Editors’ Preface
The multi-volume Longman Literature in English Series provides students of literature with a critical introduction to the major genres in their historical and cultural context. Each volume gives a coherent account of a clearly defined area, and the series, when complete, will offer a practical and comprehensive guide to literature written in English from Anglo-Saxon times to the present. The aim of the series as a whole is to show that the most valuable and stimulating approach to literature is that based upon an awareness of the relations between literary forms and their historical context. Thus the areas covered by most of the separate volumes are defined by period and genre. Each volume offers new informed ways of reading literary works, and provides guidance to further reading in an extensive reference section.
As well as studies on all periods of English and American literature, the series includes books on criticism and literary theory, and on the intellectual and cultural context. A comprehensive series of this kind must of course include other literature written in English, and therefore a group of volumes deals with Irish and Scottish literature, and the literatures of India, Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, and Canada. The forty-six volumes of the series cover the following areas: pre-Renaissance English Literature, English Poetry, English Drama, English Fiction, English Prose, Criticism and Literary Theory, Intellectual and Cultural Context, American Literature, Other Literatures in English.
David Carroll
Michael Wheeler
Vlll SERIES l 1ST
Longman Literature in English Series
General Editors: David Carroll and Michael Wheeler
University of Lancaster
Pre-Renaissance English Literature
* English Literature before Chaucer Michael Swanton English Literature in the Age of Chaucer
* English Medieval Romance W. R.J. Barron
English Poetry
* English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century Gary Waller
* English Poetry of the Seventeenth Century George Parfitt English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century 1700-1789
* English Poetry of the Romantic Period 1789-1830 J. R. Watson English Poetry of the Victorian Period 1830-1890
English Poetry of the Early Modern Period 1890-1940 English Poetry since 1940
English Drama
English Drama before Shakespeare
English Drama: Shakespeare to the Restoration, 1590-1660 English Drama: Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, 1660-1789 English Drama: Romantic and Victorian, 1789-1890 English Drama of the Early Modern Period, 1890-1940 English Drama since 1940
English Fiction
* English Fiction of the Eighteenth Century 1700-1789 Clive T. Prohyn English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789-1830
* English Fiction of the Victorian Period 1830-1890 Michael Wheeler English Fiction of the Early Modern Period 1890-1940
English Prose
English Prose of the Renaissance 1550-1700 English Prose of the Eighteenth Century English Prose of the Nineteenth Century
SERIES LIST IX
Criticism and Literary Theory
Criticism and Literary Theory from Sidney to Johnson Criticism and Literary Theory from Wordsworth to Arnold Criticism and Literary Theory from 1890 to the Present
The Intellectual and Cultural Context
The Sixteenth Century the Seventeenth Century
* The Eighteenth Century, 1700-1789 James Sambrook The Romantic Period, 1789-1830
The Victorian Period, 1830-1890
The Twentieth Century: 1890 to the Present
American Literature
American Literature before 1880 American Poetry of the Twentieth Century American Drama of the Twentieth Century
* American Fiction 1865-1940 Brian Lee American Fiction since 1940 Twentieth-Century America
Other Literatures
Irish Literature since 1800 Scottish Literature since 1700
Australian Literature Indian Literature in English African Literature in English: East and West Southern African Literature in English Caribbean Literature in English
* Canadian Literature in English W. J. Keith
Already published
Author’s Preface
'i
Writing literary histories has never been a simple, straightforward matter; but in the last twenty years the subject has come to seem so fraught with theoretical difficulties that scholars who might once have busied themselves with such tasks are now more likely to spend their energies convincing themselves and their readers that the whole project is impossible. For many, the status of the literary artefact itself has become problematical, and nearly everyone agrees that the task of relating works of art to the society that produced and consumed them involves operations of almost infinite complexity.
It is impossible, for example, to ignore such seemingly unresolvable dilemmas as the one posed by Frederic Jameson. In any effort to represent the past, he tells us, we are immediately faced with an inescapable choice between two assumptions: those of Identity or Difference. There is, he insists, no middle way. If we choose to affirm the identity of the alien object with ouselves — as many recent Feminist critics have done in their attempts to reinterpret earlier literatures - we shall be forced to admit that in projecting our world and its values onto the past we have “never left home at all”, and will inevitably fail to touch the strangeness of a genuinely different reality. If, on the other hand, we assume the radical difference of the alien object, we shall be faced with the prospect of being shut off from its otherness by all the intervening accumulations of history that have made us what we are.
In the book that follows I have tried to take cognizance of such problems without being unduly inhibited by them. America at the end of the Civil War does constitute an alien reality and it takes an immense imaginative effort to enter that lost time and space. There are, however, continuities of consciousness that help to forge links between the past and present, and these are what I take to form the basis of an interpretive mastercodc.
In tracing such lines of development as those of Realism or Modernism, I have been only too aware of the selections and exclusions forced upon me by such initial choices. I have tried to balance
author’s preface xi
my attention between major and minor writers, individual texts and complete canons, and mainstream movements and fascinating counter-currents. In the last analysis, though, decisions about what to include and what to exclude are arbitrary and subjective; which is only to say that literary history is not, and cannot be, a science.
In the appendices to this volume, however, I have tried to attain a greater degree of objectivity. The individual and general bibliographies are as comprehensive as space permits and the Chronology offers a wider literary and social context to suggest alternative lines of development and interpretation. References within the appendices are generally to works published first in America, but in the text I have identified quoted passages wherever possible by chapter number in order to facilitate the book’s use by British readers.
In the course of writing this book I have, I believe, learned a great deal more than I hitherto knew about American life and literature. I learned even more in hundreds of discussions both inside and outside classrooms and shall remain grateful to all those who took part in them. I have also incurred some more specific debts which I am pleased to acknowledge here: to my editor, Michael Wheeler, for his constant support and advice; to Freda Duckitt and Jenny Stamland for transforming my scrawl into a typescript; to my friend and colleague, Nicholas Luker, whose knowledge of European literature and sense of style saved me from a multitude of errors; and finally to my wife, Adrienne, who gave me what I needed most — space, time and unstinting encouragement.
BCL
February, 1987.
For my children, Martin, Nick, Sarah-J Rebecca and Adam.
Part One:
Reconstruction
1865-1900
Chapter 1
Introduction
The dates chosen to limit the period studied in this volume are usually associated with wars: 1865 marked the end of the American Civil War and 1940 the year in which the United States began to prepare seriously for the Second World War by introducing conscription. For American social and economic historians, however, these dates have an additional significance. The year 1865 is normally taken to indicate the beginning of the aptly named Gilded Age - a period of unparalleled industrialization that involved the transformation of almost every aspect of American life. On the other hand, 1940 finally brought an end to the Great Depression - arguably the worst economic slump in history, certainly when it is contrasted with the degree of expansion that had preceded it.
Perhaps the most remarkable domestic factor in American life during this period was the growth of the country’s population, from 31 million in 1860 to 131 million in 1940. Natural increase accounted for much of this growth, but the unique element in it was the largest movement of population in Western history, which saw nearly 40 million people succumb to ‘American fever’, uproot themselves and emigrate there from their homelands. This westward exodus reached its peak in the period 1870-1920, helped by the development of the steamship, which reduced the Atlantic voyage from eight weeks to eight days, and by the expansion of the railroads which made possible the immigrants’ dispersal within the country. During this time, Europe was also invaded by numbers of American emigration agents who travelled the length and breadth of every country painting a rosy picture of life in ‘Dollar land’ and offering transportation to a new and better life for as little as thirty-five dollars. Among the inducements that tempted so many to uproot themselves were the promise of free land for the taking as a result of the Homestead Act of 1862, freedom from conscription, equality in government and religion, and not least, high wages and low taxes. What was not made apparent to prospective immigrants was that they would be moving to a country in the throes
of an unprecedentedly rapid and massive urbanization with all the problems associated with that process. The quadrupling of America’s urban population in the second half of the nineteenth century brought with it enormous problems of housing, employment, education, sanitation, and health cart, so that it was not surprising that James Bryce was led to write in 1888 in The American Commonwealth that ‘There is no denying that the government of cities is the one conspicuous failure of the United States.’ When one considers the rapidity of their expansion - Saint Louis and Philadelphia, for example, added 100,000 each to their populations in the 1860s, and Chicago nearly 200,000! - it is not surprising that the conditions of life in them often verged on the chaotic. The difficulties were exacerbated by the huge numbers of foreign-born and often non-English-speaking people crammed into such centres. In eighteen of the twenty-eight cities over 100,000 in 1890, foreign-born adults preponderated, and New York at this time had twice as many Jews as Warsaw, twice as many Irish as Dublin, and as many Germans as Hamburg. It was the greatest emigrant centre in the world. 1 For the great majority of immigrants, the conditions of life in American cities were appalling. Some commentators believed that the fault lay with foreign governments who were actively assisting their criminal and pauper populations to migrate, but it was difficult to ignore the effects, too, of living conditions suffered by the newly arrived. In 1876 the New York Times reported:
The truth is that in no city of the civilised world does this terrible evil and cause of disease and crime exist in nearly the same degree as in New York. ... In the Eleventh Ward, where so large a German population lives, near East Houston Street . . . there are 196,510 [people] to the square mile, so each person has sixteen and one-tenth square yards for his . . . space of living. . . . Portions of particular yards are even worse.
And this especially accounts for the mortality as of a pestilence which desolates the juvenile population of our crowded quarters every summer - children dying every July and August at the rate of 1,000 per week. . . . From the nearly 20,000 tenement houses come 93 per cent of the deaths and 90 per cent of the crimes of our population.
Statistics like these were soon to be brought vividly to life, first in such works as Richard Dugdale’s The Jukes (1877), an influential study of a large, poor family, in which 17 out of 29 young males were criminals, and 84 out of 168 women had become prostitutes, and later in
naturalistic novels like Stephen Crane’s Maggie (1893). The story of the Jukes also showed that degeneration and vice were not restricted to immigrants in the cities; they were New Englanders whose American roots reached back to colonial times.
In so volatile an economy and so fluid a society, it is not surprising that the American Dream of individual success was able to take such firm root. Indeed, great individual fortunes were actually made at this time by such men as John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, Henry Frick, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. It has been estimated that by 1883 there were approximately four thousand people in the United States worth at least one million dollars, enough certainly to inspire hope in every immigrant arriving at Ellis Island. In the same newspapers that reported on the living conditions in New York slums, one can also find accounts of the most lavish and ostentatious displays of wealth so characteristic of the Gilded Age. In 1883, for example, The Times enthusiastically described the Vanderbilts’ Costume Ball as ‘perhaps the most brilliant and picturesque entertainment of the kind ever given in the metropolis’. So it must have seemed to those attending it, but viewed in a wider social context it stands as a colossal vulgar monument to conspicuous consumption. The host, Alva Vanderbilt spent $250,000 on costumes, flowers, and food, and the city’s elite vied with each other to exhibit their nonchalant spending power. Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt epitomized the spirit of the affair by appearing as ‘The Electric Light’ in white satin trimmed all over with glittering diamonds.
Despite the number of vast private fortunes accumulated in manufacturing, communications, and real estate, it has been convincingly argued that the American way of life in the latter part of the nineteenth century was determined more by the development of corporations than by the influence of heroic individuals, and that corporate life, affecting, as it did, every aspect of culture and individual psychology, was a reality starkly and wantonly opposed to the myth of freedom and individualism. According to this view, the corporate ideal reached a symbolic culmination in 1893 in its embodiment in the White City, the site of the world’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It was here that the corporate mentality achieved its supremacy, and in doing so also settled the question of the force and real meaning of America itself. ‘It seemed the victory of elites in business, politics and culture over dissident but divided voices of labor, farmers, immigrants, blacks and women.’ 2 Of course, that supremacy has been continuously subject to challenge, and the ensuing conflicts form a fascinating dialectical strand in twentieth-century cultural history, but the fact that by 1974 no fewer than 51 of the world’s 100 largest economic units were multinational corporations and only 49 were nations, may be
taken as an indication of the extent to which Western industrial nations have been ‘incorporated’.
The tensions and ironies created by conflicting social and political ideals throughout this period are clearly reflected in America’s proliferating literature, and especially in the novel, dealing as it does with the interactions of individuals within society. It is even possible to maintain that the American novel itself is a product of this period, and that the form did not really exist before the Civil War. What is indisputable is that early American prose fiction, whatever its literary quality, generally sacrificed temporal or geographical actualities to the remote, the exotic, or the purely imaginary. American romanticism in the hands of Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne, created a body of literature unsurpassed in its exploration of moral, psychological, and metaphysical ideas. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Moby Dick , and The Scarlet Letter are undisputed masterpieces of world literature, but they qualify rather as romances than as novels. The same is true of James Fenimore Cooper’s best work, the ‘Leatherstocking Saga’, a brilliant evocation of the myth of the American West, but as one might expect from a writer who never visited western America, it is an inadequate account of the realities of frontier experience.
For all these writers, as for their contemporaries, Emerson and Thoreau, the major field of enquiry was spiritual rather than social, and personal rather than political. Their efforts to discover an ideal, if natural, self, led again and again to a rejection of social reality in favour of solitary communion with nature. Ishmael’s impulses which drive him to sea at the beginning of Moby Dick and which he takes to be universal in appeal, would certainly have been shared by Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, and Hawthorne:
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon.
Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see? -Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spikes; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get an even better sea-ward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster -tied to counters, nailed to benches, chained to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?
In 1851 Melville’s question about the green fields was rhetorical but the process that was to make it less so had already begun. Within forty
years the frontier itself would be officially closed, bringing to an end the existence of free land in a ‘wilderness’, and within another forty, urban planners would be talking calmly of a megalopolis stretching from Washington, DC to Boston. The forests around Boston itself, to which Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale retreated from the city, had already been cleared, and it would not be long before Melville’s beloved whaling ships, crowding New England ports at this time, became things of the past.
