenty years – almost friends. Berry is convicted of theft by a prejudiced jury and given a long prison term. His family is thrown out of their home in disgrace. Because of community pressure from both blacks and whites, they decide to flee north to New York City. In their new environment, the family goes steadily downhill. Fannie Hamilton is soon abandoned by her children in this big new city she doesn’t know or understand. Joe Hamilton is drawn into a ruinous relationship with the much older Hattie Sterling, a has-been singer in a cheap black nightclub. Deceived and taken advantage of by the Harlem cool set, Joe is 334

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driven deeper and deeper into alcoholism and eventually to murder. In a drunken fit, he strangles Hattie and is sentenced to life in prison. Kitty Hamilton, the pretty, sweet, innocent country girl, succumbs to a local con man and pimp; lured by money and “fame,” she becomes a mediocre singer and showgirl of questionable reputation. When her brother is sent to jail, she regards his imprisonment as “inopportune” for her career and disowns him, simultaneously rejecting her mother as a burden. A white newspaper reporter eventually discovers that the real thief of the $986 was Maurice Oakley’s brother and that there has been a cover-up. Reclusive and guilt-ridden for years, Oakley goes utterly mad when he is exposed, falling down, foaming at the mouth, and screaming unintelligibly. Berry is released from prison, but he has become a suspicious and bitter man. These feelings are fanned into rage when he discovers what has happened to his children and to Fannie, who has “remarried” without benefit of legal niceties. When Berry goes to see Fannie, she tells him the sad fate of the children. Moreover, Fannie’s “husband,” Gibson, is physically abusive. Angry, distraught, and despairing, Berry spends several weeks planning to kill the interloper husband, but fate takes a hand. The gambler Gibson is murdered by cronies at a racetrack. Thanking his great good fortune, Berry takes Fannie back to the South, to the “only place” they could “call home,” the little Southern village where it all started. Mrs Oakley welcomes them and reopens and refurnishes their little cottage on her property – as amends, of a sort, for the wrongs done to them by her family. Perhaps all will be well at last. Fannie and Berry sit together “many a night” with “clasped hands listening to the shrieks across the yard of the madman,” Maurice Oakley. “It was not a happy life, but it was all that was left to them, and they took it up without complaint, for they knew they were powerless . . . against some will infinitely stronger than their own” (Ch. 18). Some malevolent god perhaps, having his sport. Here then at the beginning of the twentieth century is one Black version of the American Dream.

A Modernist antihero? The Ex-Coloured Man The title of James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is multiply ironic, and one can taste in it the modernist flavor of the entire book. The narrator both is and is not an ex-colored man, is and is not the story’s “hero,” and the narrative is and is not an autobiography, is and is not fiction.12 By the end of the novel, the narrator has renounced his black heritage but has also kept it, sort of, secretly. Unnamed, he is simply the Ex-Coloured Man. 335

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The novel imitates the conventions of traditional autobiographical narrative by beginning at the beginning with the childhood of the narrator. It is rather like the kind of fictionalized autobiography made famous by Dickens in David Copperfield. The opening of Ex-Coloured Man, however, is distinctly more covert than that of David Copperfield: “I know that in writing the following pages I am divulging the great secret of my life, the secret which for some years I have guarded far more carefully than any of my earthly possessions.” That secret is that he is of mixed race – and that, out of a desire for a comfortable and peaceful existence, he has become colorless, nearly invisible – passing for a middle-class white businessman. The Ex-Coloured Man fits the definition of the modern antihero.13 In an absurd world, the Ex-Coloured Man seeks meaning in his black heritage while effacing it. The narrative becomes a partial parody of the quest motif that dominated earlier black fiction; and as such it is an early example of romantic irony in African American fiction. In many ways, it is the beginning of the New Black Novel of the twentieth century. The Ex-Coloured Man’s childhood has been spent with his mulatto mother, who had been sent to the North by her white lover, a wealthy Southern gentleman. Although his parents loved each other, marriage was not socially possible. Given his mother’s light skin and his father’s economic support (plus a one-time visit from him), the boy grows up believing he is white. He even makes fun of blacks at school. But one day the principal visits the classroom, and the white kids are asked to stand; but when the boy stands, he is told to sit down. Humiliated, the boy asks his mother if he is a “nigger.” She tells him that he is “as good as anybody.” When he asks if he is white, she tells him he can’t be, because she’s not. Confused by her answer, he is further confused by the sense that he belongs to neither and both races at the same time. Rebuffed by his white schoolmates, the boy finds himself almost totally isolated. The experience causes him to reject, eventually even hate, ambivalently, the black part of his being. This response makes the boy the reverse of the heroic black male figures in slave narratives and previous African American fictions. The Ex-Coloured Man is self-aware only in a contradictory way and is blind to many of the social and psychological implications of the life around him. Particularly noticeable is his blindness to his new condition: he is culturally illiterate as a black man – unable to read the signs of the black subculture. His black “heritage” is only evident in his ability to play and compose ragtime, a talent that will further entrap him in an invisible racial and social cage. When his mother dies, he moves to the South to attend Atlanta University – and experiences a new form of racism – segregation. Almost immediately upon his arrival in Atlanta, his money is stolen; and he must abandon his education 336

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and look for work, which he finally finds in a cigar factory in Florida. Impoverished and orphaned, he now lives among lower-class blacks, with whom, a little surprisingly, he finds himself quite comfortable. He also teaches music and plays for the church, where he mingles with a higher class of blacks. Thus he is able to move back and forth among various class levels, eventually formulating a three-tiered society of black people: the desperate (who hate white people); the domestics (who serve white people), and the free workers (who are independent and wish no particular contact with white people). He, however, drifts, unrooted in any class, black or white. The situation now becomes even more thematically complicated, as we see – as he apparently does not – his invisible racial enslavement. The Ex-Coloured Man moves back north, to New York City, where he plays ragtime at a late-night jazz club. Here he encounters a Rich White Gentleman, who likes his music and offers him a job playing piano at his parties. A friendship of sorts develops, but the Ex-Coloured Man is being drawn into another invisible trap, spending hours working for, and playing for the pleasure of, a rich white man. The Rich White Gentleman also begins to loan him out to friends to play at their parties, and the Ex-Coloured Man experiences yet another new lifestyle, one which he likes very much. But not all is well in his head. He does not exactly feel like chattel (after all, the extra exposure to rich white people is economically advantageous), but his life is not entirely his own, and the white folks tend to treat him, not exactly as a servant, but as a subordinate. His relationship with the Rich White Gentleman is a symbolic parallel with the master/slave relationship of the plantation myth of the contented “Darkie” before the Civil War. Although technically a free man, the Ex-Coloured Man still lives largely within the psychological and social shackles of slavery. On a tour of Europe as the Rich White Gentleman’s protege, the Ex-Coloured Man becomes even closer to his “master.” Then, although unaware that he is still acting under the influence of a slave mentality, he at last decides to set out on his own. His choice of a place to find freedom as a black man is ironic – the American South. Here he plans to work on original compositions in music – to adapt Negro spirituals to classical music infused with ragtime – to embrace his black heritage and create a new and original American music that would bring “honor to the Negro race.” But it all goes wrong. Just as he begins his new life as an authentic Black American artist, he sees a black man lynched for an unspecified transgression. Instead of hanging the man, the lynch mob burns him alive. Johnson’s description is vivid. As the man squirms and strains at his chains, he visibly withers; his eyes bulge out as the heat intensifies; his cries for help are choked off by fire and smoke. The mob is divided in its response; some are sickened; some cheer and jeer. 337

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The Ex-Coloured Man is transfixed; he has never seen racism like this. His comment is revealing: “I was fixed to the spot where I stood, powerless to take my eyes from what I did not want to see” (Ch. 10, my italics). He is transfixed by a horror he does not truly understand – one of the major paradoxes of the human condition as articulated in modernist literature. He walks away feeling shame for his country, “the great example of democracy to the world.” The Ex-Coloured Man decides he must pass as white. “I argued that to forsake one’s race to better one’s condition was no less worthy an action than to forsake one’s country for the same purpose. I finally made up my mind that I would neither disclaim the black race nor claim the white race.” He decides to change his name, grow a moustache, and “let the world take me for what it would . . . it was not necessary for me to go about with a label of inferiority pasted across my forehead.” All the while, “I understood that it was not discouragement or fear or search for a larger field of action and opportunity that was driving me out of the Negro race. I knew that it was shame, unbearable shame. Shame at being identified with a people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals” (Ch. 10). Many readers see his decision as a defeat, a cop-out. He gives up his vision of becoming the great Black American artist, the creator of a music that would glorify the race. Although he says that he does not want to be identified with a race of people who would allow themselves to be so cowed and abused, personal fear is clearly a major motivation for his decision. He says he wants to be neutral, neither disclaiming the black race nor claiming the white; but this is at least a partial lie to himself, for he does in fact disclaim his black heritage. He marries a white woman, has a couple of children, and becomes a successful small business man. The middle-class themes of the domestic novel – love and family – although somewhat ironic are not directly undercut. His wife has married him knowing his racial heritage; she loves him, and he loves her. The scene in which he first tells his beloved of his racial ancestry is affecting. Under “the strange light in her eyes I felt that I was growing black and thickfeatured and crimped haired” (Ch. 11). When she puts her head down on the piano and weeps “with great sobs that shook her frail body,” he feels, for “the only time in my life,” an “absolute regret at being coloured.” Robert Stepto offers one of the more severe critiques of the character of the Ex-Coloured Man. Not only does he suggest that Johnson’s narrator presents a naive central consciousness – wherein the reader sees ironies that the narrator does not – but he also argues that the narrator’s travels and experiences all add up to the conclusion that his archetypal “flight from bondage” is a failure. Stepto sees the narrator’s character as self-centered and idiosyncratic, standing in stark contrast with a host of “canonical images” of heroism. His pilgrimages to the South, his failed attempt at a college education, his failed effort to be an 338

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interpreter of black culture and music, and even his initiation of horror in the burning of the black man are but “empty rituals” that subvert the traditional themes of African American literature (From Behind the Veil, 104–5). When he later claims that his love for his children makes him glad that he has become an ex-colored person – that “I am what I am” – the irony is painful. He cannot abide the idea of his children growing up black (or partially black – which in America means black) and thus being economically and socially disadvantaged. Although he does not desire to be “otherwise,” he sometimes opens a “little box” in which he has kept some “fast yellowing manuscripts,” his musical compositions, the “only tangible remnants of a vanished dream, a dead ambition, a sacrificed talent.” Certainly his renunciation of art and blackness is not the ideal of a grand sacrifice for some lofty and noble cause. Perhaps, he thinks in regretful moments, he has like Esau sold his “birthright for a mess of pottage.” In this context, it is instructive to remember that Esau tells his brother Jacob, “I am at the point to die: and what profit shall this birthright do to me?” (Gen. 25: 3234). About to “die” because of his black heritage, the Ex-Coloured Man turns pale: hungry for the pottage of material comforts, he sells his birthright as an African American. He is to my mind still a sympathetic figure at the end, but hardly a hero. In adopting a pale middle-class white life, he accommodates and rationalizes himself out of existence. Dickson D. Bruce is not alone in thinking The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man the “most accomplished African American novel from the early twentieth century.” He also calls it the “capstone to the history of African American narrative from emancipation to the coming World War I.” In that assessment lies the tragedy of African Americans – for, despite the election of America’s first black president, the struggle for a Black American identity founded in equality and freedom is not yet over. That ideal lies in the territory ahead.

Notes 1. Dickson D. Bruce’s “Confronting the Crisis: African American Narratives,” ACAF (2009), 279–95, is probably the best place for readers unfamiliar with African American literature to begin. A list of more than fifty works of African American fiction before World War I may be found at the end of his essay (293–4). Also see Dowling, ACAF, 369–73 et passim. 2. A variation on this pattern appears in Gates, Three Classic African-American Novels (1990). In his introduction (viii), Gates suggests that the three texts he has selected represent “three crucial epochs in African-American history before 339

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3.

4.

5.

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7.

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9.

10.

1900: Slavery (Clotel), Reconstruction (Iola Leroy), and the Jim Crow era of the 1890s (The Marrow of Tradition).” The phrase Jim Crow refers to the political suppression of black people after the postwar Reconstruction period (1866–1877), when segregation laws were enacted in state after state in the South, becoming pervasive in the 1890s. The term comes from a popular minstrel-show character, played in black-face by Thomas D. Rice (1808–1860). Woodward (1966 [1955]) traces its history from 1877 to 1955. Two of these analytic paradigms, though different, are complementary. See C. T. Davis (1982), 6; Olney (1985), 152–3; and Ch. 4 of Stepto (1979). Also see Bruce (2001). In Bruce (1989), see esp. the prologue and Ch. 1; cf. note 9 below. Bruce’s ACAF essay (see comment note 1) will be a touchstone for the first part of the following discussion. I suggest as a second introductory essay, Stepto, CLHUS (1988), 785–99, which is a brief overview of several genres of literature that places the 1865–1914 era in a longer historical context. For full treatments, see especially B. W. Bell (1987) and Sundquist (1993). For a guide to other major critical-historical works, see Bruce’s bibliography in ACAF, 293–5. The English word mulatto, originally a derogatory term, is from Spanish mulo, Latin mulus, meaning mule; that is, a half-breed. The phrase mulatto woman is used here in its now traditional sense of a basically tragic figure. The mulatto woman could be sold into slavery after the death of a white husband. See Farrell’s comments on Iola LeRoy in the context of “Women’s Narratives,” ACAF, 268–9. Fictional treatments of the mulatto woman, interracial love, and passing the color line that Bruce cites include works by Thomas Detter, John S. Durham, J. McHenry Jones, and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. See Farrell (2009), 274–5, on Hopkins. Bruce mentions other writers who worked within the plantation folktale genre, subverted it, turned away from it, and started in new directions: notably Alice Moore Dunbar’s stories in The Goodness of St. Rocque (1899), and James D. Corrothers’s The Black Cat Club (1902). Bruce, 291. He concludes his overview with a reference to W. E. B. Du Bois’s novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), as a comment on James Weldon Johnson’s Ex-Coloured Man. The political action in Du Bois’s novel is the attempt of white Northerners and Southerners, working in concert, to monopolize the cotton trade. Resisting them is the very dark-skinned Zora, who embraces her blackness. For example, see REAmL (1963), 170, where he receives one short paragraph about his “Uncle Remus” style of folk stories and his “later” books on “race prejudice.” The major breakthrough came primarily with W. L. Andrews’s biography of Chesnutt (1980). Alluding to Wilmington, North Carolina, the scene of a race riot in 1898, in which some of Chesnutt’s relatives were at risk. A number of black people were killed and many were driven from their homes.

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11. See Moddelmog on this topic, ACAF (2009), 395–410, esp. 404–6 on Chesnutt. 12. See Ch. 20 for definitions of modernism. Published anonymously in 1912, Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man was republished in 1927, by Alfred A. Knopf as part of its series featuring Harlem Renaissance writers, with Johnson’s name as the author. He explained for its reissue that it was fiction, though loosely based on people Johnson had actually met; and some critics identify it as a roman
a clef. Many of the characters are unnamed, referred to almost as allegorical types: the rich white gentleman, the lynching victim, the wife, the Texan, the tall colored man, the rich widow, etc. In the introduction to the 1989 reprint of Ex-Coloured Man, Gates gives a brief informative biographical sketch (v–ix) and a publication list (ix), along with comments on the novel. 13. An antihero is a main character in a modern story or play who is the opposite or in some ways the contrary of the traditional hero. Instead of possessing dignity, status, power, courage, and so on, the antihero tends to be ineffectual, passive, small-minded, devious, or dishonest. The world in which the antihero moves may be empty of certainty, meaning, or value. But often the antihero stands in contrast to the bogus values of the main culture. Although such characters existed centuries earlier, the term is most commonly associated with postWorld War II disillusionment.

See also Andrews et al. (1997); Bickley (1987); Byerman (1994); J. Campbell (1986); Carby (1987); C. T. Davis and Gates (1985); Diffley (ACAF, 2009); Dowling (2007); Duncan (1998); Gates (1987, 1988, 1989); Gayle (1971); Harlan (1986); Jackson (1989); Jarrett (2010); Leonard et al. (1992); J. Martin (1975); McFeely (1991); McWilliams (2002); Rampersad (1976); Samuels (1992); Scruggs (1993); Sollors (1997); Tate (1992); K. Warren (1993); Wonham (1998). Also see references in the previous chapter, esp. re: Huckleberry Finn.

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Chapter 19

The “Dream of a Republic” War, Reconstruction, and Future History

After and even during the Civil War, a number of novels and romances were produced that deal not only with the war itself, but also with the vast political, economic, and social changes it brought. Some portray the problems of “Reconstruction”; others are associated with the politics of the “Progressive Era.” Some glorify the North or the South; others seem like a coroner’s inquest into the fate of the nation. Many of these political and economic fictions revolve in different ways around the failed dream of a republic – a phrase from Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). The word Reconstruction is now a political term indicating the tensions generated by the North’s attempt to create a “New South” after the Civil War. The “Reconstruction Era” particularly refers to the period beginning just before the end of the war and extending to the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876. During this period, the Federal Government in Washington, DC tried to reconstruct the economic, political, and social ruin of the Old South by imposing a series of laws governing readmission to the Union. Most people associate the Progressive Era with the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade and a half of the twentieth century.1 Three political parties have called themselves progressives. The best known of them was also called the Bull Moose Party; in 1912 supporters of Theodore Roosevelt withdrew from the Republican Party to form a splinter group that wanted to curtail the runaway excesses of Big Business. But the term is complicated by the fact that the word progressive was also used in a positive way to describe the rapid expansion of business and industry, which many thought a good thing for the country. Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson. Ó 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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As we have seen in the first chapters of this volume, the “Rise of Realism” in American literature has frequently been attributed to the experience of the Civil War. But several of the most thought-provoking of the political and economic fictions of the Reconstruction and Progressive Era were romances in the mode of fantasy and science fiction: utopian/dystopian futuristic projections with modernist overtones. We’ll begin with the more traditional fictions of the Reconstruction, and then turn to different kinds progressive fictions.

De Forest and the Great American War What is regarded by many as the major novel of the Civil War and Reconstruction Era was also one of the first, J. W. De Forest’s Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867). Although it is regarded as a classic of realism, much of it is in the sentimental and melodramatic romantic tradition. The novel’s reputation as a work of realism is largely based on its unsentimental and grim descriptions of combat in the Civil War and the graphic rendering of the plight of the wounded afterward. John William De Forest (1826–1906) served in a volunteer unit on the Union side; at the end of the War, he served as head of the “Freedmen’s Bureau” in Greenville, South Carolina. His familiarity with the war and his experiences as a Northerner living in the South are central to Miss Ravenel. De Forest also published a series of magazine sketches in the 1860s based on his military experience. These sketches were published forty years after his death in two volumes as A Volunteer’s Adventures (1946) and A Union Officer in the Reconstruction (1948). Their publication continued the De Forest revival that had begun in 1939 with the republication of Miss Ravenel’s Conversion. In the introduction, Gordon S. Haight called De Forest the first important American “realist,” a judgment he repeated in LHUS (1948; rev 1960; see 881–5). W. D. Howells in commenting on Miss Ravenel and other works said that De Forest was a “realist” before American realist fiction was called “realism.”2 In the introduction to Critical Essays on John William De Forest (1981), James Gargano suggests that Miss Ravenel and the two books of war sketches “should insure De Forest enduring status as a brilliant first-hand chronicler of the Civil War and its aftermath.”3 Eric Sundquist writes in CLHUS (1988) that Miss Ravenel’s Conversion is “easily the most impressive treatment of the Civil War next to Crane’s more stylistically innovative Red Badge of Courage” and that the magazine sketches are “a brilliant account of the actuality of battle and the likely source of much of Crane’s best material” (511–12). Edmund Wilson begins his long essay on De Forest in Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962) with a somewhat dismissive 344

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comment regarding the republication of Miss Ravenel, Honest John Vane (1875), and Playing the Mischief (1875). Wilson acknowledges that De Forest has “come to be recognized as a precursor of realism in American fiction”; but “now that De Forest has been rescued and accepted,” he seems to be in danger “of having his actual merits exaggerated.” Nevertheless, he is “the first of our writers of fiction to deal seriously with the events of the Civil War” (670).