The impact of these changes and related developments upon human consciousness is the major subject of this study, and will be traced in its evolution and mutations through American fiction. But the need to appreciate and understand something about the pre-industrial consciousness is equally important and requires an immense imaginative effort, if only because the reader has to come to terms as much with mental absences as presences. If, as has been claimed, the modern mind can be characterized by its need to assimilate an ‘overpopulation of surfaces’ - an environment that in its excessive detail saturates consciousness - then the opposite is true of men living in the larger spaces of the early nineteenth century, and, as one might expect, the forms of literature produced by them are radically different.
One of those major differences has already been alluded to in referring to the major works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville as romances - defined later by Henry James as those whose structures are not governed by our sense of the way things really happen. More specifically, romance sacrifices specificity and probability to the general and exemplary in an attempt to formulate truths which are not subject to empirical validation. It is concerned more with Fate than Character, Man rather than Men, Metaphysics not Manners. Its chief literary modes are those of myth, symbolism, and allegory, and stylistically it foregrounds language as an opaque rather than a transparent medium.
A related difference can be discerned at the more pervasive level of prose style. Richard Poirier in his book A World Elsewhere has illustrated the ways in which American writers have attempted to create in language environments radically different from those supported by economic, political, and social systems. In the most interesting American books, he argues, actual space, time, freedom and necessity are resisted or annihilated in favour of ‘imaginary worlds’. These books are written, he says, as if history itself can give no life to ‘freedom’ and only language can provide the liberated place. He does not accept the above distinction between novel and romance stemming from a view that was often adduced by writers themselves in the nineteenth century: that America did not provide a sufficiently dense environment for novelists to work in, and that they were necessarily forced into
imaginary worlds. He does, however, discriminate between those writers who succeed in producing alternative linguistic environments, and those whose imaginations are overpowered by the environment of the real world. It is my contention that throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, the urge to portray things ‘as they are’ and as they ‘really happen’ is paramount, and that this accounts for the more important developments in American fictional structure and prose style. It reflects a preoccupation with the material world and with causality and perception in American culture generally, and even those writers temperamentally and artistically unsuited to realism and naturalism, such as Henry James and Stephen Crane, either allow their work to be occasionally distorted by the prevailing intellectual ethos, or devise strategies to combat it. Others, such as Dreiser and Howells, are much more closely attuned to the Zeitgeist, and this is reflected in the openness of their manner, their lack of irony, and their realism.
Needless to say, the writers under consideration do not neatly divide themselves into mutually exclusive categories. For one thing, many of them share a tendency to become disenchanted with realism in later life. Others develop more eccentrically as they are influenced by literary or non-literary events. And all of them combine to a greater or lesser degree elements of both realism and romance within their novels.
Indeed, in 1871, at the very beginning of the Gilded Age, Walt Whitman, looking into America’s possible future in Democratic Vistas, called for a similar combination of elements to safeguard the essential values of civilization:
the highly artificial and materialistic bases of modern civilisation, with the corresponding arrangements and methods of living, the force-infusion of intellect alone, the depraving influence of riches just as much as poverty, the absence of all high ideals in character - with the long series of tendencies shapings, which few are strong enough to resist, and which now seem, with steam-engine speed, to be everywhere turning out the generations of humanity like uniform iron casting . . . must either be confronted and met by at least an equally subtle and tremendous force-infusion for purposes of spiritualisation, for the pure conscience, for genuine aesthetics, and for absolute and primal manliness and womanliness - or else our modern civilisation, with all its improvements, is in vain, and we are on the road to a destiny, a status, equivalent, in its real world, to that of the fabled damned. 3
It did not take any remarkable prescience on Whitman’s part to foresee the likely sources of conflict. At the time he wrote this, England had already undergone more than half a century of industrialization and had experienced many of the social traumas to which he alludes. The ideas of Cobbett, Mill, Bentham, Carlyle, and Dickens were equally familiar on both sides of the Atlantic, and the arguments about the place of man in modern society had been thoroughly rehearsed in pre-industrial America. Even so, there remains in American thought a strain of buoyant optimism and expectation that after the experiences of the Luddites, the Chartists, and the 1840s, the decade of Revolution had been almost thoroughly extinguished in Europe. Similarly, the debates about Darwinism, science, religion, pragmatism, and socialism took interestingly different forms in America, and these differences were necessarily reflected in fiction. In 1865 American thinkers not unnaturally believed that it should be possible for the New World to avoid the errors of the Old, and for the most part they anticipated the future with equanimity or even eagerness. But by 1900 the general mood had darkened and disillusionment was widespread. Henry Adams, whose optimism in the immediate post-Civil War years almost matched that of Whitman and who had called for greater expenditure of energy and capital in all areas of American life, had come to feel very differently in 1904. He gives eloquent expression to the fears shared by many of his countrymen in the last chapter of his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams:
The outline of the city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone and steam against the sky. The city had the air and movement of hysteria, and the citizens were crying, in every accent of anger and alarm, that the new forces must at any cost be brought under control.
Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid. All New York was demanding new men, and all the new forces, condensed into corporations, were demanding a new type of man - a man with ten times the endurance, energy, will and mind of the old type - for whom they were ready to pay millions at sight. As one jetted over the pavements or read the last week’s newspapers, the new man seemed close at hand, for the old man had plainly reached the end of his
strength, and his failure had become catastrophic.
Everyone saw it, and every municipal election shrieked chaos. A traveller in the highways of history looked out of the club window on the turmoil of Fifth Avenue, and felt himself in Rome, under Diocletian, witnessing the anarchy, conscious of the compulsion, eager for the solution, but unable to conceive whence the next impulse was to come or how it was to act. The two-thousand-years-failure of Christianity roared upward from Broadway and no Constantine the Great was in sight.
At the beginning of this period, though, with the Civil War over, most Americans looked forward to unlimited expansion in every sphere. In his poem ‘Passage to India’, Whitman captures this mood as he surveys the remainder of the nineteenth century:
After the seas are all cross’d (as they seem already cross’d)
After the great captains and engineers have accomplish’d their work,
After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist, the geologist, ethnologist,
Finally shall come the poet worthy of that name.
Even Henry James, by nature far less sanguine than Whitman, felt in 1867 the touch of this general buoyancy:
We are Americans born - il faut en preudre son parti. I look upon it as a great blessing, and I think that to be an American is an excellent preparation for culture. We have exquisite qualities as a race, and it seems to me that we are ahead of the European races in the fact that, more than either of them, we can deal freely with forms of civilization not our own, can pick and choose and assimilate and in short (aesthetically, etc.) gain our property wherever we find it. To have no national stamp has hitherto been a regret and a drawback, but I think it not unlikely that American writers may yet indicate that a vast intellectual fusion and synthesis of the various national tendencies of the world is the condition of more important achievements than any we have yet seen. We must, of course, have something of our own - something distinctive and homogeneous - and I take it that we shall find it in our moral consciousness, in our unprecedented spiritual lightness and vigour. 4
Some of these opinions would undoubtedly have been shared by Mark Twain who - though a few years older than Henry James - was still in 1867 barely at the threshold of his prodigious literary career, avidly collecting materials in Europe and the Middle East for his first great popular success, The Innocents Abroad. In some respects, the careers and works of these two major artists present fascinating, if widely spaced, parallels, though their responses to almost every aspect of life in America and Europe were so antithetical that one critic has been led to contrast them as prime members, if not actual founders, of divergent cultural streams, which he calls ‘Redskin’ and ‘Paleface’. The distinctions made by Philip Rahv between James and writers like Emily Dickinson, on the one hand, and Twain and Whitman on the other, can be viewed as a more comprehensive version of my earlier discussion of Romance and Realism. Indeed, Rahv includes the tendencies towards the ‘distillations of symbolism’ and ‘a gross, riotous naturalism’ in his list of opposing characteristics, but he sees these mainly as the means for expressing a much deeper divisiveness, the outward signs of a disabling split in the American personality, that has - he claims - prevented modern literature from achieving any real balance or maturity.
The Paleface, in this version of cultural history, is a ‘high brow’ though not quite an intellectual in the European sense of the term, while the Redskin, who may or may not be badly educated, is a ‘low brow’ in the sense that his reactions are primarily emotional, spontaneous, and lacking in personal culture. In extending these traits, Rahv builds up portraits of men who exactly fit the popular image of James and Twain:
The paleface continually hankers after religious norms, tending towards a refined estrangement from reality. The redskin, on the other hand, accepts his environment, at times to the degree of fusion with it, even when rebelling against one or other of its manifestations. At his highest level the paleface moves in an exquisite moral atmosphere; at his lowest, he is genteel, snobbish and pedantic. In giving expression to the vitality and to the aspirations of the people, the redskin is at his best; but at his worst he is a vulgar anti-intellectual, combining aggression with conformity and reverting to the crudest form of frontier psychology. 5
If one accepts that the elements - good and bad - attributed to the Redskin here, were beginning to dominate American life in the latter part of the nineteenth century, it is hardly surprising that Ernest
Hemingway who, according to Rahv, was himself a late manifestation of the same trend - a perennial boy-man descendant of Natty Bumppo - should assert that ‘all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn . Hemingway’s unconcealed scorn for those *of his countrymen who wrote like ‘exiled English colonials’ is well known and his appreciation of Twain has much to do with the earlier writer’s ability to create art out of ‘the words that people always have used in speech, the words that survive in language’.
But there are stronger bonds than just linguistic ones between the two of them, and if Mark Twain has a genuine claim to be the true precursor of the modern American spirit, it surely lies in his original exploration of a theme that was to influence and eventually dominate American literature far more thoroughly than did his brilliant manipulation of the vernacular.
It is the same theme hinted at by Henry James in his letter to T. S. Perry in which he contrasts the individual American’s moral consciousness with the socially constructed persona of the European, and optimistically predicts a future fusion between the two. Twain, who was less enamoured of European society anyway, conceived the issue more simply as a dilemma that confronted the American in his native land as he strove to cope with the forces emerging in late-nineteenth-century America. For him, and by extension for his fictional characters, it presented itself as a choice between freedom and conformity. This, as Alan Trachtenberg has demonstrated , 6 is the central dilemma of Huck Finn himself as he pits his sound heart against a deformed conscience and consciously chooses ‘to go to Hell’ for his crimes against society. In one way or another, it is a choice that Americans of every generation have felt the need to confront. It lies behind and gives urgency to the nineteenth-century debates about Free Will and Determinism just as it remains the central issue in recent debates between Noam Chomsky and B. S. Skinner on the subject of Behaviourism. In fiction, it forms a strong connecting thread linking the Naturalists, the Realists, and the Modernists, who oscillate wildly between the claims of social necessity and individual identity. It is above all an inescapable theme in American social and political debate, occupying the very centre of the American psyche where the often antagonistic ideals of liberty and equality constantly struggle for supremacy.
If Mark Twain has a genuine claim to be the originator of modern American literature, it is because, more than any of his contemporaries, he identified the central issues of his own and our culture, and gave life to them in a story about a boy and a slave escaping to freedom down the Mississippi River.
Notes
1. A detailed account of urban expansion in the nineteenth century can be found in Blake McKelvey, The City in American History (London and New York, 1969). For a more general account of social and economic developments in the period, see Ray Ginger, The Age of Excess: American Life from the End of Reconstruction to World War I (New York, 1965).
2. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York, 1982), p. 231.
3. Complete Prose Works (New York, 1909), p. 248.
4. Letter to T. S. Perry, 20 September 1867, in Selected Letters of Henry James, edited by Leon Edel (London, 1956).
5. Philip Rahv, Image and Idea (London, 1952), p 2.
6. ‘The Form of Freedom in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’, The Southern Review, no. 4 (October 1970), 954-71.
Chapter 2
Mark Twain
%
Mark Twain was ‘born’ in 1863 when his creator, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was already twenty-eight years old. He first used his pseudonym as the author of a humorous travel letter he contributed to a Nevada newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise. In masking his true identity, he was following an established custom exemplified by a multitude of comic journalists including Artemus Ward and Josh Billings in America and even Charles Dickens in England, who, unlike Twain, abandoned ‘Boz’ when it began to restrict the scope of his literary ambitions. At this point in his life Mark Twain can hardly be said to have had any real ambition as a writer, having drifted into journalism after a varied career as a river-boat pilot, a soldier, and latterly, a prospector in the years following the California gold rush and the discovery of the Comstock silver lode in Nevada. It was only when his short story ‘The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County’ brought him recognition from a wider public that he began to appreciate the potential of his talent. Even after this, though, and indeed throughout his life, Twain was always liable to be tempted away from his vocation by the promise of easy money and exciting new ventures. He saw himself as an inventor and a patron of America’s rapidly developing technology. He interested himself in every aspect of publishing, amassing a fortune by developing his own sales through a subscription scheme, only to lose it by his involvement with the Paige typesetting machine. In an age of professional public lecturers, William Dean Howells said that Twain was the finest performer he had ever seen. He had a great need to project himself to the public, and when he was not doing so in print, had to do so in person. It was said that at the height of his career he was probably the most famous man in the world, a role he relished and lived up to, both in his flamboyant style and in his ready pronouncements on almost any topical issue.
Many of these interests and characteristics eventually manifested themselves in his writing, making it virtually impossible for him in his later career to create self-contained, coherent fictions. Indeed, it can be argued with some justice that it is only when he is able to smuggle
himself into his books as a character, and so find an outlet for his own powerful ego, that he is free to create an otherwise independent world. Failing this, his work is too often deformed by his need to insinuate himself and his emotions indiscriminately and deviously into his fictions.