Double conversions: Romance and realism in Miss Ravenel The tangled thread of the main plot of Miss Ravenel’s Conversion winds around the daughter of a New Orleans physician-scientist. Lillie Ravenel’s political conversion occurs in two stages. In the first, she embraces abolitionism but maintains her secessionist loyalties; in the second, she finally converts to Unionism because of negative social experiences in the South. Her romantic conversions also take place in two stages: the first comes from learning of her husband’s infidelity; the second, after she is freed by his death. On the surface, the latter “conversion” is from a silly girl who falls for the romantic illusion of the dashing military officer to a wiser woman who settles for a steady life with a down-to-earth New England scholar. Given the persistent deflation of romance and romanticism in the book, one might suspect that this steady life is yet another romantic illusion – but that suspicion is not fulfilled. The novel opens as the Civil War is about to begin. Dr Ravenel does not believe in slavery, nor in secession. When war breaks out, he and Lillie move to the Northern city of “New Boston.” Part of the book’s purpose is to satirize the puritanical attitudes and social traditions of New England, especially the stuffy academic attitudes of some of its genteel inhabitants; and part of its aim is to expose the misguided romanticism and hypocrisy of the Southern chivalric tradition. In New Boston, Lillie is wooed by two young men of differing sensibilities and intentions. She prefers the Southern officer, Lt Col. John Carter of Virginia, to the high-minded Northern lawyer, Edward Colburne, who is serving as an officer in the Union Army. Colburne doesn’t approve of Lillie’s secessionist convictions, but he loves the girl anyway. The dashing Carter is serving in the Southern cause in spite of his Northern sympathies. He is attracted by Lillie’s beauty, but his ardor cools when he learns that her father’s financial situation is unstable. Carter is a dissolute soldier-adventurer, opportunistic, unscrupulous, and promiscuous; but in Lillie’s eyes he is a glamorous officer-gentleman. When Dr Ravenel and Lillie return to New Orleans, they are suspected of having been corrupted by their Northern sojourn. This treatment of her father, along with the vulgar display of hatred for the Union soldiers by the Southern 345

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women, is the beginning of Lillie’s political “conversion.” Carter, meanwhile, is on his way up in the new Confederacy. He and Lillie soon become engaged – a match that Dr Ravenel only partially supports. When Colburne hears of Lillie’s marriage, he is miserable. In the meantime, Carter is having an affair and speculating with government funds. As Henry James put it in a review in The Nation (June 20, 1867), Carter is, “by-the-by,” killed in battle and the widow, “of course,” marries Colburne. Lillie is now content to live in the North, and she supports the Union fully. As W. D. Howells put it in a review in the Atlantic Monthly (July 1867): “she can at last wisely love and marry Colburne; and, cured of Secession by experiencing on her father’s account the treatment received by Unionists in New Orleans, her conversion to loyalty is . . . duly settled before the story ends.” Despite the banal ending, the overall impression left by the novel is the realism of the hospital and battle scenes. Malaria and other pestilence infect the battlefields; in the hospitals, the sour smell of blood overwhelms that of alcohol and chloroform (Ch. 24). One man, whose leg has been amputated, has to be held down by two attendants, while he utters “an inarticulate jabber of broken screams” and rolls and bounces from side to side on a pile of loose cotton (Ch. 21). Scenes of death in battle are described from the perspectives of both Colburne and Carter. Colburne finds himself lying among several wounded and dead men. One man has “his brains bulging from a bullet-hole in the forehead.” Some of the wounded are screaming, but most of the injured and dying men are silent, settling into “the calm, sublime patience of the wounded on the battlefield” (Ch. 21). The eerie quietude that alternates with the noise and turmoil of battle is described by Carter in the same chapter as he hears a bullet strike “with a loud smash, apparently in a tree.” Between Carter and the tree is a man lying down reading a newspaper, seemingly unperturbed. Presently Carter notices the blood trickling down his neck. The rifle ball had entered under his chin, penetrated his neck, and “cut the spinal column where it joins the brain.” The man is lying totally still, holding the newspaper, as though still reading, “with his eyes fixed on a sermon by Henry Ward Beecher.”

Imagining History: Contradictory Chronicles of the Reconstruction The years 1865–70 saw the thirteenth through the fifteenth Amendments added to the Constitution, which guaranteed voting rights to blacks and prohibited slavery; the new state legislatures in the South had to adopt them in order to be readmitted to the Union. The Republican Party sought to maintain political 346

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control through manipulation of black votes, and white people in the new South devised various means of derailing a free black vote, the most notorious of which were the “Black Codes.” The Reconstruction Act of 1867 divided the South into five military zones, each with a Federal Governor and a contingent of Union troops to maintain the peace. Southern whites resented the new “tyranny” and worked steadily for the “Redemption” of white supremacy and the restoration of chivalric elegance to Southern society. Among the groups working for Redemption was the Ku Klux Klan.

Historical and “contemporary” fictions Several of the many fictions offering sometimes questionable accounts of the Civil War era and its consequences are of special interest to both cultural and literary historians. Before the war, John Esten Cooke (1830–1886) wrote “powder and periwig” costume romances. His best-known romance of the Old South was The Virginia Comedians (1854), followed by a sequel, Henry St. John, Gentleman (1859), a tale of the great-grandson of Pocahontas. In the former, Cooke dramatizes tensions between the older chivalric culture of the South and a newer culture of democratic leveling. Immediately after the war, he published Surrey of Eagle’s-Nest (1866), based on his own military service, to which he adds a stereotyped love story. Its sequel, Mohun (1869), is subtitled The Last Days of Lee and His Paladins, the theme of which is the indomitable courage of Robert E. Lee’s forces as they realize the South is losing the war. In the previous chapter, we mentioned the regionalist fiction of George Washington Cable (1844–1925). In other works, he dealt with the problems of the postwar South, especially various aspects of The Negro Question (1890). Cable’s The Silent South (1885) addressed the problems of labor laws, prisons, mental institutions, and related matters. His antislavery sentiments in John March, Southerner (1893–4; 1899) further alienated his Southern readers. Yet his Creole stories are full of the “romance” of the Old South; and he could write a popular Civil War romance favorable to Southern traditions like The Cavalier (1901), based on his own experiences in the Confederate Army. Red Rock (1898), by Thomas Nelson Page (1853–1922), portrays the Reconstructionist government as threatening the treasured traditions and values of Southern white society with total destruction. The book nostalgically glorifies life in the antebellum South, defiantly defends the Ku Klux Klan as the protector of Southern institutions, and epitomizes blatant racism. It was a best seller. Page’s collection of six local-color, black dialect stories, In Ole Virginia (1887), is somewhat less blatantly racist.4 347

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Equally popular, if not more so, than Red Rock was The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905) by Thomas Dixon (1864–1946). It is one of a trilogy of “historical” novels in which Dixon chronicles the overturning of the “Black Plague of Reconstruction” and advocates the “Redemption” of the ways of the Old South. In narrative order, the novels are The Clansman (1905), The Leopard’s Spots (1902), and The Traitor (1907). The trilogy dramatizes the reemergence of the power of the Southern white man and the disenfranchisement of the freed black man – arguing that if the black man were lifted “above his station” social collapse would follow. The Leopard’s Spots takes its title from Jeremiah 13:23–4, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? . . . Therefore will I scatter them as the stubble that passeth away by the wind of the wilderness.” Dixon interprets the verses to mean that the black man cannot be raised up and that former slaves will be dispersed to the far corners of the earth. The Clansman portrays the Clan (or Klan) as chivalric protectors of women and children. In part an answer to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), the novel extenuates a Simon Legree figure; and President Abraham Lincoln is represented as a Kentucky Southerner who in his heart sees that the North is equally responsible for slavery. The novel was a best seller and became the basis of D. W. Griffith’s once celebrated, now notorious epic film, Birth of a Nation (1914–15). A fourth novel, The Sins of the Fathers (1912), continues these themes. Dixon eventually produced over twenty novels, including another trilogy in the 1900s in which he attacked the socialism of Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward (1888). A quite different Reconstruction saga was written by Ohio-born Albion Winegar Tourgee (1838–1905), who vigorously attacked the Klan. In the main, his multi-volume post-Civil War chronicle is composed of seven related works published from 1879 to 1887: Figs and Thistles ((1879); A Fool’s Errand (1879); Bricks without Straw (1880); A Royal Gentleman (1881; first published in 1874 as ‘Toinette); John Eax and Mamelon (1882); Hot Plowshares (1883); and Black Ice (1887). Tourgee has often been dealt with summarily in literary histories as a “local colorist.” But literary historians like Alexander Cowie and Eric J. Sundquist see Tourgee’s fictions as important documentaries of postwar realities.5 Tourgee served as an officer on the Union side in the Civil War and later as politician, editor, and diplomat. As a Northern lawyer, he was active in postwar maneuverings in North Carolina and campaigned for the rights of black people. In A Royal Gentleman, Bricks without Straw, and A Fool’s Errand, he repeatedly condemned the Klan for retarding the expected progress of black liberty and equality. The story of A Royal Gentleman takes place in the years just before, during, and after the Civil War (approximately 1858–67). The novel tells the 348

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troubling story of the “love” of a Southern white aristocrat for his octoroon slave, whom he persists in regarding as property. Bricks without Straw is the story of the conversion of a Southerner to the Northern point of view about the welfare of blacks through his marriage to a New England schoolteacher. The novel also criticizes the North’s unrealistic expectations for a quick resolution to the problem of national disunity. A Fool’s Errand embodies general postwar Southern disillusionment with Reconstruction policies. Eric Sundquist suggests that, in its “explosive critique of both Northern and Southern policies,” A Fool’s Errand belongs “in the category of such visionary works of nineteenth-century realism as Moby-Dick and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” (CLHUS, 512). The “fool” of the narrative is Comfort Servosse, a Northerner who moves to the South. He dreams of an ideal republic, but he makes a series of errors offensive to his new neighbors, including selling land to blacks, giving a speech on ex-slaves’ legal rights, and urging Unionism. He gradually achieves a modicum of reconciliation with his Southern neighbors, but he realizes that the federal Reconstruction Act is a Northern delusion; the economic destruction of the South by the North in the aftermath of the war is almost worse than the war itself. Admirable in his idealism, Servosse and others like him are fools nevertheless.

Dream Visions: Utopian Romance – Time Travel – Future History Much of the reform fiction of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era was experimental in form and genre. As mentioned, a number of noteworthy works are in the mode of fantasy and science fiction: notably Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888); Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889); William Dean Howells’s A Traveler from Altruria (1894) and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907); Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915); and Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1907). Several of these works involve not only time travel but also ambiguous dream states.6

Bellamy’s benign despotism: The patriarchal utopia Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888) by Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) is almost as famous as The Jungle in the reform-protest fiction of the era. Although influenced by Karl Marx, “Bellamy Socialism” was not based on class warfare. Bellamy believed that we could all love one another and that mutual love would be the basis for an ideal society. Besides universal benevolence, the chief pillars 349

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of Bellamy’s “cooperative commonwealth” are progressive economic “equality,” the disappearance of class distinctions, and the obliteration of the “profit motive.” The ideal society will be achieved through peaceful social evolution. Unlike Mark Twain, Bellamy’s belief in overall Hegelian progress is also reflected in his optimism regarding technology; he enthusiastically embraced the flurry of new inventions that were making life easier and more pleasant for all. Whatever its shortcomings as a realistic analysis of human behavior, the novel was a popular success, selling over a million copies in ten years. It was a major text in the creation of the short-lived “Nationalist Party”; also known as “Bellamy Nationalism,” the movement influenced the economic theories of Howells and Gilman. In the novel, the insomniac Julian West has himself hypnotized in order to sleep. One evening in 1887, he goes into a hypnotic trance-state for more than a hundred and thirteen years without aging. His rescuer, Dr Leete, and his daughter Edith, enlighten Julian regarding the many changes in the world of 2000. General socialism prevails; the government regulates air quality, medicine, communications, electric power, commerce. Instead of money, electronic credits are distributed to all equally or as needed. Education is managed for the greatest good for the greatest number. There are mental rehabilitation centers for criminals. The balance between the branches of government has been stabilized, and the relations among various countries have been made harmonious. Special laws safeguarding women have been enacted; a female representative elected by women voters has veto power over any legislation affecting the legal rights of women. The narrative ends with implausible sentimental flourish. Edith has fallen in love with the man who wrote beautiful love letters to her grandmother (also named Edith) a century before: Julian.

Howells’s bourgeois utopia A Traveler from Altruria (1894) is Howells’s emulation of Looking Backward. It is basically a symposium involving a group of Americans representing different professions and mindsets – and one Mr Aristides Homos, a man from a utopian civilization called Altruria. It is a Christian country, founded on principles of equality and loving brotherhood, a type of Christian Socialism derived in part from Tolstoy. Howells, like Bellamy, presents as a model a democratic commonwealth dedicated to the romantic Hegelian ideal of the ultimate state of perfect cooperation and benevolence. Of particular note is the revolt against the “Accumulation,” Howells’s term for corporate monopolies as one great meganopoly that owns everything. The Americans point out that America is at heart a “businessman’s country”; 350

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and the essence of business is “competition,” which means triumphing over others as part of the process of “natural selection” and the “survival of the fittest.” Since the economic benefits will eventually trickle down to the rest, promotion of oneself by a member of the superior class is actually (absurdly applying Jeremy Bentham’s logic) “the greatest good for the greatest number.” When Mr Homos goes to speak with workers and farmers, however, he discovers that they are in fact quite unhappy. The trickle-down system, based on greed, isn’t working. Homos describes Altruria, on the other hand, as a civilization based on altruism. In Altruria, Accumulation has been replaced by “true Christianity,” the socialist state. The Altrurian “Commonwealth” recognizes universal human “complicity” in the evils of the world and concomitant “responsibility” to others. Static and cliched as fiction, Altruria is hardly even a novel in dialogue.7

Feminisia: Gilman’s female utopia Rather more engaging and original as fiction is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist utopian novel, Herland (1915), the second volume of a once-forgotten trilogy. In the 1890s, Gilman became heavily involved in feminist causes and worked in various social reform organizations concerned with populist themes, trade unionism, women’s suffrage, temperance, and general issues of social “integrity.”8 In 1898, she published a feminist manifesto in support of women working outside the home: Women and Economics; A Study of the Economic Relations Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution. From 1900 to 1904, she published three more nonfiction works: Concerning Children (1900), which calls into question traditional ways of child-rearing; The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903), which maintains that, for a woman, home should not be a workplace but a place of refuge and refreshment; and Human Work (1904). From 1909 to 1916, Gilman edited the magazine, The Forerunner. During her tenure as editor, Gilman published several book-length works, both fiction and nonfiction. In What Diantha Did (1910), the heroine rejects her traditional role as a schoolteacher and sets up a lucrative business in foods and housecleaning. The Crux (1911) is a novel about a young woman who is warned in time that her suitor has venereal disease. In the nonfiction work, The Man-Made World; or, Our Androcentric Culture (1911), Gilman argues that male dominance has retarded human progress and a world in which men and women have equal power offers a better future. Gilman’s novel Moving the Mountain (1911) was the first of three related utopian fictions that include Herland (1915) and With Her in Ourland (1916), all directly reflecting ideas in The Man-Made World. The first, Moving the 351

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Mountain, is set three decades in the future (that is, in 1940). Returning to America after having been lost in Tibet for thirty years, John Robertson finds that rampant capitalism has been rejected and that women have equal power with men. Moreover, women no longer bear the burden of child-rearing alone; “motherhood” is a collective responsibility. Herland is now the most famous of her utopian fictions.9 It is a didactic and partially satiric narrative about a remote utopian society composed exclusively of women. They have rejected nationalism and patriotism as instruments of male dominance and instead embrace compensatory qualities of sisterhood and mutual support. Three men, classmates and friends, each representing an area of “science,” undertake a journey to a faraway land with a group of professors. The narrator is Vandyck Jennings (“Van”), a student of sociology and an aficionado of all things “scientific.” Once separated from the professors, the young men hear from the natives of a “strange and terrible ‘Woman Land’ in the high distance,” a place “where no men lived – only women and girl children” (Ch. 1). They decide to return at a later time without their teachers. On their second trip, they speculate about what this female civilization, which they jocularly name “Feminisia,” might be like. Van thinks they’ll find a society “built on a sort of matriarchal principle”; the men will have “a separate cult of their own, less socially developed” than that of the women and will be reduced to an annual visit to produce children. What the boys actually find is rather different from their speculations. The women have not only discovered how to reproduce asexually, but have also constructed their society so as to achieve a complete balance between total privacy and community involvement. Van returns to the outside world with a wife from the community. The following year (1916), a sequel appeared in The Forerunner. In With Her in Ourland, Van and his utopian refugee wife discuss the important issues raised by the structure of the outside world, including the social and economic roles of men and women, the relation of reason to emotion, the rights and obligations of individuals to a community and vice versa. Recent readers have been disturbed by the fact that the last book shows an increasing level of intolerance in Gilman’s intellectual makeup. In her later years, she became overtly racist, anti-Semitic, and misanthropic. Nevertheless, Herland stands as an important document in the history of American utopian literature.

Politics and science fiction: London’s dystopian vision Best known as the author of three classic works of naturalism, The Call of the Wild (1903), White Fang (1906), and The Sea Wolf (1904), Jack London (1876–1916) was also a political activist. In 1894, he went “on the road” as 352

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part of an “army” of the jobless marching on Washington, DC to champion reform legislation for the ordinary worker. When the enterprise didn’t live up to expectations, he went on alone, walking and riding the rails, later described in his book, The Road (1907). During these early years, he published two volumes of nonfiction political writing, The People of the Abyss (1903) and The War of the Classes (1905), the latter reflecting ideas initiated in The Sea Wolf. These were followed in 1910 by Revolution, and Other Essays. In The Valley of the Moon (1913), London returned to some of the political themes in the stories and sketches of his hobo years. The People of the Abyss was a work of reportage on slum and labor conditions in England. He had posed as a stranded American sailor on the docks of London’s East End, eating and sleeping with the povertystricken dockworkers for several weeks. He later said that no other book of his cost him so much as this study of the “economic degradation of the poor.” In addition to nonfiction political writings, London wrote a number of science fiction works, which he used as a forum for political philosophy and criticism, mainly of a pessimistic nature. In his view, all human history – past, present, and future – looked barbarous. Before Adam (1906, 1907) is a narrative of the atavistic dreams of a prior caveman existence by a twentieth-century “civilized” man. In The Scarlet Plague (1915), a global pestilence nearly wipes out civilization in the twenty-first century, and the human species sinks back into barbarism. The Star Rover (1915) features a prisoner forced to wear a compressing straitjacket that renders him unconscious; he develops the ability to slip into a trance state and by astral projection roam among the stars and relive other problematic lives. London’s futuristic novel, The Iron Heel (1907, 1908) may be described as a modified dystopian work. The main story deals principally with the near future, in the years 1912–18; but it is complexly told through a manuscript covering the years 1912–32, and “edited” with commentaries centuries later. An oligarchy of capitalist despots called “The Iron Heel” has seized power in the United States. This rightwing takeover of America by the Iron Heel becomes international; as the years roll on, resistance grows, and an insurrection eventuates, this time by leftwing socialists, after which an ideal society emerges.10 For London, whatever utopia there is to be achieved requires war and revolution.