This need did not present itself as a difficulty during his early career, however, as he restricted himself to short stories based on the Western ‘tall tale’ or travel books like Innocents Abroad (1869). Even when he did turn to a larger fictional work, The Gilded Age (1873), he took the precaution of working with a collaborator, Charles Dudley Warner, and so treed himself from the responsibility of sustained independent invention. In later years Twain always claimed that he contributed the facts to the book but left the fiction to Warner. And though ‘facts’ is perhaps not the most accurate word to describe the contents, Twain’s share in the work is largely restricted to wide-ranging social criticism in which he draws upon his experience of business and politics in order to satirize the corruption of his age, and to ride one or two of his favourite hobby-horses, such as the wickedness and stupidity of universal suffrage, or the injustices of the contemporary legal system. To accomplish all this, he relied not so much on the sentimental, romantic plot of the novel as on the ability to embody his ideas in vividly created characters, and particularly in one that became so large that he outgrew the novel and was sporadically and variously resurrected by Twain throughout his career: Colonel Sellers.
Sellers was based upon his uncle, James Lampton, and Twain’s ambivalent feelings - love for the original of his inspiration, mixed with reservations about the type to which he belongs - give the character an exuberant vitality worth everything else in the book. Sellers is not just a peculiarly American type, but also a typical feature of the Gilded Age itself: a man of social pretensions who, down on his luck, is determined to adjust to the new commercial culture that is being created all around him. He is first and foremost a Promoter, an entrepreneur who without any capital or specific skills of his own, contrives to prosper by using his talents to bring commercial projects, often of dubious legality or morality, into being. In addition to being a fast talker and publicist, he is acutely aware of which government officials and politicians to soften up with bribes. These activities give Twain the opportunity to turn his satiric attention to the institutions of democracy itself, and the strongest parts of the novel derive from his reaction to the corruption and greed of nineteenth-century American society.
Unfortunately, though, the authors had a further, more pressing aim in writing the book: to prove to their wives that they could write a popular, sentimental novel. The story of Laura’s passage from child-
hood innocence, through an acquaintance with the sordid realities of money and sex, to a broken-hearted death, cannot be blamed on Warner. The idea of it, based on a recent murder case in San Francisco, was certainly Twain’s, and it bears all the marks of his own sentimentality, a trait that always threatened to undermine the integrity of his fiction. Throughout his career this fault is compounded by a chronic inability to structure his novels consciously, and the resulting chaos can only occasionally be redeemed by his intuitive sense of organizational propriety, as in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), or by the brilliance of individual fragments, as in Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894).
Mark Twain’s difficulties stemmed from what appears to have been a deeply traumatic dichotomy in his own nature. The Gilded Age is subtitled ‘A Tale of Today’, and Twain was passionately interested in exposing the flaws under the veneer of polite Eastern commercial society. As a Western outsider, he could find a fresh viewpoint for these criticisms, but as a man who was also determined to become a member of this elite and who was rapidly doing just that, he also experienced an alienation from himself and a suspicion that the fault he wished to expose was not local and social but psychological and, therefore, universal. The only escape possible from such knowledge was the one he found in his next major work, his first unaided attempt at sustained fiction, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), where he returned for the first time to the memories of his pre-Civil War boyhood.
He began to write it in the summer of 1874, cocooned from all noise in his little ‘pilot house’ of a study in a farmhouse near Elmira in upper New York State. His initial plan was to devote only a quarter of the novel to Tom’s boyhood, the rest being divided between his early manhood, his travels, and the ‘Battle of Life’, and his return where he would ‘meet grown babies and toothless old drivellers who were the grandees of his boyhood’. A year later, when he was almost at the end of the work, he still had no idea of its final shape, and told his friend Howells that ‘Since there is no plot to the thing it is likely to follow its own drift.’ 1
Twain’s uncertainty about the novel’s shape was related to his deeper uncertainty about an audience for his story. At first he insisted that it was only written for adults, but later agreed under pressure that it should be seen as ‘a book for boys, pure and simple’. Finally, in his Preface written in 1876 he attempted a compromise, claiming that though the book was intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, it also attempted ‘pleasantly to remind adults of what they once were themselves’.
In helping to liberate such memories in his readers, Twain tran-
scends all the technical deficiencies of his art to re-create the timeless joys and terrors of childhood. The plot, involving body-snatching, robbery, and murder, is absurdly melodramatic, but as such it exactly matches the boyish imaginations of Huck and Tom. Reality is not a relevant criterion here, any more than it is in the idyllic picture of antebellum rural America. What matters, as Bernard DeVoto has truly said, is that ‘something formed from America lives as it lives nowhere else’. 2 At a still more profound level, something from an even more general source is created, so that the descriptions of Tom’s gang in their innocent sport on the beach at Jackson’s Island reaches to the core of every reader’s memory:
After breakfast they went whooping and prancing out on the bar, and chased each other round and round, shedding clothes as they went, until they were naked, and then continued the frolic far away up the shoal water of the bar, against the stiff current, which latter tripped their legs from under them from time to time, and greatly increased the fun. And now and then they stood in a group and splashed water in each other’s faces with their palms, gradually approaching each other with averted faces, to avoid the straggling sprays, and finally gripping and struggling till the best man ducked his neighbour and then they all went under in a tangle of white legs and arms, and came up blowing, spluttering, laughing, and gasping for breath at one and the same time. (16)
Equally evocative is the description of lonely terror as Huck waits for Tom to return from his exploration of Injun Joe’s room:
It seemed hours since Tom had disappeared. Surely he must have fainted; maybe he was dead; maybe his heart had burst under terror and excitement. In his uneasiness Huck found himself drawing closer and closer to the alley, fearing all sorts of dreadful things, and momentarily expecting some catastrophe to happen that would take away his breath. There was not much to take away, for he seemed only able to inhale it by thimblefuls, and his heart would soon wear itself out, the way it was beating.
Suddenly there was a flash of light, and Tom came tearing by him:
‘Run!’ said he; ‘run for your life!’
He needn’t have repeated it; once was enough; Huck was making thirty or forty miles an hour before the repetition
was uttered. The boys never stopped till they reached the shed of a deserted slaughter-house at the lower end of the village. Just as they got within its shelter the storm burst and the rain poured down. (29)
In passages such as these Twain is beginning to experiment with the problem of articulating the consciousness of innocent, uneducated characters. Sometimes he can move in and out of Huck’s perceptions even within a single sentence, as when he writes: ‘Huck was making thirty or forty miles an hour before the repetition was uttered.’
For the most part, though, Tom Sawyer is addressed to the sophisticated reader, enabling him to enjoy his recollections of childhood from the safe and sentimental viewpoint of age. Tom Sawyer’s rebellion against society is temporary and superficial. The villain of the novel, Injun Joe, is a social outcast anyway, who is easily disposed of, enabling Tom to be reconciled to and even honoured by the citizens of Saint Petersburg. Judge Thatcher invests Tom’s new fortune for him at six per cent, and plans his education at the best law school in the country or even at the National Military Academy. Tom is restored to the affections of Becky Thatcher, and we last see him trying to convince Huck to embrace the life of respectability and regularity.
The great idyll is thus brought to an end by Tom’s recuperation into the adult world. But luckily, towards the end of the story Twain apparently realised the possibilities - till then largely ignored - present in his secondary character, Huck. As Tom fades out of the picture, so Huck begins to come into the foreground, and the book ends with him ready to occupy the vacated role at the centre. One of his last speeches, protesting against the life he is now being forced to endure, brings the story full circle, reminding us, even in its detailed imagery, of the position Tom occupied so unwillingly before their adventures began:
Don’t talk about it, Tom. I’ve tried it, and it don’t work; it don’t work, Tom. It ain’t for me; I ain’t used to it. The widder’s good to me, and friendly, but I can’t stand them ways. She makes me git up just at the same time every morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; she won’t let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don’t seem to let any air git through ’em, somehow; and they’re so rotten nice that I can’t set down, nor lay down, nor roll around anywheres; I hain’t slid on a cellar-door for - well, it ’pears to be years; I got to go to church, and sweat and sweat - I hate them ornery
sermons! I can’t ketch a fly in there, I can’t chaw, I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits up by a bell - everything’s so awful reg’lar a body can’t stand it.’
‘Well, everybody does that way, Huck.’ (36)
The difference, and it is of the greatest significance, is that now we are completely within Huck’s consciousness. Twain’s skill in creating a vernacular literature, and his manifest enjoyment of it, become increasingly evident towards the end of Tom Sawyer. His decision not just to retain Huck as the hero of his next novel, but also to employ him as its narrator, is one that allowed him to use his ambivalence about innocence and experience, nature and culture, as a compositional principle. The device of seeing American society through the eyes of an innocent and reluctant rebel allowed him to polarize the dualism of his own confused nature and work the oppositions for all the irony and pathos inherent within them. In his famous description of his masterpiece as ‘a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat’, he effectively pinpoints the difference between it and the earlier book, which he quite accurately but damningly calls ‘simply a hymn’ to boyhood. 3
Another important difference is that he hit upon an ideal situation within which Huck’s agonizing conflicts could be presented - that of a runaway slave in the pre-Civil War South. There are other novels such as Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896), in which Twain effectively uses Huck as a first-person narrator, but these are both flawed by weak plots that produce little more than random comedy. Huckleberry Finn’s great strength come from the shape given to it by the course of the raft’s journey down the Mississippi as Huck and Jim seek their different kinds of freedom. Twain, who knew the river intimately and wrote about it in detail in Life on the Mississippi (1883), uses it here both realistically and symbolically, often fusing two kinds of perception with the greatest subtlety, as in Huck’s lyrical reminiscences:
Two or three days and nights went by; I reckon I might say they swum by; they slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely. Here is the way we put in the time. It was a monstrous big river down there - sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights, and laid up and hid day-times; soon as night was most gone, we stopped navigating and tied up - nearly always in the dead water under a tow-head; and then cut young cotton-woods and willows and
hid the raft with them. Then we set out the lines. Next we slid into the river and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off; then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee-deep, and watched the daylight come. Ndt a sound anywheres - perfectly still -just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bull-frogs a-clattering maybe. The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line -that was the woods on t’other side - you couldn’t make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn’t black any more, but grey; you could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so far away -trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks -rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by and by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there’s a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t’other side of the river, being a wood-yard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh, and sweet to smell, on account of the woods and flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they’ve left dead fish laying around, gars, and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you’ve got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it! (19)
The contrast lightly touched on here is one that determines the entire framework of the novel, and it is that between nature and society. The book begins with a description of how Widow Douglas attempts to civilize Huck and ends with him deciding not to let it happen again at the hands of Aunt Sally. In between we are given in episode after episode a picture of so-called civilized life as it is practised in the small settlements which the fugitives visit as they flee down river.
Before he can even begin his main adventure, though, Huck has to fake his own death in order to escape from his brutal, drunken father. It is only as a ‘dead’ boy divested of all his background that he can start to grow as a person. Similarly, his companion Jim, a slave, only begins
to own himself and discover his true worth by running away from his old owners. Together they head down river, making for Cairo where they plan to sell the raft and take a steamboat up the Ohio to the Free States. But the plan soon has to be abandoned when they sail right past Cairo and the confluence with the Ohio in a dense fog. At this point in the novel, with sixteen chapters written and no obvious solution to the impasse into which he had written himself, Twain engineered another climax by having a passing steamboat smash the raft to pieces and bring the pair’s flight to a premature halt.
This was in 1876, and between that date and the summer of 1883 when Twain finished the novel in another of his great creative bursts, he produced only three or four chapters. These, however, pointed the way out of his difficulties. Instead of concentrating on Huck and Jim, he used their drift towards the deep South to explore the social conditions in frontier settlements along the banks of the river. In episodes such as those describing the feud between two families of aristocratic barbarians, or the murder of a town drunk, as well as in the creation of new comic characters such as the Duke and the King, he discovered a context in which he could resume his quarrel with the corruptions of the Gilded Age. Religious and political hypocrisy, brutality and sentimentality, greed and deception, are all exposed by Huck’s innocent vision and contrasted with the loving bond that develops between boy and escaped slave. Here, for example, is part of Huck’s description of Emmeline Grangerford’s pictures:
One was a woman in a slim black dress, belted small under the arm-pits, with bulges like a cabbage in the middle of the sleeves, and a large black scoop-shovel bonnet with a black veil, and white slim ankles crossed about with black tape, and very wee black slippers, like a chisel, and she was leaning pensive on a tombstone on her right elbow, under a weeping willow, and her other hand hanging down her side holding a white handkerchief and a reticule, and underneath the picture it said, ‘Shall I Never See Thee More Alas?’ Another one was a young lady with her hair all combed up straight to the top of her head, and knotted there in front of a comb like a chair-back, and she was crying into a handkerchief and had a dead bird laying on its back in her other hand with its heels up, and underneath the picture it said, ‘I Shall Never Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas!’ There was one where a young lady was at a window looking up at the moon, and tears running down her cheeks; and she had an open letter in one hand with a black sealing-wax showing on one edge
of it, and she was mashing a locket with a chain to it against her mouth, and underneath the picture it said,
‘And Art Thou Gone Yes Thou Art Gone Alas!’ These was all nice pictures, I reckon, but I didn’t somehow seem to take to them, because if ever I was down a little, they always gave me the fan-tods. (17)
Before her early death, Emmeline had made a hobby of the subject, and Twain creates, in his description of her effects, a rich satire of the current preoccupation with the morbid. Good in itself, the passage takes on an additional critical dimension, though, when read in the context of her family’s involvement in the pointless and bloody butchery of their neighbours, the Shepherdsons.
Moreover, this section of the novel has a coherence lacking in similar passages in The Gilded Age, in that it is firmly bound up with the theme of Huck’s development. It comes to an end with Huck having to choose between his heart and his head. Having capitulated to his conscience by deciding to write to Miss Watson to inform her where Jim is, he falls into a reverie in which he sees Jim ‘all the time, in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing’. He finds that he cannot harden his heart sufficiently to go through with this plan, so in fear and trembling he destroys the note and opts for a life of wickedness and an eternity in hell.