God and the American ideal: “The War Prayer” Written the year that W. D. Howells’s antiwar story “Editha” was published, Mark Twain’s fantasy sketch, “The War Prayer” (1905), may in fact have been stimulated by the same “war-feeling” that Howells describes: the furor over the Spanish– American War for the “liberation” of Cuba from Spain. But Twain’s piece was not 353

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designed to apply to just one war. In the decade or so before his death in 1910, Twain had been writing ironic and satiric anti-imperialist pieces, such as “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901) and King Leopold’s Soliloquy (1905). “The War Prayer” is part and parcel of these antiwar, anticolonialist sentiments. A “stranger” enters a small-town church on a Sunday morning during a sermon in which the preacher is asking God to support the current war effort. The church is filled with volunteers, “their young faces alight with martial dreams.” Those who have no sons to send to the “field of honor,” to achieve a great victory, or to “die the noblest of deaths,” envy their neighbors who do. The preacher reads a passage from the Old Testament and then launches into his prayer for “an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all” to watch over “our noble young soldiers” in “their patriotic work” and “grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory – ” At this point the “aged stranger” enters – clothed in a long flowing robe, his face “unnaturally pale, even to ghastliness.” He takes the place of the preacher and addresses the congregation in a deep voice: “I come from the Throne – bearing a message from Almighty God!” God will answer their prayer after his messenger has “explained its import, that is to say, its full import” (my italics). He tells the churchgoers to pause and think: to “beseech a blessing upon yourself” might bring a curse upon a neighbor. He articulates the unspoken half of their prayer for victory for them:

............................................................................................... O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their devastated land in rags and hunger and thirst . . . blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snows with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, or Him who is the Source of Love. . . . Amen.

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But the congregation finds “no sense” in what this “lunatic” meant.

Quixotic Dreams and Romantic Lies in Medieval America Lunacy of various sorts is a major motif of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), which is the finest example of the satiric utopian-dystopian 354

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romance in the period. The time displacements, narrative disruptions, framing devices, epistemological issues, and linguistic play are part of a romanticrealist-modernist narrative that is also a satire on the human condition as a whole. By casting the novel as an ambivalently parodic emulation of medieval romance, and insistently comparing the medieval world with the modern one, Mark Twain is able to expose not only the absurdities of nineteenth-century social, economic, political, religious, and philosophical assumptions, but also the inanities of the Western romance tradition from which they arose. The three principal villains are the Aristocracy, the Established Church, and encompassing both, the mindlessness of “inherited ideas.” The novel explores the Big Lie of politics, religion, and romance tradition not only in terms of various figurative permutations of enslavement, but also in terms of Progress and its attendant fantasy, American Optimism. The structure of A Connecticut Yankee derives from William Caxton’s 1485 edition of Le Morte D’Arthur (The Death of Arthur), written c. 1469 by Sir Thomas Malory (c. 1408–1471). Malory provided the principal story situation and specific incidents for the various “adventures” of Twain’s novel.11 Twain’s story also incorporates major aspects of Miguel de Cervantes’s ironic emulation of such romances, Don Quixote (1605; 1615). Like Don Quixote, Twain’s Arthurian novel is an example of romantic irony. The post-chivalric knight, Don Quixote, is both a magnificent idealist and an absurd fool; so too is Twain’s Yankee simultaneously an idealist and a self-deceived fool.

Framing romance: Initial frames Like Don Quixote, A Connecticut Yankee is multiply framed.12 The novel has forty-four numbered chapters. Two prefatory chapters and two concluding chapters (one the 44th) frame the main narrative. The two opening frames set up the provenance of the history of the story that follows. The two final frames conclude, reaffirm, qualify, and cast doubt upon it. In the first frame, a “stranger” introduces another even stranger “stranger,” who tells the main story.13 The concluding frame returns us to the opening frame in terms of both time and epistemological uncertainty. The first frame is titled “Preface” and signed Mark Twain. He sets the ironic and satiric tone immediately by apologizing for not definitively settling the question of the “Divine Right of Kings.” The second preface is titled “A Word of Explanation” and though unsigned is presumably also by the “author.” (The same speakerwriter reappears in the closing frame, which is initialed “M. T.”) The writer of the second frame says that in the armory room of Warwick Castle, England, 355

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he came across a “curious stranger” who seemed to have an exceptional “familiarity with ancient armor.” As the two men stroll along together, the stranger abruptly asks M. T. if he knows about the “transmigration of souls” or the “transposition of epochs – and bodies.” At this point, the tour guide calls attention to a “round hole through the chain-mail in the left breast” of armor said to belong to “Sir Sagramore le Desirous.”14 It seems to be a bullet hole, which “can’t be accounted for.” The stranger, however, tells M. T. that he saw the deed done. In fact, “I did it myself.” That evening, M. T. is sitting by a fire in his hotel, reading “old Sir Thomas Malory’s enchanting book.” There is a “knock at the door” and the “stranger came in.” After four scotch whiskies, the mysterious stranger feels able to tell his initial “history.” Hank Morgan is an American from Connecticut, “a Yankee of the Yankees – and practical . . .” He is skilled as a horse doctor and as a blacksmith; but his “real trade” is that of a weaponsmaker and boiler-maker. He is also an inventor. At the Colt arms factory where he worked, he became “head superintendent; had a couple of thousand men under me.” All these details and images will be significant in the ensuing narrative. Hank tells M. T. that one day he got into a fight and was knocked out by a blow to the head. When he woke up, a fellow on a horse wearing “old-time armor” was challenging him to “a passage of arms for land or lady . . .” The knight declared him captured – and thus “his property.” At first, given the fellow’s outlandish costume, the Yankee thought they might be going to a circus, but he concluded they must be going back to the lunatic asylum from which the fellow had escaped. These motifs of property, costume and clothing; iron and metal; head injury, dream, and lunacy; an insane asylum and an absurd circus recur throughout the narrative. Morgan says he then asked the lunatic if he knew how far it was to Hartford, Connecticut. When the fellow replied that he had never heard of it, the Yank decided he was lying – thus introducing the major theme of the Big Lie. Falling asleep, the stranger tells M. T. that he may read the whole story, which he has written out. While the narrative’s putative reality is thus documented, the fictionality of the history about to be presented is quietly inserted as a shaping theme. The first part of the story is inscribed on yellowed parchment – and it is a palimpsest. Like all history, it has been written over. The first words of the main narrative are “Camelot – Camelot. . . . I don’t seem to remember hearing of it before. Name of the asylum, likely.” As the Yank looks upon the fair prospect before him, he writes that the landscape is “as lovely as a dream . . .” M. T. will spend the rest of the night reading about fictional historical adventures in a dream-world that may be a madhouse. 356

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Shaping the “modern” chivalric romance The following synopsis organizes the forty-three chapters of the main narrative into five structuring conventions of medieval romance: initial conflict; first sally and respite ad infinitum; major test (often involving descent into a cave or a pool); sally and respite ad infinitum; end of quest. Recognizing this pattern provides a framework for a more detailed examination of selected key chapters and themes.15 I. Initial Conflict: Idea of Order at Camelot (Chs 1–10) In Part I, major conventions of medieval romance are observed. The Yankee knight is put in extraordinary circumstances, he is tested, and he emerges victorious – besting the court magician, Merlin. He also acquires a squire and servant, Clarence. We see the hero’s ascendency in the Court of King Arthur. He expresses his devotion to an “ideal.” His ideal is the “dream of a republic,” that is, the transformation of a medieval absolute monarchy into a nineteenthcentury American version of an ideal society. Other parallels to medieval romance conventions include: a supernatural portent in the form of an eclipse; a tournament tradition; and a summation of the Yank’s accomplishments. II. First Sally: From Merlin to Morgan Le Fay and the Ogre’s Castle (Chs 11–20) In this segment, the Yank, representing and accompanied by an honored Lady Fair, Alisandre la Carteloise (“Sandy”), sets out on a quest-journey. As per convention, he is tested, confronts a legendary sorceress, Morgan Le Fay, seeks temporary respite, is feted (more or less) at a banquet, and continues on his adventures. III. Major Test: Descent into the Holy Well and Its Result (Chs 21–26) The Holy Well is the major concrete symbol of the Yankee knight’s major antagonist – the Church, which also validates the concept of Aristocracy with its teachings. The Well is dry. Morgan descends into its depths and causes its waters to gush forth again. His purity and ascendancy is again, if ironically, confirmed (Chs 21–23). This confirmation is followed by an immediate challenge to his success in Chapter 24 (“A Rival Magician”), as if symbolic of the endless nature of his trials. The next “adventure” (a major pivot) is postponed until Chapter 27 (“The Yankee and the King Travel Incognito”), while the Yank recapitulates his achievements in Chapters 25 and 26. 357

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IV. Second Sally: The Yank, the King, and Slavery (Chs 27–38) Progress toward Hank’s ideal (the Republic) takes the form of enlightening King Arthur as to the true nature of his realm: over ninety percent of his people suffer poverty and injustice. Morgan and Arthur sally forth disguised as commoners, moving downward and upward through the strata of society via the quality of their clothing. They attain (partial) illumination, find respite, take a humble banquet among commoners (in inverse parallel with the sumptuous banquets of medieval romance), are imprisoned by an aristocrat, escape slavery, and defend the realm against assault from malevolent forces. V. Quest’s End: Destruction of the Kingdom (Chs 39–44) The last narrative segment follows the romance convention of portraying the final success or failure of the hero in grandiose terms – including both a tournament and a major battle, replete with nineteenth-century technology. In this case, the hero goes down to defeat, and the kingdom is destroyed.

Final frames After the final battle, the incautious Morgan is stabbed by a wounded knight lying on the field. An “old woman” who offers to nurse Morgan is really Merlin in disguise. He administers a “poison” that causes Morgan to sleep for thirteen hundred years. This information is conveyed in a chapter titled “Postscript by Clarence.” Although numbered Chapter 44, it acts as a symmetrical frame. Clarence writes that Morgan wanted to finish writing his “record” of events, but couldn’t. Morgan has realized that, although they have been victorious over Knight-Errantry, they are now in a “trap” of “our own making.” Their fort is full of rotting bodies, and people are becoming “sick by the poisonous air bred by all those dead thousands.” Thus if “we stayed where we were, our dead would kill us; if we moved out of our defenses, we should no longer be invincible.” The situation is a deterministic oubliette. “We had conquered; in turn, we were conquered.” Merlin declares that everyone shall die, except Morgan; for he has cast a spell that will make him “sleep” for centuries. Then, overtaken by “a delirium of silly laughter,” Merlin spins around like a drunken man – and runs into one of Morgan’s electric wires. He is electrocuted with his mouth spread open. In his Postscript, Clarence speculates that “he is still laughing” – implying, in that “petrified laugh,” cosmic derision for all eternity.

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In the last frame, we are back with “M. T.” in the nineteenth century. The Yankee is confused as to what century he is in – or which of his lives, the ancient or the modern, is real. Delirious, Morgan cries out:

............................................................................................... Such strange and awful dreams, Sandy! Dreams that were as real as reality – delirium, of course, but so real! . . . I seemed to be a creature out of a remote unborn age, centuries hence, and even that was as real as the rest. . . . I seemed to have flown back out of that age into this of ours, and then forward to it again . . . with an abyss of thirteen centuries yawning between me and you!

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He prays to his beloved: “ . . . don’t let me go out of my mind again; death is nothing, let it come, but not with those dreams . . .” Lost between worlds, he dies as if hearing from afar the bugles from the towers of distant Camelot.

Dream of a republic: Two reigns of terror, rags, and a new deal Despite disaster and defeat, Hank Morgan’s dream of a republic (Ch. 30) remains engaging and winsome, nostalgic and poignant – quixotic in a word – or at least partially so. The Yank really did want to improve the conditions of the common man in King Arthur’s world, to give them a New World and a new deal. This celebrated phrase occurs in Chapter 13 (ironically titled “Freeman!”), which contains three especially memorable passages, one on the “two reigns of terror,” one on “loyalty to rags,” and one on the idea of the “new deal.” Morgan fumes that the so-called freeman of medieval society labors arduously only to have a “procession of robbers” come to “levy their blackmail.” Heavy taxes are imposed “upon this free and independent pauper, but none upon his lord the baron or the bishop, none upon the wasteful nobility or the all-devouring Church . . .” Seeing the freemen humbly assemble early in the morning to work on the bishop’s road for nothing, Morgan launches into a diatribe on the two “Reigns of Terror.” Everyone shivers, he says (the narratee now being the reader), at the later reign of terror, the French Revolution. But the thousand-year reign of medieval feudalism was worse. The French Terror “swept a thousand years” of villainy away in “one swift tidal wave of blood.” But “what is the horror of swift death by the ax compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak?” Shifting narratees, Morgan tries to explain to the men that the “country” is the substantial thing, not “institutions,” which are the “mere clothing” of the

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“real thing.” To “be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags – that is a loyalty of unreason . . .” The “citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth’s political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal . . . it is his duty to agitate . . .” (Ch. 13; my italics). The radicalism of an insurrection becomes in his mind a new deal for the common man – the famous passage that inspired President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Two metaphors for economic and political intrigue come into play here. The word deal refers both to a “new hand” of cards to be dealt all around and to an “agreement” as both a financial and a political term. Morgan tells himself he is working for a square deal for the common people; but he has no scruples against (and many rationalizations for) deceiving people for his own ends. Although Morgan regards monarchy and aristocracy as founded on bluff, he himself bluffs throughout the novel.16

The ghost in the machine: Technological despotism Morgan never looks beyond his own preconceptions, which derive from the chauvinism of “Young America,” the blind romanticism of the newest generation of the nineteenth-century “Redeemer Nation.” He sees the flaws of Arthurian Britain very clearly but can never get outside his own culture. The novel drives home the falsity of the popular nineteenth-century idea rampant in America that technical, scientific, or material progress also means ethical progress. Instead, war, repression, and slavery continue, becoming even more “efficient.” The Yankee, despite good intentions, is a kind of moral monster and eventually becomes, more or less unconsciously, a political despot, the ultimate Technocrat Despot, nationbuilding in his own image.17 Slavery in this context takes on new meaning – not just the literal slavery of serfs, but also the general habits of mind that form the basis of society. Acting in the name of social and political “democracy,” the American enslaves with technology and a new political machine. Several forms of metal and machine imagery permeate Connecticut Yankee. To begin with, we have the Yankee’s trade as a “blacksmith” and his being hit on the head with a “crowbar” in a “weapons factory.” Then there are the various instruments of medieval war and oppression: chainmail, suits of armor, and steel helmets; manacles, handcuffs, chains, and shackles. Morgan’s own followers will spread the word of a new regime, going forth “clothed in steel and equipped with sword and lance and battle-ax” (Ch. 40). He even calls them “the iron and steel missionaries of my future civilization” (Ch. 10). The “iron” motif is beautifully and comically orchestrated in Chapters 11 and 12 (“The Yankee in Search of Adventure” and “Slow Torture”). In 360

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conformance with the customs of “these iron dudes of the Round Table,” Morgan must go forth in full armor on a quest. Once clad in the imprisoning armor, he swings into the countryside in the morning cool; at his side is Alisande, his Lady Fair. The opening is picturesque, emphasizing “sylvan solitudes” and “green valleys, with streams winding through them,” and here and there a far castle. It is a parody of the romance. Soon the sun begins to heat up the armor like a stove. Morgan begins to sweat profusely, but he can’t wipe his brow because his hands are trapped in steel gloves. With the entrance of a fly and various bugs into his armored suit, he begins to itch, but he can’t scratch. “You are inside, your hands are outside; so there you are; nothing but iron between.” Encased in iron from head to toe, he is caught in the trap of iron custom.

The prison-house of language Another trap is language. A metafictional and self-reflexive sense of the absurdity and instability of language is at the heart of the Big Lie. In A Connecticut Yankee, the Big Lie has two principal manifestations, which interpenetrate and merge, reinforcing each other. One is the misuse of language as magical mumbo-jumbo to play on superstitions. This is the language of ritual and romance, magic and superstition, and church dogma. A second is the misuse of language for political control. The embellished larger-than-life quality of the language of chivalric myth is introduced in the second opening frame of the novel and continues to be featured as a recurring and unifying motif. Toward the end of Chapter 2 (“King Arthur’s Court”), we read: “As a rule the speech and behavior of these people were gracious and courtly. . . . And plainly, too, they were a childlike and innocent lot; telling lies of stateliest pattern with a most gentle and winning naiv€ety, and ready and willing to listen to anybody else’s lie, and believe it too.” The third chapter (“Knights of the Table Round”) continues the point with the comment that their talk consisted mainly of “monologues” posing as “narrative accounts” of knightly adventures. In Chapter 11, Morgan comments on the “wandering liars” of Knight-Errantry, who all tell the same basic tale about rescuing a princess from a giant in some faraway castle. “Now you would think that the first thing the king would do after listening to such a novelette from an entire stranger would be to ask for credentials – yes, and a pointer or two as to the locality of the castle.” Two of the most pointed (and comic) assaults on the prevaricating power of language are found in the exact middle of the novel: Chapter 22 (“The Holy Fountain”) and Chapter 23 (“Restoration of the Fountain”). Talking to Sandy 361

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as they journey toward the Holy Fountain, Morgan is exasperated by her inability to understand his jargon (“knock off,” “shut up the shop,” “bank the fires”). When he accuses her of not being able to understand “the simplest thing,” she responds in a wonderful set-piece on language and understanding in the style of Malory; it goes on for a paragraph, in one sentence, a page long. “I couldn’t make it all out,” Morgan says, but “it was borne in upon me that I was standing in the awful presence of the Mother of the German language.” She “had exactly the German way; whatever was in her mind to be delivered . . . she would get it into a single sentence or die.” In the next chapter, after Merlin fails to restore the Well of the Holy Fountain, the Yankee gives it a try. For his theatrical “effect,” Morgan has hired a chorus of men to sing a Latin chant in the background. He then extends his hands and pronounces a “ghastly word” in bogus Germanic. (It is given in the text as gothic letters in boldface.) At that instant, he sets off an immense electric show. Morgan then groans out another longer word (given in even bigger type in the text), and then another and another, each more nonsensical. At this point, he lights up four stage volcanoes and commands the “fell spirit that possesses the fountain to now disgorge into the skies all the infernal fires that still remain in him. . . . By his own dread name I command it – BGWJJILLIGKKK!” The water gushes forth. Merlin is abashed at hearing the name of a demon unknown to him (though he admits that Morgan pronounced it perfectly). For the next three months, Merlin tries in secret to pronounce the demon’s name but fails.

The Orwellian lie An example of the misuse of language for political control is the word Freeman, a word that Morgan calls “a sarcasm of law and phrase” (Ch. 25). The denizens of King Arthur’s romantic land, though they may be called “freemen,” are “slaves.” In Chapter 13, the language of class, and rank, and privilege “blunt” the “moral perception” of the fact of slavery. Twain twice makes the point that this situation is similar to that of the slaveholders of the American South. In Chapter 25, he writes: “One needs but to hear an aristocrat speak of the classes that are below him to recognize . . . the very air and tone of the actual slaveholder.” This observation leads to a comment on the phrase “capable of self-government.” The submerged meaning is that “there has been a nation somewhere, sometime or other which wasn’t capable of it – wasn’t as able to govern itself as some self-appointed specialists were or would be to govern it” (my italics). In the same way, the established “rights” of the King or the Church conceal the idea that one has the right to self-governance. 362

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Morgan comes up with a new epithet for the aristocracy – one that picks up a theme from Twain’s early novel, The Gilded Age (1873). In Connecticut Yankee, farmers and artisans and workers constitute “the actual Nation” – that is, the part that is “useful or worth saving, or really respectworthy.” The rest are “some dregs, some refuse, in the shape of a king, nobility and gentry, idle, unproductive . . . of no sort of use or value in any rationally constructed world.” These Twain calls the “gilded minority.” Somehow, this gilded minority has contrived to make itself “the Nation.” And the others have “permitted it so long that they have come at last to accept it as truth; and not only that, but to believe it right and as it should be” (Ch. 13; my italics). The priests “had told their fathers and themselves that this ironical state of things was ordained of God; and so, not reflecting upon how unlike God it would be to amuse himself with sarcasms . . . they had dropped the matter there and become respectfully quiet” (Ch. 13). In Chapter 28 (“Drilling the King”), Morgan tells the King about “suffering dire privations and misfortunes,” but to the King it is “just words, words.” Words “realize nothing,” says Morgan, “unless you have suffered in your own person the thing which the words try to describe.” The “Divine Right of Kings” is a linguistic con game – an empty slogan of political power signifying nothing. Just like the word republic.

Notes 1. Some historians begin the Progressive period in the 1880s, others start at 1900, and some carry it through the 1920s. The latter part of the era has sometimes been called the “heyday” of socialism in America. 2. Howells also regarded Kate Beaumont (1871–2) as an example of early realism; Eric Sundquist calls the novel “naturalistically detailed” (CLHUS, 500). The novel’s realist elements derive from De Forest’s Reconstruction experiences in the Freedmen’s Bureau; but the story line follows a conventional romance pattern, beginning with the rescue of the heroine by the hero from a sinking ship. Frank McCallister and Kate Beaumont are “star-crossed” lovers; and most of the story revolves around the obstacles facing their union. The novel’s depiction of the contrast between aristocratic plantation society and poor whites has been compared with the works of William Faulkner. See Diffley (ACAF, 2009), 241–59 (for comments on De Forest, 249–50). 3. Gargano (1981), 5; Haight’s introduction to Miss Ravenel is also reprinted in this volume, 106–16. 4. It’s a matter of degree; see “Polly,” “Meh Lady,” and “Marse Chan.” See Kennedy, (ACAF, 2009), 154–5, for comment on Page, James Lane Allen, 363

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5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

and other Southern writers. Page also wrote a number of nonfiction works on the South and the “Negro Problem,” collected as The Old South (1892) and The Negro (1904). These works provide good introductions to the writer. Cowie treats Tourgee (RAN, 1951, 521–35) together with John William De Forest (505–20) as representative of “Civil War and Reconstruction” (the title of his twelfth chapter). For Sundquist on Tourgee, see CLHUS, 501–24. Edmund Wilson treats Tourgee (along with Cable, Chopin, and Page) in Ch. 13 of Patriotic Gore (1962); see esp. 529–48. Peyser offers detailed analyses of works by Bellamy, Howells, and Gilman in ACAF (2009), 411–27. Most students find its intellectual appeal and wit overrated. Through the Eye of the Needle (1907), intended as a sequel, is even less engaging for most literary readers, having more appeal for sociologically inclined critics and historians. From 1895 to 1900, she lectured nationwide and abroad. During this time, she spent three months at Hull House in Chicago, the famous halfway house for women, immigrants, and the poor, founded by the social reformer Jane Addams (1860–1935) in 1889. Herland was serialized in The Forerunner in 1915; the novel then went into obscurity and was not published in book form until Pantheon brought it out in 1979, with an important introduction by Ann J. Lane. The socialist counterrevolution is led by a romanticized worker hero named Everhard. The book was praised by Leon Trotsky and made into two Russian films after the Revolution. London’s quasi-autobiographical novel, Martin Eden (1909), revolves around class conflict: a beautiful socialite encourages the working-class hero’s artistic sensibilities and writing talent; but, psychologically unable to become one of the elite and alienated from his own class, Eden commits suicide. William Caxton (c. 1422–1491) was a printer credited with producing the first book printed in English (about 1475); his version of Malory’s Arthurian saga is a rearrangement of the tale-sequence in the original manuscript. Caxton’s Malory has a brief concluding frame, but no elaborate opening framing – whereas Don Quixote has multiple frames – suggesting Twain’s emulation of Cervantean irony. Framing (or framed) romanticism is also an aspect of the Arabian Nights, invoked in the opening chapters of Huckleberry Finn. The narratee in the novel varies, as does tone. See the next chapter for Twain’s concept of the tragicomic “trap” he sets for the reader. The “stranger” in the enclosing frames is one of a series of doubles in the overall narrative. The Yankee, who seems to double the outer frame narrator, appears as a stranger in Arthur’s kingdom. His great antagonist, Merlin, is a satanic stranger who appears is various guises, male and female. He is doubled by a

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14.

15.

16.

17.

“rival magician.” Clarence, the Yankee’s servant and squire, comes to be almost his replicant. These matters are also pertinent to The Mysterious Stranger manuscripts, discussed in the last chapter of the present volume. Names are spelled differently in different places in the book, and I follow Twain’s usages. Rasmussen (1995) provides a detailed chapter-by-chapter summary of the novel. I am indebted to Lee Quinby who presented an analysis of the medieval questromance structure in an unpublished paper in a Purdue University seminar many years ago. Lamb has recently published an essay (2009b) in which he contextualizes the novel in terms of both political issues and modern cultural theory: “A Postmodern Subject in Camelot,” 403–19. For criticism on the novel, see the bibliographies in that article and in his ACAF (2009a) essay, 468–98. From the eclipse, through the destruction of Merlin’s Tower, to restoring the Holy Fountain, to intimidating all chivalry with his revolvers, to the battle at the very end. In Ch. 39 (“The Yankee’s Fight with the Knights”), he bluffs five hundred knights of the realm into (once again) believing he has superhuman powers. He at times calls this the “circus side” of his nature, as in Ch. 13. Twain later called him an “ignoramus” in a conversation with Dan Beard, his illustrator.

See also Aaron (1951); Abel (MAR,1963); Beer (1997); Bertoff (1981 [1965]); Cady (1958); Camfield (2003); Covici (1962); Cox (1966); Diffley (1992); Eble (1982); Fishkin (1997, 2002); Fulton (1997); C. P. Gilman (1990); Gross (1963); S. K. Harris (1982); Hedrick (1982); M. A. Hill (1980); Howe (1998); J. Kaplan (1966); Kraus (1967); J. Martin (1967); Moddelmog (2000); O’Connor (1964); Olsen (1965); Peyser (1998); Pizer (1984 [1966]); Robinson (1986, 1995); Salomon (1961); Scharnhorst (1985); Scharnhorst and Quirk (2006); Slotkin (1973); H. N. Smith (1962, 1964); W. Taylor (1942); B. Thomas (1997); J. L. Thomas (1983); Wagenknecht (1952); Watson (1983).

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Chapter 20

At the Modernist Margin Mark Twain

The words modern, modernism, and modernist occur with increasing frequency as the nineteenth century turns into the twentieth. In the fields of art and literature, they usually invoke the “new”: something experimental – avantgarde. Historically, the word modernism most often indicates a period of about a half-century beginning just before the 1890s. The phrase high modernism indicates a period lasting from World War I to World War II.1 As an era or movement in literary history, modernism reacts to, succeeds, and overlaps realism. But the relation of modernism to realism (like that of romanticism to realism and naturalism) is one of “dialogical” negotiations.2 Linda Wagner-Martin writes that discussion of American modernism “must include the texts of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein – as well as the highly influential modernist poets Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, among others.”3 But working toward a definition of American modernism “from its points of origin” results, she says, in “a somewhat different pattern.” At the heart of “most American literature” was: “ . . . the aim of creating an eloquent new language in order to speak about themes germane to the rich promise of the New World. . . . Mark Twain gave readers one set of perspectives; Henry James provided another.” Henry James is an obvious choice; her less obvious choice of Mark Twain is amply confirmed not only by Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee, but also by his later works, many unpublished in his lifetime.

Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson. Ó 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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Historical Discriminations Focusing on World War I as the real dividing point between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, the Chronology of American Literature comments that four years of “total mechanized warfare” and “slaughter in the trenches of the Western Front purged Americans’ faith in progress and the perfectibility of man and replaced it with a cynicism preoccupied with dislocation, fragmentation, and dehumanization” (323). With the philosophical skepticism of modernism came an increased emphasis on subjectivity rather than objectivity and a recognition and foregrounding of the artifice of art: departures from quotidian realism, creation of alternate or discrepant worlds, and fascination with the uncanny, the grotesque, the ridiculous, and the parodic. Modern, modernist, and modernism have relative meanings according to context. I would say that the primary characteristic of modernism as a specifically literary term indicates a skepticism about any kind of one-for-one realism. This attitude includes not only a suspicion of preceding artistic forms, but also of traditional philosophical concepts of reality. Sometimes this uncertainty is characterized as an ontological and metaphysical crisis, fed by epistemological doubt. There is no one modernism (or postmodernism); but they share the quest for something “new.” What is new depends on one’s perspective. Walt Whitman seemed a new and daringly different voice as early as 1855, when the first edition of Leaves of Grass appeared. After Whitman, the often elliptical art of imagism became central (for a while) to American modernist poetry, with poets like Amy Lowell (1874–1925), William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), Hilda Doolittle (“H. D.”, 1886–1961), Ezra Pound (1885–1972), and T. S. Eliot (1888–1963), leading the way. Ezra Pound’s motto for modernism was in fact “Make It New.” The intense focus on art as art included the primacy of aesthetics and insistence on innovations in artistic form: stylistic experimentation, linguistic instability, disruptions of literary conventions and genre. Language was deliberately fragmented: distorted syntax, metaphors left partially complete, and oblique allusions so recondite as to be inaccessible to many readers. Modernist works of fiction featured disordered narrative, disrupted chronological or logical progressions, and elliptical relations between parts with missing connections that readers were expected to fill in. There was a new interest in the fusion of seriousness and humor, the real and the unreal: the surreal, the absurd, and what came later to be called the carnivalesque.4 Emphasis on inner psychological processes led to a proliferation of stream-of-consciousness experiments and dreamlike narratives. Christophe Den Tandt, writing on conventional literary periods and their labels, contends that novels traditionally considered naturalist develop from 368

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“three overlapping strands”: the “realist and romance discourses” and “an emergent modernist aesthetic.” His literary “map” is based on a “continuity of a realist tradition through and beyond the naturalist 1890s,” characterized by “a recurrent pattern of dialogization” that “makes it easier to acknowledge the emergence of pre-modernist concerns such as the dedication to writing for its own sake, the exploration of inner selfhood, and the development of a bohemian scene of alienated intellectuals.”5 The map that I want to sketch here is a complementary pattern that extends this romance-realism-naturalism-modernism paradigm in terms of the subvarieties of modernist convergences with other time periods and movements, some of which we have already explored: principally, impressionism, surrealism, the grotesque, and expressionism. All of these are pertinent to the later works of Mark Twain.

From impressionism to expressionism Like modernists, the impressionists were warring against the “old” ways. Instead of mimetically rendering physical details, they tended to present details from a particular angle of vision colored by a subjective mood. In literature, as we have seen, the impressionism of the painters became associated with the psychological novel and stream of consciousness. The symbolist assault on conventions of language and form was often also an assault on the bourgeois conventions of society. Dada The movement known as “dada” was founded in Zurich in the midst of World War I by a young artist-writer named Tristan Tzara (1896–1963), largely as a protest against the insanity of war. Dada, he said, is a word of no denotation or connotation and can mean everything and nothing at once. Tzara’s aim was to substitute a conscious madness, nonsense, for the accepted relation between an idea and a verbal statement. His method was “collage,” a random “gluing” of seemingly unrelated words and images in unconventional juxtaposition with one another, with a discernible structure that was illogical according to conventional assumptions of order, relation, and form. The American writer, Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), whose earliest works appeared about the same time as imagism and dada, also attempted to break free from conventional forms. Her interest in trance-induced “automatic writing” grew into a creative desire to free writing from overriding conscious control. Although sometimes criticized for babbling nonsense, she also demonstrated her ability to write clearly and powerfully in traditional forms. 369

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Her more conventionally written Three Lives, which tells the stories of three modern women, appeared in 1909. “The Good Anna” portrays a forceful working woman who is able quietly and coolly to get her way. “The Gentle Lena” portrays a mentally retarded German servant girl. The middle story, “Melanctha,” is a portrait of a strong and sensitive black woman who accepts her life and death with dignity and without complaining. Stein’s Tender Buttons, however, was almost entirely experimental; it appeared at the beginning of the war in 1914 and gave rise to the gratuitous sobriquet of the “Mama of Dada.” The book is a series of often near-unintelligible prose-poems focused on three categories of things: Objects, Food, Rooms.6 Her most famous quotation, of course, is “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” (from “Sacred Emily,” in Geography and Plays, 1922). Her concern for language as language (as language) is representative of some of the central concerns not only of the “new” poetry of imagism, but also of modernist literature in general. Surrealism Literature of the “surreal” was an outgrowth of dada and symbolism. In 1924, Andre Breton published the Manifesto of Surrealism. Here, he argued that the mind should be liberated from conscious control and reason – represented by convention, habit, and education. Breton’s surrealist manifesto is virtually a definition of the grotesque from a romantic perspective. Breton looked forward to the “future resolution” of “two states, in appearance so contradictory” – dream and reality – in “a sort of absolute reality,” or “surreality, if one may call it so.” Expressionism The general artistic movement known as expressionism began about the same time as surrealism, with which it has close ties. Expressionism is usually said to have begun in painting about 1900 in Europe, and about a decade later in literature – most notably in German drama, which had a major influence on American fiction and drama of the twentieth century. In expressionism, conventional ideas of beauty, harmony, and euphony were rejected in favor of distortion and even unsightliness. Expressionist poetry, drama, and film tend to dislocate chronology and to exaggerate or distort objects to suggest how the world seems to a disturbed or abnormal mind. In its most extreme form, expressionism espouses a violent antirealism. Intellectually, impressionism and expressionism are more like two sides of one coin than a different currency. Aesthetically, however, the differences can be marked. Whereas the basic idea of literary impressionism is a more or less representational presentation of external objects that generate an internal 370

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sensation, the central aesthetic feature of expressionism lies in its employment of nonmimetic devices: in the external distortion of objects. As manifestations of modernist dislocations, expressionist works emphasize discontinuity of thought and action, suggesting a world in the process of disintegration.7 Thus in the modernism of the early twentieth century, impressionism and expressionism merged with symbolism, imagism, surrealism, and even to an extent with dada. Behind and around these movements loomed the horrors and absurdities of war (past, present, and future) and an increasingly mechanized and depersonalized society. When Linda Wagner-Martin begins her ACAF essay on the origins of modernism in American fiction with Henry James and Mark Twain, it seems to me that she accurately identifies what she calls the “heart” of American modernist fiction. On any list of important early modernist works, I would include at least a dozen works by Mark Twain. Beginning with the grotesque “Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut” (1876), I would single out Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins (1894), The Great Dark (1897–8), Letters from the Earth (1909–10), the posthumous collections titled Fables of Man, The Devil’s Race-Track, Which Was the Dream? and the “extracts” from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven (1909) and No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (1897–1909). These works feature modernist assaults on the transparency of language and the idea of a unified self and a unified world, manifest in fragmented selves.

Letters from Somewhere: From the Great Dark to the Great Emptiness The progression from The Celebrated Frog of Calaveras County (1867) to No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (c. 1905–1909) reveals the intensification not only of Twain’s satiric acerbity, but also his dark existentialist side. “Letters from the Earth” (1890s–1909), The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899), the various “Great Dark” manuscripts (c. 1897–8), the “Mysterious Stranger” manuscripts, and the book-length essay What Is Man? (1906) parallel the drift of literary culture toward the naturalist sensibility of modernism, while also reflecting a romance tradition. Hadleyburg is the story of the corruptibility of an entire community, and by symbolic extension all of humankind. A “stranger” comes to a small American town and leaves a bag of money at the town bank with instructions that the person who had befriended him years before may now claim it. It is a 371

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bogus story designed to reveal the hypocrisy of the town’s prominent citizens, who suddenly “remember” having befriended the stranger, and eagerly claim what turns out to be a sack of lead. The pessimistic What Is Man? (a platonic dialogue between an Old Man and a Young Man) presents not so much a fully developed philosophical system as a worldview. The major thesis is that human beings are just machines or puppets, subject to the vicissitudes of environment and particular circumstances, and that free will is an illusion. A similarly deterministic thesis is illustrated in the several narratives of the “Mysterious Stranger,” which, overall, present a central assault on the concept of a unified personal identity and traditional ideas of God, heaven, the soul, and an innate “Moral Sense.” These works also make clear the affinities of Twain’s absurdist impulse with modernism and the “modern grotesque.” Although more often associated with traditional narrative than with modernism, Twain was always experimenting with narrative form, fracturing genres and conventions. Like many modernist works, Twain’s fictions are filled with linguistic play, metafictional humor, sardonic spoofing, illusion-breaking scenes and comments, and selfreferential ironies. For many years, however, only a very few of his most highly experimental works were available to the general reading public. An unauthorized version of The Mysterious Stranger appeared in 1916, six years after Twain’s death, but a large number of unfinished or suppressed works remained unpublished. Bernard DeVoto completed a collection he called Letters from the Earth in 1939; but Clemens’s surviving daughter, Clara, suppressed these pieces because she thought they gave a distorted picture of her father. She relented two decades later, and DeVoto’s collection was finally published in 1962.8 Approximately the first half of this collection contains the “Letters from the Earth” of the title, along with a “Letter to the Earth,” and, in between, seven pieces that DeVoto labels “Papers of the Adam Family,” including extracts from what Twain called “Adam’s Diary” and “Eve’s Diary.” The second half contains nineteen fugitive pieces, including five under the title “The Damned Human Race” and a longer one that the editor entitles “The Great Dark.” The “Letters from the Earth” segment proper is composed of eleven letters sent to heaven from the Devil, commenting on the earthlings’ misguided opinions on existence and belief.

The great dark In addition to the eleven satanic “Letters,” the work that received the most attention is “The Great Dark,” a fragmented collection of pieces (primarily from c. 1897–8) presented by DeVoto under that title.9 DeVoto provides a 372

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succinct composition history of the various manuscripts in the notes to Letters from the Earth, along with a conjecture on the continuation of the story from other fragments and Twain’s notebooks. These fragments are partial constituents of a great unfinished cosmic allegory of infinite regress, historical meaninglessness, epistemological indefiniteness, metaphysical instability, jarring humor, existential absurdity, and ultimate nothingness – modernism with a vengeance. After DeVoto’s anthology, other of Twain’s “Great Dark” manuscripts (as they were known for a while) began to appear. This aspect of Mark Twain’s writings has become more completely available, principally because of the early work of DeVoto and one other scholar, John S. Tuckey. In Mark Twain and Little Satan: The Writing of “The Mysterious Stranger” (1963), Tuckey presented the first study to sort out the tangled versions of the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts.10 In his 1980 collection The Devil’s Race-Track: Mark Twain’s “Great Dark” Writings, Tuckey clarifies their history and presents them in the following order: “The Passenger’s Story,” “The Enchanted Sea-Wilderness,” “Which Was the Dream?” “The Great Dark,” “The Mad Passenger,” “Which Was It?” (excerpt), “Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes,” and “The Refuge of the Derelicts.”11 In a sense, the germ of the Great Dark stories is the infinite regress shaping “Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes.” In this piece, a microorganism lives in the intestines of a drunken old tramp who himself lives as a germ in another being. They are both morsels of food in a cosmic intestinal chain, simultaneously infecting their hosts while nourishing and sustaining them. “The Great Dark” story itself begins with the Edwards family examining a drop of water through a microscope. The father, Henry, falls asleep and begins to dream. The second segment, told from his point of view, seems to begin before he falls asleep, but dream and waking are already blurred. He throws himself on the sofa, thinking of an “ocean in a drop of water” as “a great empty blank,” and begins (again) to dream. In the dream within a dream, Henry is visited by the “Superintendent of Dreams,” who proposes to provide a ship and a crew to help him explore the unknown sea of the drop of water. Henry now finds himself on a storm-tossed ship in a strange ocean. Incredible sea monsters swim around the ship, including a whale with spidery legs, said later to be a squid, but which Henry realizes is one of the tiny creatures he has seen through the microscope. He has a long talk with the frightened first mate, who informs him that even the captain of the ship doesn’t know where they are. The first mate also tells Edwards he has seen a “jimjam,” a ghostly human form that is more unnerving than the sea monsters. This figure turns out in fact to be the Superintendent of Dreams, who is also coming along on the fearsome journey – for the fun of it. 373

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The Superintendent of Dreams explains that the apparent vastness of the drop of water in the microscope is indeed “inconceivably stupendous and imposing.” They themselves are presently in the “thin and delicate rim” of shadow outside the “luminous circle of the microscope.” As dwellers in the circular shadow, their sense of motion is uncertain and relative, and it will always be dark. We later learn of a center of appalling calm called the Everlasting Sunday, where mummified corpses of lost ships’ crews are preserved. In contrast to the Great Dark, this center is a Circle of Light, but its light is a great “Glare” that either kills or drives people to suicide.