For many readers this moment marks the true conclusion of the novel, and the final chapters in which Huck allows Tom Sawyer to manipulate him into playing a childish, cruel game of rescuing Jim, are merely futher evidence of Twain’s incomprehension of his own genius which he so easily subordinated to a penchant for low comedy. In choosing to dwell upon Tom’s romantic charade at such tedious length, Twain appears to lose sight of the elements that had held everything so far in focus, and he sacrifices much of the credibility in Huck's character. No amount of critical ingenuity can reconcile most readers to Huck’s sad relapse after his magnificent development. Twain appears to have been constitutionally incapable of sustaining the fictional world which he created so effortlessly, even in this, his masterpiece, and the flaw was to become more and not less marked as his career progressed.
At an unconscious level, however, the unsatisfactory ending can be explained in terms of the unresolved tensions that dominated Mark Twain himself and prevented him from casting off the bourgeois respectability of his Hartford circle and the New England literati. Seen in this light, Huck’s capitulation to Tom, Aunt Polly and the Phelpses, mirrors Twain’s own dilemma, and Huck’s final defiant pledge to
‘light out for the Territory’ before Aunt Polly can get to work ‘sivil-ising’ him, is more a nostalgic reflection of Sam Clemens’s past than a realistic promise for the future.
Twain’s ambivalence about the conflicting claims made by nature and society or by innocence and experience pervades nearly everything he wrote. It lies behind his constant recourse to twins, claimants, or look-alikes in his fiction, figures who provide the means, by way of changing positions, to explore the effect of different environments upon the formation of character. In The Prince and the Pauper (1882), for example, he examines the link between luxury and morality, and in Pudd’nhead Wilson substitutes racial characteristics in working out a similar equation. He even toyed with the idea of trying out the same formula in a novel examining the importance of sexual roles.
What he appeared to be unable or unwilling to do, though, was to apply his ideas about Determinism in a realistic way to a novel of contemporary America. The nearest he came to it was in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), where the hero, Hank Morgan, a ‘Yankee of the Yankees’ and a superintendent in an arms factory, receives a blow on the head at the start of the novel, and comes to in sixth-century Arthurian England. In transposing a version of industrialized America to the sixth century, Twain set out to defend his own society against the attacks mounted on it by visiting Europeans - the most recent and damning being that made in Matthew Arnold’s Discourses in America (1885). Arnold’s aristocratic gibes at American institutions and the ‘glorification of the average man’, stung Twain who saw an opportunity of turning the ‘irreverent fun’ he had been planning about the nobility into a penetrating satire on injustice and privilege.
In Twain’s notebook containing the original idea for the novel there is no indication of any aim beyond fairly crude burlesque humour. He envisages a good deal of slapstick comedy in the antics of a knight errant with a bad cold or an itch, trapped inside a suit of armour, and the novel still retains much of this kind of farcical writing, often based on the simple idea of contrast. For example, Twain constantly juxtaposes Hank Morgan’s vernacular speech with a parodied version of the language of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur:
‘And then they rode to the damsels and either saluted other, and the eldest had a garland of gold about her head, and she was threescore winter of age or more. . . .’
‘The damsel was?’
‘Even so, dear lord - and her hair was white under the garland. . . .’
‘Celluloid teeth, nine dollars a set, as like as not - the
loose-fit kind, that go up and down like a portcullis when you eat, and fall out when you laugh.’ (15)
In similar vein, Twain sets up a tournament between Hank and Sir Sagramor in which the ’•knight is defeated by Hank’s cowboy skills with the lasso. But by this stage in the novel (Ch. 39) Twain had become deeply involved with his more serious cultural criticism, and Hank sees the combat as one in which a whole way of life is at stake:
I was a champion, it was true, but not the champion of the frivolous black arts. I was the champion of hard unsentimental common sense and reason, I was entering the lists to either destroy knight-errantry or be its victim.
(39)
This is the pattern of the novel’s plot: a contest between Yankee practicality and medieval superstition. It allowed Twain to satirize those aspects of European civilization he had come to despise, such as the class system and the Established Church; and at the same time to celebrate American democracy and progress in Hank’s social revolution that has been brought about by the introduction of modern technology.
Many of Twain’s ‘inventions’ are deployed humorously to allow him to milk such ideas as knights on bicycles, but the novel reaches its climax in an apocalyptic confrontation in which Hank unleashes the destructive power of technology in a remorseless and quite excessive carnage.
Hank’s embryonic republic is attacked by 25,000 mailed knights who are promptly electrocuted, shot, blown up, or drowned in an orgy of bloodshed, leaving the fifty-four freedom fighters trapped and dying in the poisonous odour emitted by the rotting corpses.
In these final images Twain makes explicit the ambivalences which create a continuous submerged theme in the novel and surface more and more in his later fiction. Beneath his overt celebration of industrial democracy lurk growing doubts both about the value of the common people he sets out to champion but ends up calling ‘human muck', and the scientific and mechanical marvels that can so easily bring blight upon the world.
Another aspect of this ambivalence is the current of powerful, if sentimental, nostalgia for the pastoral simplicity of the ‘lost land’ felt by Hank throughout the novel. His description of rural England has some of the qualities of unreality associated with Twain’s re-creation of his Missouri boyhood:
We crossed broad natural lawns sparkling with dew, and we moved like spirits, the cushioned turf giving out no sound of footfall; we dreamed along through glades in a mist of green light that got its tint from the sun-drenched roof of leaves overhead, and by our feet the clearest and coldest of rivulets went frisking and gossiping over its reefs and making a sort of whispering music, comfortable to hear; and at times we left the world behind and entered into the solemn great deeps and rich gloom of the forest.
( 12 )
The world that Twain himself sought imaginative escape from was becoming increasingly uncomfortable for many sensitive Americans in the 1880s, and too much has been made of the purely individual psychological reasons for Twain’s growing disillusionment as expressed in late works such as The Mysterious Stranger, ‘The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg’, and his philosophical essay ‘What is Man?’
While it is undoubtedly true that Twain’s reading of Darwin, Huxley, and Lecky helped to undermine his faith in a benevolent universe and the goodness of man, 4 his scepticism and pessimism were shared by many of his contemporaries who were not similarly overwhelmed by a naive, deterministic philosophy. The human and social concomitants of unbridled industrialization were beginning to make themselves felt in the 1880s in such incidents as the Hay market riot of 1886, the agitation for legislation against business and the monopolies, and the organization of labour unions.
Many other writers besides Twain were appalled by the impersonality, stupidity, and greed which appeared to be inseparable from modern life, and like him, many yearned for the simplicity and goodness of an American past that seemed to have disappeared for ever. The various attempts made to come to terms with the harsh realities of the present and to relate them to older values, constitute major strands in American fiction until well into the twentieth century.
Notes
1. The circumstances in which Tom Sawyer and Twain’s other novels were composed are described very fully by Justice Kaplan in Mr Clemens and Mark Twain (Harmondsworth, 1970).
2. Bernard DeVoto, Mark Twain’s America and Mark Twain at Work (Boston, 1967), p. 307.
3. For a discussion of the way in which Twain uses different kinds of language to mediate the worlds of the vernacular and the official culture of his age sec Jules Chametzky, ‘Realism, Cultural Politics, and Language as Mediation in Mark Twain and Others’, in Prospects , 8 (1983), 183-95.
4. A description of these influences can be found in H. H. Waggoner, ‘Science in the Thought of Mark Twain’, American Literature, 8 (1936), 357-70.
Chapter 3
Realism and Naturalism: Howells, Crane, Norris, Dreiser
Much of the confusion, as well as the controversy, surrounding discussions of nineteenth-century Realism, comes from the misguided attempts of critics and literary historians to produce a simple definition for what was, in fact, a broad and heterogeneous movement that can only be fully understood when its methods are seen in relation to wider social and philosophical contexts. It is particularly tempting for literary critics to concentrate their attention on method and technique, but even this narrow focus has produced a bewildering multiplicity of emphases and definitions. There are those, for example, who maintain that the documentary rendering of external detail is the primary characteristic of realism, and that the only justification for any statement in a realistic discourse must be its referent. Others reject the particularity inherent in this view in favour of the notion of a realistic ‘norm’, a statistical average which demands that the realist text should aim at representing the typical rather than the unique. Set against these views, or even alongside them, is another that identifies the essential technique of realism not so much in its style as in its narrative method. Objectivity can only be achieved by the elimination of the mediation and manipulation of the author or his alter ego, the narrator. Novels must seek the impersonality of drama and the impartiality of science before they can be called realistic.
If the concept of realism could be restricted in this way and used merely to describe characteristics of texts, the task of the literary historian would be much simpler. But this would be to fly in the face of actual usage which has always acknowledged certain ‘extra-textual' elements in the description of realism. For those novelists who believe that realism stems from an account of the typical or normal, the question of the referent itself becomes problematical, the implication being that some subjects are in themselves more ‘real' than others. Traditionally, this ‘reality’ has always been associated with ‘low life’ material, though as we shall see, writers have occasionally protested against what they regard as the elevation of proletarian subjects and have concentrated instead upon the blander aspects of middle-class existence.
On the other hand, for novelists whose interest lies primarily in the documentary representation of the world there are equally difficult problems relating to the ‘realistic’ priority of social, psychological, and physiological aspects of the subject. Every novelist must make assumptions or choices concerning the reality of his subject-matter, and many of the critical disputes about realism in the nineteenth century centred on this rather than on literary techniques.
The last decades of the nineteenth century were marked, as Eric Sundquist has noted 1 by ‘an increasing discrepancy between the figurative life of the mind and the literal life of the material’. What Sundquist is describing here, as he discusses the fiction of Henry James and Stephen Crane, is a central characteristic of Modernism. The dichotomy he refers to between subject and object, and the way it manifests itself in twentieth-century literature, will be explored later, but it is also important to remember that subsequent developments in linguistics and philosophy have stretched this chasm much further to the point where the referent itself is often now posited as a mere myth or mirage by post-structuralist theorists. This partly accounts, not only for the absence of any major development in the theory of Realism in our own time, but also for the fact that the nineteenth-century Realist movement itself has for the most part been described only in negative terms by modern critics unsympathetic to its general aims.
Exceptions to this neglect or hostility can be found in Roland Barthes’s studies of Balzac, and in the writing of Marxist theorists like Georg Lukacs who, in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism , mounts a sophisticated defence of Realism against what he calls the ‘ahistorical inauthenticity of Modernism’. More recently this line of argument has been extended by the American theorist Fredric Jameson who quite properly insists on the importance of the bourgeois cultural revolution in changing our world view:
In general, only the negative or destructive features of the bourgeois cultural revolution have been insisted on: most particularly the vast demolition efforts of the Enlightenment philosophes, as they seek to clear a space for what will become contemporary science. But the positive features of such a revolution are no less significant, and essentially include the whole new life world to which people are to be retrained: a new form of space, whose homogeneity abolishes the old heterogeneities of various forms of sacred space - transforming a whole world of qualities and libidinal intensities into the merely psychological experience of what Descartes called ‘secondary sensations’, and setting in their place the grey
world of quantity and extension, of the purely measurable - together with the substitution of the older forms of ritual, sacred or cyclical time by the new physical and measurable temporality of the clock and the routine, of the working day. In this sense, we may go even further in our account of the ideological mission of the nineteenth-century realistic novelists, and assert that their function is not merely to produce new mental and existential habits, but in a virtual or symbolic way to produce this whole new spatial and temporal configuration itself: what will come to be called ‘daily life’, the Alltag, or, in a different terminology, the ‘referent' - so many diverse characterisations of the new configuration of public and private spheres or space in classical or market capitalism . 2
Jameson’s achievement here, and in his book, The Political Unconscious, is to have identified and defined the importance of the ‘Realist moment’, thus freeing realism from the charge of being merely passive or representational. Alan Trachtenburg makes a similar effort in The Incorporation of America where he argues that the most profound changes in these decades of swift industrialization and urbanization lay at the level of culture, manifesting themselves ‘in the quality as well as the substance of perceptions, in the style as well as the content of responses ’. 3 The way in which a novelist like Dreiser constructs his subjects is a perfect illustration of what happens to an individual in what has been aptly called an age of reification or commodification . 4
An effect related to that produced by the work of Marxist critics can also be traced in recent writing by Feminist theorists who have been re-examining the nineteenth-century literary canon. In seeking to create new perspectives from which to study American writing, they have inevitably called into question earlier normative assumptions about that world and its representation. Whether one believes that the gender-related restrictiveness of the traditional canon derives from cultural realities suffered by contemporary women writers, or maintains that it has been imposed by modern critical theories, makes little real difference. The attempt to expose the melodramatic core of so-called ‘realist’ fiction produced by men, and to supplement this with work that exhibits a different, complementary social and psychological reality, has had the effect of creating new dimensions of historical actuality - of alerting us to the inadequacy of our literary and critical conventions . 5
The ‘productive’ nature of the Realist novel - the creation of new worlds with radically different spatial or psychological outlines - has been partly obscured by Realism’s close association with Naturalism.
In an effort to resist earlier ideologies and to portray life as scientifically as possible, the nineteenth-century novelist was led inexorably towards a world-view that reflected the prevalent mechanistic philosophies whereby man was seen as a creature without freedom of will, and adrift in a meaningless universe, a helpless victim of the random operation of hereditary and environmental forces. While it may be true, as George J. Becker claims in an influential article, 6 that ‘naturalism is no more than a philosophic position taken by some realists’, it is equally true that the very fact of adopting a philosophical position and attempting to propound it in fiction militates against the ideals of objectivity and inclusiveness upon which realism imagines itself to be based. As we shall see in this chapter, American naturalists were just as likely to employ the techniques of romantic writers as of the early American realists. The dissimilarities of philosophy, subject-matter, technique, and style in the work of W. D. Howells, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser are sufficient to show, if not the inadequacy, then at least the necessary elasticity of the term.