Which is the dream? At this point, Henry, in exasperation, wants to “end the dream.” To which the Dream Superintendent replies: “The dream? Are you quite sure it is a dream?” This question leads to a passage on uncertainty, reversing several reversals about which “reality” is the dream. Henry’s uncertainty is exacerbated by conversations with his wife, Alice, who at first cannot remember anything of their previous life. He wonders if “the land-life was a dream-life.” He begins to doubt his own memories and seems actually to remember incidents she reminds him of – as she now begins to “remember” their old life – prompted by him. In these shifting and melting scenes, Twain has exactly caught the feel of dream-action: asserting illogical connections of cause and effect between unrelated things, with abrupt shifts and transitions. The first part of the narrative ends with a dinner party at the captain’s table – and with more sudden shifts of incident and emotion as Henry becomes aware of a sullen distracted “stranger” at his side. The theme of the victory of dream over reality, at least in the protagonist’s mind, intensifies in the fragment of “Book II, Chapter I,” which begins “I have long ago lost Book I, but it is no matter.” Four years have passed. The ship is attacked by a giant squid and partially fills with water. Henry finds his children dead and dying and his wife gone mad. Is it all predetermined? The captain gives what is a parody of an inspirational talk, concluding as follows: “I don’t know where this ship is, but she’s in the hands of God, and that’s enough for me,” and it should be “enough for you. . . . If it is God’s will that we pull through, we pull through – otherwise not.” The fragment ends on this odd note. Their fate is uncertain – but predetermined in some way – so it’s okay – or maybe not . . .

Comedy as “tragedy trap” DeVoto here offers a two-page summary of Twain’s plan for the end of the unfinished story.12 Twain’s notes indicate an abrupt shift for the conclusion of 374

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the narrative. At midnight, Alice and the children come to say goodnight to Henry, but he thinks they are dreams and that he is back home only “in a dream.” For DeVoto, the last bit “brings the story back out of a dream,” yet demonstrates that the dream has “triumphed over reality in Henry’s mind” (Earth, 227). DeVoto finds this unsatisfactory, seeming to have missed Twain’s point about the interpenetration of conscious and subconscious life – reality and irreality. He also has trouble with the modernist “horseplay” of the Superintendent of Dreams, whose comic absurdities he finds “wildly out of tune” with the main story.13 DeVoto addresses the problem of textual narratees but misjudges Twain’s artistic purpose. He quotes a letter of Twain to Howells to the effect that he wanted to lure the reader, via comedy, into a “tragedy trap.” But DeVoto regards this “attempt to combine burlesque with ‘unendurable’ tragedy” as a “serious error in aesthetic judgment,” one which “had damaged much of his fiction before this.” His comment throws into high relief a central question about Twain’s art: how carefully structured and thematically unified are Twain’s fictions? DeVoto’s stricture also raises the question of modern editing. Despite his meticulousness, DeVoto makes the mistake of assuming that he knows the “real” way in which manuscript materials (especially unfinished ones) should be reorganized and redacted according to a surmised authorial intent. Worse is the presumption that an author (conveniently deceased) was confused about his own “intent”: Twain “did not clearly understand what he was trying to do with the various themes and situations that went into this story.” But DeVoto feels that he, as editor, has managed to “fuse” them all. Except one. The manuscript of the “Mad Passenger” (or the “Crazy Passenger”) does not seem seamlessly to fit the pattern of “The Great Dark.” So DeVoto simply omits it (and all references to the passenger) from The Great Dark” sequence.14 In doing so, he has omitted an iconic representation of the interpenetration of dream worlds and presumptively real worlds. It is the mad “stranger” (a vague twin of the Superintendent of Dreams) who begins to explain the nature of “Dreamland” by setting up yet another microscope and putting a drop of water on a glass slide. It is a scene representative of the intentional circularity of the whole story – symbolic of infinite regression, implying an endless circling in and out of dream and reality.

Unraveling the Mysterious Stranger Texts The book published in 1916 as The Mysterious Stranger was a corrupted melange of different manuscripts under the editorship of Albert Bigelow Paine, Clemens’s literary executor. The actual work is fragmented: left unfinished in two 375

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versions and partially finished in another. Paine and Frederick Duneka, an editor for Harper’s, cobbled together a composite text, not scrupling to delete or add to it. This jumbled text remained the standard one for the next half century and more. Twain actually titled only one work the “Mysterious Stranger”: the last of three unfinished texts attempting to tell the same story of a satanic visit to a small village on earth. The Mysterious Stranger is a recurrent trope in Twain’s works: the literal Satan in “Letters from the Earth,” Merlin in A Connecticut Yankee (and the Yank as well), the stranger in “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg,” and the angel in “The War Prayer,” to mention a few of the most prominent. Twain’s Satan figure is multiple: doubles of doubles that finally become one unnerving figure – the narrator himself (who merges with the reader). This figure is given full development in the “Mysterious Stranger” papers that Paine disfigured. It is curiously iconic and ironic that Mark Twain’s “Mysterious Stranger” pieces, standing on the cusp of literary modernism in America, are connected but disconnected and disrupted fragments. We have not just three, but four works to deal with (one of which is Paine’s distortion of what Twain actually wrote). As mentioned, the several texts were not accurately disentangled until 1963; and accurate texts were not generally available until the University of California Press published Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts in 1969. The same year, California also published a reader’s text of the main manuscript, No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, with notes and a foreword by John Tuckey.15 In a later note to No. 44, Robert H. Hirst, the general editor of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley, succinctly sets forth the history of the three texts and the 1916 editorial warping.16 Hirst notes the problems created by the fact that all three authentic versions of the “Mysterious Stranger” story were never integrated. The first version is “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” written at different times between 1897 and 1900. The second is “Schoolhouse Hill,” written in 1898. The third and most important, “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger,” was written mostly between 1902 and 1905, with 1908 apparently the last date Twain worked on the manuscript. The 1916 Paine-Duneka publication merges a small portion of the last version with the first and makes other changes in Twain’s work.17 The overall “soft” determinism of both the Paine-Duneka Mysterious Stranger and No. 44 corresponds to the ideas of What Is Man? The deterministic orientation is ameliorated by the almost unstated hope for a better society, along with a kind of forlorn desire for individual freedom of the will. But in the unaltered “Mysterious Stranger” papers, the very conundrums of an overall indeterminate determinism constitute a paradoxical unifying theme. 376

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No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger The first thing to notice about No. 44 is the motif of doubling. There are doppelg€anger selves (redoubled), dual universes, and twofold story lines, each with a twofold storyline. Although not brought to final form, the story has an overall narrative pattern dividing its thirty-four chapters more or less symmetrically into two parts. There are, however, apparently extraneous departures: mainly the chapters on Doangivadam (Don’t-give-a-damn), a debonair swordsman-printer (Chs 11–13); the extended transformation of a maid-in-waiting into a cat (Chs 24–25, 30); and a vaudeville minstrel show (Ch. 26). But, as in “The Great Dark,” these comic digressions seem to be instances of romantic irony and, I would argue, integral aspects of the disruptive modernist quality of the narrative. Once again we find a middlepoint between two equal parts. The first half of the story builds toward key revelations on the nature of human existence in Chapter 18; the second half of the story extends the revelations to the ultimate nature of the universe. Chapter 18 reveals that human concepts of time and distance are mistaken, that multiple worlds exist, and that human beings are collections of multiple selves and “Duplicates.”18 The opening chapter evokes a romantic picture of a little Austrian village, called Eseldorf (“Assville”), in the year 1490. The story is told from the firstperson point-of-view of August Feldner, a sixteen-year-old “printer’s devil” (printer’s apprentice-helper), who observes that it is “still the Middle Ages in Austria, and promised to remain so forever.” After the description of a majestic castle (Castle Rosenfeld), a second castle is introduced, doubling the first (Ch. 2). This one, falling into ruin, is where the action of the story takes place, mainly in a “print shop” buried in the castle depths. The emphasis on printing gradually suggests a simulacrum, a facsimile of existence. The other inhabitants of the second castle are rapidly introduced. In charge of the castle is a master printer, named Heinrich Stein, often referred to by August as the “master.” Frau Stein, his unpleasant wife, has a seventeen-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. Herr Stein has a niece, Marget Regen, also seventeen, who will figure in August’s love life later in the story. The “printing force” includes a half-dozen quarrelsome men and boys. There are two other important inhabitants of the castle. One is Old Katrina, the cook and housekeeper, a powerful woman with a violent temper and a strong sentimental-religious streak. The other is the ambiguous Balthasar Hoffman, an astrologer-magician. One cold day, a forlorn looking youth appears at the castle door, dressed in rags. He asks for work, no pay, just food and shelter. Frau Stein wants to send him on his way, for he has “the look” of a liar and murderer. The rest of the 377

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company divides on the acceptability of the boy. But old Katrina, who is childless, emerges from the kitchen and immediately takes to him. Asked his name, the youth replies: “Number 44, New Series 864,962.” At breakfast one day, Herr Stein announces that 44 is to be promoted to “the honorable rank of apprentice to the printer’s art,” the noblest and most powerful of all the arts (Ch. 7). The others of the “print force” are outraged. Their indignation increases when No. 44 displays vast knowledge but claims he has never studied anything.

The choir invisible: Duplicates and dream-selves Somewhat later, it is discovered that the print shop is operating by itself. All the machines, apparently tended by “invisibles,” are working on printing bibles (Ch. 11). When the job is done, “a soundless emptiness, a ghostly hush” is succeeded by “muffled spectral chuckles, the dry and crackly laughter of the dead.” The printers are angry and blame the magician for supernatural interference. They refuse to load the boxes of bibles when the freight wagon appears. But in the dark of night “big dim bulks” of men emerge carrying the boxes. To the printers’ surprise, it is themselves: doubles or Duplicates of the print crew (Ch. 13). After a sequence in which 44 pretends to be burnt into “dazzling white fire” by a spell of the magician, he reappears in August’s room a charred corpse. Here, in the pivotal Chapter 18, he proceeds to enlighten August on the nature of the Duplicates. They “are not real persons,” but multiple copies: “they are fictions.”

............................................................................................... You know, of course, that you are not one person but two. One is your WorkadaySelf, and ’tends to business, the other is your Dream-Self, and has no responsibilities, and cares only for romance and excursions and adventure. . . . It has far more imagination than has the Workaday-Self, therefore its pains and pleasures are more real and intense than those of the other self, and its adventures correspondingly picturesque and extraordinary. (Ch. 18)

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No. 44 further comments that, although Dream-Selves are more real, they “have no substance.” August objects that the “Duplicates are solid enough!” Apparently, but “it is only fictitious flesh and bone,” 44 repeats ironically. The implications for August’s own reality begin to multiply. A contemptible and evil priest, Father Adolf, then turns upon the Duplicates, and “declaring them to be evil spirits, wandering devils,” he condemns them “to 378

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the stake on his own arbitrary authority” (Ch. 19). One particularly distressing problem is that the supposedly insubstantial Duplicates are “making love to young women” in the castle. In fact, the Duplicates “soon cut out the Originals and left them out in the cold,” resulting in constant quarrels and fights. August remarks that “the castle was no better than a lunatic asylum.” The trickster 44, however, is “charmed” by all the uproar. Nettled, August says, “You don’t seem to think much of the human race; it’s a pity you have to belong to it.” No. 44 looks at him in wonder and answers: “What makes you think I belong to it?” August, stunned, asks: “Since you are not a human being, what are you?” No. 44’s reply evokes the modernist problem of language: “Ah . . . now we have arrived at a point where words are useless; words cannot even convey human thought capably, and they can do nothing at all with thoughts whose realm and orbit are outside the human solar system, so to speak” (Ch. 19). No. 44 says that he will reveal himself, not in words, but in a kind of instant telepathy. In the sudden revelation of vast cosmic knowledge, August is awestruck – stunned. But 44 says that he should not feel any “reverence.” Instead, he wants to go play. In the following chapter (Ch. 20), No. 44 reappears and proposes to take August on an illuminating dream-journey. As in Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” (1843), the spirit-being shows August a sentimental family scene representing the past, the present, and the future. Unlike Dickens’s story, however, the horrifying scenes ultimately have little relation to right or wrong – just to the hidden nature of the universe.19 It is now clear to August that “nothing was serious” to 44, that “levity was the blood and marrow of him, death was a joke . . .” Then 44 laughs at the human habit of regarding themselves as the special creation of a divine being (Ch. 22). The problem is that the human mind “doesn’t hold anything; one cannot pour the starred and shoreless expanses of the universe into a jug.”20 The next several chapters deal with August Feldner’s quest for love as an antidote to despair. In Chapter 23, we have the first direct reference to August’s own other self. Until now, August has been “tranquilly unconcerned” about his Duplicate, who has a separate name, Emil Schwarz. Moreover, August begins to comprehend that human nature is composed of three selves, identities that confusedly multiply the relationships of each of the selves to others. Chapter 25 and the next several constitute a minor tour de force of modernabsurdist drawing-room comedy, as the hijinks begin to take over the serious part of the narrative. Frenetic shifts and recurrent misperceptions suggest an eighteenth-century comedy of manners in a modernist frame and setting. In a series of missteps and miscalculations, August tries to discredit his Duplicate, thereby harming himself. 379

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Mr Bones with a banjo Twain introduces a further absurdist scene. August hears a “dry bony noise” (“kl–lackety klackclack”) far “down the distant caverns and corridors” of the castle (Ch. 26). The dreadful noise comes straight to his door, and a tall skeletal figure in a “clownish and outlandish costume” enters and capers about his room. The figure is dancing in the minstrel Negro style of the future nineteenth century; in fact, he identifies himself as “Cunnel Bludso’s” slave from South Carolina. He pulls out something he calls a “banjo” (a word August doesn’t know) and begins singing “Way down upon de Swanee river . . .” August is charmed by the music and by the “noble pathos” in the songs of the spectre.21 It’s another of 44’s preposterous jeux d’esprit. The next several chapters involve transforming Marget’s maid into a cat, satirizing Christian Science, and killing off Emil Schwarz. The digressive cat chapters are rather charming (one guesses Twain enjoyed writing them), but they are not as far afield as they may seem. Directly thematic is the cat’s attitude toward the afterlife. She knows that Christians go someplace after death – and that makes her nervous. No. 44 tells her that cats go nowhere after they die; and the prospect of oblivion, rather than an afterlife of some kind, pleases her, the implication being that she wouldn’t like the Christian hell or heaven. The final demise of Emil Schwarz essentially defines modernism without using the word. In a haphazard manner, Schwarz tries to tell August “about his life and ways as a dream-sprite.” His manner is “skipping and disconnected.” He “often dropped phrases which had clear meanings to him, but which he labored in vain to make comprehensible to me” (Ch. 29). The absence of meaning seems to parallel the blankness of existence. The unhappy Schwarz says that since there is “nothing permanent” except nothingness, the ultimate quest is simply to “have a good time,” but he cannot. Now 44 suddenly appears and, out of a heart of infinite mercy, decides to grant Schwarz’s wish for annihilation. While Schwarz kisses the robes of 44, August watches his flesh melt away revealing a skeleton, which disappears in turn, leaving an “empty form.”

Looking backwards: The assembly of the dead The castle now prepares for an event that comes only once in ten years, “Ghost Night” (Ch. 31). The castle bell tolls while August watches the “American” clock on the wall. No. 44 decides to “turn time backward for a day or two” (Ch. 32). At the stroke of one, previous conversations are reproduced backwards. This reverse word order, highlighting the absurdity and arbitrariness of grammar and punctuation, goes on for a long paragraph. 380

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The most recent scenes in the last few chapters are then repeated backwards, after which we view the march of history backwards. In yesterday’s wars, the “previously killed were getting killed again . . .” Masses of “steel-clad knights” charge across the field of battle – backwards.22 The penultimate chapter (Ch. 33) features a bizarre historical spectacle, a vivid panorama of the dead. As this partially resurrected Assembly of the Dead approaches, August hears a “dry sharp clacking” and sees the “dim forms of thousands of skeletons marching!” The amusing minstrel show with Mr Bones playing the banjo (Ch. 26) has given way to a ghastly skeletal parade. The final chapter begins with 44 telling August that he is going away, never to return. When August says that surely they will meet in another world, 44 replies: “There is no other” (italics Twain’s). Like the cat, August hopes that these “incredible words might be true – even must be true.” But, since 44 has shown him scenes of future life, August is apprehensive. No. 44 tells him that “Life itself is only a vision, a dream” (italics Twain’s). There is “no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell . . .” The truth is that “Nothing exists but You. And You are but a . . . homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities.” Unable to die, August will wander the universe of his own mind – alone – “forever.” As the form of 44 begins to fade away, he expounds on the insanity of the created universe: “Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fictions! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane – like all dreams . . .” They are the “creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks.” No. 44 himself is the insubstantial creation of imagination. Problematic enough perhaps, but consider the implied narratee of the final paragraphs. The dream will go on and on, says 44, with “you the maker of it” (my italics). You – the reader, in reading Twain’s text – have imagined it all into existence. And you are a mere “thought” in an empty universe, playing games with yourself to mitigate existential loneliness and despair. This is solipsism with a vengeance – a modernist tour de force.

Coda Mon semblable, mon fr ere We end this journey through American fiction from the Civil War to World War I with flesh and blood becoming skeletons and fading away into sentient nothingness: with Mr Bones and his banjo turning into a historical panorama of clacking skeletons – with Schwarz, the narrator’s other dark self, begging for 381

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annihilation, becoming a skeleton, and melting into nothingness – with the narrator’s alter ego, his other double, 44, evaporating into nothingness. The narrator’s primary self then dissolves into sentient nothingness, becoming the double of the reader’s other self – forever the mysterious stranger. Let me conclude with reference to a major modernist poet, Wallace Stevens, whose first poems were published in 1914 at the beginning of World War I. After the war, Stevens gathered his poems together in the ironically titled Harmonium (1923). Many of these pieces express the idea that the real is but an idea – not a platonic idea, but a subjective thought. Our reality is a subjective imposition of order upon whatever is, or isn’t, out there. Among Stevens’s early poems are several touchstones of modernism, absurdist and otherwise. “The Emperor of Ice Cream” mocks the significance of death and the idea of meaningful existence. “The Comedian as the Letter C” deals with a “mythology of self”: sensual reality and moonlight romance; aspiring clowns and vexing dreams; empty aesthetics and a “banjo’s categorical gut”; and how the “words of things entangle and confuse.” Stevens’s “The Snow Man” catches much, if not most, of what is at issue in our discussions of romanticism, realism, naturalism, and modernism in American literature. It takes a wintry mind, the speaker says, not to think of “misery” while regarding the winter landscape. Either as a snowman or as an observer observing the snowman, such a one must “have been cold a long time.” For it takes “a mind of winter” to see what there is to see – or what is there to see – in the “distant glitter” of the sun and to hear it in the “sound of the wind” and in “the sound of a few leaves.” It is the “sound of the land” for one who really listens. The “same wind” that is blowing for the snowman is “blowing in the same bare place” for “the listener, who listens in the snow. . .”

And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Notes 1. CAL’s sections on two phases of modernism and postmodernism are titled: “The Birth of Modernism 1915–1949” (sec. 4, intro., 335–337); and “Modernism and Postmodernism 1950–1999” (sec. 5, intro., 487–489). What CAL calls modernism is here termed high modernism. Postmodernism, in the view of some critics, is a continuance of the counter-traditionalism of

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2.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

modernism carried to an extreme. When it is separated from modernism, postmodernism is usually conceived as a movement or orientation arising sometime in the late 1940s to 1950s or even the early 1960s (depending on the historian or critic) and continuing to the present. For both the modernist and the postmodernist, “truth” is contextual, existing only in the framework of place, time, milieu, and the subject position of the perceiver. Some contemporary critics propose a distinction between postmodernism and poststructuralism – the former being a literary term, the latter a critical term. I usually recommend three works for entree into this problematical critical field: M. H. Abrams, GLT entries on “modernism and postmodernism” (167–9) and “poststructuralism” (238–43); Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language (1972); and John Carlos Rowe, Through the Custom-House (1982), esp. Rowe’s introduction, “The Modernity of Nineteenth-Century American Fiction,” 1–27. The term “dialogical” is used in the sense of the Russian critic, M. M. Bakhtin (1895–1975), to suggest both the simultaneity of oppositions and the interpenetration of many layers of historical meanings embedded in any pronouncement; see Bakhtin (1981). See the quotation from Christophe Den Tandt below. “Women Authors and the Roots of American Modernism” (ACAF, 2009), 140. Carnivalesque is another term of Bakhtin’s, now associated with modernism, by which he means inversion, laughter, release, humor, irony as a counter to “monological” (authoritative, one-sided) political rhetoric. See Bakhtin (1984 [1965]). “American Literary Naturalism” (ACAF, 2009), 112. Part of the “dialogical” process that Den Tandt sees is a Darwinian sociological orientation. For a discussion of naturalism and fictions of “sexual selection,” see Bender (ACAF, 2009), esp. the section titled “1900–1914: Evolution and Modernity,” 390–3. Distrusting “nouns” and “commas,” Stein emphasizes verbs as much as possible and reduces punctuation. The last paragraph in the “Rooms” section reads in part: “The care with which the rain is wrong and the green is wrong and the white is wrong, the care with which there is a chair and plenty of breathing. The care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain.” See Stein (1962), 461, 485–6, 509. Although not published until 1925, most of Stein’s avant-garde pseudofiction, The Making of the Americans, had been written earlier (c. 1906–8); it traces the intellectual lives of three generations of the Steins, who more or less stand for all Americans; it is characterized by absence of dialogue, little action, and much repetition of words and sentences and images. An associated dramatic form in Italy, the “Theater of the Grotesque” (teatro del grottesco), flourished about the same time as surrealism. Its most famous dramatist was Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936), who often privileged the grotesque as a literary mode.

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8. Letters from the Earth, ed. DeVoto (Twain 1962), hereafter cited as Earth. He also edited Mark Twain in Eruption (1940), a selection from Clemens’s Autobiography, and The Portable Mark Twain (1960). DeVoto’s major works on Clemens include Mark Twain at Work (1942) and Mark Twain’s America (1932), which was a reply to the deprecatory The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920) by Van Wyck Brooks. 9. DeVoto writes that Mark Twain did not give this story a title and that he has taken “a phrase” from one of Twain’s notes for the title (Earth, 231). For “The Great Dark” excerpt, see Earth, 185–227, and for notes, 231–9; DeVoto had earlier published a portion of this unfinished tale in his Mark Twain at Work. 10. John Tuckey’s Mark Twain and Little Satan was published in 1963 at West Lafayette, Indiana, by Purdue University Studies (the predecessor to Purdue University Press). In 1968, Tuckey brought out The Mysterious Stranger and the Critics. 11. The middle section of Tuckey’s collection, The Devil’s Race-Track (Twain 1980), includes a more inclusive context than DeVoto’s for “The Great Dark” (80–128) in a sequence of eight fragments and unfinished pieces, comprising over 340 pages (25–368). For an overview and synopses of the various texts, see separate entries by title in Rasmussen (1995); esp. “The Devil’s Race-track,” 110; “The Enchanted Sea Wilderness,” 128; “The Great Dark,” 183–4. The Devil’s Race-Track is drawn from Tuckey’s two collections of Twain’s late unpublished works: Mark Twain’s Which Was the Dream? (1967) and Mark Twain’s Fables of Man (1972), which give a fuller overview and the complete texts. 12. The fragment gives way to eight pages of notes in Twain’s hand, from which DeVoto reconstructs the story; see Earth, 226–7. 13. DeVoto, 237. But he might have instanced, in “The Chronicle of Young Satan” (see notes 15–17 below), Philip Traum’s comment that laughter is humankind’s only weapon against sham and fraud and illusion. Laughter sharpens one’s perceptions. 14. Noting that Twain rewrote a scene without the Mad Passenger, DeVoto summarizes the manuscript separately. 15. No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, annotated by Tuckey (1969); Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, ed. Gibson (1969). Also see Kahn, Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger: A Study of the Manuscript Texts (1978). 16. “A Note on the Text,” No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (cited above), 197–8. 17. For the history of the four different texts combined with detailed synopses, see by title in Rasmussen (1995). 18. For reasons of space, the following summary and analysis does not deal fully with the attacks on religious theology, practice, prayer, and superstition that permeate Twain’s narrative, or his trade union sentiments, or his parodies of

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19.

20.

21.

22.

several literary forms. Nor does it explore in detail the parallels in philosophy with Twain’s What Is Man? See Fishkin (1996), and Baender (1973). This episode not only parodies the warm and fuzzy world of some of Dickens’s most popular stories; Chs 20–22 deal with the horrible tragedy that befalls the family of Johann Brinker and parodies the sentimental bestselling children’s book, Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates (1865) by Mary Mapes Dodge. The epigraph on the title page of the manuscript is: “Being an Ancient Tale Found in a Jug, and Freely Translated from the Jug.” The myth of a message in a bottle is an old one; Poe, for example, in Eureka (1848) ironically retrieves the great message on the nature of the universe from a wine jug floating in the ancient “Sea of Darkness” (ignorance). Tuckey points out that Clemens “was a long-time fan of the authentic (as opposed to the black-face) minstrel show” (notes to No. 44; see 193). He thought the plantation blacks’ music “eloquent,” and something “white people cannot imitate,” having never felt the pathos of a slave’s life. One of the standard minstrel figures was “Mr. Bones.” (Cf. Ch. 33.) There is a satiric self-referential hit at A Connecticut Yankee when King Arthur comes along with all his armored knights. August says: “That interested me, because we had just been printing his history, copying it from Caxton.”

See also Camfield (1994, 2003); Clark (1991); Covici (1962); Cox (1966); Ellmann and Feidelson (1965); S. F. Fishkin (1997, 2002); W. M. Gibson (1976); S. Gillman (1989); Harpham (1982); Hill (1973); J. Kaplan (1966); Lamb (ACAF, 2009a); Powers (2005); Robinson (1986, 1995); Salomon (1961); H. N. Smith (1962); G. R. Thompson (1989, 2001).

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There are three components to this bibliography. 1 The first contains a descriptive bibliographical survey of general works with which serious students should be familiar. 2 The second section is a short list of abbreviations for frequently cited works. 3 The third section is the main bibliography. It is composed principally of selected book-length works of criticism and scholarship, articles cited in the notes to each chapter, and specific editions of primary works cited in the main text. Generally not included are works of fiction mentioned in the main text for which no particular edition is cited (quotations from these works are referenced principally by section or chapter numbers). Editions that contain biographical, historical, and critical materials (such as the “Norton Critical Editions”) are cited under the name of the author (for example, Howells, James, Wharton, Crane), with occasional cross-references to other works by the editors when of particular relevance. Citations in the notes and the appended suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter appear in a short form keyed to this bibliography, for example: Kerr (1972). Readers should be aware that mere titles may be somewhat misleading. For example, Fred L. Pattee’s The Feminine Fifties and Helen W. Papashvily’s “All the Happy Endings”: A Study of the Domestic Novel in America are not feminist reconsiderations of forgotten or suppressed works, but instead condescending attacks on the sentimentality of “women’s fiction.” Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture is not really a feminist work but a cultural analysis of the clergy and ideologies of the “feminine” (thus it does not appear in the chapter on “woman’s fiction”). These books are included for historical Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson. Ó 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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context. Contrariwise, I have omitted a few once-celebrated works as no longer very pertinent.

(1) Basic Background Readings For book-length introductory overviews, I recommend beginning with the “Dictionary of Literary Biography” volumes, along with individual volumes in the “Norton Critical Editions” series and the “Twayne United States Authors Series” (for further information, see below). For condensed introductions to authors and subjects, I recommend beginning with the essays in A Companion to American Fiction 1865–1914, ed. Robert Paul Lamb and G. R. Thompson (2005; rev. 2009). A growing number of “Companion” volumes are available from Blackwell (now Wiley-Blackwell), Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and others. All three have restructured programs located in Great Britain and the United States; for the latter two, the place of publication for their recent “Companion” volumes (and others) may be presumed to be either or both: Cambridge and New York; or Oxford and New York. The ongoing “Library of America” series presents authoritative texts ranging from the seventeenth century to the end of the twentieth. A number of singleauthor journals, reviews, and newsletters have also appeared, many sponsored by literary societies (for example, the Howells Society, the Norris Society, the Woolson Society); these can be initially accessed via the internet and their publications subscribed to in hard copy or often in E-text.

Textbook Histories, Anthology Resources, Reference Works For such matters as determinism, Freudianism, social Darwinism, feminism, ethnicity, and so on, in the context of literary history, several older works are especially useful (full citations will be found in the main bibliography). Four introductory surveys are especially helpful: Rod W. Horton and Herbert W. Edwards, Backgrounds of American Literary Thought (1952; rev. 1967, 1974, 1976); Stow Persons, American Minds: A History of Ideas (1958); Donald Heiney, Recent American Literature (1958); and Darrel Abel, American Literature, 3 vols (1963). Although not a textbook, Alexander Cowie’s The Rise of the American Novel (1951) is after sixty years still one of the best surveys available (despite essentially omitting Edith Wharton); Cowie has a tendency to dismiss sentimental fiction, but offers a useful analytic overview. Among other older surveys of varying depth and insight are: Carl Van Doren, The American Novel (first pub. 1921); rev. edn retitled The American Novel, 1789–1939 (1940, 1947); 388

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Arthur Hobson Quinn, American Fiction: An Historical and Critical Survey (1936); Edward Wagenknecht, Cavalcade of the American Novel (1952). The selections and introductions in multi-volume anthologies of American literature are also extremely useful. These books have grown in size and number, and it is instructive to follow the canon changes in the selections and introductions found in standard anthologies published by Grosset and Dunlap, Norton, Harper, Macmillan, Prentice-Hall, and Heath, to name a few. Most noticeable for the 1865–1914 period is the inclusion of more women and minority writers – especially African American writers and Native American writers – though the selections are inconsistent. In addition, there are several critical anthologies, histories, encyclopedic surveys, and dictionaries available, usually composed of essays by several hands. Every student should be acquainted with the following histories: The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917–1921, 1923); its successor, The Cambridge History of American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, et al., 8 vols (1994–2005); Literary History of the United States, ed. Robert Spiller, et al. (1948; reissued in several formats), and its successor the Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott, et al. (1988); and the Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliott, et al. (1991). The Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature, ed. Max J. Herzberg, et al. (1962), revised as Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature by George Perkins and others (1991), is a specialized outgrowth of William Rose Benet’s comprehensive world Reader’s Encyclopedia of 1948–65. The Oxford Companion to American Literature by James D. Hart has been updated many times (5th edn, 1983). The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, ed. Jay Parini (2004), runs to four volumes. Chronological bibliographies include Annals of American Literature, 1602–1983, ed. Richard M. Ludwig and Clifford A. Nault, Jr (1986); Bibliography of American Fiction 1866–1918, comp. James Nagel and Gwen L. Nagel (1993–); and The Chronology of American Literature, ed. Daniel S. Burt, et al. (2004). A bibliographical supplement to the 1948 Literary History of the United States has been issued several times and is available in a single volume (see main bibliography). Students should also be aware of Documents of Modern Literary Realism, ed. George J. Becker (1963) and Documents of Realism and Naturalism, ed. Donald Pizer, rev. edn (1998). Collections of critical essays include American Realists and Naturalists, ed. Donald Pizer and Earl N. Harbert, Vol. 12 of the “Dictionary of Literary Biography” series (1982); American Realism: New Essays, ed. Eric Sundquist (1982); The Cambridge Companion to Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London, ed. Donald Pizer (1995). Other such volumes are in progress by Cambridge, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, Garland, Greenwood, 389

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etc. Edd C. Applegate’s American Naturalistic and Realistic Novelists. A Biographical Dictionary (2002) has a concise documentary introduction to both the history of American realism and naturalism and the major critical studies of these as concepts.

Other sources In a larger volume, biographical sketches surveying the careers of the authors discussed here would have been routinely included. Some biographical material does make its way into these pages, but the focus is on specific texts in the context of the writers’ main works, within the general milieu of the literary schools and movements – within which (or against which) the author wrote. For concise but comprehensive overviews, the previously mentioned Dictionary of Literary Biography series (Detroit and Farmington Hills, Michigan: Gale, 1978–) is a good place to begin; the project is now approaching 300 volumes, with updates and revisions in a “Second Series.” For greater individual detail, see the introductory volumes on particular writers in the Twayne United States Author Series (published in the 1960s by the College and University Press in New Haven, Connecticut, and later as a subsidiary of Twayne Publishers; then published under the imprint of Twayne Publishers in New York and later Boston, as a subsidiary of G. K. Hall). As with any series, there is some unevenness. Also see DAB in section (3). Internet sources may also be useful but present special problems. Take for example Wikipedia (“the Free Encyclopedia”). In the main, the entries are fairly reliable; but many are full of errors and are written by contributors (often anonymous) with no particular expertise. Everything must be double-checked against more authoritative sources like those cited above. The same is true of student guides like Cliff’s Notes, Monarch Notes, Masterplots, and the like. Some of these sources are pedestrian or unreliable; others contain excellent critical analyses and useful historical scholarship. There are scores of scholarly journals, newsletters, and reviews. American Literary Realism has been publishing since 1968. Several of the various magazines are devoted to special topics, such as film and media, women’s studies, African American arts and letters, multi-ethnic American literature, and so on. As mentioned, several journals are devoted to single authors, including Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, and others. Titles and abbreviations for such journals are listed at the beginning of each year’s volume of American Literary Scholarship: An Annual (1963–present). Issued by Duke University Press, this series was originated by James Woodress and has been edited by various hands over the decades. 390

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Each year’s work in criticism in American literature is selectively surveyed, summarized, and evaluated by experts in different fields. In recent years, the final chapter surveys the latest general reference works. As the scholarship on American literature steadily increases, such a selected critical review (whatever its limitations) is indispensable.

(2) Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Works The works below, with complete publication data, are listed alphabetically by title or author in (3), the main bibliography. ACAF CAL CLHU GLT HBL

LHUS MAR NGd

RAN REAmL

A Companion to American Fiction 1865–1914 (first pub. 2005; rev. 2009). Chronology of American Literature (2004). Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988). A Glossary of Literary Terms (7th edn, 1999). Based on the original version of 1947; revised by M. H. Abrams beginning in 1957. A Handbook to Literature (6th edn, 1992). Based on the original edition of 1936; current edn revised by C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon. Literary History of the United States (first pub. 1948; rev. edn in one vol., 1960). Masterworks of American Realism (1963) by Darrel Abel. Neutral Ground: New Traditionalism and the American Romance Controversy (1999) by G. R. Thompson and Eric Carl Link (Thompson). The Rise of the American Novel (1951) by Alexander Cowie. Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature (1963). Rev. as Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature (1991).

(3) Critical Works Cited and Selected Supplementary References This bibliography consists of a broad range of book-length works in English; only those articles cited in the notes are included. “Reference” works (encyclopedias, companions, etc.) are normally listed by title unless they are authored volumes. Multiple works by the same author are listed chronologically. For additional bibliographies on particular authors and subjects, see the individual chapters in the 2009 A Companion to American Fiction 1865–1914 (ACAF, marked with  ). 391

Bibliographical Resources Aaron, Daniel (1951) Men of Good Hope: A Story of American Progressives. New York: Oxford University Press. Abel, Darrel (1963) Masterworks of American Realism. Vol. 3 of American Literature. Woodbury, New York: Barron’s. [MAR] Abrams, M. H. (1953) The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. New York: Norton. Abrams, M. H. (1999 [1957]) A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th edn. Fort Worth, Texas: Harcourt Brace. Based on the original version by Dan S. Norton and Peters Rushton (1947). [GLT] A Companion to African American Literature (2010), ed. Gene Andrew Jarrett. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. A Companion to American Fiction 1865–1914 (2009 [2005]), ed. Robert Paul Lamb and G. R. Thompson, rev. edn. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. [ACAF] A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South (2004), ed. Richard Gray and Owen Robinson. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America (2003), ed. Charles L. Crow, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Adams, Henry (1983) Democracy: An American Novel, Esther, Mont Saint Michel, The Education, ed Ernest Samuels. New York: Library of America. Adams, John R. (1963) Harriet Beecher Stowe. New York: Twayne.  Ahnebrink, Lars (1950) The Beginnings of Naturalism in American Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Alcott, Louisa May (1975), in Madeleine B. Stern (ed.), Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. New York: William Morrow. Rpt. Bantam, 1978. Alcott, Louisa May (1988) Elaine Showalter (ed.), Alternative Alcott. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, Introduction, ix–xliii. Alcott, Louisa May (1991) in Sarah Elbert (ed.), Moods. American Women’s Writers Series. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Alcott, Louisa May (1994), in Joy S. Kasson (ed.), Work. A Story of Experience. New York: Penguin, Introduction, ix–xxxi. Alcott, Louisa May (1995), in Madeleine B. Stern (ed.), Louisa May Alcott Unmasked: Collected Thrillers. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Alcott, Louisa May (2004), in Anne K. Phillips and Gregory Eiselein (eds), Little Women, Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton. American Literary Scholarship: An Annual (1963–), 46 vols. to date. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. American Naturalistic and Realistic Novelists. A Biographical Dictionary. See Applegate (2002). American Realists and Naturalists (1982), ed. Donald Pizer and Earl N. Harbert, “Dictionary of Literary Biography.” Vol. 12. Detroit: Gale. Ammons, Elizabeth (1980) Edith Wharton’s Quarrel with America. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Ammons, Elizabeth (1991) Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn of the Century. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Index

Abel, Darrel, xi abortion theme, 309 the absurd: and modernism, 368; in Norris, 97, 105, 106; in Twain, 361, 372, 373, 375, 379–80 Acadia, 213n Adams, Henry, 62, 286 Adams, Samuel Hopkins, 291 Addams, Jane, 364n adultery theme, 203–13, 269 African Americans: abolitionist and political writings, 324, 327–8; books about women, 158; color line, 325, 329–30; identity, 328–30; literary overview, 323–41; literary themes, 328–9; minstrel shows, 385n; plantation fiction, 329–30; and Reconstruction, 346–7, 348; slave narratives, 324–7; tragic mulatto theme, 324, 328, 329; trickster figures, 326; white literary representations, 288, 328–9, 347–9; see also racism; slavery agriculture see farming theme Alcott, Bronson, 191n Alcott, Louisa May: Behind a Mask, 183; ghost stories and thrillers by, 14, 179, 183; Hospital Sketches, 179; Little