Some historians, such as Alfred Kazin, reject such eclecticism and accuse the movement of having ‘no center, no unifying principle, no philosophy, no joy in its coming, no climate of experiment’. 7 What it did have, however, was a number of impassioned champions of whom the most influential was undoubtedly William Dean Howells.
Howells
Howells was a man who lacked both the artistic genius of Twain and the intellectual power of James, yet produced more fiction and criticism than either of them. His geniality and generosity enabled him to retain the friendship of both those dissimilar eccentrics as well as that of a multitude of younger writers who were helped and encouraged by the Dean of American Letters, as he was called, either directly or in his capacity as editor of the Atlantic Monthly and as a prolific essayist and reviewer.
Towards the end of his long and productive life, when in H. L. Mencken’s words he had become ‘almost the national ideal . . . enveloped in a web of superstitious reverence’, 8 Howells became aware that despite all the honours heaped upon him, his ‘beautiful time was past and his cult was dead’. The kind of realism in which he believed had been overtaken, if not overwhelmed, first by naturalism and then by
modernism. His growing isolation and the reasons for it are clearly indicated in Mencken’s critique which compares him unfavourably with Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser. Unlike his younger contemporaries, he was unable to evoke the race spirit, the essential conflict of forces, or the peculiar drift and colour of American life. The world Howells continued to move in seemed to Mencken in 1917 to be suburban, caged, and flabby. It was, in fact, the world of the 1880s, and it was during that decade that Howells really came into his own as a daring, even shocking, chronicler of the realities of American urban life.
In order to understand this change of attitude towards a man who himself had changed very little, it is essential to start from the position which Howells himself occupied when he became assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly in 1866. Like Twain, he had been reared in provincial journalism, and his respect for truthfulness and factual observation was offended by the false, idealized pictures of life contained in the majority of works on which he was obliged to comment. In his early reviews, and later in the regular feature he contributed to Harper’s Monthly in the 1880s, he fought a simple and straightforward battle to rescue American literature from the artificiality that threatened to engulf it in a tide of historical romances and sentimental novels. The two sides in the ‘Realism War’ were so far apart that it was unnecessary for either of them to question or refine Howells’s simple definition of fiction as being that which is ‘true to the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the life of actual men and women’. The more urgent question for those taking part in the controversy was whether it was morally justifiable to portray such things or whether, as Charles Dudley Warner and others maintained, it was more noble to create fiction that would ‘lighten the burdens of life by taking us for a time out of our humdrum and perhaps sordid conditions, so that we can see familiar life somewhat idealized’. 9
Later, of course, Howells’s views on human motives and the principles that shape life would be rejected by a generation of writers who had similar aims but very different perceptions of reality. It is not so much Howells’s literary technique that Mencken or Sinclair Lewis -who called him a ‘pious old maid’ - attack, as the subjects he chose to treat. Howells remained convinced that fiction must deal with the ordinary, the average, even the mundane aspects of existence. For him the ‘profound dread and agony of life, the surge of passion and aspiration, the grand crash and glitter of things, the tragedy that runs eternally under the surface’, were exactly what falsified the novels and romances of the decadent writers from which he recoiled, and as he saw it, Mencken’s demand for such things seemed like a rejection of all he valued. And Lewis’s remark to Mencken that Howells’s novels
had ‘no more glow and gusto than so many tables of bond prices’ would not have seemed as terrible to Howells himself. 10
From the very beginning of his career, in his early travel books Venetian Life (1866) and Italian Journeys (1867), Howells was intent on avoiding sentimental or* romantic responses to European culture. Unlike Twain, though, or his fellow-American realist, John de Forest, in his European Acquaintance (1858) and Oriental Acquaintance (1856) (who both responded to the conventional beauties of the Old World by describing them satirically), Howells chose to concentrate on the small domestic details of Italian life, writing about ordinary people in normal situations pursuing everyday pleasures, and he did so in the firm belief that ‘whatever pleases is equal to any other thing there, no matter how low its origin’.
The same conviction inspired Howells’s fiction, which aimed to illuminate as clearly as possible the conditions of existence in contemporary America, though to say this is not to deny that he also wrote from a firm and personal moral standpoint. Contemporary reviewers at the opposite extreme to Mencken and Lewis, who thought his work vulgar, unspiritual, and corrupting, were reacting to his objective manner and failed to perceive the moral scheme that always informs his plots. It has become a platitude of modern criticism to say of Howells that he had no perception of evil, and if by that term one means the quality shown by many characters in the fiction of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, or Faulkner, the observation is just. Howells himself suggested when writing about Dostoevsky that spiritual extremism was an inappropriate, if not an impossible, response to the unruffled, smiling aspects of American life. Political events in the late 1880s, and particularly the execution of four randomly chosen anarchists involved in a violent incident in Chicago in 1886, led Howells to modify his views on man’s propensity for evil, but even so he was always temperamentally incapable of creating such monsters of unconditioned wickedness as Melville’s Claggart or Faulkner’s Popeye.
What he does excel at, though, is showing how the real conditions of American capitalism erode the moral fabric of society and help to create such corrupt characters as Bartley Hubbard in A Modern Instance (1882), men whose professional and personal integrity are insidiously undermined by the nature of business and social life in the rapidly expanding American city. Lional Trilling calls Hubbard ‘the quintessence of the average sensual man as the most sanguine of us have come to fear our culture breeds him’, 11 and according to Edwin H. Cady, he is ‘ the modern man, the “new man’’, a foregone failure’. 12
Both critics rightly stress Hubbard’s representative elements, for these are the qualities that are new in Howells’s fiction of the 1880s, lifting the novel into the company of his two or three minor master-
pieces and distinguishing it from his competent but unremarkable works of the 1870s such as Their Wedding Journey (1872), A Chance Acquaintance (1873), or The Lady of the Aroostook (1879).
Howells was well aware of the novel’s significance for him at the time of writing. He had decided to give up his prestigious post as editor of the Atlantic Monthly in order to devote more energy to writing novels, and he cast around very carefully for a suitable subject that would do justice to his momentous decision. Like Henry James a couple of years later, who also wanted a socially significant theme for The Bostonians (1886), Howells was drawn to the position of women in American society, but being more committed to family life than James, the subject that appealed to him was divorce rather than the women’s movement itself. By focusing on the break-up of Bartley and Marcia’s marriage, he was able to describe the rich texture of modern life in depth and breadth. Unlike James who always bemoaned his inability to bring life to the material environment in which his characters move, Howells was never happier than when describing the essential trivia of existence, and he does so with a nice sense of the pressure which these things bring to bear on human life and of the way they can be used to indicate moral and spiritual positions. The Hallecks’s house, its position and furnishings, are clear examples of the way Howells uses such description to place characters on a scale of values both moral and social:
Rumford Street is one of those old-fashioned thoroughfares at the west end of Boston, which are now almost wholly abandoned to boarding-houses of the poorer class. Yet they are charming streets, quiet, clean and respectable, and worthy still to be the homes, as they once were, of solid citizens. The red brick houses, with their swell fronts, looking in perspective like a succession of round towers, are reached by broad granite steps, and their doors are deeply sunken within the wagon-roofs of white painted Roman arches. Over the door there is sometimes the bow of a fine transom, and the parlor windows on the first floor of the swell front have the same azure gleam as those of the beautiful old houses which front the common on Beacon Street. (19)
In such set pieces as this Howells can subtly suggest the family’s old-fashioned fidelity to codes of behaviour that are fast disappearing among people of their class. Passages of this kind recur throughout the novel, illuminating a wide cross-section of minor characters. These range from the wealthy philanthropist, Clara Kingsbury, whose days
‘were divided between the extremes of squalor and fashion’, and her rigid lawyer, Eustace Atherton, the epitome of‘Proper Boston', to the cracker-barrel philosopher from the logging camp, Kinney, and a multitude of Maine villagers, doubtless imaginatively transported from Howells’s remembered childhood in small Ohio towns. An unstrained realism guarantees the solidity of the created world and of the couple who stand at its centre, Bartley Hubbard and Marcia Gaylord.
Though Howells thought of the book as his ‘Divorce Novel’ and sometimes called it his ‘new Medea’, it could also claim to be a work about journalism. This was a profession he knew intimately and could write about with confidence. In addition, though, the slick, superficial aggressiveness of the New Journalism gave him the perfect tone with which to confront the old order and embody in his central character who finally brings about his own downfall by ‘stealing’ and refurbishing Kinney’s article about life in the logging camp. This is the undramatic but climactic incident in a whole series of petty immoralities that serves to alienate Bartley from his wife, colleagues, and friends. It precipitates his flight westward to Indiana where he sues for divorce and is foiled by the last-minute intervention of Marcia’s father, Squire Gaylord, who makes a final impassioned speech in his daughter’s defence. This is a melodramatic episode that, to some extent, betrays the tenor of the novel, but Howells restores the realistic atmosphere in his account of Marcia’s bleak existence with her dying father back in Equity, where she ‘saw no one whom she was not forced to see’. Bartley’s death in Whited Sepulchre, Arizona, where he has fled to indulge in a form of gutter journalism, comes ironically at the hands of someone whose domestic affairs have been exposed in the gossip sheet he writes. But the reported event cannot make any real difference to Marcia whose widowhood had actually begun long before this, her passionate heart finally shrivelled by the bitter experience of marriage. Ben Halleck, the crippled friend of Bartley’s youth and now a Methodist minister, still pursues her, hoping somehow to atone for the secret love he felt for her during her marriage. But the end of the novel, true to its roots in Greek tragedy and to Howells’s perception of the breakdown of secular society, holds out no hope of future happiness. The final images we are left with arc those of uncertainty, disintegration, and futility. And even if we did not have the novel’s title to confirm it, we are left in no doubt that the fate of Bartley and Marcia is a representative one. By refusing to create central characters of black, unmitigated wickedness, Howells increases their plausibility and typicality. The evils that he sees clearly enough are insidious, petty, and frighteningly real.
The temptations that undo Bartley also beset the hero of The Rise o f Silas Lapham (1885), the novel widely regarded as Howclls’s master-
piece. Silas is a self-made businessman, a type that was to become more and more familiar in American realist and naturalist fiction in the next twenty years. Unlike the great majority of his successors, though, who are usually seen as corrupt, ruthless predators, Silas is a man of moral principle who resists the opportunity to enter into a shady deal which would save his flagging fortunes, and chooses instead the path of honourable bankruptcy. The ‘rise’ referred to in the novel’s title is as much the moral one at the end of the story as it is the earlier economic and social one. Howells’s critics have not always recognized the point, as he himself sadly indicates in his book Literary Friends and Acquaintances (1900), and the fault may not be entirely theirs. Howells’s best writing certainly revolves around the comedy of manners involved in the awkward relationships between the nouveau riche Laphams and the aristocratic Bostonians, the Coreys. Tom, the son of this family, works in Lapham’s paint factory and is in love with his daughter, Penelope. He is generally thought, however, to be pursuing the other daughter, Irene, and this comedy of errors provides the novel with its sub-plot which is resolved by the application of common sense. When the mistake is discovered, the lovers are dissuaded from renouncing each other in futile self-sacrifice by the utilitarian argument that it is better for one person, Irene, to suffer than for all three to lose their happiness. Howells uses this story to introduce a good deal of criticism aimed at the influence of romantic fiction, as well as to create the social comedy involved in the juxtaposition of older members of the families.
Silas is introduced through the device of an interview which Bartley Hubbard is conducting for his newspaper series ‘Solid Men of Boston’. Like Faulkner, Howells constantly transfers characters from one novel to another, giving the knowledgeable reader added pleasure in the recognition of a familiar world. In this instance our awareness of Bartley’s habitual contempt for provincial virtue helps to emphasize the rough character of Lapham as we learn, first in his own words then in Hubbard’s interpretation of them, about his meteoric business career based on the discovery of a mineral paint substance on his father’s Vermont farm. We also learn that there is something in Lapham’s background that he does not want to discuss, but whether this is sufficient cause for Hubbard’s cynical dismissal of him as ‘one of nature’s noblemen’ is not revealed at this point.
Later, however, we discover that in order to finance his expansion, Lapham had taken on a partner, Rogers, only to get rid of him ruthlessly, if not dishonestly, when he had served his purpose. Lapham’s behaviour is not unlike that of other great robber barons, both fictional and actual, and he attempts to rationalize it as sound business practice. His conscience, stirred from time to time by his wife Pcrsis, is not
easy, though, and the episode has an ‘inextinguishable vitality’ that continues to haunt him.
Eventually it is Rogers who fittingly offers Silas the opportunity to save himself by proposing the crooked land deal. Howells again shows how well he understands'the subtle pressures that push a man into an inescapable web of compromising entanglements. But the scheme itself does not shock Lapham:
It addressed itself in him to that easy-going, not evilly intentioned, potential unmorality which regards common property as common prey, and gives us the most corrupt municipal governments under the sun - which makes the poorest voter, when he has tricked into place, as unscrupulous in regard to others’ money as an hereditary prince. (25)
There is an additional, external pressure exerted by Rogers himself, who paints a picture of his own and his family’s destitution if Lapham does not go through with the plan. So that, when Silas finally does stand firm for right and justice, and brings financial destruction upon himself, his reward is ‘to feel like a thief and a murderer’. He ends where he began, back on the farm in Vermont, unpretentious and shabby, but as Howells says, ‘more the Colonel in these hills than he could ever have been on the Back Bay’, where he had been building a fine mansion to symbolize his entry into the world of the Coreys.