Women trilogy, 158, 163, 180–5; A Long Fatal Love Chase, 192n; A Modern Mephistopheles, 192n; Moods, 179–80, 185; An OldFashioned Girl, 173–4; overview, 179–93; A Story of Experience, 2; Work, 158, 161, 173, 179, 180, 185–91; works for children, 192n Aldrich, Nelson, 289 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 175n Alger, Horatio, 301 Allen, James Lane, 12, 311, 363n American Civil War (1861–5): and division between romanticism and realism, 3; effects, 61; literary representations, 141–56, 343, 344–6, 347 American Dream, 285, 293–4 American identity, 299–301; manifest destiny, 61–2, 300; see also Great American Novel American literature: characteristics, x; international and domestic influences, ix–x; literary map from realism to modernism, 368–9 American Magazine, 290 Ammons, Elizabeth, 88n Anderson, W. H., 329

Reading the American Novel 1865–1914, First Edition. G. R. Thompson Ó 2012 G. R. Thompson. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

421

Index Anesko, Michael, 264 Anthony, Susan B., 165 antihero: definition, 336, 341n arabesque quality: definition, xii Arabian Nights, 364n Aristotle, 32 Arp, Bill see Smith, Charles Henry art: James’s use of, 259n; as theme, 110 atavism: definition, 67; examples, 91–108 Auchincloss, Louis, 222 Austen, Jane, 235 Austin, Mary, 11, 318n “bad boy” figures, 175n Baker, Ray Stannard, 290 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, xi–xiii, 383n Baldwin, James, 323 Balzac, Honor
e de, 19, 22n, 31–2, 35, 53n, 64 Bangs, John Kendrick, 11 Barbizon painters, 125 Baum, L. Frank, 13 Baym, Nina, xi, 159–62, 204 bayous, 213n Beard, Dan, 365n Bell, Michael Davitt, 5 Bellamy, Edward, 12, 263, 348, 349–50 Berenson, Bernard, 218 Bernard, Claude, 71n Besant, Walter, 26–7 Bibb, Henry, 326 Bierce, Ambrose: “Chickamauga,” 141–3; and melodrama, 67; “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” 141, 143–6; other war stories by, 155n; Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (later In the Midst of Life), 3, 13–14, 141–6 bildungsroman, 185, 196, 266; definition, 192n Billings, Josh see Shaw, Henry W. Birth of a Nation (film), 348 Blair, Walter, 304, 318n Blake, Lillie Devereux: Fettered for Life, 164, 166–73, 318n; Forced Vows, 166; overview, 164–73; Rockford, 166;

“The Social Condition of Woman,” 165–6; Southwold, 165, 166 Bly, Nellie see Cochran, Elizabeth J. Boccaccio, Giovanni, 25 Bold, Christine, 318n Bonner, Sherwood, 302 Bonnin, Gertrude Simmons, 318n Boyesen, H. H., 4 Brackenridge, H. H., 284, 285 Brandes, Georg, 62 Breton, Andr
e, 370 Breuer, Josef, 57 Brooks, Van Wyck, 384n Brown, Alice, 302 Brown, Herbert Ross, 159 Brown, William Wells, 158, 324, 326, 339–40n Browne, Charles Farrar (“Artemus Ward”), 304 Bruce, Dickson D., Jr, 324, 328–30, 334, 339 Budick, Emily Miller, 232n Bull Moose Party, 343 Bunyan, John, 180–1, 185–6, 190, 288 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 10, 13 business: expos
es, 290; historical context, 58–62, 283; as theme, 113–16, 267–79, 291–6; see also capitalism; industrialization and factories; nouveaux riches; utopias and dystopias Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 16 Cabell, James Branch, 13 Cable, George Washington, 20, 302, 311–12, 319n, 347, 364n Cady, Edwin H., 38n Cahan, Abraham, 261, 318n Cajun: definition, 213n Callahan, Sophie Alice, 12 capitalism: historical context, 58–62, 283; as theme, 283–98; see also business; industrialization and factories; nouveaux riches; utopias and dystopias captivity narratives, 324

422

Index Cargill, Oscar, 53n Carlyle, Thomas, 186 Carnegie, Andrew, 59, 61, 286 carnivalesque, xii, 368, 383n Cary, Alice, 318n Cather, Willa, 216, 306, 319n Catherwood, Mary, 12 Caxton, William, 355 center of consciousness: definition, 258n Cervantes, Miguel de, 25, 355 Chambers, R. W., 13 chance, 56; see also determinism Chase, Richard, 4, 5, 16–17 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 25 Chekhov, Anton, 31 Chesnutt, Charles W.: books about, 318n; The Colonel’s Dream, 330; The Conjure Woman, 329; The House Behind the Cedars, 158, 324, 329–30; and Howells, 261; The Marrow of Tradition, 2, 330–3, 340n; overview, 330–3; The Wife of His Youth, 329 Chicago: Hull House, 364n Chicago Haymarket Riot (1886), 263 children’s literature, 175n, 180–5, 192n Chopin, Kate: books about, 232n; overview, 202–13; and regionalism, 301, 312; and vernacular, 319n; Wilson on, 364n; writers similar to, 216 WORKS: At Fault, 202; “At the ’Cadian Ball,” 203, 319n; The Awakening, 2, 158, 161, 195, 203–13, 319n; “Az
elie,” 319n; Bayou Folk, 203, 312; “D
esir
ee’s Baby,” 312; “The Kiss,” 203; A Night in Acadie, 203, 312; “A Respectable Woman,” 203; “The Storm,” 203, 319n; “The Story of an Hour” (“The Dream of an Hour”), 203; “A Visit to Avoyelles,” 319n; A Vocation and a Voice, 203; “Wiser than a God,” 202 Churchill, Winston, 12, 107n, 287 Clark, Samuel M., 4 class theme, 112–13, 215–33, 252–8, 269–79; see also nouveaux riches

Clemens, Clara, 372 Cochran, Elizabeth J. (“Nellie Bly”), 213n, 291 Codman, Ogden, 216 Coleman, Samuel, 10 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 16 Collins, Patrick, 107n Comte, Auguste, 63, 71n conspicuous consumption: origins of term, 71n, 291 Cooke, John Esten, 347 Cooke, Rose Terry, 318n Cooper, James Fenimore, 27–9 Corrothers, James D., 340n corruption theme, 289, 290, 371–2 Cosmopolitan (magazine), 290 Courbet, Gustave, 22n Cowie, Alexander, 157, 348 Cox, James M., 318n “Craddock, Charles Egbert” see Murfee, Mary Noailles Crane, Stephen: and Howells, 261; overview, 126–38; and romance, 11; and vernacular, 319n WORKS: “The Blue Hotel,” 126–8; Bowery Tales, 3, 132–3, 319n; “An Experiment in Misery,” 132–3; “George’s Mother,” 3, 132, 319n; Maggie, 3, 66, 132, 134–8, 158, 319n; The Monster, 83, 130–2; “The Open Boat,” 126, 128–30; other war stories by, 155n; The Red Badge of Courage, 2, 87, 132, 141, 146–55; War Is Kind, 146 Crawford, F. Marion, 11, 13 Cr
edit Mobilier of America, 59, 289 Creole: definition, 214n Crevecoeur, J. Hector St John de, 300 Crowley, John, 279n Culley, Margaret, 207, 214n dada, 369–70 Darwin, Charles, 58, 61; influence, 100, 110; Social Darwinism, 58–62; and women, 176n Davis, Rebecca Harding, 284, 288

423

Index Davis, Richard Harding, 11, 287 De Forest, John William: on Great American Novel, 9, 18–19; Honest John Vane, 289, 345; and Howells, 261; Kate Beaumont, 363n; Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, 2, 344–6; overview, 344; Playing the Mischief, 289, 345; A Union Officer in the Reconstruction, 344; A Volunteer’s Adventures, 344 D
ecadents, 71–2n Delany, Martin R., 324 Den Tandt, Christopher, 368–9 determinism: definition, 55–7; in Dreiser, 110; in French writers, 63–6; historical context, 57–63; in James, 52, 256; in Twain, 372, 376; in Wharton, 228; see also naturalism Detter, Thomas, 340n DeVoto, Bernard, 372–3, 374–5 dialect see vernacular dialogical: definition, xii–xiii, 383n Dickens, Charles, 379 dime novels, 12 divorce theme, 267–8 Dixon, Thomas, 12, 348 Dodge, Mary Mapes, 385n domestic novels: definitions, 26, 157–8; Howells, 264–74; James, 236–58; New Domestic Novel of Manners, 215; Wharton, 215–33; see also marriage and relationship theme Doolittle, Hilda (“H. D.”), 368 doppelg€anger motif, 317, 377 Dos Passos, John, 367 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 30, 36 Douglass, Frederick, 324, 326–7 Dowling, Robert M., 317–18n Dreiser, Theodore: attention to detail, 111–12; attitude to sex and women, 112–13, 116–23; class theme, 112–13; and Hoosier school, 306; influences on, 60, 62, 63, 110; overview, 109–24; power theme, 113–16; and

€ Ubermensch figures, 62, 113; worldview, 109–11 WORKS: An American Tragedy, 112–13; The Bulwark, 110; The Financier, 3, 62, 109, 113–15; The “Genius”, 110, 112; Jennie Gerhardt, 112; Sister Carrie, 3, 109, 111, 116–23, 123n, 158; The Stoic, 62, 109; The Titan, 62, 109, 113, 115–16 Du Bois, W. E. B., 326, 327–8, 340n Dunbar, Alice Moore, 340n Dunbar, Paul Laurence: books about, 318n; The Fanatics, 329; and Howells, 261; The Love of Landry, 329; short stories by, 334; The Sport of the Gods, 3, 324, 329, 334–5; The Uncalled, 329 Duneka, Frederick, 376 Dunn, Finley Peter, 304, 318n Durham, John S., 340n dystopias see utopias and dystopias economic novels, 269–79; see also business; capitalism; industrialization and factories Eggleston, Edward, 20, 304, 306–7 Eliot, George, 33 Eliot, T. S., 367, 368 Ellis, Havelock, 57–8 Ellison, Ralph, 323 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 15, 61 Engels, Friedrich, 63 epics, 11, 19; The Octopus, 82–7; Red Badge of Courage as, 148 Equiano, Olaudah, 324–5 eros/thanatos paradox, 57, 77, 97 Estes, Angeles M., 180 ethnicity: definition, 317n Evans, Augusta Jane: St. Elmo, 158, 159–62 evolutionary theory, 58–63; influence, 100, 110–11, 115; and women, 176n expressionism, 370–1 factories see industrialization and factories

424

Index facult
e maîtresse, 64 fairy tale motifs and symbols, 159, 204 fantasy and science fiction, 12–14, 349–63 farming theme, 82–7, 88n, 289, 304–6; see also regionalism Farrell, Grace: on Blake, 165–6, 173; on Darwinian theory applied to women, 176n; on Harper, 340n; on Jewett, 308, 309; on Phelps, 164 Faulkner, William, 367 feminism see women The Feminist Companion to English Literature, 162 Fetterley, Judith, 184, 302–3, 319n Fields, Annie, 319n Fields, James T., 319n Fisk, James, 59 Flaubert, Gustave, 32 focalization, xii food industry, 291–6 The Forerunner (magazine), 351 Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins, 261, 319n; A New England Nun, 41, 44–6; “The Revolt of ‘Mother’,” 53n, 307 French, Alice, 319n French, Warren, 95, 107n Freud, Sigmund, 57, 70–1n, 235 Freytag, Gustav, xi–xii frontier and frontier spirit, 299–300 Frost, Robert, 367 Fuller, Margaret, 176n Fullerton, Morton, 218 GAN see Great American Novel Gargano, James, 344 Garland, Hamlin: and Howells, 261; influences on, 60; overview, 304–6; and regionalism, 301, 302; and veritism, 303–4 WORKS: “A Branch Road,” 319n; Crumbling Idols, 303–4; A Daughter of the Middle Border, 319n; Jason Edwards, 289; Main-Travelled Roads, 2; A Member of the Third House, 289; “Mrs Ripley’s Trip,” 319n; Other Main-Travelled Roads, 319n; “The

Return of a Private,” 305–6; Roadside Meetings, 319n; Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly, 305; A Son of the Middle Border, 319n; A Spoil of Office, 289; “Under the Lion’s Paw,” 88n, 306; “Up the Coulee,” 305 Garrison, William Lloyd, 327 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr, 339–40n, 341n gender: and regionalism, 302–3; see also women genre conceptions, importance of, 1 Genteel Tradition, 215–33, 285–8 George, Henry, 60, 263, 289, 291 ghost stories, 13–14, 262; The Turn of the Screw as, 242–4; “The Yellow Wallpaper” as, 197–202 Gilded Age, 59–62, 71n, 283 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins: feminist work, 351; and Howells, 261; influences on, 350; overview, 197–202, 351–2 WORKS: Concerning Children, 351; Herland, 12, 180, 197, 351, 352; The Home, 351; Human Work, 351; Moving the Mountains, 351–2; What Diantha Did, 351; With Her in Ourland, 351, 352; Women and Economics, 351; “The Yellow Wallpaper,” 13, 161, 195, 197–202 Glasgow, Ellen, 12, 216, 311 Godkin, Edward Lawrence, 290 Gogol, Nikolai, 30 Goncourt, Edmond Louis Antoine Huot de, 64–5 Goncourt, Jules Alfred Huot de, 64–5 Gothic works, 13–14, 197–202; see also ghost stories Gould, Jay, 59 Grand, Sarah (Frances Elizabeth Clarke McFall), 162 Great American Novel (GAN): and American identity, 300; De Forest on, 9, 18–19; Norris on, 20–1; origins of concept, 9; quest for, 17–18; as romance, 16–17

425

Index greed theme, 101–6, 113–23, 220–31, 252–8, 283–91; see also utopias and dystopias Grey, Zane, 12 Griffith, D. W., 348 Griggs, Sutton E., 324, 330 Grimk
e, Angelina, 176n grotesque, 383n H. D. see Doolittle, Hilda Haight, Gordon S., 344 Haliburton, Thomas Chandler, 304 Halliburton, David, 155n Harper, Frances E. W., 324, 329, 340n Harris, George Washington, 304 Harris, Joel Chandler, 304, 319n, 328–9 Harris, Susan K., 195 Harte, Bret: and Howells, 261; Norris on, 20; overview, 301; as regionalist, 301, 302; and vernacular, 304, 318–19n Hawthorne, Nathaniel: De Forest on, 19; on difficulties of writing romance, 36; house motif, 217; and James, 53n; as romantic, 10, 15, 16; The Scarlet Letter, 190–1 Hay, John Milton, 286 Hayes, Rutherford B., 286, 343 Haymarket Riot, Chicago (1886), 263 Hearst, William Randolph, 60, 71n Heath Anthology of American Literature, 7 Hegel, G. F. W., 17, 61 Hemingway, Ernest, 304, 367 Henry, O. (pseud. of William Sydney Porter), 192n, 301 Herrick, Robert, 287 Hirst, Robert H., 376 historical romances, 12 Holman, C. Hugh, 6 Homer, 25, 155n Hooper, Johnson J., 304 Hoosier school, 306–7 Hopkins, Pauline Elizabeth, 324, 328, 340n Horace, 138n house motifs, 216–17 Howard, James H. W., 329

Howard, June, 95 Howe, Edward Watson, 306 Howells, William Dean: on American literary realism, 34–7; books about, 279–80n; and chance, 56; on De Forest, 344, 346; and French realists, 32, 66, 261; and Gilman, 197; influences on, 31, 60, 263, 350; international theme, 265–6; and melodrama, 67; new writers discovered by, 261; on Norris, 106; Norris on, 20, 68, 69; overview, 261–81; on realism vs romanticism, 4, 10; as realist writer, 4; and regionalism, 300; and Twain, 261, 313, 375; and utopianism, 350–1; and vernacular, 318n WORKS: Annie Kilburn, 262, 267; Between the Dark and Daylight, 14, 262; A Chance Acquaintance, 265; Criticism and Fiction, 34–7, 261; Dr. Breen’s Practice, 164, 262; “Editha,” 60, 262; A Foregone Conclusion, 265; A Hazard of New Fortunes, 2, 42, 67, 262, 263, 264, 274–9, 318n; Heroines of Fiction, 261; Indian Summer, 261, 266; Italian Journeys, 42; The Lady of Aroostock, 265; The Landlord at Lion’s Head, 264; Literary Friends and Acquaintances, 261; The Minister’s Charge, 262, 264, 266–7; A Modern Instance, 2, 261, 263, 264, 267–8, 270; Mr Mark Twain, 261; Questionable Shapes, 14, 262; The Rise of Silas Lapham, 83, 261–2, 263, 264, 266–7, 269–74; The Shadow of a Dream, 14, 42, 58, 67, 262, 269; Shapes That Haunt the Dark, 262; The Son of Royal Langbrith, 264; Their Silver Wedding Journey, 42; Their Wedding Journey, 41–4, 265; Through the Eye of the Needle, 12, 364n; A Traveller from Altruria, 12, 262, 263–4, 350–1;

426

Index The Undiscovered Country, 14, 262, 269; Venetian Life, 42; A Woman’s Reason, 262; The World of Chance, 266 Howells, Winifred, 262–3 Hugo, Victor, 69 Hurston, Zora Neale, 321 Huxley, Thomas, 110 Huysmans, J.-K., 71–2n, 92 hysteria, 57, 198 Ibsen, Henrik, 31 imagism, 138n, 368 impressionism: compared to expressionism, 370–1; definition, 125–6, 369; examples, 126–56, 199–202; painters, 125, 130; see also psychological novels incest theme, 232n industrialization and factories, 6, 58–62, 117, 288, 291–6; see also capitalism insanity: treatment of women, 197–202, 291 interior monologue, 143–4, 259n; examples, 144–6, 248–51 international theme: in Howells, 265–6; in James, 49, 237–8, 245–58; in Wharton, 217–20 Jackson, Helen Hunt, 12, 287–8 Jacobs, Harriet, 158, 324 James, Alice, 252 James, Henry: books about, 258n; on concept of character, 206; on The Custom of the Country, 220; and determinism, 52; and dialogue, 53n; female characters, 236; house motif, 216–17; and Howells, 261; influences on, 32, 63; international theme, 49, 237–8, 245–58; m
enage-a-trois in, 231, 239–40, 241, 244, 252–8; on Miss Ravenel’s Conversion, 346; as modernist, 367; narrative technique, 218, 235, 245; Norris on, 68; overview, 235–60; on realist novels as

distinct from romances, 26–7; and regionalism, 301; size of output, 235; and stream-of-consciousness, 143; style of novel, 235–6; types of novel, 236; and Wharton, 216, 217, 220 WORKS: The Ambassadors, 2, 41, 46, 49–52; The American, 26, 237–8; “The Art of Fiction,” 26–7, 206; The Aspern Papers, 240; The Beast in the Jungle, 41, 46–9, 91–2, 229, 231; The Bostonians, 2, 239; Daisy Miller, 238; ghost stories by, 14; The Golden Bowl, 236, 244–5; Madame de Mauves, 238; The Portrait of a Lady, 2, 143, 158, 238, 245–51; The Princess Cassimassima, 239; Roderick Hudson, 237; “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” 14; The Sacred Fount, 14, 236, 244; The Spoils of Poynton, 2, 241; The Turn of the Screw, 11, 236, 242–4, 258–9n; Washington Square, 2, 239; Watch and Ward, 237; What Maisie Knew 2, 241–2; The Wings of the Dove, 2, 245, 252–8 James, William, 56–7, 155n Jewett, Sarah Orne: books about, 320n; A Country Doctor, 164–5, 307; The Country of the Pointed Firs, 2, 308–11; Deephaven, 307; Old Friends and New, 307; and Howells, 261; overview, 307–11; “A White Heron,” 307–8 Jim Crow era, 340n Johnson, James Weldon, 3, 324, 335–9, 340n Johnston, Mary, 12 Jones, Howard Mumford, 8n Jones, J. McHenry, 340n Josephson, Matthew, 71n Keenan, H. F., 286 Kessler, Carol Farley, 175n Keyser, Elizabeth Lennox, 192n Kincaid, Jamaica, 323 King, Grace Elizabeth, 311 Kipling, Rudyard, 155–6n

427

Index Kirkland, Joseph, 319n Klinkowitz, Jerome, 52n Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 57–8 Ku Klux Klan, 12, 347, 348

Longstreet, Augustus Baldwin, 304 Lowell, Amy, 368 Lowell, James Russell, 304 lycanthropy, 94–5

Lamb, Robert Paul, 107n, 284, 365n Lane, Ann J., 364n language: and modernism, 370, 379; Twain on, 361–3 Lanier, Sidney, 11 Lant, Kathleen Margaret, 180 Leavis, F. R., 16 lesbian motifs, 166, 171–2, 175n Lewis, Henry Clay, 304 Lewis, John T., 320n Lewis, R. W. B., 218 Lewis, Sinclair, 83, 269 Liberator (newspaper), 327 Lincoln, Abraham, 348 Link, Eric Carl, 95, 155n literary nationalism, 7n; see also Great American Novel Littlefield, Henry M., 22n Lloyd, Henry Demarest, 291 local color, 26, 301, 302–17 Locke, David Ross (“Petroleum V. Nasby”), 304 Lombroso, Cesare, 67, 107n London, Jack: and atavism, 67; influences on, 62, 63; and melodrama, 67; political activism, 352–3; romanticism and realism in works € of, 3, 11; and Ubermensch figures, 62 WORKS: Before Adam, 67, 353; The Call of the Wild, 3, 62, 67, 73–4; The Iron Heel, 12, 353; “The Law of Life,” 73, 74; Martin Eden, 67, 123n, 364n; The People of the Abyss, 353; Revolution, and Other Essays, 353; The Road, 353; The Scarlet Plague, 353; The Sea-Wolf, 3, 62, 67, 73–4, 123n; The Star Rover, 353; “To Build a Fire,” 73, 74–5; The Valley of the Moon, 353; The War of the Classes, 353; White Fang, 62, 67, 73–4

magazines and newspapers, 290, 327, 351 Major, Charles, 11 Malory, Sir Thomas, 355 manifest destiny, 61–2, 300 marriage and relationship theme: in books by women, 160–1, 64, 165, 172–3, 185, 195–214, 217–31; in James, 237–42, 244–58; marriage for money, 217–31; naturalist examples, 75–82, 99–106, 217–31; realist examples, 41–53; in Wharton, 217–31; see also adultery theme; divorce theme Martin, Jay, 6–7 Marx, Karl, 63 materialism, 58–62; see also greed theme; nouveaux riches Matteson, John, 176n, 191n, 192 Matthews, Victoria Earle, 329 Maupassant, Guy de, 65, 214n McClure, Samuel Sidney, 280n, 290 McClure’s Magazine, 290 McFall, Frances Elizabeth Clarke see Grand, Sarah McLean, Robert C., 254, 257 melodrama: definition, 174n Melville, Herman, 15, 16, 83 m
enage-a-trois theme: in Howells, 58, 269; in James, 236, 239–40, 241, 244, 252–8; in Norris, 99 Midwest writers, 304–7 mimesis, 32–3 minstrel shows, 385n Mitchell, S. Weir, 12, 199, 213n, 262–3 modernism: definition, 367–8, 380; examples, 216, 335, 367, 369–71; high modernism, 367; Twain as modernist, 367, 371–82 money see capitalism; greed theme; materialism; nouveaux riches

428

Index Moore, Marianne, 367 morality: of capitalism, 274–9; Howells and implanted goodness, 267–8; see also social criticism novels Morgan, J. Pierpont, 59–60 Morrison, Toni, 323 Morse, James Herbert, 4 Muckrakers, 283–4, 287–96 Muir, John, 70n mulatto: definition, 340n; tragic mulatto theme, 324, 328, 329 Murfee, Mary Noailles (“Charles Egbert Craddock”), 311 Murray, Judith Sargent, 176n narratees, xii narrative points of view, xii narrative structure: books emphasizing importance, xi; climax/second crisis, xi; complication, xi; crisis, xi; denouement, xii; exposition, xi; fiveact structure, xi–xii, 148; Freytag pattern, xi–xii; geometric novel, xii; “hinge” and “pivot” points, 12, 97; middle-point (Mittelpunkt), xii, 107n; rising and falling action, xi; Twain’s experiments, 372 narrative technique: James’s enhancements, 218, 235, 245 Nation (magazine), 290 Nationalist Party, 350 Native Americans, 12, 287–8, 318n; captivity narratives, 324 naturalism: compared to realism, 2–3; definitions, contexts, and themes, 55–67; ecological naturalism, 70n; European background, ix, 63–6; examples, 3, 73–139, 215–33, 292; and melodrama, 67–8, 84–7; nature in Red Badge of Courage, 152–3; Norris on, 68–70; philosophical naturalism, 70n; place in Den Tandt’s literary map, 368–9; and romanticism, 18, 56, 68–70 Naylor, Gloria, 323 neoclassicism, ix

New Deal: origin of expression, 360 New Domestic Novel of Manners see domestic novels New England writers, 307–11 New Orleans: literary representations, 311–12 New Woman’s Fiction see women New York City: in Alger, 301; in Blake, 167–70; in Crane, 132–8; in Davis, 288; in Dreiser, 119–22; in Dunbar, 334–5; in Howells, 275–6, 278; in Wharton, 219, 220, 223–31 New York World (newspaper), 290 newspapers, 290, 327 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 62–3 Norris, Frank: and atavism, 67, 91; and French realists, 32, 66, 107n; on Great American Novel, 20–1; and Howells, 261; and Maggie, 139n; and melodrama, 67, 84–7, 106; on naturalism, 68–70; on novel structure, xii; and regionalism, 301; romanticism and realism in works of, 3, 82–7, 95, 96, 106; and Sister Carrie, 123n WORKS: “A Deal in Wheat,” 83; Essays on Authorship, 20–1; McTeague, 3, 66, 67, 71n, 91, 96–106; “The Mechanics of Fiction,” 97; The Octopus, 3, 59, 60, 66, 67, 73, 82–7; “A Plea for Romantic Fiction,” 41, 69; “A Problem in Fiction,” 72n, 107n; “Simplicity in Art,” 107n; “The True Reward of the Novelist,” 72n; Vandover and the Brute, 67, 71n, 72n, 91–6; “Zola as a Romantic Writer,” 68–9 North Star (newspaper), 327 nouveaux riches: definition, 232n; as theme, 215–33, 269–79 novels: debates about value, 1; definition, xi; realist novels as distinct from romances, 26–9; rise against romances, 3–7; types and subgenres, 26

429

Index 57–8; Howells, 269; James, 235–60; Wharton, 216–31

novels of manners see domestic novels Nye, Edgar Wilson (“Bill Nye”), 304

quest romances: A Connecticut Yankee as, 357–9; Phelps’s subversion, 175n; Red Badge of Courage as, 148 Quinby, Lee, 365n

“O. Henry” (William Sydney Porter) see Henry, O. Oedipus Complex, 57 O’Sullivan, John L., 300 Ouida (Louise de la Ram
ee), 162 Page, Thomas Nelson, 12, 328–9, 347, 364n Paine, Albert Bigelow, 375–6 Papashvily, Helen Waite, 159 Parker, Theodore, 193n pastoral, 308, 320n Pattee, Fred Lewis, 159 Peck, George Wilbur, 175n Peckham, Morse, 16 Perosa, Sergio, 68 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart (1815–1852), 175n Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart (1844–1911): Doctor Zay, 162, 164–5; “Gates” series, 163; Hedged In, 164; overview, 162–5; The Silent Partner, 164; The Story of Avis, 164 Phillips, David Graham, 289–90 Phillips, John S., 290 phrenology, 72n picaresque, 284 Pirandello, Luigi, 383n Pizer, Donald, 38n, 95, 107n Poe, Edgar Allan, 15, 16, 217, 385n positivism, 58, 63–4 postmodernism, 382–3n poststructuralism, 383n Pound, Ezra, 367, 368 power theme, 113–16 Praz, Mario, 22n Progressive Era, 59–62, 71n, 343; reform fiction of the era, 349–63 prostitution theme, 134–8, 289–90 Pryse, Marjorie, 302–3, 319n psychoanalysis and psychology, 57–8 psychological novels: definition, 235; Gilman, 197–202; historical context,

racism: as theme, 130–2, 290, 301, 312–17; see also African Americans; Native Americans; scientific racialism/ racism railroads: historical context, 59–60; as theme, 82–7, 289 Ram
ee, Louise de la see Ouida realism: compared to naturalism, 2–3, 56; De Forest as realist, 344; definitions, 15, 25–6; European background, ix, 30–3, 35, 37n; examples, 1–2, 41–53; first use of term, 22n, 31–2; and the Great American Novel, 17–21; Howells on, 34–7; literary vs philosophical, 37–8n; modernism’s relationship to, 368; moral realism, 32–3; Norris on relationship to naturalism and romanticism, 68–70; realist novels as distinct from romances, 26–9; realist period, 25; rise against romanticism, 3–7, 16; sociological interpretation, 5; subjective realism, 32–7; themes, 31; types and subgenres, 26 Reconstruction: historical context, 22n, 343; literary representations, 344, 347–9 regionalism: definitions, 26, 301; examples, 41, 44–6, 301–2, 304–17; vs local color, 301, 302–4 religion: and Alcott’s works, 180–91; imagery in Red Badge of Courage, 149–55; and Twain, 357, 359 Ribot, Th
eodule-Armand, 58 Rice, Thomas D., 340n Riis, Jacob, 134, 284, 291 Robber Barons, 8n, 58–62, 71n Rockefeller, John D., 59, 61

430

Index romance-novels, 68–70, 82–7, 106 romances: debates about value, 1; definitions, 7n, 9–10; as distinct from realist novels, 26–9; examples and types, 10–14; Great American Novel as, 16–17; novels’ rise against, 3–7, 16; Romance Theory, 5; see also quest romances romantic irony, xii, 16, 22n romanticism: definitions, 14; European background, ix; and the Great American Novel, 17–21; and mimesis, 32–3; and naturalism, 18, 56, 68–70; negative (skeptical) romanticism, 15–16; positive (optative) romanticism, 15, 16; realism’s rise against, 3–7, 16 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 360 Roosevelt, Theodore, 60, 288, 289, 343 Ruskin, John, 160–1 Russell, Irwin, 328–9 Santayana, George, 215, 286 Saxton, Martha, 191n Scharnhorst, Gary, 88n Scheick, William J., 10–11 Schelling, F. W. J., 61 Schlegel, Friedrich, xii science, as influence, 6; see also evolutionary theory science fiction see fantasy and science fiction scientific racialism/racism, 63 Scott, Sir Walter, 10, 29 sensibility: definitions, 157 sentimentalism: definitions and associations, 157, 174n; in domestic novels, 157; sentimental novels, 26 sex theme, 112–13, 116–23, 134–8 Shakespeare, William, 25 Shaw, Henry W. (“Josh Billings”), 304 Showalter, Elaine, 184 Sinclair, Upton, 3, 284, 291–6, 318n single tax, 71n, 289

slavery: abolitionist writings, 324, 327–8; Crevecoeur on, 300; plantation fiction, 329–30; slave narratives, 324–7; Twain on progress and, 360, 362; see also African Americans Smith, Charles Henry (“Bill Arp”), 304 Smith, Guy E., 8n Smith, Seba, 304 social and social criticism novels: definition, 215; Howells, 263-4, 266–7, 274–9; overview, 58–66, 283–98; utopias and dystopias, 188–91, 263–4, 349–63 Social Darwinism, 58–62 socialist works, 263–4, 295, 349–53 society novels: definition, 215; examples, 219–60 sociology, and literary history, 5–7 Sophocles, 25 South: literary representations, 12, 301, 323–41, 343–9; Northern postbellum attitude to, 43; Reconstruction period, 22n, 343, 346–7; Scott’s influence on Southern character, 38n; white Southern writers, 311–17; see also African Americans Spanish–American War (1898), 60, 353 Spencer, Herbert, 58, 61, 110 Spiller, Robert E., 4 Stafford, William T., 259n Stallman, R. W., 154, 155–6n Standard Oil, 290, 291 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 166 Steffens, Lincoln, 8, 284, 290 Stein, Gertrude, 216, 367, 369–70 Stepto, Robert, 338–9, 340n Stern, Madeleine B., 191–2n Stevens, Wallace, 367, 382 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 92, 107n Stock Market: 1907 panic, 60; Black Friday Panic (1869), 59 Stoddard, Elizabeth, 195–7 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 232n, 304, 307; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 19, 348

431

Index Stowers, Walter H., 329 stream-of-consciousness, 143–4, 259n; examples, 144–6, 248–51 Strindberg, August, 31 Stuart, Ruth McEnery, 302 Sui Sin Far, 318n Sumner, William Graham, 61 Sundquist, Eric J., 302–3, 318n, 344, 348, 349 Superman theory, 62–3, 113 surrealism, 370 symbolism, 369 synesthesia, 126 Taft, Zulime, 305 Taine, Hippolyte, 63–4 Tanselle, G. Thomas, 280n Tarbell, Ida, 284, 290 Tarkington, Booth, 286–7, 306 technology theme, 360–1 Temple, Minny, 252 Thaxter, Celia, 318n, 319n Theater of the Grotesque, 383n Thompson, Elizabeth Boyd, 158 Thompson, James Maurice, 12 Thoreau, Henry David, ix, 15, 193n Thorpe, Thomas Bangs, 304 Tolstoy, Leo, 30, 69, 263, 350 tomboy figures, 163 Toomer, Jean, 323 Tourg
ee, Albion W., 2, 348–9 Transcendentalism, 6 trickster figures, 326 Trotsky, Leon, 364n Tuckey, John S., 373, 376, 385n Turgenev, Ivan, 30 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 318n Twain, Mark: attitude to romance, 162; “bad boy” figures, 175n; books about, 320n, 384n; and doubling/ twinning, 296n, 364–5n, 376, 377–9; and Howe, 306; and Howells, 261, 313, 375; influences on, 60; on language, 361–3; meaning of pseudonym, 38n; and melodrama,

432

67; as modernist, 367, 371–82; mysterious stranger trope, 376; narrative form experiments, 372; political works, 353–63; and progress, 350, 355, 360, 362; on realism and romanticism, 27–9; and regionalism, 301–2, 311–17, 318n; and sentimentalism, 297n; techniques and themes, 317; and vernacular, 304 WORKS: The American Claimant, 296n; Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, 175n; The Celebrated Frog of Calaveras County, 301; “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” 376, 383n; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 11, 12–13, 67, 343, 354–63, 371, 376, 385n; The Devil’s Race-Track, 371, 373, 384n; Fables of Man, 371; “Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut,” 371; “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” 27–9; The Gilded Age, 2, 60–1, 283, 284–5; “The Great Dark,” 371, 372–5; Huckleberry Finn, 2, 67, 131, 175n, 284, 300, 301, 304, 313–17, 318n, 364n, 371; Innocents Abroad, 301–2; King Leopold’s Soliloquy, 354; Letters from the Earth, 371, 372–5, 376; Life on the Mississippi, 2, 29, 301; “The Mad Passenger,” 375; The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg, 131, 371–2, 376; No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, 11, 365n, 371, 372, 375–82; Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, 11; The Prince and the Pauper, 11; Pudd’nhead Wilson, 301, 312–13, 371; Roughing It, 301; “Schoolhouse Hill,” 376; “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” 354; Tom Sawyer, 67, 175n, 301; “The War Prayer,” 353–4, 376; What Is Man?, 371, 372, 385n; Which Was the Dream?, 371

Index Tweed, William “Boss,” 288 Tzara, Tristan, 369 € Ubermensch, 62–3, 113 Union Pacific Railroad, 59 unlived life theme, 31, 41–53, 219–22 utopias and dystopias, 188–91, 263–4, 349–63 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 59 Vanderbilt, William, 59, 60 Veblen, Thorstein, 71n, 284, 291 veritism see Garland, Hamlin vernacular, 2, 26, 304 vulgarians: definition, 215 Wagner-Martin, Linda, 367, 371 Walker, Alice, 323 Wallace, Lew, 11 war theme, 141–56, 219, 343, 344–6, 347; antiwar works, 353–4, 360 Ward, Artemus see Browne, Charles Farrar Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps see Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart Warner, Charles Dudley, 60–1, 283, 284–5 Washington, Booker T., 326, 327–8 Watanna, Onato, 318n Webb, Frank, 324 Westerns, 12 Wharton, Edith: Balzac’s influence, 32; house motif, 216–17, 230; and Howells, 261; and James, 216, 217, 220; overview, 215–33; and regionalism, 301; sensuality in works, 232n; and Susan Lenox, 290 WORKS: The Age of Innocence, 219–20; A Backward Glance, 220; “Beatrice Palmato,” 232n; Bunner Sisters, 220; The Custom of the Country, 2, 220–2; The Decoration of Houses, 216; Ethan Frome, 3, 32, 73, 75–82, 216, 217; False Dawn, 220; ghost stories by, 14; The Greater Inclination, 216; The House of Mirth, 2, 158, 161, 217, 222–31; “The Life Apart,” 232n; Madame de Treymes, 217; The Marne,

219; New Year’s Day, 220; The Old Maid, 220; Old New York, 220; The Reef, 217–18; “Roman Fever,” 220; Sanctuary, 217; A Son at the Front, 219; The Spark, 220; Summer, 217; The Touchstone, 217; The Valley of Decision, 217; The Writing of Fiction, 220; Xingu and Other Stories, 220 Wharton, Edward, 216, 218 Whitman, Walt, 1–2, 15, 368 Wilde, Oscar, 92 Williams, William Carlos, 367, 368 Wilmington race riot (1898), 340n Wilson, Edmund, 216, 243, 344–5 Wilson, Harriet E., 158, 324 Wister, Owen, 12 The Wizard of Oz, 13 Wolff, Cynthia Griffin, 79, 88n Wollstonecraft, Mary, 166 women: African American writers and literary representations, 158, 324, 329; Crane’s view, 134–8; Dreiser’s view, 112–13, 116–23; feminist utopias, 188–91, 352; Garland’s attitude, 319n; Gilman’s feminist works, 351; Howells’s female characters, 264–6; James’s female characters, 236–58; Muckrakers, 287–8; New Woman’s Fiction defined, 162, 195, 213; New Woman’s Fiction develops, 159–233; overview of literary representations, 157–9; prostitution theme, 134–8, 289–90; regionalists, 302–3, 306, 307–11, 318n; tomboy figures, 163; treatment of insane, 197–202, 291; see also marriage and relationship theme Woolf, Virginia, 172 Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 174–5n, 252, 301, 302 World War I (1914–18): literary representations, 219 Wright, Frances, 166

433

Index Wright, Richard, 323 Yellin, Jean Fagan, 192n Yerkes, Charles Tyson, 123n

Zitkala-Sa, 318n
Zola, Emile: influence, 32, 35, 92, 107n; on the new novel, 63, 64; Norris on, 68, 69, 70; overview of works, 64, 65–6

434