The aristocratic Coreys represent the dominance of the aesthetic sensibility in late-mneteenth-century Boston society, and Howells, like Henry James, maintains a continuous debate on the subject of art and morality that runs throughout his fiction. This debate is brought to the forefront of the novel at the dinner party given for the Laphams by the Coreys. Even taken out of context, the episode constitutes a brilliant piece of sustained comic writing, ranging over such topics as architecture, fiction, philanthropy, and military heroism, each of which is dimly reflected through Lapham’s progressively more drunken consciousness. Seen in relation to the larger stories of Irene’s abortive romance and Lapham’s moral struggles, though, the inadequacies of the Brahmin culture are given sharper focus, anticipating the direction taken by Howells’s thought in the years following the traumatic experience of the Hay market riot in 1886, and brought to its fullest expression in his next major novel, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890).
It was in 1886, too, that Howells began reading Tolstoy in earnest. The impact of the great Russian’s Christian socialism and Howells’s own developing awareness of new and ugly forces in society, led him to reassess his social philosophy and with it his theory of fiction.
Without renouncing realism, he began to insist on its critical function in an art whose main purpose must be to ‘make men know each other better, that they may be all humbled and strengthened by a sense of their fraternity’. He is quite clear about the need for art to teach those principles, and came to believe that an art which ‘disdains the office of teacher is one of the last refuges of the aristocratic spirit’. 13 This spiritual crisis is the immediate background to the economic novels which he began writing at this time, among them Annie Kilburn (1888) and The World of Chance (1893), and also to his decision to forsake the cosy environment of Boston lor the more turbulent world of New York.
Howells actually uses this momentous migration autobiographically at the beginning of A Hazard of New Fortunes. Basil March, another of his favourite recurring characters, is persuaded to give up his comfortable profession in Boston in order to become editor of a new magazine, Every Other Week. As in his earlier novel, Their Wedding Journal , Basil and Isabel March are used as observers and commentators, and their extended house-hunting in New York which takes up nearly a fifth of the whole book, helps to delineate the larger and less homogeneous environment commensurate with the novel’s more ambitious scope.
Centring upon the publication of the magazine, Howells creates a broad spectrum of characters to reflect a wide variety of political and economic views. More than any of his previous works, this is a novel of ideas, and the conflicts brought about by their juxtapositions and confrontations are presented with an urgency and dedication new to him. Similarly, the climactic scene of the novel which describes a riot during a transport strike and culminates in the violent deaths of two of the central characters, is far removed from the minor domestic disorders found in his earlier works. The events Howells describes, based as always on his own meticulous observation, confirm his privately expressed fears that the direction taken by industrial society was wrong and that the fabric of civilized life was becoming dangerously threadbare.
The two victims of violence are, appropriately, two idealists: Conrad Dryfus, the Tolstoyan son of an egotistical capitalist, and' Lindau, an old German socialist. Their deaths were the only plausible outcome Howells could envisage, given the current state of contemporary society. In their portrayal Howells suggests certain Old and New Testament parallels which point to the possibility of spirituality redeeming the world of the Social Darwinians whose only gospel was the Gospel of Wealth. To have pursued this theme more energetically, though, would have taken Howells into unfamiliar and even irrelevant areas, given his preference for social and economic themes. Instead, he
opted for the popular alternative of writing Utopian novels, and his two Altrurian romances, which constitute an important contribution to the genre, will be discussed in chapter 5.
By the end of the century Howells had exhausted his major themes and had seen the triumph of realism taken to extreme limits by his younger proteges. Though he continued to produce novels until 1920 with indomitable professionalism, for the most part they are largely devoid of literary or political inspiration, being mainly elaborations of the romantic sub-plots of his earlier fiction.
Crane
One of the most gifted of Howells’s younger contemporaries, whose brief career began much later than his and ended much earlier, was Stephen Crane. Though he died at the age of only twenty-eight in 1900, Crane’s achievements in fiction and the long reach of his influence since are such that it is awesome to speculate on his possible career had he lived a fuller life into the twentieth century. As it is, one might note that at the same age - twenty-eight - Crane’s great contemporary Joseph Conrad, had not even begun to write fiction, and that his compatriot, Henry James - one of the most prolific of novelists - had published a mere handful of mediocre stories that would surely have been forgotten by now had they not been followed by so much distinguished work.
Crane, befriended by Howells and inspired by Hamlin Garland, not unnaturally described himself as a realist. The novel that brought him to their critical attention, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), owes much to Howells’s suggestion that the Bowery offered a promising fictional field to a young writer, and also to Garland’s praise of A Hazard oj New Fortunes as the greatest study of a city in fiction. Yet Crane’s own description of his aim to come closer to nature and truth in his work provides no indication at all of the form his realism actually took. For Crane, truth is habitually reflected obliquely in the angles of his ironic vision, and nature is presented in a style that is selectively impressionistic. When contrasted with the painstaking delineation of surface detail in the fiction of his fellow realists, Crane’s art only serves to prove the inadequacy of the term ‘realism’ as a decription of a manner, or even a mode of perception. The most he shares with Howells and Dreiser is a preference for urban subjects, and even this only accounts for a fraction of his writing. He also thought of himself
as a naturalist and claimed that Maggie aims to show that environment is a ‘tremendous thing’ in the world and ‘frequently shapes lives regardless’. But Crane’s notion of ‘environment’ was so much more fluid and subtle than Dreiser’s, and his description of its shaping effects so less mechanical, that the differences between the two authors are more apparent than the similarities. Maggie herself, for example, seems somehow to have escaped the effects of the filth and poverty of the New York slums in which she grows up. Her parents, brothers, and neighbours are vividly presented as subhuman denizens of a foulsmelling and dangerous urban jungle who are constantly warring with each other for survival, while she, we are told, ‘blossomed in a mud puddle’. Maggie’s frail prettiness and purity, preserved amid the squalor and vice of crowded tenements, puzzles not only the neighbourhood ‘philosophers’ but also many literary critics who see it as a flaw in the novel’s design. For Crane, though, the pressures of the material environment must be balanced against the more subtle though equally powerful effects of a society’s manipulative value-system and its coded beliefs. Maggie and, to a lesser extent, those around her, are shown as victims of an ideology which is utterly inappropriate to the real nature of their existence, and it is this yawning gap between appearance and reality that both accounts for the work’s multiple ironies and causes Maggie’s tragic self-destruction.
The opening sentence of the story points out this discrepancy:
A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of
Rum Alley. (1)
Throughout the novel Crane insistently contrasts notions of chivalry and descriptions of barbaric behaviour or, in the case of Maggie’s mother, those of middle-class morality and respectability with her brutal and animalistic behaviour towards her family. The same dichotomies characterize the entire urban society and are embodied, for example, in the inability or unwillingness of the Church to relate its Christian teachings to the real lives and needs of those around it.
In Maggie’s own case these idealistic concepts are reinforced by the propaganda of popular culture. She is conditioned by sentimental ballads and plays to believe in the fulfilment of romantic and domestic love, just as the unmistakably evil people who watch these plays are led to hiss at vice and applaud virtue. For all of them the pictured drama becomes ‘transcendental reality’, only serving to set in stark contrast their very different and inescapable destinies. For Maggie this means prostitution. Having forfeited the respectability of her home life and her job when she takes up with Pete, a flashy, small-time womanizer of the Bowery, she has no alternative from the inevitable
moment when he deserts her. From then on she is no longer able to maintain even the tenuous threads that have linked her dreams to her life, and she begins the slow drift down through the lower depths of her world to inevitable suicide.
Rather than document’Maggie’s decline in detail, however, as some of his fellow naturalists would have done, Crane compresses this period of her life into a single brief chapter in which she traverses the various social strata of her professional territory, moving down from the rich young man protected by evening dress and ennui through the ranks of the cheerfully uncaring middle classes, to the ultimate spectre of ‘a ragged being with shifting, bloodshot eyes and grimy hands’. Beyond these human encounters she comes face to face with the hostility of the very buildings:
She went into the blackness of the final block. The shutters of the tall buildings were closed like grim lips.
The structures seemed to have eyes that looked over them, beyond them, at other things. Afar off the lights of the avenues glittered as if from an impossible distance. Streetcar bells jingled with a sound of merriment.
At the feet of the tall buildings appeared the deathly black hue of the river. Some hidden factory sent up a yellow glare, that lit for a moment the waters lapping oilily against timbers. The varied sounds of life, made joyous by distance and seeming unapproachableness, came faintly and died away to a silence. (27)
But Crane will not allow this silence to bring his novel to an end. TIad he done so, emphasis would have remained on Maggie’s tragic fate, and the reader’s abiding emotion would have been one of pity. Instead, he offers a coda of social satire in which he first shows Fete deserted by the woman for whom he left Maggie. She takes his money and, brushing aside his incoherent adorations, contemptuously leaves him in a drunken stupor. Finally, Maggie’s death is announced to her mother who racks herself into spasms of sentimental grief - after first finishing her meal - then, true to an unshakeable belief in her own virtue, offers her dead child a mother’s forgiveness. The picture of this gross and maudlin figure who is obsessed with the grotesque idea of forcing Maggie’s baby boots on to the dead whore’s feet, brilliantly recapitulates both the theme of the novel and its bitter, sardonic tone.
Crane’s ironies are etched so deeply in his fiction that it would seem difficult for any reader to miss them, but this has certainly been the case with his masterpiece The Red Badge of Courage (1895). A great many critics have interpreted Crane’s Civil War novel as though its
values were exactly those of its confused, misguided hero, Henry Fleming, thus redefining it as one of those classic rites of initiation which, as Harry Levin points out, often use war as the subject of a realist text to show man confronted and sometimes subjugated - even reified - by matter. 14 In this case, of course, the hero, in his own mind, finally triumphs over the mechanistic forces that threaten his individuality, and asserts his maturity by the strength of his conscience and will. He triumphs over the sickness of battle that has come close to robbing him of his humanity, and so can wear with pride his famous red badge of courage. Nature herself confirms his victory by beaming out a ray of golden sunshine through the leaden rain-clouds. Such a reading of the novel, however, seems determinedly perverse. It contradicts not only the pattern of action so carefully established in the story but also the book’s entire texture and tone.
Throughout his life, Henry Fleming has nurtured his imagination on dreams of epic battle, and though the Civil War does not appear to possess any distinctly Homeric qualities, he enlists in the Union Army in the hope that he will discover something of glory there. To his dismay, his mother does not share his dream of returning home in triumph, either with a shield or on one, and can only talk of keeping himself out of trouble and making sure that he has clean socks to wear.
Before Henry can put himself to the actual test, though, he is faced with a long period of inactivity during which he listens to a variety of rumours and the conflicting opinions of his regimental companions on the nature of warfare and the effect it has upon particular men. He is tortured by doubts about himself, and decides they can only be resolved by the actual experience of ‘blood, blaze and danger’. In the event, his actions and reactions during the first battle produce a variety of conflicting rationalizations for his instinctive or unconditioned behaviour. Whether he remains in the firing line, trapped by the inability to move, or flees in terror like a rabbit when the opportunity comes, he finds it easy to produce specious justifications for what he does. In rapid sequence he congratulates himself on his unyielding courage and then on his superior strategic wisdom when he runs. He convinces himself that he is an organic part of nature, or that nature, at least, extends sympathy towards him:
This landscape gave him assurance. A fair field holding life. It was the religion of peace. It would die if its timid eyes were compelled to see blood. He conceived Nature to be a woman with a deep aversion to tragedy. (7)
This assurance, like all his others, is immediately undercut when he enters a chapel-like clearing in the forest. Seeking solace in the ecclesi-
astical half-light under the trees, he is confronted by a hideous spectacle:
He was being looked at by a dead man, who was seated with his back again'st a column-like 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 a 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 bundle along the upper lip. (7)
Here, as elsewhere in his work, Crane shows profoundly ironic contempt for romantic applications of the pathetic fallacy, and for those who delude themselves that nature reinforces their arguments with ‘proofs that lived where the sun shone’. Characters throughout Crane’s fiction are prey to this kind of specious complacency and are invariably subjected to ironic mockery. Failure to recognize this fact has led to innumerable misinterpretations of I'he Red Badge of Courage , the most notorious of which purports to discover in the image of the sun pasted ‘like a wafer’ in the sky, a clue to the religious significance of the entire novel. Such a view is so much at odds with Crane’s temper that it hardly seems worth considering, and in any case, it has been thoroughly discredited by a number of other critics. 15
Nature remains obstinately aloof from and indifferent to man in Crane’s work. One only has to read his short story ‘The Open Boat’ to discover that truth. The ‘inevitable’ sun, as Crane describes it, shines down on our triumphs and failures alike, and it is manifestly futile to attribute to it our own philosophical predilections.
This is, of course, exactly what Crane’s hero does after his last battle. This time he has not run away, and though still occasionally conscience-stricken by his behaviour during his absence from the regiment, he has little difficulty first in manufacturing excuses for himself, then in discovering a spiritual lesson to bolster his self-esteem:
He was emerged from his struggles with a large sympathy for the machinery of the universe. With his new eyes, he could see that the secret and open blows which were being dealt about the world with such heavenly lavishness were in truth blessings. It was a deity laying about him with the bludgeon of correction.
His loud mouth against these things had been lost as the storm ceased. He could no more stand upon places
high and false, and denounce the distant planets. He beheld that he was tiny but not inconsequent to the sun.
In the spacewide whirl of events no grain like him would be lost. (24)
This last quotation is taken from the text of the novel edited by John T. Winterich, which includes manuscript material not included in the first edition. 16 The additional passages in the final chapter make Crane’s ironic intent much clearer, it is true, consisting as they do largely of sardonic commentary and Henry Fleming’s final interior monologues. The very existence of these two texts, emphasizing different aspects of Fleming’s character, lends weight to John Berryman’s view of Crane as being ‘simultaneously at war with the people he creates and on their side’. 17 According to Berryman, Crane continually vacillates between two views of his character. In the first, he shows the Alazon (impostor) after vaunting and posturing, being routed by the Eiron who affects to be a fool. In the second, he comes closer to the form of Greek tragedy in which the characters, swollen with Hubris are seen as victims of Heaven’s jealousy. The existence of this duality in Maggie and The Red Badge oj Courage helps to account, not only for the variety of interpretations they have provoked, but also for the complexity they share with stories such as ‘The Open Boat’ (1898) and ‘The Blue Hotel’, and the better parts of novels such as George’s Mother (1896) and The Monster (1897).
Stephen Crane also produced work - notably his poems - in which his complexity of ironic attitude is sometimes compressed into a teasing obscurity that defies interpretation. Nevertheless, he wrote enough ‘pills’ as he called them to make up the most important body of poetic work in the 1890s. He also wrote potboilers when in need of cash, among them The Third Violet (1897) and the unfinished O’Ruddy (1903), written when he was dying in his rented medieval hall in Sussex - that should not be held against him. That he created the masterpieces we do possess is an astonishing achievement.
Norris
Frank Norris’s life occupied almost exactly the same short span as Stephen Crane’s. Like Crane, he learned his craft as a journalist, though he sought to perfect his art by studying creative writing at
Harvard. Also like Crane, he reported the Spanish-American War in Cuba. Indeed, the two young prodigies ot American literature actually met in the Caribbean in 1899, but failed to strike up any kind of friendship and their acquaintance was not renewed. Despite the regularity with which their names are linked in histories of American naturalism, they were temperamentally, socially, and philosophically poles apart, and their fiction mirrors those differences rather than any similarities.
Their fiction also reflects their geographical separation. Norris’s California was, in some respects, as remote from New York as both were from the rural heartland of America that separated them. Norris is primarily a Westerner in outlook and style, and when he does forsake his own region in The Pit (1903), it is because the subject of that novel, finance capitalism, requires a different setting from the one in which he is most at home. Not surprisingly, then, The Pit lacks the energy and force that make his three other mam works, Vatidover and the Brute (1914) McTeague (1899), and The Octopus (1901), so remarkable.
Vatidover, mainly written while Norris was at Harvard in 1894, was not actually published until 1914, after the manuscript, believed lost in the great San Francisco fire of 1906, had been completed by his brother, Charles. The additions only amount to about five thousand words, and according to Warren French, are probably confined to the beginning. 18 Vatidover belongs to the same period as McTeague, and has gradually come to be recognized as one of Norris’s major works, though few critics would go so far as Maxwell Geismar who thinks it his ‘key’ novel. 19 In its youthful crudity, it exposes very clearly the roots of Norris’s ambivalence about current theories of social and biological evolution, as well as showing the overwhelming influence of Zola’s work, especially La Bete Huttiaine and L’Assommoir. Its melodramatic plot traces the decline and fall of a young San Francisco dandy whose brutal, amoral instincts gradually overwhelm both his social training and his aesthetic sensibility. After seducing one of the numerous ‘fast’ but virtuous girls who populate the city’s pleasure spots, Vandover finds his life beginning to disintegrate. The girl commits suicide, Vandover is socially ostracized, and after his father’s death, plunges into a life of debauchery, poverty, and indifference, marked by the onset of lycanthropy, a disease which periodically transforms him physically into the animal which he morally resembles. The ironies of Vandover’s life are underlined by constant reference to the careers of his boyhood friends, Charlie Geary and Dolliver Haight. Geary’s philosophy of the survival of the fittest, together with his amoral business dealings, eventually lead to a situation where, as a slum landlord, he employs Vandover to clean out his filthy cottages. Haight, on the other hand, is a sensitive young man who believes in
the purity of women and the superiority of old-fashioned virtues. His life is ruined when he innocently contracts venereal disease from a prostitute’s playful kiss on his cut lip.
These examples of determinism, fate, and chance, create a pseudo-philosophical scheme that makes for a naively contrived plot. What redeems the novel, though, is its texture. Norris shows an unerring mastery of physical and psychological detail which he deploys with great vivacity to produce an unforgettable picture of San Francisco in its heyday. Saloons, oyster bars, hotels with their various categories of private rooms, the meals consumed in these colourful places, and the people who eat them before seeking other pleasures, the parties and dances, the rituals of courtship, and the more dubious pursuits of young bachelors out on the town - all are evoked with unusual power to create a dense medium for his melodrama. Here, for example, he is describing Vandover and Ida’s moment of weakness in the Imperial Hotel:
They did not hurry over their little supper, but ate and drank slowly, and had more oysters to go with the last half of their bottle. Ida’s face was ablaze, her eyes flashing, her blond hair disordered and falling about her cheeks.
Vandover put his arm about her neck, and drew her toward him, and as she sank down upon him, smiling and complaisant, her hair tumbling upon her shoulders and her head and throat bent back, he leaned his cheek against hers, speaking in a low voice.
‘No-no,’ she murmured, smiling: ‘never - ah, if I hadn’t come - no, Van - please -’ And then with a long breath she abandoned herself. (5)
For Norris, realism was a term reserved for the depiction of small, everyday detail - ‘the things that are likely to happen between lunch and supper’. The seduction of Ida, on the other hand, belongs to his romanticism - ‘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’. This defence of the romantic in fiction, which probably derived as much from his admiration of Richard Harding Davis as of Zola, was composed after the event and published posthumously with his other essays and articles in The Responsibilities of the Novelist. Though V. L. Parrington called the collection ‘the textbook of the young naturalist’, 20 Norris’s criticism is not only full of inconsistences and contradictions, but is also, as Donald Pizer has demonstrated, deeply anti-intellectual and primitivistic. 21 If any coherent critical position can be derived from his essays, it has less to
do with mechanism versus organism or realism versus romanticism, than with a sustained attack on the aesthetic decadence of Wilde and Pater and a plea for what Norris called ‘manliness’ in literature. His championship of life over mere literature also led him to despise the ‘tea cup tragedies’ of the older realists, and to plead for fiction that takes characters away from the mundane and flings them ‘into the throes of a vast and terrible drama that works itself out in unleashed passions, in blood, and in sudden death’.
McTeague (1899) certainly fulfils these requirements. The passions that Norris unleashes in his Polk Street dentist lead inevitably to murder by way of lust, greed, and the most startlingly sadistic rape fantasies. With the creation of McTeague, Norris took American fiction into an entirely new dimension. The lower-middle-class world of San Francisco still provides a medium and ballast for the melodrama, and for many readers the picture of merchants and tradesmen at work and play is the best part of the novel. But all Norris’s conscious power went into his story of the fatal events in which McTeague and his wife Trina are enmeshed. There is a remorseless inevitability in the way the two exacerbate each other’s obsession: Trina, utterly lost to human satisfaction, can in the end only be moved by the ecstatic sensuality of stripping naked then embracing her precious hoard of gold; McTeague, in pursuit of the same treasure, works himself into a frenzy of hatred for his wife, in trying to control his fury by beating his mattress as he lies prostrate on it in torment. There is only one outcome imaginable, though the sequel to the murder of Trina - McTeague desperately fleeing into the California desert with the worthless money and the equally useless symbolic canary in its gilded cage - provides a surreal and unexpected conclusion.
If Norris’s career had ended at this point, or even after the publication of his next three works, the semi-autobiographical romance Blix (1899) and his two adventure novels, Moran of the Lady Letty (1898) and A Man’s Woman (1900), there would be some justification for those who see him merely as a disciple of Kipling or a precursor of Jack London. His preoccupation with the type of Nietzschean superman figure results in characters not unlike those found in The Sea Wolj (1904), while his confused applications of popular Darwinism also recall London. Moreover, the two authors shared a belief in white racial superiority that most modern readers find unpalatable, though if one reads more widely in the popular literature of the period -Southern novels like His Red Rock (1898) by Thomas Nelson Page, for example, The Clansman (1905) by Thomas Dixon, or even The Battle-Ground (1902) by Ellen Glasgow - it becomes apparent that such attitudes were so widespread as to be taken for granted.
Norris was too ambitious, though, to continue with such potboilers. His ambition was to create an epic novel of America, and as the subject of his projected trilogy he chose ‘wheat’: its cultivation, sale, distribution, and consumption. The final part, The Wolf which would have had a European setting, was never written, since Norris died of appendicitis in 1902 shortly after completing the second volume, The Pit. In any event, he came closest to fulfilling his ambition in the first book of the three, The Octopus. Though it suffers from the same kind of muddled logic as his other work, it captures better than any novel both the essence and the feel of the closing period of American westward expansion. Norris based his story on an event that had taken place in 1880, the notorious Mussel Slough affair in which six members of the Settlers’ League, ranchers in the San Joaquin Valley, were killed by hired gunmen of the South Pacific Railroad in a dispute over the sale of land. The novel has all the elements of a classic muck-raking work, and, indeed, at the time, Norris was associated with the magazine McClure’s which was to become famous for its articles by such writers as Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens attacking the monopolistic trusts and corporations. He even wrote to a member of his publisher’s editorial department who had urged caution on him retorting that he was firmly ‘enlisted upon the other side’ from the railroad trust. Norris’s subsequent interview with the president of the railroad, incorporated into the novel as an interview between his poet-narrator Presley, the fictional counterpart, and Shelgrim, may have modified his views about the innocence of the settlers and changed the planned direction of the novel, but the philosophical contradictions in The Octopus go much deeper. In broad terms, the main story seems designed to show the insignificance of individual men in relation to larger ‘forces’ whether natural like wheat or industrial like railroads:
Men, Lilliputians, gnats in the sunshine, buzzed impudently in their tiny battles, were born, lived through their little day, died, and were forgotten; while the Wheat, wrapped in Nirvanic calm, grew steadily under the night, alone with the stars and with God.
Men were naught, death was naught, FORCE only existed - FORCE that brought men into the world,
FORCE that crowded them out of it to make way for the succeeding generation, FORCE that made the wheat grow, FORCE that garnered it from the soil to give place to the succeeding crop (2: 9)
At the same time, individual stories, especially that about his chief character Magnus Derrick, imply a belief in the efficacy of moral
choice. Derrick who is a lifelong upholder of principle, succumbs to the prevailing corrupt practices of his friends and enemies, and so brings about his own destruction. Similarly, the evil railroad agent, S. Behrman, becomes the victim of poetic justice when he suffocates in the wheat-filled hold of a ship bound for Calcutta. Norris, it seems, was not prepared to forsake sensational irony in the interests of consistency. The most curious strand in the novel, though, is the subplot dealing with the life of a mystical shepherd, Vanamee, a Thoreau-likc figure living close to nature and shunning society. Vanamee’s great love, Angele, had been raped years before and died in childbirth. Now she is restored to him in the guise of her identical daughter, and it is Vanamee the transcendental romantic who sees the connection between man and wheat, and who is allowed to pronounce the final truth that all things inevitably and surely work together for good. It is an embarrassingly sentimental intrusion into what is otherwise a powerful, if flawed, epic.
The Pit is also flawed in its structure, for it sacrifices the logic of its story to a sentimental ending in which Jadwin, the wheat speculator, loses his fortune in the wheat pit at the Chicago Board of Trade, and is thereby restored to his errant wife, Laura. Like that of Silas Lapham, Jadwin’s fall helps to restore his humanity, but despite this obvious contrivance, The Pit is, as Larzer Ziff claims, the first profound American business novel in that it does more than merely transpose traditional moral problems into the field of commerce. 22 In addition, it examines the psychic consequences of the commercialization of American life. Ziff is surely right to emphasize the social and sexual corollaries of industrialization in the novel, but The Pit is also profound in its perception of an important change that was taking place in American capitalism itself. The old-style, swashbuckling moguls like Jadwin were coming into contact with a new breed of speculator typified by the cold, ruthless financier, Crookes, men whose only interest lay in figures and statistics and whose inhumanity was sure to replace the all-too-human Napoleonic qualities of the independent businessman. Norris captured American business at a significant moment during its shift from one phase to another, which also gives the novel an importance which surpasses its purely aesthetic qualities. If, as Richard Hofstadter claims in his book on Social Darwinism in American Thought, this period of American history was like a vast human caricature of the Darwinian theory of evolution, it is novelists like Norris, and from rather different perspectives in the same city, Henry B. Fuller in The Cliff-Dwellers (1892) and Upton Sinclair in Ihe Jungle (1906), who have enabled us to see that era’s developments, conflicts, and mutations more clearly.
Dreiser
Howells, Crane and Norris, for all their considerable literary skills, do not in retrospect relate as clearly as Theodore Dreiser to twentieth-century American literature. Though they guided the novel towards new subjects and made possible a radically new form for it, they, like the cities they wrote about - Boston, New York and San Francisco - were never completely emancipated from European forms and influences. Chicago, on the other hand, was coming to be seen in the 1890s not just as the capital of the Midwest but as the quintessential American city, and Dreiser along with other Midwestern novelists was determined to be its laureate.
Chicago had forced itself upon America’s attention during the Columbian Exposition of 1893. To many visitors at the time and to various observers later, the spectacle of the White City in Chicago was the culmination and embodiment of all that America had been and might become, from the celestial city upon a hill to the New Jerusalem. For others, the debates between James Burnham and Louis Sullivan about architecture really masked a struggle between the conflicting forces of business elitism and populism. Turner’s famous ‘Frontier thesis’, first propounded at the fair to members of the American Historical Association, signalled, for many, the end of America’s rural past and the official inauguration of its urban future. And yet others thought that the central issues embodied in the exhibition were the principles of Pragmatism, expounded by William James versus those of Idealism and the Genteel Tradition.
James’s chief disciple, John Dewey, preferred to call himself an Instrumentalist rather than a Pragmatist. His thought, like Dreiser’s fiction, seems to have a particular geographical relevance to Chicago and its central position in the developing nation. What Lewis Mumford says of Dewey can equally well be applied to Dreiser:
No one has plumbed the bottom of Mr. Dewey’s philosophy who does not feel in back of it the shapelessness, the faith in the current go of things, and the general utilitarian idealism of Chicago - the spirit which produced the best of the early skyscrapers, the Chicago exposition, Burnham’s grandiose city plans, the great park and playground system, the clotted disorder of interminable slums. 23
Mumford is misleading, though, in suggesting that in both writers ‘lack of style is a lack of organic connection’. Reading Dewey may be
‘as depressing as a subway ride’, just as Dreiser’s pages sometimes resemble ‘a dumpheap’, but these are just the expressive connections between their thoughts and sentences in which we see captured their acceptance of the way things are. In Dreiser especially, a steady, flat, empirical gaze gathers all the various objects of attention into an undifferentiated and democratic flow - a slow, shifting movement of life in which individuals struggle to realize their desires but very seldom succeed in imposing their wills. It is precisely in his style that Dreiser manifests the profound changes that were taking effect in American life around the turn of the century.
Dreiser was not Chicago-born, but like thousands of others, had been drawn there from the vast surrounding land of middle America - in his case, small-town Indiana where he had grown up in an impoverished Roman Catholic family. His own feelings about his initial encounter with the great city can be found in the opening chapters of Sister Carrie (1900), though his heroine was ostensibly based on one of his sisters, Emma. He also recalled ‘the throb and urge and sting’ of his first days in Chicago in his autobiography Dawn (1931), when as he says, the spirit of the city flowed into him and made him ecstatic. That was in 1887, and in the years between his arrival and the writing of his first novel he had plenty of time and opportunity to modify those feelings. Working at numerous jobs in a variety of cities, he gradually became familiar with other, darker sides of American urban reality. What he experienced there convinced him that those who had not shared his experiences and vision but had remained loyal to the farm and all it stood for, were at best nostalgic lotus-eaters, suspended in dreams or lost in impossible romances. There is plenty of evidence to support Dreiser’s view in the writings of his contemporaries from Indiana. Two immensely popular novels bracket Sister Carrie at the turn of the century: Charles Major’s When Knighthood was in Flower (1898) and Gene Stratton-Porter’s Freckles (1904). Their accounts of adventures in Tudor England or even in the Limberlost swamps, allowed readers to ignore the social and psychological realities of urban life and to substitute for them the colour of remote or impossible worlds. In the context of such books, it is easy to see why Dreiser’s novel caused such a furore in the publishing house of Doubleday, Page and Company.
The story of the novel’s publication has become part of American cultural mythology as it concerns the war between the puritanical phil-istines and the bohemian artists. Both H. L. Mencken in A Book of Prefaces (1917) and Frank Harris in his Contemporary Portraits (1919) used the story to illustrate this theme, and even though later accounts distort actual events in order to produce more clear-cut heroes and villains, the episode does have its representative characteristics and, at
the very least, demonstrates the sharp divisions in taste and morality at the time. Sister Carrie had already been rejected by Harpers when Frank Norris, who was employed as a reader by Doubleday, Page and Company, enthusiastically recommended it to his employers as ‘a true book in all senses of the word’. Page, in his partner’s absence supported this view, but was subsequently persuaded to change his mind by Doubleday himself who was horrified by what he read. Page then attempted to extricate the firm from its obligation on the grounds that Dreiser’s characters would not interest the majority of readers. But, supported by Norris, Dreiser insisted on publication. A thousand copies of the novel were printed, and despite the publisher’s unwillingness to help in its distribution, a few hundred copies were sold. But it was not until Dreiser issued the book himself when he became part owner of a publishing house in 1907, that the novel began to sell in any quantity. Even then its success was limited compared with the sales of Mrs Porter’s sentimental romances, said to stand at eight million during her lifetime.
But the troubled history of the novel’s publication did not end there. In order to get it published at all, Dreiser had allowed a variety of friends, relatives, and professional editors to edit his original manuscript for him. In addition to tidying his uncertain grammar and removing instances of coarser language, his friend Arthur Harry and his wife, Jug, also took it upon themselves to rearrange several incidents and remove about thirty thousand words. It was not until 1981 that a text was finally produced corresponding to Dreiser’s original version. As Alfred Kazin says, the restored text is not necessarily a better novel, but it is certainly a different one, less reticent about the sexuality of its characters and less cruel in its presentation of their lives. 24 Given that Dreiser always believed that beneath all other desires, whether for wealth, preferment, or distinction, there lay a deep craving for sensory gratification - ‘lust moves the seeker in every field of effort’ - the restoration of the expurgated passages helps to establish more clearly the forces at work in the lives of Carrie, Drouet, and Hurstwood. The strengthening of these unconscious motivations also sharpens the dialectical play between the striving of the various individuals and the ‘vagaries of fortune’ which determine the wider structure of the novel. Carrie’s undeviating, automatic pursuit of the better life and her lack of interest in or comprehension of any broader significance in the world about her, is apparent from the moment she arrives in Chicago. Here she is looking for a job:
Through the open windows she could see the figures of
men and women in working aprons, moving busily about.
The great streets were wall-lined mysteries to her. The
vast offices, strange mazes which concerned far-otf individuals of importance. She could only think of people connected with them as counting money, dressing magnificently and riding in carriages. What they dealt in, how they labored,*to what end it all came, she had only the vaguest conception. That it could concern her, other than regards some little nook in which she might daily labor, never crossed her mind. Each concern in each building must be fabulously rich. These men in dressy suits such as Drouet wore must be powerful and fashionable - the men the newspapers talked about. It was all wonderful, all vast, all far removed. (2)
Appropriately, Dreiser keeps Drouet in the back of both Carrie’s and the reader’s mind, even at this stage in her career when she is hoping to succeed by her own efforts. Once she sees the futility of menial work and the meanness of the life endured by people like her sister who remain trapped in it, she allows herself to be taken up and kept by the flashy womanizer she first met on the train to Chicago. Drouet, like Carrie, is caught up by the city’s hypnotic influences which play upon his deepest desires. ‘He could not help what he was going to do. He could not see clearly enough to wish to do differently. ’ Though Drouet himself might occasionally feel twinges of conscience about his behaviour, Dreiser would no more think of judging him than he would any other predatory animal. Carrie’s eventual desertion of him in favour of her more sophisticated lover, Hurstwood, is also recorded as a simple, natural, and instinctive act.
With the appearance of Hurstwood, the novel finds its determining form - the contrasting and unwilled destinies of the helpless couple. Carrie’s successful career that takes her to success on Broadway is as inexplicable as Hurstwood’s slow decline to poverty and suicide a few blocks away. The precipitating event, one which cost Dreiser a great deal of thought and labour, shows how radically different is his view of the human condition from that of all his predecessors, either American or European.
Hurstwood, unhappily married to an ambitious woman who wants to divorce him, and beset by emotional and financial problems, has the opportunity to steal ten thousand dollars from the safe of the tavern he manages. The money would ensure him a comfortable future with Carrie, but the fear of discovery and prosecution holds him back, as he crouches by the safe with the money in his hand:
The wavering of a mind under such circumstances is an almost inexplicable thing and yet it is absolutely true.
Hurstwood could not bring himself to act definitely. He wanted to think about it - to ponder it over, to decide whether it were best. He was drawn by such a keen desire for Carrie, driven by such a state of turmoil in his own affairs, that he thought constantly that it would be best, and yet he wavered. He did not know what evil might result from it to him - how soon he might come to grief.
The true ethics of the situation never once occurred to him. It is most certain that they never would have under any circumstances. (29)
Dreiser’s emphasis on the truth of Hurstwood’s psychology, however redundant it seems, can be better appreciated in the light of his own experience. As a young man he was accused of stealing twenty-five dollars from his Chicago employers and was dismissed. A quarter of a century later he is still preoccupied with the entanglements of accident and will, and sets up an identical situation for the ‘murder’ of Roberta by Clyde Griffiths in An American Tragedy (1925).
In spite of Dreiser’s awkward attempts to protect his central characters’ instinctive desires from censure in this way, it is significant, as Maxwell Geismar has pointed out, that such men are usually the victims of excessive punishment for their attempts to defy convention. Their fate, Geismar argues, reflects ‘civilisation’s deep reservoir of guilt, where indeed we were all caught, tried and convicted for the sins which we, like the hero, had planned and barely not committed’. 25 The trap that Clyde Griffiths falls into is much more complicated, however, both psychologically and sociologically, than anything devised for the characters in Sister Carrie or Jennie Gerhardt (1911). Jennie, like Carrie Meeber, is a ‘sinful innocent’ caught up in the lives of men who themselves are torn between society’s moral codes and their own materialistic desires. A similar philosophy lies behind the creation of Cowperwood, the hero of Dreiser’s ‘Trilogy of Desire’, The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914) and The Stoic (1947). In these novels, though, the earlier formula of‘a waif amid forces’ is reversed to show a Nietz-schean superman - based on the financier Charles T. Yerkes -attempting to subjugate society to his will, and women to the demands of his sexual appetite. More significant than this reversal itself is the way it leads Dreiser to regard the social medium in which Cowper-wood’s career unfolds, or at least, the way Cowperwood’s consciousness constructs that medium. Both The Financier and The Titan make much greater use of imagery drawn from Darwinian biology than the earlier novels do. The story of Cowperwood’s rise and temporary fall in the Philadelphia jungle of finance capitalism begins and ends with evolutionary parables. As a boy he learns his most important lesson
by watching the way in which a lobster slowly and cunningly tears a squid apart piece by tiny piece; and at the end of the book, after his term in prison, when he decides to change his field of activity to Chicago, Dreiser gives us the story of the black grouper whose great quality is its ability to change its colour according to its environment - a perfect example of nature’s subtlety and chicanery. 26 In The Titan Cowperwood’s second wife, stung by his cold-hearted infidelities, rails at him: ‘What a liar you are, Frank! How really shifty you arc! I don’t wonder you are a multimillionaire - If you could live long enough you would eat up the whole world.’ (57)
At this point in his career Cowperwood resembles Henry James’s financier Abel Gaw of The Ivory Tower , a novel left unfinished when James died in 1916. James pictures Gaw, an old man, sitting ‘like a ruffled-hawk, motionless but for his single tremor, with his beak which had pecked so many hearts out visibly sharper than ever’, and says of him that ‘He was a person without an alternative . . . and now revolved in the hard-rimmed circle from which he had not a single issue.’ (Bkl, 1) It has become a commonplace of later literature to see the triumphs of such moguls as hollow and self-defeating, but Dreiser’s superb study of the type is an entirely original exploration of modern dehumanization and alienation. In point of fact, Dreiser did envisage an alternative for men like Frank Cowperwood. In The Stoic, for example, he begins to suggest that the antidote to Western materialism might be found in Eastern mysticism. The Bulwark (1946), completed during the period of his life when he became interested in Thoreau, is full of yearning for the lost innocence of America. His hero, Solon Barnes, is a Philadelphia banker, too, but also a Quaker who resigns from the bank in order to pursue a life of religious study. Dreiser’s revulsion at the sordid world of American capitalism is genuine enough. It led him in the late 1920s to flirt with Russian communism, and in 1931 to write a full-length condemnation of the world he had earlier so lovingly documented, called Tragic America. But by the time he wrote The Bulwark, he no longer had the energy to embody his beliefs in convincing stories or to relate his characters to their environments.
One of the great achievements of the Realists was to create characters whose lives were so completely identified with their milieux that they illuminated an entire era of American social history. The frenetic turbulence and confusion of the Gilded Age, brought about by America’s transformation into a modern industrial democracy of unprecedented proportion, is brilliantly reflected in the dense medium created to support Maggie, Carrie, Vandover, and Bartley Hubbard. In their struggles to ride the powerful currents of late nineteenth-century capitalism, they - and a score of other memorable characters
- unconsciously express the conflicting tensions that were helping to shape a new ‘American Ideology’.
Erik Erikson has described these contradictory forces, just as the novelists did, in terms of the personalities produced by them:
. . . the functioning American, as the heir of a history of extreme contrasts and abrupt changes, bases his final ego-identity on some tentative combination of dynamic polarities such as migratory and sedentary, individualistic and standardized, competitive and cooperative, pious and freethinking, responsible and cynical, etc. . . . To leave his choices open, the American, on the whole, lives with two sets of ‘truths’: a set of religious principles or religiously pronounced political principles of a highly puritan quality, and a set of shifting slogans which indicate what, at a given time, one may get away with on the basis of not more than a hunch, a mood, or a notion . 27
If this may be taken as an accurate description of the modern American, then it was the nineteenth-century Realists who first gave us our detailed insights into the phenomenon.
Notes
1. American Realism: New Essays , edited by Eric Sundquist (Baltimore and London, 1982), p. 23.
2. Fredric Jameson, ‘The Realist Floor-Plan’, in On Signs, edited by Marshall Blonsky (Oxford, 1985), p. 374.
3. Alan Trachtenburg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York, 1982). p. 7.
4. For further analyses of Dreiser’s style see Sandy Petrey, ‘Language of Realism, Language of False Consciousness: A Reading of Sister Carrie ’, Novel, ■ 10 (1977), 101-13; Walter Benn Michaels, ‘ Sister Carrie’s Popular Economy’, Critical Inquiry, 7 (1980), 373-90; and Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (London, 1985).
5. See for example Nina Baym, ‘Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors’, American Quarterly, 33 (1981), 123-39. This essay is reprinted in an excellent collection, The New Feminist Criticism, edited by Elaine Showaiter (London, 1986).